#102: Check Your Latitude at the Door (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 102nd 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.Beginning with a discussion of health and illness, followed by ads for our sponsors, we then launch into discussion of vitamin D deficiency and Covid comorbidities; a new study in The Lancet which finds that, if infected with Covid, vaccinated people transmit at the same rate as do unvaccinated people; and the prospect of v...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number
Seven.
Seven.
Mm-hmm.
Missed it.
Yeah.
All right.
What number is it actually?
102.
Dalmatians.
I don't know what the Dalmatians have to do with it.
We have a Labrador.
But in any case, we are here.
We are somewhat ready to rock and roll.
You're ready to rock and roll.
I should probably note for the audience that I am a little bit under the weather, that I have contracted a something, and for those of you who are watching rather than just listening, I have elected not to shave so that you will have a visual indicator that I am I am multitasking.
I am podcasting at the same time I am fending off some sort of virus that has invaded my system, I will tell you right now.
I thought you were going to claim that growing facial hair and doing anything else simultaneously qualified as multitasking, thus giving the patriarchy yet another win.
I have tried that claim.
Nobody buys it, so I've moved on.
To their credit.
Very much so.
You know, I didn't know, but it turns out they see right through that.
Yes, you did.
I am multitasking.
In fact, the second task, defending off of a virus, is by far more remarkable than podcasting.
Tough as podcasting is.
So are you going to get to the punchline?
That was the punchline.
No, no, no, no, no.
You thought that it was possible, although your symptoms really don't suggest that it might be COVID and you had a test.
Oh, yeah.
That's not really the punchline.
That's the that's the prognosis and the diagnosis and the zoonosis.
This is going to be long today, isn't it, guys?
It may actually be short.
Right.
Here's the thing.
I was considering taking some Sudafed, which is a drug I really don't think is safe, but would get you through a podcast.
I elected not to, but I may have a contact high from having looked at where in the medicine cabinet the Sudafed is.
Oh man, back in the day, back in the day, very occasionally, feel under the weather, have to go in for a three hour lecture, take a Sudafed.
It's a very different experience, isn't it?
I remember.
I should not confess this, but I once did that because, you know, there was no other way.
I think I probably did it three times.
Yeah.
It's memorable.
It's memorable.
And I recall walking back across a red square.
Yes, Evergreen has a red square.
Other places have a quad.
Nope.
Evergreen has a red square.
So I ran into one of our Kindest and most decent colleagues, and I remember not being able to avoid blurting out something like, I don't understand why we ever lectured without Sudafed.
And this colleague never looked at you the same way again.
Yeah, I mean that happened multiple times with many colleagues.
Having nothing to do with Sudafed.
Right.
Yeah.
But in any case.
Your claim now is that you did not in fact take Sudafed or any other amphetamines that you have access to.
Not, I did not take any.
Who knows who put what in my... I didn't even have Cheerios, so it would have had to be yesterday or something.
Those people who drugged your Cheerios are out of luck.
They are.
I have defeated them by not having breakfast, but... It works!
But anyway, I did have a COVID test yesterday.
I did not expect it.
Nor do we, in fact, I should point out, own any Cheerios.
Right, nor do I think... Cheerios are wheat, right?
I can't even eat them.
I'm sure there are wheat-free O things that you can eat for breakfast.
Oh, no doubt.
The form factor has been adopted by some gluten-free cereals that are mostly disappointing, I would imagine.
But anyway.
I find cereal disappointing in general.
It is kind of.
There are some good cereals.
Oh man, now we've done it, though.
The pro-cereal crowd is going to come after us.
Right.
Whatever happened to Grape Nuts?
Do they still sell those?
Those were never good!
I'm going to take over.
Right.
We've got to get to the part where I took a COVID test, though, and didn't have COVID.
That's right.
I mean, you didn't expect you did, because like we said, your symptoms weren't COVID-y, but you figured you might as well.
I needed to take, given the range of symptoms that come with that particular infection.
But yes, I came up negative, which of course, I don't even know really what that means, because I don't know how good these tests are.
No, I mean, this is the problem, right?
Like, you know, you take a test and you know what now different than you did know before, because these tests are garbage.
And it's like, we deserve, all of us deserve reliable tests, but we don't have them.
We deserve a lot of things that we don't have.
Yep.
And we don't deserve a lot of things that we do have.
Now, I would love to be able to talk to our audience, who I know can handle it, about our current sense about COVID, this dangerous disease that you and I have been talking about for 102 podcasts.
You know, we do still have to do the logistics at the top of the hour.
Totally.
But I'm just saying, I would love to be able to tell them, you know, you thought you had COVID.
Well, what does that mean to you?
That's a discussion we should have.
What does it mean for you in the audience?
If you contract COVID, how should you think about it?
That's the kind of thing we might be able to provide some useful insight on.
But here we are on YouTube.
Unaware of where the actual lines are and whether or not they are honorable enough to abide by them, because of course they're written in such a way that you're not supposed to know where they are, right?
And you can go through your history books and you can look at what kinds of regimes do that, set up rules that you can't possibly follow, right?
And so your own terror at the possibility you will stray across such a line keeps you in check.
But anyway... Or at least it's supposed to.
Yeah, at least it's supposed to, but maybe that's a problem we're going to have to address somehow.
That is a feature.
Yes, a feature, not a bug.
You also said to me off-air, and I think you intended to say this on-air, that you assume at this point, as do I, that you probably will at some point.
Get COVID.
Because as much as the piece that we wrote that we published to mysubstack at the end of July, we still thought there was a chance of actually driving it extinct at that point.
And I at least don't at this point, and it seems like it's endemic.
Let's just say I am not compelled of the position that it cannot be driven to extinction.
I'd be happy to have that come.
I'm not convinced that it can, but what I am convinced of is that the arguments that it cannot be driven to extinction are not fully fledged in light of what we now are coming to understand about this virus.
Especially it having emerged from Wuhan, that likelihood growing ever greater with every new revelation.
You mean the WIV in particular, the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
Well, let's put it this way.
Let's say it's the WIV.
That's certainly the evidence that I've seen points to the WIV, but let's say somebody framed the WIV.
Okay, but when you say the evidence grows that it came from Wuhan, there have been occasional people who've, you know, I mean Dasik at some point was like, oh no, it's from like thousands of miles away, but like all of the hypotheses have centered around that as the point of origin, whether or not it was circulating a long time in advance or whether or not it was Lab leak or zoonotic or bioweapon, like all of these things focus on Wuhan.
That was my mental cloud speaking as a result of whatever little virus I've caught.
What I mean is that the origin looks to be laboratory.
The most likely laboratory is obviously the Wuhan Institute.
Given a laboratory origin, I don't think we can apply the rules of thumb that would tell us, oh yeah, this is a respiratory virus.
It's endemic at this point.
Get used to it.
Nor do I agree, nor do I I think that we all mean the same thing when we say that.
Some people mean a seasonal return.
That's endemism.
Some people recognize that, you know, a disease like rabies isn't extinct, but is so well managed that it might as well be in much of the world.
And anyway, we can have that discussion another time.
We do have to get to the pay and the rent part here before we get into the further discussion.
Indeed.
Yeah, so we are going to be talking some about vaccinating the young, and vitamin D deficiency, and whether or not the vaccines are in fact reducing transmissibility of the virus, and also then talk a bit about some of the lessons learned by Nobel laureates in some of the sciences to round up our hour, which is certainly to be a bit more than an hour today.
But first, but first, let us do some logistics and then pay the rent.
So this book, you may have heard of it.
A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century is now definitely in stock at Amazon.
If you've read it and you enjoyed it, please consider reviewing it wherever you bought it or anywhere else, really.
It's the same book regardless of where you bought it.
Hopefully that's still true.
Hopefully there's no crazy pirated copies out there that are different.
Well, it's being translated now into many languages, and I do.
I wonder what it will say in those languages.
I firmly hope that it says the same thing that it attempts to say in English.
Yeah.
No, the number of languages it's being translated into and will be published in within a year or two is extraordinary.
We're really thrilled at the response to it.
But yes, since we don't speak Almost any of those languages at all.
It will be a question.
I was talking more about the pirated things in English.
There are already all these guides published to it that people can buy.
The guides to the guide.
Yes.
I was just going to say, for those of you who are waiting for the Fortran version, hang in there.
It's coming.
No, it's not.
If you are watching on YouTube, consider switching over to Odyssey.
That's where the live chat is happening.
Ask questions for the Q&A that will follow this hour at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Next week, we are going to be streaming a little bit later due to a conflict earlier in the day, and we will be forgoing the Q&A.
So this, if you have a question, we never get to all of them, and we do pick and choose, but if you have a question that you were thinking about asking this week or next, ask it this week, and then we'll be back with the Q&A again two weeks from now after today.
Tomorrow on my Patreon at 11am Pacific is our monthly private two-hour Q&A.
The questions have already been asked, but we'll be answering them and that is a small enough group that we can see that we keep the chat live and we can see it as we're talking and so it's fun.
It's a little bit, it's actually interactive unlike any of these other things that we're doing live.
This week on my Substack at Natural Selections, I published a piece on vitamin D deficiency and COVID, which has gotten a lot of attention, and we'll talk a little bit about it today.
Consider joining me there as well, and tomorrow I'll have a special Halloween post on zombies.
Of course you will.
Yes.
Yes, I will.
But before we go any further, you wanted to say, I'm just going to put the pen down because I keep hitting things with it.
Yes, you do.
Yeah, I wanted to say a few things.
About ads.
Yeah, I did.
More or less like this.
Nobody really likes ads.
We don't like doing them.
But I do want the audience to understand the predicament that we are in, and therefore the predicament that you are in.
So we've talked about whether the ad should go in the middle, at the end, having them at the beginning.
There's definitely a price to pay with respect to having people listen to stuff that's about commerce up front.
On the other hand, realize why it is that those are there.
We are doing a difficult job.
It's one that's really not easy and for which there is a lot of vitriol thrown our way and a lot of barriers are put in our path.
And one of those barriers is that YouTube demonetized us and has apparently, we're still, there's an appeal pending.
It's been well over a month.
We've heard not a peep because, of course, why would we have heard anything about the appeal of this question that is central to our ability to feed and house our family and continue to do our podcast?
After all, we're just the riffraff or something.
But in any case, the point is These sponsors are being courageous.
They're doing, they're sponsoring a podcast that they believe in enough to take a risk on their own behalf.
And so in any case, we know nobody likes the ads, but please recognize that this is necessary in order for us to do what we do and that these advertisers are doing a great service if what you're here for is to hear a conversation of people who are trying to sort out complex issues that matter.
I will add to that that we have a just a fabulous guy we work with who is our ad broker and he says he reports that we are incredibly choosy which he reports for appreciating though I imagine it's harder for him that we reject a lot of the offers that come our way which means that although no one we don't want to be doing ads and we know that you don't guys don't want to be hearing them but we never run ads for products that we don't actually endorse and so you know we
We take what they give us and crunch it down and write it into scripts that are our own words, except for the very end, the call to action, which we read as it is given to us.
If we are advertising for something, it's because we actually stand by it.
So, without further ado, we've got three ads today, and as always, there's that little sound at the beginning and at the end of the ads, and if you're watching, you have that green barrier, that green perimeter around the screen, so you know at that point that this is sponsored content.
Our first sponsor today is new to us, Hometics, which makes an air purifier that actually lives up to expectations.
All of them.
We have spoken often, and I have written about the health benefits of being outside in the fresh air.
Science knows some, but not all, of why being outside is so good for you, but sometimes you can't be outside, and some indoor spaces aren't amenable to being totally cleared out by opening windows.
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Our second ad of the day is one that you've heard us talk about before.
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And I'll say this, I enjoy my coffee but I don't need it and that's intentional.
I've spent time places where coffee was not or might not be available so it's important to me not to lose functionality if I can't get it.
So I wasn't sure when our wonderful ad broker brought us this opportunity that I needed or wanted it.
But I said, sure, have them send us some, and I pretty quickly fell in love with it.
It's great.
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So, visit Mudwater.com slash Dark Horse to support the show and use Dark Horse at checkout for $5 off.
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Among all our sponsors, we probably use this the most.
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That's what it feels like when I put on a regular pair of shoes now.
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I have never personally owned a set of hooves, but I have watched many creatures with hooves and I have some sense of what that's like.
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All right.
All right.
And just one more thing about our sponsors.
If you ever try to use the code that we've given you and it doesn't work, certainly do try to make it work on the site, but also contact our moderator at darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com because we do occasionally have problems with the codes and it's good for us to know and we send it to our ad broker who sends it on to the vendor and they'll get it fixed.
All right.
We are going to be talking about vitamin D in the upcoming weeks a bit more, and it will probably become something of a drumbeat.
I mean, we've been talking about it off and on for a while now, but I dove into it this last week for this piece that I posted on Substack and wanted to share just a few things.
You can show my screen here, Zach.
This is the piece, Vitamin D Deficiency and COVID-19.
Make D while the sun shines, and when the sun doesn't shine, supplement.
So I began the piece right up front by saying that vitamin D deficiency is so widespread that many people are calling it a pandemic, including many researchers, including even in the title of some papers.
And some researchers are cautioning, you know, what we don't know if what we're looking at is causation or just correlation.
And so maybe there isn't really the problem that we think it is.
And one of those big reviews is actually what we cited in our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
And so in the very top paragraph, and actually, Zach, if you would please put this back on the screen and leave it up here while I'm talking about this.
Of this piece, I say that although our larger point completely stands, that the hyper-novel world that we have lived in, which is of course the main theme of our book, is part of what is making us likely vitamin D deficient.
The fact that we have indoor lifestyles, the fact that we are told to slather ourselves with sunscreen whenever we go outside.
is a large part of what is making us vitamin D deficient.
But we do not say don't supplement with vitamin D in the book, but we do say that we think it's yet another example of the sort of reductionist metric heavy thinking that so much of modern science and medicine is guilty of.
And both of us have now, on this point at least, on the question of vitamin D supplementation, especially for those living far from the equator, We have changed our tune.
We have now seen enough research and have talked to enough people that we think that vitamin D deficiency really is something that is difficult to escape from if a few other things are true of you about which I'll say a little bit more in a minute but you have some.
Yeah, I just wanted to point out what we did and didn't get right.
Yeah.
Our point in the book is that supplements do not appear to have a benefit if you don't have a deficiency, and therefore an obsession with supplementing towards some ideal state is unlikely to be effective.
On the other hand, what I think has changed in our viewpoint is the likelihood that you are deficient in certain nutrients.
Well, I would say there's an additional point, which is that supplements isolate a particular thing.
So apparently something like 90% across our species of our vitamin D synthesis happens from exposure to the sun, specifically UVB rays.
But there are dietary sources, and largely fish, eggs, and organ meats like liver are the primary dietary sources.
But for vitamin D, like for, you know, everything else that we get through our diet, it is not necessarily and often is guaranteed not to be as accessibly, be as bioavailable to us if we just take it in some isolated form, rather than with, you know, in combination with the food in which you would normally be getting it, which is then providing also the other things that are necessary to, you know, whatever it is, open up the pathways that allow it to become part of you.
Right, totally agree with this.
And in fact, in this case, what we have, what you unearthed in your piece, and what's evident in all of the vitamin D literature, is that we have disrupted a very elegant system.
And so, for example, this is a fat-soluble vitamin.
It deposits in fat.
And so you can imagine an ancestor who, during the plentiful times, during the growing season, Maybe.
I actually took out that exact... Probably yes, but there's more complications that I'm not yet prepared to go into here because there's some questions about exact mechanism.
Fair enough.
I actually took out that exact, probably yes, but there's more complications that I'm not yet prepared to go into here because there's some questions about exact mechanism. - Fair enough.
In any case, the point is you have a prediction that comes from the supplementation question, which is if this is about dealing with deficiency, then the point is if you're not deficient, If you are deficient, you do need a supplement, but it's not entirely clear how well that supplement works.
One of the issues with vitamin D is can you take it up, right?
And so the fact that it is in your diet doesn't necessarily mean that it makes it into your physiology.
And so that's a question and probably it would be wise if we all got our vitamin D levels measured so we at least even knew where we were, right?
And then there's, you know...
There's also the issue, which maybe you'll get to, but the idea of we have stupid things like recommended daily allowance, right?
Recommended daily allowance doesn't say summer, winter, it doesn't pay heed to the idea that this is actually a bankable vitamin, right?
And that all of these things impinge on whether or not you should look at a vitamin D supplement and think that's something I might need or that's something I don't need.
Yeah.
Now RDA is an overly simple metric the same way that the idea of a universally best diet for all humans is an overly simple metric.
There can't actually be a number for any molecule that actually you can say, that's the RDA for all humans across all ages, across both sexes, across all races and health qualities.
There's no way, right?
So we have one that is for some, you know, it used to be, I remember in the 90s, when we were in grad school, you would hear, ah, you know, so many of the recommendations are just based on men, and specifically white men, and specifically white men of a certain age.
And this is a risk, and we actually know this still for things like heart attack.
Now, we're not talking about supplements here, but most of the signs, the warning signs of heart attack that people know of are actually typical warning signs of heart attack for men, and typical signs of heart attack for women are different.
And, you know, this is a true thing, and yet somehow we still seek the simple universal rubric or a metric that we can just carry around with us and exchange with other people as if what is right for us is inherently what is right for them.
I would just point out in passing that in some sense the best response to the woke claim that the only cause for disparities in outcome between populations is oppression, vitamin D is the ultimate proof that this isn't the case because you're headed this way.
Yeah, yeah exactly.
So anyway, I'll just say the stem for the idea is we differ in amount of melanin based on where our ancestors lived and that degree of protection from UV radiation, which is of course damaging, affects how readily you make vitamin D in the Sun.
So black people, for example, living in low latitudes have an obstacle to producing enough vitamin D that obviously isn't about oppression, right?
You mean high latitudes?
Sorry.
Yes, living at high latitudes.
Let's just spell it out, and I do exactly spell this out in the piece, that dark skin color is exactly an adaptation to tropical sun so that you don't burn.
And the trade-off of not burning in the tropical sun due to dark skin coloration is that you synthesize vitamin D more slowly.
And in our global world, in our global economy, when you have lots of people moving around compared to where our intermediate-level ancestors lived, pale-skinned people, fair-skinned people going to the equator are much more likely to burn, but their vitamin D synthesis is going to be sky-high, and dark-skinned people moving far from the equator are not going to burn.
They're much less likely to burn anywhere, but they're much more likely to be vitamin D deficient.
And so one of the things that I started thinking about when I was writing this piece was all the comorbidities for COVID-19, many of which, maybe all of which we've talked about on this show, on this podcast, are also conditions for which vitamin D deficiency is a known correlate.
And so let me just walk through the, I think it was seven that I specifically pulled out.
We have, and you are showing my screen.
Thank you, Zach.
So as I say, four of the most common conditions associated with vitamin D deficiency are also four of the most severe comorbidities for COVID-19.
Age, race, obesity, and kidney disease.
So the older you are, the worse your outcome from COVID.
This is one of the few things that everyone knows and everyone seems to agree on, even though it's still you have occasional social media tweets that ignore this fact.
But it's also true that the older you get, the less well you synthesize vitamin D, and older people are more likely to be vitamin D deficient than young people.
Point one.
Point two.
Race.
For exactly the reasons we were just talking about.
We know that African Americans, we've been hearing that African Americans have poorer outcomes than European Americans from from COVID, and we've been, you know, we've been Some people have been trying to sell us on the fact that this is due to inequities in medical care.
And frankly, if you believe that it is entirely due to inequities in medical care at this moment in 2021, then you really should not be in charge of helping people because you are really not thinking things through clearly.
It is true that, because of the reasons that we just spelled out, the darker your skin, the less quickly you synthesize vitamin D, and therefore the more you need to spend time in the sun and potentially eating a diet rich in vitamin D-rich foods, although even those foods have a tiny percentage of the ability to get vitamin D into you as sun exposure does, and or supplement.
So, I would just point out... I do have the other five to get through, but... Okay, I just point out, this isn't to say that oppression couldn't cause the problem, right?
You could have lousy healthcare in certain parts of town... It could not be the only cause, is my point.
Right, but the point is, because both of these things point in the same direction, right?
Yes.
So, an economic disparity and a melanin skin sunscreen, a built-in sunscreen that blocks the production of vitamin D, would both point in the same direction.
This is what people your and my age would call a confound, what people below 45 seem to now call a confounder.
But in any case, this is just something I've noticed.
I'm going to stick with Confounder.
Yeah, I think me too, although I'm not entirely convinced Confounder isn't grammatically more correct.
But in any case, I'm going to be stodgy and they can just get the hell off my lawn.
Too bad for them, we don't have a lawn.
Right.
Right, yeah, I care about less.
No Cheerios, no Lawn.
What the hell are we doing?
We even call ourselves Americans.
Right, how's that?
But anyway, so the point is, what you've got is a situation in which you don't know what the contribution of melanin versus disparities in healthcare is, but at the very least, it is insane to imagine that the only cause would be oppression.
That to find an outcome difference inherently points to oppression is nonsense.
And, you know, how many people of any skin color know that skin color actually affects the ability to synthesize vitamin D in your skin and that vitamin D is a well-known correlate of so many health outcomes?
I'm not going to go into it here because we have a lot of other things we want to do today, but, you know, go read this piece.
It's available for free on my sub stack.
The number of health conditions that are associated with vitamin D deficiency is extraordinary.
From cancers, to immune response, to infectious diseases including influenza, to other upper respiratory viruses, it is truly extraordinary.
So let me just get through these top... you had something quick?
Well, I got one more thing, which is also notice that our public health authorities do not say politically incorrect things like, hey, take a look at your skin.
And, you know, depending upon how dark it is, we have a very different recommendation based on, you know, based on that, how much lying in the sun you'll probably ought to do, right?
Like how often do they recommend lying in the sun to anybody?
But in fact, it's probably a good idea.
Anyway, I would point out there is an app which I have just become aware of called D-Minder, which actually takes all sorts of factors and it would be great if you knew your D levels to start with, which it has a field for.
But anyway, it tells you what hours of the day you're capable of making vitamin D. Given where you are.
Given where you are on the planet, right.
It includes all these things, including skin color.
Yeah, great.
I'm not going to go through the whole piece here, but I guess we did say the farther from the equator you are, the less capable of synthesizing D. The closer to the winter solstice it is, the harder it is to synthesize D. And add to that these things which are internal to who you are as opposed to the environment that you're in, age, Race, obesity, the higher your BMI, the less good at synthesizing vitamin D from the sun you are and the more likely you are to be deficient.
And of course we know that's one of the major comorbidities for COVID.
And then chronic kidney disease is both a major comorbidity for COVID and at least a correlate of vitamin D deficiency.
And then these additional three things, and it's really five depending on how you count.
I was less certain of the connection, although I've since, even since just posting this on Tuesday, have since learned more and I'm growing more certain.
Both depression and anxiety disorders, both of which are actually considered comorbidities for COVID-19 in this piece, in this massive article that we've talked about in past episodes, have been linked to vitamin D deficiency.
So that's again, both anxiety disorders and depression, diabetes, both type 1 and type 2, ...are understood to be downstream of vitamin D deficiency.
It's not the only factor, but vitamin D deficiency is definitely a cause in developing these things and are both COVID comorbidities.
And then being institutionalized, like in a nursing home or a care home is associated with vitamin D deficiency simply because you're very often not even allowed outside.
And of course, we know that nursing homes were basically super spreader places.
And you know, what's true of nursing homes, at the very least, it's institutionalized old people, which brings two of these risk factors right up close.
So, can we say that vitamin D deficiency is causal in bad COVID outcomes?
Some people are saying that.
I am still thinking on it, but are there a ton of correlations between the two conditions?
And do you actually have control?
You, everyone listening, if you have access to You know, a drugstore to start supplementing with vitamin D if you're deficient?
Yes, you do.
So, you know, to the degree that you can take control of your own health, do so.
I would just finally point out that there is some question about the causal nature of sufficient D levels in resistance of COVID, but it is A, probable that D is causally protective, that sufficient levels of D are protective.
But the key thing, and this is an argument that has been made by several people, we made it, others, some of whom we know have also made it for various other substances.
But there's a Pascal's Wager issue at the very bottom of this.
Yes.
Which is to say that the risk, the likelihood that you are D deficient is incredibly high.
The number of things that D seems to be protective of is incredibly large.
The harm to you if you raise your D levels and it somehow turned out that D was a third correlate and not causal is so low.
The cost of the stuff is very cheap, the danger of taking way too much of it is very low, and the potential benefit is sky high, and so the point is, you might as well, but then the real Import of that is, to the extent that our public health authorities are not recommending this, have not been recommending it throughout the pandemic,
You know that they are either incompetent at a level that strains credulity or not interested in health.
And until they change their tune on this, I think one has to look at everything they say with a kind of skepticism.
How do I know this person is actually interested in my health the way they claim to be if they are not picking the lowest hanging fruit on the tree, which is vitamin D. And, you know, that's a jaw-dropping thing to say.
Public health officials who aren't interested in health, public or otherwise, that's a remarkable claim.
On the other hand, how else are we to explain their total silence on vitamin D?
Indeed.
Indeed.
Okay, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about this study that just came out.
Zachary, if you will show it.
This is by a team of people, the lead author's name being something that I will unfortunately probably butcher here, Sanganayagam et al., published in, gosh, I've forgotten, published in The Lancet.
Oh, I knew that.
Published in The Lancet, it's called Community Transmission and Viral Load Kinetics of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta B.1.617.2 Variant in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Individuals in the UK, a Prospective Longitudinal Cohort Study.
We're going to say a few things about this, but let me just go right here first.
Interpretation.
Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance.
Nonetheless, fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts.
Host-virus interactions early in infection may shape the entire viral trajectory.
So I may have my screen back, Zachary.
Thank you, sweetie.
Additional takeaways from this work before we talk about what this means.
There's two other pieces of work that they cite, which I was not aware of.
They cite work out of Singapore, which found that only 8% of COVID cases in unvaccinated people were with the Delta variant, whereas the Delta is representing nearly all the COVID cases among the vaccinated.
Oh, that's fascinating.
Right?
That's fascinating.
Apparently, households are indeed the site of most SARS-CoV-2 transmission globally.
And this has been one of our drumbeats from the beginning.
You're sending sick people home to their families where they can and probably will infect them.
Well, yes, that is what the policy has been.
And apparently, that is the site at which most of the When it has been looked at, where are people getting sick?
Most people are getting sick from COVID in their homes, from other people in their homes.
But with regard to the present study, two additional results are that peak viral load did not differ by vaccination status or variant type, but did increase modestly with age.
So again, something that suggests possibly why people may be getting sicker as they are older when they are infected with COVID.
And finally, a question about which I want to spend a little bit more time.
In the present study, they found that the risk of infection increased with time in the two to three months since the second dose of the vaccine.
Let me just say that again.
And also, let's just point out that across every study that I've seen and all of the public health pronouncements, the numbers are being juked in so many ways.
But one of the ways is that you're not called fully vaccinated until you are two weeks out from your final jab.
And that means that a whole lot of stuff can happen in those first two weeks, and indeed in the, you know, not the first two weeks, in the first month or more between the moment that you have your first shot, if it's an mRNA shot for which you're expected to have two, and after the two weeks after you've got your second one.
And so none of the things that happened to you in that time do you fall into vaccinated status.
So that's one thing.
So we have this firm set point that has been handed to us without any explanation as to why, that you are only considered fully vaccinated two weeks after.
And what these researchers find is that in two to three months, Within two to three months, your immunity is waning, which is to say your risk of infection is rising.
So this raises questions again, again and again and again for me about what it means to be vaccinated, right?
If you're losing immunity two to three months after your final vaccine, at what moment really can you claim to be fully vaccinated?
We've got this beginning set point, this beginning point, and no one's told us an end point.
We're now being encouraged to do boosters if you've already had your first ones.
But it's illegitimate to have a start point and no end point.
You know, really, after two or three months now, we are seeing in this study and across many studies that you're simply not as protected as you were.
And so what does it even mean to be fully vaccinated?
And let me just say before we jump in here, I want to consider the rabies vaccine and our experience with the rabies vaccine.
We were vaccinated against rabies in the 90s when you were doing a lot of bat work.
This is a prophylactic vaccine that you get if you think you may encounter rabies.
So people like veterinarians get it.
I mean vaccine is prophylactic.
Right, there's an inoculation that you get famously if you've contracted rabies, if you have contacted rabies.
But that's not a vaccine.
Right, so we both sought out the rabies vaccine in the 90s when you were working with bats and I was working with you sometimes.
Actually, I'm not technically certain that what you get after contact with rabies isn't a vaccine.
I will have to look into its exact mechanism, and then I think it's not a simple question.
But it may be that you're right, and I just don't know.
Okay.
Semantically, to me, vaccine suggests prophylaxis, which is to say before exposure.
But perhaps this is not right.
So, we were both vaccinated against rabies in the 90s, and at the time they told us, you know, we said, okay, is this lifelong?
Because some of the vaccines you get are considered lifelong, and they said, you know, maybe in 10 years or so, if you're still doing the work that is putting you at risk of exposure, then you should consider getting your titers checked.
So like tetanus.
Like tetanus?
Right, and indeed a lot of these things, which are actually childhood vaccines, at the point that you are an adult you may get your last shot and they will say, you know, in 10 years you'll be due again.
This is true for yellow fever as well.
Yellow fever and rabies being vaccines that, you know, we're vaccinated against, but most people aren't because most people, most weird people, most people in the U.S.
for instance, don't go to places where they will be exposed to the To the pathogen.
But we had our titers checked 10 years on and our titers happened to be fine so we never got a booster.
But the idea of a booster 10 years on makes some sense because immunity will wane and there are a lot of things that your immune system is doing and if it hasn't been exposed to the pathogen in question in 10 years, then maybe your body has lost some of its immunity.
The idea of a vaccine that is effective only against some variants and not very effective against Delta even at the beginning and begins to lose its efficacy within two or three months of being so-called vaccinated raises for me the question of what counts as a vaccine at this point.
Yeah, this is, first of all, they are playing on the lack of biological sophistication of the public, right?
The public does know more or less in some vague sense what an antibody is, and therefore it can understand something like what a titer is, and it can understand these things as a proxy.
But the idea that what's being generated by these vaccines, and we can argue about whether or not that's even a fair term in light of the mechanism of action, But what they are producing is B-cell immunity.
They're producing antibodies.
What we want is we want T-cell immunity.
And so we are seeing the failure.
And again, these are a technological marvel.
It doesn't make them safe, right?
They're a technological marvel.
They do work to some extent, but basically... They are, in your words, they're a prototype.
They're a prototype.
And you know, the other term, which I think we haven't used yet, I say this as somebody who, I've done less of it recently, but I used to tinker and invent things.
And there's a stage called proof of concept, right?
Where you have some object that took you so long to build that it can't possibly be regarded as a success in terms of solving the problem it's targeted at.
But it does prove that the problem can be solved.
So you, having produced this monstrosity, will be delighted as its inventor that, yes, the problem is solvable and I've figured out step one of how to do it.
will be delighted as its inventor that, yes, the problem is solvable, and I've figured out step one of how to do it, but it's not something you could bring to market or you would inflict on somebody, right?
But it's not something you could bring to market or you would inflict on somebody.
Right.
And this is what we've got, is we've got proof that you can vaccinate against this disease at what cost in terms of risk to a person and to what level of effectiveness.
Immunity that wanes at this level, we're basically dealing with something that's the analog of the gamma globulin shots that people used to get for, maybe they still do get, for malaria, where, you know, you can get some antibodies that will, you know, probably gum up you can get some antibodies that will, you know, probably gum up the malaria if it gets into your system, but it only, you know, but because you're not producing them, it's a very short-lived
I think the first time that we traveled into the tropics, we got the gamma globulin.
I've certainly had it, I can't remember when.
And then it was different prophylaxis, including chloroquine.
Right.
But the fact of this, so first of all, this game, and you're right about the juking of the stats, in some sense this pandemic has a meta-pandemic of fraudulent accounting.
That goes with it.
The idea that there's any debate at all about what vaccinated means, who the unvaccinated are, or what does it mean to be fully vaccinated.
No, no.
Are you vaccinated?
Well, did somebody put a needle in your arm and inject the stuff?
You're vaccinated.
To the extent that the vaccines... Are you protected?
Right.
Different question.
Right.
Are you immunized?
Maybe we could use that term and we could say, actually, you're not immunized until weeks out, but you're vaccinated.
But if we start talking about immunity, Then we're not just going to have to also talk about acquired immunity from actually having survived COVID.
But also, especially if there does turn out to be this causal link between vitamin D deficiency and COVID, if your vitamin D levels are sufficient, don't you kind of have immunity to COVID?
And, you know, it's not perfect, right?
It's not perfect, but then neither are the vaccines.
There is no perfect solution here.
Right.
And, you know, we have many categories.
And, you know, Gerrit van den Bosch is focused on innate immunity, which is different than natural immunity.
Natural immunity being generated in response to the disease.
Innate immunity being the kind of immunity that mostly protects most of us from most things most of the time, right?
It's the kind of immunity that you have You mean innate versus acquired in the immune system sense, as opposed to what I just used.
Maybe I confused the terminology by saying acquired, by which I meant from a disease.
I think you got it right.
No, I know I got it, but I think that you just spoke in a way that was maybe confusing.
Well, let's put it this way.
I think to the layperson's ear, innate and natural immunity sound alike, and they refer to two different things, right?
So, the fact that kids fend off this disease pretty well, Gerrit van den Bosch at least ascribes to their innate immunity.
And the point is these systems interact.
So at the point that you're buying vaccine-based immunity, you may be buying it at some cost to innate immunity.
And you may be compromising the system's ability to generate natural immunity because of something called original antigenic sin.
Right, original antigenic syn, syn meaning that when your immune system has seen a pathogen, it already is part, it becomes trained on the path for the solution, which means that to the extent that some other solution might be better, it's not available because the immune system is like, ah, I got this one, I know.
It's cannalized.
Right, it becomes cannalized, exactly.
And so anyway, all of these things trade off against each other.
And in a healthy environment, we would have people hard at work at figuring out what those trade-offs were and for whom it was worth making that gamble.
By healthy environment, you mean a healthy scientific and political environment.
Right.
And a scientific and political environment in which doctors and scientists were free to say what they were seeing, to say what they thought it meant and why, and to fight it out, right?
Honorably.
And we don't live in that environment at all.
We live in an environment where we've been told the answer And we are going to have people insist on that answer.
And what's more, they're going to demonize anybody who says, wait a minute, I know that answer isn't right, and here's how, right?
Those people become villains.
And you know who else becomes villains?
The unvaccinated.
Even if the unvaccinated have complied and had a vaccine, right?
That has to do with the fraudulent way that that term is being used.
Right?
The idea that you're fully vaccinated at the point that you're weeks out from your second vaccination rather than at the point that you have complied means that we've created this phony category.
People who have complied but remain vulnerable because the vaccines are a disappointment are being shoved into this other mythological category in order that they can be demonized so people will rush toward the vaccine.
Opposite, but yes.
Well, people who've complied are being demonized in the data.
They're being claimed to have resisted the vaccine, and that's why they're safe.
And that's why they're sick.
Right?
To the extent that somebody who is one week out from their second vaccination comes down with the disease, and then they show up in a data set as unvaccinated and sick with COVID, it sounds like- Those are the people you're talking about.
Right.
Those people sound like they have been resistant and not done what they were asked to do, and that's why they're sick.
When in fact, the reason that they're sick is that there's an immunological process that has to unfold, and that in fact, I mean, if you think about it, The way that this works, the disease itself and your first vaccination cause the development of immunity.
At the point that you are vaccinated again, that immunity interacts with your vaccine, right?
It cannot help but do so, to the extent that the second time you get vaccinated with one of these things, some new crop of cells starts putting out the antigen
The cells that are built to recognize that antigen will do that and they will start bonding to the antigen either sticking off the surface of these cells that are now making it or floating around because the anchoring domain didn't work and the point is that is going to have an effect on how immune you actually are at that moment if you encounter a person sick with COVID.
So you know this isn't This is straightforward, right?
This problem exists.
What is its effect on a person's actual level of protection?
And what advice should we therefore give them?
And how should they show up in a table that tells us where you're protected and where you're not?
This feels very, very abstract.
What advice we should give them, in part, is immediately after vaccination, you're actually at particular risk.
That is actually the moment when you should be most careful not to be exposed to the disease.
Right, and we give no such advice, right?
We at best say something like you're not fully protected till, rather than you're actually in a special state.
Exactly, exactly.
Okay, you wanted, before we start talking about Nobel laureates, you wanted to talk a little bit about the coming down the pike at us likely EUA to allow the vaccines for 5 to 11 year olds.
Yeah, I just wanted to point out something that's increasingly sitting very badly with me.
There has been, obviously, a tremendous amount of ink spilled and video produced of people disagreeing over what the correct response is to the evidence we have regarding the vaccines available to us, the disease, what their interaction is, right?
Should we be vaccinating the very vulnerable, right?
Should it be a ring pattern?
Should we really be trying to vaccinate everybody in the middle of a pandemic?
There are real arguments to be had about what the wise thing is, and there is no room for a real argument.
Have you seen Ring Pattern proposed?
Yeah.
Fascinating.
Yeah.
I mean, the fact is there's lots of room to have an honest discussion about what the best way to deal with the tools we've got and the disease we face, right?
Yeah, there's lots of things we could do, and we are not having any of these discussions in an honorable fashion, and it's maddening.
But here's what I see.
Many people, including friends of ours, very smart people, Some of whom do have the scientific chops to evaluate this stuff and some of whom don't have, in my opinion, and I assume our opinion, gotten this dead wrong and they have understood the fictions that we are being sold as noble lies that we should probably embrace.
What I don't understand is why at the point that we are being told that 5 to 11-year-olds should be vaccinated, that A, it's acceptable to vaccinate them, and B, that maybe this should be mandated, why is this not waking people up who accepted the past excuse that these were noble lives designed to control a pandemic and that we didn't want to burden people with the nuances of the actual risk-benefit analysis?
There's no defense, as far as I can see, for vaccinating people so young, if they're healthy.
If they are healthy, they will endure COVID very, very well, and they will acquire a durable kind of immunity from an encounter with it.
And so the idea of putting them at risk of original antigenic sin, in this case, of signing them up, if what you're going to have is Immunity from the vaccines that then wanes, that then requires boosters.
Somebody 5 to 11 is going to need a whole lot longer series of boosters if we don't have an alternative coming down the pike.
And frankly, You may, should a good vaccine show up, you may limit their ability to take advantage of it because you will have already catalyzed their immune system in a direction.
There is no defense.
What's more, every booster carries the risk of adverse events, and we can argue about how many adverse events there are, but when the disease has essentially no risk for young children, the idea of exposing them to any significant risk of myocarditis or any other serious adverse event is very, very hard to justify.
So one thing that we were talking about off air was that as you all can imagine, Brett and I have had a lot of conversations about this, some of them on air, but most by far the majority of them off air.
We talk weekly about what the conditions might be that would prompt us to decide that it was necessary to get vaccinated with the current vaccines.
What we have both agreed to and didn't take even saying it aloud, although we have, was that the evidence is so overwhelming across so many domains that what we cannot imagine allowing is letting those near our children.
That is, given the evidence for the danger of the pathogen to young people and the danger of the vaccines to young people, young men in particular, of which we have two, that is a very normal parental response.
Yeah.
You may be able to get that near me, but do not get it near my children.
Where is that response?
I think this is the question that you are asking.
Why do we not seem to be seeing that response in the public conversation as the age limit for these is dropping lower and lower?
Yeah, it's very strange.
And I would just point out that there are other little nuances in here.
There's a question about, you know, I mean, the idea of being forced to the vaccine is obviously, you know, one's freedoms are potentially on the line here.
So it's not unreasonable to judge even an unacceptable level of risk against other costs.
Probably, in our case, if we were going to be forced, it would make sense to have one of us be vaccinated and the other one just because we don't know what the long-term implications of this are.
Nobody does.
And just in terms of protecting our family from various possible outcomes, there's a question about what you do.
And I don't know what the answer is, but it is so odd to see people who clearly have the capacity and the information to understand that something is wrong to the extent that we are rushing to the idea that if vaccines are inherently good and this is just but it is so odd to see people who clearly have the capacity and the information to understand that something is wrong to the extent that we are rushing And I,
I hesitate to say this because I understand it can be inflammatory, but in some sense this looks like I think it would be generous to call it a religious response.
our friend Marcos Andrinos put out a tweet this week.
What did I just do?
I don't know.
In any case, I will come back and fix that in a second.
But the question is, is this a kind of built in response in which people are effectively making a sacrifice of their own children to some sort of belief system.
And I feel the same way as I watch children leaving school, 19 and 20 of them, as I've been counting, masked, even though it's broad daylight with plenty of UV light, they're walking largely alone and they're effectively at no risk of COVID and this disease isn't particularly dangerous to them at all.
And yet they appear not to be questioning.
It's as if they are born into a family that has embraced a religious, or in this case, it's not religious because it hasn't stood the test of time.
It's a cult structure.
Yeah.
Well, the rules as they make less and And that's part of that's part of the point.
Yeah.
Okay, should we should we move on?
Yep.
I've been reading a lot of good books lately, and one of them that I recommend is this one.
This is Brian Keating's new book, Into the Impossible, Lessons from Laureates to Stoke Curiosity, Spur Collaboration, and Ignite Imagination in Your Life and Career.
I think that's the subtitle I just read, although it also says, Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner on the front.
So, Brian Keating is a professor of physics or astronomy or both.
I don't remember which.
At UC San Diego, he interviewed us on his podcast, Into the Impossible, about our book, which he enjoyed just actually, I think, a week before this book of his came out.
What are you smirking at me for?
I need to interrupt, go back and correct something or my brain is going to overheat.
Alexandros Marinos.
I stumbled over his name and then could not recover it having gone into shock.
And I apologize, sir.
You of course knew exactly who he was.
No, I didn't.
I wrote it down.
I was like, I don't know who he's talking about.
And then I wrote Alexandros as a question mark.
Frightening event that I will not soon forget.
Dude, you're a little bit sick.
That could be.
That's all.
And even the dog knows that.
Yeah, especially the dog.
Okay, so Brian Keating, who we had a really terrific conversation with a few weeks ago on his podcast, has this is a second book that's come out.
And he's basically, you know, he's interviewed a number of Nobel laureates on his podcast.
And in this, he basically pulls what he sees as some of the prime lessons from many of them.
And you're fine.
You did it.
It's done.
So there are a lot of people who aren't watching and can't see that No, I have- It's very hard for me to continue when you look like that.
Post-traumatic podcast disorder, and it is- Great.
All right, I'm working on it.
The DSM-17 will have that one in it.
Hopefully not until then.
Okay, what are we doing?
This is just a terrific book that I recommend, and it's a lot of fun.
And I'm not going to spend time on who the Nobel laureates are, although that seems like it's kind of evading the point of the book, but there's just five things that I wanted to mention that we can riff on, just lessons from the book that Dr. Keating points out.
So the first one, which is near and dear to both of our hearts, but yours especially, is on tinkering.
Keating asks, Keating asks Ranier Weiss, You would develop a trade by the age of 14, working with record players, or as they used to be called, phonographs.
And of course, there was an interesting corollary between the microscopic vibrations of a tiny needle on vinyl and the reverberations of space-time.
So again, these are excerpts from the podcast that Brian did with these Nobel laureates, that Dr. Keating did with these Nobel laureates.
Weiss answers, many who have gone into experimental physics got their experience by being the fixer in the house.
They worked in a garage or as an apprentice to a plumber or an electrician.
It teaches you how to problem solve.
Noise is the thing that kills you.
Why did I get interested in electronics?
It had to do with the end of the Second World War.
By 1944 and 45, so much stuff was coming back as salvage.
A friend who ran a junk store on Courtland Street in New York, near where the World Trade Center was, told me, we got a nice thing.
Just came back from the South Pacific.
You'll have to get the Varnashov, but there's a whole radar set up there.
You want the oscilloscope?
And it goes on, but to this point, so many people who have made advances in science have been, in a detailed way, in a just totally enmeshed way, utterly immersed in the physical world and in taking apart objects and seeing how they work and seeing if they can get them back together.
Yeah, the thing about tinkering with devices is it's a little bit like biology, and I think I've made the point here before.
Biology is very unlike other sciences, right?
We group the sciences together because the method you use to sort them out is the same, or similar, but the content Is very different, right?
In chemistry, at least chemistry of the natural world, there's no objective, right?
Chemicals don't have an objective.
Maybe in biochemistry you can say there's some objective.
But, you know, H2O isn't trying to accomplish something.
It happens because it's a stable state that arises.
Whereas in biology, things don't necessarily make obvious sense.
You don't know why the animal does that crazy thing.
But that it's doing it for some good reason you can be certain of.
Evolution is what unifies it.
I'm going to absolutely disagree with your first contention that it's about methods, because molecular biology and evolution and ecology use wildly different methods.
But in the case of biology, what links it is that evolution applied.
No, no, I think you misunderstood what I'm saying.
The scientific method is the same from physics to biology.
Nothing else unites them thematically, physics and biology.
Oh, science writ large, not disciplines, not biology versus chemistry.
Right.
And so the point is, what is biology like?
Biology is like engineering, right?
Because in both cases, the thing does the thing that it does for a reason, right?
The idea that you can expect there to be a reason.
Now, when I dove into that typewriter over there, right?
Was that painful?
Oh my god, that was quite the learning experience.
You just said that, and I'm thinking physical space.
I'm imagining you did like a swan dive.
It was a metaphor.
But the point is, you can look into that thing, and boy, if you get a chance to look into a Selectric sometime, especially one that works, it is mind-boggling what is in there.
It totally shocked me.
But the point is, You may not be able to sort it out.
In fact, you could probably spend a lifetime with a selector typewriter if you had no internet and no instruction manuals and never figure out how it actually all works.
It's that complex an entity, but you can be damn certain That everything that's in there is in there for a reason, right?
And therefore, to the extent that some part of it is failing, you don't have to understand the whole thing to be able to diagnose some subsystem and figure out how to adjust it so that it comes to work.
And so this is like the perfect training ground for a mind to do certain kinds of puzzles.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Next quote from this lovely Keating book.
Here he's talking to Adam Rice, the stargazer.
In 2011, he shared the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae.
Oh, I just read that, and yet actually the quote here I want to read is just Keating talking.
He says, in academia, we have what I call the academic hunger games, You have to start off in a top-tier school, get good grades, then impress your professors to get letters of recommendation, go to graduate school, get a good thesis project, publish papers, get first authorship, get a post-doctoral position, get a faculty job, get tenure, and eventually win the Nobel Prize.
That's not the end for most people, but do you ever feel like the game is broken?
To which Rice says, I think that it's not a great scheme.
I am lucky that I did not feel compelled by that scheme.
Early on, I decided science was interesting to me and that I would pursue it as long as it was fun and engaging, but that I would not pursue it for checking certain boxes along some path.
If people find themselves trying to check boxes, complete a list to get to a certain place, they're probably in the wrong field.
Science is a lot of fun if you're driven by your own curiosity and passion.
We do it because we want to know answers.
Yes, well it's actually in some ways it's the perfect non-political analog for what we discuss in our book about the defect of liberalism that comes from a focus on problem solving.
Right?
So the desire to fix things often points to a solution that would correct that problem.
Why not build a prize?
If you really want to incentivize people to find really important stuff, then what you do is you build a prize that creates, you know, effectively a lottery.
You get a lot more value out of giving a million dollars to somebody for having succeeded in something great.
If it causes, you know, a hundred people to shoot for that prize, you know, if you divvied that amount up, it wouldn't amount to very much incentive.
But once you start doing that you come up with a corruptible structure where that prize becomes a focus and then you get all kinds of skullduggery to get there and you've in fact may have done more harm than good.
I think that's true, but I think the bigger point, which applies to vastly more orders of magnitude of scientists, is most people aren't even doing – most scientists, even most scientists aren't doing research that even is applicable to the Nobel Prize.
There is no Nobel in biology, right?
The Medicine and Physiology Prize picks up some of that, but most of the work that is done in biology actually is not possibly going to win a Nobel.
Across all science, though, at least in the modern, weird world, What you have are exactly what Dr. Keating lays out, you know, this just like, okay, you got to get into a good school and get the good grades and they get the letters of recommendation and get to the right graduate school and have the right mentors and start getting your name on papers and then you got to do a postdoc and then you get into the right tenure track position, you got to get your first author on papers and you got to have the lab, you got to have start doing other people, have other people do the work for you so that you just are the, you know, the PI because now your work Now your job is getting grants.
So you went from doing science to being a money getter, and really if what you wanted to be doing in your life was making money, you could have gone into any number of other fields where you probably could have made a lot more.
It's a racket, and it's also a checklist that you sort of To some degree, you pick up, but also, I mean, I remember I never went to any of them, but I remember there being like workshops and like, here's what you're going to need to do to succeed, you know, if you want to be in academia.
And it was just sort of in the air.
And it was part of why, you know, both of us at the end of grad school were like, No, thank you.
Like, not actually what we're interested in and, you know, ended up at Evergreen because it was so different.
Because neither of us wanted to play the game the way it was being demanded of us.
Right.
But if you zoom out, right, from the modern game and you just say, what are the major innovations that led to science being done in this current way, you know, and you look at, you know, the invention of Or the insistence on these advanced degrees, peer review, and the question is, alright, well, did these things do more good than harm?
Right?
Peer review certainly didn't.
For one thing, it has sucked up all the oxygen around the idea of review by peers.
The idea that peer review and review by peers are actually two unrelated processes, that peer review is somebody's invention, invented solution to a problem that may or may not have even existed, and that it is the way in which power corrupts the system, right?
It's not on anybody's mind because it sounds like, well, What scientist doesn't want their peers reviewing their work?
And the answer is no scientist doesn't want their peers reviewing their work.
We don't want it done privately and anonymously such that our work is vanished before it ever sees the light of day by our competitors.
Is it possible that peer review is to review by your peers as COVID vaccination is to vaccination?
That's a really interesting question.
There is this You know, and really, you need to hold the definitions of terms with some agnosticism because of exactly this phenomenon.
And, you know, I don't even know whether or not vaccination is the right term.
I'm pretty sure it's not the best term.
For what?
For the current COVID vaccines.
In fact, a good friend of ours has done a good job of convincing me that transfection is actually the correct terminology.
That this is a very different phenomenon.
And, you know, you're signing up for something that's a lot more involved, right?
You're signing up for basically... That borrows a lot more of your body's machinery.
Right.
Now, is it perfectly unique?
No, an attenuated viral vaccine has some of the same characteristics.
But nonetheless, we really need to have a much richer taxonomy rather than, as you and I have pointed out regularly, just because it comes in a syringe doesn't make it a vaccine.
Right.
And, you know, just because it's a vaccine doesn't mean it's safe and effective.
And what the hell do they mean by safe and effective now, right?
It's as if that term has completely lost its meaning.
Okay.
Three of five here.
Okay.
We got John Mather, whose name I may be mispronouncing, who co-won the Nobel in physics in 2006.
Keating asks him, what advice from a mentor has most affected you?
And Mather says, to successfully mentor people, give them really hard problems, maybe impossible problems.
Don't tell them that they're impossible and let them figure them out.
And so I've taken on really hard problems and they've gradually yielded bit by bit so that we could actually build a COBE satellite and even the James Webb Space Telescope.
So our whole community has been doing this bit by bit and we've been inching forward to make better equipment to make our measurements that would have been completely imaginary.
Give your mentees, give your students, difficult problems that may be so difficult that they're actually not solvable.
That is extraordinary advice and actually is so exactly the opposite of what the current educational framework that we're hearing is.
You need to be comfortable at all times.
You need to be safe.
You need to never have your feelings hurt.
You need to never feel in any way at risk of failing.
And if you're really never at any risk of failing, well, you're really not at any risk of succeeding either, right?
You're guaranteed to just keep on going on, but will never surprise anyone with your insight.
Yeah, I'm somewhat troubled by this one, and I wonder if it's not a clash of biology versus other sciences.
Okay.
Because, I mean, A… Well, I mean, recognize that his example then is one that didn't turn out to be impossible.
Right.
I think the point, and this may be too much inside baseball, but the point really has to do with why biology is different than other sciences.
Which is to say, at the point that we discover, for example, That the amount of time that a male northern elephant seal spends submerged exceeds the aerobic dive limit, which should tell us exactly how long they can stay under.
Nobody says, well, I guess it's a magic creature.
It's like, huh, what did we miss in setting up the aerobic dive limit, right?
How is this possible?
This animal is doing something that our model does not say is possible.
The animal existing is proof that the model is flawed.
The model is flawed, and so we all know, you know, if your advisor says, okay, if you're so smart, how does the male northern elephant seal exceed the aerobic dive limit, right?
Which may in fact have been words uttered to you at some point, it sounds like.
No, I have nicer mentors than that.
But anyway, the point was, look, any mentor who said that is not saying, I know the answer, go find it.
They're saying, there is an answer, and you may well die not knowing it, but it exists.
We know that much.
And so I guess the point is, there are problems you can't solve in physics and engineering.
And knowing how to recognize them is probably a thing, but because we start with the critter generally and work backwards to how the heck does that function, mentorship has to be different, I think.
Yep, that's a good point.
Okay, this is just a quote from Feynman with Keating framing it.
Keating.
Richard Feynman said, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Meaning, for example, that if Einstein had just trusted Newton, he would never have heard of general relativity.
I don't know a scientist who says, oh, so and so is such an eminent scientist, I'm just going to believe whatever they say.
This may be the most important one for our moment in time, right?
No, you don't follow the scientists.
No, you don't follow the science.
That's not what science is.
Yeah, I can't remember what it was, but I tweeted something that ended with, science is a method for figuring out how to detect the errors of experts, rather than, you know, yeah, it's obviously not about following the experts, it never has been, and anybody who thinks it is, has completely lost the plot.
All right.
One more.
One more today.
And this is with Barry Barish, who co-won the Nobel in Physics again in 2017 for, quote, decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.
LIGO.
LIGO detector.
I probably mispronounced the earlier acronym, COBE as well.
Actually, LIGO detector and lie detector for short.
Yeah, I don't think so.
No?
No.
Okay.
Keating, you left particle physics when you moved over to the LIGO experiment.
Was it scary to leave the field you had come of age in?
Barish, it was invigorating.
Why would it be scary?
The only reason things get scary is if you are so comfortable in what you are doing, which probably means you aren't pushing yourself or doing anything very interesting.
I've always done different things.
And here Keating makes an editorial note.
He says, His courage comes through here.
This stopped me dead in my tracks.
It flipped things around for me to hear that growth is painful sometimes, but also leads to new synergies that can catalyze discoveries.
You'll bring to your new endeavors the previous tools developed in different fields.
That can be a powerful combination.
The freedom of having a beginner's mind combined with the advanced toolkit from decades of prior experience.
It's almost welcome to take on challenges like this because on the other side of fear is stagnation or worse.
Such challenges are growth opportunities.
Seeing them that way is, yes, invigorating.
He's helped me develop the mental toughness to lean into these kinds of changes, to go where the fear is.
I love this framing of the freedom of having beginner's mind while actually having the advanced toolkit that you can use simultaneously.
It's, I mean, it's exactly what we both seek and which what we were trying to inculcate in our students as well and Oh, and what we're trying to get at somehow in the book that we wrote as well.
Yeah, it's a brilliant framing.
And the closest we've come is talking about the value of knowing, I've even said, Knowing one market really well, right?
Maybe you have some passion, right?
For me, it might be photography or bicycles.
And the importance of it is that this is not about intellect the way that quote is.
But the point is, if you know one market really well, and so you can watch You know, the bicycle industry lie about the beauty of carbon fiber frames.
You're like, oh, I get it.
You've solved an industry problem and you've decided to advertise it to your consumers as a solution to a problem that they don't even have.
In this case, the industry problem being when people buy a steel frame, they don't need another one anytime soon.
Right.
If you buy the right steel frame and you don't crash it, and maybe if you do crash it, it'll still last you a lifetime.
And so that results in a sleepy industry.
Yeah, better give them a disposable frame.
Right.
This is the solution.
You give them a plastic frame.
Oh, they're not going to buy a plastic frame.
Oh, I know.
Yes, we'll focus on the carbon fibers and not so much on the plastic resin and maybe they'll assume it's an upgrade and maybe, hey, if we get really lucky they'll leave it in the sun and it will degrade it with the UV rays and, you know, so that sort of thing.
You know one market really well and then when you're In the market for something you don't know, at least you know what lives sound like, right?
So anyway, I think this is the same.
The expert toolkit in one area, and then you point yourself at some new problem for which you don't have the toolkit, but at least you kind of know what it's like to build up that toolkit, and therefore you'll know what success should feel like.
Yeah, and having beginner's mind, as Keating says, is thrilling.
You have to be willing to not be the expert.
You have to take some joy in not knowing.
And if you do, if that doesn't come natively to you, if you can teach yourself to like the sense of, actually I'm not sure yet, And actually, actually enjoy it, not just put up with it.
It's, you know, that's the way to expand both your mind and potentially the understanding of other people as well, because that's where you will make discovery.
Totally.
And actually, this has such broad applications.
So we've got a kind of a consumer version, Noah Market.
You've got an analytical version, which is a beginner's mind in a new discipline or new field.
There's a physical version of this.
So our family started playing around with these personal electric vehicles at some point a few years ago.
The electric unicycle being the second one, right?
Toby got you a hoverboard.
We quickly moved on to electric unicycles.
Leaving me in the dust.
You were recovering from an injury.
You have invited me many, many times.
Many, many times.
And hopefully we'll get you over the hump with these things.
But then we moved on and we haven't abandoned the electric unicycles, which I think are going to turn out to be the best of all of them, just in terms of what they can do and all of that.
But we tried one wheel.
And each of these things forces you, you know, you know what it's like to learn to ride one of these things, but you don't know what it's like to ride that one, and it forces you to do this.
And there's one that I… And even these scooters, right?
Like when you and Zach were in Texas a couple weeks ago, you were zipping around all over the place on these little scooters that lots of people ride now.
Actually, this is the perfect example, because this one fits both what it's like to look at the garbage in somebody's market.
And the skill set.
I mean, skill set-wise, it's the low bar.
That's why they've taken over.
A novice can ride it.
But the garbage in the markets about these things is incredible.
I know.
I was looking at the charges.
I was like, how did you manage to rent that many at the same time?
And there are only two of you.
Like, well, you pay whether or not it works.
You had to drop it and pick up one that worked.
30% of them are unrideable or dangerous or whatever.
So anyway, that's been interesting.
But here's the thing.
Um, so I've learned to ride all of the vehicles, with one exception, which is electric unicycle in reverse, which should be the same trick as learning to ride it forward, but it's so much more terrifying.
Like, I can't get there.
Toby's learned it.
Yeah, I think, I think Zach has too.
Um, was that a yes?
That was a no.
Okay.
Um, well yeah, Toby, our younger son, but has, yeah, has mastered it.
Yep.
All right.
All right then.
Is that it?
Yep, I think so.
Are we there?
All right, then we will take a break that is as close to 15 minutes as we can manage given the various tech issues and we will return after that break with with your questions, starting with the question that comes out of the Discord this week.
In the meantime, so you can ask those questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
If you are looking for more Q&A, you can join my Patreon and join us tomorrow at 11am Pacific for a two-hour Q&A, and we leave that up so you have access to it after it happens, but it is live-streamed.
And once again, consider buying the book if you haven't yet and reading it.
We've been getting a ton of wonderful communications from people about it.
And also, I continue to do many conversations a week, many of which are not yet out in the world.
Various podcasts and a little bit of print.
And are really enjoying these conversations.
You know, I'm definitely getting tired of hearing myself talk, but everyone at this point is feeling new, actually, and different.
And I thought at the beginning, at the point that we had done like 5 or 10, like, ugh, how are we going to keep on doing this?
But really, in the last couple of weeks, every single one has been unique in a way that I hadn't imagined and has been vibrant.
So, we have on the book website a page now that is beginning to get populated with these, so you can find them there.
It's very interesting to hear what people took from the book, which is such a wide range.
I will also point out that we very intentionally structured the book so it could be read if you're in the Southern Hemisphere.
You can read it lying in the sun as summer dawns, and if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, you can supplement with a little vitamin D while reading it.
It's conducive to both.
This is what I have to put up with right here.
They know that!
And, you know, it's not that bad.
Oh, well, thank you.
Yeah.
All right.
Until next time, be good to the ones you love and eat good food and get outside.
