#85: YouTube and the Truman Faux Medical Show (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 85th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, Bret begins with a monologue on YouTube, Google, the allegory of the cave, David and Goliath, and more, before we switch off YouTube and stream solely from Odysee. We then discuss what counts as a positive Covid test from the CDC’s perspective, and why their answer differs depending on whether you’ve been va...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream where you never know exactly how the tech is going to behave until you actually fire up the live stream.
It is livestream number 85, am I correct about that, Dr. Hying?
That is right.
I am, Dr. Brett Weinstein.
And we are in an unusual spot, as most of our viewers and listeners will know, so I'm going to ask all of your indulgence I want to talk about our predicament and what it is that we're going to do about it before we start the show in the normal sense.
Many of you will know that I was in Austin this week.
I went to do what may be the first in history emergency podcast with Joe Rogan, who put me and Dr. Pierre Corey on to discuss the situation of YouTube-Google censorship and repurposed drugs.
It's an excellent piece.
It's gotten a very positive reaction.
I strongly recommend you look it up.
I also went on Lex Friedman's wonderful show, and I must say Lex and I had never met before, but Lex is a marvelous, fascinating, and very unusual human being.
I really thoroughly enjoyed meeting him, and I hope that there are many more discussions To come.
But I want to point your attention to one thing in particular.
In my discussion with Lex, and as on this show, I don't think Lex really does interviews.
He does discussions with people, but Lex is so fascinating that obviously they're all peer conversations.
He asked me a question that caught me off guard, but it put something together that I hadn't realized before.
Lex asked me if I was aware that martyrdom was a kind of drug that people could get addicted to.
And it was clear that he wanted to know whether or not that was in some way motivating us to challenge power as held at Google YouTube.
And it immediately struck me that this must be something that people are thinking.
Now, I don't think there is anything to this idea, but as I said to Lex, We are all mysteries to ourselves and it is always possible that there's something happening outside the view of our conscious mind that is driving, that we are unaware of.
But in this case I believe something else is true and I want to tell you a little bit.
The question was so good that I couldn't help but keep thinking about it on the plane home and in the days since and I've come to a conclusion about what role this analysis is playing and what the analysis that I think is correct might be.
So, there's a big difference to me, and I would argue inherently, between people who seek martyrdom and people who are willing to risk things in the pursuit of important goals.
These may superficially look alike, but they're two opposite things.
It's a little bit like fission and fusion power, which you can say are both nuclear power, but really they are literally opposite processes.
The desire for martyrdom is, in my opinion, a selfish process.
It comes out of a need in the person.
Whereas the willingness to take risks in order to achieve something is more or less the opposite.
It is, in some sense, selfless.
Now I don't want to say that we or I are selfless.
Obviously human beings are complicated and we all get something out of what we do or we wouldn't do it.
In terms of what is driving us, I believe something that is not entirely visible is playing out.
In order to see it, I need to point us to a discussion, an ongoing discussion that has been taking place largely between me and Jordan Peterson over the course of many years now, or several years at least.
And it has to do with the meaning of myth.
I think Jordan and I both believe that myth is evolved and very important.
In other words, it's an adaptation and therefore has to be treated very seriously and we dispense with it at our peril.
My point to Jordan has been that because all of our myths evolved in a world we no longer live in, we have to look at them with a certain amount of circumspection.
We have to reevaluate them because they may or may not be applicable to our current situation.
And I think Jordan takes them to be likely to be much more important as they were presented.
Now leave that conversation where it is.
I want to revisit a number of myths.
Really two of them in particular that I think are relevant to our current situation.
One of them is the myth of David and Goliath and the other is the allegory of the cave.
Now the allegory of the cave is presented as a myth.
It's not presented as a modern story.
Or as a literal story.
And these in some sense are opposing myths.
David kills Goliath.
The person who leaves the cave in Plato's allegory is killed by those who don't want to understand that the real world is outside the cave and is not contained in the shadows on the wall.
So we should take that in some sense as a tension.
We are trying not to find ourselves in the position that Plato describes, and we are trying to find ourselves in David's role.
But in order to understand how this myth emerged and what it means to us, I think we actually have to look at the story of David and Goliath and see what it is.
Now, if you dig into this, you will discover that historians actually believe that Goliath was a real person, and we'll return to him in a second.
David was also a real person, but David did not kill Goliath.
Apparently, Goliath was actually killed by a person named Elhanan.
The story was then subsumed into David's story, effectively by the authors of biblical texts and the evolutionary process that followed from their original authorship.
In effect, it's like a screenwriter compositing multiple characters into one to simplify a story so that it can fit into two hours of a movie.
So Elhanan fights Goliath and wins.
And what are we to take from this?
Well, the other part of the David and Goliath story, the part that does not involve Elhanan and David, involves Goliath himself, who in all probability was a real giant.
And what does it mean to be a real giant?
Well, those of us who have looked at the Guinness Book of World Records and the Book of Lists and seen other such discussions know that every so often nature produces a very large person.
Now, what is typically going on in the case of these very large people is that they have a pituitary tumor.
A pituitary tumor does not shut down the production of growth hormone at the point that it should, and so the person continues growing beyond the normal point of growth cessation.
Now that has a number of impacts.
Those of you who have been following Dark Horse, who have listened in on the portal, will be aware that if you are accelerating growth past the normal point of cessation, that you will be borrowing from the capacity of repair and maintenance.
And that means that giants may be very powerful, but they are also fragile.
And that is in all probability the deepest message of the David and Goliath story, or better, the Elhanan and Goliath story.
So, what does this have to do with Lex Friedman's question?
It has to do this.
I am not interested in martyrdom.
As I told Lex, I'm enjoying what we are doing and I feel that it is far too important to have it come to an end by fighting an unfightable foe.
I know I speak for you as well in this regard, Heather.
You don't have a desire to die on that hill.
But what people don't necessarily realize is that dying on that hill is not the only option.
There is dying on that hill.
We have no desire for it.
There is also taking that hill.
And we do have a desire to do that.
Why in this case?
Because that hill has to be taken.
What Google and YouTube are doing is they are infantilizing a huge fraction of the population.
They are making certain discussions off-limits.
We are only able to discuss the COVID situation if we adhere to certain pre-digested conclusions and we pretend that they emerge from evidence, which they do not.
The evidence is conflicting and self-contradictory.
What that demands is an analysis that we are literally not allowed to do on YouTube at this moment.
We have to end YouTube's hegemony.
Either YouTube has to relent and it has to allow that conversation, or we have to recognize that YouTube is effectively like Sesame Street now, where it's going to tell us things that it believes to be in our interest and expect us to just simply take them in and not question them.
That is obviously an untenable situation.
Dark Horse is not a program for children.
This is a program for adults who are interested in nuance.
It cannot exist on a platform like YouTube if YouTube is going to exert pressure of this form.
We have to take this hill.
Now, I do not believe that Dark Horse alone can fight Google.
That's very unlikely.
But I would point out, to the extent that the myth of Elanan and Goliath, which becomes the myth of David and Goliath, emerged from an actual historical story, the population of planet Earth when that story took place was less than 1% the population that we have now.
Goliath is not likely to be a person.
David or Elhanan is not likely to be a person either.
These are liable to be conglomerations.
Google is playing the role of Goliath.
That is what it has chosen to do.
I hope that it is free enough to un-choose that, but we'll find out.
David is not going to be a person.
David is going to emerge.
People who are courageous enough and see the picture clearly enough are going to join together and they are going to fight this battle.
Some of you may have seen Bill Maher last night on his program discussing the predicament of our channel.
It is well worth considering how David or Elhanan is going to form as a matter of emergence and figuring out how one can participate in that.
For our part, we are going to have to escape this infantilizing discussion of crucial life-and-death medical issues that we are seeing unfold on YouTube and on the other major platforms.
They have effectively created the Truman Foe Medical Show, and it is intolerable.
It's going to kill many, many people if we are not careful.
What can we do?
Well, the Sword of Damocles continues to hang over the Dark Horse.
You can see our installation here to demonstrate that jeopardy.
And what we are going to have you do is we are going to have you move over to our new home on Odyssey.
And I want you to realize that this is both a practical matter, this is a place that we can continue to broadcast no matter what YouTube, Google does.
But it is also symbolic.
The reason that platforms like Google and YouTube continue to exist, even though people find the censorship they are exerting intolerable, has to do with something called network effects.
Network effects mean that once you've got the audience, people have a very hard time figuring out how to leave.
Of course, you can leave and you can go broadcast somewhere else, but if the audience isn't there, what's the point?
So what we're going to do is we are going to move our audience to Odyssey.
We are not giving up our spot on YouTube, and hopefully YouTube will realize the gigantic error that it is making, and it will realize that actually, Dark Horse is meant something as a warning, right?
The podcast is named Dark Horse because the Dark Horse is an entity that is mysterious.
One does not know how to bet on it.
How would you bet in a fight between people like us and Google YouTube?
Well, the simplest thing to do is just to bet against us because, of course, Google is huge and we are not.
On the other hand, the story of Elhanan and Goliath tells you something else.
It tells you that Goliath, though incredibly powerful, is not invulnerable.
That is what Elhanan figured out, was that this giant was fragile, and that there was a way to attack him.
Now, I believe if you've followed the story so far, you will understand that because the New Goliath is an emergent property, it is evolved.
And that tells us something about its vulnerabilities.
It tells us it will be ferociously powerful on territory that it understands well, and it will be a bit dim on territory it's never seen before.
That's the nature of evolved creatures, humans being the lone exception to this pattern.
Creatures do not deal with novelty well.
Goliath does not deal with novelty well.
And that is what Goliath is now scratching his head over.
What the hell is happening in his attempt to shut down this discussion from Dark Horse and elsewhere?
And Google is going to find out.
So, with that, let me ask you, if you are not already watching this on Odyssey, to find the link in the YouTube description that will tell you how to get to our Odyssey page and move there now, and we will start the podcast as normal.
All right.
You ready, Heather?
Sure.
Okay.
Hey folks, welcome to the main part of the podcast, number 85, if I am thinking of this correctly.
85, I will point out, you don't need to tell me, it's not a prime number.
It's not a prime number?
Does it get an asterisk?
Does it get an asterisk?
Oh, why would it get an asterisk?
Oh, just because of everything you just talked about.
Oh, hell yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It at least has earned an asterisk.
It has earned at least one asterisk, absolutely.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's hard to start out normally after getting right into the deep stuff.
But yeah, here we are.
If you were asking questions, if you were paying attention on YouTube and you were asking questions in the super chat, very sorry.
We are not doing super chat, obviously, because of YouTube and the Q&A system that we were hoping to be live this week had one last glitch.
So we're going to do one more week of Twitter questions, right?
So use the hashtag, hashtag take the hill, and we will compile your questions and answer as many as possible in the second live stream today.
Um, the Patreon, the private Q&A that we have at my Patreon once a month on the last Sunday of the month is tomorrow, so consider joining us there.
It's a lot of fun at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
Can I point out, it is going to be off the hook.
It is going to be off the hook.
It has been.
It has been before, and it's small enough that we get to pay attention to the chat and engage with the chat for the Patreon Q&A, which is great.
There's some interesting big good news on Tuesday that we may come back and just talk to you a little bit about, but maybe not.
But we'll be able to talk to you about it next week.
And today, you know, we're going to do some things that we wouldn't be able to do on YouTube, probably.
We're going to talk a little bit about some stuff around vaccines and breakthrough cases and how the CDC is responding and suggesting that both laboratories and health agencies, reporting agencies, are responding.
We're going to talk a little bit about what OSHA is doing, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration here in the United States.
We are going to talk a little bit about, just a little bit about, a brand new paper that tried to do an analysis of how many lives are being saved versus lost by the current vaccine protocols.
And we are, of course, as has become our want, going to read a little bit from, this week it's chapter two of our forthcoming book, the chapter on deep histories.
We're going to read a little bit about mammals.
We're going to do that at the end of the hour.
And we have a couple of paid ads.
We're going to pay the rent here.
We have a couple of paid ads.
And then also, just in order to make Odyssey a little bit more like Sesame Street, since YouTube is, today's episode is brought to you by the letter B. And we are going to read the index for The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide from the letter B. Oh, yes.
Is it the number 85 and the letter B?
Is that it?
Yes.
This week's episode brought to you by the number 85 and the letter B. And the letter B. Yeah.
Yes.
Okay, so I'm going to start.
We've got a couple ads today for Public Goods and for OMAX, two sponsors that we've talked to you about before.
Let us go!
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Awesome.
All right, and I am going to be talking to you about omax cryo-freeze.
Now, the obvious thing to do would be to read to you about omax cryo-freeze, but as a lifelong dyslexic, that is a very frightening prospect.
And so I'm simply going to tell you that living with chronic pain sucks, and the pain and soreness that you get after You do something like exercise is also really unpleasant.
Once you get the message that something needs to be protected, it's nice to be able to do something about it.
And Omax Cryo Freeze is a very interesting thing that you can do.
I have used the product.
I can say that it does seem to work.
It is a nice smelling roll-on based on CBD.
It does not trigger my allergy to cannabis, which is interesting.
If any of you have an allergy to cannabis, I would be interested to know if you also find that it seems to work without triggering Those allergies, it's 100% natural.
You just roll it on and within something like 10 minutes it seems to alleviate pain.
They are giving 20% off to Dark Horse listeners and viewers.
You go to their site omaxhealth.com and you enter the code Dark Horse to get 20% off site-wide.
If you've got pain that needs treating and it's in your joints or your muscles, I suggest you try it.
All right.
Just since we're doing, since this episode is brought to us, brought to us, it's not brought to us.
It's brought to you by the letter B. We are going to share with you.
Now, last time I did this, Brett, you wanted me to be more animated.
No, wow that.
Wild-eyed better.
Okay, today's episode brought to you by the letter B, specifically the index from the forthcoming hunter-gatherer's guide, beginning with the letter B. Baboons!
Deloid rotifers!
Fear.
Being in the zone.
Beringia.
Bilateral symmetry.
Biological clock.
Biparental care.
Bipedalism.
Birds.
Lots of things in birds.
I'm not going to read all the things in birds.
Birth control.
Blood pressure.
Blue spectrum light.
Bone setting.
Bonobos.
Boredom.
Jorge Luis Borges.
Brachiation.
Brains.
Bread.
Breasts.
And, last but not least, can you guess?
Bush turkeys.
Bush turkeys!
Hell yeah!
There it is.
There it is.
Oh man.
So this episode brought to you by all of those things.
Yeah.
Bush turkeys.
Bush turkeys.
Bush turkeys, one of the only bird species in which parents do not meet their offspring.
Exactly why they're in the book.
That's why they're in the book.
The exception that proves every damn rule.
Yeah, about birds anyway.
Yeah, unless the birds.
Yeah, there's a lot of birds in the book.
Cool.
That, by the way, was very good on the wild-eyed front.
Thank you.
It does make me excited for the book all the more.
Excellent.
Okay, so let's talk about what counts as a positive COVID test, shall we?
Yes.
So there are a lot of kinds of tests out there, and early in the pandemic, you know, March-April of last year of 2020, we were talking about the difference between the antigen tests and the antibody tests, and now we've got PCR tests as well, and I'm not actually sure when the PCR tests were rolled out or started to be used.
Um, so there's, you know, there's a lot of type of tests.
There's a lot of question out there about how reliable the various tests are.
Um, a number of people, um, you know, have even been told by doctors, uh, you know, I'm pretty sure you had it, but you know, you're not testing positive.
I don't know what to tell you.
So, um, that's actually, that's not really the focus for today though.
The focus for today is, We're going to specifically talk about the PCR tests, which have become described as the gold standard for testing whether or not you have active infection.
Well, actually back in August of 2020, the New York Times reported a bit on these PCR tests on the very high cycle threshold values on the PCR test being run.
Meaning, so a cycle threshold is like how many cycles, how many amplifications do you have to do of the data that you brought in in order for the test to find a positive result?
Do you want me to explain a little bit about how PCR works so people will see why that's such an important parameter?
Yeah, why not.
Okay, so PCR is the brilliant insight of Carey Mullis, who got a Nobel Prize for it.
He is now unfortunately deceased.
Fascinating character.
And what he did was he reasoned from the characteristics of DNA that one could amplify a very small amount of DNA using the enzymes that are involved in the copying And that basically what you get is exponential growth.
And so any of you who have played one of these games where you put like a piece of rice on the first square of a chessboard and then you double it each square thereafter and then you don't get to the end of the chessboard for reasons that I will allow you and your rice vendor to discover.
This is Einstein's point about compound interest being the most powerful force in the universe, or whatever exactly he said.
Right, or didn't say, but it's frequently attributed to Einstein.
But anyway, the point is exponential growth is so freaking powerful that you can take the tiniest signal in something like DNA or RNA and you can amplify it to an amount that it's readily readable by you just by asking the enzymes to keep doubling it, right?
So, the point is, cycle threshold is about how much intensity you point at the amplification.
A very strong signal doesn't need much amplification to show up.
A very weak signal needs a lot.
And one of the things that I believe Mullis himself warns about is that this is so powerful, the amplification is so powerful, that you can take a signal that is on the verge of non-existence and you can get it to show up by simply turning up the number of cycles high enough.
So the higher your cycle threshold, the more false positives you will get.
And even more to the point, you know, COVID at one level, it's binary, like you have it or you don't, you've ever had it or you haven't.
Ish though, right?
Because there's, there's a lot of people who have been sort of a little exposed and may have a little immunity and whether or not they're going to get really sick, actually there is a density dependence to it, right?
That the more of it you have in you, the sicker you are likely to be, and the worse your outcome is likely to be.
I believe it is also the case, though, that there is every danger of amplifying tiny amounts of contamination.
Yes.
Right?
And so COVID in the air, COVID from a past patient that isn't fully removed from some piece of glassware.
There are a lot of ways to take COVID that is not present in the actual sample you have taken from somebody and to amplify something so it feels like it is.
Exactly.
So, um, and this is all, uh, just sort of background to the actual story that we want to tell you about today, but, um, I'm just going to read a few paragraphs from this article again, published in August of last year.
So yeah, I'll just point out August of last year, uh, we still had Trump as president.
And so the New York times was still actually, uh, coming after what the current policy on COVID, uh, with a somewhat negative bent.
And they appear to have basically switched it based on who the president is.
And so I suspect that this article wouldn't have been written today under a Biden administration.
So Zach, if you want to show my screen, I'll link to the actual article, but I've just got a PDF here so that I can show you guys what I've highlighted.
The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles, the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus or viral load in the sample.
The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.
This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.
Now let me take a break there.
So one thing which was implied in what we already said is that the lower the cycle threshold on a positive test, the more infectious and kind of infected the patient is, and the higher the number that it took to get to a positive result, the less likely that result is meaningful at all.
And I will also say that this last thing, and I've got one more excerpt to read from this, but this last thing I read here, that the cycle threshold is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients.
That basically doctors and coronavirus patients are only getting a binary, yes positive, no negative.
And I spoke to a doctor who said that has never been the case for other tests for which she has sent in PCR labs before.
The threshold value has always been next to the tests.
And so this raises all sorts of questions about why, once again, why we are being denied data, right?
Like, why would you move this into a binary data set as opposed to one with actual information in it?
A binary, it is actually a kind of pseudo-quantification, because what you have is a... We're getting there.
Okay, so, but by taking out that data, which is automatically inherently generated by the process, so in other words, the data is there and not reporting it as a choice.
Right.
It requires nothing additional.
Right.
It does not allow the clinician to say, actually, I wonder if that test is accurate because the number of amplifications is so high that it might have just been contamination.
Right.
And to that point, just a little bit more from this article again from August 2020 from the New York Times.
One solution, and so you know the problem being laid out in the article is that probably a ton of the positive tests that were coming back last summer, because that's when this was done, were not necessarily positive.
So one solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected.
Most tests set the limit at 40.
That's just 40 cycles.
A few at 37.
This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles or 37 to detect the virus.
Remember, the higher the cycle threshold, the more likely you are to test positive, even if you're not.
Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus, but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk, akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said.
Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside.
I'm shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive, she said.
A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added.
Dr. Minos said he would set the figure at 30 or even less.
Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient's sample would have to be 100 to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result.
At least one worth acting on.
So that last bit points to the fact that this is not a linear test.
The difference between 35 and 40 is not the same thing as the difference between 30 and 35.
Given that number, either they're just doing the math shoddy or, you know, it's not exactly exponential.
It's not a log scale, but it's not linear.
And maybe it is a log scale and these numbers are just off.
I'm not sure.
Can I have my screen?
Thank you.
You think it has to be a log scale?
Well, I think it has to be exponential.
Yeah, so I didn't look into that.
Those numbers are – that 100 to 1,000 fold difference is way off if it's a log scale.
Let me then just bring us to – you have something quick to say here before we – I do.
I hope I'm not stealing your thunder.
We should wait for – Maybe we should just talk through this then.
then.
So on May 1st, Zachary, you can show, wait a minute, oh boy, this changed since I created this this morning.
On May 1st, the CDC said, and I'm not going to show you my screen because I'm not seeing it there at the link anymore.
Vaccine breakthrough cases are expected.
COVID-19 vaccines are effective and are a critical tool to bring the pandemic under control.
However, no vaccines are 100% effective at preventing illness in vaccinated people.
There will be a small percentage of fully vaccinated people who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19.
Makes sense.
That totally makes sense, right?
However, quote, As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focusing on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause.
This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance.
The CDC is no longer monitoring cases of COVID in people who have been vaccinated unless they are also hospitalized or dead.
That is obviously going to skew the data tremendously and so when we are told for instance as we are any of us who's paying attention to you know state reports that are coming out daily or national reports or national reports that are saying Well, the case count is rising, but it's mostly among unvaccinated people.
How would you know?
We actually are being told by the CDC here that they are not collecting the data with which we would be able to tell.
So, they also claim on the same page, vaccine breakthrough cases occur in only a small percentage of vaccinated people.
Again, on what basis?
Wait, wait, wait.
No, that's just a simple tautology.
If they're not going to test you unless you have a case that requires hospitalization, they have built that conclusion into their collection method.
Yes, yes, yes.
So this gets worse here.
Actually, yeah, you can show my screen here.
So this, I've got two documents.
I think this is actually, this is showing up in, this is the COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Case Investigation, Information for Public Health, Clinical and Reference Laboratories.
So this is CDC's instructions to the labs who are doing the actual work with regard to testing, but not testing everyone.
This is just testing people who have been vaccinated.
And so they describe what it is that the lab should be doing.
And how it is that you will know if you've got a breakthrough case.
And note here that even, oh boy I can't even select it well, that although I could find no indication until May of this year that the CDC had actually set a threshold value, even with all of this story From last summer about the threshold values are way too high.
Please CDC why won't you set a lower threshold value so that we don't keep getting so many false positives.
They never did it as far as I can tell and I would, I need to know if I'm wrong about that but I can't find any evidence that CDC had set a threshold value.
Except now, in those cases where someone has presented more than two weeks after being fully vaccinated with one of the COVID vaccines, quote, clinical specimens for sequencing should have an RT-PCR critical threshold value of less than or equal to 28.
Now, 28 is a lot lower than 37 or 40 or any of the other numbers that are being used in general without any advice from the CDC and which will presumably still continue to be used in those people who come in with possible COVID who have not been vaccinated.
Therefore, what we've done is we've set totally different standards for, do you have COVID if you're vaccinated?
Well, let's just put the critical threshold value really, you know, Basically at an appropriate level.
And you're less likely to get false positives.
But we're not going to advise on what to do for people who come in who aren't vaccinated.
Probably it's going to stay where it's been.
You're going to continue to get the same rate of false positives.
And that is going to falsely exaggerate the rate of people who are getting COVID who are not vaccinated.
It is an absolute like monkeying with the baseline.
It's messing with data.
It's lying to all of us.
Yeah, it is creating an environment in which the conclusion to the story, which is vaccines are highly effective, people without them are getting COVID like crazy, right?
That is built into the collection methodology.
And the fact is, you have to be able to actually analyze these things.
And as much as I hate the analogy, compare apples to apples, you have to compare apples to apples in order to know.
And if I can point out one other thing.
Oh, go ahead.
Yeah, just one more thing on this story.
So, you can show my screen again, Zach.
So, there's a comparable document the CDC produced, same title, COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Case Investigation, but this one is not for the labs who are doing the work, but information for state and local health departments.
And again, I'm looking at a PDF here, but we'll link to the pages.
that are available on the CDC site and so here's what they are they are informing the health departments how it is to interpret the tests that come in.
Number two, so screening questions to assess if the case meets vaccine breakthrough investigation criteria.
Respiratory specimen tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen and was collected more than 14 days after receiving the last dose of an FDA authorized COVID-19 vaccine.
Stop if there was only a negative or equivocal test result.
So, equivocal here is vague, and again, negative in this case means do not ever amplify those tests beyond 28 cycles, and maybe equivocal means you also get a little bit more fudge room in there, I don't know.
We see no instructions like this.
I could find no documents like this for how to read these tests if you're the health department or if you're the labs and you're dealing with people who are coming in with possible COVID and they're not vaccinated.
This is the CDC putting together very formal, highly detailed scripts about how it is to deal with people who are coming in who've been vaccinated in order to, frankly, clearly Minimize the number of breakthrough cases that are being recorded.
All right, so I want to point out two things in addition to this.
One, scientifically speaking, it is very important, reproducibility is important, right?
It is important that the data be available in order to interpret or reinterpret a result, to take the thing that somebody proceeded from when they reached a conclusion and say, actually, if I run it through an analysis, I don't reach the same conclusion, or I do.
In this case, by denying you the information about what the cycle threshold was for the test, what we cannot do is the following thing.
We cannot compare the number of cases in any group for which we don't have that number with the data from before.
If you did have the number, you could say, all right, we're only going to count cases that showed up above some threshold, right?
And you could see whether or not things were moving up or down.
But this effectively leaves you having to accept their conclusion because there's no mechanism for going back into the data and saying, actually, if we compare apples to apples with the new standard, you know, there's nothing wrong with finding a new threshold that works better, but you have to be able to go out, go and throw out the things that are one end or the other in order to be able go and throw out the things that are one end or the other in So they are forcing us into this infantilized, you have to accept our conclusions. - Yeah.
Exactly.
The other thing is that these breakthrough cases, right, there's this weird attitude towards them, right?
Yes, of course, all vaccines have some breakthrough cases.
And I have no doubt that that's true at some level.
I mean, for one thing, there will be cases in which somebody administers the wrong vaccination and somebody isn't vaccinated who thinks there is.
There will always be some reason that you will see a few breakthrough cases.
But the number of breakthrough cases here is probably not small based on what we've seen.
And what's more, those breakthrough cases have an importance in this story that shows up nowhere in the official record, and that has to do with two things that I spot.
Others may spot more, but one of them has to do with antibody-dependent enhancement, right?
Which could result in places where the pathogen is capable of actually utilizing the immune response generated through vaccination or through prior exposure to COVID, In order to infect cells that it couldn't gain access to otherwise.
This is something that on one of the videos that YouTube removed with Robert Malone, we discuss.
Find it here on Odyssey.
You can find it here on Odyssey.
Right.
So anyway, that's a very interesting and frankly in the context of coronavirus is very dangerous possibility that may or may not be occurring here.
We don't know, but we do have to be able to look for it.
The other one has to do with Gerrit van den Bosch and his model for what's going to take place when you vaccinate with vaccines that are not as effective as they might be in shutting down new infections in which people who are partially vaccinated may get COVID and this becomes a Well, specifically when you do so during a pandemic, in the middle of a pandemic.
So the point is, when the pathogen and the vaccines are moving through the population together, you're going to get lots of people with incomplete immunity, either because their immune system is still working on the puzzle, they've had one vaccination and not two, Right, they've got a breakthrough case in which this vaccinated or partially vaccinated person is now imposing a kind of selection on the pathogen that is basically selection in favor of escape from immunity created by either COVID or vaccines.
The problem is, we are seeing a proliferation of variants.
In order to understand what its relationship is, we would need to actually start looking at breakthrough cases very directly, and figure out whether what they are shedding is actually new variants that pose an increased danger.
And if this pandemic comes roaring back, and I have to tell you, I do believe the vaccines are working.
There are other things that may be working as well.
Possibly the seasonality, for example.
People have been cooped up.
They're now outside more where the virus is not very effective.
Restaurants have changed the way they serve food.
People are dining outdoors more.
So there are lots of reasons that you might see a decline in cases.
Let's say it's all of them working together, right?
If the pandemic comes roaring back at some point, there's going to be a question about what caused that, right?
And what we are specifically doing is not collecting the information that will tell us if one of the things that contributed to it roaring back was the effect, as Garrett Vandenbush lays out... Vandenbush.
Sorry, Garrett.
As he lays out, one of the things that may drive this is the escape mutants that will be driven by this particular mode of deploying a vaccine into an ongoing pandemic, right?
You would want to know whether he was right, because A, you wouldn't want to make the mistake again, and B, you might want to change course so that it didn't continue to happen unless, of course, I can't imagine anybody on earth wants the pandemic to continue, but should such people exist somewhere... Yes, you can.
I guess I can imagine it in a certain sci-fi kind of way, but Well, no, not individuals, but individuals who have a business model that benefits from doing so.
That I can imagine.
I can imagine entities reaching that conclusion where people are doing their own little part of the thing and they don't realize what they've become party to, right?
So it is possible that what's going on here has to do with that.
Or they can keep their consciences clear by not actually doing the dirty work.
Actually, that's an excellent point.
I mean, I think it's classic.
It's part of the way that entities enable themselves to act sociopathically, even if there are in fact no individuals there who are.
Right.
But you have one individual who may be the closest thing to the sociopath, deciding who does all the things, and all the people doing the things may really not even know.
Well, actually, it fits really well.
I think I mentioned recently somewhere, probably here, the TEDx talk I gave many years ago on the personal responsibility vortex.
And the part I want to call your attention to is I lay out a model for why we face sociopathic corporations.
And it basically starts out imagining that corporations will come in three varieties.
Very rarely, a corporation will be committed to doing the profitable thing no matter what the harm.
Very rarely a corporation will be committed to doing the right thing irrespective of the cost and more generally Corporations will be somewhere in the middle and they will do some stuff that's harmful and they will resist other stuff That's harmful.
But the point is if you iterate competition between them over time The ones that are committed to doing the right thing, no matter what the cost, will go extinct.
And the ones that are balanced somewhere in the middle will evolve towards ones that will do the wrong thing if it makes a profit.
And you're left with a market that's more or less constantly moving in this direction of ruthlessness.
And so the question is, well, what does that look like on the inside?
And the answer is, one of the things it will look like is, let's figure out how to avoid collecting the data that will cause people on the inside to say, holy shit, what are we doing?
Yeah.
I mean, it's a point that's been made many, many times by many, many people, but you know, it's, it's, it's, that is the theoretical description for how you go from, uh, do no evil.
Don't be evil.
Yeah.
Do some.
It's fine.
Evil.
Yeah.
Right.
Oh, I want to correct one thing just so I don't get a flood of, um, correspondence over this.
So I was describing PCR in its original form, which was DNA.
Obviously, these viruses are RNA.
It doesn't take much to change the protocol.
I thought you said both.
Okay, well, I should have.
Yeah.
All right.
I think that's what I've got remaining on this.
You got anything else on?
I mean, I guess the OSHA stuff is related.
Should we should we segue into that?
Let's do it.
Cool.
So OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the DOL is the Department of Labor.
So we're just going to go to their fax page, www.osha.gov, coronavirus, fax, hashtag, vaccine, where one of the questions is tiny.
Are adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine recordable on the OSHA record-keeping log?
It asks on the page.
The answer is, Department of Labor and OSHA, as well as other federal agencies, are working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations.
OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers' vaccination efforts.
As a result, OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904's recording requirements to require any employers to record workers' side effects from COVID-19 vaccination through May 2022.
We will reevaluate the agency's position at that time to determine the best course of action moving forward.
I've read that like eight times now and every time I'm just stunned.
Yeah.
First time you read it to me my jaw literally dropped.
I cannot believe.
I cannot believe.
I haven't yet found an agency that isn't somehow complicit.
Yeah.
So just to put it in non-OSHA language, They've got some, you know, 29 CFR 1904 recording requirements for when employers end up doing harm to employees, they have to report it.
But if an employee wants to, you know, require or strongly encourage, I don't know about strongly encourage, but certainly if an employer wants to mandate vaccination and the employee ends up harmed as a result of the vaccination, the employer doesn't have to keep track of that.
They don't have to keep track of that.
No one has to know.
The federal government's not interested.
Thank you very much.
So I would argue, you know, we've seen a lot of monkeying with the baseline.
I think there's a strong argument to be made.
This is one more manifestation of it.
It's also a manifestation, as you say, you can't find the agency that says, no, actually this looks different to us because zero is a special number, right?
This is a case in which you can't have an agency breaking ranks.
Now, a question for the rest of us.
How the hell does this all work?
Right?
I don't know why it is that nothing makes any sense if you analyze it in the context of either public health or individual health.
The advice does not add up from the point of view of doctors trying to help their patients or public health officials trying to prevent the pandemic from continuing.
I'm not saying it's causal.
It does all make sense if you modify the objective and you say the objective is to deliver as many vaccinations as possible whether or not they are medically useful or counterproductive or whatever.
It's like we're the Borg.
Something is... I mean, we're just not... A decision was arrived at, for the most part, I mean, no one I know was consulted, and it was just handed down.
This is a decree, as if from God, and there will be no strain.
There will be no strain.
There will be no straying and we're not going to play it on this show, but there is a recording circulating of a doctor being effectively fired for talking to his patients about what he was seeing and giving advice.
Vaccine wise?
On the basis of that.
And anyway, I will make it available someplace.
It's a fairly long, you know, 20 minute recording or something like this.
But anyway, I don't know how this all works.
And frankly, I don't know Yes, I can say none of this is consistent with the hypothesis that the thing in charge, whatever it is, whatever its nature, emergent or a cabal or whatever, it is not consistent with health.
It is consistent with the delivery of vaccines at all costs.
I cannot say that that's actually what's driving.
It's possible there is a third hypothesis that is not on the table that we haven't thought of yet.
If that hypothesis exists, I'd love to hear it.
But damn, in the absence of that hypothesis, this just looks like a headlong rush into a giant novel vaccine experiment with no thought to what happens if this is harmful.
No thought.
No stopping condition.
How can that be?
No stopping condition, exactly.
So I barely know what's going on in this paper, but there is a new paper out Called the Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations, We Should Rethink the Policy, published in the journal, it looks like the Journal of Vaccines, although that's not a journal, yep, just the Journal of Vaccines.
So, you know, peer-reviewed, the whole shebang.
Interestingly, what these guys, what these authors did was they went and looked at the data in Israel.
And Israel, as probably all of our listeners and watchers know, was, you know, came out very strong, you know, mass vaccination effort got, you know, tremendous percentage of their population vaccinated.
And, you know, really pushed it with very little, as far as we could tell on the outside and a couple of people I know on the inside, like it just didn't seem like there was there was pushback on the ground.
And so, we also have not seen any evidence that, and it could be out there, that the Israelis equivalent of like the CDC and OSHA and such are doing the same kind of monkeying with the baseline that the US is doing.
I don't know if it's happening, but because it's a relatively small population where the vaccines were pushed out early and strong, and we have reason to think that the data are relatively clean, it's a good population on which to look at actually what are the values of these vaccines.
And again, I haven't spent much time with it, but here from the end of the abstract, I'll just do the result here.
So the number needed to vaccinate is between 200 to 700 to prevent one case of COVID-19 for the mRNA vaccine marketed by Pfizer, while the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one death is between 9,000 and 50,000 with a 95% confidence interval, with 16,000 as a point estimate.
The number of cases experiencing adverse reactions has been reported to be 700 per 100,000 vaccinations.
Currently, we see 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations, and the number of fatal side effects is at 4.11 at 100,000 vaccinations.
Then they conclude, and this is based on the math that they do that I haven't fully assessed, for three deaths prevented by vaccination, we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.
Conclusions.
This lack of clear benefit should cause governments to rethink their vaccination policy.
Save three lives, cost two.
And that doesn't include the side effects, the lingering side effects of the vaccines, of course.
I think that's actually a conservative estimate of the costs.
But let's also talk about, what are the lives?
Actuaries do this, and it seems harsh and horrible, but people have to do this.
So what three lives are being saved when you cost two other different lives by vaccinating?
By and large, The lives that we are seeing lost in vaccinations are of young people who would have been very unlikely and I don't actually know the numbers so I don't know if that's a majority but there are at least what we are seeing for sure is that young people are having serious effects and sometimes dying from vaccination and those young people would have been almost certain not even to get COVID.
I will be unembarrassed about the actuarial aspect of this.
Now, I'm going to blow this.
I was saying for a long time, in many places, that in order to do a compassionate analysis, or to make compassionate policy, one has to do a dispassionate analysis.
It turns out that actually I'm not the first person to say that.
I have not heard of the first person to say it, but I've now forgotten his name, so we will post a link in the description.
But anyway, let's just say I'm... If you get it to me.
I'm borrowing that.
But in this case, I don't believe there is any justification whatsoever, even if the number of children lost, or young people lost, was much smaller than the number of older people saved.
I don't believe a healthy society is ever going to sacrifice the young to save the old.
It is not a tenable position.
We have to protect the young and we used to understand that like five minutes ago.
So there's no justification in this case given that at the very least kids and young people appear to endure COVID very very well and therefore the justification for vaccinating them for their own well-being is not in evidence.
There is an argument, I don't believe it's a very strong one, but there is an argument that because we don't know how much COVID they are getting and transmitting, since they typically tolerate the disease so well, that the population requires them to get this.
Again, not fair.
We don't do that to our children and our young people.
It doesn't make any sense to start.
But I would also point out, All of this.
All of this is in the context that assumes that the alternative to vaccination is nothing at all.
Yes.
When you have an alternative that appears safe and effective, to do this, to run these risks for people who don't need it, is absolutely ghastly.
And I feel like I need 30 synonyms for the word ghastly because across this story, it's like ghastly, ghastly, ghastly.
That's all it is, right?
Yeah.
It's reprehensible.
It's unforgivable.
It's reprehensible.
And, you know, we can argue about how strong the evidence is in various cases, but what we can't argue about is that, again, if you want to analyze this through, well, what's the conclusion we're being sold?
The conclusion we're being sold is vaccines, safe and effective.
Repurposed drugs, not safe, not effective.
Right?
And that's all we got.
That's all we got.
Now this paper suggests vaccines, these vaccines, are arguably effective.
Okay?
Let's say that that's true.
It doesn't say that they're safe.
Are they safe enough?
Depends what you compare them to.
And then you've got to step over to the repurposed drug thing and say, well, but wait a second.
We appear to have strong evidence, and yes, these meta-analyses are strong evidence.
They might not be the evidence you want, but you know, this is an emergency.
The very reason that we suspended the normal rules for the vaccines is that this is an emergency, right?
In an emergency, you maybe don't get the data exactly the way you want it.
You have to read the signal into data that's a little noisier, but we've got people who are That's what they do for a living.
And what they found is, yep, highly effective.
Not only highly effective when you give it early in the course of disease, but highly effective as a prophylactic.
And yet, we are pretending that that evidence isn't there as we are exposing people to this danger.
And, okay, here's where I'm lacking that synonym.
It's ghastly.
We're killing people, right?
That's what the evidence suggests.
Could that be wrong?
I guess so.
But certainly the evidence that we have currently suggests this.
And, you know, I have to tell you, I hope that paper is dead wrong.
I do too.
Yeah.
And you know, like I said, I didn't spend much time with it.
But boy, those are not even the numbers I was expecting.
They're stark as hell.
They are really stark.
Boy, the number needed to vaccinate is so high.
Right.
So high.
The other thing which you sort of pointed to is Realize that there is a bias in the data built in.
I think it's inherent and, you know, you would have to build a study very carefully to avoid it, right?
But the adverse events recording system has an obvious bias towards recording events that are so close in time to vaccination that people recognize them as inherently connected.
And the longer the period of time goes before you have an adverse event, the more likely it is that something else has intervened.
So even if there's a very strong signal of delayed events, the likelihood that we will see it is low, right?
Well, I do think that, again, makes Israel a better test population for this kind of analysis as a smaller, confined population.
I don't know.
Do they use VAERS?
Do they use something else?
I honestly don't.
I don't have any idea about what's going on.
You mean in Israel?
Yeah.
Didn't I say Israel?
I may have just missed it.
Yeah.
But it's going to be a very different assessment here in the United States.
Right.
Well, and in the United States, as Robert Malone, who frankly is part of the regulatory process, he's seen it up close as an insider who's inside the rooms where these things are being discussed, he said, look, they had a choice as to whether or not to collect extra data given that this was an experimental vaccine being delivered to a large population they had a choice to collect extra data to figure out whether there was a signal and of course they made the choice that you would make if your purpose was to deliver vaccines and not to protect the public health which was not to collect the data.
So anyway boy do I hope there's another hypothesis that explains this because otherwise what we've got is this institutional capture that seems to touch as you point out everything.
There isn't an agency that's dissenting And frankly, I mean, you know, neither of us voted for Trump, neither of us voted for Biden either.
Couldn't bring ourselves to.
But the media is just dog with a bone, single-minded hatred of that man.
...meant that they were actually doing somewhat better journalism simply to fight anything that he did when he was in office.
Like this New York Times article that I led with, right?
From August of last year, the New York Times could talk about, well, I don't know, maybe the cycle of progress is a little high, maybe we're getting false positives, maybe this isn't what it seems.
There's no way they would publish that now.
As of January 20th of this year, whenever actual inauguration day was, everyone stopped doing journalism to the degree that they were doing it at all.
And yes, the journalism for the last four years was just driven by Ridiculous hatred, you know, single-minded hatred.
But if that was the thing that was needed to get a little bit of truth out there, okay.
I mean, it did not help the public discussion or many things larger.
But I feel like now, with the transition, just everything is pointing in the same direction.
There is, like, where are the voices beyond the constituent parts of David, right, against Goliath?
Who are saying, actually, no, and just don't talk to me about data driven, show me the data, stop monkeying with the data, you're, you're destroying the data.
Like, what the hell are you people doing?
Yeah, it's a, it's an amazing predicament to find ourselves in with nothing, you know, we end up having to like, You know, rant about the fact that there's obviously something... You're yelling on Odyssey!
Oh my god!
Yeah, it's amazing.
So I do find this all... I don't know how to do this carefully because one of the... so here's the problem, okay?
As you have pointed out before, And I think the place to see this is to go back to the aftermath of LabLeak, at the point that it started to be officially okay to discuss LabLeak, and it didn't make you a conspiracy theorist for thinking in these terms, or an officially considered a conspiracy theorist.
The evidence that Trump derangement syndrome is not just a cheeky way of poking fun at people who are single-minded about the one individual.
But that it's an actual disease.
And I don't know if it's fair to say it's an actual disease of individuals.
But it does appear to be an actual disease of our evaluative capacity.
Our sense-making apparatus has parts of it that are diseased with this thing.
And you can tell.
Because at the point that the Lab League thing emerged in public, What the people who had gotten it wrong all said, and I really think it was across the board of all of the major publications that had gotten it wrong, was, well, right, but the people who were saying that it might have been a lab leak were all crazy Trump supporters.
So how could we possibly have been expected to figure it out?
Now, A, that's a lie, right?
We were there.
We've never been Trump supporters, right?
We were right there.
We were right there on their televisions.
We said it on Bill Maher, right?
On Joe Rogan.
You know, you go into a room with Joe Rogan and you say, lab leak hypothesis is where all of the evidence is pointing.
Which is like last July or something.
Last July.
And you know what?
That's a room full of liberals talking about the Lab League, so this excuse doesn't make sense.
But the point is, okay, if their point is Because Trump was in the story somewhere, we didn't do what we should have done, which is assume that if we thought Trump was just a liar, then what he says has no content.
It doesn't mean that the truth is the opposite of what he says, right?
It's so dumb!
It's so dumb!
Right, you couldn't get dumber than that.
But okay, so what that means, the fact that we are still dealing with this, the fact that somehow we can't talk about ivermectin because Trump talked about hydroxychloroquine, which of course we also see Trump derangement syndrome, In the way hydroxychloroquine was evaluated, right?
And we can now see that that, you know, so it's deranging our medical policy.
But even Dr. Alina Chan, who was, you know, early and persistent on LabLeak, and was one of the, I think, was it 18 authors on the Nature or Science?
The Ralph Baric-containing... It was Science.
It was Science.
On the Science paper that included Ralph Baric, who runs the North Carolina lab that is sort of Would be a sister lab to the Wuhan Institute of Virology if they called them that.
Even she has said, and I don't have it pulled up because I didn't know we were going to be talking about this.
Yeah, you know, people, I know I was hesitant, I think she says, and she says people were hesitant to talk about this because it was something that Trump was talking about.
And that's a terrifying statement.
Yeah.
That that, you know, that is the chilling effect of, you know, that's the soft, the self-censorship as a result of a social environment that accommodates one and only one set of views and conclusions.
And it would be an absolute disaster if all it was, was that People were self-censoring when they start censoring others who are interested in talking about what's visible that isn't being discussed then this becomes a cryptic totalitarian nightmare and that I Increasingly feel like that is what we are seeing and I increasingly hear the following thing said by multiple people who have no connection to each other as far as I can tell
People who have lived under totalitarian regimes are much less confused at this moment about what is taking place in our public discourse.
They all have some sort of sense that they have seen something like this before, and I'm sure it wasn't exactly like it, it can't possibly have been, but there is some sense of like, oh yeah, The public discussion has gone to noise, right?
And the only discussions that make sense are private discussions in which the people present feel safe enough to look each other in the eye and say what they actually think, right?
And the problem partly is that the places where people say feel safe to say what they think are ever fewer, which is why you and I have talked about, you know, the utility of Uh, family as the, you know, like the last place that you can be sure you can talk and, you know, say what you think and it's not going to show up online.
Absolutely.
And it's, and it's, so yes, absolutely.
Um, but it's also part of why we're able to do what we do, right?
Because you and I, when we're off screen, we still live here.
I mean, we don't hang out right here mostly, but, um, you know, you, you, you kind of do.
It's my office.
Speaking of which, it's going to hit triple digits here today.
It's going to get over 110 degrees here tomorrow.
This is an insane moment in Portland, Oregon.
We can do this in part because we can look each other in the eye and we can also then say, you know, we're going to look you in the eye because, oh, it turns out YouTube was kind of our boss.
Guess what?
Odyssey came along.
There's other alternatives and there's lots of other alternatives, frankly.
Um, we no longer have a, uh, an actual boss who can say, you really shouldn't be saying that.
And we know that we have each other's backs.
And frankly, many, so many of you have been, have been supporting us, um, mostly, you know, quietly, you know, we see it as, you know, it's the support of our Patreon and the subscriptions on the channels and the super chat questions.
And basically, you know, we are, we are, financially okay because of you, not because of anyone else, not through the grace of YouTube or Google or Facebook or anyone, right?
But individuals who are seeing what is going on and saying, actually, agree or disagree with them 10%, 90% of the time, I see that voices that are able to speak truth without censorship are necessary to a functioning democracy.
Whether they understand it in these terms or not, cultivating our security because they want to see more of this discussion, which doesn't mean the discussion doesn't contain errors, but I think it does mean that we deal with those errors honorably when they occur.
Yeah, so I guess there's one more sort of related piece in this that I think I mentioned it to you at one point, but you may have even been in Austin at the time, so who knows how much of it you heard.
You know what PEG is?
PEG?
I do.
Yeah, so what's PEG?
Polyethylene glycol?
Yeah, why do you know what it is?
I believe I know what it is.
I'm quizzing him on air.
It's not fair.
I'm about to indict myself as a scientist and as a driver of cars.
I'll ask you an easy question.
Yeah.
You think it's good for you?
No.
Okay.
No, I don't.
Am I right that it's a component in antifreeze?
Oh boy, it may be.
I can actually find a long list of places that it is.
This is a live fire exercise for us.
But it's also a component in the mRNA vaccines.
I know.
Along with lipid nanoparticles.
We've talked about lipid nanoparticles and exactly what is What is the nature of those?
Oh boy, that seems dangerous.
But peg is a little bit ubiquitous in our environment at this point, and that's not good for any of us.
And I wasn't thinking about peg.
This is not what I was thinking about.
I wanted to think about frogs.
I wanted to go think about neotropical frogs for a bit.
Frogs who have their own antifreeze that I am pretty damn sure does not involve polyethylene glycol, but it might.
But not the neotropical ones because they don't need it.
No, they don't need it.
No, it's the ones in Iowa that have the antifreeze.
We'll come back to you later with the Iowa antifreeze frogs.
I should make a note to myself to talk about that.
It's cool.
It's a cool story.
It is a cool story.
But there's a paper that came out.
Here I am politely searching scientific databases for Physalemus, which is a It's a genus of frogs that you're familiar with.
It's the same genus as the Tungara frog that calls at exactly the frequency that the... what is the bat?
It's, hold on, don't tell me, it's trachops.
Trachops, yes.
So trachops, bat, whatever the species is, and phospholema pustulosus, trachops loves to eat them bats.
No, frogs.
No, frogs.
And the frogs, the males, have to sing for their sex.
They don't sing for their supper, they sing for their sex.
If they don't sing, the females don't find them, they're not interested.
And they call at exactly the frequency that the Dracops are suited to find them by.
And so those who are successfully still calling are also demonstrating how masterful they are about evading predation and thus look even sexier to the would-be female suitors.
Yes, what?
I have just resurrected from deep storage the call of the Tungara frog.
Should you want me to deploy it here?
Oh, I do.
I do.
I used to do this in classrooms all the time.
One possibility is that I will do this and either female frogs or Treykop's bats or both are going to find their way in here.
It could happen.
Yeah.
All right.
So you tell me if I've got it right.
Yeah.
Boo!
Boo!
Chirp!
Chirp!
Boo!
Am I wrong?
Yeah, but the more chicks the better.
The chicks are the sexy part.
I didn't want the frogs or the bats, frankly, coming in here.
I think the BOO is the part that the trachops is honing in on that frequency, and then the chicks... I can't remember.
I don't think that's right.
One of them is species-specific, and so you get to the right species, because the females definitely want to find the right species.
Another one is sort of within species, who's the sexiest?
And I don't remember.
I think it's the more chks.
It's the more chks that the females have.
But it's both, because basically the females, by selecting for the chk part of the call, are forcing the males to do that more, which then puts them in the bullseye of the bats.
That was the Kodak pond work.
Yep.
Kodak Pond, named after the Kodak building, which it was next to on BCI, the place that I did my graduate work.
And I was, I think I may have been the last resident of the Kodak building.
Kodak building was one of the original buildings built when the fuel station was put in as the Panama Canal filled in 1913-14.
And so anyway, that building was really decrepit at the point that I was doing my graduate work there, and it was slated for destruction, and it wasn't air-conditioned, and it was way far away from all of the other buildings, but I loved it because it meant that I went to sleep every night in the forest with nobody else around.
And you had lizards.
I had Cayman in the greenhouse.
And you could raise a crocodile in your bathtub.
Without anybody being the wiser.
I probably could have done that in any building.
But anyway, yeah.
So I lived in Kodak, which was a termite-infested building that I loved dearly, which I think is now gone.
It's too bad.
Yeah, and I was there for the three, four months that I was there with you.
I was there with you.
Totally.
And Kodak Pond, which sounds like a lovely- Before I went to my field station on an island Yeah, you're truly remote.
Not a field station.
Yours wasn't 200 stairs away from other people.
It was a long way.
But anyway, the pond, Kodak Pond, where the work on the Trachops frogs and the Trachops bats and the Tungara frogs is a little concrete-lined I don't know if it was a meter and a half wide or something.
It wasn't big.
It wasn't beautiful.
No, it wasn't big.
It wasn't beautiful.
But it was full of frogs.
Yeah, and it was a great place to collect the data.
But yeah, boo!
Well, except, I mean, this is far, far afield.
It wasn't a great place to collect data, actually.
So there's a whole monograph written, I think, that Rand and Ryan did, you know, a whole A whole story on the sexual selection of these frogs in this pond.
To some degree, I think it was about the trachops, but also about how the high concentration of the frogs was affecting mate choice and mating systems and such.
It turns out you have this resource of this permanent pond that's concrete lined, so it's not seasonal at all.
A lot of the still water on BCI was seasonal.
And so you have this pretty artificial resource where the frogs are super concentrated.
And actually it was a friend of ours, right?
I think Dave Marsh, who did the work where he's like, I'm going to go see if they do the same thing out in the forest where they're not so highly concentrated.
And sure enough, the mating systems and the mating strategies are somewhat different where you don't have all the males clustered together calling all at once.
Yeah.
All right.
Somehow we need to link this.
To the CDC, and I don't know how we're gonna do it.
Well, so this I'm I'm I just don't want to think about COVID.
I want to I want to find a cool paper on frogs.
I don't even know how I ended up here, but I ended up at a paper called Polyethylene glycol acute and sublethal toxicity in neotropical Physalemus cuviere tadpoles.
In the journal Environmental Pollution.
There's a lot that could be said here.
There's a lot that could be said here, but the...
Here's...
Nothing about this computer is very functional at this point.
Here?
Yeah, here it is.
Zach, so this is just the end of this paper by Nascimento et al.
The conclusions are data confirmed the hypothesis that short-term exposure of Physalemus cuvieri tadpoles to sublethal PEG concentrations can induce physiological changes in animals.
While changes related to oxidative stress were evident in animals exposed to the highest concentration of PEG, The neurotoxic effects were similar in the treated groups, both low and medium levels.
So we've got metabolic stress, oxidative stress, neurotoxicity in tadpoles with exposure to PEG, and of course, you know, the only reason to be exposed to PEG is not from being vaccinated that you were talking about It's in the water supply, environmental pollution, and also everyone who is taking this stuff.
And PEG is in a lot of pharmaceuticals.
And of course, it's getting peed out and into our water supplies, just like there are estrogens in our water supplies.
There's all of this stuff in our water supply.
And sure enough, PEG is just yet one more thing that isn't good for the other organisms we're sharing the planet with either.
All right.
I want to say one other thing.
Yeah.
And Zach, may I?
Thank you.
Now remember, as I tell you this, I am Bret Weinstein, notorious pro-vaxxer.
I'm very enthusiastic about vaccines as a general matter.
I am a little skeptical of these current vaccines for reasons that have been well explored here, but... Did you call yourself a notorious pro-vaccine?
Pro-vaxxer.
Yeah, notorious pro-vaxxer.
I am vaccinated against rabies.
I'm proud of it.
I actually have my eye on another vaccination, which I'm hoping to get.
I know you do, actually.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm of an age where being vaccinated against shingles would make sense, so anyway, I'm kind of excited about that.
I'm not excited about shingles, which is why I'm excited about the vaccine, but put that aside.
Notorious Provaxer, Brett Weinstein.
There is a kind of sleight of hand, right?
There's various sleights of hands that get played.
One of them has to do with the amount of radiation in a banana.
The other one has to do with the amount of mercury in vaccines with the Marisol.
And we are frequently told things like it's the same amount or less than is in a tuna fish sandwich.
Right?
Now here's my point.
A. There shouldn't be any mercury in a goddamn tuna fish sandwich.
So the fact that you're feeling safe because a tuna fish sandwich is more toxic than it should be and that we recommend that pregnant women don't eat them tells me that your safety standard sucks.
But it is also not the case that consuming a tuna fish sandwich with however much mercury in it and being injected with that same amount of mercury are the same thing.
And the point is that topologically speaking The stuff that you ingest is not inside of you in the same sense that something injected into you is inside of you.
Think of yourself as a donut.
Think of yourself as a donut.
You're a Taurus.
You're a Taurus, and you're welcome for us pointing that out.
You'd be better off if you were a Tesla, but it turns out you're a Taurus.
Get used to it.
A Ford Taurus.
You know it's spelled differently, right?
I don't.
All right.
Actually, I don't know how the car is spelled.
I assume it's spelled like the bull thing.
So they're spelled differently?
Yeah, they are.
Oh no, not even pronounced the same.
Alright, well I have thoroughly embarrassed myself on today's episode of Dark Horse, but we'll just go with it.
Anyway, things that you ingest are not inside of you in the same sense that things that are injected into you are inside of you, so comparing the amount of mercury in one place versus another is not a fair comparison, right?
Well, which is one of the reasons that leaky gut syndrome is such a problem, because it makes the things that you ingest potentially have access to what's inside of you right away, even when they shouldn't.
Exactly.
And you know, let's put it this way, you'll get a lot of pushback on leaky gut syndrome Right, because it is abused as a claim, but it is apparently a real thing.
So let's just say what we're talking about is places where your gut develops holes that expose things in your gut to things like your immune system, which are not supposed to, or parts of your immune system that are not supposed to be seeing what's in your gut.
But we have another one of these now live, which is the evidence that spike protein actually shreds the blood-brain barrier.
Now, I did talk to Dr. Corey about this.
You don't have a paper on that?
Yeah, I do.
You can check my recent Twitter thread.
You heard it here first, guys.
Brett says I can check his recent Twitter thread.
It's the easiest place to find it.
But anyway, I asked Dr. Corey a couple questions that have been on my mind since finding out that the blood-brain barrier is apparently disrupted meaningfully by spike protein.
Does the blood-brain barrier repair itself?
He says yes, so that's great news, right?
Now, it will create some vulnerability because pathogens and toxins that do not normally get into the brain We'll be able to get into the brain until it repairs, and unfortunately I don't have a good sense from him or anywhere else of how long it takes to repair.
But in any case, the idea that your body is built to exclude things that are in one place from another place, and that that's part of the magic of how it works, and that certain features of modernity cause breaches in these things, so that your gut may expose things on its inside.
Is it this one, this penicillin paper?
Does Stages in Discovery, ACE2, and Stroke?
No, it's not that one.
Anyway, so the point is, you've got novel influences which your body was not built to resist, and the meaning of why spike protein has the effect on the blood-brain barrier that it seems to, at least in in vitro models and I think mice, It is not clear.
I think that there stands a fair chance that actually the pathogen probably utilizes that.
To what effect, I don't know.
But it's at least possible that that's an adaptation and not an incidental destruction.
But we need to be aware that we're talking about having taken delicate tissues that protect one part of the body from phenomena in other parts of the body are disrupted all the time.
They're disrupted by things that we eat that we're not supposed to be eating and they may be disrupted by things that we are injected with and they may be disrupted by diseases like COVID which produces spike protein on its own obviously.
So these are all Worthy questions and they should be built into our model and they should basically make us very cautious about novel phenomena from SARS-CoV-2 to polyethylene glycol in a vaccine to mercury in a sandwich or a vaccine or any of these things.
All right, that's it for the rant from Brett Weinstein, notorious pro-vaxxer.
It's good.
All right.
Can we talk about mammals a little bit?
Please.
All right.
We, as you regular listeners know, have this book coming out in September, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
We have a website up, which Zach, you can show.
As usual, when I'm reading, we have on this site links to pre-order.
We also have some lovely blurbs from some awesome people who have already indicated that they like it.
Robert Sapolsky and Jamie Wheel, Sebastian Younger, Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Haidt, Christina Hoff Sommers.
Really, really lovely comments from them.
So, while actually, sorry, oh no, I don't need my computer back.
The chapter two which we are on for this week is the deep history chapter.
So chapter one which we talked about last week sort of introduces a number of big theoretical concepts.
Chapter two talks basically walks the human lineage through time and then starting next week we get into medicine and then food and sleep and sex and gender and on and on and on.
Um, but so I just picked a segment that I have not marked here, uh, an excerpt from this deep history chapter beginning with 65 million years ago.
So we're going back, but we're not going that far back, you know, 65 million years ago.
It's not that far back.
Do you think it's that far back?
I, I know roughly how far back it is.
That's not a, that's not a number chosen out of thin air.
No, no, it's not.
So, um, yeah.
Okay.
That is a number that emerges out of deep space.
That is a number that emerges out of deep space.
Not out of thin air.
It did thin the air.
It did, and then it sort of thickened it, articulated it.
65 million years ago, the Chicxulub meteor hit the Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula.
Its impact kicked up so much dust that the sun was blocked for years.
Photosynthesis ground to a halt.
On the other side of the planet, perhaps accelerated by Chicxulub, one of the largest volcanic features on the planet was forming, the Indian Deccan Traps, belching out large amounts of climate-changing gases.
Mass extinctions followed, including that of all the non-avian dinosaurs, which have been doing pretty well for themselves for many tens of millions of years.
There is still disagreement about how long it took mammals to begin to diversify, to turn into the great chaotic mess of nearly 5,000 mammal species extant on the planet today, half of which are rodents, another quarter of which are bats, and the remaining quarter of which include forms as varied as dolphins and kangaroos, elephant seals and antelope, rhinoceroses and lemurs.
Sometime back when dinosaurs still reigned, primates emerged from the mammalian ranks.
Against the odds, our primate ancestors managed to survive the mass extinction 65 million years ago, as did the ancestors of every other organism on the planet today.
100 million years ago, well before Chicxulub, the common ancestor of all humans was a small, nocturnal, tree-dwelling primate.
It was cute and fuzzy.
The one point here I have a footnote that you're not sure you agree with that.
It was cute and fuzzy and lived in small family groups.
You just didn't want it in there.
I think it's undignified to call it cute and fuzzy.
I think that our 100 million year old primate ancestor was undignified.
That's what I think.
That is possible.
Yeah, it was cute and fuzzy and lived in small family groups.
As primates, we developed greater agility, dexterity, and sociality.
We primates are still eukaryotes, animals, vertebrates, craniates, bony fish, amniotes, and mammals.
Each successive, less inclusive group providing greater precision rather than putting the lie to any earlier group membership.
Primates developed opposable thumbs and big toes, acquired pads on our finger and toe tips, and replaced claws with nails.
Everything about our hands and feet was becoming more dexterous, more suited to fine motor activities.
We early primates became excellent climbers, too, by virtue of the terminal long bones in our legs and arms becoming less cemented to one another, less stuck in place.
Climbing ability came at the cost of some stability on flat ground, which provided even more reason to hang out in trees.
As primates, we became more visual and less olfactory.
Our noses shrunk and our eyes grew.
Primates are not as good at the chemical senses, olfaction, or taste as are the other mammals.
Just as mammals before us got brainier relative to their ancestors, we primates got brainier too, compared to the other mammals.
At the same time, gestation length expanded, but babies cooked for longer inside mom before being born.
Litter size fell, so mothers had fewer children at a time to tend to.
Your call.
The period of parental investment after birth lengthened and intensified, and sexual development happened later and later, giving ever more time for young primates to learn how to feel, how to think, and how to be.
And there's another section about that long that I can read or we can stop there.
Your call.
Yeah, well, that's primates for you.
That's primates for you.
Right?
And in part, I wanted to read that section to point out that so many of the things that we think are so unique to humans are not what we would call synapomorphs of humans.
They're not unique and derived to humans.
We inherited them from our ancestors.
And it's certainly true that humans are unique in ways that far surpass the uniqueness of really any other species.
We're more unique, as Dick Alexander, your advisor and one of my mentors, wrote in his extraordinary monograph from 1990-1991, The uniquely unique species, and that sounds like a redundancy, but it's... Intentionally so.
It's utterly true.
And yet, the fact of us having these neo... I don't know if it's neocortices or neocortices, along with indexes and indices... I'm going with neocortices.
Neocortices.
Sounds way better.
Yeah.
We have these neocortices.
that are doing jobs that have been borrowed.
In ancient times, what is now curled up and this massive brain here, a lot of it was entirely about smell.
And so, the fact that smells can trigger memories, for instance, is not just an accident.
It's not just, you know, a delightful error, in fact.
It's just a repurposing of structures that, especially for primates, as we became more and more visual.
So, you know, mammals became these great smellers.
Birds don't smell very well.
Birds are incredibly visual.
With some exceptions.
Like vultures.
Yes, true, true.
And similarly, mammals are the great smellers of the vertebrate world, with some exceptions, notably primates, and probably the aquatic ones as well.
Well, fish are the great stinkers, at least on land.
You know they're not mammals, right?
Yes, no.
You're talking about fish sensu lato?
Mammals are the great smellers, fish are the great stinkers on land.
That's not helpful.
No.
No, that's really not.
Sorry.
Essentially, some of what we imagine is unique to us, being so visually acute, is really about what our primary ancestors were doing.
There's a lot more.
The closer you get to us in time, the more you see this reduction in litter size and this Extending of childhood and then we get, you know, a move away from seasonal births to having, you know, having babies and therefore being reproductively available and interested all times of year.
All of these things are not unique to humans, but they are in our relatively recent past and they all inform what it is that we're doing today.
So I would just add that we had a discussion, I can't remember, maybe it was in a Q&A from a recent live stream, in which we talked about what creatures had the potential to, you know, if we disappear, what creatures might have the potential to do something like what we had done.
And one of the things that that conversation settled on was that it isn't just being a very intelligent social creature, but it's also having the body plan That facilitates the manipulation of the world, the testing of hypotheses, etc.
And so something like a toothed whale, a dolphin, or an orca, which is a dolphin, would be handicapped in some sense in reproducing our gains because having flippers instead of hands, it's not in a good position to construct things from experiments to buildings to anything.
And the point is, okay, how marvelous the opposable thumb, right, which we all, you know, understand to be somehow important, is really initially about gripping branches, right?
And the point is, that's a practical maneuvering around the world condition, but that ends up being a precondition for the manipulation of objects.
Yeah, I'm actually not totally sure of that, because it's very hard to figure out the ordering of the character evolution, but the opposable thumbs and the loss of claws and replacement by nails are kind of right next to each other in evolutionary space, in our history.
And it feels like if it was really, if it was about gripping branches specifically, like A, we can pronate and supinate.
But if it was mostly about gripping, then the claws it seems like would be helpful.
And instead we see a loss of claws around something like the same time.
And it's possible that someone has better granularity on the timing of that character evolution relative to the other, but I don't at the moment.
Yeah, well, I'm now out of my depth.
I've always imagined that nails are somehow a better backing for the sensory capacity of the fingers.
Right, but that's, that's about manipulation of stuff.
Right, but so I guess nothing, you know, I could be dead wrong about The gripping of branches and the role that it plays.
I doubt it.
But even if the gripping of branches very quickly leads to, oh, well, now you've got a structure that is capable of manipulation.
And so even in very primitive primates, you still have an advantage in being able to manipulate and sense up here, which, you know, so even if nails, are quickly on the heels.
It doesn't mean that it is not the precursor to the manipulative capacity that is so key to what we accomplished as humans.
I'm just saying it just requires... you have implicit in what you're saying a hypothesis about character order, about the order of character evolution, and I don't know that we know that to be the case.
All right.
Well, it'll be interesting to find out.
Yeah, I guess it is a hypothesis that makes a prediction.
Right.
And you were introducing it as an assumption rather than a hypothesis, and I'm not sure that's borne out by the evidence.
All right.
Well, we're going to find out because it's going to come to light.
No, I don't think we are.
That's my point, in part.
Because this is such deep history and You know claws and nails Don't fossilize and I don't think like the attachment.
It's it's all gonna be soft tissue.
I just I'm not sure there's gonna be any evidence really, but well Yeah, well, we'll see if there is evidence it will show up It will contact us probably over email.
That's not actually how it works.
But okay, I Will go looking and I suspect that they won't that I won't find anything.
Okay What else what else do you want to talk about?
Uh, well, geez, I feel like we've done an awful lot.
We've gotten to mammals, whether you see them as cute and fuzzy, or... I think now most of them are.
I think that first one, though.
Not elephant seals.
Not elephant seals.
Not manatees, frankly.
I know some people think so.
But, you know, whenever people say, yeah, manatees is probably the origin story for mermaids, I'm like, You gotta be at sea a long time.
Yeah, or be really nearsighted, something.
Something, yeah, yeah.
I agree, I agree.
Yeah, I mean, there are a few not-so-cute mammals.
We've got that Centurio cynics bat that has a flap of skin that he uses to cover his face so he doesn't scare his... I really want to demonstrate that properly.
You have to hang upside down and pull the flap.
You gotta put some hooks in the sea for that.
Alright, fair enough.
Yeah, what other mammals are really hard to look at?
Some people.
Sadly, sadly.
All right, we have reached the end for now.
We're going to take a 15-minute break and then be back with that live Q&A, answering questions that you have posed on Twitter and you can continue to pose them using the hashtag TakeTheHill, which we are attempting to do with your help.
The Dark Horse membership at my Patreon has its monthly private Q&A tomorrow, two hours, starting at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
We have a fun time with that.
All the questions have been asked already and I'll be collating them tonight and answering them, but we can engage with the chat.
It's a lot of fun.
I encourage you to join us there.
Also, Brett has his conversations at Patreon every month as well, and I guess if this is happening tomorrow, then yours will be happening next Saturday and Sunday from 9 to 11 a.m.
So consider joining Brett there as well.
You can send me logistical questions you have, not questions for the Q&A, but just logistical questions to darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com.
We do have some merch at www.store.darkhorsepodcast.org, but we haven't put anything new up in a while, but we got hopefully something coming.
We got a couple things.
We got a piece of artwork actually in the mix, as opposed to ideas that you just mentioned today.
Right?
No, a couple of them have been on the drawing board.
Okay.
And please consider certainly supporting us on our Patreons, but subscribing to, I mean, maybe all of them, but on Odyssey, especially on YouTube, both the main channel and the Clips channel.
Like the videos, share the videos, and keep on keeping on.
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