#116 Selling out the West (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/EvoLens116:8625cfabc83e3fcd1a8012edf0d213fc12fff490 View on Spotify (With video): ***** In this 116th 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 discuss a hypothesis regarding the mechanism by which mRNA vaccines may cause myocarditis. We discuss fear and safety and how fear is used to convince us that we...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast Retro Cold War Edition episode welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast Retro Cold War Edition episode number That's right.
116!
Not a prime number, no danger of it in this case.
We've been off for a week, we were recalibrating and the world was also recalibrating, not in the best direction, but anyway, here we are.
We've accomplished something great, all of us.
You, me, the audience.
Well recently, I don't know if it was our last episode, but recently we discussed the fact that we had made it halfway through the winter.
We are now two-thirds of the way through the winter.
It's looking ever more like we will survive to see the spring.
Yeah.
Unlike certain dinosaurs from 65 million years ago.
Yeah, it's not looking good for that.
I mean, certain dinosaurs from 65 million years ago are doing not as well as they have been, but still hanging in there.
But yeah, the ones you're referring to, they're not going to make it.
Yeah, the non-animal dinosaurs, they went out in a puff of, well, I don't know, rock and rage or something.
A puff of magic dragon.
And it seems like it happened in the spring, which is kind of amazing.
In this sea of ridiculousness out of which it is hard to gather hope and inspiration, there is some research this week suggesting that not only can we get You know, it's probably the Chicxulub impact.
It might have been, you know, there's the Deccan traps in India.
There's a couple of possible competing hypotheses for what happened 65 million years ago at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary, after which the non-avian dinosaurs were gone, and which brought in the age of mammals.
But some new research suggests that not only can we get it to sort of that level of precision, the event, whatever exactly it was, but that it was in the springtime.
And I just, you know, I love science.
Oh, man.
I love fricking science because we can tell things at that kind of level of precision in some cases, and use inference, use a whole series of inferences.
And when they are consilient with one another, we say that looks ever more likely.
Extinction in the spring.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's something.
It is amazing.
My guess is that it's going to be, I mean, I know nothing about this.
I'm going to be putting you through your paces as you explain this research.
But I'm going to guess that we have a pretty good shot at being right about the season and no shot whatsoever about being right about the year.
Oh yeah, yeah.
No, for sure.
And this, of course, doesn't presume to get at the year.
The evidence that you would look at to assess seasonality, which is of course going to have to do with signals about growth rates and when growth is happening more, and therefore when certain kinds of isotopes and other molecular forms are being laid down in bones such that they can be fossilized, is really a totally different kind of evidence than How many tens of millions of years ago, again, was that?
Right, and in its own way, what difference does it make what exact year it was?
On the other hand, seasonally speaking, it does make a kind of an interesting difference.
And so anyway, that's going to be I'm looking forward to the point that we get to discuss that.
Yeah, I don't even I don't know very much about it.
So I've said most of what I know.
But let's do let's do announcements and, and ads and then get into get into the meat of the show.
So We continue to be thrilled with the responses that we continue to get about Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
There are a number of translations into other languages in the works at this point, with the first of them due in the spring in French.
And we just encourage you, if you are interested in the kinds of analysis that allows you to clear away some of the chaff and get to the wheat of clear, logical thinking, we think that we do a pretty good job of it, and so do many other people, in this book, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Yes, although oddly, oddly this week, chaff has taken on its second meaning, which actually may be etymologically related to the first meaning.
Is this a Ukraine thing?
Well, kind of.
Yeah, it's a fighter jet thing.
There is a kind of distraction that planes drop in order to get missiles that target them to blow up in the wrong place.
It sounds like the same idea.
Chaff.
Yes, exactly.
Metaphorical chaff.
The wheat being the plane, the chaff being the stuff that you can get the missiles to target.
Indeed.
Okay, we are live on YouTube and Odyssey.
The chat is on Odyssey.
For those of you who are live with us, you can ask questions, which will happen in the second hour after we're done here.
I would imagine everybody who's with us is live.
I hope so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I really do.
I hope so.
I hope that our viewer count isn't being added to by the dead.
Yes.
Well, they just do a poor job of viewing.
I don't know.
We should move on.
This is becoming depressing, and we don't need any more of that this week.
No, we don't.
You can ask your questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
That's questions for the Q&A.
If you have logistical questions about how do I ask questions, which this would be a strange moment to need that.
But you can email darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
Speaking of which, our moderator has received well over a hundred emails of interest about the web developer that we sent out a call for a couple weeks ago.
So we are trying to make our way through those and are thrilled with the level of response, but just recognize that there's a lot to get through.
You can go to darkhorsepodcast.org, store.darkhorsepodcast.org to find images of this little guy here, this epic tabby, and digital book burning, and direwolves, and various other things.
At Natural Selections, my substack, I have been focused on the Trucker's Convoy in Canada for many weeks now.
And of course, what happened since we were with you last was first Trudeau announced that he was invoking the Emergencies Act, and then after quite a lot of drama, he sent in the police and they got rid of the convoy.
And then the Emergencies Act has since been rescinded.
I'm not sure that's exactly the right word, but he's backed off of it.
Basically, he was losing.
But he was losing in a way that can be framed as winning, which is so much of what losing looks like these days, doesn't it?
Yes, the curtain fell on the Emergencies Act.
I think that's the way we should think of it.
Okay, good.
I hope, yeah, I like that.
I like that.
Anyway, there's a whole lot, this most recent piece that I published on natural selections is Get Ready for the Biggest Game of Whac-A-Mole the World Has Ever Seen.
And I'm hoping that happens, that we have lots of, basically, so many pop-up protests that are objecting to the mandates, the tyranny, the authoritarianism, the broad governmental overreach in times in which we have been lied to endlessly.
such that it becomes clear that actually the power that they appear to be wielding, the majority they appear to have, is very thin.
And by that I don't mean like 51%.
I mean it has the appearance of depth and robustness, but I think it is largely a Potemkin kind of village situation.
Yeah, it's Potemkin victory.
They pretend that they are winning.
They are declaring victory so that we will not notice how badly they've botched this and have lost.
And they have lost in large measure because of the rate at which people are waking up to their bullshit, which is good news.
It's late, but hopefully it's not too late.
Hopefully it's not too late.
Okay, without, well, I don't usually clap on air.
Okay, without further ado, we have three ad sponsors this week for which, as usual, we are very grateful.
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Excuse me.
And we got a little movement in the background from our dog at the very mention of Sundaes.
I fed her with Sundaes this morning, and boy, was she thrilled.
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No comment.
I'm very fond of the soup.
I will say that within the category dog food, I am most fond of sundae.
I did add sort of a garden and some crunchies to the top of the soup.
Now, it was nuts and sort of roasted corn, but maybe next time some sundaes.
Please don't.
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When Sundaes approached us about being a sponsor, we were dubious.
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Can I?
I'm gonna interrupt here and say that someone approached me this week in a Trader Joe's and said, do you like those shoes?
I said, oh my god, I love them, even though they're ugly.
She said, oh, I don't think they're ugly.
See?
So, there you go.
This is the experience.
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Yes, indeed.
Our green perimeter off.
Yes, we can remove the green perimeter parameter.
Would you say that?
Okay.
All right.
We're good.
Good.
I think you're gonna, you're gonna launch us.
I'm going to launch us, yes.
And I must tell you that somehow this week it all oddly comes together even though the topics seem to have nothing to do with each other.
It would be wrong of us to launch into a discussion of anything without noting that somehow, suddenly, without warning, the 20th century is back.
The Cold War is afoot, and we are now grappling with that reality, which we probably didn't need to, but because we have not been minding the store, we have been reminded that there are actually rules to this game, and if you do not pay attention to them, they come at you fast.
All right, so my hope today was to talk about a hypothesis.
A hypothesis about myocarditis and why it is being triggered by mRNA vaccines of the type we have seen.
I'm not going to present this as factual.
I do not know that this is true.
But what I do know is that an understanding of A bit of biology and understanding of what viruses are, about the predicament that viruses put multicellular creatures like us in, and the way that our ancestors have evolutionarily learned to fend off viruses,
Suggests a hazard about this new and amazing but until now untested technology When introduced into the human body So that's my hope and I think the thing to do here is you're gonna play Student and I don't mean student in the sense that most people are familiar with it.
I mean it in the sense that That we scientists become each other's students at the point that we have something to discuss where we don't know, right?
We are the students of those who have seen something we have not yet seen.
So you're going to play that role on behalf of the The audience.
Which means explicitly the expectation is that I interrupt you when you say something that I don't find clear or that I maybe disagree with.
Yeah, maybe disagree with and maybe I learned something because you forced me to see something about what I'm saying that I didn't see when I went through it myself.
Something like that.
Okay.
And you know, of course the lovely thing is that this is exactly how we behaved in a classroom and we had a group of, you know, if we taught together something like 50 students, but we would also be each other's students in that context and certainly we have different areas of specialty and it all works out pretty well because really what you always want when you're trying to understand something is somebody who understands why you don't get something yet to ask the question that causes it to be explained in a way that you do get.
And potentially model what other people may or may not already know, right?
So the difference between, say, the dinner table and a classroom is that the classroom is going to be a representative sample of at least, you know, of something, of some larger group.
And you will hear from people, you know, if you hear from a few people, that isn't making any sense to me.
There's a decent chance that either there's a There's a lack of understanding in the population that you didn't know was there, or there's a way that you're communicating it that is in some number of people's blind spots.
So let's try this.
This is tougher than either a dining room table or a dinner table or a classroom because the audience really is all of you who we can't hear.
We can't hear and we don't know in detail, so we can't even guess what is in this unclear.
We hear a little bit, and in fact we'll end maybe today with one of so many lovely notes that we got in these last couple of weeks from people, but we can't hear in real time.
Right.
And I would just say that there are many, many different moves that the student in this case is entitled to avail themselves of, including, you know, here's a question.
I don't think the I don't think the audience will know X piece.
I think I know it, but I'm going to ask you the question anyway to get you to spell it out.
So anyway, yeah, you have tools.
I don't know if what you just did was rhetorical or if you're about to now ask me something.
Nope.
Okay.
That was rhetorical.
That was just pointing out that I am not necessarily, in explaining this to you, I am really using you as a surrogate for people, most of whom aren't biologists.
And so anyway, I'm going to err in the direction of being overly clear, hopefully.
Alright, so here's the predicament.
Viruses, I believe, I'm going to oversimplify everything because that's what we do in science, especially anything in the area of complex systems.
The fact is we do not fully understand biology.
We're a long way away.
So what we do when we discuss biology is we describe a cartoonish version of the reality and hopefully our cartoon is simplified but not incorrect.
Right?
We described an overly simple version of the reality and hopefully if you were to expand it to the full level of complexity, it wouldn't contradict what you say.
That's the objective.
So I'm going to describe enough about viruses and enough about the immune system for you to see a picture that I think I increasingly see clearly.
Right?
That may explain why myocarditis is a downstream effect of RNA vaccinations.
Or at least some of them.
In so saying, I do not mean that this is the only reason, right?
We have different kinds of hypotheses.
You've got mutually exclusive hypotheses where if this is causing it, then that isn't causing it.
But in this case, I'm just simply saying here is one mechanism that I believe is likely to create a link between these things, and there may be others.
Okay, let me ask you right off the bat then.
You are going to propose a hypothesis that posits an explanation for why myocarditis is downstream of these mRNA vaccinations.
Of course, we now know that myocarditis is one of the sometimes effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection, of the actual disease COVID.
Is this a separate hypothesis from that?
And if so, does this explain that separately?
And if so, do you have a separate explanation for why you think SARS-CoV-2 may also be causing myocarditis?
So, myocarditis, my understanding of it, and I'm not a heart specialist by any means, My understanding of it is that it is effectively inflammation of the heart muscle, and inflammation can be downstream of various other processes.
Now my guess, and I do not know, but my guess is that the inflammation caused by COVID is different in origin than the inflammation caused by the mRNA vaccines, and I believe I have learned this by listening to Dr. McCullough, who is a cardiac specialist, Mm-hmm, and I should also point out as I was Realizing as I was formulating my hypothesis for what's going on here.
I shared it with several people and One of those people Alexandros Marinos said I believe I have heard that hypothesis elsewhere and he in fact pointed me to a place where dr. McCullough appears to To spell it out and I also now know that our friend Jonathan Cooey is
Who some of you will know from his lab leak series early in the pandemic called JC on a Bike, Journal Club on a Bike, that he also has advanced a version of this hypothesis.
So I don't claim it to be unique.
I do think I arrived at it independently.
But in any case, here's the basics.
We multicellular creatures have a problem with pathogens, and pathogens come in different flavors, right?
You've got things like fungi, a comparatively rare pathogen for us, bacteria, a comparatively common pathogen for us, and viruses, a very common pathogen.
Now, you want to compare in your mind the difference between bacteria and viral infections.
Bacteria are living creatures.
And as such, they have a biology of their own.
It is simplified relative to us eukaryotes, right?
Because bacteria are smaller and simpler than we are, but nonetheless they are biological creatures in their own right.
Viruses are An interesting kind of exception.
They function biologically, but they are definitionally in a gray area.
And the reason for that is that viruses have abandoned the mechanisms that allow a biological creature to function.
Now, how is it that they function if they've abandoned those mechanisms?
Well, they borrow those mechanisms.
So they are in some sense analogous to Special forces that you might drop behind enemy lines that would not carry a great deal of equipment with them, but would have the knowledge of how to utilize stuff that they find inside of enemy territory.
For their own use.
So instead of, you know, getting tanks and airplanes and things in behind enemy lines, you drop something that is full of information about how to utilize what they find locally to the same effect.
And viruses are effectively this.
They have gotten a tremendous advantage by abandoning their own biology and commandeering the biology of the creatures that they infect once they invade.
Right?
And what this means is that we have a problem in trying to fight them.
Because almost everything that viruses do isn't really them.
It's our own machinery that has been commandeered and has now been turned against us.
Okay, can I interject here?
Please.
Just a point of clarification, which I think is not at all central to your argument, but I believe, and I think I may have missed something, but I believe that you said pathogens can come in the form of sort of fungus and bacteria and viruses.
And it seems to me that fungus is a really tiny, tiny kind of human pathogen, but there's two large classes that aren't included in that.
So just in service of sort of categorizing what kinds of human pathogens there are, there There are single-celled eukaryotic pathogens like Plasmodium, which is the microbe that causes malaria.
Bacteria are single-celled prokaryotes without a cell nucleus, and then there are single-celled eukaryotes, what used to be called protists, I think, but it's sort of a giant, giant junk group.
It doesn't have a single evolutionary origin.
And then of course there are multicellular organisms, animals like worms.
Worms, sure.
Right.
So just to have like a categorization, there'd be pathogens come in all of these, single-celled, multi-celled, all of these things.
The distinction really that I think you're trying to make here is virus versus not virus.
There are lots of other functional ways of discriminating between them, but the particular distinction that you're making is because a virus has stripped itself of almost all biological functioning, it can act as effectively special forces.
Right.
It can come in, and you didn't say this yet, but you've said this to me before, it can come in sort of like the dude with the backpack and sneak in without having all of, you know, it doesn't have a tank and it doesn't have, you know, all the stuff that makes it easy for the body in this case to say, ah, there it is, there it is.
It's easier for it to sneak in under the wire and without alarming the self-defense.
Okay, so I want to add two things.
One, there's even a weirder category than virus we now know.
This is something that was very much learned during our lifetimes, which is that there's also something that's even more stripped down, which is a prion disease.
And it's not even really clear that a prion disease It's not clear that it's serving its own interests.
A prion disease is a contagious misfolding of proteins, right?
And so, anyway, it's very pathogenic from the point of view of doing harm.
Spongiform encephalopathy being, you know, mad cow disease being a classic example of this.
But, you know, a virus is at least Creature-like in the sense of we know what it's trying to accomplish.
A prion disease could just be an error that echoes, right?
I'm not going to pretend to know.
I'm sure there are people who know better than I do.
But nonetheless, the spectrum goes from things like a worm, right, which is similar to us, a multicellular To single-celled creatures, to non-celled creature-like things, viruses, to folding errors, right?
Yeah.
And all of these things have pathological implications.
Yep.
But let's take your example of the special forces guy who parachutes behind enemy lines.
Let's say he gets a tank.
He gets behind enemy lines, he sneaks up behind somebody who's got a tank, slips his throat, and takes over the tank, right?
Now you've got a question, which is your own forces are now looking at a tank that looks like them.
That's our tank, but it's pointing at us, right?
So the point is, which tanks of ours do we now shoot at, right?
And that is the question that viruses create.
And so, without going too deeply into the issues of immunity, the overarching story of immunity for creatures like us is something called self versus non-self recognition.
What happens is early in development, there is a process in which your immune system, which in principle is capable of responding to effectively any biological molecule, that immune system is asked a question before you encounter the outside world.
And the question is, Which things can you currently see?
Now, if during that period, you know, in utero, you see molecules that are biological, well then, okay, those are yours, right?
They almost have to be, right?
Because you're insulated from the outside world.
Well, they're yours, they're mom's.
Well, but that's just the thing.
Even that, the placenta is an absolutely remarkable organ that does not get enough attention, right?
The way in which it allows mother and baby's systems to interact without exchanging very much above a certain size is miraculous.
But, the point is, the self-non-self recognition system is programmed during development to recognize all of the stuff that you yourself produce, and then to go on for the rest of your life and ignore it, right?
Then, once you build a system that recognizes all of the molecules you produce and ignores them, now it can do something else, which is now anytime it sees anything that isn't on the ignore list, it can assume it's a pathogen, right?
That means that you don't need to have seen a particular pathogen before in order to know to fight it.
Right.
Right, so... It's a simple rubric that can be gamed.
That can be gamed, and also has certain failure modes, like allergy.
Right.
So, if pollen gets into your lungs, well, your immune system won't recognize it as self, but it's not a pathogen.
And so fighting it can be worse than ignoring it, but you don't know that it actually should be on the ignore list.
There's lots of interesting stuff about the IgE system.
IgE is the abbreviation for antibodies, which are the most famous component of the system, which we know, which has also allowed our minds to be gamed.
But nonetheless, IgE is one of the subsets of antibodies that appears to be particularly prone to create allergic reactions.
And it's probably particularly prone to create allergic reactions because it's not busy doing the things that it would normally do, like fight worms, which we don't have a problem with in the first Because we have such a sterile landscape that we've created for our bodies and our environments.
Right.
So you've got some part of your immune system that's twiddling its thumbs, and it overreacts to, you know, it's the bank guard.
It's grass balling!
It's grass balling!
Right.
I could just sit down, just relax.
We got this.
It's grass balling.
Okay, so you've got a system, and it functions basically by ignoring everything that you make, and therefore feeling entitled to react to anything that you don't make.
Now, again, remember what viruses are.
Viruses are these, um, they are like particles with a creature-like objective but no creature-like bits, right?
It's just like an envelope with creature-like objective written on the letter inside.
And that letter, if it gets into your cells, instructs the cells to do what the virus, if it were a creature, would do for itself, right?
Make more viruses.
So, here's the thing.
When viruses get into us, wherever that happens, if they're respiratory viruses, it will typically be in the surface of the lungs, for example.
You know, we get other kinds of viruses, it'll be in other tissues.
But the virus gets in, if it manages to get into a cell enough that its message can trigger the cell to start doing the virus's bidding rather than the creature's bidding, then that cell becomes effectively a factory that is dedicated to the virus's interests.
The body has to now look at this the same way you would look at a tank that had been commandeered by enemy forces that had parachuted over your border and grabbed a tank, right?
It has to say, aha, I used to think that was self, but that one drives different, right?
That one drives on the left side of the road, not the right side of the road or something.
I got to shoot at that one as if it's the enemy because it actually is.
Even though it also has the tags that say self.
Right.
It has the tags that say self, but it has indicators that it is not anymore self.
And so, the basic punchline here is that when our body sees a cell that looks like us, but does something extra, in other words, it puts out messages that look like non-self, it concludes That is a virally infected cell, and the right thing to do is then to kill it, because a virally infected cell is not going to become unvirally infected.
So there's no trade-off, like how much is that cell worth to me, you know, dead versus alive.
The point is, once it's been commandeered, even though losing a cell is not a good thing, it's better than that cell continuing to do the enemy's bidding.
So the immune system targets cells, and in fact the cells themselves have an interest in being targeted.
Because they only pass on their genes if the creature survives, and the creature survives better if it's not infected, so the cell effectively would volunteer for death.
Okay.
But the basic point is, what does a virally infected cell look like?
It looks like a weird hybrid between self and non-self, right?
It has self markers because it's a self cell and it has foreign markers because its internal machinery has been commandeered and it's now making proteins that the body has never seen before, etc, etc.
Okay, so now what happens if you do what these mRNA vaccines do, right?
If you just assume that they function as the brochure tells you that they should.
These vaccines contain a message.
They are viral-like in this way.
They contain a message without biological structure around it.
And it is encoded, or it is... It's even more stripped down than the virus itself.
Yeah.
It is a single message in this case.
These are cartoonishly simple vaccines in the sense that they produce one antigen, the spike protein.
And that spike protein is wrapped in lipid nanoparticles.
Now, why is it lipid nanoparticles?
It's lipid nanoparticles because like dissolves like, and by surrounding these things in lipids, they are protected from the parts of the human system that would disassemble.
All the mRNAs, I'm not sure how to pronounce that, but that are in the intracellular space would Immediately tear apart the mRNA if it weren't protected.
Right.
So by putting it in this envelope, they make it invisible to a system that would otherwise attack it as foreign.
And they also cause it to have an affinity for human cells.
Those human cells, all cells are covered in this lipid envelope.
And so because like dissolves like, The lipid, and this is one of these places where the story we tell isn't exactly right, the lipids, being non-polar, are not actually attracted to each other, but they're driven together by all the polar stuff sticking to itself.
Well, and the lipids on the cell is actually this phospholipid bilayer, which has things sticking inside.
Yeah, anyway.
So, the point is, the lipid coat, the lipid nanoparticle coat, causes the mRNA to get taken up by cells.
And those cells Because of the way the cells are constructed, they have a nucleus with a DNA genome in it.
Certain mRNAs are produced from genes that the cell wants to transcribe And they're produced from genes that the cell wants to transcribe.
Those mRNA messages move from inside the nucleus into the cytoplasm, and in the cytoplasm you have ribosomes that automatically translate mRNAs that they encounter.
So the whole clever thing about these vaccines, and it is truly clever, is if you put an mRNA message into the cytoplasm of a cell, the cell automatically transcribes it, because the cell is built to do that, because it wouldn't encounter mRNAs in its cytoplasm other than in the case of maybe being infected.
It's the factory behind enemy lines.
If the virus is the enemy, and the virus is dropping in, you're like, okay, can we get self to make things that look like you to trigger the immune system to say, aha, now I know?
Yeah.
And once informed, I will not forget.
Right.
Okay, so you get cells, they pick up the mRNA from the vaccine, they start producing spike protein.
Now the design of these vaccines, right, the spike protein has been modified.
The hope of that modification, which failed actually, so it doesn't completely do this, but presumably it does it somewhat.
Modified from the so-called wild-type SARS-CoV-2.
Right.
Yeah.
Modified in a couple ways.
It's got a hinged piece that's been locked open in order to expose a piece of the antigen to the immune system that would otherwise be so that because the virus is a very sneaky evolved creature it's covered in sugars basically that shield what would ordinarily trigger the immune system from seeing the spike protein so they've locked it open so the immune system sees it but anyway the point is they put in this anchor domain
To get these spike proteins to stick out of the surface of the cells, the hope being that the immune system will see these antigens sticking off the surface of the cells, will learn what they look like, and you will magically become immune to the pathogen when it shows up with very similar antigens on its surface.
Immunomagically.
Immunomagically.
Well said.
Okay, here's the problem.
A cell that is displaying the spike protein on its surface will look, in all probability to the immune system, like an indication that that cell has been virally infected, because that cell is now displaying a mixture of self and non-self proteins.
Yep.
And the immune system has no model for this.
Because the only time that that would likely take place under natural circumstance is viral infection, the right response to a cell that is doing that is to kill it.
Because as much as that cell is useful, it has been lost.
Right?
If your enemy has captured a tank of yours, you're better off, even though that was your tank, you're better off destroying it because at the moment it's working for the enemy and not you.
So, the immune system, seeing cells that have taken up the lipid nanoparticles and transcribed the message inside, the right response for the immune system is, that is a virally infected cell and it has to go.
Right?
Now, this is the wrong thing.
If you could tell the body what was really going on, what you would want to say is, look, stand down the immune system, Because that cell that looks like it has been permanently compromised has only been temporarily compromised.
Those mRNA messages will eventually be lost and the cell will go back to doing its own bidding, which is not something that happens in a virally infected cell.
So the immune system reacts, it overreacts, right?
And it destroys these cells.
Now the problem is, and this is where this whole set of questions that we've been dealing with over the course of COVID interacts with all the weird stuff I did as a graduate student surrounding telomeres and cancer and tumors.
The heart is a weird tissue.
Now the reason that the heart is a weird tissue is that the heart does not have normal repair capacity.
Almost all of your tissues have the capacity to replace dead cells with new cells and to keep functioning.
It always comes at a cost because you're always borrowing from the future capacity to repair that tissue and maintain it.
So every time you destroy some tissue and have to replace it, you're effectively accelerating your aging.
But the heart is super special.
It's one of a small number of tissues.
It doesn't do that trick.
And what that means is that when you destroy a cell in the heart, it doesn't get replaced by a similar cell, right?
This is maybe too far afield, but it strikes me that the heart not having repair capacity is for analogous reasons to salmon being semiparous.
That it is about the chances of surviving repair, or in the case of salmon, the chances of surviving another trip back out to the ocean and years and another move back into the freshwater where you came from and having another reproductive opportunity.
The chances in both of those cases are so low that in the case of the heart, the repair capacity has been dialed all the way down.
And in the case of salmon, they've become a breed-once-then-die species.
Well, interesting.
I think there's an analogy.
I think it is actually different.
It's a different analogy.
Yeah.
If I can rephrase what you've said.
There's a point at which your likelihood of making it to a second reproductive event is so low.
If you're a salmon.
If you are a salmon.
Really, if you're anything.
There's a point at which if you are at reproduction, your chances of getting back to reproduction are so low that you ought to invest everything in that reproductive event that you've reached, and therefore there's a shift where it's like anything you hold back is wasted in all probability, so you might as well invest it all here.
That is to say, any tissue that you can turn into more eggs or more sperm is better spent now because it's very unlikely to get back to this very difficult place.
Yeah.
Specifically Pacific salmon we're talking about, not corrincus.
Yeah.
Right.
And so anyway, there's a whole interesting discussion here.
I've hypothesized that actually bears may be the difference.
It could also be the sharpness of the Western mountains.
But the point is the stakes are very different in the West.
Okay, so back to the heart.
than the East in a way that has caused all but one of our Western salmon to go semelparis.
Our salmonids, yep.
Yeah.
Okay.
So back to the heart.
Why is the heart a different case than the salmon case?
Yeah.
The hypothesis I put forward in my paper with Debbie Cizik in, I guess it was published in 2002 finally, That's right.
The hypothesis that we put forward was that the reason that the heart lacks this capacity is that in order to have the capacity to do cellular repair, You run the risk of creating what we called a prototumor.
A prototumor is a growth of cells.
If a cell becomes unregulated, and it produces a bunch of, you know, if a cell becomes deaf to the messages that say, stop dividing, then it will just simply divide.
And if a cell does that in the heart, it could create a prototumor.
Let's imagine something the size of a pea.
Well, a growth the size of a pea, if it happens in your liver, you're never going to know If it happens on your skin, it will be a mole.
If it happens in your heart, it could block an artery and kill you, right?
So the point is, the danger of a prototumor is so high, and again, this is a hypothesis, I don't know if it's true, and as far as I know, it's never been tested, but the danger of a growth of cells out of place in the heart is so large that the system has had repair turned all the way down so that there is no hazard of that, and as a result, the heart is this
Absolute marvel of design, or as if design, where it goes for 85, 100 years effectively, flawlessly, without the capacity for repair.
And there will be people saying there is capacity for repair.
Yeah, there may be a tiny bit.
In general, though, instead of repair, what you get is the capacity to scar, right?
And scar is basically like biology's spackle, right?
Not the thing that is being replaced.
It's something that's good enough.
Yeah, and so in any case.
To make a long story shorter here, you've got an mRNA message which causes cells to transcribe or to translate a protein that is not self, which almost cannot help but be read by the immune system as an indication that those cells have been virally infected, which they haven't been, but the immune system doesn't know about mRNA vaccines, and so it will assume
That the category that explains this anomaly is infected cell, and it will do what the right thing to do is, which is to destroy that cell, when in fact the right thing to do here is to leave that cell alone, let the mRNA messages burn themselves out, and let the cell go back to its job, because damaging the heart is not a good idea.
Right, damaging the heart is not a good idea.
I think one of the pieces I see missing yet is obviously it was hoped, it was expected, we were told that the mRNA vaccines would stay basically local to the spot of injection.
And it is well documented at this point that that has not happened, is the idea that they spread and maybe there are predictable, maybe we could make predictions with regard to whether or not the proper aspiration happened, whether or not it was left or right arm, a number of these things have been proposed.
Where it will spread to, or is the prediction that the vaccine is going to be spreading throughout the body, much to the chagrin of those who developed the vaccines, and that doesn't have necessarily widespread horrible effects except when it ends up in the heart.
It's not that it is specifically going to the heart, it's that it's ending up everywhere, which it never was intended to do.
And when it ends up at the heart, that's going to have particularly bad effects.
Yeah.
If the hypothesis is correct, it is a close analogy for what I found to be likely with respect to drug toxicity back in the days of my telomere work, which is we see the heart damage for a couple of reasons.
One, because the heart is very bad at self-repair, so damage shows up in a meaningful way.
The same amount of damage in most other tissues would never bother us, right?
You'd get better and you wouldn't know that you'd lost some future capacity for repair.
And B, the failure of the heart is utterly unambiguous.
Right.
So let's say that the vaccine robs you of a bunch of liver capacity.
Well, good news, you were born with excess liver capacity.
And so the point is probably you don't die of liver failure, you die of something else.
So probably you got away with it.
If it's the heart, well, you probably didn't get away with it.
You've borrowed from something important, right?
Heart failure is one of the major, so you've got basically two important biotic ways to die for a well-fed, well-protected creature.
One of them has to do with growth of tissues that shouldn't grow, basically tumors and cancers, and the other has to do with the failure of organs that are necessary, and heart being primary among the organs that are likely to fail and kill you.
And the point is, when this happens in somebody young, it's conspicuous, because it doesn't happen in somebody young under ordinary circumstances.
So when somebody drops dead on the football pitch, that catches our attention.
Now it's not that that never happens under normal circumstances, but there's a question about is it happening more.
Than we're used to.
And is there a reason for that?
And basic point here is that you've got a mechanism of action, the expected mechanism of action, the desired mechanism of action is for this message to be taken up by cells and translated into protein.
That is likely to trigger the The biological phenomenon of non-self-recognition and the de facto conclusion of the immune system, this is an infected cell and it needs to be killed.
When that happens in the heart, it is both worse for you because your heart's not good at dealing with it and more conspicuous to medical science because somebody who shouldn't have had a heart attack just did.
Right.
And that is resulting in this.
Now, you raise an interesting point about The potential asymmetry, and this is one of the little corollary hypotheses here, which is that if this is true, if this is the mechanism or one of the mechanisms that is causing serious myocarditis to come to people who have been vaccinated with these mRNA vaccines, there's a question about whether or not
What is it that causes it to be taken up by the heart, right?
The thing that is lacking in these vaccines, right?
If these vaccines were really to be brilliant enough to be wielded in this way, they might have a targeting mechanism that would cause them to be taken up only by tissues that you could afford to suffer this fate, right?
And not to be taken up by tissues that you very definitely wanted to protect from it, like the heart.
And they don't have that.
They've got no targeting mechanism in them at all.
So what happens is you have a An arbitrary uptake, right?
It's not random, because some cells are more prone to take up the mRNA, the lipid nanoparticles, than others.
And the heart, as I understand it, is prone to take them up.
So if they flow to the heart first, if they escape the arm, And they flow to the heart, then that's a very likely place for them to be taken up.
And then what you'll end up with is dead tissue in the heart that then hopefully scars over and hopefully you're close to get away with it, but you're losing capacity from your heart for life.
But there's all kinds of questions.
If this is actually true, and again, this is just a hypothesis, but if it's actually true, then it raises all kinds of questions about what How might we have vaccinated people that would reduce this effect, right?
So, for example, should you be getting this one in the arm?
Would you be better off getting this shot in the ass, right?
It's possible that the circulatory pattern would be less devastating because the stuff would get taken up before it gets to your heart.
Now, I don't know enough about circulation to say maybe it would make things worse if they gave it to you in the butt cheek.
That's one possibility.
Another possibility is that there's asymmetry in the circulatory system, right?
Heart attacks cause left arm pain.
And so there's a question.
We don't know because we didn't get this vaccine, but it's possible that they sit you down and they say, which arm would you like this in?
And it's possible that that shouldn't be your choice, that they should give it to you in the arm that protects your heart better.
Right?
So anyway, there are all kinds of questions you could ask here.
And Because what we've been fed is, oh, these things are safe.
We can't, you know, John Campbell did a marvelous exploration of the question of aspiration, right?
It's possible that, you know, it's possible these vaccines are simply not safe enough to do this, but they could be rendered a lot safer than they are by things like aspiration technique, by tissue in which they are injected.
And that we aren't asking those questions because instead we've been fed a fairy tale about safety.
Right.
All right.
So I think that's all I had to say on this topic.
I just wanted to put the hypothesis out there about why we might be seeing this effect from these vaccines and what it implies and, you know, God forbid this happens to us again, what we might do better.
Indeed.
I think I thought that you also wanted to talk a little bit about why the origin of the virus matters with regard to gain-of-function research.
But before you do that, if you do indeed want to talk about that, this might be a decent place to point this out.
What we've been hearing from all the public health officials, At this point, now that they're finally beginning to grant that their randomized control trials were too short, that they were indeed shorter even than they were supposed to be, that the efficaciousness that was supposedly demonstrated in them was not quite exactly, and in many ways not at all, what it was that we were told it was.
But specifically with regard to safety, increasingly the tune has changed, right?
The tune is no longer, of course, of course we did everything that we always do, because it's become totally clear that they didn't.
So, in October of 2021, Norman Doidge published this excellent piece in Tablet, like a three or four part, I don't remember what, called Needlepoints, which explores what he calls vaccine hesitancy.
That's the term that is used.
I don't like it, but it's really extraordinary.
And he also read it aloud on Jordan Peterson's podcast, for those who would prefer to read it.
But here, and a PDF of all of the pieces together is available.
So here's a 38-page document that is available if you go to tablet.
I'll link there, but here's just a PDF of it.
Two-thirds of the way through, or half the way through, Deutsch writes, still, it was obvious as early as the fall, this would have been Sorry, I think this is going to be fall of 2020.
Still, it was obvious as early as the fall that some testing steps would be skipped.
We'll have less safety testing than we typically would have, Gates noted.
We just don't have the time.
And, you know, that's Bill Gates who said that.
He was certainly not the only one of the people pushing the one solution for the massive problem that we are all sharing.
His words are not unique in this regard, but they are telling, because this is a rhetorical trick that is becoming the thing that is used against us.
First, there's the lying, the obfuscation, the, you know, of course we did everything according to protocol, of course these are totally safe, of course we know.
And then if and only if enough people in the public are going like, you know what, you couldn't possibly have, here's how I know.
And they are forced to reveal that actually there were safety steps skipped or fudged or whatever it is.
Then the story we get is, Well, of course we did.
A. You know, no acknowledgment that they had just lied to you.
Of course we did.
Of course we skipped some safety, but it's necessary because this is an emergency.
And so this is just like trick-and-treat-doe invoking the Emergencies Act against a bunch of people who were standing up for their freedoms, right?
And this is like almost all of the rhetoric that we get back when we resist now.
And so before you – I'm going to step outside of this particular conversation for a moment to go to something that seems completely other, but it uses the same – it uses exactly the same rhetorical trick.
And this is on an issue about which, you know, we actually do feel that there is something that needs to be done.
And reasonable people do disagree.
This is going to be about climate change.
Reasonable people do disagree.
And this is not about you have to accept the science as if the science is a thing.
But we are so often told that because climate change is the emergency, just like the COVID pandemic is the emergency, It is okay if we skip certain things like burden of proof, like scientific evidence, and go forward with the one solution that's been proposed.
This is anti-scientific, it's anti-democratic, it's pro-tyranny, it's all of the bad things.
And here's just a particular example.
Here's an article, Zach, if you just show my screen briefly and then I'll pull my screen back.
This is science news, so about some work that's being done.
It's not published, it's not some research that's being published in science, but about work being done by a biotech firm.
The headline is, and this is from the 23rd of February 2022, to fight climate change, a biotech firm has genetically engineered a very peppy poplar.
Okay.
And it's in the voice that we have now come to expect from science journalism, even at one of the two premier science journals in the world, that's very much rah-rah.
This is not journalism.
This is advocacy, one.
And if I may have my screen back, Zach, so that I can just see what I wanted to read, what quotes I wanted to read here.
We have in the article, the transgenic trees are growing fast, and the idea is that faster growth means faster take up of carbon dioxide and therefore that's going to slow down climate change.
That's the basic argument.
Quote, the firm's genetically enhanced poplars grew more than 1.5 times faster than unmodified ones in lab trials.
There's a lot to say about what's wrong with this research, and we can go there.
But we have a quote from a forest geneticist at Oregon State University who, yes, does in fact have a financial stake in this outcome being what he hopes it is.
There isn't even the pretense that there's not financial incentives here.
Quote from the article, Strauss for one believes the urgency of addressing the climate crisis outweighs potential risks associated with transgenic trees.
We don't have the luxury, he says, to wait for 30 years and make sure nothing can possibly go wrong.
Oh, really?
Transgenic trees now.
Yes.
No, they've generated what?
Look, I mean, they sound like a bunch of dumb shits.
And so probably they didn't do the work right.
And that's probably what will protect us from their madness.
But it sounds to me like what they tried to do was create a really impressive invasive species, as if we don't have a tragic invasive species problem on virtually every continent.
Right.
And I mean, you know, they bemoan in this article how there are rules in place that prevent if you're going to be used as a sustainable forest product, you can't be genetically modified.
It's like, okay, has anyone in this biotech firm noticed what actually naturally occurring fast-growing trees are true of?
So let's take alder, let's take cecropia, let's take acroma, balsa, right, like just to name three of the world's most known and widespread fast-growing trees.
What is true of all of them?
They grow fast, they die young.
They fall over very quickly.
They're light because they are more air than structure, because they grew fast, because that's what they do.
There are trade-offs that can't be avoided.
Yes, or let's take eucalyptus, which is absolutely devastating.
I don't think it's particularly fast-growing.
Well, it's particularly invasive, and to the extent that they've done their work at all well, to the extent that they are correct in at least arguing that this would capture a bunch of carbon out of the atmosphere, then surely what they are saying is that these are dense trees, right?
They have to be dense in order for that to work.
If they are, you know, like Cecropia, mostly hollow.
So just Cecropia is actually the one that I mentioned that may not be familiar to people.
It's just it's, it's, it is the first Yeah, the primary successional species in lowland neotropical forests of the New World.
Along with balsa.
Along with balsa.
People will know that balsa wood, you know, basically doesn't have as many molecules in it as other wood.
It's super light.
You can get the, like, many-dimensional lumber in terms of balsa wood to build stuff.
And, you know, unless it's like, Half by half inch, like you can just squish it, right?
It's because it's that soft a wood, because fast growing means soft wood in general.
Right.
But let's say that they've got, you know, the equivalent of eucalyptus, which is a very dense, hard wood, right?
But nonetheless, they're talking about… Again, I don't think eucalyptus is fast growing, but eucalyptus has a different… It is fast to capture habitat.
Right, but I mean, it's got a number of different tricks up its sleeve, right?
It withstands fire, for instance.
Yes, it may.
It starts off with more ice, but anyway, look, the point is, and we're going to have to work our way back here, but one of the sort of themes of what we're getting at, which is actually going to link a bunch of different things together,
Including, this will sound wrong, but even the appalling thing that has now taken place in Ukraine is that in effect we have a system in which everybody who is supposed to be telling us what we need to know has been transmuted by our economic system into a fucking salesman, which is to say a liar, right?
And sometimes they do this by lying to themselves.
I mean, what salesman, right, is going to invest in the precautionary principle in which they're telling you all of the reasons that actually you shouldn't be listening to them because the danger that they've missed something is so great, right?
Or...
A deep investigation of the trade-offs where that salesman is now going to tell you all the downsides of the cool thing that they just tried to convince you that you need to do and in fact what they do instead is they hijack your amygdala or whatever it is and they utilize your fear to get you to stop thinking.
And that is what they have done in all of these cases.
They've said, we don't have time, the emergency is too great, and therefore you're going to have to let us get you out of this dangerous situation that you will otherwise suffer from.
And it's monstrous.
It's like amygdala spinal tap.
This one goes to 11 and we're going to keep it at 11 on you for as long as we can and we're going to make sure that you buy our stuff.
Right, that you buy our stuff and the fact is this is sort of how you and I ended up in the crazy position that we're now in, right?
Because the fact is you can actually check their claims and you can't check them like no that's wrong but you can check them like Actually, that doesn't add up.
What you just told me has a flaw in it somewhere, and it's either here or it's there, and here's how you know.
And so at the beginning of all of this, at the beginning of COVID, You and I were hearing claims that, you know, these vaccines are safe and effective.
And it's like, well... Well, at the beginning of COVID we weren't because it didn't exist.
No, but a year in.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I could tell you one thing right away.
You're lying when you say it's safe because safe, you know, I can't tell you that there's a harm, but I can tell you, you don't know anything about what this does to you five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road.
You couldn't, it hasn't existed long enough.
And so you're telling me that it's safe is you either admitting that you don't understand what you're saying, Or that you're willing to mislead me.
But either way, I'm now going to be super cautious because I know that you're not telling me the truth.
Now, I want to point something out.
We've got various mantras that we use, little things that we say to flag certain kinds of errors, right?
Like, you know...
Trade-offs are a key thing for us because if you're not talking about the trade-offs and these things the chances are you're involved in the sales pitch, you're not involved in the cost-benefit analysis.
The cost-benefit analysis requires the trade-offs.
We also say welcome to complex systems and by that what we mean is you are now dealing with a realm so complex That as soon as you tell me you know all of the effects of the thing that you've just proposed, if the thing you've just proposed is sufficiently novel, you don't know all the effects.
And the one thing you can say to make me more comfortable with you is, we don't know all the effects.
And if you don't say that, then the point is then, the question is, well, what did you miss?
And here, I don't know if you noticed this week, but I believe the 25th of February, a Swedish paper emerged.
that actually upended a lot of the stuff that some of our antagonists have crowed about very subtly.
And what it said, and this is a single paper, maybe it's wrong, it's a single paper that demonstrated something in vitro, that is to say not in living creatures, but in tissues outside of living creatures.
What it showed Was that the vaccines, the mRNA vaccines actually get reverse transcribed into DNA, which is then found in the nucleus of liver cells.
Uh-oh is right.
Now, it isn't 100% clear what that means.
The one thing that you would love to know above all else, which they did not show in this paper, was that it does or does not get basically spliced into the genome.
Right.
Right?
Which is a crucial question.
Right.
But they did show, interestingly, that the fact of this mRNA getting And reverse transcribed into DNA, which is the language of the genome, then upregulates a appallingly named protein, something like line one.
I mean, God, biologists, I love biologists, but they suck at naming things.
And this is a particularly bad case of that.
Failure on their part.
But anyway, it upregulates the very machinery that reverse transcribes mRNA.
So it's even suggestive of a positive feedback mechanism.
Now, There are a million possibilities here, right?
It's likely that this never makes it into the germline, right?
Even if it does get cut, spliced into the genome in the nuclei of cells in some part of the body, that it never makes it to the germline.
Likely an evolutionary dead end, but that doesn't help the individual.
Right, but I mean, I guess the point is, look.
People have fought over the question and those on the vaccine enthusiast side have crowed endlessly about the fact that this is not gene therapy because it does not touch the nuclear genome, right?
And you know, I've stayed out of that because yeah, it's not supposed to.
So, it's about unintended consequences and complex systems and specifically the hyper-novelty about which we go on so much in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide and with which we are all surrounded, really.
And actually, I'd love to just circle back and give you one more example of exactly that from this transgenic tree organization.
Oh, great.
The company is called Living Carbon, and we are told in this piece that's published in the news branch of Science Magazine, the journal, Living Carbon is also trying to engineer trees to take up heavy metals from degraded soils.
Company leaders hope those metals could give the wood antifungal properties that will reduce its decomposition rate, enabling it to store carbon longer.
That actually makes sense to me.
It's not a complete analysis.
They're trying to reduce decomp in the trees?
They have to.
They have to, because what they're arguing – and frankly, I don't believe them, because they are obviously victims of this thing that has replaced science with sales – but what they're trying to do, what they want to say is,
The way to reduce global warming in so far as global warming is the result of too much of the ratio of carbon in our atmosphere having gotten too high, what they need to do is pull that carbon out of the atmosphere But then they're acknowledging that they have no intention of these species being part of any ecosystem ever.
But then they're acknowledging that they have no intention of these species being part of any ecosystem ever.
Because if they are actually trying to produce trees that grow fast, presumably die young, and then lie there forever, not returning their nutrients to the earth and to the nitrogen cycle and everything else, then they become yet another unforeseen problem then they become yet another unforeseen problem in that ecosystem that they have created and that no one will know what to do with.
Well...
If this is just a product, and if they could, which of course they can't, but if they could grow it in a contained manner such that it did not spread its genetically modified seed, who knows?
I don't know if it's in the germline, although plants not having the sequestered germline, probably it will be, right?
If they could basically plant these and have them not interact in any way with any native species, I can't imagine they possibly would.
And then they're hoping that it's pulling up heavy metals from what then?
Every step you take it falls apart because they both want it to be part of the ecosystem, so that it's helping mitigate heavy metal toxicity in soils, etc.
But also they want to then immediately chop those down and use them in building materials, even though it's going to be softwood because it grew so fast.
But they don't want that return to the soil because of the heavy metals that they were supposedly solving the problem of.
I mean, it's not that they haven't identified some real problems, but it's like every analysis stops at exactly the point.
Like we are told the analysis stops at exactly the point that it comes to the conclusion they want.
And this is the game the CDC plays, right?
The CDC is like, oh, we got 19 months worth of data.
We're going to show you two weeks right here in a particular state, and that's going to reveal the pattern we like.
Right?
And, you know, this is what is happening everywhere.
Pick and choose the little slice of data that you like.
Don't actually share the data, but be assured, here's a nice graph with, you know, maybe even mucked up axes.
And trust us, we're the science.
So it is the mental disorder called sales.
That's what's happening, right?
The mental disorder called sales is one in which you don't actually care that your customer is better off.
The important thing, you have succeeded at the point that your customer believes they will be better off enough that they buy the thing.
And what I would argue is that we have been running the stupidest gain of function experiment with respect to sales in the history of the universe, right?
We, by virtue of the fact that we have plugged science into the market, right?
Where we have basically said, "Oh, your science is good.
"Here, convince a bunch of your peers "that your science is really important "so that you win the funding game." Right?
What we do is we train people who we are supposed to be, we are supposed to be training them to be totally deaf to whether or not their conclusions are good for them.
Right?
We want you to put forward a hypothesis because it needs to be advanced and then to falsify it and to feel happy that you shot down your own hypothesis.
That's what a good scientist does, right?
Instead, what we do is we train scientists who may have gone into it with that instinct.
We train them To be salespeople and to lie to each other, right?
And then we group them into little clicks where the point is, hell, I've got a little lie that I'm going to include in my grant proposal and then you can pick up that lie in your grant proposal and we'll each, you know, validate these lies.
And the point is, how do you get to a place Where the entire scientific apparatus all lies in unison, in perfect harmony about the same topic.
Well, this is how you do it.
And it's even worse!
But wait, there's more, right?
We know, and again, Deutsch talks about this in his piece, and Goldacre talks about it in Bad Pharma, and it's well understood that Pharmaceutical companies write papers that come to conclusions that are favorable to them, whether or not they're freaking true or not, and then they get people whom are assessed on the basis of how many publications they have to put their names on those papers.
And those people whose names are on papers they did not write, whose data they have not seen, that they cannot vouch for, then get all the spoils of academia.
They get more grant money, and they get more advancement within their university, and they get the accolades, and then they get more papers coming to them that they did not write and cannot vouch for and probably are not true, onto which they just slap their name, and so it continues.
Right, and it is effectively the pharmaceutical companies having invaded academia virus-like, and then suddenly people who look like scientists are spouting pharma bullshit, right?
They're partially spouting science, they're using the terminology that they were taught to wield, but they are saying things that are pharma-favorable because it pays their fucking rent, right?
They are effectively infected cells inside of academia, and the problem is the public Has no idea that this is taking place.
But they've got the elbow patches, so it looks like self.
Exactly.
It looks enough like self that people buy it.
And when they say, hey, be terrified.
This terrifying thing is out there, right?
And you know what?
Here's the good news.
The terrifying thing is coming to get you, but it just so happens that we have the thing that protects you from the terrifying thing, so you're welcome.
Yeah, you don't need to be afraid anymore.
We did have to skimp a little bit on the safety, but it's for your own good.
What turns out to be a relatively small number of people who are so committed to the science thing that they will continue to do it in the face of this sales game.
Yeah.
And what has happened to all of us, frankly, is we have been demonized and marginalized and portrayed as crazy and weird or corrupt or something.
It's the exact inverse of the truth.
And I do want to point out If you're interested in that paper, the Swedish paper on the reverse transcription of the mRNA messages, check out Dr. Mobin Saeed.
He's one of the heroes of the COVID pandemic.
He's got an excellent series on YouTube in which he explores medical questions in depth, rather like John Campbell and others.
Anyway, check out his recent video on the February 25th Swedish paper on reverse transcription.
We will put a link to that.
And I also will put a link to the paper itself so you can look at it.
But, you know, you've got a small number of people who are committed to not doing sales.
The sales thing has gone after us, right?
It has.
It has.
It has gone after us because it cannot tolerate an encounter with, frankly, the scientific method, right?
And that, I mean, this is the irony of the whole thing.
I'm reminded of the idiot ecologist, and sorry, not all ecologists, but this guy was truly special, who said to me smugly, I used to think hypothesis was important.
Now I know better.
Now I know worse.
Yeah.
All right, so I wanted to connect this.
I don't know if we're done with this topic, but I wanted to connect it around, and I don't even think it's a stretch, right?
It seems like it's a stretch, but it's not, okay?
I want to connect this up to what's happened in Ukraine, and I want to say up front.
I'll say I don't see it yet.
But you will.
Okay.
So easily.
Here's the thing.
First of all, I want to confess up front.
I know very little about Ukraine and even Russia.
And that's embarrassing because actually my ancestry on my father's side largely comes from Ukraine and Russia.
I should know more.
But I don't.
And I'm not going to pretend to.
And there has been some excellent discussion of late about The reflexive tendency of people especially on Twitter To feel like they have to say something about what's taking place in Ukraine because it's the thing of the moment And so you've got all kinds of people who should know better who are saying perfectly stupid things Just so that they haven't been silent, right?
And so anyway, I want to avoid that trap.
I don't feel compelled You know, I am very much a student on the question of Ukraine and I will say Among the delightful discoveries of this horrifying chapter in which realities of the 20th century that you and I remember have come rushing back into the 21st century in a most unwelcome way, Yeah.
One of the great discoveries is Constantine Kissin's excellent exploration of this.
He is somebody who has relatives.
He's half of the trigonometry duo.
Half of trigonometry.
And there's an excellent interview where Francis basically interviews Constantine who speaks Russian, who I believe emigrated from Russia, has family in Ukraine, both Russian separatist family and Ukrainian nationalist family.
He's got family members on both sides of the divide.
And anyway, he goes through this as somebody who does understand the deep issues here.
And it's an amazing, heartbreaking and very beautiful exploration of things that does connect certain dots.
One of the things that connects is something that you and I have been saying, you know, obviously, we didn't start in the public eye talking about COVID, you and I came to public attention over the early and very dramatic eruption of wokeness at the college where we used to teach at Evergreen.
And one of the things that we said very regularly I can't mean it must I must have said it a hundred times is You can't do this, right?
If you do this with civilization, the ship isn't gonna sink right away Yeah, but what is gonna happen is you were gonna open the door to every enemy, right?
Because you're too busy fooling around with phony hazards and all of this other nonsense and anyway Zach, will you show... I sent Constantine's tweet from, I think, this morning.
Can you show that?
So, in any case, while Zach is putting that up, I will say... Yeah, can you enlarge that?
Constantine's Perspective here is very sobering.
Effectively what he says is, look, I told you this was going to happen.
It's not, it wasn't even difficult, right?
Now what he says in his tweet this morning is, there is a narrative emerging about people like me who predicted the Russian invasion and the broader geopolitical reordering we are now seeing.
Right?
And effectively what he points to is something you and I find familiar from this other landscape, right?
Which is people saying, okay, you got it right, but for the wrong reasons, right?
You may have predicted it correctly, but you're still wrong.
And to me... Because we can't afford for you to be right.
Or we can't afford to embolden you, to empower you.
It is the thing... You're the wrong guy.
The salespeople, this is the thing they fear most, is that history will demonstrate... Constantine's the wrong guy.
He's the wrong guy.
Now here's the thing... Just like we're the wrong guys.
It is totally possible to make a correct prediction for the wrong reasons.
Sure.
That happens.
What is not possible is a track record.
Right?
The more times you make a correct prediction that other people are not making, the more likely it is that you have an underlying model that actually does reveal something about reality that others are not seeing.
So this idea that people are going to go after Constantine, and he does deliver in this tweet thread, which I encourage people to go look at, evidence that in fact, no, no, no, no, he did not get this Right by luck, right?
He understood what was going to happen and why.
He tried to warn people, and they didn't listen.
And now it's happened.
And his basic points, very sobering in the video he and Francis put out, he basically says, look, You have brought a particular part of history to an end through your indifference.
You have played around with an essential feature of the world, and now the predictable collapse has come, and you now live in a different world, and that's your own doing.
Right?
And it's, I believe, completely accurate.
But what I want to... to bring these things together.
You and I studied biology.
We studied evolution.
That allows us to see certain stuff.
But we also studied the philosophy of science, which, you know, our audience, I don't know what they think about our invoking the philosophy of science.
But I want to remind people, the point is, the philosophy of science is in its own way, kind of a dry topic, right?
It doesn't have a lot of punch.
It's not like squirrels and hummingbirds and other fun stuff, right?
It's dry.
But the point is, Getting the philosophy of science right is the difference between actually doing science and doing pseudoscience.
And so what I want to say about Constantine's point here is that if you got something wrong and somebody else predicted it correctly, You do not get to raise the objection that they got it right for the wrong reason, right?
Even if it's true, that is not your place.
The only people who are in a position to critique somebody who predicted correctly are people who also predicted correctly, which is a tiny, tiny subset, right?
So my point is, look... I'm not sure I agree with this.
Really?
Well, I think I don't like the idea of actually it's not your place to critique here.
I obviously see a ton of bad faith critique out there, a ton, and it more often than not is actually destructive of communication and of learning what is actually true.
But I guess at the moment I'm very averse to any kind of gatekeeping that looks gameable.
I'm not really talking about gatekeeping.
I'm not saying if you got it wrong that you need to not speak.
What I'm saying is you are not in a position to go after somebody who got it right, right?
You can say, look, I think that that was incorrect, and here's where I think the error is.
It's fine to say whatever you want.
But to actually try to pull the rug out from under somebody who correctly predicted, right, To me, it is a violation of the underlying philosophy of science, where the real point is, look, I don't care who you are, I don't care what degree you do or don't have, I don't care whether you are officially understood to be insightful, expert, or anything.
What I care about is whether or not you are capable of seeing things ahead.
And if you are capable of seeing things ahead in this realm, As far as I'm concerned, I'm listening.
And if you're not, I don't care that you have the advanced degree and the fancy position and that you, you know, show up in the New York Times.
The point is, you either have predictive power or you don't.
And at this moment, we ought to be listening to Constantine on the question of Ukraine because he correctly warned us that warning was not heeded and we now live in a worse world that could have been avoided if we did listen.
Well, on that, I agree.
And, you know, one of the things he says in this video that, again, we'll link to repeatedly is, there is an absence of leadership.
There is an absence of leadership.
And, you know, he not entirely, but part of his argument is, and this is not his language at all, but basically, you know, I see as I think, you know, the entire world understands Putin to be this strong man.
And what does a strongman respect is other people like him, and they don't need to be operating in bad faith or through terrible actions.
But a strongman respects strength, and is going to respond to strength, and is not going to respond to To what we've been doing in the West.
Yes.
And, you know, he's not going to stand down and wait for us to get our act together before he makes his strongman bullying, horrifying moves on the planet.
He's going to take advantage of the moment when we are being idiots.
Of course he is.
Right.
Of course he is.
And, you know, of course we see, as of today, military games by China off of Taiwan.
How would this not have been the case?
And so what we have been doing In the West is not only not tending our strength, but we have been broadcasting weakness.
We have been broadcasting foolishness and frivolity and effectively an autoimmune disorder.
And I guess maybe the last thing that I would want to do today.
Well, okay, I'll do this last thing and then we can move to whatever the other thing is.
I have lost my train of thought.
We're talking about strength and the West, and I can't get you farther than that.
Hmm.
Bad news.
All right, you do your thing.
I'll come up with it.
How about I'm going to read this one poem, and then maybe you'll come back to it.
Okay.
We do have a short letter that we wanted to share, but also we were sent The Piece of Wild Things by Wendell Berry this week by a fan.
It's wonderful.
He's wonderful.
There are just several marvelous poems in here.
Actually, two.
Two poems, okay?
The eponymous poem of the book, The Piece of Wild Things.
When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
That's one.
This other one is very, very different.
Did you remember?
I did.
You want to do that before I read this next one?
Sure.
Go for it.
All right.
What I wanted to argue is that we've got a built-in defect that has caused us to put our very future in jeopardy.
And I don't just mean the future of the West.
I mean the future of the world, which is imperiled by the failure of the West.
And the defect is this.
All creatures, all products of evolution, seek opportunity to improve something.
Even a bacterium is likely only to replace itself in the world unless it finds an untapped opportunity right an orange sitting on the counter is an untapped opportunity and if a fungus or a bacterium can find it then its numbers can grow exponentially and that population then becomes the basis for finding the next orange or the tub of yogurt or whatever so creatures are looking for non-zero-sum opportunities
And they are not looking, therefore, for things that work really, really well, because there's no opportunity in them.
If you've got something that's perfect, there's no opportunity for improvement, and so obsessing on it is a waste of time.
Now we don't have anything that's perfect, but what we do have is a system that has been spectacularly good at being productive, And has been spectacularly better than everything that preceded it in distributing well-being in a fair way.
Now, what I did not say was that our system is fair.
I don't believe it's fair.
It's terribly unfair.
But it's fairer than anything that has preceded it.
And the solution to its unfairness is to make it fairer than it is.
Not to destroy it.
But what I believe has happened is that very foolish, childish people have obsessed on the degree to which our system does not fully succeed.
And they have invented Instances in which it is claimed to have failed when it didn't.
And they have used this as an argument to unmake all of the underlying structure that actually does work, right?
And you and I tried to prevent this.
We tried to explain, look, we're not saying the system is fair.
And this is one of the strengths of liberals is that we do understand the unfairness of the system and we aspire to see it become more fair.
But we're not naive liberals.
We understand that it has actually done a really good job.
It has liberated many people who were not liberated before, and it has been a beacon of hope for exactly that reason.
And so, to the extent that it is not as fair as it might be, Let's fucking fix it, right?
Let's make it better.
But let's not gamble on the idea that the unfairness is so riddled through its core that we have to destroy it and that something magically wonderful will replace it.
That's not going to happen.
The chances that something that replaces it will be fairer rather than worse are really, really low.
And in fact, you can see that in the dual threat of Russia and China waiting for us to be weak enough that they can Do things in the world they would not have done before.
And so what I'm getting at is that this bias in evolved creatures, and therefore in human beings, in focusing on that which doesn't work, because places that something doesn't work are an opportunity to improve something.
And therefore a bias against looking at things that do work has caused foolish people to jeopardize the West having no idea that every problem that animates them is likely to get worse if they succeed.
They have now put us in that jeopardy and It is so incredibly naive of them and so not their right to have done this that I think many of us who did see this coming and said so, right?
It's not college campuses.
It's not a free speech crisis.
You are making claims about civilization that are going to affect our engineering schools and our medical schools and our ability to govern based on something scientifically robust.
And our public health response.
Our public health response, our military, and you can see it, right?
If you want a civilization in which people are liberated to explore the possibility that there are 30 genders, right?
If you want people to explore the idea that you can shift your sexual preference with each day of the week, right?
I don't think that's smart.
But if you want a society that's free enough in which you can explore that hypothesis and see whether it turns out to make things better, then what you need is a really fucking masculine military to guard your borders so that your enemies don't take advantage of your little experiment.
And instead, we did it to the military too, right?
We basically flung the gates of the city open to our enemies.
And one thing that I think It's just a hypothesis, and I'm not saying, you know, to say that it is a hypothesis is not to say that I believe it is true.
It's to say that it might be true, and I'd like to know.
But one possibility is that somehow our level of stupidity exceeds what could naturally be explained by confusion.
That in fact, you know, riddled throughout our technology and our media environment are components that were built by people whose interests are not our interests.
And maybe our level of stupidity is not organic.
Maybe our level of stupidity is not organic, he says.
He says.
Well, I think that actually is a good segue for this next Wendell Berry poem, believe it or not.
This has very little in common with that last one.
Manifesto, the mad farmer liberation front.
Oh, I like this.
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay.
Want more of everything ready-made.
Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery anymore.
Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something, they will call you.
When they want you to die for profit, they will let you know.
So friends, every day do something that won't compute.
Love the Lord.
Love the world.
Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love somebody who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace the flag.
Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot understand.
Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium.
Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit.
Prophecy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
Listen to Carrion.
Put your ear close and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world.
Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself, will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields, lie easy in the shade, rest your head in her lap.
Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.
Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail the way you didn't go.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Holy moly, is that a good poem.
Isn't that?
That is so good.
What was the line in there?
So long as she does not go cheap for power, please women more than men.
Yeah.
So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men.
Oh, that is so good.
And it is, you know, it's one of these things where one of the other things that we say is that all true, all true narratives must reconcile.
And so that is to say that when a poet is tapped into something deep, then it ought to reconcile with all the stuff we know from Science.
And in this case, the thing about the two strategies, the two reproductive strategies of men versus the one reproductive strategy of women is that it effectively comes closer to synonymizing the viewpoint of women with the long-term well-being of your lineage.
And so anyway, I feel that this has been Discovered in that poem.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
Okay, and then here are some words from a man named Matthew, who said that yes, we could share them.
Wonderful.
We get notes like this, and this one was particularly lovely and short, but I'll just read it.
Hi, Heather.
I started paying attention to what you and Brett have been talking about roughly around when the Dark Horse podcast began.
I had the fortune of attending one of the speaking events Brett moderated in Vancouver with Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson as well.
As COVID began, and both you and Brett questioned the narrative and the vaccines, I began to lose confidence in both of you, as your views deviated from what we were being told.
Now, as the narrative perpetuated by government, media, and the medical establishment is crumbling, I know both of you were right and absolutely courageous to stick to your beliefs and convictions.
I am Canadian, and I am in absolute disbelief at what must become of my country.
This was written on the 22nd of February.
I also feel the worst is yet to come, and COVID was just the tip of the iceberg.
Now more than ever, sensemakers like you and Brett are critically important, and I am very grateful you are doing what you do.
Please keep fighting the good fight.
Matthew.
Thank you, Matthew.
Yeah, you have no idea, Matthew, how much a note like that means.
At some point, you and I should talk a bit about what it has been like to live in our shoes during this.
And it has been, I think, quite different than most people would expect.
That is very clear, is that it is not easy, even if you know you're right.
And I don't mean right like in an absolute sense, but you know, right more often than not.
Trying to be right and actively trying to be right and discover where you're wrong.
Writer every day, right?
If you do that thing where you purge the stuff that didn't turn out to be right and you accumulate stuff that gives you more predictive power, there is a way in which you are right in the end.
But one of the things that's really difficult is as you do that, to find yourself demonized by the salesman in every discipline.
It's a very Awkward and alienating experience and just simply to hear you know it let's put it this way in some ways It's a better letter to receive And one that says, you know, I've believed you all along, right?
Somebody who went through the process of losing confidence in us because we were so far from what the public health narrative said.
And then to discover in the end that actually the public health narrative was garbage.
It's very, very meaningful.
So thank you, Matthew.
Yeah.
All right.
I think that's it.
I forgot to start the hour by saying that tomorrow is our private Q&A on Patreon, which that was an omission.
So yeah, consider joining us at my Patreon, where every month we collect questions earlier in the month.
Those have already been collected, but tomorrow on the last Sunday of the month at 11 a.m.
Pacific, we have a two-hour private Q&A that's small enough that we actually can watch the chat and interact with people on the chat.
And it's actually a lot of fun.
It's fun!
It is.
Yeah, we really enjoy it.
You can ask questions for the Q&A that's immediately to follow this as soon as our break is over at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We will get to as many of them as we can.
We never get to all of them.
We don't promise to do that.
Logistical questions can go to DarkHorseModerator at gmail.com, but not the questions that you want to ask of us.
Again, our Patreons are open and lively, and actually before we see you again next week, Brett will have his first two-hour conversation in the Saturday morning before our next livestream on your Patreon as well.
Maybe that's it.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
