#122 Retroactive Cancelation & Rights of Passage (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 122nd 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 cancellation for being woke, and for being medically woke. We discuss vitamin D, latitude, altitude, health and allergies. We talk about teaching children how to think, not what to think, and about Margaret Mead’s retroactive cancellation. We discuss coming of age in Samoa, New Jersey, amon...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
We're gonna start slightly differently.
There are lots of new people finding the podcast who may not be aware of the trajectory that we've been through.
So I am Dr. Brett Weinstein and you, as I understand it, are Dr. Heather Hying.
Yes, as if we're just meeting each other for the first time.
As if we are- As if you- as you understand it, you said.
I have to say, it makes me a little nervous.
And this is our 122nd live stream, which we started a little over two years ago in March of 2020 as COVID was descending.
In the prior world.
Um, the prior world that followed- Eskon was descending, and then it quickly became ascendant.
And, uh, although many in the world would seem to think that it's disappeared now, but it seems rather ascendant in terms of the mark it's made.
What were you saying?
Uh, ascendant, but never once resplendent.
Right?
I've come to loathe this virus and really resent the fact that some yahoos were foolhardy enough to go around mucking about with the ancestors and such a thing, to see if they couldn't make it infectious enough so that they could learn how to fight an infection with a virus like this.
Indeed.
Well, today, among other things, we have a sweet Labrador snoring in the background, so if you're hearing noise, that's what it is.
We're going to talk a little bit about coming of age in Samoa, in New Jersey, Among the Amish and in the era of COVID.
And also a little bit about how progressives have sold out their—our, I guess, depending on how we continue to view ourselves—values in the last two years, putting at risk so many of the gains that liberals in general have made over the last, you know, 50, 100 years.
I'm going to defend us preemptively here, just so that if people go digging and they find this, they have some sense.
Progressives are in favor of progress, but what you regard as progress could be anything.
It's fine to be a progressive with a completely independent view of all other so-called progressives, and I suspect that is wherein the solution to that little puzzle lies.
Indeed.
We're also going to talk a little bit about vaccine mandates, and you're going to invoke the possibility of a Gen X revolution.
Indeed.
At the very end.
Okay, so we are coming to you at our normal time, on a normal day.
In the upcoming months there's going to be some changes to the schedule, but we will be here again next week, same time, same place.
And that is to say we're on YouTube, and we're also on Odyssey, where the chat is live, if you are interested in that.
We, after our first hour, hour and a half or so, we take a break and then we come back with a live Q&A.
You can ask questions for the live Q&A at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
That is open now.
We rarely get to all the questions, but we get to as many as we can and we pick and choose, so we don't promise that we're going to get to any particular question, but we get to a lot of them.
We get to a majority of them for sure.
Um, please consider, um, supporting us by subscribing to this channel, by subscribing to the Clips channel, uh, the Dark Horse Podcast Clips, where we have, um, where our, uh, excellent, uh, other producer, uh, makes clips of these streams, and they are, they're smaller, more succinct bits that are perhaps more easily shared, uh, and that does seem to be the case of how a lot of people are finding us through, through the clips.
I would add, check your subscriptions, too, because there's something odd that's going on with our numbers on YouTube.
We are encountering more and more people who seem to be very familiar with our work, but that's not reflected in the numbers.
And of course, people being unsubscribed without their knowledge is a commonly observed feature of the YouTube universe.
Indeed.
We encourage you to join us on our Patreons, where we do on mine a monthly private Q&A, on Brett's a couple of monthly conversations, and you also get access to the Discord community there, which is, as we understand it, very lively, and in the next few months we're going to be announcing improvements in that space that should make it even more exciting.
We have, of course, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century out now for, gosh, almost seven months, which is crazy.
You know, it was decades in coming and it's out for almost seven months now and continuing to do really well.
We continue to both see great sales but also, more importantly, have engagement over the content with this book.
So we We are proud of it and we hope that you have the chance to dig in.
We have dire wolves and epic tabbies and digital book burnings on our store at store.darkhorsepodcast.org and my Substack natural selections this last week I I've been thinking so much about what I'm writing about for the next week, which is partly why we're going to be talking about coming of age.
Was there any thought crime?
Does that ring any bells?
Probably.
Goodness, what a strange little glitch there.
I can figure this out quickly enough.
Oh, of course.
What I did this last week was I posted an essay that I actually wrote 10 years ago from my time at Navapatya.
Which is an extraordinary, very small field station on the Sea of Cortez, not on Baja, but on the mainland of Mexico, right near the Sonora-Sinaloa border, called Naturalist and Sonora, a place that I went to as part of my role as a professor at Evergreen.
Next week!
Which also seems a very long time ago.
It really does.
It really, really does.
But I was able to actually, and we'll get into our ads here shortly, but in service of where we're going to start today, I took a peripatetic walk, if you will, through a number of ideas and thoughts and readings and more ideas and thoughts, and it reminded me of one of my favorite concepts, one of my favorite ideas in the world, which is serendipity.
And, you know, being able to walk in a new place where you don't have a goal that you have to be to, or at least not at a particular time, or being in an actual library where you can meander through the stacks and discover, you know, find yourself in a section you never would have gone to, because maybe you didn't even know that kind of thing existed, but now you find yourself among the thoughts of previous, you know, the previously down thoughts of people who may well have something to share with you that will expand your world.
And so that's the sort of expansive investigation I was doing a little bit this week, in part complemented by and facilitated by the fact that we had one crazily beautiful, unseasonably just summer-like day.
It was misfiled.
It was misfiled.
We're here in the Pacific Northwest in Portland, Oregon, and in Portland we have relatively mild winters and perfect summers.
Last year we had a couple of crazy heat waves, like 115 degrees, but in general An August day is high in the 80s with very low humidity, and it dips down into high 50s at night, so it's cool enough to sleep easily.
It's a perfect temperature during the day.
And in July and in September, it's in the 70s.
So, you know, it really is perfect here.
And that was what Thursday here this week was.
It was 75 degrees.
You know, blue skies, some high puffy clouds.
I actually got into the water.
I got out paddleboarding for the first time this year.
You got on your bike for the first time in a little while.
It was glorious, and these sorts of experiences of being out without feeling, you know, cowed by the weather, without feeling like, oh, it's, you know, it's dangerous out here, it's fraught, really can open up the brain to more More being more open to ideas than you might otherwise be.
Serendipity.
Plan for it.
Okay.
I don't know.
I thought I'd try it out.
I'm not convinced it's wrong.
Okay, but you know, so you say it.
Yeah.
And it's a thing.
Yeah.
But then I'm supposed to like riff on your pun.
No, that's not incumbent on you at all.
Right, but when I just kind of move on, then you and some of our audience is like, wow.
Wow, she didn't like it.
If I recall correctly, we could do the slow-mo and see, but I think you chuckled, so that's par for the course.
Yeah, punsters, man.
Okay.
So we have three sponsors that are very much helping support us this week, and we will bring them to you now.
Our first sponsor this week is Sole, S-O-L-E, a sustainable orthopedic footwear company.
Sol is one of two footwear sponsors that we have, and we love them both.
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I was, as I said, out paddleboarding for the first time this season last week, and I paddleboard barefoot.
But getting to and from the water from the car requires something comfortable and protective, walking over some jagged rocks and such, that you can slip on and off.
Sol's highly-structured flip-flop, they've got several, I have the Baja, is perfect for this job.
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All right.
Our second sponsor this week is Alform, a company that makes absolutely terrific custom sofas.
And I know that the folks at home are asking themselves, what makes them so terrific?
And it's two things.
First, it is unmitigated awesomeness.
Second, it is the things I'm about to describe.
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We've got a beautiful sectional all-form sofa in whiskey leather.
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Every time I read that, I hiccup on it.
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Effectively fight white noise supremacy.
Okay, that one's good.
Yes, that one was good.
I think it's a good thing I didn't go into advertising, and we all know it.
For many reasons.
Yeah, it probably would have been highly lucrative, but... And also effective as a mechanism of torture, which I am not in favor of.
No, you are not.
No.
Okay.
You wanted to actually start with a correction from last week, as I understand it.
Yes, I did.
Actually, before we do that, can I just say one thing about the situation of ads on YouTube?
And I would like to point out that we, when we started doing ad reads, which we were reluctant to do, and we made a commitment to read only ads for things that we actually Believe in.
We also made the agreement with ourselves that we would make very clear when we were speaking as a result of a financial agreement with a sponsor.
Hence the green border and the sound that connotes that we are now in that part of the podcast.
YouTube has taken to labeling podcasts that contain paid sponsors with an icon which they awkwardly place over things in a way that disrupts and I think actually is in its own way a kind of accusation.
Now in principle I like the idea.
Obviously we wouldn't have generated our own mechanism for highlighting when we're in I know that.
So YouTube asks whether or not you contain sponsored content and then it puts this icon on the videos.
But the point is I find something troubling about the fact that YouTube is now doing this to us despite the fact that we voluntarily did it, showing that we're not trying to hide anything.
We're making this very clear because we believe it's part of being credible and honest about how we make a living.
But YouTube has also demonetized both of our channels, which was a massive hit, eliminated more than half of our family income, has refused to reinstate us for essentially doing what we trained to do, trying to make sense of complex systems in public.
And so in any case, I just want to point out that our videos are now double labeled because YouTube labels them on top of our self labeling and that people should should note that that's the kind of place YouTube is.
Well, and you can therefore also be assured, the reason that we wanted to have both a border around the sponsors and a tone coming at both the beginning and the end, was so that you can be absolutely sure that if at the point that you were looking at us, listening to us talk, and there's no green border around what we're saying, that this is 100% the conclusions that we have come to with no financial incentives at all.
That there is no sponsored content that is cryptic in our stuff.
Right, which is very important if you think about how we ended up here, right?
You and I were driven from professions that we were very good at, college professors, so suddenly jobs that seemed very secure and provided all of the income for our family were no longer tenable.
We carved out a second way of making a living in the universe.
This one much harder to do in many ways because, you know, the architecture for how you put together a podcast that people will actually pay attention to isn't simple but we did it and then YouTube rendered us incapable of using their mechanism and so we, you know, we were already reading content but We have no choice.
This is a primary mechanism by which this content is supported.
And in any case, I just want to point out YouTube's rather backward view of the universe and I guess probably... Well, I mean, it's perfectly analogous in the way that you have just described it in terms of one career from which you and to some degree we were chased out by a woke mob.
And a second career where big tech is trying to cancel us by virtue of, you know, Woke 2.0.
Medically woke.
Medically woke in your framing.
And in neither case, you know, there are ways to reduce our reach and our impact, but that is not going to work to cause us to change what we say when we find errors.
And what we said we come back to you and we tell them and we tell you and we're constantly looking to falsify what it is that we understand about the universe, especially when it does run run afoul of or is just different from what the mainstream is telling us is true.
Right okay so good and I hadn't put that together but you're right this is the second version of Woke once again interrupting our ability to earn in the universe in a universe where people apparently do want to hear what we have to say we were very popular in the classroom you know there was you know we always had overflowing classrooms with waiting lists always I believe every single quarter that either one of us taught that was the case
And, you know, despite what I would argue is interference by YouTube and an inexplicable flatness of the growth of our channel, we detect in the world that lots of people are interested in what we have to say.
In any case, this will come back at the end of the podcast when we talk about the possibility of a Gen X revolution, but for the moment I just thought it needed to be said.
Gen X being the generation to which we, I guess at this point, proudly belong.
You know what, actually, I don't like appointing the word proud to immutable characteristics.
I have objected to this in the past.
We had no say in the moment at which we were born any more than we had any say in what sex we were born.
Or what our lineage had been.
So you can be proud of things that the people born in the same era like you have done, but that is not the same thing.
Yeah, I take a different approach here.
I am proud AF of being a Gen X for reasons I could not possibly defend as a result of the logic you just deployed.
So anyway, we will get back there.
What the hell is Gen X?
How many of us are actually in the world?
It's not a lot.
But anyway, are we about to become important in a new way?
I sure hope so.
Let's talk about it at the end of the podcast.
Okay.
Oh, correction.
Yes.
Okay.
So, last week we had a Somewhat extensive discussion about the recently released but long-discussed TOGETHER trial, a trial of several different drugs.
There were several different arms to the study.
One of them was about ivermectin and its effectiveness for COVID, and we learned seven months ago that the conclusion of the study was that ivermectin was ineffective, but we waited seven months to see the methods, and There was a feature of what was finally published in the New England Journal of Medicine that caught several of us off guard, including me.
It looked as if a bunch of people had mysteriously disappeared from the placebo group.
Turns out that was not correct, so what I said last week is not in fact an error in the way that we thought it was.
That said, there are several groups that I'm aware of, one of which I'm a participant in, that are looking deeply into the TOGETHER trial.
And it is amazing how many features of the method seem non-standard and potentially dangerous.
I won't say more, but I... Not just the method as it was described in advance, but the method as it plays out in real time.
As it plays out in real time.
As it is actually applied.
Like the method that they claim to have used doesn't seem to be the method.
They broke with method in several places.
Now the one thing I want to point out here, in addition to the correction, which I believe is necessary, and I think we've been very careful to make corrections when we've gotten things wrong, which is inevitable, and in this case we weren't the only people who got this wrong because it was the obvious interpretation even though it was not the correct interpretation, but I'm now watching
A group of something like 10 people, some of them absolutely experts in this exact location, whether it be experts in how clinical trials are run, experts in medicine and the treatment of COVID.
I'm watching these folks grapple with simply understanding what happened, right?
What was done according to the manuscript that is supposed to be a recipe for replication.
Right.
A recipe for replication.
And we are approximately a zillion miles from enough information to replicate the trial.
We are still grappling with understanding even what happened.
And not in trivial ways.
In ways that are absolutely central to whether or not the conclusions of the study mean what they claim to mean.
And I must say that that is jaw-dropping.
Let's assume that it's honest in origin.
We cannot have science where 10 smart people who know what you need to know to understand what happened cannot unpack the simple description of how the study was done, right?
That should never be the case because, as you and I know from having written dissertations, It is incredibly common that if you look at the title and the abstract of a paper, and then you look at the methods, that you discover that actually the title and the abstract are not justified by what was done.
Right?
Yeah.
So the claim about what has been learned is not found in the actual science that was done.
It was not, is not found in the actual science, and you know, there are places where this can actually happen to you honestly, right?
Like places where you submit an abstract to a conference for work you're doing.
The work will be done by the time you present it, and the point is your abstract is a pretty good guess at what you will present, but you may discover that it's not exactly, in fact, Charles Handley, who was one of my BAT mentors, used to say, may all your abstracts come true.
So just, I mean, we've talked about this before here, but just the way that academic communication, one of the ways that academic communication happens, like the first pass, especially for young researchers and especially for research that people think is going to be very important.
Um, has been, at least in the past, and this may actually be changing with social media, frankly, but it has been until very recently, um, the conference, right?
So there are annual conferences for all of, you know, all of the major organizations, and you can parse it in lots of different ways.
You know, it can be organism, you know, over in our space, it could be evolution, it could be animal behavior, it could be, um, you know, molecular biology, it can be, you know, mammals specific, it can be lots of different ways.
But you have to submit an abstract to be accepted or rejected to be able to give a talk at a conference many, many months, sometimes well more than half a year in advance of actually giving the talk, and very often the field season or the lab work.
For us, it was always field season.
But the field season, during which you're actually going to be doing the work that you're hoping to talk about, hasn't yet happened.
So you have to take a guess.
And this also is the case for permits.
Like, I found myself in Madagascar arguing in bad French with some bureaucrat about my inability to explain to him exactly what I was going to learn in the next five months, which is the reason that I was trying to get permits to study these frogs.
It's like, you know, if I already knew I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't need to be doing the research.
So yeah, there are a lot of these You know, bureaucratic solutions in order to make scheduling easier, in order to make paperwork easier, that reveal just like a tragic misunderstanding of what discovery is and of what science is.
Right, and so there are organic ways that your abstract can be a mismatch for what your study produces.
This one ain't that, right?
Not only was this a paper published in the standard way in a high-profile journal, right, with top-tier editors, presumably top-tier peer reviewers, but it's delayed by seven months in an environment where things have been rushed.
This one was delayed, and so the point is the number of opportunities for somebody to say what they were scientifically obligated to say, which is We can't tell what you did, right?
You may have done what was necessary to get to that conclusion, but it damn well better be in the methods section.
And if, you know, smart people can't figure it out from what you said, then that's on you.
Smart people, some of whom are specialists in exactly the fields for whom this is a second language, are having a hard time figuring it out.
They are having a hard time figuring it out.
That is a technique used in some cases by some scientists in both writing and speaking in order to sound like they are smart but not actually interested in being understood.
It can be an obscuring technique.
I do not, I am not claiming that's what's going on here and it certainly sounds like even if there is any of that it's a whole lot of other things as well.
But the idea that scientists need not focus on communicating what it is that they have learned is archaic and regressive and wrong.
And it may be that some scientists need not think about what it is that their message would be to the outside world.
That's what science journalists are for.
But being able to communicate what it is that you've done and what it is that you think you've learned And what it is that you think it means are absolutely necessary parts of the scientific process.
Necessary parts of the scientific process that as soon as they fail what you are doing is not science.
Right?
The philosophy of science depends on these things being done correctly so that somebody else can figure out.
I mean the fact is we're all not good at figuring out every error that we make.
Right.
Sometimes we catch them, sometimes we don't.
So the point is built into this whole mechanism Is the ability for others to scrutinize what you did.
If we can't even figure out what it was, then we can't get to the stage where we say, well, okay, does that result in your conclusion being robust?
Is there a confound, what younger people call confounders, that, you know, you should have spotted that may have been important?
I think I've said this before, but I actually believe the younger people are right to call them confounders.
Interesting.
It's linguistically more correct than what we say, but it sure sounds wrong to me.
All right, anyway That's the long and short of it I would say people should be paying I should say there's a clock ticking as I understand it that there is a retraction clock That if you're going to request that a journal retract a study that has published in this case There's a short window to do it And so in this case because this journal has a shorter than average window or because this paper has been given a shorter than average window for the journal
I believe it is the Journal's policy, but the point is that clock is short relative to the amount of effort that a large group of smart, well-informed people need in order to figure out even what was done, let alone whether it reaches the conclusion naturally.
So anyway, I'm sure that if the paper, any paper, turns out to be nonsense after that clock has expired, the New England Journal of Medicine has a mechanism for retracting it, but the point is to request the retraction.
They have very severe limits on how much you can say and how long you have to say it.
You know, which may be more bureaucratic solutions for problems that don't necessarily fit into bureaucratic rules, but I also understand the constraint.
Sure.
Like, you know, you would need, you know, just like there's statute of limitations for, you know, for crimes, there needs to be limits so that people can't come back.
And, you know, we would definitely see, especially, you know, the, you know, trans activists would be asking for all sorts of things to be retracted now.
Right, but okay, so I have argued in many places, including lots of stuff in and around Game B, that a complex system that is well managed, a human system, has to be well managed with discretion.
Right, you need individuals with discretion.
And so to the extent that there might be a clock for a standard thing, there ought to be a way to send an email to the editor and say in this case the clock shouldn't apply because there's too much resting on it and the complexity of the methods is too great for us to be expected to meet that.
And a formal request for an extension, sure.
Okay, are we there?
I think we are there.
Yeah.
Before I start talking a little bit about the next thing, I want to say that one of the effects of the glorious weather that we had this week, and then today it was hailing, so I don't know what's going on.
It's spring in the Pacific Northwest, is the amount of pollen.
It's unbelievable.
We are surrounded here gratefully.
We are in the forest and so we have a certain amount of the evergreens for which Washington State is named, for which the college that we were once tenured at was named.
Things like Western Red Cedars and Doug Furs and Noble Furs and And such, and others, no pines, but a lot of those.
But right now we've got the most common deciduous tree, sometimes called a big leaf tree, broadleaf?
Broadleaf tree, I guess, is a big leaf maple.
And we've got a lot of them here.
Which is, it's a periodical green.
It's a periodical green, yeah.
It's deciduous, which is also known as periodical.
And they are just, they are horny this week.
They are having a lot of pollen.
The male bits.
Yeah.
We don't know about the female bits.
I haven't asked.
Yeah.
I haven't- I didn't ask the men either.
The men trees.
You didn't need to.
They nested all over your car.
I should not play with the word man like that, but I didn't ask the male trees either, but here they are.
You know, everything, every surface.
I was, I put my hand down on a window sill.
Like, oh, and our beautiful black cat is coming inside, his toes yellow, his brump yellow.
So we have a, anyway, this little in the throat is about pollen right now.
Well, I actually, I'm going to pat myself on the back here, physiologically speaking.
Can I do it for you?
You could, but that's weird.
Here's the thing.
I have had pretty severe allergies and we are having a hell of a pollen season.
Yes, we are.
So far, I got it under control.
You know, this is of course a conversation that could go lots and lots of places, but you know, I never had seasonal allergies at all.
And just in the last couple of years, you know, I'm not sneezing, my eyes aren't watering particularly, but I definitely feel it in my throat, which is where anything will go when I get got.
Any kind of pathogen or your immune system thinks it's a pathogen and it's going to go after it even though it shouldn't.
So that is interesting because really we had every window in the house thrown open for both the perfectly glorious day and the slightly cooler day that preceded it.
And as a result, pretty much everything in the house is yellow now.
It's all coated in pollen.
It is all coated in pollen.
I will just mention that after I had had COVID in our recent bout, I had lingering stuff for a long time.
I thought it might be long COVID.
It may have been a little bit of long COVID.
Medium COVID.
But at some point,
The symptoms that I had experienced when I was still eating wheat that I had not known were symptoms of a wheat allergy Started coming back and I was kind of ignoring it and then the symptom that is the most conspicuous to me it's not the worst symptom by far but The numb hands when I'm sleeping Came back and it was like, okay, wait a minute Am I eating wheat somewhere that I don't know and I started eliminating things that had shown up you know in the right time frame that they could plausibly have been and
And nothing, nothing, nothing until finally I cut out all of the supplements that we have been taking to prevent COVID and other diseases.
Yeah, D, C, magnesium, zinc.
Right.
And I got better very quickly.
And I think what happened is I was stuck in an inflammation cycle.
One of those supplements has something in it.
Well, I'm pretty sure.
I'm hesitant to test this because it's going to involve me, if I'm right, it's going to involve me messing myself up again.
But what happens, and it's not the first time I've been here, You think a supplement doesn't have any wheat because it doesn't say wheat anywhere on the label.
But unless it says something like certified gluten-free, which in my case is a weird thing because I don't think it's gluten as we've talked about here before.
It's some other molecule in wheat.
Unless it says that, if it says something like vegetable gelatin, right?
That is to say, gelatin of a non-animal origin.
That can contain wheat without them saying the word.
And so I don't know if that's what happened, but it turned out that the vitamin D, of which I was taking a substantial amount, does say vegetable gelatin on it.
And so anyway, I'm now in the uncomfortable position of scientifically the right thing to do is to go back on it and see what happens.
But from the point of view of like living a life, it's not an exciting prospect to me.
Right.
Well, and at least from the perspective of, but what are you going to do for your d levels, we're now in the time of year when we can, when the sun is high enough in the sky for enough hours a day that you can actually generate d here in at, what are we at, 45?
I don't know exactly what our latitude is.
Actually, that's strange, but it's 40-something.
It is.
It's 40-something for sure.
I want to say 45, 46.
I'm not actually sure.
I may be off by a couple of degrees.
But I guess it's anyplace over 35 degrees north or south of 35 degrees south.
There's some period of the year when the sun is simply never high enough in the sky on any day.
for some days, weeks, or months in the winter that you can generate D at all.
But we are out of that period now and it's warming up and at least you don't need the D in order to have the D in your system. - Yeah, now for those of you wondering about what this means about where you live, we have recommended and I'm gonna recommend even more strongly an app called Dminder.
D-Minder allows you to know when in the year you can start making vitamin D, when in the day you can start, and when it is no longer possible, based on your location.
It allows you to integrate things about your own physiology.
Anyway, it's a little bit difficult to understand, but it is worth investing the time in this thing.
So I just went on it for the first time after I was out for, you know, two hours on the water.
Like, okay, let's see what that means, you know, for me.
And yeah, you can plug in a whole lot of stuff about your age and your weight and your height because, you know, the heavier you are, the heavier set you are, the slower your deacquisition.
And the older you are, the slower your deacquisition, and the darker your skin, the slower your deacquisition, and there are some other things, too.
But you don't need to include any of that, right?
The thing that it can tell you that is clear, simple, quantitative data is just tell it where you are.
And it will know, therefore, what your latitude is, doesn't care about longitude, and, well, it doesn't care about longitude with regard to d, but it also, if you tell it exactly where you are with regard to latitude and longitude, it'll tell you, it should be able to figure out, or you should tell it how high you are, your altitude, because Basically, the less atmosphere between you and the sun, the faster you make D as well, and of course the faster you burn.
So there's a trade-off, always, but having a sense of, okay, given where I am and what day of the year it is, what is the, you know, is there a window in which I could be making D from the sun, and what is it?
And it's useful.
Okay, one last thing here.
What I think we have learned as we have built up our understanding on D is that supplementation is important for people who live above a certain latitude because we're almost all deficient.
In the part of the year.
Right.
Supplementation is not a great replacement for self-made photosynthetic vitamin D. That's right.
And so the point is one of the things that this I was looking at this app when I was out on my bike ride.
I was looking at when in the year you can start making it.
Turns out to be the day before my birthday.
February 20th is for Portland the day you can start making vitamin D. Now how much can you make?
Very little.
How much are you likely to make?
Almost none.
Why?
Because February is cold and so even if you go outside and even if it's sunny both of which You know, are iffy at any given moment in Portland.
The chances that you'll make substantial vitamin D are very low.
The number of... The idea being, because it's cold, you're covered up.
Right.
And so, you know, the more of your skin is exposed, the more vitamin D you're making.
Right.
So, in any case, we are something like 100 days into our... No?
No.
Alright.
50?
45 or 50?
45 or 50 days into a...
200 and I have to look at the app to figure out exactly how many total days there are but the point is knowing If the point is you want to make vitamin D that you will then store in adipose tissue, which will then be released over the winter when you can't make vitamin D, right?
Then the point is, well, there's a clock ticking in terms of how long you have to do it.
And in fact, the clock in which it's practical to do it is pretty short because it's when the sun is shining, it's warm enough for you not to be overly covered up.
And knowing that is a power tool with respect to total vitamin D you can produce.
Absolutely.
And I mean, I was thinking about this too.
It's been a trope for a long time that old people on the East Coast go to Florida in the winter, right?
And we grew up in LA, which actually it turns out is at a latitude where you can make D all year round, which I didn't know until I looked at this app, right?
But the idea, and lots of people who aren't old, who may or may not be spending the entire winters in Florida, will vacation in the Caribbean, in Florida, for a week.
And we know that it feels good.
I mean, this isn't something that we ourselves have done, but we've done similar things.
Obviously, when it's cold out and you're stuck inside and it's gray and it's dark, what you're craving is a blast of heat and blue sky and just ease, right?
But that is partially your body telling you, you need this.
This is good for you.
This is healthy for you.
And it's novel in that to go from a place where you're making no d at all and therefore if you're Caucasian you're probably really really white and the first day you go out you're going to get burned and then the rest of your vacation is going to be kind of miserable because you got burned the first day.
So you have to be much more careful than you would be if you were in a place that had just a fluctuating level of d with a fluctuating height of the sun in the sky over the year.
You have to be more intentional about your exposure as you first begin to get exposed, as I did, you know, on this, on this just, you know, two, two and a half hours out on the water.
But it was the first time that my shoulders had seen the sun in, I don't know, five months.
It's a long time.
And it just, it reminds me that even many of our modern cultural things that seem cute, not very serious, may well be driven by our bodies actually informing us of what they need.
Yeah, and actually this will come up as we get into some of the other content here, but you know, there is a way in which tan, for a Caucasian person, tan looks healthier, right?
That may be about something, and we may have gone through a long period in which, frankly, what we now should understand as paranoia Over sun exposure.
It's not that sun exposure causes cancer.
It's that sun burns cause cancer.
And you can have sun exposure without a sunburn, right?
Learning to modulate that may be a key skill for life.
And you know, and this has huge implications also for things Flu is much less of a deal in the tropics.
Right.
Why?
Well, vitamin D production is possible all year round, okay?
Well, that's good.
Why did COVID hit so hard in, was it Guayaquil?
In Guayaquil, if it's in the tropics in a place, you know, it's near the equator, right?
Well, Guayaquil is really unpleasantly hot and humid.
And so I'm not saying that this is what happened, but my hypothesis about what happened in Guayaquil would be that the capacity to make vitamin D was overwhelmed by people acquiring air conditioners, which dehumidify and cool buildings.
And in that hot, sticky environment, if you're not just sort of condemned to hot and sticky and you get used to it and you stop noticing it, but there's a place to retreat that's cool and drier, right?
People will tend to do it.
So what I would love to know in the prediction of the hypothesis Is that actually there's vitamin D deficiency in guayaquil that, for example, doesn't match what there is in keto, which is at high altitude, is naturally cooler and drier, is a great place to make vitamin D because it's less atmosphere between you and the sun.
So anyway, these are all parsable questions, but the fact that there is generally less of this issue in the tropics, right, with interesting exceptions, suggests a pattern to be learned from.
Yeah.
Boy, we're going to a lot of places we didn't think we would go, but this brings up something else I was thinking about this week, actually.
I had, in the last few weeks, two different women, both of whom I know a little bit, both of whom are very skilled in some areas.
They're smart in the domains that they are good in.
Um, but I made a comment to each of them separately, and I was reminded of this, um, because another one of these, the second one just happened yesterday, about, um, well, having been up, um, in the San Juan Islands when we were signing copies of our book for, for Darvilles on Orcas, um, and said, well, you know, of course, it's even darker up there in the winter.
The days are even shorter than they are here.
And she said, oh, really?
And I'd had a very similar interaction with another woman in a totally different domain a few weeks ago, and I thought, I'm actually shocked that people are walking around the world with an ability to know that there are different places on the earth and not recognizing some of the very simple patterns that you could know about whether or not, if you're farther north,
If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, and you're in place A, and your friend is in place B a thousand miles north, their winters are going to be darker, their days are going to be shorter, and around equinox you're going to hit equilibrium, and then they're probably never going to get quite as hot as you, but their days are going to start getting longer than yours, until at the solstice, at the summer solstice,
Their days are going to be a lot longer than yours, and then it's going to start sliding back again towards the equinox, at which point they're going to be equal again.
I remember actually going into one of the few times I went and was like, okay, I'll teach one of our boys elementary school classes for a day, as you're often asked to.
I took in like styrofoam balls with sticks through them, and had the kids like third grade hold them at 23 degree angles, and try to get them to understand the path around the sun, and it was a little much.
You know, the boys were using them as swords, and it was chaos, but it was it was fine.
So I'm not, I think it was a little bit complex for a third grade classroom, but we used to do this.
We used to do... I was just gonna say.
Okay, go for it.
Talk about We used to, both of us, in the classes we taught together and in the classes we taught separately, try to get our college students to unpack issues, both what is the pattern of, let's say, moon phases, right?
How exactly does it work?
And, you know, I remember we put together a long questionnaire that had a bunch of questions.
Some of them are quite tough.
Just thinking about them.
Maybe I'll post that on Substack.
You know the tides are the result of lunar gravitation.
Why are there two high tides every day rather than one, right?
That's a tough question, right?
But we used to do this and the basic, look, I think the thing is, A person who had a natural relationship with night would be aware of the moon phase, right?
They would be aware of the moon phase because you would detect it often enough that the pattern would trigger you.
If your night existence is primarily indoors, Right.
You know, and you're not counting time this way because you have artificial time counters that tell you exactly when in the year you are and things like that.
Yes.
Then, you know, you're just, you're divorced from it.
Likewise, your awareness of how daylight, you know, I think our day length changed perceptibly, even in our move from Olympia to Portland.
Yeah, which is just a hundred miles south.
Right, it's not a long move.
Yes, I agree.
Our summer solstice night is not quite as long.
Not quite as long.
And our winters are not quite as hard to deal with.
Right.
Because the day length also changes most slowly around the solstice.
Solstice.
I like it, yeah.
And another thing that is not as easy to pay attention to because we're living so much inside, which is also about seasonality, is phenology.
Not phrenology, but phenology, spelled the same way except for that missing R. So, you know, phrenology being the, gosh what even is it, like pretending to be able to tell people's something from the shape of their head?
I don't even know.
But phenology, which I think, gosh, I want to say Benjamin Franklin, maybe?
One of the early important American dudes paid a lot of attention to basically the timing of flowering and fruiting, and usually it's about plants, but also to some degree about animals.
So, you know, when is the first onset of Huckleberry bud.
When is the first huckleberry berry in a particular place?
When do, for instance, I think this would fit into the same kind of thing, you know, when do the migrant hummingbirds come back?
When do you see your first hummingbird each year?
And so because people have cared about this, because it's a way to keep in touch with what's outside your window and to get you outside your window and to spend time outside, And because it has very real practical applications for things like farming, for agriculture, we have many, you know, centuries actually of records, at least well over a century of records for many places, and that has been how we're able to see what is happening as seasonal changes are happening in some places.
Phenologies are changing, and we can see this in part by looking at museum records and at people's personal, like, just journals.
Like, ah, You know, I'm gonna make something up for some random place like, oh it's April 2nd and I saw my, you know, and I saw my first huckleberry bud today.
All right, well, it'd be way too late for here, but one interesting thing.
I am certain that the introduction of non-native species, invasives that actually succeed, will change the phonology of native species because one of the things about phonology that's really fascinating is that Plants tend to spread out.
Plants that are animal dependent tend to spread out.
They're fruiting and flowering because they are playing... Spread out in time.
Right.
Because if you imagine, let's imagine that you've got a bunch of flowers that use the same pollinator.
If they all flower at the same time, A, they're in competition for the services of that pollinator, right?
And better not to be in competition.
But B, think about this in terms of satiation be be right spelling but the point is if if you have a population of a pollinator and there's nothing for it right you'll get starvation that's The number of that pollinator will drop.
And so what you want... It's classic Latke-Volterra dynamics, which is the classic ecology, which is probably too simple, but, you know, predator-prey dynamics where prey numbers rise, so predator numbers rise, and then as the predators too many of the prey, such as the prey numbers, can't crash, then so too after a short delay to the predator numbers crash.
Right.
And so in the case of a bunch of plants that have no interest in each other or may actually be competitors for each other at the level of competing for light or something, having a pollinator population that is always fed and therefore doesn't crash is actually in all of their interests.
And so anyway, you get this repulsion across the calendar so that things flower and fruit at different times, so that they're not in competition with each other, and so that the animals that they depend on don't starve to death.
And so if you introduce something that succeeds in your environment and it fits somewhere in the calendar in its home phonology, then the point is, okay, well now that changes the calculation for all the native things and where they should be.
So my guess would be... Well, if it attracts native pollinators.
If the outsider attracts native pollinators, then the native plants have to have to work their way around it.
Yes, exactly.
So anyway, it'd be a really cool, frankly I don't know whether it's been studied or how extensively, but it'd be really interesting to plot out, you know, I mean exactly as you said, one prediction is that an invasive that doesn't use native pollinators is unlikely to have this effect.
On the other hand, It's not that no, you know, there's plants that have multiple dispersal and Strategies so it could be something, you know, if it's not using a native pollinator.
What is it using if it has a home pollinator?
That's an animal How is it reproducing?
So if it's an invasive it probably is using the local Well, if it's vanilla in Madagascar, it is using the local people to hand-pollinate each individual bean of that orchid.
Okay, that's a conversation for another time.
That's pretty far afield.
Yes.
But maybe I'll just condense this.
So I was thinking about the phrase this week that is so common now among people.
You know, you need to teach children how to think, not what to think.
What we should be doing in college is teaching how to think, not what to think.
It's something that we used to say, not so much in our classrooms, but we gave a couple of talks at Evergreen's, like, come figure out what you're interested in days.
I remember they always put us in the farthest room, like at the bottom of a dark staircase with the missing stairs, and still the rooms were filled.
But we used to invoke this, right?
Because it seems, once you hear it, it seems obvious.
Um, and yes, also there needs to be a basis.
I have heard some conservative, mostly conservative pushback on like, no, there needs to be a framework upon which you can, um, ask the questions.
But, um, my sense has always been actually that comes, like if you, if you put the what forward, uh, then you often never get to the how.
And if you put the how forward in, in education, uh, you will end up interspersing the what in a lot of places.
Yeah.
And also, you know, It would be really challenging to teach the how without it resulting in the what.
The point is, the what is the natural consequence of getting the how right.
I think so, and certainly we had, I believe, excellent success doing it that way.
I have heard, I do hear murmurings, and even louder than that, from, again, largely conservatives who want what they view as a more traditional approach to education.
I don't think they're right.
I'm sure they're not right at the college level.
I do wonder if there's sort of an age at which, well, there are some topics, and we talk about this in the school chapter and the childhood chapter of our book, there are some topics which you're not going to be able to educate yourself in, likely, by simple observation.
You know, things like calculus.
Yeah, I don't believe that any of us who've used teach students how to think, not what to think, actually mean... Don't have a what?
Right, the point is there's lots of what, but the point is the what is the consequence of a how, and you can teach material So you're arguing with me as if this is my position.
I am telling you for sure that this is a position that is out there.
Right, but I think- And I don't fully- I don't understand- like, I don't agree with it, nor do I fully understand it.
So it's gonna- it's really gonna be just frustrating for you to sort of argue with me, and I'm like, I agree with you, but- So let's just- I know that- Let's say that we agree.
There are people who say, no, actually, the fundamentals first.
Right?
Right, and you need some fundamentals, right?
You know, you're not going to be able to figure out how a cell works without somebody saying, that's the mitochondria and here's what it does.
But let's, I think, I think the thing is that it's like, you know, when we were talking about this, you and I were talking about it earlier this week, there are lots of things like, you know, the government that governs best governs least.
Which, yes, if you take a narrow understanding of it suggests no government is good, but that's of course not what it means at all.
Right.
And so this is one of those things.
It doesn't mean don't tell them what.
It means that Well, but literally, the phrase is, teach children how to think, not what to think.
So I think that's what people hear, because that's literally the word.
So let's just, let's go there.
Okay.
What I learned this week, or actually what I was reminded of this week, and I thought I was learning it, but it turns out I knew it back in 1990, is that that phrase, I believe originated, or at least as far as I can tell, originated with Margaret Mead in her 1928 book, Coming of Age in Samoa.
And I found, you know, this is the copy that I had in my Intro to Cultural Anthropology class, because after going through a number of majors I ended up as an anthro, I ended up with a degree in anthropology, and I have in this book.
So I've since now gone through and started book darting it.
That's a modern thing, but I used to underline in books, which I don't do anymore, and I find here my underlining from 1990, I think.
The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
In her very final chapter, Education for Choice.
And one of her positions in here is that Modern societies, as she refers to them, have all of this choice, and that that's a good thing, but we have to understand that it comes with challenges, and that in a society like Samoa, she argues, because there is so much less choice, it is easier to have something, to have a culture that is sort of all of a type, which of course makes sense once you hear it said that way.
Now I will say, I will say that Mead has taken a hit.
Like a big hit of late.
And not even that recently.
It's been a few decades now where basically a lot of anthropologists decided that they didn't want to pay attention to her, is how I sort of understood the story.
And we're looking for ways to, I don't know, like, deep six her.
Like, you know, something.
I don't know.
She's retcanned.
Retcanned?
Yep.
Retroactively cancelled.
Cool, yes.
She was retcanned, or the attempt was made to retcan her, retroactively cancel her, because the fact is that, you know, she is still understood to be one of, you know, she was a woman working in a field where there weren't many women in an era when ethnography was being done, but was also always done, always communicated in very highfalutin terms that were not communicated well to the public because that was not the
And this book, Coming of Age in Samoa, she actually specifies in an introduction that she later writes that it was the first book that she intentionally wrote it with the intention of it being, and it turns out it was the first time it had been done, of writing a scholarly work in an inaccessible prose.
So that's extraordinary, right?
She wrote in English in a field where the lingua franca was jargon.
Yeah, exactly.
She wrote it.
That's perfect.
She wrote it in English.
It wasn't perfectly set.
I kind of, you know.
Well, no, but so I'll say it again and I'll probably stumble on the same thing.
She wrote it.
She wrote.
She wrote.
Margaret Mead wrote Coming of Age in Samoan English in a field in which the lingua franca was jargon.
Well done.
Thank you.
Setting the bar.
Yeah, there we are.
But so someone, I don't have all the details in my head right now.
Someone who came of age himself, if you will, reading Mead, wanting to become an anthropologist, many, many years later, like I think in the 70s maybe, went back, went himself as a proto-anthropologist seeking to do ethnography, went back to Samoa in order to, you know, see this amazing culture and interact with and again do some ethnography.
And very quickly, he reports, I think, found an informant, or maybe it was two, from when Mead had been there, so by now very, very old, who said, and mostly she was talking to teenage girls, because she was doing coming-of-age work, and she as a woman herself had greater access to the girls than the boys.
And so she found an informant or two that had been one of Mead's informants who said, yeah, you know, those were really invasive questions.
And I just was not, I'd never thought about these kinds of questions before.
So I just told her what I thought she wanted to hear.
Now, even if we take that at face value, as many in anthropology have done, and said, ah, well then!
Then you can't trust what those informants said.
The leap that is then made is, then you can't trust anything in this book.
Then you can't trust Mead.
Then you can't trust anything that emerges from her thinking.
And those are erroneous logical leaps.
So, what you find in this book is a certain amount of stuff that she's reporting from her informants.
Honestly, I skimmed and reread much of this book this week.
I find that now, from my underlining, if that's any indication from back then, some of the least interesting parts of the book.
It's her observations of cultural happenings, and how she describes them, and then also the interpretation that she puts on them as separate things, What is actually happening, and then what does she think it means?
Those are the places where she shines.
And those don't hinge on what her informants are telling her about how they view their own sexuality, right?
It just doesn't.
So I am still interested in Mead as both an historical and a scientific figure, and in this book as, you know, especially her thinking about education, which this entire final chapter is about, and which, as it turns out, is the source of this thing that everyone's got on the tips of their tongues now.
We should teach children how to think, not what to think, which I once knew and I had forgotten, and I assume most people don't know that that's from Mead.
A couple things.
One, it is taught in anthropology.
Nobody assumes that informants are speaking accurately.
Right.
Everybody who understands human beings knows that that is unlikely to be perfectly true and maybe totally false.
And it is especially likely to be false on sexual matters where human beings are not typically all that honest.
Right.
So, anyway, it would be shocking if Mead had fallen into that and just simply assumed that her informants were telling her Exactly what they thought.
So this actually, the whole retcanning thing.
Retcanning.
Retroactive cancellation.
Retroactive cancellation.
It's a genre.
It is a genre.
It's a genre.
Oh yeah.
And I, you know, I think the thing is we've seen a bunch of these cases and they're highly relevant, right?
Luke Montagnier.
Right?
Retroactively cancelled.
The discoverer of HIV cancelled because he had some very heterodox views on some other matters, including whether or not HIV is the cause of AIDS, where he initially believed it was and came to believe it wasn't.
Similarly, Carey Mullis.
Similarly, Carey Mullis, another Nobel Prize winner, who has been downgraded in people's estimation.
Right.
There are many other examples.
I mean, it could be... Nap Shagnon.
Nap Shagnon.
Napoleon Shagnon with the Yanomami.
Right?
I think this happened to us as we sorted out COVID in real time.
So anyway, I think the thing is It really troubles me, actually.
It's one thing if you discover that somebody has engaged in a fraud, right?
It's another thing when somebody is doing what they told you that they were doing, and you've changed your mind about how you feel about that, which I think is what happened to us, where it was like, oh, people, they loved us heterodox when we were fighting the first version of Woke, but then the point is we tread into sacred territory, And the point is actually we're doing the same thing that we've done all along, you've just decided you don't like it this time.
Yeah, not trying to be heretics, trying to see what's real.
Yeah.
Yeah, indeed.
So I will also mention, and this actually this is going to be something that I'll write about in my natural selections this week, but in I believe that same class where I was assigned coming of age in Samoa and read it back in 1990-1991 something, I also had this book, which no one has ever heard of, and I can't even find anywhere, and so I lent it out to a couple of students at one point, a couple points, and almost didn't get it back.
It's like, I treasure this book.
It's also since been book darted.
This is Coming of Age in New Jersey, written by an anthropologist, Michael Moffat.
Coming of Age in New Jersey, College and American Culture.
And in it, he's a young anthropologist hired at Rutgers, who decides to go undercover in the Rutgers dorms.
And that grew as a, you know, he's 33 and he's pretending to be a slightly older freshman coming back to school for the first time, and this is in late 70s.
And that only lasts through, like, orientation.
Like, it only lasts a week or so.
But then he, A, stays in touch with a bunch of the kids that he met then, and he spends two years living in the dorms, but as an anthropologist, as a participant observant, rather, engaging in participant observation, not pretending to be an undergrad, both then in the late 70s and then again in the early mid 80s.
And I read this book in the early 90s and was reminded of dorm life from my freshman year very much.
It struck me as like, okay, this really, the college experience for so many weird kids is precisely the coming of age ceremony that, uh, that we don't really have anymore.
And, um, I got, you know, I got a fork here.
There's two places I want to go.
The first one is, John McWhorter wrote an excellent op-ed in the New York Times this week on whether or not we should really be thinking that everyone who's college age should be going to college, and he says, among many other things, and again I'll link this in the show notes, quote, and this actually is an idea from a former president of Bard College, an offshoot of which is Simon's Rock, which John McWhorter went to as well,
Quote, the idea that in our society the ordinary trajectory after high school is to attend another four years of school has become arbitrary, purposeless, and even absurd.
And that is certainly, that is certainly true.
And he asks in the book, in the article, How many of the things that we are interested in people doing actually requires four years of college?
He doesn't get into what, you know, anyone who's familiar with his work knows to be some of his other main criticisms.
Indeed, his most recent book called Woke Racism, the idea that college may be actually more harmful than good at all.
As opposed to this other argument, which is, even if college is functioning as it should, aren't there a lot of things that you might be doing that would be incredibly valuable both for you and for society that could be better attained through learning, through apprenticeship, for instance?
That's not a word he uses in the article.
Yeah, well, I must say, at one level, I feel I have long since lost my patience with the idea that this is debatable about modern college.
Right, sure.
I think there is a question about whether or not college makes sense.
Certainly, you and I experienced and many of our better colleagues talked about the fact Absolutely.
Yeah.
And this is a point McWhorter makes also, yes.
effectively for many people, college is where they learned things that prior generations might have learned in high school.
Absolutely.
And this is a point McWhorter makes also, yes.
So that is a very troubling fact.
Now, as for it being a rite of passage, I agree, and I think we talk about in our book, I agree that it's sort of the closest thing that we've got, but I think it's fairer to say we actually don't have a rite of passage.
And that rites of passage are crucial in the sense that you have a example of a rite of passage.
I'm struggling for an alternative to the word juvenile, but you have effectively a pre-adult program, and it is not synonymous with your adult program, and it is not that there is some event that actually causes you to transition, but You need to know when it is that you are, you know, when it is the time to put away childish things.
When it is that you are responsible at the level of an adult.
When it is that you are allowed to avail yourself of the extra tools that come with adulthood.
And the point is we blurred all of these distinctions.
Imagining them antiquated or something.
And of course that's insane.
It's, you know, yet another example of Chesterton's everything, right?
It's, you know, who would have thought that in a world in which every culture had its rites of passage, that eliminating rites of passage would have caused a problem, right?
You could see it coming a mile away.
But we've done it and it's resulted in a A permanent infantilization where people never mature and so at some level my feeling is, you know, is college necessary for everybody?
Is it absolutely required that we keep our best people out of college so they don't get their thinking polluted by this insane mechanism in which they are now being told that men can become women, two plus two might not equal four.
You know, this is the point is, do we want them?
I'm going to avoid using the term that is causing so much trouble in the last two weeks, but do we want them inculcated into sophistry?
The people that we're going to depend on to build the future?
No, we have to keep it away from them.
And that's not to say that college couldn't serve a purpose, but it is to say that modern college can't.
Modern College has proven that it can't, and it has proven that it can't because they've all failed the same way.
If it could succeed, then some of them would be succeeding, even if it was a tiny fraction.
And the fact that it's none tells us that mechanism is lost.
Indeed.
So I was considering actual coming of age.
Rituals like Romspringa of the Amish, which is, for those who never heard of it, it's called the running around period when Amish youth of both sexes at 16 or 17 are
Allowed to be freed for some amount of time from the restrictions and many of the perks of the Amish community and church, and then at the end of some period they must choose.
They must choose to either come back into the fold with all of the positives and negatives that accompany that, or to reject their life heretofore, up until then, So am I correct that you said it a little too carefully, I think?
They are allowed to participate as a modern person.
Well, I said it very carefully because I didn't spend a lot of time in mostly the books.
I don't have access to a good library anymore.
One of the few perks of modern college affiliation is an excellent library.
So I dug as much as I could in the little bit of time that I spent at it, and it seems that for those who have heard of it, mostly what we have in our heads is kind of a time of, you know, almost like spring break, right?
It's like college kids on spring break, all the restrictions are off, and they're going to be at their worst, right?
I think Brum Spring often actually has some adult Amish still overseeing.
There's still a lot of organized activities.
I suspect that there's some of that, but it does seem like it's actually a much more staid and less sort of orgiastic experience than we may imagine.
I would never have imagined that a person raised Amish, liberated to do what they want, would go spring break.
I mean, you know, I think frankly most kids avoid that.
Well, it's possible that there was just a reality TV show about this that got into people's heads because that seems to be the thing that is in people's heads about it.
Well, my guess would be if you've been properly raised and if there's one thing that an Amish community is likely to do, it's to properly raise its children.
Yeah.
Then you liberate them and they're going to I would be skeptical of an awful lot of what the modern world has to offer, I wouldn't imagine.
But also quite curious.
Sure, of course, of course.
But anyway, the basic point is they are liberated to some extent, maybe fully.
What that means they actually do is an open question.
And then I think it's a year.
It varies.
It varies.
They come back and they have to decide whether they want to continue effectively in the modern world or they want to return to their Yeah, so I guess that version is much tidier than the actual reality.
Okay.
It's part of why I was being very careful because I had a couple of things in my head, sort of that version and then like the spring break version, and neither of them are true, it seems.
Yeah.
But, you know, probably to some degree there's as much variation as there are people who engage in this.
One thing that I think holds from what we have understood in the past is that Um, the vast majority, like, you know, almost to a person, um, come back into the fold, come back, um, to, to be Amish again.
But anyway, that got me thinking about, uh, this video that I saw back in October of 2021, uh, in which a, uh, well, actually, why don't we just, why don't we, Zach, if you would play the first, uh, almost two and a half minutes of this, uh, it's a, it's a news report on a channel that hopefully will be obvious.
When it comes to actions taken to address the COVID-19 threat, hindsight is still very much underway.
For your consideration, a story and outcome you probably aren't hearing much about anywhere else.
It takes place in the heart of Amish country.
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Thousands of families lead lives largely separate from modern America.
The Amish are a Christian group that emphasizes the virtuous over the superficial.
They don't usually drive, use electricity, or have TVs.
And during the COVID-19 outbreak, they became subjects in a massive social and medical experiment.
So it's safe to say there was a whole different approach here in this community when coronavirus broke out than many other places.
Absolutely.
Calvin Lapp is Amish Mennonite.
There's three things the Amish don't like, and that's government.
They won't get involved in the government.
They don't like the public education system.
They won't send their children to education.
And they also don't like the health system.
They rip us off.
Those are three things that we feel like we're fighting against all the time.
Well, those three things are all part of what COVID is.
After a short shutdown last year, the Amish chose a unique path that led to COVID-19 tearing through at warp speed.
It began with an important religious holiday in May.
When they take communion, they dump their wine into a cup and they take turns to drink out of that cup.
So you go the whole way down the line and everybody drinks out of that cup.
So if one person has coronavirus, the rest of the church is going to get coronavirus.
First time they went back to church, Everybody got coronavirus.
Lapp says they weren't denying coronavirus, they were facing it head on.
It's the worst thing to quit working than dying.
But to shut down and say that we can't go to church, we can't get together with family, we can't see our old people in the hospital, we got to quit working.
You're working, it's going completely against everything that we believe.
And you're changing our culture completely to try to act like they wanted us to act the last year.
And we're not going to do it.
So he says, there's three things that the Amish won't get involved with.
Government, education, and health care.
And those three things are all central in the COVID response.
Remarkable.
Remarkable.
And there is a, so I don't know if you'll remember this, but when we first started discussing writing, uh, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
I wanted chapter one to be titled, Are the Amish Right?
That of course got long since abandoned as we developed our idea of what should be in there.
But I think the question is an important one because the Amish of course seem strange to us.
It's like the very definition of anachronism to be Driving your horse in, you know, 2022.
On asphalt.
On asphalt, right.
On the other hand, given the theme of the book, which is hyper-novelty, or at least that's one of the central themes of the book is hyper-novelty, the question is, well, all right, you have these people who bailed out of technology, or bailed out of the advance of technology, and the question really is, at a net level, Were they right that the trouble is not worth it?
And, um, in any case, later in this, in this video, um, he says, no, the, the narrator says, the journalist says, one thing's clear.
There is no evidence of any more deaths among the Amish than in places that shut down tight.
Some claim that some claim there were fewer here.
That's without masking, staying at home or much vaccination.
Right, which raises all kinds of interesting questions, because the Amish are not in a great position to perfectly protect themselves, to the extent that- Right, and as we hear here, they believe, and you know, many people have had this experience, and you know, why are we distrusting, mistrusting, maltrusting?
I don't even know what the word is anymore.
People who say, okay, someone had COVID, and they did the sharing, the- We can't hear it when you watch it so I don't remember if it was wine or what if they're sharing the thing and then everyone got sick.
Right.
And then they ended up all better.
But what I mean is they can't protect themselves from the folly of the modern world in the sense that if Vaccination drove the evolution of variants.
They're exposed to variants too, so to the extent that what this story is about is about herd immunity, they are not in a position to prevent the thing from evolving away because of what modern folks are doing to it rather than what they did.
Nonetheless, in spite of that, the benefit of doing... it's not even exactly nothing.
But the benefit of not imagining that you were going to outwit technologically this virus may well have been superior in the aggregate.
And this is one of the things I really... I don't know that we will ever get an honest accounting of it.
Yeah.
But I think it's very important that at some point we get an honest accounting of the difference between, I think it would be three categories.
One is what we did, right?
What were the consequences of that for human health, well-being, and longevity?
There's a question, and also things like happiness, correlated damage.
Second thing would be if one did nothing.
Right?
And the third thing would be if someone, if we had approached it organically, rather than the top-down, the CDC is gospel view of what we should have done, if doctors were allowed to do what doctors are supposed to do, which is be scientists and try out things based on the symptoms they see in front of them and discover what works and compare notes and, you know, prescribe as they will.
And that actually, we're not spending as much time on some things as I thought we might because we spent so much time on vitamin D, I guess.
But that actually is a great segue to another piece I read this week that I'm just going to read a tiny bit of here.
But in it, the author argues, and we've made this argument, we've seen lots of other people making this argument, for, you know, in your organic category, not so much a category as a category, in your organic category, you effectively left the space for
Individual doctors to figure out what worked, and what you didn't say, but I'm sure is included in your organic category, is as opposed to having a blanket policy and one treatment for everything, all the time, everywhere, saying, okay, you know what?
The infection fatality rate is so much higher the older you are, that perhaps we should strongly encourage more invasive treatments the older you are, and actually discourage treatments that we know come with costs the younger you are, because the younger you are, the more likely you are to get it, not notice it, then have immunity.
And the idea of protecting yourself against all costs and thus leaving your immune system potentially naive to it until a later point, at which point you will be more susceptible, is batshit crazy medical policy.
Yep.
Is what it is.
So this piece was sent to us by a fan this week.
I would not have run into it otherwise, and my computer has decided that it's going to take this moment to not pull it up.
That's really... What's that?
It is, it's spinning.
Okay, so this is in an outlet called The Gray Zone, which I'd never heard of before, written by an academic called Christian Parenti, published the last day of March of this year.
Title is How the Organized Left Got COVID Wrong, Learned to Love Lockdowns, and Lost Its Mind.
An Autopsy.
It's a very long piece.
It's excellent.
I'm just going to read the first two paragraphs, and this is written by a left-leading academic, as far as I can tell.
I mean, I think he says that in there, but you can also just kind of tell that he is.
He says, It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it.
After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volte face I looked up how to pronounce this, a volte face.
I saw a lot, okay.
It means an about face.
I don't know why we're using that one.
I'm going to start over.
Yeah.
Okay.
Oh, hello.
It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it.
After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volte face and embraced anti-working class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures.
For two years, the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations.
For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals, call them the lockdown left, cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class, those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.
And he, if I may, thank you Zach, he then He spends some time in that vein and then says, arguing reason against COVID hysteria is like attempting to put out a magnesium fire using water, but I will try anyway.
And then it's just reasonable argument after reasonable argument, including this one about actually a blanket policy of vaccinate everyone immediately never made sense, given what this disease looks like.
I don't think, I don't often feel like we've been trying to put out a magnesium fire with water, but that is to some degree what it has been on occasion.
We've also been trying to figure out what the narratives that are being used against people are.
So that we can help pull people out of their anxiety and their fear and their propagandized mindsets and start to see something that's real again.
But it is tough and I feel like this piece, along with increasing numbers of others, reveal that there are a lot of people who are saying, for God's sake, can we please get this history right?
Else we are certain to repeat it because there are some who would like us to.
Well, there's an epic battle to prevent us from doing the post-mortem properly, or if the post-mortem is done properly, to demonize it in advance so people won't be able to figure it out.
And I must say, I think a lot rests on our ability to override the force that would like us not to do it.
I will point out that an epic battle is coming Over the difference between Consequences in 2020 and 2021 Because the point is anything that happened as a result of our vaccine policy Will be easily blamed on COVID and the difference between what happened in 2020 and 2021 is the place to see that distinction but Anyway, very, very interesting to hear that that has emerged.
It sounds like a very bold academic.
It will be interesting to see what happens to him.
Yeah.
So, in keeping with that, you wanted to say something about vaccine mandates.
Yeah, I did.
There's actually a rally today in LA which I couldn't attend, but I wanted to make a certain point that has dawned on me over the course of months.
There's obviously a relationship between these mandates and tragedies of the past and anybody who raises that connection is subject to being demonized as somebody who is taking the deaths of Jews in the Holocaust lightly or something like that.
And frankly, I'm having none of it.
We are in a place where the lessons of the past are directly relevant because we are remaking mistakes that we've seen before.
Are we remaking them identically?
No.
Are we remaking them for the same reasons?
Probably not.
But are those lessons relevant?
And if so, are we liberated to talk about them?
We damn well better be.
And the point I wanted to make is We are watching the rollback of the Nuremberg Code and the gains made at Nuremberg, and I believe we're seeing it on two separate fronts that are easily conflated because it went down in such a way that they were both in play.
One of them has to do with the idea that a human being is morally obligated to reject immoral orders.
This is a very important principle.
The Nazis who were put on trial at Nuremberg all used the defense that they had been following orders.
And the point was, the world correctly decided that no such defense was viable.
That if the order was immoral, you had an obligation to reject it, even though that's obviously a very dire choice, right?
And you know, let's give the defense its due.
Does that mean, you know, in states that have the death penalty, that if somebody tells you, you know, that you are obligated to put somebody to death, that you are obligated to reject it?
It's not clear what it means, because it's not clear that it's in the moral order.
Now, I happen to personally Right.
the death penalty, I believe there are cases in which it is morally justified, but that we actually don't have a system good enough to deploy it and therefore we don't need it, it isn't useful, and we should forbid it, we will be more civilized if we forgo it, but it doesn't mean there aren't people who've earned it, right?
Right.
You, like I, prefer to make the other error.
I think we have to make the other error.
It's the civilized error to make, but in any case, the point is, there are lawful orders, potentially, or at least arguably, that do result in a person, you know, going to war.
There are wars that are justified and you will kill other people during them, so is it an immoral order just because somebody dies?
No, not inherently.
But the Nazis' claim to have been following orders was Rule a non-defense.
Right.
Right.
Now we are in the process of purging our police forces, our military, our universities, our hospitals of exactly the people who were most likely to raise objections.
People who recognize that there was something wrong with these mandate policies and refused to either apply them to others or to accept them for themselves.
The number of people we've heard from Who have nurses in the family or doctors, but we've heard from more nurses and nurses in the family who are no longer allowed to work In an era when we are also being told That we that not so much now, but two months ago, you know, the hospitals are overfill or overflowing, right?
We're in crisis mode and yet we're firing people for making a choice of conscience, right?
And what I would say is whether it's intentional or not The consequence of this policy of firing people from police forces, the military, hospitals, universities, for resisting, is to create police forces, military, universities, hospitals, in which people are much less likely to object to immoral orders, and that is hugely dangerous.
You leave behind a compliant population.
Right.
But the other way in which we were rolling back Nuremberg is that Nuremberg focused on the medical experiments that were inflicted on victims in concentration camps.
Now, what was ruled at Nuremberg was that human beings have a right to informed consent.
That is to say that they have to be able to say no to participating in an experiment, and they have to have the basis on which to make the judgment themselves, which means they need to be fully informed.
Now we have pointed out before that these vaccines, mRNA vaccines for example, are one of the probably the largest medical experiment in human history but for one thing, but for the fact that we are apparently not systematically collecting data on what happened to people who got them and comparing it to people who didn't in order to figure out how dangerous or not they are.
So it is an experiment in one sense, in the sense that we don't know, But it is not an experiment in the sense that we are not taking even that responsibility seriously.
Yeah, it's an experiment in the layperson, in the lay sense of experiment, but it's not a scientific experiment.
Right.
And if there's one thing we can be certain of, you and I having traversed this ground many times, it's that it is almost impossible to find good information on what the risks are and how common the harms are.
And when you do look at what evidence we do have, you're told it's not reliable without being told what is reliable.
And so the point is, The informed consent requirement that was established so thoroughly.
I mean, we literally hung doctors, right?
We hung doctors as a result of those trials, right?
That informed consent is now out the window.
We are in an experimental phase.
There are things that are true based on whether or not the vial that you happen to be injected from is part of the emergency use authorized batch or whether it is the FDA approved version and apparently the authorized batch is the only thing you can get in the U.S.
This is a baroque landscape that no person could possibly understand where their interests actually are and what risks they're being put to.
So informed consent is out the window, and those who would object on the basis that they are being asked to apply an experimental remedy to people who have not been informed properly, those people are subject to losing their jobs.
I don't know if the rolling back of the gains of Nuremberg is intentional, but I do know that it's extremely dangerous.
And what I would say is that we are effectively setting the stage for a tragedy of history, and we are obligated to recognize that and to resist with everything we've got.
Wow, excellent.
Excellent.
You actually reminded me of something else that I saw this week that might actually be worth sharing here, which I haven't shared with you before, but it is in keeping kind of with what you've been saying here.
The Oregon Health Authority, whose emails I receive, asked for people who are vaccinated but not boosted to fill out a questionnaire.
I did not, because I do not qualify, but I did go and see what the options were.
It's a one-question questionnaire.
And it reads, Oregon Health Authority, vaccinated but not boosted, help us understand.
About 75% of people age 18 and older across Oregon have completed their first series of vaccinations, and only 45% have also received a booster dose.
We're hoping to understand some of the reasons why people have thus far not received a booster.
If you've been fully vaccinated but have not had a booster shot, please select the one reason that most closely represents your situation.
All responses will remain anonymous.
It's interesting, they said that about anonymity several times on the page, and there was no obvious way for them to have collected any information about you, so it was Okay, their options that they offer are, I am young and healthy and don't believe I need it.
something from the computer you were logging into.
I'm not sure why they kept saying that all responses were made anonymous given that they never collected anything in the identifying features of you.
Okay, their options that they offer are: I am young and healthy and don't believe I need it.
I would like to get a booster shot but just haven't gotten around to it.
I would like to get a booster shot but I haven't been able to make the time or don't have easy access to provider or clinic.
I got COVID anyway and don't believe the vaccine works well enough.
I had side effects from the vaccine and don't want to go through that again.
People around me are getting COVID-19 and they seem okay, so why bother?
I want to wait until there is a newer vaccine that targets the BA.2 Omicron sub-variant.
That's a lot of reasonable reasons in that list.
This list surprises me.
I think many people will not have just one thing on here, but this is a match.
You know, if the Oregon Health Authority is concerned, because 75% of Oregonians are what they consider fully vaccinated, well, two dose or one dose of J&J vaccinated, but not boosted, and only 45% are boosted, that's a big gap.
That's a big loss for the messaging, for the success of the messaging.
And I said sometime back in the fall, this hopefully is where the narrative crumbles, because if they mandate boosters, they're going to reveal how many people will not get boosted.
What we were hearing were a lot of these things.
We were hearing from people, I had an adverse event.
I'm not going there again.
I did it.
It wasn't one and done like I was told.
I'm not going there again.
Or yeah, I still got COVID.
What the hell?
Or actually, where's the new one?
Right?
Like, where's the one for Omicron that we were promised apparently in March and that no one is really talking about anymore?
It was so quick to figure out how to make these in the first place, and it didn't actually take from, you know, March to November of 2020.
It actually took kind of a weekend, and then it took a lot of production and trials, which were faulty in their own way, but there are just This is a list that reflects more of the reality of what is actually going on on the ground with people who are experiencing COVID and vaccines than anything else I have seen from any public health messaging.
Yeah, I think, you know, somebody is trying to figure out who to target with what message in order to get them to change their mind.
Of course, it's not a pure, they don't have a pure goal.
My point would be, so it accidentally reveals The truth of this, which is that over time people woke up to many of the concerns.
Now there were things that weren't on there that should have been, unless I misheard it, right?
In other words, the evidence suggests that these vaccines are more dangerous than they were represented to be.
Yeah, that's a theoretical objection, whereas the only thing they have on here is, I had side effects from the vaccine, I don't want to go through that again.
Well, they do have, I got COVID anyway, and don't believe the vaccine works well enough, which is also a conflation of two things.
It's a conflation.
Now, they do rescue their little study here with other... Yes, yeah, I didn't include... No, but it has to be there, because it's hardly a complete solution set, so you need a garbage category somewhere to catch all those other explanations.
But anyway, I do think it reveals that yes people were reached by messages that were demonized but nonetheless they heard them and people had experiences with themselves or other people having reactions and and that resulted in uh More awaken more people awakened than they would have hoped for.
Yes indeed Okay, uh you ready to uh To finish us off here?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That sounds dire.
No, I don't think we're there yet.
I mean, it's spring.
It's spring, yeah.
We're going to get some months of some relief.
Yeah, the question is, in light of Elon Musk having taken a major stake in Twitter and joining the board, and in light of Peter Thiel's very interesting talk at the Bitcoin conference in Miami, which I know you haven't seen yet, but Well worth listening to what he has to say.
It's an extremely challenging, interesting talk.
I didn't follow a hundred percent of it, but I got most of it.
He basically levels an accusation at what he calls the gerontocracy.
Basically, he claims that very powerful Boomer, or older even maybe, financial forces are suppressing the natural growth of Bitcoin.
Anyway, it's a very interesting talk.
He makes an argument for the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
He's not a full believer in Ethereum, it's clear, but nonetheless he lays out a framework in which they're actually playing different roles.
He said one thing I quite disagree with, which is that to say that you're pro-blockchain is an anti-Bitcoin stance.
I don't think that's true.
But nonetheless, it's a challenging, interesting talk in which he very forcefully comes out in favor of Bitcoin, says that it predicted inflation, that the markets didn't catch.
Those are very interesting things.
And Mark Andreessen Who is another major force, a tech guy who was the prime mover behind Netscape Mozilla, right?
In the early days of the web.
He has started calling out what he calls the current thing.
Right?
So he's now just started replacing, you know, COVID, Ukraine, whatever, with the generic, the current thing.
And his point is, oh, you know, you're not allowed to reason about the current thing.
You're allowed to reason about the last thing.
And anyway, by calling it this, he reveals the absurdity of this sort of flocking behavior that people have to these positions that they don't understand.
Anyway, I would argue that all three of these are suggestive of Gen X rising, but there is a level at which, you know, and Eric has been big on pointing out how, you know, the age of people who win Nobel Prizes has gone up and up and up.
You know, just the degree of power that has concentrated in these elderly folks.
We can see it in the last presidential election, you know, the two oldest people to have run.
That the gerontocracy is now increasingly facing a group of very powerful Gen Xers who I think are fed up, who have had it and do not like the woke nonsense and are potentially, let us hope, going to break the stranglehold on power and narrative that they have held.
Hopefully in favor of something better more nuanced and more careful, but I just wanted to call attention Call people's attention to the fact that you sort of had three blips of these people who have become very wealthy and powerful who seem to be fed up and are Simultaneously on the move in the same week right that that feels to me like something is up Well, let's keep our eye on it.
Yeah indeed fantastic Okay, that's it?
I think so.
That's it.
We've put our cat to sleep, but that's easy.
We have put our cat... Our cat is sleeping.
Yeah, maybe it wasn't us who did it.
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