In this 110th 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 Covid from different rooms, because one of us has Omicron. It’s fine, very minor really. And having had it will provide lasting immunity to the virus! We discuss vaccine mandates, this variant compared to the last, and how some people have viewed the mRNA vaccines as a raft in a shipwreck, while oth...
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein and I am sitting today with Dr. Heather Hying from an undisclosed bedroom in our house.
The reason for this is that, well, it's not entirely clear.
It sort of seems that Heather might have COVID.
Do you know what says she has COVID?
She has the symptoms of Omicron.
A doctor confirms that it sounds like Omicron.
Do you know what doesn't say that she has COVID?
COVID tests.
So in any case, we are doing the responsible thing.
We are attempting to live by CDC guidelines for a household in which somebody has a presumed case of COVID.
I think it is fair to say, it will certainly emerge in discussion here, I think it is fair to say that we don't believe any of this makes sense in light of the ferocious contagion that is Omicron.
Which is very hard to control, but in any case, we will get to that.
This is live stream number 110.
Is that correct, Heather?
That is right.
All right.
We are back after a break of three weeks, which is why, despite the chaos here for the last, certainly, hour and to some degree day or two, we are coming to you live, even though it is not optimal.
Yes, now I will say, today's show is brought to you by the letter Omicron and the variable X, and it is not a palindrome, but we promise you a palindromic show sometime soon, perhaps in the upcoming week.
We have a little bit of Business to do here, but before that, let's just set out a goal for today's podcast.
I think that by the end of today's podcast, our audience should be able to make a credible argument as to whether we are broadcasting of COVID or with COVID.
I mean, it's a high bar, but it's not too high a bar.
It's not too high a bar.
No, I think that's excellent.
Yeah, we had some great plans and most of them kind of went to the wind, so we're going to be flying by the seat of our pants a little bit here today, but let's get the business out of the way, shall we?
Yeah, let's get the business out of the way.
And by the business, Heather means the paying of the literal mortgage, which we do through our courageous sponsors.
Not yet.
Nope.
Not yet.
Oh, wait, we'll get to the courageous sponsors.
And in the time that it takes to get there, they will become presumably even a little more courageous.
My God.
Okay.
Let's just get through this.
Okay.
This is harder without being in the same room.
I can't kick you under the table, which I never ever do.
Right?
But I know that you could, and it keeps me in line.
Exactly.
And you know that I can't now.
Um, okay.
So, um, uh, usually we talk about where we're going today.
We're, we're just, we're going to riff a lot on the Cron and other things related to COVID.
Today, we continue to encourage you to find A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century if you haven't found it yet.
We continue to be thrilled and pleased by the reception it's getting and by how many languages it's being translated into, what the sales look like, how many libraries are having to buy multiple copies.
It's wonderful.
And we'd love to hear questions about it, follow-ups, all of that.
We're streaming for now on both YouTube and Odyssey.
The chat is live on Odyssey.
Consider asking questions for our Q&A in the next hour at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We already have a number in.
I haven't seen the questions yet, but I've seen evidence in my email that questions are coming in, so that's great.
Consider joining one or both of our Patreons.
At mine, we have a private Q&A, a two-hour private Q&A on the last Sunday of every month, and we invite questions earlier in the month, and Brett does a couple of Fairly intimate conversations with people at higher dollar amounts in usually the first weekend of the month, but it's delayed a little bit, or first, yeah, I'm confused.
We have stuff at store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Nothing new since before Christmas, but we got direwolves, we got an epic tabby, we got some digital book burning, all of that.
And consider joining me at my substack, naturalselections.substack.com.
Where the last two entries, I was going to take a break from that, like we took a break from the podcast for two weeks, but I found myself writing about COVID and experiences with, and I may yet do that a third time this upcoming week since now the Omicron is with us, but go there and find those things.
Now, now we are prepared to pay Uh, the rent, by appreciating our sponsors.
I knew it was going to happen.
You knew it was going to happen.
Okay, we have, as has become our want, three sponsors today.
Are we ready?
I think we are ready.
Alright, since I'm in the bedroom, I can't see anything about what anyone else can see, except I can see Brett, that's it.
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I deleted the word evolution from the script somehow.
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Alright, our third sponsor is All Form Sofas, and I should tell you, I am wearing something that is not my reading glasses, because my reading glasses don't interface with these headphones, which I have to wear because, you know, quarantine and safety first.
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All right, there we go.
What should we talk about today, Brett?
Well, let's talk about the predicament that people such as ourselves who, let's face it, what we did when COVID descended on the world was after Zach and I made a number of midnight runs to our downtown studio to recover all of the equipment for the Dark Horse podcast and built the studio into our home here.
You and I started live streaming, and what we were really doing was trying to sort out, in all of the chaos of the information that was circulating around SARS-CoV-2 and the disease COVID-19 that it causes,
We started to use our generalist evolutionary toolkit to sort out what it all meant, and people watched as our model of what this was, which was initially crude, got better and better, and it helped to inform them as to how one might reasonably live in the time of COVID, how one might protect themselves from the disease and from contracting the pathogen.
And that was going really spectacularly well for a while until we hit a tripwire.
The tripwire involved certain things that the Public Health Authority, for reasons that were not clear, did not want to talk about.
That started with the question of Certain prophylactic treatments that might help avoid COVID.
I think you're actually forgetting, you know, the first tripwire was LabLeak, of course.
Well, that is true.
That's, you know, that's almost a year before we started talking about off-label use for drugs for prophylaxis and treatment of COVID.
So, you know, we weren't playing by narrative rules, ever.
And we weren't even on that narrative for very long.
And in fact, as you said, we started in March of 2020 in part because the messaging that we saw was so incoherent.
It just made no sense.
And we thought, frankly, that we could add some clarity, which I think in large part we have done.
Yeah, it was absolutely incoherent, and it did not give people a sense of what they could do to take control of their lives again.
And I will just remind people of some highlights that I've been thinking about this week, of things that we thought might be useful, and we discovered, as evidence came in about how the virus actually transmits, our model altered.
So initially, people who have been with us from the beginning will remember That we were doing things like wearing sacrificial gloves when we went out so that you could touch things.
If you touch the virus, you then come home, you strip your clothes off, you put them in the washer, you go take a shower, you throw away the gloves, or you put them in the washer.
These were all things that were SARS-CoV-2 transmitted by fomite might well have been useful.
We were also very early on the question of masks, much earlier than the people surrounding us here in Portland.
It turns out that masks, especially cloth masks, are not particularly useful.
The evidence does not support that.
People have watched our model get better and better.
We also had copper tape on our doorknobs because this will interrupt the transmission of certain viruses, and doorknobs are a place where they're very likely to be transmitted from one person to another for obvious reasons.
So anyway, all of these things are stages.
Where we contemplated something that might be useful and ultimately discovered that it wasn't, that the evidence didn't support it.
And so our model of how to protect yourself got better and better.
It started focusing on things like spending as much time outside as possible, both because you generate vitamin D outside, at least in the summer, this far in the temperate zone, because the virus doesn't transmit outdoors very well.
Now, of course, we don't really know what the truth of Omicron is, but So far, the outdoor environment has been much more as much safer.
And so we watched the public health authorities telling people to stay home and lock themselves in the environment where people were mostly contracting the virus.
And it was warning them away from the very places that they could go to feel sane, to have normal interactions.
And we raised the alarm about this.
We were also very early in pointing out that there was an important question about air circulation and that even an indoor environment could be made much safer by paying attention to the way air circulates or stagnates and doing things to adjust that parameter.
And we've done quite well.
That said, Omicron is a very different beast.
It is incredibly contagious, and people, I'm sure, around the country and the world are experiencing what we're experiencing, where every context that we interact with people, virtually or otherwise, we're discovering that lots and lots of people who are a degree of separation or two away from us have COVID, mostly.
It is milder than Delta.
There certainly appears to be a lot less severe illness.
But in any case, we are grappling with a new paradigm.
That said, the public health advice That we are given changes very little, almost irrespective of what the virus does.
And this, in many ways, appears to bear out what we have been arguing for many, many months, which is that something is driving our public health advice and messaging that is not about either containing the virus or reducing its harm.
And that is a very frightening thing to have concluded, but nonetheless, the fact that Omicron has not caused our public health authorities to completely revise their advice Is evidence that they are at best not paying attention to the change in the disease.
So we are living by or we are trying to live by CDC guidelines here for people who are believed to have COVID and are or believed to have contacted them.
But we also know from the evidence that that is almost certain to be futile.
That there is no way that it can contain a virus with people living together.
And so we find ourselves in a similar position as we do with masks, where when asked to put on masks, we put them on despite the belief that it is not a very useful mechanism for controlling spread.
Well, so we're obviously we're not in the same room.
And so this is this is a totally different situation.
It's very hard to really have a conversation.
But I think I think the fact is that, as we said, I believe On the last time that we were live with people, Omicron, if it showed up now, wouldn't be getting any attention.
If it showed up as the first time that anyone on earth had met SARS-CoV-2, it wouldn't merit attention at all, right?
It's just that minor for most people.
And some people are hospitalized and some people are dying.
But in terms of Highly transmissible, but really low level of disease.
That seems to be the MO of this variant by and large.
And so what we have said, I believe, on air, and certainly we have said it to each other and to our children and to others, is that in fact, and we are not the only ones to say this, that this may in fact function as the vaccine we all wanted.
And that it may actually be the thing that finally allows the idiotic and presumably self-serving, but certainly not serving any of the rest of us, public health policies and public health officials to stand down already and allow us back the things they took from us that they never had any right to take from us.
So in fact, It would make sense.
It is not my choice, having apparently contracted Omicron, to give it to someone at the grocery store.
I'm not allowed to make that choice.
But we certainly, within our family, ought to have the choice to say, you know what?
We're not vaccinated against COVID with the existing vaccines.
This variant flew in from we don't know where.
It appears to be easy to get and very easy to survive.
Hey, let's do that.
So, um, we, you know, the, the rules around, um, quarantining, if you've been in contact with someone who's positive makes some sense because you're not allowed to make that choice for other people, but within a family, you can make that choice.
So I want to go back and just fine-tune a couple things here, and I think in some sense the value of this podcast is hearing you and me talk about how we see these things and getting it precise is going to help other people know how to think about it.
There is this question of whether or not Omicron, I mean some people have raised the possibility that some entity, maybe a state or who knows what entity, could have released Omicron as a white hat
Contagious vaccine that would solve the problem by giving people natural immunity and basically taking us out of the hands of our inept at best public health authorities.
I want to point out whether or not anybody might have intentionally done that.
I want to point out the important distinction.
I think this is something that we covered on our Last private Q&A, but have not covered on Dark Horse, and I hope that if we did cover it on the main Dark Horse podcast that people will forgive me for the repetition.
But many vaccines, in fact many of our best vaccines, are what's called attenuated virus vaccines.
Attenuated virus vaccine is a true virus, a living virus, that is capable of infecting you.
But does not cause serious disease.
Now these vaccines can be excellent.
In fact, they tend to be excellent because since they do cause an actual infection, they play right into the immune system's tendency to fight infection and to learn the formula, right?
They tend to be very good at creating a robust immune response, a long-lasting one.
So an attenuated virus vaccine, knowing nothing else, is a good thing.
There is a slight hazard to it.
The slight hazard is that because you're dealing with a live creature, it can evolve and change.
And so although the virus that is used for these vaccines when they are manufactured is not dangerous, one could conceivably evolve a trick that its ancestor did not know.
And it could do something new either through recombination or mutation.
Now that's not very likely because those vaccines are not contagious between people.
You have to get injected with them and then you get this minor infection.
It causes immunity and you walk away with the ability to spot that pathogen before it makes you sick.
So if this Omicron is either somebody's intentional project, which to me seems unlikely but definitely possible, or an accidental attenuated version of SARS-CoV-2 that functions like a vaccine, it has one crucial difference.
The crucial difference is that it is contagious.
In fact, it's highly contagious.
So, that makes it even more frightening, because although Omicron may be creating less severe disease, it could evolve into something else, and as people have begun to learn, the rules of thumb that we talk about, about viruses evolving to become less virulent, they are rules of thumb.
They are not absolute rules, and they are especially likely to be upended by a virus that wasn't natural to begin with, as this one appears not to have been.
We have something that may well function as an excellent, very high quality, attenuated virus vaccine that gives people permanent immunity and could restore planet Earth to its prior state where we can go about doing our business and not worrying about COVID-19.
We don't know what variant comes next that might descend from Omicron.
It does not appear that Omicron descended from Delta, which is one of the things that raises the question of whether or not it came from a lab.
It appears to come from a much earlier ancestor that apparently was off the map and then returned suddenly.
Let me just interject here that what you just said may throw an error for people because the standard way of understanding evolution is as if in a line.
That A begets B, begets C, begets D, even when you're talking about not just individuals, but species.
And instead, what we have here, and I don't have any ability to share my screen with our setup right now, so I can't show you like a phylogenetic tree, but you might have a precursor organism that beget A and that beget Delta or, you know, from A. So, you know, the original variant may have, in fact, created Delta, but Omegron may have come from
One of those ancestors rather than, and it seems really clear that it did not evolve straight up from Delta.
So it's not a linear transformation, it's a branching formation.
And everyone is familiar with those trees, but the implication of the trees is often subtle.
And in this case we have two things.
One, Delta is not the ancestor as far as anyone can tell.
That is not hard to explain on the basis that it could evolve from some other strain circulating somewhere, but it appears to be from an early strain that spent a lot of time not evolving and then evolved very rapidly.
That's the perplexing thing.
But anyway, let's put that mystery aside.
We have a highly transmissible Less virulent.
It's not a safe variant, but it seems to cause a lot less death, certainly, than Delta did.
That that opens the possibility, especially since it is so contagious, of it creating herd immunity, of it creating a population in which most people have had it recovered and aren't vulnerable, and therefore As we talked about early in the pandemic, if the R factor drops below 1, that is to say that your average infected person has a strain that has a better chance of not finding a next victim than it has of finding a next victim, right?
If we reach that state, the thing heads towards extinction.
Now that could result in another variant popping up.
Those dynamics are interesting and difficult to fathom at one level.
But nonetheless, this could be the answer, assuming it doesn't evolve into something worse.
For people like us, we have a question that unfortunately we don't have enough information to answer perfectly.
We have to take a guess.
And the guess is, are we better off Contracting Omicron and getting the immunity that comes from it, knowing that that immunity probably will cover future variants, that there is probably a limit to how long it can do that.
But are we better off getting, suffering the disease, accepting whatever long-term consequences of the disease there may be, including very few?
That's one possibility, a likely one.
Or are we better off trying to stave off the disease, not getting the immunity, and therefore being vulnerable to the next set of variants that comes along?
That's the question people have to answer.
And so what Heather is saying here is, you obviously don't have the right to decide this for anybody else.
Right?
You don't have the right to decide this for somebody at the grocery store.
But shouldn't we, inside of our family, be able to decide, you know what, Omicron is not a perfect vaccine, that is one that is so subtle in its infection that you can't even detect the symptoms, but it certainly does seem to be vastly safer than the landscape we've just emerged from.
Should we effectively accept that infection as a vaccine that is far safer, many of us would argue, including Heather and me, than the current set of vaccines that we have?
Should we accept that immunity and move on?
And as a family, it would seem that we have the moral right to do that, and that logically speaking, there is a very strong argument to be made.
And I will point out, we've got a prior case of a different virus in which we have a kind of analog for this thinking, which is chickenpox.
So when Heather and I were children in the 70s and 80s, when somebody in a community came down with chickenpox, there was very often a decision to have children who did not have chickenpox play in close proximity to the child who was infected.
In the hope that they would contract it.
And the logic was that chickenpox became more dangerous the later in life you got it, and therefore contracting it early would provide natural immunity and prevent infection.
Now, I don't know whether our parents' generation was right to expose us to chickenpox, because chickenpox actually remains in your system for life, and it returns late in life as shingles.
So I don't know if having gained those chickenpox infections in an effort to gain natural immunity made any sense, but I do know that people have been through similar logic before, and their answer was not resist the disease at all costs.
Their answer was the disease you face as a child may be better than facing it later in life, a pattern that is also clearly true of SARS-CoV-2.
And that we ought to be having that conversation.
Given that it does not appear that Omicron is controllable in terms of its spread across the population, should we not be considering embracing the natural immunity and, frankly, using all of the tools that we have discovered that work to treat the disease in order to manage it so that the moderate level of danger it seems to pose is reduced to one that exposes very few to anything serious?
Yep.
Is that what you got?
Well, I mean, there's a lot more to say.
You know, we are in the position in our family of trying to live by rules that we don't believe are rational.
There's a question about how... I guess, I don't want to say that to our audience, because Because I don't think we are.
Today, we discovered that yes, what I suspected, we basically got a confirmation from a doctor that we trust very much, that given the particular nature of my symptoms, which again, I'm fine, right?
He said, yeah, you got Omicron, you just do.
That means that we had to completely upend plans to give talks at a conference we've been looking forward to for a very long time next week.
We had to cancel our travel, we had to cancel the plans, we had to change a whole lot else.
Because getting on a plane, if you've recently had Omicron, which is, in the vast majority of people, less impressive as an illness than a cold, is frankly reason to have you strung up by your heels in the court of public opinion at And we have stopped talking about all of the other insane things that people do all the time that put people at risk.
And we have stopped talking about the trade-offs in general in society and how it is that we have to make decisions knowing that everything that we do comes with some risk.
The idea that disappearing the risk on this one thing to zero, decreasing it to zero, is the way to be a mature and responsible adult.
No, it is not.
It is the way to be compliant and childish and to basically assure the authorities that next time they want to get you to do something, you're going to do it.
So, you know, we, we did, we did cancel our plans to travel starting tomorrow.
Um, because, because we are public enough about our positions and who we are and we cannot take the risk of actually having possibly infected someone.
So we are quarantining.
This bit about I'm also isolating, though, within the house, so as to maybe not get you all sick when it's actually highly, highly transmissible.
We've got HVAC.
We've got shared airflow here.
This feels like theater.
And it is theater.
And frankly, they've been putting us all through theater for so long.
I'm pretty done.
Well, I hear you.
I mean, I should point out to our audience, you have had two tests.
They have both come back negative.
We did not believe that negative result, and so we contacted a doctor to find out whether, in fact, it was positive.
Right.
And here we are, an hour later, doing a podcast from two different rooms, because that's what the CDC says we should do.
We have told you, the audience... As you know, most of what the CDC says we should do is Bullshit.
It's bullshit.
It's not going to work in this house, right?
But we have an obligation to our children, right?
We have an obligation to our children to not make them vectors of something, even if the thing that they would be vectoring is arguably very strongly in the favor of the people who might be infected.
In fact, both of their schools appear to have rampant Omicron infections at the moment.
I guess I wanted to say that.
I don't actually know how the rest of the country looks in this regard.
I know that Omicron is everywhere, but in Portland, The schools are insane.
Two of the high schools shut down, and they're going to go back to remote for six days.
The school that one of our children is at had, what did he say, 19 teachers out yesterday?
Something like that?
Did I make that number up?
I think it was actually somewhere in the 20s, and 17 of them were confirmed COVID or something like that.
Yeah.
And it's one of these biggish schools, but it's not that big.
That's an incredible amount of people out.
And at our other son's school, there are a tremendous number of student and faculty out.
And another school that we know of, what was the number?
Zach, if you can hear this, what did you say that the other school had, like 60%?
Say again?
60%.
60%.
Six zero.
- 60%.
Say again? - 60%. - 60%.
- Six zero.
60% of, was that everyone or just students?
- Students.
- So I couldn't hear him.
He said students.
Okay.
60% of students are out of one school.
So we're behind closed doors here.
It's insane.
But that's probably for the best.
At these schools, at two of those schools, at one of the schools we have no way of knowing, but two of those schools, the vast majority of these kids are vaccinated, which is almost certainly not good for them.
But Omicron might be.
Get it over with, get your infection, get your immunity, and move on.
Well, wait a second.
I agree that given what we know, that's the obvious right answer.
There is also that which we do not know, right?
So if somebody released Omicron as a white hat exercise in returning planet Earth to normal, They took a massive gamble on our behalf, which probably they didn't have a right to do.
Yeah.
Right?
Because it could evolve into something that is outside of their understanding.
I don't know.
Maybe it has a kill switch in it.
Or, more likely, it's a natural derivative of this unnatural virus, and there's some weird explanation for where its ancestor was hanging out and not evolving for all of that period of time.
But nonetheless, We've got a situation in which, um, let's put it this way.
I mean, again, I don't think incompetence could possibly explain the horrifying nature of our public health response to COVID.
It's on beyond what incompetence can account for.
Incompetence could get you arguably to a random response.
It cannot get you to a response that is the inverse of the right response, which is again and again what we have.
So, these people are absolutely awful at their job.
Is it because of corruption?
Is it because they have some kind of insanity that has not been publicly disclosed?
I don't know, but the point is... I have to say, actually, and I said this on my sub stack this last week, they are either awful at their jobs, or they are awful at the jobs that we have been told they are trying to do.
Right, they are.
And as you know, as we have talked about several times, it's really a very different question.
We have been told that they're trying to do a job.
And if they are really, truly trying to do the job that we are told they are trying to do, they're doing it abysmally.
But the idea that this many people in this many positions of power are doing this bad a job is rather, rather unlikely, and does point to at least an alternative hypothesis that they are not doing the job.
They're not even attempting to do the job that we think they are attempting to do.
Right, and actually nowhere are they doing it worse than in the US, right?
There are some ways in which we are lagging behind Australia and Canada in terms of some of the truly draconian nonsense, but in terms of their actual effect at controlling COVID.
We have an appalling response.
And the question is, do you really want to listen to these same people who have failed, who have actually raised the bar of failure on COVID for the world again and again?
Do we really want to listen to them as to what the right response to this is?
No, there's no way that we do, especially when I mean, look, the evidence is actually mounting, and I don't want to claim it's conclusive, but the evidence is mounting that actually vaccination with the current vaccines makes you more likely to catch Omicron, not less likely.
So in light of that fact, why is the recommendation, why is there not even a pause, right?
Why are they not gathered in a conference room and saying, look, Omicron is a different beast, right?
It has a different, it poses a different risk.
It may be the opportunity that we wanted.
We've got prototype vaccines that frankly, by any normal definition, are a cartoonish failure, right?
The feeble immunity that they create is not normal for vaccines, and everybody knows that.
What vaccine needs to be boosted every six months, right?
And for this virus that we're running the risk, we've got an adverse event signal that's through the roof.
The claim is, oh, that doesn't mean anything because anybody can file an adverse event.
Okay, but then that means we have no information on how many adverse events is.
It doesn't mean that there are no adverse events.
We have a massive signal.
We've got some people telling us it doesn't mean anything.
That's not the same as information that says it's safe.
What's more, we've got obvious problems with myocarditis and pericarditis, and these are not minor diseases.
The heart is not an organ that repairs.
It scars over.
So likely people who have these things, even when they get better, are being robbed of years of life.
So the question is, yeah, I'm not at all comfortable with the idea that getting Omicron is a safe thing to do.
The question is, is it safer than continuing to expose yourself to the public health authorities and their lousy advice on how to manage your health?
And I don't think that argument could be made.
So really, that's the question for us citizens, right?
Are we again going to continue to take advice from the same people who failed all the way here?
I vote no.
I'd like to read a poem, if I may.
Sure.
I mean, I can't even stop you without violating quarantine.
You'd have to break my isolation to come in here.
So this is in The Sun, this magazine which we subscribe to, which I like a lot, from the October 2021 issue.
I'll just read this without comment first, and then I'll comment afterwards.
By a woman named Alison Luterman, it's called, A Few Days After My First Vaccine.
Walking by the, and this is the October 2021 issue, so we know what vaccine she's referring to, a few days after my first vaccine.
Walking by the lake, I lose an earring and don't even notice it at first.
Overwhelmed as I am by the strangeness of everything.
Blocks later, my hand reaches up to feel that slight absence in one ear.
So then I have to retrace my steps, as they say to do.
Past the guy jogging with his mask pulled down and the hijab-wearing, stroller-pushing young mother in stylish jeans, And the homeless man emerging from his tent on the banks of our urban oasis, bearing a boombox on one shoulder.
And that's where I spot it.
Lying on the sidewalk, miraculously untrampled, small, precious found thing, a turquoise oval encircled with rows of beads, given to me with love by someone I haven't hugged in more than a year.
Tiny rescue from the sea of loss, just as we seem to have found a raft to grab onto in the wake of a shipwreck so vast we cannot yet imagine the end of it.
I was struck by this poem, and I've read it several times now, because I think it finally gave me some insight that I've been looking for into the mindset of the people who really believed, and many of whom still believe, that the vaccines are going to be our salvation.
This tells us that.
The last lines about the earring, but we know what she's talking about.
Tiny rescue from the sea of loss just as we seem to have found a raft to grab onto in the wake of a shipwreck so vast we cannot yet imagine the end of it.
The vaccines have been promoted by these same health officials who have had incoherent after incoherent, damaging after damaging recommendation and And and mandate in many cases that that come down on us with regard to this thing.
And they are the ones who successfully sold to many, many people the idea that there is one and only one solution for you.
It will be the vaccine that is the only thing that will help you.
These are the same people who will not talk about repurposed drugs.
They will not talk about vitamin D. They will not talk about the value and virtue and wisdom and health of moving your body and losing weight and eating real food.
They will not talk about any of those things.
The only thing they talk about is the vaccine.
And so in a honestly pretty hippie, crunchy, liberal, dippy magazine like The Sun, which I love, We have a poem that ends just as we seem to have found a raft to grab onto.
No, these vaccines aren't that.
They're not that.
And every passing week assures us that that's not the case.
So how do we, how do we talk to the people who still think that they're the raft and that those of us who didn't grab onto the raft are not actually sinking them?
So the I'm struck frequently, you know, you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that the first tripwire we hit was the lab leak.
I don't actually feel that it was a tripwire because, you know, I think of them actually as third rails.
And that one, we touched it.
And I think people were already clear enough that something about the story of the origin of this virus was Phony enough that we didn't suffer the same fate as discussing early treatment.
I think you're misremembering how hard it was for the first year, actually.
That may be.
Let's put it aside though.
Nonetheless, being steeped in the question of lab leak, and then finding ourselves with an appalling, cartoonish, upside-down public health response being managed by who?
Being managed by the dude who circumvented the law.
In order to make gain-of-function research that he wanted done move to China, so that the Congress's ability to prevent gain-of-function research from being done, explicitly because it could cause a very serious pandemic, he wanted to override that.
So, we are being fed I mean, if that was ineptitude, fine.
But the point is, is that not sufficient ineptitude that this person couldn't possibly be put in charge of dealing with the pandemic, right?
And having failed to deal with the pandemic, couldn't possibly be left in charge.
And certainly that same person who overrode the ban on gain-of-function research and offshored it To China, that that guy couldn't possibly be the one to decide whether we should just double down on the same vaccines in light of Omicron or maybe switch gears.
Why is that same guy in charge of the question?
Right?
That should be on everybody's mind.
This is a path.
Charge not just of the question with regard to the vaccines, but the only two possible drugs that have been considered, which turned out to be both ineffective and toxic.
are the ones that are produced by the profit-making entities as well.
Right.
And I would just add to that list of amazing anomalies.
You know, how many times were we shouted out about the supposed failure of randomized controlled trials as evidence for drugs that in a clinical setting clearly work.
But, you know, we have a randomized controlled trial that that says fluvoxamine works extremely well and it's not like that has been rushed to the forefront of the standard of care.
So we have a An incoherence, right?
We had to do everything to rush these vaccines to market in a single year, and it is an impressive feat to have done it, irrespective of whether or not the vaccines are something that should be contemplated by people.
But nonetheless, we were in this incredible rush to get a vaccine out the door, and now it's been a year and we're sucked We're stuck with the same vaccine, it hasn't even been updated with respect to antigen, right?
We were in such a rush, we're now rushing with the Molnupiravir, right?
But we have a drug that has passed randomized controlled trial, appears to have a very good effect, and there doesn't seem to be any movement on it at all.
What is this?
This is all true, but I think we're talking at cross-purposes, and I think maybe you and I are just in different places with regard to what is gripping us most at the moment about the utter absurdity of the moment that we're living in.
And I, for months now, really, have been trying to figure out what's in the heads of the people who are going along with this and helping make these policies, these insane policies, stick and persist.
And this poem, I feel like, gave me some insight.
And what I don't know is how How to reach such people.
You and I have both talked about things that we do, eavesdropping when we're out, not that that's going to happen for a few days here, or just raising anything that sounds like non-narrative, not on-narrative doubts in casual interchanges, and being not at this point surprised by the vast majority of people who immediately grasp onto that and go like, oh yes, yes, I don't see it the way I'm being told I see it, right?
And I mean, I had an interchange this week with a woman who I do know in passing, but who I thought was totally on board, who just got boosted recently and is done.
She is done.
The side effects she's experiencing, the fear now of what she has done to herself, and the fights that she is having with family and friends over her refusal to engage in the cognitive dissonance anymore.
It's extraordinary.
This reflects what a lot of people are going through, but how to be open and honest and honorable enough to reach more, to reach the people who would write a poem that seems so earnest and has so misplaced its faith in that raft.
These vaccines are no raft.
Well, but I think in some sense, it's the same thing, right?
I'm frequently asked to isolate the issues from each other.
All right, let's leave aside the issue of repurposed drugs.
Let's talk about the vaccines.
And the answer is you can't actually separate those, because the whole argument in favor of taking a vaccine this novel and applying it so broadly is that we didn't have a choice.
And to the extent that we did have a choice, and that choice was driven off the map first in order to make the argument that, well, Okay, it's novel, but we don't really have a choice.
The point is, those are two sides of the same coin, and so the sense that the person who sees the vaccines as the raft is conveying is a sense that was cultivated for them.
It's not a natural conclusion, right?
We would be somewhere very different if doctors had been allowed to do their thing, which some great doctors did, right?
Doctors are supposed to be scientists.
When they have an emergent condition, they are supposed to say, well, here are the symptoms, and this is what I think it implies about what's taking place inside of this person, and here are some compounds that have this and that effect, and I'm going to try them.
And they are supposed to learn, and then they are supposed to talk to each other.
And that process is supposed to make doctors better and better at treating the disease.
And what we did instead was we had some top-down bureaucratic thing telling doctors what they were allowed to think, what they were allowed to try, what they were allowed to discuss.
It has literally removed licenses, it has fired people who concluded things that were contrary to the public health authority, and it has created an environment in which basically you have two choices.
You either embrace the advice of a public health authority that is clearly mad, Or you're on your own.
And neither of those are good choices.
But it is time that we, the public, I mean in some sense, aren't we stuck When you and I were kids, the idea of entheogens, right?
These were very controversial.
And the idea that a person might actually have the right to ingest a mushroom that would alter the way they saw the world, that was not understood to be a right by most people.
And some of us said, well, what is the basis on which a government tells you you can't alter your thinking by eating a mushroom that does not appear to be toxic, right?
Why does the government get to do that?
And of course, you know, in 2020, 2021, 2022, we're waking up to the fact that maybe the government doesn't have that, right?
And in fact, there are therapeutic benefits to these things.
But why is this situation any different, right?
You've got a variant out there.
It is not safe.
But you are being offered other alternatives that aren't safe.
You're being offered vaccines that aren't safe, and you're being offered the gamble that you will face future variants that are even much less safe.
Do you not have a right to decide for yourself that actually, you know what?
Given everything I know about this disease, and given what I know about the hazard of Omicron, that I'm better off contracting it, and if you're really in good shape, you can actually manage the disease with many of the tools that the renegade doctors have discovered works, Right?
Are you not entitled to do that in consultation with your doctor?
And if not, why not?
This isn't a perfect segue, but I have one paragraph from Nobel laureate Carey Mullis to share.
So this is this book, which some of you will be familiar with, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.
Carey Mullis, of course, won the Nobel for inventing PCR, polymerase chain reaction.
Which is now being used for some of the tests for COVID.
And he famously, before he died in 2019, he wasn't that old.
He died younger than he ought to have.
He famously said, there's no way PCR should be used to diagnose a pathogen in a body.
It's just, it's too strong.
It's too powerful a process.
Would you say that's an accurate description of that?
Yeah, let me fill it in one step further.
The idea is, polymerase chain reaction, because it is inherently exponential, can amplify the tiniest signal and turn it into a readable piece of data.
And so the point is, Let's say that you have a PCR machine, and it's on a COVID ward, and you turn the cycle thresholds way up, right?
What you do is you end up amplifying contamination, so that many tests come back positive, when in fact, they shouldn't.
And so his point was, you can't...
Right, there's virus everywhere, right?
This is one of the things you learn, you know, in a laboratory setting.
It's very hard to control this stuff, and so if you have an amplifier, and basically the point is it can amplify any level, any low level of signal into one that is then going to trigger your test, it's not an appropriate diagnostic.
At the very least, you would have to figure out how to calibrate it and you would have to hold the cycle thresholds perfectly still so that you could see over time what was changing, right?
You have to have a definition for what it is to be positive with COVID rather than a floating definition that allows you to effectively shunt people into that category by amplifying contamination.
Yeah.
So there's a ton in this book that is extraordinary.
And I haven't read all of it, and this could have been said by a lot of scientists, but it's amazing how many scientists are not saying this now.
The scientists who would tell you to follow the science are mostly not saying this right now.
Again, Carrie Mullis.
Claims made by scientists, in contrast to claims made by movie critics or theologians, can be separated from the scientists who make them.
It isn't important to know who Isaac Newton was.
He discovered that force is equal to mass times acceleration.
He was an antisocial, crazy bastard who wanted to burn down his parents' house.
But force is still equal to mass times acceleration.
It can be demonstrated by anybody with a pool table and familiar with Newton's concepts.
This is just a perfect summary of the point that, you know, again, one that we've been making over and over and over again.
But, you know, the claims made by people in white coats with no reference to the actual data and no ability for those of us who could potentially understand it to see that data amount only to their opinions.
That is not science speaking.
That is someone who may or may not have an appropriate credential making opining.
That is them opining.
That is not them sharing a scientific conclusion.
It sounds like it is, and they want us to believe it is, but we can see from, you know, the rapidity with which, for instance, the CDC is changing their minds about stuff.
And the fact that what, you know, I don't remember where it is, but apparently the newest thing is, you know, what is Walensky and the rest of her team focusing on?
They just hired a PR firm.
Now at one level.
Okay.
They got a PR disaster on their hands for sure.
But they have a PR disaster on their hands in part because they have an actual scientific disaster on their hands.
And when I read that they had hired a PR firm, this was one of the main approaches that they were taking to try to fix the messaging problem.
I was reminded of, and you know exactly where this is going, Brett, but this was the move at Evergreen about two weeks into the mess there.
Instead of fixing it and turning it around, And being reasonable and seeing logic and having compassion for people with real complaints in that case, or recognizing what the data are actually saying and not calling people crazy and then having things that were called conspiracy theories six months ago now accepted quietly without anyone ever saying anything.
Instead of actually fixing the problems at the agency, they're going to hire a PR firm to figure out how to cozy it up and make it look good.
This is not what a science agency in the United States in 2022 should be doing, obviously.
This is not where their priorities should be.
Dragging this way out of the archive here, but there was a moment, there was a guy in the George W. Bush administration.
I think he was a Democrat named DeLillo.
He was like the token Democrat that the George W. Bush administration brought in.
And so he was in the White House and he reported that he was horrified to discover that there was no policy wing to the administration.
His point was the policy was coming from somewhere.
It was being fed in.
And the entire thing was about presentation, right?
That something was authoring the plan, and it had nothing to do with the people in the White House.
The people in the White House were a figurehead, right?
And, of course, the world came crashing down on him, and he was exiled, and all of the terrible things happened that you would expect.
But the point was it was one of those brief peaks behind the curtain.
Oh, you just discovered that your government is being inhabited by something that hasn't even thought about the implications of policy because that's not the point.
Which goes back to your point at the beginning of the podcast where you were saying that they may not be so terrible at their jobs, we just may not know what their jobs are.
And, you know, I agree.
In fact, I think somewhere months ago I said I thought I was betting that Fauci is actually excellent at his job.
It just isn't.
He's been at something.
Well, he's been at something.
But, you know, we.
Well, let's put it this way.
There's an interesting discussion beginning to bubble up behind the scenes.
And a lot of these interesting discussions happen amongst people who have crossed the Rubicon and are in the hinterlands months before they show up in public.
So, you know, mass formation showed up in the Malone podcast.
On Joe Rogan, but we had been talking about mass formation for quite some time, the Matthias Desmet model, and you and I had been talking about the impression that we had that there was clearly some kind of emergent psychosis overtaking the world, right?
We saw it, and we named it that before we knew what mass formation psychosis even was.
So I like Desmet's formulation, but nonetheless the point is there's a long discussion of what really matters that shows up before the public suddenly becomes aware that there's a discussion at all.
And so the discussion I want to reference now, there's a discussion beginning to happen about whether bodily autonomy is really even the point, right?
Some of us, I've been very careful not to invoke bodily autonomy because, as I frequently say, there are scenarios in which you can imagine that mandates would be justified.
And I don't want to say anything that suggests that the very fact of mandates are invalid.
However, the question, you know, so people will maybe have seen me say or tweet, not these vaccines, Not these public health authorities, not this pathogen, right?
Mandates fails on three separate grounds here.
These vaccines aren't effective enough or safe enough, the pathogen isn't dangerous enough, universally enough, and the public health authorities are not free of corruption enough that we could justify mandates, but... Not even close.
Right, not even close.
Here's where I think this is headed, though.
I believe it is conceivable that you could have a governmental structure good enough to be entrusted with the question of mandates in a sufficiently serious situation.
I don't believe that government has ever existed.
I believe we have to leave it open as a theoretical possibility that it is not a fact of history that we've had such governments and that we do or don't have one now.
We have a terrible instantiation, but none of the governments, none of the human architected governmental structures has been up to that challenge, which means that at least...
We need a new structure then, because the existing structures can't bring the best of humanity out of us and give us the government that maybe we deserve, but certainly we want.
Right, and I completely agree.
We need to figure out what that structure is.
As you and I argue in our book, it's not a structure that we can blueprint.
Nobody on earth knows how to blueprint it, but we could navigate to it, we could prototype our way to it, we could evolve our way to it.
But in the present, stuck with the governmental structures that we have, the argument would be, these governmental structures are not up to the challenge of mandating and overriding bodily autonomy.
They are not up to that challenge.
And in light of the fact that they are not up to that challenge, and nothing could be done to them that would make them up to that challenge, they are allowed one tool and one tool only.
And that tool is persuasion.
Right?
If they want us to take their remedy, because it is the right remedy, and because it is better than the others, and because that's how we will protect each other, their one tool is to convince us.
And they have completely failed to convince us.
Why?
Because the tools they have presented us are completely crappy.
Because their corruption is so obvious.
And because we can detect that what they are doing is taking any counter-argument and doing their best to silence it, to stigmatize it, to shunt it off the side of the map.
Right?
So we know we're not having a fair conversation about what the best path forward is.
We can all see that.
Right?
That's why people are being thrown off Twitter.
And I don't know.
tube, right?
That's what this is about.
It is about creating the false impression that their argument is actually robust when it could not possibly be more feeble.
And I don't know, I'm sick of it.
And we are now faced with Omicron and we are really left with the question of whether or not the test, did they pass the test so well with respect to previous variants that we are still listening to their advice with respect to this one, even though this one is so different and their advice hasn't changed. even though this one is so different and their advice Doesn't that tell you this isn't about us?
This is about their, I don't know, I guess business interests or whatever it is, but it's certainly not about us because the fact is the disease is so different.
The advice would certainly have changed if this was any sort of rational process, and yet it doesn't.
In fact, what they do is they pretend.
They, what's the...
Retcon.
They retcon things.
Retcon.
Retroactive continuity.
Where they tell us, oh, it was always the case that the vaccines were designed to prevent serious disease.
They were never designed to prevent transmission of the disease.
So the fact that they don't prevent you from contracting or transmitting the disease, and they don't reduce viral loads, oh, that was all expected.
It's all part of the design.
Well, bullshit!
Right?
We all heard them tell us that it was about control.
I'm reminded as you talk.
Just as maybe many of them are actually doing their jobs very, very well, and we just don't know what their jobs are.
Maybe the public health policy is very much doing what it's supposed to do, and we have just been misled by its packaging.
A point you have made in different forms in many ways.
That because it has the words public health in it, we assume that it's about public health, but that's our bad for being so gullible.
And I'm reminded of the thinking of the great John Taylor Gatto, recently deceased, who was an extraordinary educator and who wrote, among other things, Weapons of Mass Instruction and Dumbing Us Down.
And I've talked about his work before on this podcast, but in one of his books, he goes through a history of compulsory schooling, which, if memory serves, emerges from a German model in the late 19th century.
Which the Americans import, and it's basically like the robber barons, the rich tycoons of the turn of the 19th and 20th century who need mindless workers to do the work of the new industrialized world, post-industrial revolution, that explains the format of schools.
That schooling is not about creating well-informed citizens who can make decisions for themselves.
It is precisely about creating cogs.
That is, in fact, the point.
This feels a bit like that.
You say school, you say education.
You imagine sweet children bursting out of a classroom into recess and then going back into the classroom to learn the good things that they need to learn, and maybe that was never the point at all.
And maybe the point of public health policy has not been, at least for this, for this little pandemic of ours, the entire world has been dragged through for almost two years now, has never, the public health response has never been about public health, but about compliance, but about seeing how far you can push a population.
And maybe as a practice run, I don't know, but they do know a whole lot about how all of us will behave now.
They know who will tend to be compliant.
They know who will carry water for them.
They know who will ramp up their fears because it feels good because they can get other people to do things based on their fears.
There's a whole lot of knowledge now about what different quadrants of society and what different individuals will do and will not do.
And that is I don't know how to phrase this so that it will be hearable.
I know that natural rights is a fraught concept, but the thing is, we are human beings.
this feels like, you know, maybe the final blow.
But I don't even, I don't know how to phrase this so that it will be hearable.
We, I know that natural rights is a fraught concept, but the thing is, we are human beings.
We get one life.
In this life, halfway through for us or more, suddenly a virus that appears to be the product of really bad decision-making emerges out of a lab in China.
That really bad decision-making had Anthony Fauci as a prominent, he was at least an architect of the offshoring of the work that seems to have caused this pandemic.
And yet he is also somehow in a prominent position where he gets to tell you and me, you having apparently contracted a descendant of the virus that he stupidly had engineered, somehow he gets to tell you and me how we are to manage the consequences of this?
You and I are PhDs in evolutionary biology.
We are capable of looking at this and saying, I don't think that solution you've handed me is any good at all, and here's why.
I am also capable, as you are capable, of saying, you know what?
I've talked to Dr. Corey.
I've heard what he has to say.
I've heard him revise his understanding of things in light of new evidence.
We've talked to Dr. McCullough.
And in light of what?
And in light of new variants.
Right.
The people who are thinking on their feet are also recognizing that no matter how much information they had last month, what is happening now may be different because it's not just that the information is new to them, but what is true is actually changing.
This is also true.
Right.
And, you know, we've heard from Dr. Malone, himself vaccinated, right?
The inventor of the technology that underlies these vaccines.
We've heard him talk about the hazard of these things to us.
How is it That we, attempting to act responsibly and in the interests of ourselves and of our family, are not entitled to make those calls.
How can it be?
It just seems to me such an inversion of decency that Anthony Fauci has more say over what we are allowed to think and not think, do and not do, Then we do when Anthony Fauci has demonstrated at best incompetence.
He is a key player in the escape of this virus into the world, the creation of it and the escape.
And all of that ought to have him absolutely silenced in this conversation.
Responsible people who have proven that they can handle the complexities ought to be in a position of responsibility.
It's some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare where Anthony Fauci has all of the say over what we get to do.
I mean, look, Somehow, it would appear that you actually have contracted a virus that seems to have been engineered downstream of a Fauci offshoring grant through EcoHealth Alliance, right?
That's an amazing fact, right?
That error in judgment has reached out and touched you at the cellular level, right?
And frankly, as we have talked about, I will be glad to have had it.
And in fact, it's been so trivial, by and large, that it was never really that much of a big deal.
I am angry at the timing, in part, because this place that we were going to be going was Florida, which we've spent almost no time at all.
But by all accounts, one of our son's friends spent the winter break in Florida and came back to Portland, Oregon, saying, it feels so normal there.
Normal.
And we've been in Texas recently enough to say that that's largely the case there too.
We were just in Austin, but a lot of the country doesn't feel quite so crazy.
So somehow, some number of other political authorities, not public health authorities perhaps, are saying to the talking head that fills the screens, if you turn it on, no, actually, Not your choice.
We have been hearing, too, from many conservatives in the last few months saying, this is our objection to liberal forms of government because no government will be good enough.
This is, in fact, the response that we're getting from honest, wonderful conservatives who say, now you see.
Well, and you know, to the extent that that is their point, it is absolutely right.
And I would just add, it's not like governments don't have the right to make policy.
But the point is, the tool by which they should get there is persuasion.
They have to persuade us that this is actually the right path.
And mandating it is obscene.
In light of where this virus came from, and in light of what they've done to both the discussion and to the tools available to you and your doctor in order to deal with the condition.
And our point would be, you know, to your point earlier, we need to invent something by which the structures are in place to allow people to be their best selves so that we can have a governance structure that is effective, because we need.
We need global governance of some things because we have global systems.
So, the fact that we haven't yet figured out a way to not have it be corruptible does not mean that the answer should be, or can be, therefore we can have no system.
The systems which need governing exist, therefore they need governing.
Well, and in fact, you know... That didn't quite work, but there are systems that need governing that are global, and those systems aren't going anywhere, therefore we need to figure out a way to govern them.
Yeah, all of the processes that need governing have to be governed at a level that is capable of managing them.
There are some global processes.
I don't think most of us who have seen the appalling failure of government want to see everything or even anything managed at that level.
That doesn't have to be.
But nonetheless, we are stuck on a very tiny rock, and there are global processes and externalities, and they have to be addressed in some sort of adult form, which is not taking place.
But at the moment, we are in the most bizarre upside-down world conceivable.
I'm even thinking as we're talking here, right?
I think the conversation that you and I are now having, oddly, a couple of rooms apart, is what a normal conversation between Evolutionary biologists who are long and I think happily married would have about their family's well-being.
We know from what people say to us that hearing our conversations is keeping them sane.
And at the same moment, I think this very conversation where I think frankly both you and I are at the end of our patience with this insane nonsense.
This conversation, as healthy and reasonable as it is, as careful as it is, is actually probably a danger to our channel.
Right?
That in fact the very, just as our public health response is upside down, it is the very conversations you most need to hear that are most likely to be mislabeled as disinformation and thrown off of these platforms.
I don't know.
I hope people will keep track of that hazard.
And I hope people will also keep track of the fact that we are being very careful to point out.
It's not like we're saying, hey, Omicron is an attenuated virus vaccine that just so happens to be the kind you don't have to drive anywhere to get because it'll come find you, right?
That's not what we're saying.
And in fact, there's a danger here that I can't I can't rule out, right?
Just as chickenpox comes back as shingles.
We don't know what SARS-CoV-2 does decades later to people who've had it.
I'm not eager to have had it.
But as between the choice of facing the risk that Omicron might do something that we don't know decades after one has had it, and the risk that these vaccines are going to do something of that nature, I actually think you've got a better shot with the virus.
And who the hell are these out-of-control public health officials to tell me otherwise?
They have not demonstrated that they have deep knowledge of this.
In fact, they've demonstrated the opposite.
There's three things, three more things that I want to touch on before we shut down the hour, however long we've been going for.
One of which is something you alluded to just now.
We met a number of Wonderful people, fans of the podcast, in the three weeks since we've been here.
And we do at this point, I don't know, one time in three, one time in four, that we go out and meet someone who is familiar with, recognizes us.
And the conversations to date have always just been so wonderful.
The ways that people are taking solace and consolation and also knowledge from what we are sharing is extraordinarily gratifying, and we appreciate it.
And furthermore, it being since we last saw you, it was before Christmas, some number of people found the PO box that we have listed or asked our Dark Horse moderator
Where to get it, and sent us gifts, and we are the recipients now of a tremendous number of just wonderful, wonderful handmade, like, you know, beef tallow sabs, and chocolates, and wine, and weavings, and books, and really remarkable things that often come with letters, and often letters come without other things.
These letters, too, are amazing, often written in longhand, sometimes typed.
Also, of course, over email, we get those things.
But it really does help us realize that we are not just shattering into an abyss.
But it makes me realize, too, how much harder it would be not to be getting that reification.
And so we know that for some people, us not being here for the last few weeks was hard.
And so here we are.
Back.
A couple rooms apart from one another, but back.
One of the other things I wanted to touch on before we go is, before we move into our Q&A, is I want to talk about Brisket.
Can we talk about Brisket a little bit?
Oh, hell yeah.
Yeah.
So one of the things that we've all been taking in our family up until I got the crown here.
We were supplementing with D and C and magnesium and zinc and quercetin, but we had run out of quercetin a while back and I'd ordered some and it never came.
Quercetin is something that no one I know had heard of before all of this, but it's a zinc ionophore.
And so it's found in various plants.
It's a zinc ionophore, which means that it facilitates the entry of zinc into cells.
So if you take it with zinc, you're more likely to have the zinc actually do what it needs to do.
But it also apparently has a lot of antiviral and anti-inflammatory effects on its own.
So it's really, it's quite a valuable tool in the arsenal on its own.
So finding myself unable to come up with any Any new pill form of quercetin, I did what I should have done a long time before and looked into it and found, well, actually in supplement form, as is the case with many of these things, it's not that, most of it just goes right through you.
You don't take much of it in and you can increase the amount that you'll take in if you eat it with a fatty meal, but still you're not getting that much.
And really this is one of those things that you're much better off getting with your food.
And of course that's true for almost everything.
But the three primary food sources of quercetin are capers, Okay.
Kale and onions.
And we actually do eat kale.
We ate kale even before it went through that crazy fashionable phase a while back, at which point I stopped eating kale because I don't like to eat the fashionable things at the moment.
But I started replacing it with collards and chard and such.
But kale apparently is a good source of quercetin, so if you like it, cool.
Continue eating that.
But also onions.
And I think most Americans actually have enough of a taste for onions such that if you cook at all, Upping your intake of onions in your food at the moment is probably just a good healthy thing to do.
So I decided to, I'd already actually by chance ordered a brisket.
Six pound, six or seven pound grass fed brisket.
And the recipe that both, you know, Brett, you in the past and I now am using has you thickly slicing eight onions.
Eight onions that then get cooked down.
We've got this giant croquette, this giant le creusette croquette that when I just poured the onions in, it basically filled it to the rim.
And of course it cooks down to not almost nothing with that number of onions.
These are big onions too.
But the house smells amazing and the brisket is fabulous.
And it's got a few other things in it too, but not that much.
It's got a little bit of fat to brown the brisket and a little bit of, in this case, gluten-free flour and some garlic and carrots and such.
But mostly it's that meat that you slow cook for hours to break down all the connective tissues and just make it melt in your mouth soft and delicious.
And these onions that you have prompted a Maillard reaction in and gotten them to brown and then you just slow cook it with the meat Forever.
And it's extraordinary.
And it's an excellent source of quercetin, which is actually a terrific tool in your arsenal right now in the, for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, even, even, fuck COVID, but you know, even absent this particular virus, like this is, this is, this is flu season.
Not that anyone's heard of flu anymore and who knows where all those diagnoses are going, but this is the season when you want the most Anti-viral and anti-inflammatory stuff on board, so I recommend quercetin in the form of onions.
That's point two.
You want to say something about that?
Yeah, I do.
I must say I have a lifelong fondness of brisket.
The recipe in question is one that my grandmother used to make, and so it's a family favorite.
And I'm also, I think it is important to pass on the important insight into what brisket is, which has largely been lost.
But the idea is brisket is a cut of beef, That is an absolute delicacy.
It is top flight stuff, but only if you have an ungodly number of hours to cook the stuff.
And so the point is it was immigrant food, because the collagen in the brisket, the brisket is basically, uh, it's at the trapezius, shoulder blade muscle of the cow.
This beef is so tough, right?
When if you just cooked it quickly, that it's almost inedible.
But if you can cook it for hours and hours across the day, then you break down that collagen and it turns just so incredibly tender.
And so the thing is, immigrants often had more time than money.
And so they could afford to buy a cut of meat that wasn't good if you cooked it quickly.
They could invest the time cooking it all day.
And it's just so delightful when you do.
All right, I don't know if I interrupted your train of thought.
No, absolutely not.
I have one third thing to touch on which has nothing to do with anything else we've talked about.
So if you have anything more to say about brisket or COVID or anything, go for it.
Wrap up with COVID and I can say my thing first.
Yeah, I think we've pretty much said it.
All right, so today would have been David Bowie's 75th birthday.
And I asked Zach to cue up a photograph.
I have no idea what photograph of Bowie he found, because I only have the ability to text him.
So Zach, can Zach hear that I am asking for the Bowie picture to show?
Oh, I can't.
Are we seeing a Bowie picture?
Yes, we are.
So I can't even see what it is.
Can you hallucinate it?
What era is it from?
Like, which persona is it?
Oh, it's pretty... Wow, I'm going to get this way off, but I would say it might be 80s Bowie.
Okay.
Oh, this is terrible.
I can't see the picture that he's shown.
Just right before we came on, I realized it would have been Bowie's 75th birthday had he not died in 2016, I think.
I remember we were right before we were going to go to Ecuador with our class, and most of our students were young enough that he hadn't really been that important to them.
But he was one of the very few, and he was still obviously active at the point that we were of age listening to music, but he was also of an era that was well before our time.
And he was one of the artists, of the musicians, that really, when he died, I felt like a light had gone out in a way that would never come back.
He was just such a one-off, brilliant Brilliant innovator across so many domains, and frankly, one of them was, of course, the gender-bending stuff, the cross-dressing.
We could use his wisdom around that, because I'm sure that he was not pleasing to those who have a very traditional view of what gender is and should be, and where women should be, and where men should be.
And to those people, I would say you need to look forward and stop looking to the past for your inspiration, because it's not the way things are going to work, and it's not good for the vast majority of us to be restricted to traditional gender roles, for instance.
But Bowie never thought he was a woman.
Right?
Bowie never confused his really all-over-the-place sexuality, his sexual orientation, his interest in people of both sexes at a sexual level, or his interest in female typical fashion and in dressing up with lots of makeup, very fabulous, very fabulous, as confusion about the underlying reality.
And I certainly wasn't conscious of that, of my appreciation of that when I was a huge fan, an avid fan of Bowie in the 80s when I was a teenager.
But I'm certain that it affected my understanding of what was possible and also what you didn't need to do.
He never needed to pretend to actually be a woman.
To adopt a whole bunch of stereotypical affectations of women in some of his cosplay, and then to take that off and try on another hat.
So, yeah, Bowie, R.I.P.
This was, what now, six years ago.
But I still miss him in a way that we don't usually miss the people we never knew.
Yeah, in some sense, you know, there's this claim about, you know, well, you know, the binary is just, it's too limiting.
You're born into a sex and then that just tells you, you know, what the limits of what you can do are.
And Bowie's point was like, oh, really?
What limits are those?
You know?
That's right.
And this, you know, so the talk that I was supposed to be giving in Miami this week was exactly on sex differences and gender differences and what the difference is between sex and gender.
You know, why sex is binary and gender isn't, but it's strongly bimodal, but you can move around on the gender norms.
And boy, Bowie just exemplified this.
And he did so with class.
And we wouldn't know any of that had he also not been a supremely talented musician and songwriter as well.
So I just wanted to say something about Bowie since it is an anniversary of his birth today.
Yeah, I agree.
I also miss him.
He's one of those artists that reached out of their genre, if they even really had a genre, and meant something to a lot of us who would not ordinarily, you know, I wasn't a big fan of glam rock, but David Bowie was, you know, worth crossing that boundary for.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Did you want to finish off with anything?
I mean, we got tons more here, but this is such a weird, weird setting, but maybe we'll save most of the rest of it, huh?
Yep.
All right.
So we'll be taking a break while we get the Q&A ready.
You can ask questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
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Yeah.
Be good to the ones you love.
Eat good food.
And get outside.
And I will add, it is time for Americans to join the global fight against the mandates.
Consider joining us in Washington, D.C.
on January 23rd.
Or if you can't come to Washington, wherever you may be, we have to rise up.
These mandates don't make sense.
They are not responsive to the change in this pandemic.
And that tells you that they aren't about us in the first place.
So please, it is time.
Hashtag stand up.
Alright everyone, thanks for joining us, and we will see you for Q&A in hopefully about 15 minutes.
