#91: The Fog Machine of War (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 91st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss co-morbidities that are associated with bad outcomes from Covid (e.g. obesity, anxiety), and how to take control of your own health. We discuss Joe Rogan and his detractors. The “Central Park Karen” story from May 2020 is revealed as something most people don’t know, by Bari Weiss and Kmele Foster...
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying, and we are the official Dart Heat 91st livestream.
I don't even need you to confirm that number because I know it to be correct.
You don't need me to confirm it.
Nope.
Nope.
It's dead certain.
It's the 91st.
It is, and I'm glad you're on it, because my grip on time and the passage thereof seems to be slipping somewhat.
I think I said years at some point in the last episode when I meant either days or weeks.
I don't remember what the error was.
There was another error, and in tweeting out the announcement of today's show, I suggested that it was going to be on July 7th.
So, you know, hope springs eternal, I guess, for that endless summer, but we're not going to get it.
Yeah, the more time passes, the less I'm a believer in it.
No, no, that's not true, actually.
Well, it might be.
We'll have to sort that out later when we have a bit more room for that sort of thing.
All right.
So today we are going to be talking about ways in which we might take control of our own health with some sort of personal stories and just a reference again to the comorbidities that put you at particular risk of Of, I think, contracting, but definitely of falling very ill from COVID.
A paper that we have referenced before and that others have as well.
We are going to talk about Chapter 8 from our forthcoming book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which is the chapter on Parenthood and Relationship.
And then we're going to talk a little bit about how parenting might be evolving.
I'll just leave it at that.
That's a teaser that is somewhat misleading.
That sounds awesome.
Maybe, maybe.
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No, certainly not.
No, certainly not.
And so today we do have two sponsors of the episode.
Without further ado, we will go into those.
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That's not so strange.
The fact is it's a very technical landscape.
A VPN is a protocol that allows you to anonymize your browsing so that it is not documented by someone because we all know that as we are browsing online information about what it is that we are looking at is being collected and sold to advertisers and you don't want that.
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All right.
And an homage to Sesame Street.
Today's episode is brought to you by the number 91 and the letter O. So the O section of the index from a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century is short.
It's much shorter than most of the letters in the index, and it reads as follows.
Obsession, octopuses, olfaction, explosive gases and other dangerous substances, and remapping of olfactory perception, warning provided by Olives.
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This episode brought to you by the number 91 and the letter O. The letter O. All right.
So.
That's an odd sound.
We wanted to talk, you specifically wanted to talk a little bit about what some of what you're planning for us, specifically you and our children, as the summer looks like it might not in fact be endless.
But first let us review briefly the fact that people with comorbidities are far more likely to get sick and die than those without of SARS, of COVID-19 caused, of course, by SARS-CoV-2.
And that line that I just read is directly from our Driving SARS-CoV-2 Extinct post that we made a couple of weeks ago that we've talked about here.
And the evidence for that is all over the place, really.
But one of the papers that does a remarkable job of collating the evidence that exists is the one that we cited in that paper, and also described at some length by Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity, in which he dove into this paper a bit more, a fair bit, for 35 minutes or so.
So we'll post the link to Martinson's video as well.
And I'll just, if you would put this up for a moment, Zach, this original research... Oh, I hope you can't put this up because I am not playing Up with this he cannot put.
Yeah.
Nothing, nothing is working very well.
Okay.
So don't put it up yet because I've gone back to my notes here.
Yeah, which means my computer has gone dark.
Oh no.
Yes.
Here we are.
Okay.
So what?
My new computer arrived yesterday, but I'm not on it yet, so I'm really hoping that by this time next week, I have a computer that is far more functional.
All right, so you can show my screen now here, Zach.
I think I mentioned this paper by name before, and then I also couldn't pronounce the first author's first name.
Kampanyats, perhaps?
Published in Preventing Chronic Disease on the CDC site, or yeah, it's not even clear to me exactly if it's just on the CDC site or if it's in a Yeah, and I guess it is in this Preventing Chronic Disease journal.
So the title is Underlying Medical Conditions and Severe Illness Among 540,667 Adults Hospitalized with COVID-19, March 2020 through March 2021.
And the upshot is really, as we have said multiple times, you are much more likely to get sick and also separately to have a very bad outcome from COVID If you have one or more comorbidities, but it's not just any comorbidities, and specifically the one that they found being the most predictive of bad outcomes is obesity.
And then, you know, interestingly, anxiety and anxiety disorders is number two, and neither the authors nor the paper, nor Chris Martinson talking about it, nor some of his commenters were suggesting interesting things, you know, nor I.
Have you have anything definitive to say about that?
Like what might that be?
One possibility is that the anxiety actually comes afterwards, right?
That at the point that you're hospitalized for COVID, then you were easily diagnosable with anxiety.
So, you know, there's a cause and effect issue.
And then there's also a possibility that because people with a lot of health problems tend to present as anxious or depressed, because of course they would be and there would be good reason for them to be, that they would then be diagnosed, you know, before ever having COVID, be diagnosed as anxious or depressed and be given, you know, the anti-anxiety or anti-depression drugs.
As a result, and that being on one of those things is enough to get you described as being anxious or depressed in such a study.
And some of those drugs may also be risk factors for COVID as well.
Although, of course, there's one that may actually run in the other direction.
Flavoxamine, right?
Yep, exactly.
But the fact that you may be more likely to get prescribed such things if you already have a suite of other health problems, because you may have good reason To have anxiety may mean that this isn't what it seems, that it's actually about the presence of a bunch of other underlying health conditions.
Unclear, but, you know, the other predictive comorbidities are, you know, as you might expect, things like chronic kidney disease and, you know, as I said, the number one factor that they found in this over half million people is obesity.
And so, as we've said, in service of this, why does almost none of the health messaging around SARS-CoV-2 and COVID seem to be about those things that you can actually take control of yourself?
There is so much that we can do with diet to make us healthier and to bring into alignment with expected healthy numbers are, you know, things like our blood sugar and our blood pressure and things like this.
And obviously, the more fit you are, the more active you are, the less likely you are to be obese and have other underlying health conditions.
And the downside of getting your health in order is not a downside at all, right?
So even if these things turned out to be, you know, third correlates of something else, and they didn't have direct effects on COVID, you would almost certainly have greater longevity, greater happiness, etc.
for having addressed these things.
Even if it didn't turn out to have effects on COVID, which it seems clear that it would, it clearly would on other things.
Metabolic syndrome is this scourge among Americans now, and it's not in non-weird countries.
This is something about the modern lifestyle, which includes crap food and sedentary lifestyles.
Yeah, and so I was in my conversation with Patreon subscribers this morning.
I was describing that effectively we have a herd of elephants in the room and this is one of them.
The complete failure to highlight all of the easy things to do that don't appear to have a downside that do appear to contribute to your resistance to COVID.
And it's a very strange reaction because On the one hand, we are literally at the point of, you know, strong-arming people into certain treatments as we are ignoring other treatments.
And it's not like all of the other treatments are controversial, right?
The fact is, vitamin D is spectacularly important.
As you and I had talked about early in our series on COVID, we talked about extensively the evidence that vitamin D is a strong contributor.
And, you know, the way this works, probably, If you have sufficient vitamin D, there's no benefit to extra vitamin D as far as we know.
But the cost of being deficient in vitamin D is very, very high with respect to contracting COVID.
I was actually surprised at how strong the evidence has grown since the last time I looked at it.
With regard to vitamin D in particular?
Vitamin D in particular.
And I guess the reason that this is conspicuous is that we are not highlighting either the fact that time spent outside in the sun is particularly important in doing away with a deficiency of vitamin D. The clock is ticking for those of us in the northern hemisphere, because yes, winter is coming.
I know, you're shaking your head.
You're literally shaking your head.
I tried to make it July today.
But nonetheless, this is an obvious intervention with no downside, tremendous upside, extremely inexpensive, something people can do, you know, without needing to radically alter their lifestyles, and yet for some reason we are not recommending.
And so in this case, you're talking about taking it sort of prophylactically, but really on an ongoing basis.
Well, I would now just tell you how I'm looking at this for myself and for our family, which is I suspect but do not know that building up vitamin D the most natural way, which is with sunlight, has some holdover effect into winter.
There's probably some period of time at which you've had little enough sun exposure that you're likely to be deficient unless you supplement.
And so supplementing is sure to be second best, but nonetheless, I am supplementing.
- Or go to some place with sun for a week.
- Or go to, if you have that luxury. - If you have the capacity and the luxury and yes.
And if you know, there's also other things you can do.
It's not like the sun doesn't shine in the winter.
In most places, it does.
And the problem is that you're dressed up in such a way that you don't encounter, but you can you can adjust this to an extent.
And I think, and I actually would have to go back and re-familiarize myself with the research, but because the winter sun, especially the farther from the equator you are, the winter sun, which is December through March in the Northern Hemisphere and June through September in the Southern Hemisphere,
It's such a low angle and therefore coming through so much more atmosphere that it takes much more exposure to get what you need and then add to that the fact that much less of your skin is exposed, there's far fewer hours in the day when you could possibly be exposed, that it's just actually much harder.
This is part of why, for instance, Boy, which Scandinavians, the Vikings I guess, who famously ate cod, and they were the ones who didn't get rickets.
And no, they didn't know what the mechanism of action was, and it turns out you don't need to know the mechanism of action for it to be a mechanism of action that works.
Right.
In fact, we've only recently been aware of mechanisms of action at this level at all.
The ability to detect them is hard enough.
But it certainly seems You know, I think there's a very terrible argument to be made about, you know, obesity, for example, and that there's some, you know, they don't want to fat shame people.
And so they're not highlighting that.
I think that's an absolutely appalling justification for not highlighting it.
Because for one thing, if this motivated people to get healthier and to control their weight, it would have, you know, collateral health benefits.
But you can't even make that argument with vitamin D. And from the point of view of You know, this is psychologically stressful for all of us.
As you point out, there may well be a tie-in with anxiety, that it may be a comorbidity, and that therefore making, you know, making hay while the sun shines, getting out, doing activities that you can do easily when it's not cold outside, is good for you.
It allows you to socialize in a way that isn't, at least so far as we know at this point, risky with respect to COVID.
All of these things are pointing in the same direction.
And so our failure to highlight all of the simple interventions that you can make that do seem to work, that have collateral benefits like, you know, calming you down, improving your mental health, allowing you to socialize without putting yourself or others in jeopardy, All of these things point in the same direction and yet they are conspicuously absent from the advice, right?
The advice is so narrowly targeted as to be suspicious.
That's right.
Yeah.
Which, so I will say, I heard Joe Rogan was trending last night and this morning as a result of people being dismayed at things he had said on his podcast, of course, and as is so frequently the case when you go and check A, Joe did not say the things that he is reported to have said, and B, the things that people imagine were so upsetting shouldn't have been upsetting to them.
One of the things that Joe said was something very much like what you and I have been planning to say here about these other interventions, and the fact that it's weird that we're not recommending them.
But, the thing Joe got in trouble for most precipitously was he was claimed, it was argued that he said on this podcast that the vaccines might be causing mutations in the virus.
Right, which is an odd thing for him to have said.
And when you go and look at what he actually said, he never said anything of the sort.
In fact, what he did was he read from a paper that argued that the vaccines might select for mutants that would be more dangerous or more transmissible, which is a totally defensible and highly logical thing for him to have said.
So in any case, there's some weird phenomenon where the simple fact of You know, Joe Rogan speaking common sense is so dangerous that he needs to be strawmanned online and he needs to trend for, you know, supposed villainy, when in fact what he's saying are things that should be obvious to anyone.
You know, there clearly is a hazard that comes from the selective environment that we are creating for this virus.
There clearly is a lost opportunity in not recommending to people that, hey, there are certain things that are under your control that you're maybe not doing and you don't realize may be playing a very large role in whether or not you're vulnerable to COVID come January.
Right.
So there's some there's some failure of our discussion that's so fundamental that we're just we're missing opportunities that are obviously there and should be completely uncontroversial.
Right.
Indeed.
Which I guess leads then to the question of what we are what we are doing.
Yeah, we can go there, or given that you segued there first, there's a couple other things that, you know, as you like.
Either way.
All right.
After you.
We're just going to kind of be all over the place today.
I guess two things, and one I forgot to mention to you before.
I listened to this extraordinary podcast from Barry Weiss this week, her relatively new podcast.
Honestly, it's really terrific.
And this week she had Camille Foster, our friend Camille Foster, who's one of the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast, also an excellent podcast.
And it's mostly it's Camille Foster who has basically chased down the story of the Central Park dog walker, a woman named Amy Cooper, who got into an encounter with a guy named Christian Cooper, no relationship between them.
Um, and as I did not know this until listening to this hour plus conversation, um, apparently that incident happened within hours of George Floyd's death.
Um, that that was, that was right, it was actually before, it was just, it was like, I don't, I don't remember what, it was like 12 hours or something before.
And so it just got wrapped up into the whole story of, you know, historic and systemic racism against Black men and how it manifests today.
And Camille Foster, you know, finds Amy Cooper, who's gone into hiding, who's nowhere that anyone can find her at this point, and talks to her.
And he does due diligence, and he does journalism, and he finds that the story is Not what we were told, right?
It's just, it's not what it was told.
It's not a, and I refuse to even use the epithet, you know, they're calling her a Karen.
As I've said before, I hate the idea, and this is another kind of othering, of dehumanizing people, the idea that, you know, middle-aged white women who are, you know, too nosy or something, I don't even know what it is exactly, are going to be given a name that actually is the name of a lot of people.
No, thank you very much.
But what was actually happening there, and we'll link to this and I really encourage you to go listen to the conversation, turned out to be You know, emerging from such a deeper and, you know, if there was any racism there at all, it's unverifiable.
And it's probable there's no racism there at all.
And in fact, if you swapped the roles of the two people, the black man and the white woman in that incident, it would have been just as easy and maybe even easier.
to ascribe racism to what is now the white woman's position, which in this case was the black man doing what what he was doing.
So all of that was fascinating and again I highly recommend it and we'll link to it in the in the description, but the overall the overwhelming sense that I had coming away from listening to it was that this is what happens when our sense-making apparatus becomes conclusion-driven.
That the conclusion is decided before data come in, before evidence comes in, in the case that it might not be data per se, before analysis is even possible, and certainly before analysis is tolerated or allowed.
And then if and when data or evidence or analysis does show up, When it runs counter to the conclusion that has already been generated, that has already foregone, it's ignored.
And this is not how journalism is supposed to work, of course, or science.
What it is, is PR.
It's public relations.
And it's PR decked out in the guise of journalism, or science, or justice, right?
But this guise, it has no clothes.
You know, this is like a classic emperor has no clothes, actually.
Like, look guys, that's not journalism.
I'd love To follow some journalism, and follow some science, and follow some justice, and be right there in the thick of it.
And it turns out, without hardly any trustworthy journalists out there, Camille Foster, Barry Weiss being two notable exceptions in this regard.
I don't even know if Camille regards himself as a journalist in general, but in this case he did some extraordinary journalism.
But this PR just yells and yells and yells at us, and it can't see beyond itself.
And those who disagree with it are evil, or disgusting, or dirty, or deplorable.
And of course we're seeing the same thing over in COVID space.
The conclusion is foregone.
We have a conclusion, there is some conclusion, and who knows under what circumstances and by whom and for what purposes it has arrived at.
But then we are fed the conclusion along with feel-good human interest stories and some of, you know, something that looks a little bit like data or evidence that may or may not be.
And what they're effectively doing is guaranteeing that some, it's increasing a sense of tribe, By dehumanizing those who aren't in tribe.
And it pretends that we're all one people, right?
It talks a good game about like, well, we're all in this together.
But we are actually all one people, and this is doing nothing to preserve that.
And following along from that, I was sitting thinking about the podcast this morning, taking some notes, reading a couple of research articles in this beautiful park today, and I was listening.
I ended up eavesdropping and I ended up ultimately going over and telling the people that I had been and we had a wonderful conversation.
I was positioned such that I couldn't help but overhear what these three women You know, a bit older than us.
Three women, liberals, in or outside of Portland.
White women, not that it should matter.
People with adult children, because I heard them talking about them.
Who were engaging in this very careful discussion of COVID in so many ways.
One of them had been diagnosed with it and gotten a false negative first and then come up with a false positive but that sent everyone into some kind of disarray like what are we supposed to do with this false negative when clearly this person seems to Have it, to which one of the women sitting there says, you know, I don't, I just don't think the tests are reliable and they're not reliable in either direction.
There's false negatives, there's false positives, and they're saying that they're not, you know, they're not prepared to travel yet because, you know, it's likely that another wave is coming.
And they're vaccinated, but they're not sure about everything that they're hearing about the vaccinations.
And so one of them said, CNN is so untrustworthy.
I don't trust them any more than I trust Fox at this point.
So again, this is liberals, and I know a lot of people listening to us and watching us might say the opposite, you know, Fox is becoming untrustworthy.
I don't trust it anymore that I trust CNN at this point.
But I'm saying this, you know, speaking to those many of us who are liberals, And those many who would say, oh, you're not and no liberals think the way that you do.
Right.
This is this is anecdote for sure.
But listening to these women talk and then talking with them a little bit before before I had to leave to come back to do this, you know, they're saying it's they're talking about particular politicians and I'm just not going to name them here and and, you know, Hollywood actors and stuff and saying they're trying to make the unvaccinated the enemy.
It's horrible.
Get them, they seem to be saying.
And our country is in such poor shape, and with regard to the media and corporation and the politicians, each of those groups, they said, they're just making shit up.
This is what they said over and over again.
They're just making shit up.
And the path that we're on, 100% for sure, people are going to be restricted in terms of where they can go.
It's terrifying.
So this is one conversation, one, that I overheard between three women In, you know, very liberal Portland, very liberal people vaccinated, who were saying, this is, this is a very big problem for our country and for democracy.
And effectively, much like in a totally different domain, what I was hearing in this conversation with Camille Foster and Barry Weiss on the Honestly pod, That when the conclusion is handed to you and you are told there is no possible other thing that you could conclude, you should immediately begin to wonder what you're not being told.
So I think you're on a very important topic here and I'm juggling a few things that seem to fit together and you know this is the first time I've heard your riff on this so I don't know where this goes but I want to start with something some of our listeners will have heard of and many will not or won't know what it means even if they've heard the term.
You know what a push-pull is?
I do, but… So a push-poll is a poll whose purpose is not to collect information, but actually to drive belief, right?
And done by the people working on behalf of politicians?
Under what circumstances do push-polls exist?
Yes, it's often done by workaday people who have just, you know, signed up for a job, but they're, I think, always instituted by terrible people who are using the act of data collection as a stalking horse for another purpose, and it's hard to imagine how any decent person finds themselves engaged in that behavior.
Well, but I mean, a push-pull, I wish we had an example here, because my sense is that they don't always, unless you're thinking very carefully, they don't necessarily reveal themselves.
Oh, right.
No, it's like any other kind of advertising, right?
PR, advertising, yes.
You're supposed to think it's not working on you, that's when it works on you.
But anyway, the idea is there's some thing that we all understand to be a legitimate exercise, which is a pole.
And because it exists, you can use it for another purpose, which is actually to manipulate people's belief structures.
And what you're describing, your conclusion-driven landscape, Is a place where the language and form of logic and analysis is borrowed for something else.
And I think this actually explains a lot of what is happening.
It's equivalent to scientism, right?
In Hayek's formulation, but it's bigger than that.
Yeah, it's logicism somehow.
Analyticism.
Analyticism.
And so here's what I think you and I are running into.
You and I are trying to do an analysis of a set of evidence that is nothing if not confusing and self-contradictory, right?
And, you know, on the one hand, that's not outside of what we do on topics where there's nothing riding, right?
In evolutionary biology, you're often looking at different kinds of conflicting evidence and trying to figure out what the underlying pattern is.
Sorting through evidence and figuring out what to wait and how is an art more than a science, and if you're good at it, what it results in is predictive power.
But anyway, the point is, that's just a thing that we do.
We are now doing it in a realm where everybody perceives a great deal at stake, and there is a lot at stake.
But what that results in is a lot of people being hostile to the exercise of those tools and availing themselves of the right to borrow logic and analysis, or the trappings of them, for the purpose of manipulating.
And I think, almost to a person, That the people that we come up against, who we know, who we have had positive histories with, who are doing this, imagine that where we are is this.
This is no time for analysis, right?
It's like the person who wants to question authority in the middle of trying to, you know, defeat the machine gun nest, right?
This is not the time for that.
This is chain of command business.
And so the point is, look, we all understand the vaccines are good and that they are the key to going where we're going.
And we all, all of us adults understand that it's a more complicated story than that.
And this is no time to talk about downsides, trade-offs, risk, uncertainty.
Long-term hazards any of those things because the point is we either get over some threshold number in which case things get better or we don't and you By trying to deploy your analysis in the midst of this battle are getting in the way of us crossing that threshold now I will speak only for me, though I would imagine you are in the same spot.
I've looked at this puzzle.
There's no threshold.
It's not like we're going somewhere.
It's not like some policy is being deployed that explains what number we're shooting for, and if we can only get enough people on board, we will actually be able to relax.
There's no conceivable way that this goes that direction, but... And if we were, even if there had been a number, they're like, that's what we're shooting for 100%.
It'd be like Catch-22.
They just keep on upping the number of missions.
I think the thing is either they're so deluded that they think there's a number, right, and they haven't looked at the vaccines that they have at their disposal and what will happen if you... there's no number.
There's no number to hit.
The vaccines are too leaky and there's too much of the globe they can't reach.
So, sorry, but that's like, that's a combination of...
You know, the social landscape is such that actually there is no number, and we're certain of that.
But the more important thing, of course, is the actual, the facts on the ground.
The non-social landscape, the biology, is such that we actually have never heard, because there does not exist, a plan to end the pandemic with the extant vaccines.
Right.
And so it's all done by implication.
Well, there are vaccines and vaccines could be used to end a pandemic.
And there's some number that you have to hit.
And those people who, you know, aren't participating are counterproductive to that end.
So it's all done through implication, but it's never stated for some reason.
But in any case, I think this this neatly explains, I hope it's not too neat, but I think it neatly explains the experience of having people who on an ordinary day should see through the failures of our public health apparatus just as easily as we do, who seem to be completely blind to any level of failure that exists there.
And the basic point is they are on a team because they believe that we are in a Battle that has a coherent endpoint and that anybody who is not, you know Shouldering their share of the load is counterproductive rather than no.
I'm sorry that battle doesn't even exist That's not the battle we're in right and so frankly, I guess You know, the other term that I think belongs in here is that this is basically a Machiavellian approach to analysis.
That effectively, because there is loosely understood to be a coherent public health endpoint, and it is imagined that the prescriptions we have been given with respect to what to do must point in that direction, That there is a sidelining of one's own self-skepticism that is resulting in a kind of certitude from people who know better than to have that kind of certitude about anything that they believe, right?
Yeah.
You know, who amongst our friends isn't good at the question of, you know, where's the weak spot in my own argument, right?
These people are typically good at that, and they seem to have just lost touch with that instinct, which I take to be
about a I think demonstrably demonstrably false belief that we are on a path and that there is Something useful at the end of it and that therefore it is simply time to put it all aside and pull together well or I guess an alternative Way to think about where people believe we are is that we are Ascending I you know trying to take out a machine gun nest that we are in the fog of war
And frankly, how do you create the sense of the fog of war without the fog of war?
what needs to be done and ignoring the chain of command here will get all of us killed.
So stop it already.
Right.
Right.
And, you know, frankly, how do you create the sense of the fog of war without the fog of war?
You have to get people scared.
You have to get people back on their heels.
You have to get people terrorized, not just by a virus, which is actually terrible and horrifying, but also terrified of each other.
You have to create division between human beings such that whenever you go out, you're looking at them going, oh, I'll bet you're the enemy, right?
Right.
So two things.
One, in this milieu, the fact that we can't seem to make the point that, hey, actually, we're not the thing that you just portrayed us as.
Right or wrong, we don't believe the things that have been ascribed to us.
That's odd that anybody would be continuing, anybody honorable would be continuing to assert these things or to believe them, unless the point was really the purpose is to get you to stop what you're doing, irrespective of true, false, whatever.
The thing you point to, though, about It's funny, this...
The fog of war is a natural fact of the confusion of the battlefield and it has impacts.
If you need the fog of war to be useful to some objective that is unstated, and I'm not claiming that that's what our friends are up to, but I do believe that somebody is polluting our environment so that we are not capable of making sense that we would otherwise make, it is the fog machine of war.
Oh boy, PR meets war.
Yeah.
And so that is, in fact, what I think we are really fighting over, is whether or not this is simply a war and that fog is natural and we need to get unconfused and all pull in the same direction, or we are being fogged so that we will be confused about what is and is not on the or we are being fogged so that we will be confused about what is and is So that, for example, the possibility of driving SARS-CoV-2 to extinction, which you and I are still advocating and still I hear almost nobody else talking about as even a possibility.
No, to the degree that most people say anything about it, they say, yeah, everything else maybe, but certainly not that.
We're never going to accomplish it at this point.
Right, even though it seems to be implied in the simplistic prescription that has been handed to us.
What then are we trying to achieve?
Right.
So, alright.
Fog Machine Award is.
I like it.
I mean, I hate it and I like it.
Yeah.
It's a decent description of a horrible phenomenon.
It's clarifying.
Yes.
Yeah.
Alright.
Oh, so I hadn't yet talked about what it is that we all are doing.
That's right.
And this is something I'm just going to invite everybody within the sound of our voices to figure out their own version of this and join us in it.
I will say Heather is in a slightly different position than the rest of our family, because as many of you will know, Heather was in a nearly fatal boat accident.
What is it?
Five years ago?
Yeah, five years.
Nearly five years ago, which means that cycling, although... Over five years.
Over five years.
That bicycling, which was a major part of all of our activity, is something Heather is working her way back into, but isn't where the rest of the family is exactly at the moment.
Yeah, I was thrilled.
I mean, I'm just going to jump here.
You know, I've been paddleboarding a lot, as people know, and it's wonderful to be out on the water, especially early in the morning.
He had some nature, but there's no speed.
And I love speed.
And I did go on a 24-mile bike ride yesterday, which was mostly up and then mostly down.
And man, I just love going fast.
There is speed in paddleboarding, just so little it's barely perceptible.
It's not that I'm staying in the same place the whole time, which would be its own kind of work, but… Yeah, no, no, no.
No, it's wonderful, but it's, you know, just as, you know, like single track mountain biking, which we used to do a lot of, is fabulous, but not when you're out there as a birder, as a naturalist, right?
Like you just, you don't see anything.
You go too fast and you don't see the nature, and so paddleboarding allows you access to um to the nature allows you to be a naturalist at the same time but um if you also like to both get your heart pumping and just have the sense of like the world going fast past you fast um bikes are more likely to get you there so that's true that's true i have been biking to a nature area and then hanging out there yeah no that works yeah you bike there and then you slow down and then you bike home yeah Exactly.
But anyway, what we are doing is we are looking at the calendar and thinking, oh God, it's going to be winter here sooner than we know.
Some of us are thinking, if I just write it down, it'll be July.
It'll be July.
I hope that works.
And please invite us backwards in time to July.
I wouldn't mind that.
But anyway, for two different reasons.
One, because of all the things we've talked about with COVID and the value of being in good health with respect to fending off the disease from the point of view of contracting it.
And if you do contracting it, having a less severe course of disease, it makes sense to get into shape while the sun shines.
And the hard part for all of us who live fairly far north or presumably fairly far south, the harshness of winter makes it hard to stay on your exercise regimen.
So just simply getting on your bike here in August is pretty easy because you don't need to bring that much, you don't need to think about the exact temperature and all of that, and it's very different in, you know, let's say December.
So, we have set a goal in the house, and I'm going to be leading my kids in this.
The goal is... Kids at this point being 17 and 15 year old, really young men.
Oh yes, young men, right.
We are going to ride a century, that is 100 miles in one go, before it's too cold to do it, which really means before school starts.
I mean, those are two different goals.
You might want to clarify exactly which goal it is, because... Well, I'm targeting... Especially here, summer tends to, you know, our summer weather often lasts through mid-October.
Yeah, it's not the necessity.
I mean, the days do get shorter, which makes it more challenging, too, because there are fewer hours of daylight.
But anyway, we're gonna ride a hundred miles, and we're gonna try to do that before school starts.
If it ends up being after school starts, that's not a big deal, but before it becomes a matter of needing equipment to stay warm and all of that, we're gonna ride a hundred miles, which is obviously not a huge number.
People ride hundreds of miles.
all the time.
I've done it many times.
I haven't done it in quite a number of years.
But anyway, it's a challenge.
You definitely feel it.
It's not the kind of thing you can just hop on a bike and do.
You have to train a little bit to get there.
But the idea is at the beginning of cooler weather, you get to the point that your body can do the 100-mile ride.
And then as the weather warms up on the other side of winter, you get to that point again as quickly as possible.
And you use it kind of as a bookend.
And the idea is the amount of fitness you lose over the winter as it becomes harder to ride a long distance without getting cold and soaked or whatever, you lose less and you stay in better condition.
And then that will have COVID benefits too.
So that's the plan and I'm hoping you will end up making that goal, but it's obviously not, you know, you're doing other things that we're not doing.
Yeah, I'm not setting it as a goal, but I will participate.
For instance, we're going to do a 40-ish mile ride next weekend is the plan, and I will participate with you guys in that.
And I guess you wanted to, not yet formally, but maybe talk about at some point formally inviting people to have their own challenges.
Rapidly ramping up to this year's century.
It's not going to work for us to gather with others here locally, but on the other side of winter, I'd be kind of interested in seeing if there are enough people in the Portland area that we could, you know, hold each other's feet to the fire a little bit.
Do people bike in Portland?
People do bike in Portland.
Yeah, they do.
Yeah, quite a number of them.
So anyway, you know, if you're not in Portland or even if you are, we would encourage you to do something in the waning days of summer to gain as much fitness and as much vitamin D as you can and to think about how you're going to return to that state of fitness at the far end of, of the cold season.
Yeah.
And figure out, I mean, just like with food, you know, some people are like, well, you know, I don't want to eat healthy because it doesn't taste good to me.
And yeah, good, delicious, delicious.
We eat very, very healthily.
And, We do have some sugar and some alcohol and stuff in our diets, but it's delicious.
We eat extraordinarily well.
It's from the farmer's markets and from farm-raised, grass-fed beef and these sorts of things.
It's fabulous.
You do have to train your palate if you were raised on other stuff or if you become accustomed to other stuff.
And the same thing with exercise, you know, if your sense of what you have to do to be in shape is, you know, if what I had to do to be in shape was go inside in a gym and do repetitive stuff on machines, I wouldn't.
I just wouldn't.
I cannot imagine that.
And for some people, that's terrific.
For me, and I think I've actually mentioned this on the show before, I like, you know, part of what I get from being outside is the constantly changing conditions and the slight risk, frankly, of just being somewhere where you got a little skin in the game in terms of taking on some risk because you are outside.
And then that also means that you get, you know, you can be surprised.
Like I saw a couple, what, a week ago, I saw mink while I was paddle boarding.
um you know bouncing along going you know it came out of the water then it was in the rocks going in and out and would stop and look at me and i got pretty close um and i watched oh my god i think maybe i mentioned this already but i watched this this eagle uh diving for ducks uh at bald eagle not a not an osprey which you tell me is an eagle as well Yeah.
So you just, you see things that are unexpected and that itself can take you into new places in your head and take you out of whatever stuck places you were in.
And so, you know, it's not just about the physical fitness part of it.
So, you know, figure out what it is for you that's going to, that you want to do, that you will find pleasurable and, you know, to get your, to get your ya-ya's out.
Right.
And not to say that as much as, you know, we used to bike a lot.
And still, in the various places where we biked and we did a lot of single track mountain biking, it was really hard to get that activation energy to get out the door, even though we loved, we not only loved having done it, which is fairly common, but we loved actually doing it.
And yet still, the motivation to actually get out there.
I had the same experience yesterday.
It's like, I don't want to go.
I haven't been on a bike in a while.
And it's just a fabulous time.
Yeah.
So, you know, it is true that your brain can convince you that whatever it is that you're not yet doing is just too hard and it's better off for you to sit on the couch with your Cheetos, but really overcome the inertia and make the inertia work for you such that once you're moving, then you're more likely to stay moving.
Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the rules has got to be figure out what works for you, right?
And, you know, there are lots of options available.
We don't have any electric bikes, but electric bikes open up a world of possibilities.
And it's true.
Yeah, trikes are complex to get anywhere, unfortunately.
But, you know, electric bike, you can go a lot farther with the same input of energy.
It's not necessarily like you're working less hard.
It's just, you know, how far do you want to get with it?
You know, I have a helmet that I use to listen to music if I'm, you know, biking somewhere that's not super interesting to look at.
And you don't find that helmet to be one of the horsemen of the apocalypse?
No, it's actually, no I find it, it's great because well what it does is it, the music is A, close enough to your ears that it's not loud to other people.
B, it's not in an earbud that blocks your hearing of things in traffic that you need to be aware of.
It's easy to silence it if you need to.
You can also, you know, if I'm late coming home, as you know, I can call you or text you from the helmet.
And, you know, anyway, it's not the most natural experience, but I do find, you know, it means that I get out on the bike more because I can multitask a little bit or whatever.
You can, yeah.
You actually do phone calls from it.
Yeah.
Whereas I really relish the silence.
As you know, you got me one of these and you tried hooking it up and it lasted about 15 seconds.
I was like, it's the helmet or the marriage really.
Oh God, I didn't know it was that bad.
It wasn't.
That was an exaggeration.
Thank you for choosing the marriage.
Yeah.
I mean, I still have the helmet.
It's just not activated.
Yeah.
Okay.
As far as I know.
It needs a VPN.
All right.
Good.
Are we there?
I think we're there.
Okay.
So, as has become our want, we are working through the chapters of our book in the weeks before publication.
So, 13 chapters, all told, and we are now on Chapter 8, Parenthood and Relationship.
So there's a lot in here.
So last week's chapter was sex and gender, and we talked a bit there about mating systems.
There's a lot in this chapter about mating systems.
That's not where we're going to go today.
I will say, as a little teaser, that my Natural Selections post next Tuesday is about polyandry.
Whoa!
Yep, you didn't know that.
Is that a threat?
No, it's not.
Okay.
Yeah, you should read it.
You should subscribe.
I do subscribe.
So, so we will, we will, we have and we will continue to talk about mating systems, which just means, you know, the terms you'll be familiar with are like monogamy and polygamy and the promiscuous mating system, which in humans is often called polyamory.
But, you know, descriptive of, on average, how many partners do individuals of one sex tend to have versus the other.
So we talk about that a lot in the book, but we're not, that's not the section we're going to read from today.
Can I ask you one question before you move on to the reading?
Absolutely.
Have you tried, if you say... Oh, Andy, no I have not, but you know that.
Thank you.
Have you tried the term, you say, promiscuity goes by the name polyamory in modern circles.
I have the sense of every polyamorous person within earshot of this podcast, their blood pressure going up if you say that.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah, it's not quite right, right?
It's not quite right.
It's not quite right.
And so polyamory is a modern weird capitals, acronym weird, human thing that I don't think has a representation in non-human animals or even in sort of pre-industrial cultures.
And so, you know, promiscuity as a mating system in which there really is no There is no sticking to any particular mate, and so individuals of both sexes might have one or two or eight or forty partners, whatever, whereas polyamory is having, you know, having a primary partner but also having sexual relationships with other people in a mutually agreed-upon situation.
It's not cheating.
It's discussed and past tense of discuss.
Right.
So I also should say I've had extensive discussions on this topic with a number of people that we know who are polyamorous and one person in particular who I think I'm not going to name because I don't know whether I don't think he's secretive about it, but in any case.
One person did manage to convince me that there is sort of a higher order pattern that effectively people who are serious about polyamory are actually serious about stabilizing something that is not in any way indiscriminate.
Right.
But as I remember this set of conversations, it requires a stability over enough generations, right?
And if you're the rare mating system phenotype in this chaotic culture, we're never going to get there.
Well, two things I would say.
One, he convinced me that such a stable structure is at least possible, that it did require the demonstrations of it require a The real fly in the ointment is that the raising of children.
process of discovery of what the stable pattern was.
And I also say that, I will say, I have particular concerns that the real fly in the ointment is that the raising of children may be, even in those stable patterns, not so easily done well, because, of course, humans are so thoroughly wired for investing in their own children that, you know, there's a hazard to kids involved in
Those things and I feel quite differently about people's exploring this if no kids are involved, right?
That is, you know, it stands to do less harm than if kids are caught up in the mix.
Indeed.
Agreed.
I'm glad it went there and I don't have to threaten to investigate polyandry more thoroughly.
This is not going well.
It's going just fine.
Okay.
Okay, so we're going to read just a couple of short sections from the end of Parenthood and Relationship, which is chapter 8 of A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Um, having just so the section immediately preceding is a fairly, um, a fairly in-depth and discussion of senescence and, um, and, and how our children provide us immortality of sorts, uh, which is fairly, fairly deep and serious section.
So love across species.
In pursuing lighter fare than considering that children, not immortality, are the antidote to aging, let us ask, we love our pets, but do they love us?
Humans have domesticated dozens of species of animals across the globe, mostly to provide food or do labor for us.
Some of those relationships that began as purely functional—cats as mousers, dogs as protection—have since become cross-species friendships.
Cats have befriended us for far less time and remain more wild than dogs, more of their original selves, although they bond tightly to humans under the right circumstances.
Even before we began to farm, though, dogs were by many of our sides becoming domesticated.
As hunter-gatherers, some of us already had dog friends.
Dogs are in many ways a human construct.
We have co-evolved with them for so long that they are now attuned to human behavior, language, and emotion.
Perhaps you could argue, then, that humans are also partially a canine construct.
Does your pet love you?
Of course your pet loves you.
Qualifier, your pet can love you if it's a mammal or one of a few clades of birds, like a parrot.
If your pet is a gecko, or a python, or a goldfish, your pet is probably incapable of love.
Love develops for every evolutionary pairing that requires devotion.
We love our pets, and our pets love us.
Dogs, in particular, are love generators who hang out with you and help you know that you're not alone.
Dog is love, unmoored.
Watch how cats and dogs engage with each other and with us.
They don't use language to convey meaning and emotion, but convey it they do.
You have no reason to doubt that your dog is disappointed when you stop throwing the ball for him, or that your cat would prefer that you stay seated with her in your lap.
We name our emotions, love, fear, grief, and when we attribute those words to animals we may be accused of anthropomorphizing.
As Frans de Waal, who has spent a lifetime studying emotion in animals, points out, this argument is rooted in assumptions of humans being not just exceptional, but wholly different from the other animals with which we share ancestors.
We need to be careful in how we attribute emotion and intention to other animals, as we should within our own species as well, but there can be no doubt that many other species plan and grieve, love and reflect.
In our interactions with our pets, we read their cues without language.
It is helpful, too, in your interactions with people to turn the sound down sometimes, be an animal behaviorist, or just act sometimes like a human before language evolved.
We often use language to cover how we actually feel, to deceive, to throw off the scent of what is actually going on.
When you watch people, especially strangers from a distance, it's relatively easy to read the emotion of the situation.
Pay attention to people's behavior, not the stories that people tell about their behavior.
That's what your dog is doing.
Your dog doesn't buy your cover story, although he is likely to forgive you for your foibles.
Next section, grief.
In his Metamorphoses, Ovid writes of the old married couple Bacchus and Philemon.
They have been poor all of their lives, but generous with what little they have.
The gods recognize them for their righteousness and ask what they would like most in the world.
Bacchus and Philemon ask that when death draws near, they might die together so that neither shall see the other die nor be left behind.
The gods make it so.
The old lovers become trees, an oak and a linden, which intertwine their branches with one another as they grow.
Absent interference from Zeus, the only way to avoid grief is to live a life without love.
Grief has evolved multiple times across species, always in highly social organisms with parental care.
The grief of chimps is presumably the same at its root as human grief.
The grief of dogs has distinct origins, though, as the most recent common ancestor that we share with dogs was a nondescript little mammal with little to no social structure.
Perhaps the most famous story of how grief manifests in dogs is that of Hachiko, a handsome Akita who was born in Japan in 1923.
Hachiko was taken in by Hidasaburo Ueno, a professor of agriculture who commuted to work by train.
Every day, when Ueno was due back, Hachiko met him at the train station and they walked home together.
One day, Ueno did not return, having died of a cerebral hemorrhage while lecturing.
Hachiko However, continued to go to the train station every day and wait for his master for nearly 10 years until he himself died.
The grief of canids, wolves, and domestic dogs evolved separately from our own.
Elephants also grieve, as do killer whales.
In all of these cases, grief is independently evolved yet deeply similar, an extreme emotional response to the death of an intimate, unpredictable in its length and manifestation.
Modern approaches to loss and to grief tend to overemphasize metrics and logistics.
How many years had he been sick?
How do I obtain a death certificate?
Close bank accounts?
Cancel appointments?
And spend too little on meaning and narrative.
What did he bring to us?
How are we better for him having lived?
We often don't want to see the body or sit with it at all.
Death is at a remove in this particular hyper-novel situation in which it is our choice to not confront the corpse of a loved one can render us more confused in the aftermath of death.
Grief is us recalibrating our brains for a world without one of its central pieces.
We must reformulate our understanding as we are no longer able to go to that person, or animal, for words of wisdom or comfort, but we are still able to think back, to learn from, and to take comfort in the relationship that can no longer grow, but can still be remembered.
We don't want to believe in their permanent absence, and so our brains create fictions, ghosts.
Was that him turning the corner at the cafe we used to frequent?
Surely that was her.
I know her hair, her jacket, getting on the train.
Grief is the downside of high-bandwidth interdependence.
Grief is the downside of love.
All too often, moderns try to protect children from grief.
For instance, we have known parents who would not allow their children to attend their grandparents' funerals for fear that it would scare them or harm them.
This fear and anxiousness in raising children, in turn, creates fearful and anxious children.
In the next chapter, we explore childhood and how to raise children who are independent, exploratory, and full of love.
And then the very first corrective lens for this chapter is, no actually the second one.
Spend time with the body of your loved one after they die.
Those who have lost loved ones to situations from which their bodies could not be recovered often suffer from prolonged periods of grief.
When we view our dead, sit with them and talk with them, we set a foundation upon which our grief, our natural recalibration can be moored.
So, I mean, this chapter has a ton of stuff in it, right?
It's all over the place.
But that felt appropriate given that we recently lost one of our kiddies, Moxie, as regular viewers and listeners know.
And, of course, that hadn't happened at the point that we were writing this, but I was thinking specifically of my father and of your grandfather.
Who had, you know, who had died within a decade of writing this.
And just thinking about the way that the modern medical structure moved in and tried to prevent the natural grieving process in both cases, right?
In the case of my father, Who unfortunately died in the ICU, but surrounded by five people in the world who loved him tremendously.
My mother, his wife, and you know, who they would have just celebrated their 53rd wedding anniversary this last month.
And you and I, our two children, and the staff at the hospital.
And the staff at the hospital were mostly quite kind and understanding, but they were, I think, shocked that we wanted to stay in the room afterwards.
And we stayed with his body for an hour or so.
And then also accompanied it to the crematorium when it came time for that.
And it really helped Assure me anyway of what I did not want to be true But it assured me that it was true and it helped me not Be in denial about it any more than would then would have been helpful Yeah, the ambiguity that one is left with if one doesn't have some sort of evidence that's incontrovertible is obviously a source of of danger psychologically speaking
And it is not surprising that we would be built this way because, you know, to put it in relatively stark terms, a human being is a big animal and it's hard for a human being to die in, you know, your home range and there to be no evidence.
So in general, Our ancestors would have had a pretty good idea, you know, somebody wouldn't simply disappear with no sign.
There'd be awareness in general.
And so… Lost at sea is particularly hard for this reason, right?
Well, and sea is novel.
That's the thing.
It's not that novel, but… Yeah, we were coastline explorers for a long time, but not deep ocean voyagers until relatively recently.
Right.
And I'm not saying it never happened, and I'm not saying that the evidence was always… You know, really substantial.
Obviously, there are predators in the world, but a predator doesn't tend to take out a human being and leave no evidence.
And, you know, there tends to be a record enough that a person can grieve and move on, which we argue is You know is this is the downside of love it's not that grief is inherently good But grief is necessary when you have loved a person or a creature deeply in order to rewire So that their absence is not a constant obstacle to functioning Same thing as, you know, just as we were talking about earlier today.
Anxiety and depression are not inherently maladaptive, right?
You know, sometimes the world is such that depression is the appropriate response.
Sometimes your situation is such that anxiety is the appropriate response.
When someone you love has died, grief is the appropriate response.
Can each of those appropriate adaptive responses occur in situations, or for a duration for instance, that make them maladaptive?
of course.
And, um, you know, but, but the modern quick fix types of solutions would have you medicate equally all instantiations and that, that misunderstands, um, that there are, there are appropriate times um, that there are, there are appropriate times and places for, for all of these responses.
Of course.
And in fact, the, um, the pattern of grief leaves no doubt whatsoever that This is not a malfunction, right?
This is a highly organized process which tells you that it You know, it is it is providing a benefit.
And I would say it's a necessity, you know, and it's one of these things.
One of the one of the things, the features of the pattern is that you can put off grief, right?
If you can't, you don't grieve on the battlefield when your best friend has just died in front of you, you fight and then you grieve later.
And that that capacity to put it off, but not forever, is, you know, one of its fascinating features.
And of course, you would expect that.
You can't have a creature who can be suddenly debilitated by grief so that they themselves succumb to whatever the threat is.
That just wouldn't make sense as a program.
So it isn't like that.
But it is also true that we intervene in this process, you know, both by, you know, removing bodies and having a process that deals with them so that, you know, the family doesn't have Contact that might be part of the closure process.
But we also I think this we did not put this into the book, but there's this issue of, you know, In our case, we did not ask to know the sex of the children that we were going to have.
In one case we found out accidentally because the technician, you know, it was pretty rare for people to know.
We specifically asked not to know.
We asked not to know.
Explicitly.
Yeah, no, I took it out of the book because it was, I don't know, we didn't have time to explore it fully.
But I will just say that the question is this.
Yeah, no, it's gone.
I think it's not there.
Yeah.
The question is this.
If you are going to have a child and you do not know its sex in advance, as no ancestor until very recently could have been certain, what it does is it prevents you from doing too much scenario building about what your life is going to look like after the child is born.
And what that means is that the degree to which you have to forget this lesson is decreased, and that in some sense by now providing this information, which seems like what could the harm of more information about You know, the child you're going to have, what could the harm of that possibly be?
Well, the harm could be that once you know you're going to have a boy or you're going to have a girl and you start thinking about, here are the places we'll go, this is what we'll do, this is what it'll be like, that there is the need for vastly more grief to unwire those things at the point of loss.
Well, I guess, I mean, I would also argue that, you know, for us, we intended to raise our children without the expectation of stereotypes, right?
And we're not going to paint a room blue or pink, depending on the sex of the child, either way, right?
That was just never Never in anything that we were thinking.
And frankly, imagining all the possibilities absent any overlay of boy or girl, male or female, helped keep that alive.
And, you know, even though I think that we were particularly, you know, just because of who we are and how we think and what we think about, would have been unlikely to fall prey to those kinds of stereotypes.
But especially in this modern era, Um, where we should be as free as possible from, um, the traditional gender roles that don't have specific anatomical or physiological bases.
Um, you know, what, what does it get you to know in advance if you're going to have a boy or a girl?
And, you know, in both cases, because I was, um, Because I was older, you know, we had all the genetic testing and so, you know, there was a karyotype and a sealed envelope in both cases that, you know, I could have looked at at any moment and since looked at and like, sure enough, that Y chromosome in both cases, but specifically did not want to know in advance.
Yeah.
And, you know, at some level, even if you didn't have these two reasons formulated that you might not want to know, the one thing that you can know for sure is that the information wouldn't have been available to an ancestor.
And so you don't know whether there's any, you know, harm downstream of it.
Now, of course, scientifically speaking, This makes a prediction, which is that in the case that somebody loses a pregnancy, that the amount of grief will actually correlate with whether or not they did or didn't know.
And that at some level is something I think we should be, I don't know if it's been tested, but it is something we should be looking into because at some level, The natural way of doing this may simply be superior and we may be creating unnatural trauma that could, you know, be avoided if we just simply realized we were being unwise.
Yeah, you know, I actually remember a grad school colleague, this was in the 90s, I think, or maybe early, very early aughts, who, he was a guy, but we were also friends with his, with his wife, who was also a grad school colleague, and she got pregnant.
And she never said this.
But he said, at the point that they revealed what the sex of their baby was going to be, I don't even remember what it was.
And I said something to him, like, Are you sure that that's something that you wanted to know?
Or I don't know exactly what I said.
He said, I'm a scientist.
More information is always better.
I thought, that seems like a rule that sounds like something you can say and have most people agree with, but I don't think it's true.
Yeah, it's definitely not.
It's not true.
There are many cases in which more information tends to be better, but there are certainly cases where more information can be destructive.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, should we talk a little bit about breastfeeding?
Of course.
Of course.
So, this will seem like a totally different thing.
The final corrective lens of this chapter is actually about it, and I wasn't going to talk about it, but then I was reading the New York Times.
Oh no.
I know.
I was reading the New York Times, the Sunday paper, and we still get it.
We still get it in hard copy.
Last week, August 1st, and I came across this full page ad, which I'm just going to show you briefly.
I'm going to read it.
Okay.
So this, yeah.
How is breastfeeding going?
It says, except breast is crossed out.
It's crossed out.
And then it's got four, uh, testimonials, brief one word testimonials.
Um, someone named Leslie Ann says, don't assume my breasts can make milk.
Someone who is a tan frantic as a gay man says, don't assume I want to feed my baby donor breast milk.
An entrepreneur named Hannah says, don't assume I can do it all.
And a philanthropist named Kelly says, don't assume breast was best for my entire family.
The rest of the ad reads, nearly 75% of US parents will turn to formula within the first six months.
So why are we ashamed to talk about it?
It's time to evolve the conversation.
We'll start.
So I obviously pulled this from the paper and saved it, and I then went to the site, being somewhat horrified by this full-page ad in the front section of the New York Times, and I find this.
This is HowIsFeedingGoing.com.
We're starting a movement.
It's time to evolve the conversation around how we feed our babies.
Make the commitment.
And it says, I commit to evolving the conversation around how we feed our babies by asking a new question.
How is feeding going?
Your commitment will further help Bobby shake the stigma on formula feeding.
Every committed voice helps reduce another parent's guilt.
So you can take my screen off here.
First of all, guilt, like anxiety, like depression, like grief, is appropriate in some circumstances and not in others.
Same thing with stigma.
Some stigmas exist for a good reason.
It turns out that this entire thing, and I'm going to try not to swear here, even though I don't always try not to swear, it's a formula company.
Of course.
This is an advertisement.
The whole thing is a It's an advertisement for a formula company and it's reprehensible and confused and unlike your helmet, another horseman of the apocalypse.
And it comes in this like woman-friendly, family-friendly guise.
It's a couple of women who really felt that they needed to create this formula company, but it's manipulative and greed-driven and yes, I think another existential threat.
I'm going to read this last corrective lens for this chapter and then go to one of the papers.
When I'm reading excerpts, I'm not reading the footnotes, obviously, but this book is very well referenced.
We've got a lot of primary literature and other literature in it.
I'm going to go to one of the papers that this corrective lens bullet point at the end of our chapter cites.
Breastfeed your infants if you can.
Adults who are breastfed have better-formed palates and better-aligned teeth compared to those who are bottle-fed.
And breast milk has in it all manner of nutrients and information that we do not understand.
It may, for instance, contain cues with which the infant entrains his sleep-wake cycle.
Thus, if you do breastfeed and also pump milk to feed the babies at other times, feeding your baby milk that was pumped at the same time of day as it currently is could be helpful in getting your baby to sleep when you want him to.
Put another way, beware Chesterton's breast milk.
So before we go to the literature, I just want to say with regard to that hypothesis in the second half here, the idea that there may actually be like circadian cues in the breast milk which may help entrain the sleep-wake cycle of the baby is a hypothesis put forth by a former student of ours, Josie Jarvis.
And I actually approached her when writing this and said, you know, have you ever published anything?
Do you have anything?
What we have is the paper that she wrote for us in the program in which she described a considerable amount of evidence in support of the hypothesis, but still not directly tested.
But it points again to the idea that simply, you know, if you really do recognize and believe and recognize the facts that breast milk is best for your child through some age and what age that is varies widely between cultures, then it is and therefore you if you really do recognize and believe and recognize the facts that breast milk is best for your child through some age and what age that is varies widely between cultures, then
And therefore you are interested in pumping milk in order to give your child that milk when you can't be there for him or her.
It actually makes sense, and we hadn't thought about this, so this was not something that we did for our own children, but To actually keep track of the time of day when you express the milk, because sending a child who wakes in the middle of the night, if it's your partner who's getting up to feed them, for instance, giving the milk that was expressed midday may in fact wake the child up more.
And again, this is a hypothesis that has not been tested, but given how much immunological, inter-immunological stuff, material there is in breast milk, It almost seems to me, once Josie proposed this to us, I felt like, oh, it's like so many of the best evolutionary hypotheses, obvious in retrospect, which was almost the name of our book, right?
Obvious in retrospect.
Highly likely to be true.
This is the perfect demonstration that it's not like paleo everything, right?
There is a role for pumping breast milk and modern society and the way we relate to work makes it useful, but the point is there's a ham-fisted way of doing it in which you assume All this is is food, right?
And then there's a way that understands that actually this is a complex mechanism through which mothers have been communicating with babies in a way neither of them understands for I guess almost 100 million years?
No, not quite.
But nonetheless, I mean, it's a... I missed the... Oh, mammals?
Yeah.
Mammals is probably closer to 200 million.
200 million, all right.
Yeah, well older than Chicxulub impact.
But, you know, 100 to 200 million.
100 to 200 million, okay.
So, in any case, the...
The point is, this is a complex phenomenon, and you know, is there room to disturb it?
Yeah, you may even have to disturb it, and not everybody can breastfeed, but the idea that we're going to pretend that breastfeeding, that Promoting breastfeeding is a bad thing because it's insensitive to somebody who can't do it.
That's precocious.
And the fact that a majority of mothers currently feed their kids some formula and therefore we need to normalize it and de-stigmatize it, that's no argument.
That's not, it's circular.
That's no argument at all.
Right.
It's quite appalling.
And the issue of palate, actually.
I want to return to that one.
And so this actually, let me just read the introduction of this paper, because this is actually the paper about palate.
This is by actually a dentist at DDS, Brian Palmer from 1998, called The Influence of Breastfeeding on the Development of the Oral Cavity, a commentary.
So the short introduction simply reads, And you can show my screen if you want, Zach, although you don't have to.
Conventional wisdom supported by scientific research advocates breastfeeding as the superior method of infant feeding.
The nutritional, immunological, psychological, and general health advantages conveyed to infants have been documented for years.
And then he has nine citations.
Lugovic listed the merits of human breast milk as compared to artificial feeds to include ideal nutritional content, better absorption, fewer food-related allergies, more favorable psychological development, better immunologic defenses, and a substantial economic advantage.
There is another compelling benefit to exclusive breastfeeding—positive effects on the development of an infant's oral cavity, including improved shaping of the hard palate resulting in proper alignment of teeth and fewer problems with malocclusions.
The purpose of this commentary is to stimulate further research as well as to propose the importance of breastfeeding to developing and maintaining the physiologic integrity of the oral cavity.
And then he's just got a ton of evidence in here, including from basically skull collections from both modern and historic peoples.
And yes, some of that's going to be diet, as we've talked about before, as you talked about with Mike Mew in summer of 2020.
But the idea here is that, in part, basically the way that the tongue and the jaw are held during breastfeeding, as opposed to with an artificial nipple, are so different that you end up with things like tongue thrust in bottle-fed kids and that you don't in breastfed kids, and that those things, those misalignments, those malocclusions, tongue thrust and such, persist into adulthood.
Right, and result in a tremendous amount of orthodontia, which is self-destructive, as I learned all too painfully.
But anyway, to connect this up with the mic mute stuff, right?
Mike does a great job of laying out the evidence that suggests that all of this tooth alignment stuff is likely to be downstream of changes in diet and behavior, and not the result, as the entire field of orthodontia, of orthodontists, has it, that it's some sort of mystical, mysterious failure of genes, which couldn't possibly be the answer.
Our genes just got really bad.
Really bad, really quick.
And the point is, the evidence from other creatures, from ancestral populations, all suggest something very different.
And, you know, that it isn't one thing.
You know, you've got breastfeeding, you've got, you know, the chewing, the gnawing on harder foods by very young children early on.
Which is good for jaw development.
Good for jaw development, and the point is it results in a mouth shape that is proper and prevents all of these other things.
It's not just your teeth alignment, it's whether or not you have things like sleep apnea.
Exactly.
Nasal cavity development even, I think, is some evidence for soft tissue in the esophagus development.
Right, so anyway, it's the same story again and again.
We have some foolish, simplistic medical explanation for why there's so much dysfunction in the world when really the answer is many, many variations on the same theme, which is somewhere along the line we disrupted something that was important that we didn't understand the function of and we never got around to saying, hey, maybe that was a mistake, right?
You're watching that mistake be amplified with sophisticated advertising with a full-page ad in the New York Times.
And you know, that's not to say it's not an appropriate remedy if you can't breastfeed your child, but breastfeeding is simply superior.
And I mean, I think one of the errors here is, and I guess I alluded to this already, is the idea that if something has been stigmatized, we as fully sophisticated modern people should recognize that that's regressive and archaic and we need to abolish the stigma.
And no.
Some things that have been stigmatized should still be stigmatized.
To use the example I gave last week, pedophilia.
That needs to remain stigmatized.
All of it.
All of the horrible things that I could list here.
They need to stay stigmatized.
Rape and incest and murder.
These things need to stay stigmatized.
And the idea, therefore, that something that was stigmatized needs to come out into the light, like, it's a borrowing of the successes of civil rights, frankly, and women's rights, and we're seeing it across the board.
You know, the idea that we lived in a much more racist society in the past, and most of us have seen the errors of our ways, and so have we, society-wide.
And we can therefore look back on that and see how bad it was.
Well, now people are taking that overlay and applying it to things to which it does not belong.
Yeah.
Another way to say this is that many things like stigma are named after the malignant version of something functional.
And so we tend to get the sense that everything that looks like that is bad, when in fact, no, there's a category where you've got some adaptive, you know, guilt, for example, Right guilt has a bad rap, but it shouldn't right guilt is one of the things that causes us to self-regulate and there's a point at which you're feeling too much guilt to be adaptive where it becomes Maladaptive at which point we start noticing it and that's not the way it should work.
So if we can divide, you know All of these things into, to what degree has it been useful?
To what degree was it adaptive?
To what degree is it still adaptive?
And when have you gone beyond what is adaptive?
When is it a pathological version of the thing?
It's a much healthier way of viewing it rather than, you know, stigma bad.
Right.
It's a very binary approach to the world.
All right.
Are we there?
I believe we are.
All right.
We're going to take, for those of you listening, we will be back here next week for episode 92.
And for those of you watching, if you care to stick around, we're going to take a 15 minute break-ish and then be back with a live Q&A.
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Anything to say before I finish our sign-off?
Uh, no, but yeah, figure out an exercise regimen and get to it because winter is coming.
Be good to the ones you love and eat good food and get outside.
