Exquisite Failures: The 233rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 233rd 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 The Hope Accord, which calls for the “immediate suspension of Covid-19 mRNA vaccine products.” We encourage you to sign it. Then: wisdom from Charlie Munger on why we should prefer a world in which some people are not compensated for their losses (even if they didn’t deserve to lose), o...
Hey folks, welcome to the dark horse podcast live stream number 133.
133?
233.
Oh, excuse me.
200.
Now that is a mistake anyone could make if they were in my exact frame of mind.
In fact, they would make exactly that mistake if they were me.
It's a cool number though.
guess 233 yeah prime it's prime it's also a fibonacci number which makes it a fibonacci prime wow check it out i could do this from my head but i'm not going to because i'll screw it up on my camera one one so as you know fibonacci number means that um each each number in succession is the sum of the previous two numbers so one one two three five eight thirteen twenty So 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, also a good number, perfect square, 233.
So 233 is a Fibonacci number.
It is the sum of the previous two Fibonacci numbers and its prime.
So that suggests that this podcast is going to spiral in control.
In control?
Yes.
I don't see any reason to expect that.
No, no.
If you wanted a controlled spiral, the Fibonacci sequence would be your gateway math.
Maybe we should have had a Nautilus on as a co-host this week.
I mean, if you were going to have an invertebrate, a cephalopod would be a good choice, but I would go with an octopus just in terms of your likelihood of consciousness.
Yeah, less obviously spiral though.
So this week we're going to talk a little bit about the Hope Accord, and a bit, well, a little bit about workers' compensation laws, strangely.
Not very much.
A bit about sunscreen, and how truly awesome a lot of people think it is, and about frog saunas.
So, with that...
I totally know what a frog sauna is.
I know, I know you do.
I do.
No, no you don't.
No, I'm looking forward to learning.
It's exciting.
It's good for the frogs and it's good for us to be able to talk about frog saunas.
So, if you are watching live, join us on Locals.
We have the watch party going on there.
Lots of good stuff going on on Locals.
And we're not doing a Q&A this week, but we've done two in the last week.
We did one last Wednesday after our livestream and the Sunday before that, and those are great fun.
So we're able to watch the chat as they happen.
We've moved all of our Q&As to locals.
Please join us there.
Yeah, we're going to address the stuff that we want to tell you about to the end, except for our sponsors.
As always, we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour.
These are companies that make products or provide services that we truly stand by.
And so you know that if you're hearing us read an ad that we actually truly vouch for them.
I would also say it, in my case, the reading sets a low bar so that I can see it and impress people.
Okay, but in this case, the first sponsor this week is for you to read, and you are going to do a better job than the organism for whom the product is intended.
So, I think that you can just have that in your head.
Dogs also set a low bar for product endorsement.
I mean, they can participate, they just can't.
No, I was talking about the reading.
Right, exactly.
I think Maddie would do a good job of product endorsement, but not too good with the reading.
She can sell some product, but she's got a learning disability, which is that she's a dog.
I'm a dog.
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The standard high-end dry food that we were feeding Maddie pleased her well enough.
She's a Labrador, and Labs will eat basically anything.
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She loves the food that Sundays makes.
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If we run out of Sundays and give her the previous high-end kibble instead, she is clearly disappointed.
We should be giving her sundaes and she knows it and we know it.
It really is amazing how different she is when you open the sundaes bag versus a scoop of anything else.
Yeah, she'll eat anything but sundaes is what she loves.
Yeah, it's really quite clear.
We should probably film that at some point so people know we're not making it up.
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And healthy for people to eat.
That's a complicated sentence because easy to pronounce for people, healthy for dogs, yes, but also in a pinch, people.
It's far better for... Easy to pronounce but hard to grammar.
You wouldn't want to grammatize it if you were a dog.
But it's easy to avoid doing if you're a dog.
Just check with your dog if you think we're making that up.
It is far better for your dog than standard dry dog food, and apparently it's delicious.
Apparently.
You wrote this, so apparently it's delicious.
Oh, you're referring to the dog here, not me.
Sorry, I took it personally.
Even our Tabby likes it.
See, you were referring to the cat, like I said.
It's made for dogs, tested by cats, and husbands.
See, there you did get to referring to me.
I knew it was coming.
Yep.
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She, you know, Yeah, look at the page!
There's only like 300 words on this page, and yet this ad read seems interminable.
You know what it is?
That thing that Trump has is contagious, and I've caught it.
What does he have?
Trump gives a speech, and he interjects commentary next to the speech.
And frankly, as somebody who finds oration important and a skill, I find it maddening.
But here I am doing it.
All right.
I find oration important in skill, but reading not so much.
Maybe it's the reading part.
I think it is.
Yeah, okay.
Let's see.
Yes, our own... Why don't you just start again at the top?
All right.
Our first sponsor this... No.
Let's don't.
Okay.
Uh, yes.
Maddie, our laboratory, supports the results.
She bounces and spins and leaps in anticipation of a bowl of sundaes.
Way more than for her previous food.
Do you want to make your dog happy with her diet or his diet?
Depending on if it's a him or her.
Not a matter of preference.
And keep her or him healthy.
And now I'm alluding poorly to a Monty Python skit.
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Did you know that Sundays as in the days of the week is spelled differently than the ice cream dessert?
Yeah, you know that.
I probably told you that last week.
You did.
Well, it wasn't last week, but it was very recently, and I was shocked.
I'm still a little dismayed.
Switch to Sundays and find your husband and get even sillier.
But only if you try it.
Wow.
That would be cool if it was the Sundays that was doing it.
Oh, have you made a habit now?
Or was it just the once?
Are you constantly doing the Sundays?
is that why we're out nope it was just once but it was pretty good okay A little crunch in the middle of the day.
Clean your teeth.
This is going to be nearly so enjoyable.
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We're not done with the ads yet.
Yeah, I know.
I was super distracted.
Sorry about that.
No, no.
Sometimes you just have a little snarky interjection to make.
At the moment, yes.
A snarky interjection would be perfectly appropriate at this moment.
However, the terror I have about upcoming trips has got my mind in a jumble.
Yeah.
Jumble.
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This is the second time that Peek has sponsored the podcast.
We are enjoying Peek's Nundukkah more than ever and are making a concerted effort to actually pronounce their product correctly.
I think I've got it right.
Nanduka.
Even if we don't, though, Peaks Nanduka.
Make no mistake, this is a fantastic product.
So it's spelled with all A's.
The only vowels in the word are A's.
But they give a little phonetic pronunciation thing and they want us to say it.
Nanduka.
Yeah.
It wouldn't be Nanduka.
Well, I don't know about that.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
Now you're getting into the A weeds.
Nanduka, maybe like Vietnam.
Be it name.
Lord.
Well, there you have it.
OK.
The coffee alternative market is increasingly well-saturated, but Peaks Nanduka... how do you want to pronounce it?
Nanduka?
Is that wrong?
I don't know.
Stands out.
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I was actually thinking, that's a cool construction!
Lift your mode!
You're one!
With an N of one, you can't lift your mode?
No, you can!
You put it in sport mode.
Oh, boy.
This is going to be very silly today.
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We had this conversation last time, too.
Is that how you pronounce that?
Sashay?
I thought you knew.
I don't know.
Yes.
That's the word that they use, which is not... I think of sashay being like something you put lavender in and throw into your underwear drawers.
It's a mode of locomotion.
Rare.
It's spelled differently.
We did have this conversation.
Yes.
I think it's sashet.
and dissolves quickly in water.
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Nanduka tastes great, like a creamy, indulgent, spiced hot chocolate.
It really actually does.
As much as we are destroying this ad read, this is a great product.
But you can see who wears the grammar pants in this family.
Grammar pants.
I call you Captain Grammar Pants.
Look at how they use.
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We made it through the ads.
Hell yeah.
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Our green perimeter is off.
We're no longer being paid to say what we're saying.
Yes.
But we still vouch for it.
In fact... What we say?
Yeah.
Yes.
See?
Very much so.
All right.
Well, here's the thing.
We've gone from a matter of mode elevation to a period of the opposite, which I guess is mode delevation.
You would, wouldn't you?
Yes, I would.
Yeah, you did.
All right.
I want to talk about the Hope Accord, which is something that many of our viewers will have encountered somewhere.
Now, the Hope Accord was just released this week.
Do I have to pull that up?
Yeah, you want to pull up the Hope Accord if you can?
It's at thehopeaccord.org, which I will say again.
The Hope Accord is a collaborative effort.
To rally support for removing the COVID vaccines or so-called vaccines, transfection agents from the market for reasons that will be well familiar to viewers and listeners of the Dark Horse Podcast.
Now, on the one hand, I will say that response to the Hope Accord has been spectacular in the short number of days that it's been up.
We're already well over 30,000 signatories.
Many scientists, doctors, and other folks with expertise have signed the accord.
So that's great.
And 30,000 is a large number for a small number of days.
On the other hand, because this is an initiative that we have the view on the back end, we can also see how many people are looking at the thing and it's orders of magnitude more.
So what's going on?
So what you're saying is a lot of people are, many more people are looking than are signing.
Yes.
And it would be one thing if they were looking at it and having a negative reaction, but we are getting nothing but positive reactions.
So that leaves me thinking, obviously, um, lots of people are curious about things and you know, you would expect, you know, the number of signatories isn't going to be larger.
The number of views, it will always be smaller for whatever reason.
But the question is, how can we get the massive number of people who look at this document and resonate with it to actually take the step of signing it, and why aren't they doing it?
And I think there are a couple things going on.
One, I think we have all been traumatized and retrained by the propaganda campaign and the stigmatization that went along with things that happened during the COVID so-called pandemic.
So people are in the habit of keeping their cards close to their chest because almost no matter what you say, you're in trouble with somebody, right?
So I think there's a sense of like, well, you know, it's a tragedy of the commons.
It's a collective action problem where lots of people who would absolutely be on board with pressuring the powers that be to remove these dangerous products from the market.
Would rather not have their name on a list where they've said that.
Now, I'm going to argue that it is essential that you do this.
And another thing that is contributing to people maybe not converting their support into an actual signature is the sense that this is in the past.
The mandates are gone that lots of people, most people aren't taking the shots.
So it's the urgency isn't there.
And I want to make three points that I think will cause people to realize that this is very much a live issue.
The first one has to do with a friend of mine, I will keep her name private, but a friend of a friend of mine who is working under a work permit, she's an immigrant, is now being forced, despite being young and healthy and despite whatever argument there may or may not have once been for there being an emergency, I lean towards there was no COVID emergency, but whatever
Emergency might once have existed everyone acknowledges has gone and yet somebody seeking a work permit in the US is still Mandated to get a booster for no reason.
There's not an argument for a healthy young person getting it in the first place.
There's no Collective need for anyone to get it because it doesn't block transmission and contraction and yet we are still pressuring people to play Inoculation roulette with with their health and it's completely unfair.
So even just to know that But there is somebody out there who is going to have to take one of these shots for no medical reason whatsoever and with every reason not to.
This is somebody young enough to have children.
If he chooses to have children, there's also reproductive consequences.
So, you know, even just that one example says, oh, my God, there are thousands of people who are facing that.
And many of them are going to take a shot because they have no choice.
They don't want to.
Fail to get their permits.
They don't want to live here illegally.
And for those people, you should do it.
Second thing is, the CDC just recommended these shots for all people over six months of age.
Now, that is perfectly insane in light of what the COVID crisis is at the moment, at the very least, never mind what it once was.
But you want to recommend these to healthy six-month-old children?
For what possible reason?
Even if you thought that these things carried no risk, which is obviously wrong.
They are not only risky, they cause harm to a substantial number of people.
But even if we didn't know that, you are taking children who fend off COVID very easily as a result of innate immunity, and you are disrupting the natural trajectory of the development of their immune system.
You don't know what the long-term consequences of that are.
It may be that in a world where there's COVID circulating and it's not a serious disease and it's readily treatable, that actually contracting a mild, cold-like version of COVID when you're young and healthy gives your immune system something to work on as the disease progresses.
And by inoculating people with a static view of spike protein that isn't relevant to the currently circulating version, You're disrupting their own ability to fend off the very disease you claim to be protecting them from.
And you're putting them at great risk at the same time.
So babies, they can't defend themselves.
We are supposed to have a right to inform consent.
A baby's parents are supposed to exert that status on behalf of the child.
And a parent going into a pediatrician's office, being told the CDC is recommending this, is going to be in fear of being told they're an anti-vaxxer.
And of course, Doctors are strong-arming people into taking vaccinations that have never been demonstrated to cause a net benefit to health.
So anyway, do you really want babies to be injected with these things because the CDC is recommending it for whatever reasons of corruption and insanity live in that agency?
No, you don't.
And so We adults are supposed to protect children.
This is a way to protect children.
You sign this thing and you let people know we are not going to let this slide just because nobody's mandating us to take the shots anymore.
Okay, and the third reason is the mRNA platform is a potential goldmine for pharma.
And the defects of that platform have nothing to do with COVID.
They have to do with the way the mRNA shots induce immunity in the body, which puts us at risk because, as I've said many times, The mRNA is taken up haphazardly.
It's taken up wherever the shots circulate by whatever cells they encounter.
When cells produce a foreign protein, as the shots direct them to do, the immune system regards them as virally infected and it attacks those cells and destroys them.
I often say if that happens in your liver, it's not a big deal because you can spare some liver cells.
If it happens in your deltoid, it might have an effect on your strength, but it's not going to shorten your life in all likelihood.
If it happens in your heart, it very well might, and the reason It's because the heart does not heal, it scars.
So, especially in the period where you've got a wound prior to scarring, it's very dangerous.
And after it's scarred, you have a heart that will perform suboptimally for the rest of your life.
So, the idea that they are reformulating other shots, they're making bird flu shots out of mRNA, they're going to do regular flu, they have everything planned for this platform.
We need to get the shots that already exist on the market taken off in order to make it clear we're not putting up with this.
They are not done with us and we have to fight now even though it seems like the pressure is off.
I will say that you made a little video about the Hope Accord, and you put it out on Twitter, and I retweeted what you did.
And I have been, more or less blissfully, not much on social media for a while, and so it's hard to control for what I saw next, because I haven't been super active.
I don't recall ever before seeing the kind of nasty nonsense coming back at me for anything else I had tweeted.
The claims of, you know, of course they're safe.
What the hell's wrong with you?
What are your credentials to say such things?
These aren't vaccines anyway.
You were always pro-vaccine.
Like, you know, all sorts of internally inconsistent and certainly between them inconsistent.
But, you know, a lot of smoke.
Just, you know, a lot of stuff being drummed up by, you know, by and large, I assume, not actually organic individual human beings.
It felt like campaigns of various sorts.
I don't know from, you know, I don't even know what we call all of these now.
But, you know, from these like farms of, you know, paid people in Southeast Asia in front of, you know, lots and lots of screens with lots and lots of accounts that they are manning.
To, you know, possibly bots to, you know, occasionally actual individual trolls.
But I think that actual individual trolls are actually a much tinier piece of the way that people's opinions are changed online.
And because this is an online poll and it's mostly being circulated through online Sources.
It would be very hard for anyone who ran into this not to see the insanity that's coming back in the negative.
Of course they're safe.
Of course they're effective.
What's wrong with you?
You're an idiot.
You don't have standing.
Stay in your lane.
All the stuff that we were seeing early in the pandemic, and I honestly have not seen it for a while, and suddenly it's back.
So I do think that that is part of what is going on with regard to people going and being like, yeah, but I can't afford, I don't want to have that kind of bile come back at me.
Yeah.
I, we see three terms I would use.
We see bots, we see sock puppets, and we see shills, right?
There are some named shills who make particular points.
Some of them, most of them have credentials of some kind or another.
What's your definition of a sock puppet?
A sock puppet is a real person like at one of these farms where they might be managing dozens or hundreds of accounts that masquerade as an individual with an opinion.
It's not a bot.
So a sock puppet is inherently someone who is a real person.
Their real identity is not showing up.
They have created or someone has created for them lots of identities and they are voicing all those different identities.
Yeah.
Like shallow backstories but they appear to be You know, they can all back each other up and make something appear to be a common opinion when it's actually one guy typing for all the accounts.
Right.
And the bots are increasingly good, of course, because, you know, AI now passes a Turing test.
And so you can basically point a machine at turning into a chorus of people.
So increasingly, the distinction may be irrelevant.
In fact, why would you pay sock puppets when you could get A thousand or ten thousand times as many machine accounts to sound like people.
So sooner or later maybe sock puppets go extinct.
And then you see what look like individuals spinning their wheels arguing with these accounts.
Right.
And it's just it's it feels tragic it feels so sad but you know you as the individual who may have posted originally you don't want to jump in and be like just don't engage because then because then that's engagement.
Well but I've actually I've had some success Pointing out to a person who's having an argument with a sock puppet go look at the account Look at who you're arguing with really they've got 75 followers and they're following 600 people and you know, look at what they've posted and it's like, you know Retweets of sort of There's no original content.
Right.
So the point is, oh, if you were going to manage an account, you're going to try to make it look like a person to anybody who wasn't going to scrutinize it.
It sounds like a person.
But, you know, I think I must have seen the same picture you did of one of these farms where one person has a computer that's connected to, you know, a hundred phones.
And it is worth, I mean, we know that pharma engages in creating a chorus.
Right.
And it shapes opinion.
The danger of this really couldn't be greater, right?
Because a human being has
endogenous mechanisms for figuring out when they are out of step with everybody and that's not necessarily a good thing you know when everybody else is wrong you got to be comfortable with being right but most people spook when they think that there is this you know wave of condemnation coming at them and if the wave of condemnation is 17 people who've been paid to make it look like a wave of condemnation and all of the people who would be jumping in to support them are like hiding under their desk Right.
The point is it creates change in a paradoxical direction.
It does.
So anyway, yes, please sign the accord.
Obviously, if you don't agree, don't sign it.
But I think when you read it, I mean, it's very carefully written.
It errs in the direction of caution.
There's a part of me that wishes in some places it was more aggressive based on what we've come to understand.
But it's hard to disagree with it.
Coming up, Zach, just scroll down and show.
We, the undersigned healthcare professionals, scientists and concerned members of the public, call for 1.
The immediate suspension of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine products.
2.
A comprehensive reevaluation of the safety and efficacy of all COVID-19 vaccine products.
3.
The immediate recognition and support for the vaccine injured.
4.
The restoration of ethical principles abandoned during the COVID-19 era.
That's a big ask.
And 5.
Addressing the root causes of our current predicament.
Even bigger.
But, you know, critical.
Right, yeah, and you know if you do the first ones the other ones naturally follow if you if you say I mean it Why did we do what we did during COVID?
Because that story reveals the dysfunction of the system.
Not only was it important as a story, but the story itself, the way it flowed through the media, the way it affected online behavior, the way it revealed the connection between government and the social media platforms, it told us what world we live in.
And it's the Truman Show.
Those shots have to be pulled.
Not another person should be injured by these things.
There's no reason for it.
There's no demonstration of net benefit.
There's certainly no reason to inject a healthy young person.
There's just no argument.
I don't even know what the argument would be in light of what the evidence says.
Um, so given all that, let's follow through.
Let's get the shots, which are the most concentrated element of harm dealt with.
Let's get them off the market and then let's reevaluate.
How did we get here?
What happened to academia?
Where, you know?
Where were the universities that said, you know, we've looked at the evidence and it doesn't add up?
Not a one?
Right?
Nobody?
They were too busy instituting mandates.
Right.
For their healthy undergraduates.
There you go, which a few of them still have, amazingly enough.
Yeah, they sure do.
That can be a fourth thing on the list.
There are mandates in some places, like several universities.
Those kids don't need to get injected with this stuff.
It's insane.
Yep.
It sure is.
All right.
Well, I've got three things that I want to bring to the table.
I don't know what the through line is.
I don't think there's a through line.
Game on.
Yeah, exactly.
You can figure out what the through line is.
All right, I'm finding the through line.
Enough so that I could have just thrown these three topics up in the air and been like, whatever order we want to discuss them in is fine.
So we're going to start with an idea from Charlie Munger.
So you know who this is much more than I do.
He was, he's dead now, was the partner of Warren Buffett.
Berkshire Hathaway.
Berkshire Hathaway, the founders and leads in Berkshire Hathaway.
And you recently got Port Charlie's Almanac, his book.
He's a big fan of Ben Franklin, so that's obviously named after Port Richard's Almanac.
Yeah.
Why is Richard Benjamin Franklin?
I don't know.
Okay, I'm confused now.
And you recently put that on our Audible account, and I swooped in and started listening to it.
And I'm not all the way done, but there is an idea in it.
There are several ideas, but there is a particular idea that kind of crystallized for me some of what I think Some of how it is that I and I believe we have always been out of step with the left, to which we always assumed we belonged.
But first, maybe you want to say a few things?
Well, I just, I have an anecdote which I think will give the audience a sense of why Charlie Munger.
So, pure happenstance, I didn't have even very many conversations with him, but I briefly went to school with his son many years ago in Los Angeles, and I had heard the name Yeah, in high school.
I had heard the name Charlie Munger, but didn't really know.
I knew that he was an extremely wealthy guy, you know, that people quoted him every now and again.
But I didn't really have a relationship with the idea of Charlie Munger and didn't know why I should be paying attention to him.
I saw a interaction, two incredibly old guys sitting on stage talking about the philosophy of life that had made them successful and insightful and, you know, basically telling young people what somebody should have told them.
And they were both interesting and insightful, both, you know, had clear humility.
They were funny, engaging.
But this one guy really impressed me.
That dude's old.
I really want to have him on the podcast and I want to talk to him.
And obviously time is of the essence because he's so old.
Well, it turned out that the video I was watching was released after his death as people were sort of reviewing, you know, his... And this was Munger?
Yeah, it was Munger.
And anyway, so I was sort of sorry to have missed him because when I heard the way he spoke about how he had succeeded in life, so much of it resonated.
And it was so interesting that anyway, I started down the path of chasing down Wisdom of His and other videos.
I will also say that Warren Buffett on Munger's death released a extremely generous statement about his dead friend and basically said that Munger had been the secret to Warren Buffett's success in Larchmifer, which I thought that's an unusual thing.
You know, obviously Warren Buffett is the more well-known person.
But that was apparently by design.
Munger wanted to be in the shadows.
Yeah.
He did not want to be a public-facing figure.
Yeah.
So anyway, all that is to say this person had a lot of insight into the world.
They're well worth listening to.
And that's how, that's why I ended up buying the book and you swooped in and have gotten way ahead of where I am in it.
Yeah.
Um, so, and I'll, it's again called Poor Charlie's Almanac and I'll put a link in the show notes.
Um, It's a series, it's a bunch of intro.
It's a book that I'd like to have actually in print because it's a little hard to tell when they're doing background on Charlie versus one of his talks, but it's a series of his talks.
In talk three, I don't even remember who his audience is here, but he's discussing California's worker compensation laws.
And in his estimation, they seem like a noble thing to do.
So that's where he starts.
Yeah, it seems like a noble thing to do.
But the problem with the compensation practice is that, quote, it is practically impossible to delete huge cheating.
Because it was so easy to cheat, in California in particular, it created whole cadres of crooked lawyers and doctors and unions who were participating in referral schemes.
So they were enriching themselves and working the system.
He concludes with this quote in discussing workers' compensation laws, specifically as they manifest in California.
A great idea.
Seems like a lovely thing to do.
A noble thing to do.
But in practice, you've got the rise of all of these people who are just working the system and enriching themselves by doing that.
Quote from Charlie Munger, You get a total miasma of disastrous behavior, and the behavior makes all the people worse as they do it.
So you were trying to help your civilization, but what you did was create enormous damage, net.
So it's much better to let some things go uncompensated, to let life be hard, than to create systems that are easy to cheat.
This seems both so profound, like so obvious from a game theoretic and evolutionary analysis perspective, and like perhaps exactly the point of difference that many people on the right and some people on the left, as we are, have with many people on the left.
Which is, do you feel that All hardships should be compensated, and that's more important than the system is so deeply flawed that there's a whole bunch of cheating in it?
Or do you feel that a system which allows cheating is never the appropriate mode by which to try to correct a problem, and that some people suffering hardships which not everyone suffers equally is actually a better outcome?
I have always, even when I was absolutely 100% voting blue all the time, believed the latter.
That having systems that are flawed and that create winners where there shouldn't be any and also help some people not lose who we'd rather not lose, that's not okay.
That's not the preferred system.
All right, there are obviously a number of interesting threads to follow here.
One, as we've said many times, one of the core failings of people on the left is that I'm not talking about corrupt people on the left.
I'm talking about well-intended people on the left.
Well-intended people on the left have an idea of what could be made better.
Their idea may be right.
Something is a problem.
What they do not appreciate chronically is the unintended consequences of the solution And as a system gets better and better, there will come a point at which the average solution makes things worse than the problem it's trying to cure, right?
A really bad system is easy to enhance.
A really good system is difficult to enhance.
And because these are complex systems rather than complicated systems, the chances that something you don't expect is going to pop out of this is near certain.
So you need you need a really big problem You need a really high quality as simple and robust a solution as possible before your likelihood of actually making the system better is argues in favor of intervening the other thing which goes to Goes to a deeper set of questions.
We may get to or may not but the I would argue, I have argued, that the West is really an agreement on a level playing field.
That the West is, the core of it, is an agreement not to rig the world on behalf of your people, whoever they are.
Whether that's a race, or a political party, or a class, you don't rig the world.
That we create a world that's as fair as possible, and with limits, right?
I think that that actually has been taken to an insane extreme and is what explains the no borders movements, right?
That we have to, all of us do actually recognize the nested sets nature of how we understand our world and who we care about most.
And we were talking about this exact thing last week, that we all have an indifference, I think, and I sort of bristled at that.
We have to cultivate, or we always have, and we have to not abandon the indifference that we inherently feel for some other people, because we cannot feel equally for all 8 billion people on the planet.
We're not going to rig the world, but we are actually going to hope that hope and do what we can personally without using undo, and that's where the devil is, influence, try to end up better off than those who are not us.
Well, there's a difference.
So I use the term rig advisedly.
The thing about it, and this goes to a distinction that our longtime viewers and listeners will be familiar with also, there's a difference between what an ecologist would call exploitation competition, which sounds bad, but it's not.
Exploitation competition is I'm going to get to a resource and I'm going To deny it to you by simply being better, right?
So that is a kind of competition that causes all entities to level up.
We level each other up in an arms race to capture resources.
Interference competition is, well I'm not going to out-compete you by being better, I'm going to get in your way so you can't even get to the resource itself.
So rigging the world is really a question of allowing myself access to something that I'm going to deny you access to in some artificial way.
Yes, I take your point about open borders.
The problem there is a collective action problem.
Any nation that decides, well, we're not going to advocate for our own citizens is in a wonderful position to ruin the life of its citizens and not in a position to make the world substantially better.
So it's a collective action issue.
You look puzzled.
Yeah, I don't see it.
And it feels like almost the opposite.
It feels like any country that actually closes its borders and says, we're going to allow some immigration because that's who we are, but we're not going to pretend that we don't favor our existing citizens, wins.
Right, exactly.
So the point is, I'm going to argue you are not rigging the world in favor of your people by having a border that is not open, right?
You are simply taking a necessary action for good governance.
You cannot do this if other people are freely able to pass over these boundaries.
But what isn't legitimate, for example, is to say Consent of the governed is the sole source of legitimacy for governmental power and then to To depose elected leaders in other countries because a corporation that is under your flag Gets an advantage by having a dictator installed right so the point is you can that's rigging so yep anyway to go back to the the original point we
And a level playing field is the objective.
I'm going to claim, and you can argue, somebody could argue that I'm not right about this, but the central thing that unifies the West, which is not a geographic designation, it's not a list of countries, right?
It's really an agreement to just simply have a fair competitive environment in which you do not rig against.
Your competitors that that produces an incredibly vibrant system it causes a diminution of all kinds of terrible stuff like racial arbitrary racial biases etc But it doesn't reduce to zero the effects of luck and differential skill.
Right.
And the little bits of differential opportunity that will remain no matter what.
Well, there are two things.
Differential outcomes are actually good.
You want the thing that... Yes, I didn't say outcome.
Right.
I heard you very clearly.
You said differential opportunity, which is the thing that we should seek to make equal.
But we won't.
But back to Charlie Mauger's point.
Right.
The point is, will you ever get truly equal opportunity across the board?
No, of course you won't.
There are arbitrary advantages, disadvantages.
You know, what are you going to do about somebody who has smart parents and therefore, you know, the dinner table conversation was enriching of their minds.
You're going to Harrison Berger on them.
Right, you're gonna Harrison Burger on them or you're gonna get over it and you're gonna say what you really want is a system that over the long term Rewards people for talking about important stuff at the dinner table and then that will spread but what you really must have is You'll never get the opportunity exactly equal.
If you become obsessed like a simple-minded liberal with leveling the playing field, you will start solving unlevel things that aren't worth solving, and you make problems bigger, not smaller.
What you really want is the inequality of opportunity to be randomly distributed.
Right?
You don't want to go after every instance in which somebody got an advantage, right?
What you want to do is, you know, you win some, you lose some.
Sometimes the advantages go your way, sometimes they go the other way, and they have no net directionality.
That is really the sine qua non of a good system, not the perfect elimination of asymmetry.
Well, he doesn't spell it out in this speech, in this book, but with regard to workers' compensation, he has a lot of negative things to say about what has been created by the particular way that California has instantiated its laws.
And he reports on a friend who was, at his wit's end, he was losing, I don't remember the number, but something in excess, I think, of a quarter percent of his payroll was going to workers' comp claims.
And he moved his company to Utah, which also has workers' comp.
And again, I do not know what the difference is between what California does with workers' comp and what Utah does with workers' comp.
Munger doesn't describe it in the story that he tells, but he says there is no reason to expect that.
There's a different number of legitimate workers' comp claims at a factory making the same stuff in Utah versus a factory making the same stuff in California.
But the percentage of his payroll that was going to workers' comp claims in Utah went to 2%, and suddenly he wasn't at a razor-thin profit margin and could basically expand what he was trying to do, which presumably, if he's not hateful and somehow staying in business despite this, will to some degree get passed on to the people who work for him as well.
So this is so I would just say I'm headed to Freedom Fest, which is a gathering, an annual gathering of libertarians, which I am not a libertarian, but I am a small libertarian.
I'm not a capital L libertarian, but.
This is a place where libertarians have a very strong point, right?
Their point can naively be understood as obstructionism to any attempt to solve any problem.
But if their point is, you know, that solution making you do tends to make things worse and not better in, you know, an overwhelming fraction of cases, then the point is, yeah, you wouldn't want to take solution making action in cases where you weren't pretty darn sure you were going to have more Positive impact than negative, and you would want to have an extremely good program of figuring out when what you did worked and when it failed.
And we're back to this construction that we've talked about through COVID.
I talked about this some in my Natural Selections post this week in which I asked what is going on in Lopez, and which is this.
There's a recognition of a thing.
And then you were told, oh, well, the solution is Y. Recognition of X, the solution is Y. Or, we know what causes that.
It's Y that causes it.
Therefore, the solution has to be this thing that's downstream of Y. And pointing out, actually, we don't know the Y part.
That thing is just your You just put that in there because you think that's what's going on.
You think that the workers' compensation program in California is the solution to the problem of some people being losers who didn't deserve to lose and should be compensated for the random chance of that.
Well, if other places are doing this with lower rates of workers' compensation claims, And you don't have a movement simultaneously in those places of people saying, actually, we're being completely under-recognized for all of the suffering that we're enduring.
Well, that tells you that probably what's going on is exactly what Charlie Bunker was saying, which is that what you have is fraud and a system that's easy to cheat, in the one case.
And again, I'll come back to, I feel very strongly that I prefer some people to be undercompensated than to create a giant system that is rife with fraud and then encourages whole industries to emerge in which people coming up, people who were smart and capable and creative and analytically Um, out there, who could have been doing something interesting in the world, who instead go into a life of fraud.
And, you know, they don't think of it that way.
But you create systems that are easy to cheat, and what you've done is create incentives for cheaters.
I prefer a world with no incentives for cheaters to a world where absolutely everyone who has ever suffered a loss that wasn't entirely under their control is compensated for that loss.
What you've done is created a niche.
What I've done?
No.
What an easy-to-cheat system does.
Right.
It creates an irresistible niche.
Evolution is going to solve that problem.
It's going to invent the parasite that uses that opportunity.
And this happens every freaking time.
So yes, it does.
I guess I just want to make... I keep on coming back to I don't think that I am saying anything that will be surprising to people on the left or the right.
But when you are talking to people on the left about anything, almost, what comes up is, but that's not fair.
And don't you care about him?
And don't you care about the suffering?
And don't you care about the homeless and the historically underprivileged and this, that, and the other?
What you're providing me with is a false choice, because don't I care about X, therefore we need to do Y?
Unhook those things, and then allow me to say, yes, I wish that this suffering didn't exist in the world, that this unfairness wasn't there, that these things weren't true.
But you have not yet provided a solution that actually addresses those without creating a niche for massive cheating that then allows a whole lot more people to suffer.
And the flip side of it is if you allow poverty to suck, but you distribute opportunity as fairly as you can do it without creating problems, what you do is you create an incentive for people to figure out how to lift themselves out, right?
I'm not arguing for, you know, it's fine, poverty's cool, because a lot of what poverty is, is a self-reinforcing pattern.
Right.
But, you know, the fact is, if you get hooked on drugs, and this is not about poverty, this is a second example, if you get hooked on drugs...
It's going to mess up your life.
If you immunize people from the harm they're doing to their life, they do more of it, right?
If a shrink makes you feel better about the fact that your friends hate you because you're untrustworthy, right?
Then you're going to be untrustworthy and you won't have friends and maybe you'll feel better about it, but they're not doing you a favor.
It enriches the shrink, though.
The point is, solution-making very easily creates a niche for parasites and bad behavior.
I've now forgotten the name of the drug, but you may remember the instant shot that recovers people from fentanyl overdoses.
Narcan.
And we covered this, and I think we were still in Oregon at the time, but we were being told by the Oregon Health Authority that therefore every responsible person should start to carry Narcan, because obviously a lot of people are overdosing on fentanyl now, and what you really need to do is no matter what, just save their lives immediately by carrying around a shot.
Wait.
Like, no on so many levels.
No on so many levels.
Actually, the person who is the addict who is recovered by Narcan over and over and over again has an ever-diminishing quality of life.
And that's not to say that some people won't die who might have died if they had gotten Narcan, but knowing that it's out there and that everyone is being encouraged to carry it and that you will be recovered from the brink again and again and again, Yes.
Terror of fentanyl is one of the things that keeps people from experimenting with it, and to the extent that you reduce that terror by having everybody be a first responder, you're interfering with that.
So, you know, I'm not saying we shouldn't save people who've overdosed, but I am saying that fear is nature's way of getting you to look out for a hazard.
And to the extent that you start, you know, anesthetizing people's fear or adjusting the stakes, you're not doing anybody any favors.
You're, you're creating a bigger problem.
I wanted to add another example that is a totally different kind of example, but the immunity that vaccine manufacturers ended up with created a niche.
You're talking about metaphorical financial immunity.
Yeah.
So as I understand the story, vaccine manufacturers were going out of business because they were getting sued into oblivion because they hurt a lot of people.
There was one left, I think it was Wyeth, and this was during the Reagan administration.
There wasn't one left?
I believe there was one major manufacturer left, and what happened was there was a Some sort of a discussion in which they were told, well, why aren't your products safer?
And the answer was, actually, they're inherently dangerous.
There's no way to make these things safe.
And so in order to make the number not drop to zero, the federal government created a program.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.
Which created a special court, it created financial immunity, it created a payout scheme for people who were injured, it created the VAERS system for tracking injury.
Right.
All of these things made the problem vastly worse.
Yes.
So now what we have is an industry that very predictably doesn't give a shit about the safety of its product.
And what we have is a system of financial incentives leveraged to get doctors to vaccinate their patients.
And those incentives are insane, right?
We've now begun to see discussion of how big the incentives were during COVID, how big the incentives are for pediatricians to To get their group of patients immunized above a certain level.
100% compliance.
Right.
And so the point is, well, what happens here?
You're taking doctors who would ordinarily have some, you know, a medicine requires the noticing of patterns, right?
Doctors should be noticing patterns, even if there aren't enough individuals in your practice.
The sum total of the doctors who gather around whatever the current version of a water cooler is and they say, you know, I've seen this pattern, that shot.
And then, you know, another kid had this that causes doctors to do the normal thing, which would be, you know, I'm not sure that one's worth it.
Right.
But you've got a doctor who's got a financial incentive for reaching a target.
That person becomes a salesman for a product that the manufacturer has been immunized from liability.
Well, it's also true that the proliferation of vaccines in the childhood vaccine schedule created the need for bundling, because parents aren't going to come in every month.
And with the bundling, it becomes much more difficult to recognize patterns.
It becomes much more difficult to say, maybe that one isn't worth it.
Because, like, well, I gave them eight of them, and there was a bad reaction.
But of course, you might expect that, because that was a lot of shots at once.
Right.
All of this is perfectly predictable from the niche that you created.
And you know, in biology, I would say the niche defines the creature.
You're going to get a creature sooner or later.
Maybe if you're on a remote island, it takes a long time for anything to get there that can inhabit the niche.
But if the niche exists, it gets filled by selection, ultimately, with the creature.
And the creature has the description of You know, the niche is like a vessel and the creature is like a liquid that takes the shape of the vessel, right?
And so every time you create one of these systems, if it's gameable, you're going to get people to game it.
And that's it, you know, back to the monger point.
That is precisely why.
People who have thought of themselves as progressives and liberals their entire lives will still prefer to not have a system in place to protect those who lost due to no fault of their own, if the only system that you have created to protect them is one that is inherently gameable.
Can't be gameable.
In fact, back in the Game B days, I spent a lot of time thinking about how you build a system that doesn't get gamed.
And one of the things that has to be true is that experiments in attempting to find the gameable structure, figuring out how you can game the system, those experiments have to be ruinous.
Right?
If those experiments are tolerably costly, right?
Like, you know, you lose 50% of the profits that you would have made by gaming the system based on the fact that you're not caught every time, but each time you're penalized at a certain level.
Right.
Then it becomes a cost of doing business.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
It's just a line item.
Right.
It's just a line item.
Right.
So what has to happen is that individuals or groups that attempt to game a system have to come out so far behind what they would have done that they never evolve.
The arms race doesn't exist to game the system because anybody who tries ends up worse off than they would if they just played it straight.
That's what you want, is a system where playing it straight is the best option you have.
Then what gets explored?
What gets explored are the opportunities in the market that actually enhance us.
Problems we want solved, right?
That's where people should put their energy.
Figuring out where there's an opportunity should not be, where is the system leaky?
It should be, where is there something that will make people better off for which I can get paid?
And it feels like, you know, I hope I'm not doing an injustice to, say, the libertarians and even some conservatives, that seeing that the left is really happy with solution making and not so interested in tracking whether or not that system is gameable or leaky or creates conflicts and perverse incentives, many on the other side, however you define it, respond with A functional system is not possible.
Therefore, what you need is no regulation at all, no intervention at all.
A functional system is not possible.
I am not saying I know what, for any of the problems we are facing, inherently the functional system that is not gameable looks like, but I still believe that in many of these cases, perhaps not all, There are functional systems that are possible, and that is what we must do.
We must not accept one of these systems that is gameable, and that is pretty much everything that we're dealing with, and so those should be dismantled.
But that doesn't mean leave it.
And human nature is what it is, and therefore it's You know, nasty, brutish, and short for all of us, right?
Well, what you need is a damper on the instinct to solve problems without understanding what risks are involved in problem solving.
And then, really importantly, you can't, the system cannot de facto rationalize failure.
One of the things that we see are systems that are built by people who paid no price for the failure.
So I don't yet know what type of failures we're talking about.
The failure to address a problem.
So if you take affirmative action, affirmative action clearly had some benefits.
It also had some unintended consequences and what is necessary is a net evaluation, right?
Was this net positive and was it sufficiently net positive to cover all the things we don't know about the way we've intervened in the system?
But To the extent that you are, hey, my job is government problem solver, right?
And I, as government problem solver, have a great idea about how to address that honest to goodness problem.
But if it doesn't work, I will be government problem solver on the next thing where the, you know, if it was a business.
So you want failures to be recognized and hopefully dismantled before moving on to the next project.
Sure, but I also want the reputation of the person who had it wrong to come back to haunt them, right?
And I don't necessarily, you know, because what that will do is that will produce people who are actually wise about problems.
The people who won't have the instinct to solve a problem that doesn't need solving or that will make things worse if they attempt to solve it.
What we get are, you know, it's to use Nassim Taleb's term, there's no skin in the game.
Right to the extent that the failure of the system doesn't come back to hurt you know in it This is this is again where the libertarians have it right in a business if you've got a bunch of dumb ideas You know how that's gonna manifest you're not gonna make a profit right you're gonna lose money not make money and so You know it's self-correcting It corrects stupidity.
If you've got a governmental bureaucracy in which the point is my job is to come up with cool ideas and, you know, to quote Tom Lehrer, you know, once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That is not a viable mechanism for getting smarter.
You want a system that causes you to get smarter.
You can't avoid all mistakes, but you can learn from them.
And if you don't, you end up, you know, a nitwit with power.
Yeah, well, the learning from mistakes gets more difficult with scale.
I think is part of the problem.
And I haven't seen the answer to, even if some group of people has figured out a great way to do something with four people, and then 10 people, and 20 people, that says nothing about their ability to run that system, whatever it is, with 2,000 people, or 200,000, or 2 million, or 2 billion, for sure.
So, the scaling problems are part of why bureaucracy destroys systems.
Uh, absolutely.
There are some problems that just, uh, for reasons of allometry or whatever, do not scale.
And so that's even worse because you may have gotten the inkling that something is a solution because you saw it work at a tiny scale and, uh, it ain't going to happen.
Right.
So, yeah.
Should we talk about sunscreen?
You know it.
Yeah.
So it's been hot here.
Although it was 72 when I got in the truck.
No, no, no.
It was in the mid 80s, which is crazy hot for the islands.
I know you're going someplace.
It's going to be close to 120 degrees.
So sorry.
Oh, I'm so sorry, but it has been very hot for here.
And into the middle of that I read, this is actually from last week, a New York Times article called, Do You Really Need Sunscreen Every Day?
Some Worry It Robs You of the Benefits of Sunshine Like Vitamin D. We Asked Experts to Weigh In.
Some dirty anti-vaxxers think it robs you of necessary vitamin D. I'm putting this in the, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail file.
Nail file?
What?
This doesn't pretend to be, I have my snarky notes here, this hard-hitting piece of journalism from the New York Times.
It's in the Wells section, so it's not actually pretending to be hard-hitting, but we asked experts to weigh in.
Here let's let me actually I'm gonna read a few Paragraphs once I find the I've got a whole bunch of frog stuff here.
Here we go.
Okay.
So here's the article New York Times, do you really need sunscreen every day?
Some worry it robs you of the benefits of sunshine like vitamin D We asked experts to weigh in published on like I said, July 2nd Sunshine seems to make a strong case against daily sunscreen.
When we step outside on a clear day, the sun's ultraviolet light triggers the body to produce endorphins that lower stress and boost mood.
UV rays also tell our skin to make vitamin D, and when we look up at the morning sun, our bodies recognize daytime and adjust our sleep-wake cycle accordingly.
That might be enough to tempt some people to skip the sunscreen.
Indeed, dermatologists say their patients often worry they'll miss out on these benefits.
This is one of the biggest obstacles in people's minds.
The idea they shouldn't use sunscreen for fear they won't get vitamin D, says Dr. Stephen Q. Wang, the Director of Dermatologic Oncology and Dermatology at the Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, California.
Recent surveys reflect this fear.
In one poll of more than 1,000 adults in the United States, 11% of respondents said they thought wearing sunscreen was more harmful than direct sun exposure.
In another, 15% said they thought sun exposure was the only way to get vitamin D.
So, before I talk about the experts that they chose, because I read this article so you don't have to, but it's not very long so you really could.
Recent surveys reflect this fear.
Just notice the language that the New York Times is using here.
If you are one of those people who sometimes doesn't wear sunscreen, you are acting out of fear.
And it is unwarranted, and our experts are going to tell you why.
It's a phobia.
The only reason it's a phobia, you're probably scared of needles, that's why you didn't get vaccinated, you're probably scared of not getting the benefits of the sun, and that's why.
Well, what we are here to do is to put you in mortal fear of skin cancer, and that'll get you on the sunscreen bandwagon.
That's what we at The New York Times do.
May I have my screen back?
Thank you.
We asked nine experts, they say.
Who are the experts whom they asked to weigh in?
The first one we already heard from in the article, Dr. Stephen Q. Wang, Director of Dermatologic Oncology and Dermatology.
We have Dr. Elizabeth Richard, Associate Professor of Dermatology at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Deborah Sarnoff, Professor of Dermatology at NYU and, by the way, President of the Skin Cancer Foundation, Dr. Robert No.
4, Dr. Robert Ashley, an internal medicine doctor at UCLA Health, who incidentally represents the only voice of moderation in the entire article, but he also says that you can get all the vitamin D that you need from your food, which is Terribly hard.
And as for Experts 5-9, which remember the article starts right up front with like, we asked all these experts, we asked nine of them, Experts 5-9 are never mentioned by name, field, or institution.
We have no idea who they are, or even if the New York Times actually talked to nine so-called experts, or just the four that I just mentioned.
So, we have four that we know of.
Three of them are oncology or dermatology or skin cancer experts specifically.
And the other one is the only voice of moderation cited in the entire article.
So, in the spirit of when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, when all you have are oncology specialists, everything looks like cancer, doesn't it?
These are people who are paid to specialize on ca- to look for and specialize on cancer, on skin problems, on...
Cancers in skin.
It's those three things.
We've got a cancer specialist, we've got a skin specialist, and we've got a skin cancer specialist.
So, of course, the things that they have to tell us about why you absolutely must not ever expose your skin in any way to the sun are fitting with the, oh my god, skin cancer is bad story.
It's true.
Skin cancer kills.
And skin cancer is real.
But before you jump in, I want to remind people, we've talked about this before and we recite this research in Hunter Gatherer's Guide.
Just one of many pieces of research that points in the opposite direction, which is this.
Here we have an article published in the Journal of Internal Medicine in 2016.
Avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for major causes of death, a competing risk analysis of the melanoma in southern Sweden cohort.
I'm just going to share the results from the abstract.
Results.
Women with active sun exposure habits were mainly at a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and non-cancer, non-CBD death as compared to those who avoided sun exposure.
As a result of their increased survival, the relative contribution of cancer death increased in these women.
Non-smokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group, indicating that avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking.
Compared to the highest sun exposure group, life expectancy of avoiders of sun exposure was reduced by 0.6 to 2.1 years.
That's a hell of a phobia.
That's a hell of a phobia.
Let me then jump to the end of this stupid article in the New York Times with a quote from the president of the Skin Cancer Society, or whatever it is, in which she says, People want to hear they can get direct sun exposure for a little bit of time, maybe five minutes to a half hour, and that's enough to get the benefits, Dr. Sarnoff said.
But the truth is, why even do that?
They are going to be killing people.
Yes.
So you have experts in reductionist fields where the only thing they see, their little blinders, are skin cancer.
And you say to them, what can you do to reduce skin cancer?
But you don't have to frame it that way.
So you pretend you're framing it as, what are the benefits of sunscreen?
What's the harm in not wearing sunscreen?
And the only thing they see, because this is the only thing they're trained in, is skin cancer.
Sunscreen.
Regular application of sunscreen reduces skin cancer.
Yes, there may be benefits from the sun that we don't even know.
I don't care.
It doesn't matter.
You'll figure that out.
But skin cancer.
That's the only thing they're focused on.
Why even do that, she asks.
Why let your skin be exposed to the sun for even five minutes?
Don't risk it.
You might get skin cancer.
Beer mongering.
Experts.
So, a number of things.
One, Jimmy Dore did an excellent segment somewhere in the last couple of weeks.
I haven't had a chance to look at the research that he was working from, but it argued, this piece that he did, argued that actually the cancer story is even more complex than we thought.
And I will go to the complexity.
No, I think it is.
Yes.
Where melanoma actually seems Sunburns are bad, no question about it, and I will come back to that point in a minute.
But sun exposure actually turned out to be protective against melanoma, which is the skin cancer that is so deadly.
So, I wanted to point out a couple things.
One of them is just linguistic.
We asked how many experts?
Well, they said they asked nine, but they only mentioned four.
Okay.
They asked them to quote-unquote weigh in.
Weigh in.
Interesting metaphor.
Do you know where it's from?
What does it mean to weigh in?
I mean, it's probably an actual weigh-in in like the military or something.
Boxing, I think.
Boxing.
Oh, okay.
So the idea is, what does it mean to ask experts to weigh in?
What weight class are you in?
Yeah, it means you're asking them to show up and present themselves and duke it out.
The whole idea is to get experts on both sides to fight it out to see which ones are more persuasive, right?
It's a fight.
That, which the New York Times arranged, is not a fight.
I don't know about the origin of this metaphor, but I could see, in fact, a different understanding, even if this is right, about the origin of weigh-in being for boxers.
Like, okay, everyone's going to weigh in.
Oh, you're all in the same category.
Cool.
You're all on the same team.
You're all welterweights or something.
And so we don't expect you to fight.
We just wanted to establish what team you were on.
Yeah, but that's not what it means in boxing though.
Can I just say very quickly?
Yeah.
You are already put in a weight class well before.
You have to weigh in to demonstrate at this point in time.
Right.
But you're like, you're a member of the class that you've already been assigned.
Right.
But it doesn't matter.
They like start themselves before and everything so that they get light enough.
But the answer is verify that right now you are eligible to, to compete.
You're about to get in the ring.
Right.
But I mean, that sort of feels in keeping with what they're doing here.
Like, oh, well, we asked cancer and skin cancer and skin specialists what, you know, to weigh in.
Are you still a cancer specialist?
Good.
Right.
But the point is, weigh in is you're an expert in this case.
We are now going to have you fight, not knowing what it is that you think.
And the idea is the fight is supposed to happen.
So we find out which is more persuasive.
Not gonna happen here.
So again, back to level playing field.
What you want is a level playing field, not so that both sides stalemate, but so that the better arguments are more persuasive and what you have is an artificial Artificially slanted playing field where the New York Times for whatever reason either because you know sunscreen manufacturers are feeling the pinch and they've decided to lodge a journalistic seeming story in the New York Times which is something that happens all the time or an industry puts a story into a journalistic outlet.
Or it's hard for people to grapple with things like all-cause mortality.
Right?
Like, oh, people who smoked but spent more time outside were healthier?
Had the same death rates as people who didn't smoke and never went in the sun?
It's too much for people.
It's too much.
And, you know, I also hear an echo from the COVID madness, which is during the COVID madness, as we sorted through all of the competing arguments, one thing that came out very clearly was that there was something bizarre about the fact that these entities, the CDC, which is supposedly so obsessed with our health that they're going to, you know, erode our freedoms in order to protect it.
Doesn't mention vitamin D, doesn't talk to people who are likely to have a chronic deficit of it because of where they live, right?
It does not address the elephant in the room, which is, look, actually your health is compromised over this, uh, you know, photosynthetically produced product that you're almost certainly not getting enough of.
So, right.
The idea that that surfaced because the heterodox people were shouting about vitamin D, and the doctors weren't, and the CDC wasn't, and the New York Times wasn't, they're now covering their asses, right?
They're creating the impression that that was, you know, yes, people are afraid of a lot of things like not getting enough vitamin D, and that's why they're not wearing sunscreen, which will protect them from cancer.
Bullshit.
The cancer story is complicated, right?
It's complicated in multiple ways.
And also, vitamin D is not the only benefit of being in the sun.
Right, not the only benefit by far, by far.
But, of course, in a pharma-obsessed world, the idea that you're unhealthy in like 16 different ways, you know, because you're not in the sun and the sun is something that your body, you know, coming from sun-drenched ancestors, is depending on.
Right?
You've got a whole bunch of patients, psychological, physical, and otherwise.
But I want to go back to the telomere connection to cancer.
There was this result.
I was doing my work in the very late 90s.
There was this result, right?
Dermatologists were confused because they had a story, which is exposure to the sun causes cancer.
And then they had an anomaly, which was that people who got a lot of sun exposure, people who were in the sun every day, couldn't avoid it, and had clearly sun-damaged skin, you know, cowboys and the like, didn't get cancer.
What the heck?
What is that?
Right?
The sun causes cancer is not true.
The sun is a factor in a complex equation where cancer emerges.
Vitamin D deficiency is another factor in the same equation and sunscreen is some anomalous Control for one aspect of this it's like a solution making liberal like oh god wait that equation that Results in people dying from cancer.
It's got the Sun in it Well, let's neutralize the Sun's impact on you with no regard for the other impacts that it has on your physiology Right?
It's madness.
And the New York Times can't figure it out because it got a bunch of experts all on the same side of a puzzle to talk themselves into some sort of bony consensus.
It's nuts.
It is nuts.
And nowhere mentioned here, either, is the toxicity of almost every sunscreen on the market.
I will say, we're not being paid to say this today at all, but Van Mans makes a sunscreen that is tallow and zinc.
It's beef tallow and zinc.
And, you know, you should expect, given what you've just heard here, that we basically don't wear sunscreen, neither do our children.
I've been paddleboarding, and it's been bright and sunny, and when you're paddleboarding, of course, you're getting a lot more of the rays off the water, and third day in a row, my face was beginning to feel like it was getting a little crispy, so I just put Van Man's Tallow and Zinc sunscreen on my face, and, you know,
Didn't get any crispier and wash it off once I once I got back and that felt like like this is the way that you can do it that you can play this game and still get as much sun exposure as you want while recognizing that some parts of your body are going to get more exposure and maybe sometimes you're going to be pushing it and you can't avoid being in the sun and so you want to you know you want to cover up.
Yeah, and zinc is a physical sunblock, right?
It's not a chemical sunblock.
The problem is when you start interfering with the chemistry, you have lots of other effects, you know.
Could zinc be bad for you?
Sure, but the point is it functions the same way a hat does, right?
It's physically blocking these wavelengths of light.
So, um, other thing they said five minutes ago, why would you even do that?
Is five minutes, I honestly don't know, is five minutes under the worst circumstances enough to get a sunburn?
I wouldn't think.
I mean, I really wouldn't think so.
I'm prone to burning and my sense is that takes 20 bad minutes, 30 bad minutes under the worst conditions.
Why take the risk, Brett?
Well, but I guess my point is the risk, if I, There are benefits.
Five minutes is enough to get some benefit.
But people love you.
Are you sure that you really want to put us at risk of losing the man that we love by going out in the sun for even five minutes?
If people really loved me, they would stand between me and the sun.
They would function like a zinc layer.
I feel like they're trying to.
And it's not out of love.
They're weighing in and then standing between me and the sun.
Yeah.
Okay.
What time is it?
Okay, we got a little bit of time here.
Frogs.
Frogs.
So, in the late 1980s, you remember the late 1980s?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, you do.
Herpetologists, that is to say the scientists who studied the creepy crawlies from the Greek herpetos, including the amphibians and the reptiles.
It's a weird group.
Amphibians and reptiles aren't each other's closest relatives, but I'm nominally a herpetologist because I worked on frogs.
Herpetologists, this is back before I was one, were beginning to notice that frogs in a lot of parts of the world were disappearing.
They were failing.
Frog populations were crashing.
Within a decade, a bunch of species were extinct when they had been doing just fine.
Seemed to be doing just fine.
This was actually announced at the first World Congress of Herpetology.
Did you know there were World Congresses of Herpetology?
I did, but I bet most of our audience did not.
The first World Congress of Herpetology in 1989 is where this was first announced.
The frogs are disappearing, what's going on?
By the time I attended the third one, they're not every year, so they're only about every four or five years, the third one, which was in Prague, the first one was in Prague, was for the third World Congress of Herpetology in 1997.
The plummeting of frog populations was well-recognized.
Everyone there knew that it was happening, but we still didn't really have a fix on what it was.
Flummeting frog populations.
It's raining frogs.
It is raining frogs.
Yes, which I think you appreciate more than when it rains men.
Never liked that song.
No, I know.
There are a few things that cause you to get more irritated.
I mean, let's put it this way.
As a description of a climatological phenomenon, I get it.
Why it creates joy, I don't.
It seems like a bad thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, not least for the men.
Right?
They're going to break things.
Yes.
Themselves.
Exactly.
Shortly after, sometime in the late 90s, early aughts, a culprit had been identified.
There had been lots of hypotheses about what was going on, and there of course are many factors contributing to various population declines in frogs, but the major culprit that in fact many people who've never thought about frogs will probably have heard of at this point is this chytrid fungus.
um which was by then being spread between disparate ecosystems by oops herpetologists because herpetologists were who would you know actively trying to figure out what's going on with the frogs would um you know go from one place to the next and sort of like uh you know hundreds of years earlier uh surgeons going from corpses or you know doctors going from corpses to women delivering babies and uh creating bacteriological conditions that created uh higher degrees of maternal death
The herpetologists who were there to do good were causing harm because they didn't know that they were potentially carrying a pathogen with them.
So this was not presumably the major way that things were getting between frogs, but it was certainly part of what was going on.
But the pathogen in question was this chytrid fungus.
But that raises a question, so I'm going to get back to, there's some new research out about how frogs might benefit from saunas as a way to be treated for the fungus that is still decimating, and more, that's to say, more than 10% of frogs in many places in the world are being taken out by this fungus.
But it remains a question, or it raises a question, Like, why then?
Like, this chytrid fungus, there weren't any gain-of-function chytrid fungus labs being operated, as far as we know.
That we know of.
That we know of, right.
And, you know, there hadn't just been a release from one of them, strangely near a wet market.
So, why was that happening, then?
And this is obviously a question of import to humans as well.
You know, why, under what conditions do, in the case of human, zoonotic diseases emerge?
Under what conditions does a pathogen that's presumably existed somewhere for a very long time suddenly make a break and become a worldwide problem?
Well some new research, some genetic research says chytrid originated in Korea and I don't find the research totally compelling and in fact one of the papers that says it originated in Asia cites another paper that says this related but totally distinct Fungus that only affects salamanders originated in Asia.
So, you know, I sort of went down this path of, my god, the research is so bad that they're not even citing the right papers to make their points, right?
So, you know, we have, of course, some of that as there always is in the scientific literature once you start chasing down references.
But there is some genetic evidence that it started in Asia, in which case I don't think we have any better idea of why it would have suddenly made a break for it.
And some of the research does find, not with regard to origin now, but the chytrid fungus has actually taken out more species than either rats or domestic cats, which are the usual bad players in the game when we're talking about conservation and how we should which are the usual bad players in the game when we're talking about conservation and how we Chytrid fungus has actually taken out more species than that.
But an earlier investigation than the genetic research that finds that chytrid came out of Asia suggests that it came out of Africa.
And the evidence for that is interesting.
I thought I'd walk through this because it's a cool story.
I don't know if it's true.
I'll put the references in the show notes.
It was known to be a fellow traveler, effectively, with various native African frog species, and produced subclinical, if any, symptoms in those frogs.
So when it is in African frogs, they don't get sick.
So that suggests that it's been with them for a while.
Do you know if Xenopus is on the list?
It's this Xenopus turns out to be the central figure in the story though, in this hypothesis.
So Xenopus laevis, and actually you can show one of the two pictures that I sent to you, Zach.
It's just a picture of the, not the ones in the saunas, but the other one.
So this is Xenopus laevis.
The common name is the African clawed frog.
That's with claws, not named Claude like Monet.
You don't know that none of them are named Claude like Monet.
Probably some of them are named Clawed the Clawed Frog.
I would hope so.
Anyway, maybe both of these are, but then it would be hard to tell them apart.
How do you know who you're talking about?
Anyway, obviously this isn't a tank.
This is either in a lab or in pet trade.
So these frogs became very popular in the pet trade, but the reason, first, that they were being spread so widely, I'll bet you do not know this part of the story.
This came as news to me today.
Now, wait a second.
Wait a second.
I would say that the reason is that they were the model organism for developmental biology, so they were spread through labs throughout the world because you need a model organism so that people working on development in different places can repeat each other's experiments, can discover things that happen, you know, like one tissue induces another tissue to create some third tissue.
You piece together what happens in development with different labs working on different things.
And so, anyway, African Clawed Frog became the go-to developmental organism for vertebrate development.
Right.
So, why do we need model organisms?
You just did a great job of describing it.
We have model organisms for invertebrates in Drosophila, Melanogaster.
We have in, gosh, it's going to be a dicot, I think, a flowering plant, Arabidopsis.
We have E. coli.
There's others that I can't think of at the moment.
Oh, C. elegans.
Yeah, and you've probably heard us talk about ferrets, which are increasingly used as an immunological model.
Mice are used for anything and everything, and they're very unreliable for multiple reasons, one of them being ultra-long telomeres.
But anyway, yeah.
Yeah, that's not the reason.
That is what became the way that Xenopus continued to be spread throughout the world.
Frog's legs?
No, not culinary.
And then what's that? - Is it frog's legs? - Frog's legs?
- Yes, culinary.
- I was saying frog's legs.
No, not culinary, nope.
Or culinary, either way.
There was the invention of a pregnancy assay in 1934, wherein if you-- - The frog died?
If you inject urine from pregnant women into Xenopus, they are induced to ovulate.
Xenopus was one of the original pregnancy assays for human pregnancy.
Which I hadn't, I know that, yeah.
I don't know where the rabbit comes in.
There was a rabbit assay.
Maybe people cared less about samples.
I don't know, but I didn't know this.
No, I didn't know that either.
It does go to, in a weird way, it goes to Jordan Peterson's point about serotonin being a very ancient molecule.
And the point is, you know, it's, we're talking about steroid hormones.
We're talking about, well, I don't know, actually, I don't know exactly what, What's that?
Progesterone.
No, I don't think it's going to be the progesterone and estrogen, but anyway, it's some of those sex-specific hormones that specifically elevate early in pregnancy, and yes, those are at least common to vertebrates, and a lot of them do start with vertebrates.
Not all of them.
Some of them are more ancient than that.
Serotonin being one of them, hence his example with lobsters that got him into so much trouble for no reason at all, because the point is right.
So, Xenopus starts to be exported widely and sort of indiscriminately at the point that this pregnancy assay is discovered in 1934.
And then at the point that non-biologic pregnancy tests come on the market some decades later, then they start to be used as the model organism in molecular and developmental biology.
Centipus does.
Your through line is becoming very obvious.
Do tell.
No, no, we'll get to it at the end.
I need to know where you're going, but I can see it looming into view.
For all three of the topics?
Absolutely.
I'm thrilled about that because I don't know it.
Actually all four of the topics.
Excellent, excellent.
So, you know, partially I just wanted to tell that little story because it's cool, but also, you know, don't mess with complex systems.
What could go wrong?
Oh, we're just gonna, you know, export a whole bunch of frogs and, you know, again, some more modern research that's Explicitly genetic and doesn't look at the ecology, which I don't trust research that relies entirely on the molecular work, thinks that the chytrid fungus that affects frogs and is killing so many species off came out of Korea.
And this is an older hypothesis for which there was a lot of circumstantial evidence.
I'm compelled by it because it makes sense as a story, and there are a number of conciliant pieces of data with it.
The idea that the African frogs are fellow travelers with the chytrid fungus and they're not getting sick from it.
The ability to track the timing of Xenopus's explosion through space, and that it still doesn't show any evidence of being badly affected by chytrid.
Um, Anyway, chytrid fungus, the one that affects the frogs as opposed to the one that affects the salamanders, different fungus, remains a bane of frogs everywhere and a lot of species have gone extinct and it's still at risk.
And some researchers are trying to figure out how to boost frogs resistance to the pathogen.
I see a vaccine campaign coming.
Not yet.
No, I hope not.
Probably.
So let's take a step back first and say that when Why We Get Sick came out, Williams and Nessie, or Nessie and Williams, I don't remember the order of the authors.
Williams and Nessie.
No, Nessie and Williams, sorry.
I think it's Nessie and Williams.
Randy Nessie and George Williams Nessie is a medical doctor and an evolutionary biologist, and Williams was one of the preeminent evolutionary biologists of the 20th century.
He published this book in 1992, I think?
1992, 1994, something, early 90s, Why We Get Sick, which was really the first and, frankly, still, as far as I can tell, the only real tome that lays out a bunch of the ways that an understanding of evolutionary biology can help you understand your health, could help the medical system understand your health, and could provide a roadmap as opposed to the sort of scattershot here, take this pill, let's see what happens approach that so many medical doctors are giving to patients now.
And one of the things they talked about, which was known and is now more commonly known, but is still often ignored in treatment of fever, is that fever is actually not always, but often an adaptive response by your body to basically pull you, but often an adaptive response by your body to basically pull you, an endotherm, who is generating your heat internally, and also a homeotherm, who has a stable set point, out of the normal range of temperature for you,
In some cases, out of the range of possible living temperatures for whatever pathogen is infecting you.
And so a fever, while not good for you, because if that were good for you, that might be your set point normally, but something that you can sustain for a few days, hopefully long enough not to kill you and not to do too much damage to you or any lasting damage to you, but enough to kill off the infection that you've got so that when your fever subsides, you're free of the infection and can now get back to your world.
So that's the Now, widely accepted explanation for many, but not all, fevers in humans.
That works for endotherms, but it doesn't inherently work for ectotherms, which is to say those who don't generate their own heat but collect their heat from their environment.
Ectotherms, because they are not generating their own heat, also tend to be what are called poikolotherms.
They don't keep a constant body temperature.
They tend to change their internal body temperature as the external conditions change as well.
Mammals and birds are the big groups of endotherms, and pretty much everything else you can name among animals is an ectotherm, frogs included.
So frogs can't get a fever in the same way.
It wouldn't make sense, because they don't have a set point.
They're not homeotherms.
But what they can do, and what various species are known to do, although the actual rigor of their research is a little lacking, is behavioral fever.
Point of order.
change what they're doing such that if they are sick, they go sit on a hot rock and raise their internal body temperature to, once again, raise their body temperature to a level that is tolerable, if not perfectly enjoyable, but is beyond the limits of what their pathogen if not perfectly enjoyable, but is beyond the limits of what their Point of order.
Yes.
I fully believe that story.
The behavioral fever story.
But I would predict that a behavioral fever is far less useful than an endogenously generated fever.
One of the things that you get, endothermy is expensive as you well know.
85% of our calories go to maintaining a body temperature.
That's a huge debt to have.
85%?
What about the brain?
The brain costs a lot too.
Yep, it's very expensive.
I recall that number from from back in the telomere days.
But anyway, 85% something like that goes to just maintaining just idling.
That's before you ever get to making a profit.
One of the things you get for it, though, is that your temperature is highly predictable.
Therefore, enzymes can be much more efficient because they can be specialized on that temperature, which is part of why having a fever sucks so badly is that everything that you are Expect that temperature and when you're not that temperature overall it interferes with the processes that depend on it.
Endotherms are more likely to be able to move fast for longer periods of time, have both higher burst speeds and higher endurance speeds.
Totally.
So for a ectothermic poikilotherm, that is to say a creature that gets heat from the external environment and therefore fluctuates widely, it has to have generalist physiology.
And what I'm, I don't know if this is new, but what I'm imagining in a new way is that because the creature exists over a wide range of temperatures, because it's not maintaining a constant temperature, its pathogens have to be tolerant over a wide range of temperatures also.
And therefore that fever that it has by sitting on a hot rock will be less devastating to the pathogen because the pathogen doesn't know what temperature to expect in the first place.
Yeah.
It might have to do it for longer.
It might have to go to a higher temperature, but I exactly, I exactly agree with you.
The tolerances have to be greater to begin with, of the host, and therefore the tolerances of the pathogens have to be greater to begin with, and therefore you have to go wider from the mean, farther from the mean, either farther or for longer than you would if you were dealing with something with narrow tolerances because you're an endotherm.
Yeah.
I think that's right.
Also, interestingly, another barrier to zoonotic jumps.
True.
I mean, in fact, even with endotherms, we generally don't have the same set.
We don't have the same set point.
You would imagine something that was broadly tolerant would be less efficient and something that was narrowly targeted would have a harder time jumping.
Well, and the prediction there is that Zoonotic jumps between endotherms would be tougher than zoonotic jumps between ectotherms.
Absolutely.
Now the solution to this problem is Anthony Fauci and his gain-of-function research program, which he swore in Congress didn't exist.
That's probably the solution.
Too bad it doesn't exist.
No, it exists.
He just says it doesn't exist because he's a pathological liar.
But the ability to take something that can barely infect a new something and give it enough runway to learn to modify its enzymes so that it can exist at a different temperature.
Maybe Anthony Fauci should start watching your favorite Reddit channel, What Could Go Wrong?
He would have, we would have to do a fork of what could go wrong because Anthony Fauci is what can go wrong across so many domains simultaneously that it would just, it would eat up the whole channel.
It would.
Yeah.
No, you wouldn't want to take that.
You wouldn't want to lose all the regulars.
No, right.
There's far too much stuff that can go wrong with flaming drinks, pouring gasoline on a backyard fire, doing a backflip onto a folding table, diving onto a folding table, wheelies in traffic.
Yeah, all these things can definitely go wrong.
See, I listen when you talk.
You do listen.
That's amazing that you can rattle off that list.
Oh, I only have one example.
It's amazing that you could add the correct thing at the correct moment to the list, and I appreciate that about you.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
Okay, Zach, would you show the picture of the frogs in the saunas?
Here they are.
Aren't they cute?
I mean, they're cute.
Wait.
They're cute.
You're pigeonholing them.
I am.
I'm sauna-holing them.
Nature published both the popular account and the original research.
Waddell et al.
Yes, that's actually his name.
We'll keep that up while we talk about this.
Wal-at-all published, "Hotspot shelters stimulate frog resistance to chytrid--" I forgot how to-- "Kytridiomycosis," I believe is the whole name.
Resistance to Kytrid fungus.
Now those aren't Xenopus.
What is them?
No, no, no, no.
Why would you use Xenopus?
We just talked about them.
Yeah, they're resistant.
Yeah, so, so, hold on.
So these authors have proposed, executed, and found both useful in reducing fungal infection and attractive to the frogs in question.
Frogsanas.
From the abstract, quote.
Here we show that sunlight-heated artificial refugia attract endangered frogs and enable body temperatures high enough to clear infections, and that having recovered in this way, frogs are subsequently resistant to chytridiomycosis even under cool conditions that are optimal for fungal growth.
Not only are these cute little brick saunas easy and cheap to build, attractive to the frogs, and effective in reducing current chytrid infections, but having spent time in a sauna, these individual frogs, going back to their cool ways, are resistant, more resistant, to future chytrid infections.
Now, wait a minute.
Yeah.
I'm not saying you're not just taking the conclusion from the paper, but that last step in the process is one of two non-mutually exclusive hypotheses for why they are more resistant going forward.
uh having spent time in a sauna as opposed to right as opposed to having cleared an infection the adaptive immunity that i believe frogs do have so they have a mechanism i believe just like we have so i believe that i remember but i'm i'm not going to have the ability to go through the paper right now and make sure um that it wasn't just um infected frogs that were in the saunas in the first place in which case it's Both.
That would be the test.
That would be the test.
And so you could distinguish, like I said, they're not mutually exclusive.
It could be.
Yeah, of course.
Having recovered from the infection is like they've been vaccinated.
Right.
And or say that more.
Clearly would be that they have natural immunity as opposed to innate immunity.
The other thing is that like a sauna, a human sauna, general increase in quality of one's health could come out of it.
Yep.
Yeah, sir, I'm trying to look through the methods.
It's a good paper, but I don't remember... We'll look it up and see.
If I'm wrong, that they did not find clearing of future infections greater even in frogs that they did not know to have had them in the first place, then we will come back with that correction next week.
If I'm right, you're never hearing about this again.
All right.
Are those highlands?
Yeah, I should have figured out what exactly.
No, I think this is Australia, so it's not going to be hylids.
Hylids are, as you know, the common name is tree frogs, but in this case tree frog refers to the phylogenetic group, not the tendency to hang out in trees, because there are a lot of non-hylid arboreal frogs.
Which frogs are they?
I'm having a hard time.
It's just a lot of paper here.
I'm not remembering which species we're looking at.
You can start talking so that I can try not to talk and read a technical paper at the same time.
I take your gasp at my error that there are no hylids in Australia, which would not surprise me.
Oh, I thought your gasp was recognizing.
Oh yeah, it's Endangered Green Golden Bellfrog Litoria aurea.
I don't think there are hylids.
Latoria Aria is, oh, I was wrong.
It's a highlight.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Oh, it's been, it's okay.
It's a dryad.
Yeah.
It's been redefined many times like all other frogs.
Yeah, exactly.
It's got, I mean, check this out.
Actually, show the screen here, Zach.
Here's all of its former names.
That's all the other binomials it's had, including Rinoidea, and it's been a Hyla, and Latoria.
Lots of different synonyms, in part because people find them at different times and give them names, and before the internet, they didn't know.
Right.
They named the same frog.
But yeah, my bad.
It is a Hyla.
Which then suggests strongly that there are highlights in Australia.
Indeed.
Yep.
Yeah.
All right.
You ready for the through line?
Um, yeah, I want to make sure I didn't screw up.
We're definitely in Australia.
I think so.
I read, so you could, I've got like seven papers open on Kitrid and, um, I'm hoping that I didn't misattribute their work.
I think that they're in Australia.
Um, Greenland?
No.
No.
So the authors are in Australia.
I think the work is, although I'm just having a hard time finding it at the moment, the matter, the through line.
Yeah, yeah, the through line.
Well, it seems to me that the through line for everything in this podcast, all four topics, the four topics being the Hope Accord to get the shots withdrawn from the market, Charlie Munger and his quote.
Yep.
The, what was the next thing?
Sunscreen.
Sunscreen.
And then finally the frogs and the behavioral fevers.
All of these stories have a strong component of the hubris of humans thinking They're going to solve problems creating a catastrophic outcome.
You're right, you're right.
Munger explicitly points to the hazard in the case of the workers' comp situation.
In the case of the mRNA vaccines, you've got this at multiple levels.
You had scientists convincing themselves they needed to do gain-of-function research to save humanity, creating a pathogen.
Basically, oh, this is another through line here, not for all of them, maybe, but There is a kind of risk that human beings uniquely create by taking something that is some harm that is limited by a barrier.
Like a dispersal barrier in the case of chytrid fungus perhaps.
That fungus can't get across thousands of miles of salt water from Africa to Australia.
But if you give me a plane ticket!
It's a ride with herpetologists who, you know, are out there trying to understand the herpetofauna because that's good for humans.
Well, it is, but awfully bad for the herpetofauna if we've now driven many species extinct by, you know, not washing our herpetofauna studying equipment and transmitting a fungus between continents, right?
So there's the barrier jumping, there's the uh naive belief that you're going to do more good than harm that then results in you know massive often global yeah uh harms and it creates niches where it didn't exist that's another through line from uh You know from Charlie Munger suggesting This thing which looks an awful lot like a niche was created for parasites to exploit the workers comp system, right?
You create those niches with all of these right mechanisms.
So anyway, I think You got it.
The thing is united.
Yeah, it's hubris human hubris human hubris.
It's a kind of liberal hubris that results in complex systems laughing at us in the form of massive unintended negative consequences.
Yes.
Yep.
I think you're right.
I think you're right.
All right.
I think also that we've arrived.
We are here.
Yeah, we are.
Well, we've arrived and now we're about to leave.
You are anyway.
Yes, unfortunately so.
We'll be back again next week on Tuesday, again.
Do we have any merch to show this week?
Alright, alright.
So, you can go to darkhorsepodcast.org, our website, and get a link to our store.
We've got some great merchandise.
We just got another Epic Tabby hoodie for our younger son, which looks great.
It does look great, but in response to this episode, I think a shirt that says, cut that shit out.
That's exactly what you want to wear.
You know, as some bureaucrat is about to create a niche for parasites, cut that shit out.
Yeah, exactly.
No, I actually said to him yesterday, we need that on a hoodie too, because there's times when you want people to cut that shit out, but the weather isn't quite accommodating.
Yeah, I figured.
Yeah, so you can get that on a hoodie as well.
Yeah.
So find us more places, including locals, and lots of great stuff there, always.
This week I took a break from... I've been publishing chapters of Antipode, my first book, to give me time to work on my next book, but I published something that I actually was sort of writing for the new book and decided I wasn't sure it belonged there, and so put it into Natural Selections about
Um, some observations, uh, that led me to, um, to a really simple and elegant statistical test to assess that, yes, indeed, something unusual is going on on one of the neighboring islands, but I still don't have any idea what.
And, um, basically teasing apart in this piece, um, what you can know and what you can't know from, um, from different kinds of observations and, indeed, goodness-of-fit tests like the Chi-square, which I did.
One hypothesis, liberal solution making has run amok on Lopez Island and it is threatening to cross a water boundary using a ferry.
In fact, yes.
Yes.
That is one hypothesis.
I didn't go into that too much in the piece.
In fact, you have competing hypotheses.
Some people say, it's the lack of sustainable housing, therefore we need to build more sustainable housing right away.
And some people say, it's all the new sustainable housing that was just built, and that's the problem.
So, you have these competing, completely mutually exclusive hypotheses.
Of course.
Of course you do.
It wouldn't be the first time that solution-making had caused a problem.
It would not be.
This week.
This week, indeed.
OK, once again, check out our wonderful sponsors this week, Sundays, Seed, and Peak.
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Until we see you next time, again, that'll be Tuesday, seven days from now, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
