In this 166th 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 ants and agriculture, coevolution and symbiosis, the mainstream media and SARS-CoV2 origins, raccoon dogs and Kristian Andersen. We talk corruption, capture, and narrative control. We finish with two heartening stories about resistance, and coming together, that remind us of how to be good and human to ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number one.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying.
166 is not a prime number on multiple grounds, and there's a lot that we need to cover.
I will say, I forgot to mention this to you, I am going to make a reversal, not a complete reversal, but a partial reversal of a position that I have previously Taken on today's stream.
Yes.
Excellent.
I am changing my position on the announcement of one's pronouns.
Yep, the announcement of one's pronouns.
Let me just say that in general I have found that I am so good at guessing people's pronouns that it is unnecessary that people announce them.
Yes.
But I am now cautiously in favor of the announcing of the pronouns of a cat upon first meeting.
So you know What sex cat you're dealing with?
Is this based on the piece that I just published?
I don't think so, no.
No, you haven't read it.
No.
No.
Uh-oh, that's embarrassing.
No!
Okay, well I'm now excited to read that piece to find out how it connects to the… So what prompts… So I begin, this is from not this week's Natural Selections but last week's, I begin with a true story about having interacted with a friend of ours' young son some number of years ago when we were looking across the yard and I… I remember this story.
"Oh, what sex is your cat?" Maybe both.
And I said, "No, cats aren't like that." And he called me a liar. - I remember this story.
No, I was just prompted to this thought by realizing that I'm not entirely convinced.
I'm betting there are cases in which somebody has gotten a bad diagnosis of their cat's sex early in life and have probably had the cat for its entire life without coming to understand what was truly going on.
I mean, you know you have in your own family some bad diagnoses of cat sex.
Trying to remember.
Well, I believe, we will presumably hear about it if I'm wrong, that back during the Gulf War, your parents came into possession of a cat whom they named Stormin Norman.
And Stormin Norman there turned out to be a female cat, so they changed the name to Norma.
Right.
Yes.
Storma Norma.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Am I... No, no, I believe that story is completely accurate, and I do think that this is... I feel like you came unprepared today.
It's an excellent demonstration of the need to announce a cat's pronouns upon first meeting, which was really my point.
So you think the cats should now be announcing their pronouns?
Is that the idea?
To the extent possible, sure, but if they can't do it, I wouldn't mind somebody else stepping in.
And actually it might... How about a placard of some sort, like a...
Sure, or, you know, some sort of, you know, flag on a hat or something, but... Cat store hats with flags.
Well, I, you know, I just think... Why not shorts, too, already?
I don't think a cat would put up with shorts.
Hats is one thing, but... Really?
Okay, uh-huh.
Yeah.
All right, well, this is off to a weird start.
Indeed.
Indeed it is.
Indeed it is.
Oh man, it is almost spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, at least in the San Juan Islands where we are.
Man, it feels like the season changed, like, two days ago.
Instantly.
Two, three days ago.
Like, just the light feels different.
It just, everything is coming alive and it feels great.
And, you know, there are people for whom winter is their favorite season and, you know, all of this.
And I will say, I'm going to put you guys aside for the moment.
For all the rest of you, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, I'm sorry, but we are here in the Northern Hemisphere.
It is happening.
Spring is coming.
Then summer.
Lovely.
Well, I was actually of a similar mindset, and I was going to point out that this is our last winter podcast for the year, and I was going to suggest... No, it won't be.
Sure it will.
Well, winter begins on the 21st of December, and there being more than seven days beyond the 21st of September, we'll probably have a podcast at the very beginning of winter.
Um, we are exiting the winter season, and we will do so on the equinox, which is the 20th this year.
This year it is, yes.
So this will be our last winter podcast, us being exiting of the season.
The calendar year, however, will end at the beginning of winter, not on the first, on Oh, got it.
Yeah, all right.
I was not making an astronomical error.
I was making a clerical error, the clerics having defined the calendar rather oddly from my perspective.
But okay, in any case, my suggestion was going to be that for those who will miss the Winter Dark Horse podcast, all you got to do is move to the Southern Hemisphere, and you got another several months of them coming.
Three months, in fact.
But not right away.
Right, you got a few days to arrange that.
Starting in, today's the 18th, starting in two days, there will be no winter broadcasting possible on this planet for three months.
That is correct.
Yes.
Yes.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so we have worked our way to clarity, which is what we do in this family and on this podcast.
I really don't think we did.
No, I think we did.
And it was painful, but, you know, it's not about the journey.
It's about the destination.
And we got there.
So, this week, for the first time in three weeks, we are going to follow this live stream with a Q&A, which, you know, after that remarkable display, I don't know that anyone is going to want to stick around, but if you do, if you have questions, ask them!
If somehow, despite all that clarity, you still have Qs, then we will A them.
Yeah.
And then there's another way to ask us questions also, which is that we do a monthly private Q&A at MyPatreon.
Right now the question asking period is open at MyPatreon, so consider joining us there.
We do a joint monthly private Q&A and you have conversations at your Patreon.
You have one tomorrow, in fact.
Yes.
Right?
So those are good ways to join us in other venues.
There's also a Discord server that is available at both of our Patreons where they have karaoke and happy hours and book clubs and all sorts of awesomeness.
You can also read about a confused child and his feelings about cats at My Natural Selections.
This week I published something, this is just, this is, it's always surprising me, I published something that I called How Now, Cow of Brown, Which I guess it worked, because it took off.
It became one of by far the most popular pieces that I've ever published, and I really did not see that coming.
I love that title.
You know, I think the title went a long way, yeah.
It's a great title, because it's a terrible title.
I love that about it.
Right, right.
So it's an exploration, not of pronouns, but of adjectives and word order and how the frickin' language police would have us believe that by changing by brute force, by diktat, you know, standard English usage, we are somehow going to solve the problems of the world.
Which, of course, A, we're not.
B, that's not how language works.
And C, what the hell, guys?
Come on, grow up and, you know, get a clue.
Point of order.
Yes?
Are all language police bastards Well, see, I think this is another reason that this piece was as popular as it was, is that I actually created a little graphic.
Hashtag defund the language police.
Oh, you did?
Oh, wow!
We are on parallel wavelengths.
I'm just days behind.
You haven't read anything I've been posting for a while.
Well, at least for the week, yeah.
And last week.
The last two weeks, alright.
All right, the admissions are flying fast and furious.
Yes.
So, yes.
All language cops may be bastards.
I had that actually in the piece, and I took that out, and I went like, you know what, hashtag defund the language police.
Not the actual police, and then we can talk.
And, you know, then we can talk.
Then we can actually talk, and then let's get down to business talking about how to actually solve some of the problems of the world, as opposed to all of this I believe there's just no way for me to elegantly deal with this at the moment.
I believe you have a small piece of lint, and I think it's going to be on your right side, right about here.
Is there what? - I believe there's just no way for me to elegantly deal with this at the moment.
I believe you have a small piece of lint and I think it's gonna be on your right side, right about here.
Here we go. - Okay. - All right.
Okay.
All right.
I didn't see it.
I think it may have been in your head, but we'll hear about that.
Okay.
We can go back to the instant replay.
You'll see it was not a figment of my imagination.
Wait, so you've... Okay, let's do it.
Oh, we can't.
Oh, instant replay.
No, the delayed replay by several hours.
But nonetheless, it can be done.
It can be done.
Okay.
So I also, on Natural Selections this week, went back and recorded audio of both How Now a Cow of Brown and
He, me, she, they, and also apparently we're the bad guys, which was another surprise hit in which I detail some, by no means all, of the positions that we have had over the pandemic and just sort of laid them out and said, okay, these are some of the things we've talked about.
An incredible string of being right by accident for the wrong reasons and through total guesses, isn't it?
Precisely.
Yeah.
Yes, precisely.
All right.
Maybe it's time to go to our sponsors.
We are grateful for our sponsors.
We start off after whatever this was with three ads at the top of the show, and here we go.
All right.
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So I wonder who discovered the macadamia nut and whether they were capable of retiring on that contribution to humanity.
Kind of like the bacon-wrapped date, the first person to do that, you feel like they contributed enough, much more than most people do, and it should have been sufficient for them to move somewhere nice and, I don't know, look out at the view, right?
I bet they didn't.
No, I bet they didn't either.
Yeah.
Right.
In fact, they were probably... I actually don't know.
I feel like I looked into it when I was researching macadamias when we first accepted the sponsor.
I don't remember where they're native.
But I assume wherever they are native, that they were discovered to be edible by the people who were first there, as opposed to by mostly the people who are currently mostly in charge of selling them to us.
But maybe, you know, given that they're being farmed in Africa, maybe they're native to Africa, although I'm not sure about that.
I don't know.
I would not be surprised if someone plagiarized a primate for the idea.
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So, we, in all of that silliness that we started at the top of the hour with, did not talk about where we're going today.
Right.
We are going to start by talking about farming and ants.
And then we're going to take the natural segue from there and talk about control and narratives.
And we are going to end with a couple of stories that we've heard this week that should, I think, give us a bit of hope.
And it all actually ties together, although if you just look at the topics that we're talking about, it all sounds a little bit diverse.
And we'll get some raccoon dogs in there, If you say so.
I did, and there's nothing I can do about it now.
I can't take it back, even if I think that would be wise.
Can we get that on instant replay, or not so much?
Severely delayed replay, yes, potentially.
So I was recently researching Atene ants, leafcutter ants, for some presentations that we were giving a couple weeks ago, and looking into the question of the evolution of farming in leafcutter ants.
And what the comparisons are, if any, to the evolution of farming in humans.
And one of the comparisons is, well, humans originated farming many, many times across the world.
In fact, in China alone, there are two different evolutions of farming.
There's at least Um, there's at least, uh, one origin in Europe, maybe more, um, a couple in the New World, um, several, um, you know, several all over the world, but it's always, it seems, within like 10, about 10 to 12,000 years ago.
12,000 years ago is about as far back as we think farming goes.
Uh, there was some, uh, domestication happening before then, um, but agriculture is 10, 12,000 years ago in each of the places that it happens independently, whereas ants, They've had a bit of a head start on us.
They definitely thought of it.
Yes.
Funny, of course, to say it that way, but of course one of the big differences, one of the reasons that we have been able to catch up and in some ways you might say surpass them in terms of the diversity that we have employed our farming uh with is that of course for them presumably it's entirely genetic right that they they're they're they're
they're little robots uh running around doing their thing and it's working for them and it's working for the fungus that they are um farming on the leaves that they are cutting and carrying and growing the fungus on as substrate uh But they are not learning in real time, right, to, you know, how to farm better or different things or anything.
And so there's a lot, of course, to be said about this.
But there was one paragraph in this really remarkable paper, really long, like a monograph in In a book called Insect Fungal Associations, Ecology and Evolution, a piece by Schultz et al.
from 2005 is when this book was published, called Reciprocal Illumination, A Comparison of Agriculture and Humans.
And so the comparison is, okay, we have these Atean ants who've been farming for 50 million years, 50 million years, five zero million years, and humans who've been farming for 10 to 12,000 years.
And what are some of the comparisons?
So question.
Yeah.
In this, are you going to describe that farming, or should we do that in advance of you reading this?
Go for it!
So, the basics of the farming involve the removal of pieces.
You've undoubtedly seen pictures of ants which have cut a kind of fingernail-shaped piece of a leaf.
They do this from Canopy trees, they bring them one piece at a time in large numbers down into an underground cavity where they grow a fungus, which is uniquely adapted to this association.
It grows on the leaves because the ants are animals.
They actually do not, for whatever reason, have the chemical capacity to break down the leaves directly.
Fungus, for whatever reason, are much better at advanced feats of organic chemistry, and they are able to break down the cellulose and other components of the leaves, and so essentially the ants facilitate the growth of the fungus, and they eat the fungus, and this is a clearly mutualistic interaction with many fascinating offshoots and other features.
Indeed, and there are many stages of agriculture in these ants.
The leafcutter is being, by our estimation, with our anthropomorphic lens on it, the pinnacle of atine agriculture, of ant agriculture.
Uh, but there are, there are many stages that are, you know, less tightly symbiotic.
There are, um, pathogens that are also co-evolved with, you know, with this fungus ant co-evolution.
So, you know, it's, it's just, the story just goes more and more amazing the deeper you go.
But this is not, um, going to be that, that story here.
Um, the paragraph I want to read from this paper is Schultz et al., 2005, and I'll have you show my screen when I'm, when I'm ready to read it here.
Just talks about the question of who has the control?
So with humans, we imagine that, okay, well we're the farmers, therefore, you know, the crops that we have domesticated, be they plant or animal or in some cases fungus, are clearly under our control.
We are the masters.
And you can similarly look at ants and guess the same thing.
And there's some evidence with regard to the ants, given what we can tell, 50 million years is a long time for this association to be happening, so it's hard to know.
It's impossible to know exactly what the ants 50 million years ago, who were not farming, looked like and what they were eating, but all evidence suggests that they were basically eating arthropods, insects, live and dead.
And the advantages to the fungus and to the ants for going into this farming relationship It seems like there's some evidence that actually the fungus might have had more of a drive to end up being in this association with the ants than the ants did, which raises questions about control.
You know, who's actually in control here?
And when you think you see a system in which one or the other person, organism, system, whatever it is, is in control, Maybe look more closely, look from a different angle and find that actually control has a lot of different levers and a lot of different ways of manifesting itself.
So let's go with this paragraph here and I'll just put it on the screen so people can read along.
That did not work.
Nope, it did not work.
And if it doesn't, it doesn't work.
Hold on, let's try one more time.
Get that plugged in.
It is plugged in still.
Nope.
It's very blue.
Okay, well, I'm going to go ahead and unplug that so that I do not risk my computer suddenly showing up, and I will just read it off the screen and I'll link to this in the show notes.
Again, from Schultz et al., 2005.
We suspect that most readers will resist our suggestion that human agriculturalists were once under the partial control of their proto-domesticates during the early evolutionary process that ultimately led to human agriculture.
Human intuition suggests that we are not under the control of the cabbages and tomatoes that we plant in our backyards, that cabbages cannot facultatively escape from our gardens and from their inevitable destinies of death in our kitchens, and that cabbages have not enslaved us to labor on their evolutionary behalf.
Human intuition can be misleading, however.
We know, for example, that human symbionts can sometimes induce profound behavioral changes in humans that benefit the symbiont.
The rabies virus induces drastic aggressive behavior to facilitate its spread to new potential hosts.
And coca plants induce in humans a physical addiction and a craving for more coca, which requires the cultivation of more coca plants.
Though seemingly far-fetched and in conflict with our intuitions, we cannot at this point rule out similar manipulations during the pre-agricultural evolution of humans, a stage when humans began to assemble the behavioral repertoires that ultimately led to agricultural systems guided by human planning and intentional experimentation.
This I wanted to just put out there for people who have not Given farming much thought, given ant farming much thought, ant agriculture much thought, as a way, as a different way in to being able to question of any system that you think you understand, who is actually pulling the strings?
Who's actually calling the shots?
There's one thing in that paragraph that I find troubling, the use of rabies as an example, right after the term symbiont, because rabies is clearly not a symbiont.
I think it's a very worthy exploration.
Symbiont it's not, but is it able to exert a behavioral influence on us?
Of course it is.
Of course.
And, you know, the case of coca is a better example where it is likely a mutualism.
And there are many examples of human mutualisms.
There are plants which are only known from human cultivation, which suggests that an ancestor changed radically in order to partner with humans.
What are you thinking of?
So there's lots of salvias, but the salvia that is used as a psychoactive, as an entheogen in central Mexico is only known from the gardens of the population that utilizes it.
It's a fascinating plant.
There is a euphorb in Madagascar, which is only known from gardens.
It's not clear whether that's a mutualism or whether it's simply gone extinct in the wild and been preserved by people.
But in any case, there are a number of examples.
And I do think, you know, evolutionarily I would say the real question effectively what you have to realize is that a mutualism tends to start as a parasitism and a parasitism that does not harm but in fact in some indirect way helps the creature being parasitized
is almost immediately a mutualism, because the creature that is being parasitized but, oh, it ends up being a net positive thing then becomes augmented to facilitate this interaction.
And, you know, if you think about the classic case of something like a hummingbird, you know, taking nectar and transporting pollen for a flower to which it is adapted.
It seems like, oh, they're cooperating.
But of course, the hummingbird is truly indifferent to the well-being of the plant, at least first order.
At least first order is important.
At least first order.
And the plant is indifferent to the hummingbird.
They are each taking advantage of each other.
And because they are both getting a benefit that outweighs the cost that they are paying, we say, oh, it's a cooperation.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Well, the tighter the cooperation, the tighter the need, right?
Right.
So, I mean, this will be the thing that maybe isn't obvious to people who haven't considered, for instance, a hummingbird plant affiliation, which is that, you know, the more tight the, for instance, corolla of the flower is, the particular recurve nature Decurved nature.
Can't remember which is which.
Of the hummingbird's beak, the more both of those species actually depend on the other in order to make it into the future.
Right.
To have their genes make it into the future.
And there, you know, there's a lot of nuance here.
It can be that the plant is obligate with respect to what pollinator it needs, and that the pollinator might be a generalist in some cases.
There can be cases where the relationship is obligate on both sides.
But in any case,
At some point where a mutualism has occurred, we are effectively defining the mutualism based on the fact that both parties are benefiting from what might otherwise be a one-way parasitism, but that is in some sense our projection onto it, and in any case, you know, it's clear that these ants, and actually I wish we did have the ability to show your screen, you could show some pictures of this, but these plants are a major
These plants?
These ants are a major force in the habitats where they are doing their farming.
They're actually significantly altering the amount of photosynthetic capacity of the trees that they're utilizing, and so they're a tremendously powerful ecological phenomenon.
What that also means is that this huge amount of productivity that the trees were producing, that the ants had no access to directly, they have found a way to access it through what might have been a parasite on their ancestors, but it turned out to be beneficial, right?
In other words, You know, you could imagine a fungus growing inside, I have no idea if this is the proposed mechanism, but you know, that there might have been a fungus growing inside the effectively caverns that these animals created.
Maybe it was growing on arthropods, maybe it was, you know, I'm not sure what it was, and you can imagine maybe ants had, you know, tunneled into some place where there was leaf matter or something, and some fungus is breaking down the leaves.
You could see how you could get to a place where actually feeding the fungus would emerge from the accidental fact of a fungus Growing on cellulose, but at the point that we arrive currently and we look at this highly interwoven set of adaptations, right?
You have a fungus that can't grow without the ants, you've got ants that are utterly dependent on the fungus, you've got behaviors in which That's true, Aegis, and I had not said that.
At this point, the fungus that the ants are farming is obligately in association with ant fungiculture.
It does not exist outside of the ant fungiculture, which is remarkable.
It is remarkable, and so then that leads to this consideration, right?
Always troubled by people's sense that, you know, vegetarianism is a favor to the creatures that we eat.
It is no such thing.
Especially for the creatures that we cultivate in large numbers, right?
Chickens are far better off evolutionarily than their jungle fowl ancestors.
Cows are far better off than their wild relatives.
Just by virtue of the amount of control that humans exert on the ecosystem.
And so, although it's counterintuitive to us... So, the place that you will get dragged for saying that is that you haven't defined better off.
You are talking about evolutionarily better off.
Individuals might also be, but not in a factory farming situation.
Oh, and that is the place where I would argue that the harm to the individual animals at the level of suffering is so great that even though evolutionarily even the factory farmed animals are certainly in a better position that morally we are obligated to confront that problem and to end that practice.
But you know just as you know we're all gonna die.
It does not... Wait, what?
No, I swear it's true.
That does not cause you, it does not invalidate your life, right?
It does not make you not want to live while you're here.
Likewise, an animal that is going to be slaughtered for food is not, you know, a non-animal.
It's an animal with a known end of its life, just as a salmon, Pacific salmon, has a known end of its life right after it reproduces.
So anyway, the point is we need to rethink these things because from the perspective of the organisms in question, the interests are not intuitively obvious to us humans.
Well, I think one of the pieces you didn't say there is that most of our domesticated food animals, most of those individuals, if not all of those individuals, would not exist but for the fact of our having domesticated them.
So the fact that they will die in service of being eaten by humans basically starts the analysis too late.
If you're concerned about the lifespan of the individual, consider that the individual never would have existed at all.
Never would have existed at all.
Yep, and that's exactly it.
So anyway, when we get back to the ants, what we've got is an obligate relationship, and that obligate relationship is clearly great for the ants, and it is, you know, clearly great for the fungus.
In fact, it's so great that both of them have evolved to become completely dependent on it, And so at this point, there's no point in looking at the relationship and saying, you know, who's driving?
They're both driving, right?
But it doesn't mean, if you traced it back far enough, you would almost certainly find a parasitism that turned out to have a benefit for the victim, and therefore a mutualism grew from it.
And, you know, if only because it is Statistically very unlikely that two clades, two individuals, two anythings coming together that end up in a cooperative, romantic, you know, whatever it is, relationship Have exactly the same moment of, hey, here it is.
This is what we're going to do, right?
So almost always, and we can basically say really almost, almost, almost always, if not always, one of those individuals or clades or entities will have made a move first, will have had an advantage first, will have seen the opportunity first.
Right, and I was actually having a parallel thought, actually.
The way to see this clearly is the romantic analog of this, right?
Because A, you can see that individuals are motivated to get involved romantically by a very powerful kind of self-interest, which is so powerful that it It predisposes them to a kind of mutualism.
But let's take the case of two randos, right?
Considering whether to get romantically involved, right?
You make it sound so awesome!
Yeah, I'm trying to not impose anything one way or the other on it.
A guy trying to bed a gal is actually involved in a parasitic behavior.
Now in modern times it may not be this way because it may be that he, you know, his conscious mind full well understands that she is going to control whether or not she gets pregnant and so there's no real parasitism possible at that level.
But a guy trying to bed a gal pre-birth control, right, is effectively attempting to inflict a pregnancy on somebody who will then invest all of the labor in raising an offspring that is only 50% related to her.
That's parasitism, right?
However, the possibility of a relationship that is reproductive and worthy of both partners, right?
The point is that would-be parasitism is adjacent to an obvious profound mutualism in which two people decide to team up on the raising of offspring and the creation of a home and all of those things.
And, you know, we sometimes hear people almost Jokingly talk about a fetus being a parasite on the mother, which is not correct, but it is actually half correct in the case that the father has not stuck around, right?
Because the female has been put in the position of raising an offspring, you know, she's divided her genome in half.
Fused it with a half a genome from somebody else, and if that guy skips out, then the point is the half the genome that isn't related to her that she is raising, that is, she is effectively forced into a degree of altruism, raising this other half a genome.
But if they partner, then it is not that at all, right?
Then the point is, yes, she's only, you know, her offspring is only 50% related to her, but the guy is putting in enough effort that the point is she can actually raise twice as many of them, and she recovers that as a matter of mutualism.
So anyway, now we've taken all the fun out of sex, romance, and all of that stuff, but The idea that there is an exact map of this sort of tension between parasitism and mutualism over in human romantic space is really profound once you see it.
Mm-hmm.
Dean, I thought you were going to go into genomic imprinting space, but maybe that's a bridge too far for today.
Yeah, I think we've done enough of the dry, sucking-the-fun-out-of-romance biology for one afternoon, but maybe a future episode.
We thought we'd start there, just to raise issues of, raise to consciousness questions of when you see interactions between two players, let's say, let's just leave it vague, entities.
Who appears to be control?
Who appears to be driving?
Who appears to be conscious?
Who appears to be making decisions that benefit them?
It's not always what it seems.
And that is in service of what you wanted to talk about next around issues of narrative control.
Yeah.
So I wanted to add one more thing, which I think is a good transition.
Not always what it seems, right?
In the case of Antz, the Queen is named as if she is the boss of everybody else, and it's not obvious that that was actually a proper description.
Yes, the colony is acting in service of the Queen, but in some sense she is as much a slave of the colony as she is its director.
She is not actually in a position to dictate What the ants do, it is this underlying genetic fact of their close relatedness that causes them to behave in such a way that this queen who is totally hobbled by her... She's just an egg factory.
Yeah.
She's just producing mostly daughters.
Some sons, but mostly daughters, all of whom are more closely related to each other than they are to their mom, if they're full sibs.
And she's just pumping out eggs.
Pumping out eggs.
When they're fertilized, they're daughters.
When they're not fertilized, they're sons.
And that's what she's doing, day in, day out.
And you can get a totally wrong idea.
In fact, I had the once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of watching a colony of these These ants, these farming ants, move from one burrow to another, and probably that was a result of the fact that something had gotten in and they needed to move in order to escape a parasite.
But I watched them... Hubert Hoobie, who was on BCI when I was there studying leafcutter ants, knew that the move was happening, and he and I went and Filmed it.
But anyway, the point was, the queen was being moved.
Right?
We saw the queen being moved.
She was so distorted by her reproductive role, she couldn't even walk.
Right?
She was literally being carried.
And you can imagine that early, you know, scientific appreciators of these ants might look at it and it's like a queen in a litter being escorted to her new nest.
But that's really, that's a projection of a human construct that is really not very similar, right?
She is a reproductive slave of the colony as much as anything else.
So, which then brings us to your transition about things not being necessarily what they seem and the confusion surrounding corruption and narrative control in our modern circumstance.
So let's explore that a little bit.
I was prompted to think of this by, we will only be here briefly, but I watched the most recent interview of Sam Harris and he once again makes all of the same
What I would say are decidedly wrong points but the point that in the case that 97% I think is the number he uses of your experts agree and 3% disagree that yes of course it's always possible that the non-experts are right but you should go with the 97% of the experts each and every time because you're You're much more likely to be correct in your thinking.
And so, that's obviously nuts, or I should say, the fact is obviously nuts, but why it's nuts isn't so obvious, and I thought it was worth us exploring that a little bit.
So, first of all, let me just recall something that we've talked about here before, which is that It is a... the return on investment for betting against the fringe is pretty reliable, right?
In general, the fringe isn't right, and even when it is right, it's that something within the fringe is right while the majority of the fringe remains wrong, right?
The fringeness of the fringe is in and of itself reason to just be a little skeptical.
That's certainly true.
But what Sam's assertion does not take into account is A, the disproportionate benefit of knowing when something on the fringe is actually right, in spite of the belief of 97% or 99% or effectively 100% of the experts, right?
In those cases where the experts have it wrong, the profit to be made is huge.
That's one thing.
But the other thing is, there's a question about what that 97% even is, right?
Under normal circumstances, if everybody was perfectly free to believe whatever they wanted, and the experts were having vigorous discussions in which they were pushing each other around and had arrived somewhere naturally, Then that's not perfect evidence that they've got it right, but it's at least something.
But we don't live in a normal era, and this is really, I think, what's driving Sam mad in front of our eyes, is that he is applying rules from some other time and place as if they are universal, and they are far from universal.
So, um, what I wanted, what I thought was that it was worth laying out a kind of taxonomy of, uh, of narrative brokenness, right?
And looking at what underlies, um, the, uh, the differences between times and places and what we ought to put, uh, how much stock we ought to put in the belief of so-called experts.
So I think everybody realizes that we have a degree of corruption.
Sam would acknowledge, and in fact he repeatedly does acknowledge, that there is corruption in our institutions and that that's a problem.
But the problem is that the word corruption itself suggests that it is the minor force, right?
If we say that, you know, you have an SD card and it's corrupted, we're not saying that most of what's on the SD card is wrong.
We're saying that there is a small disruption somewhere, right?
And that small disruption may be enough to prevent your camera from reading it, right?
Or it may distort a photograph or, you know, a photograph may not be viewable.
But the point is the corruption is the minor part.
And the question is, are there things that would cause the distortion to be the major part?
So, okay, corruption is like, you know, let's try this.
In the case that the interests of some entity that could corrupt the system are aligned with the interests of the public, in other words, if you have a democracy where the interests of the public are supposed to guide, And you have some corporation and it wants something done that would actually be good for the public.
There's no problem.
It doesn't really have to do anything.
It can just make the argument and the public, seeing its own interest, will be in support of the thing that works for the corporation.
What that means is that the efforts that these corporations deploy, the expensive efforts like lobbying, for example, those efforts will be in places where their interests diverge from the public.
Right.
It will corrupt the government, not where it doesn't need to do that.
It will corrupt the government where it wants the government not to do the government's job, serving the public, but instead to serve the corporate needs.
And so it will disguise those things as if they are in the interest of the public.
I'm going to steel man just one piece of this.
Sure.
Lobbying could be simply about getting the word out.
So even under circumstances where all the interests align, which will be somewhat rare, you might still have things like promotion, marketing, advertisement, lobbying, in order to spread the good word, frankly.
I agree at a technical level.
The problem with that, I mean, you've said you're steelmanning it, so I know you're not advocating this as a major countervailing force, but the problem is it doesn't take almost anything to spread the word if it's in the interest of people to hear the word, right?
If you're a representative in Congress and there's some piece of legislation that would be beneficial to both Your constituents and to some power player, then it doesn't take very much to get that in front of you because, hey, it's a win for you.
Even cynically, it's a win for you to advance the cause.
You'll make yourself more likely to be reelected.
You'll have greater power, etc.
And so likewise, you know, you can say, look, There are two reasons for advertising to exist.
Advertising exists to manipulate people into doing things that they wouldn't otherwise do.
Spending money they wouldn't otherwise spend, or choosing this thing over that thing.
And you could say, well, part of advertising is just getting information out.
And the answer is, yep, but sit in front of your TV sometime and figure out what percentage of each ad is actually about information and what percentage is about manipulation.
And you'll realize, oh my goodness, the lion's share of this thing is absolutely about manipulating people and the information, you know, sort of squeaks in there every now and again.
So I think it's like that.
It's not that there's no You know, a lobbyist could potentially just alert a lawmaker this thing is possible and might be good.
But more or less what they do really, the reason they're paid the big bucks, is to pretend that that's what they're doing while in fact they are incentivizing and manipulating and lying and all of the things that they're so good at.
But okay, we got corruption, right?
Corruption takes a system that is supposed to be rigged around the interests of the population and it distorts it, right?
A little bit.
Then we have the next piece of this taxonomy, which is capture, right?
Now capture, I want to be careful, capture is a term that often comes with another term, regulatory capture, right?
Now in my opinion, that's too narrow.
Regulatory capture is real, and that means that an industry or a company has gotten control over some entity that is supposed to be controlling it, right?
When a pharma company gets control of the FDA, right, that's the tail wagging the dog.
The FDA is supposed to be protecting us from pharma.
It is supposed to be exerting control over them, and the reverse has happened.
So that's regulatory capture, but what we are seeing is something much broader than that, right?
Because a lot of the things that have been captured aren't regulatory, right?
So anyway, when corruption is the minor force, corruption is the right term.
Capture is when some entity within the system, some institution or process, has been taken over by something that is supposed to be subservient to it, right?
And then there's this next phase where it's not even that the FDA has been captured by pharma, but it is actually a whole network of institutions that then have an emergent nature.
Right?
The FDA has been captured and the FDA may grant emergency use authorization where it shouldn't.
It may participate in silencing critics.
Right?
It may participate in obscuring harms.
These kinds of things.
These are terrible in and of themselves.
But then you find, you know, the New York Times playing wingman.
Yes, you do.
Right?
And so this is like a whole next level.
Not only are we dealing, so corruption is the minor version, where the major version is still doing what the system is designed to do, but it has been redirected to a small extent.
You've got capture, where entire institutions have been inverted, and they are doing the inverse job.
They are working for those they are supposed to be regulating, and regulating those they are supposed to be working for.
And then you have this next level thing, which is the emergence of a network of institutions that are captured by one mechanism or another.
And what it results is in an entire false narrative about where we are, what we face, what the experts believe, which is Really the place where the analysis that says hey, let's go with the experts that usually works, right?
We don't know what the experts believe because as you and I keep discovering every time you have a conversation where you Confess your actual beliefs on these things you find that people don't hold the beliefs that they have been espousing Right they to one degree or another have private suspicions that they haven't been sharing things that they would get punished if they said them out loud And so, you know, we are living in a hall of mirrors that goes even beyond a world where you imagine regulatory capture has happened, right?
Why is the New York Times participating in the same story that the captured FDA is advancing, right?
How did that happen?
How is there no possibility of real journalism?
How does it have to happen in a tweet thread or on substack Right?
Rather than in the New York Times and the Washington Post and, you know, the New York Post or whatever other papers.
I guess the New York Post has done a certain amount, but it's also been silenced for doing it.
All right, so that's the general taxonomy.
Yep, and to your point about the New York Times playing wingman, we have a beautiful example this week.
All right.
Shall we share some of that?
Let's do it.
I was hoping to share my screen for some of this, so I'm just going to be reading it, and again, we will share the links.
In the show notes, but the New York Times reported basically raccoon dogs for the win.
It's their fault.
COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, it's the raccoon dogs after all.
But not frozen this time.
No, not frozen.
It's the fault of those crazy Chinese people who trade them.
Now it's not racist, right, to blame the Chinese people and their trade of wildlife that they definitely shouldn't be trading now.
Now this is the honorable thing.
So the New York Times, in their article, headlined, New Data Links Pandemic's Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market, which came out on the 16th, March 16th, two days ago.
The first paragraph reads, an international team of virus experts, just up there, an international team of virus experts, An international team of virus experts said on Thursday that they had found genetic data from a market in Wuhan, China, linking the coronavirus with raccoon dogs for sale there, adding evidence to the case that the worst pandemic in a century could have been ignited by an infected animal that was being dealt through the illegal wildlife trade.
And you have to go down pretty far in the article to discover that the players involved are a lot of the same players that we've become familiar with.
Now, it's Christian Anderson leading up the team.
He's one of the international members of the international team of virus experts.
And then you have playing sort of, well, wingman to the wingman is Angela Rasmussen.
And it's just, you know, the same people with the same conclusions over and over and over again.
And this New York Times article is actually Particularly bad.
But as it turns out, they just borrowed most of it from The Atlantic.
So we've talked before about The Atlantic Monthly's reporting on SARS-CoV-2, which has been abominable.
And they've got this small team of three or four happens-to-be-all-women reporters that are just doing this like gossipy coffee-clatch stuff that sort of sounds science-y but really never is.
The abominable snow job.
Abominable snow job, indeed!
So it's one of them, again, in the Atlantic, writing, and so we talked about this explicitly in November of 2021 on episode 105, what's going on at the Atlantic, but they are still at it.
So here I'm going to, and again wish I could show you my screen here, but read you just some highlighted sections from the Atlantic article called The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic.
A New Analysis of Genetic Samples from China Appears to Link the Pandemic's Origin to Raccoon Dogs by Catherine J. Wu.
This was published somehow the same day as the New York Times article was published, even though the New York Times cites The Atlantic as having been the source of this.
See earlier point about the weird coordination across institutions.
Yes, indeed.
Updated the following day, that is to say yesterday, March 17th.
I don't know what was updated, but this whole piece is worth reading if you can stomach it, but I'm just going to read the pieces that I've highlighted here.
Oh, actually, I'll start with, you know, what is the evidence, anyway?
Like, what has happened that we are now so certain that it's raccoon dogs of Gnodic origin, right?
This must be powerful evidence.
Oh, it's powerful.
It's going to be powerful.
For three years now, the article begins.
The debate—this is the article by Wu in The Atlantic Monthly, published this week.
For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas.
That SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab.
Through a swirl of data obfuscation by Chinese authorities and politicalization within the United States, and rampant speculation from all corners of the world, many scientists have stood by the notion that this outbreak, like most others, had purely natural roots.
But that hypothesis has been missing a key piece of proof.
Genetic evidence from the Hunan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China showing that the virus had infected creatures for sale there.
Now, an international team of virologists, genomicists, and evolutionary biologists may have finally found crucial data help fill that knowledge gap.
A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019.
Just slow down here.
A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019.
That's the evidence.
It's some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans rather than an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses.
This really strengthens the case for a natural origin, says Seema Lakdawalla, a virologist at Emory University who wasn't involved in the research.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist involved with the research, told me, this is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected.
There's really no other explanation that makes any sense.
Really, Angie?
Should I go on?
Do you want to introduce first?
Well, I think there are a couple things.
There's a lot more to say, but yeah.
One, the idea that this is the strongest evidence yet may actually be true, even though there is really essentially no evidence here other than the presence of the animal in the location that they want us to believe it started in.
And we'll get here, but there's some sequences that have the genome of the raccoon dog and the genome of the virus that show up in the same place.
Right, right.
At the same time, ish.
Right.
The kind of evidence that implies that the people in the World Trade Center may have brought it down themselves, because their DNA was present in the crime scene.
But, you know, but also notice the linguistic turn of phrase there, where the point is, what we've been waiting for is evidence that it came from the Wuhan lab.
I mean, the Wuhan seafood market.
Yes, that is the piece that is missing.
That is the piece.
And, my God, there's so much here.
As far as I can tell, this is the scientific evidence at this point.
There's not even a frickin' paper to look at.
Oh.
There's nothing.
It's not, oh, it's only on a preprint server.
No, it doesn't exist yet.
Well, it doesn't exist yet, and yet you have two major publications trumpeting it.
And we've seen this before with COVID.
We saw this with the TOGETHER trial that supposedly showed that ivermectin was ineffective against COVID, where we had that result six months before we were able to look at the methodology of the paper that was trumpeted in major headlines.
And so this is not even unpeer-reviewed, right?
You've got peer-reviewed where something has been scrutinized and then it is presented to the public.
You've got unpeer-reviewed where it's put on a pre-print server and nobody has scrutinized it ahead of time.
But it's presented so that other scientists and anyone else who wants to can assess.
Yes.
There's no assessment possible.
It's not possible.
The point is what they've done is they've decided to give us the conclusion in advance of us being able to scrutinize how they reached it, which suggests that that conclusion may not be based on a robust methodology.
Why would they want Why would they want to do that, though?
Why would they want to start with a conclusion?
What possible interest could they have in starting with a conclusion?
Interesting.
Now, some people will remember that Christian Anderson was, in fact, initially the person who called Anthony Fauci's attention to the fact that the genome of the virus in question was, in his words, inconsistent with predictions from evolutionary theory from a natural origin.
Well, he has seen the light.
For those of you just listening, I'm making that gesture that people make when they're handling money.
Does anyone actually do that with money, though?
I have never seen film of Christian Anderson doing this, but there is actually evidence of a tremendous amount of money having flowed to him, to his boss, Eric Topol.
Yes, that Eric Topol at the Scripps Institute.
That's an expert I can really get behind trusting, can't you?
Um, I am, I am somewhat behind in trusting Eric Topol.
I just think he may have a conflict of interest, um, the size of a, you know, the International Space Station.
But, um, anyway, the idea that we are being told, you know, that you have multiple journalistic sources that are reporting, it's so urgent Yeah, it's so urgent that we know the conclusion from this study that they have to publish on it before we're even allowed to look at it.
Well, that Department of Energy stuff that came out and said, like, actually, we're not sure at all, but like, it really kind of seems like it could be a lab leak.
They, they had to get right on top of that.
So here we have these sort of glowing endorsements in pseudoscience-y language.
And, you know, the, I don't know the, I'm not, I have never run into, as far as I know, before the work of the author of the New York Times piece, but this, like, The Atlantic just created this stable of Pseudo-science journalists reporting on pseudo-science that did their work over and over and over and over again during this pandemic, for the last three years, and they just haven't veered.
They just have not looked outside of their lane.
They picked the lane and they are staying in it, and there's nothing to indicate that that lane is reflective of reality or truth.
Shall I read a few more bits from this?
Absolutely.
It's a long article.
The genetic sequences were pulled out of swabs taken in and near market stalls around the pandemic start.
So that's the source of the evidence.
The new analysis led by Christian Anderson, Edward Holmes, and Michael Waraby, three prominent researchers who have been looking into the virus's roots, shows that that may not be the case.
That may not be the case being Sorry, no animal host for SARS-CoV-2 can be deduced.
Within about half a day of downloading the data from GISAID, this is not a database I am familiar with, and so I'm not actually sure how it's normally pronounced, but GISAID, it's an open access genomic database, data were posted there, and this team happened to get lucky and pull it, and then the data disappeared again, and no one can figure out what's going on there.
So that also is strange.
Maybe everyone just got lucky?
Maybe?
Within about half a day of downloading the data from GISAID, the trio and their collaborators discovered that several market samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were also coming back chock full of animal genetic material, much of which was a match for the common raccoon dog, a small animal related to foxes that has a raccoon-like face.
Finding the genetic material of virus and mammal so closely commingled, enough to be extracted out of a single swab, isn't perfect proof, Lakdawalla told me.
It's an important step, I'm not going to diminish that, she said.
Still, the evidence falls short of, say, isolating SARS-CoV-2 from a free-ranging raccoon dog, or even better, uncovering a viral sample swab from a mammal for sale at Hunan from the time of the outbreak's onset.
Still, the findings don't stand alone.
Do I believe there were infected animals at the market?
Yes, I do, Anderson told me.
So this is just a statement of belief.
It's simply a statement of belief.
It's a statement of belief.
Do I believe there are infected animals at the market?
Yes, I do, Anderson told me.
Does this new data add to that evidence base?
Yes, end quote.
The new analysis builds on extensive previous research that points to the market as the source of the earliest major outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, colon.
Here's the evidence.
She's going to trot out.
Many of the earliest known COVID-19 cases of the pandemic were clustered roughly in the market's vicinity.
Roughly.
And the virus's genetic material was found in many samples swabbed from carts and animal processing equipment at the venue, as well as parts of nearby infrastructure such as storehouses, sewage wells, and water drains.
That's two pieces of evidence, neither of which are evidence, not extensive research.
Raccoon dogs, creatures commonly bred for sale in China, are also already known to be one of many mammal species that can easily catch and spread the coronavirus.
All of this left one main hole in the puzzle to fill.
Bear cut evidence the raccoon dogs and the virus were in the exact same spot at the market, close enough that the creatures might have been infected and possibly infectious.
That's what the new analysis provides.
They could really use someone who understands anything about evolution or how viruses might actually move between species, don't you think?
No, I think that would screw up their whole plan of selling us the idea that the seafood market is the likely origin of the human pandemic.
All of this left one main hole in the puzzle to fill?
Think of it as finding the DNA of an investigation's main suspect at the scene of the crime.
The findings don't rule out the possibility that other animals may have been carrying SARS-CoV-2 at Huanan.
Raccoon dogs, if they were infected, may not even be the creatures who passed the pathogen on to us.
Well then why are we talking about them?
Okay, that's not in the article.
I'm editorializing now.
Which means the search for the virus's many wild hosts will need to plod on.
Do we know the intermediate host was raccoon dogs?
No, Anderson wrote to me, using the term for an animal that can ferry a pathogen between other species.
Is it high up on my list of potential hosts?
Yes, but it's definitely not the only one.
So now we're kind of backing off from this giant, like, oh, the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly is going to tell us that now we have this evidence, it's raccoon dogs, it's raccoon dogs.
Well, except maybe not, but it could be.
So we've now backed off two-thirds of the way or so through this article to, yeah, maybe, but isn't this cool?
Quote, at this point it's still unclear why the sequences were so recently posted to GISAID.
They also vanished from the database shortly after the international team of researchers notified the Chinese researchers of their preliminary findings, without explanation.
They go on and on and on.
There's really no explanation.
Skeptics.
I don't think they need to be poked.
I think there are plenty of holes in those findings.
- They don't require any of us skeptics. - Like we've had nothing shared with us.
There's no findings except that we've been told. - We've been told swabs had DNA from the raccoon dogs and genetic sequences from the virus in close proximity in a market where sick people undoubtedly co-mingled with animals that they were buying.
You sound like a skeptic.
Do I?
Skeptics will likely be eager to poke holes in the team's new findings, pointing out, for instance, that it's technically possible for genetic material from viruses and animals to end up sloshed together in the environment even if an infection didn't take place.
Maybe an infected human visited the market and inadvertently deposited viral RNA near an animal's crate.
But an infected animal with no third-party contamination still seems by far the most plausible explanation for the sample's genetic contents, several experts told me.
Other scenarios require contortions of logic, and more important, additional proof.
I got it.
We're almost there.
Alright.
The debate over SARS-CoV-2's origins has raged for nearly as long as the pandemic itself.
Okay, I don't even get the rest of the sentence.
Outlasting lockdowns, widespread masking, even the first version of the COVID vaccines.
I don't know what that's doing there.
And as long as there is murkiness to cling to, it may never fully resolve.
When President Joe Biden asked the U.S.
intelligence community to review the matter, four government agencies and the National Intelligence Council pointed to a natural origin, while two others guessed that it was a lab leak.
Finally, end of this crap piece in The Atlantic.
If this new level of scientific evidence does conclusively tip the origins debate toward the animal route, it will be, in one way, a major letdown.
It will mean that SARS-CoV-2 breached our borders because we once again mismanaged our relationship with wildlife.
That we failed to prevent this epidemic for the same reason we failed, and could fail again, to prevent so many of the rest.
Oh, I frankly, I predicted that.
If they manage to sell us on this story that this has a natural origin, then the point is the lesson of the pandemic is the inverse.
Not, you must not do the kind of research that turns the world upside down, but in fact you have to do more of that research because we missed it, you know, by this much.
We were studying these viruses but we didn't get ahead of this thing and it got us anyway, so next time we need to have done much more of this gain-of-function research in order to be ready.
That's what they're gonna sell us.
It's even worse than that.
Oh.
Yeah.
All right.
My turn.
Yeah.
No, so that for sure, but also don't go out into nature.
It's dangerous.
There's wild things out there and they will give you diseases.
Stay inside.
Be safe.
It's clean.
We've got some antibacterial spray for you, antiviral spray, anti-everything spray.
You just get Right in that comfortable little zone of yours, we'll stream some crap into your face that you can watch and be entertained by, but for God's sake, don't go outside.
It's dangerous out there.
Yes, don't unplug from our mechanism of narrative control.
So I wanted to give an interpretation.
You wondered about their claim of the natural origin having outlasted Something, something about Vectines, masks, etc, etc, etc.
It's just a weird thing to... Well, but no, I know what they're getting at.
Okay.
In this case, the they is a she.
Well, that's a C earlier point regarding the emergent nature of the they-she complex that advances the phony narrative.
We're not going to talk about cats again, are we?
No, no, no, we're done with that for the moment.
No, no, we're on to raccoon dogs having... Wait, do they have pronouns too?
You'll have to ask them, but I will say that this is a major leap forward from the frozen ferret badger steaks that they failed to convince us were the source.
Did you just talk about the great leap forward and talking about the origins of this virus?
I guess.
I mean, you know, make of it what you will.
Okay.
But what really is going on here is there are a couple of narratives that are disproportionately important, and this is a subtle point, I think, but in some cases We have succeeded in staring down their garbage narratives, right?
Safe and effective is not a phrase you hear regularly used about the vaccines anymore.
We're into much more nuanced territory.
We're still lagging behind the reality of what is apparent in the data, but nonetheless, but there are certain There are certain narratives with an undead nature to them, right?
And I in fact would call the kind of journalism that you're talking about, instead of burying the lead, it's exhuming the lead.
They keep resurrecting their lead because they cannot afford to have it die, right?
To the extent that the world keeps discovering, I mean, we keep getting new agencies, you know, people who were on the commission, who, you know, Jeffrey Sachs has announced that he saw nothing but corruption in the commission that was trying to find the origins.
We've got all of these things that would ordinarily cause a regular person to say, you know what, that Wuhan seafood market explanation, Turned out to be nuts.
All sorts of people with all sorts of different kinds of expertise have converged on the idea that this does seem to have emerged from the lab right there in Wuhan, etc.
Outbreak of chocolatey goodness.
Right.
The point is they can't afford to let it go.
And I don't think that they think they're going to win this one.
But I think what they have to do is muddle it, right?
This is the doubt component of a Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt campaign.
The point is they need to have some alternative that remains live so that the people who have been so thoroughly embarrassed by the failure of that garbage narrative have something to say.
Oh, I'm on Team Atlantic, New York Times, right?
I mean, don't you know that they found the DNA of the, you know, uh...
They found the DNA of the raccoon dogs along with genetic material from SARS-CoV-2, which of course, if you're paying attention, you know that at the point that these things were being swabbed for in the Wuhan seafood market, likely the disease had been circulating in Wuhan since September or October of 2019.
It's no surprise that there was SARS-CoV-2 all over the Wuhan seafood market, which means it's going to be commingled with every single organism that was in that market, right?
There's no evidence here.
And, you know, much less something that they would let us scrutinize.
But the point is that narrative and the ivermectin turned out not to work narrative, these are two narratives that they are never gonna let die.
Doesn't matter what the evidence says.
They need both of them, right?
And they've got...
They've got confederates like Rasmussen saying, this is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected.
There's really no other explanation that makes any sense.
This is as credentialed on point a scientist as you could possibly be, who has made a statement that is so Utterly and transparently ludicrous, and yet here it is.
Here it is in the Atlantic.
That statement makes no sense, and yet that authority saying it will be sufficient for some number of people.
Right, and it sounds so full of meaning.
No other explanation makes sense.
How about somebody with COVID coughed near a raccoon dog?
I mean, even in this terrible article, there's other things.
Even this terrible article cannot manage to not admit that actually, yes, this isn't the only possibility.
Even Christian Anderson says, this isn't clear proof.
Yeah, it's the weakest of tea.
And what's more, here's some strong evidence.
We haven't found the wild circulating Pandemic in any creature let alone raccoon dogs, right?
So the point is if you really wanted to find this evidence look if you know that Maybe they should hire OJ to go look for it.
Basically, right?
You know, he's he hasn't come up with anything on his ex-wife's killer, right?
So he's probably at this point free to go look for the infected raccoon dogs Wow I guess my point is, look, nobody really expected OJ to go looking for the real killer, because that would have been a very, you know, annoying experience, given what he apparently... He would have been at it a long time.
Well, and, you know, not only at it, it's one thing to search in vain, it's another thing to search for something you know doesn't exist, right?
Precisely.
And so the point is, look, we've had an awful lot of time, much longer than it has taken in any of the previous cases that are in any way analogous to this, to find the intermediate host.
And the point is, it's not, you know, not like we don't know what we're looking for.
So I do fear that somebody is going to cook it up at some point.
Well, and it's interesting, too, that, you know, we have, oh, you know, Anderson saying, well, you know, it's definitely, you know, at or near, I don't remember exactly what he says, you know, at the top of my list of possible intermediate hosts, but I've got a lot of others.
Like, oh, really?
Tell us.
Because this is the first I've been hearing about raccoon dogs, and I'm sure some other people were talking about at some point, but like, wasn't it the frozen ferret badger stakes there for a while?
Yeah, and there are some other possibilities, but interesting that in direct contrast to how science is supposed to happen, this is an issue that concerns the entire planet.
And there are a list of possible intermediate hosts in the head of the main guy who's got one and only one hypothesis, and he will never ever stray from it.
Therefore, it doesn't make it a hypothesis, really.
And he's not going to share that with us?
Doesn't that make it easier for at the point that they discover some maybe better evidence that, oh, actually, it's, you know, this guy over here, it's a pangolin after all.
Ah, yes, well, that was on my list, on my short list that I kept private.
Because why?
Like, to what end?
Who wins by that list of possible intermediate hosts being only in the head of the person who has a goal to prove that this was a zoonotic origin as opposed to from the lab?
Right.
There's nothing here, but I want to tie this back to the taxonomy that we were building.
Because when you get to this emergent layer, where you've got narrative control, you've got a storyline that is so fundamental to the power players getting whatever it is that they're trying to accomplish.
Protecting themselves from taking the blame that they rightly deserve for having triggered this global catastrophe.
For example, in order for them to avoid responsibility, they need to preserve a story like this.
They cannot preserve it through any normal means because any normal rules of evidence would tell you that you actually don't have any evidence here.
There really isn't any evidence of anything that isn't effectively automatic.
Yes, people will have had SARS-CoV-2 in that market and they were selling whatever they were selling, right?
So The existence of kinetic sequences doesn't tell us one way or another, and as I've pointed out before, you know, if there was a coffee shop on the ground floor of the Wuhan Institute and somebody went around swabbing it and found, you know, evidence of very early versions of the virus, it wouldn't say that the coffee shop had produced it.
The point is the coffee shop happens to exist in close proximity to the lab, which is the very likely source, as the seafood market exists in very close proximity to the lab, which is very likely the source, which is the reason that it seems to have been circulating at the Wuhan military games in September-October of 2019.
The point is this is circumstantial evidence where you would expect there to be circumstantial evidence.
It doesn't narrow down the search at all, right?
Right.
Now an infected ferret badger or infected raccoon dog would.
A population of infected raccoon dogs would.
Again, we don't have actually the scientific evidence in front of us, but the article says actually it's already known.
It was already known that coronaviruses, or maybe this one, I don't remember, do circulate in raccoon dogs.
Okay, that's a valuable piece of information.
No, that doesn't tell us that it's circulating in the population or that it is moving between them.
No, I mean, in fact, to say that, you know, coronaviruses are known to circulate in raccoon dogs doesn't mean anything.
Coronaviruses circulate in people, right?
We're talking about a very odd coronavirus with some very odd genetic anomalies, and the point is you want to find something that is plausibly a descendant of an early ancestor of this virus circulating in raccoon dogs, either in the wild or in captivity.
And, you know, again, I fear that somebody is going to cook this up, right?
And we're going to depend on sleuths to make sure that it's actually a real instance rather than something somebody has generated to get Anthony Fauci off the hook.
Yeah.
Let me just, I found the quote from, this is again from the Atlantic Monthly's article, Published this week, raccoon dogs, creatures commonly bred for sale in China, are also already known to be one of many mammal species that can easily catch and spread the coronavirus.
Yeah.
That's the sentence, which, written badly, Yes.
Written badly intentionally or unintentionally?
Who's to say?
But from that sentence, we cannot tell.
We do not know anything about the coronavirus.
There's not a the coronavirus.
Yeah, there's not a the coronavirus.
What's more, as far as I know, that statement, to the extent that it could be narrowed to something meaningful, like, hey, here's an animal that actually transmits this coronavirus, Isn't right, right?
Because there are a wide variety of animals that have contracted SARS-CoV-2, but in terms of those who are capable of transmitting it to people, the list is tiny.
It's really... Are raccoon dogs like mink in this regard?
Which would be something, and...
Boy, like, for those who will say, well, you know, why are you picking on this?
This is part of the point, right?
Literally, there's no science out there yet.
There is nothing written that has been shared publicly.
And, you know, we, along with many others, have been taken to task for talking about papers that are posted on preprint servers that haven't yet been peer-reviewed.
There is no paper, there is no research, there is no write-up, there is no ability to analyze what has happened except for these two articles, both of which are basically borrowing from one another and which rely on interviews with
With sources that are known, at least in one case, at least in the case of the author of the Atlantic article, to already be longtime friendly with these same sources who will not stray from their conclusion, regardless of what other evidence shows up.
This is not science!
It's not science, and you know, you can actually... One thing that struck me, I read the New York Times version of this, was that one of the authors of this paper that does not exist is confident that raccoon dogs existed in the stall from which these swabs were taken in 2014 when he happened to be there.
Right.
Yeah, I know.
Really?
This is anecdotal nonsense, the idea that that constitutes some kind of evidence worth reporting in the New York Times about some paper that we haven't seen and can't see.
Look, we know, right, the cold fusion episode Right?
The problem was they went to the press before there was anything to scrutinize, right?
We know that this is a no-no.
Journalistically speaking, they shouldn't do this for a reason.
Now that's very different than a preprint.
A preprint in which, at the point that the conclusion emerges, we can also scrutinize the methodology.
And it's good, because all of us can scrutinize it, as opposed to, oh, well, it's been peer-reviewed, therefore you can trust that it's already been vetted.
Well, it's been vetted by people who may or may not have had a perverse incentive to either actually definitely let that get published or definitely not let that get published.
Right.
So the preprint servers, I mean, we've talked about this, you know, three years ago, Three years ago, and two years and 11 months ago, and two years and 10 months ago, in the spring of 2020.
It was the Wild West in terms of the preprint servers, and it was amazing because so much was available.
And no, you couldn't keep up.
No, you couldn't read everything, just as you can't read all the stuff that's peer-reviewed.
But what you knew was the stuff that was out there, that was on preprint servers, you could assess for yourself.
And maybe you had the skills and maybe you didn't, but at least it didn't have an additional level of editorial control between you and your ability to assess, which If the editors are great, and if the peer reviewers are great, then fine.
That'll help.
That'll help you not have to wade through so much of the chaff to get to the wheat.
But, as we know, back to your point, right, about the capture, and the corruption, and the ways that you have wingmen effectively playing, you know, entities playing wingmen to, you know, the desire to not have the truth come out.
We have...
We have a problem that is multivariate and deeper than I think almost any of us could have imagined.
I did not see any mention of why it is they were reporting the conclusion before the emergence of the paper.
Now, if the paper is ready to go, enough that reporters could have looked at it and decided for themselves whether it was worth reporting, they could put it on a pre-print server.
And they could say, this paper, which is now going through peer review, but is available here in its pre-print version, they could have done that.
And they didn't do that, and that is a tell.
And the tell is, What we want is the report.
In other words, the report in The Atlantic and The New York Times are the purpose of this research, right?
The research itself is beside the point.
And in fact, stalling and delaying so that we can't scrutinize it, and then predicting that, oh, well, certainly skeptics will emerge.
Geez, maybe you did crappy research.
And of course, you know that the skeptics are going to come after you, because they're going to notice that it was crappy, because there's so much writing on it.
And there will be lots of scrutiny.
So the point is, yeah, announce your conclusion, predict skeptics, and then later on down the road I guess we'll get to see this paper and find out what fucked up bullshit you actually did, right?
Which is a remarkable place to be.
The New York Times and the Atlantic should be calling bullshit on this rather than amplifying it.
Yeah, who's... I don't know, I was gonna say, like, whose pocket are you in?
But, like, This isn't what you guys stand for.
The New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, this is not what you stand for.
Well?
This is not what you claim to stand for and should be standing for.
If you're journalists, it's not.
We need an open and free press.
And instead we have sentences like, four government agencies, the National Intelligence Council, pointed to a natural origin while two others guessed that it was a lab leak.
Pointed guest.
Sorry, wrong.
One last point.
In this taxonomy, right, where you go from corruption to the capture of an institution to the control over some larger piece of the system, which, you know, the journalists are doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical companies and the, you know, corrupt head of governmental agencies, etc.
There is a question about how that emergent phenomenon happens, and certainly some of it Right, when we scratch the surface and we see that Christian Anderson and Eric Topol have both been greatly enriched and just so happen to hold positions that are consistent with the powerful corrosive entity, right, we can say, oh, well, I think maybe I understand that.
But then there's lots of people who are a little hard to explain.
Right?
And I wanted to just point out that because we're dealing with an emergent phenomenon, it doesn't have to abide by a single mechanism.
It doesn't have to be that there's some coordinating entity that reached out to a bunch of people and, you know, figured out who was willing to do its bidding and whatever else.
What it can be is that people get very good at figuring out how to get remunerated, how to get paid.
And paid doesn't have to be in money.
It can be in social credibility.
It can be reputation.
It can be positions at institutions that are ascendant, whatever.
Opportunities.
But essentially there's like a gradient of well-being.
And if you take certain positions and your life starts getting better because some powerful entity takes notice that you are doing its bidding and it decides to protect you and reward you and do all of those things, then you can get a vast network of what I call freelancers to do the work for you.
So in the case of the New York Times and the Atlantic, are we dealing with people, are we dealing with useful idiots?
Right?
Who don't know that what they're saying is nonsense?
Are we dealing with extensions of the entities that are corrupting and controlling our system?
Maybe.
Or are we dealing with freelancers who noticed that when they spoke up with skepticism about the lab leak hypothesis that things started to go well for them and when they spoke up in the other direction things went badly and just started to do what it was that effectively this isn't It's selection.
Right.
It's selection creating an emergent analog of a conspiracy.
Now, I'm not saying there's no conspiracy.
Undoubtedly, there are many levels of one here.
But there's also a lot of stuff that may well not be conspiratorial.
It may be people responding to their incentives, and as you say, selection, choosing those who do the bidding of those in positions of power.
Indeed.
Wow.
Okay.
Let's finish up today before we take a break and then come back for the Q&A with two stories that were relayed to me this week by an acquaintance in a major west coast city.
I'm sharing these stories with permission, but I've changed a few details to preserve the anonymity.
of the people involved.
And so the first one he suggested, the heading was "You made your bed, you have to sleep in it." I'm thinking this is a "You can play that game" story.
So we've got a woman who was interviewing for a job for which she was qualified.
And And she was asked if she had been vaccinated against COVID.
The would-be employer clarified that while they don't have mandates now, they had had mandates and they wanted to know if she had been vaccinated.
And she was offered the job.
She turned it down, and in telling them why, said, I'm looking for a position that is inclusive, and I want to work for a company that values diversity, and do not feel given the past COVID vaccine policy at this company that this company would be a good place for me to work to experience those values that I hold so dear.
And I think that's brilliant.
Use some of their tools against them, right?
And this also fits with, and I wish I could show my computer here this week, but I have shown before this sign that is at a store in Selwood in Portland that I haven't been back for a while, but I've seen up for a while, including when everyone was being told you absolutely 100% need to get vaccinated right now.
And there are a lot of stores and restaurants that didn't let you in if you weren't, and they have this sign up.
I'll just read it from my screen.
It says, We do not discriminate against any customer based on sex, gender, race, creed, age, vaccinated or unvaccinated.
All customers who wish to patronize are welcome in our establishment.
So this is in that vein.
So I would point out that this is the honorable counterpoint to the evolution of freelance propagandists.
That's right.
That if we take care of those who, in spite of the fact that it was difficult to do, stood up for us, you know, instead of having onerous mandates posted at their door, they posted the opposite and they invited people in.
You know, we should remember those people even now that those mandates are gone.
We should recognize them and patronize their institutions because we want a world in which people stand up.
It's a better world.
That's right.
It stands a good chance of functioning.
Certainly do.
Okay, second story.
Also a West Coast city, and that's relevant because, you know, cities across, well, across the West, but especially in the United States.
Paris is getting it right now, isn't it?
But especially in the United States since the summer of 2020, and I think there wasn't a city on the West Coast, a major city on the West Coast, that wasn't spared a lot of the chaos.
And People, you know, even people who persist in their pre-George Floyd, pre-COVID beliefs about what should and should not be happening at a policy level are looking around saying, you know, this isn't safe, I don't feel safe, I need to figure out how to protect myself.
So we've got a guy who teaches firearm skills and safety to small groups of people at a long-established gun range in school, and many of his students who come in come in with no experience, of course, but also sometimes they are vocally anti-gun, and they feel they have no choice to be there because they're looking around their neighborhoods going, I actually need to figure out how to protect myself, but they're They resent it.
They're sullen.
Often these same people who are sullen, who will come into these classes, you know, talking, being explicitly loud about, I don't want to be here, I don't think guns are a good idea.
They're there.
They're also often masked.
It's not maybe a huge surprise that those are overlapping populations, even now.
But he, this instructor, reports that in a recent class, this again happened, and there were, you know, it's a small class, but a good portion of the people were, you know, started out resentful, sullen, you know, vocally resistant to what they were there doing, masked, not interacting with the rest of the people.
And that by the end, There was none of that.
It disappeared.
People were laughing together, talking, sharing stories, learning from each other.
Everyone had taken their masks off.
Like literally, and I think figuratively, everyone had taken their masks off.
And the guy who's telling me this says, it's not about the guns, the guns aren't bringing people together, that's not what's going on.
He said, I think what it is, is About connecting outside of your comfort zone and interacting with strangers, frankly, with people who you didn't know before and coming together around something that is challenging, that is tough, that is a real skill that can be learned but that you need to focus and
And and pay attention and you can learn not just from you know the person who's supposedly teaching you but from your peers as well.
This is broadening and it's humanizing and it's something that so many of us have have missed out on and lost access to starting just about three years ago now.
Yeah, the sense that I have is, A, whenever we try this thing where we confess our doubts to people and they ante up by confessing their doubts, right, there is a sense, a palpable sense of relief.
And I have the sense that most people are living in this tightly constrained narrative where they know what they are expected to believe and they have convinced themselves that that is what they believe and they say it out loud and other people affirm them.
And so they're living in this sort of terrified state.
Yes.
And the, you know, just as there was something awful about being locked down in our homes at the beginning of the pandemic, when in fact what we should have been doing is gathering outside, right?
Gathering outside, Okay, so there's a pathogen spreading inside of buildings, but we can go outside and talk about it and not be fearful, right?
That sense of relief is so important, and from the perspective of those who wish to maintain control over us.
It is necessary that we find ways to break that hegemony over us.
And I think the natural human part is if you take that risk and you do let your guard down and you dare to say what you actually think, you're actually concerned about, you will paradoxically feel so much better to discover that you're really not alone.
Um, and I suspect that's what happened on the gun range.
Yeah.
I suspect so too.
And it's, you know, it may seem to some that, you know, it's easy for us to say at this point, right?
Um, that, you know, we, we've been doing it for three years, but, you know, of course, I'm taking an awful lot of shit for doing so.
And, um, And there's of course the majority of people in the world don't don't know what our positions are when we interact with them uh and every single time I mean you've just said this one I'm just going to repeat it like every single time that I have been in a situation where I'm interacting with someone who you know I'm a stranger to them and they're a stranger to me
Uh, and, uh, it's, you know, it's a, it's a barista, it's a waitress, it's a dry cleaner, you know, it's some, it's a retail, it's a cashier, you know, Uber driver, something, right?
In any number of, of things.
And you say something that suggests Anything that isn't in lockstep with what, given the place you're in, which is to say like if you're in a west coast city, you know what you're supposed to believe on any number of topics.
And if you say something that suggests anything outside of lockstep, it is almost universal that what you get is first cautious and then like just an outpouring of conversation.
And relief on both sides.
And connection.
You don't end up getting glared at and yelled at and hated, and that certainly happens, but if you're taking as evidence of how people feel what you see on social media, it's not a good rendering of what is actually happening in the world.
Yeah, it's actually a co-opting of a natural circuit where we're supposed to be able to assess what people think just based on our interactions with them and what is apparent.
And because the narrative control is so powerful, we get a very wrong impression about how unified people are in believing certain things, whether it's in our city or across the net.
You know, I'm also struck As you know, we watched the big short again last night, just really as a refresher on what had happened in 2008.
I said to you, I think it might be time to re-watch that movie.
I was struck actually, I can't really believe I didn't put it together, maybe I've just forgotten, but the bulk of the movie is spent in this excruciating period where the people who had seen what was taking place in the housing market
Place their bets, but the evidence that they were correct is oddly delayed and everybody is shouting at them about how stupid they've been and how they're going to be losing all of the money that has been entrusted to them.
And as far as what's public, the most parsimonious explanation is, you guys, you 3%, if you will, you were wrong.
Right.
You were wrong.
Like, yeah, of course it's possible, but no, what we're seeing is evidence of such deep fraud.
Such deep fraud.
That is what we are seeing right now.
And no, that's not the most parsimonious explanation.
Yes, that's evidence of conspiracy, but you know what?
That's what's going on.
Yeah.
Well, they were right.
It is the most parsimonious, but not at that point.
It was impossible to see in terms of what was visible to the rest of the world.
Right.
And so anyway, I think, you know, you and I have been suffering from this very thing throughout much of the pandemic where just simply following the evidence where it led led to excruciating levels of pressure from, in many cases, quite close quarters.
Right.
You know, back off.
You're wrong.
You're killing people.
All of these.
Claims, which of course turn out to be nonsense.
Yes, the analysis was difficult, but it's not that difficult, right?
If you're not responding to the pressure.
But in any case, I think it has to be described as the consequence of the cognitive dissonance that comes from doing exactly the thing you were trained for, right?
Scientific analysis.
And having it put you at odds with all sorts of people who claim that that's what they're doing is, it's torture.
But in the end, reality is what it is.
Nature bats last.
And, you know, I fear that they will be able to drag out a recognition of what has taken place for many decades.
But the truth will out.
And pretending that it is other than it appears to be is no way to live.
All right, well I think we've gotten there.
That means it is your turn to start moving the tech around.
Boom.
We're going to take a 15-minute break, and this week, for the first time in three weeks, we will come back with a live Q&A.
You can ask questions at DarkHorseEmissions.com.
I forgot to mention at the top of the hour that our store has some new stuff in it, including pins.
It's got Dark Horse pins now and some other great stuff, so check that out if you're interested in stuff.
Here I've even got, it's not hidden, but stickers.
We do not sell laptops, you can't have your laptop without stickers.
I would just add a member of the Coalition of the Reasonable Discussion suggested pins.
Apparently they were already in the works, but pins are a great way to subtly indicate to others who might also not be of the enforced perspective that you've been paying attention to Dark Horse and might be open to a conversation.
So anyway, the idea of people finding each other the way they find us And often say marvelous things to us.
Unexpected moments.
Anyway, if you find each other, that will be even that much better.
So a pin might be a good way of doing that.
Indeed.
Okay, so you can, if you've got logistical questions as opposed to questions that you want us to answer, you can email darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
Consider joining our Patreons.
Consider getting our book, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Check out my writing on natural selections on my sub stack.
And until we see you next time, be that in 15 minutes or a week from now or sometime later down the road, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
