#107: Explore Outside Your Lane (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 107th 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.We discuss dissent, and argue that it is more common than people tend to think. What is up with the omicron variant? We remind people that there are ways to deal with Covid other than vaccines. Meanwhile, the AMA is apparently too busy declaring “morbidly obese” a mean term to actually care about people’s health. Florida is...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 107.
107.
We are once again prime.
Oh, I should have seen that coming.
But here we are.
There'll be more.
Yes, that's true.
They never stop.
That is what we have actually proven, they never stop.
We.
Right here?
We, humanically.
The apes that have taken charge of proving things have done a good job on that one.
Well, let's see if they can devote themselves to discovering other truths and disseminating that to everyone.
Yeah, truths would be a great thing.
It would be kind of a wonderful counterpoint to this moment of untruths and fictions and nonsense and lies.
And speaking of that, we have a lot in store today.
We obviously have an impressive Dystopian, authoritarian nightmare emerging in society, and the signs are increasingly unmistakable.
Also, I have to remember to collect my dry cleaning from the dry cleaners.
Just thought I'd put those two things, I'd juxtapose them, because that's the world we now live in.
So we're still there.
We're still at the picking up the dry cleaning stage.
My contention is that you're always, I mean it's really, it's the point at which the pianos are in the street and the people are fighting around the pianos as if nothing was odd.
At that point you're not involved in dry cleaning but right up until very very late in the process you're still collecting your dry cleaning because if you're going to make any attempt at all to fend off the encroaching authoritarianism and dystopia You want to have a nice jacket, you want to be pressed, not wrinkled, you want your collar to be crisp, right?
Those things are actually a help in fending off dystopia because so much of what allows dystopia to happen is social chaos and you want to make a good counterpoint.
I have to ask you a question.
Yes.
Do you think that in fact you had any dry cleaning at all in the year 2021?
Well, it depends.
You would have to define your terms well.
Yeah, not a lot.
2021, any, and dry cleaning, I guess.
Let's put it this way.
I got haircuts, right?
It's more or less the same thing.
Doesn't count.
I didn't cut my own hair, which I could have, and under some circumstances might have to, but it was still necessary to have a professional involved.
Presumably the lovely woman who cut your hair washed it first, though, making it a wet cleaning followed by a cut.
Just different.
Oh yeah.
No, that was not my level of argument.
I was arguing that haircuts are similarly optional and yet not optional.
Right.
So the fact of dry cleaning having been a prominent component of 2021, irrelevant, because there are lots of other things that one does that one doesn't have to do.
And one imagines one might stop doing as something like, you know, tyranny descended, but, but you find out, no, that's not how it works.
Keep on keeping on.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Well, here we are.
Keeping on keeping on.
And my computer has chosen this moment to stop.
It's like, you may be, but me, here, Siliconville, not keeping on.
Nope.
OK.
Got it back.
Yeah, we're not going to tell you in advance where we're going today.
We're just going to jump right into logistics and do the three ads that we'll have for today.
And then we'll get to where we're going, because we usually do.
Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
People have been asking about getting signed copies, and a few weeks back, or maybe more than a few weeks back at this point, we said, hey, maybe a bookstore somewhere in our region would be interested in purchasing a bunch of books.
We would come and sign them, and then you could order from that bookstore, and they would send them to you, and that would be really great for some independent bookseller.
We would prefer to be doing events in person, which of course no one on the West Coast seems to be doing at this point.
But anyway, we got the wonderful Darvill's Bookshop on Orcas Island, Washington to say yes.
We aren't going to be able to do the signings for another week and a half or so, but if you are interested in a signed copy for yourself or to give as a gift, you can go on to the Darvill's, D-A-R-V-I-L-L apostrophe S site.
They're located in Orcas Island, Washington.
That should get you there.
And order a book.
I actually don't know.
I think, you know, maybe specifying that you want it signed, but presumably any orders that are coming in now will suggest that.
So that is now an option.
We are here for now on YouTube and on Odyssey, and I think we're going to be a few more places soon, but for now, if you are here live with us, the chat is on Odyssey.
We will be doing a Q&A after this hour, hour and 15 minutes, whatever it takes, where we answer the questions that you ask at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We are still on our Patreons.
Brett had a Patreon conversation this morning.
You'll be having another one tomorrow morning.
Our Patreon conversation this morning was both on fire and off the hook.
It was one of those conversations where you don't really know exactly where you are until suddenly it gels and wow, I got a lot out of it.
That's excellent.
That's excellent.
Brett has two monthly conversations on his Patreon for the higher tier patrons, and we also do a private Q&A for patrons at my Patreon.
We announced several new products last week at the store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
One of them was promptly taken down, the YouTube community guidelines, because you can't handle the truth.
A shirt has been removed, and we for now seem to have no recourse.
In a fit of irony, Goliath saw fit to remove this shirt, mocking YouTube for its absurd community guidelines.
Maybe you should be picking up your dry cleaning, but you have to laugh.
You just have to be able to laugh.
You've got that as the thing.
This is, um, this is something that, uh, I think, I think we Jews know quite well that even in the worst of times, you have to keep your sense of humor about you because even if it's, uh, extremely dark, the ironies, they abound.
And if you don't know, sometimes you just got to stop and smell the ironies, you know?
I don't know about that, but yes, I get your point, and actually I think we'll return to a point like that at the very end of today's show.
That said, all the rest of the images and products that we had up before are up, including the other three that we announced last week.
The saddle up, the dire wolves we ride tonight, epic tabby, and the digital book burning with the smoke having zeros and ones in it are all up, as well as the previous ones.
And if anybody did manage to get one of those YouTube Community Guidelines because you can't handle the truth shirts, I would love information that it escaped into the world and that you are proudly wearing it somewhere.
So anyway, if they're out there, a picture of that shirt in the wild would be great.
In the wild, yes.
Also consider joining me at Natural Selections, my substack.
This week's post coming up on Tuesday is going to be about gift-giving and traditions of gift-giving in both humans and non-human.
Non-humans.
And I'm recalling, since we have been on air, we have been receiving occasional gifts from strangers who appreciate what we're doing.
And it's totally lovely, and I'm in fact wearing one of them right now, a scarf handmade by someone who admires what we do and saw that I have a penchant for scarves.
And in the case of scarf and scarves, it is actually the appropriate pluralization, unlike giraffes.
Unlike giraffes, yes.
But, you know, we have received a number of beautiful things, and as I will be exploring in the post to come on Tuesday, and we'll be mentioning a little bit later on today, those things that truly indicate not just attention to the person you are giving it to, but that are not completely a commodity.
They can't simply have been exchanged for the money that you have, but took some particular effort or thought on the gifters part are precious in a way that those things that are more fully fungible may not be able to be.
So that's some of what I'm exploring in the post to come in a few days, and I guess with that we have our three ads for this week.
All right, our three sponsors for this week are Soul, Relief Band, and Allform.
Today's program is brought to you by Sol, a sustainable orthopedic footwear company.
We already have one shoe sponsor.
Why a second?
Well, this company is quite different from the other and we honestly love them both.
Vivo Barefoot, the other shoe company that we sponsor, specifically aims to give you the sense of being barefoot in your shoes.
Sol, with both their shoes and their footbeds, brings structure back, but in the right way.
In some ways, these two companies are taking the opposite approach and trying to find solutions that allow your feet to get back to their health.
And frankly, it seems like given the very many different kinds of environments we find ourselves in as modern humans, both approaches are quite valuable and we really do like both of these kinds of footwear.
The shoes made by Sole are beautiful, and that is just a sort of unavoidable observation when you see them.
They have created a footbed, by which they mean it's a great place to rest your sole, S-O-L-E, that's affordable, customizable, and improves people's everyday foot comfort.
Millions of customers rave about this product, and two-thirds of sole customers have two or more pairs of their footbeds.
They have created their own recycling program, ReCork, to collect and upcycle used wine corks to make their products.
They've collected over 125 million wine stoppers to get ground down and reused from the company's own footbeds and shoes.
That's cool.
And our two boys are wearing these shoes a lot at this point, and our sense from them is they take some getting used to, but once you get used to them, they provide great support for feet and they look great.
And, like I said before, they really do look terrific, and if you're looking for footbeds to make shoes that you already own, be healthy for your feet, try them.
Seriously, try them.
So they've got this great offer for first-time customers of 50% off through YourSole.com so you can try Sole for yourself.
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So again, that's S-O-L-E.
Your, Y-O-U-R, S-O-L-E dot com slash Dark Horse.
50% off for first-time customers.
That Dark Horse offer is applicable to all items of the Soul Store, be it footbeds or footwear.
All right.
Now we are going to try an experiment here, and I'm going to try To read two ads, and I thought in order to increase the chances that that works out, I would try a magic spell.
Dislexiando Expelliarmus.
Expelliarmus.
Dislexiando Expelliarmus.
It's hard to say.
I'm hoping that my dyslexia will vanish at least long enough for me to get through this, but we will see.
Alright, second sponsor is Relief Band.
It is a product to help with nausea.
First though, a little about nausea.
Under ancient circumstances, and some modern ones, nausea was generally a useful signal that something is off, that you had eaten something you shouldn't have, for example.
In itself, it's a signal that you should avoid something.
In modernity, though, we still need to track our bodily sensitivities.
We should not always choose to simply erase discomfort, like nausea, whenever we feel it.
That said, some of modernity creates nausea that does no good at all.
Travel sickness, for instance.
Can be agonizing and relief would be lovely.
Travel sickness effectively the body perceiving the novelty of being jostled around as if you might have eaten a toxin.
That's why people throw up after this and the fact is you don't need to because you didn't need a toxin you're just in a boat.
And to ReliefBand, ReliefBand is an anti-nausea wristband that has been clinically proven to relieve and prevent nausea associated with motion sickness, anxiety, migraines, chemotherapy and more.
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Alright, I would say that spell was not as effective as it might have been.
It was okay.
I mean, who knows?
Maybe it had no effect and you're just that good.
Right, or maybe I was going to be way worse on the spell.
Or maybe it was counterproductive, and it would have been perfect without the spell.
We'll never know.
All right.
Let's try a second one.
Allform Sofas.
Allform is a company that makes absolutely terrific custom sofas.
What makes their sofas so terrific?
You can customize your size, layout, and materials easily for a fraction of the cost of traditional sofas.
Fabric, color, size, and shape are all customizable.
They do armchairs and loveseats, all the way up to an 8-seat sectional.
And you can start small and buy more seats later on without needing to get a whole new sofa.
All-form sofas are delivered directly to your home, free and fast, and assembly is easy, and I must say they assemble good and rigid the way you would want a sofa to be.
We've got a beautiful sectional all-form sofa in whiskey leather.
We love it.
It is soft and supple and warm, unlike a lot of leather.
We all pile on it to watch movies some evenings.
It looks gorgeous and is incredibly inviting and comfortable, a rare combination.
I must say we are about to experiment with reconfiguring it slightly as our use of the room has changed.
That is not something you can do with most sofas.
Yes, I'm still not compelled that it's going to stick to the ceiling, but you seem convinced.
The suction cups are better than they look.
If you prefer fabric, all form fabrics are three and a half times more durable than the industry standard for heavy-duty fabrics, so their fabrics are going to hold up really, really well with pets as well.
Finally, they offer a forever warranty.
Literally forever.
To find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com slash darkhorse.
That's allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M dot com slash darkhorse.
They are offering 20% off all orders for our listeners at allform.com.
All right.
I would give me a B minus, which isn't bad.
That's open, yeah.
One more announcement that I forgot to make is that next week we'll be live streaming earlier, probably around 8.30 a.m.
Pacific.
So for those of you who like to show up live in the chat, that's four hours.
I think we'll be going four hours earlier than we normally do.
You might want to make sure you have coffee.
If you're on the West Coast.
Right.
Yes.
All right.
That's fair.
So I was sitting in a cafe this morning thinking about today's show and making some notes and reading some stuff, and I overheard a conversation, as I do, as I like to do.
This is one of the things that the animal behaviorist enjoys being able to do, and frankly, it requires anonymity, and so it's become a little bit less easy to do, the more of this that we put out into the world.
Ethical eavesdropping.
Yeah.
Often I will then engage with the people.
In this case, I didn't have the opportunity.
But it was two men, a young man and a man that could have been his father, although I think he wasn't, at breakfast.
And I heard them say, listen to what they're saying.
They're saying this new variant is brand new, so get vaccinated with the vaccines that don't work very well on the previous new variant.
And this guy continues, he says, it makes no sense at all.
No sense.
And yet most people seem to be buying it.
And then, I didn't actually catch which of the two guys said that, but then the younger man says, in the context of this little piece of the conversation, he says, my friends all sound the way that I do on this.
Meaning, the messaging is making no sense.
But then I look around, he says, and I know that almost everyone else doesn't see it.
And I'm hearing this, and I think they weren't actually an earshot of anyone else in the restaurant.
And they sort of were looking around the restaurant when they said that.
But my sense is actually that those conversations, like the one I overheard, are happening far more frequently than the people who are having them believe.
And that is intentional, that is necessary, that we believe that we are a tiny minority.
And that we stay in our little pockets without any connection to one another, and that we believe that everyone else is going along with something, even if we can see that, you know, pick your narrative metaphor, the emperor has no clothes, or when you look at the man behind the curtain, he's not what you thought.
You know, any of these things which are true and apt.
Plato's cave.
Plato's cave.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think there is the potential for hope to be found in the recognition, I think, that there are actually many, many more people who are awake at least at some level than mainstream messaging would have us believe.
Alright, a couple things.
I'm seeing the same phenomenon.
A lot of people are waking up.
Sarah Silverman had a moment yesterday.
Really?
Yeah, which was one people did not expect.
I think a number of things are happening at once.
One, the rate at which people are waking up is high, and that's very good.
On the other hand, something else is accelerating, maybe because people are waking up so quickly.
So part of the game here has been to leave a mind.
So your mind was built by selection for a world in which you actually walk around and you sort of do an unscientific census of the world that gives, you know, if somebody has a freak accident in front of you, that may not tell you anything.
If it happens three times in a week, you may think, well, what's causing this?
Maybe nothing is.
It can be random, but sometimes it isn't.
But anyway, the point is the mind is, under normal circumstances, very good at getting a sense for whether something is up.
And whether something is up, you know, socially speaking, when you actually have contact with, you know, a billion people via some social media platform, that Thing would trigger you to recognize that, hey, we're not all on board with the same narrative, except that the platforms are throwing people off who disagree.
Those people who are still on who disagree are demonized.
They are portrayed as if they've lost the plot, et cetera, all of these processes.
And what it does is it games the mind so that the mind becomes very comfortable with things.
And so this leaves you You and I know, for example, from our larger-than-common social circle, we have a lot of people in contact with us now.
Large fraction of those people have very serious private doubts, many of which have not been publicly acknowledged.
Many serious what?
Serious... Private what?
Doubts.
Doubts, okay.
I thought you said debts.
Oh, I don't know anything about that.
It's impolite to talk about it.
I haven't asked.
Many people with whom we are in contact have doubts that they are keeping to themselves, but they will share with us, for instance.
Right.
And many of them, frankly... Doubts about the public messaging, about the safe and effective messaging, and about all the rest.
Right.
They have doubts about these things that have, in many cases, some cases have not governed Their behavior and in some cases have governed their behavior and they're now wondering what to do in a world of mandates that they may not qualify to get the checkmark from and in any case.
We get a very bad idea of how common these doubts are, and the arms race to keep us in the dark about how common our perspective is, is ratcheting up rather precipitously.
We, of course, are stuck in a predicament with something like Australia, where yes, it's true, we're not in Australia, we're not in a position to know directly, on the other hand, You and I know two people who have fled Australia because they believe that there is a very powerful force that will not be transient that is engaging in authoritarianism of an egregious kind.
Furthermore, we do live in Portland, and we have lived in Portland for a little over three years at this point.
So we were here during the summer of 2020 into the fall of 2020, and in some cases saw directly the protests that regularly turned into riots every night for something like more than 100 consecutive nights.
And the damage to downtown, and the enduring damage, and the just wasteland that so much of, frankly, a lot of East Portland has become.
And yet, it's not everywhere.
Even then, even at the worst time of it, it wasn't everywhere and it wasn't all the time.
It was actually fairly predictable when and where it was.
And Portland is tiny compared to Australia.
And so people could plausibly, granted I don't think they were actually doing honest journalism, but people could plausibly come into Portland during the height of the reliably nightly riots and stand in the middle of a beautiful square in the middle of the day and say, I don't see any Antifa here, therefore it's not real.
And that story was bought, right?
So if that can happen in Portland, which is frankly very small, and anyone who was interested could have asked almost any resident of Portland, where would I go to see these alleged riots?
And they would have been pointed to the right place, and they would have seen it.
In Australia, it's far bigger, it's still looser.
There are a couple of these places where people are now being funneled, but by and large, the argument that you're not here, you don't know what's going on, it's a feint.
F-E-I-N-T.
It's a feint, because there are a lot of people who live in Australia who won't be directly seeing what is happening in other parts of Australia.
Well, there's that, and there is also the problem that the incentives surrounding acknowledging what is taking place mean that if anybody who is in Australia can pull rank on anybody who isn't in Australia, then what you get is an effective veto over a yes, imprecise, but nonetheless accurate perception.
Something has gone wrong in Australia, which is now engaged in behavior.
That is not, you know, we have internment camps, okay?
We have internment camps in which you cannot leave for a period of time, but then you go home, okay?
That's not exact, it's not Manzanar, but it is something and, you know, we have a right to think about it.
And it's another form of stay-in-your-lane-ism, which we have previously argued against all forms of stay-in-your-lane-ism, because the lane that may be actually legitimately described by an historical discipline that really did constrain certain kinds of inquiry that involved certain kinds of methods that if you weren't familiar with, you might not know how to assess claims of truth in that discipline, right?
That said, the standard way to acquire that knowledge, which would allow you to assess claims within that discipline, because they are corruptible, they have become corrupt, and therefore requiring that you have followed the standard way to acquire knowledge is a way to accelerate the corruption.
And that is true even in places where there might actually have been a lane, historically, that was legitimate.
But, you know, geographical stay in your lane-ism?
I live on, you know, basically I live in this quadrant of the planet.
It's not quite a quadrant, but, you know, I live on this continent and therefore I know what's going on here and you don't?
Well, that's patent bullshit.
Yeah, it's a little bit like Sarah Palin having lots of foreign policy experience by virtue of, you know, Russia being just over the street.
And that was easy for, you know, half of the country, including us, time to laugh at, like, oh, for God's sake, you know.
But now it's roughly the same half of the country just buying these kinds of absurd arguments.
Right, well in a sense, I mean, you and I have bristled at stay in your lane since the first time we heard it, because of course it is a territorial argument, and it is used to silence that which is inconvenient, etc.
But the argument you just make makes me realize that effectively lane, as it's being used in this case, Are a kind of blinders.
And the idea is you are to blind yourself to that which is outside of your lane.
And so my sense is that we actually have... What was the thing we talked about a number of streams ago?
We talked about the obligation to disagree.
Oh yes, which I'm going to mispronounce his name again, Richard Rearson, I think on his on his podcast revealed that he's a he's a both a former Marine and I believe a commercial pilot who said that in aviation, There is a obligation, I don't have the framing right, I can't remember exactly the phrase, but an obligation to disagree.
To challenge.
Obligation to challenge.
Not a tolerance for challenge, but an obligation to challenge.
An obligation to challenge.
And so I think...
Basically, my feeling is not only should we reject this stay-in-your-lane-ism, but we should found stay-out-of-your-lane-ism, right?
That you have an obligation to get out of your lane and see what is adjacent because, frankly, you're living in a... I wouldn't say stay out of your lane, I'd say get out of your lane.
So you also get to live in whatever domain you Feel that you legitimately have expertise in you don't want to you don't want to throw out and get out of your lane is better Yeah, you're right.
Stay out of your lane is Linguistically more fun, but get out of your lane is right.
But anyway, I mean at some level look this is I Don't know I'm having the sense that something is going on this week and it may be that it's just crossed a threshold for me this week Yeah, it's not really this week.
On the other hand.
It may be that there's something to it and Increasingly it's like look either You know, yes, our enemies will make hay of this, but either we've just lost the plot and we don't understand the first thing.
And I think, yeah, you and me.
And I can effectively prove that short of something amazing like, you know, schizophrenia in which none of what we think is evidence is actually even external to our minds.
But short of that… Including all of the people we are interacting with.
Exactly.
But short of something really exotic like that, you can effectively prove this isn't true.
It doesn't mean that we know what is going on, but it means that you can detect the anomalies.
They're everywhere.
And the thing about your frickin' lane is your lane allows them to construct a Potemkin reality in front of you.
And our basic point to those with whom we disagree is we see the Potemkin reality also.
But if you stand over there, you'll see that it's a set.
You're being led to understand a particular picture.
You have dots put in front of you, and you are thinking that you're clever for connecting them.
And the point is, it doesn't add up unless you do stay in your lane.
Yeah, and I think, I mean actually there's sort of, there's like little breadcrumbs dribbled for people, I suspect, in which people are allowed to feel clever for discovering little anomalies or, you know, things that don't quite fit.
And then, and then they think they've gone all the way.
Right.
And, you know, this, this one just, this, this whole, again, the metaphors are endless, but, you know, for the moment I just call it a house of cards.
You can't take one card off and go, like, now.
You can't take one card off the top and say, now that thing is built on a stable foundation.
That's not how foundation works.
Right.
And in fact, I mean, here's one.
I had a little fun this week.
I put up a poll on Twitter.
You know, obviously polls on Twitter aren't scientific because, you know, people who follow me and therefore see it are not a random sample, although I asked people to distribute it to places that wouldn't be reached.
It's a, you know, it's a put up your finger and see which way the wind is blowing in this very, you know, in an admittedly local street.
Yeah, it's a straw poll.
And the point is a close answer wouldn't tell you anything, but an answer that's wildly off in one direction does.
Anyway, I asked people to rate what they thought the level of pharma corruption of academia, government and media was with respect to COVID relative to average or average disease, you know, and it was like, it's negligible, it's below average, it's about average, it's above average.
And the answer was 84% of people thought it was above average.
Now, here's my point.
Above average doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean it's tolerable or intolerable or anything, but our public narrative is as if there is no corruption here.
Right.
Whereas people privately, apparently... Talking about the corruption that at least has been demonstrated to exist in all previous... Right.
...attempts to deal with public health, with pharmaceuticals, ...is immediately called a conspiracy theory as opposed to actually the burden of proof that this isn't happening is on you.
The default hypothesis here, the null hypothesis, is that this is business as usual and that the pharmaceutical companies are not actually engaged in trying to heal people so that they no longer need the products.
Right.
Like, that's the null hypothesis, not the other way around.
Right.
In fact, you know, certain things like we know that pharma routinely knocks drugs that work out of the standard of care in favor of drugs that are under patent, right?
So when a drug goes out of patent, there's a question about, you know, the pattern of discovery of something new that's claimed to be even better is unnatural, right?
If that's normal, Then why do we assume it plays no role in the claims by pharma in this case that X, Y, and Z doesn't work?
And so anyway, just even a baseline assumption that, hey, there is a whole slew of evidence.
People become expert in pharma corruption.
It's in fact a very fascinating and complex phenomenon.
You can read RFK Jr.' 's book, for example.
You can read Ben Goldacre.
Right.
Pharma corruption is a powerful, powerful force, and it does involve adjusting people's view of things.
And until you've at least figured out what baseline is and at least allowed the baseline might continue into COVID, you don't you're not even in a position to have this discussion.
Yeah.
Agreed.
So I thought actually the question that we got asked from the Discord server this week seemed in keeping with some of the other themes that we were going to talk about.
So I thought about moving it into the main section.
They asked us this.
Can you steel man the arguments for the various ways Omicron might have evolved from a 2020 strain without being noticed by the medical community that has been sequencing as many variants as they find?
To the naive, engineered seems like a possibility, but I would like to hear other natural evolutionary solutions to the problem.
Yeah, so the answer is kind of a yes and no.
I think we can steelman the general category.
I do want to say, I think I said something last week that I wanted to correct this week.
I think I suggested that the spike in the Omicron variant doesn't have mutations, doesn't have alterations.
Mutations is actually the wrong term because those mutations are then either selected or not, but mutation has been a confusing term here.
Nonetheless, there are something like 30 alterations to the spike protein.
That makes a lot more sense.
That's much more in keeping with what, you know, that seems to be the most quickly evolving part of the virus.
On the other hand, actually, Zach, would you show that tweet and animation that I sent you?
Right.
All right.
Well, I will describe this as Zach is digging it up for people who are just listening.
It's worthwhile anyway.
What we've got here is somebody has put together a time-lapse animation of the phylogeny of different strains.
And I should just say to our audience, Molecular phylogenetics has never been our bag, particularly.
We've been in and around it.
We've used it occasionally, but it's not our specialty.
But we do have a rather deep history.
In fact, we learned from the best.
We learned from Arnold Kluge, who was philosophically so deep that we really got the full strength introduction into what phylogenetic systematics is and why it works the way it does.
So let's just give two sentences of explanation.
Phylogenetics, or phylogenetic systematics, is the sort of origin of species half of evolution, wherein we are trying to determine relationships between species, or in this case variants, of a virus, as opposed to the sort of half of evolution, where we tend to spend more of our time talking here, which is at the population level.
How do characters, or in the case of viruses, variants, arise, and what kinds of selective pressures Allow them to actually expand in numbers in a population or recede.
And so systematics, being the sort of the macro-evolutionary side, can use a number of types of information to build the trees.
And, you know, historically, and Kluge, who was my major advisor, typically used morphological characters like bone and muscle.
You can also use developmental characters.
And then, of course, the sort of molecular revolution that began in the 90s ...would seem to have overwhelmed the use of other slower-to-code characters like morphological datasets once sequencing came online and became cheap enough for people to do in a lot of labs.
But really, as we learned from Arnold, as we learned from Dr. Kluge, a total evidence approach in which you look at data from all of the angles and look for conciliants between them is likely to be the best.
Yeah.
At some point we ought to have this conversation.
I would not divide the two evolutionary biologies as you've just laid it out.
I mean, obviously… That is the traditional divide that everyone who's had a week of evolution anywhere will have heard macroevolution versus microevolution.
Right.
But, you know, as you know, I differ with most of our colleagues on the relationship between adaptation and macroevolution.
So anyway, I think there's a better way to do it, and just from the point of view of our listeners and viewers, phylogenetic systematics is about describing the tree shape itself.
What is more closely related to what than what else, right?
The shape of the tree.
And then the other part is the study of why things look the way they do or function the way they do.
So just one more for those of you who have read our book.
Chapter 2 of the 13 chapters does the sort of deep history of what are the changes that we think we know about the lineage to which we belong, the three and a half billion-ish year lineage to which we belong.
And so, you know, we have I think three, four, five trees, phylogenetic trees, in that chapter that describe the current best understanding.
And really, we only included trees where we're really very, very certain that these are the relationships.
Yeah.
And as you zoom back out on a tree, the relationships become much more secure, right?
There are lots of very subtle variations in the nitty-gritty at the tips of the branches, but between big groups, they're much clearer.
Anyway, Zach, did you find the… If you click on the tweet... Well, people will get the gist.
Okay, so actually this points out in part why macroevolution might be the wrong term, because this is all microevolutionary change.
So these are all the variants that are being tracked, and the line... What's the X?
I mean, the X-axis is presumably time, but when does it start?
What's the leftmost...?
Zach will have to read it.
I think it's like mid-2020, or maybe it's early 2020.
2019.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it starts right at the beginning of the sort of named pandemic.
And what you have are all of the variants and their relationships as deduced by their sequence differences.
And what you saw is that Omicron pops up Without any history of connection to the rest of this swarm, as if it came about somewhere March through September of 2020.
2020?
Yes.
Not 2021?
Omicron?
2020?
No, it shows up in 2021, but the point is, its relationship, it is as if it has been frozen in time at a much earlier state and then shows up.
Now the thing is, this has people over in LabLeakWorld Fascinated, because this is not the first time in history that this has happened.
In fact, there's a very famous example that you may have just barely heard mentioned in the Lab League discussion about the flu of 1977.
And the flu of 1977, it has been concluded, this of course could be revised if some better model emerged that was more predictive or assumed less.
But it has been concluded, for now, and with substantial evidence, is actually a lab escapee.
And the way we know that is that its closest relative dates back to 1949.
So it vanished from the world, and then the clock started again on its evolution in 1977.
So, that indicated this surely was in a fridge somewhere or isolated from the world.
Whatever was happening with it, effectively time was stopped and that effectively requires a refrigerator.
In an organism or a virus that does not have extraordinarily variable mutation rates, you would not, you could not possibly expect a, whatever that would have been, a 28-year hiatus with no changes.
Right.
And so the other example that we have of this, which isn't as good because we don't really have a good ancestor, right, is SARS-CoV-2 itself, where we suddenly have a virus that's very, very good at doing the things a virus needs to do in order to become a human pandemic with no History of circulating in another animal where it learned those tricks.
No history of circulating in some population of humans as far as we can tell.
Somewhere it just, it's a genius right off.
It's like a child that was born speaking three languages or something, you know?
And so anyway, this has people who are paying attention to this thinking very carefully about what could even explain this other than it having been somewhere in someone's lab During the period of time that we would have expected it to emerge and then suddenly popping back up.
And there are other anomalies too, like things like the non-synonymous to synonymous mutation rate is way off of normal.
It's like 25 to 1.
So this is about how many alterations that have no consequence for actual protein sequence you would expect for every one that has an actual consequence.
And the number appears impossible through a normal process.
Now, what the Discord server has asked us to answer is the question of, well-- - Could it be, you know, what-- What might explain this variant with this many changes appearing so suddenly, given a supposed background rate of so many people checking all the time for variants?
Right.
And so what I think we should do, rather than search the world for crazy explanations, is just… So you've heard things like immunocompromised person in which much more evolution took place than normal because their immunocompromised state effectively created a gain-of-function environment, a serial passage environment between tissues that was extremely favorable to variants.
Now this doesn't make a lot of sense to me because And in fact, I think the idea, so it was originally reported that it had been isolated from somebody with HIV, undiagnosed HIV.
I believe that that has been debunked, although who even knows what debunked means in 2021.
But nonetheless, these kinds of explanations have been offered before.
In fact, there was one Quite good paper.
I thought it was dead wrong, but quite good paper that argued that it could be that SARS-CoV-2 experienced extreme evolutionary change in one of the miners who got sick in Yunnan province because lungs have such a large surface area.
Yeah, back in 2013.
Yeah, it was a very clever argument.
Again, I think it's dead wrong, but Anyway, it's at least the kind of thought you would want to have.
How could you get more evolution than you expect, right?
Maybe surface area is the answer.
Well, at least in that case, you can track the story evolutionarily.
Each logical step is plausible, even if one or more of them may be so unlikely for it not to have happened.
So many of these stories that are charted out, these explanations that are thrown out at the masses and then the guy in effectively the white lab coat steps out to say, "I know you can't follow this, so let me just tell you the conclusion is," actually just don't even logically hold together.
And you know, we've sort of stopped, you and I have stopped largely coming on here and saying, "Oh, this thing, except it doesn't make sense, and this thing, except it doesn't make sense," because it's just coming so fast and furious.
On the face of it, the idea that immunocompromised creates gain of function in a body, I don't know why that would be true.
I have yet to hear the explanation for how you get from A to B. That's just a simple A to B.
Spell it out.
Well, the idea, to the extent that it is an idea rather than an excuse, is in the immunocompromised body, the defenses that would ordinarily silence lots of evolutionary experiments in the body tolerates them.
Right, something like that.
And so you have, it's like a big population in which processes that wouldn't make any headway in a small population gets a chance.
But do we have, so if that is true, you would expect that immunocompromised people would tend to be incubators of lots of variations in colds and other coronaviruses or flus or you know any of the other things.
It makes other predictions and frankly I don't know whether any of those predictions are manifest.
Right, that's how you would actually follow this up with a scientific approach.
The other thing would be, okay, so let's say that this is true in the immunocompromised person, and you get lots of evolution of little, you know, there are lots of foothills in the immunocompromised person that don't exist in people with a fully competent immune system.
But then when the variant gets out into people who do have a fully competent immune system, you wouldn't expect those variations to function very well.
- If they only got a foothold because of immune suppression. - Right, so then you would need another step to the process.
And the point is this is where you start running afoul of Occam's razor.
You're not just hypothesizing an immunocompromised person which provides a unique environment.
You've got another black box that you need to fill.
And at some point it's too many epicycles to be sustained.
So I just want to point out the other thing that we talked about last week that fits this category is the, why did COVID-19 collapse in Japan?
Oh yes, after they allowed doctors to prescribe ivermectin, and the answer was, oh, it became mutationally aggressive and lost its coherence.
It just did so well that it failed.
Something.
And so the answer is no, you need at least one more factor.
You know what, one factor could do it.
Ivermectin could drive a virus to make some sort of a deal that it couldn't sustain, but you can't do it just spontaneous mutational idiocy.
Yeah.
Well, there are a number of things that, a number of places to go here.
I think one of them is increasingly, as evidenced by what we were talking about earlier in this conversation, many people are realizing, I think.
Many people are coming to realize that these vaccines are not the magic bullet that we were told they were.
And some of us questioned that messaging from the beginning, and some of us question it somewhat later, and some of us are saying, right now, wait a minute, if, you know, like the man I was sitting near at breakfast this morning, if these vaccines aren't effective against the last variant, why are we being told that the vaccines are going to be effective against this one, absent any new information?
So, given that, Given that they don't block transmission, and at most they're effective for a few months before efficacy, whatever that exactly means, wanes, and by six months you need a booster, and presumably now you're on the booster treadmill for life, and they don't block transmission, they're not good against variants, they wane very quickly to the degree that they're effective at all,
Still people are clinging to them, in part, even the people who are seeing the inconsistencies in the messaging, because I think, and this is actually a patron of mine this week wrote to me and said, please resume talking about how many early treatment options there are, which is something we were doing a lot of in May and June and July, and it's basically what got us demonetized on YouTube, right?
Because he argued, and I think he's right, this patron of mine, that people may well be seeing that the vaccine story isn't what it seems, but they haven't been shown any alternatives.
They still think it's the only option.
So what he argues, and I think he's right, what you'll hear people saying is, yes, they aren't all that, the vaccines aren't all that, but it's all we have.
And so we need to be saying, and everyone who knows this needs to be saying, it's not all we have.
There are so many tools that we have at our disposal.
This fellow traveler of a virus has been with us now for almost two years.
And we know a tremendous amount more now than we did two years ago.
And in fact, many doctors have known for almost all of those two years that there are many, many things that you can do to reduce your risk and to reduce the chances that you get very, very sick if you do get COVID.
And most of them involve taking control of your own health, things like moving around a lot, being active, being fit, getting outside, breathing clean air, not stuffy air that hasn't been recycled in a room that you're sharing with sick people.
Getting vitamin D and then some of these other repurposed drugs that we have talked about at some length.
And I think that that actually needs, that is one of the pieces that needs now to be sort of gently shown to people again.
Well, the problem is we have been outfoxed.
Because what they've actually done is dried up the supply of those things.
They have not dried up the supply of the sun.
No.
And they have not dried up the supply of, you know, you know, early in, you know, spring of 2020 and still actually, I guess some places still, they were doing lockdowns in your home.
They were telling you they were closing beaches and parks and that should never be legal at all, ever, under frankly any circumstances.
But the sun is not taxed.
It's not taxable.
They cannot limit it.
And getting yourself in shape and eating real food and breathing outside air and being outside during the daylight hours when the sun is shining on you, all of these things will improve your health.
Yeah, I agree.
And you and I know how deep the vitamin D literature in particular goes and how potentially world-altering a recognition of vitamin Ds and in particular vitamin D deficiencies role in the story is.
But in terms of people and their model, right, their model is There are dangerous diseases and there is medicine, right?
And when your dangerous disease doesn't have proper medicine, you're in trouble.
And when the medical establishment is not talking about vitamin D's obvious role, well established, right?
In high quality experiments, then the idea of like, well, okay, I'm going to ignore what all of these doctors who are pushing their one The remedy that will always be offered no matter how paradoxical and nonsensical it is, you know, the idea that you are going to take control of your health and spend some time in the sun and supplement with vitamin D doesn't sound like a sophisticated person's answer to this.
And so it'd be one thing if you said, look, actually vitamin D deficiency has a tremendous role to play in the vulnerability to SARS-CoV-2.
So I'm going to take that step because it's cheap and easy and very, very low risk.
In fact, it's the opposite of risk.
You will get collateral benefits even if it didn't work for COVID.
But then what I want is an arsenal of things that work if I do come down with it and it's more serious than I'm expecting it to be.
Right?
And the point is fluvoxamine is now the thing we should be talking about here because they swear that the reason that they are dragging their heels on the other drugs is because they haven't been demonstrated in a, you know, a randomized controlled trial to their liking.
But of course fluvoxamine has and we have not seen it rushed into the standard of care the way you would expect it to if they were actually obsessed with health and really interested in finding repurposed drugs that work, they've dragged their heels.
So The fact of difficulty finding doctors who will prescribe stuff that actually works, failure to recommend the things that people can do for themselves, all of these things mean that there's one answer that sounds like medicine.
And that's kind of, that's why I say we've been outfoxed, is that they have left people with an artificial desert of options.
Yeah, no, that's true, and it requires a decades-long process by which many doctors and scientists have been trained and credentialed and put into positions where they can make decisions for patients and for experimental protocols, but they don't actually know what they're doing.
And so into this environment comes this, if you would show my screen just briefly, Zach.
American Medical Association declares moratorium on morbidly obese and other problematic terms.
They haven't declared a moratorium on actually being morbidly obese.
They're not actually, it seems, really, frankly, very interested in that.
It's the terms.
And, you know, this piece goes on and shows more things.
Zach, may I have my screen back?
Thank you.
It continues in the now standard woke way of not allowing doctors to use terms that are actually important and useful in describing characteristics of people, but as we've talked about several times before here on Dark Horse, obesity is one of the primary comorbidities for COVID risk, both for catching it and for bad outcomes if you do catch it.
And into this environment, we have this.
The American Medical Association.
Because protecting the feelings of morbidly obese people is apparently more important than actually protecting their health.
That's what they're doing.
That's what they're saying.
You morbidly obese people, we don't care about you.
We're going to care about your feelings for the next five minutes, but the fact that you are very likely to die earlier than you might, and more likely to catch the disease that everyone is focused on to the exclusion of everything else in the world in some cases, that's actually not our job.
Well, it turns out, no, wrong.
The AMA, the American Medical Association, it's your job to care about people's health, not their feelings at the moment.
And frankly, if people's feelings are hurt by being told that being morbidly obese is unhealthy for them, then they need to get their feelings in order.
This is insane.
This is completely insane.
And here's a quote from the article.
Don't show my screen here, Zach.
Words matter, said Philip Alberti, Ph.D., founding director of the AAMC Center for Health Justice, stated, echoing Harmon's remarks, quote, they matter because they have the power to perpetuate or to dismantle structural racism, to empower a person or to marginalize them, to reinforce a harmful traditional narrative, or to provide an alternative one.
Uh-huh.
Words matter.
You know what else matters?
People's actual health.
These frickin' doctors, and now the AMA, are declaring that words are more important than actual health.
They've gone full bastardization of postmodernism here.
And they've decided that actually their mission, the core mission of doctors, the reason we have health professionals, doesn't matter.
That's not what they're doing anymore.
They are not engaged in actually caring about people's health.
They are engaged in semantic games.
To what end?
To keep their jobs?
To keep their funding?
Who knows?
Who knows?
But clearly, whatever is causing this, this is the thing that is causing people to get sick and to die.
Yes, and it is causing a All sorts of systems that are fundamental to the functioning of society are being disrupted for some higher purpose that we have not been told about.
And one of them is the doctor-patient relationship, the obligation of medical science to patients, and something has subordinated that.
Your doctor is no longer allowed, through a well-established mechanism, to instruct your pharmacist to dispense a compound because your doctor thinks it would be good for you.
Now somebody is deciding to overrule your doctor on the basis of, we don't know what, with a one-size-fits-all solution that we know doesn't work.
That medical jury has prescribing privileges, except when it doesn't.
Except when it doesn't, right.
This will all not make sense to you as long as you stay in your lane.
If you get out of your lane, you will recognize that something that has not been shared with us is driving this and it is disrupting everything, including your relationship with your doctor, which has a whole lot to do with your health.
And you know, if you didn't want a doctor to be honest with you, you could probably pick a different doctor.
But the idea that no doctor is going to be permitted to share with you the information.
I mean, look, obesity.
As an interaction with vitamin D, right?
It blocks vitamin D production.
So the point is, one piece of information that a doctor who was liberated to say the truth to you might say is, by the way, given your weight, you may want to be extra careful to supplement with vitamin D because even under optimal circumstances, you would have a hard time producing enough, right?
That's medical advice.
And it's not medical advice coming from me.
That's medical advice coming from the literature, right?
And the point is... It's not actually fat-shaming to try to keep people healthy.
Right.
Your doctor, I mean, you know, because you're a smoker, X, right?
Like that is a construction.
It's not, the doctor's not recommending that you smoke.
The doctor is saying because X, then something else.
And because you're a woman, you're at risk of getting pregnant if you are sexually active.
Oh, wow.
Are you, are you, are you pregnancy shaming me?
Right.
Because you are a woman is now even problematic.
And so why we're listening to, yeah.
Precisely.
So I will say, you know, there are a lot of these now, but there is one little ray of hope here.
And I was directed to this on Twitter.
Zach, you may show my screen again.
Here is the Florida Health, I don't know, agency, authority, something, with their Healthier You website.
And to optimize your health, they recommend, quote, This is a resource for Floridians of all ages to get active, go outside, improve nutrition, including vitamin D intake, or learn about COVID-19.
Well, I never!
My goodness!
Create healthy habits, they suggest.
Small changes in mind.
Focus on one or two, like what you eat or drink.
Get active.
Start a walking program.
Aim for a variety of physical activities every week.
Nourish yourself, add healthy fats, all of these things.
People with healthy eating habits live longer and are at a lower risk for serious health problems such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.
This sounds like basic, like really fundamental, nothing surprising here, medical advice that the state of Florida is actually giving to people.
And one of the comments in the tweet that this came from said, Florida gives me hope, something I never expected to say.
And, you know, I resonate with that.
I feel like, okay, okay, Florida, you keep going.
Because, you know, among other things, Florida is actually far enough south and does have enough sun in the winter that actually being outside and being active will likely allow you to make the vitamin D that you need, you know, assuming that you, you know, assuming that all of the other factors are also in your favor.
And it might just be sufficient.
Yeah, well, it's an interesting question, and it's an interesting week for that question, as the governor of Florida announced this week that he was interested in assembling something like a state militia, which was then instantly dismissed by the Twitterati as him wanting a Gestapo, which I thought was an amazing leap.
Quite a leap.
Quite a leap.
But in any case, there's something interesting going on, and I must say there are a number of topics on which the current blue insanity is revealing things about arguments on the other side.
You know, for one thing, I'm having, for the first time in my adult life, I have serious doubts about the idea that single-payer health care would be a good idea.
Not because single-payer health care wouldn't be a good idea under good governance, but what I did not appreciate before was that under toxic governance it could be a disaster.
So anyway, I'm going to have to do some rethinking.
This is a point presumably many conservatives have been yelling about for years.
Well, but again, I don't think the conservatives are right about this.
It's not that single-payer is bad.
It's that it is contingent on good governance for it to be positive, and it could be deeply negative in the other circumstances.
Well, so, you know, almost everything over in regulation or, you know, mass services is contingent on good governance.
And I think that, you know, every thinking liberal, and yes, many of us are out here, knows that.
But the degree to which good governance is actually extraordinarily fragile and not as present as we thought it was, is the thing I think that you and I are still, continue to be surprised by at this moment.
Yeah, which is funny, because in many ways, the idea that captured government is the problem that, you know, our students were too young to remember government that functioned at all.
And so they have a sense that government is synonymous with malignant government.
This is not a new topic for us.
But it is interesting to see, you know, that all sorts of things like, you know, I never thought the idea of well regulated militia was going to make sense to me.
I always thought that was going to be some weird anachronism.
You know, that I was always going to be a little annoyed at the Founding Fathers for, and you know, it turns out, no, I'm now understanding.
That what they were concerned about was centralized tyranny.
And, you know, it is interesting to see that this extraordinary moment is revealing things about previous arguments that I didn't know.
Indeed.
So here's another thing that we saw this week.
Our friend Alexandros Marinos shared this with us in the Evening Standard.
Up to 300,000 people facing heart-related illnesses due to post-pandemic stress disorder warn physicians.
Yes.
Post-pandemic stress disorder.
You may not have heard of this yet, but PPSD is a well-known and established medical diagnosis since, oh, probably early 2022 was my guess.
Which is to say, not yet.
This thing doesn't exist.
Post-pandemic stress disorder, so named to sound like post-traumatic stress disorder, and it will have more or less the same acronym with just one letter different, isn't a thing yet.
Yeah, that's Boris Johnson.
We don't need to look at him.
So, PPSD, post-pandemic stress disorder.
This could result in a 4.5% rise in cardiovascular cases nationally because of the effects of PPSD, with those aged between 30 to 45 most at risk, they claim.
There are of course other reasons to expect a rise in... I think I got it.
Oh really?
You got this?
One of the symptoms of, is it PPSD?
Sure.
Is Lyocarditis.
- Yes.
Oh my God.
I mean, this article is just so insane.
Here we go.
You can keep my screen on here, Zach.
A senior vascular surgeon said, I've seen a big increase in thrombotic-related vascular conditions in my practice.
Far younger patients are being admitted and requiring surgical and medical intervention than prior to the pandemic.
I believe many of these cases are a direct result of the increased stress and anxiety levels caused from the effects of PPSD.
We also have evidence that some patients have died at home from conditions such as pulmonary embolism and myocardial infarction.
I believe this is related to many people self-isolating at home with no contact with the outside world and dying without getting the help they needed.
I mean, maybe just, like, leave that there.
It's so freaking obvious, but... Epicycles are back, baby.
It's really extraordinary that a piece like this with a newly made-up medical condition that, my guess is, I don't even know what the equivalent of the DSM is for physical conditions.
Or maybe it would go in the DSM, right?
And I don't know, this is the UK, does the UK use the DSM?
I don't even know.
But the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, I guess is what the DSM stands for, has updates every, I don't know, five to ten years, something like this.
And PTSD made it into the manual at some point, and if it's due for an update soon, I'll bet they forced this one in there.
Yeah.
And they then list as one of the symptoms of it all of these heart conditions, thus putting I don't know, the cart before the horse, the symptoms of something else entirely as diagnostic of this made-up thing that they can then say, oh, look at all these people who have suffered, look at all of the indirect effects of the coronavirus.
Well, this is an indirect effect of the coronavirus, but it's an indirect effect almost certainly of the coronavirus in that it is almost certainly a large number of these things are an effect of the only treatment we are allowed to talk about for the coronavirus.
You can see if you're standing anywhere other than where they expect you to stand, you can see that the point is the conclusion walked through the door.
And no matter what the evidence is that emerges, the point is it's going to be shoehorned into pointing at that conclusion.
Even if they've got to make up disorders, they're going to normalize stuff.
You know, kids have strokes too.
Really?
No, really not.
No, they don't actually.
Sorry.
No.
I mean, I'm not saying never, but for God's sake, on the side of a bus.
Yeah, this wasn't on the side of the bus, but this was in the Sunday New York Times last week.
The kids section, you know, there's a special kids section in the Sunday New York Times.
It's only available in print, not available in the electronic version.
So here we have extra, extra!
The New York Times read all about it.
Editors note, this section should not be read by grown-ups.
The vaccine is ready for you.
It's the biggest news of all.
That is what the New York Times wants to feed the children at the moment.
This section, just for the children of the people who are still daft enough to get the hard copy of this paper into their homes on Sundays, is what they want the children to be reading.
It's amazing and I have to say for anybody who is still towing the party line on this, you need to check in with your understanding of why these vaccines are being recommended for children, healthy children, right?
This is the strongest indicator that you could get that this isn't about health This isn't about protecting children from something.
It is about something that has not been described to us.
Yep.
And the idea that they will go directly to children through the New York Times, especially in a section that nominally is not for adults to read.
This section should not be read by grown-ups, it says.
Yes.
It's...
Finally.
Finally.
Kids between 5 and 11 can get the COVID vaccine.
Wow.
It's what you've all been waiting for.
Yeah.
This does actually raise a point that I just want to say in passing.
I keep forgetting.
Do we have a lighter?
Can I just burn this?
I am increasingly, I watch my blood pressure go up every time I hear somebody use any version of the term jab.
I have the feeling that this was somebody's very clever branding and that the idea is it's kind of fun to say jab.
I think it actually has a longer history maybe in the UK.
Maybe.
Nonetheless, I would say It, A, emphasizes the thing that, of course, naturally people focus on for any vaccination or shot is the needle thing, right?
And so the point is, oh, you can take it.
It's just a jab.
It's not so bad.
It'll be over quick, right?
And the point is, no, this has nothing to do with that.
This has to do with the immunological consequences and other consequences of the stuff in the Right, but you can specifically get into kids' heads this way, like, oh honey, I know you're scared of needles, but it's going to be fine.
Right.
We'll get you a lollipop afterwards.
I would just ask that people who are anywhere near wanting to do an honest first principles investigation of what the costs and benefits and risks that are associated with this, anybody who is in that group, proper skeptics, need Staying in your lane is saying jab, right?
Getting out of your lane involves using any one of a number of perfectly responsible synonyms that are available to you, right?
You could call it a shot.
You can call it an inoculation.
How about calling it getting stuck?
I would like to stay out of that.
I mean, I agree, but I would like to stay out of that territory and just say that the point is whose bidding are you doing when you say jab, right?
You're making it cute, right?
If there's one thing this is, even if you think this stuff is great and all of those of us who have our doubts are out to lunch, the point is it's still serious business one way or the other.
So jab, it's the wrong term.
Yeah, no, that's true.
A few other things I wanted to have us talk about today.
One of them is, as we spoke about in some previous edition of Dark Horse right before our book came out, when we were reading from each of the chapters week by week, our epilogue, which I'm scrolling through and trying to find because apparently I don't know how to use search, This is a reframing of the Hanukkah tradition, and we are in the middle of Hanukkah right now.
And actually, I was going to read this from the book anyway, so I know why I was doing that.
So it is now, tonight will be night six of Hanukkah, and we've been doing this.
So basically the For our Hanukkah tradition, which is the Jewish Festival of Lights that occurs just before or around the northern winter solstice this year, it's quite early, we light the menorah as is traditional and sing the, what are they called, the blessings.
And each night review an additional principle, which is not.
And so I could, I don't know if I should share all of the rules.
It starts with day one, all human enterprises should be both sustainable and reversible.
But day eight, night eight, which we are not at yet, which will come on Monday night.
seems particularly apropos at this moment.
And our Hanukkah tradition, Day 8, is, Society has the right to require things of all people, but it has natural obligations to them in return.
Which means that it may not require things of you if it has not met its side of the promise.
Yeah, it is in breach of contract.
It is in breach of contract and that is the reason that in this case this is rightly a private medical decision.
It is not that it is inconceivable that we would find ourselves facing a disease so serious with vaccines so good and so safe and under the guidance of public health officials So far above corruption.
It is not inconceivable that you would end up in a situation where... It's three things we don't have.
Right.
It's three independent reasons.
Not this disease, not these vaccines, and not these health professionals, or these public health professionals.
This is exactly the thing.
And so, you know, again, this is a place where The conservatives have a very important point.
I don't think it's exactly right, because there's this default to, well, it's my choice whether I get a vaccine or not.
And in general, that might be the case.
In some cases, it might not be the case.
But in this case, we've got three separate, independently sufficient reasons that we should not be required to do any such thing.
That's right.
The last thing I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about today was prompted by my thinking about this piece I'm working on for Tuesday about gift-giving.
It took me back to actually this lovely book, Human Universals, a 1991 book by Donald Brown, which I'm going to read a couple of very short excerpts from.
But we relied on it in part in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, including, just to share a little bit, including in these first two paragraphs from the final chapter, the fourth frontier. here.
Humans make sense of the past, so these are things that all humans, all human cultures, even if not all human individuals, have been understood to do.
Humans make sense of the past and imagine the future.
We have help in this from our uncommonly large frontal lobes and from one another.
Our children are exceptionally curious and learn from adults and from one another, from the environment and from experience.
We coalesce in large groups, multiple generations working and living side by side.
We use language, experience menopause, mourn our dead, and have rituals to mark events and seasons.
We harness the productivity of earth, sea, and sky for our own ends.
We domesticate other organisms for food and textiles, labor and transport, protection and friendship.
We tell stories, both fact and fiction.
We have unlocked many of the universe's secrets, substantially freeing ourselves from the natural order that created us.
But many of our strengths are also cryptic weaknesses.
Our outsized brains are prone to confusion and miswiring.
Our children are born helpless, and they remain dependent on us for an uncommonly long time.
Our great linguistic diversity severely limits to whom we can talk.
Even our bipedal gait, so important in allowing us to move and carry things on the ground, comes with risk to mother and baby and childbirth, and reliably causes back pain.
We're gossipy, sentimental, and superstitious.
We build extravagant monuments to fictional gods.
We are arrogant and confused, often mistaking the unlikely for the inevitable, even as we downplay massive and obvious hazards in everything.
trade-offs.
So, I went looking in this book, the Human Universals book, for what I thought to be true and what he affirms is true about the ubiquity of gift-giving.
Gift-giving traditions in various forms across human cultures.
And indeed, he claims that there is no human culture in which some form of gift-giving is not found.
But there are a few other things in looking through this book that are notable, I think, about what humans What has been ubiquitous in human cultures and which we should all be thinking about remembering around now.
So he's talking about the universal people, the UP, which are the people who are all of our human ancestors.
The universal people have law, at least in the sense of rules of membership in perpetual social units and in the sense of rights and obligations attached to persons or other statuses.
Among the UP's laws are those that in certain situations proscribe violence and rape.
Their laws also proscribe murder, unjustified taking of human life, although they may justify taking lives in some contexts.
They have sanctions for infractions, and these sanctions include removal of offenders from the social unit, whether by expulsion, incarceration, ostracism, or execution.
They punish or otherwise censure or condemn certain acts that threaten the group or are alleged to do so.
So some of what we're seeing at the moment is Those of us who disagree with the one narrative that is acceptable are being sanctioned, censored, ostracized, expelled from decent society, in some cases incarcerated, you could argue, in some places, and hopefully that doesn't continue to spread.
But, you know, the wisdom, the ubiquitous human wisdom of recognizing that laws of this sort are necessary also mean that they are, of course, gameable.
It occurs to me that they are bringing us in, attempting to train us, and when it doesn't take, they're sanctioning us.
Rather exactly like what George Bridges, the erstwhile, now-departing president of the Evergreen State College, said he would do to those who disagreed with the new orthodoxy.
Yeah.
Finally, the universal people know how to dance and have music.
At least some of their dance and at least some of their religious activity is accompanied by music.
They include melody, rhythm, repetition, redundancy, and variation in their music, which is always seen as an art, a creation.
Their music includes vocals, and the vocals include words, i.e.
a conjunction of music and poetry.
The UP have children's music.
The UP, particularly their youngsters, play and play fight.
Their play, besides being fun, provides training and skills that will be useful in adulthood.
We need to remember these things.
We need more music, we need more dance, we need more play.
We need to remember that collective joy is actually a fundamental part of what it is to be human.
And the fact that they were able, that forces that sounded like they were on our side were able to take away so much of this.
And that in many places, including where we are living now, they are still gone.
And people are just getting used to it and now getting in the habit of defending their more restricted lives because they feel safer this way?
The fact that some people feel safer in a world that is authoritarian and censorious and ever narrower with the blinders on you on your own particular lane does not mean it's the right way to live, nor do you have the right to constrain everyone else around you in this way.
So I'm struck by that description of effectively the characteristics that we infer that the ancestors of all our modern cultures would have had.
Because the point is those effectively are the human universals.
We are watching them abandoned and dismantled.
What does it mean that they are being abandoned and dismantled, and why would they ever be?
And one answer, which I think is likely to be right, is that in effect, something has decided that it does not have shared fate with the rest of us.
And this happens.
This is what happened, you know, in Weimar, Germany, where one group decided that it could dispense with others.
And I think the point is, this is what happens when something defects from the agreement that unifies you.
And what we are seeing now, I am increasingly convinced, are endgame dynamics.
People's heuristics for understanding what's taking place.
Are not working because they're not used to a civilization in which something with a great deal of power suddenly defects and it takes all of the structures that had a meaning and it starts co-opting them like medicine.
Why is my doctor suddenly not able to tell me what my doctor thinks is in my interest with respect to my health, right?
Why is my doctor not allowed to tell my pharmacist to give me a particular medicine?
And in what way is that therefore still in any real sense my doctor?
Right, it's not.
Something has, it's as if, you know, it's an invasion of the doctor snatchers or something.
And this, I think people are going to have to recognize that the first step to getting out of this is just recognizing that it is Unarguably happening, right?
And I think the problem is many people are constructed, their development has caused them to think that at the point that you recognize that something terrible is occurring, then the point is, okay, then what do we do about it?
And the answer is, we don't actually know what we do about it, because this is new to all of us, right?
We actually have lots of analogies for pieces of this, but I think we are lacking, for example, a great Turnkey, totalitarian novel that would tell us what it would feel like if this happened to us.
And so a lot of us are missing it.
But it is, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago from the great novel Catch-22, better to live on your feet than to die on your knees.
A hundred percent.
So first step.
We're off script, but here we go.
You gotta recognize that it's happening, and then, once we get enough people to recognize that it's happening, then we can talk about what we should do about it.
And to return to where I started today, my sense overhearing yet another conversation in which people are speaking privately and saying, well, I see the stuff that's happening, but I know that nobody else is.
The fact that I keep landing in situations where I'm hearing that sort of thing tells me that There are many more of us than most think.
And, you know, we aren't in a great position to tell from the fact that our inboxes are overflowing and we don't respond to the vast majority of people, of good people with amazing stories that we would love to be responding to because we just get too much of it.
But, you know, if you just went by that and you had confirmation bias, you would be certain that it was everyone who was seeing this.
And it's certainly not.
It's obviously not that.
Um, but the fact that I can, um, when I am just going out into the world with the hope of, uh, you know, having a coffee and working on a podcast and, um, hopefully being anonymous and able to listen to conversations around me, repeatedly hearing this sort of thing, even in the, um, you know, still we're in mask mandate territory, Portland, Oregon, suggests that there are a whole lot of people who are
Who are considering living on their feet.
So let's do it.
Yep.
Alright.
Start by admitting what you suspect.
Yeah.
And acknowledging it, even if just in small ways, with the people with whom you're interacting.
At the store, with your family, with your friends.
Pointing out the inconsistencies that are the most obvious first, and then continuing to expand the The flaws in the arguments that we are being told to believe in from there.
The time for being timid is over.
I think so, yeah.
Okay, we're going to take a break and we will be back as soon as possible with our Q&A.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Just a reminder that next week we'll be starting earlier, probably four hours earlier at 8.30.
AM Pacific.
You may email logistical questions, not the questions for the Q&A, but logistical questions to DarkHorseModerator at gmail.com.
We invite you to join us at our Patreons and also invite you to read our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which does provide some instructions in some ways for understanding the world with an evolutionary lens.
And helping, I think, people learn to have the courage to live on their feet.
So, until next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
