Everything Under the Sun: The 225th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 225th 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 assassination attempts, the sun, pharmaceuticals, and the American presidency. Assassination: Robert Fico, the president of Slovakia, was shot several days after announcing that his country would reject the WHO Pandemic Treaty. The sun: last weekend’s dramatic aurora were the visible manifesta...
Hey folks, welcome to the 225th Dark Horse Podcast livestream.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Uh, stuff is happening fast and furious at every conceivable scale from the human to the solar.
And we are going to try to put it all in context.
All of it?
No.
Good.
We're going to leave.
We're going to avoid.
We don't have that much time.
We don't have that much time.
I mean, that could be a description of the state of humanity or just the podcast.
But in both cases, we're going to have to constrain ourselves.
Yeah.
The TLDR on this episode is we don't have that much time.
Is that the first time you have ever said TLDR?
Well, I thought about it.
It's like, do I say the symbols or I just say TLDR?
I don't even know.
Yes, I'm sure it is.
It is.
Yeah, I think it might be.
I've certainly said those letters like that.
I've never heard you say it.
Have you?
No.
Until you were impeding me.
Wow.
This is getting boring.
I feel like I was lured into that.
Hey, join us on Locals.
That's where the Watch Party is happening.
That's where lots of good stuff is happening.
And we're going to do Q&A there this Sunday.
So if you've got questions for us about this episode, the question asking period is open on Locals right now.
You can go there.
But other than that, we just want to start at the top of the hour with our sponsors, if I can find them.
Oh, we're going to be talking today about The Sun.
Yes.
Ozempic.
Weight loss trend.
Slovakia?
Yes.
Biden.
Yeah.
Is that it?
Yeah, I mean, stuff arises in the context of all of those things.
Those are sort of the four big main themes.
Main themes, yes.
All right.
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I do not remember this part of the story.
You do not remember?
Well, I'm hoping that I did not hallucinate that, but I believe it is, I believe it is correct and it would be very... Certainly, they've been introduced and they're a problem, but no one is arguing for their complete eradication.
Yep.
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You want to talk about talking about solar storms?
Uh, I think actually we should start with, um, the rapidly evolving story of the assassination attempt today in Slovakia and then move to solar storms, if that's all right.
Okay, I know nothing about this.
Okay.
Well, you are in good company.
We all know very little about it.
What we do know is that Slovakia Had announced its Prime Minister Robert Fico.
I believe I'm pronouncing his name correctly, but I'm not certain of that announced that Slovakia was going to resist the World Health Organization pandemic accord and international health regulations Here you can see my tweet from several days ago.
I think this is three days back and I'm retweeting Kat Lindley, who says, great news from Slovakia.
Slovakia says no to the World Health Organization.
And I said, this is fantastic.
Congratulations to the citizens of Slovakia.
And thank you, by rejecting the WHO plan, you are leading the world toward freedom.
Okay, so today, apparently, Prime Minister FICO was leaving a policy meeting and in broad daylight, in front of cameras, he was gunned down.
Gunned down?
Like he's down and out?
He's out?
He, I believe, is still alive there.
As of the beginning of this broadcast, there was no indication that he had died, but he is apparently gravely wounded.
We don't know how seriously, but it is good news that he has survived this long.
Actually, we have some video of the assassination itself.
I have checked and people in Slovakia confirm that this is This is the actual event.
It's not repurposed from some other assassination.
You want to show it, Zach?
Okay.
Now, interestingly, the gunman was apprehended immediately.
I believe he is, if the reports are correct, I believe he's 71 years old and actually, strangely enough, there is some video of him describing his motives.
Now, I'm not going to show it because it's in Slovakian and I can't verify that he says what he's claimed to have said here.
But apparently what he says into this camera is that he did it because he disagreed with government policies.
There is certainly a question about how to deal with the possibility of a conspiracy.
In general, when somebody, when a political official is gunned down, one must presume it is done by somebody who believes they have an interest in altering
Some sort of policy objective now that can be a load a lone nut who simply disagrees with the policy but in this case the idea that somebody would be so angered by the activity of a prime minister that they would risk death and certainly end up behind bars for the rest of their life And not be able to say what policy it is that they object to is pretty conspicuous.
I would imagine that anybody who had decided to do something so drastic would have the policy that had motivated them very much on their mind.
So at the very least I will say that this strikes me as basically a generic rationale for an event that in this person's mind couldn't possibly have been generic.
Well, if I steel man, again, this is all like second, third, fourth hand, so I don't want to claim to know anything about the situation, but to steel man the idea of a would-be assassin making general objections to the policies of someone whom they have tried to kill,
Uh, it is always going to be the case that if you start saying, it's this thing and this thing and this thing, that people will nitpick apart your particular choices as opposed to saying, you know what?
The whole platform, I don't like it.
I don't like what this guy stands for.
Yeah, I don't know what to make of that.
Yes, this person could be strategically trying to immunize, on the other hand, to the extent that this person was clearly involved in an assassination attempt that they didn't intend.
To walk away from the idea of obscuring their motives, you would think that they would want to do exactly the opposite, so that anybody else who decided to pick up these policies in the event that this person had been successful and had killed the Prime Minister, you would want the next person to think very carefully about enacting this policy.
So being cryptic about it seems strange to me.
But in any case... Why do you say you don't think he intended to walk away from it?
He did walk away from it.
No, he didn't walk away.
He's alive.
No, he lived, but he was immediately tackled and taken into custody.
Okay, well that, I guess, that's not what walk away means to me.
But he survived it, which I don't, you know, I can't imagine that was guaranteed, but nonetheless, he's in custody and
Has nothing to say about what it is that he objected to and I find that conspicuous I will say my initial reaction was of course the Conspicuous fact of this assassination attempt having come literally three days after the announcement that Slovakia was going to lead the world in resisting the World Health Organization was hard to ignore Now I do know I'm reminded of and I have not looked it up, but
There were three, I think, African leaders who died.
Early-ish in COVID, shortly after they had resisted the standard WHO-CDC recommendations and had started to talk about repurposed drugs like, I believe, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
Again, I don't have the specifics here, but we talked about it at some point.
This is probably going to have been late 2020 or early 2021 or even the summer of 2020.
I recall this as well, but it's far enough back and there's been so much water under the bridge that I don't remember the details of what happened either, but it seemed conspicuous at the time.
In this case, I'm of course becoming aware of all that this Prime Minister was doing in the aftermath of this assassination attempt, and while the proximity and time of his Announcement about the resistance to the World Health Organization is hard to ignore.
There are some other facts.
For one thing, he was generally indicating that he and the party that he founded were going to pursue an investigation into what happened during COVID.
So this was somebody who was not just resisting the World Health Organization.
They were interested in getting to the bottom of this.
They had specifically called out pharma corruption.
And vaccine harms, which he says many people were derided for describing during the so-called pandemic and that have now been vindicated by evidence, which is of course true.
So there is a sort of more general rationale that might exist here.
Do we have the tweet from April?
Uh, in any case, I've also been made aware by a friend of mine, April Harding, who is an expert in international relations about the broader context, um, that this prime minister existed in.
So this prime minister has been, uh, resistant to fueling the war in Ukraine, among other things.
Um, and, uh, maybe we should just read her tweet and I will fill in any detail that, uh, isn't contained here.
So April says, Some context with respect to Slovak Prime Minister FICO's attempted assassination.
FICO is a relatively serious problem for the elite coalition.
He criticizes many of their policy, of their priority policies, Ukraine-Russia war, COVID controls, vax mandates, pandemic preparedness, in quotes.
Mass and unregulated immigration.
He's a long-standing left-of-center politician with a lot of credibility and experience He's apparently been Prime Minister.
This is me talking.
He's apparently been Prime Minister three times It's a lot harder for the elite coalition to present him as crazy extreme Dangerous politician when he's been in office before and people can look at his record and since he's left of center It's hard To use the tools which work well to demonize politicians on the right, like calling them far-right, anti-democratic, etc.
He's also well-spoken, so it's hard to make him look like a bore or a cretin the way they do with Trump.
So I imagine the elite coalition would very much like to see him taken out.
So anyway, I thought this was a very well-thought-out comment, and the idea that He is walking a road that is not so far from the one that Viktor Orban has walked, but he's more problematic from the point of view of the ruling elites because he can't be dismissed, right?
A well-spoken, reasoned, left-of-center politician who nonetheless is skeptical of investments in the war in Ukraine, vaccines, pandemic preparedness policy, etc.
Somewhere in there is likely to be a reason that somebody decided to attempt to end his life very publicly.
Presumably that having the effect of resetting policy in Slovakia, potentially, but also sending a message to anybody else who might wish to oppose these things for all of the obvious reasons.
So, go ahead.
It's despicable that we end up thinking in terms of, and he's left of center, therefore they're not going to be able to dismiss him as easily as successfully.
That is true, and it is one of the implicit widespread pieces of evidence that the media is captured by one side of political ideology.
And it is certainly true that there exists on the extreme right extreme bigotry.
It is also certainly true that there exists on the extreme left extreme bigotry.
And we've talked about this over and over and over again.
Other than the bigotry, the nationalism, the racism that extremists on both sides are eager to embrace and force the rest of us to embrace now, and the various isms, the anti-Semitism and the racism and the misogyny and such, which, yes, some members of the far right and some members of the far left embrace,
It is despicable that anything else among political positions that one might have are beyond the pale simply because they have been identified as right-of-center.
Yeah, I mean for one thing we've all noticed that the right-left distinction just simply doesn't cover what we're talking about, but it has.
I mean rather like the claim that Russia is involved causes lots of people to retreat to amygdala level thinking, right?
The idea that something is right or far right or extreme right causes people not to be able to understand what it is, which is why that epithet has been thrown at us so many times, despite the fact that it matches nothing in our actual belief structure.
You're right.
It is a megadal level.
It's what snakes do to people.
Like, I threw a snake at you.
Ah, okay, I know how to respond.
You know, I threw Russia at you.
I threw far right at you.
I called you a Nazi.
I called you a TERF.
I called you anything I want to call you.
But it's all these things that people who aren't paying a lot of attention and just want to be left alone, just want to live their lives, just want to be seen as good people.
Go like, oh god, no.
Nope.
I don't like snakes.
I don't want to be involved.
I don't want to be involved in any of that.
Make it go away.
So that's why FICO is going to be, would, hopefully will continue to be, would have been more difficult to dismiss because it was harder to throw any of those word snakes at him.
Yes, and so I tweeted about this this morning and I put together just a few little pieces of information for people, including two videos of him speaking.
And he's speaking in Slovakian, but the translation makes it quite clear that this is a reasoned person who is angry and motivated and quite courageous in confronting many of the evils that we've encountered of late.
So, you know, Yes, you would imagine that people who are interested in retaining a stranglehold over policy don't want anybody who can articulate an alternative viewpoint in reasoned, rational, calm, level-headed terms.
And anyway, does that have something to do with this assassination?
And of course, people will say, you know, well, what evidence do you have that anybody other than this old man was involved?
And the answer is, I don't.
The logic surrounding political assassination does not abide by the same rules, right?
Because the likelihood of getting away with it is extremely low, and the benefit to those that a person with political power if a person with political power opposes something the benefit that comes to those who can eliminate that person and replace them with somebody that isn't opposed to those things is great and so the point is you've got a lot of people
With motive, and the question is, you know, if one guy can find the opportunity, then a group of people could find the opportunity through one guy.
So, in any case, the question of conspiracy is on the table inherently because this was an assassination attempt of a political leader who was doing something different from other political leaders.
It is a viable hypothesis and it has to be discussed and no You shouldn't be, you know, cowed into silence because the evidence isn't in that there was a conspiracy.
Conspiracies inherently attempt to obscure evidence and paint a picture that isn't true.
So the fact that we don't have that evidence could mean there's no evidence to find or it could mean that the evidence has been obscured because of course it would be.
That's right.
I did want to connect something else here.
In the aftermath of discovering that FICO had been shot, I found myself thinking about the WHO pandemic accords and the road that they've traveled and the clear fact that the WHO is back on its heels.
Pulling the teeth out of the Accords in order to try to get them to pass trying to You know change the course here and that you know, the UK has taken up a position That is skeptical of these Accords as well.
So anyway, this is a very live question And in rethinking all of the the path that brought us here, I was reminded of the piece of video that Tucker Carlson played when he talked to me about the WHO pandemic accords.
He showed me a piece of video that I had never seen in which Tedros Argued that there was no sovereignty issue here and his words are now ringing in my ears, and I think we have that video So we're just gonna play it here now We continue to see misinformation on social media and in mainstream media about the pandemic accord that countries are now negotiating.
The claim that the accord will cede power to WHO is quite simply false.
It's fake news.
Countries will decide what the accord says, and countries alone.
And countries will implement the accord in line with their own national laws.
No country will cede any sovereignty to WHO.
If any politician, business person, or anyone at all is confused about what the pandemic accord is and isn't, we would be more than happy to discuss it and explain. - Did that say it was from March of 2023?
At the beginning of that video?
It surprises me, if so.
I thought this was from much more recent.
In any case, Zach will figure out the answer.
The rationale, which is subtle in this video the first time you hear it, the rationale by which he claims that there is no threat to sovereignty is effectively, well, you have your right to be represented and you've exercised it in putting people in office and they will negotiate what happens to your rights in accordance with whatever happened in your elections.
And if they hand over your rights, you allowed them to do that by voting them into office.
Right.
Now, that's effectively what it is.
Two points.
One, that's not how it works, right?
I literally cannot sign away my own constitutional rights, okay?
I cannot put somebody in office who will sign away my constitutional rights.
That's not how it works.
You would have to amend the constitution through that process.
So, This is this rationale is at least null and void in the US on the basis that I literally do not have the right to Sign up to be a slave.
For example, I have my constitutional rights whether I like it or not But the second thing is And again, we don't know that the World Health Organization's pandemic accord and the Prime Minister's opposition to it is playing a role here.
It is only the timing that specifically calls out that issue.
But in a world where somebody opposes and leads their country to resist signing such an accord,
In a world where such a person ends up gunned down, then that points to an entirely second problem with Tedros's claim, which is that in order for his claim to make any sense, we have to live in a world where we really do have the consent of the governed and obviously assassins and coercion and Yeah.
um uh the blocking of uh speech rights and all interferes with that process so it leaves you with the illusion of representation rather than actual representation yeah um okay
so i guess the last thing i wanted to say is that uh i caught up to the fact that this had been sent to uh our inquiry box too late to do anything about it but apparently politifact which has um uh which is claims to be a fact-checking organization but is clearly a highly
partisan entity that is used to smear people and has been used to smear me and us previously, has reached out over the very issue raised in that Tucker interview that I did, wanting me to comment and defend the- Wait, PolitiFact has reached out to you?
Yes.
I'm asking me to defend the idea that the pandemic accord would abrogate free speech rights.
And in any case, I wanted to just call attention to this because it suggests that there is a broad scale attack coming.
That they would like to reverse people's correct impression that this treaty sought to, at least in its initial form, take control over the informational environment for the ostensible purpose of doing away with what they call misinformation, which you heard Tedros speaking of in that clip.
And so anyway, yes, this is of course an attack on our rights, and of course PolitiFact would find itself on the wrong side of this.
would be signed up with the elites who wish to control what can be said.
And anyway, that's the world we're living in, and we have to figure out how to function under these rules, which I think we're actually doing a pretty reasonable job.
But the fate of the Slovakian prime minister suggests it's a dangerous situation.
Indeed it does.
All right.
So I guess the last thing to say is just, of course, we wish him a speedy recovery and a return to what appears to be the excellent job that he was doing.
The people of Slovakia deserve it, and the people of the world are depending on courageous leaders like him to continue to buck the powers that be.
Indeed.
All true.
All right.
Where should we go next?
You said you wanted to do solar storms next.
Ah, solar storms, yes!
Wow, it's amazing.
I spent eight minutes there not thinking about solar storms after it was quite a week.
So, let's talk a little bit.
Obviously, we released a podcast with Ben Davidson in which the issues surrounding this week's highly unusual spate of solar storms, which were all produced by a very active, large sunspot cluster, took over many people's minds on the basis that it called their attention to some hazards that we face, etc.
Do you want to put up the picture?
So here is actually a time-lapse of this sunspot cluster on the face of the sun.
Can you show the zoomed out version?
Yeah.
So, in any case, the basics here are this.
The Sun is rotating in something like the way the Earth rotates on a daily basis, and the rotation of the Sun takes something like four weeks.
So these sunspot clusters emerge on the left here, on the western edge, and they rotate around, and then they disappear off the right side, and they're on the far side of the Sun where we can't see them.
for something like two weeks.
If they survive that period they'll re-emerge again on the left.
This sunspot cluster is something like 16 earth diameters long and three earth diameters wide at its narrowest point.
It's a very large cluster and what happens is These sunspots, you can have clusters that have various characteristics.
This is a complex sunspot, which means that it has the intermingling of positive and negative spots, such that the arcs that go between them are... Positive and negative are charges.
Yeah, those are the charges.
Obviously, as I said, an immense scale, but the charges are not unlike the charges that you would experience, you know, across a battery.
And so you get these looping electromagnetic arcs.
And sometimes when the sunspots bump into each other in the right way, they unleash a flare.
And that flare puts out two kinds of stuff.
It puts out a kind of electromagnetic radiation, actually several different kinds.
It puts out x-rays, it puts out microwaves, it puts out-- Full spectrum, right?
Maybe not?
Well, probably not full, but there's certainly visual components and then-- Infrared components, ultraviolet components, microwave, x-- Yep.
Most of the components.
Maybe not absolutely everything, but the electromagnetic spectrum is broad and this has got most of them.
Yeah, and every flare does that.
Those things, so basically the position of the sunspots on the face of the sun that is facing the earth dictates the likelihood that anything flung off the sun is going to hit us and how directly.
Right.
Is it pointing towards us or not?
If it's pointing away, most of the energy goes away.
So in that first... Somebody else's problem.
It's somebody else's problem flare.
Yeah.
But the initial flare puts out electromagnetic radiation, which moves at the speed of light and reaches the earth in something like eight minutes.
And it does cause communication stuff.
There's an X-ray burst that disrupts radio communication and things like that.
So that's a very quick effect.
And we saw that here in each of these flares.
And then there's a second effect, which is much more nebulous, to use a strangely relevant term.
But these flares can fling off plasma, which is basically sun stuff.
It's particles.
The cloud of particles that are undifferentiated into atoms.
We had a conversation about plasma earlier this week in which I acknowledged to you that I've never been entirely clear on what plasma is and I think that the three of us established that We're not sure that anyone is totally clear.
It's what you say about matter when it is divided in a way that you're not totally clear on.
Precisely.
Anyway, I feel inclined to quote, they might be biased.
So as I understand the story, it's lovely.
And if it's not true, it deserves to be true.
But they might be giants, released some piece of music in which they called the sun something like a big ball of fire and a bunch of astrophysicists reached out and said, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
That's not what it is.
And so they released another song that has the line, the sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma, which has got to be one of the greatest lyrics in all of musical history.
And comebacks to astrophysicists who clearly had it coming.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
But in any case, the sun... Also, who knew they might be giants, had a large audience in the astrophysics community.
Right.
In fact, I think they had already resorted to making children's music at the point that this happened.
And well, in any case, so the sun...
Flares from these spots.
The flares fling energy at us.
Electromagnetic energy.
It arrives very quickly.
And sometimes, often, the flares also have this plasma component which takes time.
It takes a couple days to reach the earth.
How fast it reaches the earth depends on how fast it was flung off because it's physical stuff moving through space.
And whether or not it has important effects on the earth is a matter of if you imagine something like an explosion on the sun the density of stuff varies a lot and it's extremely difficult to predict with precision how much of that stuff is going to actually hit the earth.
The big cloud can come our way and we can go through a whole like Or how densely packed, you know, even if you say, oh, you know, actually, as it turns out, we had 100 units hit the Earth.
Like, well, did that come over the course of two minutes or two days?
Right.
Right.
And in fact, the initial wave that reached the Earth from the first of seven of these coronal mass ejections came on incredibly quickly.
So it was densely, it was a condensed wave of stuff.
And that's going to have been associated with, at least here in North America, although I think actually Europe too, it was Friday night auroras.
Yes, I think there were two nights of extraordinary auroras.
You and I saw one, we didn't see the other.
But you said the first wave, so I'm talking about the first night, which was Friday night.
Yeah, I think there were auroras that we didn't see, so maybe it was three nights actually that had them.
The second and third night of the auroras then reached extremely far south in the Northern Hemisphere, which is conspicuous because
the size of the flare that produced these things uh was not these reached farther than you would have expected for the emissions from the sun which i will leave you all to check out all of the materials that ben davidson has put online but his point is what that's telling you is that the magnetic field of the earth is weakening and that weakening means that basically
For a given level of solar activity, we get bigger effects here on Earth because we're less protected by the magnetic field.
So, let me just say, that is one of these things.
This is a land of great uncertainty, right?
And predictions and probabilities and risk assessment and safety and lots of people want a like, yes, but will it or won't it?
Yeah.
And you can't have it that way.
But one of the things you can do is you can say, ah, Prediction is that, as the Earth's magnetic field gets weaker, the same level of storms should have greater effect and reach farther towards the equator.
Farther south if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, or farther north if you're in the Southern Hemisphere.
And, you know, knowing that you can't control for everything precisely because of, you know, where was it facing, how much energy did it have, how dense was it as it hit the Earth, all of these things, you can still say, do we have A hundred years worth of data in which we did have modern methods of measuring the energy put out by the sun.
Can we see that the storm, the effects on the Earth are having greater impact?
And we'd have to decide on what the measurement of greater was.
And is it going to places closer to the equator?
That's an easy one to measure.
Apparently, and I have not fact-checked this, but apparently that is something that is manifested by what happened this last week.
People saw Aurora in, I guess, Puerto Rico, as far south as Puerto Rico.
Usually, we correctly associate the Aurora, when they're visible at all, with extremely high latitudes.
Here we are into the tropics, where they're visible.
Yep, now there is a certain amount of pushback on the claim that auroras are reaching farther for the same level of incoming intensity.
I don't think it's credible, but people do... So again, that's the thing that absolutely should be empirically fact-checkable, like actually fact-checkable.
Well, the problem is that You don't have a perfectly controlled environment and so you've got two things.
One, many people saw these incredible pictures that cell phones were making and I actually tweeted about this because as much as the Aurora that we saw was incredible and in many ways much more incredible than what the phone could see, the phone did intensify what was there.
Well, there's a whole other conversation, of course, to be had about what are the Aurora and what is the human experience of the Aurora.
The phones pick up colors that the human eye generally does not see, apparently, or at least they relate it.
Um, you can have pictures from the place that you were, and go, uh, I didn't see it that way.
But what the phones don't do, unless you're taking video, what still photographs don't do, is reflect the dynamism.
And so, the really extraordinary part, so we've seen Aurora before in Nova Scotia, and I remember there being color, and I don't actually particularly remember the dynamism as much, but this time, What was extraordinary was the movement, the entire sky moving, and it was close to a new moon, and it wasn't up anyway, and we have very little light pollution where we are, and there were no clouds in the sky, and it was just moving, and it was easy.
It was psychedelic, right?
It was easy for the brain to be like, oh, it's a bow tie.
It became a hummingbird.
Is that a Quetzal?
Like, it was remarkable.
And I haven't seen any actual pictures from anyone taking these aurorae where the picture looks representational.
So that's in part the human brain interacting with the sky and its dynamism and the plasma flung off the sun, making meaning where there isn't any at least of that sort.
Yep, I agree with all of that, but the fact that the cameras are interpolating at all means that it's very hard to correct for, you know, where what you want is the same object recording in the same way in two storms of similar intensity to see whether or not the receding magnetic field is actually contributing.
But the other thing is The cameras have gotten more sensitive.
That's the people who say that the auroras aren't getting farther are imagining that the cameras being more sensitive is what's causing that impression.
The problem is light pollution has gotten far worse and cameras will amplify both.
Mm-hmm.
So, in any case, I think it's very clear that the Aurora reached to extraordinary levels in light of the historical capacity of a storm of this size to reach that far, and that is perfectly consistent with this model that says the magnetic field is weakening, which it is, and that the weakening is accelerating, and that that ought to be calling our attention to the other part of this phenomenon.
Yes, we get the beautiful lights in the sky.
But we are endangered because those solar storms that are caused by the coronal mass ejections place the grid in a dire kind of jeopardy.
The earthly electrical grid.
Yes, now there were many failures from this storm.
Failures of communication systems, satellite systems, including a GPS system that is used for farming somehow.
So there were lots and lots of failures.
We did not see major grid failures, but that is on the table to be caused by these solar storms.
And unfortunately what people don't realize is that If the transformers are blown by having this electromagnetic excitement fry the circuitry, they are not easily replaced.
And again, if you were to order one of these transformers today, it would take at least a year for you to see it.
If we needed a bunch of them because a major solar storm had fried a bunch of these transformers, the Earth would be in very serious jeopardy.
And so, you know, in conjunction with the excitement about the, you know, the amazing display we saw in the sky...
People should not be panicking, but they should realize that we are running a risk.
I understand it to be a one in eight risk every decade of a major grid collapse as a result of a solar storm.
And the last time we had a Major impact was in 1859, when the world was not a heavily electrical place.
Very intense things were seen in the telegraph network, including fires and people being shocked at their telegraph stations, and the ability to send messages even with the telegraph not connected to power, because the induced current in the wires allowed the messages to be sent.
But the point is, okay... The curse of the machine is plasma.
Yeah.
Incandescent plasma.
There you have it.
But anyway, we are potentially in increased danger because of the decreasing magnetic field, and we are running stupid risks regardless.
So it would make sense for us to harden the grid.
Obviously, there are some things the sun could do, throw at us, that there's nothing we can do about it.
But we could be, and you've made this point over and over and over again, and we mention it even in our book, we mention Carrington events.
We could mitigate this risk substantially, and by the standards of the federal budget, at very little cost.
Yes, and I've put two measures on the table.
One is hardening the grid with respect to protecting transformers.
The other thing that I think is a high priority, which I just don't hear people talking about, is the nuclear reactors and the spent fuel.
We have decades of spent fuel in the fuel pools, largely stored above these reactors.
Is that being cooled?
Yeah, they're being actively cooled with water, and if the water stops being pumped, it will boil off and they will catch fire, right?
Now, you can't, with the current dependence, which is not high, something like 10% in the U.S.
of our power is nuclear, we could do without that, but with our nuclear reactors, we can't do anything about fuel that has recently been removed from the reactors.
Those rods have too much of what's called decay heat.
They can't be taken out of those pools.
They have to be actively cooled for something like five years, if my understanding is correct.
But a huge fraction of the spent fuel in those pools is not within that window, and it's old enough that there's not so much decay heat that you couldn't put it in what's called a dry cask storage.
Dry cask storage does not need to be actively maintained which meant that if the grid went down the stuff in the fuel pools might be lost to the environment which would be terrible the stuff in the fuel pools and the stuff in the reactors but if we could take The idea is that all of that lion's share, as you put it, would itself ignite if it was next to the stuff that is fresh.
So all of it would ignite and we can get rid of a bunch of the fuel and store it somewhere where it would not ignite because it can be stored safely without active input of electrons.
Right.
And I'm not saying that those reactors and the five years of spent fuel that's too hot is not a major catastrophe in and of itself.
It is.
But the idea, you don't want to compound it with all of the stuff that could be.
Here's a failure of language, right?
It's a major.
It's a major catastrophe either way, what's the problem?
Why are we talking about this when we could solve other problems?
No, it doesn't equal major.
We could talk with high precision, potentially, although we don't have the technical details to know exactly what the numbers are.
And it doesn't matter.
What matters is actually an extraordinary tragedy could be mitigated and turned into a different level of still extraordinary tragedy that was orders of magnitude less.
Yep and there's I mean the point is in in both of these cases the hardening of the grid and the massive reduction in the amount of spent nuclear fuel that requires vigilance to keep it contained those things are very cheap relative to the risks we are running and you know I will just say in passing the danger from the sun
As a result of the society that we have built up with the expectation that the sun will not lash out in this way, even though it definitely will given enough time.
The idea that we are going to turn civilization upside down over models that say the globe is warming due to human activity, when in fact, if you look at what the sun will do in these scenarios, it dwarfs anything that humans are contributing.
So the point is, it's not that we want you to be afraid, the opposite.
What we want you to do is realize we're focused on the wrong stuff and that actually our ability to mitigate the hazards to us is greater and cheaper than we think and it does not require tyranny or any other such thing it just requires us to focus on this thing which at the point that you definitely know for sure that this really is a problem it will be too late right this is this is there's a you know there's certain there's certainly a lot of uncertainty surrounding how the sun behaves and what the magnetic field will do
But what we do know is that this risk exists.
We've seen this happen before on a not highly electrical world, and that if you just simply take what happened in 1859 and transport it to the present, we have a huge problem, right?
Every system, the systems that feed us, the systems that purify and distribute water, every system is highly, not only electrical, but electronic, which makes it sensitive.
So it's time to get serious about it.
The cynic in me thinks, but where's the enemy in that story, right?
That is an earth-unifying story, or at least a nation-unifying story, and every nation should be interested in every other nation also doing the work and, you know, helping each other, if possible, because we all will benefit if, you know, fewer Less spent fuel gets incinerated and fewer people have their entire grid destroyed and are therefore desperate and hungry and violent crossing borders, right?
So, you know, the enemy is something that doesn't have it in for us.
It's just a fact of life.
And that is much harder to create ideology and win elections for.
Yeah, it's actually, interestingly, it is the core of our book.
Basically, the point is it's hyper-novelty and you don't intuit the danger of it because everything about it is new except the fact of the sun and its behavior.
It is that for sure, but I think it's also something that we do mention in the book, but it's also absolutely fundamental within evolutionary biology.
It's a theme that we've mentioned here on Dark Horse, but I think it should become a drumbeat.
It is the distinction between abiotic and biotic forces.
Darwin's hostile forces of nature that any individual that is alive, be it human, zebra, What kind of a plane is that?
I don't know.
I guess it's a U-4.
Fungus virus.
We'll contend with both biotic and abiotic forces of nature.
Biotic forces of nature include other members of your own species with whom you might be competing or trying to attract as mates, members of other species whom you might be trying to eat or may be trying to eat you or might be trying to infect you in order to serve their own ends of making it into the future, right?
Those are biotic forms.
Those are other life forms that are competing And sometimes cooperating with you and they can adapt to your response and they will adapt to your response and therefore how you respond because it will change how your future interactions with same thing will be matters.
compare that to abiotic forces of nature, like hurricanes, like the climate, like weather, like volcanoes, like the sun, right?
The sun doesn't care what we do.
The sun doesn't care, period.
It's not a conscious being.
And even if it were alive and not conscious, it can't respond, right?
So, So our response to it, our recognizing that's a threat, our recognizing that we live making something up now, like, oh my god, we live in a floodplain, and there are hundred-year floods, and they seem to be happening more than every hundred years at this point, and maybe we need to build on higher ground, bring in the Army Corps of Engineers, and build some stuff.
We need to figure out what is going on and how to mitigate the effects of this thing, which will not respond to us.
Nature, the abiotic stuff, is not out to get us.
It doesn't care.
This is one of the things that I used to talk to my students about before studying abroad.
You want to imagine that it's nature red in tooth and claw and the big risks are from the big cats and the snakes and maybe the anopheles mosquitoes are going to come vector some malaria to you or something.
But honestly, the biggest risks tend to be the dead tree falling on you in a storm, the water rising in the Amazon or the riptide in the ocean.
It's the stuff that actually cannot respond to you, has no ability to respond to you.
You need to keep your wits about you and figure out what to do.
And so this is an abiotic thing.
And climate change is being presented in this really sensu stricto.
It's carbon.
It's only carbon.
Carbon is the only thing that matters.
Not only is carbon the only thing that matters, it's anthropogenic carbon that's the only thing that matters.
That turns, frankly, the abiotic thing that is climate into a biotic thing.
It changes what the force of nature is, and I'm not saying that we aren't having any effect.
We are.
Right?
But the way that this thing is being manifested in all of us is insane and wrong.
And it is changing our models.
It is befuddling our own models and our ability to do anything about it.
Yes, and I mean, I think this is where you started, but it also neatly creates villains.
Exactly.
The villains are the people who are resisting the climate measure.
You can't have abiotic villains.
Right.
Snowflakes!
Hailstones!
There you go.
I hate them!
Like, cool, and they don't hate you.
Yeah, they're different.
Vandals, yeah, and they do hate you, potentially, so figure out what that is.
Now, I hate to do this to you, but can you search on the term tsunami stones or Japanese tsunami stones?
Because I think it makes your point very, very well.
So what these are, whether we find, we should easily find a picture of it, but what these are stones.
Japan is obviously a set of islands inhabited by an ancient culture and the ancient... So I find something at Smithsonian right away.
I don't know.
You want me to show?
Yeah, let's just see it.
Smithsonian, the century-old stone, tsunami stones dot Japan's coastline.
Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis.
Do not build any homes below this point.
Yes, do not build any homes below this point.
Now, of course, the folks who built the Fukushima reactor ignored these stones.
Oh, they did?
Yeah.
So these stones were in the Fukushima Prefecture?
Yeah.
And, you know, obviously they got their comeuppance.
Unfortunately, the rest of us got their comeuppance, too, because the diesel generators that were supposed to maintain the cooling after the earthquake flooded because the tsunami swamped them.
And that resulted in the triple meltdown that we had at Fukushima and very nearly resulted in a much greater disaster than actually happened.
The only difference between, there were two differences that happened that account for the terrible disaster not being, you know, a hundred or a thousand fold worse.
One was the courage of people who maintained control of the site.
And two is dumb luck, right?
Terrible stuff happened at that site.
For example, one of the gantry cranes over the fuel pools collapsed into a pool.
It did not crack it.
If it had cracked it and the pool had emptied, then you would have had a fire very quickly.
And then I would think the whole site would have been abandoned because it wouldn't have been safe for anybody to be there.
They would have been like the firemen who fought the Chernobyl disaster and quickly died thereafter.
But anyway, tsunami stones are supposed to be telling us something.
Yes.
I did want to introduce just one other little dichotomy.
I like your point about biotic versus abiotic antagonists.
It's hugely important.
Here's the other one.
We have when we talk on Dark Horse about complex systems We are usually talking about complex adaptive systems biological rights, right?
There's a whole other kind of complex system, right?
Which is just simply a complex system the Sun the solar system These are complex systems, but they don't have an objective like surviving They just simply function the way they are and to give one example You know No objective.
That's the distinction.
No objective.
Yeah.
There's no objective.
There's no success or failure.
It's just a complex thing.
Not trying to kill you.
Right.
It might happen.
Right.
Yeah, it might happen.
Yeah.
But, you know, I remember now, now that I'm finding myself learning a lot about the sun and the solar system and the galaxy and the way these things interact, which appears to be tremendously explanatory for all sorts of patterns that we know about, but nobody ever tells you exactly why or the answer isn't satisfactory.
Right now we have an 11 year sunspot cycle.
My feeling is it's too late to harden the grid.
There may be small things we can do, but we're not going to.
We're in the middle of the this one.
We're at the peak.
We're closing in on it.
OK, it's very unlikely that we can do anything fast enough.
We are going to be gambling for the rest of this one.
So 11 year cycle and it lasts.
What's the how long?
Several years.
So that 11 years is from the end of the last one to the beginning of the next one?
It's from peak to peak.
Now, I did find myself scratching my head over this.
Where the hell does an 11 year cycle come from?
Well, and also that 11 years, if it's last, like, that doesn't sound like, anyway, it doesn't sound like an 11 year cycle to me, but well, the numbers are just, it's a strange way to describe it.
Periodicity is 11 years.
As far as, as far as we know now, anyway, I found myself puzzling over it.
Cause I've known since I was a kid, there was an 11 year cycle, but nobody ever told me what that was from.
It turns out we don't actually know, but there is a leading hypothesis.
Jupiter.
Now, I love this.
I heard that and I immediately went.
Jupiter, our second sun.
Yeah, Jupiter, which just doesn't have enough mass to become a miasma of incandescent plasma.
It's just a lot of gases.
But anyway... Can you fill that in a little bit?
Yeah, Jupiter's year is a little bit longer than 11 Earth years.
And so, I don't know how these things interact, but my guess would be that on its close approach to the Sun, either the gravitational effect or the electromagnetic effect or the two combined effects have an impact that causes stuff to churn inside of the Sun, which is interesting.
And it's got a highly elliptical orbit in which it has one closest approach?
I mean, that would be necessary for that.
Well, let's put it this way.
I don't know that it has to be highly elliptical.
It doesn't have to be, but there has to be a point of closest as opposed to an ellipsis in which there are two points of close.
I don't know that it is the proximity.
That's my layering this on top of Jupiter is the leading most likely explanation for this 11-year pattern.
But where does that idea come from?
Where did I get it?
Oh, it's Jupiter.
Says who?
Well, I asked Ben.
I said, do we know why the 11 year sunspot cycle exists?
And he says, we don't, but leading hypothesis is Jupiter with potential contribution of Saturn.
Anyway, so.
Tantalizing that that, you know, there has to be something that would have that periodicity.
And we do have a large something in our solar system that has roughly that periodicity.
So that's fascinating.
But again, this is, you know, complex, non-adaptive systems.
And it turns out that if you think about the sun as a sun and the earth as a thing that is interacting with the sun gravitationally, Right, you're not getting the degree of interaction.
You know, the electromagnetic interaction is profound and the punchline of the whole thing is that the electromagnetic interaction of our solar system with the galaxy, which also has an oscillating electromagnetic nature, has profound implications also, which we do not typically think about.
So anyway, that You know, it's simpler than biology.
In some ways, it's more intuitive, but it's also the degree to which we are interacting with forces that are simply so profound that we have nothing to do but accommodate ourselves to what we can deduce they will do.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, biology, some biology happens at exactly the scale that we live at.
And so we can see it.
But all of biology has the potential to respond to what we do.
Yep.
And the universe, other than the stuff that's alive, does not.
Yes, it seems to be.
We can change some things, but that doesn't make it responsive to, it doesn't make it an adaptive response.
Right.
1859 would have come and gone with the solar storm as it was, and the difference between us having a telegraph network and not yet having one is the difference in how that would have been understood on Earth.
Is it just lights in the sky?
Right.
Or did it have, you know, an electromagnetic implication for terrestrial stuff?
Okay, one last thing I just want to put on the table here.
When the sunspot cluster was facing the earth and it started throwing off these coronal mass ejections, I knew that we were in some trouble because I'd been thinking about this for some time.
Now, I'm not sure exactly when I started thinking about it, but I know that an inflection point in my thinking came in 2015 When I saw a video done by Arnie Gunderson, who I had followed since the Fukushima days, he is a nuclear engineer who turned whistleblower.
Much of what I know about nuclear power comes from him.
He did a talk with somebody I didn't know, a guy named Matt Stein, who has now tragically died.
But, in his conversation with Matt Stein, they talked about Carrington events and the implications for the grid.
And it caused me to start digging.
And the more I dug, the more concerned I became that we were just leaving this vulnerability open.
And, you know, the people who have delved deep enough to understand the vulnerability tend to become very active on this.
It, you know, Newt Gingrich, it turns out, was very good on this topic.
He was very focused on our vulnerability and tried to get something done about it, to his credit.
Who knew?
Yeah, who knew?
But anyway, so in 2021, in the summer, I can't remember exactly how it happened, but I think UnHerd asked me, maybe I had tweeted about it and they had noticed and they had asked me to write something about this existential threat.
And so I wrote a piece about the way it might go down, that a solar storm would cause disruption on Earth that would result in the extinction of humanity.
And when this Sunspot started flinging stuff at us this week.
I went back and read it and I was stunned by the first line.
So it says, the world began to end on the 12th of May 2024, though another 309 years would pass before our species finally went extinct.
Now that caused a lot of people when they saw this, I retweeted my article, when people saw it, it caused a lot of people to think, what the hell is going on here?
Including me.
Yeah.
You know, when I saw that, I, Couldn't make sense of it because the, you know, indeed this was going to be right in the middle of this wave of truly frightening and unprecedented in the last 20 years.
19.
Solar storm.
And so, you know, I considered various possibilities.
Did somebody mess with that page?
Did I really?
Recently.
Yeah.
So I went back to the Wayback Machine.
Now it turns out that was the original date.
So that's a pretty interesting coincidence.
Now, um, my, uh, I was briefly in contention for the next Nostradamus, and then the sun rose normally on Monday, and everybody went to work, and my contention was... But very short-lived Nostradamus.
Yes, very short-lived.
Um, because as, you know, as even those of us who know how frightening these things are all believed, our likelihood of coming through this storm, uh, relatively unscathed was very high.
Extremely high.
Yeah.
Yeah, the risk is unacceptably high.
Davidson put it at something between 10 and 12 percent of a catastrophe, which is high.
But, you know, the point is, yeah, that's almost 90 percent chance that you get away with it, which we did.
But I wanted to talk a little bit about what people should be thinking about that odd coincidence, right?
Many people have asked me, how'd you come up with that date?
And so I've thought back to how I came up with that date, and I now know how I did it.
And you can judge for yourself its implications.
When I went to write that article, there were two things that went into choosing that date.
One of them was the 11-year sunspot cycle, which I very carefully looked up and I chose a date that would be squarely in the hot zone.
And the other thing was narrative.
Having identified roughly where I wanted to place the date, you know, and I wrote that sentence in my head where the idea was extinction was not going to happen because the sun flung something off and caused us to go extinct.
The sun was going to trigger a cascade of events that ultimately Would lead there, and I didn't want it to be winter right because if it was winter the events would have been dire right away And I wanted people to understand that the catastrophe of civilization unraveling slowly even if this happened at a hospitable moment like you know in early spring where you have or mid spring where you have the
You know, a long period of time before winter sets in and starts killing people.
I thought that would be useful.
So what that should tell you is that yes, this was a spectacular coincidence having picked a date on which there was a rather spectacular solar storm impacting the earth.
It was not totally random.
It was chosen to be a day that would have a high likelihood of such a thing, but no day has an especially high likelihood.
And the other part was just happenstance, which is I chose I chose it to be spring because narratively that worked.
So it was an amazing coincidence, but maybe not quite as huge as it seemed.
It wasn't like I picked, you know, One date out of thousands of dates.
So anyway, I thought that was interesting, but I will say I do think that there is a small lesson in it.
To the extent that I was able to identify a date on which this was likely, and to the extent that people became aware that the sun is doing things that potentially have implications for their safety because of the lights in the sky, which is one of the things that I describe in my piece.
I describe lights being seen, I think, as far south as Costa Rica in my narrative, solar aurora.
Yep.
The answer is, well, a certain amount of knowledge went into that.
To the extent that that knowledge resulted in an admittedly quite spectacular coincidence, You probably ought to have that knowledge too because your well-being could potentially depend on it and our collective reasonableness depends on it, right?
This ought to be a priority because it is a real threat to not only nations but to humanity and if this gets your attention...
I'm going to push back on you there.
It is huge.
But it ought to be a priority for individuals.
Individuals literally can't do anything to protect the grid.
Oh, individuals can't do anything to protect the grid, but it is certainly the fact that individuals are largely unaware of the threat to the grid that causes the political apparatus that could do something about the grid at very low cost not to do it decade after decade.
So I do, I think, given that, yes, how can those of us who see this, parts of this problem, with this abiotic, hostile force of nature that is also, without it we wouldn't be here.
How can we work to shift the narrative from It's carbon and anthropogenic climate change that is going to take us out, and we must all do everything we possibly can to buy carbon credits and offset carbon, etc.
Two, the climate may change dramatically in a way that will take out humanity.
And there are things we can do.
And it's not the simple story you've been told.
And you think it's not simple because it's got all these fancy models, but behind those models hide all sorts of scientific chicanery that make it extremely difficult to assess.
And the fact that there's other models that come up with different conclusions tells you that it's not exactly what it seems.
Whereas this So many people saw the aurora this last weekend.
So many people saw the aurora and now people, briefly, are awake to the idea that that was unusual.
That it's not just, oh, if you go above the 55th parallel you'll see aurora.
No, there has to be something going on with regard to what the sun is emitting within some days of that for you to see them.
And I think also people are, many people, Saw the eclipse, the full eclipse that happened earlier this year.
We weren't in the path of totality, but the path of totality went across so much of the United States that many more people saw it than would see most eclipses.
I was talking to a friend whom I was supposed to see this week.
She's one of these double PhDs.
She's super educated, very smart and wise.
She said, I saw the total eclipse and I don't know if she used the word spiritual but or mystical she said it was almost it was almost a mystical experience like I couldn't believe the physical and visceral experiences that I was having watching this and I've seen partial eclipses before I've never seen a total eclipse and it was just mind-boggling it made me think about my place in the universe in ways that I hadn't I haven't thought before.
And so we have that too, that you and I didn't experience, but a lot of people experienced that recently.
And then a lot of people with considerable overlap saw the Ouroboros over this last weekend.
And so there is right now a consideration of The sky and astronomical bodies and how they can affect us.
And so this is kind of a moment where we could get attention to actually, yeah, you know, you're concerned about the Earth's health, about planetary systems, about climate.
Put aside the fear mongering that you have been fed for 20 years and let's talk about this other thing and about what governments could actually be doing to mitigate the risks.
I think that's well said.
I think... I cannot figure out why we are focused on...
on anthropogenic climate change as mitigated through carbon and not focused on this other issue.
It's possible that some folks who are aware of this other issue are using anthropogenic climate change for other reasons.
And so one of the things that I think is vital for people to understand is that There is no reason that a recognition of this interaction between the sun and the earth and the danger that we face requires any tyranny.
And to the extent that the tyrants are looking for an excuse and the point is it's because you're a bad person because your carbon footprint is too large.
That gives them license to do all kinds of things and you know, from the World Health Organization on down to your local governments, the idea of using that excuse, you know, we're protecting the planet and that's why we're debanking you.
You know, that's a very frightening turn of events.
What we're saying is look, This does not require your freedoms to be restricted at all.
This has nothing to do with you.
You're not causing the Earth's magnetic field to decrease, making us vulnerable to, you know, to charge particles from the sun.
But we collectively have built a society... Just because you didn't cause it doesn't mean it couldn't take you out.
Right.
And so anyway, I guess the idea of like, hey, It's not that we want you to worry, it's that we think you're worried about the wrong thing.
There is an existential threat, and there are things we can do about it, and we should be doing them, and they do not require us to make you, you know, you will own nothing and be happy.
This isn't that.
And so, anyway, I'm hoping that that, in conjunction with, as you point out, people's, you know, very Profound interaction with what they saw in the sky either during the eclipse or during the aurora or both This is the right moment for them to start paying attention To these patterns because they matter a great deal and you know The universe is an interesting place.
I have found it so.
The galaxy is not just like a background mural.
We are interacting with an electromagnetic sheet suffused through that galaxy and it has Implications that, strange as this may sound, you are likely to live to see.
So, anyway, yes, let's get our act together and not panic, but at least start focusing on the right stuff.
I feel like we have a line in our book.
Here we go.
At the very end of, it's going to be the sleep chapter.
In which we are giving some advice, the corrective lens stuff.
We say, restrict outdoor blue spectrum light at the societal level, particularly lights that shine upward and outward at all hours of the night.
Nighttime darkness is healthy.
24-hour light is not, and is even implicated in higher rates of disease.
Furthermore, humans deserve a night sky, a sky full of possibilities, sometimes of clouds, often the moon, occasionally planets, nearly always stars, and the milky way in which we live.
Besides sleep, which we need, what else might we lose when we disappear our own night sky?
And I think one of the answers that we're seeing, that I think part of the reason that we are ever more focused on the narrow and the tiny and the selfish and the narcissistic, frankly, is because we are restricting our view by polluting everything.
With light pollution, with noise pollution, with everything, we restrict our ability to actually sense the reality that is outside of ourselves.
And when we lose the night sky, in part, we lose track.
My prediction would be that the ancients had a better sense of the dynamic nature of the universe.
They, of course, did not have the modern understanding that we get from our instrumentation, but they had a better sense of its dynamism than we do.
Yes, and the irony of it is the When you look up into the night sky and you see the stars, I've always thought that it was philosophically destructive.
It turns you into a solipsist not to be able to see the sky.
And you know, a kid growing up in the city just doesn't have the same relationship to the wonder of what's out there.
But the funny thing is when you look out there, Most of what you see is right here, right?
It really, actually, it's misleading, you know, as much as it suggests a complete vastness of space, which is good enough psychologically.
It's also a distortion because you're seeing stars that are, you know, in our little arm of the galaxy, and then you see a kind of a haze that is the galaxy itself, and the true vastness of space You know, it mocks that level of scale, right?
I mean, you know, the galaxy itself is a hundred thousand light years wide, right?
When light from the other side of our galaxy was released from those stars, it would be 90,000 more years before any human thought to farm, right?
That's an amazing fact.
And that's, you know, that's 60,000 more years before any humans and dogs got together.
Whoa.
Right.
But anyway, there is something about having your attention called, you know, the Hubble telescope has done a good job of this, and the new one, the Webb telescope, is picking up where the Hubble left off.
You know, seeing those deep field pictures does tell you a lot about the amazingness of the universe, but also the proximity Understanding that the sun isn't just a thing that, you know, throws light on the earth.
Right.
Right?
That's a pretty big wake-up call.
Yeah.
Well, okay, so that's a decent segue to an adaptive complex system.
A segment I'm calling Ozempic for the Lose.
But I want to preface it by saying this is super complex.
The research isn't even actually released, and there are so many tentacles here that I'm going to kind of try to muddle my way through it.
You help, and we may come back to this.
But let me just start with Ozempic and Wagovi, I think is how it's pronounced, are the two brand names of semaglutide, which has skyrocketed popularity.
It's marketed as a weight loss drug, originally produced as something else.
I feel like it was late 2023 was when it really hit the market.
I'll just show you, if you want to show my screen here, Zach.
Back end of 2023, I quote-tweeted someone.
The Chrisman said, is there anyone in the world who both A, has a decent understanding of principles of complex systems, and B, thinks the Ozempic craze is going to end well?
And I quote tweeted him and said, "Ozempic is fooling people just as COVID treatments did.
Even those who understand complex systems and other contexts can be convinced that the stakes are too high to think for themselves when it comes to medicine and health.
In fact, the stakes are too high not to." So I stand by this, right?
The number of people who are otherwise careful, critical thinkers, who think of themselves as heterodox, who think of themselves as not following the herd, who, when it comes to things that come wrapped in a health or medical package, go, oh, well, okay, if the experts say it, then I guess we'll go, is surprising and saddening and dangerous.
So, this week we had, if you'll show my screen, Zach, The Times of London publishes a piece called Weight Loss Jab Cuts Heart Disease Deaths by 20%.
Semaglutide, also known as Azempic or Rigovi, is set to transform treatments for cardiovascular disease, but a change in guidelines is needed to allow routine prescriptions.
So, I'm going to just walk us through a little bit of this paper, and then I'm going to I'll show you what I did to find the actual research in question and what lies there.
Millions of middle-aged Britons should be routinely prescribed weight loss injections to cut their risk of heart attacks and strokes by a fifth, according to a trial set to revolutionize medical practice.
The largest study ever into semaglutide found the drug cuts heart disease deaths by about 20% even if people don't lose weight.
The results presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Venice were hailed as the biggest medical breakthrough since the introduction of statins in the 1990s.
Professor John Deanfield of University College London, who was also the study author, said it was clear the drugs quote, target the underlying biology of chronic diseases independently of their effect on weight loss.
This suggests they can be used to treat several conditions beyond obesity and diabetes, which is All they are currently approved for.
They were originally being developed for diabetes.
That's right.
And then it was discovered that they were apparently effective in weight loss.
And so I will, of course, link to this article, but let me just go to a couple of things.
So semaglutide is manufactured by Novo Nordisk.
This is, again, Dean Field, the lead author on the study, who's also a professor of cardiology, added that the drug could also be, quote, added onto pre-existing therapy for heart problems, including statins and blood pressure medication, with almost all of those in the trial also taking statins.
So, that struck me as surprising, and we will come back to that point.
There are already people in the Treasury thinking about the savings to the economy because of the opportunity to boast productivity.
You need to get your workforce as fit as possible.
And nothing says fit like, inject this into your thigh.
At this week's European Congress on Obesity, delegates can be heard excitedly talking about a future in which millions of adults take the medications as a preventive measure.
Sounds like not my kind of conference.
And finally, only a fraction of NHS patients eligible for weight loss jabs are currently able to get a hold of them, meaning that rolling the jabs out to millions seems like a pipe dream.
Just that phrase right there.
Rolling the jabs out to millions seems like a pipe dream.
That is not just shades of COVID.
Rolling the jabs out to millions.
So they are trying to create this excitement around this But there's scarcity, can you even get it?
There's scarcity, just like there were with the vaccines, and this would not be what it's developed for.
Of course, it wasn't even developed for weight loss, it was developed for diabetes, but now it's a weight loss drug.
But oh my god, it has these amazing effects on heart disease.
Let's do this, right?
Okay, so this struck me as...
a by turns hysterical and um dishonestly written article and I of course went to get um wait wait one red flag I want to introduce you just one yeah well there are a bunch but the idea that ozempic or whatever this stuff is yeah some meglutide semaglutide semaglutide
that this has this effect even if people don't lose weight it's just it's like a health improver um not buying sure um that you know if if it caused you to lose weight there would be some cost And you would have a mechanism whereby it might reduce strain on your heart, potentially, and we could talk about the net effect.
But the idea that it's just sort of generally health improving seems preposterous.
And then there's this point that you make about the majority of the people in the trial were on statins.
Did I get that correctly?
Well, I'll show you what I found, but that's what was claimed in the Times of London article.
Well, I will just say, my guess is it will be hard to dig this up, but that does suggest a mechanism where something that is health negative could be made to look health positive.
Did I get it?
Well, I think so.
There's no evidence, but that is exactly what I think is going on.
But one of many things, I mean, this is just a I think.
This is such a mess.
It's a perfect example of how... I feel like we are seeing in slow motion right now, and very quickly it'll be impossible to decipher what's in the rearview mirror, how this drug that got announced to great fanfare as the new weight loss dream pill or shot for people suddenly becomes in everyone's medicine cabinet.
Sending the stock price of Novo Nordisk through the roof, and the health of people who were also on statins maybe finally gets to equalize because they're taking one toxin and the other toxin kind of maybe partially neutralized it?
Maybe?
That's my hypothesis, too.
This is not published research.
You can show my screen here if you like.
This is from a talk, which as of now has an abstract, which again is just like a scientific summary, from the 31st European Congress on Obesity, which has been held for the last four days.
It ended today.
Today's the 15th, right?
In Venice, Italy.
And they do, in fact, have the... Actually, give me my screen back for a second here so I can figure out... Oh no, this was right.
Okay, yeah.
So you can show my screen here.
So the abstracts from this conference, this is 509 pages long.
This is a big conference.
Again, it's an obesity conference.
It's a big, fat obesity conference.
It's a big, Fat Cluster Obesity Conference.
Yeah.
And, you know, they got Dave Blue.
They mentioned physical activity once.
Hey, that's surprising.
And, you know, we'll get back to what this conference is and who's sponsoring it and all.
But there are a number of things.
So let's see.
A number of things.
I just searched on the author that is mentioned in The Times of London, Dean Field.
When I search on that author, I find that he's actually got three abstracts.
He was part of three talks.
The first one is Ryan et al.
You see that Dean Field is the third author, but he's in there.
Long-term weight loss in the select trial, semaglutide 2.4 mg versus placebo over 208 weeks in a global population of 17,604 participants.
So this is a clinical trial that is called the SELECT trial, and this is about, did it or did not, 208 weeks, so it's almost four years, right?
Or this is four years.
Did it or did not affect weight loss?
Seems like it did.
Okay, that's one of the Dean Field papers.
The second paper that has his name on it is this one.
Second one, just in order in the list of abstracts, 500 plus pages of abstracts from this obesity conference that just finished in Venice.
Serious adverse events and safety profile of semaglutide versus placebo in the select study.
Again, Dean Field is the third author.
Same study, they're just pulling different conclusions out of it.
And if we find the third one, oops, no, that's the wrong thing.
This one is actually, he's the first author, and so this is the one that the Times of London article is referring to.
Relevance of body weight and weight change on cardiovascular benefit with semaglutide, a pre-specified analysis of the select trial.
Now, there's a lot to say here, but one of the things I wanted to say is I think I read you the titles of the three papers that this Dean field is on, and they're all pulling data from exactly the same clinical trial, which is massive, as clinical trials tend to be.
But this is the only one that says a pre-specified analysis, which I think just means it's hypothesis-driven.
I think a pre-specified analysis.
You know, I may be wrong.
Actually, we should ask Tess Laurie what this is code for, but I think what this is code for is we actually had this idea before we did the work.
Wait, wait.
It's science-driven science?
And it's terrible, but I think pre-specified analysis, I believe, means that they actually thought about this in advance rather than just data-mined their way to conclusions.
I bet you what it means is that they registered it.
Yeah, it may.
So, Zach, if I may have my screen back for a second.
Okay, so with regard to the question about statins, right?
Oh, actually, no, before we go there, I forgot that I wanted to do this.
I wanted to talk a little bit about what it's actually doing, what we think semaglutide is doing.
So you can show my screen here.
This is a paper from 2023, not related to this conference.
That just sort of reviews mechanisms of action, among other things.
Semaglutide for the treatment of obesity.
Mechanisms of action for weight loss.
These are two screenshots I put together, so this is down lower in the paper.
Mechanisms of action for weight loss.
Sema glutide is a long-acting GLP-1 receptor agonist with 94% homology with native human GLP-1. 94%.
It has structural modifications to allow for reversible albumin binding, reducing renal clearance, and decreasing degradation by DPP-4.
Albumin binding.
Okay.
Reducing renal clearance and decreasing degradation by DPP-4.
I don't know what that means.
While also allowing for sufficiently high GLP-1R affinity.
The part that matters, that I fully understand there, is structural modifications.
The thing is 94% homologous to what we've got natively, so it's already 6% different.
Probably that 6% is largely these structural modifications that allow it to do things that we want it to do, but again, with the structural modifications on things that we're putting into our bodies, we of course do not know all of what it does.
This formulation results in slower degradation and a half-life of 155 to 184 hours.
Allowing for once weekly subcutaneous dosing without compromising weight loss efficacy.
Figure 1 shows theoretical and empirically supported mechanisms of action of semaglutide.
And here's figure 1 from this paper.
Theoretical and empirically supported mechanisms for action of semaglutide for obesity.
A. There's no references, so I don't know where the empirical support is for this.
This figure should obviously have references.
So, I can't tell which of this is theoretical and which of it's empirical.
The fact is, they say, OK, GLP-1 is impacting brain, pancreas, stomach, and tends to decrease api, an appetite suppressant, and also a suppressant of gastric emptying.
We've heard these sorts of stories, right, of people who were on Ozempec and Wigovy being at risk from surgery, because the usual fasting period that anesthesiologists tell people to take before surgery isn't sufficient if you're on one of these drugs, because this suppresses gastric emptying.
It slows gastric emptying.
So, what we know is that two of the effects of GLP-1 are to decrease appetite and to slow gastric emptying.
But then there's a whole lot of, like, and it has effects on the brain, and the pancreas, and the stomach.
The stomach, like the brain, has a ton of neurons, and we don't know all of what's going on.
The pancreas, I think, has a pretty decent model with regard to what's going on, at least endocrinologically.
GLP-1 affects the pancreas.
It causes upticks in insulin, decrease in glucagon.
therefore upticks in the sense of fullness and being satiated and a decrease in cravings for food.
So, okay.
But the stuff in that box, you're not as hungry, you feel more full, you crave food less, you have greater control of your eating.
We don't know a lot.
This looks like we have a lot here, but I don't know how much of this is actually empirical, except GLP-1 has these effects on insulin and glucagon.
And we know what insulin and glucagon do, at least at a rough level.
That's where I suspect most of our empirical evidence is here.
And maybe it's a bit more, but Point is, we've got some ideas, but we don't really fully know, and of course, this is complex system upon complex system, and we're going to mess with this at our peril.
So let me just try to unpack a couple things here, and you tell me.
Maybe neither of us know enough to sort this out, but it looks like, well, there is a system that ...shuts down the activity of the gut when there are higher priorities, right?
When you are being chased by a tiger, you are not hungry, you are not dedicating resources to extracting nutrition from your food.
And you would be liberating stored resources so that you would be able to have energetic bursts.
Is that what they're doing here?
I don't think so.
This is not involved in the adrenaline system at all.
I don't think.
I think that is going to be some similar, some parallel truths, but I don't think it's part of the same system.
And I don't actually have any idea.
Probably you're right that adrenaline basically It slows down digestive activity, as you say, but one of the effects of that is whatever food is in your stomach stays in your stomach, although food in your stomach has got to make you a little slow.
I'm not actually sure what adrenaline does with regard to food in your stomach, but in general, yes, it moves blood and energy where it needs to go and reduces the homeostatic stuff.
But okay, let me try it a different way.
You've got GLP-1, which is some molecule that meets the GLP-1 receptor and normally triggers a reduction in appetite, reduction in gastric emptying, increase in insulin, decrease in glucagon, The receptors presumably being in these three places which presumably again is empirical.
Which would make the way the way bodies are constructed this makes sense.
You've got a hormone that under conditions of X it hits all of the systems that need to be modified in the up direction or the down direction and triggers them all at once.
Yep.
And you would imagine that if these are the natural effects of GLP-1, when it hits the GLP-1 receptor, that it would be very difficult to get this into a pill.
Because if creatures could cause this decrease in appetite, right, then they would have a mechanism to thwart your consumption of them, right?
Like imagine that you're, you know, eating tubers and those tubers can make you feel full.
Oh yeah, exactly.
Suddenly I'm thinking about going to a movie.
I'm not interested in tubers anymore.
Do these pants make me look thin?
Right.
So anyway, you would imagine, okay, if that is what GLP-1 is doing, that the GLP-1 receptors are having this effect and that a food coming in through your gut could mimic this and cause that reaction, that lots of things that you eat would have done so in order to adjust their likelihood of evading your hunger.
And so that would explain why you need to inject this thing because the gut Doesn't accept that message coming across because if it did that would be a vulnerability, so I don't know Do we have any idea if I'm in the neighborhood here?
Well, I mean, that's that's an adaptive hypothesis.
Yeah, I'm sure it's not been investigated.
I don't like well, but I mean, I guess I'm wondering Why'd they go after GLP-1?
What did they think?
I mean, you said the R&D was on diabetes.
I have no idea what that R&D looks like.
I have no idea.
Nor do I have, nor do I expect that the decisions in advance of where do we look, look as hypothesis driven as we would like it to.
Yeah.
Right.
So, you know, there's certainly heuristics for like, we're not going to look over there.
That research space has never generated anything good.
So we're not going over there.
But in terms of, you know, why GLP-1, I don't know.
Yeah.
To go back to this obesity conference that just ended in Venice, from which this Times of London piece is basing its analysis, there are three papers, all based on this select trial, a four-year, several tens of thousands of people trial.
in which people were either given placebo, supposedly, or semaglutide at some level.
And The author of the paper that the Times of London is talking about is on three of these papers, and let's see.
Ah, the question was, in the Times of London, it says, also most of the participants in the trial were on statins.
It's like throwaway line that, for me, it was like, wow, wait a minute.
What is that?
So let's figure it out.
So there's, again, three papers.
You can show my screen here across all these three papers.
This first one, long-term weight loss in the select trial, semaglutide, 2.4 mg versus placebo, over 208 weeks and a global population of 17,604 participants.
This is probably the biggest one.
This is Ryan et al.
All I've done here in these three screenshots is I've put the title of the paper with the authors and the entire methods.
Again, this is an abstract, so it's not long.
The methods for this paper as presented at the conference is SELECT, a multi-center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, event-driven superiority trial enrolled 17,604 patients aged 45 years and above.
Patients were randomly assigned to receive once-weekly subcutaneous semaglutide 2.4 mg or placebo, in addition to standard of care recommendations for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease, including healthy lifestyle counseling without specific weight loss instruction.
Standard of Care Recommendations for Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease, I think is where the statins are hidden here.
There's nothing else.
The rest of the methods specifically are about what particular measures were they looking at.
Hold on.
This is so odd.
I'm having trouble even understanding what they're claiming.
Patients were randomly assigned to receive once weekly subcutaneous semaglutide 2.4 milligrams or placebo in addition.
Is only the placebo?
I don't know from the punctuation.
Do we have another situation, like with the vaccines newly added to the childhood vaccine schedule, in which placebo doesn't mean what placebo means?
Oh, don't worry about it.
We've just redefined placebo.
It's fine.
You're safe, right?
Does it mean that?
Or are they saying, as the Times of London piece suggests, but why do we trust a journalist to have reported on something that isn't even listed here?
And this isn't even the research she's talking about, so we haven't even gotten to the crazy part yet.
The journalist suggests that most of the participants in the trial are on statins.
So, if we read that, if we take that as true, then this is regardless of whether you're in the control of the treatment group, you were also given standard of care recommendation for secondary prevention of CV disease, including healthy lifestyle counseling without specific weight loss instruction.
But healthy lifestyle counseling without specific weight loss instruction sounds more like placebo.
I can't tell.
So let me just, let me get to the, I'm going to show the three, the methods for the three abstracts, for the three papers that are about the select clinical trial, all of which have Dean Fielding.
Before you move on, I just want to make this clear for people who are just listening, who can't read that on the screen.
The way this is punctuated, it sounds like the placebo group got something that the treatment group did not get.
And that was standard of care recommendations for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease, including healthy lifestyle counseling without specific weight loss.
I don't think that's what happened.
Right.
I think they've just miss punctuated.
And it's really it's not it's not the big deal.
I really don't think that's what happened, but it's but it's poorly written.
The big point is.
Standard-of-care recommendations for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease.
We know that the medical establishment is statin-happy.
Statins are the standard-of-care recommendations for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease right now.
I think this is the mention of statins.
It's nowhere else in the abstract.
In fact, when I did a global search on that 500-plus page book of abstracts, I find only one or two mention of statins throughout the entire thing, and they're in totally unrelated papers.
So there's no mention of statins by name in any of these three abstracts.
Here's the second one.
Sorry.
There we go.
This is Kushner et al., again with those Ryan and Dean Field.
Serious adverse events and safety profile of semaglutide versus placebo in the select study.
So this is the paper on serious adverse events.
The entire methods section is on the screen here but it begins select enrolled 17,604 patients aged 45 years and up from 41 countries who were randomly assigned to semaglutide dose titrated up to 2.4 milligrams that's interesting yeah no that's different it up to titrate up to that's different even though it's the same patient so those two different sentences refer to the same yes or placebo comma
So they had a comma, in addition to standard of care recommendations for lifestyle counseling that did not target weight loss.
So here we've lost the standard, the language around standard of care recommendations for cardiovascular disease.
We don't have that at all.
And there's a lot to do here.
In addition to standard of care recommendations for lifestyle counseling that did not target weight loss.
Okay.
Okay.
So there's no mention of standard of care recommendations for cardiovascular disease here.
And then in the third one, which is the research purports to find this great benefit from semaglutide with regard to limiting the impacts of heart disease.
And again, it's all the same trial.
It's the same people.
It's the same data.
We have, again, the entire methods read as follows.
The select trial randomized 17,604 patients aged 45 years and up with a BMI of greater than 27 kilograms per square per meters per meter squared.
Yeah, meter.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's height.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Meter squared.
Why is the meter squared?
Okay, I'm going to put that aside.
They're falling?
I don't know.
Okay, so I'm going to start over and I'm going to leave out the Exponent.
I don't know why that's there.
OK.
The select trial randomized 17,604 patients aged 45 years and up with BMI of greater than 27... I'm just going to go with 27.
72% male, 28% female, from a geographically and racially diverse population to semaglutide or placebo for a mean of 40 months.
That's it?
No mention of anything, right?
And then it goes on to specifically the relationship between time to first MACE's Major... I've forgotten.
Here, give me my screen back for a second.
I have it in the original paper.
MACE is... God, that's tiny.
Major Adverse Coronary Event.
Okay, so you can show my screen again.
The relationship between time to first major adverse coronary event and baseline weight, BMI, waist circumference and waist height ratio, etc, etc, etc, right?
So just once more, the first one says, These patients received standard of care recommendations for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease.
The second paper, which is exactly the same patients, exactly the same study, exactly the same data, says that the patients received standard of care recommendations for lifestyle counseling that did not target weight loss.
And the third paper, same people, same data, same everything, says nothing about that at all.
Just says semaglutide or placebo.
It also, oddly, says a mean of 40 months when it was a 48-month study.
So the methods are a little presented differently in each of these, even though it's exactly the same actual data set from which they're pulling these data.
And I think it's alarming.
That the very paper that is claiming to find an effect of semaglutide on reduction in cardiovascular disease is the one that mentions nothing about additional advice and specifically one of the other papers says that
Standard of care directions were given for cardiovascular disease and the author of the Times of London piece at least took from that and maybe from talking to Dean Field directly, because that author did talk to Dean Field directly, took from that, oh yeah, actually pretty much everyone was on statins.
Yeah, so let's just talk about two ways that the statin thing could be Distorting, I don't even want to say confounding, could be distorting the result here.
Okay.
One would be, let's say that the statins are doing harm and the semaglutide is neutralizing.
So just take an analogy, right?
Like let's say that you were going to give patients Chlorine.
Right?
And the patients happen to be on sodium.
So what they end up getting is salt, which is safe.
But neither sodium nor chlorine on their own is safe.
They just neutralize each other.
That would be one.
And then the other would be If there was a differential in the number of people on statins in the two groups, right?
This would be a place you could hide fraud.
You could absolutely hide fraud.
And the fact that they never even used the term statins.
Right.
And in the paper, supposedly about the reduction in coronary disease, they don't even mention that there was standard of care recommendations given.
for cardiovascular disease.
Why do we think that they are, well, other than all of these things, which I could find from just abstracts, why do we think that otherwise everything is fine?
I don't.
I absolutely 100% do not assume that this was done carefully or with an attempt to actually discover what's true.
Yeah no this is a this is a classic case of how is the magic trick done right and as we've talked about before in the context of the ivermectin the major ivermectin trials the fact that you cannot reconstruct What the experiment was from the methods is invalidating on its face, including things like, you know, patients were shown a video.
You have to provide that video for me to know whether or not you winked at them and caused them to go buy ivermectin at their local pharmacy because you've effectively told them that many people think it's good for COVID.
Those standard of care recommendations, did they come with a prescription in hand?
Right?
Like, what are they?
Right, and, you know, like, let's say... And why don't you mention them at all in the one paper where it is most relevant?
Let's say that semaglutide has some known effect on physiology, some measurable something, right?
Like, let's say that it, you know, increases blood pressure, blah blah blah.
You could then use blood pressure as an indication that somebody needs statins In order to cause a differential between the treatment and the control group, right?
You're giving the treatment group something and it results in you either not giving or giving so that you separate these two populations to create the impression that it is the semaglutide that is having the effect when really it has caused you, you know, to trigger a subroutine where you're dosing them with some other physiologically active compound.
Yeah, so as Incomplete and appears to be fraudulent as this abstract is.
There's one line in here which I'm surprised they included because I can't even like let me read this one line here this again from the abstract you can show my screen here.
So actually let me start the reduction in the major does that stand for major?
Sorry, I need to go back to my notes.
It stands for this time, you know, you can keep on my screen on major adverse coronary event Mace major adverse coronary event it stands for it's like a broken heart The reduction in the major adverse coronary event rates by semaglutide versus placebo was similar in patients who lost more than 5% and those who lost less than 5% or gained weight.
Major...
What does it say?
Why can't I remember?
Major adverse coronary event rates among patients on semaglutide were similar in the two weight loss categories, whereas patients on placebo who lost more than 5% of weight had higher major adverse coronary event rates than those who lost less than 5% or gained weight.
So, just to put that in English without me stumbling over this stupid acronym, Put aside the semaglutide entirely.
Now we're talking about the placebo groups.
Hopefully they're getting nothing.
They're getting shots of saline in their thigh once a week.
That's it.
And maybe they're being handed statins, right?
If they lost weight, their risk of heart attack went up.
But if they didn't lose weight, or they gained weight, or I don't know if they went up.
If you compare the rates of heart attacks, of major heart events, in people who are on nothing but shots assault, gaining weight was correlated with having fewer heart attacks.
Losing weight losing 5% or more of your body mass in this study if you weren't on their fancy drug Was associated with more heart attacks What the hell is that?
Yeah, what the hell is that?
So I It just, it brings all of it into question.
It sure does.
It sure does.
And you know, strange things happen, but on the other hand, you've got an experiment that you can't evaluate.
You have the impression that you've been handed a method section, but even multiple descriptions of the same method can't, don't allow you to deduce.
I mean, how often do you get that?
Like, Oh, we got three, 17,604 patients.
I guess it was the same patients.
The ages were 45 years and up.
And yeah, it was good to replace over four years.
And like, oh, but then the similarities stop, even though they're exactly the same.
Yeah.
No, it's, uh, it's unbelievable.
So one more thing.
Here's the New York Times on semaglutide this last month.
It introduced Ozempic to the world.
Now it must remake itself.
Novo Nordisk's factories work nonstop, turning out Ozempic and Wagovi.
They turn out both.
It's blockbuster weight loss drugs, but the Danish company has far bigger ambitions.
So I'm not even going to go there.
You can give me back my screen here for a moment.
So that prompted me to wonder who the conference's sponsors are.
Oh, no.
Here we go.
Three major sponsors.
Novo Nordisk is one of them.
Wow.
That's it.
So, okay.
Two things.
Yep.
The conference is sponsored by the manufacturer of this economic blockbuster drug.
You know what I didn't look into is who helped fund the select trial.
Right.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
But okay.
We've now seen the same trick twice.
We covered something.
Oh yeah.
What was that?
There was another one of these things where a conference led to a major headline.
Yeah, and I looked this up.
You mentioned this before I looked this up.
On March 20th of this year, in episode 217 of Darkers, we discussed some research coming out of the American Heart Association's conference in Chicago.
The purported to find, well, so I think it was the Daily Mail, further butchered already really bad research and claimed that sunbathing for just one day increases your risk of heart disease.
Then I looked at some other abstracts and some of the research at this conference said that intermittent fasting increases your risk of heart disease.
I had a family member send me that.
I know, I know, sent me two.
But this work that we've been talking about today, it seems to be of a similar stripe in at least one way in that it's like a so-called science journalist goes to a conference, sees a talk, Apparently there's a big brew house.
There's nothing in the abstracts to tell me that that paper landed.
That paper looks unimpressive, and I'm not even compelled that even if all of the rest of the errors that we already talked about were true, that the statistics that they did demonstrate what they say they demonstrate.
I'm not even going there.
Even if you take all of that at face value, this You know, breathless, anticipatory, oh my god, what we're going to need to do is get ozempic into the thighs of everyone as a preventative measure, just like we have statins in everyone now.
Like, we need to increase the pharmacopoeia of every Briton in this case.
Like, how did you go from presumably science journalism, journalism, journalism, to writing a piece that is 100% an argument to increase the bottom line of Novo Nordisk stockholders? to writing a piece that is 100% an argument to That's it!
Okay.
Science journalists, not the sharpest tools in the shed at the moment.
And the idea, if you were these clever pharma folks, then you would love an idea where you could put on something that was a conference.
I'm sure these people look very academic and scientific as they go about their conferencing, and the abstracts look very abstract-y, you know, and then, you know, hey, there's a method section.
You could see what they did, and I don't really get it.
And I haven't noticed that three papers describe the same experiment differently.
Right?
But whatever the point is, this is, it's cargo cult science in conference form, and the idea is it bypasses the normal process, right?
The normal process, you know, even peer review, which is a cruddy, crappy, captured process, but even peer review is bypassed by conference modality, in which stuff that is more preliminary and It's happening.
So if you invite the science journalists in and it's like, oh, well, you're, you know, not only are you going to get to report on these cool results, but you're going to be kind of part of the process, you know, how we're sorting this stuff out.
This is, you know, this is cutting edge, right?
And so the conference results in the presentation of completely incomplete stuff that is scientifically invalid because you couldn't reproduce those methods.
If you tried, you don't know what they mean.
Right?
And the point is, you know, well, the conclusion is obvious.
I mean, we've got a problem, don't we?
Will the factories be able to produce this stuff quick enough?
I mean, we could lose people.
Jabs and thighs, guys!
That's what we need!
Jabs and thighs!
Jabs and thighs, because you know what?
This stuff, for reasons we can't fully explain, we acknowledge that, but this stuff makes you healthier.
Yep, it sure does.
This is that kind of stuff.
That's the last stuff.
It's health stuff.
Yeah, like the last stuff, except the last stuff didn't turn out in the end.
Well, no, if you add last stuff to this stuff, then you're definitely getting better off.
Oh man, so healthy.
And we got some stuff for you tomorrow.
It's coming up.
Stay tuned.
I bet that stuff even is more stuffy than this stuff.
Yeah, but you definitely want to keep taking the current stuff and the last stuff as well.
Oh yeah, you wouldn't want to, you know, you don't want to lapse on your past stuff.
No, no, no, no.
It would be dead if you hadn't been taking that stuff.
Yeah, I know.
Many people are.
Good point.
Yes.
Killer point.
Thank you.
That's an unfortunate phrasing on my part, but all right.
So I get it.
They've got a trick.
The trick is the Cargo Cult Conference, which is used to go directly to the journalists.
And of course, we've seen a thousand versions of this where the idea is Farm ads are used to buy influence over news organizations so they don't report about adverse events and other awkward phenomena coming out of drugs, right?
That's one version.
Another version is, oh, we're going to put on a conference and the, you know, it's the, hey, do you know what side your bread is buttered on conference?
Well, also, oh, it was in Venice.
Oh, those poor people.
They had to spend four days in Venice in May.
Oh, jeez.
You're right.
You're right.
You're just lucky to be at the, do you know which side your bread is buttered on, Constance?
Absolutely are.
In Venice.
Venice is lovely.
In May?
My God, it's perfect.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, man.
I almost wish I could go, but... It's over.
Yeah, the problem is I do... The bread has already been buttered, and you didn't get any.
Yeah, it's been margarined is what it's been, but... Yeah.
But okay, so they got this phony conference bullshit.
Yes, they do.
And it's used to create the impression of a scientific discovery that never happened, and that's where we are.
And I would just say that what we are watching is the proliferation of tactics, right?
Everybody is now on to the fact that the journals have been captured, right?
We've had defections.
Editors and chiefs of journals have said, you can't trust what's in these things because they're captured by the company.
So then now they've moved on to a different mode, right?
So what's happening to the, what has happened to the journals is happening to the trials, is happening to the conferences in which the trials are being covered.
Is happening to the funding, is therefore happening to the people who are calling themselves scientists.
Yeah, exactly.
And the point is, it becomes like a one hand washes the other.
You know, the journalists reflect well on the scientists who don't deserve to be reflected well on, and the scientists are bringing the journalists in on, you know, their research, which is how they're making their way in the world.
And the whole thing is just theater.
It is.
I want a flag.
I mean, this whole thing, this whole segment has been a flag, but At the point that your neighbors mention that, of course, they're on semaglutide, because that's what you are.
I'm on statins.
I'm on semaglutide.
That's just what we do.
Remember this.
I never trusted statins.
I knew that there was a problem there from the beginning.
I'd never paid a lot of attention, but I saw doctors start to try to give them to my dad, I believe.
I don't think so.
But I wasn't paying attention to this level of the clinical trials and such at all.
I don't know how that unfolded.
But I really believe, given that Times of London piece, that we are seeing the opposite of time dilation.
Time crunch.
That that is going to happen, that they're pushing for semaglutide to become the statins, tomorrow's statins.
And I have just unearthed in a couple of crappy abstracts, in a 500 page compendium of abstracts at a conference in a beautiful European city for the last four days, All of the evidence that they are currently willing to offer by which they're going to fast forward this into your medicine cabinet.
And don't accept it.
And into your mind.
What they are doing is they are creating Headline, seemingly headline worthy science out of pseudoscience.
And so the point is they're going straight to the headline, and once the headline has told you, hey, you know what?
We have a problem.
We do not know if these factories are going to be able to produce enough of this stuff that you'll be able to get your hands on it.
But you know, if you're lucky, who knows?
You might be able to get some.
Let me just remind us of these two quotes from this Times of London article that I read before.
At this week's European Congress on Obesity, delegates can be heard excitedly talking about a future in which millions of adults take the medications as a preventive measure.
One thing, delegates?
It's...
Like, scientific conferences don't have delegates.
Political conferences have delegates, so I don't know what the word delegates is doing there, and maybe that tells us something about what is happening.
And then, only a fraction of NHS patients eligible for weight loss jabs are currently able to get a hold of them, meaning that rolling the jabs out to millions seems like a pipe dream.
Yeah, you people are smoking crack.
You need to keep it to yourselves.
That's the kind of pipe dream you're having.
Yeah, that's well said.
Yeah, that's very, very frustrating.
They're going to hurt a lot of people with this stuff.
Yep.
All right.
You had something to say about Biden.
Yeah, I did.
I have nothing to say about Biden today.
Nothing.
Well, you might.
All right.
So here's the thing.
Big news on the Biden front today.
Biden is feeling feisty.
Oh, is he?
Oh, yes.
And he is ready to debate Donald Trump.
No, he totally is.
Okay.
Which this is a little surprising because for those of us who have been tracking the decline in his competence, The last thing he wants is to end up on a stage with Donald Trump, who will eat him alive.
OK, so this is interesting that suddenly Biden is on offense here.
Do you want to play this little video?
Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020.
Since then, he hadn't shown up for debate.
Now he's acting like he wants to debate me again.
Well, make my day, pal.
I'll even do it twice.
So let's pick the dates, Donald.
I hear you're free on Wednesdays.
Did Donald Trump lose two debates to Biden in 2020?
I don't remember that being the consensus about what happened.
Yeah, no, I don't think that may be his faulty memory.
But okay, there are a number of things about this that need to be scrutinized.
One is that the rules of this debate have been carefully chosen.
Okay.
That's not in here.
So what do you know about the rules?
What I know about the rules are the following things.
One, there is a rule that says at the end of your allotted time, your microphone is cut off.
Okay.
That was equally applied.
Maybe it makes sense, but Honestly, you don't want to live in a world where that's the way this has to work, but nonetheless.
You can see arguments both ways.
Like, oh, you know, no interruptions, dude.
You're too interrupting.
And, oh, the guy mutters under his breath because he doesn't realize he's still on stage.
Right.
Second thing, and I think it's the whole purpose of this exercise, is that RFK Jr.
is excluded.
Explicitly excluded.
Yes, and so I've been saying forever The blue team fears RFK jr It doesn't like Donald Trump, but it doesn't fear him in the same way for two reasons one He would only have four years in office and they can Tie him in knots for four years more easily than they can tie Bobby Kennedy in knots for four and possibly eight years But
B, he doesn't have the temperament or the team building skills to be able to fight them effectively and so their terror is that Bobby Kennedy returns to the manor and strings the bow and upends their racket and so what they would love to do is create the impression that this is a two-man race because Trump is a known quantity and they think they can beat him and even if they can't they can neutralize his effect.
So the whole point is to create that impression as Bobby Kennedy is on the rise in popularity.
So Donald Trump.
has a I don't think his real interests are there but he has a similar as far as he can see this race I think he believes that he also has an interest in keeping Kennedy out and so anyway there is this de facto agreement between the two campaigns as I understand it Trump has accepted this offer and this sidelines the commission on debates which is a clusterfuck of its own but by sidelining The commission, they are able to write rules of their own.
The commission might let Bobby Kennedy in on the basis that he was on enough ballots or had enough support, and this allows them to exclude him.
Now, what they're actually thinking, how they are going to deal with Biden, who, frankly, and if you don't believe me, think I'm exaggerating, all you got to do is look at video of Joe Biden back when he was in his prime talking about any issue.
He was never a great orator, but he was certainly competent.
Right?
He was not slurring.
This is not stuttering.
This is a man failing.
And I would point out that that video that we just watched of him challenging Trump has an interesting tick to it.
It makes it at first read as kind of like modern, you know.
No, it's just like eight different takes.
Dark Brandon.
Every single sentence is separate.
And the way they do it is that they change the Yeah, they make it look intentional.
They make it look intentional.
But the question is, is there any, you know, and look, sometimes it takes multiple takes, but the outtakes oughtn't be embarrassing.
Is there a single take here that we can see?
Or did this have to be done sentence by sentence?
And if it did have to be done sentence by sentence, it makes you wonder what they are thinking with respect to the debate.
One possibility is that, you know, and I keep waiting for them to Have some sort of shame where they realize they can't run this guy and something happens.
And there's, of course, you know, lots of structure around the party and when they can simply replace a candidate without having to go through that structure and how much control they have over that structure.
But, you know, are they trying to structure this as a two man race and that would last through the swapping of Biden with some other candidate or something like that?
I don't know.
But but anyway, To the extent that they have to cut every sentence separately because Biden is at a place where it's hard to keep him on track long enough to do a compelling take that would make you feel that he was capable.
How are they going to manage a debate?
Yeah, that's what I'd like to know.
All right.
I think we're there.
I think we might be there.
Do we have something from our store behind you there, Zach?
Not so much.
Oh, good.
Pfizer.
The breakthroughs never stop.
Sweatshirt.
Yeah, maybe we need a new one with Norvo Nordisk.
Yeah.
Yeah, darkburst.org.
DarkHorseStore.org.
Sorry, I'm just admiring it.
DarkHorseStore.org.
That design and many, many others you can get.
And I will say, next week, I will try to remember, I took pictures when we were in New Mexico with our younger son, Toby, of him wearing his Cut That Shit Out shirt, which he gets comments on all the time.
We were in Bandelier National Monument, having just climbed up some ladders, and there were a couple of women our age who were coming down and one of them saw his shirt and I thought oh no she's not gonna and she's like love your shirt man excellent so cut that shit out is is is at Dark Horse Tour as well all right Please join us on Locals.
We had the Watch Party there just now.
We do early release and some only release of materials there.
We do all of our Q&As there.
We're having our monthly private Q&A on Sunday at 11 a.m.
Pacific, this Sunday there, and the question-asking period is open now for that.
Lots of great stuff going on at Locals, and the Discord server is there as well.
So, you know, great, great, great stuff.
Join me at Natural Selections.
I am releasing chapters from my long-ago published book Antipode, my first book, there for a while while I work on a new book, but I also have pieces that I put in every now and again when new things strike me.
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They were Maui Nui Venison, MD Hearing, and American Heart for Goals.
