Polite Society Can Kill You: The 214th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 214th 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 polite society, RSV, and Google’s Gemini. Under what circumstances should we listen to, or defer to, the will of polite society? How can we tell if those conditions are changing? With regard to RSV (Respiratory Syncitial Virus), how deadly is it? To whom? What drugs—vaccinations and otherwise—...
- Hey folks, welcome to the 214th Dark Horse podcast live stream.
You are Dr. Heather Hying, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
Things continue to happen, mostly for the worse, but nonetheless, here we are to talk about the implications of these things using what we call the evolutionary lens.
That's right.
Here we are with the Evolutionary Lens.
Come join us on Rumble.
Subscribe to our channel there, please.
Today we're going to talk about polite society and RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, and positive feedback, and Gemini, and maybe some other stuff as well.
I forgot to mention because of all of the difficulty getting us up onto the internet, which has had nothing to do with us folks.
That was our ISP or actually something upstream of our ISP.
But anyway, here we are.
It is three quarters of the way through official winter by my calculation.
From the winter solstice to the spring equinox, we are three quarters of the way almost exactly today.
Really?
Yes.
Which means we're very likely to make it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I feel like maybe not quite, but maybe, yeah.
Well, it's possible, you know, I assumed a 30-day month.
Yeah, you can't do that.
Yeah, you can't really do that, but I came out with 75.5% of the way through winter, so with a little bit of wiggle room, I believe we are there.
Winter is longer this year, of course, than normal.
Because of the hedgehog and the shadow?
No, because of the Leap Day.
You know what?
I had completely forgotten that tomorrow is Leap Day.
Happy Leap Day soon!
Well, thank you.
Yes, I, uh, how does one spend an entire extra day cobbled together of four quarter days from four separate years?
I guess we'll find out.
I guess we will find out.
We can report back.
So we're not doing a Q&A today, but we had two last week, and you can find them there at Locals.
We encourage you to become a Local supporter over at our Locals channel.
There's a watch party going on now.
We've got Locals-only live conversation, also at Locals early release of guest episodes.
AMAs, all of our Q&As, access to our Discord server, which has lively conversation and book clubs and karaoke and happy hours and more.
And we're going to move the rest of the stuff that I want to talk to you about until the end, except for our carefully chosen ads, which as usual, we have three ads at the top of the hour with sponsors whom we actually truly vouch for.
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Yeah.
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Indeed.
All right.
All right.
You wanted to start by talking about polite society, I believe.
Yes, I did want to talk about polite society.
I've been thinking increasingly much about polite society because polite society has become increasingly impolite to me and us, and frankly, I'm not having any of it.
So, I wanted to talk about what polite society is, how it's behaving, what the alternatives might be, and so here we are.
In thinking about polite society, it occurred to me that polite society is effectively the social arm of the Overton window.
In other words, there are lots of things which we are told we must not believe and talk about.
Who does the telling?
It's polite society, and polite society also tells us who we must not sit down and talk with.
And our viewers, many of them, will be aware that I have sat... I have seated myself... Have I sat down with?
I guess I've sat down with several people.
Who caused the blood pressure of those in polite society to rise.
I've certainly sat down with Tucker Carlson and they barely tolerate that kind of behavior.
They don't tolerate Tucker Carlson himself, but those who sit down and talk with him are only barely tolerated in polite society.
And then I went and I sat down with Alex Jones.
And that is just a bridge too far as far as polite society is concerned.
So I received a whole bunch of pushback.
Zach, do you want to show the Caitlyn Flanagan tweet?
Now I will say, before we show this tweet, I like Caitlyn Flanagan.
Always have.
I think she's an upstanding person and Yeah, you want to show that?
So in any case what she lashed out at me with was Evergreen College's loss is our gain of a crackpot.
Here she is calling me a crackpot even though I think up until the week that she did this she would also have said that she liked me.
Then she goes on to say That the reason for her accusing me of being a crackpot is that HIV causes AIDS, and condoms are hugely effective means of lowering risks of transmission, and gay men living with the disease stopped dying when researchers discovered that ACT could perform a miracle.
I mean, A-Z-T.
What did I say?
What even is ACT?
ACT was an activist organization associated with It was.
Now, that's an embarrassment because she got it wrong.
It's not AZT she's looking for.
It's triple drug cocktails, protease inhibitors, and the like.
And anyway, she acknowledges that in the replies.
But this is a classic.
This is somebody who is reassured by the fact that she is deeply integrated in polite society and that therefore the kinds of things that people in polite society say have passed some kind of standard and they can be trusted and then she's made an error that reveals that she's not deeply familiar with the subject matter.
Now she is taking me to task actually for something I said to Joe Rogan What I said to Joe Rogan was that having read Bobby Kennedy's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, that I found the argument that HIV is not the causal factor that causes AIDS to be more compelling than I expected.
Now, I don't think there's any universe in which that should be a scandalous statement.
You can believe that HIV is the causal agent behind AIDS, and I can be surprised that the evidence that that's not the case is better than I thought.
Which does not mean that it is not the causal agent.
It means that I was prepared to see nonsense and that is absolutely not what I saw.
What's more, the claim in question is thoroughly well researched and presented with an encyclopedic set of references in the book I referenced.
So this is a book that has sold a huge number of copies.
It's a best-selling book May I just add something?
Please.
I too read Bobby Kennedy's book and was struck by all of it.
I found it more compelling than I expected to.
Go ahead.
May I just add something?
Please.
I too read Bobby Kennedy's book and was struck by all of it.
It's a challenging book in terms of coming to grips with how many assumptions we have that are in fact untested.
And I've said this before on air here, that I did not, you know, fact-check every single thing that he has in that book.
It's an incredibly well-referenced book.
But I did spot-check a number of things, and everything that I spot-checked, you know, turned out to be, you know, exactly as he said it was.
And that's not to say that the original research was perfect.
Of course it might not have been.
But I was actually, with regard to the question about whether or not HIV is the single causal factor in AIDS, even more compelled than by Bobby Kennedy's book, by Celia Farber's book, which was recently republished by Chelsea Green.
It was originally published in 2006, and it's called Serious Adverse Events.
And I wrote about that and published actually an excerpt with with her and the publishers okay on my substack back in April of last year.
And interesting that that got almost no pushback.
And granted, you know, there's not nearly as many views on, you know, a substack of mine as there is on a Joe Rogan.
But, you know, there's many tens of thousands.
And literally no one said, how could you possibly say that?
And in part, what I was saying was the evidence here is much more substantial than I imagined it would be, and it raises questions that I didn't know that I should be having, and now I have them.
I have not read that book, but it does not at all surprise me that it is also thoroughly compelling, because what you find here is a A story in which the pattern that we've now seen with COVID is repeated, where received wisdom becomes the only thing that you can publish.
And so there's a kind of self-reinforcing aspect to this, which leaves us having to struggle with the question of, is the story I believe, on whatever topic it might be, the one that's accurate?
Or is there some other story that's struggling to gain attention?
And, you know, as I said on Joe Rogan's program, The fact that Luc Montagnier, who got a Nobel Prize for the discovery of HIV, came to understand it not as the causal agent, is a powerful piece of evidence to me.
This is somebody who was highly intelligent, and his own contribution, his own legacy, is decreased.
Based on the conclusion that he came to towards the end of his life, that it was not the causal agent.
So I find that an interesting fact.
That is to say, he has the opposite of a perverse incentive.
Right.
In fact, he would have had an incentive to, if he had questions about the important role of the virus that he literally discovered or co-discovered, depending on how you're keeping track of it, it would have been far easier in every regard for him to just keep quiet about it.
Absolutely.
And, you know, in a legal context, I believe this is called statement against interest.
And the idea is if you make a statement, if you are under oath and you make a statement that actually is bad for you, if it's true, it is taken to be more likely to be true because you have the opposite of a perverse incentive to say it.
So in any case, but I also think, and you know, Caitlin, look, to be honest with you, I'm going to forgive you for this.
All right?
I'm going to forgive you because I think I know I think I know where the motivation comes from, and it's an honorable motivation even if it ends up in a dishonorable outburst like this.
But the entire episode is not what it appears to be.
Now I believe, based on private communication, that Caitlin was actually upset at me for my failure to wave the appropriate flag after October 7th.
The fact of what happened here is that my having gone on Alex Jones meant that it was now possible to attack me in polite society.
And there are a number of people who are doing that dishonestly because they have... there are other places where I believe they genuinely think I am in some sort of significant error and I am a threat to something.
But the point is, this is all not the way this is done.
And what's more, I wanted to point out That it doesn't have to be done this way.
There are lots of people who disagree with me and disagree with things that I said in these places, but do so without ad hominem attacks and do so in a way that does not claim that there are certain people you're not allowed to sit next to and have a conversation.
So would you show Michael Shermer's tweet?
Now, Michael Shermer takes a lot of crap from people for his positions.
I certainly disagree with him on a wide range of issues.
There are, of course, many other issues on which I agree with him, but the fact is he does not treat these things as personal.
In fact, he says right here that people have asked if he's had a falling out, and no, we haven't had a falling out.
And so my point would be Not that you shouldn't be disagreeing with me, but that if you're going to disagree, don't make it personal.
And this is where we get to the rubber meeting the road with respect to polite society.
My claim is going to be that polite society exists in all eras.
There was a polite society during the Nazi era.
And I'm sure it had its beliefs and suppositions, and there were, you know, people you could sit next to that would have been scandalized.
So you want to show that picture, the blueberry picture?
There are a couple of them.
So there are a couple of famous pictures that recently, I guess maybe it's not that recent anymore, but you know, 10 years ago or something, these pictures emerged.
Somebody found a So these are some very nice Nazi girls outside of Auschwitz enjoying some blueberries as there's a genocide going in a few miles away.
Okay, this is what polite society looks like in the Nazi era.
You want to show the other image?
Now, my point is not to compare anybody in our environment with Nazis.
My point is to say that polite society is always present, and the fact that polite society has beliefs about what's tolerable, who's tolerable,
That it sets those boundaries is something that those who are in polite society, you have to ask yourself, am I in polite society in an era when polite society is tolerating things that it shouldn't tolerate, and therefore should I view polite society with skepticism in this era, versus an era in which presumably when things are humming along and moving in a good direction, maybe polite society amplifies that, maybe it's an amplifier.
But, so, what I'm getting at is What is polite society putting up with at the moment?
Well, polite society is tolerating one of the major political parties fielding a candidate who is obviously mentally decrepit.
That has been obvious since before he was elected the first time.
But the idea is polite society is not in the streets over the fact that we have a president who is incompetent to do the job that he must do and that that's actually a severe constitutional crisis, right?
If this was a body of people who soberly evaluate the issues of the day and reach conclusions based on the science that they swear that they follow, then these people would be very troubled by the fact that we have an incompetent president.
And they too would be calling, as I have called, for his stepping down or being removed in favor of Kamala Harris, who I do not want to be president, but that would at least be a coherent presidency.
It would be somebody that you could call in the middle of the night and say, Madam President, we have evidence that a strike has been launched against us.
We have five minutes to decide whether to launch a counter-strike.
Kamala Harris can at least understand what she's being told.
It's not obvious that Joe Biden can.
He has no business being president, and polite society is okay with it.
In fact, many in polite society will tell you that you have an obligation to vote for the man.
Which is absurd, and what's more, I mean, the real hallmark of polite society's insanity at this moment is that many in polite society will in fact tell you that you're not allowed to contemplate somebody who is not Joe Biden or whoever will replace him because you will be making it more likely that Donald Trump will attain the office.
Now my point is you don't get to play that card when your party is claiming that they are going to field an incompetent president for a second term.
You've surrendered that argument.
I don't think the argument is valid under normal circumstances, but we get to consider whatever we want because your party is creating an emergency.
So, alright, that's just for starters.
Polite Society is comfortable enough with an extra-constitutional version of a presidency in which the DNC, or whatever it is, is actually the president, and the real president is just a figurehead who's incompetent to do the job.
It's also apparently comfortable with the mutilation of healthy young people as the result of a delusion that is well understood is one that people grow out of.
So polite society ought to be in the streets about that.
If polite society is a reliable entity for judging who is, you know, reasonable enough to talk to and who isn't, Well, in both cases, presumably the polite society part of this will argue, obviously there would be cases when your argument would make sense, but we're not there, right?
If the DNC was running a llama, like an actual llama with two L's, for president, it would be understood that that was a bridge too far.
So the argument will be, he's fine.
He's totally fine, and he's a great president.
And with regard to the barbaric practices having our children being experimented on, we will similarly be told, at first, and less so now, but at first, not only is it fine, but it's necessary.
It's necessary for their health, otherwise they will kill themselves.
And so, in both cases, the argument that you are making has to be understood by everyone, and therefore the only response possible is, the thing that you see that we are doing is not as bad as you say it is.
Well, I mean, I have no doubt that they have rationalizations that sound great as long as you assemble an echo chamber of people, all of whom are sort of loosely on board with the same ideas, which is why I have stopped caring at all that they view me as finally having gone too far, right?
My feeling is They do not understand that their little club is not an arbiter of anything, right?
So, you know, it is also the case that these people have tolerated and still tolerate the fact of a extremely dangerous medical technology having been mandated on the population That people who didn't take it were demonized.
In fact, Matt Orfila just put up an excellent compilation of places where the idea of the pandemic of the unvaccinated was said by anyone and everyone.
So, I guess the point is, look, how many of these places where polite society turns out to be provably insane do we have to see before we stop taking their judgment on anything as significant?
I'm not arguing that the people in polite society don't have a right to their opinions.
Of course they do.
But the point is they want the right to declare sitting down with Alex Jones, for example, as evidence that you are not a serious person.
And my point is, look, We can talk all day about ways in which Alex Jones places that he's been wrong, whether his style of presentation is a good way to go about things.
But he's been right about a lot of stuff, right?
He is on target with respect to things like central bank digital currencies and the obvious threat that they pose to the citizenry.
Polite society has said little, if anything, about this.
And so my point is, look, You can't have a de facto body of people claiming the right to tell you who you can and cannot talk to if they are more wrong than the people they want to rule out as possible discussion partners.
They don't get that right.
So the piece of this I don't agree with, as you know.
Well, let me take a step back.
I haven't framed it this way to you before, but hearing you talk about this, it's as if there's a block of people, all of whom believe a certain number of things, and they are polite society.
And of course, what we know to be true is that almost no one actually has all of the beliefs of, you know, the platform of the Democrats, or all of the beliefs of the platform of the Republicans, or whatever, whatever platform it is that we're talking about.
That almost everyone, um, and probably actually everyone, but let's just be safe here, almost everyone has some amalgam of beliefs, even if they think of themselves as very far anything, left, right, up, down, whatever it is, right?
So, Given that, I know that there are, you know, the vast middle that does not
understand some things that we have come to understand, and we of course have not understood some things other people have come to understand, but we are in a position, and we know this from having heard from many people, of speaking clearly and carefully such that people who have not yet seen some of what is going on can be awakened to it.
And Having something like going on Alex Jones in your past allows for an easy way for people to say, ah, see, never take him seriously, right?
Never take him seriously.
And I say that not because I think, as you said, that everything Alex Jones does or says is wrong or that the man is evil or any of that.
I don't believe that, right?
But I do believe that we all make choices all the time about when and where to do what.
And this would not have been the moment that I would have chosen given how many other things are happening now.
So many people are considering waking up, have like these tinglings at the base of their neck, are looking at The number of people who are getting really sick this winter, even though they're fully up to date on their boosters, and the number of people they know.
You know, maybe not many people know that there are any people they know who are unvaccinated, but by and large, the people we know, including us, who are unvaccinated, are not the ones getting sick, right?
There are these just like anecdotal things which accumulate and accumulate and accumulate, and then having those voices point them out and say, you connect the dots.
It is very powerful, and it makes it harder to do so when – basically, you make their job easier, and you don't let them drive.
I'm not saying – you can never talk to the people who are on their list of people you can't talk to.
Right?
That's letting them win.
But I don't know that simply saying, because you people are so wrong on so many things, I will pay no attention at all to what it is that you are the arbiters of.
I don't understand the last part at all, actually.
Now, I don't believe that polite society all believes one thing.
It is exactly like the Overton Window.
There is a range of things that you can tolerably believe, and then you step outside it and you are beyond the pale.
You are not allowed to question the received wisdom on climate change and its causes because that is settled science, which of course it isn't.
But like society would have it that there are those in the world that we call climate deniers and you can't arrive at skepticism about the presentation that we've been given without
There is some sort of natural connection between your responsibilities as a rule setter and your capacity to set rules that matter.
And I guess my point would be I think, actually, polite society... I mean, look, we remember polite society trying to declare Jordan Peterson a bridge too far.
We had a personal run-in in which Jordan Peterson, the idea was to exclude him directly and to treat him as if he was a quack.
It's nonsense.
Jordan Peterson makes a great deal of sense.
I shouldn't have to say I don't agree with him on everything.
It doesn't matter.
But the point is he makes a great deal of sense.
And I guess the point is, if you make less sense than somebody, you have no right to declare them beyond the pale.
And polite society is in such violation of its own standards, right?
It swears that they are the scientific people.
And the idea is, well, if you are the scientific people, then you know That there is no conclusion that cannot be questioned scientifically and what's more you know that the stuff of real science involves scientific revolutions in which we discover things that we absolutely took as an assumption turned out to be wrong.
So I guess the point is I'm not, I don't want to deal with the piecemeal accusations anymore.
I know what the scuttlebutt is, right?
The scuttlebutt in polite society about me sounds like this.
Sounds like, well, you know, I really supported him when those students accused him of racism.
I really, I thought that was wrong and I, you know, I just, my heart went out to him.
But well, you know, Evergreen is a small college and it's not it's not really where the best and brightest professors go.
And I think Brett has kind of gotten the idea that he's like a thinker.
And, you know, I mean, I just I just I doubt that he could tell a Pinot Grigio from a Chardonnay.
So anyway, that went weird.
Well, welcome to polite society.
I mean, So, the point is, if you are in a bad era, an era in which our sense-making capacity, our public truth-seeking has gone to noise because every single institution that you would ordinarily use to do that job has been captured by something or persuaded of something that has caused it to become perfectly inept,
Then the point is, everybody needs to wake up and realize standard thresholds of reasonableness have to be altered because we have to consider, you know, okay, every single truth-seeking institution is falling apart and incapable.
I don't know why that is, but one does have to be ready to consider a wide range of hypotheses, some of which sound crazy on their face, if not for that persuasive pattern of evidence, you might not consider them.
But given the persuasive pattern of evidence, we have to be ready for all kinds of Potential explanations, and if you're only capable of, you know, dealing with things that are a slight, you know, nuance away from the received narrative, then you're not gonna be able to get there, because you don't, your thought pattern can't encompass anything big enough to explain the pattern.
Right.
I do think you're making two different points, though, and you slightly conflated them by putting up the two tweets that you did.
Neither, it looked to me like, and I haven't seen either of those tweets before, neither what Caitlin Flanagan said nor what Michael Shermer said was an attack on you for who you chose to speak with.
Now, that might have been implied, but I frankly doubt it from either of them.
And I think the idea that you are to be vilified because of the people whom you sit down to talk with is clearly a position that has no place in an arena where we are trying to figure out what is true, right?
I feel like it wasn't the right moment yet.
But that does not – it is not me saying, how dare you, or you're not allowed to, or anything like that.
But then I don't think that that's what either of them are saying either.
So the second thing that I think you're conflating with that is...
This thing that you said, that you seem to believe, is so beyond the pale that anyone who says such a thing shall be deemed a – and this is an extraordinarily unfortunate use of words – on Flanagan's part, a crackpot, right?
And so I didn't have time to read all of what Schirmer wrote.
But, you know, Caitlin Flanagan has a position.
It is the mainstream position.
It is the only position we are supposed to be allowed to hold, right?
Much like the totally laughable proposition that vaccines might have anything to do with autism, obviously HIV is the only thing, the only causal agent in AIDS.
Oopsie.
Like, maybe both of those things deserve a relook, and actually I am certain that they do.
The idea that having a position adjacent to, orthogonal to, outside of the Overton window from what is currently acceptable allows people to start name-calling, that's a problem.
But those are two different things.
Frankly, and you know, they're both ways to gatekeep, but they're different, and I don't think either of these people are doing the first.
They're not accusing you of having gone beyond the pale because of who you sat down next to.
Well, it's possible that those are unfortunate choices of tweets, because I do think that what happened was my choice to go and talk to Alex Jones opened the door to critiques on other fronts.
And so what came back was a wave of criticism, which largely did not name Alex Jones, but the point is it became open season.
So there's a potential for something invisible that opens up that then never need be explicit.
In fact, two invisible things.
And again, this is me reading the tea leaves, but I know a lot of these players too, and so watching this unfold, you know, a lot of people are upset with me for not waving a flag in the situation after October 7th, right?
And I've been very clear about why that is, which is You know, I don't want you supporting the Biden administration's position on something and imagining that you are protecting me as an American citizen.
I see the Biden administration as my enemy as an American citizen, and I see the Israelis in conflict with their own government as similar.
So the point is, I don't think there is a simple support the Israelis position.
If you support the Israeli people, which I do, then the problem is the Israeli government in large measure.
That's not a flag, and I won't waive one because— That's not a flag, but I guess I don't think there's a word for what you call—so, I consider myself a patriot, even though I think our government is off the rails, and has been for a while.
It's not even though.
Right?
No, it is— You're a patriot.
I am going to say it that way.
I consider myself a patriot, even though I understand my government to be off the rails and understand that it has been for quite a while.
Presumably, a very high number of Israelis similarly consider themselves patriot, and some percentage of those – I have no idea what percentage of them – also feel that their government is off the rails.
So how do we, from across an ocean and vast cultural divides, show support for the patriots of Israel?
And so it doesn't necessarily mean waving a flag, but I don't know how it is that you... I mean, again, I've written about this, and what I got back was, how dare you ignore the people dying in Gaza?
Right.
Yeah, I get that one too.
You know, look, I think this is the predicament, right?
I was told specifically that my critique of the government of Israel needed to wait until after quote-unquote the war, right?
What war?
Right?
War on Gaza?
Until hostilities cease, right?
Yeah.
Is it a war against Iran?
Is it World War III that I'm to wait till the end of?
And no, I don't believe any of this stuff.
So anyway, my point is a lot of people are angry at me because my feeling is actually you've handed me You've handed me a requirement that I express no nuance in this area when you absolutely need nuance, right?
If you're going to create a false entity, right, which is an illegitimate government engaged in a war on behalf of people who may or may not support that government, or maybe, you know, as the American populace was, led under false pretenses into war with Iraq, Right?
The point is, look, this is a complex situation.
We need to address it at the full level of complexity that it exists and not pretend that the thing is simple.
But anyway, that angered a lot of people.
Those people have been sniping at me ever since.
And the point is, they have used an opportunity that arose because of who I chose to sit down next to in order to attack me where they saw me as most vulnerable.
Which is a claim that to many people will sound preposterous, as it did to me at one time.
Right?
HIV is not the causal agent of AIDS.
Huh.
Now, that's not what many of them said about my point.
They distorted my point.
Right?
They said I said it wasn't one, rather than that the evidence was more compelling that there was another causal agent than I expected it to be.
somebody, I can't remember who accused me of demonizing the gay lifestyle or something, but whatever.
So the point is, I got madness back.
And that madness, I am now calling out the address of that madness.
That madness comes from a thing called polite society.
And polite society is a problem precisely because it is arrogant, it is convinced that it is allowed to set the boundaries of who is tolerable, and I am no longer tolerable.
And my point is actually, I don't care if you think I'm tolerable.
And I will just say to people who see this, Look, if you need somebody to comfort you about the basic story that society is telling you about this, that, and the other, you have lots of options.
Jesse Single came after me, wrote a substack, and if you need somebody to tell you that everything's pretty much okay and I'm nuts, then he would be a good person to go to.
You should sign up for his sub stack.
If you, what?
I'm giving the guy a plug.
I mean, you could do worse.
He's a smart guy.
He knows how to write.
He's been ahead on some issues.
If you need somebody to hold your hand, Jesse Single might be your guy.
So go check him out.
If you're on the other side of the spectrum, if you need somebody to push every button you've got and to point out that you don't know a quarter of what you think you know, then Owen Benjamin's your guy.
You can go check him out.
Interesting, entertaining, he's wildly offensive, you know, you won't be bored, right?
On the other hand, if you need people to help sort through the noise that we are handed and try to figure out what the signal is telling us, if you want people who are Going to tell you up front we will make errors.
Here's what we will do when we make an error.
We will figure it out as quickly as possible.
We will tell you that we've made an error and we'll tell you what we've come to believe and how we got there.
Then this is a better place for you.
But I'm not having any more of this social nonsense where people who are, you know, tolerant enough of healthy kids being mutilated by doctors, right?
If you're okay with that and, you know, And I don't take it as a defense that, you know, you gather at your dinner parties and, you know, roll your eyes about that stuff.
We're talking about the actual mutilation of healthy children.
We're talking about needlessly injecting students who want to go to get a college education with extremely dangerous medical injectables from which they have no conceivable benefit.
More than 60 many elite colleges and universities across the U.S.
still have COVID vaccine mandates in place.
Still.
The CDC.
Including everyone from like Harvard, Cal Poly, Wellesley.
Oh my goodness.
Right.
If you're not trying to figure out how Harvard, of all places, could possibly still be recommending these things for its- Not recommending.
Mandating.
Mandating these things for its students.
I mean, effectively, think about this.
You've got the most elite college in the country, certainly.
And what it does is it requires students to engage in a dangerous kind of ill logic in order to come there and get a degree.
Right?
Nothing I have said here is in any way in doubt.
You, if you want to get a degree from Harvard, you must accept a violation of Nuremberg, and you must accept a kind of Russian roulette with respect to the technology involved.
And what's more, there's no benefit to it.
You, as a healthy young person, there is no conceivable argument that this is actually good for you.
You have to do it because Harvard says you have to do it.
And so what does that produce in the future?
That everyone who graduates with a Harvard degree will have effectively been somebody who abandoned Nurnberg to get through the door?
Like, That is an insane thing, and polite society is not up in arms.
If it's grumbling at all, it's barely audible.
So, you know, polite society, get your frickin' act together before you start telling other people what they can and cannot do and who they can and cannot talk to, because frankly, most of what you believe is garbage, and half of it is dangerous.
That's actually a great segue to talking about RSV and how polite society, if you will, how the mainstream media has been talking about it lately.
And then I think of this as like a media story in three parts with a scientific addendum to follow.
Should we do it?
Let's do it.
Were you done with polite society?
I was done with polite society a while ago.
Hopefully they will get the message.
Yeah.
Luckily, you weren't ever that much of a cocktail party enthusiast.
And I was only ever barely tolerated by polite society.
I noticed.
Yes, but those days are in the past and I feel unfazed.
I think you're a little fazed.
Tiny bit fazed.
All right.
So, man, we've been hearing a lot about RSV lately.
Yes.
Right?
Have you ever thought about it before?
Heard about it before?
Out of nowhere.
Out of nowhere, it seems, right?
So, RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, we've mentioned it a couple times before here.
It is a widely circulating, very common virus that has been known about for a very long time, actually.
And it is one of these sort of classic viruses in that when it causes pathogenic effects and it does kill people, it's almost always in the very old and the very young.
And by very young, I mean very, very young, like less than six months.
Which, on top of everything else, means that given that it has had a strong seasonal aspect to it, it's actually really not a risk for babies born in the spring and summer because they're already outside of the window of most of their risk by the time RSV season hits in late fall and winter.
It's that narrow a risk for tiny babies, and then it is also a risk for the elderly, as almost everything is.
I used to think that all diseases were a particular risk for both of those groups, and then COVID comes along.
It's like, why isn't it hurting the babies?
Why isn't it hurting the kids?
That's an unusual thing.
Um, but I started thinking about it, uh, this week, uh, because of this article here, and you can show my screen for a while.
What's, oh, I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm not plugged in.
That's entirely on me.
Um, and now my screen is going to freak out briefly.
Let me just go back to full screen while it's hopping around.
And now you should be able to see it.
It's.
Oh, no.
Yep.
You got a cable issue.
I got a cable issue.
You can see it reflected in my eyes.
Yeah, you want to put on some goggles or something?
We've got some ski goggles over here.
Excellent.
Okay, so Politico, that mirror of polite society, no?
Yes, very much so.
We'll get to the New York Times next.
Actually, the New York Times rides in on kind of a What was it called?
The Grey Lady?
Yeah, so it's like the Grey Lady on a white horse.
The New York Times is actually a little bit of the hero in the story.
Bizarrely, right?
Whoa, that makes me so uncomfortable.
Politico, this is published on February 13th of this year, 2024.
There's a new life-saving vaccine.
Why won't people take it?
The next front in disinformation and the vaccine wars.
Oh God.
Oh God.
So I'm going to read just a few excerpts here, then go to the New York Times article, and then we're going to come back to sharing a little bit more from this Politico article.
It's quite long.
See, that's super science-y right there.
Wow.
Yeah, very, very science-y.
This is written by a Joanne Kennan who has identified as Politico's former health editor, a journalist in residence at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and Bloomberg School of Public Health, and still a Politico magazine contributing writer and contributor to the Nightly Newsletter.
And she writes, as a little blurb on the side of this article, the science of countering misinformation is still young.
The science of countering misinformation is still young.
Okay.
The science of countering...
So she begins a little, you know, her lead is this little story about a TikTok granny, I think, who, yeah, who says, get the RSV vaccine.
It saves lives.
I did.
You should do it too.
And then she describes RSV, as I just did, mild for most people, but it affects very young children and very, very old people.
Between the CDC reports, Who knows if these numbers are accurate.
Between 100 and 300 kids die every year, and 6,000 to 10,000 deaths of people 65 and older are attributed to RSV.
Again, we know these people play games with cause of death and it being a fellow traveler.
So I'm not going to take a position on whether or not those deaths are actually RSV deaths, but we know that it can be deadly, is almost never deadly in people between like six months, honestly, despite what she says here, and the elderly.
But ahead of this RSV season, for the first time ever, Politico writes, immunization was finally approved for the most vulnerable groups of Americans, young and old.
It was also recommended for those late in pregnancy, which would protect infants from birth.
Would people get the jab?
As this RSVC season winds down, the answer is that, by and large, they did not.
The latest data from the CDC shows that only 16% of eligible pregnant people got vaccinated.
Note pregnant people.
Pregnant people.
Oh, man.
Among the over 60 population, it was just over 1 in 5.
And among babies and eligible young children, the uptake was low, the CDC said.
That's terrible, right?
But the very next day, on February 14th, the New York Times writes, Some pregnant women and infants received the wrong RSV shots.
Doctors and pharmacists seem to be confused by the guidelines and the brand names aren't helping.
Okay.
This winter, for the first time ever, there were two vaccines available to ward off RSV, which is particularly dangerous to older adults and infants.
Only one of them, a Brisvo made by Pfizer, was approved for pregnant women, and neither was for young children.
The distinction apparently slipped by some clinicians and pharmacists.
At least 128 pregnant women were mistakenly given the alternative vaccine, Arexfi by GSK, and at least 25 children under age 2 received a vaccination the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned.
Now, didn't we just learn from Politico the day before that the uptake among children was really low and that the CDC had, and that was cited by the CDC?
Well, in fact, we did.
And here, oops, sorry.
Oh my God.
Can you give my screen back every time?
Okay.
I wish computers were better.
Here we go.
This is just a screenshot from the Politico article that I just read.
Would people get the jab as this RSV season winds down?
The answer is that by and large, they did not.
The latest data from the CDC shows that only 16% of eligible pregnant people got vaccinated, among the over 60 population it was just over 1 in 5, and among babies and eligible young children the uptake was low, in quotes, the CDC said.
Less than 24 hours later, we hear from the New York Times that there is no RSV vaccine that has been authorized for children.
So, what's going on here?
Well, let's see what happens when we click on that CDC link, shall we?
That CDC link goes here.
I'm just showing you PDFs, but I'll link to all of the I'll link to all the URLs.
I have these stable PDFs because often, often pages change after people start noticing what they say.
So I am showing you what I downloaded, what I downloaded as a PDF as of yesterday, February 27, 2024.
It was on the CDC site, the Politico site, the New York Times site, all of that.
Vaccination trends, children, CDC, they say.
CDC recommends that all people aged 6 months and older stay up to date on COVID-19 vaccines and receive a seasonal flu vaccine.
If you are 60 years and older, talk to your health care provider to see if an RSV vaccination is right for you.
CDC also recommends Nercevumab, a monoclonal antibody product, for all infants younger than 8 months who are born during or entering their first RSV season, as well as some older babies.
Politico cited the CDC, this site right here, as saying that uptake was low for the RSV vaccine for children.
What the CDC is telling us, which is consistent with what the New York Times is telling us, is that there is no vaccine authorized for children, for RSV.
So in this article that Politico has written, which is an almost unending stream of bile and snark and attacks on all the misinformation coming out of, well, people like us, they don't mention us, but they themselves have patently gotten it wrong.
So let's go back now to the Politico article and just share a little bit more from what's in here.
Zach.
So here we are again in the Politico article and what we have, it's long.
In one major victory for accuracy and the public health world, Google followed guidance from experts convened at the National Academy of Medicine and the World Health Organization.
Those experts outlined how tech platforms can identify credible sources of health information that can be elevated online.
It's not that nothing wrong or nefarious about RSV or any other health topic will ever get through Google search or YouTube, but these practices may make it less pervasive.
For instance, if you Google RSV, the first items that appear on the screen come from sources like the CDC, the Mayo Clinic, the American Lung Association.
Not from some self-appointed vaccine expert posting jeremiads about fictitious vaccine hazards from his basement.
So here it is, Politico is advocating for censorship, applauding the censorship that Google has agreed to, while in the very same article getting one of the fundamental pieces of information it is talking about in the article completely wrong, with regard to whether or not there is in fact an RSV vaccine that has been authorized for children.
Let's just read a few more excerpts from this article.
With vaccines, it's possible to pre-bunk, and blunt, some of the predictable tropes since there's a well-known anti-vax playbook of falsehoods.
The various fictions include, vaccines haven't been thoroughly tested.
That's not a fiction.
Or they cause autism.
Don't know.
Or they change human DNA, or the side effects are worse than the disease if the vaccine gives you the disease, or natural products boost immunity better than vaccines, or vaccines are just a way for big pharma to make more money, or vaccines damage fertility.
So many of those things are true.
That last one, goes on Politico, is a particularly pernicious message given that the RSV vaccine is given during pregnancy.
Yes, it would be pernicious if the vaccine given during pregnancy was actually understood to be either safe or effective, neither of which are true.
Yeah, I mean... Keep talking.
No, I just want to say there's a little bit more.
Actually, let me say this one more thing here.
Later in the piece, Politico actually gets it right with regard to whether or not there's a vaccine for children for RSV, which means they didn't even read their own piece.
Like, this piece is internally inconsistent.
The RSV vaccines don't generate quite as much fury as COVID for several reasons, including the fact that there are no mandates for this shot.
Not at jobs, not at schools.
Gee, go figure.
If you choose to take a neither demonstrably safe nor effective drug on your own because you have chosen to do so, we're not going to get as furious with you as if you tell us that we're at risk of losing everything if we don't do so.
The audience is also narrower for RSV vaccines.
Shots are recommended for people over age 60 and those who are between 32 and 36 weeks pregnant so they can pass on antibodies to the fetus.
Infants not protected in utero and other young children at high risk can get monoclonal antibodies.
Here they get it right!
Which isn't technically a vaccine, although it is an injection.
Those monoclonal antibodies were in short supply this season as this was one place where manufacturers apparently underestimated the demand, or overestimated the already considerable hesitancy.
Separately, I'm not going to go through all of what I saw on the various CDC sites, although I'll link them in the show notes.
The CDC acknowledges that these monoclonal antibodies, which are an immunization but not a vaccination, and there is a difference, but places like Politico and the New York Times use them almost interchangeably, as if willing us to be confused, right?
The CDC identifies these monoclonal antibodies, which are the passive immunization that's been authorized for infants, As having an efficacy that lasts around five months.
And also separately, I learned from looking into RSV, that it is everywhere.
That most people, I think in the world, but certainly in the United States, are regularly exposed throughout their lifetimes to RSV.
Most of us don't know we ever had it.
Most of us are asymptomatic.
And we'll get to, with a little scientific addendum at the end here, who in the age groups where it is a high risk, ...are actually high risk.
And it's not just, oh my god, all babies under six months of age are going to die from this thing if they're exposed.
Well, no, because the thing is circulating.
Like, it's all over the place.
So, one more quote from this article.
This Politico article.
There's a level of exhaustion, right?
Said Katie Evans, Senior Program Officer at the Beaumont Foundation, one of the groups forming the Public Health Communication Collaborative.
You want me to get three, in some cases three, vaccines this fall?
A COVID booster, a flu shot, and an RSV vaccine?
And if I am someone who doesn't really understand why those things are valuable, that feels like a big ask.
It also feels like a big ask if you do understand what the risks are and why this isn't the shot for me.
Maybe none of these are the shots for me.
It's a really big ask.
But the only framing that we are allowed here is, the only reason you wouldn't choose to do this if you were in the age group for which the CDC recommends it, is you don't understand.
Only the ignorant are ignoring the advice of the authorities.
They're still doing this in 2024!
I am actually boggled by this, that they are trying to pull this again.
They're never going to stop.
Yeah.
And this actually is, it's a perfect example of a piece of the polite society problem, because what that article is, is it pretends to know a great deal more than you do.
It can't really claim to know more than you do because it makes glaring errors, but if you... let's say that you're a... I don't really like the term normie, but let's just say you're a normie.
You're a regular person.
You're not a biologist.
You're not a doctor.
And you're being told that you should think about your health this way or that way, and that it should impact your acceptance of something that comes in a syringe.
Yep.
Right?
Well, that's confusing.
Right?
You probably, you know a lot more terms than you did four years ago.
You know, you've thought a lot more about antibodies.
You've thought about, you know, you've probably now heard of the childhood vaccine schedule, and you're aware that has a lot more things on it than it once did.
And it occurs to you if you've had children that they got a lot more shots than you did when you were a kid.
Right.
You know that there's something being said about a technical definition of a vaccine, but you wouldn't have the first clue what the borders of it were and why a monoclonal antibody shot isn't one.
And why an mRNA shot isn't one, but an RSV shot would be one.
You don't know what these things are.
Well, and the idea that there are RSV vaccines, and then there are also these RSV monoclonal antibodies, which provide passive immunity, but they aren't vaccines, but they come in the same kind of looking thing.
Right.
They both come in a syringe.
So the point is you're understandably confused.
In fact, I will tell you for sure that most of us who are now not confused on these issues because we've gone through the most hellish crash course over the last four years also find this stuff confusing, right?
Of course.
The point is, you know, okay, so, you know, tell me again, there are two shots for RSV We're not talking about an mRNA.
There's actually three shots.
There's three shots.
There's three shots for RSV, two of which are vaccines, one of which is not approved for pregnant women but is approved for old people, both of which are approved for old people, and there's a third shot that's not a vaccination but it is an immunization because it provides monoclonal antibodies, Therefore, it provides passive immunity.
And that's for the babies, because the RSV vaccination, none of them, neither of the two that are approved for old people, one of which is approved for pregnant people, is in fact approved for infants.
But it's fine if you give a 36-week pregnant woman that vaccine and allow her to pass that on to her kid, because what could possibly be the harm there?
So let's imagine that you are a smart, well-intentioned normie with substantially above average levels of courage.
Curiosity.
Curiosity.
All of the good characteristics that you would want in a normie.
But you're looking at... you're looking at...
These recommendations and you just know you're way out of your freaking depth.
Right?
Right?
Of course.
Right.
And then the point is you encounter that article and that article is like, okay, these people get me.
They even get why when you start telling me I need three shots, I want to believe you, but It seems like a big ask.
And it's like, guess what?
Three shots is gonna seem like a big ask.
Here's why you should get over that feeling, right?
It's like pharma inhabiting a, you know, the skin of a journalist in order to write an article that will make you think, okay, at least somebody who's looked deeply into this and has all of my concerns comes out in the place where, all right, I'll get the shots, right?
It's like that.
Yep.
And the point is, oh no, if somebody who really knows what they're talking about looks into this article, it's like, well, the article isn't even right, you know?
And the article acknowledges, you know, how long have we been battling over the fact that they missed, they misdefined the mRNA shots as vaccines and switched the definition and used it to slide it into our blind spot and I'm sure this is just an honest error.
Right, but the point is, look, polite society is composed of people who have read, you know, they haven't all read the same one, but there are 60 versions of this thing targeted at different audiences who read different things, different lengths based on whether, you know, you get all your news from tweets or you're the kind of person who likes to sit down with an article, you know, you like articles that are, you know, New York Times-y versus
You know whatever they've they've digested it a million different ways, but the point is then when you get together at the goddamn cocktail party and believe me I Like a good cocktail party that has people in it who were worth talking to but there's some mythological cocktail party
Where people who have all read one of these articles get together and they look each other in the eye and they reassure themselves that they're the people in the know and that they are aware that there are reasons that people are skeptical of things like, you know, like the RSV vaccine, even though it's three different shots, only two of which are vaccines, right?
And the point is they reassure themselves of the conclusion that has been fed to them that is not actually based on a natural kind of logic.
And anyway, Of course we end up here, right?
It's a social phenomenon masquerading as an analytical phenomenon.
Yes.
It's even worse than that though.
Oh no.
So to go back to the New York Times on February 14th, just farther along in the article, remember there's three shots as we just talked about.
Arexfi is the vaccine that was not authorized for pregnant women, and then there was monoclonal antibodies that were authorized for infants, but no vaccine is authorized for infants, okay?
Based on, again, New York Times, February 14th, based on available data, Dr. Long said she was more concerned about the young children who received an RSV vaccine than the pregnant women who received Arexiv or their babies.
Evidence from animal testing strongly suggests that Arexiv might exacerbate RSV infection in children younger than two rather than mitigate it, according to the FDA.
Okay, so the immunization being recommended To old people, not authorized for pregnant women, not authorized for infants, but having been given to some pregnant women, the evidence from animal studies is suggestive that it actually makes the disease worse rather than making it better.
It's not neutral, even.
It's not even neutral.
Okay?
In 2022, GSK, which is the maker of the Araxavir vaccine, halted clinical trials of a version of its vaccine in pregnant women after a safety review indicated an increased risk of preterm birth.
The company also found an increase in neonatal deaths, but it said they were a consequence of the preterm births.
Finally, lots of shoe ads.
Here we go.
Dr. Long said she was flummoxed that young children received RSV vaccines.
Because they are not approved for children, pediatricians' offices, which typically administer vaccines, should not have had any in stock.
So, I thought, in the middle of thinking through these things, keep on my screen here for a bit, um, nope, uh, there, I just did a Google search, a Google Scholar search rather, which is, I don't know how much Google is messing with their Google Scholar search, um, but I did a simple Google Scholar search simply on RSV, and I spelled out respiratory syncytial virus as well,
And I looked at a number of the papers, but it turns out the top two hits, which generally the hits are in order of, there's some algorithm measuring importance, and it's often about cited by numbers, although that's not exactly how it's showing, because obviously there's some cited bys that are higher, lower down on the list.
But these top two articles proved to be very interesting.
The first one, is Wellever, 2003, Review of Epidemiology and Clinical Risk Factors for Severe Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection, 2003.
My frogs are going off.
Oh.
Uh, early in this article, he writes, this is, uh, again, 2003.
"In otherwise healthy infants less than six months of age, 4.4 hospitalizations for RSV infection occurred per 100 child years of observation.
For infants in the second half of infancy, this rate fell to 1.5 per 100 child years and declined thereafter.
For infants born prematurely but without chronic lung disease, the rates of hospitalization were 8 to 9.4 per 100 child years depending on gestational age at birth, indicating that prematurity alone was associated with increased severity of illness of RSV infection.
And then his results, sorry, the conclusions in summary form, and I'm going to just click on my little thing here so I can read my Conclusions.
The data presented indicate that infants in the four patient groups discussed, that is premature, this is chronic lung disease, congenital heart disease, and immune deficiency, are at high risk for severe, prolonged, and occasional fatal illness caused by RSV infection.
These infants are the ones most likely to benefit from measures to prevent RSV infection, including active and passive immunization.
So once again, we have a virus that causes extreme disease when there are comorbidities present.
The comorbidities are again, like with COVID, extremely age stratified.
Although unlike with COVID, it affects not only the very old, but also the very, very, very young, specifically the first six months of life.
And the comorbidities are somewhat different for RSV than they are, at least for infants, than they are for COVID and they are having premature birth, chronic lung disease, congenital heart disease and immune deficiency.
That seems important for people to know as they are taking their precious newborns to the doctor and being told in order to protect your child you need to give him the shot.
A relevant question that a parent might ask is, given that my child, given that I had a healthy pregnancy and that my child was not premature and does not have chronic lung disease or congenital heart disease or an immune deficiency, what are the benefits to my child from this?
So the second paper listed on the Google Scholar Search, you have got something there?
Yeah, I've got lots of stuff to say before you move on.
I'll keep it brief.
One thing here is, note, it's a classic welcome to complex systems moment, because you've got a shot that ostensibly provides a benefit, but in the wrong category it does the inverse.
It actually makes things worse with respect to the same disease.
And one of the shots actually, in the animal studies, promotes premature birth.
Right, causes one of the comorbidities.
Causes one of the comorbidities!
Yeah, so the point is, look, Fine.
So, good that we know that.
But, I mean, the obvious thing, back before COVID, I got into battles with Claire Lehman over the safety of vaccines.
Her point was, vaccines are safe.
And my point is, no, they're not safe.
I'm not saying they all do harm, But I'm saying to say that they are safe means that they are risk-free, and the history of these things says that they are not simply risk-free, because for one thing, we've had vaccines removed from the market because they injured people.
That means vaccines are not safe.
You have to make a particular claim about a particular vaccine, and you would have to have an awful lot of information to say anything like safe.
So, the point is, look, even the pattern you've just seen here tells you that the idea that vaccines are safe is nonsense on its face, because this vaccine Ostensibly is safe enough in one population, but makes things worse in another, right?
And guess what?
There's a history of exactly what you're talking about with this disease.
That's the second article in the Google Scholar search.
Oh, cool.
One more thing before we get there, though.
You do that first.
I'll come back to this thing.
Okay.
Second article, again, this is just a simple Google Scholar search for RSV, respiratory syncytial virus.
Understanding Respiratory Syncytial Virus Vaccine Enhanced Disease is the name of the article, published in 2007.
Here it is, published in Immunological Research, again in 2007.
I'm just going to read one paragraph from this early in the introduction.
In a series of vaccine trials conducted in the 1960s, a F-I-R-S-V vaccine was administered to children.
Surprisingly, approximately 80% of the vaccinated children experienced serious disease and were hospitalized after requiring a natural RSV infection, as compared to only about 5% of a control vaccine group.
That is, the kids who weren't vaccinated.
Furthermore, the severity of the disease was found to be age-dependent.
The older the children at the time of vaccination, the less likely subsequent RSV infection would result in hospitalization.
We've been through this with exactly this disease, and there have been reviews of the thinking and the understanding that we have, that the medical and research community has, as recently as 2007, and I'm sure, and this article has been cited hundreds of times, so there is continuing to be an understanding of, a conversation about,
The risks of previous vaccines that were produced for exactly this disease for children, in which, in the 1960s, you had a vaccine that, once children had it, increased their chances of experiencing a very bad outcome from being exposed to the disease by, what is that, uh, 16 times.
From 5% of children to over 80% of, to about 80% of children.
Yeah, and that's not what vaccines are supposed to do.
Not what vaccines are supposed to do.
And in this case, the exact thing, the exact harm happened to be measured in terms of what the ultimate cost of these things is over all of the pathologies that we don't think to ask about or that occur after the study is long since over, you know, we have no idea.
You know, we are flying blind with respect to these things and that, you know, I'm embarrassed at how long it took to find out, right?
It took COVID and it took seeing how deep the bullshit was on COVID before you even know how to ask the question about the rest of it.
But, you know, and to their credit, there are lots of people who did ask the question before COVID and Tried to raise the alarm and they have suffered the most vicious stigmas.
You know, I have become aware how many of the people who are dismissed as, you know, selfish, feeble-minded, anti-vaxxers are really parents who have had a desperately ill child, who watched a healthy child vanish and be replaced by a crippled child.
Yeah.
Watched the light go out in their eyes.
Right.
And the point is, look, I don't care.
Let's suppose that the vaccines do so little harm that this is vanishingly rare and it's obviously worth it to take the risk because the benefit was so great that it dwarfs the risk, right?
I don't think that's true.
But if it was true, you would still have nothing but compassion for the people who had a child injured by this thing.
And yet, What we get is clearly pharma-backed stigmatizing, you know, demonizing the very people who've already suffered this terrible harm.
You know, were they anti-vaxxers?
No, they vaccinated their kid.
That's how it happened, right?
So anyway, it's the whole thing becomes clear, unfortunately, when you spend enough time to sort it out.
I did want to ask you one more question, unless you had somewhere I just, before we move on to the next thing, I want to just recap what I learned here.
Alright, well before you do that then, I'll ask you this question.
Something is going on with the names of these injectables.
And as the New York Times suggests, they want to blame the names for being ambiguous or easily confused or something.
Well, let's leave that aside.
Somebody has decided to make names that are difficult to pronounce, difficult to read, difficult to remember.
Yes, and... Comernity?
How do I say this?
Chemical names of molecules are hard to pronounce, but there are rules.
Decades ago, I thought, yeah, I don't want to have to be thinking about the chemical names of molecules.
I don't want a 48-syllable long drug name either.
But at least from that, I could derive what it was, and I could learn the pronunciation rules just like I do with Latin names for scientific names of organisms, and you're like, okay, now I know how to pronounce that.
Whereas Yeah, these names are weird.
They don't feel like English.
They're intentionally weird.
Of this, I'm quite sure.
Somebody has... I think there's been a series of eras.
Initially, the brand names of these drugs, drugs in general, were... they masqueraded as if they were chemical descriptions.
So they sounded to somebody who didn't know what a compound... how you would name it.
They sounded scientific.
Yeah.
Right?
Then they became sort of Fanciful, they alluded to something, right?
And we saw this happen with the erectile dysfunction stuff, like Viagra.
Is that supposed to rhyme with Niagara?
It's not, it doesn't sound like a chemical name, right?
It sounds like they're alluding to something.
Sea Alice.
Is that a reference to the, to that song?
Who's Carol?
Yeah, no, oh no, I thought it was a reference to, what is it, Jefferson Starship?
Go ask Alice.
Yeah, of course it does.
It's a reference ultimately to Alice in Wonderland.
But anyway, so the point is, that was somebody playing games with, like, associations in the mind.
And now, we're in some new era where it's like...
You would have to study that name to remember it, right?
I don't know how many times I've read Comernity, and I'm still uncertain saying it out loud.
Do I have it right?
The vowels don't show up in the right place.
Right.
It's designed to not stick.
And I wonder, is that an evasion of liability, that you're unlikely to remember what shot you got?
Like, is it designed to emphasize to you that you're not an expert because you can't remember the name?
I don't know what it is, but there's some purpose behind choosing names that do not sound like English.
Well, it's certainly true that people wield, you know, maybe they're shibboleths of a sort, right?
That people wield correct pronunciation of rare words as evidence that they know what they're talking about.
And so if this is one of the things that you choose to focus on, to learn all of the rare and technical jargon associated with, say, you know, modern pharma products, then you are more likely to be believed, because you never stumble over those words.
And it's clear you've done a lot of thinking about this, and probably the people who've done a lot of thinking about this really know what's true, and they also have our best interests at heart.
Well, that was a leap of logic that you just made, but oh, then I'm going to trust that guy, because he pronounced the word right.
Yeah, all right, all right.
I accept that.
I guess there are a bunch of hypotheses.
Sorry, I'm a little stuck because I was remembering Molnupiravir, one of the COVID drugs, which struck me as, is that a reference to peer review?
Molnupiravir, Paul Revere.
What is going on?
There is something going on with the advertisers I mean, this – yes, here is a place where my visual orientation and your auditory orientation just kind of like fly past each other and never meet.
Like, I never – until you said see Alice in that way, I don't – like, it's spelled so far from see Alice that it never occurred to me that that was kind of how it was pronounced, because I'm not primarily thinking in terms of how things are pronounced.
I see the words, I don't hear them.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess we also, you and I don't watch TV, like ever.
But because some of these things, and I bet you it's kind of a, there's a dichotomy.
There are drugs that get advertised on TV.
Cialis would be one of them, right?
Yeah.
Old audience watching legacy news program.
Yeah.
But the point is you would hear it because it was said, right?
So it, you know, yeah.
Yep.
So was there a question there?
Yeah, what the hell is going on with the names of drugs?
Because I think somebody is trying to manipulate us, and they seem to be doing it in a way—something changed.
The first one of these that I remember hearing about was comernity.
It's like, well, what is comernity?
It doesn't pretend to be scientific.
It's not an allusion to anything I recognize.
It's just like a child spits syllables at you.
I've forgotten the linguistic term, but when I taught with a linguist many years ago, one of my favorite surprising things that I learned from her was this concept, for which there is a word in English but I've forgotten what it is, of Words in any language that phonetically would fit, but aren't a word.
And it's not that they should be a word, no.
It's the empty niches, like, oh, that word doesn't have a meaning yet.
That could totally be a word in English, but it's not.
Flerb.
Okay?
Whereas comernity, no, sorry, we weren't waiting for that.
Right?
That doesn't actually fit with normal English phonetics.
Right.
And one of the ones in the article, the political article you read, is even weirder.
It's just like, Yeah, there were, where even is it?
The Politico article.
I don't know.
Maybe it's not worth it.
Yeah, I don't, I don't know.
They're all weird.
Anyway, you had a, you wanted to summarize.
I did, yeah.
I just wanted to recap.
So, RSV is real, and most people are exposed to it multiple times throughout their lives, and most people experience little if any illness as a result.
And certainly that latter part is true once you're outside of infancy and before you hit old age.
Immunity gained either naturally, through your many exposures, or through a pharma product, either an active vaccination or a passive immunization, like these monoclonal antibodies that are being recommended for infants.
Immunity gained any of these ways is very short-lived.
Very short-lived.
And so the next time you're exposed, your body is going to deal with it as if it's something new.
The very young and the very old are most at risk of disease and death.
Among the very young, there are four primary core morbidities that predict bad outcomes.
Again, that's premature birth, chronic lung disease, congenital heart disease, and being immune compromised.
The first, and I believe last time, there was an RSV vaccine for the very young.
The risk of bad RSV cases was dramatically enhanced in those who had taken the vaccine, and the trend was worse the younger the child was when they had the vaccine.
There is no current RSV vaccine for children, but the passive immunity enhancing drug, Bayfortis.
Bayfortis, you say?
Bayfortis, which lasts about five months, is being pushed on all newborns born during RSV season, and the RSV vaccine is being pushed on pregnant mothers regardless of the risk factors of either the pregnant mothers or the newborns.
And I guess my final thing here is that it's fine.
Nothing to see here.
It's fine.
Just get your shots.
What are you, scared of needles?
Come on.
All right.
I hate to stick this at the end, but you mentioned all of these things to the extent they provide a benefit at short-lived.
Yeah.
I just want to point out that could be just, darn, luck of the draw.
But it could also be that for whatever reason, you know, if you generate antibody immunity, it's going to be short-lived for many of these pathogens, right?
Because antibodies are not the way long-term immunity is established.
Right.
Long-term immunity is based on T cells.
So antibodies give you the ability to claim credit for having done something important and maybe allows you to get a really powerful short-term result in a study.
But from the point of view of benefiting, if each time somebody injects you with something, you're taking a risk and what you really want is, well, geez, I'd like to be immune forever.
If I'm going to take that risk, that's not how pharmacies it.
Right.
Pharma wants to give you as many of these injections.
So, you know, ideal for them would be something that gives you really powerful short-term immunity in which you keep coming back for more.
And anyway, so the idea that just so happens that all of the things we've got are, you know, they give you short-lived immunity.
Well, but natural immunity is also short-lived, so it's not that these drugs are worse than natural immunity.
I'm not saying they're not, but in terms of the length of the duration for which you actually have immunity to the virus, natural immunity is also very short-lived.
That's true for adults with RSV.
Yes, apparently.
Interesting.
Okay, I missed that.
So maybe it's built into RSV immunity?
Yes, it seems to be in this case.
The rate of evolution of the virus or something makes it so that whatever formula the body picks up doesn't stick.
Right.
Or it sticks, but the virus, by the time you re-encounter it, is different.
Right.
Different thing changes.
Yep.
All right.
All right.
Yeah, next topic.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about the hilarious catastrophe with Google Gemini, the AI engine that people started
to query and discovered that the engine had come by some extremely woke rules that it refused to violate even when it was asked when it was asked or tasked tasked with uh finding a factual piece of information
um that didn't was not consistent with the rule it had been uh had been induced to take up through exposure to whatever the training materials were.
But anyway, the point is... That's a question, isn't it?
Whatever the training materials were.
Well, we're going to get there.
But Zach, do you want to just put up the iconic failure?
There are hundreds of these, but here...
This is a tweet from Reason Magazine.
In Gemini's telling, the Pope is black, ancient Romans are black, the founding fathers... The Pope looks like she's a woman, too.
...were at least partly black, and so on.
So anyway, you can take a look at some of the amazing images that Gemini Well, I mean, you know that Joan of Arc was actually trans, right?
very simple queries which are just simply at odds with historical realities of the phenotypes of the people involved in different stuff. - Well, I mean, you know that Joan of Arc was actually trans, right?
So these guys, I guess, were just transracial all along.
Not allowed.
I can't remember who lost a job over this one.
Somebody early on in the battles over woke.
I don't mean to laugh about it.
It was somebody sympathetic.
But anyway, somebody lost a job over whether or not that was a thing, and it turns out it's not.
But point being, you got this AI which, in my opinion, is saying the quiet part out loud.
And it is revealing just how insane the inner belief structures are of these tech giants that are producing these things.
And Mark Andreessen tweeted something yesterday that suggests exactly that.
He said, it really doesn't matter which of these companies it is because they all have these belief structures deeply embedded with them.
But anyway, I wanted to extrapolate and go somewhere new with this.
So, A, Oh, one caveat first.
There is a part of me, and you know, you can call me a... Crackpot?
Uh-oh.
You can call me a crackpot.
You can call me a conspiracy theorist, even though I traffic in hypotheses.
That's what a theorist does.
You advance hypotheses, and then if you're lucky, then they turn out to be validated by experiment.
If you're good at what you do, yes, it involves some luck.
But if you're lucky?
Yeah, I don't mean it that way.
You're right.
If you're good at what you do, then some of these will cross the line, and they will become theories by virtue of the fact that every competing hypothesis will fail.
But my point is, it is not wrong to say, That somebody, you know, let's take conspiracy out of it.
I'm an evolutionary theorist.
I generate hypotheses in the hope that they will become theories, right?
So the point is the theorist generates hypotheses.
They don't generate theories.
But anyway, that's deep in the weeds.
There is a part of me that, call me paranoid, that worries that the Gemini episode Was so ridiculous that it was just a step too far and it got an entire class of people who have been, you know, Shouting about wokeness and the dangers of it, to focus on this thing and the absurdity of it.
You know, here you could query it and it would spit out such stupid stuff across a wide range of topics, not all of it visual.
It's hard to imagine this level of failure.
It's hard to imagine this level of failure.
So there is a part of me that wonders if we were supposed to happen onto this, you know, goose that lays incredibly woke eggs and just keep poking it.
That sounds painful.
It's not the best metaphor, but whatever.
Anyway, so there is a part of me that wonders if we've stepped in a trap even talking about this, but let's assume that that's not the case.
Let's take this at face value.
If you take Gemini and its absurd products at face value, my claim is it's all well and good for the AI engine to be revealing itself in this way, but that it suggests something truly frightening.
And the truly frightening thing is that this is a mirror for the parts you can't test in this way.
Feed and search algorithms are biased.
They are a moving target.
They change.
I have been asking for eight years maybe.
Why is there not a field of people that actively studies the current state of search and feed algorithms so that you can have an analysis of what it is doing to your mind so you can correct for it, right?
In my opinion, one of the most important things to be studied is how are these biased entities impacting what we see?
How is what you see different than what I see different than what somebody in a different political party sees, right?
That is an essential question, and as far as I know, there is not a huge number of people studying it in a systematic way so that they can give you a report that says, here's the way the algorithm is biased today, and therefore, here's what you likely believe more strongly than you should.
Right?
That kind of thing.
So, Gemini is hilarious, but Gemini reflects a process that does the very same thing and has been doing the very same thing that we cannot check in this way, right?
So the fact that the search and feed algorithms think that the founders were black is deeply disturbing, right?
So every so often we get an evidence of this.
The 1619 Project, was it?
You know, is evidence of this same sort.
But most of the time, it's happening to us.
It's impacting what we find when we go search something, but we have no way of knowing that.
True.
So, anyway, here's where I want to go with this.
I want to talk a little bit about positive and negative feedback.
I'm going to do a little professor lesson on these two very important concepts so that you can sort of see what's going on here.
Negative feedback is the structure that allows something complex like a human being or any other animal to function.
Negative feedback is the basic rule by which all of the systems of the body are regulated.
And the way negative feedback works is if you think about the thermostat in your house.
The thermostat in your house, you set it to a temperature.
As the temperature drops low, it turns on your heat and returns it to that set point.
As the temperature gets high, it turns on your air condition, brings it back to the set point.
So the point is, negative feedback returns you to some state, okay?
That's how all the pH in your blood and your temperature and everything else about your body gets regulated.
And that is glorious, right?
That's how we should want all of our systems to be regulated, all the systems that we build as humans.
Positive feedback, although it sounds like a great thing, and in the context of a paper that you've submitted, it may be a great thing.
Hey, I got some really positive feedback.
That's a different meaning.
Right.
Totally different meaning.
Positive feedback as compared to negative feedback is a system if you imagine that your HVAC engineer is a dummy and he hooks it up backwards so as the temperature of your house gets hot it turns on your heat so it gets even hotter that's positive feedback right temperature your house drops it turns on the air conditioning gets even lower now
The problem is that negative and positive feedbacks, whichever direction they go, are self-destructive.
Okay?
These things create phenomena that can't be sustained.
There's only so hot your house can get, right?
And to take one example of a positive feedback, just to make the point clear.
There's a thought experiment, and I can't remember there's a narrative context for it, but never mind.
You take two grains of rice, and maybe you start with one grain of rice.
Start with two grains of rice because I'm more sure of the math.
You take two grains of rice and you put it at the first square of a chessboard and then you double it for every square thereafter until you've gone through all 64 squares of the chessboard.
The mind has some idea of how much rice you end up The mind is wrong.
The number is so impossibly large that it actually exceeds the number of grains of sand that are thought to exist on Earth.
Right?
I don't categorize that in positive feedback.
I mean, I see your point.
Albedo, to me, is an easier example of positive feedback, if I may, that white surfaces reflect heat more than dark surfaces.
Dark surfaces absorb heat, white surfaces reflect heat, So, as you get more snow on the ground, more heat is reflected back into space, and the temperature at the ground becomes colder, and more snow accumulates rather than melts.
And so you get positive feedback in terms of growth of snow and ice growth, expansion of snow and ice fields, because albedo is a positive feedback effect.
Yep, that one works.
The problem is, my example is better because it tells you the sort of second-order rule that you need to know, and it happens— Which is that it runs away.
Well, A, it runs— It runs away according to our misfire, our misunderstanding of the human scale of things.
Right, and so the point is, a process that within the space of a single chessboard goes from two grains of rice to more grains of rice than there are...
Grains of sand on the earth, right?
That is a process that the universe cannot sustain, right?
So the point is, the meta-rule for positive feedbacks is every positive feedback, no matter what it's constructed of, is reined in by some process.
It has to be, because it would blow up the universe if it wasn't, right?
You know, what if you had... Thank God for asymptotes!
Right!
What if you had two chessboards, right?
Like, you're very quickly going to run out of, you know, you're going to need more grains of rice than there are atoms in the universe, right?
That happens very, very quickly.
And so the point is, why is there a universe?
Because positive feedbacks are always reined in by some process.
They have to be, have to be, right?
Now, in the case of albedo, the reason I don't want that example, it's a great example of a positive feedback.
The reason it doesn't work so great here is that what reigns it in is that the Milankovitch cycles fall out of phase.
And that is not an intuitive, it does limit these things.
There's an extenuating circumstance.
There's an external variable that isn't included in the original understanding.
Right.
And it does fit the rule.
It short-circuits the positive feedback.
You're just explaining why, then, isn't the entire Earth, you know, a snowball.
Right.
Why isn't the entire Earth white as a result of the fact that all of the water has turned to ice and it incrusts everything, right?
Well, it's not just Milankovitch cycles.
It's also tropics and spin and seasonality.
Nope.
No, in this case, the Milankovitch cycles, if they did not fall out of phase, would result in that albedo positive feedback encrusting the entire Earth in ice.
And anyway, meta rule, the thing that I want you to take from this lesson, is that positive feedbacks are always reined in by a negative feedback.
They have to be, or they would each destroy the universe, and because the universe is here, we know that they are always reined in by some negative feedback force.
Now back to Gemma.
Gemini is a status report on a positive feedback process, okay?
You and I, when we went to college, encountered a prototype of woke, right?
We encountered political correctness and we encountered it in Anthropology, physical anthropology in fact, which it was early that we encountered in physical anthropology.
It had already taken over cultural anthropology, but we encountered one of the first places that physical anthropology had this mindset to it, right?
Now, that mindset was limited to certain quadrants of the university back then, and we fought it.
I'm proud of this.
People often say, oh you didn't you didn't wake up till it came for you.
Nope, we fought it from the beginning.
But the point is, okay, it's 2024 as far as I can tell.
Gemini is a status report on how woke the techies inside of Google are as they are engaged in their hubristic experiments in generating artificial intelligence.
I don't know why anybody has not noticed that this is the opposite of intelligence.
It's artificial stupidity is what they've got.
But anyway, this is a status report on artificial stupidity.
Now, remember, I've said that artificial stupidity that is so funny when it's Gemini, because you can ask it to make a picture and the pictures are insane, that thing has been haunting your feed and search algorithms without your ability to see it.
Even if you know it's there, you don't understand how crazy those things actually are.
It's laughable when it's visible.
It's deranging when it's out of view.
Right.
Now here's the problem.
How do we seek the truth in the world?
Well, it's hard to avoid using the tools that are apparently inflicted by this stuff, because as Marc Andreessen points out, all of these companies are full of people who believe this nonsense, okay?
People who believe this nonsense because they encountered processes that had it infused through them, right?
You are embedded in a positive feedback, where This style of insanity seeds the next round, which is even crazier, right?
And here's my point.
The good news is that that can't go on forever, because it's a positive feedback, and all positive feedbacks are reigned in by some process, thank God, or the universe would be destroyed by them.
The bad news is, the process that reigns this in, where each round of search and feed and all of the things that inform how we see the world, as those things get stupid and they create a generation of people who takes that stupid stuff in at a more fundamental level, the thing that reigns that in I don't know what it's going to be, right?
It could be an outbreak of sanity.
That would be great.
But it could also be extinction, right?
It just has to reign it in so it doesn't destroy the universe.
Woke is not going to destroy the universe, people.
You can relax about that.
Probably it never gets off this planet.
But the reigning in process could be absolutely catastrophic.
So anyway, that's kind of the rant I had in mind.
All right.
Well, I actually have one very brief more thing to say before we sign off for the week, and I want to just show this.
This is the soon-to-be-published Taiwanese cover of Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
One of the people at our agent's office points out that she loves the guy's hair, just thinks he's got great hair.
That's pretty good hair.
I mean, for a caveman, right?
Hunter Gatherer.
But this is coming out, this is not quite published, it is the second to last day of February, and yet in March, both the, I think it's the largest bookstore chain in Taiwan, and one of the largest e-book retailers is making our book, Book of the Month, in Taiwan.
Book of the Month!
Book of the Month, yeah!
Hell yeah!
And I think it's the hair, honestly.
You think it's the hair, well... I think it is the hair.
Yeah, I mean... And the well-muscled back.
I mean, he does look fit.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, he's not going to remain so for long.
Look where he's going.
No, he's going to be full of seed oils and he might even melt.
Yeah, he's going to pick up an iPhone, get handed a burger stuffed with seed oils, you know, with the bun and everything.
And, you know, you're right.
He's going to melt into a pile of goo.
Yes, after encountering feminizing compounds in his water bottle.
And yeah, it's actually kind of a sad tale now that you think about it.
I think we need to warn him and get him to turn around.
Yeah, indeed, have him approach us instead.
But we know we're better.
We're also in the 21st century.
Yeah.
As I remember it.
I mean, there is substantial evidence of that one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So, actually, one more thing.
Can you show the newest, maybe?
So, we got one new piece of merchandise.
We're signing off now.
We'll be back in a week at our normal time, hopefully, if the internet gods are with us, at 11.30 Pacific, AM Pacific, next Wednesday, but we've got a new piece of merch.
We've had for a while, we've been talking about Cut That Shit Out, which has been met with appreciation, and now we've got, wait, show that again.
I haven't talked about it yet.
Now we've got Cut That Shirt Out.
For people who are going to schools with principals that would rather that they not have profanity on their shirts.
Which I get.
Like, I understand.
I understand.
And so now you could cut that shirt out.
Cut that shirt out.
Yeah, absolutely.
Same font, same great fit.
Yeah, the only way in which the shirt is lesser is that it's somewhat less on point.
Right, yes.
There's another step that you have to take, and you can show some of that other stuff now if you wanted, Zach, before we go into the final words to say.
say we got blueberries because I don't, yeah, we've got blueberries because oxidants happen.
Psyop until proven otherwise.
It's not on here, but that's fine.
Welcome to Complex Systems.
Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply.
Epic Tabby with our very own Fairfax right there.
First Against the Wall Club.
Goliath.
So tons and much more.
Keep Portland Weird.
Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
One of my favorites.
I should I should get one of those and wear it down there next time I'm down there.
Oh, totally.
Because Portland remains a great city, and I just wish it wouldn't do what it's doing to itself.
Yeah.
Here we have Jake's Micro Pizza.
I'll put on a mask when I'm done eating.
Lots of great stuff.
You can find that at our store, which is darkhorsestore.org.
Please subscribe to us on Rumble.
We're trying to get to 100,000 subscribers.
We're trying by mid-April.
It's looking slow, guys, but help us get there.
Bring your friends.
Bring your enemies, frankly.
If you need to.
Don't bring our enemies, but you can bring your enemies.
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We've got our Q&As there, we do early release of guest episodes, we have brand new content that's nowhere else, and we're going to keep on putting up new content that's nowhere else at Locals.
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Check out our wonderful sponsors for this week, which They were Free Spoke, Paleo Valley, and American Hartford Gold, I believe, if memory serves.
And a reminder again that we are supported by you, our audience.
We are grateful to you.
You can help us out a lot by coming over to Rumble and Locals and subscribing on Rumble and or subscribing on Locals and I don't know what you do.
You do things on Rumble and Locals.
What are the verbs?
Support on local, subscribe on Rumble.
Subscribe on Rumble.
And here's the thing, you are doing us a big favor if you subscribe on Rumble, so go do that right now and then take the rest of the day off.
I don't know that you can offer that to them.
I just did.
It's exactly that kind of helpful advice that you will get if you come visit us at Locals.
Fair.
Alright, until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
