#173: Would You Believe… (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 173rd 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. First up this week, we discuss SARS-CoV2—again!—in light of new research that finds no evidence for a zoonotic origin at the Huanan Seafood Market. Science is not faring well these days. We also discuss AI “doomers,” and why that’s a misleading epithet. A new product that’ll keep your produce fresh with absolutely no ...
*Breathe Music* Hey folks, I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein This is the 173rd Dark Horse Podcast livestream.
I am sitting next to Dr. Heather Hying, and I have successfully mixed up the order of the intro without anybody noticing.
No one noticed, not even the dog who was sleeping behind us.
Unperturbed.
She has our back.
Yes, she does.
173.
We are informed by the universe and by our friend.
It's not just Prime.
Not only is it prime, but feels prime.
It's a sexy prime.
And not only is it a sexy prime, it's part of a sexy prime triplet.
What does that mean?
I don't know.
Well, sexy is a play on the Latin word for sex.
So it just means that it is part of a prime.
If it was just a sexy prime, part of a prime doublet that are six apart.
And in this case, it's part of a triplet.
It's the middle prime and three primes, each of which are six apart.
So that's, we are at 173.
So it's going to be 167 and 179.
So it's going to be 167 and 179.
179.
179.
Now, do you remember the 171st episode where I suggested that 171 felt prime?
I wouldn't have been able to tell you which episode it was, but sure.
I believe it was the 171st, and you'd be surprised how many people took me to task on that.
Sure.
Easily knowable information at this point.
Yeah, easily knowable.
I mean, I wasn't pretending to know the answer.
I was just saying it felt prime, which it still does.
But their point was that there was a simple method for knowing, which is something like, if you're a Pisces and the numbers add to nine, then it's divisible by nine, or something like that.
Amazing.
Also, I think if you're not a Pisces or don't know or give a rat's ass what astrological sign you are, this also works.
Here's the thing.
I am a Pisces and I don't give a rat's ass what astrological sign I might be.
But nonetheless, I got it wrong and our audience successfully educated and traumatized me over my error.
No, it'll be all right.
I'm nearly over it.
Yeah, that was eight episodes now.
Where are we at?
We're at 170.
It was two episodes ago.
Yeah, two episodes ago.
We're doing great on the math front today.
Is prime despite being even.
Two?
Yes.
Ah, yes.
Okay.
We're back at our usual time and place, and we will be here on Saturdays at noon 30 Pacific for the foreseeable future, but there are some changes coming.
We've got some new platforms coming.
We've got some new ways of coming at you coming, which we will be announcing We're also going to start doing Q&As, I think only twice a month.
We haven't quite decided, something like the second and the fourth live stream of the month, or the second and fourth Saturday of the month, something like that.
But we will continue doing our private Q&As at my Patreon on the last Sunday of the month, so we encourage you to join us there.
Why are you smirking, Dr. Weinstein?
Two reasons.
One, living in a permanent event horizon, saying the foreseeable future now means so little, but I mean, what else do we have, right?
It's just not a very long foreseeable future.
And then The way you said Q&As sounded like a confluence of a terrible set of conspiracy hypotheses and a sandwich spread.
Yes, exactly.
So, yeah.
It's conspiracy garlic spread.
Conspiracy garlic spread it is.
Yes, it's both and neither.
However, today we are doing a Q&A immediately following this live stream.
We're 10 or 15 minutes later, so you can go there now to darkhorsesubmissions.com and pose your questions, and we'll get to as many of them as we can.
If you've saved your Q's, we've got a bunch of A's.
We'll try to match them up.
Yeah, like one of those, you know, really uninspired tests from elementary school.
No, Highlights Magazine, sitting in the dentist's office.
That too.
Right.
Yes.
Where you have ten objects over here, and sometimes ten over here, and sometimes it's like ten and thirty.
Like, match them to their perspective.
Perspective?
Match them.
That magazine always raised questions for me.
Highlights.
Does Highlights still exist?
I have no idea.
Does Highlights exist outside of the U.S.?
How many people in our audience are we speaking to now?
Even when it existed, it barely existed.
I mean, it was a magazine that existed entirely in dentists' offices and pediatricians' offices.
Only where there was a captive audience too young to effectively complain about anything.
And before there were televisions everywhere.
Yeah.
Right.
So that I mean, I think part of what happened is now everyone expects screens and they get them.
And it's it's easier and cheaper for offices to supply screens with mass produced garbage than Highlights Magazine, which wasn't the most brilliant children's magazine.
It wasn't terrible.
Well, I don't know.
Every time I picked it up, I felt it was time wasted.
It was a lot like a preview of the Internet.
Let me guess.
I actually know the answer to this.
You preferred the back cover of National Geographic World with its What in the World game.
Do you remember this?
I do remember that.
Yeah, so there were like six or nine pictures.
A macro, usually, of something.
Yeah, like it was hanging on a feather in a room.
Yeah, and the question was, what the hell is this?
Yeah.
Yeah, it was fun.
Yeah, I think it's been renamed WTAF.
I don't know what it stands for, but the kids today, they do.
Yeah, they do, they do.
Okay, uh, what else?
Top of the hour logistics stuff.
Here we go, um, Natural Selections.
We came to you late last week, so I had already just posted my piece on Seastars, but people are enjoying it, and I appreciate subscribers, both free and both free, all three.
Now there's many, um, actually tens of thousands of you are free subscribers, and I'm, and I feel wonderful every time I post something.
I know that it's going out to to that many people, and of course I appreciate paying subscribers as well.
I would just point out, Jacques Cousteau is the only sea star I can name.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
Wow, we're just gonna go down all sorts of... When I was in... Rabbit fish holes.
Yeah, when I was in Baja last, in La Paz in December of last year in Mexico, There are some lovely sculptures along the Malcon, if I remember, Melson Malcon, I don't remember, the sort of the public walkway, including one of Jacques Cousteau that I now have as the avatar for one of our seafaring friends.
So whenever I think of him, I now think of Jacques Cousteau and vice versa, even though I'm not sure, not sure if that would be appreciated in either direction.
But I just, I have this sort of... Who is Jacques Cousteau?
I don't know.
I don't really know much about the guy, honestly.
Jacques?
Yeah.
Oh.
We're not on a first name basis, so.
No.
All I know is all of those specials, which were quite good, as I recall.
And, you know, the accent, irresistible.
I may never have seen one.
Never have seen a Jacques Cousteau special?
Yeah, I think that's possible.
It is amazing.
Over in the west side of LA, we were watching land-based Mutual of Omaha-sponsored specials.
No, that's... I can't remember.
I remember elephants and lions.
Oh yeah, jumping out of helicopters and darting the shit out of stuff.
Absolutely, that was more my speed growing up.
Okay, we have an awesome store.
DarkHorseStore.org is where you can find stuff.
The print shop he makes all of our merchandise and also runs the online store is owned and operated by...
It's just so nice out.
I feel like I want to be out there.
Yeah.
Let me go back.
The store, where you can find our merchandise now, is owned and operated by this wonderful couple in Louisville, Kentucky.
So, what that means is if you want some Dark Horse merchandise like Pfizer, the breakthroughs never stop, tote bags, shirts, all that.
You are supporting not just us and our store, but also supporting American entrepreneurs, small entrepreneurs, and products made right here in the U.S., which is awesome.
And also, these guys are never going to censor us, unlike the place that we used to have our store based.
So you can get, for instance, the Pfizer stuff or the Lie to a Tyrant, Google, all of that, right there at darkhorsestore.org.
And you can shop the store outside.
Just turn your brightness up.
Probably useful, yes.
And right here, more local yet, right here in the San Juan Islands, where we are streaming to you from, on Orcas Island, is Darval's Bookstore, where you can get signed copies of our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and you can order that online, but you can, of course, as always, get that book anywhere, pretty much anywhere books are sold, still, amazingly.
And we are supported by you.
Subscribing to the YouTube and Odyssey channels and the Clips channel and sharing and liking both our episodes and our clips really does support us.
You can also consider joining our Patreons.
You had one of your Patreon conversations this morning.
Coalition of the Reasonable.
Awesome.
And how reasonable were they or were you?
They are always reasonable, and it was, you know, it is very much like the experience, at least my experience, I won't speak for you, but in an evergreen program, which I tended to do in an open-ended way, the exact description of the program, the thing that you were pursuing the exact description of the program, the thing that you were pursuing tended to emerge as the program drew to a close, having come down all sorts of
And these conversations are a little like that we work our way towards the concept that we've been wrestling into consciousness.
Anyway, it works great and very rewarding and very lovely to see how many reasonable people there are who are actually, you know, serious enough about the question of what we should do in civilization to put in the mental effort and to struggle with each other serious enough about the question of what we should do in civilization to put in the mental effort and to And anyway, it's great.
I'm very, very pleased about it.
That's fantastic.
I'm going to make one snarky comment.
Oh, God.
You said that your programs tend to be open-ended.
And I thought, as someone who likes to carefully craft and architect many things while still allowing lots of room for surprise and serendipity... If you say half-assed, I'm going to... That your programs were not just open-ended, but open-middled and open-beginninged.
But you've got amazing places, and even more unexpected than in programs that allowed a lot of room for exploration, but did have some kind of mileposts laid out.
Believe me, as you know, I admire Our son knows what I'm talking about.
Yes, he does know a bit what you're talking about.
I admire the architecting of programs that you did.
It was extraordinary.
I didn't attempt it because I couldn't have accomplished it.
We both know I would have tripped over the attempt, so better to do it the other way.
But in the defense of the other way, We are talking about biology, and my point would be, you know, you could walk into a tropical forest, for example, and you could say, all right, where do we begin?
And you could come up with a bunch of different rubrics about how to study it.
You can study layers of the canopy, you can study trophic levels, you can study food webs, whatever.
But the basic point is you can start anywhere.
And the fact is, It all fits somehow, and so by studying anywhere, you do tend to make your way towards the thing, and that worked analytically.
Well, I will say, in my defense, but I don't think any defense is necessary on either side here, that I took much more of that approach in the field, both domestically and tropically.
uh that although especially on a long study abroad trip um I had to have you know planned a ton of things in advance the actual like um you know what is this day in the field going to look like was very much more likely to be actually you're all going to go out there you're going to explore and then you're going to come back over and talk about what we saw and what it meant.
And I think that was actually surprising to students who had worked with me up until that point because it was a change.
But my sense is like, I'm not going to tell you what you're going to see because that's not how nature works.
Yeah.
Nor am I going to tell you what Exactly what what you might see will mean because you might be seeing, you know, as it turns out, the organisms don't read the scientific literature, they don't read the field guides, they don't know what we call them, and they don't care.
And they often do things that are utterly surprising.
And so, I mean, it's remarkable.
In 20, back then, you know, in the 20 teens and the 20 aughts that, you know, excited, enthusiastic, but unskilled in the art of, say, observation of tropical ecosystems, students could walk into a jungle and see things that maybe hadn't been described by Western science before.
Actually, you know, I'm not talking about major discoveries, but, oh, well, that organism isn't supposed to do that.
Yes, but is it doing it?
Well, yes.
Well, then it's doing it, and let's figure out what it means that it's not supposed to do that.
Yeah, it's surprising how often that actually happens.
And, you know, it can be that something hasn't been observed, or it can be that it varies over space in a way that the people who have observed the more standard behavior don't realize.
And anyway, all of those things lead to the right place.
Or that all of the expectation, the ethogram of a particular organism was made out the window of a comfortable place in one concrete-lined pond, for instance, just to take an example without giving any more precision.
Okay.
Oh, excuse me.
So, you can join Brett's Patreon with open-ended conversations to us one Saturday, one Sunday of the month, usually the first, but it's not this month because we were not here, I believe.
So, fully asked, but open-ended conversations.
Fully... do you check?
Oh, but I'm assuming.
I mean, you know, people tend to bring their A-games, so... What?
That's what A stands for?
I assume.
Okay.
So you can also get access to our Discord community at either of our Patreons, where you can join a vibrant community of people who are having great conversations all the time.
And of course, finally, we have sponsors, all of whom have products or services that we actually and truly vouch for.
Three at the top of every live stream.
Here we go!
Okay, our first sponsor this week is brand new to us.
Again, another brand new to us, which we're excited about.
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Nobs is a new kind of toothpaste and it's fantastic.
In fact, we started using this product several months ago and approached them rather than the other way around, which is the standard thing.
Better Biome, again that's biome without the e on the end, is a brand that you first found, Brett, and brought to the rest of our attention.
Now we are all using their fantastic product daily and can attest that they are telling the truth when they say that they are a brand focused on transparency, safety, and efficacy.
So let's talk about fluoride for a moment.
Fluoride is the anti-cavity ingredient in most toothpastes that you already know about.
But as we discuss in our book, Undergather's Guide to the 21st Century, the fluoride in drinking water and toothpaste is not in a molecular form that is found in nature or that has ever been part of our diet.
And ever more research is pointing to neurotoxicity from fluoride exposure, especially in children.
Nobs from Better Biome doesn't contain fluoride, but that in and of itself doesn't make it unique because increasingly so-called natural products are avoiding fluoride in their toothpastes.
That said, what are you going to do as a remineralizing agent?
Many oral care products that abandon fluoride don't replace it with anything, and so you end up with a product that doesn't have any remineralizing agent.
Nobs includes a different and far better one.
Nobs uses hydroxyapatite.
That sounds like some strange word, but it's actually hydroxyapatite, A-P-A-tite, is the main component of the enamel in your teeth and is in your bones as well.
It's the hardest surface, it's the hardest structure in your body.
It's been extensively studied in both medicine and dentistry and is as effective as fluoride in remineralizing teeth without the toxicity of fluoride.
Hydroxyapatite doesn't just stop cavities from forming, there's even increasing amounts of research suggesting that it arrests tooth decay once it's underway.
So knobs doesn't use fluoride, does use hydroxyapatite, but that's hardly the only thing unique about it.
Even most natural toothpastes that are free of fluoride still have lots of abrasive ingredients like charcoal, baking soda, and eggshells, which actually you shouldn't be scrubbing your teeth with that stuff.
Nobs has none of these things.
It also has no sulfates, parabens, phthalates, or microplastics.
No B.S.
It's right there in the name.
N.O.B.S.
Nobs.
You can pronounce it either way you like.
Nobs or No B.S.
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Take a tablet, chew it a few times, and brush as normal.
Your teeth are going to feel fantastically clean because they are.
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Anything to add?
Oh, so many things to add.
I would just say at this point that it also solves a problem for travelers.
It does, yes.
The ability to transport a small number of tablets.
Which TSA will never take because it's not a gel or a liquid or anything.
Right, exactly.
You don't have to worry about whether you're volumetrically within range or whether or not they're going to be scanning it.
is absolutely fantastic.
It also means that you're never going to have the problem where you put the toothpaste on the toothbrush and it falls off into the sink.
Well, what if you put the knobs in your mouth and you just like hang with your jaw open for a while?
I can't protect you from you, but I can say that the toothpaste falling off the brush because the thing that holds it on the brush is a tiny number of contact points.
That thing doesn't happen.
So anyway, there's a lot to be said about how good this product is, and there's a reason that we approached them.
So highly recommend it.
I'd be surprised if you didn't like it.
Yeah, so Zach, our producer, a 19-year-old producer, just uses Velcro on his toothbrush, which, while perhaps not as abrasive as charcoal or eggshell, still not recommended, sir.
Yeah.
Okay, well, this is another reason to use knobs.
Avoiding Velcro in your mouth, for instance.
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No, I just read the wrong word and I was thinking I was doing so well on the reading today.
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That's M-I-N-D-B-L-O-O-M dot com slash darkhorse, promo code darkhorse. All right. Should we start in AI learning?
land or in seafood market land?
Let's start in seafood market land.
That will give the A.I.
a little more time to mature before we get to it.
Which is definitely what we want.
Absolutely.
Give it a running start.
Absolutely.
We want a fair fight.
Do we?
I don't.
I don't know.
I don't, but I want the A.I.
to think that I do.
See?
I'm impressed.
It's not.
No, I can't imagine that it would be.
Okay, so, um, more research has failed to find evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged zoonotically from the Huan... It's spelled Huanan.
Wuhan?
Wuhan.
Seafood market.
Okay.
Oh no.
The seafood market is, is spelled H-U-A-N-A-N.
Yeah.
Huanan?
Uh, I... This is gonna be, like, we don't speak Chinese, so I'm sure I'm butchering it either way.
Yeah.
I'm just gonna call it the seafood market from now on.
The seafood market, there you go.
Uh, so the seafood market in Wuhan, China.
We talked several live streams ago on live stream 166 about two months ago in our live stream called Corruption Capture and Narrative Control about the then newest research that was attempting to find evidence that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from a bat to an intermediate host like a raccoon dog or a hoary rat is one of the possibilities now being discussed and from there to people at the seafood market in Wuhan.
Due of course the Chinese people's tendency to eat all sorts of things that Westerners don't eat.
We have been talking about this since almost the beginning of our live streams over three years ago now, but we have been saying that the evidence points strongly to a lab origin, since well before that was... since that was considered mis- and dis-information, presumably, and mal-information, all of that.
Those of us saying that the evidence points to a lab origin, indeed a lab just down the street from the seafood market, have been accused of being racist, right?
Because blaming three years of global hell on the culinary traditions of the Chinese isn't racist, but pointing to scientific evidence that an international collaboration between American and Chinese funding agencies and scientists was the original source of the unfelding hell is somehow racist.
Okay, just need to say that again, because every time I consider that that was the thing they tried first to shut us down, you're being racist.
No, you are actually.
Like, what is wrong with you people?
But attempts to find conclusive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a secondary host at the seafood market in Wuhan continue.
There's now been three pieces of research out there.
We talked about one, again, about two months ago.
Then the Chinese released some research based on some samples that they had taken in early 2020 at the market before they shut it down.
And now there's a new piece of research.
Nature News, which again is like the so-called journalistic arm of nature, nature being one of the two biggest science journals in the world, wrote the following.
And you might show my screen here now, Zach.
This is from May 4th, 2023.
Wuhan market samples fail to shed further light on COVID origins.
I would usually be showing the PDF version of a document because it's easier for me to have highlighted what I want to share.
Interestingly, when I get the PDF, when I click that, download the PDF of this, it's not the same document.
It's similar, but it's not the same document.
That's the first time I've ever seen that happen.
I don't know what that's about, but I'm going to read a little section from this piece here, again published in Nature News this past week on May 4th.
Signs of Infection.
Neither of the two previous reports on the animal sequences could confirm that animals were infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Bloom's analysis also supports these results.
So I'm just going to stop there first.
What kind of a crazy grammatical construction is that?
Neither of the two previous reports confirmed infection.
This analysis supports the failure to confirm that.
So this feels like intentionally confusing language to make it seem like there's something there when there isn't.
Bloom, the author of the current study, investigated whether environmental swabs rich in viral sequences were associated with genetic material from a particular animal, which could be a sign of infection.
But there was no such association that made sense, says Bloom.
In fact, the strongest associations were with species, such as fish, cows, and goats, that SARS-CoV-2 is not known to infect, says Bloom.
Quote, this doesn't provide any more insight on whether raccoon dogs or any other animal there were or were not ever infected with SARS-CoV-2, he says.
The swab data merely confirmed that the virus was widespread at the market, he says.
Again, point of order, I will say that had he found what he was looking for, he and everyone else who's trying to push this hypothesis would have found it to be confirming.
But nothing can falsify their cherished hypothesis.
They are not doing science because they have a landscape in which nothing that happens can possibly falsify their hypothesis.
I will continue with the Nature News report here.
We always knew, so this is from a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong, Alice Hughes.
We always knew that we could not definitively say if raccoon dogs were carrying the virus or if there had just been a commingling of the DNA, says Alice Hughes, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong who was not involved in any of the studies.
Making inferences based on precise amounts of genetic material found in environmental samples is problematic, says Hughes.
Hooray, an adult in the room!
Some species are just going to be shedding more DNA than others, she says, because of the animal's size, their behavior, or how they are handled and processed at the market.
Sequencing can also introduce bias, says Hughes, because some genetic sequences amplify better than others.
All of this should be completely obvious to anyone doing this kind of research.
Alice Hughes appears to be the only person being asked about this who actually is willing to say it out loud.
Still, Dabar is an evolutionary biologist at the French National Research Agency, CNRS, in Paris.
back for a moment, Zach, because I've forgotten.
It's in my notes.
The Bar is an evolutionary biologist at the French National Research Agency, CNRS, in Paris.
She was one of the co-authors of the first reports on the animal sequences.
So still, the Bar emphasizes that the latest analysis is important because it independently confirms that specific wild animals capable of being infected with SARS-CoV-2 were at the market before its closure.
It also shows that those animals were located in the part of the market linked to the most human cases, which she says adds weight to the hypothesis the pandemic had a natural origin.
No, it does not.
No, it does not.
And if she is anything, if she deserves the credentials which she apparently has, she knows that too.
So if I may have my screen back so I can continue my little rant here with a few of the Notes that I have.
First of all, that's ridiculous.
Okay, go on.
This strikes me as two things.
One, this is analogous to p-hacking.
Obviously this is not statistical, but the basic idea is In a complex phenomenon, you can get spurious results periodically, and we use statistics to reduce the likelihood of us settling on one of these spurious results arbitrarily.
It turns out that when you can play that game, so that you have lots of results that have, you know, some low likelihood of being the result of sampling error, That if what you do is you hunt for the rare result, then you'll get something that appears to be significant on its own, but wouldn't be significant if it was compiled with all of the looking.
But in this realm, the basic idea is they're trying to build a... They're trying to build legal cases.
It's like... Well, it's a circumstantial case is the point, right?
They're trying to build... Here are lots of things that would be true if some animal had been infected and was in the market, and that's where people did get it.
But the point is, Yeah, you can compile a bunch of things that would be true in that scenario, and no number of them makes that scenario probable in light of the evidence that actually does point to the lab.
But what we're doing is we're, you know, it's also, it's p-hacking, it's building a circumstantial case, but it's also... It's akin, it's very much akin to p-hacking in the same sort of way that it misunderstands and misapplies and misdirects people who don't understand probabilistic thinking.
Right, and I'm a little bit annoyed at whatever the author of XKCD is, who basically failed the COVID test and was on the wrong side of many issues throughout the pandemic.
But prior to the pandemic, he had a cartoon about the association of jellybeans.
I think it was with cancer.
And anyway, the cartoon really clearly makes the I thought I had it on my computer, but I'll try to find it here.
That's not it.
it on my computer but i'll try to find it here um yeah i think if you do xkcd jelly beans you should that's not it um that's gonna be that's gonna be it okay yeah yeah so uh for those just uh just listening it's just a 16 panel 16 identical panels.
Two scientists.
One, you can tell he's a scientist because he's wearing safety goggles.
We found no link between purple jellybeans and acne.
P greater than 0.05.
We found no link between brown jellybeans and acne.
P greater than 0.05.
Pink jelly beans, blue jelly beans, teal jelly beans, salmon jelly beans, red jelly beans, turquoise jelly beans, magenta, yellow, stop me when I get to the, you know, gray, tan, cyan, whatever that is.
We found a link between green jelly beans and acne p less than 0.5.
Whoa!
Says someone off screen.
We found out, and then we found out like mauve, beige, lilac, black, peach, orange, and then I think the next XKCD is Breaking News!
Link found between... I did, but if I go out now it's going to go into... I'm not showing your screen.
News!
Green jellybeans linked to acne!
95% confidence!
Only 5% chance of coincidence!
Except you saw, and they did, it was a was it a 4x4?
I think it must have been a 4x5 because he would have had 20 of them, right?
And that means that if you ran 20 of these with different colors of jellybeans, And one of them says, oh, it's P less than 0.05.
That is actually exactly random chance.
And so this headline borrows from the one thing that doesn't look like a negative result and proclaims it as if none of those other tests happened.
Yeah.
So anyway, one has the sense that this seafood market explanation is this kind of a game.
It's a circumstantial case that, you know, compiles a bunch of evidence that does point to it and ignores all of the countervailing evidence.
Is it analogous to p-hacking?
Obviously there's no actual statistics being done here, but nonetheless it's the same theme, you know, which is looking for the rare piece of evidence in the sea of neutral stuff that seems to indicate a connection.
But it's also, you know, it's that old routine from Get Smart.
Which we've referred to before, but Get Smart, which was a send-up of James Bond, in which Maxwell Smart is the man of intrigue, international spy, but he's also kind of a buffoon.
He's a bit hapless.
Yeah, it's not quite Inspector Clouseau, but nonetheless there's something weird about, you know... He's not dashing.
Yes, he's not dashing, he's not super capable or any of the things that James Bond is.
Anyway, he does this thing where, you know, his enemies who are...
The control agents, control spelled with a K, who are obviously... Right, this is from before our time.
Yes, the 60s.
This is like the 60s, yeah.
But the control agents have captured Maxwell Smart and they have him in their clutches and they're going to do something to him.
And he says, you know, you think you have me, but at this very moment, there's a squadron of such and such descending on this building with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And the control agent says, we think you're lying.
And he says, well, would you believe there's one squad car?
And so he keeps going through a series of less and less frightening things that might be descending on the location, seeing what they'll believe.
Anyway, it's that.
Right?
It's like they're playing Would You Believe with the seafood market.
It is that.
It's interesting.
Like, Would You Believe doesn't work if you've made all of your previous, more ludicrous assertions out loud.
Yes.
Right?
And this, of course, then raises the question of how often is this being done to us, where they were actually just barely savvy enough not to say the earlier versions out loud.
Like, they happened to hit the right one first, where people were like, oh, OK.
Well, that's OK.
I didn't know.
And, you know, instead with, you know, the seafood market in Wuhan, they're just, it is, it is, would you believe, Maxwell Smart Style.
It's would you believe where the punchline was delivered, it's got to be more than a year ago, with frozen ferret badger steaks, right?
That was the punchline.
And that was the point at which we were all like, oh, come on.
Like, There's nothing to that.
You just made it up because somebody could imagine a virus riding in a frozen ferret badger steak.
I mean, you know, with zero evidence they presented that as a hypothesis.
And, you know, I think a lot of people who were Who thought that this was an actual scientific discussion.
At that point, we're alerted, aha!
It doesn't function like one.
That's part of why I wanted to bring this up again.
So Nature News, again, the journalistic arm of one of the two most influential science journals in the world.
And they publish, you know, the piece that I just read from is in their weekly scientific journal.
So not only are there what are deemed by the editors at Nature the most important scientific results published every week in Nature, but there's also the Nature News section is there.
It's not a separate publication.
I mean, Nature has like Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, Nature like has all these separate publications.
This is in Nature itself, right?
And, uh, do you have something to say before- I do!
I am tempted in an effort to put an end to this madness, to start the Frozen Ferret Badger Innocence Project, right?
Yeah.
In which we vindicate- We're gonna need a better acronym, though.
Yeah, it's not much of an acronym.
But nonetheless, I think it has a certain ring to it.
Frozen for Innocence Project.
Yes.
I mean, I guess that does raise questions about whether or not they were innocent before they were frozen, or did the freezing actually clear them of all guilt?
No, I am imagining, as long as we're in the realm of fantasy and we're not actually being obligated to biology or the scientific method or anything like that, I am imagining Well, we're playing in their sandbox.
Yeah, in their sandbox.
My feeling is the frozen ferret badger is actually an Arctic creature that has been wrongly implicated in the COVID pandemic.
Named by some Arctic explorer who saw them and figured they must be frozen because here they live.
Exactly.
Yeah, it wasn't the frozen ferret badger popsicles that I was imagining when they first, I think it was Dasak who proposed the frozen ferret badger as source of the I don't remember who said it first.
But I sort of imagine them having popsicle sticks.
Maybe it was that.
And expecting, you know, because again, those crazy Chinese and those crazy culinary traditions that, you know, and no, this isn't racist at all.
Us ascribing truly insane things to other people and then blaming them.
Yes.
And how they eat for what you rot.
Yes.
He has blocked me.
Dasik, which makes me feel doubly good for having called him patient zero for misinformation on the pandemic origins back in the day.
Okay, a few more things about this ludicrosity that is far worse than just being ludicrous, of course, because they are actively and still trying to rewrite history, and this particular one they've been doing from the very beginning.
Nature News, this research that Nature News is reporting on, is a preprint.
Okay?
Um, that's fine.
Except that, except that every single time we were talking about preprints, especially early in the pandemic when almost all the research was preprints, um, we're told we can't, that's bad, you're not doing science, you're bad people, you're clearly incompetent because it's not peer-reviewed, therefore not science.
Well, A, not true, and B, hold yourself to the same damn standards, right?
So, This is a preprint.
Wait, if they hold themselves to the same standard... Well, they can't win is why they're cheating, right?
So we get it.
We get, like, you're behind the eight ball here, but you're wrong.
In fact, not only is this a preprint, but in this kind of realm, right?
In our realm, often papers have single or two authors.
But in the realm of virology, molecular biology, everything, they tend to have, like, author lists that go on and on and on.
This is a single authored paper.
Which is, I think I've never seen that in this realm of biology before.
And it doesn't necessarily say anything, but it's unusual enough that it was immediately noticeable by me.
But what this single author has done This again, not yet peer-reviewed, just pre-print paper.
He did some stuff and he put it on a pre-print server and now Nature News is reporting on it!
Using data released by China from the market in early 2020, he has, and I quote, implemented a fully reproducible computational pipeline that jointly analyzes the number of reads mapping to SARS-CoV-2 and the mitochondrial genomes of chordate species across the full set of samples.
I got it.
So, it's a model, he's created some algorithm, he's plugged in data that the Chinese gave us, and all he's done is introduced a new model which may or may not be accurate anyway.
We have no way of knowing because we don't know what true is, so how do you assess the veracity of a model going forward if what you're trying to do, if the only thing that you are plugging into it is stuff for which you don't know what it means, you cannot assess it Not science, okay?
Not a scientific investigation at all.
You have become cynical.
You are missing the obvious interpretation of the single-authorness and that baroque description of a model.
He is academic distancing to fatten the curve.
I mean, that sounds... to me that sounds cute, but I don't know, have any idea what it's supposed to mean.
If you imagine he's looking for the area under the curve, because that's the only place you could hide a frozen ferret badger guilty of spreading a disease to planet Earth, right?
Yeah.
Then he needs to enlarge the curve, and he's going to do this as a lone wolf academician, which is why there are no other authors on that paper.
I don't know, something in that paper.
I mean, he's not alone.
He's actually at Hutch.
He's actually at the big cancer center in Seattle.
So this is not a lone wolf guy, but this little, this one-off model that we have no way of knowing how good it is, and even if it was good, it could not have demonstrated, it could not have said whether or not the hypothesis that he was purporting to test was or was not true, is on a preprint server.
And Nature News is reporting on it?
Nature News is reporting on that little dinky piece of what even is it?
So that crazy description of what he did, a fully reproducible computational pipeline, sounds really fancy, right?
So as I just said, even if that clever model does what it says it does, and we can't know if it does, it doesn't have the capacity to say what he hopes to find out, right?
That is, as the conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong said in the little bit that I read, this work can't do what it is claiming to be trying to do.
So again, just to describe it again, and I think I've done this over and over and over again here and before, even if you found out, let's say, the genetic droppings of raccoon dogs, if that's what we think it is now, and the genetic droppings of SARS-CoV-2, were in higher abundance together in samples from the market in early 2020, you could not then conclude that the virus came from those animals.
You cannot conclude that.
So we've got this fancy-sounding computational model that may or may not even do what it claims to do, but even if it did, it could not demonstrate the veracity of the hypothesis or falsify the hypothesis.
So, this research is therefore not a test of any hypothesis at all.
It can't be.
The method may or may not be good.
We can't know that from this, but even if the method were good, it can't demonstrate that the hypothesis is true.
And the author of this paper, the one author of this paper, is quoted extensively at the top of the Nature News article.
Yeah.
So, it's not even pretending to be to be careful about assessing it.
So what the author at the top of the Nature News article says, the author of this research, is, I would basically describe this as a negative result.
So even he knows, even he knows, but negative result just meaning like, ah, I can't say anything now, except that, as I've already claimed, this research, like so much that has come before it, is set up so that they will make an argument that if they get one kind of result, it's proof of, and any other kind of result is negative.
There is no falsification possible.
So I have a prediction.
Why is Nature News writing this up?
What is Nature News doing?
If I try to go devil's advocate on this, they're highlighting that the samples from the market early in 2020 aren't useful going forward.
In fact, their headline seems to suggest that.
Given that the research never could have demonstrated that at all, they didn't need to be pretending that... I don't know if that's... we're seeing glitches here.
No, the audience didn't see that.
This research couldn't have done what it was claiming to be doing, but the less generous appraisal, of course, of why Nature News is writing about this, why the dedicated precious space... like this is literally showing up in the print issue.
This is a piece of so-called science journalism showing up the print issue of Nature, which is therefore still printed on paper with ink using precious resources.
They have a limited amount of space for this.
They're publishing this because it lends the sets.
So there is lots of Nature-worthy research being done on the zoonotic origins of the virus, I think.
And that this is, in fact, the buzz in scientific circles.
And for those of you, those of the many readers of Nature, who don't actually read, especially all the Nature news articles, like, oh, right, yeah, I did see it just last week, there was another piece on the synodic origins.
Not internalizing that actually, it was based on terrible research that found no, nothing, They found nothing.
But it increases the kind of buzz around it and the sense for people who weren't paying close attention, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, zoonotic origins, lots of research, cool.
So it's PR.
It's not science.
I think you're on the right track, but I think I would predict something beyond this. - Yes.
I would predict that we are going to get a result that's going to claim to settle the question, which won't be the first time they've pulled that shit on us.
Right, of course.
I think the idea would be... Oh, so this makes them look like they're careful.
Yes.
They admit they had a negative result?
Not only that first sentence, where it's basically a negative result?
What is basically doing in that sentence?
The sentence, Jesse Blum, the author, I would basically describe this as a negative result.
What is basically doing it?
Honestly, it's not basically a negative result, because it's not science at all.
It's not a result.
But given that he doesn't think that, it's just, yeah, it's 100% a negative result if... If it were a result at all, it'd be a negative result.
If it were a result at all, it's a negative result.
It'd be a negative result.
And so the point is, you know, I don't want to read too much into the tea leaves, but if the idea is you're on Team Zoonotic Origin, and you're going to be handed an L on this one so that in the future you can get a W, then the point is, well, that sucks.
I don't love the period where my L is being discussed in Nature News.
Yeah, but that's just long game PR.
Oh, I agree, but I think the point is this is with a purpose, would be my guess.
And we will find out the next, you know, it may be that there's another creature that has to join the frozen ferret badgers.
The hoary rats.
Is it the hoary rats and the frozen ferret badger in this project?
Yeah, right, right.
But in any case... And raccoon dogs, of course.
The overarching picture of everything you have described here from this new chapter is they cannot lose this one.
Right, and we have run into several of these in the pandemic, where there's like the garden variety, industrial strength, PR campaigns around vaccine safety effectiveness, but for some reason the epicenter of the misinformation is the official narrative on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
Why?
Presumably because of the EUA connection, right?
That was one they knew they couldn't lose, right?
Just simply can't lose it.
This is another one they just simply can't lose because if these mofos offshored work that was taking place in the U.S.
to Wuhan to get it done circumventing the gain-of-function ban that had been instituted, then the entire pandemic and all of its bad consequences belong to them.
All three years of global hell, it's on you!
Three years of global hell, and the point is it's both sides of the equation, right?
By which you mean what?
If they caused COVID with gain-of-function research that they offshored to circumvent a ban, then the point is You think the vaccines are causing excess deaths?
That's on you.
You think lockdowns caused it?
That's also on you.
Right?
It's everything.
All the downstream consequences.
All of the transfers of wealth.
All of the evaporation of wealth.
All of the insecurity that came to the globe from this.
All of it belongs to the people who made that choice.
And so they can't lose it.
And basically they're going to basically exhaust us.
That's the idea.
Right?
We're going to continue to fight.
About the fact that everything points to the lab, and they are going to continue to tread water, and then they are going to spring some, well no, it turns out, we all thought, maybe it came from the lab, even Fauci said so, but here's the piece of evidence that says it came from the seafood market, done.
They're going to pull that on us, and frankly we have to remain vigilant, and it damn well better be conclusive evidence when they come up with it.
We have to remain vigilant and, you know, I haven't racked my brains, but I've thought off and on over the last three years what would look like evidence, right, that would be like, it's their job, it's their I haven't come up with any.
they need to be coming up with the predictions that, you know, if true can only be due to zoonotic origin.
I haven't heard any of them, but they're not doing their job.
They're not doing science, but I haven't come up with any.
Whereas there's a lot of evidence for the lab origin, for the virus not being like any other virus that anyone has ever seen in the wild.
Even though I think everyone on both sides of the lab versus zoonotic origin question point to a particular clade of bats, which is either where the virus sprang from in, you know, Entirely, or provides the, you know, fundamental architecture on which gain-of-function research was then added.
I think the evidence, you know, it's not that some animal, even in their fantasy world, it's not that some animal caught this at the seafood market.
Right.
Right?
It came in with the animal, which implies a population of wild animal that has the virus or had it.
The only saving grace of this story, the only thing that I think prevents them from just outright manufacturing such a phenomenon in order to bail their sorry asses out, is that they know that they would have to, they would leave evidence if they tried to create a population that appeared to match that prediction.
They find a wild population of raccoon dogs near where the bats live and infect them.
Is that the idea?
Something like that.
That they're going to end up tripping over phylogenetic evidence that they're not clever enough to fake.
That the problem is... They don't have the original virus anymore?
Well, they have the original virus, but the point is either you've stopped the clock on that original virus, or it has been evolving independently in some population.
Well, I mean, I guess if they've been continuing to do research, if anywhere, the research using the original SARS-CoV-2 has continued to happen, then they might have something phylogenetically downstream that isn't otherwise in the world.
They do, but then the point is, do you really, if you were them... It's risky.
It's very risky because you're going to suddenly have a bunch of population geneticists and phylogenetic systematists looking at this population saying, well, that doesn't make sense.
The population is too small for that amount of, you know, you would get this analysis.
And so... Well, but would you?
I mean, like...
Increasingly, they've got two, three evolutionary biologists in their back pocket who are trotted out to say, this makes great sense, right?
So, you know, I don't know that I trust that the fields that do have the expertise and should be the ones calling the bluff on really bad science, that any people would actually stand up.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, look, there's a question.
Why, after they screwed the world over by pretending there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and they were revealed to have screwed up, why didn't they invent some weapons that would at least muddy that claim?
Thank goodness they didn't.
But nonetheless, that's much easier to fake.
Yes.
In this case, they're dealing with... The WMDs don't evolve in place.
Right.
In this case, they're dealing with a phenomenon that has so many tendrils that are studyable and so many good people who think about these.
I mean, do you really want to, you know, trigger Bill Rice's curiosity over whether or not the story you're telling about the evolution of a virus in a population of, you know, ferret badgers or hoary rats or whatever it might be, It actually adds up at the end of the day.
I don't think you want to trigger that.
So my guess is they'd much rather, you know, cobble together a Franken story from, you know, samples taken at the seafood market than have to deal with the difficulties of making a plausible phony animal pandemic, you know.
And, you know, were they to be caught doing that, Of course, they would be risking an entirely separate pandemic by taking a virus that is human capable and introducing it into a wild population.
So there are all kinds of reasons.
I don't think that would keep them up at night, though.
Oh, I think it would.
I think it would, because, you know, the pandemic Cannot.
It cannot read to them as they succeeded in cleverly managing the narrative.
They've been widely revealed to have screwed up not only the story of the origin, but the story of repurposed drugs and alternatives, even though people aren't as awake to that portion, they still are awake.
That's a different thing.
I don't think so.
At some levels it's a different they, at least.
There are different they's involved, whatever their gender might be.
But there are different they's involved, but some of the same players, you know.
And, you know, vaccine safety and effectiveness and evolutionary proliferation of viral variants.
All of these things are places where they told a very simple story and were revealed to some uncomfortably large fraction of the population as being incorrect and, at best, scientifically incompetent, if not outright lying.
Yeah, no, and I guess, you know, part of your sort of dystopian imaginings about them, you know, placing a slightly evolved version of a virus in in a possible secondary host would, if discovered, reveal that it was an incompetence.
Just like with Watergate, like the cover-up might be evidence that, I mean, I think it couldn't be like Watergate because the crime is too big here, but the cover-up reveals a different kind of criminality than, oh god, we're so sorry, look at what we did, We've been confused.
For some people at this point, the zoonotic origin people could still claim, I was wrong.
I didn't know.
Whereas a cover-up, now you can't anymore.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm done for now.
You're done for now until they reveal the next creature who will need a vigorous defense from the Frozen Ferret Badger Innocence Project.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, we might.
There might need to be some rebranding at some point because the Hoary Rat Innocence Project, the Raccoon Dog Innocence Project, you know, the You Never Heard of This Organism Innocence Project.
I guess, or I just think that the frozen ferret badger could be the emblematic creature shivering away.
Not on a popsicle stick.
Innocent, but, you know, generating heat through brown fat.
I guess it's the ferret badgers that are innocent, not the steaks.
Right, exactly.
All right.
I'm glad we cleared that up, because I think a lot of people could have been confused by that.
But no, it's the Ferret Badgers themselves.
Who are frozen and innocent.
- Yeah, prison but alive.
- You could rebrand it as the Arctic Fair Avenger.
- We could, but I think-- - He likes the alliteration.
Yeah, but there's something about the term frozen that's just funnier.
That's the alliteration Frozen Ferret.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
It is time to segue into the next.
Yes, it is.
The next piece, which I believe is my piece here.
Where I just wanted to clear something up.
It's not a huge matter, and I want to be very careful.
I'm going to use an example tweet to illustrate the issue in question.
I am not taking the person whose tweet this is, our friend Alexandros Marinos, to task for this.
But I do want to suggest a refinement in our collective terminology surrounding the discussion over AI.
And I'm going to use Alex's tweet to illustrate the issue that I think is a problem.
So I have no idea what's coming, but he can take it.
He can totally take it.
Yeah.
All right.
Zach, do you want to show Alex's tweet?
And boom.
There it is.
Can you enlarge it a little bit?
Yeah, sure do.
It says, I will keep repeating this until one of the doomers finally addresses the argument.
This is a quote tweet.
He is quote tweeting someone named Gary Marcus who says, literally every conversation I have on Twitter about long-term risk leaves me more worried than when I started.
Standard counter-arguments are mostly these.
Add homonym about who is in the long-termist movement, which is entirely irrelevant to the court question, and then I can't see the rest.
No.
Okay, so that's the tweet that Alexandros is quote tweeting, and he says, I will keep repeating this until one of the doomers finally addresses the argument.
Government control of AI, which is the logical conclusion of their advocacy, increases existential risk by pushing AI research into secret labs that are unaccountable and opaque.
Okay, so let us just say I don't disagree with the content of Alexandros' tweet here at all.
I agree that that is a concern, that the idea of we're going to control this through regulation creates an immediate problem about what that, you know, it's a black box and that black box is a frightening one.
However, the idea of doomers, AI doomers, is increasingly circulating online and The reason that I think we have to stop doing that is that I believe that, like, let's say, conspiracy theorists, There's a question.
It may be that almost everybody who's talking about some sort of AI disaster is wrong about what we actually need to fear, right?
Most people who are talking about these things are talking about, for example, the alignment problem where, let's say, an AI gets an instruction that it misinterprets and it starts doing a tremendous amount of damage thinking that it's following directions.
That is a real risk, but it may well not happen, right?
We don't know how big a risk it is.
We're too early in the story.
But that doesn't mean that everyone who sees a disaster coming is naive about the issue.
And I will say, for those who didn't see it in a past episode, we outlined five possible disasters that could come from the AGI era.
Three of which I believe are effectively guaranteed.
There is no escaping them.
They will happen.
How big they are is a question, but that they will happen is not.
And so those five involve The two that we may or may not have to worry about.
Malevolent AI that views us as a competitor and comes after us.
That's one.
Alignment, where a confused AI goes after us thinking that it is doing what we told it to do.
That's two.
Those are the ones that are in question.
Then there are the three that I don't think are in question.
One of them being the malevolent use of AI by people who are trying to make a profit or gain power or something like that.
There is no question that people are going to leverage this very powerful technology, and they are going to use it to transfer our wealth to them, whether it's by tricking us into coughing up passwords, or by misleading us into voting for candidates that they have leverage over.
Whatever it is that they're going to do, they're going to use it, and it is a powerful tool, and I would argue it is a more powerful tool That's bad.
Am I a doomer for thinking so?
I don't think so.
I think I'm just doing logic, right?
they're bad people than it is in the hands of people who are morally constrained and can only use it for a more limited set of things.
So to the extent that it empowers those who are on the right side and on the wrong side, it will empower those on the wrong side more.
That's bad.
Am I a doomer for thinking so?
I don't think so.
I think I'm just doing logic, right?
The second catastrophe that is coming that I believe is guaranteed is a cognitive, a human cognitive catastrophe that in a world where everybody has the potential to access an AI and to be informed by it or misled a human cognitive catastrophe that in a world where everybody has the potential to access an AI and to be informed by it or misled by it, you have an infinite number of feedback loops and amplifications and
So, So you're never going to know when the person who is wooing you is informed by the AI and you're dealing with a Cyrano de Bergerac situation.
Or is the genuine article, right?
You may have ways of detecting it, but the point is everybody's trust needs to go to zero.
That's like step one.
Trust going to zero is actually the right thing to happen.
And then the question is, you know, can you get out of that?
Can you figure out how to rebuild enough trust around enough things that you can actually function?
And it's a very difficult puzzle to solve.
Right on that.
I have gotten a number of ads.
I've never tried out one of these.
Not interested in using it, but a number of ads for exactly what you're talking about, which is at this point just an app that implements ChatGPT.
Builds it into your phone's keyboard, and so the ads are all about guys talking to girls usually.
Basically say, they will suggest a bunch of responses, proper responses to exactly what you're saying.
So you will have no idea, it just comes through as a text, but it just builds right into your keyboard.
You don't even need to go to ChatGPT and ask it anything.
And it does the analysis right there.
So that's, of course, the prototype version.
It may not work very well as it is, but exactly what you're saying is coming right along, of course.
It's right down the road.
And so the point is, you can make the first move, right?
You can outwit this to the first move, which is trust nothing, which is frankly almost one of the pieces of advice that I gave you.
Right?
You have to not trust that you understand anything you think you understand because it could mean anything in this era.
But the point is there's no solution to that problem.
Right?
It's paralytic.
So paralytic may be better than, you know, falling off a cliff.
You're paralyzed at the top of the cliff rather than falling off it.
But it's not a strategy that you can use to make any progress in life.
So that is another catastrophe that is guaranteed.
People will use AI against us.
That's one.
We will go crazy as a result of the fact that we don't know what our perceptual apparatus is no longer going to be a reliable indication to anything, right?
And then there's the third guaranteed catastrophe, which is an economic disruption like nothing that we have seen.
Right?
Where suddenly huge fractions of the population are no longer necessary in the roles for which they've trained, have no ability to move to some other role, and we don't have any preparedness for this.
Right?
We don't even have UBI, and UBI would be inadequate for this.
So, so Well, and perhaps more quickly hasten the loss of the sense of identity and purpose.
Right, again... Like, UBI is a separate question, but if UBI were to be implemented at the same moment that people are losing their jobs to machines, I think... I don't know how you hold on.
To a sense of purpose.
If, you know, there will be some people, there will be some people I trust who really were creative, analytical, exploratory, whatever, and in order to pay the rent they ended up in jobs and were still, at whatever moments that they had free, working to keep the artistic, scientific, exploratory, whatever it is, pieces alive.
That's not going to be most people.
Yeah, most people are just going to find that they are they have nothing to do but sit and look at their screens.
And that's terrible and that isn't the way it has to be.
That isn't what humanity is supposed to be.
But at this point if you take away jobs and also at the same moment take away any sense of drive because basic necessities are met at the same moment It's a, it's a, it's a devastation unlike anything we've seen.
Yeah, let's put it this way.
It's an event horizon.
We can't see past it.
We can talk about analogies, right?
Moments at which you have a huge number of males who are unoccupied and have no meaningful prospects for starting a family at home.
That's a situation ripe for abuse by elites who wish to arm those males and send them abroad looking for treasure.
Is this an analog for that?
Maybe.
Is this the self same object as the centralized digital bank currency?
That becomes a mechanism of control that keeps you in your 15-minute city.
You know, is this that?
Right?
Is the idea that the elites who have seen this coming, maybe because they have a time-traveling money printer version and have known about this longer than the rest of us, Have they seen this coming and do they understand they're about to have a huge number of people who are, at best, listless, who have to be controlled because of what they will turn into if they are not?
I don't know, but I guess my point is, look, it's an event horizon.
I'm not claiming to be able to see what's past it because no one can, but you can guarantee That on top of people using this thing to their benefit against the rest of us.
And what was my fourth category?
You have malevolent people using AI from malevolent ends, the Cyrano de Bergerac style crazy making.
Yes, the craziness.
Right.
So you can have a bunch of crazy people with no prospects and vulnerable to bad people leveraging AI against them.
That's three separate disasters, and I don't see how any thinking person could actually rule any of them out.
I think they are all effectively guaranteed.
So my point is, if I say, I'm worried about a misaligned AI and a malevolent AI in theory, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that those things actually might not come to pass, that nobody really knows for sure whether these things are the problem we think they are, or whether they're manageable.
Am I a doomer for thinking these other things are coming?
And in which case, shouldn't we all be doomers?
Because does anybody have an answer to why those three things aren't going to happen?
Right.
Right.
So anyway, I guess my point is doomer is not a useful term because what we really need now is nuance in the realm of what to fear and at what level to fear it.
And there's more than one.
None of these are mutually exclusive.
You know that invoking nuance proves you're a Nazi, right?
It has been used as such.
It will now be used much more effectively in light of the AI's ability to massage the language surrounding the connection between nuance and Nazism.
But yes, I don't actually think there's much to the claim, though it may become ever more compelling as the AI progresses.
Yes, indeed.
All right.
Briefly, two more things.
One is I just wanted to bring people's attention to a new product that is now authorized to be used on produce, including organic produce in the United States.
It's called Appeal.
It's spelled like it's appeal of a piece of fruit, not like it's appealing to you, because at least for some of us, it's it's not really here.
My computer will come up.
Okay, you can show my screen here.
How a peel works.
A peel keeps produce fresh for longer thanks to the help of a little extra peel.
Our plant-based protection slows water loss and oxidation, the primary causes of spoilage.
So oxygen goes out, but moisture stays inside.
What could go wrong?
Learning from nature, it's mimicking the cuticle layer.
Made from food to protect your food.
Note it's even being put on apples, where the skin of the apple isn't exactly a peel.
Like, I don't know that I want this on my oranges, but at least with oranges, some of them, if you're not zesting your oranges, at least you're not eating the thing that this is on.
But It's also being put on fruit where you actually most people eat the outside layer of the fruit and I mean citrus is actually a bad example too because a lot of us zest our citrus and use it abundantly in a lot of our food.
So This is a thin edible post-harvest coating made from plant-derived materials designed to be consumed that meets the FDA requirements for qualification as generally recognized as safe in the United States.
That's a technical term, generally recognized as safe grass.
Edapeal is allowed for use on fruits and vegetables in the U.S., Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, and South Africa without restriction.
Additionally, it's allowed for use on a limited number of fruits, basically in the European Union and Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom.
And if you look through their list of fruits other than citrus, it's fruits where normally people are not eating the outside layer.
Now, if I may have my screen back for a moment, they do claim that, I wonder where it is.
Well, I'm just going to read from my screen because I don't see it on their website at the moment.
Another quote from their website, Well then, what could go wrong?
In fact, they are so safe they can be found in products designed for the most sensitive populations, including infant formula and nutrition shags for the elderly.
Sorry, not a good enough argument.
When I try to figure out exactly what is in this product, I'm going to see if I can find the Facts which I'm at the moment here.
You can actually if you want show my screen here Zach as I try to find Yeah, it's actually it's not how appeal works I've the facts have disappeared on me.
So yeah, okay Uh, about us?
I don't know, I think you'd agree with that.
Oh yeah, okay.
Um, questions?
We've got answers!
All about appeal, yadda yadda yadda yadda.
What is in appeal?
What is appeal made of?
That sounds promising, right?
There is one ingredient in appeal, purified mono and diglycerides.
That's one ingredient?
Purified mono?
A food ingredient that is found in a variety of foods.
And again, the same line.
The safety of these ingredients has been verified by regulatory authorities around the world, the FDA, the World Health Organization.
In fact, the ingredient is so safe, it is included in products designed for the most sensitive populations, including an Ensure and Infant formula as well.
I'm sorry, still not good enough.
I can't tell exactly what it is.
Is it safe to eat?
Of course it's safe to eat.
It's only composed of food-grade ingredients made from materials that exist in the peels, seeds, and pulp of all the fruits and vegetables we already eat.
Aside from whether or not the thing itself is safe to eat, though.
What is going to be the effect on say an avocado?
And again, I'm not, their site comes up with different things whenever you click on things.
So I'm not coming up with, they've got this image of like 28 days in the fridge, an avocado without a peel and avocado with a peel on it.
Um, the avocado without a peel, you've, if you've ever bought an avocado and forgotten about it, um, you know what it looks like after a few weeks in the fridge, it looks withered and wrinkled.
And if you cut into it, you realize you really don't want to eat it.
Maybe your dog does, maybe not.
It's probably best for the compost pile.
If your dog doesn't, our dog does.
Probably so.
Unless we've got Sundays, in which case she prefers that.
But with a peel, the avocado still looks the same.
Okay, the oxygen's been going out for 28 days.
The water's been staying in.
What else does that do to the food that you are eating?
Presumably, if an avocado with its own resources could make it last longer and therefore have a greater chance of being found by the seed disperser that avocados want to be dispersed by, It would have done so.
So there must be some trade-off.
And these people probably don't know what it is, or if they do, they're certainly not telling us.
All of which leads me to the tagline for these people, which I kid you not, is food gone good.
Which suggests that when you just pick an avocado or an orange or an apple off a tree, it's not good yet.
What it needs is a little technological interference to make it become good, and then you can go ahead and eat it.
This strikes me as of a type.
This product might be okay, right?
But this strikes me as of a type that we are now seeing more and more and more of.
I know.
No one likes to have their fruits and vegetables wither in the refrigerator.
Therefore, we are going to put something on them so that they don't appear to have lost any water.
What else happened, though?
And guess what?
The fresher your food, the better it is for you.
And is that two-week-old avocado in your refrigerator better for you than something that was made two years ago and made shelf-stable?
Yeah, still.
But it's far better for you if you eat it when you buy it.
The U.S.
apparently is tops in food waste.
We do a lot of wishful thinking when we're at the market, and we buy stuff, and not we in particular, but we do too.
Americans buy things, put them in their produce drawers, even in their meat drawers, and things go bad, and that's terrible and wasteful.
The solution is not slap a technological fix on it and let's hope for the best about whether or not the fruit remains the same inside.
The solution is eat fresh food when you buy it.
So there's a lot to worry about here.
Yeah.
Am I right?
It's amazing to discover that this is happening at the point that it is authorized.
Right.
You know, this is obviously a major change in the way food is going to be produced.
It's going to change a great many things, even if these ingredients were actually safe, which they may be.
Right.
This is now going to make them a much larger fraction of the diet, right?
So there's nothing that says that that's inherently safe, even if the ingredients in some lower quantity are safe.
As you point out, there's a difference between something on an orange peel and something on an apple.
Right, we went through this with Alar when you and I were kids.
Alar was sprayed on apples and then it turned out there was a problem with Alar.
Oh yeah, right.
So, anyway, there's a lot to worry about here.
I also get an echo of, you remember back when, is it Aspartame is the sweetener that was introduced?
That's NutraSweet, yeah.
Do you remember the commercials at the point that this was introduced?
Not yet.
At the time, saccharin existed.
It was known that there were problems with saccharin and it didn't taste very good.
It's still in products though, even now.
Of course.
But NutraSweet was introduced and people were already alarmed about saccharin.
So there was a sort of like, should you worry about this?
Have some with a side of margarine.
Right.
The ad campaign involved, what is NutraSweet?
Well, NutraSweet is made with components that are found in many common foods, like a so-and-so and a such-and-such.
And I can't remember what it was, but it was, you know, like melons and something.
And it led to the impression that really that this was food that had just been sort of slightly reorganized.
When in fact, chemically, it's a much more radical departure from normal.
Yes.
And has medical implications that of course took years to emerge.
But anyway, the idea that something in a broad chemical class that is common in foods, right?
It's a little like if I said, you know what a peel is composed of?
Quarks, that's it.
Quarks, that's what all of your food is made of.
Yeah, no, it's quarks.
You're afraid of eating quarks?
Well, you're going to go awfully hungry, right?
So it's that kind of game where the average person in the public is not in a position to say, well, you actually said something that sounds chemically sophisticated, but you haven't given me enough information to know You know whether or not this version of it is as safe as the version of it that happens to be in the same Class that I do eat.
Yeah, right.
So anyway, it's all like fail games and you know Slick advertising campaigns decide designed to make something look friendly and like it's a contributor to earth well-being because of course spoiling food is a major cause of you know overuse of water and you're not You're not in favor of food waste, are you?
Right, exactly.
I didn't know.
You're one of those people in favor of food waste.
I didn't know that, but I guess I'm glad to make the discovery.
Can I share a few more facts?
Sure.
You may share my screen if you'd like.
This is again from Appeal's site.
Can you taste or smell a peel after it is applied?
No.
A peel is colorless, odorless, and tasteless on produce.
Apparently, at this point, there is required to be a sticker.
But might that regulation disappear at some point?
At which point, you simply can't tell.
In another part of the site, they tout the fact that it's invisible!
Fantastic!
Great!
Okay, are fruits and vegetables clean before appeal is applied?
All fruits and vegetables, regardless of whether appeal has been applied, are subject to food safety laws of the country where the produce was grown, as well as the food safety laws of the country where the produce is sold.
Not an answer.
What that means is, if we had to, we did.
If we didn't have to, we didn't, probably.
And it means that you, as the consumer of something to which appeal has been applied, do no longer have the ability to clean off your fruit of whatever it may have had before the appeal was applied.
You've lost that.
Can I wash appeal off?
No.
They don't say no.
What they say is you could likely remove some of appeal with water and scrubbing, but it's unlikely that you'd be able to remove all of it without damaging the fruit or vegetable.
Yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda.
So again, like I wanted to mention this, this, because this seems fine.
Like this is going to be a thing that most people are going to be like, oh okay, like there's bigger, there are a lot bigger, a lot more important hills to die on than this one.
But This is the kind of thing that is getting more and more common.
I want my food to be food.
I don't want my food to have technological intervention that is touted as invisible.
What, to protect me from myself?
To protect me from knowledge?
To protect me from being non-compliant again?
Well, and we're going to increasingly run into this with all kinds of nonsense being introduced into food products in various ways, but even if we have a label requirement Right?
Effectively, if you want to avoid this, you may not be able to, right?
If it's going to be sprayed on by, you know, will a company that has fruit that doesn't have this stuff be able to compete, right?
Is your supermarket going to have organic food with this stuff and without?
No, it's going to have it with this stuff unless there's an all-out rebellion.
No, and distributors and markets will prefer it because then they When did you last see, and I think the answer is never, an indication in the produce section of a grocery store?
This is when this was picked.
This is how long this is spent in transit.
What you do is you hold it up and maybe you smell it and you assess it.
This is one of the, I remember, the hard parts of very early COVID lockdowns.
Like, I'm not allowed to touch the fruit?
How am I supposed to choose what fruit I want?
Right?
So, if there is no separate indication of when it was picked, and now you could be buying fruit from a month ago, and because it's been appealed, there is no indication.
You are already buying old food, and the producers who don't put appeal on their food are going to be at an economic disadvantage.
Because for obvious reasons, and therefore be driven out of business.
And so you might predict that you would have an increase in deficiencies, a cryptic increase in deficiencies, because people are eating older food.
So their habit, which used to make them not deficient, is now making them deficient because of a change in supply chain that they can't detect.
Right.
I would also point out that the idea that you can't wash this off the fruit is also suggestive.
That's an awfully durable coating.
It like impregnates, or I don't know, I'm making that up, but like why can't you?
Hard to imagine it impregnates an apple.
Yeah.
And even if it does, Right, if the pores in the apple are enough for this coating to work its way in there such that you can't wash it off with soap, then the point is it's sort of beyond a certain chemical threshold.
This does not sound like a normal component.
Maybe it is.
It's a single ingredient.
Mono and diglycerides.
Wait, can I say something?
Yes.
Granted, what they've said is very vague, intentionally, of course, but assuming that it is roughly in the right neighborhood of true, whatever it's supposed to mean, that this is basically mimicking, you know the, if you peel an orange and then you bend one of the peels in front of a candle or a flame, it'll catch on fire, you're spraying a little bit of oil, and also if you take an apple and like Just any apple and, like, rub it in your hands for a while, it gets really shiny.
There are coatings and such that are bonded to the skins of lots of fruits, and I think, like, they showed an avocado on their site, and I can imagine the same thing there.
And so I think there are, I think the idea is you have some natural level of coatings like this on fruit, which is probably at that level for a reason, of course, and that this is going to bond to all of that and just That's exactly right.
Well, this is the hour.
I can imagine that they're right there, that that's not inherently a problem that it can't come off because it is bonding to something natural.
Although I imagine there's a reason that that level of those coatings wasn't naturally increased in fruits because...
That's exactly right.
This, like seemingly all of the technological innovations, put the burden of discovery of what the problem is on the consumer.
The precautionary principle suggests that that shouldn't be our job.
We should be allowed to continue to buy food that hasn't been messed with, as opposed to having to think through what all the possible effects might be, how likely we think they are, how bad they are if they do happen, and on balance, whether or not we prefer A over B. So, um, what testing was done here?
Do we know?
I don't know.
I did not delve that deeply.
I know ... How can I invest?
I know how I can invest in Appeal of Sciences.
It's a ... No, I can't.
A privately held company at this time.
You want to hear the investors?
That's not an answer to your question.
I guess I'm curious now that you mentioned it.
The investors in the privately held company Appeal Sciences include Andreessen Horowitz, DBL Partners, Upfront Ventures, S2G Ventures, Viking Global Investors, Powerplant Ventures, Temasek, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
What is the Appeal Solution?
You asked what research was done.
I want to know what safety testing was done.
Is it safe?
It's safe.
What if I have a food allergy?
Is a peel a chemical?
That's a stupid question.
A peel is made of the molecules that exist in the fruits and vegetables we already eat.
To learn more about what peel is made of, click here.
I'm clicking there.
Product safety.
Oh, it's made of molecules?
So am I!
Thin edible post-harvest coating, statement of compliance, regulatory information, ingredients, a mixture of food grade glycerol lipids.
Yeah, I don't... product responsibility, right, information sheet.
I clicked on these, they were not useful.
No, they're actually very short.
There's nothing here.
Yeah.
Yeah, at least for the U.S.
Well, I'd be very interested to know how well it was tested and, importantly, for how long.
It's very difficult to test safety in something like this because, A, as Dark Horse viewers well know, the animals that we would typically test this on are predisposed to endure chemical insults that a human wouldn't.
But also, even if they weren't, even if you used wild mice instead of Jack's Lab specials, You would still run into the problem that mice are not long-lived, and so we typically use the rubric that giving large quantities to a mouse over a short period of time ought to tell us what low quantities in a human over a long period of time will do, but there's no reason to actually think that's true.
But it pencils out on the back of the envelope the same amount over time.
It gives us something to say.
But the point is, what would I really want in order to know that this was safe?
Well, you know, I'm not a fan of primate studies, but I would at least want to see long-term primate studies, as in decades.
And frankly, I wouldn't want this deployed over the entire human population, you know, all at once, for many reasons, including, once again, they're going to deny us a control group.
Right, which is kind of their point, I think.
Anytime you deploy something globally, you eliminate a certain amount of your legal jeopardy, because there's no control group to compare you to.
So, oh, suddenly we see an increase in whatever pathology.
Well, that could be anything, right?
This is a very troubling pattern.
And, you know, we used to have a regulatory apparatus that was, at least on paper, obsessive about making sure that the tests were done, which was a never-ending annoyance to the people who produced these new products because it meant that profits were a long way down the road and might never be realized.
But that's far better than a, you know, a free-for-all in which you can bring any old thing to market because it's made of quarks.
I mean, you know, this is nonsense.
We might as well have no regulation.
Right.
Which is what, you know, the developing world faces pretty much.
Yep.
Right?
We're becoming a global banana republic.
Perfect.
Okay, Zach has one more thing to say before we finish off on hummingbirds.
Yeah, someone mentions that we do already put wax on apples, and the point that you're trying to make is that the issue with this is there's no control group.
You can buy many apples with wax, but you can also buy an organic apple, and I'm assuming that...
Is supposed to be free of that stuff.
I would also point out that wax is a substance with which humans have a many thousand year... But even if there was great testing and this product doesn't actually, even if there's no problem with this product whatsoever, the fact that it's going to be arbitrarily thrown in the category of organic can't make sense.
That has to be a category that is preserved as a real thing.
Yep.
Okay, so just a little anecdote that you have not heard.
Okay.
I was sitting outside this morning working.
It's gorgeous out, and a hummingbird!
So we've got two species of hummingbirds up here in the islands in the summer, and we've got a couple at least right in our backyard, and one of them is highly territorial, and he just screams by He's super agitated.
He'll go by like six, eight, ten times if someone's out there.
It really seems to anger him that a person is sitting in his garden.
This happened to me this morning as I was sitting at the table.
He's terrifying the cats.
I'm a little less scared, but still, if he wanted to impale me, I suppose he could.
It wouldn't work out well for him.
Yes, well, exactly to this point.
And, you know, he seems to be upping his game this week, you know, the weather's glorious, sex is in the air, he's, you know, he's definitely interested in keeping out intruders from what he imagines is his space.
So he did this to me a few times today, And I'm outside, and as it turns out, Toby, our 17-year-old son, was inside the house, and he stopped on midway, like sort of over me on one of his flights, and almost, like, almost looked like he made a decision.
He's like, oh yeah?
You're gonna be in my space, I'm gonna go into yours.
And he turns, like he makes a right degree, a right angle turn in midair, and just flies towards the house.
And we often have doors open, but we had the screen door
um open i'm closed at this point and not the glass door and he flew into the screen door and got himself stuck no and as it turns out like i was watching it and toby was watching it from inside so both of us got up right away and came to to save him um and he figured out how to how to go in reverse before either of us got to him and like backed off and then he poked a hole in the screen door No, actually.
It doesn't even leave a mark.
I mean, you think, you know, needle thin beaks, right?
And he hit it just right.
But, you know, this was an unexpected negative effect that we were having on hummingbirds.
I mean, I'm sure it was somewhat traumatizing for him.
It's a hell of a lot better than what happens when they hit a window.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And I don't even, I don't know what else there is to say.
I was glad, you know, as it turns out, two people, Toby from Inside the House has been watching me get dive-bombed by this bird.
And I was, of course, paying attention.
So we both saw it happen.
And the bird, again, reversed before we had to get to him.
But who knew that was even a thing?
I was going to miss that bird.
I'm glad he made it.
I am glad he made it, too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I wasn't expecting that.
Yeah, that's it.
All right.
That's it.
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