In this 109th 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.This week, we talk about many things Covid. Obesity is a well-established comorbidity for Covid, but the mainstream media often insists that stigma, rather than actual physiological reality, is what puts fat people at risk. Why do public health injunctions so rarely offer anything that individuals can actually do for themse...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number lambda oopsalon point three seven seven one.
Also known as 109.
109.
Well, that's the old numbering scheme.
It is.
I'm trying out something new here.
Trying out the new math.
Well, it's not really so much math.
It's like a hybrid between, you know, public health policy and the Dewey Decimal System.
It's a mashup.
A mashup that fails in every regard?
You know, pretty much.
Pretty much.
Well, that does seem timely.
Yeah, just in time to get it under the wire for 2021.
Yeah.
So here we are.
This is going to be our last regularly scheduled live stream of 2021.
We are likely to have one more, just not on Christmas, not next Saturday, and also not on New Year's.
Actually, that reminds me, I should tell them, this is our last opportunity to alert you that winter is in fact coming.
It is.
Yes.
So soon.
So soon.
In fact, we're going to end the show today with a few missives, brief missives from Australia, where winter is coming, sure, but summer is really coming to be in full swing just about now.
And what is it feeling like there from the brains of one of our friends who lives there?
We are going to be talking today about a little bit about obesity, as we've talked about before, and its implications for COVID, which we got to by thinking more about children.
We were asked in our Q&A last week about someone on the school board of his child's school uh was putting together arguments uh against mask mandates uh for school children and you know he had he had the sort of lack of efficacy in children and low lack of efficacy for masks for everyone and low rates of COVID in children uh but what we had said was you know it's just it's so bad it's so bad for them
Developmentally, in terms of what it is that they are and what it is they're learning to be.
And I thought I was thinking more about that answer last week and thought we'd go a little bit further today.
So we're going to talk about obesity, about children, about something you have termed ethical offense, and again, a bit from Australia.
And first, logistics.
Yeah, let's do that.
A?
A. Logistics number A. Logistics number A, indeed.
So we're likely to do a live stream sometime between Christmas and New Year's, but there are actually three Dark Horse podcasts that you have recorded with other guests that will be dropped sometime between now and three weeks from now.
They're all, I have not I haven't seen any of them, but I've heard a tremendous amount about them and talked with some of the guests, and they look to be extraordinary.
Mind-blowing each, I promise.
Yeah, yeah.
So we aren't going to give anything more away about that, but there will be.
This is not a dry spell for Dark Horse.
We're just not going to be live streaming on, again, Christmas or New Year's.
Our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, we had signed copies available.
We went up to the islands, to the San Juan Islands, specifically to Orcas Island, to Darval's bookshop last week to sign copies, and we signed a lot of copies.
All the copies they had, and they had a lot of copies, and they're all sold out, unfortunately.
I have been having Traveler's Check flashbacks ever since.
Yeah.
It's worse than the number of signatures you have to do when you get a mortgage.
Right.
It was a lot of signatures.
We're grateful to do it.
We're glad to do it.
But there aren't any more available at the moment.
There won't be any more available at least until after Christmas.
Please do continue to support Darvils.
It's a wonderful independent bookstore, but at the moment you can't get signed copies of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide from them.
They do have more books, they're just not signed.
They came in after we left.
If you find yourself at Darvill's and you need to pee, if you're male you will discover, I think actually probably it works for females too, but the restroom has maybe one of the most marvelous views of, I mean most restrooms have no view whatsoever.
It's an independent bookstore with one little tiny bathroom.
It's not sex segregated.
No, no, it's really a question of your... Oh, just that you're standing up.
Yeah, if you're standing up... Still, when you walk in, you do... Yeah, I think you're... Women don't, like... I don't know, what would it be, like crab walk into the bathroom?
Well, the question is... I mean, actually, you're looking up at Mount Constitution, I guess, if you're seated, so it's probably a very nice view as well.
But I can assure you that in the male typical peeing position, the view is spectacular, and it's worth a trip to the restroom.
Worth a trip to the bookstore.
Yes, that as well.
Yes.
I also wanted to mention the translation rights to Hunter Gatherer's Guide have been sold.
There's still lots of offers coming in, lots more that will be sold, but I just wanted to list off the translation rights to our book have already been sold for, I'm just going to say the countries here, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, Romania, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Russia, France, and China.
And many more are in the works, and we're told that they can take a long time to actually come to fruition, although we know that the French publisher is hoping to have its translation done and available for people as of May of next year.
So we're hoping that all of these happen fast, and that's exciting.
It's a little weird, because in most of those languages we have zero ability to assess the translation, and in none of them do we have an excellent ability, because neither of us is fluent in any other language, as much as we wish that weren't true.
I'm actually hoping that for some of the English-speaking countries that have separate rights, we will be approached to do the audiobook and we can try some really over-the-top accents.
Yes, that would be excellent.
Excellent.
Okay, if... Let's see.
Oh, well, we're for now still on YouTube and on Odyssey.
The chat is live on Odyssey.
You can ask questions for the Q&A that will follow this episode at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Please consider joining our Patreons, as always.
This month the private Q&A is not on the final, but the penultimate Sunday of the month, which is, say, tomorrow.
So if you join my Patreon before then, you can join us for a live Patreon Q&A.
It's two hours starting at 11 a.m.
tomorrow Pacific Time, and we leave it up afterwards so you can always watch it later, but it's small enough that we're able to actually interact with the chat.
And sometimes our friend Fairfax shows up for that as well, and here he is being very lovey on camera for those of you just listening.
Oh, the products that are still available at store.darkhorsepodcast.org include Saddle Up the Dire Wolves We Ride Tonight, Digital Brick Burning, the Epic Tabby himself, and various more.
There are a number more in the works, but none will be available before Before the new year, consider going over to Natural Selections, my substack, where what we talked about last week, I made a list with a little bit more information on those 12 important books and added one to the list with our friend Drew Schneidler wrote about gifting traditions two weeks ago, and for this upcoming Tuesday we'll have The complete rendering from our friend in Australia about what he's seeing there.
So we're going to finish off today's episode by reading some from that, but on Tuesday we'll post for public consumption.
You don't have to pay.
Are you going to do a follow-up on a regifting traditions?
You know, the gifting traditions, it's interesting.
The gifting traditions that Drew and I wrote about, we wrote about frogs and spiders and such too.
Naturally.
Naturally.
As one does, as some people do.
But the regifting traditions, specifically in the Kung And in Iran, which were the two non-weird traditions that we talked about, specifically have rules and regs basically around regifting.
And it is in fact for the kind of formal gifting that is done as opposed to that between intimates in at least a few decades ago in Iran.
It is not only expected that you will re-gift, but not only okay, but expected even when it's boxes of pastries.
So you just have to do it fast enough that they aren't stale by the time you re-gift them, but there's actually very little expectation that you eat them yourself, that there's a tradition of just passing along.
It's the act of giving as opposed to the gift itself.
Well, I was kidding, but that sounds fascinating.
It is, yes.
Yeah, that was, I learned, as did Drew, a lot about that from one particularly long and interesting paper that, if memory serves, was written by a woman who, I don't remember in which order it happened.
She either came to be living in Iran, and then became a cultural anthropologist, and then also married into the culture, or it may have been the other direction.
But either way, she had both the personal, intimate way in, and also the participant-observer's eye, trained as a social scientist, I believe.
Right.
I've made every mistake in the book, and now I'm going to describe them to you in hilarious detail.
Exactly.
Okay, without further ado, we have three ads this week.
We are, as we have said repeatedly, very grateful to our sponsors.
They have really helped us know that we can continue this as other sources of funding have become more tenuous.
So we have three this week and we will continue to have three most weeks for the foreseeable future.
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All right, that's our responses for the week.
One more thing I just wanted to follow up from last week before we get into the meat of the show is that another question out of the Discord, I think, from last week that we answered in our Q&A was effectively how do you source and assess the supplements?
Because we have said that neither of us is a fan of supplements, we have never taken supplements before, but in this era
We have come to understand, A, how common vitamin D deficiency is, and also how useful vitamin C, zinc, and some ionophore like quercetin are in keeping you healthy, especially when it's respiratory virus season, as winter seems to be, including not just COVID, but things like other coronaviruses like colds and flus, other coronaviruses like colds, and also the flu.
I did invisible punctuation there.
So a number of people wrote in because I talked a little bit about what we had done but said that we didn't have a great answer for figuring out how to assess supplements and a number of people wrote in suggesting consumerlab.com and I went and looked and well in fact one of my patrons Katie said I've used consumerlab.com for a number of years they're not perfect but they do some testing for things like lead and whether the supplement actually has the amount that they claim to have.
The research they show the research both good and bad for each supplement and the form that it takes and this is something I mentioned the molecular form that may or may not be for instance bioavailable And she says you have to subscribe, but they have a cost breakdown for different brands and which is cheapest.
So it sounds kind of like a Consumer Reports, but specifically for supplements and other related things.
And I went there, I assessed it a little bit, I actually subscribed, I assessed it some more, and I find that it is as good as people are recommending.
So that's consumerlab.com, which Which seems to be if you can afford a subscription or even just do it for one month and figure out everything you want to know about where to source supplements, which supplements are the right things to do.
So the idea is the lab generally surveys supplements.
It's not that you're sending them something to check.
No.
You do not send them things.
They're not in-house.
They don't do it that way.
You look at what they have already reviewed.
Assessed.
Yes.
But it really is quite exhaustive.
It's quite exhaustive and quite good.
Okay.
So, all of that out of the way.
I wanted to return first to talking a little bit about the comorbidity for COVID and the general sort of life comorbidity, if you will.
And I'm not sure that's how doctors or clinicians or researchers would say it, but that is obesity.
We've talked about this a lot before.
In fact, I found that we talked about it first in our live stream number nine.
You mean it's a comorbidity across many different things, not just COVID.
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, I guess it's a risk factor for early death and other bad health outcomes in general.
And with regard to COVID, we were talking about this as early as, like I said, April 21st, 2020.
In our ninth live stream, I went back and looked, assuming that my notes are complete.
I think we didn't talk about it before then, but we definitely talked about it then.
Um, so I just, before we talk about some of what is going on with children, I wanted to review some of what we know about obesity, uh, in, uh, with regards specifically to COVID.
And in live stream number 69 on February 27th of this year, we showed, oh, it's just showing me the wrong paper here.
Actually, Zach, you can show this table briefly, and then maybe I'll just pull it back.
Actually, apologies.
Here's the paper.
It's O'Hearn et al., 2021, called Coronavirus Disease 2019 Hospitalizations Attributable to Cardiometabolic Conditions in the United States, a Comparative Risk Assessment Analysis.
If I may have my screen back here, I think I Made some, here we go, just a couple of there.
We're not going to go through the paper in depth.
Again, we talked about this in episode 69.
They find, and you may show my screen here if you like, Zach, from the abstract, as of November, this is published a while ago, so this is not up to date, but we see nothing to suggest that what they found has been overturned.
As of November 18, 2020, an estimated 906-849 COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in U.S.
849 COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in U.S. adults.
adults.
Of these, an estimated 20.5% with 95% uncertain, you know, I'm not going to focus on the numbers here.
An estimated 20.5% of COVID-19 hospitalizations were attributable to diabetes mellitus, 30.2% of total obesity with, that is to say, body mass index over 30 kilograms per meter squared.
I'm pausing because does that make sense?
I'm going to have to go back and look at how BMI is calculated.
It seems to me that it's kilogram over There's a relationship between height, yes.
Sounds like an area, right.
I don't think that's what they mean.
I mean, I think the formula includes the person's height squared somehow, but.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, S you know what?
I'm going to skip this.
There's just a lot of numbers in there that are not at the moment making immediate sense.
What are the clinical implications of what they have found?
Having found the top risks again were obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.
They say clinicians should educate their patients who may be at risk and consider promoting preventative lifestyle measures such as improved dietary quality and physical activity to improve overall cardiometabolic health and potentially minimize the risk for coronavirus disease 2019 severity.
Sounds like a good idea, does it not?
And finally, there's one more thing from this paper.
In the most recent CDC analysis of available national data among individuals diagnosed with COVID-19, A 35-year-old with diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, obesity, or other chronic conditions had a similar risk of COVID-19-related hospitalization as a 75-year-old with none of these conditions, and a similar risk of COVID-19-related death as a 65-year-old with none, a dramatic biologic aging effect of poor metabolic health on risk of severity of a viral infection such as COVID-19.
So again, a 35-year-old with one of these prime comorbidities is in worse shape or as similar shape with regard to COVID risk as a 75-year-old with none of those risks.
It's amazing.
Which is an extraordinary finding.
So thank you, Zach.
Given the steep aging curve of this disease.
Yeah, because age is effectively a comorbidity.
It goes from a trivial disease for very young healthy people to a spectacularly dangerous disease, well, spectacularly dangerous, a very dangerous disease to elderly people.
Exactly.
And the fact that, of course it's not that simple, but the amount to which To some degree, especially if you are currently healthy, staying healthy is relatively easy.
And if you have one of these conditions, in so far as you can, in as much as possible, taking control of your own health and getting your weight down, getting your hypertension under control to some degree, can actually affect outcomes across domains.
And so we have also talked about, however, the fact that the clinical suggestions here, that health officials and doctors advise patients to lose weight and to address the health conditions that they can actually control, as opposed to simply relying on external sources of health, which is what the single-minded public policy on dealing with COVID seems to be.
Basically isn't happening.
Now we did talk in a couple live streams ago in 107, I guess, about some health advice that's coming out of Florida now, in which they're actually saying go outside, get active, eat healthy, you know, move your body.
And it sounds great, but it's literally the only one that I've found.
I'm certainly not hearing anything like this at the federal level.
And what we have seen is, and I'm going to just revisit since this is again from our ninth live stream, a piece that we saw on WIRED and then one from the LA Times more recently, that, you know, what is the mainstream media doing with this kind of actual research results around comorbidities and COVID and how you can reduce your risk?
Well, in April 17th, 2020, Wired published a piece called COVID-19 Does Not Discriminate by Body Weight.
The claim that those with higher BMIs are at special risk of dying from the coronavirus is close, grossly overstated.
And here very quickly, just Zach, show my screen to, to demonstrate that this is, this is in fact what the article What the article looks like.
One of the things they said is, obesity appears to be one of the biggest risk factors related to COVID-19 hospitalizations and critical illness, Newsweek claimed on Tuesday.
Yet this rhetoric is based on flawed and limited evidence, which only exacerbates the stigma that larger bodied people already face in society and our healthcare system.
The stigma is what truly jeopardizes their health, not weight itself.
Wow.
A fact that's only more important to consider in the midst of this pandemic.
The stigma is what jeopardizes their health.
And the article ends with this gem.
Instead of trumpeting the supposed risks of high BMI and adding to the already damaging impact of weight stigma, researchers need to be asking deeper questions and public health officials and journalists need to report on the science in more nuanced and sensitive ways.
As of today, December 18th, 2021, there is neither a correction or a retraction anywhere associated with that article from WIRED, which is from April 2020, at which point we already knew that obesity was a comorbidity, and we still know that.
Follow the sensitive science.
Follow the sensitive people and their feelings.
There you go.
Yeah.
Wow, that's really fascinating.
And I must say, I do think that, you know, BMI is a proxy for something.
And it's flawed.
It's deeply flawed.
But, you know, all else being equal, does BMI correlate with risk for COVID?
It clearly does.
It clearly does.
And so the question is, OK, you could add nuance to this, right?
For one thing, BMI is such a crude measure in its formulation that you really don't know very much about, you know, Whether someone is overweight or how overweight they are based on the simple measure, because there are body shape differences and obviously, you know, somebody can have an awful lot of, you know, muscle mass.
There's a level at which that can become a hazard in and of itself, but basically there's a lot of variation that isn't captured in this one measure.
But it's a, you know, it's a decent proxy and it's to the, you know, all of the sorts of measures that we take erase a certain amount of nuance in order to discover a pattern.
And the point is, yes, you can also study the pieces of nuance and you get A diminishing returns pattern where, you know, BMI may explain the lion's share of the pattern and then you can recover other things from different factors.
But the idea that a high BMI can reverse the risk stratification for age in COVID-19, that's incredible.
It's a clear pattern, right?
And the point is, it doesn't mean that an individual's BMI tells you anything, because the individual could be a bodybuilder or whatever.
But nonetheless, the pattern is there, and to deny it on the basis that it causes stigma, which is the health concern, is obviously upside down and backwards.
And frankly, most individuals know this.
You know, if you're huffing and puffing after climbing one set of stairs somewhat slowly, you're probably not in very good health.
I mean, in fact, I don't know why I'm hedging with probably.
I don't know the situation in which if you're short of breath after climbing one flight of stairs, I do not know the situation in which you are in peak health.
It could be that you just have something temporary.
It could be that you climb the stairs too soon after having run five miles and that you're not back at baseline.
But, you know, we know this.
And yes, there are people who have, you know, who weigh more than what the standards suggest they should, who are healthy.
Of course there are.
But that is not, there is so much evidence, there is so much evidence that obesity is a risk factor across many, many health conditions and specifically for COVID.
Well, I want to push back there because I don't know what it's like to be 90.
It's possible that a healthy 90 year old might be huffing and puffing after a single flight of stairs.
I just don't, I don't know.
Um, so I won't say, you know, it's, there's no case, but the point is, you know, if you're 40, 50, a single flight of stairs shouldn't throw you like that.
And to the extent that it does, that's nature's way of telling you, you need to build more capacity.
Right.
Um, so anyway, it's a minor pushback, but.
Yeah, no, I hear that.
There are a lot of these, but there's another amazing piece on obesity and COVID from the LA Times, which was published this year, not that recently, May 9th, 2021.
It's called, Fat Shaming, BMI, and Alienation.
COVID-19 Brought New Stigma to Large-Sized People.
I'm going to read just the first short six paragraphs of this.
And I do not know how to pronounce the names here.
Crystal Bogon cried after the needle went into her arm.
Not because her first dose of the Moderna vaccine hurt, but because finally, being fat actually paid off.
The 53-year-old was inoculated in the parking lot of Kaiser Permanente in San Jose on a rainy Friday in March, four days after eligibility in California was broadened to include people with underlying conditions.
Among them, a body mass index of 40 or more.
233 pounds for an adult who is 5 feet 4 inches tall.
Bogan's medical record at Kaiser shows she is morbidly obese.
As an activist, she prefers the word fat.
Her experience with medical providers has been one incident of size stigma after another, she said, like the time she went in with a scratched cornea and was told to lose weight.
She fears being hospitalized with COVID-19 and unable to advocate for herself.
For that reason, I decided, you know what?
I'm not going to feel guilty about being vaccinated.
I'm going to do it, she said, and I'm not going to apologize for it.
I've been in fear the whole flippin' time, staying home, avoiding everybody.
I couldn't do my job.
I'm an electrologist.
I remove facial hair.
I couldn't come to work.
I couldn't make money.
That, however, is changing, thanks to a vial of vaccine, a very sharp needle, and a policy switch that allowed women and men like Bogan a chance to be inoculated before the general public in California about a month early.
It's not every day that we get something for free because we're fat, said Bogan, who launched a YouTube channel called Fat Product Review.
We'll stop there for now.
Go for it.
Well, I just wanted to say a couple things.
I mean, this story is layer upon layer of betrayal.
Yes.
Right?
The idea that we are going to, at this stage, now champion obesity and portray this as the point at which it pays off is obviously absurd.
But let's just say civilization has failed this person, right?
The epidemic of obesity is not about people not caring.
People don't choose to be obese, right?
They can't control something.
And the thing that they can't control is obviously in the realm of what we talk about in our book, hypernovelty, right?
This is not a genetic defect.
This is something about our ancient selves encountering a modern world in which there is a factor or there are a number of factors that combine to cause that system to get out of whack.
We ought to be if you know I mean this is increasingly glaring but we have public health officials that are apparently willing to turn civilization absolutely upside down and to withdraw all sorts of fundamental rights in order to advance a one-size-fits-all policy that is clearly not based in science and yet There is no interest whatsoever.
They're obsessed with our health as long as the topic is this narrow focus and the solution in question is the only one that they allow us to discuss, right?
They're obsessed with our health in that case.
And provides no agency for us.
No agency.
In fact, the point is actually there are things you can do to protect yourself from COVID and they're specifically not advising them, right?
They're not advising us to take vitamin D. They're not advising people, hey, this would be a great moment.
In fact, you know what there is at the moment with respect to getting your weight under control?
Extra reason to motivate, right?
There's a disease out there and it will afflict you worse.
So, hey, if you needed a little extra push in that direction, here it is.
Are they saying that?
No, they're saying, you know, embrace your high BMI, right?
That makes no sense.
And some people are saying, talking about high BMI being a risk factor is itself a form of fat shaming, and that it's not the high BMI, it's the stigma that's making people sick.
And no, no, it's not.
And again, as you say, that's not to say that there isn't stigma, and that's not to say that, you know, especially for people who became fat as children, there are in many cases developmental processes which cannot be undone, such that people will be, you know, chronically struggling to get their weight under control, and it really is not Easy for them to the extent that it's easy for anyone who gains 10 or 20 pounds to lose it.
It's not the same problem.
It is not the same problem.
This isn't a simple thing.
Just like BMI is a flawed and overly simplistic rubric.
It's not, you know, calories in, calories spent.
It's not that simple an equation that actually doesn't work.
It depends on, you know, what it is that you're eating, under what conditions, what else you're doing with your life and also what your history looks like and you cannot change that.
What's done is done.
Right, and of course, you know, we are creating the problem, you know, one of the puzzles that we run into with all sorts of things, whether it's the need for glasses, the need for orthodontia, or, you know, a lifelong battle with obesity, all of these things are the result of some influence, right?
influence that even if we can't help people who are already afflicted, we can prevent it from afflicting anybody else, right?
If you figure out why it is that kids suddenly need orthodontia, and you stop doing that thing to them, then you don't need any more orthodontia for younger people.
And you just have to deal with the people who already have the issue.
And the point is, were these people at all interested in our health?
They would be focused on years of life that people are being robbed of by conditions.
They would be focused on quality of life being lost.
And there would be some sort of rational formula that says we should prioritize this thing because it is robbing people of the most quality or years of life.
And we're obviously not doing that.
You know, in fact, even the way we calculate the harm of COVID is absurd, right?
Because the point is that damage done to young people is vastly more important than damage done to the very old just by virtue of the number of years of theirs that you compromise.
And so the idea that, you know, vaccines good is nonsense.
Right?
Because the point is who you're giving them to and how much they stand to benefit versus lose.
It's not the same parameter.
And yet we pretend that it is so that we can get one number.
And at some level, I think we have to call their bluff.
They're obviously not interested in our health.
I don't know why they are interested in what they're interested in.
It could be that it's money.
It could be that it's something else.
But for God's sake, it's clear that their obsession, the appearance that they are obsessed with our well-being relative to COVID is not
Real because if it was they'd be obsessed with our health and other topics do and they clearly aren't they clearly are not One more one more quote from this Los Angeles Times article from May of this year in other words In other words said Reagan Chastain who is the author of fat the owner's manual and has written widely on weight bias and medical research Quote if fat bodies experience something more than thin bodies fat bodies are to blame rather than the unequal treatment fat people receive due to weight stigma
So, she... I actually don't know.
That person, Reagan Chastain, is saying this is a mistake.
That pointing out that being fat is correlated with outcomes is a mistake.
And that is, again, due to stigma.
So, it just goes on and on and on.
But all of that is in service of talking about children, because as it turns out, Maybe even more so in children, although it is difficult to parse the data that we are being shown, because we are not generally being shown all of it, as always.
The data are juked all the way down at some level.
Even more so for children, to the extent that children suffer from COVID, and the vast, vast, vast majority of them do not, to the extent that they do, they almost always have a comorbidity, and obesity is one of the major ones for children as well.
So let me Yeah.
Children don't die of COVID, and they don't get sick from COVID.
Here is the CDC's data.
I'm trying here to go to the government, the government's information, the CDC, the FDA, exactly the people he would expect.
If they are not giving us everything, they are going to err in the direction that serves their narratives.
Even by their own numbers, even by their own numbers.
What we have here is, um, is deaths.
This is through 12-15-2021, so it's updated regularly starting with January 1st, 2020.
Each line is split by sex and age, total deaths in that age group for this period of time, and deaths attributed to COVID.
I will say, you know, they say COVID-19 deaths.
I'm going to say deaths attributed to COVID because increasingly that's one of the ways that we are sure that the data are being juked, for instance, and It's one of the places that the literal bodies are figuratively buried is by categorizing things.
And it's clear, you and I've been through this multiple times, it is clear that there is a narrative that starts this, right?
COVID is to be maximally terrifying.
And the one size fits all vaccine policy is to be maximally beneficial.
And things are moved by category in order to reflect that narrative, even though it's clearly not a straightforward conclusion.
Exactly.
So for those just listening, I'm going to, I'm going to scroll down, I'm going to try to, now it doesn't want me to, and, and show that as you get to, you know, As you go up in age, again this is just girls coming into women, the number of deaths in the age group increase because deaths increase.
You have a lot of deaths in the first year of life because we are born fragile and we become anti-fragile with age if we are allowed to be.
But we are born very fragile.
Fragile and easy to misplace.
We never did that, I swear to God.
That's what screaming is about.
Yes, that is what screaming is.
That's how it starts out.
Yeah.
So, you know, the overall deaths in the group, unfortunately you can't – oh, actually, here, sorry.
I can – nope, don't show that, Zach, sorry.
Here we go.
Yeah, you can show this, and – oh, actually you can't really.
So you're seeing – I didn't have time to do all the right stuff here.
Um, this is, this is just the same data in a spreadsheet, uh, where you can see that, I didn't, I didn't make the formatting nice, uh, the number of deaths increases as you go up and the number of COVID deaths increases up until, um, you know, the number of deaths in women over 85 was, is well over a million, uh, total deaths and the number of COVID deaths attributed to COVID are over a hundred thousand.
That's consistent with the kinds of numbers we've seen.
And now we start over.
This is now males.
And again, it starts out super low and it just climbs and climbs and climbs.
And if we look at just the 18 and under mortality data, we have a total number of deaths attributed to COVID in people under 18 in the U.S.
is 655.
across the entire pandemic.
655 deaths in the U.S.
for people under 18.
And if you take out that first year where you're super fragile and even more so, who knows to what extent those dead with COVID was actually dead of COVID.
If you take those out, you're less than 500.
You're at 492 total COVID deaths according to the CDC's numbers in the U.S.
across the entire pandemic.
So what does that tell us?
That tells us, again, that children aren't dying of COVID, and that furthermore... Oh, you've got to be careful.
I mean, obviously, 500 is...
A lot of kids.
It's a tiny number.
It's a tiny number compared to all of the kids who have died.
And, uh, and the fact is that compared to every older age group is a tiny number.
Um, so yes, it's not binary.
It's not zero, but it's actually closer than any other demographic description of a disease progression that I, as I've seen.
Well, I would also leave open the possibility that it is zero, given the noise.
But I just want to say, 500, if that's the real number, right?
It's not zero.
It's a large number of kids in absolute terms, but compared to other causes of death, it is very tiny.
And I think I know where you're headed here.
You were not headed somewhere further.
I'm going somewhere further, but I didn't think you were done with your sentence, sorry.
It was one of those sentences that just ended abruptly in the middle.
I see.
It was a sentence cliff and... I see, okay.
Well, man, nothing is working quite...
So one of the places I wanted to go from here is to show this FDA document that came out in October 26, 2021, called Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee Meeting.
This was a document prepared again by the FDA.
In service of allowing mRNA COVID vaccines in 5 to 11 year olds.
So again, the point of this document is to provide evidence that what we need are EUAs for the vaccines to be allowed in 5 to 11 year olds, which of course, as we know, we're granted.
So again, just like with the CDC data, I'm going to the source that I would expect to be biased towards the narrative, not away from the narrative.
And yet, even here, we find things that don't quite fit with the narrative.
Here's their page 4, and this is a PDF that I'm showing, but I'll post the link in the show notes.
This is COVID weekly cases across all age groups.
And it looks, it looks scary, you know, look at those peaks, the peaks for all age groups, you have the light blue line is lowest, that's zero to four year olds, and it basically gets the peaks get higher, the older the age groups are, but the peaks are mirroring one another to some degree.
Okay, that seems like evidence that you might want to be thinking about, but then you go to page 11 in this document.
And what this is doing, for those just listening, is tracking flu deaths, or no, flu hospitalizations, and COVID hospitalizations.
Flu from 2017 yearly, from the 2017-2018 year, flu season 2018-2019, 2019-2020, 2020-2021, and then COVID from the beginning, or actually from October 2020 through September 2021.
So a comparable amount of time.
2018, 2019, 2019, 2020, 2020, 2021, and then COVID from the beginning, or actually from October 2020 through September 2021.
So a comparable amount of time they've controlled for the amount of time-ish.
And what we find here is that, you know, yes, mitigation measures have been in place.
And so you would expect, hopefully, COVID was spreading less than it might have been, and the flu was spreading less than it might have been.
But check out that flu cases are effectively zero.
There are nine pediatric influenza hospitalizations reported between in the 2020 to 2021 flu season, nine, compared to in other years, you know, we don't actually have the absolute numbers.
We just have rates per 100,000 of the population.
The rates are so low from last year that it's effectively zero, as you can see on this.
And they, of course, have not given us the actual ability to compare apples to apples here.
And the COVID hospitalizations are lower than pediatric hospitalizations from flu in previous years.
Again, there were mitigation measures in place, but still what happened was flu dropped to nothing.
So none of those hospitalizations happened And we know that at least in some cases, some of the tests that were supposedly testing for COVID were impossible to discriminate between whether or not they were testing for COVID or flu.
So how many of these COVID cases were actually flu cases?
We don't necessarily know.
We don't know.
I mean, and I will say the flu number dropping to zero could be a lot of different things.
It could have a lot of different contributors.
And we need to point out that one possibility is data shenanigans.
That basically, if it coughs, it has COVID kind of a thing.
More likely, I would say, is the strong possibility that flu has become very well adapted to our modern way of life.
And we thoroughly disrupted our modern way of life and interrupted its ability to transmit.
So flu had a rotten year because we just simply weren't behaving normally.
Poor flu.
Yeah, poor flu.
But anyway, the overarching point is From the perspective of addressing the hazard to children, that hazard has to be scaled relative to flu in an average year.
And the question is, are these vaccines something that one should Offer to children, should mandate for children, encourage for children in light of the scale of the hazard.
And the problem is that, you know, they've gotten in the way of every piece of the analysis that rational, independent people without a dog in the fight would have to go through in order to figure out what the comparison is.
But at the very least, even if we knew nothing, Of actual harm coming to children from these vaccines, which is not the state we're in.
But even if that was the state, you would have to rate the risk that there was something that would happen to these children if vaccinated later in life as too large to contemplate in light of the very small risk that comes from COVID itself, even given the way that numbers are calculated to inflate that hazard.
I absolutely agree.
And two more slides from this document that the FDA produced.
Here we have children aged 5 to 11 years hospitalized with COVID-19.
This is March 2020 through August 2021.
This is March 2020 through August 2021.
And what we don't see here is, this is outcomes in children versus comorbidities, that's underlying medical conditions.
But what we don't see is a number of, you know, how many kids who ended up hospitalized with COVID had any comorbidities.
That's the number I want to see.
And I don't see it here.
But what we do see is how many kids who were hospitalized had greater than one Oh, no, that's equal to or greater than one underlying conditions.
That's 68%.
So more than two thirds of the kids who were hospitalized with COVID have one or more underlying conditions.
And their underlying conditions, frankly, include chronic lung disease, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and, you know, things like feeding tube dependence.
And chronic metabolic disease, but these don't include all of the comorbidities that we know exist for COVID.
And also, of course, none of this includes one of the factors that we have now come to understand from our own research and from conversations we've had, that vitamin D deficiency is likely to be, you know, if you add that in here, I'll bet that number 68% of kids hospitalized with COVID have at least one underlying condition.
If you count vitamin D deficiency as an underlying condition, I'll bet that number goes pretty close to one.
Right.
And if you were, I mean, we don't know.
It's possible that the extremely compelling vitamin D data does not include kids because in all likelihood that work was done on adults.
And kids are better able to synthesize vitamin D.
Right.
So we have to leave open the formal possibility that the pattern, the small amount of COVID, or the small amount of COVID disease that is worth talking about, is not heavily impacted by D in kids.
There's no reason to think that the assumption should be in the other direction, that kids more or less mirror the adult pattern, but we have to leave open the possibility.
But nonetheless, From the point of view of would you rather gamble on giving a young person with many more decades of life in front of them and much more development to go through a brand new technology vaccine that, oh by the way, doesn't prevent contracting the disease and doesn't prevent transmitting the disease and doesn't seem to reduce viral load but is really great other than that, right?
And you may well become dependent on more On more of it, right?
So the number of boosters in a lifetime you might have to get is likely to be higher.
Would you rather go that route with all of the uncertainties involved in all of that, or would you rather try vitamin D and see whether the very minor problem that kids seem to have with COVID can be largely addressed because they have a cryptic vitamin D deficiency like everybody else?
Yes.
Or like everybody else living in the temperate zones.
And I mean, of course, we should say as we you know, this is a point that we were hammering early on in in our Dark Horse live streams, that we don't know the long term effects of COVID.
We don't know the degree to which children who have long haul COVID will in fact, you know, may have shortened life.
may have worse outcomes from long COVID because it has the potential to last for longer because they have a longer lifespan ahead of them, et cetera.
We have no information on this, just as we don't on anyone, because this thing has been around for a long time at this point, but it's still only two years, right?
But that said, all of the information that we do have suggests that, yes, obesity is a risk factor across all age groups, and children are at lowest risk for bad outcomes from the disease, and they are at the same or, in fact, higher risk and they are at the same or, in fact, higher risk for bad outcomes, adverse events from the vaccines, especially As we've outlined in other places on the show.
And so why is it that we are being asked to enable a one-size-fits-all policy?
It's not because we're too dumb to track it.
That may be part of the story, and you hear that from people.
People are too stupid to keep track, and so you just need to give them one solution, and that's what they'll do.
You know, we all get into that headspace sometimes.
My god, I don't want to make another decision.
I just want to have brand loyalty, decision loyalty, something.
I want to just vote blue.
I want to buy that kind of toothpaste.
I want to go to that restaurant and order that thing.
I just want to not think about, you know, I've got choice fatigue.
That is gaming the fatigue that we all experience rather than actually an organic situation.
People do not want to be handed single answers that don't actually fit all solutions and are being told that they fit all solutions, especially at the point that they come to realize they've been lied to and that those lies have effects.
They have effects on individual health, on societal health, on economic health, on all the healths.
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense that this is about we can't handle the complexity.
For one thing, much of the vaccine hesitancy surrounds a lot of us having seen the complexity and saying actually there's too much uncertainty here.
To contemplate this and, you know, the longer that we wait and the more we learn, the more frightening the picture that emerges from what is apparently already known becomes.
So, I would point out in thinking about this question, you're comparing it against a lot of unknowns with respect to how much hazard there is to kids in these brand new novel vaccines.
That would be true if there had been no observation of harm whatsoever, but we are not in that circumstance.
In fact, Even in Pfizer's trial on kids, which was tiny, it was like 1,200 kids, there was an absolutely serious adverse event with permanent effects.
The Maddy Dagheri case, I think that's how you pronounce her name.
It may be Dagheri.
In any case, this was a girl, really a hero of the pandemic, somebody who volunteered to test the vaccines because she wanted to contribute to the solution to COVID.
She now has a feeding tube, is permanently in a wheelchair.
And the reaction of Pfizer was to unblind very quickly and basically she was written down in the report as if she had had stomach upset.
This is a person who is now on a feeding tube, right?
This is a person who is permanently injured.
In a, you know, a group of about 1,200 kids.
That's not an insignificant number.
You know, in 1,200 kids, even a very high rate of very serious reactions could have been missed.
But in this case, there actually is a person.
She has a name and she has a life ahead of her.
And, you know, Pfizer is effectively pretending that she doesn't exist or is faking or something like that.
And it's preposterous.
And the fact is, parents have a right to know this and they have a right to say no to these things.
Yeah.
And I feel like that should be the easy argument to be having, and of course we're not being allowed to have it.
But maybe what got me thinking specifically about children, and the way that we are frankly destroying children's futures right now, was not even about the vaccines.
I'm showing you data that was prepared in service of getting the EUA for vaccines in 5 to 11 year olds.
But I got thinking about it because of how schools look.
And I guess schools don't look this way all over the place, but certainly where we are and where a number of places are, there's still mandatory masking in schools and other measures in place.
And actually, let me just show this one last screen here, Zach.
This is again from the FDA document.
This is page 14 of this FDA document.
Which just shows the data from the previous page in a different graphical form.
Underlying conditions as risk factors in hospitalized children 5 to 11 years, again March 2020 through August 2021, in which obesity and chronic metabolic disease show very, and things like feeding tube dependence again, show up as strong risk factors for bad outcomes from COVID.
I wonder if Wired or the LA Times would say that the FDA is fat shaming here.
These are data from the very organizations that refuse to actually advise people that they need to take control of their own health and do have a single solution for everyone that actually should not be the single solution for people.
And even their data show that obesity is a major risk factor for children.
And again, across domains, it's not just COVID.
It's not like, oh, well, for COVID, sure, being fat may be a problem for you.
But no, across domains.
And again, because developmentally, you set so many things in motion that you then may not be able to change later on, the healthier you are as a child, the more likely you are to be able to maintain, and if you lose it, sometimes regain your health as an adult.
So we wanted to actually show, I've just been thinking about, even now, we're in Oregon with the indoor mask mandate still, and I'm not, you know, I don't like consumption as an activity, but I do go into the stores sometimes and enjoy Enjoy touching, which we couldn't do for a long time, including produce, but in a retail store... You've been fondling the produce!
Well, always before, right?
But, you know, ceramics in particular, as a ceramicist in a past life, I want to feel the heft of it, I want to feel how it feels in my hand, I want to turn it over and look at how it's been trimmed and, you know, what the signature looks like and all of this, and look at the glaze inside and out.
And I also want to smell things.
There are a number of things that you can buy that are actually about smelling them, and you can't smell through masks very well.
You are going to love meta.
It is very much like... Sorry, that was a terrible, terrible joke.
Yeah, I'm really not going to love meta.
But if that's my experience, and I'm a middle-aged woman who has long since come to understand my embodied nature in the world,
Children are just coming to recognize, coming into a knowledge of who they are as embodied beings, as intellectual beings, as mental beings, as psychological beings, and they are learning how to use their eyes and their noses and their fingers and to make eye contact with one another, which okay, fine, you can still do that with a mask, how to smile at one another, how to give indications of mood,
Of agreement, of tolerance, of disagreement, of intolerance, with facial expressions, with with hugs, with refusals to hug, with turning away, with all of these things that frankly mask mandates and keeping children from getting close to one another
It's going to have such remarkable downstream effects and it's probably not going to be traceable to those things, but we are even more than we were doing before with our helicopter and snowplow parenting and the pharmaceutical drugs that were being handed to kids in the form of speed and anti-anxiety meds and SSRIs and the screens And, you know, having destroyed the economy such that they would have a hard time ever imagining a future in which they could own a house.
All of that has been terrible.
And we've written and spoken about that extensively.
But this thing that we're doing now to kids in the schools, it's worse.
And it's going to be very hard to undo.
And I wanted to just show this video of Jen Pisaki, our Press secretary responding to a question about this from a reporter.
So Zach, that is the video that we sent to you, if you could... Okay, all right.
One more question on schools.
Obviously, the White House wants schools to be open.
They've been encouraging schools to be open.
Many schools are fully open.
But inside schools, there are often, you know, very strict rules.
For example, sometimes students are required to eat outside or eat distant from each other and not talk to each other while they're eating.
Does the White House want to see those rules lifted as well to get back to a more normal school experience?
Well, schools are taking steps, especially since we've only recently approved through the CDC and FDA vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds.
They're not approved for kids younger than that to keep their kids safe and keep students safe.
I will tell you, I have a 3-year-old who goes to school, sits outside for snacks and lunch, wears a mask inside, and it's no big deal to him.
I'm not saying that's the case for everybody, but these are steps that schools are taking to keep kids safe.
And I think the vast majority of parents appreciate that.
Obviously, we want to get to a point where we're turning to a version of normalcy for everybody, right?
Where you're not sending your kids backpack with seven extra masks, right?
Where you're not adding two hats so that they're warm outside for a snack.
There's no question that's the case.
But we also think the most important thing should be safety, the safety of kids, keeping kids in school, which the President is very focused on.
And some of these steps, creative steps, that schools have taken have enabled that to be possible.
Yeah, that's incredible to me.
There's so many things in her statement that reveal the degree to which this is a charade.
I mean, for one thing, she specifically says in there that this is, you know, this is, yes, all of these things are important, but it's about keeping kids safe.
That's got to be our top priority.
And The more you think about that claim, the emptier it is.
I mean, in fact, given everything we know, and you know, as you mentioned some minutes ago, the one caveat here, the one asterisk, is that we can't say with certainty that kids who have a very, very mild case of COVID, which is what kids who are healthy are likely to have if they get COVID at all, That those kids won't have some sort of negative health consequence later in life as a result of them having had COVID.
Seems pretty unlikely.
It does.
But possible.
But nonetheless.
Asymptomatic cases in adults don't seem to lead to long COVID, for instance.
Therefore, cases in kids tending to be asymptomatic are less likely to seem, in keeping, unlikely to lead to long COVID.
But it's not impossible that it would manifest in a different way.
Not impossible.
We have to leave the door open to that possibility.
But we can basically say the presumption ought to be no.
That they have mild cases, they get better, they seem to end up with durable immunity from it.
And therefore, even the idea that this is about keeping kids safe is preposterous.
And, you know, think about it this way.
The argument we make in our book is that the purpose of childhood is to create durable, high-capacity adults who are dynamic and capable of navigating risk And all of these things.
We're talking about the immune system of such a creature, right?
It's in school and you are keeping it safe from a disease today, that if it got the disease it would be safe for the rest of its life in all likelihood.
And instead of allowing it to become safe for the rest of its life, at very low risk of any health consequence, you are going to stave off, six months at a time, you're gonna stave off this disease And so that later on in life, when they are more vulnerable, that they are going to have an encounter with it.
Risking taking out the young person's immune system, at least with regard to this disease entirely.
Right.
That makes no sense.
And the mask thing is just so unimaginative with respect to, I mean, just the very fact, as we talked about I think last week,
The highly unusual fact of human facial musculature having gotten all of this control specifically for the purpose of exchanging information about state of mind and the point is, you're going to interrupt that and you're going to say, well, we don't think it's serious enough, that COVID is more serious and that we're not going to worry about the fact that we're taking years of these kids lives and we're going to block off this much of their face.
And you know, we were objecting early on to the, frankly, largely coming from the right statements that, ah, it's just the flu.
It's less bad than the flu.
Well, in children, it appears to be less bad than the flu.
Always has been, by a lot.
And keeping kids safe.
Okay, so we're going to pick one thing, one thing which makes kids unsafe, one thing, and maximize that.
It's like these people have never heard of trade-offs, or diminishing returns curves, or anything mature and wise about how it is that you navigate a world in which actually it's not just one variable.
There's not just one variable.
If COVID was literally the only risk to anyone, And there were no costs to these mitigation measures, then maybe.
It's not the only risk, and there are known costs, and you've got to know that there are a lot of unknown costs, too.
And we are doing incredible damage.
And, you know, also one of the other things that she says in there is, you know, A, her three-year-old is in school, which is a bizarre claim, but okay.
But a three-year-old's in school, wears a mask, snacks outside, whatever.
He doesn't, I think what she says is he doesn't mind.
Yeah.
And this is consistent with the trans activists also, the trans rights activists, the TRAs.
They would have us believe that everything that a child conveys, be it actually stated in the case of trans rights activists or not stated in the case of my kid doesn't mind, Is the truth about that child and what they currently believe to be true is somehow magically turning into reality as well?
Now, we don't believe it when the kid claims he's a dinosaur, but when he claims he's a girl, we do believe it.
And when a kid tries to be a big boy...
And doesn't complain to his mom, who's the damn press secretary, that actually he'd like to be able to hug his friends, and maybe he doesn't even know.
He probably doesn't know what he's missing.
Right.
He's three, and he's three, he doesn't know about seeing people's faces on, you know, without these things.
I've had three different interactions with children this week, children I don't know, in stores.
Little children who were not masked, thankfully.
Sometimes even the babies are masked.
But these little children weren't masked in Oregon.
Everyone else is masked in stores.
But I was able to play these sorts of like peekaboo games with these kids, and in their cases the moms were Fine with it.
Sometimes they get freaked out if a stranger wants to play such a game with their kid.
These kids were so ecstatic.
They seemed more ecstatic than usual to just have some interaction in which there was pleasure on the part of another ape on the other side of the interaction.
And I so wanted to just take off my mask and let them see my face.
But I didn't.
And I thought, again, what are we doing?
How will we ever end up knowing what all we have brought with all of this?
And, frankly, who will be held accountable?
Yeah.
Actually, a mutual friend of ours contacted me for advice this week, and the question was literally, Should I move?
I am concerned about masks on my very young children and the developmental effects.
This is somebody who's actually considering upending, moving away from their family, moving to some state where this is A place that I think the family has lived.
He's not a first generation person there.
Right.
This is a place where somebody has roots.
And the idea is those roots are up against the normal developmental inputs that will allow a person to become a full human being.
And, you know, it was very difficult to say, well, the masks suck, but, you know, it's not that bad.
Because maybe it is.
Maybe it is that bad.
Maybe it is that bad.
And that actually isn't...
Let me read a little bit from this excellent piece that came out this week.
You may show my screen, Zach.
This is from an outlet called Front Porch Republic, which I did not know before, and the piece is by someone named Teddy Macker called Facts to Faces on the Masking of Children at School.
So I'm just going to read from my PDF of it.
Please know that were you to say to me, but Teddy, you are callous and out of touch for carrying on like this, my father died of COVID, I would bow and fall silent.
But I also bow and fall silent when I see the boy walking through the park before school with his mask on.
This child, like so many other children, is haunted by a fear that's most likely a phantom.
As you may know, of the 74 million people in our country under 18, about 500 have died of COVID.
Of those 500, it seems some, many, had underlying health conditions.
And if you glazed over reading those last two sentences, we are all so numbers-hungry and yet numbers-numb, please consider reading them again.
In the interest of seeing life steadily and seeing life whole, these numbers should be known.
So wouldn't it be more sensible for that boy to fear riding in the car on the freeway with his texting-prone sitter?
Or visiting the pool with friends?
Indeed, it's easy to think, like many do, that the masking of children is a symptom of a large, unwieldy, and blind momentum portending a host of dystopian changes, and that we've collectively gone nuts.
I'm skipping a section here.
And it's easy to think that we adults have welched on a primary charge to teach the children that the world, even with the fret and strife that accompany being human, is good, beautiful, and worthy of our trust.
Social thinker and educational philosopher Rudolf Steiner wrote, quote, From the first to the seventh year, gesture predominates in the life of the young child, but gesture in the widest sense of the word, gesture that in the child lives in imitation.
What kind of gesture, one can only wonder, do they imitate now?
One more section.
One wants to shout, what about the crappy pesticide-laced food so many kids eat?
What about the plague that is their physical inactivity?
What about the gadgets driving us, kids and adults alike, to suicidal soul-ruinous despair?
What about the public health epidemic that is the Internet?
Who isn't dying by inches because of the Internet?
What about the other challenges we face that have been nudged aside and forgotten and are actually graver than COVID-19?
And what about the challenge underlying all these challenges?
A crisis of meaning, of spirit, of a sacred hoop to borrow from Black Elk that is broken and scattered.
This is an extraordinary piece and I recommend everyone reading all of it, but he's exactly right.
We have replaced All of our concerns with a single one, and we are being told to hate the people who are on a different side of a single line.
As opposed to recognizing that we likely agree completely with nobody else on the planet, and we likely disagree completely with nobody else on the planet.
And that those of us who see what is happening to children and to democracy right now, sometimes we feel like we're yelling into a void.
But we also know you and I know and we hear from other people who are speaking publicly that the amount of Voices that we hear in return saying thank you.
Keep it up.
What do I do?
How do we get out of this?
We don't have all of the answers by a lot But you have to know that you're not alone that there are a lot of us out here Yeah, I've noticed, I'm sure you have too, a theme has begun to emerge in the many pieces of correspondence that we get.
And it's interesting, it's not the first time this has happened to us where a theme from, you know, dozens, hundreds of people who aren't in contact with each other emerges, presumably because it's Separately evolving and bubbling up in all of these different quadrants, but the theme is Thank you.
You are keeping me sane and I Increasingly, I mean a I know as you know exactly what they're talking about because it is like I'm struggling for an analogy that is not antlions and what happens to an ant that has gone over the edge of an antlion You may have to describe antlions
Antlions are the larva of an insect that sits at the bottom of a hole that it has excavated, and these sides of the hole are steep, and if you step over the edge, you slide further and further in.
The more you struggle to get out, the more you kick the sand loose and fall into the mouth of the antlion.
You being an ant, not a person.
Antlions do not come in a size such that a person could fall into an antlion funnel trap and die.
As far as we know.
I never have seen it happen or described, but of course the people who would have been able to describe it are presumably gone into the maw of an antlion.
Right.
You, the ant, find yourself struggling and making reverse progress.
But in any case, yes.
What was the antlion analogy?
The antlion analogy is the struggle to remain sane as effectively a thousand different messages that induce you towards insane conclusions come at you from every angle.
They start coming out of the mouths of your friends.
Right?
And the point is staying sane at this moment is not a simple job.
I do think you and I have been pointing out in ways big and small that the key to it is finding other people you can trust and trusting them, right?
That's the thing.
And so anyway, apparently a lot of people are getting something necessary and vital from us just by simply hearing a conversation that it may be a lot of things, but at least it's not crazy.
So, Yeah, and when we're wrong, we say it.
And when we disagree with one another, we say it.
And that's how it's supposed to work.
Yeah, we're trying to make sense.
And when one of us says something that isn't quite right, the other one pushes back and, you know, the walls don't collapse.
And anyway, it's kind of what sanity sounds like, I guess.
But in any case, that's a really interesting and important theme to suddenly be bubbling up in people's minds.
And I believe it is an important indicator of something.
But I did want to say, I'm struggling between...
Two instincts on the mask thing.
I increasingly think the mask thing is diabolical, especially as we inflict it on children and pretend that it's going to be low cost and that the reason that we're doing it is about keeping them safe from something that would actually render them perfectly safe indefinitely if they got it.
But the other thing is There's some, I think I must have picked it up from fiction somewhere, but there's some sort of an obligation to respect a highly capable enemy.
Right?
To note what the enemy has done right.
And you can imagine being some kind of warrior on a battlefield and, you know, somebody outfoxes you and you both suffer from it but also can appreciate the elegance of what they've done.
The mask thing is diabolical genius.
It is absolutely diabolical genius because of two things.
One, the symbolic nature of it.
Right?
The fact that they have gotten us to remind each other of just how dangerous everybody is if you don't let your guard, your literal guard down, right?
Or if you do let your literal guard down.
That is a beautiful metaphor, right?
Everybody else, they're your enemy, they're a hazard to you, right?
And the point is... Unless you're sitting next to them in a cafe.
Well, that's the thing, as you and I have begun to joke about the COVID layer.
The COVID layer exists up with the waitstaff, right?
Because they're standing and obviously the COVID is up there.
And it's also very useful to have them be othered.
Wonderful to have them be othered because of the class implication of it, right?
You are being served there at the table, mask down, they are serving, mask up.
It's lovely the way it separates us.
Everything for division.
Right, everything to divide us.
But then the most amazing part of it to me is at the point that you begin to realize that this mask thing, that the evidence that the mask thing actually works by putting, you know, putting them on healthy people, that that protects anybody?
It does not, right?
What's more, mask versus not mask is not the category.
Most masks are garbage.
Right?
This is something I got wrong, okay?
Most masks are garbage.
For masks to stand any chance of doing any good, you have to get a really good one and you have to know how to use it, and that's not what we're being mandated to do, right?
This is a symbolic gesture that has got us constantly in the mindset of COVID, and it is exactly the same goddamn thing.
As at the beginning of this, when they shut down the beaches and the trails and you and I were saying, hey, wait a minute, outside is where you want people to go.
They are safest out there.
It's mentally good for them.
They can interact with each other normally and not be in such terrifying fear all the time.
No, they should sit inside, eat Doritos, play on social media and wait for the vaccine.
That's effectively what was being said.
And so the thing is, the masks are the way of getting the constant reminder out there where it doesn't belong, right?
And it is amazing.
And the point is, as soon as you realize this and you say, you know what?
The masks really are.
That's the way the enemy has intruded into every interaction that we are going to have, and we are obligated to stand up against it.
But now you're in a bind, right?
If you don't wear your mask while others are wearing the mask, you are one of two things.
You are either enlightened about the fact that the masks don't work and in rebellion, but much more likely, you're just not somebody who cares very much about other people, right?
You're not even willing to put on a mask to protect other people from a disease, right?
And so the point is, that's the trap here.
is that we can't rebel, even those of us who are enlightened and understand the problem.
And frankly, even me, who was ahead of this more than almost anybody and championing masks as an obvious remedy at the beginning before we knew that they didn't work, right?
Even I am in this bind where I can't stand up and say, you know what?
I'm not wearing the mask anymore.
And it's not about the rest of you.
It's about the people who are using this mask mandate to separate the rest of us, right?
I can't make that point because just simply not wearing a mask broadcasts the message that I'm inconsiderate of others' health, which is not what motivates me at all.
And yet part of what is being demonstrated is that even we will comply with some things.
Right?
So increasingly, I think what we need is a mechanism whereby if we have to put on a mask, we can indicate that we are not putting it on out of belief, that we are not going to stigmatize anyone who decides that they should not wear a mask because we know the truth of the thing.
So that we are not in the position of being induced to broadcast a false message of indifference to our fellow man in order to rebel against some governmental authority that is abusing its power.
And I don't know exactly how we get there, but we need to We need to do it, and we need to do it right away because this masks thing is such genius, right?
They're getting us.
It's like they've gotten all of us to wear their logo broadcasting their brand everywhere, right?
And to put our own spin on it, and it's enough, right?
This is evil.
Yeah.
I agree.
Maybe it's time to talk about what you termed ethical offense.
I think we just were.
I think we just were talking about ethical offense.
Maybe we've done that.
Well, I want to add one thing to it.
We, because of the strange life that we have been thrown into after leaving our positions as college professors, we are reasonably, we are pretty well insulated compared to most people to various kinds of mandates, right?
Because, you know...
We run our own business out of our own home.
We don't interact with as many systems that are capable of inflicting penalties on us.
But we've in fact run into penalties twice this week.
And I'm not going to talk about the particular details of the organizations in question.
But twice we have encountered discrimination based on an unwillingness to receive these vaccines.
And no alternative is offered, right?
It is not that they are saying you can't participate unless you provide evidence that you don't have COVID with a recent test, which frankly I think is probably unnecessary given where we are with COVID.
But I'd be willing to do that, right?
You know, because we are not indifferent to other people's health and because COVID is a serious disease.
I wish I thought it was a truthful and accurate indicator, but given that I don't believe that of the vaccines anyway, if we're in that landscape, at least having that be an option would be a way to allow all human beings to participate in whatever it is that we're trying to participate in.
Not even just allow.
My suspicion, based on everything you and I have uncovered and looked into, is that a person who has a negative test, especially in fact, in light of the fact that the tests seem to be biased in the direction of diagnosing COVID where it might not be.
They tend more towards false positives.
Right.
That's what you're saying?
Yes.
My suspicion is that a person who has a recent negative test is safer to be around from the point of view of the likelihood of catching COVID from them than somebody who's been vaccinated a month or two ago who could very well have COVID and you wouldn't know.
So the point is if you're really trying to protect your event From COVID, and I understand, certainly, even if you didn't believe in these vaccines as being safe and effective, I could certainly imagine being in the position of hosting an event and imagining that somebody's going to come through the door and, you know, there might be an event where people get COVID at your, you know, at the thing that you're hosting.
And, you know, obviously there are consequences.
There could be legal consequences.
Why weren't you vigilant about blah, blah, blah.
You know, and there could be damage to your organization's reputation.
So I'm sympathetic, and that's why I'm willing at my own expense to get tested to participate.
But what I'm not willing to do is pretend that it is acceptable for us to be othering each other over these remedies.
These remedies are not high quality and they're dangerous, and there is no nuance whatsoever being offered with them.
So the idea, you know, that an organization would say, well, you're not vaccinated, you can't participate, when they didn't even ask us if we'd had COVID, right?
So if we had had COVID and hadn't had a vaccine, we would be the safest people to be around, at least as far as Delta goes.
So the fact that they didn't ask means that this isn't really about health in the first place, or it's so un-nuanced as to be absurd, And so, enough.
We cannot continue othering each other.
And that means, effectively, note that you are being used by something that hasn't even figured out if it is interested in health at all.
It hasn't even figured out how to age stratify or how to separate out those who are immune from a natural source versus a vaccine source.
It hasn't done any of this work, right?
And it has you othering other people.
That's an immoral entity.
And so the point is, we have to start turning the heat up on those who would do the bidding of this thing.
Yes.
Yes, and I actually saw, we also saw an example online.
This wasn't, this didn't directly affect us, but there are some cities now that actually have vaccine mandates for indoor dining.
Seattle is one of them.
We were looking to eat at a place, not in Seattle, where there are not mandates handed down from the authorities, but where some cities, some institutions like restaurants, I do have vaccine mandates.
Most of them also say negative test within some number of hours at the door, but most do not.
And I was looking at a restaurant that looked really fabulous, and they had all these great reviews, except somehow the overall review average was very low, and it was about the three most recent reviews.
Who were all from, it turns out, members of the same party, had gone to the same meal, and at first I thought, oh, you know, the restaurant was having an off night or something.
Well, it turns out, upon reading these reviews, that the major objection that the people in this party had was that they went out for some, you know, big event, there were many of them that went out to this meal, and that this restaurant did not require proof of vaccination.
And on that basis, these three individuals, who had what sounds like a very good meal, were effectively engaging in the very same tactics as Cancel Culture.
They had the ability, given that this is a restaurant that has not been in existence for a lot of time and so didn't have so many reviews, that the three most recent ones being terrible, didn't affect the overall rankings.
They had a chance, and especially in an era of restaurants struggling to survive and it not being clear what they're going to be required to do by the city or the state or whatever, it was particularly appalling that people would go after a restaurant this way for failing to put up a should-be-their-choice vaccine mandate for entry into their restaurant when, again,
COVID is not the only risk to you out there, guys, and for almost everyone, it is not the major risk to you, by a long shot.
And again, I'm not going to use the specifics here, but the restaurant owner, or his agent, responded to the lengthiest of these galling reviews and said, we're very sorry about these other experiences that you had, but with regard to vaccine mandates, This is our choice.
We choose not to require evidence of vaccination against COVID at the door.
I was about to say he did not say like, nor do we require evidence of vaccination against rabies at the door, right?
And you know, most people are never going to run into rabies.
You and I are vaccinated against rabies because we once lived a life in which we were being exposed potentially to rabies with some regularity and that vaccine was time tested and understood to be effective as well.
So the owner stood up for himself and as far as I can tell from the website they're doing a brisk business still and actually doing it despite
Despite the techniques of, frankly, the woke ideologues, the religious-like people who would have us believe that all white people are racists, and you can be a man if you say you're a man, or a woman if you say you're a woman, and that all sexual assault is equivalent, and all of the other garbage that's coming out of social justice ideology,
Those tactics, cancel culture tactics, are now here, over in, um, we found the next enemy, and, uh, it's, it's you.
If, if, if you are unvaccinated, you're the enemy, and therefore all rules are off the table.
I can do whatever I want in order to get you Cancelled.
And in this case, a restaurant that simply doesn't mandate that you as an unvaccinated person are excluded.
Yeah, it effectively treats being unvaccinated with these vaccines as synonymous with being diseased and contagious.
Yes.
And that is preposterous.
If these vaccines worked, that would be preposterous.
But these vaccines do not.
And Gibraltar, for example, tells you that their fantasy world in which everybody gets vaccinated and COVID goes away does not exist.
Right?
So they don't have the right to do this to us.
And so the question is, if I was running a business, frankly, we see signs on doors that say, you know, masks required and all.
I'm increasingly annoyed by those signs.
I don't know the extent to which those signs are mandated versus voluntary.
In Oregon, it's mandated by our governor.
Right.
Now the question then is, can somebody who is enlightened, who understands the reality of masks, that this is not an N95 mask mandate, nor is this a, you know, mask mandate that correctly parses the difference between putting a mask on a sick person and putting a mask on a person who shows no signs of being sick, versus the absurdity of putting a mask on somebody who's had COVID and recovered and therefore is really unlikely to transmit the disease, maybe at the level of zero likelihood, right?
So what the question is, maybe, you know, if I ran a business and I had to put that sign in my door, what else would I put on my door to indicate that I was actually aware of the absurdity of this and that the real purpose was, you know, it's some variation on the don't hurt me wall.
Yes.
Right.
You know, the the the wall of signs that say black lives matter was not about somebody emphasizing by repeating it that black lives matter.
It was about somebody broadcasting something about their own, you know, compliance.
And this is likewise not so dissimilar from the videos that we saw of people being harassed while dining, right?
You know, put up your fist and say Black Lives Matter or we'll harass you on video and broadcast it to the internet, right?
The question is, oh, you know, can you dine here?
Well, are you vaccinated?
You know, are you willing to say that Black Lives Matter on video?
It's all the same thing.
What will they put up with?
What will everyone put up with?
To what degree will what percentage of the population put up with this?
How about this?
How about this?
Now we know.
Right.
What then happens?
And it is effectively like, well, we the agents of the narrative have the right to demand that you indicate that you are compliant with the narrative.
And at the point you indicate you aren't compliant with the narrative, then we have the right to stigmatize you.
Right?
And that is now happening.
It's not exactly like it went down with Woke and BLM, but it's not so different either.
It's clearly a variation on the same playbook.
And, you know, this fits very well with what we've been saying about, you know, there's Woke, original flavor Woke, and then there's medical Woke.
Right.
And the point is, these have nothing to do with science or a detailed analysis that reveals a pattern that these are narrative assertions that then cause citizens To step in and do what governments cannot, right?
Citizens are being used against each other, and it is very much, you know, is it exactly brown shirts?
No.
But the problem is, you know, why are we in that quadrant of the library?
Why are we searching for analogies in that quadrant of the library?
That should be telling you something, right?
That should be telling you something.
And so the point is, you know what?
It's not brown shirts, but It's not so different either, right?
It's not Tuskegee, but it's not so different either, right?
There are genuine, real analogies to be drawn here.
And the fact is that, you know, Zach, will you put up the image I sent you?
The water fountain.
This is effectively what they're doing to us, right?
This iconic image of separate drinking fountains, right?
We are being told that the world has to break down this way, and frankly, I don't know.
This is obviously way before our time.
I don't know what the official rationalization was for separate drinking fountains.
It certainly has an epidemiological Implication, right?
Which is of course obviously stupid and absurd.
It's not like people within a race don't give each other diseases, right?
So this was obviously a phony implication.
These drinking fountains needed to be separated and it's not so different.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think the rhetoric like now was around dirtiness and lesser status and lesser worth.
Yeah.
It is, and you know, enough.
So what I hope, you know, obviously our core audience is not new to the idea that something wrong is afoot and that the narrative is taking liberties it has no right to take and it isn't based in science.
But for those who are maybe encountering us early or Alright.
to wake up to the idea that they've been dragged into something that isn't what they were told, please think about the degree to which you are being used to do the bidding of a government that can't do this itself.
Yeah.
It needs your help to stigmatize other citizens.
And the first thing to do is to stop complying.
All right.
End of rant.
No, I think we need more of that.
I THINK THAT'S A GOOD THING.
This week, our friend Mike Nena, which is a name that will be familiar to many of you, he is a documentary filmmaker.
He made, among other things, he documented the Grievance Studies Affair with Peter Boghossian and Helen Bluckrose and James Lindsay, and he also produced Directed, created, all of it.
The three-part, one-and-a-half-hour total, evergreen documentary, which he sort of came to know as we met him back when we did a... Actually, I guess we met him when we did an event.
We met him and Peter Boghossian and Helen Bluckrose and James Lindsay and James Damore all at the same event, where four of us were on stage and you introduced us.
All of this at Portland State University back in spring of 2018, something like that.
So I just want to add, what I believe happened was he was going to use Evergreen as an example in his documentary on the Sokol Squared hoax.
The Grievance Studies Affair.
And as we told him would happen, if you dig into the Evergreen story a little bit, you're going to fall into this incredible rabbit hole of absurdity.
And that's in fact what happened.
And so he did a separate little documentary on Evergreen.
Not that little.
Yeah, it's not that little.
Three parts.
If you haven't seen it, it's totally worth it.
You'll understand things about this.
And you know, it's also a good time capsule because it was several years back.
But anyway, he also participated extensively with Benjamin Boyce in putting that together.
A lot of the footage are things that Benjamin Boyce collected, cataloged, and, you know, pried loose from Evergreen in Benjamin's… The swear requests that just wouldn't stop.
Right, and so Benjamin has done an incredible job of getting all of the material that explains that event into the world.
So anyway, check out Benjamin Boyce and Mike Nayna on YouTube.
There's a whole world of fascinating stuff.
Yeah, so Mike has become a friend.
We haven't seen, well, anything of him in the last two years, of course, but we haven't seen much of him, but he saw our clip on what we understood to be happening in Australia, and he wrote to us at some length, and we had a little back and forth, and I'm going to post his entire letter to us on my Substack next Tuesday.
That's going to be my Tuesday post, but and, you know, I asked him, you know, what degree he wanted To be anonymized and he said you don't need to anonymize me at all.
I think this is important to have in the world But you know, he says these are just some things I've seen, you know These are just some things that I've jotted down about what I've experienced being in Australia because he's Australian Since since this all began so he says Heather's analogy to the reporters covering the Portland riots in late 2020 is close to how I see it too.
While gathering personal stories and perspectives on the ground, it becomes clear that experiences differ from state to state, from suburb to suburb, and even house to house.
There's something absurd in trying to describe it all in monolithic terms.
Australians are dot dot dot.
Some things that have stuck with me, though, he says, include.
I saw a man in a canoe stopped by a police boat.
I was pulled over by two policemen on motorbikes, sirens and all, for having my nose sticking out of the top of my mask.
It was a sunny day and I was alone for at least 300 meters in all directions.
They were not polite.
It was illegal for me to see my family for the better part of a year, even outdoors, because they lived outside of a permitted zone.
My sister was home alone with two boys, aged four and six, for around eight months while her husband was stuck in Africa.
We had to obtain a doctor's letter to visit her.
When I'd arrived, she'd burst out of the house as if she were escaping something.
A friend went for a run and was stopped by police.
They checked her ID and asked what she was doing.
She said she was exercising.
Two hours later, she got home, and they were waiting to fine her for exceeding the time limit for permitted exercise.
He's got a lot more, again, which I'll post on National Selections on Tuesday.
Yesterday, Mike sent another note as follows.
One more thing you might find interesting and to keep you up to date is that it's summer now and the east coast of Australia is at long last moving from a zero COVID paradigm into a mitigation model.
My sense from talking to family and looking at their Instagram feeds is that lives are looking a little more normal and memories of the police state are beginning to fade.
I'm sure many, like myself, saw something they don't want to forget so quickly and are unsettled by the state's capacity to flick the switch like they did.
Terrifying.
So terrifying.
And as we said in the original clip, which he was referring to, which he was responding to, it does feel like there will be people who will say, I'm in Australia, and that's not true.
And what they mean is, I'm in Australia, and I didn't see any of those things.
And that's quite possible.
Of course.
In some of these cases, only Mike and say those police officers are the ones who saw it, right?
But the idea that you will generalize a perfect, you know, pseudo-utopian democratic state from not having directly experienced things yourself, especially if you have the kinds of privilege that many of the voices out of Australia who are claiming that nothing is amiss there have, is rather the opposite assumption that you should have.
These examples, in this case from a trusted friend, we know he is not making any of these up.
Do provide evidence that something has been very much amiss.
They do not speak to overall pattern.
We don't know how many incidents there were like any of those, but one person alone, a person with a trained eye who is experienced in documenting things, saw a number of things across a number of domains that were very much amiss and did not remind him of the country that he calls home.
Yeah, I think the thing we really can't infer is how patchy it is.
And he says that, right?
Differs from suburb to suburb, house to house.
But the fact that one person observed all of these things says something really dramatic.
And I would point out, I've been thinking an awful lot about Julian Assange in light of his losing his motion to stave off extradition.
And it increasingly is clear to me that You know, I mean, I was vocal at the beginning of the Assange affair, and I don't think I was vocal enough, because I think the point is it was very hard to make the case that this is the step onto the slippery slope that leads somewhere you will find impossible to believe, right?
We are now somewhere that many of us find impossible to believe.
And the point is, Julian Assange was the canary in the coal mine, and the absurd treatment that he faced and the false portrayal that has been so relentless was a clear indication that something wanted rights to do this to a journalist that embarrassed it, right?
This journalist did journalism.
And the rights that a person normally has now, he's not an American citizen.
So in some technical sense, he lacks certain rights that he might otherwise have.
But nonetheless, something clearly wanted to turn him into a political prisoner, torture him publicly, so that we could all watch him come apart, so that others wouldn't wouldn't dare to do the same.
Sort of thing and we now have some indication of why and no doubt the thing didn't know about COVID and in what context it would abuse all of our rights But it did know that it wanted the right to abuse all of us and abusing all of us is a lot easier with Julian Assange You know in a cell somewhere.
And so anyway, this is a lesson of history that I think we need to remind ourselves of That you have to protest these things when they show up at first, because by the time it becomes clear just how important and broad the threat is, it's too late, you know?
You're behind the eight ball at that point.
That's right.
And it's even more important to protest the things that are being done to children, because what gets laid down in childhood becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to change.
So we risk destroying an entire generation.
We do.
And the reasons that, you know, the The willingness, the indifference to the well-being of children that this obviously illustrates is spectacular.
And then there's a question about why, why they would do this, right?
And anyway, it's something we should revisit.
Alright, well on that decidedly downbeat note, I think we're there.
Alright.
I think we've arrived.
So we're going to take a 15 minute break and then be back with our live Q&A.
You can ask your questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com and we will have our monthly private Q&A on my Patreon tomorrow at 11am.
Consider joining us there.
That will be our last regularly scheduled live stream until the second Saturday in 2022, believe it or not.
Like I said at the beginning of the hour, we are likely to do another live stream sometime between Christmas and New Year's.
We're not sure exactly when.
And we've got three more already recorded Dark Horse podcasts in the can, ready to deploy sometime.
Each of all of those, I think, will be released sometime between now and January 8th, I guess it will be.
Again, consider reading A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Not yet available in Lithuanian or French or Russian, but it will be soon.
And so you're restricted to English at this point, but it is available.
We're proud of it, and we've been hearing from quite a lot of people who have taken a lot of good from it.
We're continuing to do occasional podcasts on other people's podcasts about the book, and it continues to be A source of joy, actually.
So, anything else to say before we sign off?
Consider innovating something and putting hashtag stand up with stand and up capitalized.
Innovating something, some sort of resistance that will let people know just how many of us there are who are not putting up with it any longer.
Indeed.
And do what you can for yourself, including be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
