In this 157th 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 antibodies. Why is the public health messaging around immunity focused on antibodies, when there is so much more to immunity? Also, the Department of Defense has finally dropped vaccine mandates for the military, and the federal government has affirmed that we are in the middle of a Covid-19 “hea...
*music* Live stream-aganza number 157, which I don't know it feels prime.
Do you know?
I don't know.
All right, so let's, we'll just in our head, we'll check all of the possible factors and see if any of them go in, and I think it probably is.
That's my guess.
I'm feeling unprepared today.
We're going to talk about antibodies.
We're going to talk about the Department of Defense, the problem with the field, the Journal of Nature, the American, what exactly are they called?
The, sorry, it's something about, yeah, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and some other fish.
I like actually fishy fish.
Fishy fish.
All the rest of it was fish talk because humans being fish and all, but this is more like what people think of when you say fish to them.
People will be somewhat surprised and maybe disappointed to discover that this is how, when we were teaching and the entire room was full of people who knew that people and other tetrapods are in fact just as entitled to be called fish as any of the things that you might find at a fish market, That we used fishy fish to designate those things that look the way the mind thinks a fish ought to look, and fish more generally could refer to any of those tetrapods.
Yes.
So this week on Dark Horse, fish.
Fish.
As usual.
As usual, yes.
It's a distinction that you can use to annoy almost any of your friends.
Yes.
I'll fish the Department of Defense, at the Journal of Nature, in the field, as fish will be.
Actually, you know, you can understand their behavior, often disappointing in and of itself, much better if you think of them as fish, right?
In fact, they are almost all of the people who do disappointing things.
Oh, yes.
Except that we're all in it together.
We are all in it together.
This is, in fact, part of the problem here, isn't it, guys?
We're all in it together.
We need to remember that.
We need to act like it's true.
It gets really, really hard when some people are insistent that it's not true and all that has to happen is you need to get rid of like, you know, half the population and we'll be fine.
Right, no, that, yeah, there's a lot of that style thinking and it keeps re-emerging.
It really does.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I guess we'll just, a brief PSA.
Don't fuck it up, it's our planet too.
Thanks.
This has been brought to you by... Yeah, exactly, by fish who have seen the writing on the wall, which is something that some fish do.
See, and write, and build walls.
Exactly.
Not all fish do any of those things.
Yes, is there anyone still watching?
It's not two or three.
Yeah, it's not the kind of fish we're going to be talking about today, but cave fish have this Toggle!
They can go between eyedness and eyelessness, not within an individual, but in one generation, depending on whether or not they are in fact in caves where there is no light and therefore no need to have eyes and the eyes are in fact a liability.
Or, you know, the ceiling of the cave is collapsed and now there's light and it would be really useful to have eyes after all.
You can get them back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's cool.
You can.
Biology would be cool like that.
It do.
All right, we both botched the grammar in two different ways, but... Okay.
Logistics at the top of the hour, followed by our sponsors, and then we'll get into the meat of the discussion today.
The fish, which is debatably meat.
Never mind.
I'll get off the fish thing now, and we can just go straight to the fishiness of all of the stuff that's taken place.
Yes.
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And, of course, every week, or nearly every week, I've got something new on Natural Selections, and this week I posted on some of the surprising, even to us, surprisingly critical roles that beavers play in landscape maintenance and development, and we can ask questions about what
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So, one correction.
You said the roles the beavers play.
They think of it as work.
They do, I guess.
On the other hand, not having language, like so many fish, we can't ask them what they prefer.
Well, but see, beavers have this mechanism for displaying displeasure, and it's really unambiguous.
And the first time you hear it, you think, what the hell has happened?
The slapping of the tail on the water's surface.
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Yes, that presumes a lot about what they can understand, of course.
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Well, you know, I mean, the thing is, it's not entirely unlike what you and I experienced and did at Evergreen, where we often in the same class would have people who had taken three or four programs from one or both of us and along with people who were just joining for the first time.
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Moink?
Moink.
How would you pronounce it?
I think that is probably the better way to pronounce it, but it's hard to spell.
You know, granted I hadn't gotten that far, but all right.
That's me always putting, you know, cold water on your enthusiastic creative outbursts because hard to spell.
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Well, I never thought that this writing the stuff down was a good idea in the first place.
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Awesome.
157 is prime.
It is.
It felt prime, which often means nothing.
Exactly.
That is one of the ways that our brains like to trick us, especially the bigger the number, the more likely we are to assume it's prime when it's not.
I am imagining a great series in which the superhero's superpower is knowing what's prime just by looking at it.
Wouldn't that be cool?
No.
All right.
I mean, back to the drawing board.
A, I feel like some people, you know, like math savants, have, you know, effectively have this ability.
Right.
And, and, you know, maybe some people who aren't even savants, who actually are, you know, have, you know, it's not the one skill they have, but actually have a lot of skills.
And they're just really good at that thing.
Yeah.
But I feel like and you know, I'm not, I am not an expert on Are you kidding?
hero culture at all.
But I feel like in general there has to be a practical use for the superpower.
Are you kidding?
You don't think that's practical?
So you and I both remember from our childhood the Wonder Twins.
Oh, yeah.
The Wonder Twins, which were a boy and a girl, a brother and a sister.
Wow, it's like she would have been a boy and a girl.
Good, nice correction.
I actually can't remember what she did.
But he, she would turn into something.
I think it was an animal.
An animal.
And then the Wonder Twin powers activate and he turns into something made of ice.
Or water.
Any kind of water.
Ice was technically acceptable.
And it was such a cheat and so awesome as well.
Yes, it was an interesting experiment in constraints.
But practical, even though unfounded in the land of physics.
As most superpowers are, I guess.
Right.
No, it's like, I mean, you know, you get to violate one law.
It's like your credit card.
You get to pick one perk.
You know, it can be miles, it can be cash back, or whatever.
Superpowers is like credit cards, he says.
I guess we're done for the day.
That's what we came here to tell you.
That's it.
We've accomplished it.
It's going to be downhill from there if we keep going.
So anyway, it's been lovely.
Yes.
Yeah.
You were going to defend your choice of superpower as being able to, without thinking, say whether a number is prime?
Instantly.
Any number, no matter how big.
I get what the superpower is, but you ran to defend it as a superpower.
I'm hoping that it will become suddenly obvious to you where your error was and how great a superpower that would be.
And then explain it to you.
Yes, exactly.
That would be most appreciated, because at the moment I'm struggling to come up with a valid witch.
Practical application.
Isn't there a practical application in cryptography?
Granted, this is something I've always been a little vague on, but factoring numbers is the key to breaking hard encryption, I think.
Well, we'll find out also in the comments when people write in and tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about.
I think perhaps the emergent superpower of being really awesome at breaking code might include as one of the more fundamental, sort of, you know, fundamental superpowerettes recognizing primes at a glance.
I think we've done it.
I think we have teamed up on a real legitimate superpower that would be of spectacular value.
The Codecracker.
All right, you're envisioning this as a white superhero then?
I was not.
Do you want to talk about antibodies?
I suppose.
Well, actually, actually, you know what?
Maybe we should start by talking about...
No.
No, we'll come back there.
Antibodies it is.
All right.
I was inspired to... Basically, here's the thing.
I said something offhanded in response to Joe Rogan a couple weeks back.
Was that a couple weeks?
Boy, it doesn't feel like it.
But I think it must have been... A week and a half?
Yeah, a week and a half, something like that.
Anyway, he asked me a question.
I've now forgotten what it was about antibodies.
And I said to him, I said, look, I think the concept of antibodies has loomed way too large in the public conversation over immunity in the context of COVID.
And my guess is that the reason we have focused on antibodies is because the public knows what an antibody is.
Yes, agreed kind of loosely, but the point is when you say antibody, It immediately conjures something, right?
Whereas, you know, if you talked about almost any other concept, if I say clonal selection, right, which is a, you know, fundamental concept in immunology, almost nobody knows what you're talking about.
So, I do think that this is, it's almost a tell that suggests that what we are faced with is propaganda.
I haven't listened to that part of the clip, and so it may stop me if this just isn't making no sense at all.
So your argument is that maybe part of the reason that we're talking about antibodies so much is simply because the public already knows what they are, and so it's sort of
Ready to receive this sort of talk, but it feels to me like it's also true And I haven't gone back and reviewed this at all so I may be wrong here, but it's also true that Antibodies are easier to find in in the body like they're easier to test for than say t-cells and so you know we have we have a clinical tests that find the thing that's easy to measure and that people already know about.
So, I mean, it feels like it could be both.
Unless I'm wrong, but I think this is right.
No, you're not wrong.
It's an easy assay.
Yeah, PCR, and it's the wrong thing to be doing, right, for a number of reasons.
But Yeah, I get it, right?
those two reasons which have nothing to do with whether or not they're the right thing, make it the easy and publicly amenable thing to be talking about.
Yeah, I get it, right?
It's something that we can talk about because we're more likely to have information about it because it's easier to come by that information.
It's less arduous.
I don't think that's really driving this at all.
In fact, we can see even in the recent testing that was used, I think it was for the EUA for the childhood so-called vaccines, where they had measured antibodies and claimed that that implied that these were very good at creating immunity to modern variants.
And the point is there was a giant leap in there, right?
Which is, it's not clear.
First of all, antibodies aren't what people think, right?
This is, you're peering into a complex system and you are able to identify something and that is resulting in you saying, oh, there are a whole bunch of antibodies.
And it doesn't inherently mean anything.
In fact antibodies can be negative.
They can make the disease more capable of getting into your cells.
So anyway, I do feel like it is indicative of the propagandistic nature of our discussion that we are being presented with something that can then You know, emerge into the conversation where people are then talking to each other about antibodies because they know a little something about antibodies, whereas if you were talking about receptors on a T-cell, they'd be scratching their heads.
What's a receptor?
What is a T-cell?
Why would a receptor be useful in this battle?
You know, so anyway, there is something weird about the focus on antibodies.
And so anyway, off the cuff said to Joe that I think it's about the fact that the public knows what they are rather than the fact that that's where the conversation should be centered.
And then a friend of ours, Jumi Kim, pursued this question.
I did ask her, and she was at least somewhat inspired to look into it because of my comment to Joe.
But anyway, what she came up with is very interesting, and I'll just sort of loosely say what it is.
I would suggest everybody check out, hey, Zach, can you show Jumi's Substack post?
So I would suggest people check out her substack.
She has done a bunch of these deep dives.
She's very good at doing this in plain English so that it's very accessible.
She's highly capable as a biologist.
So the technical matter is all right.
She's not cheating on the technical stuff, but she presents it in a way you can understand why she reaches the conclusion she does.
She presents with the references.
So anyway, it's really good stuff.
Yeah, and for those just listening, her substack is called Let's Be Clear.
It's really quite excellent.
It really is quite excellent.
So anyway, what she...
What she discusses in here is all of the little threads of evidence that suggest that, at the very least, antibodies are not the end-all and be-all of immunity to COVID.
And she goes through some evidence that I was frankly unaware of.
Now that I've seen her explore it, yeah, I should have wondered if the evidence existed in this form.
But of people who can't produce antibodies for one of a number of reasons, either because they're on A drug that is suppressing their production of antibodies, or they have a congenital defect that causes them not to be producing antibodies.
And as she correctly points out, the fact that these people are not doomed by COVID means they are successfully fending it off, which implies a whole other system that is not captured in the, oh my god, it creates a great titer of antibodies.
So anyway, those who are More deeply knowledgeable about immunology, we'll spot at least one of the other components of that system, which is that we basically have two kinds of circulating cells that manage this very specific kind of immunity, right?
That is an adaptive immunity that learns to fend off a pathogen, right?
We have B-cells.
B-cells have receptors on them, and they produce free-floating antibodies, and those two things have a relationship.
So when a receptor is triggered by an antigen, then the release of antibodies occurs in at least many cases, whereas a T-cell produces no free-floating antibodies.
It has receptors, it gets triggered, and they create lots of other phenomena.
They can, for example, people will remember our discussion from I think last week, and many other times, where we discussed the question of what happens when your own cell is producing not only your own antigens, but is producing foreign antigens.
Well, that cell gets destroyed.
The body destroys it, and it destroys it using T-cells.
These T-cells identify this compromised cell.
They In any natural case that I know of, a cell that is producing foreign antigens and self-antigens is an infected cell, and so killing it is the way to get rid of it, right?
It's bad to kill your own cells, but it's better to do that than leave them in place.
So anyway, you've got these two different systems, and so the fact that the B-cell antibody-based immunity is not the sum total of COVID immunity clearly is evidenced by I mean, it is never, right?
For any illness, for any pathogen response, is it ever entirely B-cell and antibody-based?
Well, there will be things that are primarily B-cell.
So, for example... What are the conditions that predict?
It's a good question.
This is off the top of my head having studied this many, many years ago and, you know, as an undergraduate in a medical school class.
But nonetheless, it's been a long time and the field has grown and I've learned a lot during COVID that I didn't learn back then.
But for example, if you had a bacterium Right?
There's some bacteria that you might fend off by just gumming them up with antibodies that would then cause them to be consumed by macrophages, right?
That might be the go-to mechanism.
And because the bacteria is not getting into your cells, T-cells might be none of the response or not primary.
So, you know, I hesitate to say anything in absolute terms in biology because as as my advisor and Member of your committee Dick Alexander would always say he's like, you know, that's the quickest route to be wrong.
Yeah, because biology, you know He used to make this point about insects that anything you think never happens in animals check out insects.
You'll find it's there somewhere.
Yeah Well, it's a it seems like one of trend that for which there will be exceptions will be that single acute exposure to something might be your body might launch a successful immune response entirely or almost entirely with B cells and eradicate it and if you're not exposed to it again like it's it's gone Right.
Now, this actually covers one of the things.
So, my purpose today is to actually just get people used to hearing about this because I have a feeling where the conversation is about to go is, hey, is this antibody stuff really what we've been led to believe or is it being used to mesmerize us when there's a larger conversation that might say something very different, right?
And so, One thing that is the case, right?
People have a... I am now understanding people have a misunderstanding in their mind about antibodies being the result of either natural immunity developed in response to infection or a vaccination.
Acquired immunity from a vaccination, for instance.
Right.
And what this misses is that in fact, and Forgive me if you've heard this before, but there is a system that has a rudimentary set of cells that are not highly effective at attacking any pathogen they haven't seen, but have a basic ability to attack anything that isn't self.
Right?
And so the point is, it is wrong if what you've got in your mind is, oh I need something to create antibodies and I'm not going to have that until I've been infected with the pathogen or I've gotten a vaccine, let's say a classic vaccine that does this well.
That's not really right.
What happens if you get infected with a pathogen that you have never seen before is a process of evolution is triggered inside your immune system.
And what literally happens, and I believe it is the most interesting biological fact I am aware of, but what happens is your cells, be they B or T cells or both, literally evolve.
They evolve on the time scale that pathogens evolve.
And they do so, what they do is they take that crude ability to electromagnetically attach, right, or to be triggered in the case of a receptor.
They take that crude ability and they refine it.
And the way they do this is through something called clonal selection, where those, that tiny subset of your immune cells that is triggered by some pathogen you've never seen, right, It induces the cells that produce either that antibody or has those receptors on its surface to diversify, to produce daughter cells that are not alike.
They are actually programmed to be not alike.
And then that fraction of the daughter cells that is best triggered then produces its own daughter cells.
So you get this rapid pattern of evolution, right?
It's a confusing language, but it's called clonal selection.
Well, not... I mean, if you know... If the daughter cells are different, and you have in your head what most people have in their head about what a clone means, it's confusing language.
Well, it's actually a little bit like our Many earlier discussions about why chromosomes are not the end-all and be-all of sex determination, even in humans where sex is determined through chromosomes, right?
We'll notice the pattern that there is a chromosomal pattern that men tend to be XY women tend to be XX and so strongly so that we tend to want to synonymize them.
But as you point out, the real the thing that really is not a.
Broken pattern is that there's far more ancient than genetic sex determination right is the gamete size which actually dictates What is male and what's female so the shortcut of saying?
Oh, it's the chromosomes gets you in trouble and in the same way here the idea that clone means identical right and What's actually happening is you've got an asexual process that has a random number generator triggered in it in order to get diversity.
It's a cheat to bypass sex as a mechanism for producing diversity, right?
So it really is clonal and it really is selection.
In fact, Peter Medawar was one of the pioneers here.
Peter Medawar, who I believe got the Nobel Prize, he's a British biologist, got the Nobel Prize for discovering the basis of graft rejection.
Right?
Graft rejection being the result of the fact that if you take a organ from somebody who has your blood type, so there's no big antigen incompatibility, and you transplant it into you, well it still isn't self.
They've spelled all of the proteins differently, and so your immune system will attack it, right?
And so getting a match, a molecular electromagnetic match for you is important, which is why it's so hard to find a donor, right?
Somebody has to die who has that match before you get an organ that you're not going to reject.
But in any case, okay, so you've got these cells that are capable of evolving to get better, but what that means is that you have the rudimentary cells, the library, the crude library of, you know, it's not the super refined tool that fits the thing just so, it's the adjustable crescent wrench that fits it Kinda, right?
It's that kind of thing.
But that isn't nothing.
In fact, it's keeping you alive, right?
That thing, which is always surveilling, looking for hostile pathogens to get the place to start the process of evolving a good response, is ever-present, right?
And so, anyway, the antibodies and that response is always available.
It's just not high quality.
And the thing that vaccines do, and now I'm talking about good vaccines in which nobody would argue that they're anything other than vaccines, What those things do is they provide an advanced warning, right?
They provide a description of the hostile entity in advance so that that process of learning the molecular signal, the electromagnetic signal of those antigens, Can be done when you're not sick right or minimally sick in the case of a of a attenuated Virus vaccine right so you do that work when you're not challenged by the thing and then you run into the thing It's like oh, I already know how to beat that in effect.
I'm gonna beat it So I've got a head start my immune system has a head start on you because I haven't seen you before but I've seen something like you enough to Then I'm ready.
Right.
And so presumably we are constantly being invaded by viruses and other pathogens for which we already have the formula and we never get any symptoms because we beat them so quickly, right?
And so that's how it's supposed to work.
But don't get the idea that you don't have the immunity until something, either the infection or a vaccine, gives it to you.
That's just not right.
Well, but I mean, it is also true that quite possibly some of why so many people are so sick right now, you know, oh, the triple threat, right?
It's SARS-CoV-2 and flu and RSV.
Like, well, okay, but why are so many people so susceptible this year, right?
Because we just spent a long time in effective, in many places for many people to varying degrees, So I hear explanations like this.
wearing masks, basically preventing ourselves from being exposed at low level to things that kept our immune systems in the process of sort of priming themselves. - So I hear explanations like this.
They are plausible.
I am not certain that they are true.
They could well be.
I want to be a little bit cautious about it.
It feels related to me to the Hygiene Hypothesis.
Right?
The Hygiene Hypothesis, which is that we are keeping our homes, we are clearing our homes of all possible bacteria and other pathogens, and children raised in such homes end up with a higher level of allergies and susceptibility to things like the common cold.
And so the hygiene hypothesis does not specify a mechanism, but it feels like it goes in exactly the same direction.
So I feel like the burden of that's not true.
The fact that we forced everyone to socially isolate and wear masks and such for years is not contributing to a higher responsiveness to low-level and not-so-low-level viruses and other pathogens now.
I think the burden of proof of that is on the people who are saying it's not.
So, I think there are multiple things that may be contributing to the same pattern, or at least are viable hypotheses.
What you and I would call confounds and what kids today and doctors call confounders, but anyway.
So, to put a couple of them on the list.
A, the hygiene hypothesis and the The version of it that would apply to this I think is almost certain to be true during development.
In other words, the immune system during development gets exposures that are useful.
The question of whether or not adults are getting sick with these things because of a couple of years of increased isolation, certainly plausible that there is a kind of censusing of the pathogen environment in which you're basically low-level vaccinating yourself.
And I've heard doctors talk about this.
Zach's pediatrician when he was a baby used to talk about... He's a good pediatrician.
He's a good pediatrician.
I think his name may have been Peterson.
But in any case, he used to talk about the fact that he didn't get sick and he attributed it to that.
He the doctor.
He the pediatrician didn't get sick even though he's coming every day into a practice with a lot of young sick kids.
Right, and what he thought was going on, right or wrong, was that he was being exposed to all, you know, the kids are all snotting up his office and he's exposed to this stuff and basically he's constantly up to date on the library of what's out there, right?
So that's possible.
Other things that are possible is that there is evolution on the pathogen front.
So we had a year with almost no flu, right?
Now, maybe that's bullshit.
Maybe flu ended up disguised as COVID because the powers that be wanted to count it that way.
But if we take The lack of flu at face value, I think it's pretty clear why that would have happened, right?
We did something that interrupted our normal ecology, which interrupted its ecology, which is suddenly the mechanism that it uses to infect people is broken because it doesn't have access to airplanes and indoor restaurants and all of the stuff that we weren't doing.
Well, I mean, the obvious prediction here, of course, is that in places that stopped the lockdowns early, that didn't have the social isolation and closed the schools and such, there won't be as much of a surge right now in respiratory viruses.
Probably, except that we are all intermingling.
Exactly.
And so, you know, I do wonder, if you take a pathogen and you suddenly accidentally get wise to blocking it by, you know, Doing some draconian antisocial distancing, whatever it is.
And the pathogen responds by turning up its infectivity, right?
Because now it has to jump gaps that it didn't have to jump before.
That suddenly, at the point you stop doing that, could unleash a surge.
Right.
So either way, we created an environment that might produce conditions to encourage the evolution of virulence.
Right.
And at the same time, what did we do with these so-called vaccines is we intervened in a complex system that nobody knows enough about to have done this.
And we did so in a way that is now obviously dumb and in a way that is now we are seeing evidence of weird consequences that nobody predicted as far as I know, like IgG4, the attenuation signal, suddenly rising in people who have been multiply boosted.
And the question is, well, that does a couple of things.
That, A, causes a suppression of immunity for the thing for which these folks were, or potentially causes a suppression of immunity in the case of the pathogen for which they were boosted.
But it also provides a loophole in the immune system that other pathogens can find their way through.
Right, it's not specific.
It just, it causes an overall dampening.
Well, it's like, if you were running a military operation... Which I'm not.
No, thank you.
But if you were... I think I could do okay.
I mean, I'd want to study in advance.
Let's put it this way... I want to talk to a lot of good people, but we know some of those people.
The T's would be crossed, the I's would be dotted, that probably... Oh, come on!
That sucks!
I was about to... That is not what I do!
I was about to say, before I was so rudely interrupted, I was about to say that that would likely result in a great decrease in friendly fire incidents.
Okay?
Now what I was going to suggest is a crude mechanism.
I see.
A crude mechanism for preventing friendly fire incidents.
That presumably militaries use is some sort of a, hey, I'm a friendly transponder signal, right?
Which causes... We're talking about the immune system now.
No, we're talking about an actual military operation, which neither of us are in charge of.
But the point is, if every tank that is yours is putting out a signal that is, you know, heavily encrypted, so you can't The enemy can't put out that signal itself, then you could prevent the targeting of those things.
But to the extent that the enemy figures out how to do this, right, gets access to the code and creates a transponder of its own, then the point is that's a loophole for anything that they can put that transponder on.
Wait, is this all like a way to circle back to Codecracker?
Our new superhero?
You think?
No.
I don't have a pun.
I'm working on it all the time, but I don't have one.
But anyway, point is that ITG4 thing suggests...
Another mechanism that might be causing us to see an uptick in these pathogens.
So anyway, that's three different things that all point in the same direction and make it hard for us to know if, you know, which, if any of these things, or possibly all of them, are in play.
Okay, the other thing I wanted to talk about was That inside of this discussion about antibodies, we have now started discussing different classes of antibodies, right?
We discussed IgG, which is the primary antibody thought to be responsible, at least in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and probably most viruses, for neutralizing these things.
But that is what is induced by the early inoculations.
The problem is, and many people have now raised this in different ways, That this is not ideally the kind of immunity that you want to stop transmission of this thing, and it may be that at some level the very design of this vaccination was doomed from the start not to stop transmission because it's in the wrong place, right?
Your lymph can be full of immune cells that are well alerted to this pathogen, but if your mucosa aren't We're brimming over with antibodies that identify the pathogen as soon as it lands, it can still get into your lungs.
And so the way to think about this, the way to listen for it, is that the antibodies, the class of antibodies that are responsible for mucosal immunity is IgA, not IgG.
Right?
So, anyway, and you may also have heard of IgE, which is the one that paradoxically seems to produce nothing but trouble, right?
It produces allergies, right?
Places where you have an immune reaction to stuff that is not a pathogen.
And that's not good.
You can in fact be killed by your own immune response to something that is not a pathogen like a bee sting.
You'd be overwhelmed with your own inflammation.
I wonder if it might not have been in an earlier era when we weren't able to travel with such magical alacrity.
A measure of localness.
If you are now being exposed to something at 10, or 20, or 30, especially, or 40, that you've never been exposed to before, maybe you have strayed into territory where other things are going to be new as well.
Interesting.
If you would take it as some kind of a proxy for something.
Interesting.
I hadn't thought of anything like that.
Quite possible.
Yeah, actually, you know, it sort of fits with the discussion of the repulsion that people, the physical revulsion that is sometimes felt about foreign stuff.
Oh, I thought you were going to talk about sick, sickness.
Oh.
Well, but that, you know, let's put it this way.
Amongst racists, the belief that the other is not only, you know, an economic threat or a military threat, but dirty, disgusting.
So anyway, who knows?
Maybe there is some history that would explain that and it's not just a trick, a propagandistic trick.
Just an aside, I know you're still talking about IGA and G here, but one of the places where that script gets very much flipped is in the European arrival on the eastern coast of North America, where both Europeans and Native Americans who they interacted with perceived that the Native Americans were very clean and the Europeans were filthy, and what the hell's wrong with those people anyway?
The Europeans, like what is wrong with those Europeans?
How can they live like that?
Right, no, it is true.
And then, of course, you know...
At the point that the Europeans were landing in North America, the game was already in some sense over as a result of the pathogen that had spread due to early contact.
But, you know, clearly at some level the Europeans were a pathological threat that they didn't even presumably understand.
Yeah, right.
Which is a fascinating and very, very tragic story.
Back to immunoglobulins.
Yeah, back to immunoglobulin.
So immunoglobulin is just a synonym for antibody.
And it's what the IG stands for.
And you should know, so should be better done with visuals, although most of our followers are just listening anyway, but the
The fact is, these antibodies, which you have seen diagrammed a million times as little Y-shaped proteins, where the tips of the Y are the thing that sticks to the antigen and the tail is what dictates what class, IgA, IgE, IgG, etc., the antibody is in, but that thing has a close evolutionary relationship to the receptors.
Let's sit on the surface of the B-cell.
So you can imagine if a B-cell is producing antibodies and those antibodies find their target and they land, that doesn't tell the B-cell that produced them anything special.
They're not, you know, in contact.
So there have to be receptors on the cell itself so that the cell itself knows, ah, wait, it's my time.
Like the bank guard who, you know, spends an entire career sitting in the bank Where nothing happens and then finally the robber shows up and it's like, ah, that's what I've been training for, right?
So anyway, the receptors on the, you know, the T-cells and the B-cells have an evolutionary relationship.
They're not independent, right?
These are two versions, they're variations, evolutionary variations on a theme.
And the receptors and the antibodies have a relationship.
And anyway, therein lies the story.
But that's probably almost enough to cap this off for today.
Purpose being really just to get people used to the conversation since I think we're about to end up talking about whether this campaign made any sense in the first place.
This campaign meaning this kind of Did anybody think that that was going to arrest the progress of this pathogen?
campaign the vaccination campaign right creating igg immunity in your lymph and blood was that ever did anybody think that that was going to arrest the uh the progress of this pathogen and if so by what mechanism right you know
an iga response in the mucosa might have blocked transmission and there's a way to induce that which is to produce the um pseudo infection or the attenuated infection in the mucosa where the mucosa learns this lesson instead of your lymph um Which is to say a different drug and delivered differently.
Right.
A nasal vaccine of a traditional sort.
Right.
And I will say, you know, yes, we will be accused of conspiratorial thinking.
On the other hand, we've seen an awful lot of collusion just to obscure the truth.
So I don't know why we would draw a line.
There is an aspect in which there are several different lines of evidence that, you know, Pharma was very excited about this platform.
And it's easy to see why, because once this platform is something that people accept, then producing... The R&D is just slashed.
Like, you know, you get... it takes no time at all, which was one of the selling points, right?
Like, wow, we are so lucky that we got this so fast.
And, you know, you have a chance to replace literally years of R&D, and then, I mean, I don't know how it is that they are going to continue to justify clinical trials being abbreviated like they did.
But, you know, years into less than a year is going to be quite a remarkable cost savings.
Well, if they hadn't created... if the Vaccines had been less destructive than they turned out to be, or if they had been better at controlling the story so that people thought they were less destructive, then the answer is, oh, well, this new platform requires a whole new regulatory structure, because why would you spend Decades, when the only thing you're swapping out is a sequence, right?
So you can see their argument, right?
You can see them, you know, frothing at the mouth, frankly, at the profits that they're going to generate by translating every vaccine into this new platform and just, you know, shooting you up.
So it didn't work out that way.
And hopefully people are awake enough, or enough people are awake enough that, you know, We'll say two brief things here.
One, to understand that as fantastic as the potential of inducing the production of proteins using transfection with mRNA as much as that has tremendous potential.
A, we don't know that it can be done usefully and there's a basic safety problem that is going to accompany every single attempt and the basic safety problem is You're going to make the patient's cells produce foreign antigen and that is going to get them targeted by the patient's immune system and Unless you have some really sophisticated way of keeping that damage to some tissue where you can afford it It's game over right?
It's not it's not worth it.
And so anyway to my way of thinking That's where the conversation has to be.
Have you solved that problem?
If so, tell us how you've solved that problem and we'll talk about whether or not what you're saying makes any sense or if it sounds like PR, right?
But until you solve that problem, well, you've just seen a totally predictable disaster and we're not doing that again.
Hopefully.
So anyway, it's that question written over all sorts of vaccines that, you know, that they basically want to change the process on.
All right, last thing is I wanted to point out That in this discussion about antibodies, antibody immunity, whether antibody immunity is the best kind of immunity that one might want to induce with a vaccine campaign, there is also this interesting paper that showed up in Nature.
I only briefly saw it before we went on today, but it's clearly relevant.
Zach, do you want to put on that paper?
So this is a report, this is Nature, and it talks about something which people who've been watching Dark Horse for some time will remember you and I talked about earlier, much earlier in the pandemic, the possibility that there might be hybrid herd immunity that comes from some people.
Some people having received their immunity through an inoculation, some people having that immunity through exposure to the pathogen, and that really were the inoculations good at producing an immunity to contracting the disease, that you could get there by a combination of those two processes.
Well, I haven't seen this paper yet, but it looks from just what I can see of the abstract here that they at least looked at not just antibody response but also T cell response.
Yep, they did.
Now scroll down, Zach, if you would, towards the end of the abstract.
It says... It says full vaccination was crucial to provide hybrid immunity.
Right, what you have to say if you're going to publish in Nature.
However, when designing vaccine strategies, T-cell exhaustion after multiple vaccinations should be considered.
This is literally the first time I've seen this paper.
Yep.
Have you seen it enough to know on what basis they are saying, you know, that looks encrypted, that looks encoded to be like, okay, we had to say these things, and we're going to be a little bit cryptic here.
But what did they see?
What did they see?
That made them conclude that, you know, T cell exhaustion after multiple vaccinations should be considered.
Which, like, given the way abstracts are written now on this topic, that sounds like this is what we found, but we only are able to say maybe this.
Right.
What they saw was a substantial drop in T cell reactivity after multiple boosts by the vaccines.
So IgG4 and T cell are dropping.
IgG4 is increasing, which is an attenuation signal.
Oh, sorry.
So, yeah, the... Right.
I've got a sign problem.
I've got to keep track of the signs.
But IgG4 is increasing, which is causing a drop in responsiveness.
Right.
And separately, T-cell responsiveness is dropping in multiply inoculated people.
Now, the implications of that are likely to be Complex.
Hard to parse.
But one thing at the level of the discussion that we've just had, what this looks like is that these particular inoculations, whether the people who designed and or produced them knew what they were doing or not, seems to be dragging the battle against SARS-CoV-2 in those who have seems to be dragging the battle against SARS-CoV-2 in those who have subjected themselves, at least to the mRNA vaccination campaign, dragging the fight into the realm of B cells and antibodies and away from
Now, people who have studied viruses are liable to be alarmed at that because viral immunity over on the T cell side is likely to be superior.
And so this is yet another variation on a theme.
Didn't see that exact result coming, but we have talked about things like original antigenic sin.
Original antigenic sin means that once you've given the immune system a potent message about a particular pathogen, The immune system loses its objectivity, it loses its creativity, and it becomes tracked into making that first response that it made, and that is not a good thing, right?
You want the immune system to be dynamic, to be capable of switching gears if it needs to, and tracking it into this one response is not a good idea.
So that's original antigenic sin.
There is antibody-dependent enhancement in which a pathogen utilizes the antibodies that it can predict are going to land on its surface as a mechanism for gaining access to cells that it would not be otherwise able to do.
And, you know, now we've got attenuation signals, right?
Attenuation signals are not in either of those categories exactly, but does seem like a consequence of something analogous to original antigenic sin.
And now we see T-cells standing down.
That's like, you know, is that a consequence of an attenuation signal?
What is it?
But in any case, it's It is so many different demonstrations of what you and I said very simply without any specificity at all, right?
Welcome to complex systems.
You are intervening in a Interaction between a pathogen and the immune system, that's one complex system inside of a person, that's another complex system inside of a society in a pandemic.
Okay, but that description, and we have said that multiple times, by that description, so too is any vaccine.
Right, so any vaccine is going to actually have those three layers of complexity that is true about it.
And what isn't included in the rendering that you just gave is the novelty, upon novelty upon novelty, I think there's at least three, um, in the mRNA vaccines.
Like, you know, there are at least, well, yes.
So it's the mRNA being used to effectively turn you into a factory for the antigen.
Yep.
It's the introduction of the pseudouridine into the mRNA so it doesn't decay.
Yep.
And it's the lipid nanoparticles that are coating the mRNA so that they aren't found by the RNAases in the intercellular space to also not let them decay.
So all three of those things, and I'm sure there are many more than that, but those are the three that come to mind.
Like, oh, this is so novel with no track record.
Right.
So I will just put an asterisk on that last one.
The lipid nanoparticles are in and of themselves novel and who knows what their consequence is, but the lack of a targeting mechanism so that whatever they're doing is just happening all over the body is a critical design failure.
Right.
I agree with you.
The nested complex systems are always there.
It's the intervening with something novel and thinking that you know what's going to happen.
Oh no you don't, right?
The best thing you can do is you can work in a way that is close, is closely enough, is similar enough to something you've done and seen the response and hopefully tracked the consequences over the course of decades following that gives you some confidence that this works.
But even that we've seen, we've seen traditional vaccines fail, right?
We've seen them introduced and we've seen safety signals cause them to be removed from the market.
And so the point is that's not foolproof, but at least it's something. - Yeah. - Right?
And here, what they did was an absolutely, at least, triply novel intervention in a nested series of complex systems where, you know, it's just obvious that they weren't going to be able to predict the outcome.
And, you know, it is much worse than it might have been.
So far, it's not as bad as it might have been, you know?
It's arbitrary in terms of its level of terribleness.
But, you know, it was very unlikely that with that level of novelty, in that level of complexity, that their hopes were going to be mirrored by the consequence.
And we've seen them embarrassed, or at least they should be embarrassed, at what actually happened.
No, I don't see any evidence of embarrassment, honestly.
We are seeing more and more suggestions that it is not as those who are actually trying to help humanity would have hoped.
But the evidence of embarrassment on behalf of those who push these things, I don't see.
I don't see it.
Except that, actually, the Department of Defense has rescinded the vaccine mandate for the military, which is important and about time, and I don't have anything in particular to say about this, but just a few details, which is that there seems to be, and I hope to hear about it if this has already changed or I hope it will change, there seems to be nothing in
I don't remember if it's a declaration or whatever, but in the new paperwork that helps in any way those members of the military who were relieved of duty because they wouldn't get vaccinated.
I think those people are still simply as screwed as they already were by an unethical and unreasonable mandate.
But for those people who were still, you know, hoping for an exemption, who had a black mark on their record but were somehow managing to still be in the military, all of those things are supposed to now be wiped clean.
Which, you know, it's about time.
And we talked, I looked it up, in Dark Horse number 112.
We're at 157 now.
So this is closing in on a year ago.
We discussed the widespread abandonment of mandates in government and the private sector about a year ago, early 2022.
But really, two large sectors were keeping them, and there's a third that was keeping them partially.
And one of the large sectors and the third one are largely still in place.
So this week, the military drops the mandates.
Terrific.
Fantastic.
Good job about time.
But in the entertainment industry, as we have talked about before, it still seems to be de rigueur to require mandates and to be up-to-date, whatever that means, to be up-to-date on all of your shots, even for children.
And then the other place, before we talk a little bit about this, is not all of higher ed, and it was never all of higher ed, it was remarkably the elite institutions.
And it's such a perfect encapsulation.
really of what has happened here.
That it was the elite institutions that early on started mandating vaccines for its students, for its young people, who are most at risk from these vaccines and at least risk from the actual virus.
And it is them, and then you know later on some other institutions sort of joined in the mandate game, but most of them have backed off, and it's the elite institutions who still have them for a tremendous number of people.
Isn't that it right there?
The nugget.
That it is the elite institutions throughout this that have revealed their failures to understand basic logic and science and to care about humanity.
Both of those things simultaneously.
So why are we still listening?
So I tweeted something on this topic earlier in the week and I think, and it leads to the piece of the puzzle I wanted to at least Float today.
For some reason, we are living in an era in which regulators regulate only after the public has become alarmed about something.
In other words, they're supposed to be regulating so that the public doesn't have to become alarmed because it's pretty well protected.
But what's happening is the level of harm has to be great enough that the public can't ignore it.
And at that point, the regulators will step in and reluctantly regulate, right?
The vaccine mandate in the military is being dropped late after public discussion about the consequence of this for our readiness.
Including right here on Dark Horse.
You did two fantastic conversations with service members and one lawyer.
Yep.
So, what is the meaning of that?
You've got the Department of Defense that is dragging its heels on dropping a mandate that is crippling military readiness.
They should be the first people to look out for military readiness.
They should be sensitive to threats to military readiness.
Most of us don't even understand.
And then, in this case, it's the public discussion that is driving them to do that.
Likewise, we have newsrooms.
Right?
Newsrooms, they're now, you know, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are now reporting on the possibility that the vaccine campaign may be driving the evolution of variants.
Really?
I mean, so what we've got is the newsroom is now embarrassed into reporting the news?
That's what's going on?
Right?
It's all of these things are lagging and you're pointing out that the elite institutions, which are the people, you know, Every faculty in one of these elite universities should be brimming over with people saying, hey, wait a minute, this is a complex system, what are they doing?
Lipid nanoparticle?
How are they going to prevent it from getting into your heart?
Every one of these institutions should be full of people who know enough to raise the right questions, to point to the right historical instances that reveal the danger of doing this kind of thing.
Not after decades of the creation of fictional departments and fields such that many people in the faculty can't tell up from down or 2 from 2 from 4.
Right.
If they're going to engage in sophistry at the level of 2 plus 2 might not equal 4, than asking them to consider the risks of complex systems upon complex systems upon complex systems, especially when presented by people with all the credentials and the right, you know, glassware and lamp coats and such, and who are using big words that, you know, just, you know, follow the scientism.
And, oh, yes, I will, because I know that in this house we believe in science.
And, you know, it's, it's, it's effectively loyalty oaths all the way down.
And, you know, I am loyal to science.
Like, no, you're not.
You have no idea what science is.
That's not what science is.
You're being lied to.
Oh, and it's over.
Right.
It is upside down, right?
All of these things.
And here's what I'm concerned about, though.
If you think about the military mandate being dropped, and you think about people discussing what just happened 10 years from now, The discussion, whether you understand that the DOD allowed military readiness to be crippled for years before finally abandoning this policy, right?
That's going to depend on your ability to tell 2021 from 2023.
Right?
That's a minor difference when you're looking at history.
And it really erases the immense period of time in which we were shouting at them and saying, what are you doing?
Military readiness?
We're supposed to be able to fight two simultaneous wars on two different fronts at once.
And you're dicking around with this stuff?
Right?
You're taking pilots out of the air?
You're grounding them?
What are you doing?
You're supposed to be defending the nation.
And so, you know, I'm already dreading the arguments five years from now when we're looking back and it, you know, the ability to make the argument about the jaw-dropping insanity of what we went through comes down to, you know, the last digit in a four-digit year, right?
And, you know, whether or not, you know, the Wall Street Journal was aware of the variant issue in, you know, 2023 or 2021.
Right.
That's a huge difference.
How much happened in those intervening years?
It was a ton.
And they could have been talking about this.
It wasn't hard.
We were talking about it.
Right.
They presumably have access to YouTube.
They could have figured out that this was a question.
So I'm concerned that what's happening is that we have successfully, we, the whole community of dissidents, has successfully embarrassed the system into having to do the bare minimum years late.
And that that is a tremendously important story, but that it will look like a footnote.
Right.
Oh, government's slow.
Right?
So anyway, I don't know how you prepare people that that's the cover story they're building, but by doing all of these things late, they're covering their asses and leaving us exposed to doing this all again.
Yeah, they are.
Meanwhile, just show my screen very briefly here, Zach.
Health and Human Services posts.
I am over here.
Oh, it's unplugged at so many levels.
Not on my computer, though.
Due to circumstances entirely under our control.
Exactly.
So, Health and Human Services publishes, or posts, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response this week, four days ago, as we're live streaming January 11th.
Renewal of determination that a public health emergency exists.
All right, so we got another 90-day extension on, yep, COVID is a public health emergency.
This is, I think, the 11th one.
As a result of the continued consequences of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, on this date and after consultation with public health officials as necessary, I, Xavier Becerra, apologies if I'm butchering his name, Secretary of Health and Human Services, pursuant to the authority vested in me under Section 319, etc.,
Do renew, effective January 11, 2023, the January 31, 2020 determination by former Secretary Alex M. Azar that he previously renewed on, and then they go through every 90 days.
Literally, you could tell time by it.
It's like clockwork.
Every 90 days.
So we just got renewed three days ago for another 90 days that this is a public health emergency.
Which is its own hall of mirrors.
Yeah.
Because they used these things as an excuse.
On the other hand, I wouldn't even know how to call it.
Well, so let's take a look briefly, if we can, if my computer will show, at, I'll link to this, declarations of a public health emergency.
What, beyond the 11, With regard to coronavirus, to COVID, have happened recently.
Well, we've got one also recurring every 90 days, the opioid crisis.
I didn't know that.
Okay, I'm not exactly sure what to think of that, but okay.
Oh, monkey pox, November 2nd.
Okay, maybe so.
Then we've got the hurricane in South Carolina on September 30th, the hurricane in Florida on September 26th, the hurricane in Puerto Rico on September 20th, severe storms, flooding, landslides and mudslides in Kentucky on August 2nd, wildfires and straight-line winds in New Mexico.
So we've got Punctuated natural disasters that are serious and that cause real pointed moments in time when people were at risk and there needed to be an immediate response on the part of HHS, presumably, and other agencies.
And this whole list has those occasionally, and then mostly it's every 90 days, yep, SARS-CoV-2, medical emergency, opioid crisis, medical emergency, and now maybe it's going to start with monkeypox as well.
So it's like it's like inuring us to you're always in a state of emergency, be afraid, be very, very afraid.
And, you know, make sure that you are on high alert at all times.
And, you know, you don't need to actually know anything about physiology, or about psychology, to know that being in a state of high alert at all times is not good for you, you make poor decisions, you are more likely to be confused, and more able to be confused by those who would like to confuse you.
So, this doesn't feel accidental.
Organic, yeah.
No, it might be organic, but it feels like we are being led into a state of perpetual… I mean, it's like the color coding of after 9-11, right?
Like, you know, if you're yellow or orange or red, you know, you may be about to die.
Oh my god, really?
I can't live like this?
Well, yes, but let us help you.
This is no way to live.
And that's been the case since they started this 11 90-day intervals ago.
It was 10 90-day intervals ago if this is the 11th.
It's like, so you know this Rahm Emanuel quote, never let a good crisis go to waste, right?
It's like that thing has run into the same
Safety is an obsession that is riddled through everything else, where, you know, I, I really wish people would look at the COVID phenomenon beyond the pandemic, and they would look at what it implies about what our system is.
But the real question is, if we, you know, how many different ways is what we are going through a self inflicted wound?
Right.
What you are pointing to is here's a psychological self-inflicted wound.
We've also got a lipid nanoparticle pseudo-uridine enhanced mRNA self-inflicted wound.
And then you know what else we have?
We have a spike protein encrusted nucleocapsid virus SARS-CoV-2 self-inflicted wound, which is the result of its own panic over zoonotic viruses, which we absolutely have to enhance in the lab so that we'll know what to do what kind of bullshit argument is that right this is all people you know basically jerking funding mechanisms around by the amygdala right
it's just like you know we better study this now or we're all gonna really you can't That's what you think?
Is that suddenly the danger of a virus leaping out of a bat in a cave is so great that we have to enhance that virus and never mind all of the prior cases in which viruses have escaped from labs where people had them?
Right?
I mean, the story is just too dumb, but somehow people who have enough precaution in them to prevent us from overreacting are not allowed into the conversation.
You're only allowed into the conversation about pandemics if you're panicked about the chance of one leaping out of a cave at any moment.
And what that means is this self-inflicted wound was inevitable.
Yeah.
Right?
Anybody who didn't think that this was enough of a problem or that you were going to make your problem worse by enhancing viruses in the lab wasn't welcome.
And holy moly are we paying a huge price for this kind of, you know, it's like some insane field trip where everybody is leaping out from bushes and shouting in each other's ears all of a sudden.
You know, everybody's keeping each other on edge because that allows them to, you know, Manipulate the system into spitting out money or something that occurred to you on field trips No, I was trying to think of what context this would happen It didn't sound like a boardroom to me, but you know doesn't sound like any field trip.
I know no do we have a better event that Where people leap out and try to startle each other?
How about now?
Well, right.
This.
Here and now.
Yes.
Because that is the point.
It's what they're doing.
So, in that milieu, what condition is the American Academy of Pediatrics now suggesting the remedy of drugs and surgery?
For what condition?
What childhood conditions?
The American Academy of Pediatrics.
I'm going to read, this is not from the AAP, the American Academy of Pediatrics, although I'll link to that.
But CBS, among everyone else, reported on this.
So I'm going to just read the first three paragraphs, eliding the condition itself.
Okay.
Children struggling with this condition should be evaluated and treated early and aggressively, including with medications for kids as young as 12 and surgery for those as young as 13, according to new guidelines released Monday.
The long-standing practice of watchful waiting, or delaying treatment to see whether children and teens outgrow or overcome the condition on their own, only worsens the problem that affects more than 14.4 million young people in the U.S., researchers say.
Left untreated, the condition can lead to lifelong health problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes, and depression.
Waiting doesn't work, said co-author of the first guidance on this condition in 15 years in the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Waiting doesn't work.
Can we talk to the person who said waiting does work?
I just think that both the arguments should be on the table.
So, you've probably heard this story.
I haven't.
You haven't?
No.
So you want to take a guess?
What condition?
I'm reasonably confident I know what the condition is, and it's a killer.
Yeah.
It's a killer.
The condition, tell me if I'm wrong, is that some kids in this era, where frankly there are a lot of kids with a lot of conditions, some kids don't have a condition.
And not having a condition... Wait, there's 14.4 million children in this country without a condition?
That seems high, but- That's terrifying.
Well, right, but- Well, drugs and surgery.
Imagine how they feel.
Exactly.
Drugs and surgery.
Because you can- I mean, you pick your condition, right?
You could decide what condition- To the operating theater with them.
Exactly.
So is that it?
Lack of condition?
Lack of any diagnosable condition.
Lack of any diagnostic.
Anything wrong with them?
Exactly, which would make them feel like the odd man out at school.
Drugs is not too young.
Or woman, or... No, not drugs is not too young.
Drugs is... 12 is not too... And I am not on any at the moment.
That was a brief moment of channeling George W. Bush.
Is the kids learning?
Yeah, 12 is not too young for drugs if your child does not yet have a problem.
Right, exactly.
Drugs didn't work?
Try surgery.
How close did I get?
Unfortunately, you got really far.
You weren't anywhere close.
But, you know, the language, when you take out the name of the condition, the idea, you know, children struggling should be evaluated and treated early and aggressively, including with medications for kids as young as 12 and surgery for those as young as 13.
Now, the ages aren't quite the same, but this sounds like the same thing that they're doing with regard to trans, right?
It sounds like that.
And yet, in this case, it's not.
It's not trans.
It's obesity.
It's being overweight.
It's the actual health problem of being overweight.
But what they're recommending is drugs and surgery!
Right.
For 12 and 13 year olds!
And here's some other good quotations from the CBS story.
The co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota said, Obesity is not a lifestyle problem.
It is not a lifestyle disease.
It predominantly emerges from biological factors.
Because until yesterday, there were this many overweight and obese kids in the world and are still outside of the countries that feed our kids complete garbage.
No!
This is... I cannot believe that a doctor whose job this is is willing to go on the record saying this.
Like...
Have you met doctors?
Sorry.
Unfortunately, a few like this.
And the medical director for the AAP, again the American Academy of Pediatrics, Institute for Healthy Childhood Weight, and a co-author of the guidelines said, this is no different, this is not different, you know, she was speaking so it's not quite grammatically right, but this is not different than you have asthma and now we have an inhaler for you.
Which, fascinating, right?
Like, why are there so many childhood allergies now?
Why are so many kids asthmatic and allergic to things?
It's because of what we're doing to them.
It's because of what we're feeding them, and because we keep our houses too completely clean of pathogens, and yet we're feeding them garbage, and we've got pollutants everywhere.
Adjuvants.
And adjuvants.
And the obesity is the same thing.
Once you're 30 and obese, and you have been since you were young, it's really tough.
It's likely that you're going to have a very, very hard time getting to a weight that would have been considered healthy for your height if you had not been obese your entire life.
But children?
You don't start with drugs and surgery for children.
You don't do that.
No, it's insane.
And the pattern is there for every one of these exploding pathologies, right?
You've got, you know, we have talked extensively about the orthodontia version of this.
There is obviously something that we have changed about the environment of children.
Genes doesn't make any sense as an explanation.
So it's obviously something that we are doing.
And the implication is, if it's something new that you're doing, It's something you could stop doing.
Right.
Now, in the case of obesity, how insane is it that we're going to studiously pretend that the right thing to do is drugs and surgery for children who, frankly, maybe it's too late for them, but it's not too late for the children who haven't been exposed to whatever it is yet, and we are not.
Here's what we're not going to do.
We are not going to go after the ability of corporations to study the psychology of children and to induce them to eat more than they would otherwise eat and eat different things than they would otherwise eat.
As if that's not an obvious suspect in the question of why childhood obesity is rising, right?
We are actually allowing corporations to induce children into self-harm, right?
This is as bad as allowing them to molest children, right?
We are harming children.
Their whole lives will be affected by this.
And we are not looking at the obvious culprits that we could obviously do something about without touching the kids, right?
You could just simply say, look, I mean, I've made this argument not just for food, but I don't think advertisers should have any right to advertise to children They shouldn't have the right to study children.
It is our obligation to protect children.
We don't have any control over the ability of an advertiser to get into a kid's mind.
Why are we letting them do that?
Right?
You wouldn't let a stranger on the street who, you know, was trying to con your kid to talk to them.
So why are we allowing them to do it through screens?
It makes no sense.
No, it doesn't.
I cannot show my screen, is that right?
Okay, that's fine.
The Clinical Practice Guideline for the Evaluation and Treatment of Children and Adolescents with Obesity is an interesting document.
That's the thing that came out this week that everyone's reporting on.
I haven't read all of it, but just the little blurb at the top of the page.
How would you define disease?
Yeah.
I don't think... I think that actually just worked, Zach.
I saw my screen jump around.
and complex chronic disease of obesity.
How would you define disease?
Yeah.
I don't think, I think that actually just worked, Zach.
I saw my screen jump around.
I don't, metabolic disease.
Right.
Like in adults having had, you know, a developmental period during which they were taking in a lot of sugar and synthetic crap and, no, you don't need to anymore.
And, you know, becoming less active and, you know, their physiology changed with their diet and activity level through their childhood and adolescence and upon becoming adults.
Metabolic disease may well be the right term here.
And I didn't actually look up what other people think disease means, but this strikes me as, you know, the complex, serious and complex chronic disease of obesity.
I feel like part of what that is doing is once again encouraging people to take the control away from themselves.
Well, I can't do anything.
I couldn't make sure I get out in the sun every day and synthesize my vitamin D and move my body around and learn by making repeated choices about what I eat to love food that is also good for me.
Well, I can't do anything.
It's easier if you just give me a pill.
It's much easier.
And if I hear that it's a disease that I've got, then that changes the conversation.
There's nothing I can do, it's a disease.
As opposed to, you know what, you're a kid.
And you are not, this is not your fault, but you can still take responsibility.
So, at some level it's just a charade, right?
Definitely take responsibility.
And they should keep you away from the doctors who were looking at these guidelines as much as possible.
So at some level, it's just a charade, right?
You've got an industry selling food that has a perverse incentive.
You've got an industry selling pills, which has got a perverse incentive.
You've got an industry selling surgery.
It's got a perverse incentive.
And there's no industry of leave kids alone in a healthy environment that doesn't make them sick, right?
They don't have lobbyists.
There's nobody on that side.
And so the thing that is increasingly infuriating to me is the pretense that this is about science and medicine and study and consternation about illnesses that children are suffering.
It's not.
Right.
This is somehow about business.
And the problem is the people doing it don't even know that.
Right.
I'm sure even in pharma they go to work and they think, well, there's a Biological problem called obesity in children and by gum we gotta address it with some molecules, right?
And there is nobody, I mean like, you know, there used to be medicine.
There used to be doctors who had a scientific bent, who solved problems, who puzzled through what was making their patients sick, figured out what things might work for them.
And there were things like a second opinion, right?
Maybe I don't want a medical establishment in which every doctor agrees to what the CDC said.
Maybe I want two doctors to disagree and I want to listen.
No, but it streamlines the process, because there's no need for a second opinion, because you know the second, third, fourth, and nth opinion will all be the same, therefore you don't need them.
Right, no.
So it does streamline the process.
Hey doc, these check boxes, what do I take?
Right?
It's that.
There's also essentially no advocacy.
I can't remember the last time I heard anybody say that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure.
Because, you know, an ounce of prevention is a breach of the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.
Right?
Prevention?
How are you going to monetize prevention?
Treatment, that's where the shareholders get their value.
For pharmaceutical companies, not for doctors.
Even doctors running a practice who encourage whatever they're called, like the regular healthy checkups or whatever, or annual exams even, but also just, you know what, you're pre-diabetic, you're pre-like this.
It would be great to just have a sit-down, have a face-to-face, you, patient, me, doctor, every six months.
That doesn't sound like a breach of fiduciary responsibility, whether or not the doctor is working for a hospital or their own practice or whatever.
If you're encouraging patients to come in for office visits and actually develop a relationship with them, are they going to be sicker sooner and therefore require more drugs?
No.
But that's a good thing.
Well, I agree with you.
There's no doctor corporation, and I'm sure what I don't know about how HMOs and all of that work, you know, is a place where a lot of stuff can be hidden.
But at the very least, the doctors are captured by something that has fiduciary responsibilities that we don't understand all over the place.
This pandemic diagnosed the system and the diagnosis was, you know, it's got a terminal illness.
And that terminal illness will cause it to reverse the labels on cure and poison, right?
And once you have a medical establishment that's willing to do that, whether it's because of threats or perverse incentives or confusion, right?
The point is, well, okay, that's not medicine in the sense that we used to think of it.
It's something else, right?
Pharma isn't in the business of making people healthier.
Right?
It's not surprising that pharma figured out that that's not where its bread is buttered.
So, you know, what are we going to do?
Because, you know, it's a great and tragic example that you've brought to us here, where we're going to pretend that an epidemic of obesity is not about external inputs to the system having changed in a way that has overwhelmed restraint in children or overwhelmed metabolism or whatever it did.
It predominantly emerges from biological factors, said the co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota, which is both true at a trivial level and so far misses the mark in terms of what a doctor in a position which is both true at a trivial level and so far misses the mark in terms of what a doctor in a position Right?
And you do find in the guidelines, you know, mention of like, nutrition, healthy lifestyle.
But, you know, the big thing that made the headlines and that's new here is recommendations specifically identifying the youngest age at which you should start on drugs for 12 year olds who are obese, if everything else is fair.
And surgery for 13-year-olds who are obese, if everything else has failed.
And I'm not even sure the if everything else has failed language is in there.
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not even sure that's how they've framed it.
Okay, but we've got to separate these two things, right?
Because it comes up in every one of these cases.
They're the people who have already been affected, who may indeed have a permanent problem, a developmental impact on their metabolism that causes them to have a lifelong issue that we have to deal with somehow.
Right?
And then there are the people who haven't been hurt yet.
An indefinitely large group.
Right?
All those who have yet to be born, who when they are born will either be exposed to the factor that made these other kids fat, or they won't.
Right?
And so, we haven't hurt them yet.
The amount of good you, even if you were stuck with a bad situation for kids that have already been affected and there's nothing you can do for them that really works, The amount of good you can do by not doing it to anybody else is indefinitely large.
And so why aren't we focused there?
And why?
I mean, even that statement that you read.
Can you describe a scenario?
I'm not asking for something that is really true.
Can you describe a scenario in which an obesity epidemic in children is not primarily happening with biological factors?
It's a fat suit.
It's a mirror with a bow in it, right?
Yeah, it does feel like a hall of mirrors.
It feels like a hall of mirrors.
Maybe it's all halls of mirrors.
Maybe there are no obese kids and it's just an illusion.
But short of that, You know what obesity is made of?
Lipids, right?
You know how lipids get into the body?
Metabolism.
You know how metabolism happens?
You eat stuff.
You know what you eat it with?
You masticate it with your teeth.
Biology all the way down.
Right!
What else would it be, right?
The person has put on a lab coat and said a tautology and everybody's like, oh yeah, that's wild.
Well, but I mean it also, I mean this, I mean we could, there's a whole dissertation to be had in unpacking this really ridiculous statement that seems so simple and was said with such assurance.
Obesity is not a lifestyle problem.
It is not a lifestyle disease.
It predominantly emerges from biological factors.
The first two sentences in that three sentence statement are not true for children.
And once you're stuck in it, it likely is.
But the third sentence, it predominantly emerges from biological factors, is a non sequitur, which is placed at the end of these other two sentences, as if it is a rejoinder.
No, it's not a rejoinder.
It's a non sequitur.
They're different.
They have no relationship to one another.
Obesity does stem from the crazy, hyper-novel lifestyle that we have pushed actively on everyone for the last N years.
I don't even know what to call it, right?
But, you know, starting sort of, I don't know, starting, but, you know, ramping up after World War II, how about?
Yep.
And it predominantly emerges from biological factors.
Oh, that does sound science-y.
Yeah, it sounds science-y.
Okay, well then, oh, let's do science then.
Ooh, a pill.
Which factors?
Which factors?
Well, for example, the Big Gulp.
That's one.
And other big things like the Mac.
The Big Mac.
Yeah.
Alphabetically, a lot of the factors are under B. Okay.
under B.
Okay.
Yep.
Slight change of topic.
No less maddening.
Well, all right.
Okay, this is good.
I'm already pre-mad.
Oh, you are.
You're pre-maddened.
Okay.
You have presumably heard, although you hadn't heard about that one, that the USC School of Education and Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services both came out publicly against the use of the word field.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Field, field, field.
Here we go.
Wait, are we talking about sports, or are we talking about disciplines?
Disciplines and offices.
Yeah, you can show my screen.
I said field yesterday, and you told me this was going to come up.
That that was not okay anymore.
It does not properly honor people who live in forests and on coastlines.
Field.
I don't even know who she is.
The someone.
No, this is the name of the school.
Sorry.
The School of Social Work at USC has sent to everyone associated, the community, the faculty, staff, and students, as we enter 2023, we'd like to share a change we're making at the Zandvoort, Peck, Dvorak, I don't know.
That's not how you would spell Dvorak.
It doesn't matter.
School of Social Work to ensure our use of inclusive language and practice.
Specifically, we have decided to remove the term field from our curriculum and practice and replace it with practicum.
This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language.
Language can be powerful, and phrases such as going into the field or field work may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.
Give me my screen back.
Sorry, man.
And the Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services.
So that was private university.
This is now the state of Michigan.
You don't show my screen.
I just got a quote here.
As an agency, we will be discontinuing use of terms like fieldwork and field workers.
Instead, staff can use terms like community office, local office, and community local office staff.
Also, this week I proposed to you that we not call gibberish that is actually directed and not indicative of a schizophrenic break word salad, but word soup.
That's word soup.
Yeah, that's some hearty word soup.
Here's the question.
I understand that that is a weapon that you could use against somebody speaking the English, right?
Like if you were to just try to say something, then the chances that you will literally have missed a memo that tells you why you're not supposed to have used that term for this thing, right?
Chances are near certain.
Presumably.
Yeah.
And I've seen no explanation beyond a little bit more than what I've shared with you here.
Presumably, this is about the historical use of the word field to distinguish between house and field slaves, I think.
Wait, wait, wait.
And, you know, and slave isn't the word that was used, right?
If that is the case, which is the best I can do, like this is the best I can figure in terms of like how this word comes to be in the line of the firing squad here, certainly house is equally bad.
Right.
Equally dangerous, or nah, hurtful.
Hurtful.
Hurtful.
You must have missed that memo.
Yeah, apparently.
But I mean really, the point is As you speak, you can be certain that you are in violation of a memo.
Somewhere.
Somehow.
Which will not be a problem unless something decides that you are inconvenient, in which case it will become a problem.
It's a low-posted speed limit.
It's a woke version.
Right.
And all of their little traps are this way.
But what is impossible to imagine First of all, this isn't how language works.
It just isn't how language works.
By fiat.
Right, by fiat.
We won't be using the word field anymore.
Right.
Or the word fiat, you know why?
Or the word fiat?
Yes.
Because it's also a car?
I don't know what.
I don't know.
Italian, Mussolini, trauma, something, right?
Also, we've been field workers.
We're field biologists.
community office biologists, right?
Like, we're field biologists, as distinguished from lab biologists, not as distinguished from house biologists, because that's not what you do in biology.
It's field versus lab.
And that doesn't have a history of racism.
And I don't... You can't say lab.
You know why?
Why?
Because of Labrador, which is stolen land.
The island?
The province.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, it's stolen land.
Okay.
No, look, I believe the kids call this problematizing things.
You turn them into problems.
We can turn anything into a problem.
And the point is... We can go all day.
This is really about the power to put out the memos that then allow you to dictate who is no longer allowed to talk.
But what is inconceivable is that anybody could be keeping track of all of the things that you are not supposed to say.
I mean, maybe if that was your full-time job, you could keep track of the things you're not allowed to say.
Well, the problem in part is that it's many people's full-time jobs to come up with the damn memos.
Right.
Clearly.
It's an arms race.
You've got DEI offices everywhere now, and they're sitting around twiddling their thumbs because they were hired on false pretenses.
And, you know, at Stanford, which we talked about a few weeks ago, and at USC, and at Michigan Health and Human Services, they're like, oh, I know.
I'll be proactive and come up with a job.
I'm going to outlaw a word.
That's what I'm going to do.
My work here is done.
Yes.
Until tomorrow, at which point I'll figure out the other words that I need to outlaw.
Right, and the offices, they're not in good communication, so it turns out that silence is violence and speech is violence, which doesn't leave you a lot of room.
No, it's again useful because you can go after anyone at any time.
Anybody at any time for anything they might be doing or not doing.
Yeah, don't say that.
And how dare you not speak up?
Yeah, your silence is deafening, right?
It's that world.
But can you imagine for a second?
The prototypical person who is trying to be good and not offend anybody by not using words like field or house or whatever the next problematized word is going to be, right?
Okay.
So you are filtering everything you say so that you don't trip over any of these words by speaking in the way people normally speak where they don't parse everything in advance, right?
Now, imagine that that person has another job.
Are they able to do that other job while they are so busy looking at every utterance to see whether or not there has been a memo that says that they're not allowed to say that thing?
My sense is if you did this, if you took that seriously, that's all you are, is not going to do that thing.
So that becomes your full time job.
Yeah, and you probably won't be able to do it even then, right?
Especially if the memos keep coming out, you know.
It's like we recently talked about in...
God's sake, I can't remember.
The World War II book.
Long.
Okay.
I should know.
Yeah, now I'm just drawing a complete blank.
Doesn't matter.
All right.
Well, suffice it to say, this needs to be studied, and that's going to require a field.
Yeah, I mean, there was a lot more I wanted to say here, but let's move on.
When we talked about the Stanford words, you could kind of imagine what they thought they were up to in each of the cases, and it was everywhere from silly to egregious.
But, you know, one of my favorite ones was like, you shouldn't use the word seminal because, you know, it's It makes people think of semen, I don't know, but it unfairly genderizes stuff, whatever.
At least there's like a there there, like that's stupid, don't stop it, but at least you can sort of track back like, oh, I guess I see what they're doing, right?
Like, if they literally never run into anyone who works in the field, who does field work, I just fail to grasp how they could have ever left the bedroom that they grew up from and spent their entire childhood on social media, presumably.
It feels so narrow and so atrocious a life to be putting out memos like this.
Right, it is.
It's an empty existence.
Catch-22.
That's the nominal.
That's the one, yes.
It's some catch.
Well, no, it's the... when the guy keeps coming out with the memos and the memos and the memos and no one can keep up.
Oh, the Great Loyalty Oath campaign?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's that thing all over again.
It's that thing.
But look, this once again, of course, is sophistry.
And imagine for a second that the game was... that it was an analog of the social media game.
Right, where the idea is, can I put something out on a social media platform that gets engagement or anger or reposted or whatever, right?
And to the extent that you can't, you are shouting into a void.
It's no fun.
It's frustrating.
And to the extent that you put something into the world that makes a ripple, you get a little something, right?
So now imagine That you have a serious bureaucracy that is, its purpose is to protect Stanford so that Stanford will continue to stand indefinitely, right?
And the point is, you can use your own demographic markers to introduce anything you want into the conversation to see if you can make them jump, right?
And it's like, you know that word field?
It's not a good word.
You know, there are a lot of us out here who, every time we hear that, we are traumatized.
Do you know why?
Well, of course we do, but we'd like to hear you elaborate on this.
Yeah, field, right.
Explain the problem of field.
Well, do you know where slaves worked?
Oh, got it.
Field.
Memo, right?
And so, How cool a game is that, that you can get the... I mean, in a world in which you are otherwise unempowered, disempowered because the world is crazy, and maybe also because you have no skills, you know, what a power rush.
Sure.
What a rush to be able to effect change like this.
Okay, but let's just...
Some of these people are just monsters.
But some of these people... Most of them aren't.
Most of them aren't.
But you can imagine.
I mean, look, okay, let's take all things pandemic, okay?
Whatever else is true, whoever you happen to be, you were just served so poorly by the civilization that, you know, taxes you and regulates you and all of this.
You were just, you were, the level at which you were protected was beyond abysmal, right?
And you have no power to affect change.
There's nobody to vote for, right?
It's just like endless monotony and trying not to, you know, go to jail.
And the point is... Well, I guess my point is I can imagine... Look, The distaste that the dysfunction of our civilization would naturally produce in anybody who was paying attention is liable to have an outgrowth.
And if the outgrowth is, alright, I mean, you know, the class clown, right?
The class clown has figured out something that's at least interesting, right?
The class clown has figured out that maybe there's nothing for him in that room.
Unless he can turn that room into a comedy opportunity.
And then that's amusing.
You can get a room full of people to laugh.
You can watch the teacher pull their hair out.
So it's that kind of thing.
It is that kind of play.
Yeah, and so I, look, I hate the monsters who don't care about the harm that they do to innocent people, but I understand the person who is bored and annoyed that they have been given no good path to anything useful and expected just to suck it up, right?
I understand that person looking for opportunities to, you know, for hijinks, and to the extent that that might be hijinks, I don't know.
Well, and that's, I mean, to take it back a little bit, that's part of why, I guess, mostly in the summer of 2020, we were coming down so hard on the Ibram X. Kendi's and whatever her name is, white fragility lady.
Crenshaw?
D'Angelo?
Oh, no.
D'Angelo.
Yeah.
You know, Kendi who wrote Anti-Racist, or How to Be an Anti-Racist, or Anti-Racist Baby, or all those things.
But both of them, from their different perches as, you know, a black man and a white woman, were, you know, proclaiming racism everywhere, and the need for, effectively, reparations in every single moment of every single day for every single human being who can't claim to
And it just, it opens up this apparent avenue for people who never would have seen it as an avenue and wouldn't have been encouraged to take it.
But for the fact that suddenly, and especially in an era when there's so little opportunity and so much is falling apart, it's like, well, okay.
I, you know, I'm smart enough, I can get stuff done, and I've got this one little demographic marker of some sort, and you know, it doesn't have to be any number of things, and guess who is hiring?
All the DEI offices, because everyone's got DEI offices now.
Yeah, it's an affirmative action program, a cryptic one.
Well, but I don't, no, I'm actually, I'm not, no, that's not, that's not what I'm saying at all.
It's, it's, you funnel, you encourage people, and this is part of what I've been saying about part of what the, you know, the trans rights activists are about, you know, as opposed to like the, you know, very, very rare true trans people.
Trans is on the rise in part because it's the one of these demographic markers that you can opt into, and just one day you're like, yep, that's me, and now all those same DEI offices that the only people they're not open to are straight white dudes who were born dudes and are still dudes.
Right?
And, you know, that's, you know, less than a majority.
And you have, I would say it's not Affirmative Action, it's a jobs program.
It's a jobs program, yeah.
It's a make-work jobs program, right?
There's no real work to be done.
Right?
We all understand that a colorblind society is desirable and that we're not quite there and but you know it's not like you need people to studiously figure out what to do about all the interactions and words that people might say without permission and all of that.
But the problem is, it's exactly analogous to the postmodernists, right?
that by providing a foot in the door for postmodernism, the postmodernists were incubated and became postmodern activists that took over the universities.
And by creating a DEI program, the point is, oh, well, they sure are going to find some stuff to complain about because that's effectively what you've appointed them to do.
Well, and once it exists, everyone will work to try to ensure that their job stays relevant enough for them to keep a job.
And this is something we've been talking about since Evergreen blew up, right?
It's very hard to convince people whose professional position is, things have always sucked, things continue to suck, and things will not stop sucking.
That, oh actually things are getting better and therefore we need less of the constant talk about sucking now.
Because what am I supposed to do then?
That's what I do.
That's what I do is I talk about how awful everything is.
So I am actually not maybe even able anymore to see that things in some realms are getting better.
Because that would put me out of a job.
Right, right.
Can we talk about fish?
We've been talking about fish for the whole time.
Pufferfish.
Oh, good.
Yeah.
Okay, Zach is going to show this video and sound off, although I think there's subtitles, but just watch and we're going to talk over it.
So this is a... I'm going to talk even though there's words on the screen, so you're going to hear it or me.
And you can choose.
So in 2014, this pufferfish was named, and it was 1995.
These are found off of the, I think it's pronounced Ryukyu Islands in Japan, just north of Taiwan.
And the Ryukyu Islands, which has a lot of really interesting stuff in it, and I'd like to go at some point.
Just a point of order here.
Is there a geological reason they are interesting?
I don't know.
Biologically, it looks like a rift edge of some sort, but I know very little about it except when I went to figure out where these pufferfish were, and I found once again yet another fascinating, you know, animal behavior story that I was interested in.
I was like, oh, it's in the Ryukyus.
I'm like, again, okay, what's going on there?
I don't know.
Anyway, in, I think I said, 1995, scuba divers had been noticing these underwater circles and didn't know to what to attribute them.
And it was a long time.
It was almost a couple of decades before, in 2013, A paper in Scientific Reports came out called "Role of Huge Geometric Circular Structures in the Reproduction of a Marine Puffer Fish." And so here it is, it's zooming out.
Now you can see like this animal has just made this incredible thing.
It takes him, I think the BBC said two weeks.
Oh, but yeah, the scientific paper says seven to nine days working just constantly.
Because of course, this isn't, you know, not Tides change what he's building here.
So it's a he.
It's a he.
It's a he.
And the behavioral description of what's going on actually came before the scientific name of the fish.
So that's just an interesting little glitch, right, in the usual order of things where we didn't even know for sure that this wasn't a species that had already been named and was just doing something different than It's, you know, it's kin elsewhere until after the behavior was described.
And is that replaying?
Yeah, so we can stop now.
So males are spending seven to nine days.
It's always males.
I have a question for you.
Yeah.
Do we know its mating system?
I don't see any evidence of it.
But, well, no.
I can tell you what little I know.
And we can predict it.
Well, yes.
So males spend seven to nine days actively making and tending these nests, and there are at least three characteristics of these nests that are heretofore unknown otherwise in fishy fish, in rayfin fish, axonopterygians.
I mean, there's a lot of fascinating fish behavior, of course, as we've talked about a little bit, but as many people will know.
But those radially aligned peaks and valleys outside of the actual nest site, no one's ever seen fish do that before.
Those placing of the shell fragments along the peaks is new in fish behavior.
And then the fine sand particles gathered in the nest site, which you couldn't necessarily see, but maybe you can infer having now seen the big geometric design from on high, that they specifically are moving the sand around to create a central, what ends up being the nest, of very fine sand.
And those three things, the peaks and valleys outside, the shell fragments on the peaks, and the fine sand in the middle, in its own geometric but slightly more regular pattern, are all constructed and maintained before mating, before a female ever shows up.
Sure.
Female shows up, So wait, I want to predict the stuff before.
Yeah.
Okay.
I don't I don't know very much.
But yeah, go for it.
So it's gonna be a polygynous mating system.
Not clear.
Well, I'm going to predict that males will invest nothing in... if that's a male, they will invest nothing in offspring beyond gametes.
Yeah, and I think that's not true.
Not true.
So that's part of why I want to do this, is see whether this system is any different.
Because, you know, what it of course looks like is an aquatic Bowerbird analog.
Are the circles near each other?
I don't know, and I don't know if my read was incomplete or if it wasn't described.
After the females visit the nests, the nests mostly collapse, so the eggs are laid on fine sand and then they're covered with coarser sand.
It is likely, it seems to me, that the fineness of the sand increases fitness of the eggs.
Wait, wait, wait.
These are the locations where the eggs are laid?
The middle of that area.
So you've got the radial arms outside of the center.
Imagine it's sort of like a daisy.
The middle part ends up like a daisy being the actual reproductive part.
So that's very unlike the Bowerbird example.
Yeah.
In some ways, in some ways.
But yeah, I mean, it is very much actually like a daisy.
It hadn't occurred to me before.
But you know, in terms of, you know, the petals are basically the lure from afar for, you know, not other daisies, but you know, the vectors, the pollinators to come and pollinate.
And it's the center thing, it's the center ring that is where the eggs are actually laid.
So then it might not be a polygynous system.
This might be a mysteriously valuable structure.
Well, it's mysteriously valuable.
It starts collapsing in and of itself quickly.
I think that there are a few days of male attendance, male parental care, and then he goes and builds another one.
And it starts over from scratch, once the first one.
So it may be actually a promiscuous system in which, you know, if you have built the careful nest and you can attract a good mate, that's great, and you have that one thing.
And then after that, whatever it is, a few weeks, you can go and build another.
Yeah, so this is actually potentially closer to your frogs, where a male might have multiple wells.
I see, there's no description in what I found of territoriality.
And that's not to say that they're not, I would expect that they are.
I see no description of, therefore, the quality of the substrate, right?
What determines where the fish choose to build these nests and aesthetic structures around them?
Well, one thing that's likely to be true is that structure is likely to be very difficult to build and maintain if there are currents And actually, you can just put it back on while we're talking, as long as we're talking about these guys.
Yes, and I think they're in slightly deep water, but yes, there are currents, and this is exactly true.
I think I said this already, that the maintenance of the structure needs to be constant, that basically as soon as the maintenance stops, the thing decays.
Which you would kind of expect, because if neither of the fish are going to defend the thing, Then what you don't want to do is signal potential egg predators that this is a structure, so you would want it to kind of break down.
It's like these, what are those, like giant Buddhist sand art?
Oh, I was thinking that too, actually, yeah.
I don't know, like weeks, months maybe even, to create and they're gorgeous and intricate and then the point is in part that they get wiped clean shortly after they are completed.
In that case there is not a reproductive motive.
So what we are looking at It seems to be either some new kind of system or one of two known kinds of systems.
It looks like a Bowerbird kind of scenario, but that doesn't sound like Bowerbird behavior if the eggs are being laid there.
Yeah, and it's unlike... so they're what?
Something less than 20, I think, species.
Something around two dozen-ish species of barrowbirds in northern Australia and Papua New Guinea.
And there's different things that the different barrowbirds do, but they build these structures that The males build these structures that females are attracted to, but they have some permanence to them.
Yes.
And they do decay.
It's the tropics, and they steal from each other.
The male bowerbirds steal from one another.
But they're in a spot.
They are territorial of the spot, and they build a structure on the spot, the bower.
And that spot is a spot that any female can come back to over and over again, and unless something has happened, she knows that if she's in that spot, it's going to be that guy.
Except they steal bowers.
They do, but these do not appear to be territorial.
Yeah, that's why I think the Bowerbird connection is superficial.
I was wrong to go there.
I mean, it looks like it, and the shell part of the story, you know, I'd be curious whether they steal shells from each other or something like that.
And whether there is a display.
Well, so the thought I had about the shells was the functional part of this is the center of the daisy.
It's the nest.
That's where the eggs are going to be.
And my guess is that the eggs are actually somewhat fragile, and they need a very soft, very finely grained sand nest.
And the sort of the petals of the daisy, the petal, the would-be petals of this structure that he's building, are the visual attractant from on far, but the shells he's pulling from inside the nest as an indicator of, I've cleaned the area.
It's clear of the debris that would negatively impact your eggs.
Which is reminiscent, that is again reminiscent, of bowerbirds and maybe even more so birds-of-paradise.
The cleaning of the dance floor is a I don't know if it's universal, but it's close for all of those species.
You can make a lot of arguments for why that might be.
I think mannequins too.
I think mannequins clean their dance pads in those that have flat pads as opposed to sticks.
Maybe not I don't know.
I'm more familiar with the stick dancing mannequins.
But anyway, interesting, because you've got features of multiple terrestrial systems.
I'd be very curious to know what's actually going on here.
Yeah.
Yeah, so maybe we should get to the Ryukyu Islands and take a look.
Right now?
No.
I don't know.
It's probably very cold there right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I think we've been at it quite a while.
Yes, we have.
And maybe we should stop for this week and come back in a week that's not prime.
Yeah, that's going to happen soon.
Yeah, and we will take a break and then come back and do our Q&A.
So you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
That is open now.
You can ask questions there.
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Maybe that's it for now.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
