#126 Out of Controls (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 126th 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 science, Covid, vaccines, sunlight, and sophistry. New research suggests that adenovirus-vectored vaccines (e.g. J&J, AstraZeneca) reduce all-cause mortality, but that mRNA vaccines (e.g. Pfizer, Moderna) do not. What are the implications of this? What kinds of vaccines are recommended and ef...
Hey folks, welcome to the 126th live stream welcome to the 126th live stream of the Dark Horse podcast.
I'm I'm Dr. Bret Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying, and we are coming to you at our regular time, which ought to surprise you all given how much shuffling we have had to do.
With our schedule, but it's Saturday, midday, here on the soggy, soggy Pacific Northwest, almost coast.
Yeah.
It's wet.
Our one-time colleague, Jack Longino, once referred to the Pacific Northwest as the windshield of the continent, and boy does it feel like that these days.
It is the windshield, and I am the bug.
No, no, not like that.
So we are, we are here right now, as if you're here, you know that already.
This is going to be the last time we're going to do a live stream for, gosh, two and a half weeks, actually, because we've got a lot of stuff coming up.
But there will be a few, one at least, maybe, maybe two Dark Horse podcasts with Brett and a guest coming to you between now and then.
And, and all sorts of good stuff coming up if it would only stop.
My god.
Which it does, but only for a few minutes at a time.
Only a few minutes at a time, yeah.
So today we're going to be talking to you a bit about some new thinking in some COVID space.
Brett's going to talk again about why sophistry is a scourge.
And we're going to talk about, in a slightly different way than we have talked about before, some of the values and virtues of being outside in service of not just our sign-off, which is what it is because we believe it,
But also in service of one of the drumbeats that we have in our lives, and that we make in the book, and that we make here on the podcast, is that just because you can easily measure something, just because especially modern science, modern technology, modern ways of life have figured out a way
To identify, to separate out and identify and then perhaps synthesize and augment in the lab something that is understood to be valuable does not mean that that is the valuable thing or the only valuable thing or that it is as valuable to you in that form as it would be if it came with all of the original things that it came with.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that today.
Actually, I strangely see a connection, a confluence between all the various topics that we're talking about today, so I don't know, that's kind of cool when that happens.
No, that's as we aim for, as I aim for anyway.
So, just some logistics first.
This time, unlike the previous two, we will be doing a Q&A after this, so we encourage you to write in with questions to www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You do need to pay something in order to write a question, but we try to get to as many of them as possible, and any question that really interests us, no matter what the dollar value it comes in at, we will try to get to.
And sometimes if there's something that we really wanted to get to and we don't have time, we'll forward that into the next into the next Q&A.
So, we do have a Q&A today.
Our next live stream is going to be on Thursday, May 26th, at some point on that day, after both of us will have been a number of places not here, and then follow that up right away with something on May 28th for Livestream 128, and then Saturday, June 4th, and then again Saturday, June 11th, although that may be early because, again, we've got... airlines are messing with us and changing tickets that we already bought and making things hard.
That didn't used to be a thing, as I recall.
That didn't used to be a thing, although it didn't used to be a thing here, although you know well the story that I experienced, which I'll just share here.
So, you know, we talked two, three live streams ago about having been blessed to go to the Bahamas, our first vacation in well over two years, And we talked a lot about the biology and geology of what we saw there on a recent live stream.
What we didn't say was actually we were supposed to be there for almost 24 hours longer than we were there, and both of our flights got like crunched towards one another, and there was nothing to be done about it.
And that was disappointing.
It also affected, you know, because we were on a friends boat the whole time, it affected what we could do.
And, you know, that didn't used to be a thing.
However, back in 1996, I guess it would have been, when I was doing my first long field season in Madagascar, I had with me, you were not with me, you were actually doing work in Panama on Barro Colorado Island for most of that.
I think you started your season a little bit into mine, and then you were there for 19 months.
But I was there, and I had as a field assistant a wonderful young woman named Jessica, who was, who's, I didn't I don't know what all I'm allowed to say, although I wrote about her in my book Antipode.
So yeah, Jessica's dad was the United Nations resident representative from Madagascar, and they were in Tana, the capital city, and it was very heartening to know that there was that connection, and they would send us care packages.
It was like, I remember, you know, when you're living in a tent for five months, and showering in a waterfall, and your company is your wonderful field assistant, and Occasional conservation agents and sort of lemurs and chameleons and frogs.
You are desperate, if you are me anyway, or Jessica, for the written word, for language.
And so they would send us, you know, I had, I remember I finally read all of Crime and Punishment, even the troop movements on that trip.
But they would send us care packages with back copies of The Economist, which I'd never read before.
So I started reading, I didn't really continue reading, but I read The Economist while living in Nosy Mangabey in Madagascar in 96.
Um, but we, you know, flew out after five months.
Five months, had to go to, um, the offices of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which sort of, you know, oversee that part of the island which had recently been made into a national park.
And then we're flying back to Tana with, I thought, about, I had about 26 hours to spare before I would then fly home, or in that case my parents were living in London at the time, so I was flying back to London.
And we got back to Tana, the capital city, and Jessica's parents, or maybe just her mom, Roz, picked us up at the airport.
And this is, you know, after five months in the field, we are pretty grubby and ready for more human interaction than each other.
And she, Roz, says to me, so your flight's been changed, and I just have this sinking feeling because already at the beginning of this I'd had a lot of the equipment that I had put together to make a solar electricity system had been stolen, so I'd had to go into the streets of Tana and buy a car battery and use that to set it up to my inverter and all of this.
Like, oh god, what now?
She said, well, instead of your flight being 26 hours from now, it's four hours from now.
And we scrambled, and I got on the plane, and I got out of there, but I thought, this doesn't normally happen.
You know, it would have been quite possible that I could have flown in expecting that I would just stay at the airport and make my connection, my international connection, but no, that would not, in fact, have worked.
Yes, but that flight actually, I did a little looking, and it seems to have been 24 hours early, but in fact, this being Air Madagascar, it was a flight from a year prior.
It was a year late.
Yes, yes, yes.
The aptly named AirMAD.
AirMAD, yes.
AirMAD did in fact, you know, get me where I needed to go and it has every time with often very little to spare in terms of sanity or one's bags.
Each of our experiences with AirMAD, they have in fact maintained cabin pressure despite the looseness of the seals in the door to the fuselage.
There was the one time that we were flying together and we were close enough to the door that we watched the The stewardess actually seemed to push the seal back into the door.
As you closed the door, the weather sealing needed to be tucked into the door.
Yeah, this was to be a flight that would stop in, oh gosh, probably The seal held.
We cannot argue.
Before landing finally in Paris and it made it made all of those and I don't you know the seal The seal persisted the seal the seal hell.
Yeah, we cannot argue empirically speaking Yeah, so anyway That was neither here- oh, that explains why we may be coming to you early on June 11th, which seems a long time from now.
But because we bought some tickets for- it doesn't matter- that have just been moved up by six hours.
What the hell?
Anyway, if you're watching on YouTube, we're also streaming on Odyssey.
That's where the chat is.
Again, you can ask your questions for the Q&A that we'll be doing right after this, with a short break between the two, at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You can find my writing at naturalselections.substack.com.
We talked a little bit about one of the pieces in – we came to you with Episode 125 just a few days ago, in which we focused on talking about the Aledo – the leak Out of the Supreme Court from the Alito opinion, which is a majority opinion, which is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade.
So we talked a little bit about my most recent substack then.
And we also want to, as always, say that we are supported by our audience and we appreciate you so much.
We appreciate you subscribing to the channels and liking and sharing both the full episodes as you are watching right now.
And Also, the clips, which you can find on Dark Horse Podcast Clips, both on YouTube and Odyssey.
And, of course, we appreciate financial support from those who can afford it.
You can ask questions in our Q&A, that's one way.
You can join one or both of our Patreons.
Brett had a Patreon conversation this morning for two hours.
Excellent.
Which was, as usual, I hear.
Coalition of the Reasonable, rising to the challenge on a difficult topic this morning.
So anyway, it's all Nope, I think we have to keep those conversations private for the protection of all.
Awesome, okay.
And of course, we have sponsors who help support us tremendously.
As we've said before, all of our sponsors have products or services that we actually and truly vouch for, and in those cases, in those couple of cases, where they are products that we don't personally have need for, we won't vouch for them unless we can independently assess them or have someone whom we trust do so.
So, without further ado, here we go with our three sponsors for this week.
Our first sponsor this week is new to us.
It's Seed.
Seed is a company focused on bacteria and the microbiome, and has a terrific probiotic called DSO1 Daily Symbiotic.
There are so many actions that you can take to enhance your health.
Our sign-off here at Dark Horse includes three of them, as those listening are likely to be well aware.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
But a lot is hidden in those words.
What, for instance, constitutes good food?
Good food is real food, whole food, food that has been alive recently and was grown with care and conditions as ancient as possible given the constraints of the 21st century.
But even many people who eat such a diet can be missing something.
We contain multitudes.
Every individual human contains so many other organisms, some of which may harm us, but many of which exist with us in harmony.
We need them.
This is why probiotics can be an important tool in a healthy lifestyle, even if you eat nutrient-dense food and avoid processed foods and sugar.
That said, probiotics are in some ways the new current thing.
Ever heard of probiotic tortilla chips?
They were a thing, and no, they're not effective.
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If you've taken a probiotic before and never felt a difference, it's likely because the good bacteria weren't surviving your GI tract.
Seed is designed differently, and that's why it works.
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I always wondered about probiotics and making it all the way to the gut where they would have to because the stomach is designed to prevent stuff from getting there alive.
Precisely!
So, I mean, I actually spent some time looking at their, you know, a lot of that script wasn't from them.
A lot of that script was from me.
But I also spent some time looking at their site and looking into their claims, and exactly, right?
The stomach is designed to break down stuff.
Of course, many of the things that you take that the target is lowered down in your intestinal system, in your GI tract, won't get there.
And Seed's DS-01 daily symbiotic does.
That's cool.
Alright, so our second sponsor this week is 8sleep, also a relatively new sponsor for us, and we are excited to know about them and proud to have their support.
Good sleep is a game-changer.
As we discussed in the Sleep Chapter of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, intelligent life that found its way to Earth might be surprised by a lot of what it found on our planet, but not by the fact of sleep or by dreams.
Sleep is necessary.
Without good sleep, we are destined to be unhealthy and unproductive.
Yet more than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and temperature is one of the main reasons.
It is well known that individuals and couples who sleep together often have different optimal sleep temperatures.
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Having a cool, warm... nope.
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You can add the cover to any mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which a couple of times I've read these ads so far, I just stop and think, you don't want either of those, but you could.
Well, it's useful for practical jokes.
As the person who shares the bed with you, I'm not so pleased with that revelation.
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We were both a little skeptical and are now totally sold.
We are surprised at how much we appreciate this bed.
Go to Hsleep.com slash Dark Horse to check out the Pod Pro cover and save $150 at checkout.
8 Sleep ships to the USA, Canada, and the UK.
And again, that's 8sleep.com.
All right.
Our final sponsor this week is Allform, a company that makes terrific custom sofas.
We like them so much we have two of them.
What makes these sofas so terrific?
Well, for a fraction of the cost of traditional sofas, you can customize size, layout, fabric, and color.
They do armchairs and loveseats all the way up to an eight-seat sectional, and you can start small and buy more seats later on without needing to get a whole new sofa.
That's kind of an amazing thing.
It is.
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It really is easy.
Also, the frames are incredibly rigid, which you wouldn't think was possible with a sofa you bolt together, but it really is true.
We started with one beautiful sectional all-form sofa in whiskey leather.
It's soft and supple and warm, unlike a lot of leather.
We pile on it to watch movies some evenings.
It looks gorgeous and is incredibly inviting and comfortable.
A rare combination.
We like it so much, we got a second one.
Also, some listeners have asked if all-form sofas hold up to pets.
Yes!
Anything smaller than a giraffe.
Which, to be fair, we haven't tried.
So maybe even giraffes.
I guess, actually, we cannot technically vouch on the giraffe front, but everything we have tried it with seems to work.
The leather that all-form uses is 20%- I wouldn't recommend fish.
Nope, they're all fish.
Ah, phylogenetics.
They strike again.
I'm not surprised.
I still wouldn't recommend fish.
Fishy fish.
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Awesome.
Alright.
Uh, maybe you should start.
All right.
Unless you don't want to.
No, no, I'm more than willing.
Shall we start down the COVID road?
Sure.
All right.
As much as we would love to be talking about other things, the number of important developments in the land of COVID is so many, and the amount that rides not only on our ongoing developing understanding of the way COVID and COVID treatments work, but also on our ability To go back and figure out what we got right and what we did not have right in the past.
Now, this week, this episode, we are going to talk about a result that has recently emerged in which the two major types of vaccines for COVID, that is to say the adenovectored vaccines we are going to talk about a result that has recently emerged in which the two major types of vaccines for COVID, that is to
Now, that is an important thing to do, and the reason that it is an important thing to do is that vaccines, as we have pointed out hundreds of times maybe, are basically an intervention into a series of complex systems. are basically an intervention into a series of complex systems.
That series of complex systems being at least three-layered.
You've got the immune system, which is a complex system, inside of the critter, that is the human, which is a complex system, inside a society of people in which a pathogen produces an epidemic.
All of these complex systems are going to be affected by the various interventions that we might seek to deploy, and their net effect is what we ought to be interested in.
So, this recent study, which is technically not peer-reviewed yet, which means that it was not handed to anonymous reviewers, And their comments then delivered back to the editors, and the editors then deciding to publish it.
But what has been peer-reviewed, in fact, by Martin Kulldorff and colleagues who looked through and reported on this... Zach, do you want to show the website that I sent you?
So, Zach was going to bring up the website in which Martin wrote about these vaccines.
As you and I, Heather, have been talking about from the beginning of the pandemic, peer review does not mean review by peers.
Peer review is a, I would argue, a kind of jargon that obscures the reality in which peers are anonymously given a paper to review by editors and the amount of skullduggery that flies beneath the radar under this banner of peer review
is great, and while some of us oppose this kind of peer review, none of us who are worth our salt as scientists oppose the idea of peers reviewing work, but we think it would be much better done out in the open, transparently.
Yes.
I'm wondering if before you show this article by Martin Kulldorff, you want to just show the actual preprint here.
Yes, I think we need to show the preprint, which I also sent you.
Which I've got on my screen as well.
Oh, you've got it on your screen too.
Isn't this it?
Isn't this the paper?
Yep, that is absolutely the paper.
So either way.
So, here we have it.
It's called, for those just listening, Viewpoint, Randomized Clinical Trials of COVID-19 Vaccines.
Do Adenovirus Vector Vaccines Have Beneficial Non-Specific Effects?
And just as a reminder, although most listeners and viewers will already recognize this, we have two main classes of vaccines that, at least in the weird world, have been widely available.
The mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna, two different ones, And the adenovirus factored vaccine is produced by Johnson & Johnson, which is the only adenovirus factored vaccine that's been allowed in the United States, and then also AstraZeneca.
Right, and so actually maybe we should just do a little of the biology here.
Both of these kinds of vaccines are novel, and the Miracle, which is their rapid production in the aftermath of COVID, Also presents us with a problem, which is that we've got two platforms, essentially, in which a vaccine can be manufactured.
Now, apparently it can be done very, very quickly, that we know very little about.
We just don't know what their effects are.
And they work in two, I would argue, radically different ways.
One of them takes an adenovirus and basically implants an antigen, or the message that produces an antigen, into this virus which is capable of infecting human cells.
And the other one takes an mRNA, which is a message that a cell natively transcribes and introduces it into the cell as if it had just come from the nucleus, and the cell then faithfully transcribes and actually translates this message into a protein, which is supposed to then lodge in the cell surface.
But in the mRNA case, instead of being delivered by a virus which has evolved to infect human cells, it is delivered by what's effectively a pseudovirus, which is a coat of these lipid nanoparticles.
And these lipid nanoparticles, lipid means fat, and the lipid nanoparticles, because they are composed of fat and because the surface of all cells is made of a fat-based membrane, causes it to fuse, like dissolves like, and basically the lipid nanoparticles touch a cell, the message is spilled in, and then the
The ribosomes in the cytoplasm translate the message into a protein which then gets displayed on the surface of the cell, hopefully, and the immune system learns to recognize it.
Now, you and I have talked at length about the hazard of these new technologies, especially the lipid nanoparticle one.
And the reason that the lipid nanoparticle one has caught our attention is something particularly concerning, is that there is no specificity whatsoever in where these lipid nanoparticles deliver their message.
They will deliver it to whatever cells are most hospitable, and there is no reason to think that the cells that are most usefully delivered this message are the ones that will pick it up.
It will circulate, you know, in the form that the manufacturers intended it.
It's supposed to stay effectively in the arm where it's injected, and it's supposed to be those cells, presumably the muscle cells, which pick it up.
Right.
And a critical distinction being that whereas with traditional vaccine technology, of which there are also two types and one of which is more ancient than the other, as you'll talk about, but Attenuated but still live versus dead vaccines.
In both of those cases, the idea is we're going to put something in your body, the goal of which is to get the attention of your immune system so that it can learn how to deal with such a pathogen if it runs into it in its wild type.
And in this case, it is quite not that.
So it is lacking specificity, and the expectation is not that in its form in which it is injected, the immune system will recognize it, although that might also be the case, but that it will move into cells and produce copies of, for the most part, the spike protein.
And can I just read a couple sentences from the beginning of the introduction here?
Sure.
By the way, do you want to say who the authors are?
Yes, the authors are, I'm going to butcher most of the names here, Christine Benn, Frederic Schultz Buchholzer, Sebastian Nielsen, Mahai Netea, I apologize, and Peter Abbey.
This again is the preprint called Randomized Clinical Trials of COVID-19 Vaccines.
Do Adenovirus Vector Vaccines Have Beneficial Non-Specific Effects?
Or are we just a couple sentences from the intro and then sort of the conclusion out of the abstract, even though That's not usually the order in which one shares stuff.
Introduction.
Within the current understanding of vaccines, it is logical to assume that COVID-19 vaccines reduce overall mortality, corresponding to the number of COVID-19 deaths prevented.
However, there is now ample evidence that vaccines can have broad, heterologous effects on the immune system.
These effects can lead to additional protection or increasing susceptibility to unrelated infections or even other non-infectious immune-mediated diseases.
Therefore, as it has now been established in numerous studies, vaccines may have completely unexpected effects on overall mortality, different from what could be anticipated based on the protection against the vaccine-targeted disease.
That is an excellent pressee, right there, of basically the argument that then the first author on the paper, Christine Benn, makes in an interview with UnHerd that you also talk about, that she did this week, for why, unlike what was done, for instance, in the trials that Pfizer ran, we should not be focusing only on effect on that disease, but overall mortality, all-cause mortality, to use the term of art, right?
And frankly, it's easier.
It's easier to look at all-cause mortality because you don't have to end up dithering, and dithering minimizes the importance of this, but as many of us have been trying to figure out these last two years, and for many people for much longer than that, like, well, You know, in the case of COVID, it's only the last two years, two plus now, you know, did she die of COVID or with COVID?
And because, you know, especially now with Omicron being so highly transmissible and so many people have had it or still have evidence of it circulating, there are, it is quite clear that Quite a number of, you know, sometimes presumably unintentional, sometimes absolutely intentional, messing with the numbers such that all these deaths that are attributed to COVID are not actually deaths that happened because of COVID, but deaths that happened while the person also was infected with COVID.
You know, people who entered hospital for entirely other reasons were then tested, found to have COVID, died for those entirely other reasons, and were listed as having died of COVID.
So, All of that problem is avoided if you focus on all-cause mortality in those people who got, say, mRNA vaccines versus adenovirus-vectored vaccines.
And that's the comparison being made here, not to unvaccinated people.
That's not exactly right.
It's not exactly right.
So, in these three groups, is all-cause mortality better or worse?
And the abstract reveals here... Can we lay a little more groundwork?
Okay, then he shouldn't be showing the screen.
Yeah, I mean, it's not a secret.
First of all, this comes in the context, right?
And you hinted at that context, but I think that context, you have to understand it in order to see why a study like this is likely to tell you something really important that you might not know.
So, Dr. Ben talks about prior work, which has revealed a pattern.
I believe that she and her team studied 10 vaccines that are just part of the standard schedule of vaccines for children.
And the pattern that they found was that the live attenuated virus vaccines tended to increase longevity.
They decreased all-cause mortality.
And the all-cause mortality decrease could not be attributed to the target disease entirely itself.
Could not entirely be attributed to that.
For example, in the case of the measles vaccine, there was a benefit in the reduction of measles, which did account for some fraction of the reduction in overall loss of life, but it didn't account for all of it, not even close.
So the point is, there are non-specific effects of these vaccines, and we don't entirely understand what they come from.
One could imagine, for example, this is one plausible example, That cross-reactivity, because viruses are related to each other, being vaccinated against one virus might create immunity to another virus that had similar surface structure.
For which maybe we're not as familiar, we don't have a name yet, we certainly don't have a vaccine, but now you've got some baseline immunity to something that the medical establishment isn't formally looking out for.
Right, and it doesn't have to be that direct.
It could also be that because the immune system exerts a selective pressure on the viruses themselves, viruses that aren't closely related may come to resemble each other because what they're doing is they are evolving to be invisible to the immune system, and so cross-reactivity doesn't even require that the viruses be related.
But in any case, the basic point is if you look at the attenuated virus vaccines, what you see is an all-cause mortality benefit.
You get the exact opposite when you look at the killed virus vaccines.
So again, these are the two broad types of vaccines that existed before, you know, a couple years ago.
Right.
And what's an example of a killed virus vaccine that we will most of us have gotten?
Well, let's see if we can deduce it.
I just don't.
I don't happen to know this.
We can deduce it from the fact of needing boosters.
But in any case, I'm not going to guess, but the point is when people who are Dark Horse listeners will have heard the following logic discussed by us here before.
If you have an attenuated virus, a live virus vaccine, you have an answer?
You know, this is just off of a site called Passport Health Global, so I'm not going to vouch for it beyond that.
But some attenuated live virus vaccines include MMR, as you said, yellow fever, oral polio vaccination, and oral typhoid.
And some dead vaccines include They say polio here and they're going to mean not oral.
Cholera, which I mean, cholera is a crap vaccine long before any of this.
It's just got really low efficacy.
Influenza, Hep A, and typhoid.
And again, it's the non-oral typhoid.
So the logic works something like this.
When you get an attenuated virus vaccine, that is a living vaccine that is a weakened form, it doesn't make you sick, and hopefully it can't transmit from one person to another.
Right?
All bets are off if something figures out how to jump from one individual to another.
But a attenuated virus that can infect cells enough to give you a very mild infection, hopefully one that you can't even detect you've got anything, maybe you've got, you know, your arm has a slight fever or something like that.
Fitting for a day, that sort of thing.
Yeah.
That, because it is an infection, right, causes the immune system to have the right reaction, right?
They work very well for this reason.
They're also a little scary for this reason because you're dealing with an organism that Has heredity and therefore could evolve it doesn't evolve very well If it doesn't move from one person to the next but as soon as that trick gets introduced you it's it's a very different thing but in the case of a killed virus or a Antigen from a killed virus a piece of a virus that you're delivering to the immune system the immune system May spot it because it's foreign but it doesn't look like an infection.
And so the reaction is often very weak So, two things are true.
One, you may get more than one vaccination in order to introduce the same antigen multiple times, which sort of simulates an infection.
And two... Trigger is the goal here, unlike in much of social space now.
Like, you're trying to trigger your immune system.
What is this?
But then, the other thing, the thing that you and I have talked about, hey, wait a minute, what the heck is this technology?
And whoever said that was safe is the adjuvants.
And the adjuvants are basically Immune irritants.
Immune irritants that cause the immune system to react like there's an infection, which then raises all kinds of questions about how good are they at spotting the thing that the vaccine manufacturer wants them to react to, versus the stuff that was involved in the food that you ate, or your own tissues, right?
In other words, annoying your immune system with an adjuvant is basically an invitation to the inappropriate activity of the immune system, either in the form of allergies or autoimmunity.
And so anyway, what Dr. Ben reveals in her interview about this paper, which is narrower, is that in this prior work, the answer came out pretty clear.
Dead virus or pieces of virus, the antigen-based adjuvant containing vaccines, reduced longevity, increased all-cause mortality.
And the live virus vaccines decreased all-cause mortality.
So just are live, also known as attenuated virus vaccines, inherently adjuvant-free?
Do you know the answer to this?
I believe so.
I know that that's the general pattern.
It may be 100%.
So they have all sorts of things going for them.
Right.
Sorry, but this just reminds me, and this is what we've been saying from the beginning of COVID and the prospect of vaccines.
Like, oh goody, cool, vaccines!
Vaccines are one of, broadly speaking, the three major successes of Western medicine.
Antibiotics and surgery being the other two.
And oh, by the way, just because we call it a vaccine doesn't mean it's awesome.
And especially if we are in an environment in which people are willing to play all sorts of games with words and slot anything over into vaccine space, oh, and at the same time start redefining what vaccine means and what vaccination means and what anti-vaxxer means.
Well, there's just no ability to communicate anything clearly, and so really it shouldn't be necessary for all sorts of people who aren't inherently biologists or don't want to be paying attention to this sort of thing to keep track of all the different types of things that are currently being called vaccines.
But for those of us who are dealing with both, you know, as everyone is, a global crisis, some of which is based in health and some of which is based in politics, and are trying to be clear And also don't simply have the position either that no vaccines are good, I want to stay away from all of them, or anything that you choose to call a vaccine is good and therefore shoot me up.
That vast middle ground is actually the scientifically rigorous place to be, and therefore we feel the need to talk through why both the mRNA and the adenovirus-vectored vaccines that were introduced, I think the adenovirus-vectored vaccines were also introduced with COVID, or did they Pre-exist COVID.
I can't say what's been done in other creatures, but for humans, I believe this is right too.
And certainly for mRNA, I mean, they were trying some stuff, but it wasn't working.
But with regard to the two, and I don't know if we're missing other categories, but so far we've talked about four categories of vaccines here today.
And the two categories of vaccines that pre-existed, that existed five years ago, being dead or parts of viruses or, you know, antigen.
You called them antigen vaccines.
And I'm not sure I've heard that, but it makes sense.
Versus live, also known as attenuated vaccines.
Of all of these, there is one and only one And it is the original one, right?
It is the original formulation of vaccines, I believe, right?
The attenuated or live vaccines that actually appear, given what Dr. Ben's past research has indicated, and what frankly well more than a century of research has indicated, to reduce all-cause mortality in those who receive them.
Right.
Now, I will say, the work on the live attenuated versus the killed virus vaccines and their relatives, I didn't know that that work existed.
I didn't know that anybody had done all-cause mortality work, and so it's not purely independent, but I will point out This is reflective of exactly the logic that you and I worked our way towards.
We figured this out.
This is what we predicted.
There's one aspect of this that I didn't predict, which is worth pointing out too, because the question is how good is the model?
I didn't predict a all-cause mortality benefit from generalized administration of a live virus vaccine.
Okay.
That's a little surprising to me, right?
That goes beyond the effect of- That goes beyond the target disease.
Yeah.
And that wasn't included in what you said.
So there's all-cause mortality that may increase because the benefit against that disease is so high.
Yes.
But all-cause mortality that is not fully explicable by the benefit in fighting the target disease.
On the target disease.
Right.
Terrific.
Hey, there are going to be other effects.
You're intervening in a layered series of complex systems with a therapy that's going to have multiple impacts, almost all of them negative in the case of the killed virus adjuvant vaccines that we did say, right?
That did seem very likely and turns out to be true.
The conclusion of this paper, which we should probably get to now, is equally interesting in this regard.
Yeah, so just reading from the paper, and you can show my screen if you'd like, Zach.
This is just from the abstract of the paper.
Where, though?
Here we go.
Sorry, I lost track, so I was going to read this earlier, and I'm not sure now which part of this to read, because there's a lot of numbers that are just going to drag on.
The short version I'm not sure which of this is the most relevant to read.
We can put up from the web page the Martin Kulldorff... Zach, could you give me my screen back so I can see my notes?
That would be terrific here.
Yeah, put that back up.
Thank you.
Scroll down to... there's a little... what is the term for that?
Matrix there, which I can't read at this distance.
I can't see it, I don't have this article.
So what we have here, so first of all there are constraints.
That's just because we said we were going to say.
Okay.
The two types of mRNA vaccines, it's the relative... Two types of COVID vaccines, one of them.
No, the two types of mRNA vaccines in the second row here, it's under the relative risk column that we're looking at, have the all-cause mortality is higher than among those who were Unvaccinated is, I believe, the comparison here.
It's 1.03, where 1 is the baseline rate, whereas for the adenovirus-factored vaccines, of which there are also two types, J&J and AstraZeneca, the relative risk also, which is sort of a stand-in for all-cause mortality, is 0.37, which is to say the adenovirus-factored vaccines reduce all-cause mortality Quite substantially, actually.
And the mRNA vaccines do not.
In fact, the numbers are so close as to effectively make it equal, although in fact it's slightly higher.
Well, there are certain nuances we have to add in order to understand what these numbers mean, but the basic pattern is the adenovirus-vectored vaccines substantially reduced all-cause mortality, as one would hope from any good vaccine, and the mRNA vaccines, the lipid nanoparticle-vectored vaccines, very slightly, and maybe not importantly, increased all-cause mortality.
So, and I should point out, in Dr. Ben's interview, which I suggest everybody look at on UnHerd, we will provide a link to it, she is very clear on the fact that both types of vaccine appeared to reduce COVID significantly.
So, to the extent that the mRNA vaccines have actually increased the amount of mortality Right.
What it says is that they are doing some kind of harm that more than compensates for the benefit that people got from the reduction in the amount of COVID.
Now, I am cautious about this whole realm because the studies that were being looked at were studies that were done by the manufacturers.
And so the question is how Scrupulous were the manufacturers and a lot of the work suggests maybe not so scrupulous.
So was there a COVID benefit?
Probably, but we don't really know because there's lots of reason to wonder what happened here.
But the point is, the all-cause mortality number is much harder to game, right?
People either died or they didn't, and they were either in the placebo group or the treatment group.
Exactly.
And the point is, those numbers are actually, short of outright fraud, those numbers allow you to do this kind of analysis.
And they suggest that there is a massive difference between the adenovirus-vectored vaccines and the mRNA vaccines.
Furthermore, actually, it hadn't occurred to me until just now as you were talking, you know, what a vaccine is supposed to do and what these vaccines particularly do has been changing.
Like, they have just been changing our expectations about what we should demand of vaccines from the moment that we first had access or were hearing about them and then had access to them through now.
And a number of us are, you know, throwing up the alarm over this, but for the most part, people are like, oh, well, they never said it would reduce death.
It's just supposed to reduce symptoms and make it less bad for you, which of course is not true.
That is not nothing they ever said.
However, this suggests it doesn't matter.
So as much as we have been talking for a very long time about focusing only on mortality with regard to COVID is too narrow a scope.
That long COVID is real, and there's a lot of things that might be passing under long COVID that aren't that, and might be vaccine effects, and this, that, and the other.
But, you know, there is real stuff there, and this, of course, being a frankenvirus, we don't know.
We cannot predict with as much specificity or reliability what it's going to do in the future, because it didn't evolve in A cave in bats, right?
And it evolved through serial passage research in a lab maybe with ferrets.
So, you know, that changes expectations about what to predict next.
But regardless, regardless of what other benefits it may or may not be providing, if the mortality is the same-ish, then that is the bottom line.
Well, okay.
The mortality is The same-ish as if you were not vaccinated against COVID with these vaccines at all.
Right.
So, in principle, I agree that almost everything ought to show up in the all-cause mortality data.
With the caveat that we need longer time.
Well, that's where I'm going next.
Part of the problem here, right, is that one of the things that is most troubling about the way, and there are many troubling things about the way the manufacturers ran their tests, but one of the things that is most troubling is that at the point that they had early numbers that they claimed said that these things were spectacularly effective at preventing COVID and very, very safe, What they did is they vaccinated their control group, right?
Now, were you, forget what these people actually were up to, were you a corrupt pharmaceutical manufacturer interested in hiding harms done by your vaccines?
Vaccinating your control group is what you would do in order to obscure that.
So, not saying that that's why this was done, but I am saying That basically there is a predictable loophole in the logic of science as it is applied to clinical trials.
And the loophole comes in the form of, should you be in the lucky position of discovering a treatment That is so effective and so safe that everybody should want it then you are morally obligated to treat your controls because denying it to them would be unfair, right?
Now given that we know that that's the way the Moral rules of clinical trials work, shooting for that outcome.
In other words, this is a perverse incentive.
If only we can get to the place where these things look super safe and super effective, then we get to vaccinate our controls.
Then anything that isn't safe about it will disappear, right?
Which then, of course, fits with the bizarre fervor to vaccinate every damn person, right?
Which also eliminates the natural control group that comes from the fact that a lot of us are, you know, go slow, you're intervening in a complex system, hesitant here.
So, in any case, the point is, this study, this study done by Dr. Ben and her colleagues is compromised by their own analysis, by the fact that the data they were working from has a very short time horizon because of the way it was collected and then stopped being collected because the control group disappears.
Compromised through no fault of their own, and there's nothing they can do about it.
Right.
And in fact, the data do not exist.
What they've said is that actually we should be testing these things in a way that we can compare them directly.
And in fact, we couldn't do that here, and that's unfortunate.
But the other point that I want to make is that what that means is that there are two problems with the numbers that we have for all-cause mortality here.
One of them is that we don't really know all cause mortality because what you should be doing is tracking the treatment group and the control group two years out, five years out, 10 years, 20 years and then you know ideally what you'd want to know is the ultimate longevity of the people who did and did not get this treatment and then we could say something about what its net effect was using mortality as a proxy for
Good and bad health effects, but we can't do that here because a it hasn't been very long So even if they had not vaccinated the control group and these numbers were continuing to inform us It still hasn't been very long But it's way worse than that because they rushed these things to market having vaccinated the control group which robs us of the ability to say anything about Effects even a couple of years out.
Yeah, so that that is a significant factor.
So my point is 1.03 is just barely over 1, right?
Yeah.
It's probably meaningless in terms of it having increased the risk of death.
However, you know what that doesn't contain?
It doesn't contain anything about the increase in the rate of cancer that some people believe derives from the mRNA vaccines.
Right.
So, the point is, let's say that cancer is one of the outgrowths, that these things are carcinogenic in some way.
Well then the point is all of that increase in mortality will be absent from this study and will show up later.
So the point is 1.03 isn't terribly bad.
It is conspicuous in the following way.
Sorry that this is so complicated, but I think it's important to think of it this way.
Okay, you've got a number in which the amount of mortality with the mRNA vaccines was slightly elevated over the amount of mortality in people who didn't get them but were otherwise matched, right?
So close.
Effectively the same.
Effectively the same, right?
However, what that means, to the extent that these vaccines appear to provide a benefit from COVID, That means that they did harm of some other kind, like cardiovascular.
And here's the point.
If you knew that, if the work had been done well, right?
And you knew, okay, these vaccines create a benefit in terms of COVID and mortality downstream from it, and they create a harm by inducing other pathologies.
The absolutely obvious thing to do Is to not administer them to everybody, right?
Those who's at risk comes primarily from COVID might warrant the thing and those who have very low risk from COVID should be protected from them, you know, at the very least given the other vaccine, right?
So, the fact that we are not in a position to say, look, the thing has an effect on COVID as predicted, as far as we know, right?
Maybe not, but it seems to have some benefit for COVID.
It has some cost that nobody who isn't at risk from COVID should be exposed to.
And the all-cause mortality could be driven way down by not vaccinating people who get no benefit on the COVID side and have only risk from the, let's say, cardiovascular side.
Right?
That's the obvious thing to do.
And the fact that, you know, we're playing some stupid game where the idea is Vaccines good.
Who are they good for?
People.
Let's give them to everyone, right?
I'm sorry, that's just not the way this logic ever worked.
Right now, and let's not even pretend to do science and definitely get rid of the control group.
Definitely get right.
Yeah, and I do want to come back full circle actually on something that you were going to talk about before we really introduced all of this.
Zach, if you scroll... I do remember this piece now.
I think it came out a couple weeks ago.
If you scroll to the bottom of what you've got on our screen and show the audience as well, the bottom of this Article.
Yeah, we'll go up a little bit.
So, okay.
Let me go down a little bit more.
So I have it on my screen now.
Okay, now up a little bit.
Here we go.
Some may criticize the Danish study for not yet being peer-reviewed, but it has been.
It was peer-reviewed by me and several colleagues, and all of us have decades of experience with these types of studies.
That it has not yet been peer-reviewed by anonymous journal reviewers is inconsequential.
That is exactly the same argument that we made about vaccines, right?
You know, peer review is this idea that may or may not be the best way to go about actually assessing whether or not a scientific result is likely to be replicable and rigorous, and therefore the result is likely to stand for a while.
What is What is not true is that invoking peer review therefore makes you scientifically literate or indicates that the thing that was peer reviewed is therefore definitely true.
Same thing for vaccines, right?
Just because the concept has in its birth something awesome about it does not mean that the way it is currently being used either has any relationship with that origin, or that it is being used appropriately by the people saying it.
I thought this was just brilliant.
This is, again, Martin Koldorf saying, yeah, people who don't know what they're talking about will say, this research is just a preprint, it's not peer-reviewed, therefore I can ignore it.
And he's saying, you know what, I'm as good an arbiter as any, and he doesn't say it, but I will go ahead and say, like, he's probably a much better arbiter than almost everyone, if not anyone else.
He's peer-reviewed it.
He's assessed the research.
He's better at it than we are.
We don't do this research.
We're merely sort of, you know, biologists in not even a particularly adjacent field going like, okay, we can read science, and we can assess this, and we can also read other scientists who are assessing it going like, I assessed it.
That's what peer review is.
Therefore, not to say that there are errors, and he actually goes through sort of the weaknesses, and he doesn't point to the authors of the Ben study at all.
He says, given the data they were working with, which is the fault of the trials done by the pharmaceutical companies who did them, given the data they were working with, they did as bang up a job as you could possibly expect.
Right, and I want to make clear though, you're right.
He is definitely in a better position to peer review this because this is his field, right?
What we did was what our job is, right?
We went through the evolutionary logic and I've pointed to the place that I think we missed something that turns out to be true and clear, right?
The potential benefit for vaccination with live virus vaccines.
You have heard us say, actually, there is a huge schedule of vaccines that people get.
What are the chances that it's all going to be good, right?
So the question is, you know, hey, it turns out to be a much stronger signal than we might have even expected, but it goes in the direction that we pointed out.
And clarifying, and simplifying, right?
It's not just, oh, I have to somehow figure out, I have to know.
It's like, actually, we are presented here by Ben's former research.
Uh, given a choice, um, you know, especially, so is it, I think it was polio and typhoid, and that both have an oral version and a non-oral version, and one of them is live attenuated, and one of them is adjuvant-rich, you know, dead, and, you know, go with the live attenuated.
Right.
When given a choice.
Okay, so our model worked well there.
We figured out a pattern, and the pattern is stronger than even I would have guessed.
Okay, that's good.
That's, you know, Potentially a little compromised because that work existed before we did our logic, so it's impossible to know whether we were in some way informed by it, although certainly never encountered the work until now.
However, on the front of the current COVID vaccines, right, you and I also at length went through the logic here, and what we came up with was we are concerned about the hazard of both of these technologies but if we had to get one it would be the adenovirus vector one.
Why adenovirus vector?
Why?
Because A One dose, which actually should have been a clue to us about the effectiveness of it alerting the immune system, but the adenovirus-vectored vaccine is one dose, and the lipid nanoparticles are clearly concerning with respect to
Their ability to get into cells and then the likelihood of them causing the attack of those cells by the immune system, which would surely read the cells that were making the spike protein as virally infected, which might be true of the adenovirus-vectored vaccines too, but it's not likely to be a random distribution which could land in your heart or some other circulatory tissue.
So, I don't know.
These numbers suggest A net benefit to the adenovirus-vectored vaccines, whereas no benefit to the others at a net level.
We don't know how that looks over the long term.
It's still possible that the adenovirus-vectored vaccines are net negative if you look over a longer time horizon.
However, we did get the logic Right about which one to bet on from the point of view of reducing the risks of intervening in a complex system in a new and unknown way.
And so in any case, I think it reflects well on what we were doing, and given the amount of crap we've taken over what we were doing, those who have given us that crap I think now have the burden of explaining how it is that we guessed these things if we weren't actually doing the logic correctly.
Right.
I would have to agree with that.
Shall we move to another topic?
Sure.
Slightly?
All right.
You, the audience, will not be surprised to hear us advocating that you should get yourself outside.
Get outside.
We have been saying from the very beginning, this has been one of our drum beats, one of our mantras, from long before we were here, before you talking about any of this.
And some of that is for reasons that we can point to, and some of it is for reasons that we don't exactly point to but allude to in many ways in, for instance, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, in which we say, you know what?
There are things that humans have been doing for, depending on exactly what system you're talking about and how long you want to count, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, you know, billions of years, depending, right?
And some of those things, we know some of the pieces, parts of what it is that the benefits are, but some of them are likely to bring with them benefits that actually we can't, we don't yet fully know.
We maybe can't even yet ever know.
And if we try to disassociate the benefits from the package in which they have historically come to us, we may in fact negate or even reverse the benefits.
So getting outside, I think, turns out to be one of these.
So I'm going to set this up in a sort of a little somewhat counter- counterintuitive way, because it appears at first to maybe run counter to some things that we've talked about, but I think ultimately it doesn't.
So we will link to a YouTube video on the YouTube channel MedCram called, The Vitamin D Paradox in COVID-19 and Why It Predicts but Doesn't Always Protect.
Now, we of course have talked a lot about the benefits of vitamin D. Brett did an excellent conversation with one preeminent vitamin D researcher and someone who's a little bit more recently to the game, but they had a ton of information and we've also talked with them.
I've written up a fairly long thing on my sub stack about the benefits of vitamin D and why, unlike actually what we wrote in our book, This is one of the few cases where we think actually supplementation that you know taking the little the piece and and taking it into your body that way will be beneficial.
And you know one of the reasons that we argue for our change in opinion is that unlike almost all of the other things that you might supplement your diet with, those are things that you normally could be getting from a whole food nutrient-dense, closer to, you know, its origin diet, whereas vitamin D for the vast majority of humans, for the vast majority of our history, have gotten most of our vitamin D from synthesizing it through the skin from the sun.
I'll add one thing.
Yes.
I think we have been perfectly consistent and I hope clear every time we have discussed it that even though we have argued in favor of supplementation as something that is quite safe and potentially useful and for those of us who live in the temperate zones very likely beneficial because we tend to be deficient, strongly tend to be deficient, we have never once argued that you wouldn't be better off getting this through photosynthesis Right.
So we've been clear about that.
The basic point is failing at getting enough of it from the Sun, supplementation is likely to be valuable.
That's right.
So we have, for instance, I'm going to just say I'm going to ask you to quickly show a couple of things on my screen, but then kind of go off of them quickly.
We have A paper that finds here, uh, pre-infection 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 levels in association with severity of COVID-19 illness.
If I may have my screen back, thanks.
Sorry, I didn't get to printing everything out this week, so I don't have a backup.
Um, which finds that, uh, so that first paper finds that people with low vitamin D levels before illness are more likely to have bad COVID outcomes.
Okay, we have a RCT here, a randomized control trial, they're calling it randomized clinical trial, that finds, here's the title, efficacy and safety of vitamin D supplementation to prevent COVID-19 in frontline healthcare workers, and they find that yes, there is a benefit to that.
And however, we have another RCT, which is the one the MedCram video shows and talks about, which is called here.
Zach, you can show my screen just briefly.
This is a pre-print.
It doesn't look the same.
Vitamin D supplements for prevention of COVID-19 or other acute respiratory infections.
A phase 3 randomized control trial And what they find, surprisingly, is conclusions of the abstract.
Among adults with a high baseline prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency, implementation of a test-and-treat approach to vitamin D replacement did not reduce risk of all-cause ARI, which is going to be like acute respiratory infection, or COVID-19.
They found that baseline vitamin D levels increased, but that That responses to other acute respiratory infections or COVID-19 were not improved.
So that runs counter to the previous RCT that I showed.
And, you know, there's a lot of, you know, maybe there are other contributing factors.
Maybe the fact that it wasn't very high dosage vitamin D, it was in like, I don't remember, it was like 3,200 IUs per day.
They didn't give a bolus dose, as Dr. Benskin has suggested is important.
Although the RCT that did find a benefit and the Mexican health care workers also didn't use a bolus dose.
There are a lot of factors here, right?
But it does seem like there may be something additional going on.
And here I just want to show, and actually Zach if you could put up that first screenshot that I sent you.
So I've just got Yep, so the files are numbered, but they should have come in in the numbered order.
And here we go.
This is from, again, this MedCram video that I will link to as well, in which the guy talking whose name I've forgotten, I apologize, It says, okay, being outside versus inside has more than one effect.
It's not just about UV.
And of course, it's the UV light that converts, that basically photosynthesizes, although I'm always nervous about using that term with humans, but that photosynthesizes into vitamin D in the skin in humans.
So yes, we have, if you're outside, you have higher UV, and then you have more production of vitamin D, and that is true.
Also, however, when you're outside, you have higher levels of near-infrared radiation exposure.
And what that causes, and I'm going to explain a little bit more about this, although I'm not going to go into all of the kind of, frankly, exciting stuff that I've been learning in the last 24 hours about this, higher levels of intracellular melatonin.
That's intracellular melatonin, which is different from the circulating melatonin produced by the pineal gland, which is the thing that we think of when we think of melatonin.
When we think of melatonin, we think of it being like the nighttime hormone and it's circulating, it's produced by the pineal gland.
Intracellular melatonin is produced by mitochondria and actually appears to mitigate and modulate a lot of things about health, including respiration and metabolism and homeostasis.
All right, so I just want to go evolutionary biologist here on this a little bit.
Not surprising to see the same molecule show up in two radically different mechanisms because basically the point is it's a signal molecule and it works at a distance and it also works in close proximity and the physiology of the body can simply You wouldn't expect it to come up with a whole new signal because the point is the signal has already evolved and it can be repurposed.
And this is something that actually, it's not infrequent to see this kind of thing.
In fact, neurotransmitters often work on various different systems.
And then this is in fact yet another example of how our reductionist thinking like, oh, oh, I figured out melatonin.
We got it.
We know what it's for.
Okay, I think we are correct that we know one of the things that it is for, and even that language makes me nervous.
But, you know, apparently the melatonin that is produced by the pineal gland that ends up circulating does appear to be for, in quotes, helping to modulate circadian rhythms and sleep-wake patterns.
But melatonin, the molecule, when produced intracellularly by the mitochondria and does not circulate, appears to be about dealing with antioxidants and basically involving a lot of cellular health.
It's the same molecule, it's in a different place, it's produced in a different way under different circumstances, and it's doing a different job.
And both of those jobs are necessary for us, but they're not the same job.
So it cleans up basically free radicals.
That is at least, that is one of the things that we now understand.
And by we, I mean these researchers who have not, it's not very old research.
Yeah.
This is pretty new.
Like we, the scientific community, has understood melatonin as like the sleep molecule, circulating, helps entrain wake sleep cycles for a pretty long time.
And I don't know if by long time I mean decades or closing in on a century.
But this other function of melatonin is newer to us, the scientific community and humanity at large.
So I will just throw into the mix here that one of the those who have dared to generate treatment, early treatment protocols for COVID have had melatonin on the list and it has been a head-scratcher for me.
Why would this be?
And in fact, I think in a previous live stream, I think we talked about the question of whether or not that is an effect of the molecule or it is an effect of the benefit of sleep, which is well understood to be an important contributor to immunity.
And is it related that one of the main symptoms of COVID is deep fatigue?
I don't know.
I don't, you know, I don't know which of these things might be connected or not, but it does seem like there are a number of connections here.
That's really interesting.
Right.
Also raises interesting Welcome to Complex Systems style questions.
Yeah.
So just like for, like I'm actually, this is brand new to me, but it's even brander new to Brett.
Like Brett, this is the first time I've, I told you I want to talk about this and I'm not going to give you the I'm not going to tell you what it says, so this is brand new to you right now.
Yeah, brand new.
So the question then is, well, A, there are certain things we know now.
You might intuit from your own experience, but we know now from scientific work that actually there are certain elements of repair that require you to be
Dormant right right so that you know the advice to you know Take lots of fluids and get sleep is about more than just you know not having better advice to give you but it provides an opportunity to do things and thereby you know not sleeping denies your body the opportunity to do things increases the risk of Negative health impacts, but the question I guess is if you were you know if you had a hormone like like melatonin
That triggered sleep and there were some aspect of oxidant control that was better deployed during sleep.
In other words, if there are, you know, a trade-off between, you know, what your body prioritizes when awake and therefore, you know.
Well, so one of the things that I'm learning, and this is, again, new to me, even newer to you, but new to me, is that it is now proposed, and there is some research evidence to support this, that basically near-infrared radiation triggers the intracellular production of melatonin by mitochondria, and it tends to produce an excess, which is then held in reserve for those moments when there's not enough.
That would be consistent, potentially, with what you're talking about.
It would also be, let's see, I was just going to go one other place, but actually this may prompt me to remember the thing I was just going to say.
If you could show that second screenshot, Zach, which should just be the next one that I sent you, which relates to a decrease in full sunlight exposure in humans from 1800 to the present day.
So this this is extraordinary and this is actually um borrowed you can for those of you watching you see at the bottom the Zimmerman and writer paper 2019 which I'm going to read to you a little bit from um but this this screenshot is from the MedCram video and actually can you show that on our smaller screen Zach so I can see it although I obviously oh no it's okay I'll just pull it up if I if I can find it but I need to talk for a moment here while I find this thing because it's going to take me a while Um, nope, wrong one.
Um...
Yeah, there we go.
Okay, so let me just find my notes again.
We have, and I'll just walk us through it for those listening and even for those watching.
We have the two, the blue and the red.
Blue is visible spectrum light and red is near-infrared spectrum light.
And one, oh I know, one of the things that I learned today is that near-infrared spectrum light, A, goes through clothes.
And is highly reflective off of foliage.
So even if you're dressed and in shade, if you are outside, you are still getting near-infrared spectrum light if the sun is up.
Okay?
So this is not true for UV for the most part, right?
So what we have done as humans is focused on that which we can see, right?
That which we can sense.
And that of course is defined exactly as the visible spectrum.
We named it.
It's the visible spectrum for us.
It's of course not the same part of the spectrum that's visible for bees and snakes and other things.
But the visible spectrum is that which we can see directly, infrared being off one side, ultraviolet being off the other side of it.
All of it, though, the electromagnetic spectrum that we receive from the Sun brings value that we have only begun to perceive.
So in 1800, We were getting, there's no y-axis on this, but two and a half times as much near-infrared light as visible light because we were about 50% outside and we were also getting it from campfires.
So campfires give you near-infrared as well.
Isn't that beautiful?
Isn't that a lovely little thing for us who like to talk about campfire both Literal and metaphorical.
A metaphorical campfire doesn't provide you infrared light, but literal campfires do.
Actually, it can make you hot under the collar.
Not the same thing, though.
Really not.
So, by 1950, the visible spectrum light that humans, and presumably we're talking about weird humans, you know, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, etc., We're getting was lower, but also so was the near-infrared light on account of we had light bulbs, which we didn't have in 1800, but they're 100% incandescent, which do emit near-infrared.
And we were using plain glass windows in our windows, which let 25% or so of the near-infrared through.
Oh no, actually that's supposed to be on a different line.
Plain glass windows, which let a certain amount, I don't remember the percentage, of the near-infrared through.
And the estimate is we're spending about 25% of our time outdoors.
By 1990, we've begun to move into fluorescent.
Fluorescent does not emit near infrared, and we've still got plain glass windows, which are letting some of the infrared through, and we're spending less time outdoors.
And by The present time, we've got 100% visible only light bulbs with LEDs and OLEDs and compact fluorescents.
So we're phasing out incandescence even though everyone knows they feel better with incandescent lights, right?
And part of why they feel better, I'm going to posit, and I'm sure this is partially true, is that because they are emitting this near-infrared light, which we are completely deficient in, We now have low-E glass windows, which are great if what your priority is is to decrease energy loss, and therefore decrease your energy bills, and you know, decrease how much we need to rely on whatever your energy source is.
But if energy cost is the only priority, and it's measurable, you can measure how much energy loss there is, And no one has yet figured out, as we hadn't until recently, this thing, and who knows how many other things we haven't figured out, how human health will suffer as a result of low-E windows.
What you've done with the low-E windows is you've also reduced the near-infrared light that's getting through them to zero, and we're spending, this estimate is roughly 7% of our time outdoors.
Our near-infrared light exposure is staggeringly low.
And if we go outside, even if we're clothed, even if we're under some cover, we are getting near infrared light.
And so at some level, I'm going to continue to go on, but get outside!
Get outside and don't assume that the vitamin D supplement, which yes, especially in northern temperate winters and southern temperate winters, the opposite time of year, are likely to be helpful.
But it's not The only thing that you should be doing.
All right, that's fascinating.
Is your mind blown?
My mind is blown.
Yeah.
I will say that one, you know, if we keep saying near infrared, then we sort of obscure what's actually happening here, which is that we are getting more and more efficient.
And the point is... You mean our technology, in terms of our built environment?
Yes.
What I mean is, you think, just like with milk, right?
What is breast milk?
It's food.
Hey, we can replace food with other food.
Well, what if it's more than... Food is food.
Vaccines are vaccines.
Peer review is peer review.
Right, exactly.
And so the point is, the joke The joke, all of us who have, you know, worked on anything with a limited energy budget, the joke is that an incandescent bulb is a heater that happens to put out some light.
Right.
Right?
It's terrifically wasteful.
Yeah.
And so as you... I was like, oh, ow!
Why did I just try to unscrew a bulb that was just on?
Try that with an LED, it's fine.
Well, LEDs are somewhat, you know, CFLs are...
First of all, I should say, as you know, I've been ranting about CFLs for decades.
These things were never green.
They are efficient, but they were never green and they were never healthy.
They were a disaster and the idea that people have had these things in their homes and been breaking them and releasing mercury and not realizing how much mercury they had just Put it in their environment.
It's insane, right?
That was a con.
LEDs are way better, but still.
I mean, this is branding.
Like, oh, call it green.
You'll get a lot of people to buy it.
It's like, actually, there are a lot of us who really do give a damn, who really do care, and are not buying your tokenism of like, if we call it green, you're going to buy it because we know you're that much of a sucker.
Well, actually, this goes to one of your themes, you know, the tyranny of metrics thing, which is to the extent that we can measure something like how much coal has to be burned at the plant in order to make this light bulb put up enough light to do your work, the answer is yes, EFL is pretty good.
Right?
If you were going to do the equivalent of the all-cause mortality thing, it's a freaking disaster, right?
It misinforms your pineal gland.
It puts mercury in the environment all over the goddamn place.
It messes up your sleep cycles.
It's a disaster.
And as it turns out, it reduces your access further to near-infrared, which is Uh, important for dealing with the oxidants that you are generating because you got a crap diet and a bad lifestyle, which is also fed to you by, uh, you know, we moderns are living the greatest life imaginable.
It's like, in some ways, yes, but that doesn't mean we have to buy every, every solution that is handed to us because many of them are bad and some of them are bad and we don't know why yet, but if we are thinking, not sure about that one, maybe trust your instinct and think on it more.
Right, so I'm curious about all kinds of net impacts here, right?
So I'm particularly struck, I did not see coming the low E window thing.
The low E window thing, which maybe I don't understand something about this, but my guess is it's going to work in the opposite direction based on whether you're primarily losing energy to a hot outside environment or a cold outside environment, right?
Like if you're I don't know if it will work.
My prediction would not be that it would work in the opposite direction, but that you would have just a lower reduction in infrared if you are trying to keep heat in as opposed to keep heat out, but I may be wrong about that.
It seems to me that there are two things in play, and you know, I am officially way out of my depth here.
But the window, what do they call them?
We're both looking over there like, will it reveal its name?
No, it will not reveal its name to us.
- The evil pain, they have some, there's some term that they use in the industry.
You know, you blow one of these things. - We're both looking over there like, will it reveal its name?
No, it will not reveal its name to us. - Perhaps if we shout at it.
But those sealed units, right?
Those, that's an insulative.
Which like, and, and double paned with a, with a gas in between.
With a gap, with a gap and it's not.
Well, not just a gap, but like often, isn't there specifically a gas?
I don't remember what.
An inert gas.
Right.
I've forgotten what it is.
Might be nitrogen.
But, um, but anyway, the point is those sealed, uh, windows are obviously insulative and they're insulative, you know.
The old joke, I'll spare you the joke, but the Catholic priest, the Protestant minister, and the rabbi are discussing what the greatest invention of all time is.
They haven't walked into a bar?
They're just talking?
Oh, they're definitely in a bar.
- Okay. - And the Catholic priest says it's the printing press.
The Catholic priest says it's the printing press I'm apparently not going to spare you the joke.
The Catholic priest says it's the printing press because it allows knowledge to be distributed over vast distances, you know, enlightening the world.
The minister says, no, no, no, it's the wheel which allows the burden of man to be greatly reduced in the facilitation of his work.
And the rabbi says, no, it's the thermos bottle.
And they look at him and they say, well, what's so great about the thermos bowl?
He says, well, it keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.
And they say, and?
He said, well, how does it know?
Um, okay.
But anyway, the point is.
Yeah.
The point is.
For those just listening, I was laughing.
You were laughing.
I think they heard you.
They heard you.
Um, but.
Anyway, the point is, the window is insulating, and it could be keeping your near-infrared generated by whatever heat generator you've got in your house in, in which case it could be a benefit.
It does raise all sorts of questions, too, about what of the types of heating that we have in our homes are generating near-infrared.
I'm sure this is known, whether or not what is known is accurate, but I didn't have time to look into it.
It feels to me like radiant heat is maybe going to be... I don't think so.
I don't think so for the following reason.
Let's say you have hydronic floors.
Hydronic comes in multiple.
You can have radiators.
You can have radiators high on your wall.
You can have tubes on the floor.
Let's talk about the floor.
One of the things that's actually good about radiating radiant heat in your floor is that you don't actually have to heat the whole space in order for the human to get it because for one thing the human tends to be on the floor rather than the ceiling.
You heat the solids rather than the gas.
Right.
You get thermal mass.
Right.
And the other thing is if you're like us and you're shoe free then you're picking up a lot of heat through your feet and so your blood is warmed and you feel warm even if the room is a bit colder than it might be.
And so the point is, well, that doesn't give you very much of the benefit that is predicted by this result here, because that result is about your entire body being irradiated.
And so I would guess that hydronic floors are actually probably not so hot with respect to your near-infrared well-being.
Yeah, well, and I just barely got into it, but I'm not going to say much about it here except to say that the awesome Rhonda Patrick has written a paper and done a video on this same med cram.
The paper with co-author Johnson called Sauna Use as a Lifestyle Practice to Extend Healthspan actually published in Experimental Gerontology, which is where your Teal and Mary work was published back in the day, and this is just a brand new paper, 2021.
So anyway, this of course leads to what might begin to explain all of the very many health benefits that we are now coming to understand about sauna, and what kinds of sauna, what kinds of regularity, all of this.
Well, this does lead down that road, and we're not going to go there today because I didn't have time to fully explore it.
But imagine you knew, right?
Yeah.
You know, that you had, instead of the tyrannometrics bullshit where you've got like, well, how many lumens does it put out?
Right.
You've got like, well, what's its net effect on my life?
Right.
Right.
This bulb, you know, if we could end up back at Tungsten.
Yep.
And, you know, you might live longer and happier and all of that and sleep better.
All those things.
Totally.
Okay, so the Zimmerman and Reiter paper that resulted, I wish that we were talking about, with the decrease in near-infrared radiation that we're being exposed to over time since basically before the Industrial Revolution, since we've moved more and more inside with more and more protection from the sun, they proposed what we've now already been talking about, but their hypothesis, this is published in 2019, Let me just give a little backup.
Melatonin and sunlight are linked, we know this, but melatonin comes in two forms.
I've already said this, but I just want to be very sort of formal about it.
Circulatory and subcellular, which have very different relationships with the sun.
So the hypothesis that they propose in this 2019 paper that's published in the journal that I had never heard of before called Melatonin Research is, circulatory melatonin is produced in response to the absence of sunlight And subcellular melatonin is produced in response to the presence of sunlight, which itself is, you know, remarkable that the same hormone is going to be produced by opposite triggers.
It's the same input and it's with a binary state of yes there is or no there isn't and in each of those states a different source of the melatonin is triggered to produce it.
Now I will bet that there is a It's an elegant story that unites these things, that it's not just contradictory, but it's a little bit like, you know, the result that the triggering of your body by adrenaline activates certain things.
It speeds up your mental processing, for example, and shuts down your gut, right?
Is it an up regulator or a down regulator?
Well, I'm running from that scary thing regulator.
And the point is some things get put off in that circumstance and other things get amped up.
And my guess is going to be that the reason that melatonin is showing up in both places and the reason that the pattern is inverse is going to be one of these like, hey, that's your awake system and then etc.
By the way, your awake system would need to know something about your asleep system and vice versa.
Right, exactly.
So here's just a couple of paragraphs from near the end of this 2019 paper published in Melatonin Research, and you can show my screen if you like, Zach.
Sunlight and the optical properties of our surroundings guaranteed that for millions of years, most cells in the human body, especially in children, were always exposed to predominantly near-infrared photons during the day, and for 600,000 years as groups gathered around the campfire in the evening before bedtime.
This continued for the last 150 years based on the excessive amounts of near-infrared radiation emitted by incandescent bulbs.
50 years ago, fluorescent bulbs started to eliminate near-infrared from the artificial environment, but the incandescent lights continue to provide near-infrared, especially in homes.
Recent government mandates have begun a process that will, for the first time in the history of our species, eliminate most of the near-infrared exposure that once dominated.
These changes are being driven by government mandates and will be universally implemented over the next couple of decades.
With 90% of our time under artificial lighting and in front of displays that emit zero near-infrared, and with near-infrared blocking window treatments preventing near-infrared from entering our offices, schools, and homes, modern societies have created near-infrared caves.
As figure S9 illustrates, most researchers are aware that we are eliminating night by exposing ourselves to excessive amounts of visible emission in our signage, streetlights, headlights, lighting, computer screens, and displays.
What most researchers do not realize is that for the first time, 70% of the spectrum emitted by the sun in the form of near-infrared is being eliminated from our lives during the day.
Just one more thing.
As the Roundup lawsuits clearly illustrate, there is an added level of responsibility and liability associated with globally altering the public's environment.
As shown above, the human body has evolved and adapted processes based on the assumption that it is exposed daily to a single, predominantly near-infrared broadband fixed emitter, the sun.
That assumption is no longer valid.
Over the next several decades, the government will convert all lighting to visible-only emitters with little understanding as to the long-term health consequences.
Or stated otherwise, hyper-novelty is a cold bitch.
And I thought actually, there's much more to do here, but I thought actually to read the epilogue to our book here because it fits.
We didn't know this when we wrote this book.
This is Hunter Cather's Guide to the 21st Century.
We didn't know what I just read here.
Oh, actually, one more.
Just show that final screenshot from the MedCram video, Zach, if you would, before I read the epilogue here.
He says, we need to start doing randomized control trials on sunshine exposure.
Being outside.
And wouldn't that be a thing?
Yeah.
Right?
Wouldn't that be a thing?
And it would be cruel and inhuman to restrict some people to inside if almost everyone weren't doing that to themselves already anyway.
Right?
Okay.
This is the afterword.
It's just two pages from Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
In January of 2020, so just a reminder, we submitted the first draft of this book in March of 2020, just before lockdowns began from COVID.
And of course it went through, you know, a number of reviews and edits and such.
But this book was written, the vast bulk of this book was written before COVID was a known thing, but the afterward was written afterwards.
In January of 2020, we went to the Tipitini Biodiversity Station in the Ecuadoran Amazon to finish our first draft of this book.
When we emerged from our isolation, as our phones came alive for the first time in two weeks, we were confronted with a barrage of news, mostly trivial, of which we had been blissfully unaware.
But in that onslaught, there was one ominous report, a case of a novel coronavirus in Ecuador.
The pathogen came from horseshoe bats, had jumped to people, and then spread rapidly, first in Wuhan, China, and then beyond.
As the two of us tried to make sense of these first hints of pandemic, it quickly became clear that there might be more to the story.
Wuhan, we soon learned, housed a BSL-4 laboratory.
It was, in fact, one of our planet's two main centers of research on bat-borne coronaviruses.
These viruses were being studied in Wuhan in North Carolina because of fear among scientists that such viruses could jump to people and, without very much evolutionary change, cause a dangerous pandemic.
If nothing else, the fact of the pandemic having begun in one of two cities where these viruses had been under intensive study seemed a spectacular coincidence.
As of the writing of this note in late May 2021, the consensus in the scientific establishment, including national and international regulators, and in the mainstream press that follows them, has finally shifted to one of grudging acceptance of the obvious.
I will say that it has since shifted backwards somewhat.
SARS-CoV-2 may well have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the COVID-19 pandemic might therefore be for humanity an entirely self-inflicted wound.
The strength of this hypothesis is something we have been discussing on our podcast, Dark Horse, since April of 2020.
Those discussions caused a great deal of derision and stigma to be directed at us, and it is a bewildering relief to watch the world suddenly come around to the plausibility of this well-supported, if unfortunate, explanation.
But no matter what humanity ultimately concludes about this pandemic's origin, there is a deeper truth hovering just outside our collective awareness.
COVID-19 is a product of technology, no matter what path it took to humans.
Consider this fact.
From the beginning of the pandemic, the virus showed essentially zero capacity to transmit outside.
Put another way, COVID-19 is a disease of buildings, cars, ships, trains, and airplanes.
More than 99% of the Earth's surface is a COVID-safe zone.
Even in your own backyard, the virus will struggle mightily to infect anyone.
It has no meaningful impact unless you caught it before you walked out.
In the park, on the balcony, at the beach, we are, at least for now, immune.
The dependence of the virus on enclosed spaces also means that, had humanity agreed to avoid these vectoring environments for a few weeks, the pandemic could have been quickly brought to a halt.
But this scenario in which we free ourselves and lock down dangerous environments instead is little more than an idle thought experiment.
Even though in evolutionary terms these dangerous environments are all brand new to humans, the idea of humanity staying outside of them even for just a few weeks is unthinkable.
Many individuals could do it, but the majority would be at a total loss, even though we evolved outside and despite the fact that most of our ancestors would have spent every hour of their lives in what we now strangely call the outdoors.
We have forgotten the skills we once knew so well.
That knowledge of and comfort with our natural environment has been replaced with a different skill set, one tuned to pursuing value and avoiding harm in a synthetic environment of our own device.
Our cognitive software has been rewritten, and we have forgotten too much to ever again be what we were.
As a result, we are condemned to battle this pathogen in bespoke environments on which we and it have both grown to depend.
That's the view on the ground, but the human dimension of this pandemic is even clearer from 30,000 feet, or more accurately, at 30,000 feet.
For it is the way that we have begun to travel that really set us up for pathogenic disaster.
SARS-CoV-2 crossed oceans in hours and it didn't pioneer some ingenious new mode.
Where once an epidemic might have been held back by barriers that limit human travel, humans now regularly transmit communicable diseases from their continents of origin to every corner of the globe.
Much as people thought little about washing their hands prior to the germ theory of disease, we give no thought to the scale of misery caused by a given person transporting a new and nameless cold virus to some continent that was free of it the day before.
Novel coronavirus took advantage of that nonchalance before the pathogen even had a proper name.
The COVID-19 pandemic is itself a symptom of another disease entirely.
In the pages of this book, we call that disease hyper-novelty.
It is caused by a rate of technological change so rapid that transitions in our environment outstrip our capacity to adapt.
You will not find the COVID-19 pandemic specifically dissected here, but you will find a full exploration of the hyper-novelty crisis that left us vulnerable to this virus, a virus so weak that it could have been cured with a bit of well-coordinated fresh air.
So, prescient again.
Yeah, no, it's a little bit, it's a little bit chilling to hear that analysis from, was it May 2021?
Yeah, we wrote that in May of 2021.
Yeah, it's, you know, yeah, I hate to keep patting ourselves on the back, but prescient again at many different levels, you know, so we are where we are.
I wonder where we'll be a year from now.
Indeed, indeed.
So there's one more thing that you wanted to, one more topic that you wanted to talk about that I think, you know.
Kind of wraps it up.
Kind of wraps it up, yeah.
So those of you who follow me on Twitter, and really why would anyone not follow me on Twitter?
But those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I have been... I have a reason.
You do?
Yeah.
Because you're not on Twitter.
Not because you're not on Twitter.
People would not follow you on Twitter because they are not on Twitter, and good on you if you're not.
No, I think the only people who have that excuse are people who have been booted off Twitter, of which we know quite a number.
No.
No?
Absolutely not.
You know I disagree with this.
Yes, I'm also going to lie.
But nonetheless, it does make the excuse more robust.
But anyway, those of you who follow me on Twitter have noticed that I have been exploring the question of sophistry, which we have talked about here extensively as well.
Why am I exploring the concept of sophistry?
As my stupidest detractors have suggested, is it that I just learned this term?
Well, no.
In fact, it is not.
I've been talking about sophistry forever, but it has become more and more relevant as you My dim-witted critics have brought it to center stage.
But in any case, my point about it is this.
I have been exploring it because many of our best fellow travelers are, I think, a little confused because one does not want to imagine that you are up against sophistry.
And so, for example, I saw Colin Wright grappling with the question.
Not a sophist.
Not a sophist.
Grappling with the question of why he wasn't steel manning gender ideology.
And his point was, because I can't do it very well because In any case, the point is that what I said was, look, you're not obligated to because the assumption that brings steelmanning into the question involves the person whose position you're steelmanning actually believing it.
And nobody believes that men and women aren't different.
We all get this.
And so when somebody says, well, men and women, they aren't different.
It's a continuum, right?
When somebody makes an argument like that, you're not really obligated to steelman it, etc.
Anyway, this is all just a run-up to the question that I really wanted to address, which is this.
Sophistry begins in ancient Greece, right?
The Sophists were tutors, okay?
They were tutors for hire.
And I want to, ironically enough, I'm going to steel man the Sophists, okay?
Some of the Sophists may indeed have been Bad people.
Maybe they all were.
We get the connotation that they are bad people because they attacked Socrates and Plato, who is really the conduit through which we get Socrates, basically holds no truck with this garbage that they apparently hurl.
But, as tutors, I want to point out that sophistry potentially is a... it's maybe the one defensible context for sophistry.
Because the presentation... Can you define the term again?
Yeah, sophistry is the deploying of specious arguments that are structured to be difficult to counter, right?
So, the sophists So as an educational tool.
As an educational tool, you're about to say.
It is marvelous.
That's really useful.
It is really useful.
I'm going to hurl this at my students who I've hopefully just educated in some stuff and see what they can come back with.
Right.
And although I I swear that I didn't know this until recently.
In thinking back to how I used to teach, I actually used to deploy this.
I would say things that I knew weren't right and my purpose was not to fool anybody.
My purpose was to make it uncomfortable for a student who knew better to sit there and listen to me say things that weren't true so that they would challenge me and I would say, Well, but I mean, you did this, I did it too, but I had less of a stomach for it.
You would do it without acknowledging that you were speaking what you knew to be ridiculousness.
And the idea was that it was absolutely 100% incumbent on anyone in the classroom who knew that what you were saying was batshit crazy or even just subtly wrong.
You know, batshit crazy is easy to go after, but subtly wrong?
Oh boy.
I just met the guy today, because you started right off the bat like you would do with this from day one.
But even a couple of weeks, a couple of months, in some cases, we had students who we knew for years, years later, it can be It means that you can't just sit in the room and go, okay, if he's talking, if she's talking, I don't have to keep my brain alive and I can just sort of let it wash over me.
It's like, no, because at any moment there might be something embedded in the argument that's actually not right.
You have to be assessing.
And no, I'm not trying to get you to not trust me.
I'm trying to get you to always, always have your own self-reliance and intellectual self-reliance.
Yeah, I want you to trust me, but I don't want you to trust your reflexive trust in me, right?
I'm not gonna con you and tell you something I don't think is true and let you hold on to that.
But the important thing is that when a student got up the gumption to say, that's not right, and I would say, sure it is, and I would defend my point, and then they would have to counter it.
And at the point that they finally had me cornered, and they'd shown that I wasn't right, and I'd say, exactly.
But then only occasionally did they rush the stage and grab you by the lapels.
Right, only rarely.
But the point is, every other student in the room then got the idea, ah, this is the classroom where I'm supposed to be looking for the thing that isn't true, and a series of things that isn't true.
I'm supposed to be looking for the thing that isn't true.
And the thing is, I don't think there's a better educational tactic than that, right?
So, anyway.
I have steel-manned the sophists.
I believe sophists are often terrible people, but these sophists may have been decent people.
They may have been good educators, and there are certainly people who employ sophistry in the educational context that are doing so with noble intent, and hopefully, if they do it well, with good effect.
Here's the fly on the ointment.
I don't have, obviously, a window into all of the classrooms of the world at the moment.
No one does.
But I do have information that comes to me from various places about what is taking place in classrooms.
There has never been more sophistry in classrooms, right?
The problem is that sophistry is not delivered with the intent of getting the students to rise up.
And in fact, if the students challenge the sophistry, right, they are punished.
We know this.
Yes.
I am concerned that the value of sophistry is lost and that the opposite of that value is being amplified at an incredible rate.
Yes.
I would expect, I would expect in every classroom there would be some student who just couldn't stand it anymore.
Right?
Couldn't stand to hear this nonsense.
And even though it was going to be costly to do so, I would imagine in every classroom somebody would say, hey teach, You're just wrong.
Here's how you know, right?
And the fact that it doesn't happen says something about the type of environment that we have created.
Now, I want to be clear.
I'm not saying, hey students, what's wrong with you?
Why aren't you standing up?
Because I know that the danger of them doing it is real.
Yeah.
No, and we have both heard, in fact I just heard this last week, of a story out of a classroom.
In which a female student stood up to some, you know, not even the worst you've ever heard, but just like banal gender ideology and had a different take, you know, wasn't, you know, it's like, you know, a good liberal undergraduate student who had a different take and she was forced to leave the room.
She was forced to leave the classroom.
The professor in question had so little capacity to have any dissenting opinion at all in the room.
And that feels extreme, but I don't think it is.
Right.
Now, the question, though, is if we're really correct in our Well, sophistry isn't being discussed.
temperature of the culture if we're really right that school after school classroom after classroom sophistry is being discussed every day and well sophistry isn't being discussed sophistry is being enacted sophistry is being deployed and not with the intent of in upgrading the minds of the people who are being taught
Bad arguments to which it is nearly impossible to respond are being deployed by the authorities who come in with their terminal degrees and the ability to give you the grade of their choice.
And those arguments are just being required to sit there as if that is the God's honest truth and Students are neither being allowed to reject those arguments nor being allowed to learn how it is to to desist and to argue against them right and my real concern is 20 years from now as bad as things are at the moment and
If you've taken an entire generation and you have successfully created enough fear of standing up and saying, I'm sorry, that's nonsense, right?
I mean, I used to do this and I didn't pay a price for it, but I didn't pay a price in every classroom, right?
The point is it was a trade-off and I got a lot out of it.
But We now have an entire generation that is being trained, even if you know better, don't say so, right?
Right.
That saying so will be catastrophic for you.
Then, you know, and I should say occasionally you will see somebody We'll prank the sophists, right?
They will deliver a speech that, you know, it's hard to reducto ad absurdum.
Something that starts out as absurd, but they'll do it anyway.
And it's, you know, it's a good comedic effect, right?
Or some kid at a school board meeting will stand up and describe this appalling thing.
But it's, you know, it's a ten thousandth as many students as you would expect, right?
If you ran the experiment in a normal year, right?
A year 25 years ago.
If you had ran the experiment of introducing pervasive nonsense in every classroom in the nation all simultaneously, you would have had a rebellion.
Wouldn't have been every student, but you would have had somebody in almost every classroom call it out.
And we have created an environment that is too perilous for that to happen, and the cost of that will be paid for generations.
It will indeed.
Of course, what you just described is not how this happened either.
It's a slow creep, a slow change in expectations, and if we're being honest, you were very rare yourself as a student.
You know, it was, it has always been classroom, the vast majority of classroom cultures, to highly rate order and compliance.
The more so, the more, you know, the higher the student-to-faculty ratio, and the younger the kids, and the more out of their skis the teacher, the professor, is in terms of how much they know and how smart they are.
And, you know, all of these things predict an environment in which, like, you know what?
Just sit down, shut up, take notes.
Yes, it will be on the test.
I'll see you tomorrow.
And, you know, that's not educational.
I don't think anyone ever thought it was, but it does provide a certain order and people are less likely to get into fistfights in such classrooms if that compliance is adhered to.
Yeah, well, I agree with you and, you know, there's of course the value for the creation of that order and, you know, it's a pendulum question at some level.
So for now, let us just say Damn the sophists, beware the slow creeps.
The slow creeps, alright.
Okay, well that takes us to the end for this week, but we will be back in a few minutes with a Q&A.
Yes.
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