#163: Making Medicine Modern (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 163rd 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 individual vs. public health, and whether the failures of the last three years are due to an over-reliance on clinical reasoning. (Spoiler: they’re not.) Rather, the failures are due to a lack of evolutionary thinking, in combination with reductionism and a reliance on both metrics and credential...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 167.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying, and I believe that we have arrived at the conclusion that not only is 163 prime, but it is some kind of ultra prime.
Is that right?
It's fantastically prime.
It's amazingly prime.
It seems like prime already gets you there.
Yeah.
Like prime is prime.
It seems really unambiguous, but then it turns out that there are categories within prime, which we probably should have seen coming.
Yeah, totally, but we didn't.
Yeah, so this week we're going to talk about what's going on in the world a little bit.
Seems like a good idea.
Yes, including, excuse me, a newly published opinion That what went wrong with regard to public health policy in the pandemic was that there was too much focus on individual health and individual doctors and not enough on the collective.
We are also going to continue a little bit the conversation from last week with regard to your framing of the product of science being models.
Not computer models, but models.
Models with which you can then take out into the world and… Extrapolate, if that's your thing.
As it should be.
Yep.
I mean, once you start extrapolating, it's hard to stop.
Indeed.
And then we're also going to talk a little bit about race at the end of the show, right?
You have that in mind?
A race to the finish.
Oh.
Not really that kind of race.
No, but it is spelled the same way.
Indeed.
Yes.
It's going to be that kind of day, isn't it?
It often is.
Yes, yes.
Now we know.
Now we do know.
Yep.
Now I also know why the cats have made themselves.
Scarce, because they know.
Yeah, like a race to what?
Unless it's a race to tuna.
We're not in.
Right, no.
They're not racing cats.
They race.
They do?
Yeah.
They race around, but they don't, it would be hard to get them, you know, that's the thing about herding cats and racing cats has the same problem.
Yeah.
We follow these live streams with live Q&As.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
I encourage you to check out Natural Selections.
This week I wrote about the age of censorship that we are clearly living in.
Oh, I forgot to bring... actually, Zach, you want to hand me the box set of the Roald Dahl books that I've got on the desk there?
We didn't talk about last week, but what had just emerged from the Telegraph in London did an amazing bit of journalism.
on the newest censorship under the guise of sensitivity readers on Roald Dahl's entire oeuvre.
And I went and found this boxed set that I had bought for our children probably 15 years ago and went and compared what's in there to what's in some of the in some of the new edits, and was stunned in a number of ways.
Not just the obvious, like, you're dumbing it down, you're erasing history, you know, you're doing things that will make it much more difficult to learn from where we have been and actually become better in the future, but also found some things that struck me in the original as, you know, icky.
Like, oh, I don't, yeah, I Kind of wish that wasn't there, but it's there.
So what you do is you leave it there in pieces that are published, and you, if you're reading it to a child or if a child is reading it on their own and it raises questions for them, you discuss it.
You talk about the things that are in fiction that weren't written literally yesterday, but 10, 15, 100, 200 years ago, and you talk about what that means about how humans change and cultures change and social mores change.
If I might add, it is also vital, the key lesson when you go back to something, whether it's Dr. Seuss or Roald Dahl or Mark Twain or any of these things, and you find something that your modern sensibilities shudder at, the real message is, you're probably doing that right now.
You're probably doing something that enlightened people in the future will look back and say, you know, how could they not have seen it?
But they didn't.
And the point is, if you erase that stuff from the stuff of the past, it gives you the impression that we've arrived someplace that we manifestly have not.
We may have been headed someplace, and now we're moving in the wrong direction, but the idea that You have a right to understand, to be able to go back and actually even just map the ignorance of the past in order to understand what your own probable ignorance looks like in the present, right?
To rob us of that is so insane.
It's anti-educational.
It imagines that we have arrived at the state of purity, and that we have full insight, full access to all that is good and right, and full understanding of all that is wrong and bad, and that all we have to do is cleanse.
Cleanse the past.
Pretend it didn't happen.
Certainly don't let the children be exposed to anything that now passes for wrong-think.
And then what?
Then they will grow up incapable of thinking for themselves, incapable of recognizing actually bad ideas when they show up.
They'll be more likely to succumb to them when they show up outside of your view, you censors and sensitivity readers and fact checkers and all the rest of the crazy names that censors are going under now.
You will actually hobble and cripple the children whom you are pretending to be working on behalf of.
It's the exact opposite.
So anyway, I wrote about that in Natural Selections this week.
And we want to remind you that we are supported by you, and we encourage you to subscribe to the channel wherever you're listening, and if you're watching clips or if you feel like there's a piece of what we do today that you'd really like to share but maybe the whole thing is too much, check out our clips channel at Dark Horse Podcast Clips on either YouTube or Odyssey, and those are always available and being generated constantly by our awesome clips producer.
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Tomorrow at my Patreon, we have our monthly private Q&A, which is lovely, and we interact with the audience there because it's small enough to do so.
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Actually, about three.
Text, audio, or video.
Wonderful people on difficult topics.
Not difficult people on wonderful topics.
I think they're wonderful topics, and you know, honestly, we're all difficult in our own ways.
So I imagine that some of the people there might even be considered particularly difficult, and you know, so might you, so might I. But no, I will stick with the framing of wonderful people on not entirely difficult topics, but including difficult topics.
Would it be fair to say that I have an easier time being difficult than most people?
I really have no idea how easy it is for you.
You may be working very hard at it.
Oh, that's a fair point.
I think this was actually a reasonable demonstration of the process right here, and you did swimmingly.
Oh, thank you, thank you.
Well, the cat is in the background wondering what we're on about, and the dog is snoring, in case you hear.
That's not our producer.
We haven't put him to sleep yet.
That's the dog.
Okay, um, and of course we have sponsors, all of whom, uh, make products or services that we actually and truly vouch for.
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Excellent.
Okay, let's start.
I should have drunk some water while you were doing that.
Let us start.
It's never too late with water.
I think there might be a moment at which it was too late.
There actually is a moment, but you're nowhere near it.
Thank you.
Yeah, this is going to be odd this week, I can tell.
I can tell already.
Yeah, it's got that slant to it.
Yep, yep.
Okay, so we're going to start this week by talking about science and medicine and evolution and the ways that these things interact and how they are understood by many people in these fields and by the public generally.
This was prompted by, there's an op-ed published in STAT on the 24th of this month, so that'll be yesterday, called Fixing U.S.
Public Health Will Require a Health Systems Revolution and for Physicians to take a back seat.
Wow, that's so...
The headline is, I'm going to read that with the right intonation, "Fixing U.S. Public Health will require a health systems revolution and for physicians to take a back seat." So the same author published a similar piece in The Nation, which if you just want to show my screen here for a moment, this is again the same author, Eric Reinhart, the This was published a couple days earlier on February 22nd, also this week, which is called Want to Fix Public Health?
Stop Thinking Like a Doctor.
Public health requires seeing the world from a collective perspective, but U.S.
agencies are still dominated by doctors trained to work on an individual level.
So, uh, I want to first share a bit, uh, a couple of paragraphs from this piece, um, that strike me as, well, let me just share a couple paragraphs first, and you can again show my screen if you like, Zach.
This is a PDF, but it's exactly, it's, it's the Nation, uh, article, um, that came out this week by, uh, again, Eric Reinhart, in a section that he calls, The Hazards of Clinicism.
When we treat patients, doctors are appropriately oriented around taking care of the individual in front of us.
So I should say that the author is an MD.
When we treat patients, doctors are appropriately oriented around taking care of the individual in front of us.
We recognize that we typically cannot change their life circumstances, such as economic and housing conditions, employers' demands, student and medical debt, neighborhood violence, or social isolation.
And so we focus our clinical attention on helping them live as well as possible within existing constraints.
Public health, by contrast, is about treating populations.
As with medicine, the goal of public health is to enable individuals to be free of health limitations that curtail their ability to live as they please.
But public health pursues this by very different means.
The task is not to help individuals accommodate to oppressive social or labor contexts.
It is instead to use the power of government to change conditions that are constraining people's freedom.
The core tools of public health then are not just vaccines or lab tests, but also policies pertaining to corporate regulation and consumer safety standards, labor protections, public jobs and housing programs, investments in community health workers, decriminalization and decarceration, and civil rights lawsuits.
Okay, um, so you can hear my screen back here.
Let me just, one sentence in particular there jumped out at me.
You know, so far, um, like this, this seems broadly correct, this, the, the arguments here.
Uh, he says, uh, the, the role of public health is instead to use the power of government to change conditions that are constraining people's freedom.
Yes.
I'm surprised to hear that from someone who is arguing for what amounts to a curtailing of greater freedoms.
That we had so much during the last three years that amounted to, in order to get your lives back, you're going to need to give us some of what you've got.
In order to be healthy, in order to be safe, in order to, ah, then it went to, in order to keep grandma healthy, in order to keep the children healthy, in order to keep grandma healthy, or grandma safe, and the children safe, then we're going to need to curtail what it is that you're allowed to do.
Take some things away, don't worry, we'll give them back later, unless we don't.
And, you know, this has been the direction for three years, and the argument here would seem to me seem to be that the problem has been too much of a focus on the individual and not enough on the population.
And that seems to me to be indicative of having lived on a kind of a different planet for the last three years.
Well, let's fix it.
Okay.
Because I know exactly what's being alleged here.
And my sense is, so far, what they've said in principle is at least not wrong.
But the problem is the in principle.
It's a he.
It's not a they.
It is a... I will get back to defending why it is a they later, because although it is authored by a he, it is speaking for something else, I believe.
But the issue is here one of net freedom, right?
It is not one of instantaneously measured freedom.
The argument, which was persuasive to many at the beginning of the pandemic, was that in order to control the spread of the virus and therefore free us from it later, we needed to give up freedoms in the present.
That turned out to be horseshit, right?
It's not even obvious that the people who were handing down these policies were interested in us controlling the pandemic.
They exploited it for other reasons, and that is a terrifying story.
But nonetheless, there's nothing wrong with the idea that one gives up some freedoms now in order to have greater freedoms later.
One surrenders to the TSA and to the authority of those on an airplane in order to have the freedom to go to some far off place, ashwagandha or somewhere else, in order to see something they've never seen before.
So anyway, the point is, trading a reduction in freedom now in order for greater freedom later is a perfectly rational argument to make.
And certainly it is true that public...
It can be a perfectly rational argument.
It is not inherently a rational argument in any place, but there is nothing irrational about making such an argument.
It is not a non sequitur.
And I will say that public health, if it were to function, is about this very thing.
There is a conflict between the individual level of health and the collective level of health that can result in a paradoxical...
If you free the individual, it reduces the freedom of individuals on a much larger scale.
This is true, but...
It seems to me that the argument hinges, that Reinhart's argument, and yes it is a bigger they that he is speaking for, right, hinges on the idea that practitioners of medicine and science throughout the pandemic, including, and he calls out Fauci and Walensky actually, it's interesting that we are now arriving there, right, that he calls out basically the heads of organizations that helped make policy that many people are finally beginning to recognize was terrible, almost across the board.
I would say across the board, but many people are coming to realize that at least many more of these decisions were bad than many people believed at the time.
He thinks that this is because these were individual scientists pursuing things that were good for individuals.
And my argument, of course, and our argument, is It has been for almost three years.
That's not the problem here.
That's not what went wrong.
What went wrong, in part, is that science actually wasn't being done.
There were a lot of the sort of Markers of science.
I mean, there was even Fauci declaring that he was science, and there were credentials, and there were, you know, there were papers that looked really science-y, and when you went into them, they had lots of numbers in them and all of this.
But it wasn't actually a scientific approach to understanding what was going on.
And let me just, one more little excerpt here before we get back to how else you wanted to fix these first two Paragraphs that I read, this is actually from the paragraph just before in that same Nation op-ed that I just read, and you can show my screen if you want to, Zach, but you don't have to.
He writes, Physician and public health scholar Milton Romer once observed that for the work of public health, quote, most of medical education is irrelevant.
But neither doctors or relevant medical knowledge nor relative ignorance of essential fields—labor history, social anthropology, political economy, epidemiology, environmental sciences—is the most troubling aspect of physician control of public health.
Rather, it's a lack of epistemic humility, conferring an inability to recognize the limits and hazards of clinical reasoning, with which medical training often imbues them.
Clinical reasoning is not only not the population-level logic of public health, it is frequently antithetical to it.
So this, to me, perfectly encapsulates the problem with the conversation that we have been having, that we have been trying to have publicly, and that so many people, so many of the talking heads, both in and outside of medicine, that are effectively making or enforcing the public policy that's being handed down to us.
is making.
First of all, look at the list of things that he thinks need to be included.
Labor history, social anthropology, political economy, epidemiology, environmental sciences.
Where's evolution?
And I will talk a little bit more maybe before I get into this, but what I want to talk about ultimately here, why this is coming up, is that nowhere in any of these conversations Is evolution actually showing up?
And what we have been doing for our entire careers, but publicly for almost three years now, is revealing why having an evolutionary understanding of the world you're in And how complex that means, the complex systems that you're engaging, you know, of and with must be, can actually help you make informed decisions about your life and the lives of your loved ones and help you be healthier and more productive going forward.
So,
He's attacking the clinical reasoning of Walensky and Fauci, and what I would say is we have seen no evidence of clinical reasoning from them or from the vast majority of doctors who have been in lockstep with things like mandates and definitely avoiding any kind of effective treatment, and things like putting patients on ventilators, as we talked about last week on Dark Horse.
This isn't about a failure of clinical reasoning, or this isn't about the limits of clinical reasoning to solve public health problems.
That may also be true.
Like, you know, the fields that he mentions, labor history and political economy, are relevant.
to a question of how you know how is it if you're a doctor and a patient comes in and you can tell that their diet is crap but they live in a food desert and there's no way for them to get good food what can you do for them right like what you can't exactly tell them you need to start eating you know steak and avocado if they have no access to steak and avocado Right.
So that is a problem.
And that is a that is a conflict, a tension between individual level health practitioners, and a society where public health is actually in all of our interest.
But the problem with the COVID response was actually deeper, bigger, and more fundamental than what he is talking about here.
It was a complete failure to think logically, rigorously, scientifically, and in any way evolutionarily, at basically every single level.
And time and time again we got told, stay in your lane!
It's like, you know what?
If vaccinology and epidemiology and virology and, you know, On and on and on and on, and medical science and all of these things are failing because they are so specialized that they can't tell what is going on.
And we are coming in with a generalist paradigm that is evolutionary analysis, and it is time and time and time again able to predict what is going to happen next.
Well then, maybe everyone in all of these fields ought to be getting some background and experience in thinking evolutionarily, and we would all be better off.
I hate to disagree with you.
Do you?
Yes.
But I've got to take you to task.
You're being far too generous.
In other words, it's worse than that.
And I want to resurrect an idea.
Some may have heard me invoke it before.
It's originally a cybernetic idea, but it is so fundamentally important that it belongs squarely in the center of this discussion.
It is posi-wit.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Okay.
And what this says is it doesn't matter.
POSIWID?
POSIWID.
Yeah.
Purpose of system is what it does.
Right.
It's an acronym.
Right.
What it means is I don't care what that object claims to be doing.
I don't even care what the people who built the object think it does.
The purpose of the object is what it does.
And the reason that this is so important is evolutionary.
Which is that sometimes, even a system that is architected well for a particular purpose, if you build the right characteristics into it, will evolve into something else.
And nobody changes the label on it.
They assume it does what it always did.
So, my point is going to be, the purpose of our public health system is apparently to override doctors and inflict dangerous treatments on people that are profitable.
I don't know why that's the case or how anybody allowed it to become the case, but it is demonstrably the case.
It is the reason that we had a system, and this is the place that I am, I know you know this, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but the reason that I'm going to push back a little bit is that I don't think this was a failure of our system.
This was the success of an undeclared system that overrode the system we're supposed to have, that's supposed to protect the public health.
That's quite possible.
I feel like they're all related conversations.
But the point that I'm trying to make here with regard to Reinhardt, who as far as I know, I don't know who he is, as far as I know, is trying to make an argument about the collective versus the individual levels of analysis.
And he is making a claim that science failed us, that what has been revealed for the last three years is that science can't get you there.
And what we have been saying for three years is, no, you haven't tested that hypothesis yet because science wasn't done here.
We need actual science.
We need to actually do science.
And I would, can I invoke this now?
For instance, here's why we get sick.
The New Science of Darwinian Medicine by Randolph Nessie and George Williams.
Nessie was at Michigan when we were at Michigan.
We actually did, as I remember, we did like a semester-long seminar on Darwinian medicine with him.
Yep.
And we knew George Williams before his death.
Yep.
And George Williams is one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century.
And this book is critical.
Again, it's called Why We Get Sick, The New Science of Darwinian Medicine.
It is the best there is on this topic.
And it was published in 1994.
It was published 29 years ago, and there is not another book that has come in and continued the conversation.
And so Nessie is actually an MD, and George Williams is a PhD in biology or evolutionary biology.
And, excuse me, They argue, correctly, early to the game, that medicine, in order to actually be good at treating people, needs to take an evolutionary approach in all things.
Not just to the human body, but to the interaction of the human body with pathogens, to the arms races that happen between them, to which diseases that we experience are about mismatches with our current environment because of hyper-novelty, the term that we Coined?
Coined in A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Which of them are actually about trade-offs?
They're intrinsic to our system, and we ought to choose A or B, and neither of them are great, but you're going to be stuck with the trade-off.
There are different ways that our bodies do fail us, and some of them are avoidable, and some of them aren't, but they can be mitigated.
And this book does a fantastic job of describing some of that.
So I just want to read a brief excerpt.
Again, this is a book published 29 years ago, still the best treatise on the topic of Darwinian medicine as far as I'm aware.
So from late in the book, page 236, we have This is near the end of the book, in which they've already laid out argument after argument, example after example.
Why isn't the body more reliable?
Why is there disease at all?
As we have seen, the reasons are remarkably few.
First, there are genes that make us vulnerable to disease.
Some, though fewer than has been thought, are defectives continually arising from new mutations but kept scarce by natural selection.
Other genes cannot be eliminated because they cause no disadvantages until it is too late in life for them to affect fitness.
Antagonistic pleiotropy, as Brett, you have written about in your work on telomeres, cancer, and senescence.
Most deleterious genetic effects, however, are actively maintained by selection because they have unappreciated benefits that outweigh their costs.
Some of these are maintained because of heterozygote advantage.
Some are selected because they increase their own frequency, despite creating a disadvantage for the individual who bears them.
Some are genetic quirks that have adverse effects only when they interact with a novel environmental factor.
Second, disease results from exposure to novel factors that were not present in the environment in which we evolved.
Given enough time, the body can adapt to almost anything, but the 10,000 years since the beginnings of civilization are not nearly enough time and we suffer accordingly.
Infectious agents evolve so fast that our defenses are always a step behind.
Third, disease results from design compromises, such as upright posture with its associated back problems.
Fourth, we are not the only species with adaptations produced and maintained by natural selection, which works just as hard for pathogens trying to eat us and the organisms we want to eat.
In conflict with these organisms, as in baseball, you can't win them all.
Finally, disease results from unfortunate historical legacies.
If the organism had been designed with the possibility of fresh starts and major changes, there would be better ways of preventing many diseases.
Alas, every successive generation of the human body must function well, with no chance to go back and start afresh.
This is an opaque reference to adaptive landscapes.
Finally, the human body turns out to be both fragile and robust.
Like all products of organic evolution, it is a bundle of compromises, each of which offers an advantage, but often at the price of susceptibility to disease.
These susceptibilities cannot be eliminated by any duration of natural selection, for it is the very power of natural selection that created them.
That's the sentence that I wanted to get to here.
You will find Go into any scientific paper or medical paper right now.
Go onto Twitter and find the medical professionals and researchers talking about, they've got the breakthrough, they're going to cure cancer, they're going to cure aging, they've got the vaccine that's going to stop everything in its tracks, and see
How hubristic they are, and the failure to understand that natural selection got us there, and it's still working, and it's going to continue to move forward in time regardless of what we throw at.
This assumption of a stable background onto which we can apply our treatments is not just arrogant, but incredibly weak-minded.
Like it really misunderstands the landscape that we're in as an evolved and evolving landscape.
Yeah, the medical approach in isolation of an evolutionary understanding results in us being upended again and again by our failure to appreciate the complexity of the system, which we are very unlikely to improve upon, right?
We can do certain things.
Our best tricks are borrowed from evolution itself, right?
Antibiotics are miraculous, but we don't make them.
Those antibiotics come from chemical warfare between bacteria and fungi, right?
And we borrow them.
Surgery, marvelous, but surgery doesn't work on your car.
Why not?
Because it is entirely contingent on the ability of the body to fix itself after you slice it open and pull something out or modify something.
So, you know, it is a recognition of the complexity of the system and the The nature of the ratio that makes you far more likely to screw the thing up than improve upon it, that is the basis of the correct thinking, and this is now flipping that order on its head, right?
Exactly.
Because you just went there, one more little excerpt, this time from our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, In which we devote one, two-ish, but really one chapter to medicine and another to the human body and form and function more generally, we say in the chapter on medicine, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, said biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky.
This is famous.
That quote shows up in Why we get sick in most books that talk about evolution at all.
So that's Dubchansky from 1963.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
We write, medicine is biological at its heart.
That does not mean though that most medical research being done is evolutionary in its thinking or in the questions being asked.
Combine a tendency to engage only proximate questions with a bias towards reductionism, and you end up with medicine that has blinders on.
The view is narrow.
Even the great victories of Western medicine—surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines—have been over-extrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn't be.
When all you have is a knife, a pill, and a shot, the whole world looks as though it would benefit from being cut and medicated.
And just a reminder that we actually submitted the first draft of this book and that chapter didn't change much just before COVID was hitting, just before lockdowns in early March of 2020.
That was written before COVID and it's still true.
So So, there are a few connections I want to draw here, and I want to recover the idea that this is really a they giving voice to a perspective through an individual who has authored this wrong-headed piece.
But I want to point out, when we spoke last week about the value, what is produced by science being models that are robust enough to extrapolate from, I want to point out That the idea that we are giving voice to here in a medical context has a famous quote that people, our audience, is very likely to know from a totally different context, from a totally different source, an absolutely non-medical source.
And that is Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Now what that means is that, why is he saying that?
He's saying that because he is interfacing with a complex system.
And the point is, if you're interfacing with a complex system, you either get this most fundamental point, or you're going to be, you know, making infantile mistakes until you get it, because it's the baseline.
If you've got a functional complex system, then the point is, you probably don't know nearly enough about the consequences of the intervention you naively think is going to improve things.
Which then brings us to this question about, and really, the title of that piece, right?
Doctors Taking a Back Seat?
Now, here's the thing.
Public health is the recognition that there are trade-offs between the individual level and the scaled-up version over a society.
That's real.
The problem is, how good are we at solving those larger scale problems?
And I find it essentially diabolical that they would go after what just happened to us as a demonstration that really we need to double down on public health.
Because what they did is they silenced the doctors, right?
They silenced the doctors and they did something in lieu of public health, right?
It was pharma corruption that spoke as if it was trying to solve a public health problem That caused so much harm.
And what I believe that article is, whether the author knows it or not, and the author may well not know it, the author may just simply be following a signal that something needs to be given voice, but that voice is pharma having captured the system, now trying not to be ushered out the door on the basis of all the harm that was done, saying, well, that wasn't real public health, right?
What we really need to do is get rid of those people who screwed up the public health response and do some real public health.
It's interesting that actually in at least one of those two articles by the same author, published within a couple days of each other in Stat and in The Nation, he has pharma corruption and perverse incentives, maybe not named exactly that way, but he calls out pharma, which is part of why I focused on The Nation article.
We were longtime subscribers to The Nation, and criticism of the role that pharma had in public health was one of the things that I had come to expect from them, and that we have seen from nothing Nowhere on the left, you know, for the last three years.
And finally, we're beginning to get these little intimations.
And, you know, it's going to come with some whitewashing and some disappearing of history and some pretending and some lying.
And that's, you know, that's some stuff that we would, we're going to try to make sure doesn't happen.
By those who would like to pretend that they got it right all along.
But okay, if the nation is coming back to its roots in which it understands that those things that have power will try to protect their power and therefore you can't take literally all the things that they tell you about what they're doing and why they're doing it, then maybe we can get back to some kind of conversation about what has actually happened.
Well, I've got to tell you, I'm struggling not to be cynical about this, but I take pieces like that one, that at this moment would double down on so-called public health, a system that has just failed in this way, I take them as part of what we have called the middle ground scramble.
And the idea is, nobody at this moment is going to be taken seriously in any conversation if they don't scold pharma.
Right?
So, the scolding of pharma is obligate in a piece like this, in order for pharma to keep its captured entity and to continue to sideline doctors, who at the end of the day have to face the patients.
And the fact is, medicine has a multi-thousand year history.
Right?
We have some successes in public health, and we have some spectacular failures.
COVID is a spectacular failure.
And so the idea of sidelining doctors after you've just shut doctors up in an effort to advance the public health agenda, which turned out to be a pharma agenda, which did all of this harm, is absolutely insane.
And the, you know, the excuse is basically, well, real communism hasn't ever been tried.
Kind of excuse, right?
Now we have to start public health, right?
After we've paid this huge global price.
And the answer is no.
Can we at least go back to doctors who swear an oath not to harm their patients?
Right.
So, I fear that we're talking a little bit about cross-purposes.
I want to get back to talking about evolution and the fact that the public health policy, the doctors who are making the policy and who are actually interacting with patients mostly don't know how to think evolutionarily.
And that that is the core problem.
And so just one example that we have been talking about for a long time is that most people, including most doctors, but including perhaps especially the many of the intellectuals and so-called intellectuals out there, including those with medical and scientific training, Actually make claims like, why does it matter where SARS-CoV-2 came from?
Like, what could it possibly matter?
It's irrelevant to how we respond to it, right?
Like, we were hearing this back in 2020, and we're continuing to hear it now.
It's ridiculous.
And I went back, and I think that the first time, but it may not have been the first time, that we specifically talked about this.
We've talked about it over and over and over again.
Why does the origin of the virus matter in terms of how the virus will then act in humans, continue to evolve, and therefore should be used to inform how we actually act at a public health level?
On July 14th, 2020, on Dark Horse Livestream number 30, timestamp 30 minutes and 39 seconds, and I'll put this into the show notes, you start discussing why and how a lab origin may explain why the virus acts the way it does.
with regard to effects on children and transmission outdoors and other things.
So that's in July of 2020, and I'm not sure that was the first time you were talking about it or we were talking about it, but I know that at least it happened then.
At least that far.
At least then, and we've been talking about it ever since, and using an evolutionary understanding of, okay, if not zoonotic, because from almost the very beginning, the evidence has pointed to not zoonotic but lab origin, what else can we say about what is going to happen next?
That is part of what we have been doing.
That is part of the model that we have been using, which, guess what, was available to anyone who wanted it.
And, you know, this is part of why, you know, I agree with you.
This doesn't look like an error, because, you know, it doesn't cost money.
It takes some practice, and it takes some patience, and it takes being willing to be wrong, and to rethink, you know, when you arrive at someplace that is wrong, and go back to the last place on which you are certain that you're on firm intellectual ground, and go, okay, well, let's take the other branch then.
Like, you have to be doing that all the time, and most people feel like, ah, that's not what I do.
I don't have time.
That makes me look weak.
Something.
But we need it.
Like, we need all the people who are making decisions on behalf of any of the rest of us to absolutely 100% be willing to have exactly what the author of this piece calls epistemic humility, but, like, actual epistemic humility.
Not the kind that he is asking for.
The kind that he needs to, and that all of these people need.
And that we have.
That we need, and you need to constantly check in with yourself.
Be like, am I wrong?
How would I know?
Who can I ask?
What can I check with in terms of how many of the views that I hold are inconsistent?
And do it all the time.
That's the thing.
It doesn't end.
You don't get to do this and be like, okay, I did it.
I graduated.
I'm done thinking for myself now.
Now I'm an expert.
Now I'm an expert, and what I believed on that day of graduation is always true, shall always be true, nothing ever shall change because my degree says so.
That's not how the world works.
No, and if I might, this epistemic humility thing is going to become very important, and I'm concerned that this abuse of it, it's like evidence-based medicine.
Who wouldn't be in favor of evidence-based medicine?
Until you dig and you discover that evidence-based medicine doesn't mean evidence-based medicine, right?
So anyway, the point is epistemic humility involves building a circuit in which you are very sensitive to evidence that you have something important wrong and you are highly motivated to chase it down so that as quickly as possible you can fix the error and stop being wrong.
Exactly.
Right?
And so does that process end?
Absolutely not.
Right?
What you do is you get closer and closer to right, which means you get closer and closer to a model that is more and more predictive while assuming less.
That's the whole point of the exercise.
And anybody who thinks that they've got this wired and now they need to tell doctors to sit down, right, is not displaying epistemic humility.
They're displaying the opposite.
They're displaying a kind of arrogance, which they would like to, of course, cloak in the idea of humility, because it's very attractive to do that, but it's not right.
Yes.
It is, you are putting us in danger for the next one.
Exactly.
And I'm reminded, I mean, this is a theme, this is a drumbeat of ours, but this piece that I wrote, you know, What If We're Wrong, it was first published in Aereo and then I republished it on my Substack, specifically goes after the certainty that so many people seem to have.
And, you know, ironically, it is our supposed certainty that people attack us for.
And it is their certainty of things that we've said that we never said, that is the basis for a lot of these, you know, crazy beliefs and accusations and frankly, at different levels in different places, policies that are being that are being implemented.
So why are Doctors.
You know, it's one thing to say, okay, most people don't understand how to think evolutionarily.
It's not necessarily widespread in high school or college curricula.
Even, you know, even if you're a biology major, maybe you had, you know, a course, maybe, right?
So still, though, it seems like doctors, you know, if If we're right, and if Nessie and Williams are right in why we get sick, and everything about us is the product and products of evolution, obviously doctors should be trained in, practiced in, skilled in understanding how to think evolutionarily.
So I did a little Search on medical school curricula in the U.S., and I just pulled up five.
First I googled, and the first one that came up was Drexel University's College of Medicine, and then I went, you know what?
I'm going to actually just pick four more, not randomly, but out of my head.
So I went and looked at Stanford, University of Florida and Gainesville, Harvard, Drexel, and the University of Washington.
Here in Washington State, in Seattle.
And searched, and I don't have clear visuals, so I'm just going to walk us through this.
I basically looked for the curriculum that is required for all medical students, and to the degree that it was available, tried to search on all of the courses offered.
But specifically searched on not just the names of courses, but the course descriptions for all of when it was available, first, second, third, fourth year coursework, and all the required coursework.
And I searched on the word evolution.
And then I also searched on just the, just evo, because evolutionarily, evolutionary, right, could show up.
At Stanford, there are many different pathways possible.
Every med student takes the same course as the first year.
They do have a social justice and health equity curriculum, which is prominently displayed.
But the word evolution and even the root, the root evo shows up Zero times.
At Stanford.
University of Florida College of Medicine.
The required courses.
Year 1?
No evolution.
Year 2?
No evolution.
Year 3 and 4?
Nope.
None.
Never.
Okay?
Harvard Medical School.
Core courses.
No mention.
And again, I'm not just looking at titles of courses.
I'm looking at course descriptions.
I'm searching on course descriptions here.
Nothing.
The Drexel College of Medicine.
Nope.
How about the University of Washington School of Medicine?
Uh, no.
They make it a little bit harder to assess because they've got all these different pathways, but, uh, but no.
None of the pages I landed on could I find a single one.
There was one page on one of these sites where Evo showed up, but it was within the word developing, so that doesn't count.
Right.
Right.
So, literally, five – and this is some of the top medical schools in the country, and some that aren't – five medical schools in the US right now with regard to their required, and to some degree, as much as I was able to find it, their not required, but if you're interested in this, that, or the other, curriculum.
Make no mention of evolution anywhere in the coursework.
And that's not to say, of course, that some of these classes, once you're in it, might occasionally reference evolution.
I assume that they do.
But it's that referencing which is to say, of course we all know that, and therefore we all understand that.
We are evolved.
But frankly, most people who think they believe in evolution don't have any idea what they're doing.
They don't know how it works.
They don't know how to think evolutionarily.
And it's how you get to People imagining that clinical work was going on here with COVID.
It wasn't.
This was not in any way informed by what we actually are as evolved human beings this whole three years.
None of it.
No, no.
It flew in the face.
Yes.
And that is in some sense the story of what we did, is we just constantly checked reality against an evolutionary model, and what was being advised never made any sense, which alarmed us.
To a greater and greater degree.
Yes.
I did want to point out, it may or may not be easy for you to find, but that sentence that you said was a cryptic reference to adaptive landscapes.
Oh, yeah.
It's relevant here if you can find it.
I think I can.
This was in page 236.
Here we go.
It's like the last sentence in what you're almost... No, it's the previous paragraph.
If the organism had been designed with the possibility of fresh starts and major changes, there would be better ways of preventing many diseases.
Alas, every successive generation of the human body must function well, with no chance to go back and start afresh.
Perfect.
Is that it?
Yeah.
Now here's the reason I want to resurrect that.
Again, as with the Thomas Sowell quote that happens to apply to biology, or vice versa, the quote you've just read there is a reference to what you and I would technically call historical contingency, and an engineer might call path dependence.
Okay?
Now I want to point out that the... and by the way, it's not just that five medical schools make no mention of it.
It's five of five that you looked at.
Exactly.
I could have kept going.
You could have kept going.
My prediction, I would love to have anyone who says, you know, actually this medical school is the exception.
It would be great to know if it exists.
I've been saying for I don't know how long, decades, that medicine is still taught as if Darwin had never published.
Yes, exactly.
And so anyway, why is that?
Now I want to give them their due.
I want to explain where that initially came from, because it did have a good reason at first.
And then it no longer has a good reason, and we are now paying a tremendous price, the non-evolutionary nature of medicine.
Okay.
The problem is, you discover a powerful principle like natural selection.
You know, 1859, Darwin finally publishes what he's been working on.
The world is suddenly aware of something.
It can be sort of summed up in a paragraph, but it's really not clear what it implies about medicine.
If you were to say, aha!
Suddenly we know what we are.
Surely that impacts medicine.
Let's go back and revise the curriculum, you know, three weeks after Darwin published.
You would be more likely to do harm than good.
Yeah.
Right?
Because there wasn't enough understanding of what the implications, what Darwin had said was too crude.
You don't add the new stuff to the core curriculum right away.
Right.
So my point is, initially there is a reason for doctors not to jump at evolution even though in a philosophical sense it was obvious that it would ultimately have tremendous implications and that, frankly, medicine should start with selection.
Right?
Every medical curriculum on earth should start with this, because it is riddled throughout it, whether you mention it or not, whether you understand it or not.
Right?
Clonal selection, the way in which a vaccine induces immunity, is a sped-up version of literal genetic evolution inside the body.
Right?
If you don't understand the nuances of how selection works, then you're not going to understand clonal selection, and you're going to just see Vaccination as a kind of a black box that induces something important that fends off disease, and you're gonna screw up when they try to feed you something that doesn't work this way, or doesn't properly work this way, or they have to use an adjuvant because what they gave you isn't good enough to induce the response, or any of these things.
So, anyway, at first, there is a reason for doctors not to jump at Darwinism.
But then it becomes a territorial question, and they get used to not thinking evolutionarily, even as evolutionary thinking catches up and then overtakes medicine with its capacity to say something about what is likely to do more harm than good, right?
So we are still dealing with a Several thousand year old oath to do no harm, but the principle that would allow you to see where harm is before you do it is not invoked in any core way in medical curricula, which is frightening at this point, right?
That historical contingency is resulting in us not going back and saying, well, It's 2023.
Maybe it's time to rewrite the medical curriculum in light of all of the things that we have now learned about the way evolution works, right?
It wasn't ready in 1859.
In 2023, it's long overdue.
And it's not like the field of evolutionary medicine Hasn't progressed since the publishing of that book.
But what it has been done is it's been segregated.
The point is it is treated as non-medical.
The same way evolutionary psychology is treated outside of the clinical practice, right?
The point is it's an abstraction.
Oh, it's very nice that we can think in a Darwinian way about medicine.
No, it's not very nice.
It's fundamentally important when you go into your doctor's office.
In fact... It's not an add-on.
It's not an anon, and I believe that book has a terrible piece of advice from Richard Dawkins on the back.
Does it say something about... Buy two copies and give one to your doctor?
Buy two copies and give one to your doctor.
I know this is terrible advice because I did it.
You can imagine how that went over.
Okay, I don't know what to ask.
Well, I mean, basically the point is it is taken as an affront.
It is taken as a challenge to somebody's expertise rather than a, hey, you and I are in parallel fields.
I'm not in no position to tell you about medicine, but I am in a position to tell you about something that I know isn't included in that medicine, and this might change your thinking, right?
So anyway... Your doctor wasn't appreciative.
No, my doctor was not appreciative, which I get, right?
But nonetheless, my doctor, well, I don't know if my doctor went on to read it or not, but my doctor, assuming that his initial reaction was indicative, missed an opportunity.
Did he throw it at your head?
He didn't throw it, he just looked at me like I had walked in from Mars.
But in any case, Path dependence?
That is a feature of a model.
A model of developing systems.
Medicine is a developing system.
The human body is a developing system.
It's not surprising that path dependence ends up a relevant piece of the toolkit for understanding both things.
And medicine is in the process of screwing up by not being evolutionary, which is a big part of, as you point out, why you and I, with no budget, sitting here just hashing stuff out in front of a camera, were able to beat all of these experts, because we have a model that was actually relevant across the pandemic.
Evolution is relevant across the pandemic.
It's relevant to the evolution of the pathogen.
It is relevant to the evolution of the immune response.
It is relevant to the human body and the damage that is done to it by both pathogens and by badly formulated pharmaceuticals.
The point is, it's not just another field.
It is a baseline toolkit that works for any of these complex systems that have this adaptive feature at their core.
And it should be updating medicine, which it is not doing.
It's really, really not.
Yeah.
So you, this week I believe, had a friend approach you with a question that felt to you like you could use some of what you were talking about last week to continue the conversation about the product of science being a model.
Yep, a good friend sent me something that they wanted my take on because it stretched the bounds of creaturelity as far as they were concerned and they wanted to know whether or not it looked different from my perspective.
Zach, can you put up that tweet I sent you?
That's a little hard to read.
You want me to read it?
Yeah, would you read it?
You can see it.
Many people have been asking me how I got my arachniditis despite being unvaccinated.
Two days after spending time with a friend who had just received the vaccine, my heart began to have severe irregularities and it took me a year to recover.
Vaccine shedding is a valid concern.
And this is from an account, Dr. Simon Godek, who is a Brazilian.
He has a PhD.
It's not a medical degree.
He's a technologist of some kind.
And the question here is he's reporting... So this is not the friend, he's a friend of his.
A friend forwarded this tweet and said, basically, should I take this seriously?
And I thought that this was an excellent place to take our evolving model for a spin.
Right?
Is this person reporting something that we all ought to be concerned about?
That is to say, a recently vaccinated person shedding something, presumably pseudo-uridine stabilized mRNAs, causing myocarditis even though one was not vaccinated.
Alarming, if true.
So I want to tell you a little bit about the evolution of my understanding of the shedding question.
So the issue of shedding has been discussed for a very long period of time, since the beginning of the vaccination campaign.
People have reported all kinds of anecdotal stuff.
Now, my understanding, and I think it's your understanding as well, is that there's something very unlikely about the idea of being in close proximity to a vaccinated person and being importantly affected by something shed by them.
Just, just, just at the like density dependence level of analysis.
There's just not, it doesn't seem like there's enough of it.
Well, it seems like there can't be enough of it for the following reason.
If a person is given the inoculation, they get a huge dose.
Hundreds of millions of particles.
The amount that they could shed into the environment would be a tiny fraction of that.
So the point is, if the stuff that a person sheds into the environment is itself Lethal, right?
If this was, you know, polonium-like or something.
Then the point is the dose that they got themselves would have been so immense that you would expect nobody to survive it.
Right.
So the point is, one, if you take a standard model of just simply dosages and materials, this does not sound like a familiar material that a person could get a huge amount of it injected into them and shed enough of it to cause a pathology in an adjacent person.
So anyway, that was my initial doubt.
The day I met Robert Malone, Robert Malone came to our house, to our studio, to do Dark Horse, which is where I met him.
Instantly liked the guy.
Right?
Instantly liked the guy because he has the same love of biology that you and I do, and the same interest in finding somebody else who knows something about the topic, and playing back and forth, just volleying, non-competitive, very interested in talking about anything you might raise.
He doesn't show up with the diploma going like, I stopped learning back in whenever it was I graduated, and I'm read-only now.
Right?
Like, good scientists are never read-only.
Right.
And, you know, also, very much to his credit, any time that, in my case, something I said to him challenged what he had previously thought, he would admit in real time, oh, hadn't thought of it that way, hmm, that's interesting, it might be such and such and so and so.
Anyway, so I asked him after the podcast, I said, look, I've been hearing a lot about this shedding stuff, what do you think?
And I tried not to inform him of my perspective, so I don't think there was any risk of polluting his perspective, but there would be I wouldn't have to worry about it.
And he was very dubious about shedding.
Okay.
So I went on from that point thinking, yeah, there's something weird about this shedding story.
It probably is not a significant thing.
And I now have not only the fact that my model says it's very unlikely, the dosage consideration makes it unlikely, but I also have somebody who knows this topic from a completely different perspective who sees it the same way.
Okay.
I will say that after that, the medical dissidence have taken on increasing seriousness about the question of shedding.
Is there a shedding phenomenon?
So that is to say, in spite of the fact that a standard model of dosages would suggest this is unlikely to be significant, there is enough pattern in the universe that causes people who were initially dubious to wonder.
And there are, in fact, some places in which shedding is probably a significant factor.
Things like breastfeeding, blood transfusions, and potentially sex, right?
Right, but none of those are shedding.
Well, they're shedding, but they're not shedding in the sense of, you know... I mean, it's fluid exchange.
Right, exactly.
Fluid exchange is different from shedding.
It's a subcategory, but let's just say that would make sense if there was some consideration in places where fluid is exchanged, but not in, you know, breathing in the same space as somebody, for example.
So, in any case, we've updated our model.
There are some special cases which might have an important relevance, and I believe, sadly, there is some evidence that suggests there have been some injuries from this.
But then we have a claim like the one in this tweet.
Now, the one in the tweet, I don't want to fault the person who reports this, because they are reporting something factual.
Now, I'm in no position to check their facts, but what they're saying is that there was a temporal A temporal alignment of their presence with a recently vaccinated person and then this symptom showing up which has been shown to be the product of, it's an adverse event that follows mRNA vaccination.
So the question is, is there something going on that suggests the model is incomplete?
Is this person actually reporting an adverse event from an inoculation that they didn't get or not?
I never saw this before and I'm looking for it because I'd love to see what you're talking about again.
Zach, would you just put it up on the screen again?
Is that a tweet?
Yeah.
Yep.
Okay.
Two days after spending.
It's really hard to see our thing the way it is Friday.
right now.
Two days after spending time with a friend who had just received the vaccine, my heart began to have severe irregularities and it took me a year to recover.
Well, I mean, again, we don't know this person, we don't know anything about his life, but pointing to a two days after and then I've had a year of sounds like a kind of temporal causality, but it doesn't say anything about but pointing to a two days after and then I've had a year of sounds like a kind of temporal causality, You know, those two days, the seven days before, the month before any of it, right?
Like, did they have COVID, right?
Like, you know, there's all sorts of things that might have been true.
And so, you know, it's a very selective story, as stories always are.
But it certainly doesn't demonstrate anything with the kind of assurance that the tone suggests.
Right.
Well, this demonstrates nothing.
We agree with that.
The question is, could it be indicative of something?
It could.
Is it likely to be indicative of something?
I don't think so.
Now, if we go back to the model of vaccine injury that I presented, the model whereby the transfection of cells around the body haphazardly results in the immune system Attacking the cells that are making this foreign protein because the immune system effectively assumes that those cells have been virally infected and it is programmed to destroy virally infected cells.
Is that likely to be going on here as a result of shedding and could it be causing this myocarditis?
And here's what I would say and what I said to the friend in question.
Dosage suggests that that is near impossible.
That it is not impossible that a stabilized mRNA could escape a vaccinated person, be taken in by breathing or some other mechanism by somebody who hadn't been vaccinated, could transfect a cell, and that that cell could be destroyed by the immune system.
But the point is, the degree of harm that would come from a small number of these instances would be so tiny that it would be undetectable.
In fact, When a really good vaccine is based on the technology of attenuation.
An attenuated virus vaccine infects cells, and the immune system does kill them, right?
And the point is, there's not a pathology that comes from a good vaccine, because it's a small number of cells.
It may be millions, but it's a small number of cells.
But there is cell death.
Right, there is cell death, and so the point is, if you were able to measure finely enough Is it possible that somebody could shed a particle that would have this impact on a cell that would cause the loss of a heart cell in the worst case?
Yeah, but you wouldn't notice it.
So, I don't think that myocarditis could be caused by this.
Could I be wrong?
Absolutely, and I will tell you how I could be wrong on this.
But my basic point is, if the thing functions the way we think it does, this story does not function, it is not causally explanatory.
And what I would say is, remember, Every time I talk about this topic I say, remember that myocarditis, itis, means inflammation, right?
The reason that myocarditis is being caused by these mRNA vaccines, we now effectively know this based on what we've seen, based on what we showed last week for example, Is that there is damage to the heart.
Damage done when transfected cells are attacked by the immune system and destroyed.
Right?
It's like a burn inside the heart or any other tissue and it will be every other tissue.
Every tissue that is perfused with blood and takes up these particles.
But, itis is a syndrome.
It's a symptom.
It is not the disease itself.
So the point is, this person reporting that they had myocarditis That's not a high degree of specificity.
It doesn't say that it's the same kind of myocarditis.
It's a symptom of something.
It's a manifestation.
It's a manifestation.
Now, myocarditis is serious.
This person had a serious something from some cause.
But it is unlikely to be the thing that causes people who have taken in large numbers of these mRNA to have myocarditis, which is to say an internal burn of their heart.
Now, okay, so basically the point here is really about, well, what do you do with a model?
Well, you've now heard a model about what these adverse events are.
That model says that this story about somebody shedding particles and causing the same phenomenon in an unvaccinated person, Unlikely to be true, at least not by the same mechanism.
Okay, so that's what the model does.
It allows you to extrapolate.
Does that give you certainty?
Absolutely not.
And then I would say, I would open up another branch here, and I would say, if it turned out that there was a pattern that people who had been in proximity to those who had been transfected without having been transfected themselves showed this pattern of damage consistent with having been transfected, How is that possible?
Right?
I'm not saying this is true, but what would I think if I saw that it wasn't one person reporting this, but it was a pattern that had been consistently demonstrated?
Then I would have to say, well, you need something that would amplify the harm of a small number of particles.
Right?
Something akin to a prion disease.
So a prion disease is one in which, and by the way, there is a whole interesting topic to be explored as to whether or not prions are really pathogens or whether they are just a strange kind of self-propagating error, right?
But put that aside for a second.
A prion is... The distinction that you're making here being that pathogen in your dictionary that you've just...
Yeah, so really what I'm evoking is there's an evolutionary phenomenon going on when you have a prion.
some self-replicating error is just existing without any benefit or cost to itself from its interaction with host.
Yeah.
So really what I'm evoking is there's an evolutionary phenomenon going on when you have a prion.
A prion is a folding of a protein that is contagious.
In the pathogenic case, you have a misfolding of a protein that causes other proteins with the same sequence to misfold the same way.
So like mad cow disease.
But the question is, is Is this effectively a kind of life that doesn't have any DNA or RNA in it, that the information is the fold and it is actually evolving and it's a true pathogen, or is this a kind of quirk the way cancer is, right?
Cancers evolve, but most cancers are not contagious and therefore the fact that you get a cancer is, you know, your own system's failure to control a kind of runaway process.
It's not Cancer isn't trying to kill you.
Now, there are cancers.
It does raise the question of what is different in those few cancers that are contagious.
Right, right, like the one that afflicts Tasmanian devils.
It's the only one that I can come up with.
There are several, but it's definitely, as far as we know, the exception and not the rule, and the public health pattern does not reflect that it's anything other than an exception.
But anyway, point being, a contagious misfolding Is the kind of thing that could take a tiny dose of something and turn it into a serious problem.
Just the same way that a virus, you may get a tiny number of particles.
One of those particles gets through all of the defenses, and then that particle creates billions of copies of itself, creating a pathology, right?
The one particle would be incapable of doing it, but the fact that it copies itself causes these pathologies.
So anyway, long and short of it is, hey, models are cool.
You get a model of the adverse events, and then you can say, well, here I'm hearing a report of an adverse event.
Does it match the model?
Nope.
It certainly would be in conflict with the model.
It might need a separate model.
And if it needed a separate model, it would have to look like something with an amplifier in it.
So, let's assume this is an odd coincidence of a person who just happened to get myocarditis from some other influence that temporally was unfortunately connected to their proximity to some transfected person.
But, should the pattern turn up in a systematic way that demands an explanation, where to look for explanations?
Amplifiers.
Amplifiers.
Good.
Yeah, I think that's an excellent example of how to use the model.
So I'm going to keep on punting because you wanted to do a bunch of stuff this week, and you're up next.
Ah, you're up next.
Okay, next we will annex Europe.
Is that what you mean?
No.
Not even the Sudetenland?
Oh boy.
I'm glad you said it, not me, because I'm the one with the German heritage.
Yeah, it's too soon.
It's always too soon.
It's always too soon.
It'll always be too soon.
Yes, true.
It'll always be too soon.
But we did want to talk about race!
Yes, of course!
It's that time in the podcast, apparently.
Yeah, I think it is that time.
I wanted to talk about something, and unfortunately I have to break us out of, you know, as with a person who was in close proximity to somebody transfected, we have to break ourselves out of the obvious connection here, which is irrelevant to what I want to talk about.
The connection is, I want to talk about what unfolded with Scott Adams this week, and we have of course talked about Scott Adams in recent podcasts, and this is for, I want to talk about this for a totally different reason.
This has nothing to do with our ongoing disagreement with Scott about why it is that we were right about COVID, right?
He thinks it was lucky guesses, we think it's models, and by the way, we're right.
But in any case, put that aside.
Scott Adams became big news again this week because he said something rather remarkable on his own daily podcast.
Zach, do you want to show it?
Yep.
I've accidentally joined a hate group.
So if nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll, that's a hate group.
That's a hate group.
And I don't want to have anything to do with them.
And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people.
Just get the fuck away.
Wherever you have to go, just get away.
Because there's no fixing this.
Okay, now, I want us to put aside our initial reaction to the content of what he says.
It's very shocking, right?
He's effectively arguing for a kind of segregation, self-segregation, by race.
And he's doing so on the basis of a poll, a Rasmussen poll, and What I want to resist doing, it's very easy to take pot shots at him after he says something like this, but I really want to pursue this a little bit deeper because it has a deeper implication.
The poll in question reports that something under 50%, but not way under 50%, of black people say, do not resonate with the statement that it is okay to be white.
That's the thing?
Yeah.
Do not resonate with the statement?
They do not agree that it is okay to be white.
Okay.
47% with 95% confidence that it's within three points.
Um, the same poll also asked whether or not, um... But so, people who aren't white are being asked, is it okay to be white?
Yes.
Not, is it o... I'm confused.
Well, I mean, it is a confusing moment that such a question would make any freaking sense is, um...
Yeah, I mean, like, sure, at one level, it's like, okay, we have a poll for you.
Is it okay to be human?
Like, I don't, what?
I am.
And?
Right?
Like, so, is it okay to be an earthling?
What?
So I don't get, was this a poll that was sort of across all Americans, and then they also took data on race, and then... Yep, it was a tiny little poll, a thousand people.
Total.
Yeah.
Of which some fraction of that were black people.
Yep.
Of which almost half of them said, I do not agree with the statement, it is okay to be white.
Correct.
Now the same poll... Okay.
Oh, can black people be racist?
And 79% agreed that black people can be racist.
79% of the entire poll or of black people?
I believe 79% of black people.
I would have to go back and look carefully.
But nonetheless, this is a tiny poll, okay?
A tiny poll and With a suspect methodology.
Very easy to screw up a poll that is a combination of a phone poll and a online survey, right?
So not a huge study.
Sounds total garbage.
Yeah, total garbage.
But nonetheless, it's 2023, right?
Somehow we have landed in a place where the question of whether or not it is okay to be white is somehow not laughable on its face.
So that is an interesting Well, I mean, so this is going to seem totally far afield, but like, I'm not, I cannot see this.
I'm not familiar with this.
Obviously, I don't know anything about the poll, but the idea that like, okay, the methods are garbage.
And the question being asked is garbage as well.
That like, that sounds like, Where have we seen that before?
That sounds like medical research and scientific research.
Like, oh, not only is the question you asked nonsensical in the context of the environment in which we are living, but also your methods had absolutely no way of determining whether or not, absolutely no way of answering the question.
Right.
Well, let's just point to one obvious bias here.
The survey will obviously be biased in the direction of those who are more likely to voice an opinion, right?
And so it may be that opinionated people are heavily biased in the direction of having an extreme view, for example, and that this doesn't in any way represent the sum total.
Most people might just think, well, yeah, of course, why would I, you know, why would I participate?
What does that question even mean?
Yeah, what does that question even mean?
So, but the reason that I raise it, there is a podcast that I did at the very beginning of Dark Horse, long before the live streams, I believe, in which I pointed out that one of the hazards of the woke in which I pointed out that one of the hazards of the woke emphasis on race and the demonizing of the concept of what they call whiteness was that it was going to drive white people
And that that was going to be a disaster, not only for everybody, but especially for people who aren't white.
That this was going to effectively take this potentially powerful, you know, lineage or pseudo lineage And it was going to inflame it and cause it to gather.
And because it's a majority compared to the next largest lineage in the US, at least, that that was going to be an extremely dangerous thing to do.
So it was a warning from me saying, don't do this.
This is dumb, especially if your concern is the well-being of people who are from minority populations.
You are creating the very coalitions that you would have us believe are the most dangerous coalitions that exist.
Right.
And Scott Adams is giving voice to the thing that will cause people to gather.
What he says in this clip is literally, look, if people aren't okay with white folks, then I suggest white folks get away from them.
Now he screws up a what he said and he should recognize it is deeply un-American.
It is deeply un-American that we should be getting away from some population because among the many special things about this country.
Perhaps the most special is the experiment in which we attempt to put aside lineage level considerations and to live together as a collaborative people.
Right.
And so what he's saying, oh, I just want to get away from those people if they're not cool with me, is exactly the opposite of what his response should be as a patriotic American.
His point should be, holy hell, if that's real, What can we do about it?
Right?
I would also point out that even if the poll is accurate as they did it, like let's just say that none of the methodological considerations end up being important and that it is somehow representative.
Well, it still means that a majority of black people do think it's okay to be white.
And so the idea that the right reaction to a large minority of any group Coming to this also deeply un-American conclusion, is to abandon the entire population and go isolate in your own racial group is insane, right?
The point is, this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, right?
We need to confront the woke ideology that is attempting to demonize so-called whiteness, and we need to confront this instinct to, well, if that's what you're gonna do, then we're going to X, right?
There's You're such a confused people.
There are immutable characteristics.
Sex is one of them.
Your ancestry is one of them, and that maps very imperfectly onto sort of public renditions of what race you are, right?
No one is pure anything almost, right?
No one is pure anything.
There's no pure bloods, right?
That's an insanity.
But there are people who are more Lithuanian than anything else, and people who are more African-origin than anything else who are in America and therefore are African-Americans.
This is true, and this cannot change.
Like, you are what your history was, and you are what, you know, if you're a mammal, the sperm that contributed half of what is now your genetic complement to making you who you are determined whether you are male or female.
And those things don't change.
And so the idea that we Could be talking about whether it's okay to be something that you're born as?
We live in the age of original sin?
Like, what is this?
What kind of garbage is this?
And then at the same time, you've got, you know, after our conversation last week, people saying, well, you know, people are just born with these predilections that are like, Horrible.
Like pedophilia.
Like, what can you do?
You just got to accept them.
You can't shame them for having these feelings that they have.
There's nothing to be done about it.
It's like, you know what, that thing, not foundational, not fundamental, not about your lineage, and also, a hazard to guess, Not immutable.
So, so no, we don't, you know, we don't use shame.
We would never advocate for shame around something that you are, you are born with, it is something, it is fundamental to who you are.
And instead we've got, we've flipped these things.
We're shaming people for their lineage, We're pretending they can change the sex that they are, and we're embracing people's kinks, which are fundamentally bad for society.
One, two, three.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Like, how did we get here?
You know who has a really good model that helps sort this out?
We do.
Here, get that book.
This book?
Yeah, that book.
Yeah, okay.
So in this book, yeah, we talk about the distinction between the software layer and the hardware layer, and you may or may not love that distinction.
I happen to think it's super elegant, and that the fact that it works even when you start to pursue it.
Well, what about the firmware level?
Yeah, well, we got that too.
You know, the point is we do function this way, and we humans are the extreme case of a creature with dual inheritance, right?
We inherit the genetic stuff, which, as you point out, you can't do anything about.
It's whatever happens to come together between sperm and egg.
And then we get a software package loaded on.
You know, are we a blank slate?
No, but... Well, but that's too... I think in part people get confused because the software-hardware analogy isn't perfect because the software is the mutable part, the fungible part, the plastic part.
Right?
The software from, you know, day one is beginning to be informed by the environment, well I guess on day one you're still up maybe in the fallopian tubes, I don't remember exactly the timing, but call it, you know, day 14 of a zygote and the uterine environment is affecting how development happens.
And, you know, there's a reason that morning sickness and aversions And cravings during pregnancy are what they are.
And that's the zygote's and then the fetus's way of communicating to mom, hey, I need more of this, or like, no, not that, that's going to hurt me.
Right?
So that, you know, that, that is all the developing software.
And so unlike Microsoft Word, right, where you bring it in and you can say, oh, well, I, you know, I actually want to see this in my ribbon and this in my toolbar.
We, we are changing much more about what we are.
Yeah, but I mean, we don't need to get tied up in this, but my point would be, all you've got to do is then say, well, how good an analogy is that, and then pursue it into the computer layer, and you find out, oh, well, the same thing is true there.
Not identically so, but, you know, the software that gets loaded onto the underlying computer by the manufacturer before you get around to deciding what software you want to put onto the thing, the point is, it's there.
And you've got an underlying hardware layer that is Predisposed to emerge through genes about which you can do nothing and then you've got every layer of flexibility in the software layer from not much flexibility at all up through perfectly flexible and It all it all works.
But anyway You're right.
The point is we've reversed the order we're now shaming people for the stuff that they can't change and we are refusing to shame them for the stuff that they really must change and That is an indicative of something It is indicative of the fact that these conclusions are not based on some deep model of reality.
What they are is about power.
Right?
It is very powerful to take something that somebody cannot change and decide that it is a reason to shun them.
Right?
Because the point is they can't, you know, show up one day and say, well, I've dealt with it, deal with me.
It's like, no, you're still white.
You still suck.
You know, you are obligated to spend all your time getting over your whiteness, and you know what?
It's never gonna work, so go away and work on that project and get back to me at the point that, well, you can't because it's unfixable.
Except the ideology comes to somehow an equally absurd but almost opposite conclusion over in sex space.
Right.
Oh, you can cure the problem of having been born male, because how dare you, by putting on lipstick and heels and asking to be called Martha.
What did you just do and why?
What on earth are half-ish of the country doing?
Going along with it, nodding, going like, yeah, yeah, you go, girl.
What?
What is happening?
Right.
No, it's absurd.
And you know, I don't know how many times we're going to see this pattern, right?
It's one thing To not understand anything and to have a random response.
It's another thing to invert reality and to take the immutable and treat it as perfectly plastic and to take the perfectly plastic and treat it as immutable.
You know, that's not just wrong, it's upside down of right.
It's upside down if right, and I think to get back to this question of like, oh, will the hate campaign that's masquerading as loving tenderness and woke ideology cause segregation, which in turn will cause ever greater division?
Yeah, yeah, it will.
And is it better for us to be interested In hanging out with people who aren't exactly like us, yes.
Are we obliged to do that all the time?
No.
Are we in fact obliged to do whatever?
No.
But do we find our worlds enhanced and better in every regard when we do?
Yes, this holds for sex, for race, for religion, for politics, for level of education, for trade, for, you know, career, for, you know, basically across the board, right?
So, does that mean that you should never, ever, ever hang out with people like you?
Like, you shouldn't go to a conference for biologists?
Or hang out in an all-women space?
Have a friend group that is all black and sometimes say, you know what?
It's us gonna be here today and love you, but like, not you today.
It's gonna be us.
That's all good too, right?
We actually can have that both ways.
We can know that it's better to, as a life choice, be embracing of actual difference, like actual diversity, be inclusive of actual diversity, while also allowing for people to make individual choices that hopefully don't make aren't the sum of all of their choices in which they say right now, because I need to learn more accounting, I'm going to go hang out with the accountants.
And right now, because this is where my headspace is right now, you know, you're going to go hang out with a bunch of men.
And right now, you know, I'm going to hang out with a bunch of, you know, Ukrainians, you know, whatever it is, right?
Like, that's also okay.
You can have this both ways, and somehow we're being told any choice that we make if we have certain immutable characteristics is inherently wrong, and we have to go along with the fantasies of crazy people.
Yeah, I would also point out that those who are most likely to just simply narrowly take Scott Adams to task for his un-American outburst Are also likely to be people who have caused the problem.
This is why I delivered that warning all that years ago, all those years ago.
That if you do this, if you demonize people over their race, whether that race is understood to be a privileged one or not, you are going to reinvent this problem, which we had not solved, but we were definitely on our way to solving it.
Yeah.
The West had understood correctly that the right thing to be is a colorblind society.
Colorblind not meaning that we don't notice each other's color.
It means that it is not an indicator of your likelihood of success.
It does not predispose you to succeed in a court of law or a classroom or anything.
It's just a simple fact like your hair color or your language of your birth.
I'm going to take one objection there, because I do think that some of the language that we use easily is maybe contributing to the confusion, which is that in this case, we hadn't solved it.
What I will tend to say is, but we were moving in the right direction.
And I really honestly believe that, that we were moving pretty fast in the right direction, and it was getting ever better.
But I would say not.
I think what you said was, We might have solved it, or we could have solved it, or something like that.
And I know that you don't think that there's a static solution to be had.
And maybe it's an asymptote, but even if it's an asymptote, that asymptote itself will move, because people are going to people.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I don't agree with this.
The asymptote is the line of formal colorblindness of your society.
You're allowed to be any color.
It's allowed to have its implications for... Yeah, but some individuals are gonna not buy in.
Well, but the point is, the asymptote is the degree to which everybody's on board with the idea that your color ought not predispose you to succeed in any context.
It's just a simple fact of who you are.
It's not a predictive fact on the basis that you have advantages coming from one race or another.
So anyway, the asymptote is us collectively are reaching a place where you know, you know, basically the asymptote is Martin Luther King jr.' 's I have a dream right it is you are judged on the content of your character and not the color of your skin and You know the degree to which we are at the or approaching the asymptote is the degree to which everybody's on board with that Okay All right
You feel like we've arrived at the... Sure.
It's more a question for you this week, I think.
Feel like you got where you wanted to go?
Yeah, I think we've done it.
All right, so we will come back with a live Q&A in about 15 minutes, and we will also be back a week from now.
In a week when we come back, we will not be doing a Q&A next week, but we will be back at the usual time doing our live stream on Saturday at noon 30 Pacific.
In the meantime, if you have questions that you want to ask in the Q&A, you can ask them at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
If you want to join us for a more intimate conversation for two hours starting at 11 a.m.
Pacific tomorrow, that's Sunday, February something, 26th.
Yeah, it's gonna be February.
A couple more days.
I think it's the 26th tomorrow.
It must be, yes.
We're gonna be doing that at my Patreon.
And yeah, I think actually more than more than usual in this conversation, we brought this book up a lot here, so that's I'm off screen.
There we go.
It's Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
We encourage you to read it.
It's available in all sorts of languages now as well.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
