The Science of Conspiracy: The 211th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 211th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss Winter and seasonality, before a longer discussion of overfitting, shoe-horning, and straight-jacketing. How do models, collusion, and Occam’s Razor contribute to how we understand the world? Why are generalists better situated to interpret complexity than are specialists? Then: how good is th...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 2011, which I believe is I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, you are Dr. Heather Hying, and it is, if my calculations are correct, past the midpoint of winter, almost no matter how you define winter.
I imagine you could define winter differently.
If you define it in a reasonable way, either taking the shoulder seasons into account or strictly going from the winter solstice to the spring equinox.
Yes, we are halfway through.
We are halfway through.
Now, I was puzzling through this.
You follow these celestial events more diligently than I do, but I was thinking about the question of, initially I convinced myself the midpoint of the technical winter would be the point at which the day length was changing most rapidly, but then I thought, nope, I don't think that's right.
I think it changes most rapidly at the spring equinox.
Is that correct?
Boy, I'd have to remind myself.
Is the day length changing the most rapidly at the equinoxes?
I think that's right, but it's possible there are little perturbations, oscillations in there such that you actually have two Too rapid, but no, I think that's right.
I think that has to be right, because do we agree that it is changing least rapidly at the solstices?
Yes.
Okay.
But there's a question about whether or not there's, you know, just like seasonality in the tropics.
Okay, so seasonality in the temperate zone is mostly about hot and cold, but whenever you take students to the tropics, whenever you yourself go to the tropics, you're like, okay, so it's not really so much a hot-cold thing, because Given that day length doesn't vary very much, the closer at all, when you're at the equator, you don't expect temperature to vary very much.
What does vary, though, and what is often highly seasonal, even in rainforests, which have, you know, some wetness throughout the year, is precipitation, is rainfall.
You know, in the higher up you go, it may be precipitation hanging as water droplets in cloud forests.
But in even lowland rainforest jungles, colloquially, You do have seasonality, and you have wet and dry seasons is what they say, but it's really wet seasons and wetter seasons.
But it's not one wet season a year and one dry season a year.
You've got like a longer wet season and a longer dry season and a shorter wet season and a shorter dry season.
And so I don't know if there might be, and I can't imagine why there would be, but we've, but there's so many, you know, orbits to be accounted for and, and, and angles that I, that I don't know if there and angles that I, that I don't know if there isn't a quickening of the photo period change as you approach the equinox.
And then as you go away from the equinox with maybe a little dip in there.
I don't think the physics works, but... I don't think there's a dip, but I do think there are two things that match your description, and both of them will play a role, but I bet it's tiny.
Yeah.
And in fact, we've been here once before and somebody weighed in saying that our model was correct, that you shouldn't imagine perfect symmetry here.
But the two things that are going to be relevant are the rate of change at the spring and fall equinoxes.
Is that how you pluralize equinox?
Equinorum.
I'm going to go with equinoxes, just to be perfectly safe and conventional.
Sure, as you always are.
But I believe the rate of change should be slightly different at the two, because of course... Relative to one another.
Right, that one of them will truly be the fastest moment of change in the year, and the other one will lag slightly behind it, and that the reason will have to do with the The non-perfection of the ellipse of our orbit.
Yeah.
And so anyway, there is some question.
The year should not be divided perfectly into four quarters because we're not going around the Sun in a perfect circle.
And there's a perigee and an apogee question which will adjust the speed of our hurtling.
Yes.
So, something like that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, but you're right, and we are halfway through winter, more than halfway through winter, and you can tell it is so much lighter out now at 430, at 5 even, than it was a month ago, and it feels good.
Yeah, well, yeah, the temperature change has been radical from that deep dip to very mild, and now it's a little colder.
And here's just, I don't know, so the D-Minder, the app, that we started talking about a couple years ago when we started getting focused on, oh, maybe there is no flu season, maybe it's vitamin D deficiency season.
All right.
And you suggested this app, and I do use it.
I have not vetted it for accuracy, so that's just the caveat here, the disclaimer at the top.
But I was in Portland this week, which is what?
160, 180 miles south of here, something like that.
And the D-Minder app tells you how many days, at this point in the year, at this this far north, and as far north as Portland, there's no D that can be made at all at any point throughout the day.
And it's been several months.
The difference in how many days it's going to be before you can make D, according to the D-Minder app, In Portland, it's something like 7 days from now, and up here, it's 16 days from now.
That's actually a substantial – and I think I have those numbers right – in which case, that's 18 more days a year up here, less than 200 miles farther north, that you cannot make any D at all.
Yeah, that's a big difference for a small traverse over the Earth.
Exactly!
That's a really big difference, and it's about the angle of the Sun in the sky.
I think the Sun needs to be above 30 degrees above the horizon before it's possible to synthesize D.
Yeah, which I think is going to be almost certain is going to be about the amount of atmosphere that it has to penetrate before it reaches you.
I will also just say anecdotally, I was thinking about the fact that we are halfway through winter, a little beyond now.
It could have been something like February 5th would be halfway, I think.
You know, If you divide it evenly by calendar.
But, you know, given that the months aren't equal lengths and actually this, I didn't know we were going to talk about this, but this did occur to me that is, is summer the longest season given when we set our, um, set our dates?
Because there's two 31 month days in summer and there's no other span of time with two consecutive 31 month, 31 day months, sorry, 31 day months.
Well, I don't know.
There are musical traditions in which summer is considered endless, and I'm very fond of these traditions, though they turn out to be lies.
Yeah.
Still, noble lies, I would say.
Yeah, they're good ones.
It's sort of a positive sentiment, if factually inaccurate.
Sure.
But I was noticing us being, you know, halfway through winter.
That I believe personally, and I think it is true across the whole family, we have not gotten all of the little nagging colds and illnesses that often accompany this season.
For a while.
Yeah, and I would say... And a lot of people are sick.
Yes, a lot of people are sick and we have been, I can't say that this is causal, but I can say we have been very diligent over the last couple years about supplementing vitamin D and I think even more importantly when you are in a place where vitamin D can be made.
Doing so deliberately, going out during the right hours, not wearing more clothing than one needs, because the more surface area you have exposed, the better you do at it.
And I don't know, could be happenstance, could be noise, but especially given that it's not just one person, right?
If it's all of us, and you're paying more attention, that's more likely to be accurate.
I still vastly prefer not to feel that I have to supplement, and I do not.
Maybe a month on either side of winter, but really not outside of that at all.
pursued the sun.
I was never a sunbather per se, but I have always, and you know, I cheated my own photo period in graduate school by going south of the equator for my research in the northern winter months, all of this.
But I was always prone to laryngitis and colds and a little bit to flu and such.
And yeah, all of us.
And we're taking D, but we're also in this time of year taking C and magnesium and zinc.
And these things anecdotally, N of 4, seem to be working.
Yeah, I would also say I've been lucky to have traveled.
We've traveled some to the tropics in this season and I traveled with Zach one more time and definitely made use of it vitamin D wise, but that cuts both ways because my anecdotal sense is that as much as going to the tropics is helpful, traveling on airplanes is the opposite.
Yeah.
You know, the story the airline industry tells... Yeah, about their filtration.
Yeah, about their filtration and the UV filters and all of this is somewhat compelling.
Yeah, but it's not... I think that is compelling at the level of the recirculation.
I don't think there's much that helps you if the guy behind you is coughing and you're vulnerable because you're de-diffused.
No, I think you're right, and I think...
You know that I think that the first time I got COVID in February 2020 was on a plane back from LA.
Yeah.
And, you know, the guy across the aisle from me who had actually was assigned to the seat that I was in and I didn't realize that he took He took my seat because the seat I ended up in was broken, but he had sat in it for a while.
I was laking on the plane.
He had sat in it for a while, and he was hacking across the aisle the entire time, and he had been hacking in the seat that I was in and dripping and all of this, and I got super, super sick.
I don't know.
Obviously, usually whole plane loads of people don't end up sick, but if you're right in the sphere of influence, you probably do have a chance.
Yep, I was reminded of that episode in Our Family History.
Zach also got sick at the same time.
Yeah, I'm still alive.
Anyway, I was reminded, you know, in dealing with all of the various back and forth about whether there was a novel pathogen, if there was a novel pathogen, whether it was actually COVID.
I was reminded of that because at the time, COVID didn't occur to us because it wasn't supposed to be present.
But here's the interesting fact that I remember.
I remember... But a month later I was like, what?
Wait a minute.
Right.
It had to have been.
But at the time I remember, A, looking at you two as sick as you were and thinking, Having had a history of being very vulnerable to respiratory diseases, I do not want what they have and I was quite afraid that it was going to be impossible to avoid it being in the same house with you guys as sick as you were.
Yeah.
And I remember also, it's an odd anecdote, but I was staring at the thermometer.
We had one temperature thermometer.
We're taking a person's temperature in the house and I was staring at it, thinking I should take my temperature and see if there's any indication.
I'm sure you're aware that it's sterile.
Yeah.
And you know, that seems a crazy thought to me.
I'm sure I had used isopropyl alcohol on it, but you guys were anomalously sick even before we were thinking COVID had anything to do with this.
Right.
And you know, the term that ecologists use.
for organisms that can survive or indeed thrive in extraordinary circumstances are extremophiles, especially since we didn't know what this was.
There's still a question as to how robust the thing is and maybe what thing it is.
It's not a deep-sea hot vent extremophile.
It's not a sulfur pool in Yellowstone extremophile.
But extremophile is a thing that natural selection can create from some rare mutation and go like, let's run with that because that's working right now.
You know, of all of the ways to potentially, you know, if the goal is spread, if the goal is virulence, and in the modern world it's, you know, you're being very careful and you're staying away from people, but you share a thermometer, that might well be a mode that is discovered by would-be extremophiles.
There's no evolutionary reason something couldn't work.
a mechanism to get through the bottleneck that we attempt to create with something like isopropyl alcohol.
The one thing that does protect us is that to do so, a pathogen would have to surrender other capabilities for reasons of trade-offs.
You know, I don't I don't expect to see that pathogen.
And I think my concern about the thermometer, we now know whatever was circulating did not have those special capacities and indeed wasn't fomite transmittable, at least at first at all.
And as far as we know, still isn't.
But nonetheless, the reason it was important to me was just, I have a data point that says I was looking at you and looking at Zach and thinking, whatever they've got, that's odd.
This is not the normal thing that people have now.
Could be an anomaly.
But there was something weird about it even before we were thinking in terms of SARS-CoV-2.
No, and it's worth thinking.
Probably at that point, I don't remember exactly, but probably we could have afforded another thermometer.
Sure.
And you don't get two of everything that you might possibly share within a household.
There are reasons that people live together beyond wanting to be in each other's company, and some of those are economic ones, right?
So you don't need more thermometers.
Right.
However, thinking it through and thinking through like, okay, this risk seems low.
On the other hand, if I'm wrong and I get this sickness, those stakes just went so high that maybe it's just worth taking that risk.
Actually, I now even remember better what I was thinking, because I was looking at this thermometer, right?
And it wasn't a glass thermometer.
It was an electronic one, and so there was a seam where the metal tip intersects with the plastic, and my question was, all right, is there any way that a pathogen could get in there and not be touched by the isopropyl alcohol?
Right.
Now, obviously, if you're soaked in the isopropyl... No, but that, I mean, that's, there it is, right?
an entirely mercury-based, entirely encased in glass thermometer, you just dunk that thing.
Yeah, you just submerge it in isopropyl or hydrogen peroxide and sterilize it and be on your way.
All right.
Not really top of the hour anymore, but I think we need to get to our ads.
But I just want to say we're live streaming on Rumble.
Please, whether or not you tend to watch or listen on Rumble, please come over to the Dark Horse Channel on Rumble and join there.
That actually helps us out.
We're trying to get to 100,000 subscribers by middle of April.
Yeah, it helps us.
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Yeah, there's good stuff, and there will be more stuff put there.
I would just ask one other thing.
I try not to pay attention to this, but I am crawling and have been crawling towards a million Twitter followers forever, right?
It's been very, very slow for some reason that I does not feel organic, but maybe it is.
Thumb on the scale or an ass on the scale?
It could be something like that.
But anyway, if you haven't, if you haven't followed me on Twitter, I'd appreciate that one as well.
Also free.
And if I'm going to say impertinent things all of a sudden, that's going to be the spot Yeah, sometimes here.
Occasionally.
Occasionally.
Okay, so we only do two Q&As a month at this point, and there's not one today.
When they do happen, they're also on local, so again, another reason to join us there.
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You ever look at mammals?
I think that's a really weird thing to have covered them in.
Some.
A little bit, but not really because honestly I look at I look at more basal reptiles who have the thing that hair evolved from, which is scales.
And I think, yeah, I get scales, and I feel like I get fur.
But then I look at birds, which are also reptiles, and I look at what their scales have turned into, and they still have scales.
You look at their legs and such, they do have scales.
But then feathers are also homologous with and downstream of If you're thinking scales, feathers, fur, which is weirdest?
I'm going with feathers.
Well, I think feathers are coolest.
The level of the geometry that causes the filaments of the feather to function like little self-adhering zippers.
That thing's pretty awesome.
And that's only, I mean, and there are multiple types of feathers on almost all birds as well, so that's flight feathers.
I think those are like primaries.
Yeah, I mean, well, I'm not an expert on many different kinds of feathers.
There are lots of downy feathers that don't have that thing on them, but then there are also lots of different kinds of feathers on a flighted bird that do the zipper thing.
But anyway, the thing that weirds me out about fur Mm-hmm.
Is, A, the huge amount of surface area to it.
Yeah.
Right?
You ever rinse a paintbrush?
It takes forever to get the paint out of it because you've got all of these cylinders covered in paint on all sides.
Or hair.
Yeah, same kind of thing.
Like, why does this take so long?
Right, so why would... if you had an animal that was in danger of getting into something Gross, Maddie.
Why would you want all that surface area where that stuff can stick and be hard to get off?
And then also it provides a landscape for parasites and, you know, obviously creatures with scales and creatures with feathers have those parasites too, but it seems to me that... But they kind of go in between...
Yeah, like ticks will go in between scales on a lizard and such.
But yeah, fur, things can really get burrowed in the fur.
It also provides an environment for olfactory communication, though.
I mean, and inadvertent olfactory indicators of what kind of gross things you might have rolled in.
Sure, if you're a mammal who's going to go into an olfactory, you would want it.
Uh-oh, you're giving me that look.
Sorry, I just, you know, auditorily it had to be said.
Yeah, it does.
And actually, you just add a D in this case.
That's all you got to do.
If you have a spare D lying around, you just put it in an old factory and you're off to the races.
But the other thing is, isn't it just, okay, it's primarily, I don't want to say primarily, it is one of the main, I don't know if it was the driving force in the evolution of fur or it was one of several contributing factors, but thermal regulation.
It's great.
Creates a boundary layer.
It's lovely.
When it's dry.
And the problem is that an animal that's doing a perfectly good job thermoregulating, a cat that gets wet, right, suddenly has a problem thermoregulatory speaking.
Yeah, I guess I don't know, and I don't know that anyone knows.
I don't know, you know, fur is not going to tend to fossilize very well, right?
But there's some extant mammals, and relatively late arriving on the scene, that even when wet, their fur still has a high insulative capacity, like sheep.
Yeah, or otters.
Well, otters are different, but sheep, like the wools of sheep and goats, like cashmere goats and lots and lots of sheep with all the wools, still do great, even when wet.
And you know this, if you wear wool and you've got like, well, if I don't have a way to keep the rain off of me, I'm going to be warmish far more than if I wore cotton.
For instance, but I am going to smell like a wet sheep.
No matter how merino it is, how much they try to strip all the sheepiness of it, you're still going to smell like a wet sheep when your wool gets wet.
But otters do a different thing.
They actually have a layer The fur is so dense that the water can't get to the skin.
So there's not even air.
Okay, but I mean that proves you can adapt fur so that it does something amazing in terms of thermoregulation with respect to water.
But presumably the early mammals didn't.
You've all looked at a wet cat and thought, oh, that's a pitiful looking creature, right?
This has gone from this sleek, amazing, you know, triumph of evolution to a pitiful You know, critter until it dries out.
So I don't know.
I just, I mean, I'm a mammologist, as you know.
I do think it was an odd choice and not a perfect one.
Yeah.
And then, of course, you have the fact that we are in some anthropological circles known as naked apes.
And whenever this would come up when we were still professors, when I would say this, I would get students being like, but we're not naked.
We have plenty of fur.
Well, okay.
There are spots, right?
But mostly, we've kind of lost it, and that is highly unusual.
The aquatic forms, some of the aquatic forms have lost their fur, not all of them.
Otters, as we've talked about.
But the other main, I guess the three other evolutions of aquatic mammals, re-evolutions of aquatic forms in mammals involves the cetaceans, the whales, Including the toothed whales, the dolphins and orcas, manatees and dugongs, and the pinnipeds, the seals, sea lions, and walruses.
Seals, sea lions, and walruses who spend, depending, some time on land have weird, like very sparse, kind of coarse hair-ish.
I don't think any mammal has lost it entirely.
None, right.
But none of them have rich coats.
They're mostly furless, mostly hairless.
And who else?
Naked mole rats.
Yeah, and then, you know, the bat, Centurioscenix, has lost it from its face.
There are lots of places where it's disappeared, but even... I mean, I don't know how much we actually now know about why our lineage did lose so much of its fur, but I take it actually to be an indication of exactly the thing I'm pointing to here, which is that we got a better deal by being able to use the fur of things like sheep or skins of other animals or whatever,
That that gives us more, it gives us a higher return on investment than having a fur coat of our own, which you're stuck with when it's hot.
I mean, you can obviously have a different coat in the summer than the winter.
Lots of creatures do that.
But being stuck covered in fur all the time has downsides.
And we, because we can technologically substitute something, don't suffer from all of those downsides.
I wonder, I don't know if this is in the literature or not, but with primates, all but us of which have fur, although some of them have bare patches, you have a reduction in the sensory focus of the rest of mammals on olfaction.
Our noses shrink and our eyes get bigger and they move to the front, so you have frontations, you have binocular vision now.
And for all the rest of mammals, olfaction was really a primary way of communicating, and we don't do it as well.
And we don't sense smells as well as other mammals.
And as I mentioned earlier, hair is, you know, in the places that we've retained hair, actually, underarms and groins, they do accumulate secretions that have odors associated with them that do communicate to other individuals.
And they broadcast it really effectively.
And they broadcast very effectively, but I wonder if the loss of hair doesn't mean that we're broadcasting less of that than we would have been, which is useful if we are hunter-gatherers, which we were for a very long time.
And if we can't detect our own smells as much because our doses have shrunk and our eyes have taken over all that brain real estate, then it would be useful not to be spreading odors that we can't tell because we would get in the way of our own hunt.
Yeah, I like it.
Probably untestable.
Yep, at least during the podcast, right?
Well, yes.
It's just there's no time, there's no budget.
There's definitely no budget.
Time-traveling machine being expensive as they are.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay.
I believe that you wanted to start with... Subject matter, even.
Yeah.
This was subjecty.
Yeah, it was.
It was just, it was impromptu.
Yeah.
Which is good.
Yeah, I wanted to talk about a few different things.
The first one has to do, and it's funny, I told you what I wanted to explore, and then in trying to find some example visuals, I convinced myself that I was using a label that wasn't optimal.
Okay.
So what I wanted to talk about was what I have been calling overfitting.
And overfitting is a term that exists in statistics, but it has been taken over.
The majority of thinking on it is now in places like machine learning, okay?
And so I'm gonna say a little bit about what overfitting is and then I'm gonna say why I don't think it's the right term and Suggest some others.
Overfitting, you want to put up that visual, Zach?
Overfitting is a quest, so this is in a modeling context, and the idea is you're, so those dots are a scatter of some phenomenon.
And in this case, this is a hypothetical example, the dots have a kind of curve to their distribution, but there's also a lot of noise.
The dots don't all land on the curve, and this is the way data in a complex environment almost always is, because so many different factors impinge on the distribution of the data points.
So overfitting is the case where you force the model to embrace all of the fluctuations in the data and you miss the overarching thing that explains their pattern.
Most usefully.
And so the problem in a machine learning context is if you train your machine on this data and it overfits, it gets all the noise in the data and it includes it in the model, then that model correctly predicts the data that you trained it on and doesn't predict any other data set because the noise will be dissimilar.
And I should just remind people, when we talk about noise, noise is always the result of other processes that you're not interested in.
It's not fundamentally noise.
You could study those other processes if you wanted, but if you're interested in, for example, let's say you were interested in the relationship between interest rates and home buying, and you looked at the rate of home buying, There'd be a lot of noise, and one of the factors would likely be the weather and how conducive it was to home shopping, right?
Is it the kind of weather that gets you to want to go and drive around and look at houses, which then results in people making offers and buying homes, or not?
So weather is a factor, but if you're looking at the influence of interest rates, weather is noise, right?
You could also ask the question- Also called a confounding variable.
Right, confounding variable.
So if you're building a model, what you want is the right number of factors so that your model that you build based on observations, the inductive part of the process, then becomes predictive of behavior in other contexts, where you can say, well, the interest rate is doing x, I expect the rate of home buying to do y, like that.
OK, so that's what overfitting is, is the tendency to include too much in a model so that it fits the exact pattern that you've seen.
Just put that visual back up and since some people can't see it, walk through.
I think it's a nice clear visual.
I don't know if you want to give it source, but underfitting here is also nicely visualized because what people who haven't been in this in this area before may not recognize is that it's very easy to say, draw a line, right?
So to ask an algorithm or to just say, I'm going to draw a line, a straight line through data.
And the fact is that many times an XY plot, a straight line is not the best fit.
And so, you know, you're talking about Underfitting, overfitting, well, best fit is also the word that will tend to be used.
And just right, you know, it depends on what you're trying to do, right?
So, you know, I think that this is good because it's vague, it's totally abstract, right?
We don't know what it is that is being plotted here, but it looks like The straight line misses real variation at low x, right?
And the overfitting line captures way too much variability that will probably render that unuseful, as you say.
So let's actually, this is obviously not a real graph of anything, but let's throw something at it that has such a pattern so that you can see why this is important.
Let's talk about mortality versus age.
If age is on the x-axis and the number of individuals who die at that age is on the y-axis, so y is the dependent variable, Then we do have in many creatures, including humans, we have a increased level of mortality in the first year of life, which then becomes spectacularly low if you survive your first year and then it goes up.
It doesn't go up exactly the way this graph does, but the point is there's a curve to it that does have higher mortality at the very beginning.
It drops to a minimum and then it climbs over the course of life.
And if you decide that what you're looking for is a line, you will get an underfitting situation where you miss a very real pattern, which is the vulnerability of neonates.
And indeed infants up to about a year.
Right.
And so then if you were to graph Uh, if you were to graph a particular population's rate of death, you would have things, you know, there'd be disasters.
There'd be accidents, you know, even, even healthy 25-year-olds die sometimes.
Sure, you could have, uh, you know, bad, uh, trends on TikTok that result in people falling off of crates, you know, whatever, whatever the noise is.
I mean, that was a thing for a while.
Crates?
Yeah, people were stacking those plastic crates.
I don't know what the crates are actually used for, but they're, See, now the herpetologist in me heard K-R-A-I-T-S.
Oh my goodness.
People are standing on piles of writhing venomous snakes.
You wouldn't want to do that.
No.
TikTok does not allow that sort of thing.
For one thing.
No, they're piling crates.
Okay.
They're piling crates, however.
C-R-A-T-E-S, yeah.
Milk crates.
Milk crates, for example.
So anyway, you don't want to overfit, you don't want to underfit.
What you want is a model that captures the important trend.
Outgrowth in machine learning and models that are not machine-operated to the extent that still exists is that it's predictive of data sets you haven't yet seen, right?
It's predictive of novel data, not just matches the data that you fed into the thing.
Because how useful is that?
Right.
Okay, so that's overfitting and underfitting.
Now, the thing that I've been describing as overfitting is the tendency of people in a non-machine learning, non-statistical context to see in data or By the way, this is a pet peeve of mine.
I haven't said this out loud, I don't think, yet, but almost always when people say data, they would be better off saying evidence.
Data is a kind of evidence, but it is not the only kind of evidence.
So you're safe if you say evidence, even if you mean data, but you're not safe the other way around.
In this case, since we are actually talking about data points, data is a defensible term.
But in the context of people, who have a belief about the world they are interacting with, there is a tendency to force the observations to match the model.
Right?
So that is not a perfect fit for overfitting, because in the case of overfitting, you're talking about matching the model to sample data and it failing to predict new data.
And in this case, what you've got is people who take every new observation and they force it to their model.
So I'm going to propose that the right term for this is going to be either shoehorning, forcing things into a pattern that they don't fit, or straightjacketing, where observations that should falsify your model actually are unable to escape it.
And I want to point to a particular one of these.
My guess is this is a general category and that those terms are generally useful.
But the one I see is actually one I have a little sympathy for.
OK.
So here's the setup.
We don't know how to deal with collusion.
I'm avoiding the word conspiracy because it has so many bad connotations.
But if we say collusion, collusion is conspiracy.
And the problem is when people realize that they are living in an era where they need to think about collusion because it's actually not a minor fact of our environment, They do not understand that they have stepped into a realm where the philosophical toolkit, the scientific toolkit that they've been handed, now has a challenge that has to be addressed with extreme care.
And the hazard is this.
Boy, I was not expecting to go this deep into the philosophy, but let's take Occam's razor for a second.
Occam's razor is the principle that the simplest explanation for a given set of observations tends to be correct.
All else being equal.
Right.
All else being equal.
And I would also say that the problem with Occam's Razor is that it is simultaneously the fundamental principle of science, that the way we decide what is likely to be true, the way we update our models of the universe over time, is that we apply the principle of parsimony.
Right?
There's a set of things that are facts, and whatever explanation we have that explains those facts, either by assuming less We're explaining more, and hopefully both.
Whatever integrates the assumptions at the lowest level and the explanatory power at the highest level is the explanation.
It's our working model.
And my argument is that actually Occam's Razor, simplest explanation tends to be true, could be rephrased as, given all of the evidence, the simplest explanation is always true.
If you had infinite information about every observation from every side, And the simplest explanation that explained all of it, with the least assumptions, would always be right.
So when you find yourself in possession of evidence of conspiracy, for instance, or collusion, and if you turn out to be correct, part of what you have discovered is that you knew less about the system than you thought.
Right.
And so the example that makes this perfectly clear is the process of framing.
Right?
If we say, you know, Ned was convicted of murder, and then somebody says, yeah, but he was framed.
Right?
What they are alleging is that the reason that the evidence led the court to convict him was that somebody organized the evidence so it would point to this guy.
Yeah.
Right?
So if we take this example, what the court saw, the simplest explanation is that Ned committed the crime, right?
If the court had had access to the fact that there was a meeting of people, and at that meeting, a transcript of the meeting would reflect, well, how are we going to arrange the evidence so that the cops pick up Ned and he's then convicted?
If you knew that that meeting had happened, then the point is, oh, well, in light of that evidence, the simplest explanation is that Ned was being railroaded for some purpose, right?
So, okay.
In the universe, if you had all the evidence, then Occam's razor could be phrased much more strongly, and it would be a law, not just a principle.
But we never have all the evidence.
So, at the point that we are talking about collusion, we are inherently talking about some analog of framing.
Right?
Collusion always involves The evidence leading you to a wrong conclusion.
So that point is I'm going to deny you the evidence of our meeting, and I'm going to leave you with the evidence of X, Y, and Z. And given that you have a bias, and you can see this evidence, and you don't know the evidence you can't see, you're going to reach a wrong conclusion.
That's what collusion does.
Right?
At the point that you come to the conclusion, right or wrong, that collusion may be an important feature of the environment that you're operating in, you have to become suspect of Occam's Razor.
Because the question is, well, why is that the simplest answer?
Is that the simplest answer because it's really the simplest answer?
Or is it the simplest answer because I'm standing where I'm expected to stand and I'm processing the information that I'm expected to look at?
Okay, so, okay, that's great.
So now you've got people who are interested in collusion who are aware that Occam's Razor may be misleading them.
Occam's Razor as it is phrased, not as it is actually true in the universe with all the evidence available.
So what do those people do?
Well, what they do is they turn down their dependence, their reliance on Occam's Razor, which is the correct thing to do if you don't have all of the evidence and you want not to be fooled by those who would collude against you.
You get more creative in allowing your brain to make connections between things.
100%.
You free yourself from the normal rules of logic in order so that you could see what might be going on, and there's nothing wrong with that.
That is actually necessary.
However, you cannot then decide that the quality of your thinking is as it would be if you were in a laboratory where you controlled all of the inputs and you knew that the lab bench wasn't conspiring against you.
So the point is – The bench itself.
I mean, in a universe where the bench conspires against you, then you can't rely on the fact that the contents of the test tubes are really telling you anything because it may be that the bench is tricking you using the test tubes somehow.
But that's not how it works.
In the world of people, we mislead each other.
And so, yes, you have to relax your standards in order to think about collusion.
No, you don't get the same level of strength of conclusion out of it.
You have to be more careful than regular folks doing regular work on, you know, if you go into the field and you Study the behavior of frogs, as you did, right?
You don't have to worry that somebody is arranging the frogs, because what would have to be true?
A. Why would anybody want to trick you through frogs?
And B. What would they have to act?
You'd see them arranging the frogs before you got to your study set.
So you can just assume the frogs are probably doing whatever the frogs do.
Nobody's trying to trick me, right?
But the realms where that's not true, you have to relax your standards, but you also have to treat your conclusions with a kind of skepticism that is very rare amongst those who actually think about this stuff.
So anyway, what they do is they do this straitjacketing or shoehorning thing.
And I'm in a weird position now because, you know, I now am the subject of many a hypothesis of collusion.
You can be pretty sure they're not true.
You can't be as sure as I can be.
That you aren't involved?
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
But in terms of people who don't know us, haven't known us for years, who've just come across us on the internet, Right?
They don't know, right?
And nor should they.
We have to, just as we say to everyone, I always say to our students, we have to earn your trust.
You do not simply trust us because we have the right credentials.
Certainly not, because we've seen that abused for hundreds of years.
So, my point is, look, I am in a great position to watch the behavior of the people who are doing this work in public, because they're talking about me, and I can be certain of whether things that they land on are true or not in many cases, right?
So the point is, oh, Brett's one of the new gatekeepers, and he's part of a network of cross-promoters that the mainstream blah blah blah is using to X, Y, and Z. It's like, well, okay, let's start at the bottom of that That tree of contingencies.
One of two things has to be true.
Either the allegation is that I am knowingly part of such an entity, in which case I would know it.
You would.
And you on the internet can't know for sure that I'm not lying to you, but I can know that your accusation is inaccurate.
And so I can say, oh, this person is sloppy because they've landed on a conclusion that they're certain of, and I know it's wrong.
But the argument will come back, and this was the alternative to, you might know it, maybe you don't know it.
Maybe you're part of this vast conspiratorial network of future orthodox agents, and you just don't know it.
Unwitting.
Now, if I'm an unwitting agent of these people, well, I can't be certain that's not true.
But then again, it means nothing.
Because the point is, we know we live in a world Full of propaganda, which is people trying to persuade us of things that aren't true so that we will, you know, mouth off on Twitter about them or whatever.
So the point is, okay, either this is an empty accusation or it's a wrong accusation.
If it's, you know, you're an agent of Goliath and you don't know it, well, yeah, okay, maybe, but you might also be.
If it's, you are a witting agent of Goliath, then the answer is, well, I know you're not going to take my word for it, but no, your logic is sloppy.
So shoehorning, of your two possible terms, shoehorning doesn't...
really have a connotation beyond, like, I've got a thing and I'm gonna fit it into this other thing.
But straightjacketing does have this additional connotation of, once I get you into this, you are constrained.
And I think that some of what you're seeing, some of what you're responding to here, is frankly driven by a desire to constrain you, a desire to steer you in a particular direction.
As opposed to just making a pronouncement because they think they're so clever and have overfit what they see onto a guy that they think they know because they see him on the internet.
Well, I think you're pointing to a level I wasn't going to get to, which has to do with why people are sloppy.
And let's put it this way.
We are all human beings with interests in the world, right?
You and I have endeavored to be very careful, and we have tried to reach the truth as rigorously as possible to do our work in public.
We have made errors.
We have corrected them.
It's painful.
But the point is, you and I are more or less functioning As I hate the term brand but our identity is we're gonna do our work on public in public and we're gonna try to get to the truth and you can come along for the ride and you can watch us do this and you can disagree and we may even hear you disagreeing and respond to you and all of that and actually Maybe entirely, but certainly almost entirely.
This is draft, right?
The book that we wrote, that was a final product, and it's got errors and such in it too, but that was meant to have staying power and to be something that we can refer back to and other people refer back to, and that's the nature of reference of the written word, right?
And it's It's not inherently the nature of the spoken word.
I always prepared a lot more for lectures, right?
But this is, okay, let's figure out some things that look interesting, and do a little dive into it, and then talk Actually, without having had the conversation in advance and see where it goes.
And boy, there's no net.
It's risky, but it's precisely the willingness to take that risk and to then come back when we made mistakes in doing so and saying, ah, this was wrong, and here's how we know, or here's how we found out, and here's how you might have known, or here's how we might have known in advance that that wasn't the right way to go.
And it is that process, that is what the phrase Teaching people how to think, not what to think means.
That's what it is.
Let's let people in on the process by which we try to discover what is true.
Yep.
Here we go.
Dialectical exploration, which is messy as can be, but the point is you're not getting my perspective.
You're not getting your perspective.
You're getting the dialogue that happens as we try to hash out what is being said and what its implications are.
But here's the point.
You and I, there's no point I could write a script in which it would be true, but there's no point, if your identity is dialectical exploration, if that's the reason that people come to your channel, if that's the reason that people choose to support you, there's no point at which diverting from that program and embracing something you know to be wrong makes sense.
Right?
Even if you're going to lose a bunch of standing for admitting some major error, it's always better, because you don't know what we're going to be talking about two weeks from now, to get back to the place where people rightly trust you because they know you're honest about owning up to your errors.
So our incentives are well aligned with a public that wants to know what the hell is going on, right?
Doesn't mean that what we're seeing is accurate, but it means that our motivation is not Divergent from your motivation for tuning in right we are aligned in this regard right or wrong Okay, I don't know what the motivations are for the people who are engaged in the shoehorning and the straitjacketing some of them seem to be
Incapable of accepting that others are seeing the same picture.
And so the point is that person's not really seeing it.
They're motivated because they're an agent of Goliath and Goliath blah blah blah.
So the thing that I watch happen is there is an embrace of a model which facilitates the shoehorning and the straitjacketing and produces a kind of unfalsifiability.
So the the term I'm going to introduce here, which we've talked about before, is limited hangout.
Okay, so if you say Brett is a limited hangout, what that means is that somebody in an effort to prevent people from waking up is going to provide you with something that contains shocking elements of the truth But that there's a cap on how deep the truth goes, right?
So you could imagine that there's some job in which what you do is you present a sanitized version of the truth that prevents the really explosive stuff from emerging.
Now, on the one hand, do I believe that limited hangouts exist?
Of course I do.
Absolutely.
I think that this has been an important feature of our landscape since the Kennedy assassination, at least.
Where we see lots and lots of exploration of the nonsense that's obvious in the story of that assassination.
That contains elements of the truth fused to elements that are nonsense, and so the point is, it prevents us from ever reaching resolution on what actually happened.
So, yeah, limited hangouts exist.
Again, either limited hangout means you know that that's what you are, or it means nothing because it means that somebody has, you know, let you see part of the truth, but they're still obscuring something else, which is almost undoubtedly true for all of us.
So, if it means something, you know, Brett's a limited hangout.
And then Brett would know that he was a limited hangout, then I also know that this is wrong.
But then it allows me to go and look at what happens in the context of somebody leveling this accusation.
Well, what happens is they now have a model that has built into it an immunity to falsification.
It's not just a verificationism, but it has an immunity to falsification because anything I say that's shocking and seems to go against Goliath's interests, oh, well, he's a limited hangout.
I told you that.
Yeah, and of course he's going to give you the shocking stuff.
That's how he gets you to join his audience, and then it limits what you can see because now that you're listening to him, you're not going to get the real stuff, right, which only we real people are trafficking in, right?
So the point is, okay, well, you've now built – It's so tiring.
Yeah, it's tiring, but it's also fascinating, and it is – It is interesting to be on the side of it where you actually know for sure that you don't have to worry, as we do with other people, about whether they really are a limited hangout.
Because in my case, I'm just in a position to say, nope.
Right.
But I mean, you just alluded to it.
In this landscape, in this era, We all need to be concerned about where we are getting our information, and who the people we are getting our information from actually are, and what they're up to.
And I think, in part, you, but also you and I together, doing this every week, have generated Not just goodwill, but the trust of people.
And we were able to do it, I think, for a few reasons.
Because the evolutionary toolkit forces you to be a careful, rigorous thinker if you are wielding it with any kind of precision, as opposed to just sort of waving your arms and looking for cool stories.
But also because of the particular academic jobs that we had that allowed for and really, you know, were the most rewarding when you really did go deep with students and explore things that were going to be uncomfortable and counterintuitive and not what they wanted to hear.
And sometimes, you know, comfortable and intuitive, of course.
But that means that we have a sort of a toolkit that has history, and that most academics don't have that, because it's never really expected of them.
And, you know, one thing that has been said many times that has nothing to do with us in particular, in fact, it goes the other way, is that, you know, conservatives, until the college is completely broke down, say 10 years ago, 20 years ago, conservatives in college, undergraduates, maybe emerged with college degrees, being able to think somewhat more rigorously than liberals in college, at least if they were getting degrees in like the social sciences and humanities.
Because their beliefs were put to the test over and over and over and over again, and that makes you a better thinker.
And that should be less true over in the sciences, where your politics should not impinge on what ideas that you are having that are being put to the test, but of course that's a pure world, it's not quite like that.
But I don't even, I don't know if that's exactly the case at most colleges now, because they're all so broken, but Anyone who has had to defend what they believe to be true from a wide variety of people, who is therefore being leveled up by being forced to be a generalist, even if they weren't before.
Because even if they think of themselves as someone who is very much a specialist, if I have to respond, you know, if you're Luca Turin, and you are – he's trained as a chemist?
What is he even trained at?
Yeah, I think he's a chemist.
Yeah, if you are Luca Turin, and you have almost certainly discovered the actual mechanism of olfaction, which is not the mechanism of olfaction which some people received the Nobel Prize for, but if you have actually discovered the mechanism of olfaction, And you go to professional meetings before they stop inviting you, and you go to various places where you're invited, and you enrage the people in the audience because it doesn't fit with what it is that they are sure is true.
You start getting questions from the physicists, and from biologists, and the biochemists, and from all of these other people who have backgrounds completely different from you, and they think they've got the gotcha questions.
And if they never do, Everyone should be more and more convinced over time that maybe you're onto something, and you, as Luca Turin in this story, become ever more adept at understanding the scope of the scientific story that you actually are sitting on.
Yep, and there is something very powerful in every one of these cases about what happens when there is no script, when there's transparently no script, because what you're involved in is, you know, and there is a scene in The Emperor of Scent, the Chandler Burr book about Luca Turin, there is a scene that
Where Burr, as the journalist, is reporting on Luca Turin facing a hostile audience asking him questions.
And the level at which he is a virtuoso in answering them, because he has been through every piece of logic.
Any question that they're asking is something he's thought about a dozen times and he knows why it's not a devastating question.
And so he's just, he's just volleying the stuff back and forth.
And, you know, it's quite clear that, you know, it'd be one thing If somebody scripted Luca Turin to be a would-be genius who knows the answer on some topic and it's not what the mainstream says, right?
You could script that so it would look like that.
But what you can't do is make it function like that in a hostile Q&A.
This is so far afield here, but this is often how Hollywood and other literary forms get the nature of genius wrong.
They put, especially scientific geniuses, up on screen.
And they're clearly on script.
They don't go off script.
Like actually, no, the brilliant people go off script.
And that's how you know.
Yeah, it's been beautified in a way that rings hollow, just the same way when Hollywood portrays, you know, the hacker.
You know, defeating, ticking whatever bomb, you know, it just, it just doesn't look right.
Anyway, but okay, so you've got this model and you've got people, the model is built so it doesn't require any effort.
Anything that goes against the, your model gets shoved into the, well, of course they would do that.
That's how they get you through the door.
Yep.
You know, and then anything that goes, you know, with your expectation that they're not seeing the full picture is, well, of course, that's that's their purpose as a limited hangout.
So anyway, the point is, look, that's just sloppy.
That's just sloppy.
And it's not the right way to think about collusion, even though limited hangouts are real and propaganda is real and being wrong is a feature of the landscape for all of us, unless there is one This is a digression, maybe we'll return to it another time.
But a lot of the people doing this, their claim is they actually had COVID right from the beginning.
All right.
Right?
Now, there is one way that you could have done that.
And the way you could have done that is with total cynicism about anything you were told.
And the problem with the COVID landscape was that because everything was distorted, a total cynic actually had an advantage in that they didn't accept anything.
And that meant that all of those pieces of bullshit just didn't get through.
But here's the point.
That's not, I'm not saying, maybe you are smart, and that's how you arrived at a level of cynicism that was appropriate to the propaganda.
But that-- - You have to have arrived there, though.
- Right. - If you start from either faith or cynicism, then that's not a flexible, and therefore an intelligent position.
Right.
In other words, you have to out-compete an inanimate object for resistance to propaganda, right?
A chair doesn't accept any propaganda.
It doesn't make a chair clever, right?
There are some people who I think did arrive there early as a result of a carefully refined model that was ahead in detecting the level of cynicism, but not very many.
That's a rare position, and those people will have made mistakes too because it's a complex landscape.
If you mentioned COVID, if you mentioned SARS-CoV-2, then the point is you're already in the landscape of trying to sort wheat from chaff, right?
And the point is there was an awful lot of chaff.
Yeah.
But okay, so there's one more level here.
In addition to just the basic argument, you are a limited hangout and therefore there's nothing you could throw at me that I can't fit into that model.
So actually this is the reason that overfitting is on my mind.
It's not that what they're engaged in is overfitting, at the technical definition that I provided at the beginning.
It's that they are failing to detect their own having engaged in overfitting, right?
At the point that they have a model.
That fails to predict the future.
Right?
If it were a machine, the people who program the machines would say there's something about this model that's wrong.
Is it overfitting?
Right?
At the point that it's a human being doing this, they don't detect it.
They do not.
So, for example, I took all kinds of crap, as you know, for my Tucker interview, the first of the recent ones.
That was over the question of COVID, and the point was that this was the new narrative gatekeeping, blah, blah, blah, that Goliath is trying to regain control over the COVID narrative.
I just have to say at one level, anyone who thinks you're a gatekeeper has clearly never met you.
Even if you wanted to, you just don't have the chops.
Right, no.
It's just not in your arsenal.
Where do I put that gate?
Sorry.
That could be a scandal.
It could be gate-gate.
Yeah.
Yeah, also the bad puns.
You don't want a gatekeeper who can't resist the opportunity to make a pun.
It's just not effective.
But anyway, the point is, all right, if people were crowing about my inappropriate use of rhyme in declaring that there was a dream team, which again, what I said was all the smart people are on it, and a bunch of people were like, why am I not on it?
Well, gee, I think you may have answered your own question.
But, okay, so they're all crowing about Gatekeeper and, you know, Brett thinks he's in charge of the Dream Team, which I of course never said.
I just said there is one and it has all the smart people.
But anyway, okay, so people are crowing about this.
I end up back on Tucker, talking about the migration, the invasion that appears to be embedded in the migration, or at least that's a viable hypothesis, and the even scarier hypothesis, which we may talk about later, about whether the
mRNA vaccines that were distributed across the Western world could be somehow involved in that hypothetical invasion embedded in the very factual migration.
That should have caused people who thought I was some kind of new gatekeeper, and Tucker is some kind of new gatekeeper, should have caused them to say, That doesn't sound like something that Goliath would want talked about at this level.
But instead, what they did was they resorted to this model that cannot be escaped, right?
And the point is, aha!
Yes, there were those of us who were on this for years and years and years, and you're a latecomer, and what you're doing is you're trying to get ahead of the story or whatever they're saying.
So they had a falsification.
Well, but is it the same people?
Yeah.
Oh yeah, yeah, they've become... Because, I mean, it's so hard to track, and so many of these accounts aren't individual organic beings, right, who are doing things of their own accord.
One of my default assumptions is you're always going to get the same kinds of arguments whenever they could plausibly fit right now, and it doesn't matter that these arguments are inconsistent from moment to moment.
If that's true now, it wasn't true then, and therefore your argument doesn't fit, well, that doesn't matter.
Because these people, if it really is organic people, or people paid by some entity, whatever, just to cast suspicion and fog on you and Tucker Carlson and me and everyone.
If the point is not, we're going to put together a coherent story.
You're living your life and it's a coherent story.
It's got its incoherent moments.
You decohere sometimes, but like, you know, it's a lifeline, right?
It's one timeline.
And it feels, obviously, like anything that comes at you – and we've all experienced this, people with, you know, five followers on whatever social media platform they're on Presumably the experience is like some person comes in from outer space and makes some comment.
You're like, well, that's not, that's not, no, that's not what I said, or that's not who I am, or that's not relevant.
And you have the sense of like, sure, surely that's obvious.
Like, surely you know that that couldn't possibly be like, no, no, no.
They don't care.
They don't care about your... Some of them simply do not care.
Some of them are.
Because the point is, make it more poisonous to be interested for other people who don't yet know, who might be waking up.
Make it harder for them to want to come on board.
Yeah, and I think a lot of it is not organic, and I have a little rubric I look for when somebody's following count exceeds their follower count by a lot, especially if they're fond of reposting material rather than posting things of their own.
And I block those things because I think it's a false, it's a phony chorus.
But there are some real people involved in doing this, too, and they aren't, again, the really interesting thing is to be in my shoes because they'll say things about, like, we give it the timing of that Tucker interview, right?
Now, I know exactly what the timing of that Tucker interview was because I was in conversation, text conversation, with Tucker.
And I told him, I said, you know, in both cases, both of these interviews, I alerted him to something.
I alerted him to the World Health Organization stuff.
And I said, do you know what this is?
And he said, kind of.
And I explained it to him.
And he said, do you want to come do an interview?
Okay.
That's how that interview happened, right?
And then the same thing happened.
I talked to him a little bit before I went to Panama with Zach and then on getting back, I texted him and I was like, this stuff is incredible.
And he's like, how about coming back to do it?
So the point is, what was the timing?
I mean, the timing was that I initiated a conversation which told him there was something interesting to talk about.
Right.
So I'm going to try to do devil's advocate here.
We are all trying to make sense of what we are seeing.
No.
Many of us are trying to make sense of what we're seeing, right?
Some people are just being obnoxious or nasty, or both.
But of that majority of us who are trying to make sense of what we're seeing, some of the things that we look for are strange timings and collaborations we weren't expecting.
And oh, I didn't expect that guy to have that opinion, right?
Anything that throws an error, we sort of put up on this, you know, imaginary board in our head of like, okay, do I or do I not trust this guy?
Or what do I think about this issue?
Or actually, there's two, like, I just don't know, right?
And so I think You know, as I've begun to say, like, look, unless I've seen it directly or you are one of a very small number of people who has seen it directly, I don't know if it's true.
So, the stuff coming across the screens from all over the world, from all variety of opinions, all variety of demands, by and large at this point, I say, I don't know if that's true.
This is an insane way to live, but I do not know if that is true.
And of course, as we have discussed endlessly, this is true in scientific papers now too, where it used to be that I thought direct experience with the skills of observation or the direct experience with the skills of observation of one of very few people who I trust is telling me what they saw, even though if I had been there, I might have seen something different.
And the scientific literature, because the scientific literature is written in a way that you can suss out what they actually saw, as opposed to them only telling you what they think it means.
Unless...
They're lying about the data, or they didn't collect the data, and the people they got the data from are lying about it.
Or the biggest way that this is done now in the scientific literature is, yeah, actually it's not really about the data, it's a model.
And this is the one thing that I want to talk about today, which fits very well with what you're talking about with regard to models and collusion, is, well, once you're in model territory, all bets are off.
And unless you know the particular models or someone else is coming and you're like, okay, I looked at their model and here's how they arrived at, you know, this one parameter that if you just move that one, the entire model falls out differently.
And, oh, well, you know, the World Health Policy was based on that one little flipped switch.
And how can you tell?
I say that as someone who has read a stupid amount of scientific literature and has begun now and, you know, forever with, frankly, the climate change papers, gone like, I'm sorry guys, show me the paper with data.
And I still need to know that you took your data right and that those data are what you say they are.
But if all you're doing is putting this through models and everything in your results is model results, I don't care.
No.
There's no way to know.
No, it is a completely inappropriate use of models.
Models can generate hypotheses.
They can't test them.
But you're describing the Cartesian crisis, right?
Yes.
If you didn't see it, or if the information didn't come from somebody that you know, you deal with it with extreme skepticism that is born of having seen what appears to be reliable conclusions turn out not to be on closer inspection.
And that is absolutely where we are.
So I guess before we close this out, I want to just show something.
And I don't mean to be picking on David Icke, although he seems to be picking on me.
He needs me to disappear, I guess.
But anyway, could you put up David Icke's tweet about Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan's apparent new deal with Spotify?
Okay, so David Icke, I think I'm pronouncing his name correctly, says, why would someone who is a, quote, threat to the system, unquote, be paid 250 million dollars by the system to broadcast on mainstream internet platforms owned by the system?
The naivete is shocking.
So many who think they are awake are really still in a coma.
Joe Rogan signs a new Spotify deal with... Oh, so then he's just quoting a headline.
Well, but for those who aren't watching, Joe Rogan signs a new Spotify deal worth $250 million that will spread his podcast across multiple platforms, including on Apple, Amazon, and YouTube.
I know this is not the point of what you're talking about here, but cool!
Go Joe!
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Joe's doing amazing work.
Now, I responded... The move to Spotify did narrow his reach a little bit.
Yeah.
You put up my... Okay, so I said, I quote tweeted David Icke, and I said, regarding Joe Rogan, David Icke asks, why would someone who's a threat to the system be paid $250 million by the system to broadcast on mainstream internet platforms owned by the system?
And I said, because, David, The system isn't a coherent whole.
It is an emergent property made up of factions that can be played against each other.
Spotify is competing against Google and X, which puts it at cross purposes with The Who, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and DNC, etc.
In other words, we just won a significant victory, though some will see it as a defeat.
So my point there is not That there is not collusion in the system.
My point is that there is not one faction.
You have at least multiple factions colluding who may want different things.
Goliath is a strategy, not an entity.
Goliath contains collusion, but it is not one single global conspiracy as far as we can tell.
Now, David, I may disagree with that, but the point is he has put forward a logical challenge, which is, you know, if Joe Rogan is really a problem for the system, then the system would not be paying him.
And the answer is no, that's not true, because Spotify Is a corporation part of something else?
I don't know, but it's at least a corporation.
And making a deal with Joe Rogan that brings in a profit may function against the interests of the DNC.
It may function against the interests of the WHO.
But the point is that is not evidence of some grander thing in which Joe Rogan is really a part of it, even though how many people I mean, do you really want to have gone to battle over COVID and not have Robert Malone reaching 10 million, an audience of 10 million people?
It's just a loser of a battle, right?
That was a major victory.
And so, anyway, a model that straitjackets you.
Or you cannot escape it because it is constructed in such a way that evidence that goes in either direction all establishes the same thing which you're saying, which is it's all a plot, right?
That's not clever thinking.
It's very, very sloppy.
And I don't mean to take the last word here.
David Icke responded to me that what I said revealed that I'm a dummy.
You want to put that up?
He says, Mr. Weinstein, If I've ever read confirmation that you have no idea how it all works, then this is it, so thanks for that.
I have been researching this full-time for 34 years, and I don't need to be told how things operate by someone who bought COVID lock stock and... The other thing.
And the other thing.
And explained during the fake pandemic how he wore a scarf around his neck at home so he could pull it over his face when he answered the door.
I...
I called COVID, or what it was, a hoax from the start of 2020 because I had spent 30 years researching the cabal and its methods for operation.
You bought it because you hadn't.
That clearly still applies.
Now, I would point out a couple things here.
This mask thing.
Yep.
I was wrong.
Masks were not useful against COVID.
Not significantly.
Was I a fool to think they might be?
No.
Until we knew that there was no fomite transmission, then there was a decent chance that masks would...
At least have some value because they would keep droplets that contain the virus from hitting a surface from getting to that surface in some percentage of the instances and that would result in a somewhat fewer instances of infection.
So do I feel like a terrible person for advocating for masks?
No.
Was I wrong?
Yes.
What are we to think about this as an indication of the quality of my thinking?
I don't know, that I'm a fallible person who worked from a data set that was heavily polluted and became smarter over time, and I'm comfortable with that.
Final thing I will say about it is I am perfectly happy with you evaluating my record on COVID, warts and all.
But the way you do that, the rigorous way to do that, is to think of it as a question of area under the curve.
So, my advocacy of masks, and my advocacy of masks, I don't know what I said about mandating masks.
I know that I advocated for masks because it seemed a low cost and likely to do some good, and that I, at the point the evidence said it didn't do any good, I abandoned it.
I was always appalled by the idea of using them outdoors, etc.
So, If you take the harm that was done by my advocacy of masks, and I will agree there was some harm, if you take that harm and you say there's an area under the curve of that harm, and then you take the area under the curve of if you compare it to the harm that might have been done by people being vaccinated who weren't vaccinated because
They watched our podcast and realized that there was something wrong with that story and their understanding of what these things were composed of and how likely they were to be perfectly harmless, right?
The point is, the net effect that we had on COVID was distinctly positive.
And if you want to do that net analysis, great.
If you want to pick one thing and harp on it endlessly, then that's your sloppy thinking and it's not our responsibility.
Well, I hadn't seen this interchange before, and I recognize the name, but I don't really know who he is.
But going from what he claims about what his work has been, I'm reminded of – this is going to sound like a total non sequitur at first – but I'm reminded of myself as a young person going into college.
I wanted to be a writer.
That's what I wanted to do.
And I very quickly realized in my literature and writing courses, and I was also taking science because I specifically wanted to be a science fiction writer, but I wanted to be a writer.
I quickly realized, especially in the creative writing classes, that all the turns of phrase and grammatical skill in the world doesn't give you anything to write about.
And so, you know, writing is a tool and it can be an art form, but it's not sufficient.
You need to actually know something.
And so I think I feel the same way.
And again, I don't know what it is that he claims to have exactly, you know, how it is that he frames what he is, what he does.
But people who, you know, whose job they understand themselves to be to, you know, figure out where everyone else is getting it wrong.
Feels a little bit like that.
Like, you know what?
That's not actually either a particularly honourable, but more to the point, truth-seeking position.
And here is where you and I landed on one, and you know, this is our bias, but we think it is the right one.
That evolutionary biologists train in the complexity of the world, where the things that seem totally unobvious and turn out to be true, there's just no question it's a social phenomenon.
You're going to have to reconcile, well, she said this and he said that.
It's like, no, It's in front of you.
The forest is what the forest is.
The reef is what the reef is.
The bats, the frog, whatever it is.
And this seems impossible.
I cannot reconcile this.
What am I not seeing?
At the end of the day, when you have one of those, and it's nature, and you're an evolutionary biologist, You have to keep digging.
What don't I know?
What did I get wrong?
Which of my assumptions is flawed?
Where is the error in my understanding of the universe?
Because the fact is the universe is doing this thing.
It doesn't make sense according to the model I've got.
Therefore, I know that I need to keep looking.
I need to keep digging.
That is the training that you had and that I have had, and that is how we approach everything, even when it seems to most people like, what's evolutionary biology got to do with it?
Well, everything almost always.
Unless it's rocks or quasars, it's evolutionary.
And it is that training that, you know, you were thinking about collusion and conspiracy a lot for decades before COVID, but you were also thinking about rainforests and the patterns of biodiversity on the planet.
And the evolution of morality, and the evolution of senescence and cancer, and all of these other extraordinarily complex systems, which, you know, every single one of those, you had to apply a similar toolkit in its, you know, in its generality, but the precise things were very different.
And so when you start applying that to an understanding of political systems and, you know, how NIH might be in collusion with the CCP, okay, didn't do that one before, but here are all the tools that we bring to bear on this, let's go.
So, you know, were you and I Later to be thinking about Wuhan and the CCP than those who were focused on the CCP for years in advance?
Sure.
And?
Like, you're always going to be later than someone.
There's one person who's first, and this, it feels, you know what it feels like?
This feels like an analogous argument to cultural appropriation.
You know, if you if you weren't the person who invented it, then you have no business here.
Well, come on, guys, like enough already.
This is ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
And I would exactly along the lines that you are arguing, the diversity of the toolkit, right, is actually the strength.
And it may be if you want to just say, hey, I was the first person to spot that they were lying because I knew where they were lying for years before they started lying, you know.
If you want to do that, then well, okay, how operationalizable is that, right?
How much good did you actually do, right?
All you've done is preserve your ability to claim And you're cannibalized, like you can do that thing forever, right?
Along that line.
But did you have a mechanism whereby mRNA shots cause myocarditis?
Did you spot that that is actually going to be true for anything you load into that platform, has nothing to do with spike?
Did you figure out a volumetric model for how to avoid contracting COVID when you can't avoid interacting with people?
Or any respiratory pathogen.
Any respiratory pathogen, you know, all of these things come together and the utility comes from the ability to see all of these pieces, you know?
Do we deserve credit for calling attention to vitamin D as a mechanism for increasing your immunity to all manner of things?
Yes!
Did we spot it first?
Nope.
Did we claim to?
Nope.
In fact, if you go back, you'll see we highlight the people that we learned it from, right?
So anyway, um, I think we made the point.
Stop being sloppy about this.
There is something antagonistic to our interests out there.
It is telling us lots of phony stuff about pandemics.
It seems to be priming us for the next one based on all manner of nonsense and the... what makes it happiest.
is when we fight amongst ourselves for credit or we shoehorn people into a straitjacket to make those two metaphors in order to validate, you know, our own egos or whatever.
That's not doing anybody any good.
So cut it out.
Or as the shirt says, cut that shit out.
Yeah, we should send a shirt to him.
Not a bad idea.
Okay.
I want to talk just a little bit about healthy diets and how we know.
And this, obviously, that topic could be, you know, many, many lifetimes of conversation.
And this particular place that I want to go could also be many lifetimes.
And so we're just going to skate on the surface, because it really, it actually really does fit with what you were talking about with regard to models and collusion and such.
So in 2019, The Lancet published a massive report known as the Eat Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, and Health, and you can just show my screen briefly here.
The actual title of the paper is Food in the Anthropocene, the Eat Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems, and it's a paper with tons and tons of authors and Indeed.
Is EAT some sort of a cutesy acronym?
It's an acronym.
I don't even, I don't remember what, yeah.
Yeah, they're not trying to eat the Lancet.
But yeah, so the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems, and it provides, it provided, it's 2019, it was published, I didn't know about it until this week, but it provided dietary advice that would, it claimed, provide for both healthier human lives, but also a healthier planet.
Since publication, that paper, published in the Lancet and commissioned, it was a Lancet-eat-Lancet commission, has become one of the top 20 most discussed science papers across all of academia.
Cited as of the publication of a paper just this last, in this last month that I'll be mentioning, Stanton 2024.
Cited four and a half years out by over 4,500 other papers.
Which, you know, given the time it takes to publish papers, that's extraordinary.
And maybe more remarkable, by 631 policy documents.
Okay, so this is an important document, right?
And given what its claim is, like, we got it.
We got the thing that you all should be doing with regard to eating to make yourself healthier and the planet healthier.
Here it is.
So...
Let's see, let me pull up the... Sorry.
Yeah, here we go.
So here's just a PDF of that same thing.
Food and the Anthropocene, the Eat Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems.
The executive summary is what it is.
It's, you know, a lot of public policy Stuff.
We quantitatively describe a universal healthy reference diet to provide a basis for estimating the health and environmental effects of adopting an alternative diet to standard current diets, many of which are high in unhealthy foods.
Scientific targets for a healthy reference diet are based on extensive literature on foods, dietary patterns, and health outcomes, This healthy reference diet largely consists of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and unsaturated oils, includes a low to moderate amount of seafood and poultry, and includes no or a low quantity of red meat, processed meat, added sugar, refined grains, and starchy vegetables.
The global average intake of healthy foods is substantially lower than reference diet intake, whereas overconsumption of unhealthy foods is increasing.
Using several approaches, we found with a high level of certainty that global adoption of the reference dietary pattern would provide major health benefits, including a large reduction in total mortality.
Okay, so there's one particular, um, the A paper came out sometime in the last week or two by a professor out of Ireland, I think she is, saying basically, what the hell?
I went digging, I went looking, and I see error after error in your statistical analyses, in your data, in the models that you've used, and I don't know how you could possibly be making the claims that you're making.
And she goes after a number of their recommendations, but the one I want to focus on, and one of the ones that she focuses on, is this bit about what you should be doing is eating no red meat at all.
Okay?
No red meat.
So, let's see, her new paper is this.
Perspective.
Unacceptable use of substandard metrics and policy decisions which mandate large reductions in animal source foods.
Actually, here I'm going to read the abstract.
Many recent very influential reports, including those from the Global Burden of Disease Risk Factor Collaborators, The Eat Lancet Commission on Food Planet Health and the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change have recommended dramatic reductions or total exclusion of animal-sourced foods, particularly ruminant products, red meat and dairy, from the human diet.
They strongly suggest that these dietary shifts will not only benefit planetary health but also human health.
However, as detailed in this perspective, the paper that she's writing, there are grounds for considerable concern in regard to the quality and transparency of the input data, the validity of the assumptions, and the appropriateness of the statistical modeling used in the calculation of the global health estimates, which underpin the claimed human health benefits.
The lesser bioavailability of protein and key micronutrients from plant-sourced foods versus animal-sourced foods was not adequately recognized or addressed in any of these reports.
Furthermore, assessments of bias and certainty were either limited or absent.
Despite many of these errors and limitations being publicly acknowledged by the GBD and the Eat Lancet authors, no corrections have been applied to the published papers.
As a consequence, these reports continue to erroneously influence food policy decisions and international dietary guidelines, such as the World Wildlife Fund's Live Well Diet and the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2023.
So again, I'm sort of skating along the surface here going, this paper, this commission published in 2019, says basically stop eating red meat and dairy.
And that paper, which has been cited over 4,500 times in scientific papers and over 630 times in policy papers, is now the basis, the basis for dietary guidelines being put out by other organizations that have their own imprimatur of seriousness, the basis for dietary guidelines being put out by other organizations
And so it's like seriousness on top of seriousness, but these are like really unserious turtles actually all the way down, like they're not actually what they appear, like these are like skin suit organizations.
And you go back to a paper, the same lead author, the Stanton 2024 that I was just reading from, in 2022 she, with a few other authors, published a letter in the Lancet in correspondence called, 36-fold higher estimate of deaths attributable to red meat intake in GBD 2019.
Is this reliable?
So she goes back, there was a report from the same group, Eat Lancet, in 2017, just two years earlier.
And she says, she and her authors here say, her co-authors here say, to what might you attribute a 36-fold higher estimate of mortality due to eating red meat just two years later?
What happened?
What do we now know about the dire effects of eating red meat that we did not know before?
So, actually, if I can just turn my screen back for a moment to remind myself where we are here.
Yeah, okay, so you can you can show my screen.
What they did was, there is something known in this, I don't even know what to call this field, like global public health, dietary nutrition, something.
They're using many, many measures.
One of them is the Theoretical Minimum Risk Exposure, TMRAL, which in my sort of vernacular understanding of what this is, it's the exposure level, that is how much food or nutrients you're actually ingesting, that minimizes the risk of death from all causes related to a single risk factor.
So it's some kind of like aggregate data thing, where in creating a model, as the authors of the Eat-Lancet study did, they assigned for everything, for, you know, fruits, for green leafy vegetables, for red meat, for processed meats, for dairy, a TMREL level And where they got that is pretty obscure.
And indeed, in this case, where they got it was based on data that they had collected, which they hadn't really published.
Like, no, actually, they hadn't published it at all.
So these authors say, you've got to show us these data, and they finally have released those data, and they're all so unreliable and ridiculous.
But based on these data that were in this 2019 report, that are either non-existent or don't say what they said they should say, they set the TMREL, again that's the Theoretical Minimum Risk Exposure Level, for red meat To zero.
I think it should be even lower.
They just set it to zero.
So this is claiming to be research, and it's a model in which they set the only safe level of ingesting red meat to zero.
And then, wow, they acted surprised when what they got out of the model was it turns out that eating red meat, any red meat at all, is going to cause harm.
And so, these authors who are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, have a number of wonderful things that they say in response.
Let me just read one more thing.
This is again from the Stanton et al.
2022 Letter to the Lancet in response to this That's ridiculous but very important in terms of setting expectations for what we should be eating worldwide.
2019 study out of the Lancet.
The assumption of a red meat TMRL of zero is counterintuitive given the role of meat in evolutionary diets and contemporary hunter-gathered populations.
I was going to point that out myself.
In which cardio and with regard to the contemporary hunter-gathered populations in which cardiometabolic diseases were and still are uncommon.
Furthermore, recently published results from one of the largest multinational studies which was conducted in five continents and examined the association between different types of meat and health outcomes.
The prospective urban-rural epidemiology study contradicts this premise.
It is of considerable importance that the GBD 2019 Risk Factors Collaborators provide the empirical evidence for this change in TMREL and confirm that there was no projection beyond the available evidence.
We further question that the totality of nutritional effects of red meat have been considered in the meta-regressions.
If the TMREL is assumed to be zero, red meat would then de facto be presented as an inherently harmful food.
This assumption would ignore the well-documented nutritional benefits with respect to the supply of essential nutrients and bioactive components.
In a nutshell, we've got a report from 2019 It was based on evidence that was not public, never published.
After having been asked to release it, they have just released it, and it is riddled with errors and statistical shenanigans and just general scientific chicanery.
And yet, it is that report which is forming the basis for global guidelines for the reduction of red meat intake for every human being on the planet.
The... Look, red meat aside, there is too much chicanery in our diet.
I think that is clear.
Absolutely.
And there's a way... So, first of all, A thousand versions of money printers here.
Absolutely.
And monkeying with the baseline.
Monkeying with the baseline, and if we can only get our particular thing into the scientific literature dressed up as if it was the result of research that tells us what we should now be eating, which by the way isn't going to affect our dinner party at all, but we're going to ignore it.
Maybe we'll even laugh about it.
You guys should stop eating red meat because this very scientific, this very science-y paper... So science-y.
...says that you should.
And I think the point is, look, the food pyramid was garbage.
Remember the food pyramid?
Yeah.
Oh, so comforting, geometrically speaking.
Yeah.
I mean, it was really very, very good stuff because it was so intuitive and easy to follow and, well, wrong.
That was the problem with it.
Remember how we were supposed to laugh at people who thought there was pyramid power and like we're going and sitting inside pyramids, and yet we were supposed to not in any way laugh at these people?
At the food pyramid people, yeah, who appear to be equally crazy.
But we have like an infinite series of abuses of people's tendency not to investigate the content of deductive logic.
I realize that's a really convoluted way to say this, but If this bunch of things that you're not going to read, and if you did, you probably wouldn't understand them as true, then this conclusion is unavoidable.
Right?
In this case, they literally just took the slider and were like, just set it to zero.
Set it to zero.
Let's just start with the assumption that red meat is really bad for you and it's always going to increase death.
And then let's pretend that we didn't set that as an assumption and claim it's the conclusion.
Like classic modeling chicanery again.
Let's set red meat to death and see what happens in our model.
We'll just see whether how much red meat we should be even eating given that red meat is death, right?
So yeah, but it counts on the fact that even the pros who are citing this how many freaking times?
Over 4,500 times in four and a half years, and that doesn't even account for the fact that it takes a long time to get stuff published.
Right, so the pros are falling all over themselves to embrace and cite a model that's obviously nonsense.
How much does this look like the Ivermectin stuff, where the fact is, well, the evidence is clear that Ivermectin doesn't work.
Evidence based on what method?
Oh, a very complex method in which we've shifted all of these things.
Well, what if, you know… Let's say we give Alexandros Marinos a couple of weeks to scrutinize that method.
What's he going to find in there?
You know, oh my goodness, he finds all kinds of malfeasance.
And you know what would be necessary to figure out how important they were?
We need to see the data.
When are we going to see the data?
Never.
It's not going to be released, right?
So it's like that game.
That is on a need-to-know basis, and we need for you not to know.
We really need for you not to know, and especially not to tell Alex.
Yeah, it's some kind of shell game.
And the thing is, the food pyramid was not broken by accident.
It was broken by lobbyists who needed the food pyramid to reflect a particular diet based on cereal brains and stuff.
And the point is how many people died early because they believed the food pyramid that was presented to them that was actually the result of lobbying and not science, you know, lots of them.
So the amount of harm done to people was, you know, immeasurable.
And we, you know, can look back on it now and say, huh, that's a bunch of crap, right?
Aren't we clever?
But okay, then what's the latest science say?
Well, the latest science isn't any more scientific, right?
You know, the American Heart Association, right?
How long did I listen to the American Heart Association on the basis that they were at least, you know, maybe they were a little... It's the American Heart Association!
They were overly focused on the heart, but, you know, at least we can figure out what's good for you by listening to them.
Well, you know, the seed oil involvement in the creation of this thing is, you know, conspicuous.
Decades after, you know, the harm is done, we can discover that actually, you know, it's in some sense the product of a trade group.
Right.
So, yeah, it raises questions.
I did not go and look into any of the authors of the study.
I don't know what their perverse incentives are, but I'll bet we could find them.
And even if you can't, the question is... At the end of the day, it doesn't matter.
If they just took the slider and set it to zero and then went, aha, our assumption has become our conclusion.
Therefore, don't eat red meat.
That's not the way you're...
Logically, and scientifically and morally and ethically and all the rest of it, but logically you cannot do that.
The evolutionary point that the critic makes is definitely on my mind of points to raise.
What are the chances that a species in which most of its populations had red meat as a major component of their diet is actually harmed by the very fact of eating red meat?
And the extant remnants of those populations have far fewer cardiometabolic diseases than the people eating the weird diet.
Right.
Huh.
Yeah.
Weird.
And what are the, you know, red meat is not a novel product of some process, so the fact that we like it, that's probably the result of a long evolutionary history.
And that's proof that we're immoral.
You don't remember the old joke, if God didn't want us eating animals, why did he make them out of meat?
It is kind of this point, right?
It's one thing when you're dealing with something novel that you don't have the ability to evaluate its quality because your ancestors didn't have it.
But our ancestors had a lot of access to red meat.
We like it for a reason.
There are differences in how that meat is raised.
The more it is raised in a manner that is similar to the animals that our ancestors ate, the better off you are.
Shocking, that.
But you can also make the animals sick by giving them a diet high in grains.
Funny that, yeah.
It's the animal's fault for believing the food pyramid.
Yes, feedlot cattle shouldn't have been reading up on what the USDA thinks they should be eating.
You know, I don't know if this is in their defense, but they are very gullible animals.
Cows.
Yes.
So the fact that they were buying into the food pyramid is perhaps at least predictable.
But the other thing is, look, we know That meat is not inherently bad as a food substance, right?
Let us all agree.
We know it because lions and leopards don't have a problem with it.
No, no, no.
Let me finish the point.
Lions and leopards don't have a problem.
Therefore, biologically speaking, it is not an unsolvable problem that red meat causes for those who consume it.
It's been solved in lions.
We can't eat cellulose, and termites are in a symbiotic relationship with organisms that can, and they can digest this.
I get it, but this is a false analogy.
My point is, lions don't have ill effects from red meat, so it's not like red meat is a toxin.
Our ancestors ate red meat.
For millions of years.
So the point is, what are the chances that a solvable problem given millions of years of opportunity for evolution to solve the problem remains unsolved at the level that the actual level that we can tolerate is zero?
I would say the chances of that being right are near zero.
Right.
Yes.
They approach zero, right?
They absolutely do.
Whereas the idea that it's kind of pretty much okay to have some stuff in your diet that was invented yesterday on an evolutionary time scale, you know, if it was invented in the 20th century and that isn't having its slider sent all the way to zero, you know, some of the stuff that was invented in the 20th century, it's probably going to be okay for us.
But in general, minimize that stuff and maximize the stuff that you're, you know, that A, in Michael Pollan's words, that your grandmother would recognize as food, and that you can be certain your ancestors have been eating for at least thousands, if not tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of years.
Well, the way to do the question about the stuff that's recently been invented, is you don't necessarily know if it's harmful, but what you do know is that it's not safe.
That's right.
Right?
Because the point is... It's like certain mRNA vaccines.
Right.
To say something is safe is to say it is without risk, and when something is truly novel, it is not without risk.
You don't know what its long-term implications are.
You don't know what its implications are for epigenetic regulation of stuff.
Well, this is exactly the position that we have had on GMOs since the 90s.
I remember TAing a class at the University of Michigan in one of our first years in grad school, mid-90s, and it was one of these biology for non-majors classes.
We had a paper on GMOs, and even then, it was just abundantly clear.
Okay, yes, that sounds like frankenfood, but put that aside.
Get over your aversion to it because it sounds not right.
Think instead about what that aversion means.
Why are you squeamish about something that has never before been together evolutionarily?
That means it's not tested.
That means that we just don't know.
And the sleight of hand there is something that we can unpack, right?
You can focus on the actual food stuff, the creature that's been genetically modified, and you can say, we can demonstrate no harm, right?
Okay, did you test it in light of the farming practice that it alters?
Did you test it with respect to trade-offs?
In other words, you have made one strain tolerant to some pesticide, which probably isn't good for you, But, in order to get the insert that allows it to be tolerant, you have chosen a strain.
And the point is, was that strain optimal with respect to all of the other parameters?
Or did you sacrifice those parameters in order to get it to be tolerant to some herbicide?
Right?
So, the point is, there's lots of logical reasons To wonder about how healthy that thing is and whether or not it contains risks we don't know.
But the presentation is very much like that paper.
The presentation is pseudoscientific.
And it sounds like this.
It sounds like this.
It goes, human beings have been genetically modifying organisms for thousands of years.
This is not different.
This is just simply a matter of us doing what our ancestors have done.
Yes, in a newer, higher-tech way, but there's nothing new.
How could genetically modifying an organism be inherently bad if that is literally all of our food crops and all of our animals?
Right?
And the point is, OK, that is exactly what it sounds like.
That's what it sounds like.
And the problem is, it comes in the calm, measured tones of the would-be scientist wearing the lab coat and holding the glassware, and they're wrong.
Right, they're wrong and the point is most people who do not have the training to spot what's wrong in that seemingly logical presentation, right, they are belittled into not raising their questions by the idea that they are being superstitious and they are actually frightened of something that is not only not harmful but logically incapable of being bad.
As many people were hounded into accepting the COVID dogma around the vaccines, around off-label use of drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat, because anyone who began to raise questions about this, if you didn't have
And courage may not be exactly the right word, but the courage of your convictions, based usually on either cynicism, just like I'm going to go against what these people say because I know they tend to be wrong and that's the safest bet, or a history of trying to navigate like, no, I know that they've lied to me because they can't possibly be safe, therefore what else might they be lying to me about and what can we know for sure?
It was the same shaming technique that we saw on a slower scale with regard to GMOs in the 90s, as those were being trotted out, actually.
It was very much the same thing.
It is the same in this way.
There were two things that were possibly wrong with you if you didn't buy their vaccine dogma.
One of them was that you were mentally feeble, right?
That you didn't understand how well these things had been tested and how much you were freaking out over nothing.
And the other is that you were morally deficient, and that you were a parasite who was going to put grandma at risk in order to hedge out the tiniest of risks that you would expose yourself to.
There's a third one.
Cowardly.
Scared of needles.
Scared of needles.
That one didn't stick so well, but I agree, that was deployed.
That's one that I saw testimonials of the converted.
I got over my fear of needles and I went and got the jab.
Yep.
But the idea of mentally feeble and morally deficient... I can't prove on neither.
It is also what's going on with all of this pseudo-wisdom that is emerging on the food stuff.
It's like, oh, here's a bunch of hand-waving science bullshit that you're going against if you eat that stuff.
And what's more, you're killing the planet.
You're just bad.
That's what's wrong with you.
Really?
Your desire for a hamburger is worth destroying the planet?
Right, exactly.
And so the problem is that we, humans, are emotional beings that can be made defensive by these kinds of arguments, right?
You want to prove that you're not stupid, and so you want to live by their guidelines so you can demonstrate that you understood their paper, which is not Comprehensible.
Because it's wrong, right?
Or you want to demonstrate that you're more than doing your part for a good old planet Earth, and you know, look, I love this planet like no other.
I'm really fond of it.
You and me both, man.
Yeah, I mean, it's been good to us.
I have to say, of all the planets that we've been to, this one's been the best, and not by a small margin.
But, in any case, the manipulation via these emotional channels that then results in pseudo-analytical conclusions is a pattern that we should just get good at spotting, because this isn't the last time they're going to use it on us.
Oh no, it's not.
All right.
There are a couple of things that you were thinking about maybe talking about.
We've been going for a while, a couple hours already.
Did you want to go to either?
Yeah.
Let's talk about the orcas.
Orcas.
Briefly.
So a story emerged this week, and I have to tell you that this is a tough story for me, actually, because I connect it with my reaction to road kill, animals that have been killed on the road, which I have always had trouble with.
Right?
I am not an uncaring person when it comes to harms to people, but there's something about animals killed by cars that just, it hits me hard every time.
And so anyway, maybe that's a defect in my character that I feel it as viscerally as I do.
But anyway, a story emerged yesterday.
This is not about roadkill.
It is about a pod of orcas, and this pod of orcas was trapped in some sea ice off of northern Japan.
Hokkaido, yeah.
And it was a large pod, including several calves, and this really got my attention because there are pods of orcas up here where we live, And recruiting, you know, a year in which a calf, you know, is born and makes it to next year is a big deal around here.
This is a, uh, a tough process.
So anyway, I mean, the interbirth interval at a minimum, I think is two years and sometimes it's way longer than that.
And a lot of the calves don't survive.
Right.
And so anyway, um, you want to show the video of these trapped orcas?
Oh my God.
So, here you have a pod of orcas in a small section that is ice-free, bobbing up and down, clearly trying to breathe.
You can imagine with the calves there, they would have an even harder time getting to the surface than the adults.
And anyway, the story struck me as potentially very tragic, because a number of things were true.
One, there didn't seem to be any plausible plan for saving them.
Well, I can imagine that if there were an icebreaker ship nearby, maybe it would be doable.
There's a question about the depth of the water.
Anyway, nobody seemed to have an idea of how to break the ice to free these animals, and it looked like, you know, these are warm-blooded creatures who were going to exhaust themselves and die quickly.
And the idea, you know, we get very focused if a A group of miners gets trapped in a mine and we know that they're going to suffocate and there's a race to save them and I understand why those stories obsess us.
But these animals, it was like that story, you know, these are obviously incredibly intelligent creatures and also Not common.
I don't think these particular orcas are endangered, but... The particular population that they're coming from?
Yeah, but nonetheless, this was like an entire little lineage, right?
That could be wiped out by having gotten trapped by the ice in this way.
Apparently, it's not the first time this has happened.
But anyway, that struck me as a, you know, just an awful predicament.
Good news, I think, is that as of today, there's no sign of them, which people take, could be that they succumbed, but I think... Although it seems unlikely that they would all have succumbed at once.
So I would, I would, it would, it would seem that if they were beginning to fail, that there would be fewer rather than none.
Right.
That none looks like escape.
Like escape.
Yeah.
Although it could be that as, you know, You know, these are intelligent creatures.
They, you know, have a social hierarchy.
It could be that it became obvious that the only way out of this was to attempt to swim under the ice farther than... And none of them didn't work.
And none of them made it.
That's a possibility too.
So I don't know.
I'm...
I'm interested to know what their fate was and concerned that... We may never know.
These weren't tagged animals, I don't think.
They weren't tagged, but they may be known because of, you know, photo IDs and all.
They carried photo IDs, they don't have pockets, but... No, they never get stopped for speeding.
Even though they're fully capable of it.
Oh, sure.
But people take, they have atlases of the idiosyncrasies of their dorsal fins and their color pattern, and so it's possible that these are well-known animals.
I don't know.
But anyway, I thought this was an interesting story for a number of reasons.
One, there's the simple Tragedy of it.
The fact that populations of orcas have been trapped in this space a couple of times begins to suggest an evolutionary question here.
Yeah, and so when you first told me about this, I was like, Japan?
Sea ice?
That seems really far south.
And apparently Hokkaido, which is the northernmost island where this was happening, is the southernmost point where there is regular sea ice in the winter.
So it's not unusual for there to be sea ice there.
Although, you know, I don't know exactly what's going on with the circulation in the Pacific, but that does seem pretty far south for the ABCIs.
Yeah, it does.
But to the extent that this is a regular hazard, you would imagine that there's an evolutionary response in the whales, that they would know that this was a hazard.
But think about the following question.
Let's say that none of these animals survived.
Well, then you would have the production over the course of, I don't know, a decade of animals that would replace them in the ecosystem, right?
There would be room in the ecosystem for that many more whales.
If other parameters are Or stable.
Then you expect other populations to produce more surviving calves that then end up creating a new pod.
Right.
So all else being equal, we expect those animals to be replaced.
Let's say that this has happened a thousand times.
That would create a very weak selective force for trepidation amongst these whales about swimming into whatever conditions result in them getting trapped, right?
Because the new whales are naive, and so if there was a little predisposition to be worried about ice, you know...
It might, you know, the whales that didn't swim into the ice would be more likely to produce that population, so there'd be a little bit of evolutionary pressure, but not much.
Whereas, and this is actually a great example of why some of us critters, especially humans, but also almost especially Toothed whales and, you know, apes.
Clothes and elephants and apes and parrots and corvids.
Right.
Crows.
The long-lived social generational overlap, long childhood beasties.
Right.
In which our genomes have offloaded so much of the work of evolutionary adaptation to a cultural layer, right?
If these animals survived, or if any of them survived, then what they carry with them is the understanding that that condition which seemed reasonable enough to swim into was actually deadly, right?
If all of them survived, they will have that knowledge, because they will have gone through this terrifying experience.
And that terrifying experience, what is terror?
Well, terror is the, you know, all right, activate these contingency programs, and definitely remember this, because it's really important, and you don't want to end up in the situation again, you know?
So the sort of negotiation with God that a human might go through, like, if I get out of this, I'll never do it again, right?
That kind of thing.
Um, you would imagine that these whales would carry this as the equivalent of a whale story, however it is encoded, right?
Even if what it is, is that the baby whales detect their parents become, you know, concerned as they swim near the ice and they don't know exactly what it's about, but they know that ice is more dangerous than it looks.
Yeah, well, so I mean two of those parameters I just gave in that list that you're well familiar with, long-lived and generational overlap, right?
Cultural transmission of lessons learned from earlier in life when you are yourself old.
That is what all of those organisms that I mentioned have the capacity to do, and this fits very neatly with what is called the grandmother hypothesis, right?
So, you know, why and I'm trying to remember is it elephants or orcas or is there some evidence in both That they are the only other organisms besides humans that go through menopause.
What is the point of post-reproductive life?
Well, if you're long-lived and are social and have generational overlap and you have long childhoods and you have to learn how to be who you are as opposed to you're born and you're a giraffe and within moments you can run from leopards.
If you have to learn how to be who you are, there's going to be a lot of value in continuing to impart those lessons learned and generating new lessons and engaging in the act of discovery and creativity long past when you might be producing kits.
Right.
And so the prediction of that hypothesis is that Orcas or any creature that has a grandmother will out-compete, all else being equal, will out-compete a similar individual who doesn't, because the benefit of the information that their grandmother carries will provide a material advantage.
Because no matter how good your parents are, or especially if they're not very good, your grandmother and your grandfather, but, you know, your grandmother you know is your grandmother if she's your mother's mother.
She has been around for longer, has seen more.
She has survived more things than your parents have, and while what she has lived through and the lessons that she has taken to heart most may be farther from your current circumstances because more time has elapsed, the fact is that she did it.
She made it through, and she may remember that time that we were trapped in the ice off Hokkaido, and here's what we did, guys.
Right, especially for things that have very low periodicity, right?
The chances that your grandmother saw it but your mom didn't, right, is high.
And so the advantage of having a grandmother who knows is potentially the difference between life and death.
So anyway, I don't know what's happened to these whales.
I sure hope they made it out.
I sure hope they made it out.
I mean, it's such a remarkable and special creature and, you know, very sad if they exhausted and drowned, but let's hope they didn't.
And I hope less, but I hope that we find out.
Yeah, I do too.
It will be forever an open question until we do find out.
So I hope so too.
But anyway, I thought what a fascinating and terrifying circumstance.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, I think we've arrived.
I think we have done that.
I think we have arrived.
So we will be back next week.
Same time, same place.
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Yes, Zach?
This is Zach speaking.
Brett and I are going to do an AMA about Panama, so if you have questions this Friday on Locals, I'm not sure exactly the time yet, but we are going to be taking questions about that trip specifically and answering them.
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