#135 Signal Lost (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/EvoLens135:4 View on Spotify (With video): ***** In this 135th 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 how, with regard to Covid, natural immunity compares to vaccine-induced immunity. Is the omicron variant unique in this regard? What science has been done to address the quest...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 135.
It's odd, but it's not prime.
Anyone knows that.
Anyone.
Come on, multiples of five.
It's so simple.
Yeah.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying, and we have a train to catch, so this is going to be to the point.
Yeah, this is going to be rapid fire.
We are not going to be doing a Q&A today, apologies for that, but we'll come back next week with more questions.
With more of your questions and more of our answers.
We can't stop you from queuing.
No, we cannot stop you from queuing.
No, we will not.
We will not be A-ing.
And here, queuing right in front of the camera is our darkest cat.
I have a feeling that's spelled differently, but I can't be certain of it.
Queuing and queuing?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, queuing as in Q and A isn't really a word.
It's not a word, no.
But queuing, yeah, has all sorts of crazy vowels.
It's not even spelled at all.
Yeah, exactly.
It's scoffed at in polite circles.
Yeah, now queuing, Q-U-E-U-E-I-N-G, bizarre.
Yeah, too many vowels.
Anyway, here we are.
Yeah, here we are.
It is mid July.
It is almost the end of July.
And we're going to talk to you about about a little COVID stuff and a few things.
Yeah, actually do a little kind of a way back machine that needs doing.
Talk about how to know when you're being lied to and things like that.
Excellent.
Okay.
Let's do logistics first.
Let's get all this out of the way.
We have, you know, I'm mostly going to skip a lot of this.
If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and check us out on Odyssey where the chat is live.
Find some of our cool merchandise at www.darkstore.org slash home.
That's darkhorsestore.org is where you can find some really cool stuff like epic tabby tote bags and Pfizer where the breakthroughs never stop and YouTube community guidelines because you can't handle the truth.
All this and more at the darkhorsestore.org.
Check out my weekly writings at naturalselections.substack.com.
And as a reminder, we are supported by you, and we appreciate you.
We appreciate you subscribing to this channel, Burt Weinstein, to our Clips channel.
If you're looking for shorter, if we do something that you like that feels like it could have been done in a shorter form and not as part of the whole podcast, there's a good chance that our awesome Clips producer has clipped it and put it on the Dark Horse Podcast Clips channel.
And we have those at both YouTube and Odyssey.
You clearly want to say something.
Yeah, one more plug.
Michael Schellenberg.
We're not there yet.
We're not there yet.
You know, I did that last week, too.
Just don't want it to get forgotten.
Yeah.
So right now we're talking about ways that we are appreciative of our audience and how they can support us and how they are supporting us, right?
In my defense, I am appreciative of Michael Schellenberg.
Yeah.
Okay, go on.
Go for it.
All right.
Podcast out this week with me interviewing.
No, I don't interview.
I have discussions with.
I had a discussion with Michael Schellenberger.
And as with the discussion that I had, that we put out the prior week with Matthias Desmond, there's a good bit of disagreement, friendly disagreement, good natured disagreement, but pointed It's a long one.
a substantive disagreement.
And so if you're interested in hearing how these things get hashed out by adults who care deeply about what they're talking about, this is another good example of that.
I would say the Constantine Kissin episode also had that feature.
So anyway, check out the Michael Schellenberger episode of the Dark Horse podcast.
It's a long one.
I was on the road doing my own recording and we did have a camera drop out at the end.
So the video quality changes in the last few minutes of the podcast.
But it's all there, and it's a good discussion.
All right.
All right.
So back to thanking our audience.
Right.
So that discussion is presumably everywhere that these live streams go, which is to say on YouTube, on Odyssey, ultimately on Spotify, and then also in audio form everywhere that podcasts are available.
And just a reminder, YouTube demonetized us about a year ago now, and so for those of you who are able to, we are grateful, very grateful for your financial support.
You can join one of our Patreons where we have monthly private Q&As where it is small enough that we can actually engage with the chat as it's happening.
And we leave those up for patrons afterwards to listen to, and you can get access to small real-time conversations with Brett at his, at a larger dollar amount.
And on either of them, you can access our Discord server, where you can engage in honest conversations about difficult topics, join a book club, unwind with virtual happy hours, and karaoke.
And they've got all the demographic markers you can imagine are represented on all parts of those spectrums, which is terrific because that's what conversations should include.
And of course we have sponsors.
So let's jump right to that.
We only accept sponsors.
We only run ads for sponsors with whom we have an actual positive relationship, either us directly, or in some cases, as in the case of the third sponsor today, if we don't have any ability to have a relationship with the sponsor, we ask a good friend who does.
You mean relationship with the product.
We are vouching for the product, and in the cases where we do not use the product because we don't have a need for it, we ask trusted people to evaluate it.
So the first the first sponsor this week is Thesis.
New to us this summer and we are excited to be partnering with them.
Thesis makes nootropics.
Nootropics are nutrients found in nature or in the human body that have been demonstrated to enhance mental performance in areas such as motivation, creativity, mood, memory, focus, or cognitive processing.
They work best when combined with exercise, proper nutrition, and mindfulness activities such as meditation, as does so much in life.
You're probably already using a nootropic, as one of the most commonly consumed ones is caffeine, but it's far from the least... from the most exciting.
Or the least, I suppose.
Effective nootropics allow people to optimize their focus, energy, and mood based on the demands of the day.
In some cases, nootropics can replace the pharmaceuticals that are usually used to tackle a problem like ADHD.
Thesis is unusual in the nootropic market in taking a very personalized approach.
They do not assume that what works for your brother will work for you, or that what worked for you when you were under deadline for a dreadful project will be the same thing that will work when you need a spark of creativity for a project you've been dreaming about for years.
Just as some people become alert after a cup of coffee and others can fall asleep right away, so too do all nootropics have different effects on different people.
With the first iteration of Thesis products, customers were treated like subjects in a clinical trial.
Blinded customers took a series of different nootropic blends over the course of a month and reported how they felt.
Analysis of that feedback found that, not surprisingly, different people respond differently to different blends.
Now, after two years, 2,500 customers, and millions of data points, Thesis is confident that they have created a recommendation algorithm to predict which blends of nootropics will work best for any given customer.
The process is simple.
Go to their website, take a short quiz, and they'll send a starter kit with four different blend recommendations to try over the course of a month.
I've tried four blends now.
All have been intriguing.
The Creativity blend, for instance, seems to smooth things over, add a little clarity, and make inspiration come a bit easier.
And the logic blend seems to facilitate focus and getting lots of tasks done.
With fully personalizable blends, there's likely to be a thesis that is right for you.
To get your own customized thesis starter kit, go online to TakeThesis.com slash Dark Horse, take the quiz, and use code DarkHorse at checkout for 10% off of your first box.
Yeah, I love their scientific approach to figuring out what nootropics are going to work for you.
Yeah.
It's a breath of fresh air.
Indeed.
Indeed, indeed.
Our second sponsor this month.
No, today.
I've got all sorts of typos in this script.
Um, our first... our second sponsor today is also relatively new to us, Element.
That's L-M-N-T.
Element is an electrolyte drink mix that has everything you need and nothing you don't.
It's got a lot of salts, a thousand milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 of magnesium, but it has no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, no gluten, no fillers.
Electrolytes facilitate hundreds of functions in the body, including the conduction of nerve impulses, hormonal regulation, and nutrient absorption.
Element can help prevent and eliminate headaches, muscle cramps, and sleeplessness.
I've now heard from several friends, independently of one another, about how much they like Element, for themselves, or in some cases, for the physically hardworking men in their lives.
They drink it every day, and feel better doing so.
When you set, set.
Wow.
When you sweat, the primary electrolyte lost is sodium.
Athletes can lose up to seven grams per day.
Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and is perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or paleo diet, if that's your thing.
Element is not just for athletes, though.
Anyone being active may find that they benefit from Element.
Even drinking a few glasses of wine can leave you depleted, and Element can help.
Right now, Element is offering our listeners a free sample pack with any purchase.
That's eight single-serving packets free with any Element order.
This is a great way to try all eight flavors or share Element with a salty friend.
Or a friend who's not yet salty.
Get yours at www.drinkelement.com.
This deal is only available through our drink.
No.
Wow.
This deal is only available through our link.
You must go to www.drinkelement.com.
That's D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T dot com slash darkhorse.
Element offers no questions and...
This doesn't even look like English.
My God.
Element offers no questions asked refunds.
Try it, totally risk free.
If you don't like it, share it with a salty friend, or again, a friend who's not salty enough yet, and they will give you your money back, no questions asked.
You have nothing to lose.
Oh man, well, so I think I got it though.
I really do like the stuff.
Yeah.
I just can't read a script today.
How about this?
Yeah.
Potential slogan, without electrolytes, consciousness itself would be impossible.
Indeed, yeah.
Right?
And I don't think Dow can touch you.
I don't think Dow can touch you.
I don't think they can touch you for that.
I mean, they presumably got some noodley appendages.
Yeah, it's satire.
I think a slogan that is satire is protected 16 ways from Sunday.
Yeah.
I've never understood that expression, but... I don't know how many ways you can get out of Sunday.
In my experience, it's one.
It's linear.
One right through Sunday.
The only way out of Sunday is through.
Yeah.
All right.
Our final sponsor this week is MD Hearing Aid.
MD Hearing Aid was founded by an ENT surgeon who made it his mission to develop a quality hearing aid that anyone could afford, recognizing that about 95% of the people who need a hearing aid only require a few settings.
He removed some of the less often needed components.
He also cut out the middleman and now MD Hearing Aid makes a rechargeable hearing aid that is FDA-registered and costs a small fraction of what typical hearing aids cost.
These hearing aids aim to fit so well that no one will know you're wearing them.
The rechargeable batteries last up to 30 hours.
Their Volt Plus is water-resistant in up to 3 feet of water.
And you don't need a prescription to get one.
You buy it directly from the source, where audiologists and licensed hearing specialists are available 7 days a week.
Everyone can empathize with what it feels like to be left out of a conversation that others are enjoying.
Here's a testimonial from a friend of ours who has substantial hearing loss and who relies on hearing aids.
We asked her to try this product and this is what she said.
With my particular type of hearing loss, a deep male voice in a noisy room is the hardest situation for me to hear and understand speech.
I wore MD hearing aid.
I wore the MD hearing aid to have a conversation with a deep-voiced man in a room with a lot of white noise.
The MD hearing aid passed the test, as my conversation partner's voice was clear and understandable.
At a price point under $1,000, I was amazed at how effective they are.
MD Hearing Aid has brought affordable hearing to over 600,000 satisfied customers, plus they offer a 45-day risk-free trial with a 100% money-back guarantee.
Get clinic-level care for 80% less with MD Hearing Aid.
Go to mdhearingaid.com and use the promo code Dark Horse to get their new buy-one-get-one deal.
A pair of hearing aids costs just $149.99, plus Dark Horse listeners receive a free extra-charging case, a $100 value.
So head to mdhearingaid.com and use the promo code Dark Horse to get their new buy one get one deal of hearing aids.
$149.99 for the pair.
All right.
I almost got through reading that one.
You did.
Much better than I did.
It was a low bar.
True.
Do you want to start or should I start today?
You go ahead.
I go ahead.
Okay, since I'm off to such a fine start.
Well, I don't know.
It could be amusing.
It could be amusing, indeed.
Okay, here we are.
I'm just going to keep an eye on the time because we do have to be kind of fast and furious today.
Snappy.
Yeah, but we will be back next week when presumably we'll have a little bit more time, a little bit more relaxed.
We don't know.
We hope.
We hope.
Yes.
If the future is anything like the past, which so far it hasn't really been, so I don't know.
In some ways it is.
Physically speaking, the laws change very little as far as I can tell.
The physical laws.
The physical laws, yeah.
Let's start with this Nature news article, Zach, if you want to show my screen.
Nature, of course, is one of the two premier science journals in the world.
Science, which is published in the US, being the other one.
Nature comes out of Great Britain.
And they have not only sort of what is deemed to be the most elite original, the primary literature that is published across all of the domains of science, but they also have a news division where they report on scientific findings that have not been published in Nature itself.
So this is a Nature News article.
Published this week called Prior Omicron Infection Protects Against B.A., I actually don't know how you pronounce this, B.A.4 and B.A.5 variants.
I haven't heard it pronounced.
I haven't either.
I've only been reading it.
So again, the headline, Prior Omicron Infection Protects Against B.A.4 and B.A.5 Variants.
Catching an earlier version of SARS-CoV-2, particularly Omicron, provides some immunity against the two fast-spreading lineages.
Okay, if I may have my screen back, Zach.
Thank you.
I want to say a number of things here, and rather than simply dissect the Nature news article, we're going to go to the preprints that they are referring to.
And that's one of the points I want to make, that now, apparently, when the news suits Nature, we are allowed to talk about the science reported in preprints, as we were early in the days of COVID.
But for a while there, we were being told that if it hadn't been peer-reviewed, then it wasn't really science.
And we weren't really supposed to be referring to that as a scientific result.
That is fascinating, and it is a major concession in many ways.
Without there being any actual concession, of course.
It's a tacit concession.
Right.
That's one of the sort of three main things that I noticed about this.
And again, I'll link to the article in the show notes.
But the entire article is referring to mostly one, but also a second, Preprints, which are exactly the style of papers that most of us have been having to rely on almost exclusively throughout COVID in order to figure out what is going on, in part because early on, the rate of research was just so fast and furious that the journals couldn't keep up.
And then at some point, of course, you started to get censorship within the journals, wherein Non-acceptable, non-mainstream conclusions weren't being published.
And so, peer review became a mechanism of censorship.
But now we have two preprints being discussed in Nature News.
Yeah, I just want to say, I'm going to try to remember.
This actually dovetails with something I plan to talk about later in our discussion.
It's a third example of something for which I had two.
So anyway, I've made a note to myself, but if you hear it come up in line and I fail to mention it...
I mean, if you want to talk about it now, you can.
No, no.
I want to wait so that you have the other two and you can see the pattern.
Okay.
So, that's one point about this article.
Another is, and no doubt everyone has noticed, that for a while we were getting new variant names.
Every time, I don't know, every time what?
How would I even finish that sentence, right?
We were getting new variant names.
And then Omicron shows up, depending on where you are in the world, so end of 2021, And we're still an Omicron, but now we're getting new sub-variant names.
And this feels like the kind of game that systematists play.
Systematists being the type of scientists who are biologists, who are evolutionary biologists, who are phylogenists, who are systematists.
Those type of evolutionary biologists being those who are trying to determine the relationships between species, or in this case, And, you know, what point that you decide, oh, that's actually a species versus a subspecies in the case of an organism rather than a virus is a judgment call.
But this change from we're getting new variants to we're getting new sub-variants of Omicron feels also like it was political rather than scientific.
There's no discussion as far as I see as to, you know, no justification as to why that is the case.
So I want to point out it is beyond a judgment call.
It is arbitrary unless somebody has set out a standard against which you would have to make a judgment call.
In other words, you could say here you need a certain number of substantive changes to the code before you call it a new variant versus a sub-variant or something.
But absent that standard... Which is exactly, that's the kind of rule that you could use for viral variants.
You couldn't use that for species because we don't have them sequenced at that level.
Right.
And in biology, In most disciplines, which do not focus on phylogenetics but have to interface with it, as most of the disciplines in biology do, there is not an awareness of how little meaning is contained in the level of distinction.
The fact that things are a clade is meaningful, but the fact that we call it a family versus a subfamily or a genus versus a subgenus is meaningless.
Some of us eschew categorical.
Well, yeah, we joke in our household that we eschew categorical rank.
Categorical rank being family genus, the order.
We do not at all eschew the description of the clades.
That is to say, who is related to whom is a factual question.
You can get it right, you can get it wrong, but there is nothing arbitrary about it, right?
Two creatures are more closely related to each other than either are to a third.
That's a factual description.
There's no judgment call there.
It's just a question of what the evidence suggests the relationship is.
And we may have it wrong, but the history is the history.
Right.
The history is whatever the history is, even if we never figure out what it is.
So, amongst those of us who take phylogenetic systematics very, very seriously at a logical level, You know, Heather and I, for example, if we are having a dinner table conversation and somebody says, I don't remember, you know, is a skunk a weasel?
Is it a mustelid?
Right?
The answer is, it doesn't really matter.
Because skunks, mind you, I'm remembering.
We should have done this with a tree.
We should have prepared the visual for this.
I should have looked this up to see whether this is still the evidence.
But the evidence is, although skunks are not classified within the mustelidae, Currently, they are the group right outside of it, which means that you could have just as easily made the group one rung larger, and it would include them.
And so the point is, it's somebody's arbitrary judgment call.
Skunks happen to be put into something called the Mephistids, I think, and then we got the Mastelids, which is all the weasels.
Right.
But if the Mastelids, the weasels, plus the skunks is a group that doesn't exclude anybody, then the point is, well, we don't have to have a discussion about whether they're technically in the modality.
We know what the relationship is.
And so what you're pointing out with respect to these variants is that maybe there is some standard somewhere and we will hear about it.
Or maybe there isn't a standard as is true in so many quadrants of biology.
And the basic point may be new variants were beginning to grow old.
And so people, you know, they didn't want to have to learn How to speak about a new variant.
So they've downgraded the level of evolutionary difference at the level of parlance.
Or worse.
The propagation of new variants was making people question the efficacy of the public health policies that were in place, which largely mass vaccination.
Right, right.
And so really the question, I would argue, there's a natural place that you could draw this distinction, which is natural immunity, right?
In other words... And that's where we're going here.
Oh, it is?
All right.
Well, no, I mean... Well, my point would be, I would say you are meaningfully dealing with a new variant at the point that the immunity that you got to your prior variant fails to prevent you from getting the new one.
Okay, so let's just finish talking about the variance here, but then this is interesting because this does tie together.
We didn't talk about what I was going to... We, the you and I, did not discuss in advance what I wanted to say here, but I think you'll see that that fits together very nicely.
Let's just see what the CDC has to say about variants, though, shall we?
Zach, you may show my screen.
This is the CDC page.
You can see at the top there SARS-CoV-2 variant classifications and definitions.
And I'm going to, if I may have my screen back for a moment, just go to my PDF.
Zach?
Thank you.
So that I can... Here we go.
Okay, so this is the same document.
You can see this is just a PDF version of that same document.
They are talking about here key points with regard to variants of SARS-CoV-2 and their document they say...
Vaccines approved and authorized for use in the United States are effective against the predominant variants circulating in the United States and effective therapeutics are available.
Really?
That seems like quite a general statement for which there is no evidence offered, and it's not hot-linked unlike a lot of the things they've got here.
And then if you go down further and find that there's all these variants being monitored, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, eta, iota, kappa, zeta, mu, who knew?
Who knew?
And what we have under variants of concern is Omicron.
Omicron is the only variant of concern at the moment, but it's got all these different lineages.
Attributes of Omicron as the variant of concern include potential reduction in neutralization by post-vaccination sera.
Which strikes me as rather directly in conflict to the earlier claim in this very same document that what we've got in the form of vaccines is exactly what you need for the dominant strain, which Omicron is.
So within a single document, this took nothing.
This took nothing.
Just like CDC variants, what do they have to say?
Huh.
Within one document, they contradict themselves.
They do it without even pretending to be referring to any actual evidence.
They just are making claims and, I don't know, hoping that no one notices.
Which, so far, very few people seem to be noticing, at least if they have a voice in the public square.
You know, every so often there's a story of somebody who has faked their way into some profession and, you know, is behaving as a surgeon or something without ever having studied the The discipline, right?
They usually make a point of doing better than the CDC does at being a public health authority.
Yeah.
It's really remarkable how badly the CDC does at this job.
And even if we understood the CDC to be simply a PR
I mean, we've said this before, and it's been a while since we've talked about this, but back when we were in grad school, before every trip, and indeed back when I was running study abroad trips, I would be on the phone with the CDC in advance trying to figure out exactly why the recommendations for the particular vaccinations were for where we were, because it doesn't make sense to have, for instance, an Ecuador-wide or a Madagascar-wide vaccination recommendation, because frankly,
The jungles, the lowland tropical forests on the coast are going to have very different diseases with very different vectoring insects than you're going to have at elevation where it gets to freezing or below freezing at night, right?
It's just not going to be the same illnesses.
I have had, in the past, several very compelling conversations with the tropical disease people at the CDC, and that is part of why I find myself feeling almost... I mean, I'm over it at this point, because I no longer take them seriously.
I don't know who could, but it feels like something happened to this agency, because it used to actually at least have some number of people.
Well, it is an exact mirror of what I always say about the effect of the Clinton administration on the Democratic Party.
The Clinton administration is the point at which the Democratic Party abandoned working people And representing working people, whether you're cynical about it or not, is a go-to winning strategy in a democracy.
Sure.
But what the Democratic Party did under Clinton was it embraced the same kind of corruption that the Republicans were so good at.
And so the point is it needs to pretend to care about people now.
But it has real constituents, right?
People who pay up.
And the CDC has made the same transition.
It has gone from serving people who wish not to get sick to serving, let's just say, an industry with very special product placement needs, right?
They're excellent at getting a product placed like, for example, in millions of arms.
Yeah, yes.
Oh, that's exactly right.
Okay, so point three about this Nature News article, which comes back around to something that you were alluding to here, is a reminder that—don't show my screen here yet, Zach—that the title of the Nature News article is, Prior Omicron Infection Protects Against BA.4 and BA.5 Variants.
And indeed, what that entire Nature News article suggests is precisely that, that Omicron, having been infected with Omicron, protects against Omicron, but having been infected with a variant that wasn't Omicron doesn't provide you much protection.
But when you actually go to the research, as I did, and I did not do the research, I did not spend as much time as I could with these papers, but the original research It doesn't say what it says it says, as is too often the case.
So let us go to, this is the Alterane paper, there's a couple of papers here.
This one.
You can show my screen here.
And again, I'll link to the version of this that's on the web, but I've got a PDF here.
This is the preprint that is primarily being referred to in this Nature News article, and the second author is the primary author on the other preprint.
So, this is a team out of Qatar, and they have looked at infections and basically health records in Qatar.
That's how it's pronounced, right?
Never strikes me as right.
Which apparently is a very unusual place with something like, gosh I forgot now, but closing in on 90% of the people aren't from there, and only less than 10% of the people are over 50.
So it's demographically very diverse in one way, but doesn't have very many old people.
So, the title of this paper, this preprint, which is the basis on which Nature News said previous infection with Omicron provides immunity against future infection with Omicron, but previous infection with non-Omicron doesn't do you as much good.
The title is Protection of SARS-CoV-2 Natural Infection Against Reinfection with the Omicron BA.4 or BA.5 Subvariants.
Okay, I'm going to scroll.
Sorry, make you guys dizzy a little bit here.
And in there, this is what?
This is in the abstract.
Protection, they say, protection of a previous infection against BA4, BA5 reinfection was modest when the previous infection involved a pre-Omicron variant, but strong when the previous infection involved the Omicron BA.1 or BA.2 subvariants.
So, that seems to be consistent with what you were arguing and what we might expect.
Like, we might expect that if there really are distinct differences between, say, Omicron and Delta, and the differences between Omicron and Delta are greater than the differences between Omicron BA1 and Omicron BA5, that the natural immunity that an infection would confer would be greater the more closely related the infectious agents were to one another.
You would expect that.
But what did they do to assess this?
And sorry, again, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
This is in the methods.
Previous infections were classified as pre-Omicron versus Omicron previous infections based on whether they occurred before or after the Omicron wave that started in Qatar in December 19th, 2021.
Literally, the only thing they did was said, if you were infected before December 19th, it must not have been Omicron.
If you were infected after December 19th, it must be Omicron.
There were two obvious problems with this.
Aside from, no, they didn't actually test for whether or not Omicron was conferring a natural immunity advantage against Omicron.
They did not do that.
One of the issues is, of course, we don't actually know what people were infected with, although presumably Omicron wasn't circulating in, say, December 2020.
Presumably, but do we really know that?
More to the point, though, what we actually have here is a timestamp.
I mean, quite literally, this is a timestamp, and so what they have found is the totally obvious But apparently, if you were listening to the WHO and the CDC for the last couple years, maybe they didn't quite track this.
The thing that we know from every other immune response ever, which is that the more recently you've been exposed to the pathogen, the more likely you are to maintain natural immunity to that pathogen.
Right?
So, all we know, in fact, from this research is the more recent your exposure to COVID, the more likely you are to maintain natural immunity to COVID.
Well, I mean, maybe I'm missing something here, but it just seems, especially in light of the fact that the entire reason we're talking about variants is that this thing is evolving in real time.
How can you do this and just simply say, after this date, it is X variant?
That's exactly the thing that you would need to check in order to know whether or not you were seeing phenomenon A or phenomenon B. Yes, you would.
Are you seeing escape from natural immunity or are you seeing incompleteness of natural immunity?
They're two distinct things.
And there's no way to tell from this research.
And what the editorial staff at Nature, again, one of the two premier science journals in the entire world, did was take the abstract at face value.
And again, I didn't spend a ton of time with this paper.
It didn't take much.
And indeed, the Nature News article does have two virologists say, yeah, it's good work, but there is this problem.
It's like, well, I don't think that qualifies as good work then.
So one more thing.
Oh, no, go on.
I want to point out, there's something, I mean, I think the most important thing here is the way nature is dealing with the world of preprints.
Nature of the magazine, not nature of the world.
No, no, not nature of the phenomenon.
Well, I guess nature of the magazine is a phenomenon, but nonetheless, the We are told that what makes it science is peer review, which is, of course, total garbage, right?
What makes it science is the frickin' method, right?
That's what makes it science.
Peers, to the extent that they can do something, they can evaluate whether or not the method was done correctly and whether or not the things that you believe follow from your evidence actually do follow from it.
That is not inherent to peer review.
Review by peers does it also.
But there's something fascinating about this.
Nature.
So first of all, you probably in the audience will not know unless you're a professional scientist, that the people who staff these journals, the top flight journals that make and break careers, right?
These people are people who often did not succeed in science itself, right?
In other words, they have effectively left The rat race of academia and joined the rat race of the journals, which is a different game, right?
So I don't want to call them failed academics, but in some ways that's that's partially what it is.
But the point is, OK, these are the stewards of this magical process we call peer review, right?
These are the peer of peers.
Look at what they do with an un-peer-reviewed article.
First, they grudgingly start looking at this stuff, which they should have.
Now, what you and I have said about the pre-print literature, non-peer-reviewed literature, is that it's very noisy, right?
The quality varies a lot.
That's natural because it hasn't been through A filter in which people will catch errors that said it is less distorted by the peer review process so it's not obvious that more noise is inherently bad if it comes with also more signal because inconvenient truths haven't been excluded for example right so.
There is value in that pre-print literature precisely because it hasn't been put through our corrupt system.
What happens when our corrupt system touches it with the evaluation by peers, in this case the people who write Nature News, they get it wrong, right?
They reveal not only there's value in the so-called non-peer-reviewed literature, But that when peers touch it, there's nothing magical about their evaluation.
They can botch it.
They do the same thing scientists do when they're in a rush, which is they, you know, assume that what is reported in the title in the abstract is actually what is suggested by the paper.
So anyway, the whole thing is kind of revealing itself.
It is.
And it's a pity you have to know where the bodies are buried in order to see what's being acknowledged and what's being botched.
Because really everybody needs to be exposed to the evidence that peer review is not a magical process.
It's a corrupt process, and it's a flawed process.
Even when it works, it's a deeply flawed process.
And it is so corrupt as to be counterproductive in many contexts.
Indeed.
So just a couple more things on this here, and Zach, you may show my screen if you'd like, is the other preprint referred to in that Nature News article.
This has as the first author who was the guy that was the second author.
I think it's a guy.
from that other paper, and it is titled, Duration of Immune Protection of SARS-CoV-2 Natural Infection Against Reinfection in Cutter.
And this I assessed actually less completely than I did the first article, and so I'm not going to make claims as to As to how well done this particular research was, it's a lot more sticky with regard to the statistics that they use, but here is a line from, I think it's the discussion, this is just my PDF version of that same article.
This waning in natural immunity mirrors that of vaccine immunity, but at a slower rate.
Vaccine immunity may last for only a year, but natural immunity, assuming Gompertz decay, may last for three years.
This is one of the first times, if not the first time, that I've seen an acknowledgment of natural immunity being superior to vaccine-induced immunity in the scientific literature.
I believe it has been described.
It is very contentious and not widely accepted, but I believe it's been described elsewhere.
I'm struggling with whether or not they're conflating two things, right?
Vaccine immunity should be expected to wane because it's crappy immunity, right?
Even to the extent that we talk about it in terms of antibodies.
They're not the core of a robust immune response.
They're easily measured and that's why we focus on them.
They're easily measured and frankly to the extent that you want to manipulate the public the public has some idea What an antibody is or at least that they're important and they don't really know what a t-cell is.
So So the point is we've focused on them, but it's it's a feeble kind of immunity And therefore, you might expect that because the immune system does not depend on this typically for immunity to viruses to which you've been exposed, that the short-lived antibody response might wane rapidly.
And to the extent that vaccine manufacturers tap into the antibody response as their mechanism for preventing disease, that it would wane rapidly because it doesn't have the proper characteristics for long-term durable immunity.
That's one phenomenon, the failure of the immunity that was generated by the experience.
If you got sick, your immunity was more durable than if you got vaccinated, okay?
But the other thing has to do with the evolution of the pathogen, right?
Which, you know, this team looked like they were trying to sort that out in the first paper I was talking about, but then when you look at their methods, you find that they actually just used a date, you know, a moment in time before and after which was their proxy for variants, which is not acceptable.
It's not evidence.
Yes.
Yes, it is assumption is the problem.
It is an assumption masquerading as evidence.
Right.
And that's a no-no.
That's a big one.
But, so I don't know what to do with the fact that you've got these two, you know, to say that the immunity wanes may even be technically true, but is it, you know, you could get that if you had perfectly static levels of antibody immunity And the pathogen evolved away so that they were less and less well-tuned.
That would cause the observed phenomenon of less and less effectiveness.
So, is part of what you're going after here is, you know, what does immunity wanes mean?
You have antibody versus T cell, but let's put that aside for the moment.
You also have Has your immunity to the thing you were exposed to waned, or has the thing you were exposed to become such a minority representative in the population of this broad lineage of viruses, such that while that original immunity that you got from an older lineage may still help a little bit with anything you would be exposed to in modern times,
It's not that your immune system forgot what it knew, it's that it is now being exposed to something that didn't exist before.
Not only that, and this I think is where the rubber meets the road for a lot of this.
There is a question that haunts our entire COVID response.
Would we be better off if we had done nothing?
Right?
Now, that's not the only question.
We had other things to do that were not these vaccines, right?
But had we done nothing, would we be better off today than we are today, given what we did?
In which case, you don't want to do the kind of thing we did, right?
Now, I don't think we can answer that question.
I think I have a strong suspicion, but the basic point is if you're stupid, narrowly targeted, vaccine-like substance that you have transfected people with, if that thing is simply pushing around an evolutionary ninja, right?
If you have come at like a ninja with Plastic cutlery, right?
And the ninja is... The pointed stick?
Right, exactly.
If that's what we're doing, right?
And the point is, you know, we are training the ninja what we can see by coming at it with a plastic knife that can't possibly work.
And right, it's just a mistake.
And I mean, you actually then arrive us at what was what was going to be my final point here.
Well, which is, how dare they?
Why are we in this position at all?
Like, we're not I'm not talking about vaccines at this point.
I'm talking about, you know, who gave anyone the right to create this ninja in the first place?
Okay.
What if we had done nothing in March 2020 when this thing had emerged?
How about what if we had done nothing in March 2010 – I'm making that number up, I have no idea – when gain-of-function research was in its early nascent stages And some people thought it was really great and were putting together lots of justifications because that's what you need to do.
And they started to buy their own press and they started to create these things which have escaped from the damn bottles and there's no putting this genie back in.
No.
The bottle is gone.
The genie is out here.
We're all stuck with it.
And now they're just adding, you know, injury to injury.
Yeah, injury to injury is right.
To the extent that it has become quite clear that this came from the lab, and even in the tiny remaining chance that it did not, that it certainly could have, right?
If this didn't, if this came from the wet market, the fact that there was a laboratory, whatever it is, 14 kilometers away, turbocharging exactly this sort of virus without the ability to prevent a leak means... Is it going to be the Ferret Badger Popsicles again?
Yeah, Ferret Badger Popsicles, again, is right.
But to the extent that we did everything necessary to create this insane condition, and probably did create this insane condition, right?
This should be an absolute focus.
And yet, we...
So many of us are aware, but the usual process by which the public becoming aware that something terrible and needless has befallen it, right, would usually trigger a response that we just don't see.
We just don't.
And actually, here's one more thing, and then I'll stand down.
Into this landscape, Find this.
So you may, if you like, show my screen here.
It's a little bit small, Zach.
This is the Attorney General from Missouri site.
Zach, are you going to show my screen or not?
Okay, cool.
This piece is dated from May, but there was a new development this week.
The title just reads, Missouri and Louisiana Attorneys General filed suit against President Biden and top admin officials for allegedly colluding with social media giants to censor and suppress free speech.
And here we have Attorney General Schmidt, that's the Attorney General in Missouri, saying, And it's here what I've got highlighted for those of you watching.
In the lawsuit that Missouri and Louisiana filed today, again this was back in May, we alleged that government officials in the Biden administration, including President Biden, Press Secretary Jen Psaki, back in the days, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and others colluded with social media companies like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to remove truthful information relating to the lab leak theory, the efficacy of masks, election integrity, And more.
And they also say down here that they have named also Director of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz, which of course the Disinformation Board has since been disbanded on the basis that I guess it was all too clear that what they were engaging in was disinformation themselves.
But here we have two of the 50 Attorneys General in the United States saying, you know what?
Enough.
And let's see, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
It will be, yeah, interesting.
So a judge said that Discovery can happen this week.
Discovery, yeah, boy.
This is obviously that sword there sticking through the countertop.
That is the metaphorical sword of Damocles which hangeth still above the dark horse.
We, having been Demonetized and us feeling the thumb on the scales that Google applies when it is not pleased with the things that we discuss with our audience.
In any case, so this has tremendous import.
I very much look forward to hearing what Discovery unearths.
It will no doubt be fascinating.
Indeed.
All right.
I think I am going to reverse the order of my plan in light of where you started.
Exactly.
You want to give... thank you.
So, I want to talk briefly about a piece in Newsweek of all places.
Newsweek, which still exists, at least online.
Anyway, they published something by Jeremy Lee Quinn, who has been a guest of Dark Horse twice, I believe.
Jeremy Lee Quinn is a very interesting fellow.
He is a journalist, a freelance journalist.
Who was on the ground on January 6th in Washington.
He's been on the ground here in Portland.
He was on the ground for riots in LA.
He does seem to know where to go to see violence unfolding.
In any case, he published a piece.
Zach, do you want to put up the piece in question?
There it is.
All right.
So this is a piece.
Jeremy Lee Quinn, January 6th, followed years of political violence.
The committee should investigate leftist violence too.
Now.
Oh.
So, the reason I raise this is actually two different reasons.
One, Jeremy Lee Quinn is not a right-winger.
In fact, he considers himself an anarchist, and at some point I'd like to have a conversation with him about what that really means.
understand him to be a very reasonable guy.
And it's hard for me to imagine how any very reasonable person becomes an anarchist, but he seems to take a decidedly nuanced approach to anarchism.
And I'd like to understand what the nature of it is.
So stay tuned for that at some point.
We'll do it.
I feel like you talked a little bit about it in what you did.
We did.
Let's just say I still don't quite get it.
And so I have a feeling that, you know, he's technically an anarchist, but doesn't doesn't mean what most of us infer from that.
But nonetheless, the piece that he writes essentially says, look, January 6th was a travesty, but it It exists in a context of political violence stretching back years on both sides.
And it is impossible, I think, to read this piece and not realize what's going on.
I have not been paying attention to the January 6th committee because I know it to be theater and I know I can't afford to grind my teeth as much as I surely would if I was tuning in.
But what little I have seen and gleaned does suggest that what's going on here is an obsessive focus on the excesses of one side and a studied disinterest, what Eric calls anti-interest.
In the political violence on the other side.
And the problem is you can't understand what January 6th was until you realize that it was basically part of a tit-for-tat exchange that stretches back, you know, a couple of years as I said before.
Before anyone gets their panties in a wad here, you are not justifying anything.
You are explaining.
That this does not exist in a vacuum and that we as a country seem to be explicitly avoiding discussion of some types of political violence and not others.
Right, but really what I'm saying is that the crime is the committee that is Inherently only interested in one kind of political violence to the extent that these people want to pretend to be serious patriots Investigating a threat to the country the threat to the country is the process that generates this kind of reaction, right?
It's not one side's version of it and the other side's version of it is just fine.
That's bullshit.
All right, so I would invite everyone to read the article which we will link in the description and And to just see all of the cases that Jeremy Lee Quinn puts forward and understand this committee as a, uh, it's basically treason by omission, right?
By highlighting one side's excesses, exaggerating them where possible, and ignoring the excesses of the other side, which are every bit as egregious, it is creating a picture about who is a threat to the country when, in fact, the lopsidedness, the double standard in fact, the lopsidedness, the double standard is the threat.
Understanding that we have come to a place where we've lost the ability to understand each other, we see the other side as a threat to the country, and we see there being no excess in the challenge to that kind of threat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's nonsense as long as it's one-sided.
So, okay, the reason I have come back here Is that increasingly all of the issues that we discuss are about double standards and the way they are being weaponized, right?
Now, Alexandros Marinos has begun to follow this thread quite deliberately.
I think it's incredibly important.
But I wanted to, now I have three examples, I had two when I started.
I mentioned, I think it was last week, maybe it was the week before, that we ought to expect in the context of academic medicine, in the context of medical science, We ought to expect an increasing discrepancy between efficacy, that is to say, how good things look under laboratory conditions, and effectiveness, what they do in the real world.
That gap ought to grow the more corrupt the laboratory environment is.
Now, it's not a perfect comparison.
Prediction is that with increasing corruption, efficacy and effectiveness will cease to track one another closely.
Right, now the problem with that, which I freely acknowledge, is that effectiveness is also academically measured.
Right?
If your vaccines show an efficacy of 98%, and in the real world they clearly don't work that well, but you still may exaggerate how well they do work, right?
So efficacy and effectiveness will not depart as much as you would expect them to, but they will still depart.
And so that should be a hallmark.
Because there may be a problem in the measurement, not because there may be a problem in the actual reality.
Right, right.
The prediction holds regardless, but whether or not we will have access to good data is not a guarantee.
Let's put it this way.
The reason that we have laboratories is for something that we rightly call control, right?
You can exclude random noisy phenomena that would interfere with your ability to measure a pattern Uninvited monkeys, for instance.
Uninvited monkeys, you know.
Hurricanes.
The effect of the weather.
All of these things are excluded by a laboratory.
So control is a good thing, scientifically speaking.
But it has come to mean something else, I'm afraid.
Which is the ability to control the story.
The ability to make the dataset reflect something that it in fact shouldn't reflect.
And the point is, that's harder to do in the real world.
So the departure between efficacy, which is the laboratory version, and effectiveness, which is the Outer world version is an indicator that something corrupt is afoot.
Similarly, I would argue there is a gap between climate models and what I would call integrative measures, phenomena that integrate the, and mind you, I believe we have reason to be quite frightened about climate change.
Anthropogenic.
Anthropogenic climate change.
The reason that I believe that we should be quite frightened about it is that the methane clathrates, which are frozen in the Arctic, are potentially At some threshold point, able to take the question of the temperature of planet Earth completely out of human hands.
And basically, the possibility of a positive feedback causing temperature to run away is there.
Right?
How close we are, I really couldn't tell you.
What I'm arguing is that as the field becomes intolerant of heterodox perspectives on climate, right?
In other words, let's say global warming is real, right?
But it's a complex phenomenon.
Some papers will reflect it's not as bad as we feared.
Some papers will say, oh, it's worse than we feared.
That's what you would expect in a healthy environment.
But what if politically, The environment inside academia is unwilling to tolerate anybody who comes up with a result that is not alarmist.
Right?
Because the whole point is, well, we need people alarmed so they'll act.
So you can't publish anything that goes in the other direction, right?
That's clearly where we are.
So what would you expect to see if that were the case?
If there was anthropogenic climate change, but the environment was intolerant of dealing with the give and take that would be involved in understanding how bad it is and how quickly it is occurring, right?
Well, you would expect a departure between models and empirical phenomena.
It's the efficacy versus effectiveness again.
And so here's what I've been saying for some time is that I do believe that there is anthropogenic climate change.
And the reason that I believe it is because I have seen things like glacial retreat, right?
That said, the models tell me, and have told me repeatedly, the Arctic should have been ice-free by now, right?
And it never is.
Right?
And the snows of Kilimanjaro should be a thing of the past.
They should be effectively a historical artifact.
They're not gone.
The glaciers have retreated, but they're not gone.
I was told the Glacier National Park was going to be ironically named because there'd be no glaciers left in it.
That's not true.
And so, anyway, my point is you can't spin a glacier into retreating.
Glaciers don't care what we think or say, right?
They simply respond to things like albedo and, you know, actual weather phenomena.
So you would expect, in a case where the field was corrupt, you would expect the models to be alarmist, and you would expect the glaciers to be less alarmist, right?
And that is in fact what we see.
Now again, I'm not telling you That I don't think we should be very concerned and proactive about global warming.
I do think so.
Why?
Because if we cross that threshold in the Arctic, then this is going to become an academic question in which we don't know how many people a world following that positive feedback can support or what quality of life they will have, but it's not something that we would rationally risk.
Right?
We have a world that functions well, right?
To disrupt it in the hope that it will function well on the other side of such a thing is the height of folly.
And so, anyway...
Your third example.
My third example is the double standard involved in the January 6th hearings and all of the things that look like it, right?
In an environment, so the departure between the actual pattern of, let's say, political violence, which is to say it's coming from both sides and it is increasingly common, and the portrayal, which is entirely one-sided, that gap Measures the same thing, right?
The point is it is a measure of the corruption of the entities and in effect, well, if we go back to what I said about the Clinton administration again, the way these parties function now is they have real constituents, that is to say the people who pay, right?
They have, these are industries that pay for influence.
And then there's the winning of influence by manipulating enough voters to vote for them that they actually have some power to monetize, right?
So that game looks like a committee that is obsessed with getting to the bottom of January 6th because of the threat that it poses to the country, when in fact what it's really trying to do is whip its voters into a frenzy so that it can monetize the power that those voters generate For its real constituents, which are corporations, right?
Any country that is actively trying to whip its people into a frenzy is at odds with itself because that's an inherently anti-patriotic act.
Yes, whipping one fraction of the population into a frenzy against another is a tried and true tactic for keeping people from realizing who their actual enemies are.
Indeed.
But anyway, that's where we are.
So, I'm going to argue that those three things are variations on a theme.
Hallmarks of corruption in three different contexts.
Great.
Okay.
Alright, where are we time-wise?
A few more minutes?
You had another thing you wanted to talk about.
Yeah, I did.
The question is, do I have time for it?
All right, I'll do it quickly.
You do.
It's a total departure from what we've been talking about.
Last week we discussed... Before you do this.
Yeah.
There was a pre-print versus peer review connection that you were going to make.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah.
You saved me.
The pre-print versus peer review.
I hope it's not the last time.
I hope it is, but only because whatever threats there are have receded and you no longer need to do the job.
Anyway, here's the point.
To the extent that peer review is an active corrupter of science, right?
What you will note is a departure between the value.
That is to say, preprints are inherently noisy because the work is inherently of many different qualities, including crappy.
Right?
So peer review gets rid of a certain amount of crappiness.
There's a quality control aspect that actually does work, right?
And then there's a corruption aspect, which the question is, well, what's the net effect?
Did the work that comes out of peer review get better because it's less noisy, or did it get worse because it now has a bias?
I would say there's actually a third thing, too.
So there's a perhaps quality control.
We hope.
It's supposed to be about quality control.
We know that there is corruption.
But there's also a standardization, which I think isn't exactly either of the first two, right?
Where good science can actually look a lot of different ways.
And in general, scientific journals require that you tell a story that your science looked a particular way.
And so that either forces people who didn't do science that looked standard but was good to lie about what they actually did and thus get into the habit of lying about what they did, or that work doesn't get published.
And so good work that doesn't fit the style, really, like the guidelines for what it is that we expect science to look like now, Also will tend to end up on the, I'm going to mix my metaphors here, the cutting room floor with regard to not getting through peer review and not ending up published in journals.
All right, so I will rephrase it slightly.
I will say peer review does many things.
One of them is a perfect analog for censorship.
Peers censor perspectives they don't like.
They steal stuff.
They will prevent an underling from publishing something and then they will publish it themselves, right?
That happens.
The joke is peer preview, right?
So, it does many different things.
But one of the things that it does is it censors views that are out of step with whoever is powerful in the field.
Maybe most crucially, knowing that your paper has to go through peer review causes people to self-censor.
It causes them to, you know, probably bias their own results.
It causes them to pursue things that they think are liable, you know, because an investment in the project is an attempt to rise through the ranks, you don't want to write a paper, even if it's a really important paper, you don't want to write a paper that's not going to get published because it wastes time that you could have spent getting ahead.
So people are adjusting what they do in order to get through peer review, knowing what the biases of the peers will likely be, especially in a field where the biases are intense.
But anyway, A, I would argue what I've seen and frankly, you know, in public people have a much better, they have a much more, they believe in peer review more they believe in peer review more than people who've actually seen how the process works, right?
the powerful people like peer review because it's a tool that they need but basically everybody's got stories about what's happened to them in peer review and how Disgusting a process it is and the public is just not really aware of it.
But so the point is It could be that peer review falls well short of what it's supposed to do, or it could be that it makes things actively worse, right?
That it's instead of a value-added, it's actually a value-subtracted process, which is what we saw at the beginning of the pandemic when things were moving too quickly for peer review to catch up, and we were all looking directly at the preprints, right?
Was it noisy?
Oh, you better believe it was noisy, right?
It's amazing, though.
It's the Wild West.
It was the Wild West, but the point is, look, noise?
That's what you train for in science.
You train to get rid of noise so that you can see signal in spite of it, right?
That's what you're supposed to be doing.
And the idea that the public needs to be protected from the noisiness of unpeer-reviewed papers?
Bullshit!
What they need are people who are good at science, who are good at figuring out what patterns are, who are good at looking at a paradox and thinking, What does that mean?
Is there something in the methods that would have caused them to find this result that doesn't sound like something that we would expect?
Right?
That's the process and that's actually what our live streams started with.
That's right.
Right?
We started by just diving into this stuff that was emerging so quickly and the fact is it worked and not just for us.
Right?
So the point is the pre-print literature Has a value, peer review, it's value subtracted is the point.
And the gap between the value, the signal, here's the thing.
Peer review should, if it worked the way the brochure claims, it should subtract noise and it should leave signal so you can see it.
The question is, how much signal is peer review eliminating, right?
Signal that's inconvenient for somebody with power, right?
Whether it's a school of thought, whether it's a corporation that funds a lot of the research in some area.
The question is, why is signal being lost to peer review, right?
And that's really the damaging thing.
And I think it is another one of these gaps, right?
Oh, there's signal.
You can see it in the pre-print literature.
Where did it go?
Why is it not in the peer-reviewed literature?
Why did it get eliminated as if it was noise, right?
That's what we see.
And we, you know, increasingly we see crazy things like papers with important implications that are retracted.
And then you go and you look and you say, well, why was it retracted?
And it turns out the retraction It's not based on sound science, right?
It's subtracting signal, right?
Yep.
Value subtracted.
Yep, that's good.
Science cannot endure that environment.
Science is a powerful process that is very delicate.
It requires an open environment, and that is being lost.
So with that, I think I will postpone the third segment that I wanted to do for next week.
Really?
Yeah, I think so.
Okay.
Yeah, I guess we've been going.
About an hour since we got through the ads.
Got through the ads.
Endured the... They were noisier.
The ads were noisier today, but I think the signal did get through.
What I meant was... I try to have us go...
At least an hour after that.
But yeah, as you said, we got a train to catch, and apparently we have a dog who recognizes our intonation well enough to know that this is the sound of people who are getting ready to go off air and perhaps be available to give a certain dog pets and treats.
Yes.
All right, really?
So we're done?
I think so.
Okay.
Okay, guys.
Apparently, we're done for the week.
We are going to take more than a 15-minute break this time.
We are going to take a roughly seven-day break, and we'll be back at the usual time, usual place next week, and we will have a live Q&A as well.
And, you know, bring your questions, bring anything you want at that point.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bring it!
Your A-game.
Bring your A-game.
Actually, before next week, you will have, next Saturday before our livestream, you will have the first of your Patreon.
No, that's not next week at all.
Never mind.
I was just shaking my head because usually you know these things and so if I shake my head I seem like I know them too.
Yeah, no, I gotta jump on it there.
It's the private Q&A next week.
So anyway, consider joining us at our Patreons and jumping in the Discord and finding some of the great people there if you want more conversation with people who aren't interested in shaming you for having the wrong opinion, because that is what you will find on the Discord server.
So, without further ado, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
