#131 Becoming Allergic to Truth (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/EvoLens131:b View on Spotify video: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3CXDqWrOJN7OgY5uFxoFI1 ***** In this 131st 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 why so many things, in modernity, and right now in particular, are labeled the opposite of what they truly are. What we are tol...
Hey folks welcome to the dark horse podcast live stream number 131 which is prime it's It is indeed.
It is indeed.
I don't know that that matters to anyone else, but it matters to us at a very deep level for some reason that I don't even know.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying, rhymes with flying.
I'm going to try to do better at orienting people to the podcast just because who knows how much time we have left on this planet and I think doing better is one of the things that we can shoot for.
And who is this in your lap?
This is Fairfax.
One of the cats who lives around here, we feed them so they stick around.
Is that how it works?
Well, I don't know.
That's not how I've noticed the relationship.
Yes, but for those of you just listening, he has snuggled up on Brett and may be in for the duration at this point.
Yes, now for those of you who have just happened by by accident, I should point out That we are married, and not only that, but we are married to each other.
Indeed.
Yes.
Yeah, we are.
We even have children.
We do, and one of the things, I think the final segment that we'll talk about a little bit today is fatherhood, and in part because tomorrow is Father's Day.
We are recording this on, we're live-streaming on June 18th.
And yesterday, we attended the high school graduation of our firstborn.
So, lots of parenting and transitions to think about right now.
Yes, I should just say, as long as we're on the topic, that this is Zach we are talking about, who's also the producer of the podcast, and I know I speak for you too, but I am extremely proud of Zach, and it turns out it has very little to do with what went on in high school.
And presumably that is often the case.
That is often the case.
You and I met in high school.
We were just friends there.
In fact, I just found my senior yearbook, which was fun, and also to see what you wrote to me back then.
So I actually had an extraordinary high school experience.
Yours was somewhat different.
You came to the high school that I had been at since actually 7th grade in 11th.
But in general, people do not end up having the formative experiences or the friendships in high school that it feels like at the time is everything and all-encompassing.
Yeah, I got a soulmate, so I feel good about high school.
But other than that, I mean there were some good points in high school, but it was challenging.
Yeah, and it's the time of life, and it's also increasingly the way it's done.
The way school is done.
The way school is done unto the young people who are graduating as opposed to allowing them to understand how much ability they have to make the world that they are going to inherit and they want to see.
I think you can tighten that a little bit.
School is done.
I'm not sure that's entirely true, but nor do you, actually.
You just thought that was a cute thing to say.
This needs a reboot.
I'm not sure we can resurrect it in its current form.
It's gonna need, you know, a fresh sheet of paper, maybe a new foundation, and, you know, build up from there.
Yeah.
So, today we are going to also talk about why everything is labeled the wrong way, and why you're angry with the wrong people, and a little bit about baby formula, possibly, and then fathers, and something about what fatherhood means.
But first, logistics.
We follow these live streams with a live Q&A.
You can ask questions for the live Q&A starting now at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We have, of course, our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, is out in both... We got it in Spanish, but I don't have it here.
I only have the French still sitting here.
So it's out in English, and it's now out in Spanish and French as well, both of which are available on Amazon.
If you're watching on YouTube, there's a live chat going on on Odyssey right now, so you can jump over there.
We will not be censored.
We will not be censored on Odyssey, so there's a very strong reason to go over there.
We also, this week, on our store at store.darkhorsepodcast.org, we have a cool new shirt.
We have a cool new shirt, so let me pull it up and then, there it is actually.
I don't know why, um, Zach you can now show my screen, I don't know why when I pull it up it shows all the text on the store, shows in Spanish, doesn't matter, but there's the shirt.
Yep.
It reads.
For those of you listening and not watching, it says Le Tour de France.
It's like bike racing on steroids.
And I believe the explanatory text says, yes, it's rather a lot like bike racing on steroids or something to that effect.
Yes.
Anyway, highly explanatory.
I would suggest if this shirt strikes you as something that you want, you might get it sooner rather than later because although Clearly we are well within protected bounds as a parody and not using the logo of
La Tour de France We have no idea how the corporate gods will view this and we have had instances in the past where we Dare I say it made fun of YouTube community guidelines and Teespring leapt to their rescue damsel in distress as it as YouTube was and So only a few of those shirts made it into the world.
I am hoping that this one will last a good long time because frankly this one gets relevant each and every year right about July and Yeah, we're introducing this now because we're going to start, for those of you who are interested in bikes and bike racing, you're going to have been beginning to hear about the Tour de France for this year right around now.
Right.
I've actually not run into it, but then I don't run into a lot of things that are happening in the media because I can't take it.
I have run into it.
I have to say there's a part of me that is actually a bit fascinated by bike racing.
I am not fascinated by the Tour de France.
It is Everything about bike racing that it shouldn't, but anyway.
So there's one.
One, as long as we're talking about bike racing, we've got this fine shirt up on the screen where you can find at, you can go to store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
There's a bike race that is kind of in some ways similar to the Tour de France that you actually do appreciate.
It's like the real Tour de France.
Okay, what is it?
And it is the Paris-Brest-Paris race.
Okay, so it's a round trip.
It's a there and back.
It's a there and back, and it's part of a tradition called randoneering.
And the idea is that unlike, I mean the exact opposite of the tour, in the Paris-Brest-Paris race, you are responsible for navigating, you are responsible for doing your own mechanic work.
So effectively, you know, unlike the tour where you will ride a fragile bike and there will be a car with a replacement bike should your bike fail on you and you'll have a team of mechanics.
Where you don't have, in fact, you are benefited for not having thought about tolerances, not having thought about trade-offs.
And whereas with the Paris-Brest-Paris race, that's what it's called, it's just called that, you need to be thinking about tolerances and trade-offs and actually the entire, you know, it's a little bit like skiing with the help of a lift and all the help that you get that way and having to get up to the top of the mountain yourself and earn your thrills.
Right, this is more Iditarod-like and, you know, everything matters.
How you eat, what you carry, meaning what equipment you carry, you know, how much you understand about your bike, you know, if you, you know, can you make it on one break if you bust a cable and can't repair it or whatever.
So anyway, yes, it tests the full cyclist rather than just, you know, a pair of legs on a bike.
Right.
So anyway, that's a cool race.
It's not run every year, but Anyway, so yes, the shirt is available should you want one.
Yeah.
You know where to find it.
So yeah, go get yourself one.
Okay, you can take that off now if you like, Zach.
This week in Natural Selections, which is my sub stack, I posted a reprint of my 2020 Letter Wiki conversation with Abigail Schreier in which we discussed what is going on with the incredible rise in girls declaring themselves trans in particular.
And that has been a conversation that has been well-received ever since we wrote it a little less than two years ago, as a series of three letters, each back and forth.
And LetterWiki, unfortunately, is no longer, as of about a week and a half ago, and so it's up there now, freely available, if you're interested.
And of course, Abigail Schreier is It's extraordinary.
She's the author of, I didn't write it down, is it Irreconcilable Differences?
No, no, no, no.
It's Irreparable Damage.
Gosh, that was terrible.
Now, I'm going to look it up.
We're going to find out.
I'm going to look it up at the point that you're talking and then I will come back and fix that.
Okay.
We are supported by our audience, as are so many now.
We appreciate you subscribing and liking and sharing both these main videos on YouTube and Odyssey and then when it's out on Spotify and everywhere and on the audio where actually the vast majority of our audience is audio only.
But we have Clips channels which are video only that are YouTube and Odyssey and you know please do subscribe to the channels and like the videos and share them share them far and wide.
YouTube, as many of you know, demonetized us completely back in last summer, and that cut out a tremendous amount of our income.
So we appreciate all the support that we get, including the incredible fan mail that we get every week.
But if you are in a position to do so, we appreciate financial support as well, of course.
So you can join either of our Patreons, where on either of them you can access our tremendous Discord server, about which they say you can engage in honest conversations about difficult topics, join a book club, even unwind with virtual happy hours and karaoke.
Young or old, left or right, there's a spot for you around the campfire.
We actually just met yesterday another person in her 80s who's a fan of the podcast, so there really is an incredible range of people.
I don't know that she's on Discord, I didn't ask her, but an incredible range of people who are tuning in, paying attention, valuing open conversation without disrespect and without belittlement, and you can find that on the Discord server, which you can access by joining either of our Patreons.
Yes.
People are even meeting in person.
We have, again, been invited to a meet that we can't go to because we are already occupied, but nonetheless, people are meeting in person.
They're really enjoying these things.
You know, the vaccinated, the unvaccinated, they mix as if the same species.
It's an incredible vibe.
Incredible.
Almost like it's 2019.
Right.
Almost.
Those were the good old days.
Strange.
Yes.
Strange, strange.
Weird.
Yeah.
Also, of course, on my Patreon, you can get access to our monthly private Q&A, which right now, the session is open to ask questions at the $11 tier, so you can go on there and ask questions there for us to address in a couple of weeks, I think.
Are both you and Fairfax now looking out the window at crows?
Yes, we are.
We are watching a squirrel.
A squirrel?
Okay.
Yeah, a squirrel fight.
Yeah, that's good stuff.
We saw five of them outside today.
I didn't even know we had five squirrels locally.
Yeah, Fairfax only did.
And then you have a few conversations associated with your Patreon every month as well.
Absolutely.
On the first Saturday and Sunday of the month.
All right.
As well, we have sponsors, for which we are very grateful.
And we only accept ad sponsorship from products that we actually, truly vouch for.
So there's three, as always.
Here we go.
Alright, our first sponsor this week is Eight Sleep, and I want to tell you a little bit about what Eight Sleep does.
Imagine you have two people with different temperature requirements.
One of them likes to have the room cool so they can shed heat, and one of them likes to have it a little hot.
Well, if you set it a little hot, then the person who likes to be a little cool can't do anything about it, because the most you can do is take the covers off you, and there's no way to radiate heat if the room is warming you.
But if you have an eight sleep unit then what happens is it actually can pull heat out and radiate it elsewhere and it can cool you down arbitrarily leaving the person who likes the bed hot having their preference and the person who needs it to be cool in order to sleep having their preference and it's just it's a game changer.
Likes versus needs.
Yes, likes versus... Well, here's the reason I say likes versus needs is that the person who... Because you're the guy who thinks you need the thing that you need.
No, I think it's more honorable than that.
The person who likes it hotter can use more blankets.
The person who likes it cooler can't do anything at the point the room is too hot to radiate to.
So, anyway, it is kind of an asymmetrical situation, but nonetheless, nonetheless, this object allows you to pull heat out and radiate it somewhere else, just the same way your car takes heat out of the engine block and radiates it out the radiator.
It's a great system.
Your refrigerator.
Right, and your refrigerator, which then puts heat into your kitchen, even in the summer, which makes no sense.
And we could fix that, but we don't.
No, we don't.
Yet I digress.
The Pod Pro Cover by 8Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation.
You can add the cover to any mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110.
Yikes!
Not that we recommend either of those extremes.
The temperature of the cover will adjust each side of the bed based on your sleep stages, biometrics, and bedroom temperature reacting dynamically to create the optimal sleeping environment.
8Sleep users fall asleep 32% faster, reduce sleep interruptions by 40%, and get more restful sleep overall.
And with 30% more deep sleep on average, that restorative sleep will likely help with physical recovery, hormone regulation and mental clarity.
Finally, the alarm feature, which can wake you with temperature change or slight chest level vibrations, is so much gentler than any standard alarm.
We're both a little skeptical, and now we're totally sold.
We are surprised at how much we appreciate this bed.
Go to 8sleep.com slash darkhorse.
That's E-I-G-H-T-S-L-E-E-P dot com slash darkhorse to check out the Pod Pro cover and save $150 at checkout.
8sleep ships to the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Awesome.
Our second sponsor this week will be well familiar to regular viewers and listeners.
It's Vivo barefoot shoes made for feet.
Most shoes are made for someone's idea of what feet should be rather than actual feet.
Vivos are made by people who know feet.
These shoes are, as I've said many times before here, and off-air as well, a revelation.
We love them.
They're beyond comfortable.
The tactile feedback from the surfaces you're walking on is amazing.
They cause no pain.
Because there are no pressure points forcing your feet into odd positions.
They're quite fantastic.
Our feet are the products of millions of years of evolution.
We evolved to walk, move, and run barefoot.
But modern shoes that are overly cushioned and strangely shaped have negatively impacted foot function and are contributing to a health crisis, one in which people move less than they might, in part because their shoes make their feet hurt.
Vivo Barefoot shoes are designed wide to provide natural stability, thin to enable you to feel more, and flexible to help you build your natural strength from the ground up.
Foot strength increases by 60% in a matter of months just by walking around in them.
The number of people wearing Vivo Barefoots is growing.
We keep on seeing more and more people wearing them, which is a sign that people are actually adopting Footwear that is good for them as opposed to just on the basis of that's fashionable at the moment and ever, ever choosing something on which you depend so highly based on fashion is going to be a mistake, but especially when you're talking about shoes.
Once people start wearing these shoes, they don't seem to stop.
Vivo Barefoot has a great range of footwear for kids and adults and for every activity, hiking, training, everyday wear.
They're certified B Corp, pioneering regenerative business principles, and their footwear is produced using sustainably sourced material.
natural and recycled with the aim to protect the natural world so you can run wild in it.
Go to vivobarefoot.com/darkhorse to get an exclusive offer of 20% off.
Additionally, all new customers get a 100-day free trial so you can see if you love them as much as we do.
That's v-i-v-o-b-a-r-e-f-o-o-t.com/darkhorse.
And finally, 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 this sofa so terrific?
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.
Allform sofas are delivered directly to your home, free and fast, and assembly is easy.
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 all pile onto it to watch movies some evenings.
It looks gorgeous and it's incredibly inviting and comfortable, a rare combination.
We liked it so much we got a second one, as I said.
Also, some listeners have asked if Allform holds up to pets.
It does.
We've got one dog, Labrador, who has never let me clip her claws, and two cats who do, but that's a lot of animals for one couch.
The leather that Allform uses is about 20% thicker than typical furniture leather, and we see no signs, no sign of wear, despite the fact that both our cats and our dog lie on the couch many evenings.
And if you prefer fabric, Allform fabrics are three and a half times more durable than the industry standard for heavy-duty fabrics, so their fabrics are going to hold up really well to pets as well.
Finally, they offer a forever warranty.
Literally forever.
To find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com slash darkhorse.
Allform is offering 20% off all orders for our listeners at allform.com slash darkhorse.
All right.
Well, you, Brett, wanted to start this week by talking about why everything is labeled in the inverse.
Yes, and I should say, we didn't mention at the top, there are a couple of podcasts that I did in Bath that are out now and actually they fit perfectly this topic.
So, Robert Malone sat with me.
You can find that one on Spotify.
That's not on YouTube because YouTube can't handle the truth.
YouTube cannot handle the truth and they're Their community guidelines folks believe you can't handle the truth.
Garrett Vandenbosch, that one is out as of two days ago.
That one is out on YouTube and Spotify, I believe.
That one is already out?
It is already out, yes.
Both of these are... And of course Neil Oliver was the first one that you did in England.
Right.
And there's two more coming, right?
There's two more coming and then there was another one that I recorded this week on a slightly different topic.
But in any case, all of these are cases.
In which we are wrestling with the question of what the truth is and what it isn't and many of us have noticed that the labels on these things seem to be flipped at an incredible rate in modern times.
It's not like most of what is discussed by official sources is right and then every so often there's something over which we disagree and some thing that has been labeled wrong turns out to be right.
If you look at topics like the COVID pandemic And the public health reaction to it, you will find the labels are just simply reversed, right?
And that is a conspicuous pattern because if we were just simply confused, you wouldn't expect the labels to reverse.
You would expect it to be noisy and contentious and you'd get a hodgepodge.
So, examples of labels here that you're thinking of?
Well, let's just say if you were trying to navigate what to do for your family in light of COVID, right?
Let's say, like us, you believe COVID to be a dangerous and destructive pathogen and you're concerned about preventing it and you're concerned about preventing transmission and you're concerned about reducing the hazard that the pathogen poses to you and your family.
Well, the question is, if you go to the CDC or the FDA or the WHO or any of the official sources, if you go to the New York Times, the Washington Post, you'll find the answer is very clear that these Vaccines, which is the wrong term, and increasingly people have begun to understand why this is a matter of significance.
You might say that they are transfective agents, they are certainly inoculations, but vaccine is not a good definition for them, but nonetheless... It's not the word that should be applied to them, but absent that word being applied to them, it would have been much harder to get so many people on board.
Right.
That's just the thing.
Labeling them as vaccines is a case in which you've got the standard outlets all describing these things in terms that are inaccurate.
The value of these things was inaccurately described from the beginning.
Their efficacy, if we're talking about in the trial phase, or their effectiveness once they are released at preventing you from contracting the disease, preventing you from transmitting the disease, is actually extremely low.
But we are told that we must take them in order to prevent the spread of this dangerous disease.
That's misinformation masquerading as information.
Whereas, we are told that repurposed drugs, I won't mention the names so we can leave them here on YouTube, but you are free to infer that I am talking about the same compounds that we have been arguing about for many, many months.
Valdopaste.
Valdopaste.
I think you should get the human version, but nonetheless, there are multiple repurposed drugs.
That clearly have high efficacy, not only have they been successfully incorporated by the doctors who have been most effective at treating patients with COVID, they've been deployed successfully around the world, are clearly implicated in the crash of waves of COVID that took place in places like Uttar Pradesh.
This is a good crash we're talking about.
Right, so in any case what you've got is Actually effective pharmaceuticals that we are told are snake oil and we have something that isn't a vaccine, which we are told is a vaccine that doesn't do the two most important things that it would need to do in order to control the pandemic and to explain why they would be mandated, which is to prevent you from contracting the disease and prevent you from passing it on.
In other words, what you've got is the exact inverse of a recipe for protecting yourself, right?
You could have done the right thing for your family if only you had known that you should tune out the New York Times, the Washington Post, the CDC, the FDA, the WHO, all the major universities, right?
And so this is a problem because for most of us we are not equipped To look at the entire range of institutions and say, they've all got it wrong.
I mean, even my voicing that sounds perfectly insane.
What are the chances that all the institutions got it wrong?
And if they did all get it wrong, my point is we have to now go backwards and say, well, what could possibly explain that?
Yeah.
One of the issues, and I don't think I'm going to step on any of the toes that you were about to put into the argument that didn't work at all today, is that when it's all the institutions, it raises the question of how is that Possibly could be all of them.
And most people will look at that and say, well, it's just so obvious.
It's just so obvious that they have all come to that.
And back of their mind, whether or not they are conscious of this, whether or not people are actually statistically sophisticated enough to recognize that what they are imagining is everyone came to this idea independently.
Right?
Whereas, if it's really all the institutions, there's now a reasonable chance that actually that's a bunch of non-independent data points.
And we know that the media aren't doing original science, that they have to accept the authority from someone largely.
Even so-called science journalists largely are not doing as much of the sort of assessment of the science that they were reporting on as they should be.
But at the point that there is uniformity of agreement across all of the domains, then you really do have to wonder about whether or not the independence of the data points, and therefore the independence of the press and academia and everything, is in fact present where it needs to be.
Right, and you know, it should also be obvious to people as they look at the supposed consensus in front of them that those who have departed from the consensus have had terrible things happen to them, right?
We, all of us who have departed from the consensus who are Professionally trained in any regard have been dismissed as cranks and kooks and worse.
We've been called grifters and all sorts of things.
And so the point is, look, you know, there is an incentive to stick with the conventional narrative.
And then the consensus is trotted out as evidence that the pattern is very clear.
And anybody who knows how to do the analysis will reach the same conclusion that the CDC and the FDA and the WHO and the New York Times and everybody else has reached, right?
But the point is, when you see an intense campaign that punishes people for stepping out of line, then you have to ask the question, what, you know, how durable, how meaningful Is that a Potemkin consensus, right?
Is that a paper-thin consensus born of the fact that all of those who are capable of seeing the problem with it are afraid to say what they can see?
And in any case, we've talked about that many times.
What I wanted to do here is introduce an element that has increasingly been haunting me.
And I realized as I was thinking about how to introduce it, that this stretches, elements of this analysis stretch way back for me, and I wanted to point out something.
Zach, I sent you a couple of papers.
Did you get them?
Well, I will just describe the papers while Zach is looking for them.
The two papers are papers that I published, one with David Lotte on the evolution of morality.
And in that paper we make an argument that there's a tension between two kinds of evolutionary success, right?
Yeah, you want to put up the Lottie paper?
Better angels.
So, the two types of success, and I must say that I do have one major regret with this paper.
We used the word group when what we really meant was lineage.
And so, in any case, people can look at this paper, but I would implore you, yes, lineages are groups, but they are more than that, and I wish we had used a different term.
But nonetheless, Here's the paper, and the argument that we make in the paper is that you have an evolutionary tension between two kinds of success.
One is the success of competition within your lineage or your population or, yes, your group.
And so you can get ahead by out-competing others who are effectively in your same boat.
And then the second kind of success has to do with how successful your boat is against competing populations.
And that will come into play here in a second.
The other paper that Is relevant here.
You want to put up the... So I can actually, it looks like I can pull them up in a way that... People can see them.
Okay, the other paper is the Telomere paper that we, that you, those who have listened to the podcast many times will have occasionally heard us reference.
This is the paper in which I argue with my co-author here, Debbie Cizek, That we evolve to grow feeble and inefficient with age.
We senesce as the unavoidable downside of a cancer protection element of our of our physiology and cellular makeup.
And the reason that this is relevant here is that There's a long story which you can go back to Eric's Portal Podcast with me if you want to know the gory details of the academic history behind this paper.
But I had a collaborator.
When I started to do the work on telomeres, I ran into a fact that made no sense given what I was coming to understand.
And if the fact was wrong, then a lot of things fell into place.
And if the fact was right, my hypothesis was dead in the water.
And so I stared a lot at this fact and tried to understand what might be wrong with it.
The fact was that mice were all understood to have long telomeres.
And the argument that I make, ultimately published in this paper that you just saw, is that those long telomeres ought to imbue those mice with the capacity for great longevity, and mice are very short-lived.
And so the fact of mice having long telomeres was an outlier that could not be explained away unless something very strange had happened.
And what I realized over time was that there was reason to believe that the colonies in which we breed laboratory mice had exerted a selective effect that had massively elongated their telomeres, and that what the field had concluded that mice, or maybe even rodents, all have long telomeres was just simply wrong.
And that the reason that nobody figured that out was that they were all getting their mice from the same source.
And because they got them from the same source, every time people looked at mouse telomeres, they found the same thing, which is mouse telomeres are ultra-long.
So, laboratory mice, having been bred under very particular selective breeding protocols, have long telomeres, which is quite different from mice have long telomeres, or even worse, rodents have long telomeres.
And what it takes is an evolutionary perspective.
And in this case, what it took was an evolutionary theorist.
But it takes evolutionary thinking to say, oh, actually, if we move an organism from its environment into a lab and make a whole lot more of them over a lot of generations, We may have effects that we weren't counting on, and of course we've seen that in the last two years as well with regard to this virus that is...
Clearly not zoonotic origin, at least only.
Right.
Now, I will say, I wrote a piece when Carol Greider, the person that I briefly, not so briefly, collaborated with, I'll tell the story of that in a second, but when she and her advisor got the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the enzyme telomerase, which is the enzyme, it's a very interesting enzyme, but an enzyme that elongates telomeres,
I wrote a piece that never got published about the mouse telomere problem.
The title of that piece was Of Mice and Markets.
And anyway, I'm thinking of putting it up on a substack or something.
But nonetheless, here's the upshot.
When I realized that I believed that mouse telomeres were probably not ultra-long and that that was laboratory mice telomeres that were ultra-long and that were misleading the field, that was a hypothesis that had
Earth-shattering ramifications if true a probably false Hypothesis that if true was going to have very serious implications for drug safety testing for lots of laboratory science that we do on topics that are important like cancer and wound healing and and senescence And in any case, I contacted Carol Greider, which was somebody I admired from the literature.
This was somebody I didn't know, but she was clearly top of the field.
And I reached out to her.
I called her on the phone, and she was very gracious.
She talked to me.
She didn't have to.
I was a graduate student at a different university, and yet she talked to me.
And when I told her what my hypothesis was and why I thought it was true, she said, I don't think it's true, but that's really interesting.
And then she gave me some evidence that I had no inkling of, which was that not only was the pattern in evidence in Mus musculus, which was the traditional laboratory mouse, but that there was a lesser used mouse called Mus spredus that also showed the pattern.
It showed the pattern differently.
And the conspicuous thing that she told me was how long the telomeres are in Maspritis varies based on who you order them from, right?
Which was strongly suggested that there was something about the laboratory environment.
And so the laboratory environment, I believe, has this effect.
And we now have a powerful demonstration that it does based on the fact that those who run breeding colonies, almost no matter how you set them up, will attempt to increase the number of mice they produce per unit of effort, per unit of time, per unit of mouse chow, whatever it is.
And that the things that they will do to increase the number of mice will...
We'll inevitably select for younger animals and it will therefore unbalance a trade-off between tumor prevention and tissue repair elongating telomeres.
But here's the reason that shows up here with the things being mislabeled.
Carol and her graduate student Mike Heeman tested the hypothesis.
Your hypothesis?
My hypothesis.
They tested it and they found that it was correct.
They tested a number of different strains of basically they weren't wild mice.
They were mice that had been in captivity for a very short period of time and they found that they all had short telomeres, right?
So, Eureka!
This is really important.
I now knew that all of the other stuff that was dependent on this particular fact not being what Everybody seemed to think it was was meant that all the rest of what I was working on was super viable and so I wanted to publish it and I said Carol.
Where are you going to publish your laboratory result, which I should have been a co-author on.
Certainly, I should have at least been acknowledged for providing the hypothesis.
But nonetheless, I said, Carol, where are you going to publish this?
And, you know, at this point, this is still somebody who's being collaborative and very decent to me.
And she said something that I was too young and naive to understand at the time.
What she said is, we're not going to publish it.
We're going to keep it in house.
And I did not understand why she had this very important result.
It seemed to me, as somebody who understood science to be an endeavor in which we try to bring important things into the world, that somebody who had just done a laboratory test that had revealed that the mice we're using for all of these other things are broken in some new way that people did not know, that she would be very eager to bring that into the world, and yet she said, no, we're gonna keep it in-house.
So just to clarify for people who aren't on the inside of academic science and breeding protocols, that leader thing being a very small subset of people, this result that the Greider Lab generated, pursuing a test of your hypothesis as a test of your hypothesis,
...revealed that actually the widespread understanding on which was the basis for much of the research that was being done on things like telomeres and cancer and senescence at that point, the widespread understanding which was mice have long telomeres.
was demonstrated to be false.
They falsified the widespread understanding, which I don't even know if it was ever called a hypothesis, by testing your hypothesis that actually that's going to be variable by how long they've been in a lab environment.
So what, who cares?
This seems really arcane.
The so what, who cares part is actually, as it turns out, and as the Grider Lab was beginning to understand, and as you certainly were beginning to understand, This will have remarkably broad effects on things like drug safety testing.
And so, if you find this out, and you know that your entire field is actually engaged in doing research based on a flawed assumption, And that flawed assumption is going to make the results that are being generated in that field flawed, and that is going to have effects therefore on drug safety results, and therefore on what drugs get to market, and therefore on what people end up being exposed to, and therefore on people's living or dying.
It is obviously incumbent upon you to share that with the world.
And so it is in that environment that you say to her, where are you going to publish this?
And she says, we're not going to, we're going to keep it in-house.
Keep it in-house, which I didn't understand, but nonetheless, It was what it was, and so I went about writing the paper that I wanted to publish, and I was going to cite her work, which is obviously vital to my paper, which is a theoretical paper, I was going to cite her as personal communication.
Now, ultimately, I did discover that she decided to publish that work, and I won't go too deeply into it, but the question is, Why would she have wanted to keep something so important in house?
And the answer, I believe, I don't know, because at the point that I went to publish my work, Carol Greider became very strange and pretended that our interactions had been meaningless and broke contact.
But nonetheless, here's what I now believe I understand.
If you know that laboratory mice are defective in a particular way that has a predictable impact on their ability to endure damage, their resistance to tumors, all sorts of things, That is potentially a goose that will continue to lay golden eggs, right?
Because what it means is that you can predict the results of experiments that others who are not in on this will not be able to predict, right?
And so I don't know whether... So that will serve the research coming out of that particular lab, but will negatively serve other research and other science, including drug safety testing, including medicine, including the entire population of the earth who might be downstream of the effects of what drugs do and do not get approved.
Yeah, I would say there are two devastating impacts, if that was the logic.
One devastating impact is that we test our pharmaceuticals on these animals and that the particular defect in question isn't arbitrary.
That a mouse with long telomeres has effectively an infinite capacity to replace damaged tissue and has effectively no resistance to tumors.
And in fact, one of the things that Carol told me on that, in our initial, I don't know if it was the first call, but our The several calls that we had was that essentially all laboratory mice die of cancer, right?
It's the way they all die, and that's unusual.
That's not true for other creatures, and it is, I believe, clearly the result of this long telomere phenomenon, that the balance between tumor suppression and tissue repair has been completely tilted in the direction of tissue repair, which makes them incredibly cancer prone.
But what that also means Is that when you give a drug that is toxic to these animals to see how toxic it is, it will have a paradoxical effect.
If it's so toxic that it kills the animal outright, you'll see it.
But if it's not so toxic that it kills the animal outright, the animal has a preternatural capacity to replace those tissues, and so the animal will be much less damaged than a human would be, who has an intense limit on how much tissue repair they can do.
And what's more, Because, so here's why chemotherapy works.
Chemotherapy works because cells that are dividing are more vulnerable than cells that aren't and in a cancer the cells are all dividing so they have this vulnerability.
So if you give a person with a cancer a toxic substance you will poison the person and you know what they say in oncology circles is the idea of chemotherapy is to poison the cancer faster than you poison the patient.
Kill the cancer faster than you kill the patient.
If you give it to a mouse who has tumors because their tumor suppressor has been turned off and it functions as chemotherapy, it may actually extend their lives, making it seem like this drug is not only not toxic, but it's actually a bit healthy, right?
Which is surprising.
So, in any case, the long telomeres create an obvious hazard in our drug safety system.
I assumed that what would happen at the point that this was revealed is that there would be a, yes, embarrassing, but a rapid campaign to retest all sorts of drugs in light of things like the Vioxx scandal, in which exactly what you would predict if a toxic drug got through drug safety testing unfolded, and it's not the only drug.
Vioxx, Phenphen, Seldane, Erythromycin, I mean, the list of drugs that do damage that we did not spot is very long.
All the drugs that were tested on these animals need to be retested.
I thought that that was going to happen.
But the second reason that this is so devastating is that because mice are what we call model organisms, we build our scientific understanding on what we see in mice.
Everybody knows that they're not perfect models.
In fact, there are no perfect models, but they are needlessly broken in this way.
They do not have to have long telomeres.
And even the reason that we breed these animals the way we do is to get a uniform genetic background, which reduces the noise, which allows us to see the effect of treatments and things much more easily in these refined laboratory animals.
You can still have that.
Right?
You don't need to get long telomeres.
It's not a consequence of inbreeding them, we now know.
But in any case, the point is, damage was done not only to our drug safety system, But also to our scientific understanding of how we function.
Because this is our primary mammal model, we stacked a lot of bad info on top of itself.
And that destroys science downstream of it for decades to come until you finally fix it.
And then you've got to go back and say, well, how many of the things we believe are true are actually false because they came primarily from mice that had been distorted in this way?
All right.
My point is, we're going to keep it in-house, is a phrase that clues us into how things get inversely labeled.
Because it is true that you can successfully compete by being more insightful than others.
But being more insightful than others is difficult, and everybody's trying to do it.
Another way to be more insightful than others is to take- To compete successfully.
To compete successfully is to delay an understanding that others might reach.
And if they had it too, then we would all be on a level playing field.
But if I know the mice are broken and you don't know the mice are broken, Then I'm ahead in the science game.
So the two ways to out-compete other people are to actually be better, or to engage in sabotage.
Those are your two categories.
Right.
And sabotage may be too narrow a term, but broadly speaking, actually be better, actually out-compete at the like, we're trying to do X, I did X better than you.
Or, I'm going to get in your way of accomplishing X, of seeing X, of knowing what X is hinging on, all of that stuff over in subterfuge and sabotage space.
And ecologically speaking, we have terms for this, right?
We have the term exploitation competition, which means I'm going to get to that flower before you do, right?
I'm going to get to the nectar and that means you're going to have less nectar available to you.
But that's not, I'm not interfering with your ability to get the nectar.
I'm just more effectively reaching it.
Yeah, I got it and it's zero sum and the nectar's in me now, so there's none left for you.
There's none left for you.
So that's the kind of competition that we all expect when we hear, you know, I'm going to make a better product and it's going to mean that the niche in the market isn't available to you because everybody's going to want the version that I built, right?
Beautiful world.
Right.
But then there's this other kind of competition called interference competition.
Interference competition is where instead of elaborating my capacity to get to the rare resource, I'm going to interrupt your ability to get there.
I'm going to do damage to you so that you can't get there.
Yeah, at weekend bar scenes, this is known as cock blocking.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a perfect example of interference competition, actually, right?
Yes, it is that.
So, the argument I'm trying to flesh out here is that we all understand the scientific endeavor based on the sort of brochure understanding of what's supposed to happen.
What's supposed to happen is we are all trying to be more insightful than everybody else, and those who have special insight into the world They come to inhabit the powerful positions, you know, they are more influential on students, science gets better over time as a result of their efforts.
That's how it's supposed to work.
Again, beautiful world.
A beautiful world.
But we neglect the interference competition.
And this is, you know, one of the flaws with what we call peer review, which as we often say here is not the same thing as review by peers, which is a good thing.
If you have peers, it's good for them to review your work.
But peer review, the privately done thing that prevents your work from ever seeing the light of day, that is another story entirely.
So, what am I getting at?
What I'm getting at is we live in a democracy, right?
The West is built of democracies.
And inside of those democracies, we have markets, we have capitalism.
These are two distinct modes of thinking, really.
On the one hand, in a democracy, we are supposed to all be on the same page that we want our nations to do well, right?
So if you think back to the paper that we first showed, right, the tension between how well your lineage or population does is one way of getting ahead.
If your nation is strong, that's good for you.
And then the other way of getting ahead is competition within your lineage, right?
And so because we live in these structures that gather us together, we are supposed to have effectively a patriotic instinct where we want science to be more insightful, we are supposed to have effectively a patriotic instinct where we And we also want to rise within science.
But the problem is these two things are at cross-purposes with each other.
And unfortunately, whatever it is that in the 21st century is making us un-understandable to each other, is polarizing us, is dividing us into teams in which the people on the other team begin to seem Inhuman to you.
The problem is that pushes us into a mode where we don't see our shared interest.
What we see is our opportunity to get ahead.
And in such a world, we have to ask the question.
In whose interest is it to have an honest-to-goodness newspaper?
Right?
One that does the journalistic work of figuring out what's true irrespective of how that makes the people in power feel.
Right?
In whose interest is that if we are divided into teams and trying to get ahead, I'm trying to get ahead at your expense, right?
You and I are supposed to be aligned.
But if I'm trying to get ahead at your expense, then it is not in my interest that there be a public spirited journalistic establishment that sorts through the truth.
It's also true that, just as you said, that when people think about competition, the thing that is in their head is exploitation competition, almost always.
I got the thing, I therefore demonstrated that I was able to get it, and I am therefore a better competitor, as opposed to all the forms of interference competition, which also include legacy reasons for having gotten there and all of this.
I'm sorry, I just lost the connection to what you were exactly saying.
You'll get it back in just a second.
All right, so what I was getting at is there are many institutions that are failing simultaneously.
We can all see it, right?
Why are they failing simultaneously?
Because Because the thing that they are supposed to do is counterproductive for those who are playing on teams within our lineages, within our nations, right?
Do those who are trying to get ahead at the expense of others within their nation, within the West, within the world, Do those who are attempting to do that want universities to be engaged in trying to figure out what actually works?
I mean, what would happen if a university actually figured out that some generic drug that nobody owns was the most effective tool we had at our disposal?
Um, against COVID that would get in the way of, you know, a huge number of billions of dollars of potential profits.
You don't necessarily want truth-seeking to be a powerful independent force.
You want it to be something else.
You know, how much do you want, uh, the children of your children's competitors, um, uh, how much do you want your children's competitors to be well educated, right?
We've been battling for our entire lives over the nature of public education, how much to invest in it, what the content should be.
Part of that may be that we honestly disagree about what the content is, but part of that are people who can't say what they're really up to, which is sabotaging the intellectual capacity of their children's competitors.
So, this is really the argument, is that We have a system in which something doesn't want the truth labeled as truth because it wants it privatized.
It's keeping it in-house.
Did you remember what you were going to say?
Yeah, but we're past it.
Oh, all right.
So I guess that's the long and short of it.
The conclusion again, just to say it.
That when you are playing against others inside of an entity, like a nation, or a culture, or an institution, your interest is not in having the information available to everybody.
Your incentive is to privatize as much of that information as possible.
And if you can do it, causing people to have an allergic reaction to the truth is great because it will blind them to being able to find the insight that you alone want to profit from.
There it is.
That's where I thought we were going, which is the allergic... not just the fact that there seems to be a non-independent across-the-board set of conclusions that are, in many cases, the opposite of what is true.
And that in itself should trigger people to think, that's not likely.
So, you know, what single or a couple of data points, you know, rather sources of stories, of scientific stories really, did those things come from?
But also, okay, so you've got a whole lot of people believing the opposite of what is true, but it's worse than that.
It's a kind of cognitive autoimmunity, where you've got people actually allergic to the truth, not just believing something that is wrong.
But when the true thing is pointed out, this is done well enough that the actual truth feels dangerous.
feels scandalous, feels like those people who say such things must be barbarians of some sort, and of course we should all always try to keep the barbarians at the gate.
So there is this tension of explicitly tribalistic thinking at many, many different levels, where at each point that someone will begin to say, wait, I'm not sure about that, What will happen to them is they'll be triggered to be reminded, like, oh, no, you've got to think like us, or else we may not be able to protect you anymore.
Or, you know, you definitely don't want to be on the outside of science.
And, you know, for those of us who are saying, actually, a bunch of scientists, us included, are saying, that's not science.
And anyone who tells you to follow the science has just revealed that they don't know what science is.
Well, for the vast majority of people, including especially, I think, those who see themselves as educated because they have degrees that make the claim that they are educated, most people didn't ever do any science.
And to the extent that they did, it was probably taught badly, because teaching science, especially to people who aren't majoring in science, is not a priority at our universities at all.
It's very, very rarely done well, and it's even more true.
Well, in some ways it's more true, sort of the younger, the kids you're talking about teaching.
So, you have a vast educated class who knows, as I've said this many times before, knows that they are innumerate, knows that they can't do math, and they're almost proud of that.
But the idea that also they don't really know what science is, and at the point that people show up saying, that thing that we arrived at, that we are Told that was arrived at by extraordinarily rapid behind-closed-doors consensus, and that's the science, and now you have to just go with the science?
Doesn't sound like science.
Many too many people with this autoimmune, auto-cognitive autoimmunity, which is exactly what you have just walked us through, will say, Oh, no, no.
Now you've gone too far.
I know that now what you're doing is putting me in danger and putting me at risk of basically stepping outside of the bounds of, you know, respectable conversation, cocktail party talk, the people who claim to be scientists because I can tell because they crack glassware, you know, whatever the indicators are right now.
And really, at some level, we're also back to fashion.
Right?
It is in part like, well, I'm going to look around and see what other people are doing.
Oh, everyone's following the science.
I guess I'll follow the science.
And when some scientists stand up and say, no, say, well, but you're not, where are your flasks?
Where's your lab coat?
And so people look for the indicators as opposed to, I'm going to have to actually do the work and think about the technical details, or was there a hypothesis, or how was that funded, where were the incentives, what's the background, what was that based on, do mice actually have long telomeres or not, right?
So, it's the trappings of science and something, you know, and I will just say I'm agnostic about how much consciousness was involved in this system, right?
There's clearly a degree of self-assembly of this system, but... I mean, that's the wonder of selection, right?
I mean, that's exactly true.
There needs to have been no conspiracy.
It doesn't suggest that there was no conspiracy, but it doesn't require it.
Look, there are little conspiracies all the time, right?
Inside of corporations, inside of departments, inside of newsrooms, right?
People decide what they're going to report, what they're not going to report.
They're supposed to be a sort of North Star of what you're doing.
And the problem is if you follow the North Star of science, what happens to you?
Well, you probably don't make it through graduate school.
Right?
It's very dangerous for you if you exhibit too much independence and a willingness to point out what's wrong with the thinking of people who are too powerful.
So, you know, what happens if you set up a selective system like that is the people who end up with the lab coats and the, you know, the chairs of departments and, you know, the endowed chairs and the
The people who are in those positions are specifically the ones who are good at the social game of science, but not inherently good at thinking scientifically or behaving like a scientist when it's awkward for power.
Those skill sets may in fact be unlikely to be found coincident with one another.
Management of the modern scientific bureaucracy And thinking carefully, scientifically, logically, thoroughly, such that you will often find that actually something that you've based a bunch of experiments on, you're going to have to undo.
You're going to have to stop that and do this over here.
There's going to be a lot of reasons that you don't necessarily find that those two things in the same person.
Right.
And it wasn't always that way.
I'm sure there was always a degree of that, right?
There have always been people who've been good at the social system and were less good at science.
But the problem is something has flipped the incentives so that to be good at science means that you're very unlikely to succeed in what we call by that name.
And That results in a predicament that I, you know, I have some sympathy for the public here.
The public cannot fathom how it could be that all of the people, right, that the entire medical profession could get something wrong.
I mean, that's one thing if nobody knows, but if the answer is available and the entire medical profession gets it wrong, that suggests something dire has occurred, which it has.
What is the dire thing?
Something has started.
Let's put it this way.
Things like science and democracy are extremely dangerous to power, right?
If you have power, you can lose power, right?
Having a democracy that can elect people whose allegiances you don't know in advance, that's very dangerous to power.
Having science that can discover that something that you're doing is actually very dangerous or that there's a much better way to do what it is that you're profiting from that would be much less destructive, right?
Having science empowered to do that is very dangerous to power.
And so the idea is one thing you might find amongst those who have accumulated great power is a reluctance about these very systems that threaten them, right?
Journalism, science, public spirited regulation, democracy, all of these things are the whole reason that they're good.
Is that they are indifferent to power.
And so it's not surprising that power would begin to take aim at them.
And it would say, well, you know, of course we love science.
I mean, look at all the technology that is born from science.
But why do we want to share it with everybody?
Right.
That's that's the question.
Right.
So actually, now that I think about it, We do not expect our military to be interested in sharing its finest weapons technology openly, right?
We expect our military to want to keep an advantage that comes from being ahead in terms of the technology of the weaponry.
And what I'm really arguing is that that very same thing has happened inside of places where it's explicitly not supposed to, right?
Well, and obviously facilitated, like how could you possibly reverse that trend at the point that the euphemistic public-private partnerships become the law of the land?
You know, at the point that our publicly funded research, including both basic research, which is to say research that does not have a clear applied reason to exist, But also including the research that maybe is trying to do drug discovery, right?
At the point that all of our publicly funded research, much of it is now in like active explicit cahoots with trying to find private partnerships because that's where the money comes from.
You have spoiled something that you had no right to spoil.
And however many However many stories you tell yourself about how great that is, that now we've got more money coming in for research that needs to be done, the fact is that public funding of research has an ability, at least in theory, to steer clear of the profit motive that private corporations cannot because that's why they exist.
Yeah, actually, I think you've nailed it.
That the public-private partnerships are fundamentally flawed, because although it is true that a private entity benefits from science advancing the ball, it succeeds better when the outgrowth is not publicly shared.
That's a fundamental conflict in terms of the objective.
Public spiritedness is effectively dying in front of us and the institutions are doing exactly what you would expect them to do if you just simply remove the public spiritedness and therefore allowed rent seeking to dominate them.
And the trouble is that it also plays into this issue of the big lie.
That although everybody kind of gets that something isn't right with the institutions It's almost impossible to believe that they're just that the things that they say are misinformation are actually information.
Yeah, right What are the chances of that?
Well, the answer is the chances are good because of evolution and market forces and Game theory, but if you're not expert in those things you may think well, all right I'm sure there's a lot of nonsense in those institutions, but they couldn't possibly be that wrong indeed Okay, we've got three more topics.
We've already been going for an hour.
So, you also wanted to talk about why we are angry at the wrong people.
Well, in light of the fact that we've been going an hour, maybe we should hold that one?
You want to hold that one?
Yeah.
Alright.
We will just gray that out and come back to it.
How about... Actually, don't gray it out.
How would it look if we blued it up?
I don't know.
I tried.
Very briefly, before we go on to talking about fatherhood, which will be the final segment of today's show, Baby Formula.
Which, so there is, as everyone knows, a baby formula shortage, which probably presages a, you know, everything shortage, which is coming down the pike at us.
Itself a conversation for another time.
Or not coming down the turnpike at us.
It's just failing to come down.
As a result of diesel fuel.
Yes, you are about to have nothing coming down the pike at you.
And be happy.
Own nothing, be happy.
Yes.
Well, if you find yourself in possession of a baby, as we do not, and also find yourself unable to produce enough milk for your baby, and I have not been paying much attention to the baby formula thing in particular because Too often, the reason, as I have understood, is the reason that people need baby formula is because they're choosing not to breastfeed.
And that should not be a choice that feels natural or normal to people.
Babies do best on breast milk.
They just do.
However, there are lots of situations, actually, and probably these are accelerated and or entirely created by modernity, but everything from preemies to other conditions that cause a mother to want to breastfeed to produce breast milk but not enough for their child means that in some cases there will need to be something that is not breast milk that babies are getting fed.
Also, adoption.
Also adoption.
Also adoption, not lesbian parents when one of the women gestated, but gay male parents, right?
So yeah, lots of situations in which you're in possession of a baby and you need something and you can't produce it from your own body.
But prefab formula is gross, and I never looked into it really, but just like most of the alternative quote-unquote milks out there, made from various nuts, are actually just filled with gums and seed oils and all sorts of fillers basically to stabilize them, or else no one would drink them if you just ground up a bunch of nuts and put it on a Supermarket shelf and let it sit for a week or two.
They would, you know, separate and then start to go rancid very quickly.
Excuse me.
So formula has this problem, but in some ways even more so.
And of course, it's more important that formula, if that's what you have to be feeding your baby, be free and clear of all of that crap.
The additives, the fillers, the gums, the, you know, the seed oils.
Then, you know, the older you are, the better you can withstand some amount of insult in the form of toxicity to your body.
So, a friend of mine, naturopath, Dr. Dani Lockwood, has on her website, and it was actually, and so these are two new friends of ours, Danielle is the naturopath and her husband Richard, when their lovely child was born, Zach, you can show me, show me, you can show my screen if you will.
When their lovely child was born three years ago, they found that Dani couldn't produce as much milk as she wanted.
She says this.
I'm not giving away any stories here.
And Richard went and produced a formula for formula that doesn't have all the crap in it.
A formula formula.
A formula formula that is here.
And so I'm just going to link to this in the show notes.
I'm not going to walk through why he's used all of it.
You know, or any of that.
But just say, we have since met this child, you know, not when she was a baby, a three-year-old, and she is a charming, healthy, smart, amazing child.
And, you know, lots of kids are who got fed crop, but certainly it would be better if you didn't.
And I just wanted to share that if you find yourself in the position of not producing enough milk for a child that you need to feed and is too young to be eating other things, That this is a really good possibility.
Right.
Now, I haven't looked at this.
I assume it's good stuff.
We obviously can't know for sure, but really the point is, does it out-compete store-bought stuff?
Which it is almost certain to, and you know, I have every expectation it's very high quality.
Exactly.
There was something else to say there.
Zach, may I have my screen back?
Thank you.
I guess the one other thing that I was going to say is I was reminded when I was thinking about this and I looked through and I actually just noticed, you know, sunflower oil is on there.
I probably wouldn't use sunflower oil.
I'd use avocado oil or olive or something.
But I was reminded of a line that had jumped out of me when I was reading The Road to Wigan Pier.
The George Orwell book that we talked about back in episodes 117 and 118.
And the line that was one that I did not share when we were talking about the book back in March was, this is from Orwell, we may find in the long run that to tend to food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.
He, as in so many things, was prescient, and one of the reasons that this particular conclusion of his struck me is that it is a perfect analogy for much of modernity, and for the fact that when it's active physical force, you can see it.
It's obvious.
There's no denying it.
Who's going to claim it's not dangerous?
Obviously.
Obviously.
It's like a machine gun.
It's understood to be a weapon.
Whereas, once it has the label on it that says, this is a lifesaver, this is going to help you out, this is going to increase your convenience, this is going to save you time, it's going to make your life better, it's much harder for people to conclude, actually, that may be the wolf in sheep's clothing.
I'd rather just have the wolf thank you very much so that I can see it, and maybe I'll still make that choice, but I really want to know what it is that I'm accepting.
And, you know, certainly most formula, most baby formula is like that.
Most of these, you know, everything from alternative milks, but I just found, I forgot to send you Zach, but I just found in the aisles of one of the just excellent, we have such excellent grocery stores here in Portland, and yet even in one of our excellent grocery stores, I found canned raisin bread.
Which, um, I thought, I know there's no need for canned raisin bread.
Right.
I am 100% certain of this.
And some people will presumably pull it off the shelf, not as a joke, and open up a can of bread, pour it out, and I don't even know what happens next.
It's almost worth buying a can just to find out what's in there.
What happens when you open it up.
It's snakes or something.
But anyway, the idea that, again to quote Cort Orwell, we may find it the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun, just extraordinary.
It's the things that you have been told are good for you.
It's the things that you're being told are going to make your life easier.
It's the things that you're being told have solved the problems that humans have been dealing with forever.
Really.
So we know now that things like modern orthodontia, and giving children babies only very soft food to chew on, and high sugar drinks because we love it and it tastes good, well that makes our teeth rot.
So I just came up with three things that are about dentistry, but it's all over the place.
And we talk about in our book, in A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Some of the liners in the canning process when you're doing it for mass production are now understood to be causing long-term effects.
Now, that's quite different from saying, actually, I'm going to put up a bunch of my fresh produce that I grew or that I bought at the farmer's market at home.
And keep an eye on it and make sure that I know what it looks like if it ended up not being fully preserved.
But pulling a jar of your own homemade jam or pickled asparagus or whatever it is off your shelf that you made with ingredients that you know and without anything that you can't pronounce is quite different from saying, okay, well if it's canned, it's canned.
If I canned it or if Procter & Gamble canned it, it must be the same thing.
Well, no.
In part because you have very different incentives.
You have very different incentives and it's very, you know, it's a version of the demarcation problem where you don't know, you know, canned peaches aren't as good as peaches, but they are fruit that you can have in the winter, right?
So it might be better than not having them, right?
In glass is going to be better than in metal, right?
Assuming the right kind of glass, not a leaded glass, which of course you wouldn't be able to buy in a canning context.
But the point is, at what point have you modified it enough that an alarm bell should go off?
And each little step might not be the step, you know, there's some straw that breaks the camel's back, but which one is it?
Yes.
But the, you know, Canned anything, including, if you think back to the conversation we were just having, canned perspectives are in some way the same thing, right?
Maybe that's what was in the canned raisin bread.
Perspectives.
Well, you know, it's a little bit, you know, what is the New York Times?
Like it's a perspective canner now.
It was a newspaper and it's become a perspective canner and the point is if you want to be Comforted about the new gender chaos?
You can have it in your canned perspective right along with your sense about who the science cranks are and who the proper authorities are, right?
It's all prepared for you.
Yeah, everything.
It's all prepared.
It goes to Ukraine, it goes to gender ideology, it goes to COVID, it goes everywhere.
Right, it goes everywhere and the point is it comes with hidden costs that are nowhere described, right?
The hazard to you of accepting the canned perspective Is tremendous just the same way You know accepting Food that's soft because it's convenient may cause you to need thousands of dollars of orthodontia and then tens of thousands of dollars of implants Down the road, right?
The point is that the hazard is actually quite large, but it sure doesn't feel it, you know, and you know Just simply having something that's too soft doesn't Cause you to have these, you know, the point is it's the displacing of the stuff that would properly cause your jaw to form in a robust way.
Right.
Okay.
Well, from breast milk and fake breast milk to fathers.
To fathers.
Fathers.
Right.
Yeah.
So again, like I said, near the top of the hour, Father's Day is tomorrow, and yesterday we attended the graduation of Zachary, our firstborn and our producer, along with his three living grandparents.
And it was quite a spectacle.
And that and some previous things that we had been thinking about caused us to want to say a few things about fatherhood.
Yes, I did want to correct one thing you said.
Tomorrow is Father's Day.
Every day is Father's Day.
That's my feeling.
Is that right?
Yes, which means that Father's Day is Earth Day.
And the Earth shall be ours.
Love your father.
I don't know.
Something.
Yeah, I did want to.
Yep.
For some reason, your idea of taking over everything, fathers taking over everything, which is obviously a joke at one level, it's like the stereotype of what the men would do if they were allowed access to all the holidays, and actually they wouldn't, but this is like a like a Washington Post version of what they think the men would do if they were allowed to take over all the holidays.
But you're like, you know, Every Day is Father's Day reminds me of the paint company that actually makes extraordinary paint, but has the worst logo that I have ever seen.
And I'm not going to name the company, but I will say that the logo is an earth with a paint can over it, pouring over the earth.
And it says, cover the earth.
Cover the earth, yes.
It's such an abomination, and it's really hard to continue loving the paint, but it's just really high-quality paint.
But no, please don't cover the earth.
Please, no.
Every day is not Father's Day, and you don't want to do that anyway.
No.
No, I just thought I'd put in a word for the patriarchy while I was at it.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, what else?
Right.
Exactly.
I mean, every day is Patriarchy Day.
Let's agree on that.
Yeah, some of us have noticed.
Okay.
Yeah, I did actually have a serious point.
I know.
Moments ago, and it was about something.
This has actually been troubling to me for a couple decades.
There's a terminology we use out here in civilization that seems to me so upside down.
And what it is, is when we say that somebody, you know, is your biological father, Right?
What we mean is that they are your genetic father.
But the problem, and you know, you'll even hear this in courts, right?
The discussion about custody and things that, you know, who is your biological father.
But here's what is completely misunderstood about this.
Human beings are, as we describe very thoroughly in our book, human beings are a very unusual species in which a huge fraction of what we are, and in fact almost all of the important stuff, is in the cognitive software layer, not in the hardware layer.
And we have also described and done so on the podcast many times that human males have two reproductive strategies or two broad categories.
And we have described this variously as three versions.
But let's just say you've got a demarcation between a high investment strategy in which males invest symmetrically to females in the raising of offspring They're protecting and providing for them.
And then males also have other options which involve no investment in offspring.
The problem with the terminology about somebody's biological father is that it treats all of the stuff that fathers actually do the stuff that matters most as somehow secondary and Lesser and unimportant when in fact it is primary and every bit as biological in other words We our genes create a brain that is inhabited by our
I'm trying to avoid the term mind, but that's really what I mean here.
Our minds develop inside our brains.
The mind is what the brain does, and that mind is shaped by the exposure that a person has while developing, right?
Somebody who provides the genes that become you, but doesn't stick around, doesn't inform you, is not an important part of your developmental environment, is your father in one way, but it is not the important way.
Right?
The genes aren't that remarkable.
They're not so different between one individual and another.
What is remarkable, what's important, is what you become.
And what you become is not preordained in the genetic layer.
It is something that happens better when you have a father present and it doesn't matter whether that father is your genetic parent or not.
So, first thing to say is I really would love us to break the habit of referring to your genetic parent as your biological parent.
Your biological parent is the person who raised you every bit as much as it is the person who provided the genes in question.
It's great if they're the same person.
Oftentimes for many people they are not the same person and we should not be denigrating the role of somebody who has been your biological father in the cultural cognitive sense but wasn't your genetic parent.
Because it really is the primary place where being a father is difficult and where the content of fatherhood matters.
Yeah, at some level, this is a place where Mrs. X's are once again different, and this is asymmetrical with regard to a genetic mother putting aside a few modern ways that that can happen.
A genetic mother has actually, by virtue of her being the genetic mother, especially if she's going to continue to raise the child, put in a tremendous amount of resource and labor.
Through gestation and lactation, right?
Whereas the genetic father has only had to contribute sperm and that was presumably quite a bit of fun and not much work, right?
So the act of actually parenting, of mothering or fathering, to turn it into the verb form, is by far the larger part of the work and the more rewarding in many ways.
It just goes on and on and on and on.
But the genetic part of motherhood has already been a substantial investment, whereas the genetic part of fatherhood has not been.
And so thinking about fatherhood as only the sperm, did you or did you not, minimizes tremendously what all fatherhood can be.
As, too, would considering motherhood only to be the pregnancy and the lactation, the breastfeeding, would be to minimize all of what motherhood is.
But that's already a big piece.
The gestation and lactation are already providing a bond and a lifelong attachment that under almost all normal conditions then maintains forever.
And one, I think, issue here, because, you know, we hear things like, oh, you think the definition of woman is so simple, you know, it's an adult human female, but definitions change all the time.
Look at how we talk about an adoptive father being a father, and he's not a father.
You know, this is sort of where this is coming from, right?
And I think one, I don't, you know, you can't change language by diktat, or when people try, it usually backfires.
But as much as the conversation right now around sex and gender is very confused by a lot of people, including some people who are trying to make it confused, and including by some people who are trying to make sense of it, but just don't necessarily have the tools, what you and I have been saying for a long time, since long before any of this was in the cultural
Conversation was sex is the hardware and, you know, including a bunch of pieces and gender is the software or I would say gender is the behavior, the behavioral manifestations, right?
And I think, you know, those two things apply somewhat less well in different particular situations.
So, woman refers to sex, but you can act, you know, womanly or feminine or, you know, turn that into an adjective and say, well, now we're talking about ways that historically, traditionally, stereotypically, if you like, women have tended to act Women, actual women who would, do, or did, or will, or would produce eggs, right?
But for genetic or developmental anomalies, women have tended to act in ways that are more nurturing.
Women have tended to act, have tended to be more interested in people and animals than in things or systems.
Not all women, not all men aren't interested, etc., etc., etc.
We don't have to make those caveats all the time, or at least we shouldn't have to.
But we have these two different words, and as much as it seems very confusing right now, it is useful to have those two different words.
Sex refers to what the genetics handed us, and gender is all of the downstream effects, some of which are much more variable.
But we only have one word for father.
And so part of what we're running into then is almost the inverse of the problem that we're having with sex and gender.
Like, maybe we want two words?
I don't think we actually do, precisely because the genetic contribution to fatherhood isn't that big a deal compared to all of the other things that good fathers do.
So, I have a thought experiment I use to pressure test this to see whether I actually believe it.
And it works like this.
Suppose I've found... So, Zack is sitting here.
Yes, he is.
You're his father.
I am his father.
Let's suppose that I was not his genetic father and that I just discovered that.
Now this runs into an immediate complication, right?
Obviously if your spouse cheats on you and that's how you end up raising somebody else's genetic product as your own offspring, then the breach of trust in the relationship is so gargantuan that it's hard to separate out your emotions about the kid.
Yeah.
But let's say it was a switch at birth.
Could I interrupt for a second?
Sure.
And just say, just in case you guys are wondering this is autobiographical at all, the six of us, your parents, my mother, you and I, and Zachary were sitting at dinner last night before Zach's graduation, before we went to Zach's graduation.
And he embarked, Zachary embarked, on some stories about how he had gotten through school, and how he had driven, and how he had managed to obtain some vehicles, legally, but by stretching boundaries and pushing limits, and I also stretch boundaries and push limits, but every single thing about the way that he was talking, the way his
Mind was clearly moving and his facial expressions, and I looked at you and your two parents and said, I know you didn't wonder, but if you ever did wonder, now you should have no doubt as to the paternity of this child.
Well, I hate to do this so publicly, but what I never say in these circumstances, but I always think is, well, You know, I was the parent who raised him, so you would expect that these things would be that way.
Whether or not, I mean, you know, there could be a genetic component.
Even though there was pressure from both of us for him not to do some of those things.
Oh, right.
No, no.
Don't follow down your father's footsteps here.
That's just no one to trouble, Zachary.
Not terribly surprised.
But okay, the pressure test, though.
Let's say it was a switched at birth at the hospital thing, right?
So that you and I both discover he's not actually our kid, right?
Does it change how I feel about him?
Not in the slightest.
Not in the slightest.
What if you discovered it two days later?
Well, two days later, you know, you reverse the thing.
But at this point, he's my kid, whether or not he's my genetic kid.
And here's the place where the pressure test doesn't 100% work.
Am I indifferent to the kid that was our genetic kid that got swapped out at the hospital and we've never met him?
You're curious.
I'm curious.
Yeah, right.
What's he like?
I'm curious and I might even feel affection towards him but no, I'm this guy's father.
One way or the other genetically speaking, right?
And that becomes a... Biologically speaking.
One way or the other biologically speaking.
No, one way or the other genetically speaking.
Whether he's my genetic kid or not my genetic kid, my feeling about him is the same and my role as his father is the same.
Right?
And, you know, that's not to say that genes don't play some role, that there aren't some surprising heritable characteristics, but by and large they have been greatly overrated compared to the huge range of things that an actual father passes on to their kid that are not passed on.
You know, I mean, look.
Like how to be a total pain in the ass?
Like how to be a total pain in the ass.
Yeah, you did that really well.
Thank you.
How not to pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at a pun, no matter how inappropriate it is to make it at that moment.
I guess that's sort of a subsidiary lesson on how to be a pain in the ass.
How not to think hierarchically.
No, actually Zach does that really well.
He does that best.
Sorry, that was a subtle, not very funny joke, although I enjoyed it.
But yeah, anyway, so I think we've more or less arrived at the point which is let's fix our damn terminology and let's, you know, you're right, motherhood clears this up because it is so very rare that there is any, you know, ambiguity by virtue of the intensity of the relationship formed by pregnancy and lactation.
Well, I mean, there are plenty of mothers who aren't genetic mothers, but it is a rarer phenomenon.
Right.
It's a rarer phenomenon.
And anyway, we could do better terminology wise.
And I hope that especially I would almost think that the courts should start by fixing this and that the culture can catch up.
Well, I guess this isn't exactly about fatherhood and Father's Day, but my Natural Selections, my sub stack that will drop on Tuesday, is actually about issues around this a little bit.
And so I will just preview it slightly.
I believe it was last week I said something.
I don't remember what we would have been talking about, but I said something that I say a lot, which is that every human being has an equal number of male and female ancestors.
And almost whenever I say that, someone says, No, that's not true.
I know we've got lots more female ancestors than we do male ancestors.
And so I will just leave this teaser and say both things are true.
It depends on whether or not you're thinking about the individual or the population.
And most people who are walking around, especially if you're anything basically but an evolutionary biologist, or an ecologist, are not ever thinking in terms of populations.
And so when you hear something like, oh, we've got way more female ancestors than male ancestors, you assume, you put into that sentence, oh, that must be about individuals, without even in any way being conscious, even maybe having the framework for knowing that there would be a distinction.
But what I've written about, hopefully pretty cleanly and clearly to be able to point to forever after in this piece that will be coming up in three days on natural selections, Is, you know, how it is that we know that this is true for individuals, that each of us has an equal number of male and female ancestors, while it is also true that at the population level there are more females than males in our history.
So, both things are true, even though if you say either thing uncarefully it sounds like you're directly contradicting the other.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is, for me, for us, some of the fun of, but also for other people coming in.
The nuance, the complications, some of the frustration with evolutionary thinking.
And frankly, getting your brain around a few of these little tweaks, it will help everyone make sense of your world better.
And if, for instance, the people running some of the three-letter organizations had a better sense of some of these complexities, I think we'd be in much better shape.
Yeah, if they're even trying.
Right.
All right.
Anything else?
No.
I mentioned the podcast episodes that people should check out.
You did?
I said that I was going to come back with the actual name of Abigail's book, and I will also put it in the show notes.
You had it right.
It's Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
It's excellent.
I recommend it.
I also recommend Her and My Interchange, which came out before her book was published, about a little less than a year before her book was published, on the same topic.
And we will take a little break here, and then for those of you watching, watching live, in about 15 minutes we will come back with a Q&A.
You can ask questions for that at darkersubmissions.com.
And until we see you again, this time next week, We encourage you to be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
