It’s not Complicated: The 230th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 230th 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 week’s episode, we discuss air quality in Los Angeles, and how California led the way in making catalytic converters standard in cars across the United States. Now, that regulatory apparatus is being used for less honorable ends, as legislators consider mandating the inclusion of folic acid in all tortilla produc...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
It is the 95th live stream in which we have not used the term prognostication or manifest, except I just blew it because I used them.
What number is it actually?
How do you think the folks at home feel about being referred to as folks?
Well, interesting that you should mention it.
I have seen some back and forth.
I saw someone, was it Melissa Chen, say that she was going to stop following anybody who used the term folks, and then somebody else piped up and said, it's kind of okay when Brett says it.
It seems authentic.
So anyway, there's a, there's a tension over the word folks.
Um, I don't think it's so terrible.
You know, I do get the idea that it can be abused, but, um, I feel all right about it.
Okay.
It's 230.
To the 230th.
Which is prime.
No, it's not.
It's really, it's really not.
Um, that doesn't change the fact that I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Yes.
And, um, we are raring to go on this, uh, late, late, late, late, late spring Wednesday morning.
Yes, all of that is true for us at the moment.
At this very moment.
At this very moment, and not presumably for most of the people, many of the people watching.
Join us on Locals.
We've got a watch party going on there now.
Lots of great stuff going on there.
And no Q&A today to follow, but all of our previous Q&As that we've been doing on Locals are there as well.
Great community to join.
Let's just jump right into our sponsors right up front here.
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I'm gonna begin the vouching.
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Without any ado whatsoever.
Now, unfortunately our first sponsor Speaks mostly to a member of our family who is currently snoring off-camera But we'll just have to do it without her She's with us in spirit.
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So we have some of the previous kibble on backup for, you know, when we ran out of sundaes.
And when I was feeding Maddie recently, I was giving her sundaes, but I spilled a little bit of the old kibble on the floor.
And, you know, you expect a Labrador to immediately eat any food that's available.
She literally walked past it, left it there in anticipation of the bowl of sundaes that I was carrying to her regular feeding place.
Did she give you the askance look?
No, she just ignored it.
That doesn't even register as food to me now because I'm getting myself some sundaes.
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Question for you.
Yes.
Does Lady Gaga count as a white noise generator?
This is not a question on which I am going to describe myself as expert.
All right.
Do you want to take a stab in the dark?
Yes.
She does?
Yes.
Okay, excellent.
I sort of think so as well.
I mean, not that I'm super familiar, but it just sort of seems like X all the boxes.
I really have no idea.
All right.
Well, this has been scintillating.
Oh, it's fantastically scintillating.
I just, I don't, I don't, pretty sure I would not recognize, ah, a spider on my computer.
Fantastic.
Great.
Just crawling up the screen about to make an appearance there.
You guys can see at the very, it's not a very big spider, but still.
Better a spider on your computer than flies in the face.
I don't like when they disappear and you know they're still out there.
Gotta say, it doesn't phase me.
I've been posting chapters of Antipode, as you know, which is my first book published in 2001 about my research and life in Madagascar.
There it is again.
Go away.
It's on the table now over that way.
Spider teleportation.
I've been posting that on Natural Selections so as to give myself time to work on the new book that I am writing, that I'm under contract for.
And I write in that about how often there are, for people who have Feelings about these things.
They either like the animals that, in my estimation, have too many legs and really don't like the ones with fewer legs, or vice versa.
I love snakes.
As you know, I love snakes.
I really, really enjoy handling snakes and looking at them and engaging with what they're doing in the world.
And I do not like spiders.
Especially the big meaty ones.
And given that I don't really like spiders, it's a strange choice of profession to be a tropical field biologist, where if you are anywhere but a very, very well-traveled field station in the tropics, and especially if you're walking trails that are not very often walked, or early in the morning, or after a rain, as of course someone who would be looking at frogs would be doing a lot,
Ended up covered in spiderwebs and then to some degree covered in spiders because spiderwebs often have spiders on them.
And then the search is on to figure out where the spider that you just destroyed their home.
Sorry guys, not trying to do it, but sometimes you just walk in them because you didn't see them because they're cryptic because that's in part how they collect insects and apes apparently.
What a strange choice of profession for someone who really doesn't like being covered in spiderwebs and spiders.
Yeah, I have to agree.
Yeah.
There's no avoiding them.
Yeah.
But, uh, yeah.
I don't mind them.
That happens to me very much anymore.
Where's the pity?
Yeah.
I must say, I, um, if anything, I'm the reverse of this.
I actually, I like watching snakes.
Not particularly fond of handling them.
Don't like getting pissed on and you know there's always that issue of like well if somebody who's really good at hunting mushrooms wants to hand you a plate of them that's one thing but hunting them yourself you're always Yeah.
You know, so snakes are sort of the same way.
And there's the cautionary tale of the boomslang, which is a colubrid, a rear-fanged snake, which is like, oh, garter snakes, they're rear-fanged, they can't do you any harm.
It's true about garter snakes.
But then there's the occasional boomslang, which is an incredibly dangerous snake, which is a colubrid.
And in fact, I believe, if I remember the story that is told in the Natural History Museum at Michigan, a boomslang was handed to a herpetologist at the University of Chicago who was bitten and then died.
I don't know.
I would have to know who and check into it.
I will say that the story that I relate in The Antipode about being attacked by a lemur while I was brushing my teeth at the waterfall pool, which prompted suggestions from local people that it was the toothpaste that the lemur was after.
As it turns out, no, that is not what was going on.
You can go check out that story.
What did I call that chapter?
Cute, Furry, Desperate, and Alone.
That's what that chapter was, which I posted a few weeks ago on Natural Selections.
But one of my herpetologist friends responded to the news that I had been, you know, ripped open by a lemur, that I just add that to my bite list.
Because ornithologists have life lists, birders have life lists, they count up all the species they've seen, and herpetologists have bite lists.
What have you been bitten by?
So, brown lemur.
Lemur fulvus is on my bite list.
Definitely on your bite list.
Okay.
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All right.
That was...
But we're here.
That was, yes.
I want to say, we were in LA between being here last week and now, and we don't plan to be talking about that particularly, but we could.
And both you and I, you may know this already, grew up in LA.
I recall that.
It's somewhat hazy in more ways than one.
This is the point I'm making, I'm going to make here, which is that we grew up in the 70s and 80s in L.A.
and the air quality in the Los Angeles basin At that point was atrocious.
I lived, I grew up within a mile of the ocean and so our air quality never got that bad.
You grew up by the tar pits, the tar tar pits as we've recently learned to call them.
The La Brea tar pits, Brea in Spanish meaning tar, so the tar tar pits is what you grew up near Right, and if a bovid fell in and you managed to extract it and eat it, that would make it steak tartar pits.
Wow, you were not expecting that to happen, were you?
Yes.
Well, you reminded me of the, let's call it an experiment, a one-off experiment that, and you correct my details here.
Jerry Smith, who is the Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, the Natural History Museums, for ESPEL, which is where we did our graduate work, who is an ichthyologist and paleontologist?
I would say paleoichthyologist.
But he's there for both things, right?
He's a fish guy and a paleo guy.
And
And there were some grad students, I don't remember exactly who oversaw this, whose idea it was, but they were trying to figure out how long can a mammal carcass have been submerged in water as it begins to be covered with the sludge, the sort of anoxic life sludge that covers such things, and have some
Hapless, opportunistic hominids come by and say, that looks edible and have it still be edible.
And so didn't they, didn't he submerge?
I remember the story.
I think there are two stories.
One of the stories involves submerging, was it horse meat?
I think maybe in a pond.
Yeah, in an anoxic environment to assess, to learn something about, because Indigenous North Americans, I believe, did actively stir.
It wasn't just happening upon.
That's right, that's right.
This was used as a form of preservation.
Right.
And the other thing, if I remember correctly, somebody found some mammoth meat that had been preserved in a very cold, anoxic environment, and I believe it was consumed at a conference.
Am I making that up?
A barbecue?
Yeah, so we don't know.
I believe it was consumed.
What's that?
I believe it was consumed at a conference at which no one died.
Later.
They waited until later to die.
And it had nothing to do with the mammoth.
Right, exactly.
In fact, they had a story that they told up until the point they died, if in fact anyone from that conference has died, which presumably they have.
Yep.
I have no idea why I went there.
No idea, because what I was... Because I had made a terrible pun about steak in the La Brea Tar Pits.
Tar, tar.
Yes, yes.
Okay, so you grew up rather farther inland, and just inhaled all of A glorious particulate matter in the air, which you could even sometimes see.
It was so, so gross in the LA basin, but you could especially see when you flew in or out.
The air looked yellow.
It was a particular color that I only ever saw when flying into or out of LAX.
LA cleaned up Because the mountains trapped it.
Right.
It's like the Angelus National Forest, whatever mountain range that is to the east.
Angelus Crest Mountains, something.
Yeah.
And then the Santa Monica Mountains to the north.
Right.
Trap all the air.
So, you know, the winds, you know, blow the stuff in off the Pacific or they blow air in off the Pacific and then it's stopped at the mountains and the air quality was terrible.
LA totally cleaned up its act.
And so the air quality has been quite good, quite good for decades now, except that, so we were only there for a couple of few days here, and both of us started, there's a little something, and as we flew out, whatever it was, two days ago, two, three days ago, It was that yellow color again.
As it turns out, this was not the return of the disgusting pollution from 1970s and 80s Los Angeles, but there was a wildfire nearby, which strikes me as concerning, given what a wet winter Southern California has had and how early it is.
Basically, everything that might be burnable in three months should still be too wet to be burning very well.
That does not say good things about the wildfire season.
Yeah, it was just an anomaly.
Yeah, but anyway, that's an excuse for this little something still recovering from, I don't know, wildfire smoke in Los Angeles.
In addition to the air just being grotesque when we were growing up with smog, which was largely the result of combustion, largely from automobiles, which have now been cleaned up.
And in fact, California cleaned up the entire country's air substantially by driving the Move towards catalytic converters, which were part of the move away from lead, which is the other thing I wanted to point out, which was, among other things, that particulate matter wasn't just a threat to health, but it was also a threat to human development because there was so much lead in it.
In the 70s, I've forgotten when exactly lead in gasoline was banned.
But you can't put it in a car with a catalytic converter anyway.
So all of that is to say... What happens?
It gums it up.
Lead gums up a catalytic converter?
Well, a catalytic converter is a catalyst.
Catalyst does not get consumed in the process of making chemical reactions more likely.
This is all fancy stuff.
It makes them spectacularly more likely.
But in any case, the point is, yes, the lead binds to something and basically neutralizes the catalyst, renders it useless.
So, something like that.
All right.
Actually, I know almost everything that we want to talk about today is in things that you're going to be bringing to us, but there was just a little story that I was considering saying something about, and this seems relevant here.
California is considering, so you mentioned that California led the way in getting catalytic converters in all cars in the United States and that cleaned up air across the country.
California has often led the way in things like environmental regulations.
Unfortunately, now, California is more often leading the way in heavy-handed, sort of, you know, authoritarian moves that aren't good, aren't good for people.
Even though it can, it, it, the legislators can frame the moves as if they are.
And so, excuse me, Um, they are, here's a, you can show my, oh no you can't show my screen, because I have not plugged in my computer.
It was the spiders.
I'm gonna play in the spiders.
Um, they're just not fair to the spiders at all.
It's just, it's not nice.
But um, they are, yeah I am ready now.
Um, Okay, actually, there we go.
Um, LA Times, this is from a little while ago, May 22nd, 2024.
LA Times reports, um, California wants to mandate folic acid in tortillas to help babies.
Why that is bad.
So, I'll link this in the show notes, of course, and you can read the article.
It's a well-written article, and this is an editorial in which the author takes a position, and the position is that this should not be happening, which is the same position that I hold.
But, you know, the short version is tortillas are a traditional Latino food is how it's being described here.
But, of course, a traditional indigenous peoples of the Americas food.
Corn is native to the Americas.
Corn is one of the three sisters, you know, the traditional food trio, non-animal food trio that actually provides a complete protein.
Corn, beans, and squash, I believe.
And tortillas are traditionally made with corn, salt, and lime in a process called nixtamalization.
I forgot, I dropped a syllable.
Nixtamalization.
And I did not re-up myself on the chemistry involved there, but the nixtamalization allows all of the goodness in the corn to actually be To be bioavailable to humans.
Traditionally made tortillas, therefore, have just those ingredients and they are delicious.
If you've never had a freshly made tortilla that is made in the traditional way with only those ingredients, you are missing something.
Increasingly, of course, commercially available tortillas, if you're in a part of the country where they're not typically made or you don't have a tortilla press at home or you just You haven't thought about it much.
If you buy tortillas in these basically shelf-stable bags, that's most of how most Americans can get tortillas unless they are actively thinking about tortillas.
They have other ingredients, right?
They have stabilizers and such.
But there is a move afoot by this legislator in California to require
That anyone who makes tortillas for commercial sale, which would include even, and this story is about a very small bakery that sells to upscale restaurants in the LA area, because upscale eaters, upscale diners can, you know, want real food without random additives.
They would like an exemption.
They, you know, better Better, I think, for this not to be a requirement at all.
But apparently there are in other places exemptions for small bakeries that are making wheat-based things.
But the argument is folic acid.
Folic acid, we reductionist scientific people have identified, is often low.
in mothers early in pregnancy who then have children with birth defects including particularly spina bifida therefore the reductionist scientific analysis goes the thing that you need to do is increase folic acid early in pregnancy Presto, bango, then you get a cure for the spina bifida problem that is a terrible birth defect, and we would like for no babies to be born with spina bifida.
But, of course, the other side of that story is that supplementing with folic acid early in a pregnancy is not a solution to To the problem of, like, what is it that changed in the mother's diet that this was not a known problem until, basically, industrialization?
So, you know, why don't we fix the rest of the diet?
And also, oops, maybe supplementing with folic acid causes other problems, and there is growing evidence that it does.
So, forcing folic acid into people who have tortillas as a large part of their diet is a problem, rather unlike forcing cars to be sold with catalytic converters, which was a thing that California did back in the, I think it was going to be the late 70s, but we didn't look, we didn't know we were going to be talking about this.
So, as we started with, there is a history of Valuable, good for humanity regulations that started in California and that spread.
And there is now, in modern times, a tendency for California to want to control It's populous and there is a likelihood, given how big California is, that that would then spread more widely.
The misguided nature of these sorts of things, which include the sex and gender space and things like dietary additives, stands to actually make a population far less healthy.
Yeah, and it's obviously an insane way to go about this in the first place, given the what must be many orders of magnitude difference between the voracious consumers of tortillas and the not at all or nearly not at all consumers of tortillas.
So the argument is that Latina women are more likely to have neural tube defects in their children than members of other demographics, and therefore we're going to target the food that is more likely to be eaten by Latina women.
That is that is that is the argument.
I mean, I am not vouching for it, but that is I understand the argument.
But nonetheless, as you know, the first place this logic became evident to me, at least had to do with the fluoridation of water.
But the basic point being, look, you have no control over dose.
Yeah.
Right, you can control the concentration of fluoridation in water, which is a bad idea for reasons that we've covered before, but nonetheless, even if it was wise to supplement with the fluorides that are being put in our water, you would want, the key would be to control the dosage so you've got the right amount to get whatever benefit.
I'd like to titrate that.
An excessive amount.
The only place where you could in any way justify a untitrated administration of something is if the body was so freaking excellent at dealing with excess whatever that no harm could be done by having too much and we could supplement you enough to get just enough.
And folic acid is not in that category.
Acrylic acid is not in that category.
Actually, let me just share a couple more things from this article.
Arambulla, who I believe is the legislator who was trying to get this thing passed in the California State Legislature first, Arambulla said he did his own taste test.
So the question is, well, if you can't tell the difference, what does it matter?
This, of course, is not the main point, but many of the arguments against are on the basis of taste, right?
So, Adam Bula said he did his own taste test and found no difference, arguing that the amount he's requiring, 0.7 of a milligram per pound of raw masa and 0.4 of a milligram for finished products, amounts to particles.
When have particles ever hurt a person, right?
And then we go down to the bottom of the article.
This is the author having been given a blind taste test between the two.
This is a small artisanal tortilla bakery, basically, who's made a batch of their usual tortillas and then a batch with the tiny, tiny, tiny amount of folic acid that is being sought to be required.
In the California legislature right now, the author writes, "...the first tasted the way a pure corn tortilla should.
A pleasant initial tinge of sourness, a soft texture, a concluding rush of earthiness.
The second one had a subtle taste of something.
It lingered longer on the palate than an old-school tortilla and turned too rubbery in my mouth.
The difference was obvious.
contained folic acid.
And then he goes and he asks various random employees, like, have you tried this?
And one of them even jokes, he says, they tasted the same.
He replied in Spanish, drawing a laugh from Laborio Cano, who was shoveling chips into boxes in his first week on the job.
Nah, you could tell them apart easy.
So it's so obvious to the employees there and to the author of this article that they feel confident joking that they can't tell a difference because it's so clear that actually you can tell a difference Yeah.
It's just, you know, it's just the particles.
I would love to see a taste test, but even if you couldn't, right?
That's what they're, they've done the taste tests.
But have they done a blind taste test?
Yes, that's what they were doing.
Oh, I'm sorry, I missed that part.
Blind taste test.
That's an obvious reason not to.
But, you know, the fact that you can't taste the glyphosate in your wheat is not an argument that it's tolerable.
It's not an argument that it's safe.
So this amounts to sophistry.
And, you know, the idea that you can taste it takes it to a whole other level.
I think, unfortunately, for better and for worse, in this case, because there is a taste difference, this bill may be likely to fail because you can evoke traditional culinary values of indigenous people.
Right?
Like you can say, don't we deserve to eat the way our ancestors ate?
Right?
And it's insane that we should have to rely on that.
And there will be things like glyphosate, like, you know, like so, so many things that we are having cryptically and not so cryptically forced on us in our food, in our arms, like, you know, all of these things.
We don't, we need to be able to defend ourselves against these things, even if we cannot individually detect them.
In this case it's detectable and that is likely to be the way that this fits.
Yep and it points to an exact inversion of mindset.
Right?
I mean the idea that oh we've spotted a problem spina bifida well that is a real problem.
The solution is an additive.
Really?
The solution is to figure out why you know people Given enough nutrition in an environment that mirrors that of their ancestors, strongly tend to be healthy.
Right.
When you have some sort of developmental issue, like spina bifida, you are detecting a disruption of that environment.
The idea that an additive, some other additive that would not normally be in your tortilla, is the solution, highly unlikely.
We should be obsessed with figuring out how to Forgive my French, but to unfuck the environment so that development can be left to do what it does, which we are far from understanding, right?
The idea that, you know, this is a classic complicated systems mapped on to an actually complex system mindset where
The idea is oh, we've seen some you know something in the data that has to do with folic acid therefore there's going to be a simple you know tweak we're gonna be able to flip a switch and put folic acid in the tortillas and You know never mind the vaguely racist tinge of you know of dosing ethnic foods You know and reach certain people but but you know this is this is
Swallow the spider to catch the fly stuff where you're just gonna keep chasing symptoms and the answer is really nope.
You know what you need?
You need mothers who are pregnant and children to develop in an environment that is not full of toxic crap.
So I think, um, so talking with Zach, um, who's over there is why I gesture off screen, um, our, our 20 year old Zach, who is to the west.
Um, Zach recently, uh, brought to consciousness for me something that I hadn't, um, hadn't formulated in this way, which is, um, that we, what we have talked about before is that many people imagine, uh, that before the advances of modernity, um, People were dying by 30, like 30 was old.
And that is not actually the right way to assess our estimates of lifespan from days of old.
Our assessment of lifespan has a lot to do with the fact that infant mortality And in fact, child mortality before the age of 5 used to be extraordinarily high, and so that skewed the average age of death for humans.
But 30 was never old.
If you got to the age of 5, you were likely to live long past 30, always.
So that's something that anthropologically we've talked about before.
It is well understood, although often swept under the rug by those who would argue that there is only progress.
Progress is always good.
Progress is always the thing that we are moving towards better, more enlightened, more Amazing human flourishing and the idea of a lifespan that's well more than twice what it used to be is often provided as evidence of that, but that's a kind of a juking of the stats thing.
The thing that Zach said that hadn't really occurred to me in this forum was people also imagine that before modernity everyone was Sick all the time, misshapen, deformed.
They don't have that in their head, really.
But we have Quasimodo in our heads, from the Hunchback of Notre Dame, as, oh yeah, there were people like that.
There were a lot of people who were just walking around malformed.
Of course, their teeth didn't come in right.
Their cheeks were probably asymmetrical.
All of these things were probably true.
In fact, It's really exactly the opposite.
We've talked before about Weston Price and his work on, specifically, craniofacial anatomy and dentition in pre-industrial versus post-industrial peoples, which is to say, people eating pre-industrial diets versus people eating post-industrial diets.
This is from the early and middle, I think, but mostly early 20th century.
He's got picture after picture after picture of these people who have not yet been moved into, at that point, you know, the biggest problems were sort of refined sugars and flours.
It wasn't even all these crazy items that people are eating now.
And they're beautiful.
Like, you know, there's different levels of actual beauty between people, but all of them look healthy and symmetrical, and they have strong jaws, and they have straight teeth, and they don't have crowding in their mouth, and their jaws aren't too small or too big for their mouths, and for their teeth.
And like, you know, none of the problems that we have now with this epidemic of need for orthodontia, among many other problems that you have in the West, were true for pre-industrial people.
Pre-industrial, people eating pre-industrial diets looked good.
Their skulls developed, their facial anatomy developed, their teeth developed in a way that made sense, and they therefore looked healthy and were healthy.
And so, this is just in keeping with, oh, babies are being born with spina bifida?
What can we add that we have figured out how to isolate from some source and put it into a food source in which it was never a main ingredient so as to make people healthier?
Well, how about instead you figure out what has gone wrong and you allow people to get back to some of what has made more sense, while also recognizing that progress like the catalytic converter in all cars is a good thing.
Well, catalytic converter is a hack that makes the environment look more ancestral.
What it does is it causes the conversion of toxins that would otherwise be leaving the tailpipe to be rendered inert.
And I'm not arguing I don't know enough, frankly, about whether or not it does what it is supposed to do and whether or not there's any other consequence that we ought to be aware of.
But the idea, you know, this does not mean, you know, living in a log cabin.
It means an environment that looks chemically and in every other regard more like an ancestral environment.
You know, that may mean, frankly, that the LEDs that are now everywhere on our devices to tell us what phase they're in should be shifted to yellow or red rather than blue.
Yes.
Right?
That is not living in a log cabin.
That is just an awareness that there are certain things which disrupt Physiology which should be eliminated from environments and maybe you don't know that the reason that you can't sleep is because you've got a blue LED blinking away somewhere in the room where you've got those photons misinforming your brain as to what time of day it is.
Right?
So, you know, a wise census of the environment to figure out what is meaningfully distorting is the key.
The other thing is both in the Weston Price version of the work and then the later Mike Mew picking up the Weston Price stuff.
Yep.
Is the recognition that if you look at animals in nature, you don't see this level of deformity, right?
Now, there's one caveat I have to put on that, which is that there are two factors there.
One is animals in the wild are in an environment that is much closer to their ancestral environment.
They're not completely free of the toxins and things that we are distributing around, but they are freer.
The other thing is selection.
If you have a deformed monkey, that monkey probably doesn't make it to adulthood so you don't see it.
But if you were to look then at The offspring of wild animals living in an unpolluted environment, you would not find the level of deformity that you find in our environment.
We have toxified it with all kinds of things.
And I was reminded, I hope I've got this right, you mentioned the hunchback of Notre Dame.
Um, I remember when the fire happened at Notre Dame, uh, I learned about some major lead component of the structure that lead had been used in the roof for, I forgot what problem they were solving exactly.
Um, but the idea, you know, even that ancient structure was in an environment in which we were concentrating known toxins, you know, uh, neurotoxic Uh, metals that have fantastic capacity to distort, uh, development.
So anyway, we've been doing this to ourselves for a long time.
Of course.
It's about time that we fully woke up and realized we are not going to be able to additive our way out of this.
We are going to have to go back to what should the environment look like in order for development to be able to do that which we cannot yet understand.
Absolutely.
And just one more note in that same vein.
It is a problem that has emerged in part because Too often we imagine that science is reductionist, that scientific thinking is to be done by controlling for everything, finding one thing that you can see is partially explanatory for the thing, and then going, that's the thing then.
We've measured it, we've counted it, we can isolate it, we can now move that thing around and say, I want it over there, and I don't want it over there.
That has been a problem that has created many of the problems of modernity.
And what we're trying to do, often, is use the same reductionist mindset to solve the very problem that reductionists got us into, right?
So, you know, the reductionist mindset, for instance, and we talk about this in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide as well, what's, you know, what is mother's milk for?
It's for nutrition.
Okay, well, here's some formula.
It's got nutrition.
Oh, maybe mother's milk is for more than nutrition.
Maybe it's also conveying immune information.
Maybe it's also protecting and reinforcing the bond between mother and child and the tactile sense, the developing sensory systems of the child.
You think?
Maybe it's coordinating mother and child with respect to what phase of the day they're in.
Circadian stuff, right, as our student Josie Jarvis hypothesized, which I would love to see that hypothesis tested.
What is light for?
Oh, it's for seeing things, because when it's dark, you can't see things.
Therefore, what you need to do if you're going to be inside and you've created this amazing technology that allows us to work inside when the walls or the time of day make it too dark to work.
All you need to do is have light.
As long as your eyes can see enough to do things, well, that should be sufficient, right?
Because the only thing that light is doing is providing a visual environment in which to do work.
Well, no, right?
Not only does the actual sun provide the ability to synthesize vitamin D, but all of the near-infrared and just the full spectrum of light that is actually providing health and Healthy prosperity for the body is not available in almost any light bulbs, and especially now that incandescents have been outlawed basically, which they weren't doing a great job.
They weren't full-spectrum.
There are a few full-spectrum bulbs available on the market, but they're very expensive, and they're still early in their technological development.
But LEDs, Don't get you there at all.
And so, you know, if you're inside, under LED is most of the day, and the only time you get outside is after dark, you've probably got some health issues related to that.
And that is another of these reductionist mindset thinking problems that we've created for ourselves.
What is up with the spiders today?
I don't know.
Our days are numbered.
They're taking over.
I want to make two more points on that before we move on.
One is, if you take the circadian question, what percentage of the adult population has a problem regulating sleep?
It's very large in the Western world.
Anecdote.
Yeah.
Uh, 10 years ago now, when our kids were young, maybe even longer than that, I was at a Halloween party and, uh, you, I drew the short straw.
I stayed back with the people who were like drinking at the house and you went trick or treating with the, with the kids.
I didn't know that was the short straw, but it turned out to be the short straw.
Um, and you know, so one parent from each family at this, at this party were, were there not doing the trick or treating and, The conversation turned to sleep aids.
Not only was I the only adult in that room who was not on then, nor had ever been on chronic prescription or other sleep aids, but they literally did not believe me when I said that I wasn't, because it seemed impossible to adults living in modern U.S.
that anyone would not have problems that they thought were solvable by prescription.
Right.
So I would say given that anecdote the vast majority of American adults have trouble sleeping.
Yep.
I think so too.
Now the point is we've got lots of supplement style things to address that and they work at various degrees with unknown harm.
Right.
But it's a classic case where it's obvious, I mean first of all, Go backpacking.
Watch what happens to your sleep.
You know, sun goes down.
You're done with dinner.
It's like, oh, maybe I'll hit the hay.
You know, it doesn't matter that it's nine o'clock, right?
You're suddenly tracking the sun because you're living under it and the body knows what to do.
You spent the day doing physical work.
There's no electric lights to keep you up, and you sleep.
You sleep.
Even if you're on the ground.
And then you know what happens?
The sun comes up in the morning and you don't feel like, oh god, I can't get out of bed.
It's like, oh, alright.
It's the cold that makes me not want to get out of the sleeping bag.
But nonetheless, the point is, it's not like that system is gone.
That system is there, ready to have an environment in which it works.
What can we say about the environment of most Americans at least?
It doesn't work.
In what way?
Oh, probably dozens of ways.
Probably the spectrum of light you have, probably your, you know, the amount of time you spend under the sun, and therefore the degree to which your system is informed about time of day.
You know, we could list parameters all day long, but...
But the basic point is look, you know that the system is there, you know it's not working, there's something in your environment, if not a dozen things that are disrupting it, and the idea of reaching for a chemical solution is absurd.
Yeah.
Which you should really be doing is figuring out how broken is my environment and how do I fix it?
Which brings me to the second point that I wanted to make.
I betcha That if we looked at all of the major screw-ups of human health that those who ostensibly are interested in promoting it have brought to us, that the following thing is going to be the typical pattern.
You have some phenomenon and reductionism is a totally valid tool to isolate something that has some important implication for that problem, right?
So you have, you know, a birth defect or you have a system that doesn't work correctly and you're looking for what are the contributing factors.
Reductionism is a valid tool.
Yep.
You then do reductionism and you find six factors.
You then make the mistake, it's the complicated mindset mapped onto a complex system.
What you've really got is a complex system where you've identified six factors and then you mistake it for a complicated system where you know the factors that are relevant And you go about rebuilding your synthesis, right?
So reductionism on the one hand, synthesis on the other.
But if your synthesis mindset is broken because it's a complicated mindset, not a complex one, and you think that the six things you've identified, that's only five of them.
There's another.
But if you think that the things that you've identified are the map of the system, and then you go about being complicated about it rather than complex minded, then you will screw it up further because you think your understanding is way more predictive than it will be in a complex system.
And so anyway, I wonder how much harm we're doing to ourselves by using reductionism correctly and then integrating what we've learned incorrectly because of this one distinction.
It's a complex system.
You still don't know how it works.
I don't have this fully formed yet, but harking back to our conversation last week, I believe, about narrative, about story being integral to how it is that humans make sense of the world as an alternative to, important with, and not a replacement for, but also not replaceable by analysis and logic and sort of enlightenment kind of thinking, rationality.
That story has a sequence, and analysis has a harder time with sequence.
Analysis and logic and such have an easier time with a complicated mindset.
Like, I've got six things, I'm going to put it in an array, I'm going to look at them all at once.
And the narrative inherently involves A, then B, then C, then D.
Which, you know, obviously analysis can do that, but it's harder.
It's harder for people to keep alive if they've got like, oh, I've got these factors and they're taking place over here.
Actually, let me just say, I got these six things.
We just focus on the six things as opposed to understanding, say, a developmental trajectory.
In which thing A turns on.
If it doesn't turn on, then thing B won't.
But if it does, but not quite enough, then thing C is going to come back and affect things B. Like, you know, there's interplay.
There's interrelation that is more narrative in its effect because it is a time sequence than complicated systems thinkers tend to give evolutionary systems credit for.
Let me see if I understand what you're getting at.
So let's put two things up against each other.
When I understand something scientifically, analytically, that is remotely complex.
The only way to do it is to store it as a model.
It does not have a linear sequence.
It has a set of things that are related in some way that I'm aware of or keenly aware that I don't know how two elements are related.
And so, you know, you can take that thing and you can say, well, what if I, you know, What if I decrease this thing given the model that I carry in my mind?
What would I predict the effects are likely to be?
That's very much unlike a narrative, which has a linear nature.
And in fact, some of the really weirdest experiments in narrative have been like the movie Memento in which they completely mess with the linear nature of the story.
And it's amazing how hard the mind has, how hard a time it has tracking it.
Um, but the thing that a narrative, a good narrative, actually let's divide narratives into two types.
I saw what, to me, was a powerful clip of the originators of South Park talking about how they do what they do.
And they were saying something about how they've been so successful at writing so many South Park stories.
Mind you, I haven't watched very much South Park.
I mean, almost not at all.
What they said was that it was very important when they were writing stories that it wasn't just this happened and then this happened and then this happened.
It was that every two things that were neighbors had to be linked by a but or a therefore.
This happened, but then that happened.
Therefore, this happened, but that happened.
Right?
Yeah.
So anyway, I found as somebody who doesn't write narrative, I found that transcendent as an insight goes, but their stories are caricatures by their nature, right?
It's a cartoon.
It's a literal cartoon, right?
A rich story, like a deep, you know, Game of Thrones kind of story.
It has that linear sequence that you describe, but both the author and the audience are keenly aware that the model runs underneath it.
Right?
The point is, yes, this character said that.
But we are left to infer Here's what I know about that character.
Here's what I can infer about their values, right?
Here's what I think their motivation must have been saying that so the point is it implies a complex system underneath that You know haven't been told explicitly right the best the best creators of narrative don't tell you everything they know Yeah, in fact, um, I think no creator of any narrative that is at all compelling Has told you everything that they know about the world that you're inhabiting with these characters, or the characters themselves.
Right.
But the backstory has to exist.
In fact, the author may not even be explicitly conscious of these things.
They've just written a character that makes sense, and therefore the internal architecture is something that makes sense.
So anyway, I guess we got three things in the taxonomy here.
We've got a caricature like South Park where, you know, the characters aren't presumably complex.
They play a role.
You've got A model which allows you to extrapolate somewhat about what's likely to happen.
You've got a complex system.
You don't fully understand it, but you may have a model of elements of it that play an important enough role that you can say, if I increase this, I'm likely to see more of that.
And then you have a narrative which has who knows how many models running underneath it, but it presents as a linear structure, which is, of course, the odd thing about life is that we are Walking through all of these models in a complex world, but our experience is linear and story-like.
Every individual's experience is linear and story-like, and we interface with others, and then we go our separate ways, and hopefully are affected by, and our trajectory changes as a result of the interaction.
But I'm reminded, I cannot think of which film it was, but there's a French New Wave film, I think, from the 70s or so, French or Spanish or Italian, some European New Wave film in which The story is following some characters and then.
You know, they're standing by the side of the road, I'm making up the particulars, and someone bicycles by, and the camera follows the bicycle.
And you never see these people again.
Right.
And then the bicycle ends up somewhere at a restaurant, and, you know, buys something, and the waiter walks off, and the camera follows the waiter, and you never see the guy who was bicycling again.
And again and again and again, this happens.
And I remember the point, when I was studying cinema, as we understood it, was This breaks our expectation of what a film is supposed to do, because all of those individual stories may well have been interesting, but we didn't get enough of any of them to know.
To know why we should care, to develop any sort of investment at all in any of them, and also once you realize that the cinematographic trick is happening, you actively resist caring a little bit, right?
You don't want to invest in this one because you don't know when the next time the camera is going to give up on this character as well and go off with someone else.
So this is a way, I think, of pointing out the way that we understand our world's through story, precisely by saying, oh, well, here's just a bunch of stories.
Don't you care?
Like, no, I actually don't because I didn't get enough of any of them.
And I think we can do that.
I think we can make the same error without knowing it when we are trying to think, Scientifically.
Like, OK, there's this cloud of things that might explain the pattern that I have seen.
Oh, maybe it's that.
I'm going to go off on that thing.
And then something else grabs our attention.
You know, another parameter bicycles by and we follow the parameter that just bicycled by.
Like, oh, actually, you just followed the wrong thing.
And, you know, you need to be able, of course, to trace your steps back to all the branching points, all the decisions you made and go like, nope, actually, all of that was wrong.
That was, you know, six months, you know, of wasted effort.
But I know it's not down that path.
So I have to come back here now and think about the swarm again and see which path I need to follow to figure out what is going on.
Yeah, actually it rescues a saying that I detest, right?
Correlation does not imply causation.
which it's not that that's incorrect correlation on its own does not imply causation, but that is so overused to derail when you've actually discovered a correlation that does imply causation.
You can derail it with that because everybody thinks it's sophisticated when, in fact, the real question, as we've talked about before, is did you have a preexisting causal hypothesis before you had the evidence of correlation?
Then it does imply causation.
But the thing you're pointing to, if you're looking at a complex system and you think that something is involved in something else, and then you go and measure whether the two things co-vary, right?
You may well have identified something related to the system, or you may have identified two things that vary with some third correlate you haven't identified.
And it is very easy to leap to the conclusion that you understand the causal relationship.
But so anyway, one should have the proper level of caution with respect to walking into a complex system, identifying things that do seem to have a relationship.
You know, it's very easy to overestimate what you understand about that relationship.
Very much so.
All right.
All right.
Shall we get to the primary topic for today?
All right.
Primary topic for today is a revelation that came across my desk that I thought suggested so many things simultaneously that I just felt that we had to discuss it.
So could you show the Reuters article?
So what we have here is a Reuters article the title being Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during the pandemic.
Now this caught the attention of a number of people.
It caught Edward Snowden's attention who basically remarked that every journalist should forever after turn the back on any government official who utters the term anti-vax because of course the hypocrisy here is off the charts but what this article describes and mind you we have a little caution that we have to issue Reuters has been a major villain
During the COVID so-called pandemic with their so-called fact-checking and other bullshit.
So why is Reuters suddenly behaving like a journalistic entity when in fact it has been a weapon of war against people including us?
That is a question.
So we don't have an answer for that.
We don't have an answer.
And so one should take whatever the equivalent of a giant grain of salt with all of this is.
Now, I think the story is likely to be accurate as far as it goes because it is compromising of powerful elements within the government that would surely like us not to know that they were demonizing us as I think the story is likely to be accurate as far They were engaged in things that are unrighteous.
Unarguably anti-vax in a different context that they were secretly engaged in so You know this is not something that presumably those folks want revealed and therefore the revelation of it is presumably factual on the other hand Is it being revealed for some strategic purpose?
For example, did some whistleblower get a hold of this?
And is the story bigger than shows up in the Reuters article?
And the Reuters article is designed to either limit the amount that we see or to get us to blow our stack over the anti-vaxxness of this when there's something 10 times this size.
That there will be less energy around when it finally is revealed.
Who knows what's actually going on here?
But if we take it at face value and we say It's likely true because if it weren't the people who are Revealed to be participating in this will scream bloody murder that they've been accused of some terrible thing that they didn't do So we take it at face value, but we don't know why we are being allowed to see this now
What the story reveals is a campaign, and the article's focus is of a campaign in the Philippines in which the U.S.
military ran a campaign on social... They hired a contractor that ran a campaign.
They financed a campaign run through a contractor to demonize the Chinese Sinovac vaccine in the Philippines so that people would be skeptical of it and wouldn't take it.
And this was apparently Validated when X, for example, formerly Twitter, went and looked at all of these accounts that were associated with the hashtag campaign and deemed them, they were all created at the same time, they all said similar things.
And it deemed them to be sock puppets and it removed them now I'm a little disturbed that they were removed because I think this is an important artifact of history that we have a right to scrutinize So that when this happens again we can look at it, but nonetheless you have The U.S.
government financing a campaign, the content of which it ordered through a contractor, to demonize a vaccine that had been produced by the Chinese.
This is happening at the same time, mind you, that those who were interested in the lab leak hypothesis were being demonized for being racist, for looking into the possibility that a Chinese laboratory was involved in The production and the loss of control over SARS-CoV-2.
So that is deeply hypocritical in and of itself.
But this also flies in the face of everything that we were told that we had no choice but to believe about vaccines generally, right?
The argument was vaccines are safe and effective and anybody who has questions about their safety just doesn't get it.
And to the extent that people like us said, hey, wait a minute, they're not inherently safe.
We know that because vaccines have been pulled from the market and we know that because the technology that they're based on couldn't possibly be without risk, which is after all why we safety test them to discover whether or not there's a problem.
But for us to be demonizing A vaccine, especially at the moment that this was happening, there was insufficient supply of vaccines globally.
So these vaccines were not a good thing and they were extremely unlikely to be functional in controlling the pandemic.
Which ones now?
Any of them in part because you're injecting something into the person's system that is not going to create a mucosal immunity that would be necessary to block the transmission of this thing.
But nonetheless the Chinese vaccine was based on a traditional vaccine platform.
The vaccines that were produced by Pfizer and Moderna and at best This ghastly story is about the U.S.
government interfering with the distribution of a Chinese vaccine in order to clear the way for the distribution of this mRNA-based technology that came from the U.S.
But the idea that at a moment when we were being told That life and limb was on the line.
That the entire globe had to alter what it was doing.
We had to change our patterns of travel.
We had to accept the loss of our freedoms because even if you were, you know, willing to take the risk, you were not entitled to contract this disease because somebody else was going to get the disease from you and they had a right not to.
So you have to take the vaccine.
You're not allowed to travel.
All of this logic is destroyed by the idea that behind the scenes our government was paying a contractor to demonize a Chinese vaccine that was frankly far safer just simply by virtue of the fact that it was built on a known platform that it was not spike based and it was not mRNA based so um
We have to take the time to just even notice that that happened and this also This reveals many of the things that we have been hypothesizing, you know, in our discussions.
For example, as recently as last week, we have been talking about the question of, you know, we introduced the phrase, I don't know if they did it, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Morally speaking, one should imagine these people are capable of anything.
Well, this reveals that.
Because on the one hand, to the extent that they believed, either they didn't believe that these vaccines were important in protecting people, in which case giving people a vaccine based on novel technology was a perfectly insane thing to do because it was going to get people killed who weren't going to get any benefit from the thing.
You know, or they did believe that it worked.
And at the same time, they were interfering with people's readiness to take vaccines, knowing that people would die from that.
So one way or another, this validates the hypothesis that we have put on the table that A, these people are capable of anything.
B, that they don't care at all about the death of innocent people they don't know.
They are willing to play games in which Innocent people are going to die either because they took vaccines they shouldn't have or because they failed to take Vaccines that they should have they are willing to play that game.
They are also willing to participate in the The what we said years ago we called it the buzzsaw that they set up this idea of oh, there's something called an anti-vaxxer and anybody who expresses any Concern at all about safety is one of these things, and morally speaking, this is the bottom of the barrel, right?
That's the buzzsaw you get shoved into if you express even normal levels of doubt about anything.
At the same time, they're doing this under the, you know, these are cowards.
These are phony accounts.
Nobody's playing with their own reputation, but they are sowing those exact ideas in, you know, the Philippines.
And mind you, this article focuses on the Philippines, but it becomes clear once you read the article that the campaign actually was much larger than that.
Um, and it was, uh, growing at the point that a stop was put to it in 2021.
Um, so I've got lots more to say, but you look like you were ready to jump in.
No, no, go, go on.
I guess I, I'm not compelled that it, this stop was put to it.
You just said 2021.
There are a number of things I had wanted to say, but, um, I, But I'm not finding this is an incredibly long article and there are a lot of links to various places.
Here we go.
You can show my screen if you want.
This is at the end of this article.
By spring 2021, the National Security Council ordered the military to stop all anti-vaccine messaging.
We were told we needed to be pro-vaccine, pro-all vaccines, said a former senior military officer who helped oversee the program.
Even so, Reuters found some anti-vax posts that continued through April and other deceptive COVID-related messaging that extended into that summer.
Reuters could not determine why the campaign didn't end immediately with the NSC's order.
In response to questions from Reuters, the NSC declined to comment.
So maybe that does suggest that it stopped in 2021.
Although, and as long as we're here, let me just, this is the end of the article, the Pentagon then did an audit.
The Pentagon was like, oh, mercy, we did what?
The Pentagon did an audit, because how could they have known that this many-hundred-million-dollar contract that they had given to General Dynamics IT would have actually done what they asked it to do?
The Pentagon's audit concluded that the military's primary contractor handling the campaign, General Dynamics IT, had employed sloppy tradecraft, taking inadequate steps to hide the origin of the fake accounts, said a person with direct knowledge of the review.
The review also found that military leaders did not maintain enough control over its PSYOP contractors, the person said.
A spokesperson for General Dynamics IT declined to comment.
This is the end of the article.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon's clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue.
In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S.
military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using, quote, disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities to weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.
And in February, the contractor that's in February of this year, and in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign, General Dynamics IT, won a $493 million contract.
Its mission?
To continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.
Oh my God.
Every time I think about this and what they put us through and I, you know, us specifically, but you know, the population were generally right.
The degree to which they are willing to pretend that something is very, very serious.
And that is the reason that they are coming up with all of these exotic things that have to be true of the earth, while at the same time behind the scenes, they are engaged in this sort of.
Insane skullduggery against a vaccine from another country is insane.
What's more, in the article there is a discussion about the fact that there were people in social media who were actually alarmed at the fact that this was going on and that they... so okay.
I'm just trying to wrap my head around it.
You've got the government engaged in innovating new mechanisms to circumvent the First Amendment, right?
They want to strong-arm social media platforms into punishing people from deviating from a narrative that they apparently do not believe.
Social media says... Or...
They do believe it, but people in other parts of the world aren't really people to them.
Right.
Right.
Either way.
So it's possible that they believe their garbagey analysis and view Filipinos as not worthy of human consideration at the same level as other people in the world.
And it's impossible to know.
I even think that can't quite be right because the degree to which the logic of this required that it didn't matter what your doubts were or what the reality of the harms was.
The point is somebody decided that there was a right to mandate things across the population because for the first time in who knows how many decades the point was look What you do carries risks for people that you may never meet, right?
The idea that travel was limited, that you had to take a vaccine even if you stood no risk from COVID because you were young and healthy or whatever.
So the point is, look, Filipinos Even if they just cynically didn't take Filipinos as people, right?
They are vectors.
And so the point is, whatever people they do consider people, we're also downstream of their cynical bullshit.
So any way you slice this, it reveals that these people are not telling you what's motivating them at all.
To the extent that they are, you know, wringing their hands over, you know, dangerous stuff that requires them to mandate things onto you that they would rather not mandate.
Bullshit!
Right?
This reveals how insane that was.
It also reveals, I mean, think about The World Health Organization and its pandemic preparedness plan mm-hmm right we've got the idea that the globe has to Come together in order to control the spread of these diseases really the u.s.
Wants the world to come together even though it like explicitly contracted with a weapons manufacturing company to Falsely portray someone else's vaccine as problematic in some other country like no Everything they said is just the opposite of the truth here.
They don't believe this.
We don't know what this was about This was about something and we still haven't been told right this is about public health Happens to be a convenient excuse for mandating tyranny as we've said here many times public health is is a real idea but it's been captured by people who like tyranny and know that they can make it look reasonable by disguising it as public health.
It's a cloak.
And so anyway, I don't want to go too far here in imagining that we know what the story means as we said up top.
The fact that it's showing up in Reuters means there's probably more to the story than we know.
The part that we've seen is an edit that we're being allowed to see for some reason.
But, you know, think about the number of things that have been Hypothesized by brave people that we can see Made clear in the story, you know Malone's fifth-generation warfare I don't know that he invented that term, but he's certainly been calling attention to it.
All right fifth-generation warfare means the warfare is no longer about Bullets.
This is about your mind.
This is about persuading you of things that aren't true, getting you to do harm to yourself that they don't want to do to you explicitly, right?
That's clear.
The censorship industrial complex, the censorship industrial complex is obviously real, right?
It is not motivated by some You know desire to make the world a better place that has gotten out of control.
It's motivated by things we're never going to be told about and it's going to censor us for saying responsible things about vaccine safety even as it is making up lies on the very same topic and distributing them at scale.
So I don't know.
I find the whole thing very revealing and I wish, I think the upshot of this for me is imagine the world that we are living in now extrapolated forward.
Right?
You don't know whether or not the people that you think are lying to you, that you've been led to believe that because your government has decided to portray them as that for reasons that it refuses to share, and you don't know whether the people that you
Believe are actually part of a propaganda campaign designed again for reasons that have not been shared this takes the Cartesian crisis and it amplifies it to an absolutely intolerable level right it accelerates it and amplifies it and there is One and only one solution to this problem.
It cannot be a propaganda war where everything is somebody's propaganda and you decide who's propaganda to believe on the basis that you think they're on your team, because how would you know?
Or alternatively, You decide to believe nothing because it's all propaganda Which is of course the most reasonable thing to do in a world where everything has been propagandized neither of those is a Solution for people going forward at all neither of them work.
No, it's not and I will say You know, this is a long article this Reuters research and there are a lot of places that you can go looking from it and I I went a few places, and one of them is this.
You can show my screen.
That Reuters article links to a paper published in 2022 in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications called Factors Contributing to Vaccine Hesitancy and Reduced Vaccine Confidence in Rural Underserved Populations.
The idea being that they are looking at people in Idaho and Alaska, and the purported concern is, because we all know that everyone needs to be getting vaccinated against COVID, and uptake is lower in Idaho and Alaska than in other states, specifically lower in rural areas within those states, let's figure out what's going on.
What is contributing to vaccine hesitancy?
Even the, I mean the abstract is its own thing, but the introduction is more useful to take a look at.
The very beginning of the paper, which is so well referenced, so if you're not looking and you're just listening now, you see reference after reference after reference, but the first paragraph is this.
Pandemics such as the 1918 to 1919 influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, H5N1 influenza, bird flu, and most recently severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for coronavirus disease 2019, have been responsible for over 20 million deaths worldwide.
Now, we can argue with that, potentially, but they have Trimble 2019, Lee et al.
2020, Who 2014, Wright et al.
2019, Wallerstein 2017.
Several references supporting that claim, as you'd expect in the introduction of a research paper.
The big claims made in the beginning of the introduction are specifically big claims that are either required to have many references or are, and this is the distinction that I used to make to my students, are so widely understood to be true that everyone already knows them to be true and you couldn't actually source how it is that you know it to be true.
The next sentence.
Vaccination remains one of the most effective ways to limit the spread of infectious diseases, reduce mortality, and morbidity.
No references.
Nothing.
Next sentence.
"Ongoing research suggests that 70% of the United States population will need to receive the COVID-19 vaccine to achieve herd immunity.
However, the projected COVID-19 vaccine uptake is far lower than 70% necessary." Two references.
Three sentences in the first paragraph of the introduction.
A lot of big claims, all of which you could take issue with.
But one of them is that vaccination remains itself a claim.
One of the most effective ways to limit the spread of infectious diseases, reduce mortality and morbidity.
No references.
Where is the research?
Where is the research?
And what this does also is, exactly as you were discussing, conflates all vaccines with one another.
The idea that all you have to do is call something a vaccine, and then the vast majority of people, which included us until a few years ago, who go, well, I know that vaccine is an important tool in the arsenal of Western medicine, and it has been effective against some diseases.
And what was hidden, in at least my analysis, from me, even, was, I hope that, I assume that, if they are giving something the name vaccine, then it has gone through the rigorous safety and clinical testing that it should have gone through to deserve the name vaccine, which, of course, we now know is not the case.
So, this article is presumably about, once again, factors contributing to vaccine hesitancy.
And right in the very beginning of the introduction, the authors, to me, raise issues about their own independence of thought and their own ability to assess whether or not there are, in fact, differences between vaccines.
And Odd.
So here we go through the methods and it's all very qualitative and everything.
But this paper, which is cited by Reuters as explaining vaccine hesitancy, 27 individuals participated in one of six virtual focus groups connected over a two-week period.
27 individuals and then seven health care providers.
And then they just got quotes from these individuals and they say things like, I don't know what the answer is, as far as regaining trust with the CDC or the WHO or Fauci or just any level of government at this point, because it was so politicized from the beginning.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think the main concern for me is not knowing what information to trust, said a 33-year-old childbearing female.
My husband and I have had to regroup and then just make the decisions that are best for us and our immediate home and nuclear family.
I don't rely on social media for my information.
I don't trust the algorithms," said a 50-year-old female.
All of these sound like reasonable human beings who are wrestling in 2021 or 2022, depending on when exactly it happened, with how to make sense of things.
But from this, from 27 people and a few virtual conversations, they come up with a lot of themes and sub-themes that I can't make fit with these quotes that they are actually showing us.
I'm just sharing this to fit in with the Cartesian crisis.
This is a piece of research that is being cited by Reuters to explain vaccine hesitancy.
The only thing in this article that makes any real sense to me are the anecdotes that are the quotes that they are choosing to share from the people.
Then they have some quotes from the medical providers, ...are much less cogent than the ones from the people, uh, who... who are saying, you know what, I'm just not sure what to think.
Here we have the biggest scare for all of them is, uh, they've just heard bad things about people having bad signs and the thrombocytopenia and... and... and, you know, the reaction is the biggest scare, trying to reassure them that it has been hard because you can show them the data, you can explain to them, but then reach that we're here to watch you.
That's from a medical provider.
This is an article that's supposed to be convincing us that vaccine hesitancy is on the rise and there's a problem when the medical providers aren't even speaking in English.
They don't even seem to know that there's one big word in there and for that reason we're supposed to trust this guy, I assume.
I don't know.
I don't know when research like this began to be considered evidence.
Yeah, the evidence isn't evidence, but also- Not evidence.
And their categories are total crap.
In what universe?
You've got how many authors on that paper?
Um, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Okay, so you've got seven Highly educated people who apparently sat down to write this paper and did not look each other in the eye and say Vaccine hesitancy is clearly warranted given what we now know about the nonsense in our safety testing about the ineffectiveness of the so-called vaccines in terms of of controlling the spread of the virus.
They didn't have a conversation in which the point was, yeah, vaccine hesitancy is the rational conclusion of a reasonable person who has watched the last few years.
Period.
These are presumably, as you say, highly educated academics, seven authors, three locations, three affiliations, because as is common in academic papers and research papers, you always have author affiliations listed For everyone.
The three institutional affiliations of these seven authors are... I'm going to read the final one first.
College of Health, School of Nursing, Idaho State University, and then it also says Anchorage, Alaska.
I don't know why.
Oh, that's just one author is somehow affiliated with both.
But the others are the College of Pharmacy, And at Idaho State University, this is a weird way of doing, I don't know what, I don't know, I don't know what they're doing here.
I don't know why all of these are, show me again, please.
But we have Idaho State University and, and University of Alaska.
College of Health, School of Nursing, but we have College of Pharmacy at both places.
That most of the affiliations for these authors is with the College of Pharmacy.
So maybe that is not considered a conflict of interest, but obviously if you're
If your hard funding is coming from a college of pharmacy as opposed to even a medical school, but especially a college of letters and sciences, something with a more traditional liberal arts background, which should not be getting its funding or doesn't have its raison d'etre associated with the reductionist production of drugs to solve human problems that may or may not have been produced by the earlier production of drugs,
They are unlikely to come to the conclusion that vaccine hesitancy might be warranted.
Yeah, in fact let's... If you're coming from the College of Pharmacy.
Okay, so let's not come from the College of Pharmacy and let's put a valid hypothesis on the table in need of test.
The massive increase in vaccine hesitancy is at least in large measure explained by the fact that they redefined the term vaccine to cover a transfection, a gene therapy transfection agent That did not succeed in controlling the disease in question and injured a hell of a lot of people who didn't need to take it.
Right?
How about that as a hypothesis for where this rise in vaccine hesitancy might be coming from?
In which case, why does anybody get to portray anybody as anything other than reasonable for being vaccine hesitant?
They hurt a bunch of people with something that they decided to call a vaccine.
That's where the vaccine hesitancy is coming from.
That's not on anybody but them.
Right.
And to return to where you started, at the same moment that a number of us were becoming more vaccine-hesitant than we'd ever been in our lives, and were in some cases, you know, having lives destroyed, careers, families, etc., the military was funding a massive program in which it proclaimed anti-vax
I don't know, positions to at least an entire country of Filipinos in order to decrease uptake of the China made vaccine.
Right.
And we didn't even get to the fact that, to the extent that the Reuters article covers the extension of this, that Muslims were also apparently falsely told that the Chinese vaccine contained pork Gelatin, which is apparently plausible from a vaccine manufacturer perspective But the idea that they were told that so that it would violate religious terms.
How is that not a?
Cryptic attack on Muslims to make them more vulnerable to a circulating disease.
I mean all of this raises questions about bio warfare and You know the thing that isn't not covered in this article at all I don't know what to think about it because again who knows what the point of the article really even is
But given that it is now, I would argue, quite clear that this virus is downstream of so-called dual-use research, which means bioweapons research, given that that's the case, and given that the vaccines deployed by the mRNA vaccines and the DNA vaccines deployed by the U.S.
were Using an element from the virus that was downstream of bioweapons research, we don't really know what happened.
What is the relationship between the COVID so-called pandemic and biowarfare?
We don't know.
In that context, to have the military demonizing a vaccine manufactured by another country raises all kinds of questions about what tactical stuff might be going on.
You know, who wants who immune to what?
That's the question.
And so the contractor that the military used, General Dynamics IT.
When you Google them, the tagline that comes up in Google before you get to their site is, Art of the Possible.
So I would say that they're doing a lot of remarkably possible things.
You can show my screen here.
Scale your AI.
And they've got, of course, beautiful Well, I don't know.
I mean, we're back to their Cartesian crisis.
I was going to say that looks like a flower opening.
Yeah, but who knows what it is.
But who knows, actually.
And just about General Dynamics Information Technology, which is, of course, a branch of General Dynamics, which is, of course, an old, established military contractor.
We've got a leadership.
I'm not...
My intention here is not to make fun of how people look, but these pictures don't look like real people to me.
There's like, there's an uncanny valley thing going on here that makes me wonder if I now have no idea what to think at all about anything with regard to what you're seeing online, unless it's through your own eyes in the physical world.
I looked into a few of these people and they appear to be real people, but who knows?
Like how deep could it go?
There's just, there's some, these, maybe they're just enhanced, maybe they're enhanced to look less human.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know anymore.
Those top three especially.
Yeah.
Those pictures actually, it almost looks like they were stretched a little bit.
Yeah.
It's very strange.
So this, this is the leadership and, you know, the president, um, is, um, was in the military and is now leading up, uh, General Dynamics, um, IT and that's, you know, you'd expect a move from military to, to a position like this if you were powerful and interested in becoming more powerful.
But, um, Who's in charge?
Who actually has the power in our country at this point?
Let's put it this way.
Let's assume those guys are real.
At some point, they won't be.
At some point, somebody who's doing something nefarious like heading up a fifth-generation warfare assault on a foreign population by misleading them into believing that something is known about some vaccine or whatever, At some point, they will discover that they're better off not using their real identities.
After all, I mean, the thing we haven't said here is that the military use of sock puppets didn't start with COVID.
This goes way back, right?
I find, I easily find evidence that goes back to 2010.
And I remember Back when we were at Evergreen, I remember hearing about a Navy program in which there was special software being used for an individual person to man a large number of sock puppet accounts, specifically with the purpose of manipulating online conversations so that people would come to believe things they wouldn't otherwise believe, right?
This is a military tactic and the only solution here... Yep.
Is the recognition that you cannot live in a world where the propagandists are at war with each other and you have a choice between different brands of propaganda.
That is not a world we can live in.
That's not a world any of us can live in because frankly even the people who are pulling the strings are downstream of somebody else's propaganda.
It's not like they have an insight into how the world works.
The only way to do this is a to recognize that it is intolerable for governments to be propagandizing citizens of any nation And B, that transparency and open discussion is the way you figure out what's true.
Going after the people who are trying to do that, like us frankly, in real time, trying to model how you would sort out evidence and figure out which way's up and what it actually is in your interest to do, right?
You can't demonize us, whether we're right or wrong.
We're trying to do the right job, so the governments have to stay out of Demonizing citizens and they have to stay out of trying to persuade us of stuff because behind the scenes they've decided it's a reasonable thing The last thing I will say about that is that it occurred to me that The first thing that occurred to me is that the road to hell is paved with utilitarianism.
Right?
Utilitarianism seems like a great idea the first time you hear it.
Greatest good for the greatest number.
And then you realize there are all sorts of things that might arguably do the greatest good for the greatest number that are completely intolerable.
Right?
Slavery, for example.
What if slavery harms a small number of people and benefits a large number of people?
Still not okay.
Utilitarianism is dead in the water, but it keeps getting revived by people who think they have some special insight into the world, right?
The effective altruists, right?
They did terribly over the course of COVID.
Why?
Because they didn't understand that the rationalism that was reasonable Turns to shit when you try to turn it into a program for how to manage the world.
If you want to use Bayesianism as a way of thinking about puzzles, that's useful.
At the point you think you're the good guys and you get to break the rules because you know that ultimately more good will be done, then you get Sam Bankman-Fried out of it.
That's what you get.
So, alright, you go from the road to hell is paved with utilitarianism.
The road to hell is paved with Machiavellian utilitarianism.
The road to hell is actually paved with double O Machiavellian utilitarianism because that's what these people are.
They have a license to kill in their own minds because of some goal that they've never shared with us.
They think that whatever goal they're on is worth their cynical manipulation of the public in ways that results in some people living and other people dying.
And frankly, that isn't their goddamn right.
All right.
Awesome.
Awesome.
I am now getting back off the soapbox.
No, soapbox becomes you.
Oh, well, thank you.
All right.
Cool.
Is that it?
I think that's it from my perspective.
Can I read from your notes?
Did you talk about glyphosate to the extent that you wanted to?
Yes, the question is just because you can't taste the glyphosate in your wheat doesn't make it safe to eat it.
Yeah.
Why is there glyphosate in your wheat?
Hmm.
Because they're using it as a desiccant.
A desiccant to keep the wheat from molding.
But what does that imply for the consumer?
Well, you're dumb to be eating anything with glyphosate on it to the extent that you can identify it, but... You skipped a step.
Glyphosate originally is used as an insecticide.
Herbicide.
Okay, herbicide.
But that wouldn't explain why wheat crops are being sprayed right before harvest.
Glyphosate is often used in non-organic massive wheat production as an herbicide so that other plants don't compete with the nutrients that the wheat, which is the intended crop, is getting.
And then now, wheat is also being sprayed with glyphosate shortly before intended harvest in order to dry it out, which makes the post-harvest processing of the wheat easier and has less loss associated with it.
I'm no expert on this and I didn't read up on it in advance of today's podcast, but I think you've got an error in there.
I think glyphosate is not used on wheat because in order to use glyphosate, it's used on wheat in the desiccation process.
You don't think it's used as an herbicide?
And I think the reason is because you have to genetically engineer.
This is why the GMO thing is so fraught.
You have to genetically engineer a crop so it can tolerate and be Roundup ready.
And they haven't got it with wheat.
Okay, so you got Roundup ready corn and soy.
Right, exactly.
And so those things have been engineered so the glyphosate doesn't kill them.
And wheat has not, at least until recently it had not.
But you can't spray it on it if you're about to kill it anyway.
You can spray it on at the end, either right before or right after harvest to keep it from molding.
But the point is what glyphosate is terrible for you.
The idea of putting glyphosate on right before harvest is insane because the processes that might normally decrease the amount, wash it away, distribute it into the environment, break it down, don't have time to act.
So you're getting a huge dose of this stuff, even though the crop isn't roundup ready.
Yeah, a little ergot might be a better choice.
Yeah.
That was rye, I guess.
Yeah.
Ergot grown on rye, which may have explained the so-called witches in Salem that led to the Salem witch trials.
Which may have explained... which may have explained the witches.
Yes.
Yes.
There are multiple witches out there.
I've noticed that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
I think we're there.
I think we are there.
I think we got there.
Oh, what we didn't say is that it's about to be summer.
And the solstice isn't exactly on the full moon, but it's also about to be a full moon.
And what a glorious time of year to be absolutely outside, interacting with real people through your senses directly, as opposed to through screens, as much as possible.
We appreciate you being here, watching us, listening to us, but especially for the majority of you who are in the Northern Hemisphere right now, it is glorious outside and As I will say again in just a minute or so, get outside and be there as much as possible right now.
So Zach, do you have any merch to show us?
Hey, look at that!
Blueberries, because Occidents Happen sweatshirt.
is available at our store, and you can find the store and everything else that you might want to know about what we're up to at darkhorsepodcast.org, website that's up now.
Simple, but it's got upcoming schedule and links to things like Natural Selections and Patreons and Locals and all of that.
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Yeah.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
