In this 89th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we begin by discussing a recent episode of the Making Sense podcast, in which Sam Harris and guest Eric Topol strawman both our position, and that of many people who are trying to engage honestly and carefully with scientific evidence. We discuss the evidence that having had Covid confers immunity against SA...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
I forgot to check what number, but I think it might be 89.
Is it, Dr. Hine?
It is indeed 89.
Livestream 89, that's really something.
Alright, we have a lot to talk about today.
We have some announcements up top, we have a couple of ads, and then we will get to the meat of the matter.
Indeed.
Indeed.
So this week we're going to talk a bit about, well, you're going to speak a little bit to the Sam Harris episode that came out yesterday along with Eric Topol.
And we're going to talk some about natural immunity to COVID and some about the emergency use authorizations And then we are going to, as has become our wont, we are working chapter by chapter through the book of ours that is forthcoming, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, that will be out in September of this year.
One chapter per week up until the launch date.
They're all on very different topics, all exploring some aspect of humanity with an evolutionary lens.
This week's chapter is sleep.
Which is hopefully not soporific.
I think it won't be.
I'm specifically going to read an excerpt, and we're going to talk about other aspects of sleep too, but we're specifically going to read an excerpt on dreams and hallucinations.
Yeah, so I think that should be fun.
Announcements, as usual.
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Tomorrow is our monthly private two-hour Q&A on my Patreon, so that's at 11am Pacific tomorrow.
All the questions for that have already been asked, but that's a small enough group that we're actually able to look at the chat as it happens and interact with people in the chat, and it's a lot of fun.
We actually really enjoy it.
We've got, as of a couple weeks ago, we've got some new shirts, Goliath shirts, at the store.darkhorsepodcast.org, including a lot of stuff in short sleeve that when we first put it out was only in long sleeve.
And after we do ads, we will tell you who the additional sponsors of today's episode are.
I'll give you a hint, it's number 89 and the letter D. Yeah, but we'll get there.
Yes, we will get there.
We'll get there after the ads.
So today's sponsors are Relief Band and Public Goods.
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First, though, I want to say a few words about nausea.
Under ancient circumstances, and some modern ones too, nausea was generally a useful signal that something is off.
You've eaten something you shouldn't have, or near something that's emanating a bad smell.
It's self a signal that you shouldn't get near it.
In modernity, we still need to track our bodily sensitivities.
We should not always choose to simply erase discomfort, including nausea, whenever we feel it.
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You know, I always used to think that the relief band was the band that filled in if the headlining band had drunk too much the night before.
But of course, if they had relief bands, that might not be such an issue, apparently.
Right.
There you go.
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Very good.
Now, sometimes, since we've been reading from chapters of the book, we have suggested an episode might be brought to you by a certain letter.
Along Sesame Street, we felt that YouTube was treating us and sort of the whole world I feel like I have fur all over me.
Um, a bit like, uh, we were, we were the target audience for Sesame Street.
So, uh, today's episode brought to you by the number 89 and the letter D. This is what D from the index of our book sounds like.
You want me to be wild-eyed?
A little bit wild.
Just a little bit.
Slightly crazed.
Just slightly crazier.
Okay, Darwin, Charles, Dawkins, Richard, Deepwater Horizon, Oil Spill, Delano, Laura, Dennis Sovens, Design Constraint, Tradeoffs, Deval, Franz, Diaphragm, Diarrhea, Dickens, Charles, Diet, Seafood, Dimensional Lumber and Visual Perception, Diminishing Returns, Dinosaurs, Disease, Risk, and Birth Month, Diurnal, Diverse Views, Experience in Places, mmm, Experiences in Places, Exposure 2,
Division of labor in agriculturalist societies, differences between sexes and gendered work and in hunter-gatherer societies and modern society, monogamy and – that was all division of labor.
Dobchansky, Theodosius, dogs, dolphins, dreams, drugs, and children, duck-billed platypus and ducks.
Awesome.
Yeah.
It's the Denisovans that really sell it, though.
It's the Denisovans.
I think the duck-billed platypus kind of get us there, too.
There's two different references to duck-billed platypus in this book.
Do you think other platypuses feel left out by the focus on duck-billed platypuses?
Well, so I made this observation the other day, and I have not vetted this at all with anything in the literature, and I'm sure this is an observation that has been made by phylogenetic systematists, that I was looking at a bunch of geese with goslings, and these were older goslings, and they looked for all the world like a number of adult female ducks.
And I thought that there might be within the Unadids, the geese and the ducks, be some pedomorphosis going on.
You know, I don't think that there are, in fact, any other billed platypuses, but I would expect that they might be goose-billed platypuses if there were some.
That was what that long, ridiculous setup was about.
That long, ridiculous setup, yeah.
I don't think there are any other platypi.
I'm going to get mail on that one, I have a feeling.
Platypume?
Yes, I do know that the platypus, when specimens were sent back to Europe, was thought to be a hoax, because of course, you know...
Pretty bad one, too.
Hoaxing biologists used to be a much bigger thing than it now is.
People looking for the staples.
Right, exactly.
It did look like somebody had glued a bill on a mammal and tried to pass it off.
Well also, I mean the spurs, the poisonous spurs?
The poisonous spurs on the feet, yeah.
And that tail?
No, the whole thing's ridiculous.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
Yeah, and then eggs?
Eggs come out of this thing?
Eggs.
Yeah.
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
Come on.
Alright.
Come on.
But they do exist.
I really am eager to see them in the wild.
It's one of the animals I most want.
And not just because it's super weird, but because they're actually ecologically very fascinating.
Yeah, and they've got, um, it's unclear.
I actually don't remember.
The echidnas, there's like three to five species of echidnas, depending on how lumpy or splitty you're feeling that day.
And one species of platypus, and those are the monotremes, what I used to call the wacky mammals, the egg-laying mammals.
And they have like 8 or 10 pairs of sex chromosomes.
I thought it was 5, but it's definitely a large surprising number.
It's large and it's different between the species of monotremes.
As few species of monotremes as there are, it's different between them.
Yeah, I think the 5 was the platypus.
No, it's not that low.
It's not?
All right.
Well, we're certainly going to get some mail from... Look, I looked into it deeply in order to mention duck-billed platypus at one of those points in the book.
It's definitely not that low, but it's variable.
It's variable, yeah.
I don't think within species of monotremes, but between the species.
All right.
Are we on to the question?
All right.
So I think we are on to the question of Sam Harris's podcast, which came out yesterday.
Now, this is a slightly awkward topic.
Sam is a friend and the podcast he released yesterday with Eric Topol was focused Well, it was focused on Dark Horse, but it named me specifically, and it talked extensively about the issues surrounding COVID that we've been focused on for many months here, including the question of ivermectin and the question of vaccine hazards and vaccine hesitancy.
And I must say there was a certain amount of trepidation in discovering that Sam had released what was obviously a critical podcast of me and us.
I say that because I know Sam to be a tremendously capable
Interlocutor and I will say in my past I have Had a podcast on Dark Horse where I talked to Sam about free will a topic on which I disagree with Sam and I believe he He trounced me in that discussion despite the fact that I suspect that I'm actually right it took me a long time to figure out Why it was that I was unable to make my point compellingly.
It took me at least a week to figure out where I thought the bodies were buried.
But anyway, the point is, Sam is so good at what he does, so smart, and has, in my opinion, unassailable integrity, that to find that he was dismayed enough with what has gone on here on Dark Horse to take up the matter in a concentrated form, worried me.
What would he find?
And I must say that my reaction upon listening all the way through it, which I did, I listened all the way through it, and my sense is actually I'm not angry at Sam, I'm not even hurt, and I'm actually weirdly heartened.
That's just a kind of report for what it was like to listen through this, because What I find is that there's very little there that actually lines up with what I or we have actually said.
And so, in some sense, if somebody as capable as Sam is, I will try to say it delicately, struggling to make a serious critique of what we've been doing, that is a hopeful sign.
But it's even more hopeful for the following reason.
I know Sam would never intentionally strawman another person.
And I know that, in particular, he wouldn't do it to a friend.
And, in fact, he, in this podcast, goes to great lengths to say that he does consider me a friend.
And, you know, he says some compassionate things.
He also says some things about the hazard of what we are doing here to other people.
And this is an argument I will take up in a second.
But my basic point would be this.
When we began talking about ivermectin, I said, and I believe our first episode in which we discussed it at any length, that upon looking at the evidence in this realm, I was struggling to find a polite way to say, what the fuck is going on here?
Because nothing in the context of this set of claims, arguments, or evidence seems to add up in any straightforward way.
There is something distorting the entire discussion.
And I have the sense that if Sam will look at the podcast he's put out, the claims he has made, and then look at the critiques of those claims and see how they actually line up with what has been said here, he will realize that he has found himself somewhere that he would not ordinarily find himself.
And I think the upshot for any honest broker, of which Sam is definitely one, The upshot would have to be, well, how did I end up in this spot, right?
How did I end up, and I don't know how to say it more gently, but how did I end up strawmanning a friend on such an important topic?
So, go ahead.
Many people won't have heard what we're talking about, what you're talking about here.
Can I just provide one evidence, one way in which, and it's all in the abstract until there's mention of particulars and then it's you.
But one of the particular things is right up front, and I actually have not, I've only listened to about three-fifths of it so far.
But right up front, Sam claims there's a bifurcation, and that's in fact his word.
The bifurcation that he claims is that there are people who take COVID seriously, who understand what a scourge it is and how damnable it is for humanity.
And that those people embrace vaccines.
And then the other side of the bifurcation are the people who do not take COVID seriously, who either think it's a hoax, or it's no worse than the flu, or you know, or whatever it is.
And that those people strangely are concerned about vaccine safety, but not about COVID safety.
Now this is...
The imagining that that could be a bifurcating set is so, so odd, honestly.
And like, I have somewhere to say about that.
I know you weren't done, but I just wanted to provide that as like, even if it was just one thing, what is your position on COVID?
That's not going to be a binary position.
But then add to that, what is the solution that has no possibility of being a bifurcating position?
You know, you cannot have a thing with a decision on top of it in which there's only two possible outcomes.
That's just not logically, that doesn't make any sense.
And of course, it is utterly true that since our very first livestream in March of 2020, we have been banging the gong about the seriousness of COVID, in fact, to the irritation of some number of people who say we're taking it too seriously.
You know, we're wearing masks in public before anyone else was, and you know, all of these things.
And that the claim right up front to set up, you know, his audience as believing that you're either on this side or not.
You got stars on your belly or you don't.
You're one of us or you're one of them and you better hope you're one of us because we're the science people, we're the reasonable people, we're the Democrats, you know, we're the tribal affiliation.
And it's not, you know, that's not how science works.
Yeah, this is actually so I we are not going to do for one thing.
It's only been out for, you know, I think less than 24 hours, but at the very least, it's been out for a day at most the so we're not going to do an exhaustive I just wanted to mention, you keep on saying strawmanning, and many people won't have heard what's going on.
Right, so this is the first point I wanted to make.
And again, my point here is really that I want Sam to see that he has ended up somewhere that should cause all of us to be scratching our heads.
Because I think the problem is, no matter what position you land on on this logical map, None of this makes sense.
There is something distorting our ability to see what our friends are saying.
There's something that is distorting our ability to understand what the evidence actually implies.
And that means that everybody is ending up in some sort of paradoxical landscape.
And you and I, in this case, we have been what I would describe as COVID hawks from the beginning.
In fact, you know, speaking of friends, I have told Joe Rogan twice on his program That I thought he was not concerned enough about COVID, right?
So, you know, that's just a gentle critique, which is this is a very dangerous disease.
The hazard of it is not captured in the case fatality rate.
The case fatality rate is reasonably low, but the amount of damage and therefore probably the years of people's lives that are lost to this disease is very high.
That's anomalous.
It's interesting, but at the very least, it ought to have us be quite careful.
And I will say, This is an interesting day to be having this discussion.
There are protests happening around the world against various measures.
Some of those measures are vaccine passports.
So there are protests in my understanding is London, Paris, Sydney, Amsterdam, Quebec, Milan, There have been in Greece, I don't know, in the UK I think.
So we've got lots of people protesting.
Now some of what I see those protests being about are quote-unquote lockdowns, which I've never really liked as a term, but nonetheless they're about some sort of civil liberty incursions, and then others are about these passports.
And there is a question about if you had reasonable entities making... Isn't there a third category though?
Isn't it... So the vaccine passport is a separate issue from mandatory vaccination.
Well, to be honest with you, I don't know enough about what's going on in the rest of the world, but the two things are obviously connected.
Sure, but they're not identical issues.
Right.
But if you're going to be delivering a coercive penalty to people for not being vaccinated, and we will get to why that is so preposterous, no matter what you think this is a preposterous measure, But in any case, you and I have been COVID hawks, right?
We have been very careful about COVID, and initially enthusiastic about the idea of vaccines, concerned about what we didn't know about them going forward, and then increasingly alarmed by what we have seen in the data emerging about vaccine hazards.
But the point is, we don't fit in either of the categories, right?
As you say, Sam lays out two categories.
One are people who are cavalier about COVID, and concerned about vaccine hazards, and the other is people who are concerned about COVID and not so concerned about vaccines, there's no category for us because our category is, yeah, concerned about the vaccines and concerned about COVID.
And at the very least, having presented that as his framework, and then never saying actually, Dark Horse doesn't fit in that framework at all, right?
It also doesn't fit in the framework of the portrayal of this as a political issue, which also comes up in this podcast, right?
Yes, there may be more skepticism on the right of the vaccine safety.
On the other hand, we are anything but from the right.
And Sam ought to know that because he, along with us, has been portrayed again and again as somehow a right winger, and it's not true of any of us.
I will say at least so far as I've listened through it at this point, the numbers that Harrison Topol bring out are about Republicans and their vaccination rates, both their intention to be vaccinated before the vaccinations came out and their actual vaccination rates, and Democrats.
And increasingly, I feel like, don't we all know that Democrats versus Republicans doesn't capture a rather large percentage of Americans.
There are a whole lot of us.
I mean, independents have always been a real thing and, you know, a substantial minority.
Um, but I think, um, increasingly what has happened in the last five years-ish, a ton of people have, uh, have decided that they, that they can't abide either of these parties anymore.
And so those people, all of the independents are not captured.
And I, you know, I think the number that, that Sam mentions in there is that only 2%, I hope I'm getting this right.
I think what the number was 2%, but I think what that 2% was referring to was, Only 2% of Democrats are not vaccinated.
Now that's a staggering number.
And that has to mean that the vast majority of people who used to be Democrats who are now independents are part of the sort of the base going well.
Actually, actually, I know this is real.
I know COVID is a bad thing.
And you and I can agree that that's a bad thing.
But when you tell me novel solution is the only correction to bad thing, and I say, let's talk about it.
If you come back at me with if you don't agree to novel solution, you don't believe it's a bad thing.
That's a logical flaw on your end, not on mine.
And this is something I actually I talked about on episode 82 as well, like I want to know what the name for this logical fallacy is.
a bad thing out there.
Yep.
Yes, there is.
And there's only one solution to that bad thing.
Well, let's talk about it.
Ah, if you don't agree to my one solution, then you don't believe in the bad thing.
No wrong. - Yep.
And this is closely, I don't know what to say.
It is similar in theme to Eric's famous four quadrant model, which has now been illustrated by several people where one is forced into a box that does not represent their position.
But okay, we've got a false dichotomy.
You've really got, you know, at least in theory, four different categories of people and only two are laid out in the podcast setup and then we somehow end up falsely aligned with those who are cavalier about COVID, which is anything but our position.
You know, and it's not the only place where we have a narrowing of the discussion in Sam's podcast that forces an incoherent conclusion.
There's also the question about, you know, he portrays that some people are vaccinated and others are unprotected, right?
Now, in your and my case, we are anything but unprotected.
Now, it could be that our understanding of the evidence surrounding ivermectin is somehow way off.
Now, it'd be hard to imagine how one gets there, because actually there is a lot of evidence.
Not all of it is randomized controlled trials.
There are randomized controlled trials, but there's a tremendous amount of evidence that suggests this is a highly effective prophylactic, and actually it's interesting As you go through the various edits on the data, whether you're looking at the randomized controlled trials or you're looking at all of the trials,
You get numbers in the range of 85, 86, 87 percent effective, which is right up there with vaccines and potentially better than vaccines in light of the fact that we don't see the same degradation with respect to the protective nature of ivermectin against variants.
So, did you want to show this paper?
I want it to behave itself first.
You want me to show both of them?
Yeah, we could show both.
So these are both papers that came out recently.
This is Cohen et al.
in Cell Reports Medicine.
I think is the name of the journal title, although I'm not familiar with it.
Cell Reports Medicine, yeah.
Called, Longitudinal Analysis Shows Durable and Broad Immune Memory After SARS-CoV-2 Infection with Persisting Antibody Responses and Memory BNT Cells.
So that's a pretty straightforward title, but in simpler English.
These authors, I think this was the eight-month one, they look at... Oh boy, my computer is jumping around, so I can't actually look at it unless you want to take off my screen for a minute, Zach, so I can take a look.
Yeah, it's eight months.
They looked at 254 patients.
You can put my screen back up here.
254 patients for eight months, and that's just what the longitudinal means there.
It's a time longitude.
And they found several different ways in which those people retain their immunity to COVID, having been exposed through the disease, not through vaccination.
So that's one, that's the first paper.
So the upshot of this is that the immunity that one gets, the natural immunity, the natural acquired immunity that one gets from contracting the disease, this is not something you want, but if you did contract the disease, the immunity seems to be long lasting and broad.
Yeah, you know, is there any silver lining at all to having had COVID?
You know, you really don't want it.
Long COVID is terrible and real, and we know people suffering from it, and you definitely don't want it.
But, you know, like with the vast majority of other diseases out there, having had it does appear to confer immunity.
And then the second paper in this vein is this Ivanova So this one we should warn, although we have serious critiques of the peer review process.
The second one is a pre-print, which means it hasn't gone through that process.
Take that for what it's worth.
This was posted on April 21st, 2021, and it's still up as a pre-print.
This is Ivanova et al.
called Discrete Immune Response Signature to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination vs. Infection.
So unlike that first one, unlike Cohen et al., which was simply trying to assess whether or not there was long-term immunity from having been infected with SARS-CoV-2, this paper specifically looks at what the differences in immune response are to having been vaccinated versus having been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the actual virus.
And what they find is actually the immunity conferred by having had the disease is greater than the immunity conferred by having had the vaccinations.
It is based on a much broader immunological response.
It is also likely to be more durable, which is consistent with the other paper that you showed.
Anyway, I would also point out That this is something that we here on Dark Horse have predicted again and again, right?
Simply looking at the narrowness of the mechanism of induced immunity by the vaccines, it is very narrowly targeted.
And so what we have said, and by the way, the CDC uses as their justification for attempting to get people who have already had COVID to get them vaccinated, is that we don't know how long Their immunity will last.
Now that's a nonsense justification.
Even if it was true that we simply don't know, the answer is at the point that we see that immunity beginning to decay, then we could do it.
And, you know, was it last week or a week before that Pfizer, given the evidence coming out of Israel, that immunity from post-vaccination was lapsing in the face of Delta about six months post-vaccination?
And that Pfizer was, I don't know, maybe they've pulled this back because I haven't seen anything about this in the last few days, but Pfizer was saying, actually, you're going to need boosters every six months.
So, you know, the Cohen et al.
papers suggests, and they just stopped at eight months.
It's not like they said immunity drops at eight months.
They said actual exposure to SARS-CoV-2, having had COVID gives you longitudinal immunity at least eight months.
And meanwhile, some signals from the mRNA vaccines are suggesting that they are shorter lived than that.
Right.
So with respect to Sam's podcast, I would just simply point out that any analysis that forces us into a dichotomy of the vaccinated and the unprotected is inherently wrong.
We unfortunately have a large number of people who have had COVID and apparently have immunity.
So if you believed that there was no adverse event signal that was meaningful in the vaccines.
You might argue, well, there's no cost to vaccinating them, but that is not the case.
Nobody has established that that signal that is very obviously in the various data is meaningless.
It could be meaningless, but the burden is on those who believe it is meaningless to show that the anomalously large signal doesn't mean anything.
And until you do, it makes sense to take all of those people who haven't, who have had COVID, and Eliminate the hazard that there is some negative side effect of these vaccines to which they for which they would get no benefit So at the very least you have those two categories You have people whose immunity came from the disease who are not unprotected and are not vaccinated and raise Substantial questions with respect to anything like a vaccine passport.
I would point out right these people should have an exemption But the other thing is, for people, you know, and it's not easy to get ivermectin in the United States, as far as I know it's all but impossible in Canada, and I can't speak to the rest of the world, but what I can say is for those of us who have decided that actually that adverse event signal is scary, that the variance and the drop-off in immunity is troubling,
And have used this alternative method, I think the burden is on anybody who believes that this is not highly effective to explain why it is that, you know, a repeated demonstration that we have something like 86-87% protection is not sufficient, right?
So, all right.
In terms of, again, my point here is I think if Sam looks at the claims that were made in his podcast and then he looks at the analyses of that podcast, and I know he's getting a lot of pushback from various quadrants, I will say a thread emerged last night.
Zach, do you want to show that Twitter thread?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
This is a thread by Alexandros Marinos.
I should say I have never met Alexandros.
Have you ever met Alexandros?
I have not.
We have not met Alexandros.
I will say he is engaged in a project that he calls Better Skeptics, which makes me nervous because what he's been doing is incentivizing people to find errors in our podcasts.
And then he has a A group of referees who are looking into them and I'm very concerned that at the level of going through people's transcripts and finding errors there's a hazard but I'm also encouraged That he is attempting to do the job well, which would involve calibrating any errors found and weighting them correctly, following through to see what their logical implication might be.
Let me just say that I think he invoked this idea that we and this podcast needs better skeptics in the wake of the Quillette article by Berlinski and Dagan from a couple weeks ago.
And I just wholeheartedly agree with this.
We all, all of us need better skeptics, no matter how good our skeptics are.
But with first that piece in Quillette two weeks ago, and now this podcast yesterday, I feel it even more intently that, you know, we really, we really 100% need people who are going to be honorable and scientific rather than obscuring their actual perverse incentives and political in assessing what it is that we are doing.
Yes.
Oddly, I'm not sure if it's true or not, but I think he may be quoting you.
The term better skeptics may have been borrowed from something you said on a stream.
But in any case, we could just keep pointing at each other.
But in any case, my basic point is I am cautiously encouraged that that Alexandros and his team are going to Overcome the obstacles to this kind of analysis which involve basically calibrating and weighting the various conclusions and then figuring out how To compare them to other things.
But anyway, we can talk more about that some other time in any case here Alexandros has done a thread in which he goes through Sam's podcast from yesterday and he Found many of the critiques that I would make he found a few that I didn't know to make So he checks into some claims And actually I learned one thing about us from his thread, which I found encouraging that I would learn something about myself
What he points to in this thread is he says that you and I actually have a bias in the direction of caution, which he takes from several things that we have said in other podcasts.
Oh yeah, I saw that and I thought, wow, that's exactly what the reputation of your grandfather was.
This is exactly my thought.
We are so interested in risk and so interested in getting rid of all the unnecessary risks so that serendipity can allow us to go places, but he's right in one I think he's right in one way.
And what he points to are two things.
He points to the fact that you and I have a, you know, it's informal, but a policy where if one of us is sick or thinks they're getting sick, we sleep separately, which epidemiologically obviously makes sense, right?
It's the kind thing to do.
Yeah.
And then the other thing is that we are not eating fish from the Pacific after the Fukushima incident, which may sound wild-eyed and crazy.
Of course, that is the result of the fact that after the Fukushima accident, fish were tested from the Pacific and the results were alarming, right?
I have not looked at this since... It's been a while.
It's been a while.
The accident was in 2011 and the fish sampling wasn't too long after.
But what these samples showed So basically there are two isotopes that you would be particularly concerned about.
One of them is cesium, the other one is strontium.
One is a muscle seeker, the other is a bone seeker.
And these things, these isotopes, cause cancer because of the radioactive decay.
And it's actually, it's not just the radiation, it's the fact that you have a radioactive particle, basically a piece of dust, Radiating the tissue around it, but the basic point was in salmon.
It was a very high percentage of fish My recollection was it was something like half of the animals sampled had cesium from Fukushima In their tissues and strontium wasn't tested so we it's not like we can say any of the fish were free of radioactive isotopes And in tuna, the number was something like 100%, and the reason was apparently that ecologically the tuna were spending their youth in places that were contaminated.
In any case.
Well, and they're higher up the food chain.
Well, they're both high up the food chain, you're right.
Some tuna, real big tuna, are higher up the food chain.
But in any case, the point is, yes, we are cautious about certain things.
Why are we cautious?
Because actually, as you point out with my grandfather, Um, Harry was very cautious about hazards that could be managed, but he was also the guy who hiked up Mount Whitney with me, and when it was time to come back down, we slid down a glacier on trash bags that he had packed for the purpose.
So anyway... We're the cautious people who took our children to the Amazon, and like actually to the Amazon, not the, not the...
Fancy, easy to get to, and I know it doesn't feel easy, but not the place that most gringos go when they think they're in the Amazon.
But we actually took them there once we felt that they were old enough to, well, actually be able to afford to be vaccinated against yellow fever and all the other things that one needs to be vaccinated against to be safe there.
And there are risks, but you get rid of the risks that you can.
Yes, what are you laughing at?
I'm laughing at the idea of a fancy Amazon.
Because frankly, I find the whole thing fancy.
I really do.
I know what you mean.
You know what I mean, and actually probably most viewers and listeners don't, but the vast majority, and I've talked to people who think that they experience the Amazon, and those of us who are actually tropical biologists listen to what they report, and where they were, and what just outside of the resort, and maybe they didn't call it a resort, but what that looked like.
You know, there's a lot of ways to get people into things that feel like they're the real deal and are actually some Disney-fied version of it.
I would put it a different way.
I would say that the sensitivity of tropical forest to disruption is immense, and that basically the edges are Thoroughly compromised virtually everywhere.
And so the problem is that when one wants to, it's very easy to end up with an emptied forest or a forest in which certain creatures have been curated.
It's very difficult to get to a place.
And you know, even the place that we go has been compromised by, you know, effects from the outside.
As you know, I never published this, but my very first research in grad school ended up being on The effects of a so-called eco-tourist lodge having introduced a slightly bigger and more charismatic poison dart frog to the area because the one that was actually native there wasn't quite big enough for the tourists to see easily.
And of course, the bigger, slightly more charismatic poison dart frog drove the original native one completely locally extinct.
You know, as you would predict.
So, you know, I do have a bias towards thinking, you know, whenever I see development that is aimed at appealing to the aesthetics of northerners, of gringos, that pretty much every time I've then gone down into that rabbit hole and investigated what they're doing, the ways that they appeal to the aesthetics and the desire for comfort of those of us who don't live there tends to be destructive of the actual environment.
Yeah, I mean, it's a general tourism problem extended to forest.
Anyway, we're sort of far afield here.
Maybe to close this out, I want to point out a couple things.
I think that In light of what Sam released, and in light of the many valid critiques that have been leveled and can be leveled against it, that there has to be, this is an invitation to a conversation, and I think the theme of the conversation has to be what the fuck is going on here, right?
Because what the fuck is going on here is the only way to interpret The fact that we all end up in these strange categories.
So, you know, among the things that need to be, I think, explained, Sam, who's generally very careful, In his podcast is searching, it's clear that he is earnestly searching for an explanation as to why people who appear to be credible doctors, I think he's specifically pointing to Dr. Corey who showed up with me on Joe Rogan's program.
Could possibly be so mistaken.
It could possibly be on the wrong side of this and he's grasping for an explanation and it's obvious he's not accusing anybody of being schizophrenic, but this is what he reaches for.
He says, you know, of course there, you know, and it's like, really is that, is that where we... He's like, he's, so this is not in a part that I've listened to yet, but he's like appealing to the base rate of schizophrenia in the population and imagining that some, that explains some of what we're seeing.
Look, I think what he's really doing is he's looking for a proof of concept that something could explain why a doctor would be so far off the mark and so clearly so.
And the answer is the doctor isn't so far off the mark, and it is not that he is clearly so.
The problem is that this landscape is so confusing that if you start with the conclusion that Vaccines are safe.
They are the only way forward.
And anybody who says otherwise is obviously deeply confused.
And then you try to explain how, you know, an ICU doctor is so deeply confused.
Well, the answer is, I don't know, you need some exotic explanation.
Likewise, Eric Topol portrays Robert Malone as not the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, which is clearly not the case.
This has been looked into.
There are publications and there are patents that clearly indicate that he is where he said he was.
So I think we need to close this out, but the basic point is the podcast that was released
Proceeds from the argument that nobody who is concerned, alarmed about the vaccine hazards, or very enthusiastic about the possibility that repurposed drugs could be highly effective at preventing COVID, or could be useful in driving the pathogen to extinction, could possibly be right.
And on the discovery that those claims aren't correct, that the confusion is born of some other cause, the right thing to do is to have a conversation.
I would like to have that conversation with you, Sam, privately, publicly, whatever you think the right way to do it is.
But it seems like the right way to go.
So, you wanted to close that out, so this is not directly about that, but I did want to point out two BMJ, British Medical Journal, opinion pieces that have been published in the last couple of months that just speak to the fact that there are Actually, a large number of people, medical professionals, who are even willing to speak publicly.
And that, of course, doesn't address the very, very, very many number of people who are not able to speak up for whatever reason.
So here we have, for instance, Zach, if you will show my screen here, from June 8th, 2021, why we petitioned the FDA to refrain from fully approving any COVID-19 vaccine this year.
And it begins, we are part of a group of clinicians, scientists, and patient advocates who have lodged a formal citizen petition with the U.S.
FDA asking the agency to delay any consideration of a full approval of a COVID-19 vaccine.
And this is related to the podcast from yesterday, only in that I believe Topol specifically says, you know, of course people are scared.
It's only got an EUA.
It's only got an emergency use authorization.
Why won't the FDA do what it needs to do?
Well, there are a number of people in the health professions who are saying, Actually, and here it is.
Our petition doesn't argue that risks outweigh benefits, or that benefits outweigh risks.
Rather, we focus on methods and processes, outlying the many remaining unknowns about safety and effectiveness, and suggest the kinds of studies needed to address the open questions.
So, this sounds like both caution and science to me.
And then there is a similar one from May 7th, Also in BMJ Opinion, British Medical Journal Opinion, titled, COVID Vaccines for Children Should Not Get Emergency Use Authorization.
And so this is a different, it's a smaller group of people, but they are saying, you know, based on very similar arguments, that we don't know enough yet, and that effectively, this is not their language, but that the children should not be the guinea pigs.
Yeah, not only not the guinea pigs, but the fact that kids appear to tolerate COVID extremely well and have apparent risk from the vaccine suggests that we have an obligation to exclude them from the hazard if it doesn't come to their benefit.
Otherwise, it becomes a transfer of health from the young to the old, and a rational civilization wouldn't do that.
Actually, I did want to make one other suggestion, something that has increasingly bothered me, and this showed up in Sam's podcast, but it didn't start there.
It's almost ubiquitous in the battle over the evidence here.
It has to do with the claim that the other side is killing people, right?
Now my sense is this is actually logically a very simple issue.
You and I wouldn't be doing what we are doing if we thought that the arguments we were making were liable to harm more people than they helped.
Now, it's not as simple a calculation as how many lives saved, because as we just pointed out, I at least, and I assume you, would argue to protect children even at an increased number of lost lives amongst the elderly.
But, nonetheless, there's some basic calculation that we ought to all agree on, that we're trying to minimize harm in some way that is weighted towards, you know, the quality of lives lost or however one would rationally do it.
So, that means that we are looking at the evidence and we are doing what it seems is most likely to minimize the harm.
Is it guaranteed to?
No.
And we've talked about that.
It's not a very pleasant position to be in that when you air your position publicly that you know it will have consequences for people's lives, that certain number of people will perhaps die because of what you're saying.
On the other hand, I would never portray Sam or Yuri or Claire as killing people.
I know that they are motivated by a desire to get the evidence properly understood to minimize the hazard to people.
We just disagree over what the evidence suggests.
And so I guess my point is it's like a mathematical equation, right?
If everybody is motivated by looking at the evidence and trying to minimize harm to humanity, then that part cancels out from both sides of the equation.
And what we're left with is a disagreement over what the evidence implies the best way forward is.
Why can't we have that argument without one side portraying the other as either indifferent to harm, or as Eric Topol said of me yesterday, he called me predatory.
Yeah.
Right?
As if that makes any sense at all.
Topol wasn't careful in the way that Sam was at all, and there was just a ton of falsehood there out of his mouth.
But I do think that I have said here on previous episodes, at least once I think, that if, for instance, YouTube is going to have a policy by which you cannot speak the, you know, you cannot say the name of the drug that we should call, that, you know, that we might call Voldemort, That they are actually the ones with blood on their hands.
And so I have said that about the entities at least once, at least with regard to YouTube.
And I'm sure I've thought it, but I'm not sure I've said it about the other entities that might be obscuring some of the benefits of ivermectin, for instance.
Yeah.
But never about individuals.
So that's the comparison you're making, but I just wanted to be clear that, you know, I do think that there ultimately will be, there's blood, but it's in the sort of metaphorical hands of entities, of, you know, entities that don't actually have hands.
And that's part of how it works.
That's part of how it's allowed to happen.
Right.
I mean, look, if you, you know, if you capture a regulatory body And you corrupt it so that it can't monitor a hazard or something like that.
Yeah.
That's obviously a different matter.
Us out here in the public trying to navigate a confusing set of evidence is a whole different matter.
Also a whole different matter I'm getting, you know, you and I have predicted that the unvaccinated will be blamed for the variants and for the upsurge in COVID that is certain to come with the dawning of the northern winter.
Despite predictions from, you know, long before COVID that mass vaccination during a pandemic will create selective pressure for new variants.
And so I think the point is, look, I wouldn't blame the vaccinated, even though there's an argument to be made that vaccination is playing a key role in the generation of variants.
And I don't want to see the unvaccinated blamed, especially in light of the fact that the unvaccinated are several different categories, some of which are pretty likely to be blameless.
Right.
So, you know, those who have had COVID and are unvaccinated are not guilty in any conceivable way, right?
Likewise, if ivermectin actually works the way the evidence seems to suggest it does, people who have gone out of their way to protect themselves in this alternative form are actually much less likely to be contributing.
But at the very worst, what you have is a complex analysis in which do the unvaccinated who have not had COVID and aren't on ivermectin, do they play a role in the ongoing pandemic?
Of course they do.
Do the vaccinated play a role?
Of course they do, right?
These things are part of a complex system and the right way to analyze it is to exclude blame and try to understand what's taking place and what might best be done in order to get control of the pandemic.
Let me just show this paper.
Actually, I haven't spent a lot of time with it yet, but it's from 2015.
It has nothing to do with COVID at all.
Read at all.
Published in PLOS Biology.
Imperfect vaccination can enhance the transmission of highly virulent pathogens.
And the last sentence of the abstract reads, our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.
It's very much in keeping with what we've been talking about for months.
It's frankly, it's not a stretch.
It's not a leap to think this, you know, all you have to do is think a little bit evolutionarily to imagine that this would be Likely.
And here we have a paper from six years ago saying, you know, be aware, be aware.
And this, you know, again, imperfect vaccination is just a term of art here, meaning that it doesn't 100% prevent transmission.
And indeed, we don't, I don't think that we yet have evidence that these vaccines are preventing transmission at all, are they?
I mean, I'm not sure about that, but what they seem to be doing, most of their effectiveness seems to be about reducing the degree of disease that people who do end up getting it having.
But I'm not positive with the evidence.
Almost certainly they're going to reduce the amount of transmission.
But the problem is that they constitute an inadvertent gain-of-function experiment, right?
You're creating a kind of hazard that the virus then evolves past.
That is unavoidable in this circumstance.
What is inexcusable is that we are not paying attention to the signs that we might be doing something wrong in this regard.
What we are doing instead is rationalizing away the signal that this might be having an adverse consequence.
And that really is troubling.
And I guess that it does raise one final point.
I also felt in Sam's podcast that it was Ungenerous, especially in light of the fact that they spent time talking about the lab leak and the fact that civilization at large changed its tune on this.
What they did not point out was that, like on many issues surrounding COVID, we have been early on this and we have been right.
And in fact, Eric Topol did not acknowledge that he has been wrong until very recently.
In fact, he took Jon Stewart to task for... That's really recent.
It's very recent.
The fact that he also appears to have a relationship with Christian Anderson raises a question about whether or not he's in fact viewing that issue objectively.
But nonetheless, what I would say is, and I tried to say this at the beginning of my podcast with Pierre Corey, I tried to say, look, if you have somebody who has gone against the grain and against the social pressure, right, and said, look, no, the evidence suggests this thing, and then suffered, you know, something like a year of being stigmatized, For saying such a thing and then they turn out to be right.
My sense is that gives you a certain budget, right?
And I think the point is that budget means that at the point that I say something or you say something that amounts to actually the conventional narrative is dangerously off.
It doesn't make us right, but it means leaping to the idea that we've somehow missed the boat, lost our minds.
The question is, well, is this going to be another one of those cases where we turn out to be right down the road, right?
And all of the stigma on the way there is just simply misdirected.
All right.
Maybe now we are there.
What do you think?
All right.
Sure.
Should we talk about sleep?
Let's talk about sleep.
Let's talk about sleep.
Let's just start.
Sleep is chapter six of our forthcoming book, as I said, at the top of the hour.
And it's going to be a short excerpt today, just two pages, from the middle of the chapter.
So in the beginning of the chapter, we walk through a little bit about what sleep is and whether or not we think aliens, if they landed on the planet, would recognize what we do for a third of our lives.
I'm not going to give that away.
I'm just going to jump right into the section called dreams and hallucinations.
You'll remember this moment.
In the darkest, quietest moment of some night long ago, hours after we had both been asleep, Heather sat up, looked at Brett, and said, Do you seriously intend to leave these car parts on the bed?
Brett's answer, I think so, yes, did not ease tensions any.
Furthermore, the fact that there were, of course, no car parts anywhere near the bed would not be admitted as evidence in this discussion.
It wasn't the first time that Heather had said something while deeply asleep that was impossible to engage using the normal rules.
When Brett responded to Heather's sleep talk, the tone generally decayed quickly.
There was, it seemed, no reasoning with either of us.
Without having any consciousness of these episodes, Heather somehow knew, later, when awake and being told about them, what Brett was supposed to do.
Don't engage me.
Let me have both sides of the conversation and it will be over soon enough.
Seeing things that aren't there.
Hearing sounds that were never made.
Believing things that are not true, yet being certain of them.
Being unable to control one's movements.
Having conversations with people who don't exist.
As it turns out, a list of symptoms of a person with schizophrenia has a suspicious overlap with a person asleep and dreaming.
All of us enter this state every night, even though not everyone reaches out through that state and talks in their sleep.
We do not regularly draw this parallel, because our dream state usually comes with paralysis and amnesia.
Any confrontations with reality are blissfully hidden from us by the time we get to our morning coffee.
How surprising, then, that organisms that do not appear to have had our best interests in mind, such as psilocybe mushrooms and peyote cactus, seem to have accessed these very same tendencies.
To explain this, we need to take a step back.
Organisms, including us and other animals, plus plants and fungi, do not generally want to be eaten.
Fruit, nectar, and milk are, as we discussed in the previous chapter, exceptions to this rule, but in general, organisms put a lot of work into discouraging the consumption of their body parts.
Structural barriers are one method.
Cactus spines, porcupine quills, turtle shells.
Another is poison, but it is often too crude to be maximally effective.
If a deer dies after eating foxglove, the deer will be replaced by another deer that knows nothing of the plant's poison.
On the other hand, If a deer expands its dietary repertoire to include psilocybe mushrooms and spends the rest of the day having a temporary psychotic break, it may well look elsewhere for its next meal, having been educated and perhaps terrorized rather than killed.
Secondary compound is a loosely defined botanical term for a substance that is not functional within the organism that produces it.
Rather, it is intended to interact with pathways in other creatures, often in a hostile way.
The irritants in poison ivy are an obvious deterrent to herbivores eating those leaves.
Similarly, potatoes and the other nightshades contain endogenous pesticides, a class of compounds known as glycoalkaloids, that are highly toxic to humans.
In contrast to those pure poisons and irritants, consider these secondary compounds.
Capsaicin, the molecule that creates the burning sensation when we eat chili peppers, generally dissuades mammals from eating seeds that are intended for birds, which should not have the receptors to sense the heat.
And caffeine, which disincentivizes herbivores from eating caffeinated seeds at high concentrations, may also be a kind of pharmacological social engineering on the part of the plants.
When bees are given sugar rewards that contain caffeine, their spatial memory improves threefold.
The caffeinated nectar of both citrus and coffee flowers may well be priming their pollinators, the bees, to remember them and to come back for more.
From psilocybe mushrooms and ergot fungi, to peyote cactus and the botanical brew in ayahuasca, to salvia and sonoran desert toads, there are fungi, plants, and animals that have produced secondary compounds that interact with our physiology in ways that mirror dream states.
Call them hallucinogens or psychedelics or entheogens, their effect on us can be narrative and elucidating.
We live our days connected by dreams.
Lest we wake up each morning imagining that we are brand new beings, our dreams give us context and allow us to grow between days.
We are conscious during the day and unconscious in the first part of the night during non-REM sleep.
Once REM picks up in the second half of each night, our consciousness is borrowed.
Our body is taken safely offline, paralyzed, and our conscious minds create fictions strange, hypothetical, and extravagant.
Sometimes they're even true.
A vast array of cultures have some tradition in which hallucinogenic states are intentionally triggered in some or all of their members.
Humans being human, it is not surprising to find that many cultures have borrowed secondary compounds that trigger terrifying waking dreams, and have turned what might have been a bad trip into an important tool for human consciousness expansion.
More on this in Chapter 12.
Just as many cultures have appropriated the hallucinogenic secondary compounds of plants and fungus to expand the consciousness of their members, many also have sleep rituals, from the simple to the elaborate, by which individuals prepare for their nightly slumbers.
Even some of our closest relatives engage in rituals in advance of sleep.
And the next section tells of us discovering some in some spider monkeys in Guatemala.
Pretty exciting.
I'm actually quite interested to hear what the world will make of this set of hypotheses when it engages them.
It's something I've long wanted to bring into the world, and I guess we're finally going to find out whether people are ready for it.
But anyway, well, where do you think we should talk about here?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to say.
Yeah, there's a lot to say.
Actually, Zach, did you just get an email from me?
I wanted to show this.
Years after we started talking about these hypotheses, I ran into this cartoon.
It's an XKCD cartoon.
You'll have to make it a bit bigger, I think, for most people, including people on mobile who might want to see it.
So it starts out with a guy, he's just awakened from a dream, there are people repelling from Zeppelin, there's a nuclear explosion going on near a major
He runs down the stairs, he goes to the breakfast table to talk to his significant other as the whole thing evaporates and he's left with almost nothing he could possibly describe.
And she appears to be nonplussed.
Right, and the hidden caption to the thing is, every damn morning.
That's the title, actually.
Oh, it's Every Damn Morning, yeah.
Anyway, so yes, this idea that our dreams are actually built to be hidden from our conscious minds in a certain way.
And then, you know, it wasn't in the piece that you read, but the fact that some dreams aren't.
Some dreams aren't what?
Aren't deliberate, or are not adaptively hidden.
There seem to be some dreams that are... They just have their message right there emblazoned on them?
Is that what you mean?
Well, what I mean is there's a difference between the dream that you can't remember and the dream that you can struggle to remember something of, and the dream that, to my way of thinking, is actually handed across the consciousness barrier because its purpose is actually for your consciousness to see it, which feel very different.
And I think these are all disrupted by our terrible relationship with alarm clocks, which basically interrupt our dream cycles, our Alarm clocks and other intrusions in the soundscape, and also light.
And we'll talk a little bit about light here, but yeah.
Right.
But for those of us who sometimes have the experience of solving a difficult problem in our sleep, right, it's very often one of these things where you awake with a solution that you're keenly aware of.
Well, and so, I mean, you say that speaking specifically of mental or intellectual problems, right?
I think probably everyone has.
Everyone has solved problems in their sleep, whether or not they recognize it as such.
So there are physical problems that can be solved if you're like a craftsman, if you're trying to figure out how to make a particular joint or something.
But also, the one that is probably the most ubiquitous and perhaps the most ancient of at least these types that we've sort of categorized here are just, you know, how to get your body to do a thing.
And in the modern world, that might be, you know, skateboarding or rock climbing or forehand frisbee or, you know, whatever it is.
But, you know, you work at it, you work at it, you work at it.
At some point you get, you know, you either walk away calm or not.
Um, the next time you try it, if you have had time to sleep between now and then, you're almost always better at it.
Right.
And the distinction, yeah, I mean, as people who, uh, If you know the podcast well or people who will read in the book, obviously all that dream stuff has to pay its way, right?
Not every dream does, but on average it all has to pay its way because it's very expensive.
So the question is... It's metabolically expensive because the brain is by far the most expensive organ to run in the body and when it's doing all this extra stuff, even if it's got body offline, actually muscles are cheaper to run in aggregate than the brain is.
Yeah, grain is just a super expensive to run and you can also, you know, you can dormantize it.
And so choosing to make it active about narratives that aren't real and on all of that is something adaptation has done to us for a reason.
What the reason isn't so obvious, but that there's a reason or that there has to be is clear enough.
But the point is, Yes, we have all probably most of what we do in dreams is at least attempt to solve problems.
And we will all have solved problems.
And in general, those dreams that you can't remember are presumably about solving problems that you, you know, at some level that is not conscious.
But yeah, the dreams I was talking about, the ones that seem to get handed across the consciousness barrier, are ones, you know, in my experience, it's been like, there's some object that you're trying to fix.
And you can't figure out Why it's not working, and then you wake up with the solution to it.
It's clear that that work was done by your sleeping self, but it's also clear that your unconscious mind isn't in a position to operationalize it, right?
Yeah.
So it's, yeah, it's a pretty fascinating... I do still wonder about those car parts, though.
Yes, well, I mean, you know, I hadn't thought it through, but yeah, I mean, they had to go somewhere.
I guess.
You do always threaten to store things on my side of the bed since that incident.
Is that just me?
Yeah, no one else threatens to store things on my side of the bed.
Right.
No, I just thought it was symmetrical.
I thought, you know, I do threaten to store new objects that have no place.
I think if I do that, it's following your lead.
Oh, is that right?
Yes.
Oh, God.
Yes.
I've created a monster.
Yeah, yeah.
Who wants to store things on my side of the bed, apparently.
Okay, more from this?
I mean, I don't know.
I'm pretty happy with it.
All right.
Let us then, so I'm just going to read, as we mentioned last week, most of the chapters in the book have at the very end the corrective lens.
And so just the last corrective lens from the sleep chapter is this.
This is advice that we are giving.
Most of these are at the individual level.
This is one for the societal level.
Restrict outdoor blue spectrum light at the societal level, particularly lights that shine upward and outward at all hours of the night.
Nighttime darkness is healthy, 24-hour light is not, and is even implicated in higher rates of disease.
Furthermore, humans deserve a night sky, a sky full of possibilities, sometimes of clouds, often the moon, occasionally planets, nearly always stars in the Milky Way in which we live.
Besides sleep, which we need, what else might we lose when we disappear our own night sky?
And we don't know the answer to that right we will lose, we potentially lose a lot, and in light of that, in light of that.
There's a review paper out this year called Non-Visual Effects of Indoor Light Environment on Humans, a Review.
So this is very restrictive.
It's not about visual effects, it's not about the effects of outdoor stuff, but it's a review of the extant evidence which concludes a few things.
And really they aren't going to be surprising, but it's all nicely in this one paper now.
They find from the review of the literature that at night, well, first of all, let me just define a few terms.
They've got illuminance as one of their terms, which is just, I mean, it's just basically brightness, luminous flux per unit as measured in either foot candles or lux.
So illuminance, and then CCT, which is the correlated color temperature, Which is basically a measure of temperature, which is to say the higher CCT, the bluer and cooler the light is, and the lower the CCT, the warmer and yellower the light is.
And so, in advance of us going through the evidence, daytime light tends to be blue, and end of day and fire lights tend to be warmer CCT, lower CCT, and yellower, redder.
Okay.
So at night, both high illuminance, brighter, and high CCT, that is cooler, bluer light, are positively correlated with the suppression of melatonin, which I think many of us knew that, but there's basically nothing going in the opposite direction there.
Furthermore, exposure to both blue light and high CCT light, basically the same thing, not quite.
You know, different researchers using slightly different standards and measures.
At night, exposure to blue light and cool light at night induce a delayed phase shift, which is also consistent with a reduction in melatonin.
So basically your sleep is going to be disrupted.
In almost none of these cases can you just say, ah, high CCT light bad, blue light bad.
No.
During the day, especially in the mornings, the more exposed we are to blue light, and I think I mentioned this last week, although maybe I failed to, but there's a different piece of research that shows that the earlier in the mornings you tend to be exposed to bright light, to outdoor light, to cooler light, That correlates with lower BMI.
Obesity tends not to thrive as well among people who are getting out into bright outdoor light early in the mornings.
So high CCT, again the bluer light, stimulates positive mood, and high illuminance during the daytime is positively correlated with subjective alertness, so you're more awake.
There's also a bunch of mood stuff.
The mood stuff is a little dicier, so I didn't include it here.
And then one of the papers that they cite from 2013 is that after millennia, maybe more than millennia of folk tales and cultural stories about the moon influencing Influencing all sorts of things influencing mood and fertility and behavior and you know all of these things.
There's a paper from 2013 that finds that the lunar cycle does indeed influence human sleep.
And they actually did this, they went and collected data that had been collected from a sleep lab.
So afterwards, people who actually aren't even affected by the light from the moon, it's actually in the, like with- They've picked up enough information about what the lunar cycle is that even while the moon is not impacting them directly, it's still affecting their sleep.
Yeah.
So what they have is electroencephalogram delta activity during NREM sleep.
So EEG delta activity during non-REM sleep, which is an indicator of deep sleep, decreases by 30% during the full moon.
Time to fall asleep increases by five minutes, not a lot, but the EEG assessed total sleep duration is also reduced by 20 minutes.
During the full moon without, you know, for people who were sleeping inside in a sleep lab without any, you know, without this being on the table about something that they were being asked to think about.
It's interesting because people are so disconnected from the lunar cycle now that it's hard for me to, you know.
Some signal is so strong that it's getting through the fact that if you asked most people on most days where we are in the lunar cycle, they'd have no idea.
Right.
And I mean, I think this is beautiful because it's a full moon right now.
Today is the full moon.
You know, especially in the northern summer, at least in the part of the world where we live, we're going to have a clear blue sky.
I was lucky enough to be out on the water very early this morning and, you know, bright, bright blue illuminance, you know, high, high illuminance, bright, high CCT light early in the morning and then to be able to go back out at night and see the full moon rising.
Yeah, it's going to take a little longer to fall asleep maybe for the whole planet during a full moon according to this research, and your sleep duration is going to be reduced by a bit.
What this paper didn't try to look at, but what I predict is true, is that there are also going to be seasonal differences, right?
You know, whereas we have these expectations in modern and weird countries that, you know, you start work at eight or you go to class at eight.
And that happens, you know, the farther away from the equator you are, the less sense that makes physiologically across the entire year.
You know, 8am here in September when classes start, it's very, very bright out.
And in December, it's still dark out.
And, you know, being expected to get up with the same enthusiasm and alertness and ability to do calculus or whatever it is, you know, you're going to.
If you've been raised in part by the photons from the sun as opposed to by, you know, your mom telling you you have to get out of bed and your alarm clock, of course you're not going to be equally capable.
Of course not.
Yeah, in some sense.
I think we made the point on Dark Horse several weeks ago that there is a distinction between biological time and laboratory time.
And it's not that laboratory time doesn't exist.
It's not that somebody made it up, right?
Laboratory time exists and you can measure it, but the idea that what we're going to do Is build mechanical clocks and and align ourselves with them align our behavior with them That's not how it works and you know as soon as you break your cycle it just you know even somebody who lives by clocks if you go backpacking and Right?
Suddenly you find yourself not so eager to stay up to 11, right?
You know, it's like, oh, the sun sets.
Unless it's late June and you're on Vancouver Island.
Right, right.
If you're very far north, yeah.
But the point is, you know, you tend to get up very easily.
You don't need an alarm clock in the morning, and you don't need someone to tell you, hey, it's getting really late, you need to go to bed, because it just resets very, very quickly.
Now, you know, the problem is it trades off two things.
Your personal cycle and how it interfaces with, you know, the celestial motions of various objects is at odds with your ability to say, I will meet you at this place at that time, right?
Or we will engage in this activity in this location, you know, on this day and this time.
We have to be able to do that because that's the way civilization works, but to imagine that we are not borrowing from a much more natural, intuitive, and ancient interaction with time is just, it's an error.
Yeah.
And you know, you see, you begin to see in a way that I don't feel like I was seeing signage at parks and such in the 70s and 80s when we were growing up.
You know, some places now say open, you know, dawn to dusk, this sort of thing.
But then, you know, I was at a, I was at a park I hadn't been at before last week and it was, it was weird.
It was like open 8am through dusk.
It's like, why?
And I was, you know, I again was showing up to some new place to paddleboard on some new river Um, and I was there at 7 and it was, it had been, the sun had risen an hour and a half earlier and I was there an hour before the park opened.
I just thought, you know, why?
Like what, what's, to what end is this park closed, uh, until 8am even though it being open 8am in the winter, you know, to the degree that it's about safety and, and, you know, not being policed, um, when it's dark out.
Well, you know, just, just make it dawn to dusk then.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that that's, you know, the good thing about a dawn and dusk rule is that you can operationalize it because everybody can figure out whether it's, you know, after dawn or past dusk.
The problem is probably an enforcement issue, unfortunately.
Right, but in this particular case, they had one end that was a clock, a lab time in your formulation, and one that was an astronomical time.
It seemed a little random to choose one as a lab time and one as an astronomical time.
Yeah, but you're also right that as you get closer to the equator, these things become If you're really close to the equator, they become so regular that you actually... Yeah, do it six to six, you know?
It doesn't wobble at the equator, but the farther north or south you are, the farther away from the equator you are, the more variation there's going to be.
And like I said, I think now we have good evidence, and I presume that that evidence will grow, that the lunar cycle is actually affecting our sleep.
We know that it's not just female typical sex hormones that are changing along cycles that are the same length of time as the lunar cycle, and that's no accident.
There are a lot of our hormones for both of us.
All of us, or both sexes is what I meant, that are cyclic.
It's going to be circadian, it's going to be lunar, and it's going to be seasonal as well.
There will be higher peaks and lower lows the farther from the equator you're going to be.
Totally.
I'm also always keen to point out that in other creatures, there are much less cryptic reasons for these things.
So, lunar phobia in bats being a great example.
If you go out and you try to catch bats, you find that typically you get many fewer bats when you do so, you know, the fuller the moon, the fewer the bats.
And the reason for this is typically interpreted as basically increased vulnerability to visual predators, especially owls.
So the idea is the, you know, bats are nocturnal, presumably mostly because it hides them from their predators.
And microbats at least have a mechanism for navigating at night that allows them not to be hobbled by it.
So echolocation works very well at night.
There are some bats that navigate visually and they have giant eyes, but in any case, for most bats, the advantage of hunting at night is diminished when their predators have a fair number of photons to go on, and so anyway, you get this lunar phobia effect.
Obviously human beings are not likely to be sensitive for that reason, but the fact that we remain sensitive is pretty interesting.
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't, in different cultures, some restrictions on when particular types of hunts take place regarding the moon.
Well... Both because the moon makes it easier to hunt and easier to be hunted.
It's very rare for humans to hunt at night.
My guess would be, so there obviously are creatures that will eat people, but there are also typically cultural responses Right?
Like the mythology that says, you know, if a lion has hunted a person that you have to kill that lion because it has developed a taste for human blood or whatever.
And these things function presumably very effectively to select against the animals that experiment with the hunting of people.
And so anyway, you know, you and I have run into Crocodiles that could easily kill a person that, you know, flee in fear when we swim near them.
And, you know, obviously mountain lions are fully capable of killing a person, but they very rarely do.
But they're, you know, they're famously, and I don't remember which fossils, but they're, you know, they're famously these, you know, African fossils with the With the canine holes from some large cat and their heads having been, you know, having had some hominid, some early hominid have been dragged up a tree.
Right.
I don't actually remember, you know, most cats are diurnal.
I think that was an Australopithecine and a leopard.
Most cats aren't diurnal, but I think that was imagined to be, yes, a leopard, which You know, they're kind of crepuscular.
I don't know.
Yeah, that was the case... Actually, no, they've got... the cats have... all the cats have tapetum lucidum, so they are presumably better able to navigate at night than we are.
Right, but... Which is this reflective coating on the back of the eye.
...a sufficiently early human ancestor.
That they were unlikely to have mythology around, you know, the killing of animals that have killed people.
So anyway, the question at least, the hypothesis on the table is that mythologies that force people to kill animals that have killed their kin actually function to select against that, that they create a superstition or something equivalent to it in the wild animals that reduces the hunting of people.
- All right, are we there? - Yep, I think so.
- Okay, so we're gonna take a 15 minute break and then we'll be back with our live Q&A.
And Les, do you have a thumbnail for this week?
Oh, I do.
But I don't have my phone on me.
Yes, we are going to have a gorgeous thumbnail of a bee in the late evening visiting a flower.
Okay, and what's the connection to today's episode?
Ah, the connection is that the bee is preparing, presumably, given the lateness of the hour.
No, no, do not even pretend that bees are sleeping.
We don't, I don't, I mean, I think there's some evidence that... Preparing for dormancy.
I didn't, I did not do my due diligence on whether or not there's evidence that bees sleep in advance of this, so I don't want you just off the cuff claiming this.
I am sure there is bee dormancy, and that this bee is headed for it.
Okay, so we're going to be back with our Q&A as soon as we can.
It takes a bit longer with Odyssey, so bear with us.
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