View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/EvoLens118:31395c063b6c3b91882039ca90a2ad292f461c8e View on Spotify (With video): ***** In this 118th 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 mask mandates, which end today on most of the West coast of the U.S. We discuss our approach to masks (and other things) two years ago, in March of 2020....
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast, live stream number 100 something.
Is it 119?
No, that's right, it's 100-something.
100-something, I knew it.
Yep, yep, it's 118.
118.
118.
Which reminds me, for 119 we'll be coming to you early.
So in less than a week.
But we don't know exactly when.
Sometime on Saturday next week.
Very slightly less than a week.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Coming to you early.
So we'll get back to you on what time that will be, but we will be fresh and you should be sharp because it's going to be that kind of podcast.
And who knows, really.
At some point soon, and it kind of looks like it might be sooner than I was expecting, we're actually going to have a Dark Horse site where we can put announcements like that.
So if, for whatever reason of keeping your sanity, you don't happen to be on Twitter, which seems to be the only place that we ever announce these things.
It's also up on the YouTube channel, of course, but you could go there and find whether or not we are Off for a week or doing something different in terms of timing.
We'll call it the Dark Horse Ironsight.
Will we?
Yes.
Are you sure?
Of course.
It's a dog whistle of some kind.
I have no idea what kind, of course, but if you're that kind of dog, you'll know.
See, I was spelling site differently, but okay.
Yeah.
No.
No?
Uh, no, you were, weren't you?
I think, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
In my head.
Like building site.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and website.
Right!
Well, I'm thinking website is like a building site.
It's like a virtual... Yeah, but you were talking about a totally different kind of site, weren't you?
Who knows?
I see.
Yeah.
Okay, this week we're going to talk a little bit about mask mandates and how they have lifted where we live as of today.
I last week had been sent an excerpt from The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, it's his 1937 book, and I read an excerpt which I found astounding and was so intrigued by what I looked into about the book that this week I read the book.
Mostly I listened to the book, and I got a tiny Tiny, tiny little copy of it.
I didn't expect it to come so small.
But it's tiny font, too.
It's like, I don't know, 8 point font.
Anyway, I want to share some more of Orwell's ruminations on socialism for us to talk about this week.
Cool.
It does strike me that you and I are in a position to navigate this for civilization.
Can we agree that listening to a book is reading a book?
It seems to me that that counts.
It does count, but it is a completely different experience for some people.
This could be a riff for a whole episode, of course.
Yes, it 100% counts.
For me, I just ended up doing a lot of walking this week, and I was listening to it while I was walking.
But every time I would hear something that I wanted to take a note of, I'd be like, How do I do that?
And so it was much more tedious, frankly, and so I had this tiny, tiny little book.
And then I also have a PDF copy, which was easier to search, but harder to know.
I said both because I actually did do both, and I won't remember it if it just comes in my ears, unless I take a note at the time, whereas for you it's somewhat the opposite.
Well, I'm not arguing that they're the same.
They're not the same for me either.
For whatever reason, even given my visual oddities, I still get a very visual memory of where something is.
If I read something on paper and I go looking for it later, I know roughly which side of the book it's on, what place on the page.
So I have that experience too.
My sense is if somebody says, you know, 1984, have you read it?
And you listen to it?
Yeah, you can say yes.
The answer is yes.
Yeah.
If you saw the movie, the answer is no.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
If the text as it was written by the author has come into your head, either through your eyes or through your ears, then you have effectively read it.
All right.
Settled.
So we're going to talk a little bit about Orwell on socialism and vegetarians and feminists and He's a weirdo.
He is deep and my god did he die too young.
He died in his late 40s of tuberculosis.
Anyway, we're going to talk a little bit about SARS-CoV-2 because what we don't we Well, there are forces that would prefer that we cut it out, but... Well, I'm one of them.
I wish that we could.
Oh, me too.
Me too, but yeah, we will get to why we can't.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're going to talk just a little bit about detransitioning in general.
Detransitioning from having transitioned using medical and using surgical hormonal techniques to appear to be the sex that you are not.
Today is, I've now forgotten, it is D-Trans Awareness Day.
And, you know, in general, I don't like these, you know, days, weeks, months that get described as, this is the day in which you have to think about these things.
But there are some events that are happening today and I want to talk a little bit, just a little bit about About that, we probably won't end up getting to the Diet of Snakes this week, but there's some research that when we don't get to it this week, I will then say, let's talk next week about the Diet of Snakes, because that's something I've been thinking about.
I have a question about the Diet of Snakes, so either we'll get there this week or next week, but I have a question to ask you.
Well, given how much else was going on, and that I only skimmed the research paper in question once, and I went down a few rabbit holes, snake holes even, maybe.
Snakes go down rabbit holes.
Right, exactly.
I did not spend probably enough time yet with the research to talk a lot.
Bring your A-game.
This is trash-talking for biologists.
It's a whole different thing.
All right.
Announcements first.
Announcements.
We've been on a couple of other people's podcasts this week, and we'll be in the next few weeks again about some really great ones, and we'll announce when those come out.
We did a We started doing a really bad job of announcing all the podcasts that we were doing for the book because we did, you know, many dozens of them in the few months after the book, this book, Undergather's Guide to the 21st Century came out.
I mean, look, I didn't even know if we announced being on Andrew Yang's podcast or Jordan Peterson's, and, you know, we started to do a very poor job of talking about it, but now there's few enough now that specifically, well, both of the conversations we had this week were excellent, so we encourage you to look for those, and we'll announce them when they come out, but also to pick up the book and take a look at it.
We specifically were talking a fair bit about the medicine chapter this week, the evolution of medicine, and how it is that we can Keep ourselves healthy in a world that seems hell-bent on keeping us not healthy.
I will also just add, I think you and I both have a kind of uncomfortable relationship with self-promotion or anything that looks like it, and I think this is good.
I think, frankly, you know, as a scientist you're not supposed to be a self-promoter.
Of course, as we talked about last week, the culture of pursuing of grants and all this turns everybody into a salesman, but Especially as the world of people who would like you to stop talking about things you're talking about is accusing you of all manner of grifterism.
It makes it particularly hard to remember to say, oh, by the way, we were on this, that, and the other podcast.
Check them out.
So anyway, maybe we are in a new era.
Are we?
Well, yes.
I'm not promising it's a better era, but I do believe we are in a new era.
Okay.
I'm not sure what the implications of that are.
I think the implications of that are the President of Ukraine is very handsome and dances well, and we are therefore supposed to be in favor of invading to drive Russia out.
There were too few pronouns in that sentence for me to know exactly who all were in favor of invading.
Invading Ukraine in its own defense, I think, is the conventional wisdom.
Okay.
Do you want to go there?
Because I thought we were still doing announcements.
Oh, well, yeah, I guess that doesn't qualify.
The Dark Horse Podcast will not be invading Ukraine.
You're looking at me like... I don't know why we're here at all.
This does not seem right.
We are on YouTube and Odyssey, and for those of you who are listening later, we also are up on Spotify.
But right now, if you're watching, chat is live on Odyssey.
You can ask your questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Once again, unfortunately it seems that I need to say this, we don't get to all the questions.
We don't claim that we will get to all the questions, so if you ask a question you are asking it in the hope that we get to it, but we do not, and so you're not paying for a guaranteed service in that regard.
Our Patreons continue to hum along with some enthusiasm.
They both provide access to the Dark Horse community, which at the moment is housed on a Discord server.
That is probably going to change at some point soon.
We will keep you updated with exactly where that community is going to go.
You can get merchandise with dire wolves and epic tabbies and digital book burnings and such at store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Find my weekly writings at naturalselections.substack.com.
And this week I reprised my What If We're Wrong essay that was published in Aereo some 10 months ago, along with a fairly long preamble about why we still need to be thinking about this, because it seems to me that almost no one who needed to hear that essay actually listened the first time around.
And without further ado, with some help from the cats, we have three sponsors this week, as we as we usually do at this point.
As always, we are very grateful for them and to them.
And Brett is going to start us off.
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And man, it seems to correlate with me hearing more and more from people who are, you know, writing in to tell me about something else or to, you know, note of appreciation to also say, and I just got my first pair of Vivo Barefoot.
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Okay, you want to start by talking about the lifting of the mask mandates here in Oregon, I think across the entire West Coast.
Yes, I mean I think maybe it makes sense to point out winter is leaving.
God, yeah.
Here in the Pacific Northwest it seems to have just kind of given up.
Well today, so I was out walking today and I saw a lot of things apropos the mask mandates.
It was just Gorgeous out, and according to my phone, it's going to start raining before we're done live streaming today, and it's never going to stop.
It's just going to be raining forever.
Well, and our spring rains aren't like that, you know, rain that we're famous for here, where it just kind of drizzles all the time.
Spring rains can be tumultuous.
Yes, they can be intense.
Yeah.
So, question for you.
You and I haven't talked about what you saw on your walk this morning.
Our mask mandate ended today.
Yep.
So that is something that will mean very little to people in some parts of the country, where even where they've had mask mandates, people haven't necessarily been adhering to them.
But in the Pacific Northwest, they absolutely have.
And it has been oppressive.
Now I will, you know, there are certainly probably people who have joined us More recently in our in our trajectory of live streams who won't know where we started on this so we will revisit some of that But what you saw today as you walked around any difference between what you would have seen today and a week ago Yes Specifically inside.
So I went to a market to pick up some meat and such for dinner.
And in the market, there were still a few people masked, but almost no one was at this point.
And of course, a week ago, everyone was.
Last night, everyone was.
But outside, where for a long time now most people have not been masked, although at a moment, I think I mentioned this in the live stream at some point last summer maybe, I don't remember exactly what time of year it was, but I was walking actually in the very same park I was walking today by the river, unmasked, alone, and a lady yelled at me.
About, you know, saving people's lives and not being selfish.
And I thought at the time, man, are people confused.
Good lord, are people confused about what it is, what it takes to actually do your job as a citizen and be responsible, because thinking for yourself is actually a hell of a lot more important than virtue signaling something that doesn't help anyone.
But outside today, actually, I did not detect a change.
And maybe you would expect that.
I would say now, actually, inside and outside is a match.
There's maybe 10% of the people who are still walking around masked.
But we went out to dinner last night and asked the waitress, you looking forward?
You looking forward to this?
And we'd asked another wait person a week or two ago.
And he had said, nah, I don't really need it, you know.
It's fine.
Take it or leave it, right?
And this waitress last night was like, oh my god, I am going to cut this thing into little pieces as soon as I can and never wear it again.
So, you know, people are having different responses to To this seemingly endless experience of putting fabric on your face.
Yeah.
So anyway, I wish I had thought to predict that the inside environment would start looking like the outside environment, because basically the outside environment are people who are mask-focused and have been doing this voluntarily, you know?
Since the mask phenomenon began.
Now, ironically, the mask... Well, here, and elsewhere too, but we talked in, you know, spring of 2020, when they were closing down beaches, they were closing down parks, they were basically concentrating people into small spaces to, you know, help reduce the spread of disease.
Never made sense.
But there were signs up once the parks reopened.
And, you know, the beaches I'm talking about were in California.
I don't remember to the degree that there were beaches closed in Oregon, but once the parks reopened, which is insane, but, you know, we have some very big, you know, hundreds of acres parks here in Portland.
There were signs up that said you absolutely must wear a mask, and I never did.
I refused to, but at that point I would be the only one on the trail without a mask.
I mean, I remember a couple people leapt out of my way in order to reduce their chances of contracting something from outside.
So, so there was an expectation here for a while.
Yes, there was.
So I want to revisit where we've come from, because frankly, in going back to find photographs to remind myself of where we came from in the pandemic, you know, I knew all of this, but it was jarring actually to see some of the photographs from the beginning.
So Zach, do you want to begin to show those and I'll describe them for people who are just listening.
So these are photographs, I believe these are from March of 2020.
Two years ago.
Two years ago.
So just to revisit, Heather and I were in the Amazon finishing the first draft of our book and heard about novel coronavirus for the first time as our phones came awake after being in complete isolation where there was no service of any kind.
So that was January.
That was January.
So we returned and the story of novel coronavirus, which became SARS-CoV-2 and COVID, marched on.
So what this is a picture of here, some of you will remember that early Dark Horse episodes were not live streams.
They were all discussions between me and somebody in person.
And they were in a different place.
We built this studio into my office as COVID forced us out of the studio that we were renting in downtown Portland.
And so this is the photograph.
Not a moment too soon.
Right.
This is the photograph.
Zach and I recaptured everything we could from the studio downtown in a mad rush.
We were literally going into the building at midnight so we wouldn't interact with people because nobody knew how this thing spread and how dangerous it was.
I think it was literally, I'm just looking at the calendar, like we are literally two years to the day from the last day that Zach was in school, the following day was Toby's last day of school, and then that weekend is when you guys emptied out the studio.
So the kids were thrown out of school, en masse, Zach and I...
Took the dark horse studio and took every piece that would move and brought it home And started going to the hardware store to get the kinds of things necessary to make the studio work So I like the interior of a sauna right like the materials from the interior of a sauna Cabinets and the like.
Alright, so go ahead and hear an image.
Okay.
So at this time there was a Hoarding, and I don't want to say hoarding, I think that's actually the wrong term.
People were stocking up on materials not knowing what was coming, and actually I don't think they were wrong in this regard.
We have now seen supply chain issues.
Yes, they were delayed, but of course the idea that we were in an unstable situation and that one couldn't guarantee that staples were going to be available was very much in the air.
I thought all the supply chain issues were due to Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Is that not right?
No, because of Time's Arrow.
Oh yeah, that's right.
It's funny how no one in the mainstream media seems to have noticed that.
Yeah, the inflation also turns out to have been well underway before that invasion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right, go advance.
So that was beans that were out of stock.
Interestingly, people spotted that, you know, black beans were the right thing, but there were lots of other beans they left on the shelves.
It's true.
Yeah, lentils were always consistently available, actually.
Good to know.
And actually, I didn't include a picture here, but I had a picture of the peanut butter section where people have not spotted just what a good staple that is.
So you could buy peanut butter even if you couldn't buy beans.
This is surprising to me.
You got a whole bunch of Dr. Bronner's on the bottom shelf.
That's Castile soap.
That stuff saves forever.
You can do it, use it for almost anything you want to clean.
Yep.
Yeah, no, the deeper you read into that bottle, the more things you discover it's good for.
It's a little evangelism there, but okay.
Oh, yeah.
Dude was a little out there.
But, you know, here we got hand sanitizer has been ransacked.
Now notice, hand sanitizer didn't actually turn out to be important here, but we all thought it was going to be.
Very plausibly so.
Now, hand sanitizer is good stuff, and a lot of infectious disease that we spread around, colds and flu and the like, is likely very sensitive to it.
So I don't resent the bias towards hand sanitizer that we've moved to, but We all remember the craze around isopropyl alcohol, which you couldn't get, and hand sanitizer, which turned out to be more or less irrelevant to COVID.
Yep.
Okay, advance one more.
Now here, this is a line out the door at the local gun shop, right?
People were hoarding, now I've got to find a better term, people were stocking up on guns and even more importantly ammunition and it was resulting in a store that would never typically have a line having A line out the door.
I wrote a little bit about this for UnHerd where I discussed the question of the Second Amendment and what role it may actually be playing.
But anyway, that's the local gun store and the line that existed there.
Can you go one more?
And here you can see a wall of ugly duckling guns that people didn't really want.
But you can see how many spaces are empty on that wall, right, as people are buying.
Now the thing that was really in short supply was ammunition.
That's a wall that normally would have been full.
Every spot would have had a gun and it dwindled more than that.
But it was the ammunition that just simply wasn't available anywhere, much like hand sanitizer.
OK, advance one more.
All right, now here is why I was going back to look for photos.
I was one of the first people to mask in Portland.
I was so early that I was the only person at the hardware store.
Zach and I were Getting materials to build the studio here.
I was going in, masked, with those are safety glasses with a little bit of reading glasses.
Side flanges.
Oh.
Yeah, and they have side flanges.
And I had a technique, and the basic idea was nobody knew how this thing transmitted at that point.
It's true.
Everyone was talking about fomites and very high CFRs and all this.
So it stood to reason that a mask was a good idea, even if nobody else was wearing them, maybe especially if nobody else is wearing them.
It stood to reason that because many viruses do get in through your eyes, that having safety glasses on was a good idea.
And in order that they didn't interact badly with my reading glasses, I got the reading glasses Built-in.
I also used cloth gloves.
You could buy like ten gloves for five, ten pairs of gloves for five bucks, and I would put them on, wear them while I was out, so while I touched things, and then I would strip them off.
I would actually, early on, strip off all my clothes when I got home and put on new clothes.
So if this thing was transmitting on clothing, Right?
You and I had.
Your discovery was that copper actually is... I covered our outdoor and indoor to outdoor doorknobs with copper tape.
Copper tape?
Because copper is both an antiviral and antibacterial.
Right.
We had a policy that when... And it looks nice.
When packages arrived in a cardboard box, as they all do, we would leave them sit for 24 hours because the evidence was that infectious agents couldn't persist on cardboard for longer than that.
So anyway, we had an elaborate routine that was based on the fact that we really knew very little about this pathogen.
And one of the things... And we're trying to be careful.
We were erring in the direction of being careful because we took this virus very seriously for reasons we will get back to later.
But I think one of the things that I hope people will remember about us is that what we really did and what got people's attention early on when we started live-streaming, your idea that we start live-streaming from here.
Was it?
Yep, it was your idea.
So you're in good company.
Joe Rogan suggested that I start a podcast, you suggested that we start live-streaming.
Yeah, well, I do remember this.
We were pulling our hair out about the public health pronouncements already at that point.
They were so inconsistent.
They seemed to be based on no data or patently absurd analyses.
And yeah, I said to you something like, I really feel like we've got a lot that we can offer in terms of how to think through these things, even though when we knew this, and therefore we knew that there was a substantial risk that we could have been really wrong on a lot of fronts.
We were wrong on a few fronts, which you're about to get to.
Basically, the idea was we approach the world scientifically and evolutionarily.
The second is a subset of the first, and not everyone who has a scientific toolkit has an evolutionary toolkit.
But boy would we love to be able to help other people use those toolkits to make decisions for themselves and to start tracking when it is their own predictive abilities are getting better and better so that they can trust themselves more and more and rely less and less on external authorities who, oh by the way, may have interests that do not align with yours.
Okay, so I want to go back and refine one thing.
Okay.
You said we could have been really wrong.
Okay?
Not worried about wrong.
We erred in the right direction.
We erred in the careful direction.
And we have done that from the beginning.
And we did get some things wrong.
Masks are one of the things I personally got wrong.
Okay?
But I got it wrong in the correct direction.
And one of the things that I think you and I got attention that was very positive, and I hope people will remember, Is that what we did was we started with a model that effectively assumed this thing could transmit any of the ways that these things transmit.
And as data came in and it became clear that this wasn't fomite transmission, that there was something very important about the volume of air and the rate at which it was turning over so that it wasn't like you contact a particle and you get sick.
It's like there's a period of time, there's a clock ticking, and the air circulation and the volume of the room and how sick the person that you're talking to is, all of them play a role.
And so we built up a model.
Density dependence at all of the stages of interface between virus and person.
Right, and we, um, you know, we, uh, used what we called, uh, you know, um, I'm now forgetting the term we applied to it.
Something like the, uh, the real volume of the room or the, um, the effective volume.
Effective volume.
Effective volume.
So a car is a very tiny effective volume.
You open the windows, the volume jumps.
You go outside, the effective volume goes to infinity.
Mass transit where you don't have an ability to open windows.
You expect Expect things to be bad.
And I do think, you know, we never, as much as we were erring on the side of caution, neither of us ever thought it was necessary or a good idea to be applying those kinds of measures outside.
Outside, we understood.
I found a paper very early that had come out of China, very early, that it tried to track the origin of tens of thousands of cases.
Are you sure it was China?
Yeah, it was.
There was, I think, only one case out of the tens of thousands that they could actually track to an outdoor transmission, and it was a very, very sick person talking at very close range, loudly to his neighbor, if memory serves.
And effectively, the recipient of the virus in that case was right in the funnel of an active infection.
And I am very grateful that we weren't wrong on that.
I think you're even being too cautious here, right?
Because I think the real story is there was an opposing force, right?
There's this thing, I think the original is Rahm Emanuel, who once said, never let a good crisis go to waste, right?
Rahm Emanuel being a democratic political gunslinger effectively, but I think what happened the best case here Right, the best case is that people took advantage of a crisis to accomplish things that they wanted to accomplish Anyway, many of which are very much not in the public's interest, but I think you and I ended up On the opposite side of a conversation with an enemy we did not know existed, right?
Which were people who were using the pandemic for purposes.
We thought, as you know, as a normal person would, that we're all in this together.
We're all faced with this virus and figuring out what to do about it is a project everybody should be involved in and people should be bringing whatever tools to bear that they have at their disposal.
I think what actually happened is that as, you know, this thing wanted to create fear, right?
It wanted to create fear and it had useful tools at its disposal that were also potentially in play with respect to controlling the virus.
So it pretended After it was clear in the data that the outdoor environment was safe, it continued to pretend that it wasn't because its purpose really wasn't about the virus.
Its purpose was about controlling people.
And so you and I became increasingly alarmed as this thing insisted that the outdoor environment was a place that you needed to mask.
And our point was there actually isn't any evidence of that.
So as you and I developed a model of how the virus Functions how it transmits and what therefore we could relax about the many measures.
I mean remember we're talking about going out with sacrificial gloves with with safety glasses with a Mask, right?
What of this can we relax because it's actually not relevant to the transmission of of this pathogen.
At the same point, you and I looked at the evidence, and it was quite clear that there was something about the outside environment that was safe.
It was unclear initially whether or not it was safe at night, because one of the reasons it might be safe was UV light, right?
And so it became clear actually that there were two reasons it was safe outside.
One was UV light, but that even at night this was not transmitting outside.
And so the point was, what we were doing was refining a model, starting with a very careful, overly careful response, and refining it and relaxing it as it became clear that you could relax it.
And my point about the mask mandates, which ended today, is that we are watching that other thing, which had other purposes, finally having to admit that it was being overly restrictive Yeah.
We can talk about how we know that that's what's going on a little later.
But I think that you and I actually forced the conversation to admit things like the outdoor environment isn't the same.
And to the extent that you're claiming that you want people masked for epidemiological reasons, you know, 99% of the world, more than 99% of the world is in fact safe.
And you've got people believing that the world is 100% dangerous.
Why would you do that?
Yeah.
Well, okay, a few things.
One is I went back and found this paper, which was published in 2021, but I got the preprint from April 2020.
You can put it up if you like, Zach.
I was wrong.
It wasn't tens of thousands.
It was a couple thousand cases that they were able to trace.
It was China, as I said, from January and February.
So, you know, this is extraordinarily early in what we are told was when it was spreading.
So anyway, not as huge a data set as I thought, but still very large.
And then one of the other things that we were thinking early on was, well, the homeless population is going to be very at risk of this, unless the outdoors is protective.
And sure enough, we've seen no evidence of super spreader events
Either or you know or super spreader or just massive spread either within the homeless populations or among protests right and so again people will remember I think that by um sort of April and May of 2020 there had begun to be protests by people um objecting to uh to lockdowns and you know as I remembered it was mostly about lockdowns and it was mostly people
Who were identified by the mainstream media as being right of center, regardless of what their politics actually were, I don't know.
And these protests were decried widely, right?
Like, this was going to itself cause more spread of COVID, and how dare these people, how selfish.
And then within weeks of those protests, George Floyd died, and the protests, of course, erupted, first in Minneapolis, and then throughout the U.S., and then throughout the world, really.
And there were just massive protests.
You know, here in Portland, I think it was over a hundred consecutive nights of protests that then reliably became riots.
And at that point that over a thousand, I think, I think I do have that order of magnitude right, over a thousand health professionals declared that the real pandemic was racism and therefore these protests were not just justified but actually necessary.
Anyone who still thought that we were living in a world in which we were being given advice based on data and not on ideology could pretty much conclude at that point that at least a substantial portion of the health policy and public health apparatus was completely out to lunch and, you know, not in fact doing what the job description suggests doing.
That said, as much as those protests, especially at the point that reliably in Portland and some other places they turned into riots every night during the summer and fall of 2020, as much as they were disruptive of an incredible amount of humanity and goodwill,
They were not super spreader events, any more than the protests in the spring of 2020 against the lockdowns and such were super spreader events, any more than there was a lot of transmission among homeless people.
And the common theme in all of those is, of course, being outside.
Yeah, which we predicted actually at the point that many were saying, you know, we were talking about the BLM riots and saying these are going to be super spreader events.
Our point was we're not in favor of these riots as we've described many times.
Right.
It's not clear that these are a hazard in this regard.
Right.
You and I went to see for ourselves.
A few times, yep.
Knowing that the outdoor environment was likely to be safe, but being concerned that this was highly concentrated and taking place at night where you didn't have UV light as a disinfectant.
And there were people yelling, right?
Yelling and singing, such as it was.
Yet, toneless.
But anyway, you and I... Durge-like protest songs.
Yeah, dirge line that's being generous but but you and I behaved Exactly consistently with what we've described here, right?
We believed it to be safe on the basis that it was outside and we knew what the evidence suggested about the outside We knew that night was probably safe But you and I kept moving so that if we were downwind of somebody who was sick we would not we would have a high enough effective volume around us and That we wouldn't contract the virus.
So I think we now know that effectively, especially early on in the pandemic, it simply wasn't transmitting outside night or day, that it would have been safe.
But erring in the direction of caution is the refinement.
We've done that and we have relaxed our approach as it has become clear that certain things are safe and other things are not.
Okay, can you go to the next photo, Zay?
So I'm trying to remember.
Okay that's the last photo.
So here's Zach and me.
Uh there's you sporting the uh chili pepper bandana.
Now I will say.
That's my uh that's my tropical bandana is what that is.
Yeah um so uh as the pandemic continued it became clear.
So I had initially thought that cloth masks would be sufficient because the droplets that were being transmitted were large enough that they would be caught.
It became clear that that.
We need to keep that up.
We can move on.
It became clear that if masks were going to be useful at all, that it wasn't going to be cloth masks.
So moving away from cloth masks was a move in the other direction, right?
Not masking outside was a relaxation.
Moving to masks that were more likely to be effective was a move in the other direction.
But anyway, the point was we were developing a model.
This is Zach and me in the elevator as we were disassembling the downtown studio.
Is that the last image?
Last image, okay.
So now the mandates have come, the mask mandates have come to an end.
There are many people in Portland vowing to continue masking.
My guess is that won't last, but it will be interesting to see.
But nonetheless, there are at least three things about the way this mandate has come to an end.
I believe what happened is the narrative collapsed, and they were forced to lift the mandate because it was too obvious.
It was too much of a regular joke that, you know, you need to wear your mask as you're walking to the table.
But once you sit down, you know, our joke was, you know, that you've descended out of the COVID layer, and you're now seated at the table.
But the point was… Yeah, COVID is like tiramisu.
Right.
It comes stratified.
Well this goes back to what we were talking about last week where they had us in a mindset where it was like you're making an effort and both you're putting on your mask to walk to the table and taking off your mask when you get to the table are effort.
Well, but it's also... I have some place to go here, but you were on a roll.
So I just want to point out that at the point that the narrative had come apart and it became clear that the masks were not effective at controlling this virus, they decided to lift them.
But even in lifting them, It was evident that this was about control and not about epidemiology.
And the places that you can see that... So first of all, the mandates themselves, right?
Are masks valuable?
Well, the cloth ones don't appear to be, right?
So if you were going to have a mandate, you could mandate masks that stood a chance of actually controlling the virus.
To the extent that the mandates were just that you need to mask, then that's clearly about effort and not epidemiology.
Well, and it's, again, the sneetches with stars on their bellies versus the sneetches without.
Like, do you have a public indicator of compliance?
Can we see that you are willing to comply?
Right.
You know, we're long since past, you know, early on people, including us, thought that they were effective, and I was, you know, it was disturbing to see masks worn badly.
Like, you know, really?
You know, it's going to be below your nose?
Or you're going to poke a hole in it in order to play the Clarinet, like these pictures that have shown up, like who is thinking through this at all, right?
But over time, you know, there's so many people who were just wearing them sloppily such that it was patently, like there could be no epidemiological story that made sense.
It was just about, are you being a good, you know, a good little person or not?
Are you complying?
It's the inverse of the yellow star.
Right.
The Nazis forcing Jews to wear a Star of David to label them effectively as lesser people, right?
In this case, it was a twist on that where the idea was the masks indicate that you were a good person.
And that was obviously It was obviously nonsense because they didn't make an attempt to limit it to places where the masks actually stood a chance of being useful, or to limit it to masks that might actually be useful.
And then, at the point that the narrative fell apart around these people...
And everybody was joking about the absurdity of the mask policy, right?
They didn't do what would reasonably have been done by anybody who understood that there was a downside to the masks, right?
A downside for children, for example, developmentally, right?
They didn't say, okay, mask mandate.
is over effective immediately this is a mandate that took nothing uh from the point of view of architecture you didn't need anything there was no you know you didn't need crews to go out and do anything you just needed to declare it over and so instead what they did is they said okay a month out the mask mandate will be coming to an end as if that has anything to do with science and then
Oh, the narrative crumbled a bit faster than they were anticipating, and so they moved the date back on us, proving that the initial date, which was a month out, was completely arbitrary in the first place, right?
In this case, I have even less justification, but you know, we used to joke that mosquitoes obey international boundaries, because if you were traveling through Central America, you were going to need your malaria prophylaxis in Nicaragua and in Panama, but not in Costa Rica, because Costa Rica is malaria-free.
And somehow Costa Rica is malaria-free, but of course so are the areas of Nicaragua and Panama that are near And maybe, I don't know, actually maybe at this point Panama is entirely- The canal zone is, I don't know.
The canal zone is probably not the border.
Yeah, actually Bocas del Toro Archipelago I think still has some malaria.
Anyway, I don't remember exactly what the status is, but basically the idea was, you know, There is this disease that is highly transmissible, that is affected by these animals that we know, and we've got one country in the middle of a bunch of other countries that seems to have eradicated it.
So there ought to be, you know, they ought to benefit from having done this job such that if you were trying to travel there, you know, if Costa Rica was trying to build its tourism industry, which it was, And it did so well, and it's a great place to be, both to do research and to just travel around and explore tropical ecosystems.
You don't need, nor should you need, to be worried about malaria prophylaxis while you're there.
But the idea that you could be standing on one side of the border versus the other and need a different thing, need a different prophylaxis, is obviously Imagining that borders are more discreet than they actually are.
And this feels a little bit like that.
I don't think so.
My recollection was that as you crossed from Nicaragua into Costa Rica, you had to show evidence that you had prophylaxis.
In other words, you had to display your bottle to them.
And if you didn't have it, they made you buy it and take it on the spot.
And so, from the point of view of Costa Rica, Yeah, was it perfectly absent from Costa Rica?
I'm sure not.
But was it very well managed in Costa Rica?
It was.
And so to the extent that Costa Rica can't manage Nicaragua's malaria problem, but it can manage Costa Rica's, you know, where do you get the opportunity to do that but at the border?
And so, you know, was it perfect?
No.
But, you know, even the arbitrariness of what seemed to be a, you know, aborta that the mosquitoes presumably did not respect was about the fact that, well, it's the least arbitrary place to do it.
Yeah.
I wasn't actually thinking about traveling by land between the places, although that is in fact how we went between them.
But if you're back when I used to consult the CDC and thought that they really knew what they were doing, and would occasionally be talking to the consulting nurse for tropical disease at the CDC about, no, actually I'm going to this region of this country.
And so, you know, I really, it's going to be a different species of malaria and your notes don't say that.
So I'm going to have to figure out my own prophylaxis regime.
Um, it was, uh, It was about, like, if you're flying in to San Jose versus flying into Managua, Costa Rica versus Nicaragua, having very different, actually mandatory, I think, at that point, things about what you needed to get into the country when, in fact, they share a border and the mosquitoes don't care.
Yeah.
It feels a little arbitrary.
It's not arbitrary.
It just reveals that we have categories for things, and the categories can be real, but the borders that we put in place look far less fuzzy than they actually are.
So there was one more thing that I wanted to pick up on.
I don't even remember what you said that prompted me to think about the way that the schools are responding to the mask mandates.
And I just want to share the first two paragraphs of an email I got from the Portland Public School System yesterday.
You can show my screen if you like, Zach.
It says, Dear PPS families, this is again Portland Public School.
On Monday, Portland Public Schools, along with the majority of Oregon's school districts, will follow the guidance of federal, state, and county officials and make face masks optional in schools.
We know this is a big step for all of us and that some families will choose to continue to have their students wear a mask.
We urge everyone to practice understanding and compassion.
Everyone, masked or not, should feel like they belong, regardless of their own personal decision around COVID-19 safety, including the use of masks.
Each family has its own circumstances and deserves respect.
Please know that our staff will not attempt to influence your decision on masking and will create safe, inclusive classrooms that respect each individual decision.
The rest of the email continues in that sort of framing, finishing with reminding us that, of course, getting vaccinated if you're five years old or over is the best way to prevent, to keep you and your community safe.
And then they have some links to some
um some materials that you can go over with your student that clearly designed for like elementary school students even though they're sending it to high school parents of high schoolers um you know and really pretty insulting to the intelligence of people um but in it they they remind us for instance that uh in i think it's all but it might just be most portland public schools um people people like us the the unvaccinated against covid are not actually allowed to go onto the campus for more than 15 minutes at a time
And this, you know, they want everyone to practice understanding and compassion, personal decision making, respecting each individual decision with regard to masks, because they are very certain that they need to keep people interested in wearing masks.
And if they're scared, then the Portland Public Schools are not going to talk to students about how fear damages the ability to actually make conscious, smart decisions in the future.
They're going to encourage the fear.
They're going to encourage the fear in the language of understanding, compassion, and inclusion.
And at the same time, they're going to maintain their policy of not letting people who are adults, the students they have not mandated the vaccines for in the Portland Public Schools, they are not going to let the parents of students who have rejected this particular plan by the health authorities as a way to protect yourself against disease, which they're now saying the boosters last three months of that.
That's not an option.
We don't get to visit our children in school, but we need to practice inclusion and compassion and understanding as we continue to see people masked unto what?
Eternity.
And at one school we've heard that 90% of the students say that they're going to keep wearing masks.
So, what we really have here is a scientific phenomenon, an epidemiological phenomenon that has an actual nature.
You have something that has hijacked the response to it and is using things that plausibly interact.
Is a vaccine relevant to controlling a pathogen?
In principle, yes.
Not if it doesn't block transmission.
Well, right.
That's why I say in principle, yes.
So the point is in principle is not the same as this vaccine that you happen to have that says on the bottle it's for COVID is going to be effective.
In fact, we know it's not.
Right.
And has unknown risks because it's so brand new.
But the basic point is what you've got is a public school Left with no proper mechanism for navigating.
What exactly is a public school supposed to do when they have been unwittingly drafted into terrorizing their own students over a pathogen using masks?
What are they supposed to do at the point that the government, without explanation, lifts those mandates in a way that clearly suggests this has nothing to do with epidemiology?
They didn't mandate N95 masks in the first place.
They mandated masks.
They then set an arbitrary date for removing the mandate.
They then moved that date.
They are announcing to us that this is about their control over us.
What is the public school supposed to do?
The public school can't very well do what we've done and call out the governmental authorities and say, you're behaving in an arbitrary non-scientific way and we can tell, right?
What are they to do?
They've, you know, advocated and in fact enforced the mask mandate on students despite the harm developmentally that will come to those students for not having their mouths visible to each other for years of their lives, right?
Are they supposed to?
How are they supposed to deal with it?
I guess the point is the level to which the message that this is about your safety The level to which that penetrated people's minds varies.
And now, on lifting it, what they have done is they've given people an option.
But really, the school's job is a developmental job.
Yes, that is partly analytical.
But it is also about learning how to be in the world.
That school has a moral obligation to discourage the use of masks to the extent that they are not forced to require them.
The developmental value of having everybody visible so that, you know, here's the hidden thing.
We humans have very specially evolved musculature in our faces to exchange very subtle information about, you know, emotion.
And to the extent that that might have been in conflict with a novel virus floating around, fine.
But to the extent that That we now acknowledge that this is not an effective policy for controlling this virus, then we should actively discourage people from wearing something that blocks it because it is in their educational interest in every regard for them to get all of the messages, because frankly, these kids have catching up to do.
Yeah, they do.
They have a lot of catching up to do, and they have catching up to do with regard to all sorts of social interactions, and that includes, therefore, also one of the other policies that was widespread, which was about physical distancing, which was at first called social distancing.
They tried to sort of rebrand that, but it really was between the masks and the Zoom school and the, you know, the distance mandated between students and the not, you know, basically no, you know, no rough-and-tumble play, not even a touch, At all, ever.
What about for the students who come from homes where they don't get anything?
Right.
Right?
Then you just destroyed a lot of children.
So the mask mandates are lifted.
How about also letting kids hang out in small groups again?
How about letting them actually, you know, laugh uproariously at lunch and occasionally, you know, do a spit take?
That's never a good idea, but like, this is part of what growing up is.
Well, I think the thing is, um, I don't like patting ourselves on the back here, but the right thing to do was to assume a pathogen that could transmit in many different ways, and then upon discovery about what the actual mode of transmission was, and what was actually useful, to withdraw everything that wasn't justified by its utility in controlling the virus.
And so the point is, from very early on, very early on, you could have said, kids, Be normal outside, right?
Indoors, wear a jacket, we're gonna have the windows open, whatever it was that you needed to do, but the point was, as we literally said, More than 99% of the world is safe from this.
Why are we telling people that the entire world is dangerous?
That's about keeping them in fear for reasons that have nothing to do with controlling a virus.
Yeah, so exactly.
The messaging was simultaneously, if you care about other people, you will do everything we say.
And the way that we are going to get you to do that is you're going to think it's due to your own compassion, but we're actually going to scare the bejesus out of you about everything.
The entire world is a dangerous place.
There are crazy, crazy viruses lurking around every corner and you just have, there is no help for it but to trust us because you can tell we got the credentials in the background and we're the adults here and boy could we use some real adults.
Yeah.
Now, I do wonder what bejesus is and how it got into us, but it's not good that suddenly- I've always wondered.
Yeah, but it's the kind of question you don't ask.
Well, most people don't ask.
Yeah.
I don't know if I've ever even said it before.
I don't think you have.
I certainly haven't been around.
All right, I want to- I'm just trying not to swear.
You did a fairly good job.
I don't think bejesus is an epithet.
Chuleta.
That's how you avoid saying terrible things in Spanish.
At least in Panama.
In certain places.
So I did want to, one last point, is that I think that the arbitrariness of the end of the mask mandate here, which is, as you point out, not by any means the whole thing, because the vaccine mandates lurk behind them, and Yeah, some places are dropping.
There's a theater marquee somewhat near us that for months now has said, you know, vaccine required, and that disappeared.
And it's been many, many months, maybe well over a year.
No, it wouldn't be well over a year, but many, many months, and it just disappeared and nothing else was said about it.
Other places, it's getting worse.
And actually, we're not going to talk about this week, but I understand that in British Columbia, specifically, things are getting far worse, specifically for healthcare workers with regard to vaccine mandates, exactly as most of the rest of Canada is at least reinvestigating what it is that they're doing in the wake not of their
Duplicitous Ken doll of a prime minister, but of the bravery of the truckers in taking on many of the stupid roles in Standing Strong.
Well, I think that all of the stuff is going to come apart.
You will notice that we have not- what is the name of that snake oil salesman?
Fauci.
You will notice that we have not seen much of Anthony Fauci lately as he is enjoying- basically there was a big puff of squid ink and he vanished into the coral reef and is now- Is he a moray eel?
Is that what he is?
No, I like moray eels.
But anyway, I think the point is the change of subject is a great relief to people around whom their narrative was collapsing.
And I just want to point out one last thing.
The arbitrariness, in fact possibly the explanation for why they set an arbitrary future date and then moved it as the narrative collapsed faster than they expected, Has to do with the paradox of Rachel Maddow and how she dealt with, people will remember, there was a moment at which they were dangling masklessness as a reward, as a perk for vaccination.
And the idea was, well, if you're vaccinated you don't very well need a mask because you're both immune and not going to transmit this thing, right?
So back when that was still the story, let's give them the benefit of the doubt, let's imagine that they actually believed it at the time, Um, Rachel Maddow had a moment where she said the quiet part out loud on her show where she was literally trying to grapple with the cognitive dissonance that comes from, wait a minute, now the good people are the ones without masks?
Like, how is my little mind going to wrap itself around That update, you know?
And so the point is this giving you a month to go through the Rachel Maddow moment and get to a place where it's like, OK, got it.
I now know who the good people are again.
I feel comfortable with it.
I'm ready to get rid of this mask.
Maybe the reason that they didn't do an effective immediately.
But the point is, these are the kind of people who would not do an effective immediately order, even though the well-being of children depended on it.
Well, and I mean, I think I'm going to actually switch up the order a little bit here.
After you have put so many terrible policies in place that have disrupted the development of young people, To then say, ah, anything the young person says or feels is the final truth and the final arbiter of how it is that the rest of us are going to interact with them is an advocation of responsibility at every level.
So we're doing that with regard to kids and teenagers and young people who have been just emotionally and psychologically, and in many cases otherwise as well, extraordinarily damaged by two years of this madness.
And who are now like, well, I gotta keep wearing it!
It's the consistency, right?
Whatever story it is they tell themselves, it doesn't matter.
It is the job of the adults to say, actually, honey, no.
It's time for that to go.
Because you don't need it, you haven't needed it, and it's bad for you.
Same thing with regard to children who wake up one day, you know, on Tuesday they decide they're a dinosaur, and on Wednesday they decide they're Spider-Man, and on Thursday they decide that they're the sex that they are not, and no one tries to get them surgery to turn them into a dinosaur.
You know, decides to wrap him in spider silk, but somehow, because there is, there are very, very rare disorders in which trans seems to be the best way to proceed with life.
The majority of people who, especially as children, who are waking up going, You're actually a boy.
I'm a girl now, or vice versa.
When parents and health professionals say, oh yeah, no, we're not going to – of course he's not a dinosaur.
Of course he's not Spider-Man.
But he is a girl, because he said he was!
And because he said he was a girl, we are going to stop, you know, stop puberty from progressing.
And then once we've done that for a while, we are going to start giving cross-sex hormones.
And then, I mean, I guess if it's a boy, um, Claiming to be a girl, the surgical interventions don't happen as a teenager, thank God, but the girls who decide to be boys, they're doing what they call a top surgery on kids, and you never get that functionality back, nor do you get the functionality back associated with cross-sex hormones or with puberty blockers.
You just don't.
Why would we ever Take the word of a child or a teenager as the reality that everything must follow.
This is what childhood is.
This is not the moment at which they have everything figured out.
Everyone who's been a child or a teenager knows this.
But a special environment in which we have so disordered their development, in the case of trans, through social media, through screens, through, you know,
hormonal things in the water of various sorts, plastics and such, and through basically woke, crazy gender ideology in schools, and with regard to COVID, with regard to everything we've just talked about.
You've disordered the development of children, and now you're going to take what they claim as God's honest truth, and we need to change what we do to accommodate their desires and fears?
No.
It's our job to do the opposite.
It's our job to not accommodate their fears, and to help them undo some of the damage that we have done to them.
Yes, it's effectively a post-modern mask mandate.
Their basic point is, look, your lived experience.
If you think that this does control the virus, then it does.
Keep wearing it.
And if you think it doesn't, then you're free to stop.
And it's like, no, no, that is not how this works.
It either is an effective measure, in which case, why are you eliminating it?
Or it isn't an effective measure, in which case, everybody needs to take those things off immediately and Abdicating responsibility like this is absurd.
But to close this out, I just want to point out, we have traveled the full gamut, right?
From, as far as I know, me being the first person in our environment to mask at all, right?
I was masking before, you know, this was a million miles from a mandate at the point that I started masking.
Yeah.
Because it seemed likely to work.
I was resentful.
Right.
You were like, you're going out to, you know, you put on a mask.
Right.
But the point is, you know what?
When there was no evidence about how it transmitted, it made sense to behave that way.
As the evidence came in and it became clear that cloth masks were ineffective, then if there was going to be a mandate, it should have been about masks that stood a chance of working, and at the point it became clear that this was not an effective way of controlling the pandemic, we should have gotten rid of them because everything has a cost, and this one has a particular cost to children that we should never have been willing to bear.
In this case, there are some of the costs that we can absolutely see.
And I remember, oh, maybe, I don't know, 6-12 months ago, at the point that one of the associations for child psychology, I think it was, came out publicly declaring that there was absolutely no impact on little children In like preschool, interacting only with masked kids.
And then separately, and I won't be able to call it up now, but a couple weeks ago, the CDC, quietly and without saying anything, changed the benchmarks for language development for young kids.
And the number of words that kids are expected to know at various benchmarks has now gotten pushed back by six months in several cases.
Why?
Huh, I wonder what could possibly be going on in the world for the last two years that would cause all of the American children to suddenly get dumber.
They're lowering the goalposts.
Yeah.
Lowering the goalposts.
Yeah.
So anyway, I think for the people watching it is worth thinking about what it takes to drive people who were as interested in figuring out what the best practices were to control this virus as I hate to say they've driven us crazy, but they've certainly made, they have tested our patience remarkably by pretending that all of these measures have utility they don't when the evidence doesn't support them.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's been a profound, a profound transition.
Yeah, it sure has.
There's so much we want to do.
You know, let's talk Orwell a little bit.
Of course.
Shall we?
It's the natural thing to talk about next.
No, I think it is the natural way of talking about that.
I think it is.
So, I just have a number of short excerpts from this tiny little book that I want to share.
Let's see.
So, as I say, this is The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, published in 1937.
And as I said last week, it's basically in two parts, the first half being The first half being him documenting the living experiences, the lives, including with a lot of numbers, a lot of statistics about how much people are making and how much they're spending on rent and various food items and such.
The lives of the mostly coal miners, which includes also unemployed coal miners.
I think it's Lancashire and Yorkshire, maybe?
I admit that I did not remind myself of English geography before coming on today.
And then the second half is his social analysis, in which he also shares some biographical details of his own life.
He describes himself basically as having had a bourgeois upbringing, but by the numbers, he makes a sort of lower middle class income, so he's sort of, he's...
He doesn't exactly love this languaging, but he sort of is bringing in money at the upper proletariat level.
But he pronounces all of his H's in the language here, and so is culturally very much of the bourgeoisie.
Even though he's making an order of magnitude less than what most people might be considered in the bourgeoisie in England at the time.
And so the second part of the book from which these quotes are from is him sort of working through why he is in favor of socialism, although I don't think he ever actually defines what he means by that in here, which is interesting.
Despite having basically no appreciation for almost any socialists he has ever met, And I will end... I'd love us to talk just a little bit about each of these as I go, but the last couple are his characterizations of socialists, which is... I just... I don't know my history well enough to know what the hell he's talking about, but you'll see what I mean.
Okay, here we go.
This is from Chapter 9.
He's talking about himself as a young man.
"I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong.
A mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself.
I felt that I had got to escape not really from imperialism, but from every form of man's dominion over man.
I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.
And chiefly because I had had to think everything out in solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths.
At that time, failure seemed to me to be the only virtue.
Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to succeed in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.
So, this reminds me so much of the kinds of thinking that we were seeing in the BLM protests in the summer of 2020 and in the diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology generally that, of course, is what took over Evergreen and is, you know, is one thing that you can point to as the reason that we are no longer there.
That there is a knee-jerk Duality that people believe in that actually couldn't possibly be representative of what is true of life Well, it's interesting that that quote you read is timeless or at least is equally at home in the present as it was when he wrote it I do want This strikes me as needing one extra level of complexity.
To what Orwell said.
Yeah.
So I've been thinking a lot about socialism and communism and revolts like the one we are seeing and why, you know.
Yeah.
That basically, to some of us, The idea of meritocracy is obviously right, right?
I don't believe we have one, right?
I don't believe you can have a perfect one, but is it the right thing to do?
Yes, for many many reasons that are relatively easy to point to.
On the other hand, If you have a situation in which you define merit as the thing that is to be rewarded, there comes a point at which many people discover that they are on the losing end of that battle, right?
That their tools are not sharp enough to do the job.
Now, it should be the case that we democratize the tools, right?
So that everybody, so that effectively, you have the tools, should you be willing to put in the effort to achieve something meritorious enough to, you know, to live well.
Yeah, in so far as is possible, understanding that there will be no perfect world, and you cannot fully democratize either access or origin.
Right.
Allowing for the noise that will certainly be a countervailing force to merit.
Merit is a good thing to prioritize and to try to reward.
But the point is, what if you had a system that just sucked, right?
And that system was prone to miseducate people, to waste their developmental time, so that at the point that they arrive at adulthood, they discover they don't have any useful tools, right?
That isn't the fault of the people who were miseducated, but it does suggest a reason that they would find themselves in a coalition fighting merit, right?
Yeah.
The whole idea of fighting merit seems like a paradox until you realize, well, especially in a system that sucks and doesn't equip most people for a meritocracy, Why wouldn't you naturally find again and again in history this discovery that maybe meritocracy isn't real?
Maybe we should, you know, fight the very concept of merit.
Maybe it's an illusion to begin with, right?
You should rediscover that repeatedly, and I have a sense that that's...
That's why we are here again.
That's why Orwell seems to have written something that would be at home in, you know, 2018.
Right?
And anyway, we should keep it in mind.
Yes.
Oh, that's that's excellent.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, this is from a longer section.
I'm mostly going to summarize it.
He's talking about the bourgeoisie making many pronouncements because they're fashionable, but with which they themselves don't agree.
And it's sort of a gentleman's agreement that people will declare that they think that such and such is ridiculous.
But if someone, usually from the lower classes, is to come and say exactly the same thing, they'll take umbrage and be like, no, you can't say that.
You're not allowed to say that.
It's only those of us on the inside What he's talking about is the bourgeois socialists, right?
He's mostly talking about the people who are claiming to be socialists, but who are actually of the middle class, and who are very interested in class distinctions, and in, frankly, in maintaining them, despite the ideology that they propose to follow.
So he says specifically, quote, "...the left-wing opinions of the average intellectual are largely spurious." And I think this is consistent with what we have observed when we say things like the pseudo-left.
And, you know, we still understand ourselves to be on the left, because while we have a different understanding of what many conservatives actually believe, our fundamental understanding of our worldview is not changing, even as other people who claim to believe the same things we do are changing.
Yeah, it's not about a flag or a jersey.
Yeah, or a social group, right?
It's not about social group, it's about actual values.
And then he says, and this may sound Well, I'll just read the sentence and see what you think.
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.
Yeah, this reminds me of what you and I used to talk about when we would come home from We always talked about the culture shock of returning home.
It's not something you get if you've been gone for two weeks.
It's something you get if you've been gone for months or longer.
It's a weird connection to make, but it's a little bit like the um the jarring nature of a hallucinogenic trip right because it allows you to see your own culture in a way that it is impossible to and the thing that was most jarring to me when we did it was you come home and the advertising the billboards and the yeah the commercials and it's just like
You don't realize that you've gotten used to this just insidious voice that is manipulating you in the most egregious ways.
Well, in this way, actually, both of our not terrific facility with additional languages makes it easier to exist in a different space and not feel completely bombarded.
We were both able to get along okay in various other languages, but neither of us is close to fluent, and so there's plenty of advertising in Latin American cities.
Sure.
Plenty of it.
But it's not targeted, too.
We're both not the target, and because the language isn't one in which we have complete fluency, it's easier to tune out.
Well, it's also, you know, as you'll remember, I used to, I've gone looking for these photos, I don't know where they are, but the supermarket, right, in Latin American countries, if you look at like the hair color aisle or really the baby food aisle or anything,
It's a bunch of blonde, blue-eyed… You know, there's ethnicity to the people on the boxes, but it definitely leans super light-skinned.
European.
It has very European overtones, and it just doesn't look like the population in the supermarket.
And the point is there's a message there about class and refinement and origin and all of this, and it is… Well, it explains a great deal about why the world works the way it does, right?
But you can see it very clearly if you're not Latino and you're in a Latin American supermarket, it's plain as day that there's something weird going on in the shampoo aisle, right?
It's not plain as day to you at home.
Right.
And so anyway, it's yes, the adventures away are very useful for seeing yourself.
Absolutely.
And this is part of, you know, this is part of a big part of why we both advocate so strongly for travel and not, you know, not Disneyfied travel at all.
I mean, that that might be for some people that is fun.
But travel in which you're actually outside of your own culture, and in which you're not saying you have to rough it, but in which you are actually experiencing the world as some other people do, and you are other.
And you will never be other the way that some people live as other inextricably and unchangeably throughout their entire lives, because at any moment, if you've gone someplace, presumably You can pick up and go home, so it's different.
But existing as the odd thing, the one that can't blend in, that can never be invisible, and that is also trying to be a participant observer, to be a kind of anthropologist, and make some friends, and learn something about the culture, and the food, and the music, and the festivals, and everything, and come to see how many different glorious ways there are of being human on this planet.
And then, you know, then to come back and find that it's really hard to communicate a lot of that to the people who weren't with you, you know, to your friends back home, to, you know, to describe Carnival, for instance, or just the experience of...
You know, getting tacos at any time of day or night for 30 cents a piece, and they're the most delicious thing you've ever had, and that's how people eat.
I can say that, but it's different to be walking in the central square and to have that be your life day after day, week after week, month after month.
Yeah, I would say there's a temptation to travel in ways that people solve problems for you and it is a little bit hard to, it is very true, but a little bit hard to defend that part of what the most important aspect of the whole thing is, is what you what you will happen onto as you solve utterly mundane problems, right?
Like, I need to go buy a comb.
How do I, you know?
Exactly.
And there we are.
We're back at serendipity, which is a theme from last week and a theme that I bring up all the time.
And it was actually one of the tensions that I felt, and I may have even talked about this on air before, but I loved doing the study abroad that I did, and we of course did the 11-week study abroad as our final one, but I had done several before that, and it really was one of the things that I felt that I could bring to students very uniquely.
Some students who'd never been more than 50 miles away from where they've been born, help them get a passport, help them get a grant, and take them to the Amazon.
It's like, look at the world, right?
It's amazing.
But I was a little bit of two minds about it because while I left a lot of open space and a lot of room for serendipity and a lot of room for people to make mistakes, including mistakes that were cultural and that maybe put them at some risk, the fact is that I organized everything.
You know, there was one moment I remember when I'm like, okay, it's 16 months away and I'm planning lunch because we're going to be on a boat here and then here, and we have to know exactly where we're going to stop because we're going to have 30 people and we need to have planned lunch.
That's a level of planning that I could do, and I did.
It was You know, and it was rewarding in its way, but the students knowing that they were in the capable hands of someone who had done all the planning meant that they were not going to have the same kind of learning experience that they would if they had just even just had to pack for themselves without a, you know, without a carefully constructed packing list, right?
And likewise, for many of them, even at the point that they're on their own in some city, They will often go out in a large group, which diffuses the responsibility and reduces the value of the problem-solving that one does.
It's like people who are familiar with college campuses, what freshmen do for the first couple weeks on campus.
They combine into a group and it's like, oh, that's freshmen because it's 14 of them.
Um, but it was always, uh, always interesting to see which students actively chose not to do that, right?
And, you know, the student that, you know, you're, you're all the way across Panama City and you run into them and they're alone, right?
That's always an interesting student, right?
That's somebody who quickly learns about the world.
Um, yeah.
All right.
Let's do a couple more.
Um, let's see.
This is, End of chapter 10.
This, then, is the net result of most meetings between proletarian and bourgeois.
They lay bare a real antagonism, which is intensified by the proletarian cant, itself the product of forced contacts between class and class.
The only sensible procedure is to go slow and not force the pace.
If you secretly think of yourself as a gentleman, and as such the superior of the greengrocer's errand boy, it is far better to say so than to tell lies about it.
Ultimately, you have got to drop your snobbishness, but it is fatal to pretend to drop it before you are really ready to do so.
Meanwhile, one can observe on every side that dreary phenomenon, the middle class person who is an ardent socialist at 25 and a sniffish conservative at 35.
In a way, his recoil is natural enough.
At any rate, one can see how his thoughts run.
Perhaps a classless society doesn't mean a beatific state of affairs in which we shall all go on behaving exactly as before except that there will be no class hatred and no snobbishness.
Perhaps, actually, it means a bleak world in which all our ideals, our codes, our tastes, our ideology, in fact, will have no meaning.
Perhaps this class-breaking business isn't so simple as it looked.
On the contrary, it is a wild ride into the darkness, and it may be that, at the end of it, the smile will be on the face of the tiger.
With loving, though slightly patronizing smiles, we set out to greet our proletarian brothers, and behold!
Our proletarian brothers, insofar as we understand them, are not asking for our greetings, they are asking us to commit suicide.
When the bourgeois sees it in that form, he takes to flight, and if his flight is rapid enough, it may carry him to fascism.
Yeah.
It's extraordinary.
It's tragic that he didn't live longer and tragic that we don't have him presently.
There's so much in there.
One is this sort of sense that the downtrodden are fundamentally Better stuff.
Which they in fact may be as long as they're downtrodden.
But the point is what turns the elite terrible, and it's not universal, but what turns the elite terrible is the elite status.
And so that whoever acquires it ends up either, you know, has to deliberately fight the transition into that thing.
Yeah.
Right?
Or it happens to them, right?
You can't You know, if the first will be last and the last will be first, then the point is, well, you're going to reinvent the problem with new actors.
Right, yes.
Yes, it's still people.
It's still people.
It's still people, and the game theory is still the game theory.
Yeah, yeah.
You ain't done nothing to change that.
Yeah.
Okay.
One, two more.
Let me see.
I've got to figure out what I'm starting with.
The kind of person.
Here we go.
The kind of person who most readily accepts socialism is also the kind of person who views mechanical progress as such with enthusiasm.
as a And this is so much the case that socialists are often unable to grasp that the opposite opinion exists.
As a rule, the most persuasive argument they can think of is to tell you that the present mechanization of the world is as nothing to what we shall see when socialism is established.
Where there is one airplane now, in those days there will be 50.
All the work that is now done by hand will then be done by machinery.
Everything that is now made of leather, wood, or stone will be made of rubber, glass, or steel.
It's pretty plastic.
There will be no disorder, no loose ends, no wildernesses, no wild animals, no weeds, no disease, no poverty, no pain, and so on and so forth.
The socialist world is to be above all things an ordered world, an efficient God.
Yeah, that's, I mean, it's true that- It's true.
And, you know, it really goes to what- There is a dislike, sorry, but like, I think the stereotype is that, and this is true of some conservatives, is that they want to control nature, and that they, you know, and I remember seeing some stuff early in SARS, in COVID, right, with some prominent conservatives saying like, just control it, just kill the virus, just like, you know, get in a bottle and get rid of it.
And it's like, well, that's a naive understanding.
But, you know, he lays out a bunch of the history that at that point wasn't history that he was living through, in which he really demonstrates that that's actually the, you know, the love of mechanization, and of having machines do all the work that is currently done by by laborers, is part of the utopian vision of the socialists at that point.
Yes.
And you know, it's, it's oddly inconsistent, right?
Because I think probably this is the influence of, you know, dilettante socialists.
Yeah.
But the point is, the machinists are going to be aware of the trade offs inherent in things.
And they may, of course, envision machines doing things, but they will not, you know, they will envision tolerances and, Right.
Noise in the system and failure and all of that.
They won't have this, you know, this shiny view of everything being, you know, a life of leisure because the machines are doing all the work, you know.
But anyway, it's curious.
Yeah.
Okay.
One more with, I'm just going to read this one.
This is from Chapter 11.
The last one was from Chapter 12.
This is from Chapter 11.
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that socialism, in its developed form, is a theory confined entirely to the middle class.
The typical socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice.
He is either a youthful snob Bolshevik, who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings, With a history of non-conformity behind him, and above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.
This last type is surprisingly common in socialist parties of every shade.
It has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old liberal party.
In addition to this, there is the horrible, the really disquieting prevalence of cranks wherever socialists have gathered together.
One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, nature cure quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
All right.
I'm feeling good because I think I nailed two of these on this podcast.
I don't know what his problem with vegetarians and feminists and nature care.
Like, this is such a crazy list.
We could spend so long on this list.
No, it may be.
It may be that basically you get There's something pathological about being drawn at a certain level into causes, right?
Yes.
Causes are important, but the point is he's identifying people who synonymize themselves.
But sandal wearers, Brett!
And he also talks about beard havers.
Beard havers, yeah.
That's not his language, I don't remember what he calls it, but like bearded teetotalers or something, I don't know.
But hold on, I want to recover two things.
One of them, he says exactly the thing that I said just a moment before you read that, where he basically says, you'd think that these socialists are, you know, these hard-working, hard-headed people.
They're not.
It's not them.
He specifically calls out the machinists.
And what was the other thing?
Damn, I've lost it.
Was it about his hatred of Quakers and people who think nature can cure things?
Well, no, I think it was- Or fruit juice drinkers?
In his listing of all of these things, right, he is talking about people who do not sound well endowed for meritocracy.
We're talking about people who've narrowed their scope to, you know, whatever it is that Sandal wears to narrow their scope to.
I mean, he's talking about hip, some of that is like descriptive of hippies before hippies exist.
But, um, right.
But, but the point is if, if what I'm saying is true and that in effect, there is this ever present pull to rebel against merit, right?
To declare merit a fiction, where would you tend to find it?
You would find it amongst people who have overly synonymized themselves with something that isn't productive.
Vegetarianism may be good or it may be bad, but it's not productive.
It's not like I don't know what Nature Curie's got that in quotes, capitalized, exactly refers to there, but there's certainly a lot in the phrase that I can put a lot of good sense to.
Feminism has had a lot of missteps, but we're in first wave feminism era at that point, and the idea of being allowed to work outside the home and keep your name when you get married I'm so curious, because he goes off with lists like that a few times at the end of the book, and that's just one of them.
I was listening, I was walking in this park with all these people unmasked around me, and I would just start laughing out loud like, oh, he's off on another tirade about people with beards and wearing sandals.
Well, let's try this out.
Okay.
You know this thing that I always say, I am a liberal who wants to live in a world so good that I get to be a conservative?
Yeah.
Right?
I think most people don't understand what I'm getting at.
But the point is, I actually do want to see something done, and at the point that it's done, continuing to try to do it doesn't make any sense.
It's not action for action's sake.
Right.
So, map that onto feminism.
Sure.
Right?
I'm a feminist that wants to live in a world so egalitarian that I don't have to be a feminist.
Right?
That seems to make sense to me.
Right?
Doesn't mean we're there.
On the other hand, where we are is something that should always be a question, because whether or not I agree with you.
Not everything on that list works.
I'm a sandal wearer who wants to live in a world so cold that I can't wear sandals.
I just can't quite make it work.
Yeah, I admit.
It doesn't map onto everything.
And again, Nature Cure may have been some particular thing, but I do think your larger point about belonging, about signifiers of tribalism.
Really, like people who both, you know, want to adopt the latest thing and, you know, we heard about this and we saw this directly both at Evergreen and we see it in the Black Lives Matter movement and we see it frankly with COVID.
People who are just like, oh, and you know, we see it in social media tags.
We're like, oh, it went from It went from syringes to Ukrainian flags, right?
In people's names on social media.
I'm going to signal that I'm on the next big thing.
Did you even know anything about vaccines, the Ukraine, or any of this before you were told that this is what you were supposed to think about now?
Oh, but you like to feel like you're inside.
And you know, so doesn't everyone at some level.
But if that is one of your driving things, then maybe you end up being one of these bearded, sandal-wearing, vegetarian feminists that Orwell so rails against.
Yep.
And I still want to- Fruit juice drinker.
I still want to abstract it out.
Okay.
Because, you know, if you decided That, you know, merit was synonymous with deadlifting, right?
That we're gonna be able to figure out how meritorious and we're gonna reward you based on how meritorious you are based on how much you can deadlift, right?
That doesn't sound like a world that I'm very much in favor of merit, right?
That sounds like a world that's been stacked, the cards have been stacked against me, right?
And so One can imagine that for any description of merit, some large number of people will be able to look at it and say, okay, that's a world in which I lose.
I'm not for that world.
Right?
And the question is, does Orwell's seemingly arbitrary list of things that we can't even quite figure out what he's talking about, is the idea that people who are likely to end up on that list, very closely synonymized with some quirk, are those also people who are likely not to be on board With the idea of merit because it feels like a conspiracy against them.
Right?
Yeah.
Something like that.
No, I think that's right.
I think you're onto something.
You said onto something, not on something.
You may be, but I had not yet formulated a hypothesis on that front.
Excellent.
It's already 2.15 our time, but you have been saying for a couple weeks now that you want to talk a little bit about why the origin of SARS-CoV-2, likely through some serial passaging research, makes a difference.
It's not just a historical question, but potentially makes a difference in terms of the epidemiology.
Well, and specifically the individual-level illness, right?
It makes a big difference that effectively is why we are still fighting over whether it had a laboratory origin.
And it became very common, especially amongst sophisticates who had not been early on the lab leak issue, to declare, what does it matter?
We're stuck with this virus now.
Let's just deal with it.
And the answer is, actually, few things matter more.
The obvious reason is that to the extent that this is the product of a laboratory accident, knowing how that could possibly have happened so that we can prevent it is essential, but that's obvious.
What I think is not obvious is how much harm was likely done by that route and this is why we have to get this right.
So a couple points.
One, I believe and I hope that we are ultimately able to get past all of the people who want to prevent an honest exploration.
I believe that what we had was a brief period of time after SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the world in which we really could have driven it to extinction just as SARS-CoV-1 effectively is extinct.
Right?
It seems to have driven itself to extinction.
Right.
It did not have, it didn't have the goods to keep going and the question is could we have delivered SARS-CoV-2 to sufficient disadvantage in transmitting if we had gotten to it early and had taken the politics out of it?
Could we have driven it to extinction?
And I believe what we now know suggests that we probably could have, right?
Or that failing that we could have driven it to a state of extreme rarity where it's effectively extinct like rabies in the first world.
So if that is true if what happened was however this thing emerged into the world, let's assume the best let's assume It was research that it was well-intentioned research rather than dual-purpose weapons research Let's assume they were trying to figure out they were really afraid of a pathogen getting into the world of a particular nature.
They wanted to study it so that they would be ahead of the game when it happened and they goofed and it escaped, right?
That's still a terrible story and I believe likely the pathogen never would have made the jump.
No pathogen like the one that they were looking at would have made the jump and become a pandemic.
So the point is everything that happens negative as a result of that jump having been made with human assistance Before you go, but which is part of why I think it's so important for the messaging coming from those people and the people whose side they are on.
to convince the world that it has a zoonotic origin.
Basically, it furthers, you know, they could not be responsible for something of zoonotic origin, but it also helps keep the population in fear.
Oh my god, at any moment in a world that is populated as we are, where we're constantly going into wilderness areas and running into animals, ooh, scary animals, Then at any moment, we could have another one of these things.
We'd better keep things clean.
We'd better trust the authorities.
We'd better get the public health policy.
What the WHO is working on right now is ridiculously scary.
They are actually playing on people's fear that this entire situation has created in order to move forward an authoritarian mandate that potentially has the capacity to undermine sovereign governments.
This goes squarely back to what we discussed last week with the fact that the mechanism of procuring grants has turned all sorts of people that we need to do objective science into salesmen.
They don't even necessarily understand that that's what they've become, right?
It is so reflexive and so in effect there is a section of each of the grants that goes towards such research that says something akin to You know, as the human population expands, we are coming into more and more contact with wildlife, and wildlife is being pressured to blah blah blah.
That is going to result in pathogens that normally circulate amongst wild animals, making a zoonotic jump to people, at which point Boom!
And then you come up with some really crazy level of fear about what type of pathogen could suddenly emerge and not be controllable, and therefore why it is absolutely essential that every God-fearing, mask-wearing, grant-giving agency has to deliver a huge amount of money to these people who are the only ones to study the pathogen before it leaps out of a cave and gets us all.
Yeah, because what will probably be obvious but might not be known to people is that every grant application that I have ever seen, and I saw a ton of them back when I spent a year working with the grant agency, University of California at Santa Cruz, many years ago, but have since seen and heard about many, many others, is that yes, they are supposed to be assessed on their scientific merits, but there is a section of every single one.
And as I remember it, actually many grant applications begin and end with versions of that same section, and that section is basically, explain why you deserve money, which is not the same as explain why this is good science.
And so, hopefully, there is good science in the stuff that is being funded, but the decision to fund is based in part, and it's got to be largely given that it's bracketing almost every grant application, What is it about your work that demands funding now, which means increasing the sense of urgency is more likely to get you funding?
Right, and so it effectively is smoke and mirrors boilerplate, and the basic point is either the people reviewing the grant are in on why this isn't exactly true, but they're not going to call it out because they're in the same business, or they can't see through it because they don't have the expertise that would tell them why that's a bullshit story, right?
You know, human beings expanding and coming into more and more contact with wildlife, Bullshit, right?
Now it happens there are more people, and it happens we are backing the wild farther and farther away, but people coming into contact with wildlife is the entire history of people, right?
Which means most of the things that can make an easy jump have done it.
A higher proportion of the human population was always in more contact with wildness than the proportion of the human population that is in contact with wildness is now.
Right.
And viewers may be interested to go back to my UnHerd essay, where I, as a former bat biologist... This is a different one than you referenced earlier.
Yeah.
I, as a former bat biologist, go through the question at the point that COVID emerges into the world, I then have to wonder if being in contact with bats is enough to unleash a pandemic like this, could I have accidentally done it when I was in contact with bats?
And the answer is very likely not.
That this is actually a difficult evolutionary jump.
And that there, you know, you have lots of people, you have thousands of people studying bats at any one time.
We're not constantly causing pandemics.
Why is that?
And the answer is because the thing that they say at the beginning of those grant applications about the danger of this happening on any given Tuesday, right?
That's bullshit designed to get the system to spit out money.
That's right.
And so, okay.
In light of all that, you've got the bullshit designed to get the system to spit out money.
It spits out money to fund a reckless kind of research that is very likely to do exactly the thing that nature is not well-poised to do, right?
It's very likely to unleash a pathogen into the world.
Yeah, that's the one.
Is it this one?
Okay.
So... You might just suck.
Let dad keep talking, but just put it on the screen for a moment and I'll post in the show notes too.
Go for it.
So, in effect, you've got a difficult evolutionary leap that a pathogen would have to make in order to become a human pandemic.
Then you have humans who are clever, but not that clever.
Proposing to do exactly the thing that will make any small evolutionary leap, right?
They're proposing to use trampolines and catapults to get the thing across the gap to become capable of creating a pandemic on the basis of the absurd argument that in order to know what to do about a pandemic, we're going to have to create something that's capable of making one.
Which, of course, runs the risk that the thing is going to leap into the world at any moment because lab accidents are not uncommon at all.
And so, okay, so then the question is, well, what about the people, frankly, like Sam Harris, who said, well, you know, I, Sam, wasn't animated about the question of lab leaks because at some level it's an academic question.
We've got this virus.
What's the best way to deal with it?
And the answer is no.
This makes all the difference in the world because what in effect is going on, if you think back to the Natural Origins paper, the Christian Anderson-led paper, so Christian Anderson interacted with Fauci behind closed doors in his email.
Anderson argued that in fact the virus as they were coming to know it was inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
It could not have come about naturally and effectively a plan emerges to obscure that and suddenly there's a reversal of course and Anderson and his academic cronies Cook up a paper that says, this virus has to have come from nature.
It couldn't have come from the lab.
And here's how you know.
And their argument is nonsense.
Their argument is, we would not have known that the structure we see would be any good at infecting people.
Therefore, we wouldn't have planned it this way.
If people were going to make a virus, they wouldn't have made this one, which is true.
What they didn't say was that there's another mechanism.
That we're not that good at doing things like describing a virus that's going to infect people.
But what we're really good at doing is borrowing tools from nature.
Right?
We borrow enzymes to do genetic engineering.
We borrow antibiotics to fight off bacteria.
We borrow evolution to solve problems we are not smart enough to solve yet.
And so serial passaging was the thing that they were avoiding describing in that manuscript, right?
So they do not say what we're going to do, or what likely has accounted for the existence of this virus, is that the virus, ancestor virus, was passed from one individual to another.
Evolving along the way to answer the question, how would you make a pathogen for humans if you don't know enough to specify its molecular nature?
So what that in effect does is it creates a virus with the characteristics that the people who ran the experiments wanted it to have.
But it also has other characteristics.
So at the same time, they were selecting for the capacity to infect human tissues, they were also selecting for what I would call explorer modes.
They were selecting for a virus that was experimenting.
Furthermore, if you think about the question of what virus we ended up with, you and I, Heather, have been very careful Not to fall into the trap of saying this isn't a dangerous virus, right?
From the beginning we talked about the fact that actually this is quite a scary virus and that the level of Danger is not captured in the comparatively low case fatality rate, right?
There seems to be lots of harm done around the body that isn't captured there which you know, my telomere work suggests is going to accelerate aging and shorten lives.
So then the point is Is anything about what makes this virus actually dangerous the result of the mechanism used to generate it?
The point I want to make is, let's say that you used ferrets, which have an ACE2 receptor similar to humans, in order to get evolution to solve the question of how you take a virus poorly adapted to infect humans, the ancestor virus to SARS-CoV-2, and get it to be really good at infecting humans.
Ferrets are a likely serial passage organism.
So-called humanized mice, mice that have been altered so they are molecularly more similar to humans, are a likely place for serial passaging.
And human airway tissue, which can be purchased and basically uses evolution to solve the question of how to get from cell to cell in human airways.
So all of these things are places where evolution could have been used to solve this puzzle.
But what will happen?
Let's take the ferret example.
In nature, a virus that infects a ferret needs to leave the ferret capable of doing ferret stuff in order for the ferret to spread the virus to others.
Otherwise, you know, remember the R-naught term, how many cases can an individual case spur?
If a ferret is only capable of infecting its, you know, family members in the burrow and it's not going to encounter other ferrets in the population.
And neither are they.
Right, then R-naught is going to be less than one and the thing will go extinct.
So that's not a successful plan.
So the point is, There's certain pathogens that don't work this way.
Malaria, for example, knocks you flat on your ass.
Why?
Because you're not spreading it.
Mosquitoes are.
So you being so exhausted... The analysis is different with a vectored pathogen.
Right.
Because if you're lying down and you can't swat a mosquito, then the mosquito is in a good position to pick it up and move it.
And the analysis will be different with the waterborne.
As everyone became familiar with and probably mostly forgot, it's going to be different for aerosolized versus airborne, for foam light transmission, mode of transmission, vector versus not.
All of these are going to have different predictions.
That come along with them about whether or not you expect virulence to evolve, a pathogen to become more virulent over time in a population or less.
Population density, of course, as well.
So, if you're going to use laboratory serial passaging, what you are doing is you are actually creating a route that the pathogen couldn't go through in nature.
And I would just point to several features of this virus.
That are probably far worse by virtue of the fact that serial passaging is the likely explanation for where they came from.
Critically, if a pathogen, in order to get from one individual to the next, let's say a respiratory pathogen requires you to be mobile, so you can't be terribly sick, right?
Then trade-offs being what they are, It has an incentive not to do any damage to tissue that isn't directly involved in transmission, right?
To the extent that you have tissues that aren't capable of spreading the virus because they're not exposed to the outside world and everybody who contracts the virus is getting it from a respiratory source, then the point is, well, that reduces your mobility without increasing transmissibility.
So nature wouldn't do that.
On the other hand, If you've got ferrets caged together, where they don't have to find each other, and they don't have to, you know, look healthy, right?
Imagine, you know, creatures in nature are liable to have a revulsion for individuals of their species who look sickly, right?
It's natural that you would evolve that.
Because, of course, not every sickly individual has something transmissible, but a lot of them do.
And so sickly individuals are something to be avoided.
But if you're caged with a sickly individual, your preference to avoid them doesn't matter because you can't avoid them.
So lots of things about this.
Maybe even anosmia, right?
To the extent that a ferret, in order not to starve to death, has to depend on its extraordinary sense of smell.
Right?
A virus that disrupts that extraordinary sense of smell is immediately going to cause a foraging problem for a ferret, but not in a cage where the ferret eats ferret kibble, right?
So, you could get things like anosmia, which wouldn't naturally be likely to happen because the ferret needs to be ecologically capable.
Yeah, so interesting.
There might be two different possible approaches.
Anosmia might be adaptive in this situation and not in a, you know, a normal ferret situation.
Or, and this seems far more likely the one that you've proposed, anosmia might be acceptable and not come with the normal cost in the situation that it would in a wild ferret population.
Right, exactly.
In this case, anosmia is annoying.
It's not obvious that it has long-term implications, but the point is, it does seem conspicuous, right?
Much like a virus that can only be transmitted indoors, well, that also seems like an arbitrary laboratory phenomenon, potentially.
That one strikes me more like it's about effective volume, and I think most viruses that are airborne, aerosolized, are going to at least be much more likely to transmit indoors, although the degree to which that is true for this one does seem extreme.
No, I agree that it'll be more likely for any respiratory virus that is not fomite transmitted.
But the degree to which it is true in this virus is conspicuous for something that supposedly came from the wild.
And of course, the point is trade-offs are under all of this.
So if you can borrow from outdoor transmission without a cost because you're caged animals, then you will tend to borrow in that and you will get something on some other characteristic that, you know, we don't know the two are connected.
Yep.
But anyway, my, and you know, this one, it may be that the laboratory origin actually worked for us because it left the outside environment, a place that one could actually be safe if not for bad CDC advice and things like that.
Well, but, but for the laboratory origin, we wouldn't have it at all.
You don't want to go down that road too far.
I started by saying if laboratory origin, then effectively you've got everything downstream of COVID belongs on their bill.
Even worse to the extent that people then took a crisis that we could potentially have ended if we had behaved in a coordinated and smart fashion and decided to utilize it for other purposes.
Some people made bank.
Well, not even made bank.
The point is, let's say that this was a mild disease.
Let's say that this was somewhere between cold and flu, okay?
The cost to humanity, in fact, even the number of deaths is incalculable if you're stuck with it forever, right?
And so the point is the costs of Even if that was it.
Even if that was it, you know.
Okay, we had flu and now we got another one, right?
That is a disaster.
And for anyone to have used this for their own purposes and at the same time run out the clock that was running on us actually controlling the thing is, you know, it's diabolical.
Yeah.
Okay, so let me just close this out.
So you've got various characteristics that may, you know, these are hypotheses, may be connected to serial passaging in a laboratory environment that is not like nature.
One of them is the exploratory nature of this pathogen, right?
The tropism for different tissues is high and it may even be that its ability to jump species is high because it's been run through, you know, some training courses.
Tropism you're using in a way that I'm not familiar with.
It's a different definition than in botany, although maybe it's an affiliation for, effectively.
Right, right.
So, phototropic, the tendency to seek the light.
Tropism, in this case, means its ability to affect different tissues.
In effect, there is a constraint on a natural virus.
Don't infect tissues that don't help spread the virus so that you leave the animal as healthy as possible so it can go around and do the spreading.
In this case, if you've got, you know, animals caged so that they don't have to be any good at being animals, right, they're just cellular environments, then you lift a constraint and the question is, is part of the There's a large number of tissues that seem to be negatively impacted by this virus, the result of the fact that it was in a highly unusual circumstance in which animals couldn't get away from each other.
If that's what happened, then the point is much of the harm that comes to an individual who gets sick with this may be the result of its unnatural origin.
And so in effect, all of the explanations that say, Okay, if it came from a lab, we need to know that so it doesn't happen again.
But short of that, none of this matters.
No, it all matters.
And what you really need are people who are informed enough and insulated from the incentives that they can actually have a conversation about how much harm came to humanity from which errors, right?
And the errors just continue to compound.
Well, or you could make the founder of EcoHealth Alliance the lead on the investigation of what the origin of SARS-CoV-2 was for the trip to China.
I mean, that seems like there's no conflict there.
No, you could just tell him that he's got a new job, and his new job is to find out whether this came from the lab, and I'm sure he would, you know... His new job is to see if he's a criminal in a past life, which is to say a current life.
This is cool.
This is next level criminal investigation where the people who do the investigation are the people who are in the best position to do it by virtue of the fact that they committed the crime and therefore know exactly what happened.
They're in nearly complete possession of the information necessary to prosecute.
It's beautiful.
Yeah.
I mean, it's almost meritorious.
Excellent, excellent.
Well, boy, there is a lot that we were thinking we might get to today, and we didn't, but we will be back.
We will be back next week.
We'll be earlier.
I will say it's, you know, you guys, unless you're in Portland watching live right now, we'll not be having this experience, but it was so gorgeous and spring-like here this morning, and I was outside, and I came home, and I said to our younger son Toby, who's 15,
I said go out like go out on your electric unicycle enjoy this because according to my phone by three o'clock it's going to be raining and it's never going to stop and it's raining now it's it turned completely gross out there and it feels it's amazing how you can feel when you're in a weather system like this is now what is and it's part of why the sun for those of us who like the sun I think that's almost everyone like oh this is wonderful I feel good and then as soon as this happens damn
Well, it's worth talking about another time, but I actually think that there's something, just as it is hugely different to write with a word processor than a typewriter is one that we were talking about earlier this week, there's something hugely different to have seen weather at large scale by virtue of modern tech.
Imagine living, you know, if you've never seen a satellite image.
Something.
And you saw the sun shine the way it felt like it was going to last forever.
Yeah.
And then, you know, to have it change so radically is, you know, obviously everybody experiences that.
But, you know, we of course know exactly what that looks like.
It looks like a system blowing across.
Yeah.
And actually, I mean, this is also kind of new technology, but we've had the opportunity to be in a couple of different canopy towers in the Amazon.
Uh, where, um, yes, by dint of someone else's hard work, you know, pulling wood and, and, uh, and hardware up a tree, you end up with a platform that you can climb up 220 feet up a canopy tree or so.
And you can look out, I'm thinking of the one at Tipitini in particular, where you can actually look out, so you're, we're actually, I think it's in a, it's in a ceiba, and it's an emergent tree, so you're slightly above much of the canopy.
I can't remember.
There are a couple, but that one, uh, I think it is a Sabotree.
Yeah, I think it is.
Anyway, you can actually look out over the canopy.
You're not still, I mean, you are in it, and the bird life up there is amazing, but you can look and at some moments you can actually see from a long way off the weather coming at you.
And, you know, it starts to taste different.
Like, you can feel the ozone.
You can feel the electricity.
Like, you can feel it viscerally, but to also be able to be up there and see it I'm about to get really, really wet.
It's remarkable.
The Howler Mikey's announcing it.
Yeah, incredible.
But it's still not satellite level.
It's not that zoomed out.
All right, we are going to take a break and we'll be back for those of you listening live in 15 minutes or less even.
With the live Q&A, again, you can ask questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
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And consider reading our book, which I've hidden under a pile of paper it looks like, and be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
