In this 111th 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, again. We talk about how our public health authorities talk about it, and whether VAERS is reliable, and how we would know. The Oregon Health Authority assures us that we “only have to wait five months” for a booster now. We talk about consilience, and how to assess claims of truth. We show a...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 111, a palindrome, whichever way you look welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 111, a palindrome, Indeed it is, indeed.
Here we are.
Here we are.
So we're ready.
You're back from COVID exile?
Yes, from exile.
Yes, that little bit of theater last week is over.
I still have a little stuff in my throat, you guys will be noticing that, but we're good.
We might want to just slightly clear up the mystery.
Oh, I think we should.
Okay, we'll get to it.
Yeah, I think we should probably start there.
But yeah, so we're going to talk COVID this week, because we're still living this life like all of you are as well.
But we hope to talk just a little bit about some things entirely not COVID as well.
So we got a little South American, pre-Incan culture stuff to mention, and sperm whales too.
And maybe if we get to an ice fish.
Ice fish?
Did I get that right?
Ice fish.
I think it's ice fish.
I didn't know you were headed to ice fish.
No, no you didn't.
Yeah, ice fish.
Ice fish.
Maybe.
That will give me an excuse to talk about my ice fishing gloves.
Will it?
Yes.
I should have had them here as a prop.
In fact, we could have done a pro bono ad for the ice fishing gloves.
I don't think we could have because you don't ice fish.
No, but I do have ice fishing gloves.
Fair enough, but I don't think that not using them for their intended purpose will satisfy them.
Actually, it's a tremendous lesson in how to think about stuff.
Whether or not I am violating the ethos surrounding ice fishing gloves by using them for things other than ice fishing, or whether— Oh, I don't think you are.
I just don't think it would really satisfy what they—if they continue to market these things as ice fishing gloves.
Yeah, they do.
Yeah.
They do.
But let me tell you, I mean, the thing is, our audience, which is currently thinking, hey, we don't ice fish, why are we wasting time on this?
They may, by the time we get through the ice fishing glove discussion, realize that they too need a set of ice fishing gloves, for the same reason I do, or more or less.
Not to ice fish.
No, definitely not.
Yeah.
Incidentally, ice fishing presumably refers very rarely to actual, oh, Hey, look what just got delivered to me by our luscious 15-year-old son!
Some nectar of the gods, which is what I call it in my sub stack this week.
This is honey lemon tea.
Squeeze an entire lemon, put it aside, put a large, large dollop of excellent honey in, stir it into nearly boiling water, add the lemon on top, and drink.
It is delightful.
You should call it honey lemon chai, just to be more inclusive.
As I say, I should have done that into the microphone, but as I say in the substack, it's not tea.
Right.
It's tea by no stretch of the imagination, even to the degree that herbal tea might be tea.
This isn't tea, but I don't know what else to call it other than making it sound super clinical or weird, so.
But it's not tea.
Nectar of the Gods is what I now call it.
It's not tea, and the gap between what it is and calling it tea is no bigger than the gap between what it is and calling it chai.
It's just that chai is hipper.
It's definitely not chai.
Right.
Or tea.
True.
All right, then.
We have a few logistics to start the hour.
Our conversation with Jordan Peterson came out this week, in which we talk about our book, this one, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and really lovely conversation, really lovely man.
The three of us have had very few opportunities to talk all together, and only a couple of times in person, and that's pre-COVID.
But I believe I'm speaking for all three of us, but I know I'm speaking for the two of us, that we all really enjoy each other a lot, and the conversation was terrific.
So we encourage you to find that.
I should hopefully remember to put that into the show notes.
If you are watching on YouTube, you can find the chat over on Odyssey.
We encourage you to ask questions for the second hour.
Of our Q&A on darkhorsesubmissions.com, and both that and this hour are on Spotify as well, right?
The videos.
Whereas the audio of the main podcast, what we're doing right now, is only on all the other podcast places.
Consider joining us on our Patreons, where Brett this morning had one of his monthly conversations.
Great conversation, and I haven't even had a chance to tell you that we came up with a plan.
Did you?
Yes.
Oh, good.
I like plans generated by smart people who have no interest in continuing the insanity into which we are spiraling.
This is a good one.
The world will be rescued in 18 months is our best estimate.
24 at the outside.
Now I believe that you are, to use our younger son's new phrase, pulling my goat.
No.
I'm not quite sure what pulling your goat would mean, but... No, we did actually come up with a plan, but it is a very... It's very secret, apparently.
It's a very hunter-gatherer's guide-style plan, where the idea is not that we have a plan for saving the world.
It's not a blueprint.
It's a trajectory.
Let's get us to that foothill!
Yeah, so anyway, I'm kind of excited about it.
It's a very good conversation.
Are you going to share it with me at some point?
Oh, of course.
Absolutely.
You're central to it.
Oh, boy.
I mean, you're taking all the risk.
I think you ought to know what it is.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, it's good.
We did have a great discussion.
And it did arrive at something like a plan that I'm pretty excited about, which Dark Horse listeners and viewers will be brought into if they are of such a mind.
I'm sure that some of them are of such a mind.
No doubt.
All right.
So yeah, Patreons, and we do a monthly private Q&A on my Patreon as well.
You can find various products at our store.
Zach, you can show that one picture.
We've got Saddle Up the Dire Wolves we ride tonight.
We've got Epic Tabi.
We've got digital book burning, as you can see on the screen now.
We've got all sorts of good stuff there.
Okay.
And, excuse me, And of course, my newsletter, naturalselections.substack.com, continues to have been about COVID-y stuff this last week.
I called it the Omicron Diaries.
And in it, I did post or actually link to the recipe for the brisket that I mentioned last week, so you can find that there.
And a lot of people were interested in the very oniony, quercetin-full brisket.
I had a lot of contacts, too, also looking for the recipe.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think we discovered that this really was not what your grandma Sophie made.
This is a different recipe.
It's closely related.
Well, I'll let you and your mother say something else.
Yeah.
Well, all right.
Probably.
She knows better since, you know, I was five.
She did not, I did not tell her anything about you having, uh, anything about the recipe.
I just said, Hey, what is it?
Um, Brett thinks it's the same.
And she then gave us some specifics about Sophie's recipe.
And I was like, Nope, not in any way similar.
So.
Really?
Well, I'm not sure how I got the misinformation.
I will say Sophie's recipe and Natch Waxman's recipe, both excellent.
Yeah.
And there's so much leeway.
I mean, basically, the thing is, if the meat ends up fork tender at the end, then you did it right, no matter what else you did.
You gotta start with a good piece of meat.
It's not, as we said last week, it's not an expensive cut of meat, but you want it to be as high quality as possible, and then you need to take a lot of time.
You can't rush brisket.
Yeah, there are 16 kinds of awesome in the universe, and this brisket is 9.
9 of the kinds, yeah.
So this is a long-standing trope in our household that Brett, when the boys were very young, started to invoke the 16 kinds of awesome and would announce that Various experiences we were having were three kinds of awesome, occasionally as high as nine.
That's a lot.
Nine is high.
Interesting, though, that he has never, to this day, named any of the 16 kinds of awesome, thus protecting himself from future litigation, I expect.
Not to you.
Oh, right, and I kept it from the lawyers on all sides, because I don't want our lawyers abandoning us.
I don't want other people's lawyers coming after us, so...
Yeah, but there are 16, and this recipe, if you do it right, is 9.
If you do it wrong, it could be 2 or 3.
Yeah, it'll still sustain you.
Yeah, it's life-sustaining either way.
And it'll excite your carnivorans.
They will be attentive to you as you long cook the brisket.
What else?
Oh, this upcoming week on Substack, on Natural Selections, I'm hopefully, if I get to it, Going to be writing a bit about the different kinds of competition that men and women engage in, because I just had a piece that I wrote back in April of last year published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, an invited commentary to another published piece.
And that is, of course, written in academies and a bit arcane as a result, because that is how we are expected to write over in science space, so as to keep all the riffraff out.
And it's not the stated reason, but I do think it is part of the reason.
So I'm going to So I ran into actually a new category of male competition.
I don't know if you have run into this, but it's hypoallergenic masculinity.
I think it's going to be good.
It's at least fairly safe.
Well, I was going to say, it almost sounds like the opposite of toxic masculinity.
Yeah, well, it's not quite the opposite, but yeah, it's definitely at the other end of the... Amazing that with that Venn diagram, the intersection of the two groups of hypoallergenic masculinity and toxic masculinity is existent.
Right.
I mean, yeah, I think you can't go wrong with it.
That's my guess.
That's good.
OK, we have three sponsors this week, for which, again, we are grateful for our sponsors very, very much.
Um, and here we go!
Our first sponsor this week is brand new to us, and brand new to our doggie as well.
Our first sponsor is Sundaes.
Sundaes is dry dog food.
When they approached us about being a sponsor, I was dubious.
We have a Labrador.
Labs will basically eat anything.
What possible difference was she going to show in interest between her usual kibble, a widely available high-end brand, and Sundaes?
I was wrong.
Maddie loves the food that Sundays makes.
Seriously loves it, and is far better for her than the standard burnt kibble that comprises most dried dog food.
Sundays is the first and only human-grade air-dried dog food... No, we haven't tried it.
Combining the... We haven't tried it.
Maddie is eating it.
But human-grade, and yet, no, the humans have not tried it.
I tried it.
Did you?
Yes.
Oh!
I thought, in light of our commitment as advertisers, that we could not endorse this dog food if I had not Tried it.
What did you think, Kibble Boy?
Um... You know, it's really... Crunchy!
It's the best dog food I've tried, let's put it that way.
Okay, great.
Gotta change that script, then.
Yes.
Combining the nutrition and taste of all natural, human-grade foods...
With the ease of a zero-prep, ready-to-eat formula, Sundaes is an amazing way to feed your dog and apparently your husband, if it comes to it.
Oh no.
Sundaes is easy for humans, too.
No fridge, no prep, no clean-up, no gross, wet dog food smells.
Sundaes is gently air-dried, ready-to-eat.
No artificial binders, synthetic additives, or general garbage.
Seriously, look at the label.
All of Sundaes' ingredients are easy to pronounce.
Well, except for quinoa.
And healthy for dogs to eat.
Here she comes!
This is a fun cue.
Again, she's a lab and this is true for all of us.
We all feed the animals.
herders 40 to zero.
That was done with dogs though, not husbands.
That sounds like a made up number, I know, but here's the thing.
When I have a bowl of Maddie's previous food ready for her, she certainly is enthusiastic.
Again, she's a lab and this is true for all of us.
We all feed the animals, we all take turns.
But when I have a bowl of sundaes ready for her, it's a whole different level of enthusiasm.
She spins, she twirls, she offers to do a little tap dance routine.
It's amazing.
She bounces and spins and leaps.
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All right.
I should say, before I move on to mine, this does raise a little story.
I stepped on something absolutely terrible in the middle of this week.
I was so frightened to look down and see what I had stepped in.
Was it sundaes?
Well, here's the thing.
You said that Maddie will eat anything.
I had this orange that was terrible.
And I didn't want it, but I thought, maybe Maddie wouldn't.
I put it in her bowl.
Apparently she didn't want it either, and she moved it out of her bowl, where I later stepped on it.
It was an orange, not one of the decomposing mice that we occasionally feed.
Right.
It wasn't anything super great.
It was the best possible thing that I could have stepped on that would have felt like that.
Yeah.
All right.
It's a little silly around here.
It is.
Okay.
Glasses.
I swear we're not high.
It's true.
You haven't even taken Sudafed, which you could totally justify, given how you're feeling.
I did take Sudafed.
I haven't had a drink in, I don't know, a week and a half.
I had nothing.
Yeah.
I also have not had Sudafed.
Okay.
Second sponsor is Reliefband.
Reliefband is a product that can help you with nausea.
First, though, a little about nausea.
Under ancient circumstances, and some modern ones, nausea was generally a useful signal that something was off.
You had eaten something you shouldn't have, for example.
It's self a signal that you should not get near something.
In modernity, we still need to track our body's sensitivities.
We should not always choose to simply erase discomfort, like nausea, whenever we feel it.
That said, some of modernity creates nausea that does no good at all.
Travel sickness, for instance, can be agonizing, and relief would be lovely.
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Okay, and our final sponsor today is Public Goods.
Public Goods was one of our very first sponsors eight months ago.
Last time we talked about Public Goods, I had a typo in the script that Brett read and suggested that we've been doing ads for a year and seven months at that point, but no, it's only eight months ago.
And we are as pleased with them now as when we first tried their products.
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All right.
So, um, did you want to say you want to start by talking a little bit about what we were doing last week?
Yeah, I think so.
Sorry.
I get one of those Kleenexes.
Oh, why, certainly.
Well, thank you.
We've gotten very formal around here.
I never thought I never thought I was gonna end up in front of a camera as an adult, much less having to, you know, ask for Kleenex or a drippy nose.
But anyway, here we are, it's 2022.
There's a lot you didn't expect.
There's a lot, so much that I did not expect.
So yes, I got a lot of feedback on Last week's episode and some of it revealed a misunderstanding that people seem to have about what we were doing that I thought was important to address because people had every right to be confused by a message that seemed to be self-contradictory.
On the one hand, we said that we do not believe in the guidelines about what one should do with respect to COVID, especially in light of Omicron.
The advice seems preposterous, and it doesn't seem like anybody has considered what our actual well-being would dictate in the circumstances.
And so, you and I made that very clear, we made that very explicit.
On the other hand, You were quarantining in a different room, and people were like, well, what's the deal?
Why are you abiding by mandates that you don't believe in?
And I do not want to fully solve the riddle, but I do want to… And I actually, I addressed this also in my sub-stack this last week.
Yes, you did, and it is well worth reading.
And there's lots of other stuff that you can glean from your last sub-stack about, you know, how you dealt with it and what your experience was, and it's well worth reading.
But I did want to point out, without fully solving the riddle, We are stuck in a bind, right?
We have two children in two different schools.
Both of those schools have rampant infections, as does everywhere else.
This is a highly infectious variant, and it is ripping through these schools.
And so far, I don't think there's any indication that anybody in these schools is desperately ill, but people are definitely... it's not a nothing disease.
People are suffering from it.
And they're required to be out when they get sick.
They're required to be out for some amount of time.
Right.
And they're required to be out if they've been exposed to someone who has it and who has not been isolating.
Right.
And so the point is, we were living by dictates that we don't believe in, not because we're too timid to resist, but because we're stuck with respect to, you know, our children already pay a very high price for our public profile and the fact that we are not in lockstep with the people who are claiming to be protecting the public health.
We believe they are quite wrong.
And in any case, it would be nice if we could limit the harm to our children from just the simple fact of all of this nonsense.
And so living by dictum, you know, I also don't believe that the mask mandates That we abide by while rolling our eyes every time we go into a public building here in Portland where they're required and where people do abide by it.
I don't believe in that stuff either, but there's a level of towing the line that is about not inflicting costs on others.
And frankly, there's also this added aspect of I don't think the masks work.
I've looked at the evidence and I think that cloth masks are essentially a non-entity with respect to functionality, and that even things like N95 masks, if you're not pretty well-schooled in how to use them, are probably a trivial contributor.
You know, not that this variant is controllable anyway, but… So I've heard this before.
We have a box of N95 masks, which I've used on airplanes, I guess.
And I've also heard this thing about if you use them correctly.
It's a really simple object.
We've all seen people wearing masks below their noses.
What does it mean if you use them correctly?
Well, in part, it means paying attention to the question of how pressure drives airflow around the mask versus through the mask.
Basically, you know, they come with this little metal strip that goes over your nose.
And, you know, if you have a model, and it would be even better if we, you know, gave people, you know, if you're really going to use this to control something like this, you would want people to stand in front of a thermal camera or something like that.
Or, you know, you could do it with a cold day, you know, where you're breathing out hot vapor and so you can see your breath.
And get used to, you know, figuring out how to get the mask to fit.
So the majority of what is happening is going through the mask.
That's the basic idea.
And most of us who use them, and I must say I have long ago abandoned cloth masks, and long ago when I use a mask I started using N95 masks.
It's all I use now.
But, you know, you throw them on, you throw them off, and it's not You know, it is a barrier of some kind.
It is much more effective at controlling something like spittle than it is at controlling, you know, aerosolized particles.
But nonetheless, it's not, you know, I can look at the evidence and I can say, you know what, I don't think the evidence, A, this variant isn't controllable in the first place.
B, the people who are dictating this proved they, you know, they probably couldn't peel a carrot, much less control a variant of this virus, much less this variant.
That's actually a great analogy, because not only could they perhaps not peel a carrot, but peeling carrots is unnecessary.
Yes.
Right?
Like, not only can't you do this thing that everyone should be able to do, but like, you shouldn't even do that thing.
Right, but... Like, get the dirt off, and then eat it.
Right, eat it.
But the...
On the one hand, I do think I'm qualified to look at the evidence and say it's not strong enough to be turning the world upside down over mask mandates or anything else here.
But I also recognize that, you know, we are all fallible, and it isn't my choice to make for other people, right?
We can make it for ourselves, but we can't make it for other people.
Yeah, but that is, I mean, that's actually a very different set of conversations than trying to minimize the already rather profound harms to our children that they are experiencing as a result of extraordinarily bad public policy.
Right.
Totally agree with this, right?
It is unforgivable that we are masking children against this disease without, you know, with the sort of, you know, my kid loves these things, you know, rather than thinking about the developmental impacts and all of that.
No question about it.
I'm referring to what we were doing last week and why we were doing it so that our children did not have to stay home from school for a week because they've been exposed to me.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I just don't think we had a choice.
We've got regulations, and it made sense to abide by them for our children's well-being, and you make of that what you will.
I guess I will say, before we move off this topic, that it used to be I wore contacts all the time.
And now that my close-range vision has begun to fail, rather later than I was told it was going to, but it certainly has, and so I wear glasses sometimes because I have progressive lenses in these.
Like everything about me.
And when I wear my contacts, I have to put reading glasses on and off to see up close.
I can't go out into the world wearing glasses anymore.
I would actually be potentially happy to just be out in the world wearing glasses because I really like not having to navigate multiple pairs of glasses or pull things on and off when I want to read something.
Um, but as everyone who wears glasses knows, masks fog glasses, and I've heard that some people have solutions, and I heard some, and they didn't really work for me, but, um, and so this is, this is anecdote, but bizarrely, what I find when I actually pinch the, pinch the nose thing closed when I have forgotten and gone out to the grocery store or something wearing my glasses, like, oh god, now I'm gonna have to navigate the grocery store effectively blind because my glasses are gonna be fogged the whole time.
The way that I wear my mask that fogs my glasses the least is when it's sitting the loosest on my face.
The loosest, which means that it's doing even less good to the extent it does any good.
And when I've got the nose thing pinched, I feel like it forces it up around my cheekbones or something, and then my glasses fog and they stay fogged.
So, it's not even clear to me that this, like, how-you're-supposed-to-wear-the-mask thing is even doing the limited sort of good that it is claimed to be doing.
Well, and much less… If the fogging of glasses is a decent proxy for where error is going, which it should be… Yeah.
Yeah.
Even worse, you know, one of the things that I think is so absurd about these mandates, you know, we're having kids wear masks all day at school.
I mean, you know, every time I bike with Toby to school and I watch the kids going to and from wherever they're coming from, wearing their masks like it's nothing, you know, they're kids.
But you bike with him to school without wearing masks?
You're not masked?
No, we're not masked biking to school.
And you claim to love him.
Yes, I do.
So you see, both at the beginning and the end of school, all these kids coming and going from school.
Yeah, and the thing is, they've obviously, because they're kids and they're more adaptable than adults, they've gotten used to it.
And it's not abnormal to them.
And I did, there was, you know, there was some point at the beginning of the school year, kids were wearing them religiously.
And then there was like a week or two where I started to see a certain amount of rebellion against them.
You know, these are kids out of school, right?
In the outside world where I don't even think these mandates apply to them.
And, you know, there were kids, like, not really wearing them or wearing it around one ear or whatever they were doing.
But then they sort of seemed to go back to it.
I don't know if it was one of these waves of fear that was inflicted on them about new variants or what it might be.
Well, I've got just the Washington Post article for you.
I was going to save this for later, but this seems apropos.
Zach, if you would show my screen here.
We've got Washington Post.
Your computer isn't connecting correctly.
I'm not sure I can accept that, but I can't change it.
That's not good.
I have a lot of things to show on my screen today, Zach.
I was just making sure they were connected.
Okay, well, an article that came out yesterday in WAPO, Washington Post, is headlined, it's under the education section, students seeing lax coronavirus protocols walk out and call in sick to protest in-person classes.
Whoa.
Whoa, right?
Most school systems are determined to keep school in person, but some students aren't convinced.
And then we have a picture of a high school sophomore who helped launch a petition and students sick out demanding more coronavirus safety measures or a return to online school in California's Oakland Unified School District.
And it goes on and on and on.
Here we have a quote.
We were talking about how we can make school more safe.
And this whole article just strikes me as so reminiscent of the safetyism that we've been seeing since 2013, más o menos, and that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt discuss at length in The Coddling of the American Mind.
And until now, what the kids have been scared of is, you know, racism, and sexism, and hearing things that made them scared, and frankly their own shadows.
And so their own shadows now includes literally a variant of a disease that if they get it now will perhaps make them immune, will certainly make them immune to it in the future, but hopefully to future variants that may be worse again.
Like, if they're scared enough of this thing, to organize, to become activists, and petition their school to take them out of school, to keep them safe, these kids are never going to leave their bedrooms again.
And this was what we were seeing, and this was a large part of what a lot of people were objecting to and worried about, about this generation, about both Millennials and Gen Z of being scared of their own shadow and being unable to take risks and unwilling and not being able to see the world as it is and embrace serendipity.
But this article, frankly, is a perfect indicator that the sort of safetyism and the Like, preformed activism, I know what to do, I'll be an activist, have just slotted right in to COVID measures.
Yeah, it's more than an analogy.
Right?
It's much more than an allergy.
It is another version.
It is a variant of the same mental disorder that underlied the woke safetyism.
And I would also point out there are lots of other parallels too, right?
So it'd be interesting to know what actually the kids are rebelling against.
On the one hand, we hear a lot, of course, about the nonsense that our kids face in school, right?
The level of it is high.
And I can imagine that in some sense, you know, not wanting to be exposed to it manifests as, yes, I'm not going back to school.
In other words, there may be a kind of allergic reaction to nonsense.
On the other hand, it could be a kind of mirror of what's going on in the adult world where COVID disrupted everything.
People left their jobs, their employers closed down, whatever, and then they didn't really want to go back to work because they'd figured out how else to live or whatever.
And it just didn't look like an appealing deal anymore.
And I think the thing is, school is an abomination, right?
It has become one.
We have allowed it to become one.
And there's no excuse for this.
But nonetheless, it has been one for quite some time, long before COVID.
COVID and wokeism have both made it worse.
From the point of view of going in and getting your mind upgraded, it's like you're constantly fighting the malware installation that is being infused into every class.
And, you know, as I've said elsewhere, I sort of feel that the weird connection between So called learning disabilities and intelligence isn't really about the learning disabilities at all it's about the fact that they disrupt a normal learning process which when it's bad being disrupted is actually positive and so.
I wouldn't rush to judge a rebellion against going back to school, although the idea of going back to school because COVID is making it unsafe is obviously preposterous.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, you know, we just have, you know, you can do this in isolation.
Well, there's a dangerous disease circulating, don't you know?
Well, yes, I do.
But there's always a dangerous disease circulating.
And this one's less dangerous to kids than others that we constantly expose them to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I just, how do we?
Hopefully.
I hear what you're saying about hoping that the activism against in-person school is actually activism against school that's become so toxic that it's actually harming and miseducating, and shall we invoke diseducating?
Shall we coin that term?
Diseducating rather than educating.
Clearly from this article, that's not what at least these little activists are doing.
This is safetyism, RONA edition, and it's appalling.
The fact that we're encouraging it.
The fact that activism itself is seen as an honorable educational goal by many.
And we saw this at Evergreen.
Long before Evergreen blew up, we saw certain faculty basically encouraging activism as the thing that they were teaching students.
In fact, credit was given for it sometimes.
And during the meltdown, There was all sorts of overt talk about how they should be getting credit for turning the college upside down and not be penalized for not doing the work that they were supposed to be doing.
Right.
And, you know, it's not a sane moment.
It's just not a sane moment at all.
Well, that's where you're wrong.
No, you're right.
Do we want to do we want to move into showing that the brief video from?
You know it.
So this is set up.
I'm not actually positive that I know the backstory.
You sent this to me, and we're going to have Zach show it in a minute.
Hold on just a second, Zach.
It's Wilensky, it's Rochelle Wilensky, the head of the CDC, the director of the CDC, and Tony Fauci, the head of the NIAID.
Everyone knows who Fauci is at this point.
Testifying before Congress, I'm just trying to remember when.
It was this week, but I don't know exactly what day.
And, you know, top health officials testify on Omicron response.
They were called Dr. Walensky, it's been reported by some virologists and scientists that this year around 170 people have died from taking the regular flu vaccine.
The Vaccine Advisory Adverse Reporting System reported that the number of people dying after or following the COVID vaccine is actually in the thousands.
Now this is what I'm hearing.
I'll give you a chance to refute that or confirm it here.
You know, is this true?
Are we having that many people die after taking one of these vaccines?
Senator Rubio, thank you for that question.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System is a mandatory system of any adverse event that happens after being vaccinated.
So if you get hit by a car tragically after getting vaccinated, that gets reported in the Vaccine Adverse Avoidance System, their system.
So the vaccines are incredibly safe.
They protect us against Omicron.
They protect us against Delta.
They protect us against COVID.
They don't protect us against every other form of mortality out there.
Do we keep numbers of people that died following taking a COVID test from taking this vaccine?
Do we have any idea?
I'm just asking.
I'm sorry, those who have died after taking a COVID test?
Died following taking the vaccine.
Is there any number count?
Do we keep records on that, that died of just from?
Absolutely, yes.
I couldn't give you the absolute number off the top of my head, but our staff could absolutely get back in touch with you.
We collect those data.
You know Dr. Fauci?
You have any clue on that?
About how many died after?
100?
I don't know the number, but I think it's really important for people to... You can turn on your microphone.
Microphone.
I'm sorry.
I don't have a number, but I think part of the confusion is that when you do a reporting, if you get vaccinated and you walk out and get hit by a car, that is considered a death.
I mean, that's the thing that gets confusing, that everything that happens after the vaccination, even if you die of something completely obviously unrelated, it's considered a death.
So if I had metastatic cancer, got vaccinated and died two weeks later, that's a death that gets counted.
And every one of those is adjudicated.
So, Walensky, so just a reminder, foolishly, we can't hear that while it's playing, but we both listened to it a few times.
Walensky says, quote, so if you get hit by a car, tragically, after getting vaccinated, that gets reported.
Okay, even if that's true, that's true for all of theirs.
That's not different for these vaccines.
What is being revealed in VAERS at the moment is that after COVID vaccines, Adverse event reports spike.
The objection that both Walensky and Fauci make, as if they know they're speaking to completely innumerate and people who cannot possibly follow logic, is that because you might get hit by a car after you're vaccinated, of course you're going to see deaths.
That is just as much true after every single vaccine that has ever been given, and that does not explain the spike.
Yes, it's also not true.
And we have to separate these two.
These are two different objections to these claims that are being made.
Right.
And the fact that both Walensky and Fauci say the same thing, they are knowingly lying to Congress.
Now, presumably they're not under oath.
Maybe that would give them pause if they were.
But they are perpetrating a fiction.
On their interlocutors in Congress and the American public here by saying something that they both know is exactly wrong.
That the VAERS system is actually very hard to report into and not mandatory.
And what happens is that a small fraction of actual events get in there.
And it isn't things like car accidents where people know very well there would be no point in reporting it to that system because it doesn't carry any information.
Incidentally, also, same week that she acknowledges, isn't it, that a lot, like a majority, I believe, and I don't have these numbers.
I'm about to ding her for not having numbers, but I don't have the numbers off the top of my head.
I believe this is the same week that Walensky said, well, yeah, actually, a whole bunch of the COVID hospitalizations are actually hospitalizations for something else, and then they were tested, and then it turns out they also had COVID.
Right, so just so that people can track this, the CDC does make this error in the other direction when they are trying to convince us that mandates are necessary to control COVID.
There are all kinds of shenanigans, including involving counting people who are hospitalized with, after something like a car accident, if they happen to test positive for COVID, whether or not they have any symptoms.
So that's a game that we have seen played over, you know, at least a year, right?
In order to amp up the COVID numbers, they do count all kinds of nonsense that obviously doesn't belong there.
Then they're taking that thing, which they must know that they themselves are using to make COVID look more dangerous than it is.
And they pretend that that is accidentally making the vaccines look more dangerous than they are, which they know it isn't.
They know that the VAERS system, you know, there is not agreement on how much of an underreport.
I've seen estimates, careful scientific estimates, of how much of an underreport it is range from something like A 99% underestimate, that is to say 99% of actual events are never reported, to a 90%, right?
And so they are just simply pretending.
And the fact is, for most people, they will hear something vague about the fact that sometimes things are counted as the result of something that are actually car accidents and have nothing to do with COVID or vaccines.
They're not going to track which place the accounting error goes in one direction and which place it goes in the exact opposite direction.
Yeah, and then the questioner here, who I forgot to figure out who exactly it is, is asked, okay, so you say you can't trust FAERS.
Do you have the numbers then?
And she says, so he asks, is there any number count?
Do we keep records on that?
And she says, absolutely, yes.
I couldn't give you the absolute number off the top of my head, but our staff could absolutely get back in touch with you.
Bull fucking shit.
Yeah.
Lies.
What are they talking about?
You were called before the Senate to talk about what is going on with Omicron and you have the numbers and that's the one number that you didn't bring?
Well, it's not like we haven't been asking for that number, because… Of course we want those numbers.
And they either don't have them, or they have them and they're keeping them from us, and we probably will never know the distinction, but it's one of those two things!
It's one of them.
I don't think it can be that they have the number, because where does it come from?
The point is, you have a system, it's called VAERS.
We can argue about whether it's a good system or a bad system, but the point is, that's the system, and what they tell us is, oh, That huge number of adverse events that you see in VAERS doesn't mean anything because and then they have a lot of excuses like anybody can report anything.
Yeah.
Okay.
What that means is that, at worst, the VAERS system contains no information.
That's not the same thing as having information that's saying adverse events are rare.
It's like saying, we don't have any information, and therefore we're going to assume they're safe, even though we've got no system, we haven't gone looking, we haven't asked.
I guess the thing is, it is stunning how much theater there is in this kind of testimony.
I was actually, you know, what I was thinking was that Fauci was, he's cosplaying the hero again.
It's like, fake it till you make it, man.
And you know, we all, the whole country was told that he was our hero back in, I don't know, April of 2020, I guess.
And it's amazing how many people not only bought it then, but still are buying it.
Well, he is very charming.
Excuse me.
I snorted into the microphone.
That snort was non-editorial, though I think you would be entitled to snort editorially if you felt like it.
But I think the problem is, he is so incredibly charming-seeming that people just have a hard time imagining that he could be doing anything other than his best.
He does a very good impression of a person who is being flustered under unfair questioning.
It's preposterous, and the problem is... Oh, did I forget to turn on my mic?
Oh, and simultaneously rip off my mask?
Yeah.
No, I must say, even that thing, you can't establish anything, but there is something weird about the fact that he was talking into a mic that was off while leaving his mask on when his policy is clearly to take the mask off when he wants to be heard.
So there's no way for us to know what it was he was saying.
Can't lip-read.
In any case, let's put it this way.
The human part of me sees him and does feel like he seems like a nice, slightly dweeby scientist under rotten conditions, right?
There's some part of me that can't help but feel sympathy.
And then I hear what he says and I know that he has to know that what he's saying is false.
that it can't be a noble lie because of what it results in, the kind of harm.
And it's breathtaking.
Yeah.
Well, that's interesting.
I think that may reveal that you're a better person than I am.
When you say things about him like charming and handsome, I think, what are you talking about?
I can't see any of that in him.
Well, I think it's... You think it's just objectively true?
No, I mean, I think it speaks to a different kind of accounting.
You know, I also basically believe that attractiveness in people is a kind of... what is it?
In other words, there is a purely physical attractiveness thing, but the point is we all know people who aren't conventionally attractive, who we find...
Totally compelling.
Right.
We want to spend time here, literally in some sense attracted to them.
And the point is, well, what is that?
And it has to do with depth of character, it has to do with integrity, it has to do with lots of things, which, unfortunately, if you don't have a lot of experience with somebody, are partially fakeable.
And I think that's what I'm getting from Fauci, is that I think he's actually very good at it.
Well, yeah, I mean, we said this last week, right?
We actually think he's really good at his job.
Yeah.
I think he's really good at his job and we just don't know what it is.
Right.
Yeah.
The Oregon Health Authority this week, or last week, recently... Zach, can you show my screen?
You can.
Hey, look at that.
The Oregon Health Authority Is pleased to announce new guidelines.
Well, is pleased to announce that the CDC has approved new guidelines for the Moderna booster.
You ready?
Mm-hmm.
Just make this a bit bigger.
Effective immediately, adults who receive the Moderna vaccine as part of their primary series only have to wait five months before getting a booster.
Only have to wait.
Only half to wait, that's quite a construction.
Yay!
That is the update that I was looking for, because I was just chomping at the bit, waiting to be able to rush out, because that is definitely what everyone wants when they get a vaccine.
How soon can I get my next installment?
Well, so if we were, you know, as long as we're just idly wishing for wonderful things, then wouldn't it be great if we had a vaccine that you only had to wait a week till your next booster?
I think so.
I don't want to have to wait five months.
That seems like a long time in this modern world.
It seems like a long time.
Waiting is not fun.
No.
We all know that.
Waiting is hard.
Yes.
No, it's an amazing construction, and you can imagine that whoever came up with that, you know, they really... they earned six months worth of pay for that inversion of reality that they have now perpetrated on the public.
In which time they'll have to get two boosters.
If they're even getting boosters.
I mean, I hate to be cynical, but...
At the Oregon Health Authority, I suspect they are.
Yeah, the Oregon Health Authority.
Yeah, we're remote enough from the centers of power that they probably are.
Yeah, this is a low financial incentive outpost out here.
Yes.
Okay, let's see.
Oh, I forgot, when we were talking about That incredible testimony from Walensky and Fauci.
I wanted to point out this piece written by a friend of ours, Jumi Kim, in her sub stack, Let's Be Clear, which is called I Was Deceived About COVID Vaccine Safety.
She starts by talking about having been vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine in May of 2021.
And then this is an incredibly long article, and it is incredibly thorough.
And first she defines consilience, she basically goes after the She doesn't do this explicitly, I think.
I did read the whole article this morning, but it's very, very long.
I don't think she goes after directly the argument that randomized control trials.
I was thinking critical theory.
How could you have forgotten randomized control trials?
They are the gold standard of everything.
Well, critical theory is also the gold standard, is it not?
Yes, it is.
Yeah.
So, randomized control trials being basically the standard of evidence.
is absurd, and really what you're hoping for is a lot of different kinds of evidence pointing to the same thing.
And RCTs, when done well, do of course provide an overwhelming amount of evidence, but it's still one signal.
When designed well and executed well.
Right.
Yeah, done.
There's a lot hiding in done there.
Right, but what they do, what randomized controlled trials do, the reason that there is even a basis for a claim that they are the gold standard is that they are very good at isolating weak effects and making them visible, right?
By controlling for all the other things that might lead you, that might mislead you in this direction, right?
But I would also point out that this is a classic variant on the idea that science is the strongest method we have for figuring out what is true, but it is also a fragile method.
It is vulnerable to things like market forces.
It is not robust to them.
And so randomized controlled trials are very good at finding a weak effect and making it visible, but they are also fantastically gameable.
Yes.
That is to say, you can design trials to succeed and you can design them to fail irrespective of the thing that is being tested.
And I know it's going to sound like I'm becoming cynical, but the more one digs and the more one understands about the way the pharma game played, the more you realize that this idea that we all carry that this is the gold standard may indeed be about the fact that they are gameable.
And therefore, if you're a company that wishes to sell compounds and get them inflicted on patients, then a gameable mechanism, a gameable metric is exactly what you're looking for.
Yeah, especially if you're allowed to stop them short.
Well, right.
The point is, look, we don't like it this way.
We think that medicine is science, and medicine should be scientific, but the point is the idea that this compound is effective at Limiting the harm of this disease, that is a narrative.
And the point is that narrative is founded on what we think of as evidence.
But if you have a gameable kind of evidence, then the point is, oh, I can link this compound, which I just so happen to have intellectual property rights to, to this disease, which I might broaden the definition of so that more people appear to have it.
And then, wow, boy, a lot of this substance is going to end up in a lot of those people, and a lot of cash is going to flow in this other direction.
And the point is, well, Who amongst us really doesn't think that those kinds of incentives and opportunities are on the mind of these corporations who do this?
Yeah.
We are all privy to falling prey to incentives.
All of us.
And we all do fall prey to incentives.
And pointing out incentives is not the same thing as pointing out a possibility of conspiracy.
And also, those who point out incentives are thus not inherently engaging in conspiracy.
So, Jumi lays out her case, again, a very long case, and one which I think is eminently shareable with those who are skeptical of the position that the vaccines may not be all that they are cracked up to be.
If you could show my screen here, Zach.
By saying, basically, the consilience that looking at multiple kinds of data, and at the point that they align, concluding something from them aligning, is a rather excellent way of assessing vaccine safety here.
And she says, I've compiled multiple pieces of evidence to argue that injuries from the COVID vaccines are grossly underreported.
These include one, testimonies from doctors and nurses, two, testimonies from the vaccine injured, three, Evidence from medical records or official databases of adverse events.
4.
Evidence from the vaccine trials themselves.
5.
Plausible mechanisms of action.
6.
Evidence from animal studies.
7.
Evidence of past wrongdoing by pharma.
8.
Evidence of corruption or undue influence in our health institutions.
And bonus, explanations for why we are not hearing about this in the media.
Each section, she continues, of this article could be its own book, and indeed She's got a ton of links in here, but it's not even complete, as will always be the case.
So I highly recommend this as basically a clearinghouse of arguments and evidence, and encourage you to share it with people who say, what are you talking about?
Of course they're safe.
So I would just add to this.
We are all built to be logical.
Not to a fault, right?
There are places where logic will mislead you because you don't have enough information, so the logical conclusion you reach is actually less good than your intuitive conclusion.
But we are all built to do logic, because it served our ancestors to deploy that tool frequently, especially when something complex and difficult to navigate arrived, because then you could at least try to parse out what was taking place.
But this gives you lots of kinds of checks that you can do on whether something makes sense, right?
So, one check I often do is what would have to be true for this thing that I think is true to actually not be, right?
How robust is this piece of information?
It's like the mirror image of a prediction.
Right.
It's a spot.
It is a prediction, but it's like a negative prediction.
I think the right analogy is it's a checksum.
A checksum is if you've gotten a program, let's say you've gotten a security-minded program, you've downloaded it from the internet.
Well, how do you know that somebody didn't give you a A version of the program in which they've got a backdoor installed and they just made the website look like the real website and you downloaded a program that isn't what you think it is, right?
Well, you can do a checksum, right?
Which takes some set of things from within the program that the originator of the program built that if anybody modified it wouldn't add to the same number, right?
And so the point is you can say, well, I don't know why the thing I downloaded doesn't match the thing that uh the manufacturer is distributing but i know i don't want to use it because the check sum didn't match um so anyway there are lots of things you can check that way and this is just kind of a check sum on isn't that a little bit of a modern day shibboleth it's like a technical yeah it's a it's a numerological which is wrong because numerology is a weird something but it's like it's a numeric it's a numeric shibboleth yeah
and actually this is this is this is No, I think this is really good because actually what it is is, you know, so for those of you who don't know, shibboleth is a biblical term, and shibboleth is a shibboleth.
Shibboleth is a term that you could pronounce various different ways.
But you could recognize people who really were part of your group because they would pronounce it the same way.
And if they pronounced it shibboleth or whatever the alternatives would be, you'd know something was up.
You're not of us.
You're not with us.
But the thing about a checksum, and I assume there are other mechanisms that work like this, the thing about it is there are an indefinitely large number of ways to be wrong and only one to be right.
So it's like a turbocharged kind of shibboleth, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's true for shibboleth too.
There's an indefinite number of ways to say it wrong.
Maybe it's not indefinite.
It's not indefinite.
Oh, I see, I see, I see.
Yeah, it's more than one.
I see.
There's a plurality, but it's not indefinite.
Yeah.
I see the distinction.
Yeah, exactly.
You were going somewhere?
I'm already here!
I've been here since the beginning of the podcast.
No, weren't you going somewhere?
Oh, wasn't I going somewhere?
Well, I guess what I was going to say is there are lots of ways that you can kind of look at a body of evidence and say, does this look like something somebody might have constructed for my benefit so I reach a wrong conclusion, or does this look like the way evidence actually works in the world where Even if I come at it different ways, I come to the same place because it's actually true, right?
And that's so powerful, right?
If I think I know something, And then I'm working on some other problem, and it leads me right back to the same deep truth.
It's like, oh, well now I have two reasons to believe it, not one.
Yeah, something's just cancelled.
Yeah, right, exactly.
So it's just a kind of, it's a kind of… Oh, isn't that, that's just so rewarding.
It's just like, that's one of the reasons to do it, right?
To do this kind of work is to end up with things cancelling and to be returned back and go, Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And it's a different kind of reward.
It doesn't fit.
These are different things.
There's an error somewhere.
I don't know where it is yet.
But, you know, both of those have reward.
So we were headed to the Hereticon conference in Miami.
We didn't get to go because of our encounter with COVID.
But nonetheless, one of the things I wanted to do at Hereticon, which was going to involve a whole audience full of very smart people, most of whom would not have been deeply steeped in how to think about COVID or vaccine safety or early treatment or anything.
The thing I was going to say to them, which I should probably write up or something, You in the public, I believe, are subject to an anamorphic illusion.
Anamorphic illusions are, you've all seen them, you just don't know the word probably, like those chalk drawings on sidewalks that look like a giant chasm has opened up in the sidewalk.
It's extremely compelling.
It's very hard to convince your mind you're not looking into a giant Chasm, but what you may or may not realize is that it looks like that from exactly one location Right and so the exchange that the artist has made is that from this vantage point?
I can make a very compelling rendering of something with a lot of 3d content but You can look at it from any other direction, and then you get some weirdly distorted thing that doesn't add up.
It makes no sense.
It's incoherent.
Right, it's incoherent.
It's at least stretched, and it doesn't look like a 3D thing.
It looks like a crazy thing.
And my point to the audience was going to be, you are the subject of an anamorphic illusion surrounding public health.
And the only reason that that's working is because you're standing where they expect you.
And the point is... Let's change our vantage point for just a little bit.
Right.
If you step three feet to your right, three feet to your left, you'll begin to see what we're talking about.
If you continue to stand there, we're going to sound crazy.
Right?
So, in any case, I think what Jumi is up to here is a very good indication of, look, I believe something that, yes, you will be told the public health officials have ruled out long ago, but doesn't it look like a real object?
Look at all these kinds of evidence.
Right.
I might be able to show you something, a picture of a rock, and tell you all about it.
And somebody might challenge that it's not what I say it is.
But it's different than being able to hand you a rock, and you can look at it from any angle you like.
But my doctor said that he saw it.
Yeah, that's one doctor.
Okay, but ten doctors said that they saw.
Yeah, but it's just doctors.
Okay, but these people said that they were injured.
Okay, but it's still just people talking.
Oh, well, we got medical records and VAERS.
Oh, well, but VAERS is flawed.
We got the vaccine trials themselves.
Oh, I don't know what I say about that.
We got plausible mechanisms of action, animal studies, past drug dealing by pharma, evidence of corruption.
She's got so many.
She's just laid it out so cleanly, all the different kinds of evidence that we've got.
And it's still not complete.
Right.
And so the point is, what would have to be true for the analysis that she presents to just simply be backwards, right?
All of these things would need a special explanation for what had gone wrong.
And the point is you can look at what she says and you can say, look, I don't have any ability to evaluate this kind of evidence.
I know nothing about it.
But then this other kind of evidence I can evaluate.
So maybe the one that I can't evaluate, she's wrong.
But if she's not wrong about the one I can evaluate, why do they point in the same direction?
So it's that style of how do you think in a messy environment is kind of the thing, which is why you and I always say, welcome to complex systems, right?
It requires a different style of thought.
No surprise.
I actually don't know exactly her background, but she's trained as a biologist.
So actually, maybe this is a good moment to take a brief detour over to Peruvian subfossil skulls.
Okay.
I mean, right?
I don't know anything about this.
I know you were thinking that.
I was not.
You were not?
Okay.
I don't have any idea what's coming.
All right.
Forgive me if I'm disrupting a flow.
No, we're good.
Okay.
Hey, Zach, do you want to put up that?
Actually, I wanted to show some street art in DC, which is sort of a nice segue on from anamorphic art, although the street art is definitely not anamorphic.
Not anamorphic.
Actually, it's metaphorically anamorphic.
We'll return to that.
Okay, we're going to return to that because I got some more stuff to say about anamorphic art, too.
Hey, Zach, can you put up the tweet with the Peruvian?
I did send you a tweet.
It just came through.
All right.
We've got it.
It's happening.
At the moment, while we're waiting, you can look at Fairfax, who is considering some skullduggery that he might... All right.
So what we have here, our audience may want to know that There is a marvelous distinction between fossil and subfossil, where subfossil is the actual bones that have not been remade molecularly by geological processes.
It's actual bone, whereas a fossil from, let's say, a Tyrannosaurus will be an actual fossil, where what was once a bone will now be rock in the shape of the bone.
None of the original bone remains.
Right.
So what we have here… None, right?
Yeah.
None.
Molecularly distinct from the surrounding rock, but not bone.
Okay, what we have here is a sub-fossil, prehistorical, and the distinction between history and prehistory.
History is anything that exists after writing, so that there could be a first person account.
Within a culture, so you actually have, you know, prehistory, In North America up into the second millennium by this very strange, and actually I don't love these definitions.
Oh, I really like this definition.
But even in North America, right, with the Maya, you're at a different standard.
I was separating North America from Mesoamerica, but yeah.
So you've got one New World people who are using writing in Mesoamerica, the Maya, But no one else, as far as we know, was using writing.
And so, you know, they lived rich, diverse, amazing lives and had zero and astronomy and agriculture and, you know, all of these things.
But without writing, they didn't record for later generations and later peoples to see it, what it was they were doing.
And so we refer to what they were doing as prehistory.
Prehistory.
And I should point out, in the case of the Maya, we have precious little of what they actually did write because the Spaniards destroyed it, with the exception of, I think, a single manuscript and whatever was written on temples and things like this.
So effectively, we've been bumped back to a level of evidence that we have with prehistory, even with the Maya for the most part.
Right.
But in any case, so here you have a sub-fossil skull from prehistory Peru, and the fascinating thing here is that this skull has had a surgical implant of a metal plate that has been put in apparently to deal with a fracture, right?
This person has received a serious injury, but here's the really amazing part.
The injury healed, right?
The plate got healed into place.
And so what we can infer from that… It's incredible.
First of all, it's incredible.
Two thousand years ago we had Peruvian surgeons doing surgery on a fractured skull with a certain amount of metal.
This was presumably no commoner.
Right, but nonetheless.
Or it was exactly a commoner.
This was either wildly experimental.
Okay, this guy's gonna die, let's see what we can do.
Or someone who was very important and they were like, do everything you possibly can.
Right.
I mean, I just, I'm just guessing that this was not common practice.
Yeah, I don't think it was.
But here's the thing.
Somebody knew enough to be able to do it.
They used metal to make a plate to fit the location.
And we know that it healed, which means the person survived it, right?
So, in any case, the reason I raise it… Yeah, why do you raise it?
…is it is a marvelous example.
You know, when I hear that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of evidence, and I think, well, that's all well and good for you who can have them in some sense, but… Right.
Sorry.
They're fantastically expensive.
Well, fantastically expensive, and us evolutionists, we don't have the luxury of this, right?
The fact is there is a whole world of evidence outside of randomized controlled trials that we actually use and have made tremendous progress on very difficult puzzles, because even if it were the gold standard, the absence of it does not render you helpless.
Well, but I mean, that's also... Sorry, I interrupted you by...
By raising this at all, but evolutionary biology is an historical science.
And historical science inherently plays by different rules, just like history, the actual study of history, plays by different rules than other things in the humanities.
Because history happens once, and there are not iterations.
Your sample size is always one.
And so, you find You find convergence in which, you know, wings evolved once in insects and once in birds and once in bats, and the wingedness of all of these things is interesting, and you can make adaptive arguments on the basis of those things having evolved multiple times.
But they're not the same.
Like, flight evolved multiple times, but the way that it evolved, the particular instantiations are different.
Absolutely, but this let's put it this way people have all can't do our CDs, right?
It's not an option.
That's my point Yeah, you can't do them and you're not you know Yeah, there are things you can't do well without them very weak effects that are historical may be lost to history and you can't you can't Find evidence of them, but we can do a tremendous amount with evidence outside of randomized controlled trials for example a Well, that's just an anecdote.
Yeah, that's a 2,000-year-old skull with a metal plate in it and evidence that it healed after the plate was installed.
Let's take that argument back just one step.
I know that 2,000 years ago, some people in Peru used metallurgy in surgery.
No, you don't.
How would you know that?
I've seen nothing to that effect.
Here's this.
That's just an anecdote.
And then this plays forward, right?
So the argument in this case, that comprises evidence that is not negotiable.
Well, it may or may not, but this is a great test case for what would have to be in error in order for this to be an incorrect conclusion.
What would have to be in error?
So, I haven't inspected this skull.
I don't know anything about the people who wrote this paper.
The skull could be a fraud, right?
If the skull is what it appears to be.
If the skull was found in the way that it is purported to have been found, if it is true that people who can tell the difference between a healed skull and a non-healed skull have looked at it and said, yes, this skull healed in the aftermath of whatever this plate The installation of this play was.
If all of those things are true, then this single anecdotal skull answers the question, was there surgery being done in the New World prior to contact with Europeans?
Was there metallurgy?
So the point is, you can do a lot with that evidence.
Is it incontrovertible?
No!
No, there are fraudulent skulls in the history of science.
A lot of them, yes.
People have defrauded each other.
And people have incentives to make fraudulent skulls.
Right.
So I'm not telling you that that thing happened, but what I'm telling you is that you could rule out the things that actually make this in any way questionable.
I have a feeling that anybody who did would find that this is a perfectly genuine skull that says exactly what it appears to say, and that knowing that a plate was installed and healing occurred after is sufficient to tell you, yeah, They did surgery, right?
They did surgery on skulls, and people survived it.
This was not done on cadavers before mummification or something like this.
This was actual surgery.
So anyway, the point is, look.
Don't buy this garbage about the gold standard of evidence, which then, by the way, does not imply the next thing they want you to believe, which is that no other evidence is any good.
Even if it was the gold standard, even if randomized control trials were the gold standard, it hardly means that the silver standard and the bronze standard are insufficient to do scientific work, because they're not.
That's right.
And then remind yourself, Are they telling you that it's the gold standard because they're really obsessed with precision, which is what they get out of those studies?
Or are they telling you it's the gold standard because it's the standard they can game and you won't be able to detect it?
Yes.
So here we have some... Hopefully this will come up.
That's not looking good.
Oh no.
Reload.
So this is some street art that someone took pictures of in, there we go, in DC today.
And then I saw it on Twitter and we're going to see Within an hour or two, I don't remember what, reported that he saw some woman tearing them down, which is really unfortunate.
But here we go.
We got four pieces of street art that showed up in DC.
For those listening and not watching, we've got Biden holding a mallet.
And these are all sort of Soviet style.
Very Soviet.
Soviet art style.
A mallet that says OSHA on it, comply.
And he's Barking.
Comply.
Comply.
We have Biden.
Biden?
Yeah.
That is Biden, isn't it?
With needles coming out of his head, and red-masked kids looking up at the sky, and it says, good kids are compliant kids.
Again, all of these posters are Soviet art style.
Biden sitting in a chair holding, what is that, an artichoke?
Is that a coronavirus?
I don't know what that is.
Oh, I think it must be.
I can't see it from here very well.
I think it's a coronavirus.
A coronavirus that's red, and his glasses are red, and there's mass people behind him, and it says, mandate, segregate, subjugate!
And then finally, this is maybe my favorite, we have Father Fauci with a halo of an atomic symbol holding a very large needle, and it says, trust the scientism.
So, those are fabulous.
That is what art is supposed to do.
That is not the only thing art is supposed to do, but that is one of the things that art is supposed to be able to do.
And we have a whole lot.
And it's super meta, of course, because it's playing on actual propaganda and revealing how propagandist so much of our modern messaging is.
But, you know, the fact that within hours there was someone tearing it down reveals that this is kind of metaphorically anamorphic.
That you can't see this as meta-propaganda, as commenting on the propaganda that we are living through right now, unless you're standing in a particular place.
You can't see it as anything but, and I'm not going to play the video that he took of his conversation with her about why she was tearing them down, But she says it's bad for public health, and you know, this is misinformation, and you know, all the usual stuff that if you've got, you know, if you've got, if you've got Father Fauci in your head, and you really think that that's who he is, and he deserves the atomic halo, then then this is offensive to you, and it feels dangerous.
And if you move Really not that far.
Just, like, not that far.
To the left, to the right, or the front, or the back.
Or you, like, levitate something.
Just, like, move a little bit.
And you will see something very, very different.
Yeah.
I must say, I'm disturbed by how little art is being used.
You know, as we are fissioning into multiple, non-overlapping societies, the absence of art at that interface is very disturbing.
Now I have a confession, which is that I am very much in favor of this mode from the other side as well.
And I remember as a much younger person, back when evangelism was battling Darwinism, I remember admiring a kind of both sides of an arms race, right?
So you had the Jesus fish, which had nothing to do with Darwin particularly, but it was a proudly displayed symbol, and then the Darwinists Put out a Jesus fish that said, instead of saying Jesus in Greek, it said Darwin and the fish had legs, right?
You know, poking fun at the creationists.
And then the creationists came back with a symbol where it was the Jesus fish eating the Darwin fish.
And I thought, you know, I like both sides of this.
I understand we're having an argument.
I definitely, you know, the fish with the legs.
I mean, you know, this is actually even before.
We were at Michigan when Phil Gingrich, the paleontologist, came back with his Early spectacular finds of whales with legs, right?
From Pakistan, I think.
Yeah, and he was there.
He was at UMMC as we were.
Yeah, he was.
He came back and it was this spectacular news.
So anyway, the idea of fish with legs or whatever, yeah, that's surprisingly on target, right?
It's not just glib.
It's actually sometimes how this works.
But anyway, I like the idea of people who can be good-natured about their differences.
I sort of believe that in the end, the better art will win, right?
I don't believe that for any deep reason, but I think the point is one side is more vulnerable because its explanation is worse.
Well, this reminds me of something that you've pointed out often, which is – and maybe you're not the first to have pointed out, I've also heard it in other corners – but a movement that doesn't tolerate laughter, or a movement in which there is no laughter, is not what it seems, and probably can't last.
It's terrifying.
Although the wokery, the safetyism and the wokery seem to be a mostly laughter-free movement, and they're pretty damn persistent.
Yeah, laughter-free and surprisingly tone-deaf.
Including the medically woke.
Very much more about fear than laughter.
Laughter's probably dangerous because it spews droplets or something.
Yeah.
And, you know, no kidding that they want to shut down comedians, right?
Because the point is they just don't have an argument that can go up against being rightly mocked.
I mean, that's the thing.
That's what it's for.
That's what mockery is.
Yeah, and that's what those posters are.
Yeah, and you know, at the same time, I did not, before our stream, have time to put together a list of these things, but there's a bunch of just jaw-dropping authoritarian moves being made in, I think, in Germany.
I saw that Telegram is, they're contemplating banning Telegram because people who are skeptical of vaccines are using it to talk to each other, right?
I'm sure they get tired in Germany of being the example of, you know, how could it be them, given what they went through two generations ago.
But seriously, Germany, like, how could it be you?
Right.
I will say I am old enough to remember when a move like that could never have happened in the West two years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it just it's insane.
All right.
Okay, I wanted to say a couple things about things that have nothing to do with COVID.
Mm-hmm.
You ready to move on?
Sure.
Or did you want to introduce anything else?
Well, I did have one thing that doesn't fit with anything else.
You want to save that for the end?
Sure.
Okay.
Okay.
I don't know what it is.
No, you don't.
Okay.
By design.
Okay.
Oh, actually, there's one other thing.
I don't know.
Zach tells me I'm overreacting to this.
So before we talk about the science, this pissed me off.
Zach assures me I'm overreacting.
This is in the New York Times, which yes, yes, I know, we still get the hard copy on Sundays.
Chicken is broken.
This was actually covering the New York Times.
This is a four full-page ad that was actually wrapping the New York Times.
Yeah, it doesn't have a date on it.
Last week.
Chicken is broken.
It says.
Daring.
Goes on.
Daring.
However, there's no chicken in this chicken.
They actually say, a chicken that's made entirely out of plants.
Now, I actually have no problem with this company.
I don't even know who it is.
I'm not going to say it, even if I figure it out.
Like, they're trying to make plant-based protein that tastes good, even to people who like meat.
Cool, that's fine.
That's fine.
But chickens are entirely out of plants.
No.
Just, just no.
And frankly, it feels to me like this is what postmodernism has wrought.
And it is the ability for advertising companies and for frankly terminally degreed humanities professors and others to make claims in which you say A is only and shall ever be A except when it's B.
And then you just sort of stand back and watch the world engulf itself in flames.
It is part of why we're in this mess that we're in.
It's part of how Walensky and Fauci can get away with the shit that they get away with.
Well, you know, if you get hit by a car after you get vaccinated against COVID, that counts as a VAERS COVID death, or vaccine deaths.
But what about if you get hit by a car after you get vaccinated against measles?
Nothing.
So, sorry, that may seem totally unrelated, but chicken is broken.
Okay, maybe.
A chicken that's been entirely out of plants.
No.
No, it's not.
Well, this is awkward.
Something that tastes like chicken.
Maybe.
I don't know.
I haven't tasted it.
Entirely made out of plants.
Okay, cool, but...
Stop it with the pretending that Reality A is actually Reality B. No.
History, as we just talked about, is one-off, and chickens and plants aren't the same thing.
I hate to correct you in light of the fact that you've been suffering from a dangerous synthetic illness, which has probably robbed you of at least energy.
And mental capacity, surely.
I think it's just distracting you, but, I mean, all chickens are made out of plants.
And we're all, all energy is solar energy.
Yes.
Yes.
Fine.
And we're all, yes.
No.
I was going to introduce our, we were going to cut the Gordian knot and we were going to introduce our audience to the glory of second-order vegetarianism.
Do it then.
Okay.
Well, I mean, this is it.
You just eat animals that eat plants, and done.
Right?
You don't need this company for that.
No!
No, I don't trust that company any farther than I could throw them, but... But, I mean, chickens aren't made... they aren't even made entirely out of plants, because first off, they're made of other chicken from the embryo, and then they're also eating insects.
Right, who ate plants.
I mean, that's the thing.
They also eat fungus.
Fungus, which ate plants.
That's the thing.
It's glorious.
What about microbes?
What about the autotrophs?
Other autotrophs beyond plants?
Well, all right, that is a minor technicality at best.
The two kingdoms, there are two kingdoms that I think would argue with you.
This is an exception, like, you know, that's not meat because it's got salt on it.
Right.
You've got the autotrophs.
You've got the autotrophs actually doing the hard work and everybody else is stealing it.
And so ultimately, it all does come from plants.
The plants are late to the game as autotrophs, man.
Yeah, but it's what we, I'm sure it's most of chicken feed, which I have not tried.
But, um, So we're now looking for a new sponsor.
Right.
I promise that if someone comes to us with a chicken feed that they claim is human grade, I will buy us a chicken so that we can have an excuse to have it around and see if this guy will taste it.
And you know that I will.
As long as it's human grade.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay, I'll stop talking about chicken now.
Let's see.
Oh, here we go.
I need the link to work.
Okay, I'm gonna have you just briefly show my screen here for a moment, and then Zach, I'm gonna need it back.
This is not published in Science, but this is like their Science News thing.
The original article I will show you shortly.
Drug-laced beer may have forged ancient Peruvian empire.
Andean rulers may have fostered allegiance one feast at a time.
The first paragraph being, and then again, this is the science, this is the report on the science.
In the journal, Science.
Between 500 and 1100 CE, the highlands of Peru were home to a far-reaching empire known as the Wari.
Like the Inca after them, the Wari managed to spread their culture over the vast distances and rugged terrain of the Andes Mountains.
Now, new finds from a small site in Peru suggest that the Wari may have forged political alliances by serving drug-laced beer to local elites at periodic parties, extending their empire one trippy feast at a time.
If I may have my screen back for a moment, Zach.
That was enticing enough that I went and read the actual article this was based on.
Hold on, I don't have it up yet.
It's different.
Is it?
Yeah.
Here it is.
Published in Antiquity this month, the journal Antiquity, it's called, Hallucinogens, Alcohol, and Shifting Leadership Strategies in the Ancient Peruvian Andes.
Who knew?
I didn't know that this was a realm of research, and I find it fascinating.
Let's see, there's one thing at the very end that I want to share.
Let me just share the, this is sort of the summary.
I don't, it's not the abstract exactly, but maybe it is.
In the pre-Columbian Andes, the use of hallucinogens during the formative period, 900 to 300 BC, often supported exclusionary political strategies.
And they later go on to explain that basically hallucinogens tend to be individual, small group, if any group at all, and therefore foster basically, like they say, exclusionary strategies in which you have either shamans or just elites doing them.
Whereas, during the Late Horizon Period, A.D.
1450-1532, Inca leaders emphasized corporate strategies via the mass consumption of alcohol.
Corporate strategies via the mass consumption of alcohol.
Everything in this is just blowing my mind.
Using data from Quilcapampa, the authors argue that a shift occurred during the Middle Horizon Period, A.D.
600-1000, when beer made from I don't know.
I don't know, was combined with a hallucinogen and a denanthera colubrina.
The resulting psychotropic experience reinforced the power of the wary state and represents an intermediate step between exclusionary and corporate political strategies.
This Andean example adds to the global catalog documenting the close relationship between hallucinogens and social power.
And so their basic argument is alcohol loosens people up, makes people feel like they're having a shared experience and anyone can make it, right?
So once you expose people to alcohol, if somehow you have a society where there is no alcohol, which I don't know if that even exists, and you bring it to a party or a festival or something, people are going to figure out how to do it, and I mean precisely because it just happens, like alcohol happens.
Whereas, especially in South America, the strong hallucinogens tend to involve very carefully curated and crafted combinations in which you don't just happen into this stuff, right?
It's not that you found some psilocybin.
You didn't just find the mushrooms and eat them and had a trip.
They tend to be very complex recipes.
And that basically the argument is that what they're calling the corporate structure of the Inca and of many modern nation-states encourages basically mass lack of sobriety with alcohol, but not the sort of insight of hallucinogens because that many people on hallucinogens wouldn't be controllable.
and what the Wari have done, they're arguing.
Let me find this one quote that I wanted to share.
Okay, there's two quotes actually, so here's one.
Our paleoethnobotanical evidence from the Wari outpost of Quilcapamba strongly suggests that Vilca was added to mole beer at feasts.
Combining a hallucinogen with alcohol altered the experience of both psychoactive substances and, we argue, provided Wari leaders with a corporate strategy of governance via patron-client feasting relationships.
So they go through the botanicals.
They actually have a fascinating list of all the species they found at this site, which includes quinoa, and squashes, and cactuses, and coca, and beans, and peanuts, and potatoes, and aji, which is a hot pepper, and some corn, and then these salucinogen and this thing they're making alcohol into.
So we're looking for the Here it is.
Vilka infused mole chicha, So chicha is just the broad name for the alcoholic brew that is still eaten, drunk a lot in Quechua territory in South America.
Vilka-infused mole chicha enabled a more inclusive psychotropic experience in Wari society.
For perhaps the first time in the Andes, the consumption of Vilka therefore moved beyond those spiritual leaders who communed with the supernatural realm.
People couldn't go source it for themselves because they didn't know the recipe.
psychotropic experience while ensuring the privileged position of war leaders within the social hierarchy as the providers of the hallucinogen people couldn't go source it for themselves because they didn't know the recipe yeah so you came to the parties and you knew you were going to have some fun at the parties and you couldn't go try this at home um yeah actually just one more but
Yeah.
By tying their esoteric knowledge of obtaining and using Vilca as an additive to mole chicha, an intoxicant that stimulated communitas, Wari leaders were able to legitimize and maintain their heightened status.
These individuals were able to offer memorable, collective, psychotropic feasts, but ensure that they could not be independently replicated.
That's wild.
Yeah.
I have two strong... Yeah, so this is new to you.
Yeah, this is new to me.
One, there's a delightful little game you can play where, you know, you listen to this description, scientific as it is, and you know... How would they know?
Well, no, I haven't looked at it, but my guess is, you know, that's a decently plausible description of a mechanism and all of this, and who's to say if it's really 100% accurate, but nonetheless, there's nothing about that description that strikes me as, you know, preposterous.
But it does strike me as, you know, academics go to a party and then try to describe what happened.
Well, if they'd written it while they were on this brew, it probably wouldn't be as coherent.
Right, if they had been invited to the party, and it's easy to understand why academics wouldn't be.
I mean, aside from this being a 1500-year-old practice.
That's another obstacle.
But nonetheless, it is funny to me.
I think if we were to be able to teleport to such a party, you might actually be able to recover their description, but that would be like, oh, no, no, that's not what it was like, right?
You know, what it was like was very Well, they're not pretending to have done ethnography.
I hope that they wish that they could, that they could have been participant observers in these feasts and thus learned even more.
But archaeologists are not cultural anthropologists.
They do different work, and they have different evidence that they are looking at.
Which leads me to my other reaction to this, which is some part of me desperately wants alien anthropologists to describe what has happened in light of COVID and our public health priesthood and the way that they have gained power and led the Indeed.
Yeah, no, that's good.
That is good.
mass psychosis event that only served to instantiate their own blah, blah, blah, deep into the future.
If you had, if you could put that description up next to a proper and similar description of what is taking place in the present, then you'd know something.
Indeed.
Yeah, no, that's good.
That is good.
Okay.
Here.
No, it's not coming up.
Hold on.
The other thing, and maybe we'll get to ice fish as well, but...
Here we have a paper, also just published, in Biology Letters.
This is actually from the end of... Looks like it's slightly earlier.
Actually, it's not just just published.
I just ran into it.
Adaptation of sperm whales to open boat whalers.
Rapid social learning on a large scale?
Awesome.
Awesome, right?
They're looking at North Pacific whaling in the 19th century, and so they're looking at logbooks, whalers' logbooks.
It's indirect that way, and then they're modeling.
The modeling is kind of a black box.
I didn't pursue all of the data and the models that they have online.
I just read through this article where they say we've got all the explanations online, but they seem to be doing a really compelling job here.
Let me just share a couple of quotes.
Some historians have suggested that the success...
I'm going to start over.
Some historians have suggested that the success rate of open boat whalers and harpooning sighted whales, the second stage in these whaling operations, dropped substantially during the initial years of industrial exploitation, and that this was due to socially learned changes in whale behavior.
The development of pelagic whaling operations in the North Pacific by American whalers during the middle 19th century is well chronicled in digitized whalers' logbooks, so that's the source of their data.
We assessed whether this decline was caused by So they do see that there are declines in efficacy, which will reduce the effect of the hot set there.
It's confounded by that.
It's confounded by that, but they actually have four hypotheses.
And again, they're using their model to assess, and I don't love the way that they've been forced to assess what they're doing, but the fact that they lay out four alternative hypotheses up front is such a refreshing change from how most so-called scientific papers are written.
They say, we assessed whether this decline was caused by socially learned changes in the defensive behavior of the whales.
That's their primary hypothesis.
which hypothesis X they call it, evaluating support for several alternative hypotheses using causal models.
The first whalers on the ground were particularly proficient.
Oh, that's hypothesis one.
The whalers initially captured especially vulnerable whales, Hypothesis 2.
Or the whales learned to escape whalers from their own individual experience of encountering them, Hypothesis 3.
So that's different from their main hypothesis in that it's individually learned, like individuals learn to evade as opposed to their social learning, their transmission of social And in fact, it's even a higher bar than it seems.
They're asking, could groups of whales have communicated information to other groups of whales?
And they find, without going into the methods at all, The between-unit social learning model fits the data better than all other causal models, producing a rapid decline in strike rate as units learn defensive measures from one another.
All right, so a number of reactions.
One, super cool.
Two, really skeptical.
You've got a bunch of mechanisms, and as far as I can tell, none of them are mutually exclusive.
So to say one fits the data better Again, I did not spend enough time, and I just am not a fan of the modeling approach, and it was all they had.
But nonetheless, they could all be true.
But to hear them talk about it, they find it was hardest for them to distinguish between the social learning model and the individual's learning model, that it was easier to get rid of the other two.
And I think they may have, it's possible I'm overlooking it and I apologize to them if I'm about to suggest that they do something that they actually did, but there's actually more range in here because you could have... You mean in terms of hypotheses?
Yeah.
Okay.
So if you fans of our book will be familiar with this style of thought, but there are two ways that you could get a change in
Uh group behavior or lineage behavior that would result in improvement in the odds of the whales against the whalers one is that there's variation between the whales and how they behave which there will be and that the Ways of being a whale that made them vulnerable to the whalers Began to decline because the whalers had success against them and the ways of being a whale that uh were
So that's different from vulnerable.
So their use of the term vulnerable is like old, weak, young, whatever.
And you're saying basically that there will be a selective spread in a population behaviorally And some behaviors that weren't putting them at risk before put them at risk of wailing, and that part of that behavioral spread will simply be selected out by wailing, which won't read as vulnerable because they don't have the demographic measures of vulnerability.
I don't mean to diminish it.
That really is selection producing adaptation, and the nature of the adaptation is immunity to wailing.
But that's not social learning.
Right.
On the other hand, it could be social learning, and there are multiple ways that it could be social learning.
There's a question about, you know, again, individuals who succeed, and those individuals who succeed then being, let's say, even mimicked by other whales, right?
A successful… Well, you know, mimicry sounds like social learning.
Well, I'm not discounting that it's social learning, but I'm arguing if these were humans, right, you would have two things competing.
You would have humans succeeding at various things that would propagate, and you would have humans discussing the problem and coming up with possible solutions, right?
Now, in whales, we have a highly intelligent, you know, these are sperm whales.
We have a highly intelligent animal that does not have language.
They communicate, but they don't have language, right?
So their ability to propose things to each other is, on the one hand, it would seem extremely limited from the human perspective.
On the other hand, maybe not, right?
Because they can show, right?
So whale communication might be a lot more show than tell, but nonetheless, Maybe, although long-distance vocalizations, right?
But very short distance, what you can see in water, and if you're so close that you can see it, you're presumably at risk from the same whalers.
Right, exactly.
But we see much smaller-toothed whales, like dolphins, learning special techniques for corralling fish and hitting them with their tails and things like this.
Right.
I'm just arguing.
But there's no risk to them in the watching, whereas there would be risk to whales in watching here.
I'm just arguing you've got a mechanism for the transmission of information that, you know, I don't know if whales can propose things to each other by showing, but that's a possibility.
And And so you could get… Oh, you mean later, like… Right!
Like, that was close, but watch this, right?
Watch what I would do, right?
Here's what I did.
Watch what I did, yeah.
Exactly.
So, you know, that could be fanciful imagining of what whales might be doing.
It might be projecting a human-style thought process on them.
On the other hand, we're talking about a highly intelligent mammal.
Yeah, and or like, oh, I did something that worked.
I'm going to practice that a bunch because that worked and then others watch it and like, oh, look what he's doing.
I wonder if that's what worked.
Right.
So, in some sense, the point is, we argue that consciousness is about getting ahead of this process so selection doesn't have to solve the problem because you can actually mentally model a problem, pool your insight with others who are mentally modeling the same problem.
And come up with a solution that you didn't have before that actually works, and then you can try it in the real world and see whether you had it.
Yeah.
Whales have some of our tools, not all of our tools, and they have them in different proportions, but the point is it interfaces very closely here with the question of, well, how did the whales get better at this, right?
So anyway, fascinating stuff.
Okay.
Okay, the only thing about icefish I've got is this.
Again, it's in Current Biology.
New paper.
This one is actually brand new.
A vast icefish breeding colony discovered in the Antarctic.
Totally surprising.
There was... Oh boy, that's not working at all.
There it is.
A breeding colony of nonothenioid icefish, Neopagyptopsis iona, I'm probably butchering that Latin, of globally unprecedented extent has been discovered in the southern Weddell Sea, Antarctica.
The colony was estimated to cover at least 240 square kilometers.
of the eastern flank of the Filchner Trough, comprised of fishnets nests at a density of 0.26 nests per square meter, representing an estimated total of 60 million active nests and associated fish biomass of over 60,000 tons.
Oh, stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Wow.
That didn't work at all.
Man.
I don't know why it started talking at me.
Well, I can't make a computer do what I want it to do at the moment, but that is massive.
I mean, that's really all I got, but we, science, Western science, just discovered Um, an amazing amount of ice fish, uh, where apparently we'd only ever seen, you know, one or two nests in a place before.
And maybe it's because the entire global population of ice fish nest right there.
Uh, but all in one place.
That's cool.
And it speaks to one of the great things about being a biologist at this scale is that the world is actually full of things that we've never seen before.
And you and I have found stuff that nobody had ever seen before.
There's still a lot of it out there.
I just ran across one today where somebody, I think in Thailand, found a I found this through Monica Lewinsky, who I saw on Twitter.
She said that the person had lost her at the word tarantula.
Apparently she's not a fan, but anyway, the point is the report that she was pointing to was of a discovery of a tarantula whose entire ecology is based around bamboo, and apparently it's the only one.
What is it doing?
Oh, it lives inside the bamboo and it has a special, you know, it's not unlike your frogs in the sense that it has developed, you know, bamboo is a really weird plant.
Okay.
But anyway, it's cool.
I find that a little disturbing.
You do?
I do.
Well, so I mean, the audience doesn't know that my, you know, my research system was indeed Phytotelum breeding frogs.
Phytotelum just meaning like the holes that form in some plants that then fill with water and then make little mini ecosystems for organisms that choose to live in them.
And sometimes it's bromeliads, like we've got this bromeliad back here.
In the new world, it's dark poison frogs, which is the frogs I started working on.
They They lay their eggs in the wells and the bromeliads and then, depending on the species, sometimes they leave their tadpoles there and mom or dad, depending on the species, comes back and feeds them.
Or sometimes they lay their eggs in the leaf litter and then someone transports them, usually a parent, on their back.
Anyway, in Madagascar, the frogs that I worked on, I discovered a number of things about them, including that they had an Really really similar system largely using introduced bamboo, which is interesting because there are not that many native phytotomic plants in Madagascar.
There are sort of the troughs left in big buttress trees, which occasionally I found mantella eggs and tads in, but very few other things.
And, you know, occasionally in like the what are called the crotches of trees as well.
But bamboo was the big one, so I spent just a lot of time.
I like carved windows into bamboo with a hacksaw and made little windows with epoxy and ziplock bags and, you know, just spent a lot of time around bamboo.
And If there had been tarantulas also living in them, I would have been much less pleased with the whole scene.
That's all.
There's nothing a tarantula could do that would be nearly as terrifying as what Plethodon hyla natostica does if you happen to be peering into bamboo looking for mantella frogs and eggs.
Yes, it is.
But they only bark.
Only bark?
They don't have a bite.
Yeah, but it's... So this is a frog.
So Heather's system involved frogs that were laying eggs in these basically broken off bamboo where the water collects in the rain.
But there are other species that use the same thing.
I found three other species that are using the same thing and a crane fly also that is Parasitizing the frog eggs.
At some point you're going to have to explain this in plain English, but anyway, this one frog.
This one species of frog.
Plathodontohyla natostica.
Plathodontohyla.
Plathodontohyla natostica.
All right, well, I botched that.
No, no, you just mumbled slightly.
This was the one where the fathers were tending all of the babies in the well.
Yeah, so the Mantella have long-term territories.
And in fact, I identified three different kinds of territoriality that the males have, but the most successful males, the male that you want to be, defends a territory that has one or more of these wells in them.
But there are at least three other species of frogs that come in and use these wells for their reproductive purposes as well, but they don't defend them at all other moments.
They just come in and defend them short term, including Plethodonta highland atostica, which is, boy, I don't have the numbers in front of me, of course, but I don't know, seven to ten times the mass of a Mantella?
Oh yeah, it's a big animal.
It's a big honking frog, and basically the dudes fill up their whole cavity with their bodies, and they come in, they send out messages into the universe looking for sexy female Plathodontohelina tosticas.
After they get one and she lays all of her eggs in the well, he stays there and just guards the eggs as they Develop.
They hatch out into tads.
Oxygenates the water.
Oxygenates the water and guards them against predators until they fully metamorphose and leave off and go off as froglets and then he leaves.
But the way that they defend They're wells.
So, as a hapless photographer looking for interesting Malagasy phenomena peering into the occasional well, which is, of course, very, very dark.
I have a great picture, actually, that I got of Plothodonta hylaenotostica, which we will show you at some point.
Hop on pop.
Hop on pop.
That's the photo.
But in order to get that photo, I had to peer into these wells and the bark.
So imagine a frog, you know, a frog that size with a- That's his head width.
Right, and he's got a megaphone, right?
And he's got 40 babies!
Bamboo!
And his job is that if anything peers into the thing, he needs to scare the crap out of it so it goes away.
And if that something is you looking for a good photo opportunity, wow, will that wake you up!
Man!
Yeah, no, the Mantella vocalizations are sweet, and they can get loud if there's a lot of them.
And the, what is it, Anodyne hylae?
Anodyne hylae bellingerize one of the other species.
I don't remember him vocalizing at all.
Females don't talk.
But Plethodontohilanotostica, man.
Man, that is not a frog you want to tangle with.
Yeah, they'll knock you off your socks.
Oh, man, yeah, exactly.
Your socks, because it's Madagascar, are rotting.
Right.
I don't know why we're talking about this.
I don't really either.
Okay.
Oh, we were talking about ice fish and other cool things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's all I got.
All right.
Well, I'm going to leave the ice fishing gloves discussion for another time.
Okay.
I did have one thing that I wanted to do.
I had a thought.
I saw a puzzle I've been thinking about, you know, just a topic that's been on my mind somewhere back burner for a long time and finally this week I made a breakthrough and I wanted to drop it on you.
You know nothing about this and I just want to see what you think.
Oh boy.
All right.
Yeah.
Here's the idea.
Given another three or 4,000 years of selection under domestication, cats could make great pets.
So it wasn't the cats that pulled their rotting orange out of their bowl and left it for you to step on.
But we did have two instances of not entirely fresh mice this week.
Oh, there was that.
Was there something else?
That's part of it.
I just, you know, here's the thing.
Do not-entirely-fresh mice in the bedroom, I should say.
Yes.
Squirreled away, as it were.
Yeah.
I understand that there are people who think that cats make good pets already, and I assume these people must rent all of their stuff.
Anybody who owned anything would know that this is not an animal ready for prime time as a pet, but it has great promise, I think.
We invite a little bit of the wild in.
Yes, a little too much.
And it is marvelous.
And he is just sleeping through your rant, and he will see to it that you can come up at us later.
Yeah, he's such an intelligent cat.
He's been doing this thing this week.
So we, in order to watch movies at night, we like to put our feet up and we got some soft cubes that, you know, are like Ottomans.
Which I have dubbed the scratching cubes.
Right, so he will scratch the Ottomans and I will shout at him and then he will give me that look with all of the intelligence in those eyes like, huh, you don't
I don't seem to like it when I do that, but then the next thing he does, he will go over to the Cecil scratching post that we have bought for the purpose of scratching, and he will look me directly in the eye, and then he will scratch it, and I can see the gears turning in his head, like, why are you troubled by my scratching that, but you seem to not be troubled by my scratching this.
Seems equal to me.
Anyway.
He's a smart critter.
Yep.
Who has very little interest in your rules, because you're not going to throw him out of his heels, are you?
Nope.
He has the intelligence, the dexterity, and the morals of a raccoon.
Yeah.
He does.
He does.
Yep.
And we love him.
Okay, um, I think that's it.
I think that's it for the week.
We've gone on for quite a while.
So, oh!
I forgot to mention at the top of this hour, I should have mentioned, the next two weeks we're going to be at a different time.
We're actually going to come on Fridays.
Different times each of the two Fridays for various reasons.
Next week we're going to be Friday Pacific Time afternoon, which means for those of you in Europe, you probably miss us.
But, you know, stuff stays up and we put the stuff on Spotify right away as well at this point.
You just can't livestream on Spotify.
And then the following week we're going to be coming at you Friday morning.
So, anyway, two different time schedules.
We'll be here just a day early.
Friday morning, we should point out... That's two weeks from now.
Two weeks from now, because I am going to be... No, that's next week.
Oh, that's next week.
Right!
Oh, time.
Yes, got it.
The 23rd of January, we are going to march on Washington peacefully, but we are going to make clear through our speech That these mandates are unjustified.
They are not justified because the things being mandated are not acceptably safe and effective, because the people doing the mandating are not free of corruption, and because it is un-American.
So, anyway, consider marching with us January 23rd in DC.
Yep, exactly.
DefeatTheMandates.com, I believe, is the website.
DefeatTheMandates.com.
So, you can ask questions at DarkHorseSubmissions.com, email any logistical questions you have to DarkHorseModerator at gmail.com, and I mentioned last week that our moderator can give you an address, a P.O.
box to send things to, and we have been getting some just delightful things from people, and we appreciate those things.
You can of course always join our Patreons.
We would really love for you to read the book.
If you don't want to buy it, it's available at many, many libraries, many copies, and there's more translation rights being sold all the time, so it's going to be available in more and more languages.
And anything else to say?
I don't think so.
All right, so be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
