*****Watch on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v2t8xe0-bret-and-heather-177th-darkhorse-podcast-livestream.html?mref=256aqg&mc=eh4u2***** In this 177th 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. Picking up from last week, how has the book, Where There Is No Doctor, been updated for the 2022 edition? From breast-feeding to medicines, obesity to sterility, the book has rem...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 177.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
My pronouns are I and me.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
Her pronouns are also I and me.
Wait, that's going to get confusing, isn't it?
It is confusing.
The way we deal with this in our household is that when I refer to you, I use she, her pronouns, whoa, I know that sounds edgy, and when you refer to me, you use he, him pronouns, also edgy.
That's just how we keep it straight.
It's amazing, yeah, how English and all the other languages came up with a solution to this problem a long time ago.
A solution to the problem that reduces ambiguity, yep.
Now as I said in our Q&A last week, if you're wondering about your gender identity, you can just strike that right off your to-do list because it's not a thing and you don't need to worry about it.
Right.
Usually, if you're sitting next to someone reasonable, if you're at all confused, you could just ask them.
They can tell you.
Yeah, or not.
Or not.
Yeah.
All right, so here we are.
177, not prime.
Nope.
Not prime.
3 by 59.
I totally knew that.
And here we are live-streaming on Rumble, and we will do a Q&A exclusively on Rumble when we are done here.
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All right so let's jump right in we have a number of things to talk about today and for the first section I want to return to a topic that we spent some time on last week the topic that we ended on last week which was that I had and I will try to find the camera this time I had talked extensively about this book where there is no doctor a village healthcare
This is our copy from, this is a second printing of the second edition.
So this, it happens to be from 1994, but it's a 1992 edition of this book, which was originally published in Spanish in the 70s, and the first edition in English was in the 70s.
And I talked a fair bit about what What an extraordinary resource this is.
I had it with me at least on one of my extended field seasons in Madagascar, where there in fact was no doctor.
It provides insight, information, and an ability to quickly generate skills, plus an ability to know what should be in your medical kit, what drugs should you have on hand if you're going to be in remote places, or if you are specifically.
In a remote village, either living there because that is where you live or trying to do health care or other kind of social work with people who have lived there all of their lives.
And one of the things I said last week was, it turns out there's a new edition published in 2022.
I do not know how it has changed.
Well, that new edition has since arrived.
This is the 2022 edition.
These look very, very similar, right?
One of them is clearly rather, well, more loved.
You can't maybe tell that on the camera here, but it's been through, well, it's been to Madagascar and back and other places and through many moves.
And this 2022 edition is a brand new, brand new book.
So I did not compare every single thing in both of these books, of course, but they did make it easy to compare because the pagination is the same between the two editions and the table of contents are mostly the same.
And so I was able to kind of, you know, go in and spot check various things.
And I want to report out on what I find, because I think this is a relatively rare opportunity to directly compare Two books, a text that we relied on 30 years ago, 31 years ago, which has come out with a new edition in a field, that is to say medicine, that has of course changed rather dramatically, or at least very obviously, at least in the last few years.
And so I've got some categories of things to say, and you can interrupt any time because it goes on and on and on, and at some point it'll stop.
I basically want to talk about some good things that have not changed at all between the two editions.
I'm going to talk about the rare mistake from the earlier edition that I found that's not corrected in the modern one, some changes that are suggestive of what I call creeping stupidity in the medical field, and then I want to talk about how their recommendations on vaccinations have changed.
Finally, and that's the longest part of the discussion, because as far as I find, it's actually the place in the book that has changed the most, which is what I was concerned about when I was talking about the 1992 edition last week, and it turns out that those concerns were warranted.
Okay, so first, some good things that have not changed at all, that are identical between the two editions, and this will give you a sense, an even greater sense than the conversation we had last week, of what kind of things are in this book.
In 1992, Where There Is No Doctor recommended that babies be exclusively breastfed for the first four months of life.
And in 2022, they've actually increased that and recommend that babies be exclusively breastfed for six months, the first six months of life.
And then that comes up multiple times throughout the book, and in each case, both editions are very firm on the idea that breast is best.
Now, the 2022 edition may have coexisted with this cryptically dangerous fed-is-best paradigm that we've talked about on Dark Horse before, but breast is best is still what they're going with, and that makes the best sense for mothers, for babies, for people.
Um, in both editions, they say, and they're relatively staunch about this, they say for most medicines, no medicine, I'm sorry, for most sicknesses, no medicine is needed.
Great.
They want, they want you to use your own body, drink, drink a lot of water, eat good food, have a clean latrine that is maintained, uh, get good sleep, get good exercise, and that is the way, um, to health, to maintaining health, and that is Those are also the things that you should use to get back to health.
They say, in the Healing Without Medicines chapter, people will get well from most sicknesses, including the common cold and flu, by themselves, without need for medicines.
And they say, even in a case of more serious illness, when a medicine may be needed, it is the body that most overcome the disease.
The medicine only helps.
Cleanliness, rest, nutritious food, and lots of water are still very important.
So again, this is consistent between the two.
And it is perfectly consistent with evolutionary logic.
Exactly.
The body is designed to stabilize itself and when it has become
Unstabilized, there are many mechanisms that will cause it to return to health and so, you know, the lesson for, frankly, civilization ought to be do what you can to disrupt those normal processes that are so well built and so difficult to understand because taking a process and disrupting it and then correcting for the disruption is always harder than just simply not disrupting.
Maintain homeostasis when you can.
Get ahead of processes that could become positive feedback processes, runaway processes, that will send more and more of your systems more and more out of out of sync and out of health, which then may require medicines and then the medicines may require more medicines to deal with the side effects of the first etc etc.
Yeah, I was also just going to say that the extrapolation from that, and I don't think the book is going to deal as much with that, but the obvious extrapolation is that we ought to treat the developmental period with spectacular care, disrupted minimally.
Well, they don't use that language, but there is a lot in this book.
And there is a companion book, which we don't have, specifically for women around childbirth and such.
There is a lot in here about the different ways that we should be treating children and pregnant women and newborns, which is suggestive of that being understood without it being explicit.
That the earlier in development you are, the more fragile you are, the more easily disrupted systems are, and the less likely, if you disrupt them early, you are to have healthy systems later on.
And I would just add to this, I know you have lots of places to go, but that in some sense, although a developmental environment could be upgraded and it could be made to fit better with the adult environment that the person is developing to live in, you are far better with a developmental environment that is coherent and worked from 500 years ago than you are from some novel combination of things that have not yet passed the test of time.
That's right.
So, you know, an Amish childhood would not leave a child perfectly well-adjusted for the modern world, but it would certainly not mess them up in the same way that we seem to be doing across the board by giving them dozens of new inputs which can't, their effect can't be tracked because it's too noisy when you have that much complexity.
Right oh you know my my child my child is is suffering.
Well um you started off with formula and um they were sleeping on a mattress that was off gassing um all sorts of things the child never should have been breathing.
You've been kept inside the child's been kept inside out of the sun out of some misguided attempt to um to protect him from skin cancer when what he needed was sun.
He doesn't move his body because he's in front of a screen all the time.
Once he was off formula he is drinking coke and eating Fritos You know, on and on and on it goes.
Like, how do you separate?
How do you point to any one of those as the culprit, even though I think everything that I just named is actually now completely understood to be contributing to some of the health problems that so many of us are experiencing?
Yeah, and on top of that... And that's a tiny fraction of the list.
On top of that, parents are being instructed to override the natural impulse that would exist for evolutionary reasons to correct their child's wrong thinking.
They are now being induced to reinforce a child's incorrect thinking about, for example, their own sex, and there is no telling what happens.
You know, should we expect more of this in the future?
Of course you should, because you're putting bad data into people's heads.
You know, instead of saying, no, honey, you're not a girl, right, we are saying, oh, geez, are you?
You know, I had no idea.
The obstetrician told me exactly the opposite.
And anyway, that informational chaos is... That's outside the purview of the book, right?
This book is not primarily about parenting outside of distinctly medical cases, although obviously what you're talking about has steamrolled into medical space.
But a few more things between the two editions that aren't changed and that are quite terrific.
I read last week from chapter six the right and wrong uses of modern medicines with, you know, things like there is some danger in the use of any medicine.
To be helpful, medicine must be used correctly.
All of this is unchanged between the two editions.
In Chapter 9, I also read instructions and precautions for injections, including it is more dangerous to inject medicine than to take it by mouth.
Also unchanged between the two editions.
And there is, for instance, and I'm not going to show it, it's a little graphic, but there's a flowchart of how to care for a person with acute diarrhea.
And that sounds like something you don't want to think about.
Well, you don't want to think about it until it's right in front of you, right?
It's clear.
It's easy to interpret.
It's identical in both editions.
They're not changing things.
You know, there's a whole lot between these two editions that are, in fact, the same, which is terrific.
Well, in fact, I would just point out that obviously a book that is based on the idea of what you should do in the absence of the latest medical technology and the institutions that deliver it should change very slowly.
Yes, well, as we shall see, some of the things that should not have changed changed rather dramatically.
So I found, I think it's just one really, what I'm calling the rare mistake from the earlier edition that's not corrected in 2022.
So if you would show the first picture now, Zach, this is from page 110, in which they're talking about how to make sure that your child is well nourished.
Add high-energy helper foods.
This section begins by saying, you know, most cultures have a dominant basically starch.
You know, it's going to be potato or quinoa or cassava or manioc.
You know, it's going to be some rice that is the main thing, but that very often that's not going to be enough, they argue.
And so they say, add high-energy helper foods such as oils and sugar or honey to the main food.
It is best to add vegetable oil or foods containing oils, nuts, ground nuts, peanuts or seeds, especially pumpkin or sesame seeds.
On the bottom right of this image that I'm showing you here, and this is just a picture I took from, I don't remember which one of these it was, but it's identical in the two editions, if your child's belly fills up before her energy needs are met, the child will become thin and weak.
To meet her energy needs, a child would need to eat this much boiled rice, and there's a big pile on on the leaf in front of her, but she needs only this much rice when some vegetable oil is mixed in.
Well, it's possible that the way that vegetable oils were being made in 1992 weren't quite the same as how they are being made now, but in general, vegetable oil sounds like a healthy alternative to, you know, things like butter and lard, and it's quite the opposite.
So especially now, and I suspect even back 30 years ago, but for sure now, Almost all of the oils that you will get and that are used in basically, you know, any time that you aren't in control of the oil you're using are seed oils and they are being created through processes that leave so much toxicity in the oils themselves.
This is the opposite of a healthy food.
You should not be adding vegetable oil to your child's rice to increase the nutritional content That's a terrible idea.
Lard maybe, coconut oil, ghee, butter, any number of animal fats or something like olive oil or avocado oil or coconut oil.
But the stuff that's passing for vegetable oil, safflower, sunflower, canola, grapeseed, not good at all.
And that's an error that is maintained between the two editions, and I think, as I said, the only one.
So let's explore that a little bit.
First of all, in the kinds of places where this book is most useful, were you to go into a local shop and find vegetable oil, it would almost certainly be something like sunflower or canola.
It's going to be cheap and highly industrialized oil.
It's going to be exactly the culprit oils.
And indeed, if I'm thinking about in Madagascar, in Marancetra, the town nearest where I did most of my research, often the oils were in these giant oil drums, right?
And then you bring in an empty water bottle, one of these crinkly plastic water bottles that you bought at the store, you drank the water, and they basically dump it into the oil bin.
The oil can, this big drum of God knows what vegetable oil, and that's your cooking oil.
And that was in the 90s that we were doing that.
I never had any sense that that was actually going to be good for you.
Yeah, it's troubling from multiple different levels, and I would just point out that, you know, that, oh, it's a big drum of something thing gets even worse for the transportation of some of these things.
They're transported in these big ships and, you know, the controls that actually render that safe are certainly not sufficient.
But the, you know, the distinction between, let's say, olive and avocado oil, which you're almost certain not to be able to find in one of these little shops, Because they're, you know, luxury goods and canola or safflower or whatever you are going to be able to find has to do with, you know, the subtle distinction that in the case of those two oils that are good, right?
Which seem like they would be seed oils, aren't seed oils because it's not the seed from which the oil is extracted.
It's the fruit, it's the fatty fruit.
Olives and avocados have very fatty fruits and it's the fruits of the olives and the fruits of the avocado with which the oils are being made.
Yeah.
And the same thing, actually it's different and I don't know why it's different for coconut oil.
Coconut is the exception.
Yeah.
And why it's an exception I don't exactly know either.
Um, but in any case, the, you know, the diagram is referring to something accurate.
There's a correct piece of logic there.
There's an undernutrition problem for many developing world children.
Right, a high volume starchy food may have, you know, sufficient nutrition in one regard, but it's so high volume that the point is the net nutrition that one gets out of a meal may be below the necessary threshold.
But what you do to correct it is not wise in the case of the way that piece of advice would be interpreted by somebody given what's locally likely to be available.
Well, and I'm thinking, you know, my experience and our experience as well in northeastern Madagascar, a very remote part of an already very remote island nation in the western part of the Indian Ocean, where rice is the food.
People eat rice three times a day, often only rice.
uh you know enough so that the you know the national drink is burnt rice water and it's it's you know and you know when when you meet someone on the street one of the formal exchanges is how many bowls of rice have you eaten today uh and the higher the number sort of the greater indicator of wealth that you have i don't know if that is still the case but it was back in the 90s
And in the particular spot where I was doing my research, I was on the coast, of course, because I was on a little island right off the coast of northeastern Madagascar, and there were a lot of fishermen in these little pirogues, these little, you know, wooden boats that they were paddling.
Dugout canoes.
And they would go out fishing for some number of days at a time before coming back to their families with their catch.
But it being the tropics, fish doesn't save that well.
And so, in fact, on the shore of Nosy Mangabey, the island where I was working and a few other places too, there were these fisher camps where they would dry and smoke the fish.
And the two conservation agents who were on the island one of the years that I was that I was there, got very excited when a fisherman would pull up and offer to sell some of their smoked fish to us, because we would eat together.
It would be them and me and my field assistant, or the year that you were there with me, the five of us, a different field assistant, and you and me, and the two conservation agents, and occasionally a couple of Malagasy wild pig researchers.
Oh, as well.
It was, you know, a small group, tiny island, and the first time that these Malagasy fishermen pulled up, I thought, oh, thank God, I guess we're going to have something besides rice, right?
And, you know, we can have some fish.
But what is done is the fish is smoked, because unless you eat the fish the same day you catch it, it goes bad in this tropical climate.
The fish is smoked.
But you don't then eat the smoked, effectively salted, dried fish.
No, you boil it into water and you pour the reconstituted smoked dried fish broth onto the rice, and you eat the rice that now tastes a little bit of fish.
And to a Western palate, to a privileged Western palate, it's not good.
It's not good, but it is patently nourishing.
It is patently more nourishing for you than just the bowl of rice that you would otherwise be eating.
And while I never came to think it was delicious, I did come to associate those moments when we managed to acquire some of the smoked dried fish and then, you know, having watched what the Malagasy do, like, okay, this is what we do.
We make the broth out of it and we pour it on the rice.
Like, well, okay.
I'm fed.
I am fed.
When in Rome.
When in Rome, right?
Yeah.
That was the rare mistake from the earlier edition that is not corrected in 2022.
Some changes between the two editions that suggest what I'm calling creeping stupidity.
In, let's see here, in the 1992 edition on page 126, there's nothing to show here because I didn't pull it up, we have a section In a chapter, let's see, I can't remember what the chapter is called, the chapter is basically about what you should be eating and how to stay healthy and there's a section called Fat People.
To be fat, to be very fat is not healthy, it begins.
Okay, that same section in the 2022 edition, you want to guess?
What's that same section called in 2022?
It's not terrible.
It didn't go full stupid, but it's creeping stupidity, I think.
That same section, same page, like again, they really didn't make it easy to compare editions here, in the 2022 edition are called People Who Are Too Heavy.
To be very fat is not healthy.
Very heavy people are more likely to get high blood pressure, etc.
So they didn't actually change any of the conclusions.
They just took out the word fat.
Yeah, actually.
Okay, so in 1992, there was a section on fertility in which they wrote, men and women who are not able to have children, etc, etc.
And they changed that phrase in 2022 to people who are not able to have children.
Some of whom are men and women, undoubtedly.
Well, no, actually in this case.
So, oh, there's intersex people.
Like, you know what?
Intersex people are generally not going to have an easy time having children.
And if they are, then they are doing so as a man or a woman.
So it's men and women who have children, not some third imaginary sex, right?
So that's just creepingly stupid, actually.
Uh, words like sterility have been removed.
I don't know why.
They're talking about sterility and they just, like, use different words now.
And sex is often disappeared, but not always, even in chapters entirely about reproduction.
So, for instance, in 1992, men are sometimes unable to make women pregnant because they have fewer sperms than usual.
2022, a person may make fewer sperm than is normal and so be unable to make someone pregnant.
Why?
Like, just why do it?
All the chapters on sex, on pregnancy, on childbirth, on family planning, and there are a lot of them in here, have removed some mention of male and female in places, but they've left in others.
So it's just a mess.
It's just going to be more confusing to people who are trying to use this as an actual manual.
for, you know, village health care.
It's silly and it's actually potentially bordering on dangerous because, you know, no one who lives in a village who's dealing with fertility issues or childbirth issues or any of this is actually confused about who it is who gets pregnant and who it is who has the sperm.
Like, they're just not confused about it.
All right.
This is interesting because you can imagine that in whatever context it is that the revision was decided upon, the details of what would be changed, that a conversation probably unfolded where, well, if we adjust the language so that it can't get us in trouble, it doesn't actually... anybody who reads it is going to know what it means, so... But they didn't do it completely.
Well, but never mind that.
Let's say they did.
But they didn't.
Doesn't matter.
Let's say they did, okay?
If they changed everything so that nobody who disbelieves in two sexes would be offended, right?
But anybody who did believe two sexes would know exactly what was being said, then you could argue that the meaning hadn't been lost.
However, Especially in places where such a book might find itself.
The idea that the language is going to appear to dance around a fiction that's actually biologically settled and not complex, right, is dangerous.
And I want to tell a little anecdote.
As I've mentioned before, my first research gig Was in Jamaica.
And it was a fascinating experience.
I lived in a little town.
There was not even a phone line into the town.
It was before cell phones.
It was before cell phones.
I was living with a Jamaican family and I was brought into their world and I actually got to see how their world worked.
And they took me in as one of their own, which was a lovely and formative experience for me.
The children of this extended clan.
So I was in this house that had a yard, but the family was related to a number of other houses.
So there were, I don't know, probably 10 kids who followed me around and were interested because I would talk to them about my life, which was very different from theirs.
They were very interested to hear what I had to say and I knew things.
I was a science student and anyway, so they would ask lots and lots of questions.
You were a decent human being and a stranger in a place with a closed, tight-knit group, and you were accepted, and so, hey, talk to the new guy!
It was totally, totally cool, except for one incident where Uh, I was reading, uh, I think it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
You were reading Kundra, and okay.
I was reading Kundra, and that was fine, but, um, I got, I think, to the end of the book, and I, I can't remember the book very well, but, um, there was a very sad, poignant moment, and I was fending off tears, and the kids were, like, interested to come talk to me, and I did not Want to cry in front of the children.
And anyway, so I was like moving into the bush trying to find a place where I could finish reading this book and be done with this.
But anyway, yeah.
But anyway, so I got a lot of interesting questions from these kids, and they were very revealing.
Some of these questions were brilliant questions that really made you think about things, and some of the questions were the result of the very provincial circumstances that these kids were living in.
And one of the very unfortunate facts of their existence was that the Weekly World News... Remember the Weekly World News?
Is this like a tabloid that would show up in the supermarket checkouts?
Yeah, it was a tabloid that used to be, I don't know that it still might still be, but used to be available at supermarket checkouts.
But it was the one, right, the National Enquirer was the one that kind of pretended to be a newspaper and report real stories that were super sensational.
And the Weekly World News was for people who had given up on reality.
And it was just the most outlandish stuff, right?
Like, you know, woman gives birth to space alien was literally one of these things.
Somehow, Every so often one of these things would land in this little piece of Jamaica, and it looks like a newspaper, and so... It's news from the United States!
Right.
They've got it going on!
How tragic is it to have something broadcasting insane nonsense that it's not even clear if it's a joke, right, into, you know, backcountry Jamaica where there's nobody to say, yeah, let me explain to you what that newspaper is so you won't take it so damn seriously if you see it.
Yeah.
So anyway, Okay, into that milieu, you've got this insane newspaper that finds its way into these kids' hands, and this book.
Also, might well be in such a place, right?
And so my point is, if this book is skirting around some issue of gender that makes it seem like, oh, even the medical people are, you know, being very careful not to say men and women, maybe this is real, maybe there are more than two sexes, right?
Then the point is, it reinforces that rather than just saying the damn truth and, you know, Okay, there's a truth.
But it hurt my feelings.
Okay?
See Ben Shapiro about that, right?
But, um, so anyway.
Check in with reality and get back to me, or don't.
Right, so I guess what I'm comparing in my mind... Was there a particular incident that you wanted to relate to?
Yeah, yeah.
I think it was actually this question of a woman gives birth to space alien, and they wanted to know if this had in fact happened.
It's like, I mean, how would they know that it didn't?
Right?
But how... Let's suppose that I hadn't been there, and they hadn't asked anybody who could straighten them out on this issue, You might think, well, I don't know that a woman gave birth to a space alien, but I did read it, so I have to leave that possibility open.
Well, how much educational harm?
So the kids were literate?
Were they reading this?
Yeah, they were in school, and as I've mentioned before, they were bilingual without realizing it, because they spoke Patois and English.
And which made me frustrating to them.
But they thought they only spoke one language.
Right.
They thought it was one thing because they moved seamlessly between them.
And I spoke English very well and struggled the whole time with patois.
And so when they would say things to me in patois and I would not understand them, they would be like, What are you, dumb?
What are you doing?
Stop that!
You know what we're saying.
So anyway, it was a fascinating experience.
But if you compare the high-minded discussion at the publisher, surrounded by whiteboards around the big laminate A conference table in which they decided what to delicately change in some way that left the meaning there for whoever wanted to find it.
And then the harm done where this book finds itself into the hands of somebody who just wants to know what the hell is going on.
And the book implies by being very strange with language that men and women, that's not, those categories aren't as good as we once thought.
And some fool has told them the same thing.
That's a tragedy.
The book just needs to be straightforward.
It's a medical book designed to tell you what to do in the absence of an authority.
That's its purpose.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Okay, um, just a couple more examples of some changes that I find suggestive of creeping stupidity, uh, and then we'll talk about the ways that their, um, their recommendations around vaccinations have changed.
Uh, in their chapter, How to Stay Healthy During Pregnancy, or the section called How to Stay Healthy During Pregnancy, in 1992, they say, continue to work and get exercise, but try not to get too tired.
In 2022, try to rest more, but also get some exercise.
Now, most people would probably just go right by that and not even notice that there's been a change.
The fact that so much in these two editions is unchanged makes it really, really clear that that is a change.
And it is a bad change.
It is a stupid change.
The idea that now you're basically telling pregnant women that they are, you know, delicate, fragile, precious flowers who are going to do themselves a service by trying not to do too much and definitely not continuing on with their lives.
And that's actually, in all but a few cases, going to result in worse outcomes.
You know, the less fit you are as you go into childbirth, the more likely you are to have complications.
So, you know, try to rest more, but also get some exercise.
It flips the thing that you should be prioritizing on its head.
Now, I could see I could see a possibly feminist argument for getting rid of the first framing, which was, continue to work and get exercise, but try not to get too tired.
You know, continue to work and get exercise.
Definitely, you know, get down there and scrub the floors because that's your job, woman.
I don't read it that way at all.
And frankly, I think that the move away from encouraging women to continue to do what they do while they are pregnant until they can't anymore, because there does become a point where it's just like, just get this out of me.
I'm just, I'm done here.
It's anti-feminist, actually.
This is a dangerous thing, which we see in our culture, moving women away from being, you know, we were moving in the right direction of, you know what?
No, you're different.
Men and women are different, and there's going to be different constraints and different possibilities, and you can try for anything you want.
And also, if you are going to get pregnant and have a child, there are going to be limitations on what you can do.
But don't limit yourself on the voice of an authority from outside.
Listen to your own body.
Listen to your kinfolk.
Listen to your mother and your sisters and your midwife and your doula and all of these people and say, you know what?
I feel like I should be walking right now.
Then go walk.
That's what you should be doing.
Not taking a book that is deciding, you know what?
Try to rest more, but also get some exercise.
It feels like it flips what should actually be being done on a Yeah, it actually sounds conservative, but it's radical.
Yeah.
Right?
And it flies in the face, I mean, and this is really, frankly, a problem for medicine as it is currently understood, it flies in the face of obvious evolutionary logic.
The answer is, to the extent that you should be limited by pregnancy and you should alter what you're doing, you're probably programmed to know it, especially with respect to activity.
It's one thing with respect to a modern food that your ancestors may not have encountered and therefore you might be sensitive to something and you wouldn't have a detector for it or whatever.
But with respect to something that every single human female ancestor did while pregnant up until five minutes ago, the answer is You probably have an internal guide to how far you can push it.
Listen to that.
Listen to that.
And so, you know, I guess what I'm getting from this is there's a lot of stuff in medicine that instead of taking the Do not disrupt that which works, that that should, you know, that's like above even the Hippocratic Oath, right?
It's like the central principle.
Don't disrupt something that works, right, just because you think you know how to make it better because you're not going to make it better.
Yeah, don't make the mistake of Chesterton's fence.
Right.
So as far as things that aren't working, what should you do?
You should try to restore the conditions in which the body's natural ability to fix this thing functions to the extent possible, right?
And then there comes a point at which you don't have a choice, right?
You've got a tumor for whatever reason.
Cutting it out of you is the mechanism using antibiotics to prevent infection at the site.
All makes sense, but the basic point is there should be a strong bias in the direction of doing what made sense in ancestral times, not disrupting those patterns as much as you can avoid disrupting them, being especially cautious about development, intervening as little as possible, as being as sparing as possible, and if it should show up anywhere, It's in this book, and it is here in this book in some ways, but it's degrading.
Yes, that bias is strong and exists in this book in a good way, but it is disappearing a little bit.
And there's one notable exception, which I'm about to get to, which is with regard to vaccines.
But just one more example from their section called How to Stay Healthy During Pregnancy.
In the 1992 edition, they say, avoid taking medicines if at all possible.
Full stop.
That's the advice.
In 2022, they say, avoid taking medicines, and they take out the if at all possible.
And then later in that same little bullet point, they say, get up to date on vaccinations and test it for HIV.
And the increasing recommendation for women who are pregnant to be getting vaccinations is concerning to me.
And I have not seen, I don't know if it exists, a good history of what recommendations have been made when.
I have increasingly been hearing, in fact just this week we have a friend who's pregnant who asked me, I said, you know, I've been recommended that I get this thing during pregnancy, uh, this vaccine, and, you know, my sense 20 years ago, you know, when we were using this 1992 version of this book, long before I was pregnant, I was thinking about getting pregnant, was like, that's not, that's not when you do that.
You go into pregnancy healthy, and you don't put new... and introduce new possible pathogens into you at that point.
Like, that's not, that's not what you do.
No, and the fact is it speaks to the same hubris, right?
What are the chances that medicine understands the placenta well enough to know how it is going to react to a vaccinated mother Right?
I mean, A, I would just point out the developing fetus is spectacularly well insulated from pathogens by a very ancient mechanism, right?
So the question is, okay, is the mother more vulnerable during this period?
Is the mother's illness a greater threat to the The growing infant than the novelty of the intervention, right?
These are complex questions and the idea that medicine has looked at them carefully, studied them, figured out the answers and it turns out that a cost-benefit analysis makes it better to vaccinate a pregnant woman than to hold off.
I don't believe it.
No, I don't believe it either.
And I think there is a larger burden on a pregnant woman or a woman or a family with a newborn to work harder to not be exposed to certain pathogens.
And it can feel constraining and it can feel unfair if what you thought was every human should have access to exactly the same choices and decisions about how to spend every moment of their time as every other human.
Well, that's not true.
If that's your sense of why it's unfair, then you've just been betrayed by reality and there's nothing to be done about it.
If you're pregnant, you should work harder to avoid pathogens than when you're not pregnant, just as if you're immunocompromised.
I'm sorry that you're immunocompromised and that that puts a greater burden on you, That happened, and now it is more important for you than for someone who is not immunocompromised to work very hard to avoid pathogens.
Same thing when you're pregnant, same thing when you've got a newborn.
And doing so behaviorally through your own choices of how to move around the world, as opposed to imagining that, you know, these reductionist, anti-evolutionary, non-thinking You know, doctors can deliver unto you a magic shot or a magic pill and that will solve all of the problems.
Those things don't exist.
And, you know, I say that, again, as someone who is, you know, enthusiastic about vaccines in general and enthusiastic about antibiotics in general, and there's just a lot of moments when neither are the appropriate move.
And the 1992 version of this book did a very good job of saying, you know, children should get these recommended vaccinations and that will help protect them against these very debilitating diseases.
And what has happened in the 2022 edition on this question is a little bit shocking.
So before I go there, let us Show the second picture, if you will, Zach.
So I read from last week how injections can disable children, and this is the section that I read from that I'm showing now.
One out of every three cases of polio is caused by injections, they say in the 1992 section.
They specifically say, to reduce the chance of paralysis from polio, it is best not to give vaccinations, immunizations, or any other injections when a child has a fever or signs of a cold.
This could be a mild polio infection without paralysis.
Okay, and show what that same section looks like in 2022, if you will, Zach.
That's the third picture.
It's exactly the same section, and it's one of the very few sections of the book which looks very different, although it's in exactly the same, you know, it's the same section.
So they've taken out both the image of three children, three children with polio, one of whom they are attributing to having gotten some kind of an injection.
And they've taken out all mention of the fact of vaccinating when you are already sick, vaccinating a child when the child is already sick, potentially causing trouble.
They have taken that out.
They've removed it.
Why?
I don't know.
But they've taken it out.
Well, we have to leave one possibility open here, and I think with polio, I mean, I don't know, and I would like to look into it, but the nature, so in the case of one in three cases of polio may actually be vaccine-induced, what they're likely talking about is the case of an attenuated vaccine that has a bad interaction with a latent infection.
They're not specifying actually, if I read both the lines and between the lines, they are not restricting in the 1992 edition their claim that 1 in 3 or up to 1 in 3 polio infections may actually have been caused by an injection.
They're not saying that 1 in 3 would have been caused by a polio vaccination.
They're saying an injection, which is to say that it's possible that a low-level sickness that a child has could be Polio and that sometimes it is in these cases where polio is still endemic and that getting any kind of injection that has any kind of effect like an adjuvant that's going to trigger the immune system will cause that polio infection which the child would have been able to fend off and then be immune to it to blow up into a lifelong debilitating disease.
Yeah, well, if that is the case, if that's really the implication there, then it hints at a very important fact, which you and I have become increasingly focused on as we've thought more and more about the various different technologies involved in vaccines and so-called vaccines.
But the idea of, hey, some manufacturer needs to get more of a reaction out of the immune system because what it's giving you is very weak T antigenically, and so it's going to use an adjuvant to wake up your immune system.
How good is it to wake up your immune system?
What happens if your immune system is reacting to something else at the same time, which it often is and you may not be aware of?
So anyway, So I mean and when if you think about it this way like okay should I take should I take a shot or an oral vaccine for instance the purpose of which is to engage my immune system when I am sick with something else does would that ever make sense?
Right?
It seems actually kind of clear that that is something that should be a common sense piece of advice.
Wait until you feel in perfect health, wait until I'm going to make some numbers up, you know, a week, two weeks after the last time you felt in any way sick, before you get something on board, before you take something on board, the purpose of which is to Inform your immune system of a particular pathogen and aggravate it enough that it hops to, right?
If your immune system is already responding to a cold or a flu or, god forbid, you know, a low-level poliovirus, it's already engaged and now it gets some other injection, the purpose of which is in part to get your immune system to kind of, you know, get flustered, get active.
If their original numbers are right, that is extraordinary.
And it's another reason we're going to get back to, like, Kurt Vandenbush is like, you do not vaccinate during a pandemic, right?
You do not vaccinate against a thing when that thing is circulating.
Right?
Because you potentially make it worse.
Because there is going to be some ability for some number of people, and we don't at all fully understand why people vary so much, but for any given disease, exposure to that disease is going to result in very different kinds of illness across the population.
Yeah, it's also true that to the extent that there is something called a safety test that actually has the capacity to find risks, the number of people involved in a safety test who would have been sick with any one of the dozens of things that they might have contracted is going to be tiny.
So to the extent that this vaccine and this illness are a bad combination, A, it's almost certain to be missed.
B, that risk is always there, and therefore the idea of, well, should you take a vaccine?
Vaccines are safe.
Suppose a vaccine was perfectly safe, which I don't believe they ever are, but a vaccine was perfectly safe except in people who were sick with something that does circulate.
Right, so that some tiny number of people who happen to be sick with something, maybe it's, you know, the first day of their illness with something else, and they don't know that they're sick yet, right?
And they get a vaccine.
The point is, you're taking that risk inherently when you say, this is a vaccine worth taking.
This should be factored into the calculus.
What are the chances that some parameter like, am I sick with something else, is going to change the safety of this vaccine in my particular case on this particular day?
If that exists for every vaccine, right, then the point is, oh, well, there's a reason you shouldn't want to have the number of vaccines be arbitrary large in the first place, even if they were all safe, right?
Because the point is... And that you shouldn't simply follow a schedule, like, well, if he's three months old, he needs to get it, but he's got a cold.
Nope, if he's three months old, he's got to get the thing.
I'm going to wait until that child is healthy.
Right, you know, as you and I have talked about, there are lots of things that potentially could have influences on the hazard of these sorts of technologies that are simply not discussed, right?
If myocarditis is a risk, does it matter which arm you're injected in?
Probably.
And therefore, why is that something, you know, that is left to the clinician or to the patient to decide, right?
Why is that not an issue?
If it is true that being sick with something changes the risk that accompanies a particular inoculation, then is there a season in which inoculating is safer, and therefore should there be inoculation season and no-go season, right?
Yeah, maybe pollen season isn't the right season to be inoculating people.
Perhaps it isn't.
Maybe it's true that vaccines are an incredibly potent weapon against infectious disease, but That they are dangerous enough that what should happen is you should have a blood panel that decides whether or not you appear to be sick with something you don't know about that might affect how safe the thing is.
Before getting any inoculations.
Right.
The point is there's a whole landscape of possibilities in between.
These things are too unsafe to contemplate and these things are so safe that you are a bad person if you don't get one.
Yes, that binary being of course trotted out as anti-vaxxer and vaxxer.
Right.
And neither of those positions make sense.
Anti-vaxxer and decent person, which is not a dichotomy.
All right.
Okay, so let us walk through how specifically the recommendations for childhood vaccines changed between these two editions.
You can show my screen here, Zach.
I created a document which I went through the two books and compared the recommendations.
And I walked through the recommendations last week, from the 1992 edition.
This is all, you know, easily found, page 147.
In 1992, there were four vaccines recommended.
They've got six here for young children.
They got DPT, which is diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus, polio, BCG for tuberculosis, measles, just the single measles shot,
uh and then those are those are the early childhood vaccines that the 1992 edition of where there is no doctor recommended and then they've got tetanus for older children uh and which incidentally in 2022 here you see that that's just kind of wrapped up into number one so they've got nine recommendations but they've actually cheated by combining one and five from before because the t in the dpt shot is a tetanus shot So, you know, consistently, where there is no doctor says, you know, tetanus is the thing that you really have to worry about and you really want to be protected from.
Polio, tuberculosis, measles, and smallpox being the others.
Smallpox, they said, and I didn't actually catch this when I was talking about it last week, they mentioned in the 1992 edition, but they said the disease has been eradicated, so you don't need this anymore.
So they actually had five recommended vaccines in In 1992, for young children, and in 2022, they still have DPT, and polio, and BCG for tuberculosis, and measles, although now they say maybe it should also be, maybe instead of measles, it should be the MMR shot, which is the triple measles, mumps, and rubella.
And then they add a whole bunch more.
So in 2022 we've got Hep B, which and I'm just I've got in quotes here what the what the 2022 edition says about either the disease or the pathogen that is identified as being dealt with by the vaccine is what it does.
So Hep B is described in the 2022 edition of Where There Is No Doctor as a serious liver disease and they say three or four shots simultaneous with DBT.
Hib, which is Haemophilus influenzae type B, which, quote, causes meningitis and pneumonia.
Three to four shots, again, simultaneous with DPT, plus a booster.
You've got number seven here, pneumococcal conjugate, against pneumonia.
Three shots, again, simultaneous with DPT.
Got rotavirus, which is apparently, quote, against a diarrhea disease that can kill young children.
That's an oral vaccine, like the polio vaccine.
And then HPV, which they don't specify, but I believe they're not giving that to young children anywhere, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt here and did not put that into the young children recommendations.
This is human papillomavirus, which quote, causes cervical cancer and some other cancers.
And I counted up the shots too, and in 1992, where there was no doctor, Recommended for young children five shots plus oral polio vaccine and three additional shots for older children in the form of the tetanus shot and in the 2022 edition they're recommending 15 to 17 shots depending plus oral polio and oral rotavirus and for older children an additional five to six shots.
That's a big change.
And when I go looking just a little bit at what, how effective these new vaccines are, whether or not they are actually doing what they're claiming to do, whether or not they are definitely necessary all the places that they are being advocated for whether or not having all of these at once, which is probably more about compliance than about health, right?
Now if you're a rural health care worker and you've got someone with a baby and you are convinced that they absolutely need for the health of their baby to get them this full retinue of vaccinations, it is going to be much harder to get that mother with her young baby and she may have other babies at home, other children at home, and she's got a lot of things going on.
It's going to be harder to get her to come in 15 to 17 times.
than it is to get her to come in three, four, five times, right?
So if you have everything on the same schedule as the original DPT vaccine, the diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccine, and you're taking the Hep B shot at the same time, and the Hib shot, and the pneumococcal conjugate shot, and the rotavirus oral vaccine all at the same time, well, most of these vaccines have adjuvants in them, don't they?
And so you're just ramping up that immune system of that young child, in some cases so young that they are, if you've taken the other advice in this otherwise excellent book um completely, that child is still only and exclusively breastfed.
That child is still being protected uh largely by the breast milk of their mother and receiving immune information from their mother.
There is A lot to wonder about what has changed in these recommendations, and this is not a match for the childhood vaccination schedule in the U.S.
Indeed, the childhood vaccination schedule in the U.S.
is more than this, but I don't, I have not yet heard or read or thought of an explanation for an increase in the childhood vaccination schedule this extreme that makes evolutionary or medical sense.
Yes, and the mechanism for knowing is available to us and does not appear to be deployed as a rationale.
Right?
An all-cause mortality benefit of both the individual vaccines and, more importantly, the schedule as a whole.
Right?
If you adhere to this schedule, are you better off in terms of how long you're going to live than if you didn't?
Right?
That's an important question, because as you point out, let's say you have a shot, and let's say that it was tested in isolation, because of course it would be, and it has the correct amount of adjuvant, if there is such a thing, for inducing the correct amount of response in the immune system to produce the correct reactivity.
Okay?
Now you give somebody multiple shots at once.
Okay?
Well, probably, If the correct amount of adjuvant was some quantity that was activating enough of the immune system, then really you only need the adjuvant from one shot because the activated immune system from that one shot is sufficient to activate the immune system for the antigens in the other shots.
Unless the argument is, oh actually you need that because you need the immune system responding to Hib and to DPT and to all of these things, in which case that's an argument against taking the shots at the same time.
Yeah, right, exactly.
And so, I guess, let's put it this way.
You and I, like so many others, bought the story surrounding vaccines.
And, you know, I believe that the story, the Jenner story about smallpox and cowpox, is a very powerful story that talks about a very potent mechanism for actually reducing infectious disease.
We are believers in the idea of vaccination, but the radical program in which we take many diseases and vaccinate a young person from them, effectively sending that person's immune system the message that they are in this environment full of these pathogens, just attacking them at an incredible rate, Right?
Is that safe?
Nobody knows.
Could we find out?
We sure could, but there's a question.
Is the explosion in the vaccine schedule driven by our having developed vaccines that are in isolation worthwhile?
Are they still worthwhile in conjunction?
Or is this motivated by shareholder value and the fact that standards of care can be used to get doses of things administered to people and what happens to those people is actually quite secondary?
Yes, I wonder very much the same thing.
So, a couple more things here with regard to changes in this, again, mostly excellent book, Where There Is No Doctor, between the 1992 and the 2022 edition.
At the very beginning of the 2022 edition, there was in the 1992 edition a section on thanks, a whole page of gratitude, basically acknowledgements.
That's gone in the 2022 edition.
Instead we have an entire page devoted to COVID.
COVID-19.
Yeah, makes me feel that way too.
It has some things here that are true and accurate descriptors of what we think we know about COVID, but it also says It says a lot.
Vaccination.
There are several vaccines for COVID-19.
All prevent serious illness or death and all are safe.
The sooner you get vaccinated with any of them, the sooner you will be protected and the sooner the disease will stop spreading.
After six to eight months, you will also need to get a vaccine booster injection to strengthen your resistance to COVID-19.
Prevention against COVID-19.
Getting vaccinated is the best way to prevent COVID-19 infection.
Until vaccines are available to everyone, you could take steps to protect yourself and others.
And then they direct the interested reader to a lot of online content.
I'm going to share just a little bit of that, that they have created, that Hesperian, the publisher, has created with regard to... Wait, wait.
Before you do...
Again, nothing in that advice is risk stratified for age or health status.
Now, there is some risk stratification in some of the stuff online.
They got a lot of stuff online, okay?
Where there is no doctor, but you definitely have access to online, I guess, if you want to find out about the risk stratification.
Right, good point.
Okay, so let us show my screen if you will here, Zach.
This is a PDF that I pulled directly from online.
I'll link to these two documents in the show notes.
This is Hesperian Health Guides, which again is the publisher of this book, COVID-19 Vaccines.
There are now several vaccines for COVID-19.
Oh, actually, I think this is just exactly the same as the section I just read.
They're all safe.
It's all good.
Just do it.
Right?
Vaccines are safe and effective, they say.
Vaccines work.
You and many people you know have been safely vaccinated against many illnesses.
Because of vaccines, some illnesses that used to harm or even kill people, such as polio and smallpox, are now rare or have disappeared completely.
Here we have the same trick we've been talking about basically since we began Dark Horse, right?
Where they take a category and a word that describes that category and it's meaningful, and then they say, I'm going to take that word and I'm going to apply it to something else, and I'm going to tell you that if you don't believe that I am telling you what is true, then you don't believe in the category itself.
And that is a faint, that is a bait and switch, that is cheating, and that is dangerous.
So I'm going to continue reading from this here, Zach.
The COVID-19 vaccines were developed so fast, how do we know they are safe?
All vaccines are tested to make sure the vaccine is not harmful.
Find the best dose, make sure there are no serious side effects, and make sure it is effective.
The COVID-19 vaccines have been tested by more than 250,000 people in many different countries.
People of different ethnicities, with various existing illnesses, and of a wide range of ages.
After many months, almost no health problems were reported from any of the new vaccines.
That's why the COVID-19 vaccines were approved quickly.
No.
The vaccines now have been used by millions of people around the world, with very few serious side effects reported.
Much of the research to develop these vaccines was done before the COVID-19 epidemic began.
Outbreaks of other coronaviruses in 2002, SARS, and 2012, MERS, drove the development of new vaccines and vaccine technologies to stop them.
This and other research worldwide quickened the development of the COVID-19 vaccines.
It's stunning.
Like, this is an excellent book.
What have they done?
What has happened?
Well, I mean, the number of errors there, and they're subtle, right?
Some of them are subtle.
There's a lot of things that are factually true there, right?
The developmental work on these vaccine platforms may have followed SARS-1.
Right?
But it doesn't mean that they had a vaccine that was being tested on... It wasn't fast.
We already had it in the wings.
Wait, you did?
Yeah, no.
No, you didn't.
And the idea of, you know, very few side effects were reported.
Well, have you looked into VAERS?
I mean, you know, the yellow card system?
What the hell is going on?
But anyway, look, I don't know what to make of that, but it's like a religion managed to insert a page into this book which indicts the entire book, because the thing is, where there is no doctor,
A village healthcare handbook that can kill you if you don't understand risk stratification and uncertainties involving new medical technologies, right?
And I just never had the sense about what was in the earlier version of that book at all.
Well, but I mean, it is conspicuous.
There are people, let's call them young men, right?
Okay!
Young men who are healthy.
and do experience a significant risk of myocarditis and I'm telling you it's going to be other pathologies as well but we've spotted the myocarditis we all get that it's there that it tends to be more a risk for young men who are healthy and also Not in danger by COVID.
The idea that a medical advice book does not say, you know, it's questionable enough that this is a proper thing to do from the point of view of decreasing all-cause mortality for people who are older and do have comorbidities, but for young people, We're healthy, especially men.
The idea that there's just a blanket recommendation that they are safe, that there is no mention of the difference in how safe they are, depending upon your health status and your age, and there is no mention of the difference in the threat of COVID to you over those things, is medical malpractice.
So what is malpractice doing in this book?
Yeah, so there's another just from the same document here, something I wasn't planning on reading, but who should get the COVID-19 vaccine?
Everyone should get the COVID-19 vaccine.
When there is not enough vaccine for everyone, it makes sense to give the vaccine first to the groups of people most at risk of getting sick.
Health workers, workers who are just coming into contact, elders, people who have illnesses or disabilities.
That's it.
It's just about when there's not enough.
And separately, they argue that one of the great healthcare discrepancies of our time is that the developed world countries got the vaccines first, and this is a terrible injustice.
But I think that's also a tell, right?
The idea that the logic of risk stratification is there because the risk of the disease is stratified and they acknowledge it and there's no mention of it with the vaccines tells you what is this about?
Sounds like it's about demand, right?
To the extent that there's not enough vaccine, So there's not enough supply for the demand.
The point is, oh, well then we can talk about risk stratification, right?
But to the extent that there's plenty of vaccine, it's for everybody and boosters, right?
The point is, that sounds an awful lot like what we're talking about is shareholder value and not about human health.
Yes.
So, the publisher Hesperian has a new book coming out.
It's called New, Where There Is No Doctor.
I don't know what the relationship of that book is to this book because this 2022 edition is pretty new.
I'm thinking maybe it's not the same author.
I don't know.
They've got some advanced chapters available online for new Where There Is No Doctor and I just want to share a little bit from their vaccine chapter that they've got available online again for this is the new Where There Is No Doctor as distinct from the 2022 edition of Where There Is No Doctor.
Vaccines prevent illness.
They go through.
How do they work?
Vaccinations work.
Vaccines are safe.
I'm going to talk about a little bit of the other stuff in here, but they make these, again, blanket statements.
Vaccines work.
Vaccines are safe.
This is an eminently gameable position, and with COVID we saw it gamed.
I don't know how often we've been gamed before.
Convince everyone that vaccines are a good.
I'm convinced.
Put anything that you want everyone to take into a category called vaccines and then behind the scenes kind of change the definition of vaccines or maybe don't even worry about it because most people aren't tracking.
Once you've called a thing a vaccine, vilify anyone who says, I'm not taking that.
I'm not at risk for the disease it prevents against.
It doesn't actually prevent against the disease you say it does.
It's not safe, and you couldn't possibly know it is, so I know you've already lied to me.
Any number of reasons that you might not want to take something that they have decided to try to shove down your throat by calling it a vaccine.
This, unfortunately, does the same trick.
Vaccinations work.
Well, I believe That I have seen evidence that some vaccinations work.
Vaccinations don't work across the board, right?
Yeah, it doesn't match either the history of vaccines that have been tested and failed, or the vaccines that have been released and recalled.
Exactly.
Same with vaccines are safe.
So, you know, people are better than this, are smarter than this, and when you simply put falsehoods in front of them, they trust less and less.
And this, like, this was an amazing resource, and I think largely still is.
And again, this little section is from a different book that's about to come out with an almost identical title.
What if my child is sick when vaccinations are scheduled?
Remember, so this is the last thing I'll do here and then I'll get off this topic for now.
Remember the conversation we just had and what was in the 1992 version of Where There Is No Doctor, which says don't give immunizations when your child is sick.
Because something like one in three cases of polio may actually have been produced by injections that were given when the child maybe already had a low-lying case of polio that then got, you know, shot into a really bad territory by the fact of the immunization.
Here we have in a not-yet-released book an advanced chapter online of New Where There Is No Doctor, What If My Child Is Sick When Vaccinations Are Scheduled?
Vaccinations can be given to someone with a cold or minor illness.
If a child has a serious health problem, the health worker will tell the family if a vaccination should be delayed.
When others in the family and the community are vaccinated, it will help prevent sickness in those who cannot receive a vaccine.
They seem to be reversing, not just disappearing the previous advice, but now reversing the previous advice.
and Vaccinations can be given to someone with a cold or minor illness.
No, I don't think they should be.
No.
And if a child has a serious health problem, the health worker will tell the family if a vaccination should be delayed.
What are the chances, again, that a health worker in a rural area with a family that has made a long trek and at great expense, personal, monetary, everything, to get to the health clinic is going to say, not today, come back in a week.
Because for the most part, that family is not going to come back in a week.
Healthcare workers are not going to, even if they were informed, and increasingly there's less chance of them being informed because now they're getting told things that aren't true, but even if they were informed about the risk of giving immunizations to sick children, they are really unlikely to say, I can't do that now.
I can, you know, I can immunize the rest of you, but not little Timmy because he's sick right now.
Yeah, and you know, going back to our conversation a few weeks ago, even just saying, you know, vaccines are safe.
Hey, guess what?
That's another violation of Nuremberg right there, right?
Just a casual violation.
And I must say, it's a little hard to know what exactly goes into giving such rotten advice.
But the I find it sort of despicable that we have people in the first world who know that that sentence can't even be true, who are dispensing that advice to people in places where they don't have the ability to check it against anything.
Right.
And anyway, so there's a I don't know what it is.
I don't know if it's a class issue or whatever other kind of arrogance it might be, but there's something very wrong with dispensing un-nuanced information where a parent has an absolute right to know the truth as we understand it, which is Maybe, at best, this vaccine is understood to be safe enough that it is worth whatever risk comes with it, right?
But this is just, you know, vaccines are safe.
There is no defending that statement.
It is not a true statement.
Okay, one more thing.
Just one more thing here.
I don't know, my screen may have blinked out.
This is again the bottom of this advanced chapter on vaccines to be published soon in a book called New, Where There Is No Doctor.
The number and type of vaccinations have changed compared to my first child.
Why?
There's a lot to unpack there.
More than one pharmaceutical company makes a vaccine that is safe and works well.
They may have different schedules.
So if two countries use a different vaccine brand or the same country changes from one to another, the schedule of injections may change too.
Other changes happen when a new vaccine is created or an old one is no longer needed.
There's a lot to unpack there.
The thing that I want to point out is that presumably I would have assumed that most of the reason for the vaccine schedule to change, the childhood vaccine schedule to change, is because we now have vaccines against diseases that we didn't have vaccines against before.
And to some degree, like with smallpox and polio, we've actually fully eradicated them.
And so you don't need the vaccination anymore, at least for many of us.
But that part of this answer comes last.
The bulk of the answer, the majority of the answer here to why does the vaccine schedule look different than it did for my first kid is it's about pharma.
Like they just put it right up at the front.
It's about the pharmaceutical companies.
And they're all safe and effective, we know that.
And they just sometimes have different schedules.
And so maybe your country used to be getting theirs from Merck and now it's getting it from, you know, AstraZeneca.
Who can say?
But it's fine.
It's fine.
That seems to be sort of the overall, like, don't you worry, you're pretty little ahead about it.
It's, you know, yes, sometimes there's new vaccines, sure, but really it's about the pharmaceutical companies and they got your back.
So we're good.
Well, look, I hate to have fallen into a well of cynicism, and I'm doing my best to avoid it.
But, you know, once you spot this issue of pharma having this deeply perverse incentive, right?
Pharma masquerades as wanting to create health, but of course its bottom line is facilitated when there's ill health or threat to health that demands its products.
One thing that is true, you know, I was surprised to see in that little description if a vaccine is no longer needed.
Oh, that suggests we've defeated a disease.
It doesn't sound very good for demand.
So I guess what I would predict... Well, but I mean, that's consistent with smallpox.
Like, the 2022 edition of the original book doesn't have smallpox mentioned at all, whereas the 1992 edition mentions it and says, actually, we've done this, we've been there, we did that, you don't need this anymore.
Right, but my prediction then is if what we are seeing is a medical landscape that is actually being driven by fiscal considerations inside of pharma, which I increasingly believe is the dominant player, then you would imagine that we will stop at any potential to drive
Pathogens to extinction that are the basis of demand for pharmaceutical products will at least not happen while those products are under patent.
In fact, the ideal for pharma is a vaccine or something that masquerades as one and therefore gets called things like safe.
Right?
That does not block the spread of disease, but has some credible claim to being desirable, so that it will be made into the standard of care, and in a really good week for pharma, will be inflicted on the public under mandate.
Right?
That's what you want, is something that doesn't control the disease, because the disease is, after all, the reason for the demand.
Right?
And you wouldn't want to go around curing diseases, because, you know, that would be the naive pharma thing to do.
So anyway, my prediction is we're gonna see an awful lot of the explosion of schedules of standard of care for items that happen to be profitable, and then we'll see shenanigans like we discussed, I believe, last week.
Where a perfectly viable drug has now been put into a new triple cocktail that is now suddenly, again, reviving the patentability of the thing, right?
You're just going to see endless versions of the same game.
And anyway, I would love to be proven wrong, but I'm not expecting it.
Yes.
Yeah, I'm where you are on that.
Okay, that is my extended update on the update on Where There Is No Doctor.
All right.
We're going to switch gears.
I have a number of topics I want to talk about.
I admit up front, it's a little hard for me.
I know that they connect in multiple ways, but how to present them so it's clear is not as obvious to me.
But I'm going to start by suggesting that we are in A moment that is nothing if not bewildering, right?
That the number of things that seem off-kilter, counterintuitive, broken, deceptive, all of those parameters have been turned to 11.
And I believe that's going to get worse.
The LLM AGI issue is going to amplify the confusion.
Large Language Models Artificial General Intelligence, for those who aren't keeping track of every single acronym that is being thrown at them all the time.
That is correct.
But anyway, we have talked about the fact that one of the several disasters that is likely to come out of the LLM AGI era, that's Large Language Model Artificial General Intelligence, Is human confusion.
That the inability to know how authentic the thing that you're interacting with is, whether it's a person reporting what an LLM told them or, you know, somebody who doesn't even, didn't even talk to an LLM, who's had their perspective altered by some intrusion into the online environment, is going to cause us at best to all become very cynical and not believe anything, which is a recipe for disaster.
This is that era.
Yes.
So, what we have argued up till now is that basically it would be great if there were some rules that you could apply that would at least do a substantial fraction of the heavy lifting of figuring out how to think in this era, right?
That's really the label for this segment.
How to think, right?
And I can't tell you how to think, but I can tell you that we are making progress towards some things that are useful.
In the context of artificial intelligence, we have given two rules that are useful.
One of them is that you should take all of the things that you formerly assumed.
that are in some way affected by the existence of these large language models, and soon to be AGI if it's not here already, and you should go back to making no assumption, right?
You don't have to change your assumption about what's true of the elements on the periodic table or the forces of nature or natural selection as it explains the existence and modification of creatures because those things aren't affected by the AI.
But what we believe about the facts of the present is going to be affected by this dramatically.
And so the point is things that you could safely assume a few years ago are no longer safe to assume.
You have to be agnostic about them, and then to the extent that you want to take them back on as assumptions, you need to check them specifically.
That's rule one.
Rule two is treat AGI itself like a new species.
Like something arrived from somewhere else and you know nothing about it.
This is important because as it happens, the way AGI seems to be showing up in the world or threatening to dawn, it is going to have access to the human API.
That is the mechanism by which the human mind is contactable from the outside.
Human language, right?
The LLMs are going to have access to human language because that's how they work.
So, instead of assuming that a statement by one of these entities is meaningful in the way that it would be if a person said this to you, you should be agnostic about what it means, about what's going on internally, because you don't have any mechanism for knowing how the thing thinks, and therefore treating it like a totally new species is the best you can do.
Right?
It's hard to do in practice, but it is the best you can do.
Okay, so that's two prototype rules.
Here's a realm, artificial intelligence.
Here are two rules that you can apply straight out of the box that will make you better off than if you didn't have those rules, right?
There may be other rules we should add to that list, but for the moment we've got two rules and they constitute some sort of a baseline approach.
I want to suggest that there's another realm where we can deploy a rule to good effect.
We saw A new chapter of the UFO slash UAP story dawned this week.
Again with the U's and the P's and the A's.
Yeah, UFO, I got unidentified flying object.
Aerial phenomena.
Unidentified aerial phenomena, I think.
It's basically a synonym.
It's a fancy-sounding synonym for UFO.
I think you've given it too much credit.
It is a rebranding of UFO, and I believe that... I'm not the one who used it.
Yeah, I know.
I'm not giving it credit.
No, no, you're giving it credit by saying that it's a euphemism, and my feeling is UFO had taken on a certain fringe connotation, and that somebody decided it was time to have responsible people be ready to talk about these things in polite society, and so it needed a refresh.
The brand had to be reintroduced to the market, and lo and behold, Kentucky Fried Chicken, which sounded stodgy, is now KFC, and it sounds edgy, right?
UAP sounds a whole lot more responsible than UFO, despite describing the same damn thing.
That's what I think.
But in any case... So I don't want a new planet.
I want all of them to find a new planet.
I know just the one.
Yes, yes.
Oh, you know the one?
Yeah.
What's that?
It's not ready yet.
Mars, they can't have Mars.
I don't actually care.
All right, you don't care.
You don't care if it has an atmosphere.
All right, I'm still in a more generous mood.
Oh, yeah.
So, you can hear the cynicism.
UFO, UAP, three-letter acronyms, on and on and on.
The phenomenon here, you're going to employ, you're going to suggest a rule for dealing with, okay, they got a rebranding.
They've rebranded.
We're supposed to take it seriously now.
Oh yes, it's the serious stuff now.
But the rule is what you might use to look at the news this week.
Something new happened in the land of UAPs.
What happened?
We have a highly credible source who has turned whistleblower and actually now has whistleblower protection testifying under oath that the federal government has multiple alien craft and dead pilots of those craft.
It possesses them.
Which is huge news.
Unless it's not true, in which case it's huge news of a different kind.
But now you have to live in a world where you can't figure out which of those two it is.
Okay.
It's Schrodinger's world.
It's Schrodinger's UFO pilots.
I mean, I feel like, but I think the LMAGI situation.
is producing Schrodinger's reality everywhere.
There's so many of these where she's like, I just can't know.
And for some of them, it's like, you know what?
No.
If that's true, then I don't care.
I'm done.
So I'm just going to go with this one.
But so many of them, it's like, I really have to keep these mutually exclusive things alive at the same time.
You are stuck in a quantum superposition nightmare.
Yep.
Okay, so this is why you need a rule.
Okay, what's the rule?
The rule is, sigh up until proven otherwise.
Okay?
Now, this rule is something I don't know... Oh, so it's a rule about the null hypothesis.
Right.
It's a rule about the burden of proof.
Yeah.
And this is either generated in concert with Jeremy Riss, who was a guest on Dark Horse, or maybe it's his and because we introduced it into the podcast together, it doesn't really matter.
Let's say it's Jeremy's and he's due full credit for it.
Nonetheless, the utility of the rule is the following thing.
What we have are a lot of phenomena which are increasingly difficult to dismiss, right?
A person with proper credentials turning whistleblower on programs that apparently house an attempt to reverse engineer alien aircraft and have in their possession multiple dead pilots.
Right?
That's hard to ignore because what, you know, what has to be true for that story to be garbage?
Okay, a lot.
On the other hand, story is kind of hard to swallow without physical evidence that would at least make Earth-bound scientists stand up and take notice because it was not explicable by the material sciences that we are aware of, the biology that we are aware of, for example.
And so, the point is something like this.
First of all, there's an awful lot of eyewitness accounts of very profound stuff happening in our skies, right?
I don't know how much you've looked at it, but amazing things, right?
Kraft trans moving across space at incredible speeds, turning at rates that not only defy physics, but reason, right?
Why?
What do you mean?
Why are the aliens flying like this?
I mean, because they're teenage boys, I don't know.
No?
Alright, I have a better hypothesis for this one.
Okay.
No, wait, no- You've been that alien.
Okay, but I haven't- These aliens are worse than I ever was, okay?
They're worse than I ever- I was just about to say that!
No, they are!
Look, I can prove it.
I can prove it, okay?
The aliens- Why are they turning that way, right?
Surely there's a better way to do it.
What are you doing?
Rentler!
Nicer, easier on the... Okay, look, but forget it.
Okay, you guys, you defend this.
Maybe it's a rental.
They've got a collision dam... a galactic collision damage waiver.
Hell yeah.
But, no, I still have you right where I want.
Okay, great.
On this planet, without aliens.
You say I was that guy at one point, a younger person.
Just saying, I was a tiny bit worried.
How many vehicles have I totaled?
These aliens are totaling vehicles in Nevada like nobody's business, right?
What?
They are?
Yes, that's where the government got these warehouses full of alien crap.
Always in Nevada.
That's not always in Nevada, but there is a... Are they interested in the prostitutes?
What's going on?
I can steelman this.
I learned well from my friend Jeremy Riss, okay?
The steelman of the argument that the preponderance of these things is, you know, in places that, you know, Americans might find entertaining...
Has to do with the fact that nuclear tests were performed here first, and therefore the beacon that we sent into the universe that said that we are ready for punking by the aliens, which is apparently what they're doing, because let's put it this way, we've got now decades of observation.
Again, see earlier comment about their teenage boys.
They could be teenage boys punking us, but they're not good at driving, right?
They have craft a lot of these craft according to this new witness, okay?
So, anyway, look, here's what I'm really telling you, okay?
We can do this all day long.
Am I telling you there are no aliens?
No, in fact, I'm telling you that everything I know as a biologist tells me that there most certainly are aliens.
What I want to know- The question is one of locale.
Yes.
Look, I could be wrong about that.
Maybe we're the only life in the universe, and if we're not the only life, maybe no other intelligent life ever escapes the development of the technology necessary to get here.
But if there are aliens, have we been visited, and are we being visited?
That's what I want to know.
That part of this argument will be clear to almost all of our listeners, but let us just be very clear, right?
Forever.
As long as I can remember, and I think probably as long as you can remember too.
I think both of us, we met each other when we were quite young, but already before we met at like 16, when we became friends, we both understood that we believed that there had to be lots of different evolutions of life in the universe, some of which would be sentient.
Actually, including in the galaxy.
They don't have to be, but the probability suggests.
The probability suggests that is the case, that we are not alone.
But we are not alone is a phrase that often gets said, and then the assumption is that you're not saying the part about, like, right here.
And the We Are Not Alone conclusion never imagined that that meant, like, everyone's here.
Because it's the scale, both space and time, of, yes, the entire universe, but even just of our galaxy, that allows biologists in particular, but lots of other people, to say, you know what?
Almost certainly, yes, life has happened elsewhere.
But It's not here.
Well, we don't know.
I'm open to it.
Any day of the week that the aliens want to settle this.
And here's the thing.
Aliens who want to show off in our skies and not show up and talk to us about what it is, don't make a hell of a lot of sense to me.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but there's no reason for aliens to be revealing themselves zipping around our skies and crashing into our deserts without actually showing up and saying, look, here's what we've got to tell you.
Or, you know, take us to your leader.
Or, uh, resistance is useless.
Or any of the other things that they might say.
Right.
Right?
So the point is, we've got anomalous aliens who are very interested in, um, Causing a problem for small numbers of people who have these encounters they can't shake, and other people who look at them like they're nuts.
Why are the aliens doing that?
If the aliens want to talk, let's talk.
And if they don't want to talk, then the question is, are they really aliens, or are they something else?
Right?
Hence the rule.
The null hypothesis is, we are alone here.
No, the null hypothesis is the observation in question, the report in question, the video in question, is a PSYOP until proven otherwise.
So the conclusion is the same, but your framing is specifically around what is that then?
The rule is PSYOP until proven otherwise.
Right, and again, my point is about the thing which you, whoever you are, are putting in front of me or whoever else.
If your point is, how do you explain that?
My answer is, PSYOP until proven otherwise.
The moment you show me something where PSYOP is not an obvious possibility, I'm all ears.
I'm not saying that there aren't aliens who would be interested in us and come by.
They might.
Are they barred from doing so by physics?
We don't know.
We sort of think so, but, you know, people who know better than I do think those rules may not be as absolute as we thought.
Okay?
I'm totally open to the possibility of aliens, but I'm sick and tired of... Be precise.
Yeah, I'm totally cool with the idea of aliens showing up here, and actually I almost think it's one of the few things that might break us out of our terrible trajectory.
So there's a part of me that's hopeful for it.
But I'm sick of pixels.
I'm sick of eyewitness reports of aircraft that do amazing things and make no noise, right?
Unlikely.
Now, of course, the PSYOP can start introducing noise.
Sure can.
I mean, we saw what I think is a really garbage-y version of this whole thing, where there was a 911 call from a family who had something crash in their backyard.
There were aliens 8-10 feet tall.
The police came.
The police had caught the Object falling out of the sky on a, whatever you call it, a body cam.
Right?
So, you know, the story, like, superficially, it's like, whoa, the cops caught it on their cam and these people are calling saying there are aliens standing around their backyard?
They seem to have forgotten to film them.
I don't know, maybe these people don't have cell phones.
But they didn't catch it.
They report that the aliens, when they, you know, that there was an alien hiding behind a forklift and the young man... Was it a biped?
That's the implication.
Now, nobody seems to have thought to draw a picture of what they saw, which I can't quite explain.
Stretched out humanoid, no doubt, because that's always what the aliens look like.
Right.
So, you know, I don't know.
Maybe their bowel plan constraints are great enough that it's more limited than human.
You know how I feel about that.
Of course, but I'm open to us being wrong about any of this.
I just want something that constitutes actual evidence Where the most parsimonious explanation is not, someone would like you to believe there are aliens, right?
When that's the most parsimonious explanation, my point is, my guess is, if there are aliens and they're coming here, I'm likely to miss them by a hundred years?
A thousand years?
Could be a while, right?
The idea that we just happen to be here and, you know, Trump and aliens are happening at the same time, right?
It's like, ah, okay, maybe you're just trying to get me excited.
That's what you're doing.
You're feeding me story after story that I can't resist thinking about because you don't want me thinking about I don't know.
Corruption and Ukraine or something.
I don't know.
Trump, COVID, George Floyd, trans, Ukraine, aliens.
It's a never-ending sequence of stories that makes us feel like this is the moment when it's all happening.
And anyway, it's not up until proven otherwise.
Good.
And I welcome that it is proven otherwise as soon as possible, but you know, really you've got... Yeah, I'd like to know.
You've got two entities that can do it.
The aliens can do it any day they want to do it, and the government can let somebody into that warehouse, you know, so we can talk about what technology it is or what materials it is that can't be explained as earthly in origin.
And better still, The alien pilots.
Here, you're not talking about technology that we just don't know the government has, you're talking about biology.
And the point is, actually biologists might be able to look at that and say, earthly or not, right?
Or biological or not.
Okay, so that's the setup.
You need some rules that allow you to take care of your quantum superposition problem, and PSYOP, until proven otherwise, is the one to use for UAPs.
And I would advise all sorts of people to use that rule, because I believe that to the extent that something wants us to believe the UAPs are really extraterrestrial in origin, it is especially interested in important people.
Okay.
Now I want to move into the second phase, which is that I'm in terms of trying to get people to figure out how to think so that the world is less complex and they can make some kind of meaningful, useful sense from it that they can actually navigate their lives.
I want to talk about a category that I have spotted, which I think it needs a name and I don't know it, but the category is Important concepts that are destructive in the way they are deployed, right?
So these are concepts that you don't want to dispense with because they matter, but the way they are being deployed is more harmful than it is useful.
So let me give you some examples.
The right side of history.
Okay, the right side of history to me is an incredibly important concept, right?
The Nazis were on the wrong side of history, right?
You want, in retrospect, to have been on the side that opposed them and as early as possible, right?
The same thing can be said for the segregationists.
Right?
You don't want to be on the side of the segregationists or those who defended Jim Crow laws or any of these things.
The right side of history is obvious in retrospect.
Okay?
That said, declaring yourself on the right side of history is not a Simply interpreted move.
In other words, I certainly live my life trying to be on the side of history that will be understood to be the right side of history in retrospect.
Correctly understood.
Correctly understood.
But saying that you're on the right side of history isn't evidence one way or the other.
And we can take the example of so-called affirmative care, right?
The affirmative care folks, some of them I believe to be cynical, some of them I believe to be very confused.
The confused ones... Just specify.
Affirmative care means that when a child declares that they are the sex that they are not, but not when they declare that they're a donut, that they are definitely the sex that they are not, and that you must affirm them in every way that you can.
Right.
Unless they think they're a donut, in which case you don't.
And you don't even, you know, State of California is experimenting this week.
I don't believe this has become law of the state of California, but they're experimenting with a law.
In which parents would be obligated to deliver so-called affirmative care at the indication of a child that they were not the sex that they were thought to be.
Which to me is the height of diabolical.
But the point is to a person truly confused about this issue... You have to make a person want aliens.
Right.
Enough with the PSYOP.
Bring on the aliens.
So the point is, the person who thinks that they are protecting a child who is going to be harmed by not receiving affirmative care, that person thinks they're on the right side of history, and they are certainly not.
But the point is, both sides of history, one or the other of these, is going to be the right side of history for certain.
Right, because either these are people in desperate need of help, or you're about to maim them while thinking that you're helping them.
Okay, so that's one concept.
The concept is important, right side of history, but the abuse of it is very troubling and common.
Second one I would say is the, you might have seen the formulation You know, this person is a dumb person's idea of a smart person.
Now... I haven't run into this.
Okay.
The idea that there are people who are not smart, but their niche is to behave as people who aren't very smart, We'll understand them to be smart.
That is a particular kind of a con, right?
Oh, I've seen faculty do it a lot.
Sure.
Oh, absolutely.
Actually, it's an epidemic inside of the academy.
There are lots of people who aren't smart who, you know, have the affectations of somebody who is deeply learned and knowledgeable.
Chalk on the elbows.
Yeah, the whole thing.
Though, there is a real thing.
A dumb person's idea of a smart person.
Okay.
And there are probably more decent ways to put that, right?
Dumb is a bit provocative, but whatever.
But you will then see, you know, on Twitter, for example, somebody will say, oh, name a, you know, a person who is a dumb person's idea of a smart person, right?
And then you will get a flood of answers, including me and you and Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and all sorts of folks.
The basic point is, ah, this is a trap.
If you put this label on somebody, dumb person's idea of a smart person, and then somebody looks at it and they think, wait, I thought that person was smart.
I guess I must be dumb.
Right?
So the point is, that thing is like, you know, it's a trick in order to keep you from listening to somebody by claiming that if you think what they say is good, then that's an indictment of you.
Right?
You don't get to do that.
You didn't buy their stuff, did you?
Right.
God, anybody who doesn't understand, you know, anybody who doesn't understand, you know, that Heather Hying is a You know, a faker who, you know, obviously didn't earn a meaningful degree in biology, right?
The point is I...
No, that's not true, but you've just leveled an accusation.
Well, again with the null hypothesis, it reverses the null hypothesis.
I mean, that's not a perfectly clean analysis, but the idea that someone who has begun to listen to you, or to me, or to Joe Rogan, or to Jordan Peterson, or to any number of people, and has begun to get something out of it, has begun to feel themselves awakened, perhaps, and begin to take on new kinds of analyses that maybe they couldn't before.
But it's not conscious, and we're not writing curriculum here, and so we haven't provided a list of, like, these are the things that you can now do, and these are what, you know, these are the changes that you will see in yourself.
And so if someone lobs, and especially into social media space, and again, like, I've never seen this because I'm blissfully unaware of most of what goes on there, Someone lobs into that, like, oh, you're not buying that bullshit, are you?
Like, well, but I was being – I thought I was more aware and being transformed, and no, there isn't.
Now that you say that, there isn't anything that I can actually point to, is there?
And it's not the job of the person, especially who is learning anew, how to do a certain kind of analysis or view the world through a particular lens and then through a different lens and a different lens.
To back up and say, here is a list, here's the list of things that I, you know, I have learned which demonstrate to me, or that she has said, or he has said, or they have said, that demonstrates to me that they're actually smart.
Like, it's no one's obligation to demonstrate that someone from whom they are learning is actually smart.
If they are learning from that person, then it is effective.
Well, it is.
That is true.
And the fact that as you try to struggle out of this argument, it gets worse and not better, right?
If I say, oh, I'm calling your bluff, I think Heather Hying is very insightful than the point alone, right?
So the point is, The more you insist that this person actually is smart, the more you indict your own intellect and ability to discern, right?
And so the point is, that's just logically unfair, right?
That I simply disagree cannot be the argument that calls your own intellect into question, right?
So anyway, it's a Chinese finger trap, or it's a Missed net.
The more you struggle, the worse it gets for you.
That's not a fair argument.
Okay, now, the one that I wanted to focus on most, though, is the concept of controlled opposition.
Okay, so somebody leveled this accusation at me this week.
You need to define it first.
Well, that was the question.
What does it mean?
Okay.
So, controlled opposition superficially means that this person is on the correct side of the argument, but that they are actually more useful to the people on the other side of the argument because they either provide a tepid version of it or they will reverse their position at the last minute.
They will do something.
So, you know, if If the CIA killed John F. Kennedy, right?
And it didn't want us to know that.
It might have somebody in the world of researchers who study this question who deployed part of the evidence for this but cast doubt on other even more important evidence or just somehow polluted the question or, you know, turned out to have something in there.
History that made them unreliable so that people who glommed on to their version of the story ended up embarrassed.
Whatever it was, okay?
So here's the problem.
Controlled opposition is a very real phenomenon, okay?
Sophisticated actors use controlled opposition to keep us from getting where we need to go in civilization.
So it's a very important concept.
You wouldn't want to live without it in this era.
But as an accusation, It's diabolical.
And here's the reason.
So I asked, after this person accused me of being controlled opposition, I asked my Twitter followers, does that accusation imply that the person in question would be knowledgeable that they are controlled opposition?
Or might it be true without their awareness?
There was near universal agreement that the person in question would not have to be aware.
That you could be controlled opposition and not even know.
So now we have a meaningless term, right?
Are we controlled opposition because YouTube tried to manipulate us into altering our message about COVID remedies by demonetizing our channel?
I think they certainly tried to control us, but it didn't work.
Right?
We kept doing what we were doing.
So, are we controlled opposition because somebody desired to control us?
Or are we not controlled opposition because we resisted?
In which case, when you see this accusation leveled at people, the question is, well, what are you really saying?
Are you saying they're being successfully controlled?
Are you saying that somebody has put them on a list on a board somewhere and decided to try to control them?
It's a completely unfalsifiable, meaningless way to dismiss people who are on the correct side of an argument.
Which also means that it is An unfair kind of competition, to the extent that all of us are trying to put a message into the universe that we hope people will find valuable, and there's a limited amount of attention.
The idea that you can just take somebody who is doing a better job of that than you are and say, oh, well, that's controlled opposition.
You wouldn't want to listen to them, right?
The point is, well, it's a devastating argument.
It's just that it didn't require anything of you like evidence, right?
You just said the fact that that person is making sense is evidence that you shouldn't listen to them.
It's like, well, Because they're making sense, I shouldn't listen to them?
Well, that's what controlled opposition is.
They make sense and you shouldn't listen to them because somebody else has decided it's in their interest for you to listen to this version.
So, the point is it's like, you know, it's like, you know, dumping LSD on an argument, right?
It's not going to clarify anything, right?
So, Anyway, my point is this category I'm building are arguments or terms that are important, but where the use of them is actually highly destructive.
Right?
And my three examples were controlled opposition, the right side of history, and a dumb person's idea of a smart person.
Yep.
So anyway, it's probably a much bigger category.
Oh, undoubtedly.
Undoubtedly a huge category.
And I think, you know, the language games are cheap and so powerful.
The return on investment is incredible.
Yeah, the return on investment is huge.
We've already talked earlier in this episode about other ways that language is played with, from the eradication of using male and female when talking about who's getting pregnant and who's impregnating, To, you know, oh, what we have to do first is to make sure that everyone understands how important and valuable vaccines are.
And then all we have to do is just call anything we want a vaccine.
And then we can vilify anyone who doesn't agree with that because, well, you're an anti-vaxxer.
So it's not the same kind of language play, but it's similarly cheap.
You know, in the case of what is being done to the concept of vaccines, it required a decades-long investment, right, to make sure that the vast majority of us were on board, right, that we actually agreed that yes, vaccines are a good, are a societal good, and that we appreciate that they have helped.
So I don't, you know, it's a totally open question, one that I've not really given any thought to, as to whether or not what is happening now with the term was imagined at any time in the past.
But it was just waiting there, easy pickings, like, oh, well, now that we've got everyone, almost everyone on board with the concept of, you know, the vast utility of vaccines, all we have to do is just shove a bunch of stuff into that category that isn't right.
And, you know, at some point, probably people will wake up, but hopefully it'll be a while.
I think what we are honing in on is language.
Language is, you know, I called it earlier in this podcast, the human API.
Right.
There is cognition.
Human beings are unique in the ability to pass abstractions from one mind to the other and have them be, you know, erected in the new mind in a reasonably complete form.
How is this done?
Through an absolutely miraculous process where one person literally vibrates the air molecules in some way they don't even couldn't explain how they're doing it And it lands in a little membrane in the ear and the side of the head of the other person and wobbles just so that precise meanings are transmitted between people who share the same code.
Right?
That's stunning.
But the point is, that thing that is exchanged, the words, the vibrations that are used to transmit them, or if it's on a written page, the organization of pigments so that people can deduce the symbols in question, Those things are not the meaning.
This is a version of the map is not the territory, right?
The language that we use to explain an idea is not the idea, right?
And so what you're really describing... Actually, postmodernism makes the map as the territory error.
Yeah.
Actually, it really is analogous.
I hadn't thought of it in those terms before.
I think it really is.
And so the idea is, look, if you have an antagonist who wants to tangle your thinking so that you become helpless, what they do is they Subordinate.
In fact, they disassociate from the meaning layer and they descend into the language layer, the means of exchange, and they tangle it with sophistry.
They game the language so that you cannot make sense.
And if you can even manage to make sense to yourself, you can't make sense to the next person because they've placed all these booby traps.
And the point is, you know, one of the rules that we need to, um, To name, to codify, has to do something with an obligation to the underlying reality where language is simply a tool used to get there.
And what we should do is seek to clarify our language such that we can talk our way out of the trap we find ourselves in together, right?
To the extent that the language is getting in our way and we're fighting over definitions, And all of these things.
The point is, all of that is beside the point.
We're destroying the meaning layer while we're fighting over the language layer.
And really the meaning layer, you know, nature bats last.
The meaning layer bats last, right?
Our confusions about sex and gender are not going to result in a language catastrophe.
They're going to result in a developmental and reproductive catastrophe.
And that has to be paramount, right?
We have to restore that idea that the real world exists, and although most of what we do as humans is done through the language layer, it's not what any of this is about.
Okay, so the last part of what I wanted to do is talk about a couple of things that emerged into the news this week, one of which is highly sensational, and the other one is Almost entirely obscure.
I think they're both very important, but in this new space where we are trying to figure out how to make sense of the world, despite the, um, the hall of mirrors that is being constructed around all meaning.
And so the two, the two things are the indictment of president Trump or the, um, I don't even know what the term is for it.
His taking of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago.
Obviously a sensational story.
I believe that this is the only case of a sitting or former president indicted for a federal crime.
Anyway, for those who want to understand more about the legal nuances here, I would recommend Glenn Greenwald's system update from yesterday where he explores this.
Um, but let's talk for a minute about what it means and what the proper way, the proper context to be thinking about it might be.
And then we'll get to the other issue, which is much more obscure, but I think potentially as important or more so.
So first of all, there's a question here about the sensational fact of President Trump being indicted or a crime that could literally put him in prison.
There is a question about how to think about the issue legally, and it is far from a straightforward situation, right?
The man did have the documents and they were classified, but there are nuances here which are incredibly important.
One of them is that the president has the authority to unclassify anything that the president wants to unclassify at any time the president wishes to unclassify it.
And so if it is true that the president took classified documents and was not entitled to, he also had the power to make himself entitled to.
So at some level, it's like a clerical question.
He didn't file the right papers to be allowed to take the things that he took, but he had the right to file the papers.
So is that something worth putting a former president in jail over?
Doesn't seem like it.
That's one piece of context that I think is very important.
Now, I did ask a legal authority, is there a procedure that he was supposed to go through that he might not have so he would be technically guilty of this crime?
And what I was told, and I will check it with others and make sure that we're all on the same page about what is being said, is that there actually is no procedure.
And so if that's true, then how does a president declassify material?
Well, maybe he treats it in a way that it's not classified.
Maybe he takes it home.
Right?
Maybe he's just simply not guilty on the basis that what he did declassified the documents and therefore this is just all nonsense.
Right?
That's one important question.
It's a lot of nonsense regardless.
Oh, there's a lot of nonsense.
I mean, second issue is Joe Biden did the same damn thing.
Okay?
Except for one thing.
Okay, Joe Biden took documents home that were classified, right?
So we've got a selective prosecution question here.
Why are we prosecuting Donald Trump and not Joe Biden?
But it's worse by about a thousand times.
You know why?
Because when Biden did it, he was vice president.
Without the ability to declassify the documents.
Exactly.
So it's, in fact, if I understand it, and again, I'm always open to being corrected by people who understand this landscape better than I do.
But if I understand this landscape, Joe Biden committed a crime Trump arguably didn't.
And that we would be prosecuting Trump and not Joe Biden is conspicuous.
Yeah.
Further, This is a moment at which Joe Biden.
And you know, maybe this is all happening to distract from the fact that Joe Biden appears to have taken $5 million in what sure looks like a bribe in the same scheme in which Hunter Biden took another $5 million, uh, surrounding Burisma Energy and Ukraine.
So we're talking about a president who appears to be guilty of some very serious, consequential stuff.
Influence peddling, which frankly I must have said a hundred times during the 2020 election as we were trying to advance the idea of Unity 2020.
I kept saying, look, Joe Biden is a non-starter.
Why?
He is an influence peddler.
And you can't have such a person as president.
You did.
And so, okay, lo and behold, five million bucks to the big guy.
Okay.
And that turns out to be the real deal.
And it's not $500,000, it's $5 million.
That's a large amount of money.
And there is now a war in Ukraine, and none of us know how any of these things fit together.
But nonetheless, we should be very seriously concerned about the Biden family influence peddling.
And at the moment, what we seem to be concerned about Is the appearance that Donald Trump seems to have taken documents that by some analysis he wasn't entitled to take, but even the people who make that analysis would have to admit that he had the right to take them through some other mechanism.
So it's like an, you know, it's like a nothing burger without even a patty, right?
It's the ultimate nothing burger, right?
Yeah.
Okay, but... So, I find this story fascinating.
I find the selective prosecution aspect of it absolutely maddening, and the idea that if there is a crime... Oh, by the way, one of the things that Glenn Greenwald is very clear about in his system update is that Washington, official Washington, classifies stuff Just out of reflex.
It classifies all kinds of things that have no reason to be classified.
And so even just the fact that, oh, classified documents were taken does not mean that these were highly secret important things.
It just means somebody marked them secret.
Right?
So, all right.
All of that is very interesting.
And then there's the second question, which is, why would the elites be playing this game?
Right?
For one thing, Maybe I don't get it, but I feel like they are playing directly into Trump's hands in an election in which there are a lot of other ways to go.
If he got to run from prison, man, this is born to be a murder.
I mean, frankly, I've never voted for the man.
I'm not planning to vote for the man.
But they are making an argument for voting for him that is getting ever harder to ignore, which is that they are so terrified of him that they will use anything to stop him, including a completely flimsy legal argument that could land him in jail, which would, ah, the whole thing doesn't make sense.
So, you know, it's like, okay, we agree that there's a terrifying bear outside the cabin, and the DNC has a plan to deal with it.
It's going to go shoot the bear.
And so it grabs its BB gun, and it empties the BB gun into the bear, and the bear notices.
And now what?
Right?
Like, no.
Why did you- The DNC assures us we've got more BBs!
We do!
We've got so many BBs!
I gotta wonder.
I mean, look.
Okay.
Is the DNC trying to elect Trump because they're afraid of Robert Kennedy Jr.? ?
They are afraid of Robert Kennedy Jr.
I mean, I don't even know if I'm kidding.
Right?
This is a dumb plan for dealing with a guy like Trump.
This is playing right into Trump's hands.
Is it possible?
I mean, I've said, and I was not kidding, that I believe the DNC fears Robert Kennedy Jr.
much more than it fears Trump.
It would rather live under a Trump administration than deal with Bobby Kennedy Jr.
in a position of power.
So this would be one interpretation of what's happening here.
It's hard for me to imagine that they would do that.
But here's where I come out on it.
I don't want to vote for Trump because I really don't think he's the right guy for that job.
I do think he is facing, he is revealing, he is the story that diagnoses the system.
Right.
Donald Trump is a terrible problem for elites because he's his own elite and he doesn't listen to them, right?
So the point is to the extent that they've got a nice little racket going, they do not want this particular bull in a china shop or wrecking ball or whatever your metaphor is for Trump.
And so the point is they will break out all kinds of exotic stuff, you know, they will Whatever happened to the actual election?
They will certainly move outside of the election and do things like suppress important stories about Joe Biden's son, right?
So, you know, a conspiracy does exist against Trump.
That forces you to think about Trump in some different way.
That's a very unfortunate thing for them to have done.
But here's the punchline.
Robert Kennedy Jr.
and Donald Trump are both threats to the underlying thing, the anti-democratic, unpatriotic thing that exerts this kind of control, right?
They're both a different kind of elite that doesn't listen to the establishment.
Yeah.
But Kennedy has gravitas and knowledge and statesmanship and depth.
Let us say, at the very least, Bobby Kennedy has an excellent knowledge of history.
I believe he has clear integrity that he is not obsessed with aggrandizing himself.
In fact, has paid very heavy prices to do what he believed to be the right thing in the face of incredible pushback.
And so we have two versions of a threat to something that is reacting in a way that reveals just how vile it is.
They would go after a former president with a limsy argument over his possession of documents that he was entitled to take if he wanted to, right?
That is appalling.
And we are historically stuck with the question, what kind of republic, what flavor of republic are we to have?
Are we to have a democratic republic?
Or a banana republic.
If you like banana, then, you know, we can play these games and we can go after each other's presidents with exotic legal theories and, you know, nonsense and, you know, gotchas and whatever.
Or we could try to actually govern in the interest of the people the way the founders decided that we should do it.
And I think we are at the moment where we get to choose, and my feeling is, whatever it is that's doing this has to go.
And the question is, by what mechanism, right?
Do you want the wrecking ball ball in a china shop, or do you want the passionate, careful student of history who loved his country... Who's not beholden.
Right.
Who is not beholden.
Who is also not beholden.
Yeah.
Okay.
I know which one I want.
Yeah, me too.
Second piece here, the news story that I said was very important but has gotten very little press.
It is today the 9th of June?
10th of June.
10th of June, which makes Monday the 12th, am I right?
Monday is the 12th.
The 12th is, as I understand it, the first day of the largest NATO air exercise in history.
It will begin on Monday in Europe, involves hundreds of different aircraft, and It, you know, in addition to being the largest exercise ever by NATO, it also has at least one very unusual feature.
So I believe the exercise is something that is done periodically, maybe even yearly.
But this Defender 23 exercise is going to include the Japanese this time, right?
This is NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The Japanese are not in the Atlantic, and as far as I know, they are not moving to the Atlantic.
So, this is odd that they would be included in the exercise.
It could send a very interesting message to China.
That's a possibility that this is about some piece of history yet to emerge.
Um, it also is strangely juxtaposed by the fact that the Luftwaffe, yes, the Luftwaffe, that Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, is in charge of this exercise, which all suggests that this is a rather dangerous... And how often are the Luftwaffe Well, I don't know because this story has barely been reported, and I can't understand how it would not be, right?
The very fact that we have a very hot war being fought in Ukraine, that that war is at least It least exists in the context of the Russians having extracted a promise that we would not expand NATO to the east, which we then did.
So what role that plays in the invasion of Ukraine, I cannot say, but I can say
That NATO and its expansionist instincts are relevant to the conflict in Ukraine, and in the middle of that conflict, in which one of the parties is our Cold War adversary with a ferocious nuclear arsenal, that we are engaged in a military flex, the largest NATO exercise of its kind in history, that we've put the Germans, the enemies of the Russians, in charge of it.
We've invited the Japanese.
And the Italians?
Are they coming?
I don't know.
I should have checked.
I assume that they're involved.
I don't think they have the biggest air force, but... Well, they're also not in the North Atlantic, so they should be.
Right.
True.
True.
But anyway, I don't know.
But anyway, the point is, look, let's just even just run a little thought exercise.
If NATO decided to move a huge force of aircraft to Europe at this moment, right, it would be noteworthy.
Does this have anything to do with what's going on in Ukraine?
Is this defensive or is this offensive, right?
Those are questions that are legitimate to ask.
How dare you, sir?
Right.
Instead, what we've got is an exercise You know, is NATO moving aircraft to Europe?
Yes.
One has to practice.
Exactly.
So anyway, as always, I am completely open to information that would tell me I am seeing a mirage.
But I do think, from my perspective, having read, you know, articles in out-of-the-way places about this happening, that we are engaged in a undeclared flex against Russia in the middle of a hot war in Ukraine,
and that that is at least something that we would want to think very carefully before doing because the last thing we want to do is take this highly kinetic war and turn it into a nuclear exchange, right?
NATO flexing on the doorstep of Ukraine, at this moment, is a topic that should be much more discussed than I hear it being.
And anyway, that's my point.
Why is this hiding outside of our sight as if nothing is going on?
Because it's obviously something.
Defender 13 is what it's called.
Yep.
Okay.
Oh, no, Defender 23.
Oh, Defender 23.
Well, I'm way off.
Who knows what Defender 13 is?
Don't know.
Maybe it happened in, I don't know, 2013.
Yeah, perhaps.
Well, yeah, I really don't know what to say, so I'm not going to comment at the moment.
That's more insanity.
Tell me I'm overreacting.
You know, I can't do that.
I only know what you've told me here.
You said a few things to me about this yesterday, but I have no independent knowledge of any of it.
It doesn't seem to make sense.
Can we at least agree that it's weird that it's not news in light of what's going on in Ukraine?
Yep.
Yep.
All right.
Well, I hope I'm overreacting.
Maybe we'll get through next week.
That'd be cool.
Okay.
And this is why people are interested in talking about aliens.
Of course, for which we have a rule.
Yes.
Yes.
And I think that that rule applies not just to people trying to make sense of the situation, it also makes, it applies to aliens trying to make sense of the situation.
Yeah, well the fact that they have employed that rule.
If they're in fact here, they have employed that rule, and they've gotten through their version of whatever stupid we're living through right now.
Like, they did it.
They figured it out.
I mean, they're a space-faring species.
Or more than one.
We don't know.
Yeah.
Yep.
OK.
OK, well, that was long, but we promised a Q&A today.
Yep.
So we're going to take a break.
We're going to do all of our post-amble stuff here that's usually a preamble, and then we're going to take a little break, then we're going to come back with a Q&A, but we're going to try to keep it brief because that went on for a while.
So if you want to ask questions, you can go to darkhorsesubmissions.com to ask your questions.
You can also find us, find me at Natural Selections.
where I write weekly or nearly weekly about things such as this time this week I was writing about different kinds of conspiracy and also about malaria prophylaxis and it was kind of fun to do so you know how how mefloquine ends up affecting your brain such that you wonder if you're actually paranoid because of the malaria prophylaxis you're on or if they really have to get you Maybe there's mefloquine in the water.
That would explain a lot.
Maybe there's mefloquine in the water, yep.
And you've got stuff going on on Twitter now.
You've got a Twitter subscription thing going on encouraging people to go there, right?
Yep, yep.
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It's coming.
Awesome.
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You've got two weekly, two monthly conversations.
We together do a private Q&A at mine right now.
The question asking period is open at my Patreon for our monthly private Q&A, which will happen next week.
And you can get access to our Discord server at either of our Patreons, where there's conversations all the time.
Yes, that was a fear that I would be called upon to do karaoke.
and happy hours and karaoke and real life meetups.
No.
And I don't know which one you were smiling at, but was it the karaoke?
Yes, that was a fear that I would be called upon to do karaoke.
Right now?
No.
Okay.
I'm not going to do that to you.
And the wonderful people on Discord send us a question each week that we start our Q&As with.
So we'll be starting, we'll be hearing from Discord shortly as soon as we come back.
And again, check out our wonderful sponsors for this week, which were iHerb, American Heart for Gold, and MD Hearing Aid.
And a reminder that we are supported by you, our audience.
We're on Rumble now.
Subscribe to the Rumble channel.
Please.
And check us out anywhere that you can find us, which is lots of places.
And share, subscribe, like, do all of that.
And until we see you next time, remember to be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
