In this 162nd 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 John Campbell’s discussion of an autopsy report, and his discussion of drug recommendations in 2020 Britain raises, which raises serious questions about medical intent. We discuss scientific models—the good kind—and how Campbell’s first video reveals the correctness of our model of mRNA vaccine i...
hey folks welcome to the dark horse live stream podcast number wow did i forget to look it up uh it is it It does have a number.
It is numbered.
It is numbered.
Yes, we've decided to number these.
Yes, and it's still in the 160s somewhere.
Indeed, indeed.
Yeah, it's 162.
162!
I think, if my notes are correct.
Okay, well, I presume your notes are correct.
We'll mandate it.
By fiat, it's number 162.
No issue of primeness.
Um, I... You are.
That's a great point.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
And, uh, we are, uh, we are here hosting.
We have plenty to discuss.
I should tell you I am not, as you well know, not totally on my game having just recovered from COVID.
Yes, COVID.
Do you remember COVID?
You know, I was going to drop that into our discussion here in a way that was going to be surprising.
Surprising, okay.
Well, having just had COVID, it may still be surprising to me at least, not being entirely on my game.
Well, I have stepped on that presentation, but I will say it is... I had one rough night.
Treated it aggressively from the get-go.
Spent five days in isolation.
Are you feeling horsey?
I did not take horse pace proper, but I certainly did take some medications that are well understood by those who well understand things to address COVID symptoms.
Be useful to treat a wide variety of problems in both people and other organisms, including horses.
Right.
Including horses.
Right.
But anyway, I will say I had a very mild case.
It was quite annoying in the sense of, you know, every time you get sick with this disease, you have to think about how much damage it does.
And although it's not a very dangerous disease to those of us who are healthy at this point, it is certainly does damage across a wide number of systems, which is troubling.
And, you know, As we talked about extensively at the beginning of the pandemic, there is this question.
Those who called this thing forth from a bat cave and enhanced it have inflicted something on us permanently.
And okay, so maybe you get COVID every year or two, and it compromises a week of your life, and presumably for reasons that we will talk about later on in the podcast, It accelerates your rate of aging across multiple tissues.
I'm sorry, Zach, can I get a towel?
The cat just spilled a bunch of water all over the deck.
This is not as bad as the pandemic, but it's bad, so I admit that.
I thought my computer may be about to fritz out because I got a situation.
Well, it's on the cords and such.
You can just throw it to me.
I'll just deal with it, we're good, okay.
Yes.
Go on.
What were we talking about?
Yes, we were talking about the tissue damage.
But anyway, my point is, one of the things that I said early on in our discussions was that the cost of the pandemic, no matter how mild this disease gets, is effectively indefinitely large if we let it get to the point that we are permanently stuck with COVID and that is where we appear to be.
It is now people, even people who are stuck with it believed that it might be addressed and driven to extinction early no longer believe that.
I no longer think it's possible with current tech to drive it to extinction and so anyway there's a point about What if we just take all of my future cases of COVID until I am gone from whatever thing ultimately takes me out, right?
How many weeks of my life are going to be compromised by somebody's idiotic decision to engage in gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, right?
That's a huge cost even just to me personally, and then if you scale that up across all of the people of the earth who are going to be suffering from something, even if it's just cold-like, right?
If you have seven more colds in your life that are the result of Anthony Fauci, right?
That's a pretty big cost for one dude to inflict on you personally for his own idiocy.
Yeah.
And that's the least of what might be going on.
And that is the least.
And...
And again, as I will discuss later on in the podcast, a proper model of the biology underlying this says that it's not just the weeks that you lose because you're sick.
That is all borrowing from your lifetime capacity to repair your own tissues.
And so the point is it is accelerating your rate of death.
The reason most of us do not reach the maximum human age Is that over a lifetime we spend the resources that might get you to 120, fending off, you know, flus, damage, all sorts of things.
And anyway, so they have now added another one.
Even if it's a mild disease that we get periodically and it's just annoying, the cost is still arbitrarily huge.
This is absolutely true.
And of course, it's also true that, you know, it's hard to meet anyone now or to hear of anyone really who hasn't had it at this point.
And so, you know, many people, you know, most people have some sort of a mild case and it's fine, rightly appear to be fine with all of the caveats that you have just made.
But even Even then, many, many people will report feeling like, this isn't like other viruses.
This isn't like other respiratory infections that I've had.
It feels different.
It feels alien in a way.
And you know, of course, you know, it's a frankenvirus.
So Uh, you know, that's not all that surprising, but the idea that it might, it might just be, oh, we've introduced another thing that's going to circulate indefinitely, and you're going to be exposed to it, and you're going to get it indefinitely, it's really unlikely that it's going to be that.
So let's just say some of the stuff we're going to talk about today, you've got a couple of clips from the excellent John Campbell to show and discuss some of the implications with regard to COVID and the pandemic.
Following that, I'd like to talk about a paper
A paper that was published, I guess it's last month, purporting to show that while infections, COVID infections, are higher after you've been vaccinated than after you've had COVID itself, visits to emergency rooms and hospitalizations and deaths are higher among those who have natural immunity but aren't vaccinated as opposed to those who are vaccinated.
So I want to just, that seems like a That's certainly a very important result, if so, and contradicts what a lot of us have been suggesting.
So I want to walk through that paper a little bit.
And then if we have time, I'd be interested in talking a little bit about stigma.
Stigma and shame.
Based on a recent piece that I read and some things that are sort of happening in the cultural space around various behaviors and predilections that people have and it seems to have become de facto accepted.
That if you say, oh well now you're shaming that person, now you're using shame, that this is absolutely beyond the pale.
It's an indictment in and of itself.
It's an indictment in and of itself.
If you're using shame, then obviously we're done here.
I want to explore that question.
And then, you know, probably that could get us through a lot of time.
And there's a few other things we could talk about, but probably won't.
So before we get into all of that, let's do just a little top of the hour stuff.
Uh, which is to say that we follow these live streams normally.
We did not last week, but we are this week with a Q&A, live Q&A.
You can ask your questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We also start the Q&A every week with a question from our Discord community, our wonderful Discord community, where they vote on a question every week.
And that's where we start.
And if you're interested in being part of that wonderful community, you can access it at either of our Patreons, and they have conversations in text, in audio, in video, they have karaoke, they have happy hour, they have book clubs, a lot of great stuff going on there, and we encourage you to check it out.
Also, at your Patreon, you have conversations once a month, two conversations once a month for the higher tier patrons.
And we at my Patreon do a monthly private Q&A.
And right now you can ask questions for the monthly private Q&A at my Patreon.
So that's some of the stuff that's happening right now.
If you are watching live, you can watch on YouTube.
You can watch on YouTube.
YouTube did demonetize us, so there is no benefit to us if you're watching on YouTube.
But we are also streaming on Odyssey, and that's what the chat is, if you want to join the chat.
If you are looking for reading that reminds you of what we're doing here, we of course wrote Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which we encourage you to take a look at, and I write weekly at Natural Selections, which is my substack.
That's naturalselections.substack.com.
This week I wrote about the explorations of salmon.
Including a little bit about the kokanee, who are the sockeye salmon who lose their anadromy.
Wow, that was a lot of words in one sentence that sound like jargon.
So, kokanee is the word that we have decided to use for this one species of salmon, sockeye, at the point that they are no longer taking the journey out to sea and spending most of their life there and then returning to reproduce and then die.
And that life history strategy of being born in freshwater and going out to saltwater to live most of your life and then returning back to freshwater is called anadromy, or an anadromous lifestyle.
And the kokanee, it seems to have evolved a strategy that's evolved multiple times in these sockeye salmon, have lost their anadromy.
They are effectively landlocked, and even in some cases, maybe, where the landlockedness has disappeared, the Kokanee lifestyle persists.
But there's also some cases, at least one case, where they were blocked by a dam, and then there was an option to move out downriver, and some of them took it, and two years later, right on schedule, some of them came right back.
So it's like this toggle, this genetic toggle.
That was a human dam.
That was a human dam.
Yeah, that was not a beaver dam or a salmon dam, which doesn't happen.
Well, the thing is... Or just like a landslide dam.
I can't resist pointing out that the reason that this kokanee strategy... No, you look like I'm setting you up for a pun, which as far as I... If I am, I'm even setting me up for it, because I don't know yet.
I don't feel for you.
I do not feel your pain in this regard now.
The strategy whereby you lose your anadromy, that is, you stop going out to sea, Um, is likely the result of the fact that during glaciation, many of these waterways are blocked by, uh, ice dams.
And so anyway, it's not surprising in this landscape, which is so heavily modified by glaciation, that even in, during this interglacial where you don't see the causal effect, the selection for the ability to become landlocked and persist that way.
And if you've got a really good- Yes.
Persist that way is, is not surprising.
Yeah, no, and this is analogous to, you know, like these Mexican cave fish that live in these systems where there are underwater caves and sometimes a cave will collapse and a lineage that had lost its eyes is now living in sunlight and it's a pretty easy toggle.
It can just become eyed again.
Not individuals, but the next generation can have eyes when their parents didn't.
But you would not expect that to exist in some lineage in which something happened that doesn't repeat throughout history.
Where, oh, OK, the eyes were just a hazard, no help, they lost them because getting Poked in the eye is a risk, and so they don't have eyes anymore.
Oh my goodness, the light came back.
Well, there's going to be some lineages where that flexibility, that plasticity does not persist.
All right.
So, um, excuse me, you can also get, I was trying to mop up the, uh, error from the cat with this lovely tote bag.
The error from the cat being water, for those of you joining late.
Yeah, so it's just water.
He's just not, but, um, here's the other cat.
This is the Epic Tabby, um, tote bag, which we've got at our store at darkrorestore.org.
Um, and, uh, there's lots of good stuff there.
Okay.
Um, The only thing remaining before we get into the meat of the show is our sponsors, with whom we are so pleased and about which we are very grateful.
At which we are very grateful.
Yes, we're being grateful to you guys now.
Thank you.
OK, we've got three ads at the top of the hour, as usual.
That's the wrong piece of paper.
Just go with it.
Is there anything terrible on it?
It's the notes for the show.
I just don't think it's going to be the same thing.
OK.
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So, here's a question for you.
All right.
Adaptively speaking, slowest growing nut.
Why would that be?
Here's my thought.
Yeah, you mentioned something there.
No, just a very long time to grow.
Very long time to grow, alright, maybe not slow.
And that doesn't necessarily mean slowest growing nut, it may just mean a long time to set seed.
Irregardless.
Irregardless, here's the adaptive hypothesis for you.
Because they grow in such marvelous locations, waiting isn't a problem.
You see what I'm saying?
They're also really delicious when they're done, so, you know, it's a big reward.
You get to hang out in this beautiful place while you're waiting.
The waiting isn't so bad.
Exactly.
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Alright, here we are.
So, to the meat of the show.
You wanted to start, I believe.
Yeah, I wanted to do a couple things, and let me frame this properly here.
I think one of the things that we learn in watching how our material goes into the world, what sort of impact it has on people, what sorts of challenges come back at us, one of the things that we learn is how our understanding of the way something like science functions is different from what most people think.
And, you know, to us, the bread and butter of science is in the predictive power.
But even that doesn't quite explain what science is and why it works the way it does.
And in order To really understand its role in civilization, its role in pushing civilization forward, one has to get into the nitty-gritty of the philosophy of science.
What is the product?
And so, in any case, I want to get at the question of what is the product by looking back at some Things that I and we have said over the course of the pandemic that now exist in a very different light as a result of work that has emerged very late.
In this case, I want to talk about a couple of things that were discussed by John Campbell, who is, I will speak only for myself, but he is one of my favorites during the pandemic.
He's extremely rigorous and careful, and he manages to navigate some of the most difficult territory in the pandemic.
So anyway, my overarching point is going to be that the product of science, the good product, the thing that we want, the reason that we go through the effort of science, Is not what you think it is.
The product of science is not data.
The product of science isn't even evidence or experimental results.
The product of science is models.
Now I have to add a caveat right there because you and I have said some very disparaging things about models.
They're a different kind of model.
The model to be super cautious about are computer models, right?
Where you put into a computer that oversimplifies, especially the biotic world, some sort of a set of algorithms.
You feed it something that is like data, and then it spits out a projection of what's going to happen.
A climate model might be a very sophisticated computer mechanism for predicting future temperature.
And they are fraught with danger because What those who build models know is that the more complex a model is, the easier it is for it to mirror some behavior for completely the wrong reasons.
So although it looks like an accurate rendition of the world, it is not capable at all of predicting anything accurately about the future, because it is basically just mapping on to the past, and then your assumption will be that it will work in the future.
So I'm not talking about computer models.
Go ahead.
Just the fewer inputs a model has, the broader it will be and the less predictive it will be, even if the inputs are entirely accurate.
And so it doesn't have as much utility.
The more inputs it has, the more narrow it's going to be, and the more likely some of the inputs are to be wrong, or maybe most to the point here, which is what I thought you were going to say, your inputs are inherently riddled with whatever assumptions you have.
And, you know, we are trying always in science to figure out ways to reduce bias.
And because we are human beings always doing the science who have bias and who cannot completely escape our own bias, we are looking to control for that bias.
But what you plug into a model
um will be based on what assumptions you have and so it is um often disingenuous for people to say my goodness look what that model just spit out when in fact what it spit out is exactly the biases that you plugged into it in the first place right that is one of one of the ways that a a model can appear to be accurate and yet be inaccurate in the sense that it predicts nothing going forward that it maps properly onto onto the past um for no good reason um so
You want the simplest, if you were going to do computer models, you want the simplest model that manages to predict something going forward.
But predicting going forward is the key.
And what I have said is the only valid use of a computer model is not to test something, but it is to create a hypothesis, which you would then need to go test in the empirical world.
But put that aside.
The point here is the product of science, the correct product of science, are models that work, right?
And I don't mean computer models.
I mean models like a model of the atom in which something called electrons have a negative charge, they orbit a nucleus which is positively charged composed of two components, they orbit in something called orbital shells which have different shapes, and this is not an exact description of the
the atom but what it is is a highly predictive model of an atom that tells you a lot of what will happen when you combine atoms in different combinations and ratios under a wide range of conditions and then at some point the difference between the model and whatever the underlying reality is causes you not to be able to predict certain things and that's where we are with something like the excellent model of the atom we have.
It's imperfect but it's very good for most circumstances.
Like those orbital shells.
Shell is metaphor, and it's almost certainly not true that it's in these concentric spheres going out from the nucleus.
But it works up to a point, and then at the point that it stops being predictive, or you start throwing errors when you put different parts of the model against one another, then you know you need an upgrade.
Right.
And, you know, even electron, right?
An electron is a thing.
What sort of a thing is it?
Well, even that has a degree of metaphor to it, right?
So sophisticated versions of the atom treat the position of the electron not as a point, but as a probability.
And so the point is your models have to get more and more elaborate in order to deal with the subtle nuances.
And, you know, we see this again and again.
Newtonian physics is a model of the universe that works really well at low speeds.
But, you know, it breaks down at higher levels.
But anyway, the point is, it's the model.
Do you want to figure out what's going to happen on a pool table when you input forces in a particular way?
Newtonian physics is a good model, right?
It'll tell you what happens on a pool table pretty effectively.
But in science, we have to push the models farther and farther in order to predict the really subtle stuff.
And I did want to give one example, a famous example, of how the product of science is not the data, right?
It's the models.
And I was going to use Einstein's prediction about the effect that gravity has on light, right?
It is very counterintuitive that light should be affected by gravity because this effect is so weak that in normal space we don't experience anything that is remotely affected by it.
In fact, the Earth isn't really big enough to have this effect.
You need something gigantic like the Sun to exert enough of this very weak force to actually impinge on light sufficiently that you could measure it.
But the point is, the test of relativity Involved the requirement of an eclipse, which happened in 1919.
Two expeditions were sent to remote places where the eclipse would be total.
One of them was an island off of Africa, I believe, one of them was Brazil.
And the idea was, if Einstein is correct about relativity, and that doesn't mean perfectly correct, but it means more correct than the model he proposes to replace, Then the following thing will be true.
The position that we know for the stars that are right behind the position of the Sun will be altered by the Sun's presence.
That's true with or without the eclipse, but you can't see it because the Sun is so bright.
You need the eclipse to darken the Sun in order for you to see the stars move as a result of the gravitational lensing of the light bending around the Sun.
So, All the scientists knew that this was a prediction of the model.
Yeah.
They can't very well create an eclipse.
They can't work with anything smaller than the sun in order to get the effect.
You can't see the stars and there's no eclipse.
Right.
And so the point is, hey, guess what?
Natural experiment.
It's coming, but we need to be in the right place.
We got one, only one option until 1930 something, right?
Actually, 1937, I think.
But anyway, so the point is, okay, natural experiment.
They send these two expeditions.
Lo and behold, the position of the stars moves exactly as Einstein predicts that it will, based on what we understand to be the size of the Sun and its gravitational force.
Hooray!
But the change in the position of the stars when the Sun happens to be right there in the sky and the Moon happens to be blocking the light is useless.
There's no value to it.
All it is is evidence that this model that Einstein proposes is correct.
Now, once you have a model of relativity that's correct, then all sorts of other things flow from the existence of that now improved model, including things, and I'd be hard-pressed to explain how it works, but Things like GPS depend on small relativistic differences in order to precisely pinpoint your position on the Earth.
I didn't know that.
I hope that's true.
As always, we will find out if I've got it wrong.
But nonetheless, the point is relativity has huge implications.
It doesn't affect a baseball game.
It doesn't affect billiards.
It doesn't affect, you know, most of the stuff we do down here on Earth.
But there are things that we do that now are impacted by it.
And certainly our understanding of the universe and how big it is and in what way it moves is all affected dramatically by this input.
So the point is the product of that whole scientific process that Einstein went through, where he hypothesized relativity and then it was demonstrated through eclipse.
The point of that was not data.
It was not even evidence.
The point of that was, hey, if he's right about the eclipse, nothing else predicts that.
His model is not exactly right, necessarily, but the point is his model contains some kind of truth that we didn't have before, and that means, well, now we can extrapolate from it about other things, right?
Because we have reason to believe it contains a big chunk of the truth.
Which brings me, of course, and obviously, to John Campbell.
Awesome.
Right.
So, all right, we're going to start with a paper that John Campbell reviews in the last week or so that is actually the report on a single autopsy of a gentleman, I believe a British gentleman, It's the autopsy one.
who died after COVID vaccination, if I recall correctly.
He'd had three mRNA shots.
And anyway, so this is a autopsy report that his family was concerned that his death did not appear to make sense.
He was in his 70s.
Can you show that clip from John Campbell?
It's the autopsy one.
Yes.
Okay.
So we can say definitively that this damage was caused by vaccine, not by the natural infection.
Let's have a look at the proof for that now.
Here we see the SARS-CoV-2 virus that we're familiar with, the spike protein here of course.
Now the spike protein can occur on the virus itself or the spike protein is also generated by the vaccine.
But the nucleocapsid protein is inside, it's associated with the RNA, the actual ribonucleic acid of the of the virus and the nucleocapsid protein is only found in the virus.
It's never generated by a vaccine.
So if you see spike protein on its own, that means it's vaccine.
If you see spike protein and nucleocapsid protein, it means it's natural viral infection.
That's the difference between the two.
Now, in this first slide, we're looking at the frontal part of the brain, and we can see patches of degeneration and inflammation.
On this next picture, we can actually see acute brain damage as well.
Whenever there's a one, that's a death of a nerve cell, neuronal death.
And two is microglial infiltration.
These are the defense cells in the brain.
And three are lymphocytes, which are associated with viral infection.
And of course, all of these are pathological findings.
None of them should be there.
Is that where you want me to go?
Yep.
Okay, so I'm not going to translate this into English, because John Campbell speaks English probably better than I do, but I am going to translate it into slightly less technical language so people can get the full impact here.
What we have is evidence of substantial, that is to say visible on microscope slide, brain damage in this now deceased patient.
And the question is, why?
What they found is spike protein in the area of damage.
That's conspicuous, but that potentially has two different explanations.
The vaccines produce spike protein, and the virus obviously produces spike protein.
So in and of itself that could be consistent with either.
But what they in fact find is that spike protein is present and another protein nucleocapsid protein which we have discussed before nucleocapsid protein being proteins associated with the genetic content of the virus is completely absent even though in normal virus nucleocapsid protein is actually more prevalent than spike.
So were this the result of a cryptic COVID infection It would be that both proteins were present, and in fact what we have is only the protein produced by the virus itself.
But further, and this is the point, this is the reason I'm using this particular clip from Campbell in conjunction with this discussion of models.
Further, what is shown in these microscope slides and in this report is the presence of T-lymphocytes at the site of a brain damage.
Right?
You've got dead neurons here, you've got spike protein, you've got microglial cells, and you've got T-lymphocytes.
Okay?
Now, all of that is actually the validation Of the hypothesis that I put on the table, I will have to look up when it would have been the first time I discussed it, but I presented a model for vaccine damage to the body.
We've talked about it a number of times since, but the model says you've got lipid nanoparticles that coat an mRNA message that encodes spike protein.
Those lipid nanoparticles coating this genetic message do not stay local to the injection site, at least in some people, but probably all people.
They escape into the circulatory system.
They float around the body.
And conspicuously, the vaccine manufacturers have no targeting mechanism whatsoever.
Which means they will be taken up by cells, I don't want to say randomly because it may not be random, but arbitrarily.
Cells that the vaccine manufacturers did not choose in any way.
They didn't specify them as cells that you could afford to lose and therefore could afford to make this message and then suffer the consequences.
And so what that means ...is that they will be taken up by cells in the circulatory system, very conspicuously in the heart, and then something terrible will very predictably happen.
That very terrible thing is that the immune system will spot the cells of your own body producing a foreign protein and they will make the only conclusion that your immune system could possibly make in that situation.
Because that is exactly the marker for a viral infection where your cells have been hijacked by a pathogen And they start producing foreign proteins.
And then the point is, in such a case, there's no rescuing such a cell.
Once it has taken up this foreign message, killing that cell, even though that's bad, is better than the alternative.
That's what the immune system is designed to do.
Right.
That's what it's for.
Right.
Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have built it to spot this very common phenomenon and to deal with it in the unfortunate but best way possible, which is to kill off the cells that have been infected.
And so by creating a pseudo-infection, which is what these mRNA vaccines are, They are effectively painting a target on cells in your body, whichever ones take up the lipid nanoparticle message, lipid nanoparticle coded message.
They are targeting them for destruction and autoimmune destruction of your own cells and worse, This would be a temporary phenomenon, but they stabilize the damn mRNAs so that they don't go out of functionality and return the cells to an innocuous presentation that then stops triggering the immune system.
So anyway, what John Campbell has revealed, and what that little clip shows, Is low and mold all of the things that you would predict from that model, which I spelled out, are true.
You have... So the thing that you haven't said yet, the connection, is that the T lymphocytes there in the brain next to the obvious brain damage is an indication that they were there looking for cells that were spouting viral messages.
Viral message.
So here you have a person who did not have an infection of the brain.
We don't see any evidence of that here.
What they had was a pseudo-infection of the brain with the mRNA messages encoded in the mRNA vaccines.
That was apparently transcribed in the brain into spike protein, caused the immune system to freak out, as of course it would, to then target cells and kill them.
And you have all of the, you know, the only thing we don't have is a live movie of this happening.
What we have is all of the consequences that you would expect, all here in a static microscope slide.
And the point is, look, That vaccine wasn't supposed to reach the brain, right?
It wasn't supposed to get into the brain.
That's already a major design flaw.
Having reached the brain, it shouldn't be particularly prone to transfect those cells, but of course, how would it not?
It's a dumb particle.
It's just covered in fat.
It's going to transfect whatever cells will absorb it.
And so here you've got a case, and yeah, it's only one case, But nonetheless, you've got a guy who has a vaccine injury that has produced brain damage that has left its signature, making it unmistakably the consequence of vaccine spike protein and not COVID spike protein.
And you have the obvious activation of the white blood cells countering what they must think to the extent that they behave like they think is an infection.
So let me just try to, um...
Steal me in the opposition here.
Are there any known cases of SARS-CoV-2 in the body, the spike protein gets loose?
Can the spike protein travel on its own in the body?
Do we have any cases of that?
I think the answer is no, but if it could, then you would see that signature that is otherwise a vaccine signature Somewhere.
I think that that's the only way, though, that this...
indication this you know this this smoking gun of either there's spike protein and nucleocapsid protein in evidence in the place where the damage is or if there's only spike protein then it's vaccine injury if there's both um it's it's virus injury it unless the spike protein can never disassociate from the virus uh in in vivo well i would bet that it does all the time because the you know the mechanism uh if you get
Let's take the unusual nature of SARS-CoV-2 out of the picture.
You get an infection with a coronavirus.
It invades some cells.
It causes those cells to produce foreign protein.
Those cells produce new virus, which goes around infecting your own cells, trying to get out of you into somebody else.
But what happens is, as the immune system gets better and better at recognizing the infected cells, it does break them apart.
And so almost... So fragments.
Fragments.
But if it's just like broken apart fragments, it doesn't have any ability to Well, it shouldn't be spike and no nucleocapsid.
You could imagine a weird ratio.
You could imagine the spike protein is more durable, and so the nucleocapsid proteins get broken up at a higher rate, but they're produced in higher numbers to begin with.
They shouldn't be getting into the brain in the first place, right?
Sure, but that's a different question.
It may or may not be, right?
So the point is, you've got a pathology that flows from these mRNA vaccinations.
One of the things that we talked about, for which I believe actually we were attacked by PolitiFact, I hope, I'm not sure it was PolitiFact, but somebody claimed to have fact-checked us on this, was the blood-brain barrier question about the fragmentation of the blood-brain barrier from the spike protein in the damn so-called vaccines.
So, anyway, the point is, look, is this proof positive?
No.
But proof positive isn't a scientific thing.
What this is, is a bunch of different predictions of a model that show up in a case, right?
And then the point is, is this as good as, you know, an eclipse proving relativity?
No.
But what it is, is it's damn good evidence that that model was capable of looking into the future and predicting the results of somebody's autopsy, okay?
So, given that, And to get more evidence of similar sort, unlike in physics, we don't have to wait almost 20 years.
Right.
And, okay, so then here's my point.
Unlike in that particular instantiation of physics, right?
That weird, very famous case.
Here's my point, okay?
The payoff of all of this is not even the model.
Okay?
The model is great.
The fact that we now have a model that says not only do we have an effect, right?
This isn't correlation equals causation.
This is, oh, here's a model that predicts damage in an individual, right?
Okay, but now the payoff comes from the extrapolation.
Now we can go back to that model and we can say, okay, if this model overlaps the truth substantially, which I think is probably the correct way to say it, right?
What else does it tell us?
Oh, well, here are the other things it tells us.
It tells us that you have a completely indiscriminate transfection agent that is going to cause your own immune system to damage tissues arbitrarily around the body, and the effect of that will be that this isn't... it's not causing myocarditis.
Yes, it causes myocarditis, but myocarditis is going to be one on a long list of pathologies, most of which, or maybe all of which, are more subtle, in which various tissues around the body or damaged by your own immune system, responding to this vaccine being effective in places that the manufacturer either didn't anticipate or wasn't honest about.
So what you mean when you say it doesn't cause myocarditis is that myocarditis and pericarditis, being injuries to muscle associated with the heart, myo, or the pericardium, the membrane around the heart, peri, are going to reveal themselves the membrane around the heart, peri, are going to reveal themselves more easily because of the fact that the heart does not have repair
And I see Brett's earlier work on telomeres and cancer and senescence, right?
That's what we're going to see first.
That does not mean that it's the only damage that's happening.
By a long shot, the model says, and here we have evidence supporting the model with what you have revealed from John Campbell here, that the damage will be everywhere.
Depending on the particulars of whether your shot was aspirated, how healthy you were at the time, how healthy you are in general, exactly where it went in your body, and what other viral load you might have had at the time, etc.
All sorts of things are going to affect what tissues in you may have gotten affected.
But were there tissues that were affected?
100%.
Because actually, that's the mechanism of action of the thing.
Right.
That's the intended mechanism of action of the mRNA vaccines, is that they will transfect some cells and then your immune system will come in and learn from them and figure out how to prevent future infection, which of course we now know doesn't.
Right, and in fact, if you were to go to that, before we had this particular result, if you were to say, well, you know, is it going to nail all tissues?
Maybe not, right?
There may be tissues which, for whatever molecular reason, don't take up the lipid nanoparticle very well, so you could have little or no damage.
I don't know that there are such tissues, but there could be, right?
But if I was going to say, yeah, where would you expect an exception?
The brain might be most likely because of the blood-brain barrier.
But the point is, here you have it.
You have the exact prediction of this model, which suggests that this is going to be happening.
You're going to have itises all over the body.
And the itises aren't just inflammation.
That is inflammation that is downstream of damage.
And the point is, OK, you can basically now Name your pathology, because you're talking about, you know, gee, which tissues are profused with blood?
Virtually all of them, right?
Right, right.
So the point is you can in principle get damage just about anywhere.
And so, you know, the other thing that we now have to look at is How did we end up, you know, this has been a very painful educational process, figuring out what exactly they were proposing and what exactly it suggested might be the hazards.
But now that we know, now that we can look back This technology had no business being utilized in people, right?
Not because... But they've been trying for so long, Brett.
Not because it isn't brilliant in principle.
It solves a major problem, a gene therapy problem, which is how do you get enough genes into enough cells to actually treat a pathology, okay?
That's a difficult problem.
Well, it also solves a time of onset, a time of realization.
There's a pathogen to realization of the treatment problem.
The timescale is remarkable.
And you can imagine people who have a financial interest in this technology thinking Damn, we're so close.
This thing is really incredibly capable if we can just get past a couple hurdles.
Oh, what will it take?
Oh, about 50 years to solve the targeting problem and get through the regulatory proof that we've solved it well enough that we're not going to kill huge numbers of people.
Right?
Can you wait 50 years?
No, I'll be dead.
Can you get it to me sooner?
And so that's the question.
Did they utilize a global emergency?
To fast forward, to get us not to notice that they had a targeting problem they couldn't solve.
Right?
And to get this technology so mainstreamed that it's now like, oh, well, you know, get ready.
We're going to start doing flu vaccines with the mRNA tech.
Really?
You still haven't solved the problem.
And the fact is...
The model that I presented, right?
The model that we now have some evidence turns out to be predictive of things like autopsy results.
That model says, actually, the pathology?
Nothing to do with COVID.
Yes, it's bad that they chose spike protein.
That's bad.
Spike protein has its own added pathologies.
So you mean the pathology from the vaccine?
Yes.
The vaccine pathology is simply about foreign proteins produced indiscriminately by human cells that then get targeted by the immune system.
Right?
And so the point is, okay, now you want to tell me you want to do other shots with this platform, that it's so marvelous, you still haven't solved the main problem that should have prevented you from injecting this into any people at all.
Right?
You still haven't solved it.
And now you're like, what else can we use it for?
Right?
So it's mind-blowing that we would be there, but that is where we are.
And anyway, I do want to go back and just emphasize The fact that the model says heart damage may be noticed first, heart damage may be more serious because it's your damn heart, right?
It's not some big necrosis in your liver that you might well survive or not even notice, right?
This is your heart.
Any damage to it is serious, right?
It's not just that, but the fact is this is a Destroyer of future capacity for repair, right?
So the fact that myocarditis is predictive of other itises that are actually the result of damage, not just inflammation, across the body is the payload, right?
Now we need to look for these things and we need to figure out A, how to minimize the damage that's already been done to protect the people who have had these things, right?
Maybe we need to engage in some new kind of scanning to find damage that may catch these people unaware.
Anyway, it's a...
The payload is the model.
The model predicts things well beyond the heart and it is time for us to now be paying attention because the evidence is quite clear and really also the onus is on those who say, well, it's one patient, right?
It's not really very much evidence.
Well, no.
Now the burden of proof is on you to prove that that patient was highly anomalous rather than this is now something that we do see when we look elsewhere, right?
You can't use the fact of not looking as a falsification.
How about we begin autopsies of people who've experienced unexpected death?
Which we absolutely should have been doing and we're resisting doing for some reason.
Deeply buried in the catacombs of public health.
Right.
So you had another video you wanted to show.
I thought that was part of this, but if you want to wait until later we can do that.
No, no.
Let's introduce that one here.
So this is actually a separate John Campbell video on a separate topic, also I believe in this last week, in which he, and again he is among the most careful analysts of the COVID pandemic that I'm aware of, But this one is quite shocking and also matches a different prediction in a way.
It's not quite as clear-cut but I think you'll, I think you'll see it.
Hey Zach, can you hear it?
Yeah.
Out of their guidelines here.
Now this is managing breathlessness.
So this was published, remember, on the 3rd of April 2020.
And they say this, consider an opioid and a benzodiazepine.
Now, what they mean there is an opium-based drug like morphine and the benzodiazepine they talk about is midazolam.
Now, this is a classical, well-tried, trusted form of treatment that we use for things like terminal agitation, part of terminal care when people are dying of conditions such as cancer and things that are incurable, to manage a peaceful death.
And it's completely the right thing to do in the vast majority of circumstances.
But what seemed to happen was NICE just took that and transposed that into the COVID situation.
And COVID of course we know is an infection and most people can get completely better from it.
Was this a fundamental...
All right.
What John Campbell says here is that, and this is a British memo that he is unearthing here, a British memo from April of 2020, in which a recommendation was made a British memo from April of 2020, in which a recommendation was made for the treatment of patients who have very serious These are hospitalized people who are clearly in jeopardy of death.
The memo suggests the application of a two drug protocol, one an opioid like morphine and the other a benzodiazepine like midazolam.
And his point is, this is shocking to hear because that combination is well understood and properly used in medicine in patients who have a terminal disease at the very end of their pathology.
That this is effectively palliative care that allows life to be ended by prioritizing comfort in a patient for which there is actually no medical hope.
What John Campbell says here is this doesn't make sense in the context of a COVID patient, no matter how close to death they appear, because what they are sick with is an infectious agent that they might fend off.
Right?
The fact is, we have all... Which people do.
Yeah, we have all had the experience.
of being very very very sick and then suddenly being on the mend and headed in the right direction and what has happened is your immune system has figured out the formula sufficiently well that you go from a trajectory that if you followed it far enough would take you to death right and suddenly your trajectory is in the upward direction and you may not feel great but you feel a hell of a lot better because you're on the mend the the infection is being reduced and his point is look
That happens in people, so it does not ever make sense to give a patient a deadly, if compassionate, pair of drugs in the case that what they're sick with is an infectious agent that they actually might beat.
And I will say the title of his video involves the term euthanasia, which I struggled with a little bit because this is an official memo suggesting a use of this drug cocktail.
This isn't the case in which somebody has said, well, this patient, you know, should be humanely put out of their misery.
This is just medical recommendations that result in the same thing.
I don't know whether that's an accident or not, but I will say there's a segment, those who watched my last Joe Rogan discussion, 1919, there's a section in there in which I become uncomfortable and I actually discuss my discomfort.
I say, you will hear me hesitating to say this, but I can't help but wonder, I say something like, I keep revisiting the part of the pandemic in which we are applying ventilators to desperately ill people.
Ventilators that we later came to understand were doing more harm than good.
They were actually killing people.
And my thought, the thing that I was struggling to express to Joe, was That one of the effects of using ventilators as the standard of care for patients who they actually harmed was that it drove up the number of people who plausibly died of COVID.
And so from the point of view of justifying a draconian response to COVID, it made COVID look that much worse than it actually was.
And again, I'm not saying COVID isn't a terrible disease.
I think it's much more dangerous than the case fatality rate suggests.
But nonetheless, driving the number of Dead from COVID people up did cause all of the panic that then ensued that caused us to lock down and do ourselves damage that way, to mask children, all of the things that we did.
We're downstream of the implication of the desperate seriousness of this disease.
And we were induced to think this by many things, including fraudulent video out of China that misrepresented, uh, you know, people dying in the street, this sort of thing.
So anyway, this is not as secure as a autopsy result that matches a mechanistic model of the pathology that arises from mRNA vaccination, but it is another place where a prediction is now manifest.
In other words, I didn't see this drug combination thing coming, but it is perfectly consistent, right?
The idea that a The standard of care that increases the number of people who die of COVID was not just one thing.
It wasn't just ventilators.
It was also apparently, at least in Britain, the prescription of this combination of drugs and who knows how many other things.
Which is also consistent with a total failure to advise people about the hazard of vitamin D deficiency, a total failure to apply the drugs that we had that actually were highly effective against many mRNA viruses like ivermectin.
So anyway, it is again part of this pattern that is very hard to Very hard to miss once you see it.
We do all sorts of things that appear to have increased harm rather than decreased harm.
And you could imagine, medicine is a difficult business.
Sometimes you're going to do something thinking it will be helpful and it turns out to be the opposite.
But when you start doing that across the board, you do everything that's unhelpful, it raises a question about why that happened.
Yeah, and it goes on and on and on, as you say.
Locking people in their homes away from the sun, away from the ability to do physical activity.
I recently ran into again a picture, I think maybe out of Italy somewhere, of the police scooping up sunbathers because those were the people who were at risk and putting other people at risk.
Being alone outside, catching the rays and generating vitamin D.
And we had, as obesity became clearly a comorbidity for this disease, and a really strong one, and we talked about some of the really remarkable evidence for that, we had a resurgence of the idea of fat shaming as the problem.
And again, maybe we'll get there later in this episode, but it's the people who are shaming others that is the epidemic here.
It's not the fact that actually there are going to be, regardless of whether you like it or not, or think it's fair or not, mechanisms by which this virus is acting in your body that allows it to do more damage if you have a lot of fat on you.
It's not fat shaming.
It's not.
Yeah, I remember The sheer number of places where even just a basic understanding of COVID and how it transmits would have not only given you a different prescription, but the inverse was stunning.
And I remember you and I looking at each other.
I think I remember a image that we showed, probably of a newspaper article discussing how they were closing down the trails and the state parks.
The beaches.
Right.
And we're just thinking, You're actually going to harm people because if they're not outside, they're going home to an environment where somebody may have COVID, they're going to catch it.
Whereas if they had been outside at that time, they would have virtually no risk.
Playgrounds strung with caution tape.
For months and months and months, children weren't allowed to play on playgrounds.
I believe they literally put sand in skate parks.
Yes, yes, yes.
I mean, that's just ludicrous.
I mean, that's like almost, uh... For a little while there, skateboarding was a crime.
Yeah, how did we not see that?
But you're right, they made skateboarding a crime, and just this sort of anti-fun, you know, kids weren't threatened by COVID in the first place, right?
You're pouring sand in their damn skate park, right?
You're screwing up their world, they can't go anywhere, they're not going to school, you're gonna take their skate park from them with sand?
Like, you're just a terrible person.
That's right.
That's right.
Go on.
So I did have two last things that I forgot to say.
I want to just add in here so that it's all in one place.
So remember, the whole point of both of these examples... Can I just point out before you say it that what you've written there isn't English?
No, it's not English.
None of those are actually even letters in the alphabet that we use.
Here's what I have learned after years of living with myself.
I've learned two things.
One, I don't have any choice about that.
And two, you don't have much choice.
You have more choice than I do, but I have some sympathy for you in this regard.
But the other thing is that when I write notes to myself, the only question, they're not going to be readable, they're not going to be English, they're not going to be defensible to anyone else.
The question is, at the point that I need to go to the note, do they convey enough that I can reconstruct my way back to whatever it was I was trying to say?
And in this case, I think so.
Yeah, hasn't been that long.
That's the key to doing it, is you want to write the note and then find it within five minutes.
Usually that's short enough.
Written language is just a brilliant invention that at some point you'll be able to find.
I'm not all that compelled.
I think written language is great, I just don't think English should have been one of them.
That's the problem, I see.
Yeah, English becomes crazy when you start to write it down.
For one thing, they're all the doubled words, the that-that's.
Drives me crazy.
Does it?
Yeah.
Oh, it is, because in speech you can distinguish between the two that's, but on paper you're just stuck with the fact that it's the same ASCII symbols repeated.
So you want intonation introduced into the written language.
And the way you do that is by not writing it and speaking it, yeah.
I'm glad we had this conversation.
I am too.
We are getting to the limits of the time period in which I can still... But you don't think that's intentional on my part?
It might be.
You may end up proving your point here.
No, I actually can read the first word.
I just don't know what's on the second line.
The first word is model.
The first word is model, the second word is DNA, and then the third word is... Got it!
It's attenuated.
You don't say!
Yeah, I do say.
No, I do say.
Okay.
Okay, so what I wanted to just wrap this up with is the following thing.
The fact of having, and we're lucky that it happened on camera, because that means that it's not just our say-so.
We could go back and we could find the presentation of the model.
But the fact of having models Discussed early that then predict actual physical phenomena later on.
Or predict the revelation of evidence in the case of the second model here.
The idea that maybe there was not an attempt to reduce the number of COVID deaths early on.
The fact of having those models means that the things that get said to us about why we ended up right so frequently are now falsified.
Right?
The things being, you got lucky, broken clocks, right, two times a day, that sort of thing?
Everybody guessed.
You guessed, and you happened to guess right, but somebody would have guessed right.
So this wasn't about insight, it was about, you got lucky, congratulations, right?
That's sort of the Scott Adams version of things, right?
Sam Harris's version is you were right for the wrong reasons, right?
Well, no.
When your model turns out to be predictive of autopsies, you're right for the right reasons.
Sorry, it's just the way it works.
Then there's the thing that gets said to us about, well...
Okay, you were contrarians, and really what they're saying, which frankly I would almost settle for because it's good enough to get where we need to go, is yes, what you were officially told was 100% wrong, and a contrarian therefore didn't fall for any of it, which is not what happened in this case, right?
You and I were very careful about, we didn't fall into any known camp, right?
COVID is a dangerous disease.
The vaccines are also dangerous, and you're not actually trading one danger from the other.
You're actually compounding them if you get the so-called vaccines.
No, but I, so, you know, I, as you know, I have a particular sort of visceral reaction to the idea of contrarian, which, you know, has, because it was being said with affection in some cases, like it was people defending us saying, well, you know, but they're contrarians.
No, no, no, and no, in part because I disagree that we didn't fall into a known camp.
I understand what you mean by that, which is that, like, oh, well, the people who are skeptical of vaccines also think COVID isn't a big deal.
Like, that tended to be two opinions that went together.
And the people who are gung-ho on vaccines take COVID really, really seriously.
That was also two positions that often went together.
If you were just voting with ideology, if you were team blue, it was the latter.
If you were team red, it was the former.
But the camp that we fell into was camp science, which is skepticism of those things that come at you until you can assess them using the tools that you have, using as many of the things that you can see or sense with your own senses as possible, but also then trying it out, extrapolating, testing it against other things, looking at the papers, Which is what we'll do next.
Looking at the papers that are being trotted out, it's like, oh, well, but science says, boom!
And I'm like, okay, let's see what science says.
Yeah, it doesn't.
See here?
This is where the bodies are buried.
So, you know, we did that kind of thing because we can, and we do, and lots of people are trying to do that.
And some people don't have a background in scientific jargon enough to make it through the papers, And we're more easily compelled, and some of those people went, actually no, I can't assess that, and I know it, but I'm going to reject it out of hand.
And a lot of people went, you know what, I can't assess that, and I know that I can't assess it, so I'm just going to accept it out of hand.
And both of those positions are understandable, but neither of them is what we did.
And a lot of people didn't do that either, so it is a known camp, which I'm just going to call it camp science.
Well, okay.
It is a distinction not worth fighting over.
The fact that it wasn't a known slate, right?
There's obviously a method, but that's kind of the point, is the method involves building a model, and how do you know that that model is anything other than a lucky guess?
Well, it's predictive going forward, not just Not just was it predictive in the moment, it's predictive even going forward.
The last thing I want to say is, okay, so you've got a model, and then you have reason to believe that that model is accurate because it predicts things that are hard to predict, like will this gentleman's brain show...
Lymphocytes on autopsy.
Yeah.
And then here is what an extrapolation looks like.
Not only do we have the, you're going to find damage across the body and you've only noticed it in the heart because heart failure is so conspicuous, but this is going to be pathology after pathology.
That's one thing.
The other thing is this.
The transfection technology that the mRNA vaccines utilized was, in one way, absolutely special.
And in another way, not that special.
And it is the distinction between the special and the not special that tells us how to evaluate the relative risks, which we did correctly.
Everybody who is coming to realize how dangerous these vaccines are and were has focused on the mRNA vaccines, right?
They are most dangerous.
Why is that?
Well, you and I said early on that the number of novel features involved in the mRNA vaccines was by far the highest, and therefore, even things like the DNA vaccines, which are truly novel, the DNA vaccines in this case, the adenovirus, the adenovirus vectored vaccines, right?
Even those which are highly novel, right?
That had not been done before, but even those
are less novel by virtue of the fact that instead of using uh lipid nanoparticle coats which are completely untargeted they borrowed targeting from a pre-existing virus that had an evolutionary history that therefore would have limited the places that are transfected to a smaller number of tissues so not safe but much safer i would also point out and we we did we were we were
When asked, both by friends and family and on air sometimes in the Q&A, if you have to, which one would you do?
And in the U.S.
here, the option was J&J.
Right?
And that turned out to be correct in spades.
The Christine Stable-Ben work shows a slight all-cause mortality benefit for the DNA version.
I don't know whether that will hold up over the long term because, of course, pathologies will eat away at that.
But nonetheless, the point is you've got a spectrum of hazard.
The mRNA LNP-vectored Transfection agents are the maximally novel, least targeted of all.
Second, you have the DNA adenovectored Vaccines which are highly novel but have some sort of targeting that would have come from some virus that would have had some interest in keeping you on your feet, right?
Probably a pretty good interest, so they would not transfect nearly as indiscriminately.
And then there are the best vaccines that we have, right?
Which are attenuated virus vaccines.
Why are attenuated virus vaccines the best vaccines that we have?
Because they trigger a proper, not very serious infection that then causes the immune system to have the proper reaction to an infection.
It's like a little practice infection so that you don't get the real infection, right?
Is that cost-free?
No.
Because the exact thing that I've said, this model where your own cells spot What they regard to be as infected tissue and target it.
That will happen in an attenuated virus vaccine and it will happen in the adeno vector virus vaccine.
What is so different is the completely indiscriminate nature of the of the lipid nanoparticle targeting or lack thereof.
So anyway overarching message here is Product of science is models.
The utility of models is that once you have reason to believe that they are accurate based on the fact that they predict things, you can extrapolate from them.
And here are Two different, extremely important extrapolations that come from the model that you and I developed here on air, right?
One of them is the damage will be across the body and have implications well beyond the heart.
And the other is that you can look at virus or vaccine technologies and you can specify how likely to be dangerous they are based on the underlying model that we discussed over the course of many, many episodes.
Indeed.
All right.
Slight switch.
We didn't quite end where I was expecting us to, so I don't have the segue I was expecting.
Zach, I'm going to ask you to show my screen off and on here a little bit.
This week, many people will recognize.
You can show it now.
You are not giving me any useful video.
No, no, no, no.
I have video from you, but you are extending your screen, so it's not there.
I see your desktop.
I didn't change anything since we set this up.
Maybe it's protein.
Um...
So, yeah, nothing...
Nothing has changed since...
Um...
I'm sorry, I don't know why it's not...
We are fighting a technical difficulty, A gremlin, as it were.
Just goes on and on and on.
Is it possible you can set this up while he's sorting the tech?
No, that's the setup.
It's just a little preamble, which we can totally skip the preamble.
Yeah, nothing is working for me on your computer, so I think something's just frozen or something.
Well, you know, I do have a new computer on order.
I would recommend restarting, but you're going to lose a lot of stuff, so I don't know.
I can't get it to give me anything useful right now.
Okay.
Well, we are going to do this without me showing my screen at all.
It's unfortunate.
I guess I can just unplug this then.
I don't need that.
Okay, so this week, and I'll link these things in the show notes, this week NBC famously put out this headline, Immunity acquired from a COVID infection is as protective as vaccination against severe illness and death.
Study finds.
Okay, so they are citing a Lancet article, which I have actually not spent any time with yet.
And my first reaction to this was, well, it's about effing time, right?
And in response, some number of people point out that Mother Jones, right?
Remember Mother Jones?
I loved that magazine.
I loved it more than I loved the New York Times.
And Mother Jones has fallen farther and harder.
Mother Jones, back in May of 2020, had a headline, Anti-vaxxers have a dangerous theory called natural immunity.
Now it's going mainstream.
Quote, your body is an amazing being.
It knows how to take care of itself.
Okay, so that was Mother Jones.
Wow.
Incredible.
I hope that that woman has an immune system that is intact, but she doesn't seem to believe in it, the woman who wrote this.
That's amazing.
That's amazing, right?
And then when I look, when I search the New York Times for natural immunity, as you know, as the phrase natural immunity with the quotes, I get a December 5th, 2020 hit.
Natural immunity from COVID is not safer than a vaccine.
So that's just the conclusion.
And then the second hit for natural immunity, when I look in the New York Times, this week after NBC has revealed the results of this Lancet article, I have a hit from August 29, 1954.
Science in review, man's natural immunity to disease may be bolstered by two recent discoveries.
Now, if you do scroll down in the natural immunity stuff, you do find a couple more things from the pandemic, but it's all about how natural immunity is basically an anti-vaxxers creation.
Okay, so We have this article out of the Lancet this week, which, again, I have not spent time with, but one of the things that happens as a result of NBC putting out a headline like this is that people will put in the responses, yeah, but.
Like, yeah, but this paper.
And so one of the papers that I saw a few times come up was this, and again, apologies, I can't I think if you plug it back in, it might work.
OK, we're going to try this.
So let me find a thing that I might want to show now.
Hold on, hold on.
Yep, I see your screen.
OK, I've got the beach ball of death.
Just hold on a minute.
That's always fun.
OK, nope.
Give it a second.
I guess.
So this paper comes out in... I just don't... I've now lost access.
Okay.
Not working very well.
Well, let me know if you want me to show it.
You can show my screen now.
So, this paper comes out.
It was published first online in December of 2022.
It was officially published earlier this year.
So, Wanzu et al., 2023, published in the American Journal of Public Health, SARS-CoV-2 Infection, Hospitalization, and Death in Vaccinated and Infected Individuals by Age Groups in Indiana, 2021-2022.
It's a big study, and they specifically went to look at, it would appear, That they were looking at some of the same things that the Lancet study that's now being reported on by NBC were looking at, which is, again, in the abstract, the objectives to assess the effectiveness of vaccine-induced immunity against new infections, all-cause emergency department visits and hospital visits, and mortality in Indiana.
And Indiana is just because that's where they had access to this giant, giant data set.
And so again, they're looking at four things.
They're saying, okay, we've got people who are vaccinated, we've got people who've had prior COVID infections but aren't vaccinated, and we're going to compare.
Who does better in terms of getting infected with COVID in the future?
Who does better in terms of getting emergency department visits?
It's ER, basically, right?
ER visits.
How about hospital visits?
Which I think what they mean by that is hospitalizations and death and mortality.
So you've got these four measures.
And is my screen not working anymore? - I think it just physically disconnected over there, but you don't need to. - Let's just assume it's not gonna work.
So they have this paper.
This paper is not brilliantly done at the.
At the editing level.
And so they've got a lot of figures that don't have explanations, and they've got a whole section of the results that seems to refer to the wrong figures in the wrong way.
But ultimately what I find, and this is where I would really like to be able to show you guys the The data here is that across all age groups and what they did was they tried to basically control for, they tried to match, they did what they're calling a matched cohort design where they looked at various indicators of health And they ranked them, and some of their rankings were a little dicey.
Obesity was an issue, but not a very big issue.
Of course, for COVID, it's actually a really big issue, so I'm not sure why they ranked things the way they did.
But they took this giant data set out of health systems in Indiana of vaccinated people, and this giant data set, sometimes overlapping in terms of where they were from, what hospital systems they were from, of people who are not vaccinated but have had COVID, and they say, OK, we're not going to compare really sick people with really not sick people.
We're going to try to match.
We're going to try to match the cohort.
And what they appear to have found is that with regard to infections, just like with this Lancet paper that, again, I have not directly assessed, but which was which was promoted on NBC this week, You find actually lower infection rates among those who have previously had COVID than among those who have been vaccinated.
Considerably lower across all of the age classes.
However, across all of the age classes, for each of the other three measures that they're looking at, that is to say, basically emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and deaths, Uh, you have higher risk of these bad outcomes if you only had a case of COVID earlier, and it's all cause mortality, so they're not trying to attribute this to COVID or, you know, to the vaccine, certainly.
You have a higher risk of ER visits, of hospitalizations, and of death Uh, more than a month, but less than the end of the study out from having had COVID, um, than if you had been vaccinated.
So that's what they find.
And that seems, you know, pretty damning of much of what, what it is that we are, um, much of what we have said about the vaccines.
Uh, and again, if true damning of what we have said.
Yeah, exactly.
And, um, I'd love to show you all of their data, but the bodies are buried, unfortunately, maybe almost literally, in this paper here.
What they have done is they have taken publicly available data, And they have said that the two populations that they have compared is vaccinated people and people with past COVID infections that weren't vaccinated.
But the only people they have access to, the only records they have access to are people with records, are people who are in the health system because they had COVID among that second group.
So whereas, if you've been vaccinated against COVID, you are inherently in the system as someone who has been vaccinated against COVID, because that is a medical intervention.
Therefore, the entire population of vaccinated people in Indiana is potentially included in this in this data set.
The vast number of people who were not vaccinated against COVID and who got it and didn't seek medical help for it, or who weren't otherwise sick and went to get care and got a COVID test and it was discovered that they were positive, are not possibly represented in this analysis.
Anyone who is unvaccinated and had COVID and recovered, like you this week, like our son Toby this week, who took an at-home test, went, holy cow, that's the first time I've actually got a positive test, right?
You got two positive tests, Toby got a positive test, and we know lots of people like that, right?
I didn't happen to get COVID this time, but you know, lots and lots of people who are not vaccinated have gotten COVID because basically the entire world has gotten COVID at this point, and the vast majority of us Never go and get an official test to assess that.
So what they have actually done here is they have compared the entire population of vaccinated people to that population of unvaccinated people who got COVID and were sick enough to get medical care.
And by doing that, you then get a result that is not at all surprising And which is that, okay, those people who had COVID and were sick enough to seek medical care as a result of it, or coincident with it, are more likely than the entire population of vaccinated people, which includes lots and lots of otherwise healthy people, to end up in the ER or hospitalized or dead.
I'm trying to think of an analogy that would explain just how insane this comparison is.
I sat with this paper for a little bit.
It's extraordinarily badly written.
We said this last week, too, a couple weeks ago.
Obviously, this is the kind of paper that no student of ours could have submitted to us, but if a student of mine had submitted a paper with figures like this, I would have told them they needed to fix them, that I would not even assess it like this.
I mean, it is that bad.
The labeling, the lack of labeling, the lack of clarity.
It is that bad.
But even getting beyond that and saying, OK, the science communication is really bad.
Maybe the science communication is really bad because they kind of don't want you messing about and knowing what's going on.
Or maybe it's just they're just really bad at science communicating.
And the editors of the journal were sleeping that day.
Who knows, right?
But the science itself, The setup of the study.
So we have a question.
We have a hypothesis.
They don't set it up that way, of course, but I'm imagining that their hypothesis was Vaccination is more protective than previous COVID infection against ER visits, hospitalizations, and deaths.
And maybe they also had that hypothesis for future infections of COVID.
I don't know.
But those were the four measures that they were looking at.
And note, too, that even though they didn't include a lot of people who are unvaccinated and have had COVID in this analysis, they still have a result that shows greater protection from future COVID infections from natural immunity rather than vaccination.
So in that way, this paper is coincident with the Lancet paper.
But it's the other stuff that is remarkable, because I basically guarantee you this is going to be a paper that gets trotted out over and over and over again to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of these vaccines.
And it does nothing of a kind.
Well, it is designed to fail.
It's impossible to say it's intentional, but it appears intentional.
If what you're describing is accurate, the non-comparable nature of the two groups is so extreme, it's like if you wanted to say, well, okay, you know, Let's say that your country was at war with another country, and you wanted to figure out, you know, the way they did during Vietnam, right, what your casualty rate was, right?
And the answer is, well, we've got records of all of the people in our military, so let's just see how many of them have been hospitalized.
And then how are we going to get, how are we going to figure out how the enemy is doing?
Well, let's go check our hospitals and see how many of their soldiers are in our hospitals and we'll see, you know, whether the injuries are more severe.
And it's like, well, you checked the hospital, right?
You went to a population that had, you know, had been hit.
And, okay.
So, you know, it, There's other smaller problems here.
They don't even start counting.
They say, oh, well, it takes a while for immunity to happen, and so we're going to start counting a month after vaccination or a month after COVID infection, which of course will guarantee that you miss some of the more acute vaccine injuries as well.
Not all of them, by any means, but the ones that happen fast are going to be totally missed by this.
But I think I think that is a decent analogy, and I don't think there's a perfect one.
It would be useful, I think, for us to come up with as many ways of describing this as possible.
You've got a population of 100 people, 50 of them are vaccinated against COVID, 50 of them aren't.
just for ease, even though they won't be.
You've got a population of 100 people, 50 of them are vaccinated against COVID, 50 of them aren't.
And some scientists come in and say, we want to figure out if the vaccine is actually protecting against COVID infection, against hospitalization, against ER visits, against death.
Obviously what you want to do is you want to compare the 50 people who were vaccinated to the 50 people who weren't.
But the people who have come in and have decided, okay, we want to figure out the answer to this question, it turns out don't have access to some of the 50 people who weren't vaccinated because they weren't vaccinated and therefore they weren't seeking that sort of medical intervention.
Well, what do we know then?
Okay, some people who ended up with COVID, and this wasn't quite perfect, so that sort of assumes that the entire background rate is that everyone's had COVID, I guess.
Some number of the people who end up with COVID who aren't vaccinated are sick enough that they get medical treatment.
Okay, cool.
We'll take those.
We'll compare those people, and let's call it 10.
10 of the 50.
That's high.
20% of the people who didn't get vaccinated and who have COVID end up with it bad enough to seek medical help?
No way it's that high, but let's just keep it that way for ease of numbers.
You've now got 10 people that you're comparing to the whole 50 over here.
And those 10 people have already been selected for Not doing very well in the face of this disease.
Is that because of something else?
Well, the authors of the study will say, no, we try to control for that.
Maybe, but...
You didn't control for everything, did you?
And the fact is that you pulled from a small sliver of the population that you claim to have pulled from.
A small sliver of the population.
And the vast majority of us out here who are not vaccinated against COVID, and have had it, and did just fine, and never went to the hospital to get tested, aren't represented in this comparison.
Therefore, the comparison is not legitimate.
Okay, I want to come at this, the degree to which this failure to science properly... I had not shared this with you.
No, it's so stunning that the point is, this is malpractice.
It's not only malpractice, you know, it's one thing, maybe you suck at science and you would propose such a thing, maybe you'd get to the point of running such a study, but the idea, this is a peer-reviewed Study and nobody caught the fact that this is you're not you can't do this and the point is do this look There's a distinction.
We used to talk about this a lot as professors to our students There's a distinction between two kinds of error, right?
You've got random error and you've got systematic error and it sounds like Systematic error would be better, right?
Because random error, who knows what's in it, right?
But in fact, the point is, random error is okay.
You can deal with random error by having a larger data set that will swamp out the error.
The signal will overwhelm the noise.
And big data set here, like random error is going to be okay.
Right.
Yeah.
Systematic error where you have a bias in the direction of, you know, who, pray tell, who was in their natural immunity category.
People who were sick enough to go to the hospital, right?
And yes, so that's, that's a, let me just, let me just make sure I'm being very, very careful here.
I don't know that they were hospitalized.
People who were sick enough to end up with a positive COVID test that was in the system.
Right.
Okay.
And so they might've, they might've, been in the hospital for something else, they like, you know, there's going to have been some number of people who just had it latent and actually the COVID didn't have anything to do with the fact that then they got hospitalized for something else, right? - You've got a spectrum of people all the way from, went to the hospital and died of COVID to, you know, asymptomatic, right?
And the point is if your sampling method excludes anybody who was asymptomatic and therefore there wasn't a test or whatever, right?
And explicitly will not exclude anyone from the vaccinated group.
Right.
No one.
Yes.
I don't know how to make it obvious how bad the systematic bias in this study is and how much it means that there's actually just nothing to read in the tea leaves there.
Once you've got a system that is systematically biased in this way, the point is it's just simply invalid.
Right?
You're not, there's no recovering it.
And, you know, we see this in, we see this kind of error.
And it all, you know, just like with your bank.
If your bank makes a dozen errors and half of them go in your direction, maybe there's just incompetence at your bank.
If your bank makes a dozen errors and they all go in the bank's favor, then whatever the mechanism underlying it is, the point is it's an unfair bank.
Okay?
And that right there is a distinction between if half of them go in one direction, half in another.
Or, you know, even if it's like nine, 8-4 maybe it's random error right, but if they all go in one direction at some point you have a stronger and stronger indication That's systematic error, and you're owed your money back right, and you know it's it's a testable model going forward Does it you know does the slight bias in your favor in the error is reverse?
Then that's a random phenomenon if it just gets more and more biased in the bank's favor that tells you what's going on But we've seen So much monkey business, and it all goes in the same direction, right?
Always.
You've got the studies of early treatment drugs like ivermectin, which have lots of cryptic ways, especially in the most recent ones, the ones that have been so highly touted.
You have the systematic mechanism for underdosing those who are most vulnerable to the disease by capping the dosage, you know, at 90 kilograms so it stops being scaled to body mass.
Right?
That is a systematic error introduced designed to make the drug not look effective.
Also, the crazy way that, you know, whether you were vaccinated or unvaccinated and therefore your outcome as a result of, you know,
In an all-cause mortality, if you count people who've been vaccinated but haven't gotten two weeks out from their vaccination date as unvaccinated, you systematically bias these studies when the point is, all you really care about is somebody who's deciding whether or not to get injected is, does my likelihood of making it go up if I get it?
And the point is, that includes the two weeks right after you got it.
If you're more vulnerable, for two weeks and then less vulnerable after, then the answer is the result in terms of vulnerability is an integration of those two things.
You can't systematically exclude it.
So what we see is again and again, I would call this a study not designed to be read.
Right?
Well, and that's actually completely consistent with the, um, like I, This is going to sound like hyperbole, but I think I've never seen figures this bad.
It is stunning.
And within the paper itself, they confuse themselves, and they're talking about the wrong parts.
You've got 87 authors now.
It's more like seven or something.
But you've got a bunch of authors on this very important paper, and you You couldn't even label your figures much less accurately.
So, yes, I think it was designed not to be read.
And also, in the original, most of the figures are even in the supplementary materials.
They're not even in the paper.
Those, once you find them and figure out what they actually mean and put it together, are actually readable.
But the one that's in the paper is tiny, and you have to expand it, and then it's kind of fuzzy.
What is going on here?
A paper designed not to be read is a paper that will cause busy academics, journalists, whoever looks at it, to look at it and say, looks like a scientific paper to me.
It's got numbers.
Read the abstract.
Okay.
I guess this is what it means.
Oh, they used a matched cohort.
That's good.
Oh, matched cohort.
That's good.
I know what that means.
Let me just like, matched cohort is fantastic.
Of course.
You know, when you are trying to compare two populations, you can be like, okay, we got these people over here, and you got these people over here, and let's just be like, are they different?
Or, you can say, okay, we're sampling from the entire population over here, A, and the entire population over here, B, but the comparisons we want to make are actually one-to-one.
We're going to do individual-level comparisons, and so we're going to control as much as possible for the kinds of differences between people that might matter for the purposes of this study.
And so that also allows you, if you have, you know, a population A that's, you know, a third bigger than population B, like actually we're just we're going to compare these two, and we're going to match them person to person, and we're going to see what we get.
But that requires that you actually pull from the entire population that you're claiming to pull from, which they did not do.
My point is, There is a mechanism for introducing things that flatter somebody with a little knowledge, right?
Not somebody who's completely in the dark about statistics, but somebody who knows enough to know that matched pairs would be a good thing to do, or matched cohorts, right?
And so the point is, oh, I get a gold star for knowing what that is.
In fact, I'm going to put it in my article, right?
Oh, they used a, you know, a matched system, whatever.
So, and you know, the point is, this is a mechanism for getting people to turn down their skepticism.
Because once you've been flattered that, you know, these course and statistics that you took prepared you to say a little something about the statistics they used in their analysis, right?
You feel good about this study.
You're rooting for it.
And you feel like, oh, and they know what they're doing.
Oh, good.
Finally.
Oh, it's even better than it might have been, right?
And the point is, no, it's garbage.
And the real question is, anybody who thinks that peer review has a value has a lot of explaining to do.
Yes.
When a paper that actually, you know, there's one in the earlier Ivermectin literature in which they literally reversed the two groups.
Right?
They concluded that Ivermectin had no value because they had simply swapped data sets between treatment and control.
Right?
It's like, you can't get a worse error than that.
So anyway, the idea, if peer review had a value, which it doesn't, but if it did, that value would be in finding obvious errors in papers, which those who have tested peer review have discovered actually it's not effective at, and very often it introduces errors that weren't there in the first place.
So anyway, yeah, this is mind-blowing.
I'm hoping that at some point the absolutely correct analogy will dawn on one of us, but you cannot sample from those people who have triggered a medical record.
That's not the same thing as we vaccinated a bunch of people and therefore have all their records, you know, irrespective of anything else.
Yeah, so I was just going to say it, and again, probably very much the same way I've already said it, but Question they're trying to address is, does vaccination or previous infection protect you better against future COVID infection, hospitalizations, visits to the ER, and death?
Great question.
Important question.
A question that we need answers to.
Absolutely.
The way to answer that question is to look at people who were vaccinated and people who were not vaccinated but have had COVID.
Which, frankly, in that second set, people who were not vaccinated but have had COVID, that's almost everyone who's not been vaccinated at this point, because almost the entire world has had COVID at this point.
There may be a few people who still haven't, but put that aside.
What you cannot do in comparing those two groups is say, okay, we'll take all of group A, vaccinated group, And we'll take a subset of group B who got into the health system with a positive COVID test.
And just like I would ask our audience to consider, vaccinated or not, when you did have COVID, because you probably did, and maybe you've had it twice or three times or five times, right?
When you did have COVID, Did you go to the ER and get a test?
Did you go to your doctor and get a test?
Or did you not test at all, but were just so certain because you lost your sense of smell?
Or did you take one of the home tests that the post office was sending out to people for free for a while, right?
Chances are that you did one of those other things.
And if you did end up with a positive test that was in the health system, again, vaccinated or not, My prediction is, and this is just not a risky prediction, is that that's because you were just that sick, as opposed to, oh boy, OK, God, it finally happened.
OK, I've got to treat this.
I've got to sleep.
I've got to get better.
I'm going to do that at home.
I'm not going to the hospital, where there's a bunch of sick people and where I might get sicker.
I want to push back on one thing.
It should be important to study the question of which of these things is more protective, right?
The so-called vaccine or prior infection.
I mean, I think we know the answer.
We do, but it should be important.
But in some ways, We have a holdover idea that it is important from a period in which we believed much more strongly in the idea that these things actually prevented people from contracting COVID.
The idea that what you are really doing is compounding the risks of the two things, and you are not choosing between them, because getting the vaccine doesn't prevent you from getting COVID.
And maybe there's a complex story in which it affects what kind of COVID you get, but the point is, it should be important, but it isn't.
Right.
What we have is a very damning video in which a much younger Anthony Fauci says, you know, of course, natural immunity is better than any vaccine.
Everybody knows that.
Right.
That's effectively what he says in that clip that circulates.
And the point is, OK, yeah, we all do know that that is the natural Order of things when it comes to to viruses But in this case what we have is a confusing situation in which it really isn't clear a there's all the shenanigans that have been played with you know You're unvaccinated until you've been vaccinated for two weeks and therefore which category were you counted in there's all of this stuff and so really the point is If he died a week after being vaccinated with COVID, that might have been a COVID death.
Right.
And yeah, exactly.
So the right thing to do at this point, given the, I believe, artificial complexity of the picture, right?
Where we are given information that's hard to parse.
You know, oh, that person died unvaccinated.
No, they were vaccinated.
They just weren't two weeks post-vaccination, right?
If they're going to play those kinds of games, the only game in town here really are measures that are un-gameable, right?
Like all-cause mortality, right?
You're in Category A. Did your all-cause mortality go up?
Right?
That tells you I don't need to know the mechanism, right?
What I need to know is that this did or did not benefit me from the point of view of staving off death, right?
It's a simple measure and because it's a simple measure it is much harder to game and anyway, I think that that's where we are in part because As we have said multiple times, science is the most powerful way for figuring out what's true, but it's a fragile mechanism, right?
It requires that you do it right.
And when there are so many people with so many perverse incentives to do it incorrectly, to reach conclusions that are rewarding because somebody wants to, you know, have a paper to waive, right?
The point is no, it's not going to work.
Science doesn't work under those circumstances.
You need people who actually Have the as their highest priority, discovering what is true, whether or not it flatters their preconceptions.
And we're just not in that environment.
We're in an environment of endless scientific sophistry.
That's right.
Let's let's just say a few things about stigma and shame.
Well, good.
No, really, actually.
And I think there is a segue here, which I didn't I didn't see, which is that One of the very few, I think, silver linings from the public health response to this last three years
has been that people are more aware of the risk that they're putting others at when they walk out into the world while sick.
It got ridiculous for a while.
There were moments I remember being in a restaurant and having something stuck in my throat and being like, "Oh my God, must not cough because I will get the look of death from every other person in this restaurant." Right?
And so, like with everything, it can be taken too far.
But should there be a stigma against you taking your productive cough out into the world and into other people's spaces?
Yes.
Yeah, they should.
They should.
And should, you know, could people use shame to help create that stigma?
Yeah.
Now, will there be things that we might be interested in shaming people for, in having stigmas about now, that will change over time?
Might it turn out that we weren't right about things?
Of course.
Yes.
So, the amazing Lionel Shriver, wrote a piece this month in UnHerd called Western Societies Built on Stigma.
Here's just one little excerpt.
My point being that stigma isn't always bad.
It can attach to particular conduct for good reason.
Collective disapproval is a powerful tool for encouraging behavior that's in the collective interest.
More recent campaigns to remove the stigma clinging to overtly destructive conduct are therefore questionable.
That includes the crusade to embrace fat pride, which wages a two-pronged war on conventional assumptions about both aesthetics and health.
So, you know, spot on.
She's so good.
I haven't read many of her novels, but I've been reading a number of her essays lately, and she's just incredible.
This is, again, Lionel Shriver.
So, she talks a lot in this essay about fat shaming.
as a 15-year-old, because even though she never thought she was a man, no, but was tired of being sort of associated with girly stuff.
So she talks a lot in this essay about fat shaming.
It puts me in mind, too, of the thing now that people say kink shaming, right?
And I was going to show, but maybe it's better that I don't.
An online commentator who is fairly well-known said this this week.
Well, so there's a move to normalize autogynephilia.
Autogynephilia being, broadly, I hope I get this exactly right, but basically the condition in which a man basically gets off sexually on the idea of being a woman.
And he can enhance that sense by dressing up as a woman.
And it has been proposed, I think it was Ray Blanchard who first introduced this term to all of us, and who proposed that this is actually one of the things, this is one of the things that is what modern trans is, right?
Is that these are actually autogynophiles.
Who don't actually think that they are women but are... They get off on it.
They're getting off on it.
They're enhancing their erotic lives by doing this.
So this week it was revealed that Leah Thomas, the swimmer dude who beat all those women at swimming because when he'd been swimming as a man he wasn't beating men and so he started swimming as a woman because apparently you can do that now.
It was revealed that he's been active in a bunch of autogynephilia forums online.
And, you know, at one level, like, okay, like, whatever, he was still cheating.
Like, I don't know why we care, really, like, how he got there, but he shouldn't have been swimming against those women in a competition, and by doing so, he was cheating, and it made the entire competition not a competition.
But we have this...
This online commentator saying, it's perfectly legitimate to debate the fairness of male-to-female trans folk competing on female sports teams.
Shaming hashtag autogynephilia, however, is unfair.
AGP, I can't say it, autogynephilia, appears to be simply another atypical sexuality that people do not ask for and cannot change.
Now the same person, I should say, has made similar arguments about pedophilia.
Yep.
Um, so obviously, obviously in this case, you can make analogous claims.
Like, he just felt like raping people.
Can't change it.
Like, he's just kind of a rapey guy.
And obviously we can't let him do it, but you don't want to shame him.
He can't change it.
It's just who he is.
What exactly is a kink?
When did kink get to become this thing that we're like, oh... A protected category.
A protected category.
Yeah.
A kink.
Yeah.
What is going on here?
And furthermore, why is it that kink is elevated to this protected category?
That's exactly right.
And anytime there is any implication of shame or stigma, that can be dismissed and the person who is using it or is in any way alluding to that being useful As effectively an evolved strategy by which to allow all of us to live together in peaceful harmony.
That's the thing.
Like, oh, you can't.
Well, now I can't talk to you.
You're kink-shaming.
You took that protected category, which never should have been protected at all, and used a technique that we're not allowed to use.
We don't shame people.
Well, actually, you know what?
We do, and we have.
And as Lionel Shriver writes about, she's specifically writing about stigma and not shame, but they are closely related.
As she points out in this piece, Western society is actually built on this.
This is how we enforce social norms, is by stigma.
Not entirely, not the only way that we do it, but it is one of the ways that we do it.
So, I haven't read the piece.
It is 100% obvious from an evolutionary perspective that shame and stigma are evolutionary adaptations.
There is something to be concerned about in the weaponization of these things.
Of course.
We all remember, all of us who saw it, the Game of Thrones scene where the horrible Queen Cersei Cersei?
Yep.
Is, you know, has her walk of shame and she's naked and she's being pelted and such and she's done something horrifying, I don't remember what, but it still feels appalling, right?
Yeah, I don't know what to do with that one because of course the character is so morally compromised to begin with, but nonetheless, look, we were all shamed.
Those of us who did not want to get these so-called vaccines were all shamed.
That was weaponization of an evolved trait.
Against people who were actually just looking out for their own medical well-being and Anyway, obviously that's not legitimate.
But the idea that shame itself is invalid is preposterous Again I didn't read this article, but my sense is never mind Western civilization right human society is founded on shame and
I saw the same tweet that you did from this very troubling person who would defend pedophilia and is now defending autogynephilia as immutable.
The person didn't ask for it, so who are you to, you know, blah blah blah.
No.
A, there's an assumption built into this, and yes, I'm sure there is a whole shoddy literature that will be used to pretend that this is actually the result, an empirical result, but the idea that your desires, your kinks, whatever, are not sensitive to whether or not they are viewed as shameful, whether people whose shame causes them, you know, I mean, look, we've, you know, we've now had
A secretary of nuclear waste management who was a pup handler, which is obviously a kink involving something very closely psychologically related to bestiality, right?
I'm super comfortable shaming pup handling.
Right.
Pup handling.
And the point is, pup handling is presumably the gateway to actually getting sexually involved with animals.
So, whatever.
The point is, there are biological reasons that bestiality is viewed as shameful.
Should we be playing with that boundary?
Right?
No, we should not be playing with that boundary.
Right?
Likewise, we can say exactly the same thing Uh, with respect to incest, you know, could you make an argument for tolerating incest in cases where you're not going to find any deleterious recessives that get doubled and cause birth defects?
We shouldn't be playing with this boundary in the first place.
The point is the So, I mean, so the argument will come back like, well, but the boundary is inherently fuzzy because, you know, incest is an easy one to describe the border being fuzzy.
Like full sibs, no.
You know, second cousins, oh, right.
So, you know, where, where is the boundary?
And that's going to differ by situation and culture and, you know, opportunity.
But you and I used to teach all the time that where is the boundary is not a valid argument against a principle.
Yes.
Yes, but you seem to be arguing about, you know, should we be playing with the boundary, which suggests that you can see, that you can find the boundary.
No, my point is, like everything else, you know, how much, you know, how close to the cancer would you like to get during the surgery?
I'd like to get far enough away from it that you didn't miss any.
Yeah, take it all out.
Where should we have the boundary in our, you know, tolerance for incest?
Really far away from incest, right?
Really far away from any place that it has impact.
You know, how free should we be to play with sexual violence, you know?
Not really free at all.
I really just don't want to see it legitimized.
You know, pedophilia, huh?
You know, how young is too young?
Well, how about just stay the fuck away from people who are too young for you and let's talk about what hard boundary we should leave in the law and what kinds of really serious penalties we should inflict on people who violate that age restriction.
You know, this is...
It's obvious.
The point is, what is important is the functioning of civilization and the protection of people.
And the way you do that is you figure out where the boundary is far enough away from the intolerable behavior that there's no danger of crossing into it.
Right?
And so anyway, I'm not interested in hearing about The problem of shame.
Yes, shame misapplied is bad, right?
Yes, yelling if it's too loud or in an inappropriate context is bad.
Yes, skipping a period too long between meals is bad.
But the point is, none of these things are inherently bad, and people are just... it's sophistry all the way down.
They're taking instances in which something is misapplied and using it to invalidate the whole category because there's something they want to do.
And, you know, in this case it's, you know, something that gets them off.
But it's not... civilization is not theirs to screw up.
Yeah.
No, and to the degree that a lot of these arguments, like, you know, autogynephilia appears to be simply another atypical sexuality that people do not ask for or cannot change, that sounds like a kind of libertarian argument.
And there were people, and there will be people who show up and say, well, you know, who could it harm?
You know, A, not our responsibility to figure that out, but B, the number of inroads being made to protected women's spaces with the argument that some tiny minority of, in this case, people engaging in sexual kink That it's their rights?
It's the tiny number of people over here with sexual kinks who, oh by the way, all happen to be men, get to override the rights of, oh, half the human population?
Yeah, no.
Mm-mm.
Nope.
I think we're done.
Like, this has gotta stop.
It's got to stop and somehow we need the proper tools to talk about what's really going on because undoubtedly there's a parameter in here that should be called reinforcement, right?
Where it may be that I bet it isn't even Any genetic predisposition at all.
My guess would be it is the accident of early experience that causes somebody to have some sexual focus that's off.
Totally.
And the question is, does it get reinforced enough that it becomes a fetish?
And I think the technical definition is that it's somehow required to get off.
Right?
For a fetish.
But the idea is, how does something end up in that category?
Through some process of reinforcement, where some initial interest that wasn't okay has been fed upon, probably by people making money off of, well, let's see what weird kinks, you know, haven't been met by some supply, so we can make money by feeding them, right?
So you find some really fringe stuff, and you feed it, and you make money, and then the point is, okay... You might even create it!
Right, but then, okay, you've now reinforced A, the idea that it's normal.
Yes.
You've reinforced B, the person's sexual focus on this thing.
And the point is, and then some pseudo-researcher is going to say, oh, well, it's just, you know, they didn't ask for it.
Yeah, so given that online forums and social media and advertising separately are doing all of this positive reinforcement of ridiculous behavior, the idea that the rest of us aren't allowed to employ some negative reinforcement?
No, not only are we allowed to, it's our obligation.
It is our obligation.
You've got online and social media communities who are riling themselves up into a state of kinkery and Advertisers of various sorts who are helping if they happen to create the products that are related to that kinkery and There's all the rest of us out here, many of whom aren't paying any attention to this, but all the rest of us.
I think you've nailed the word.
We are actually not just allowed to, but obligated to engage in negative reinforcement.
No.
No.
That's not interesting.
That's not good.
I don't care if you think you get off on that.
That's not okay.
Stop it.
Yeah.
Now, I would add one more piece to the puzzle, which my guess would be Shriver didn't find.
Yeah, I mean most of this that we're talking about wasn't in her piece.
The most fundamental version of fame as an adaptation has to do with the fact that shit stinks.
Shit stinks so that people cannot help but be repulsed by it, right?
And that means that you, as a producer of S.A.M.E., have to be very careful about how you do it, where you do it, what you do after, wash your hands, this, that, and the other, so that you do not find yourself shunned by people who will be acting on, yes, a crude proxy for a later-to-be-discovered microbiological reality of, you're a hazard if you smell like that, right?
And shunned, shamed, stigmatized, because you're literally a vector of disease!
You could be.
You're a vector of disease and the point is, you know what else it is?
It's a training program.
Right?
The point is, if you smell like that and people shun you, you might learn to change your behavior so you no longer smell like that.
You become a non-hazard to people and they might welcome you back into polite society.
And so the point is, that's an exact model of what should be going on here.
Right?
Be the non-vector you want to see in the world.
Right.
So, oh, okay, you're applying for the job of Secretary of Nuclear Waste Disposal and you want to use your platform as a governmental official to broadcast your dog sex fantasies, is that right?
Sorry, that's inconsistent with your role as a public official.
Why don't you come back when you've got that good and cured?
Right?
I mean... So there's obviously a line here where that particular person, I don't remember his name.
Sam Brinton.
Sam Brinton.
No longer in the position, not for the kink, but for repeatedly stealing handbags from airports, is that right?
Luggage.
Luggage.
Oh, it wasn't ladies' purses, okay.
Okay, so he's no longer in the position.
But There is a question, of course, about if, you know, so, so many of these things are wrapped up in exhibitionism, which makes it easy.
It's just easy.
Like, nah, you showed us because you wanted us to see, and now we're going to talk about it and we're going to shame you for it.
But if somehow he had been a, at home, behind locked doors, with consenting dog people, Yeah.
Men dressed as dogs.
I do this thing.
Yep.
I don't talk about it.
I don't share it with you.
To what degree is what used to be the military's position on gay people in the military, don't ask, don't tell, relevant here?
It's only relevant in one way.
Which is, if we don't know about it, it's not relevant to your qualifications.
If you're highly qualified at dealing with nuclear waste and we don't know what you're doing in the bedroom, then it's not relevant to that question.
It doesn't make sense.
I agree, but the way that you framed it, what I was responding to was you said, like, you get that thing cured and then come back.
It's like, well, You put that in front of us.
You just put that on full display.
And for some reason at the moment, half the country is like, yay, go for it!
And that's part of the problem.
But if it had never been on display, and he was actually competent at the disposing of nuclear waste safely at the federal level job that he was actually hired to do, and also had this kink, that he actually kept private.
He's not actually obliged to cure that thing.
No, he is obliged to cure that thing having nothing to do with his federal position.
He's not obliged in order to perform the duties of the job.
Correct.
Correct.
But, you know, this is ultimately the conversation that we have to have, is how much is the argument that, well, whatever goes on between my ears is my business and no one else's?
How true is that?
How true is it that whatever two consenting adults do in the bedroom is their business?
You know, obviously I believe that to a point, but I do, I stop believing it at the point that the idea is You know what?
Rape roleplay?
That's cool.
As long as you got a safe word.
And the answer is, look, I'm not really comfortable with how it is that we say, actually, that's not okay, even if you have a safe word, right?
I don't know the answer to that.
I don't know the answer to how do we deal, you know, can rape be represented in the movie?
Presumably it has to be.
Right?
How is that going to be any different than what consenting adults do behind closed doors with a safe word?
I don't know the answer to that question, but the question I think I do know the answer to is, is this actually a healthy process where we turn, where we play with sexual violence so that it becomes normal, right?
That's not okay.
Assuming a heterosexual role play there, both people are worse off.
are going to be, and less fulfilled sexually.
Less fulfilled sexually, presumably, but even if they're not, the point is the normalization of that behavior, right, turning rape into a fun game, right, means that some people are going to get raped who wouldn't have otherwise, because somebody turned it into a fun game, and then somebody who wasn't capable of managing the border between game and reality got a hold of that thing.
And so the point is, you're actually talking about rape victims.
You may not be talking about it in the bedroom in question, but you are talking about it somewhere.
And the question is, you know, well, look, we do let people drive and people are going to die on the highway.
So there's some level of tolerance for harm that comes from things that are productive.
But, you know, in the case of something like the normalization of rape as a kink, right?
Where's the upside?
Yeah, no, and that's, you know, that's why I bring it up here, because, you know, no one is yet saying rape is kink.
Oh, boy.
I don't think that's true at all.
That's not true.
Okay, then I brought it up thinking that it was new, you know, whatever it was 15 minutes ago or so.
But, you know, if phytogonophilia and pedophilia and violence, sexual violence, are all things that are somehow now a protected category, and to speak ill of them is shaming and bad, right?
That's backwards land.
We landed in a space where the conversations that you're trying to get us to have in this conversation are are challenging, and I think almost no one will show up at exactly the same place in that.
You and I don't show up at exactly the same place, and we can try to figure out where we do, but the place where we started?
That's not nuanced.
Right.
That's easy.
- Right. - That's easy.
Like the like, what, how okay is, like how free is your head actually?
And how free can your head be?
And how free should it be if we are simultaneously trying to free the individual and live in a society?
Well, it is the hallmark of us moving in the wrong direction.
So again, I freely acknowledge that I don't know how in a free society you draw the proper line, but I would also point out that in some ways Shame is the answer here, right?
How free should you be to use the toilet and not wash your hands?
Well, at the moment, what we've got, as far as I understand it, is a rule that if you're employed in a food selling establishment, there are legal requirements.
And if you're not, you're apparently free to do as you like.
Right.
I don't really think you should be free to do as you like.
And frankly, there is a informal mechanism whereby all of us are disgusted by the person who walks out of the stall and bypasses the sinks and then go touches the doorknob, right?
And the point is, that's not a law, but it does mean, hey, that thing that you just did is not okay.
Agreed.
shame is the way to do it without having it that's the extra legal way to do it right like that's what we have that's the tools that we have without having to take everything into the law which we no one wants it's not good for everything to be at the level of the law agreed and so you know this needs some kind of a we're going to be here again on various different topics but the point is we are rediscovering an ancient mechanism Yeah.
Right?
The fact that that ancient mechanism gives us all kinds of evidence of how it works, right?
The stinkiness of shit, that's a built-in feature designed to keep you safe from a microbe that nobody knew was a microbe at the point that that evolved, right?
There was no language.
Well, it can't be bad if you don't know the mechanism of action.
Hey, you sound like Clara Lehman.
And, you know, most of the Yahoo scientists who were talking about what you could and could not know during this pandemic.
Yep.
Right?
Totally.
But yes, the idea that we have an informal... How dare you?
Sorry.
Well, you were doing an impression at the time.
I didn't know.
I have no idea she said anything like that, but...
We won't go into it.
But anyway, I do think...
We have landed on something vitally important.
I must say, everything that we have experienced during the pandemic has spooked me more and more about governmental power.
Yes.
Right?
It is not, I have not lost any sight of the fact that there are certain processes that just absolutely have to be government regulated or we're in huge trouble.
But I fear the power to regulate now because I've seen what happens with it.
Right.
The idea that we have a whole bunch of tools below the level of legal regulation that, you know, it's not just some giant gap.
Whatever is not legally forbidden is totally cool, right?
The point is that space is where we actually have to get along with each other.
Right.
And it isn't about the law.
And if you push these boundaries, you will force it to be.
So.
Yeah.
Don't.
Yeah.
That's good.
That's good.
All right.
I think we did it.
All right.
I think we're at the end.
When you say we did it.
Civilization is saved or not yet?
I don't think we did that yet.
We'll give something to do next week.
Yeah, we're working on it.
Okay, so we're going to take a 15 minute break and we'll be back with a live Q&A shortly.
You can ask questions for the Q&A at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
And also right now, if you're interested in joining the private monthly Q&A that we have, which is really fun.
It's a smaller group, so we actually pay attention to the chat and engage with the chat as it happens.
You can ask questions for that at my Patreon right now, and that Q&A will be next week.
In the meantime, until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
