Stupid Water: The 246 Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 246 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 how Kamala Harris is presenting herself, and being presented, in the mainstream media, and whether there is any misinformation therein. Then: How the reductionist, scientistic approach to human health is making us less healthy, rather than more. Examples: California requires folic acid be...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 241.
Six. 246, of course.
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense because it's the next one in line.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Time is flying by and we are hurtling towards an important election.
I don't know if you know about that, but it's coming up soon.
It is coming up. So, Sarah, we're going to talk a little bit about...
About the mainstream media and its coverage-ish of the upcoming election and then we're going to talk some about the productionism that is rife in science and what is passing for science these days with regard to things like Folic acid and fluoride and a few other related topics that we've talked about before, but as is so often the case, as more information is either generated by actual science or revealed because it had been obscured before, it turns out that those who are hesitant to take a reductionist approach to both science and their health Are more often than not going to have made the right choice.
I feel like there were a lot of negatives in that sentence, but I think I said it correctly.
Yeah, you did. I was paying close attention because I'm growing more hesitant by the hour.
Yeah, more hesitant by the hour.
And part of what I think we want to talk about today is...
How hesitant we always were about a lot of these interventions, both for ourselves and for our children, and how our deep, scientifically informed, evolutionarily informed hesitancy was still not enough.
Not nearly enough. Not enough.
It was high strength, but not nearly strong enough to protect us and our children.
Anyway, it's a painful lesson.
It is. So, that's what's coming today and we're also doing a Q&A for our local supporters right after the live stream.
And so we encourage you to join us there.
Right now there's a watch party going on at Locals.
There's going to be the Q&A afterwards.
All of our past Q&As are there.
There's a lot of original content on Locals.
Our Discord server is there.
All sorts of good stuff. So please consider joining us, supporting us on Locals.
And also, top of the hour, as always, we start with our three sponsors, carefully chosen.
You know that when you see, if you're watching, you see that green perimeter on the screen, the tone at the beginning and the end, that that is the only sponsored content that we provide.
And that we carefully choose all of our sponsors.
And I'm holding my paper, even though you are going first.
I am going first. Yes. All right.
A true live fire exercise.
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I wrote that script and interacting with the people at Policy Genius really was actually a pleasure, which is rare.
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I've lost my place.
The older we get, the more likely we are to lose our place.
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I don't think that's what was going on just there, but who knows?
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Yes. All right.
Shall we start with Kamala Harris and an update on where my prediction stands.
Longtime viewers will remember that I reacted to Kamala's performance in the debate, which was surprisingly good to most of us, by suggesting that we would see competence from her ongoing from that point forward.
Some things emerged that allow us now to judge that prediction.
And I don't think it was wholly successful, which is interesting.
So why don't we play...
You mean wholly correct? I don't know if the prediction can be successful or not, but...
Wholly correct is a better way of putting it.
I think it was partially correct, but not what I had envisioned, and I think it's important to acknowledge that.
So let's play the first clip from the Colbert...
Show, Stephen Colbert show, where she is answering a question about how her administration would be different from Joe Biden.
It's possible that I have screwed up the forwarding of this.
You have it? Okay, great.
Here it is. Of course. Polling shows that a lot of people, especially independent voters, really want this to be a change election.
And that they tend to break for you in terms of thinking about change.
You are a member of the president administration.
Under a Harris administration, What would the major changes be?
And what would stay the same?
Sure. Well, I mean, I'm obviously not Joe Biden.
I noticed. And so that would be one change in terms of...
But also, I think it's important to say with, you know, 28 days to go, I'm not Donald Trump.
And so when we think about the significance of what this next generation of leadership looks like, were I to be elected president, it is about...
Frankly, I love the American people, and I believe in our country.
I love that it is our character and nature to be an ambitious people.
You know, we have aspirations.
We have dreams.
We have incredible work ethic.
And I just believe that we can create and build upon the success we've achieved in a way that we continue to grow Opportunity and in that way grow the strength of our nation.
So for example, my economic policies, I think of it and I've named it as creating an opportunity economy.
So it's about things like investing in small businesses.
I love our small businesses.
Yep. So there's nothing in that answer.
It's certainly a dog.
Well, no. No, there's two things. She's not Joe Biden and she's not Donald Trump.
Okay, and you could fact check those and you would discover that those two things are in fact true.
And she's not, at least in those moments, a purveyor of misinformation.
Right. Absolute facts delivered.
Are you opposed to misinformation?
Here we go. Right here, no misinformation in those statements whatsoever.
Right. All right. But you can see that this is a perfect demonstration that my prediction was partially but not wholly accurate.
She is putting together English sentences in a way that is highly defensible, but there's no content in what she is saying.
There's no content, and although it is true that she is neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump, two of the statements that she does make I think are testable, albeit with difficulty, and I suspect that they would prove to be false.
She says, I love the American people.
I doubt this. She also says, I love our small businesses.
Well, to the degree that she is in the current administration, we see exactly the opposite evidence from this administration, that there is any love at all for small businesses.
Yeah, so these are definitely testable statements, or as you would contract those, detestable.
You would not contract them that way.
I would contract them that way.
Exactly. That's not helpful, I don't think.
They're detestable statements.
But, in any case, point is, more competent than it was imagined prior to the debate, but no content, complete empty soup, which is not...
But she fills it out nicely.
Sorry. I mean, this is part of what's going on, right?
Like, she's an attractive woman.
And this is like, I'm not Joe Biden.
I'm not Donald Trump. You don't like looking at those guys.
You don't like hearing from those guys.
Hey, I'm easy on the eyes.
You don't want to listen to me, but, you know.
Here I am. But that's what this has become.
This has become about symbolism entirely.
Would you rather look at this person rather than the prior inhabitant of the office and his competitor?
And the answer is that has nothing to do with the well-being of the nation, of the world, of Americans, of small businesses, of any of the things Yeah.
That one might be concerned about.
At some level, it's the expected progression of the Hollywoodification of DC. Right.
And I think we've talked before, especially in the context of the medical tyranny that we faced, that the medical tyranny had the unique characteristic that the lives of those who have captured our system and fed the lines to their puppets Those lies actually came back to haunt a great many people immediately.
That there was so much harm done in the wake of COVID and that it was so immediately detectable in so many different places that people had a reaction that I think is, they woke up in many cases because unlike the usual case where, you know, we have an argument about the, you It's hard to track.
It's too multivariate. Yeah, there's so much noise in the system that even if your belief about this is incorrect and it is in theory tested, you would need a scientific experiment in order to sort the noise from the signal so you could see what the effect of the actual policy that you had advocated for was.
But in the case of COVID, people got immediate feedback because, for example, many of us know people who were injured by the mRNA shots.
So, people forget that this isn't about, you know, this is not just a figurehead who sits in the office and, you know, speaks for Americans on, you know, on the international stage.
This is somebody who's actually involved in how the country is governed, and it matters a great deal.
So actually, could we play the other clip from Colbert?
We, yeah, the hurricane one.
Yep. Yep. Folks in North Carolina and Georgia, please know that FEMA and the people on the ground are there to help you.
You are entitled to help.
There's a lot of misinformation, and I beseech you, I beg you to please not pay attention to it because there are a whole lot of folks who are there to give you help and aid in terms of the immediate aftermath and what people need to do in terms of getting through the height of this emergency and this crisis, but also in terms of long-term All right, so what I wanted to point out here, and I don't know, Jen, do we have the Glenn Beck on the ground interview of the FEMA person?
Can we hear it? No.
Okay, so then I will just describe it.
So there is a lot of misinformation.
I think some of it's probably deliberately planted, but let's say it's just the fog of emergency.
There's a lot of stuff being said about what's going on on the ground that isn't true.
But there's also a lot of information coming out of the disaster zone, and the information makes it quite clear that whatever is going on with FEMA, it's not disaster relief in a meaningful way.
You know, yes, you can fight about the $750.
Either the $750 is a deliberate finger in the eye, or it's just the beginning to get people through the basics and more is coming.
Are you forced to sign a contract in which you're You know, your home is in jeopardy if you fail to repay it.
There's lots of stuff that is very hard to answer that question if you're not there.
But what is clear is that the FEMA response is not what we paid for.
We Americans have paid for a massive federal bureaucracy that is supposed to swoop in in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, because disasters happen, And it is supposed to take care of the people who are jeopardized.
And what Glenn Beck unearths here, and I've seen many things that are consistent with this, here you have a FEMA crew parked where they're difficult to find.
Glenn Beck and his crew had to go seek them out.
They weren't in the main place where you would expect them.
When he begins talking to this FEMA worker, it becomes obvious that they have arrived a week late, that what they are doing is paperwork.
They're getting people, quote, into the system.
They're just getting them to sign stuff.
They're not out in the field addressing the emergency.
Well, and this is, you know, to your now long-standing point about the Cartesian crisis through which we are living, it is impossible to know what is true, right?
Unless you have seen it with your own eyes, or someone who you trust deeply and dearly.
Insists and asserts that they have seen it with their own eyes.
And we happen to have good friends in Western North Carolina whom we have heard from.
And so, you know, we also are lucky to have met Glenn Beck, so I trust him.
But this is a crew, like, this is a few steps removed because this is sort of produced for public consumption.
Whereas when we have asked our friends who were there, What we are hearing is consistent with what you are saying these guys are finding.
They've seen FEMA at this point, but they're not the ones doing the necessary work to actually help people on the ground.
Not only that. And that's two sets of stories in one particular place, and maybe it's anomalous, but for sure it is not inherently misinformation to know that FEMA is not doing the job that the American taxpayers have paid for them to do.
Right. We have paid a huge amount to have this.
And worse than not doing the job, they appear to be obstructing the job being done by private citizens.
And I want to point something out here.
If FEMA got the hell out of the way, Americans would rally, and you would see something that would cause a unification.
Americans are not obsessed with the fact that this is a red zone and not a blue zone.
They would watch Americans rescuing other Americans, and it would cause people to feel that we are a country and that we do have capacity and that we care about each other.
It's exactly The necessary remedy for an entirely failed bureaucratic state that has become increasingly tyrannical.
But what FEMA appears to be doing on the ground is obstructing that effort, literally parking aircraft on runways to prevent private aircraft from filling in the gap, right?
These things are documented.
I don't know why the federal bureaucracy is behaving this way.
I do know that there is a conspicuous centrality of Secretary Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Department of Homeland Security, who seems to be at the heart of many stories that are upside down.
He is at the heart of the border crisis.
He appears to be facilitating an invasion at the border.
He was in charge of the department that launched the quickly failed Ministry of Truth.
He failed to authorize Secret Service protection for Bobby Kennedy and failed to authorize increased Secret Service protection to Donald Trump.
And what is the final?
There's another. Maui?
Fourth. No? No?
I mean, he would have been involved there, too, because he's had a FEMA. But I will think of it in a second.
But actually, with regard to your first example, you were on the ground with Zach and Chris Martinson and others in the Darien Gap in January of this year.
And you saw something directly relevant to Mayorkas' failure to protect Americans against the immigration crisis.
Yes. So Mayorkas, before he was Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, he was actually on the board of which is a Jewish immigration aid society that is actually facilitating the flow of migrants into Central America and then the U.S. and in fact their office is, or at least one of their offices, is literally right outside the gate of the camp that we reported on that is almost entirely Chinese immigrants.
I can't Totally different demographic from the other camps that you saw.
Totally different, yeah.
Highly concentrated, largely male, largely military age, almost entirely Chinese.
That camp, in the aftermath of our visit, then had a suspicious fire in which the records of those who had flown through the camp burned up.
But in any case, and Mayorkas had been to that very camp, and he had proclaimed its glory and pledged to enlarge it, which it was then enlarged.
So anyway, Mayorkas is like an Anthony Fauci figure, where he's, you know, Fauci is like involved in the creation of the virus, and then he's the point man on dealing with the virus, and he's pushing the vaccines, and The whole thing is strange.
But anyway, the failure of the federal bureaucracy...
There's got to be a name for that. Both the creator and the apparent white knight who shows up to deal with the damage that you yourself have wrought.
Yeah, you know, you would think there would be a series of...
It's a trope.
Yeah, it's got to be, you would think, but I'm struggling to think of what those cases are.
Yeah, other than Fauci. Yeah, other than Fauci himself.
But anyway, to see Harris saying absolutely nothing as a figurehead who exists only as a kind of symbolic, you know, Who becomes president if Kamala Harris becomes president?
Well, she does technically, and whatever is currently president continues to be president.
So, you know, well, what change does your administration represent?
Well, you may have noticed I'm not Joe Biden.
I would also point out I'm not Donald Trump.
Woo! Yeah, like, this is strictly a matter of like, you know, what flavor of ice cream, you know?
You're still being served ice cream for dinner, and it's like, well, which flavor, right?
It just, it's nonsense.
All right. I think you just give ice cream a better app.
It's more like Twinkies.
Twinkies, yeah, except they don't come in multiple flavors.
And apparently, we're told they don't exist anymore.
Weren't we told that by someone?
Well, here's the thing. Technically, they do exist because somebody's got a shelf full of them somewhere.
They're not being generated anymore in factories.
They're off-brand Twinkies, which is a strange concept, off-brand Twinkies, because weren't they always off?
Yes. Actually, we learned that from one of our Uber drivers in Washington, D.C. I think we talked about them last time.
All right, so that's about all I have to say here.
Okay. Just an update on the prediction.
Only partially successful, but a lot is revealed.
Oh, no, there's one other thing.
Oh, right, yeah. 60 minutes edit.
Let's take a look at this 60 minutes edit, and then we'll cap off this little segment.
But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.
Well, Bill... The work that we have done has resulted in a number of There were movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.
But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.
We're not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.
I find this strange because the edited answer, for two reasons, the edited answer doesn't appear to be in the original answer at all, but the edited answer also makes no sense.
It's just as much gobbledygook as the first one, it's just shorter.
It's just tighter. Yeah, but it makes a lot of sense there because the idea is if you're still watching 60 Minutes, then you're looking for certain buzzwords.
Okay. A, 60 Minutes, which once upon a time was journalistic, has an absolute...
We used to watch it most Sundays.
It's on Sundays?
Is that right? Is that the right one? I think it is.
They have an absolute obligation to allow us to see this candidate for the highest office in the land as she actually is, warts and all.
And the idea that they are going to Pretty this up in any way at all.
I mean, really, they have an obligation to actually show us the entire interview unedited so that we can evaluate this person as they should do for her competitor in this election.
Right. We the democracy works when we have information, actual information on which to make a judgment.
Right. Does the system work perfectly?
No, it's going to be noisy.
Some people show up better on camera than others.
But the idea that they are going to edit her into greater coherence is journalistic malpractice to say the very least.
It is also obviously one of a dozen varieties of election interference.
They are interfering with the election by...
Causing us to imagine that this person answered question A with answer B, right?
That is supposed to tell us something about her mindset relative to something of tremendous importance, the conflict in the Middle East.
And we have a right to know whether this person has...
A model in their head, what it might sound like, whether it's going to result in the war deepening because they're confused or the war abating because they have some sort of insight.
This is not something that they are entitled to do, and yet it's obvious that they're doing it.
Even the interview as presented is preposterous.
It's like... Instance after instance where she is asked a question, there is a number of seconds of her answer, and then the reporter goes back to a voiceover that obscures her answer so we can't hear the rest of it.
Right? It is absolutely illegitimate.
And, you know...
That sounds like a documentary, not an interview.
Right. A documentary that we understand has a perspective is different than an interview with a candidate in which we are supposed to be allowed to reach our own judgment.
And instead, we are going to be led by the nose to a judgment that the editors of the thing have decided on.
And I would point out... Let's say that the election is close at this moment.
If people were to vote today, the election was close.
We end up there in a world where one of the candidates is constantly being covered for by the press, right?
Her gaffes are being obscured.
Her answers are being improved over what they actually were.
And the other candidate is suffering the exact inverse.
A number of places where Trump has been portrayed as having said something that he didn't, you know, the very fine people quote, for example.
This is A kind of interference that is distorting this.
And to have a close election when the press is, you know, weighing in entirely on one person's side and making the other person look as bad as they can tells us something about where we actually are in history.
I think there's also, there's like an embrace of the toxic feminine on the Democrat side.
And this emerges and, you know, Is there toxic femininity?
I've written about this. Well, if there's toxic masculinity, then of course there's toxic femininity.
You expect it to manifest very, very differently.
And just as we should not embrace the toxic forms of masculinity, we should not embrace the toxic forms of femininity.
But it's easier to do so, or to be compelled to do so, because the toxic forms of femininity don't tend to be outward-facing violence, right?
It's really easy and obvious that you should legislate against outward forms of violence.
which is one of the primary ways that toxic forms of masculinity manifests whereas toxic forms of femininity manifest with like whisper campaigns and behind the scenes and like and and feigning weakness Feigning, like sometimes actually being weak, but then using the fact that on average women are not as strong, not as large, not as physically capable as men, toxic forms of femininity tend to use that true thing and feign weakness, feign incompetence when they don't actually have it in order to get their way.
Because many men in particular are primed To see that and go into, like, savior mode.
And that's, you know, that's on men, too.
But when women do this, no one should be embracing it.
But a lot of women, especially sort of around Me Too, which had the capacity to do something good and, you know, became a complete shitshow.
Excuse my language. Women...
It saw a power to make claims that were unfalsifiable and to take out good people.
And it made actual victims of violence, actual female victims of rape and domestic violence and all this, um much more at risk because of the toxic feminine behavior of some who would game the system and so we now have sort of a like this like oh god you don't want to push the one woman among the four people who are running for president or vice president because that might be seen seen as like aggressing as the one we can't possibly do that so that's going to be part of the excuse But then we see in her running mate an adoption of exactly this sort of toxic feminine trait amalgam that is, frankly, reprehensible in women, and it's just disgusting in men.
There's been many examples of this, but I'm specifically thinking, and we referred to this last week, of Waltz's...
Final answer to the one question that was mildly hard-hitting in the VP debate, where it turns out he lied about, was it Tiananmen Square?
Like, I don't remember what, like, he lied about having been in China at a pivotal moment.
I think it was Tiananmen Square. And he just did.
And so what is he saying?
Instead of being a freaking adult, and yes, that might look like being a man, but it also looked like being a responsible woman saying, wow, that wasn't true.
Fucked up. I'm just a knucklehead.
And this is never what you want in a leader.
And frankly, it's never what you want in a friend or a colleague or a boss or an employee.
Oh, it's just silly me.
I'm just too stupid to know what I'm talking about.
That's who we want? A second in command for the leader of the free world?
No, I'm sorry. If you are willing to say I'm just a knucklehead, you have no right to aspire to the job.
Meanwhile, the person who's aspiring to the top of the ticket gets no questions at all and gets covered for by the mainstream media.
It's a complete debacle in every regard.
Yeah, I mean, I have a hard time imagining him acknowledging a lie like that, but the real point is...
Well, he did say, like, by saying that he's a knucklehead, he was acknowledging it.
He acknowledged that it was incorrect as he weaseled out of responsibility for it with this knucklehead claim, which, you know, is juvenile, as you point out.
I don't think it's juvenile.
I think it's classically manipulative, toxic female behavior.
I mean, yes, kids do it too, but kids are kids.
They grow out of that. No, I agree with this.
The lie and the weaseling out of it is not Walt being a man.
It's just not. There is something about what has taken over the Democratic Party that does have a lot of these characteristics.
And, you know, it's not that it's female.
It's that men are adopting these very characteristics and it is...
Well, if toxic behavior gets, go ahead, and no one is allowed to engage in classic forms of toxic male behavior because they're violent and brutal, but everyone is somehow allowed, if they're willing to be this kind of shameless degenerate, To behave in sort of toxic female ways by backbiting and being covert and claiming that you were just too silly to know what the truth was, then of course a certain number of men are not going to have enough shame,
are not going to have enough pride or self-respect to not lower themselves to that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I do think we're getting a tremendous number of windows into this dysfunction.
The problem is, if your media diet is mainstream, the whole thing is edited into a phony story about what's actually taking place, including, you know, FEMA is on the ground, hard at work, and it's suffering.
Not only is it battling terrible conditions in the disaster zone, but it's having to battle misinformation and the fact that people don't trust it, even though they're doing their damnedest.
And the fact is, no, they're on the ground doing paperwork and obstructing other people who are trying to do the physical work of rescue.
That much is clear. Is that 100% of what's going on?
I don't know, but I've certainly seen documented evidence of all of that.
It's happening. And it's completely...
I struggle for words for how maddening it is to watch the federal government obstruct the rescue of Americans in desperate circumstances.
Yeah. Meanwhile, over in, really for lack of a better term, Nanny Stateville, we have an update on a story we discussed in June, in Livestream 230, June 19th, in which we reported that California, reported, we're not journalists, but we did report on California considering mandating folic acid to be added to commercially sold tortillas and masa flour.
And even at the time, the LA Times pointed out that this was a bad idea.
And so here, you can show my screen if you like.
Here's the story from the LA Times that we showed some bits from back in June.
California wants to mandate folic acid and tortillas to help babies.
Why that's bad? So I was surprised at the time to see one of the big mainstream newspapers talking about this attempt to add a molecule to tortillas, which sounds very much like the kind of thinking that got us into the COVID madness, critique it.
And here's just a couple of paragraphs from this piece, again, some of which we shared a few months ago.
I think based on the data, we need to make sure we're protecting our moms and families as best as we can and lean into science to use all the tools that are disposable, he told me.
The assembly member, who is Latino, didn't flinch when I pressed on the idea that this bill would basically ban Mexicans, Salvadorans, and others in California from enjoying their heritage.
These disparities won't resolve themselves, and it's important for us to fortify.
I go back to, I don't see anything about people complaining about how bread tasted prior to 1998.
We see the benefits and we appreciate that.
He's referring to the fact that many grain products, like breads and cereals, are already enriched with folic acid.
His unsympathetic approach is Big Blue California at its worst, thinking that the state should take care of residents from conception to death and being willing to mess with traditions if they get in the way.
So this article does a very good job of pointing out that, you know, what they call Big Blue California, and if I can have my screen back here, what they refer to as Big Blue California is getting in the way of cultural traditions, which I can certainly get behind, and they have the Author of the piece, along with several people who are making tortillas to be sold commercially, which traditionally have three ingredients, masa harina, salt,
and water. They do blind taste tests, and you can taste the difference.
People who know tortillas, people who care about tortillas, and maybe that sounds trivial, but this is an ancient And foundational element of many Latin American diets can taste the difference and there would appear to be not only no reason to do it, but there is of course, and it's just beginning, but rumblings about like actually there's going to be a trade-off here and there's a really good chance that you're trying to maximize this one thing, which is, you know, Really minimize birth defects like spina bifida from too little folic acid pre-conception or in early pregnancy,
but supplementation with folic acid is beginning to have intimations like, ooh, actually there's going to be problems there.
So, that's all back from June.
You have something to add before? No, no. Okay.
That was back in June.
On September 28th, just a week and a half ago, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, Big Blue California, as the author of that LA Times article referred to the state, signed the law that mandates the folic acid be added to commercially available tortillas and other corn masa products.
So, here we have a article...
Nope, wrong one.
Here we go. Now you can show my computer is hanging.
Perfect. Okay, so this is in not the LA Times, but in a publication I wasn't familiar with before called CalMatters, which sells itself as non-profit and non-partisan news.
Published the day that Newsom signed this bill into law, why a new California law will require tortilla makers to add an extra ingredient.
But the summary right up at the top is, in summary, folic acid is so important to infant health that it's required to be added to cereal and bread.
A new California law ensures it'll be in tortillas.
So, as always, with this kind of reductionist science reporting, or often just frankly, scientism, you have the...
The conclusion being presented as fact when it is not actually established.
It's so important to infant health that it's required to be added to cereal and bread.
So the previous move to enrich many cereals and breads is being used as evidence that it's necessary to start adding it to everything else, as opposed to what should be happening is investigating whether or not the fact that our food is, quote unquote, enriched in the first place is good for us.
And of course, you know, my position and I believe ours will be, yeah, actually, you shouldn't have been doing that in the first place.
So one argument here is, oh, my highlights seem to have disappeared.
There's a note here.
The new law addresses The new law, quote, addresses a health equity issue, and California is once again leading the nation in protecting mothers and infants from preterm birth defects, said Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, Arambula, not sure, the Fresno Democrat and physician who authored the law.
And so this argument is going to be about, well, Latina mothers, excuse me, probably Latinx mothers, don't buy as many breads and, you know, Cheerios as they do tortillas and other masa products, so we'd better get this into their food as well so they can't avoid our big blue California interventions, which we assure you are good for everyone.
All right, I want to just point out a number of things about why such remedies are always ill considered.
Yes. One is that because the quantity of tortillas, bread, everything else that people consume varies widely, there's no capacity to properly dose this.
Even if there was the issue in question, the point is to give the average person the correct dose of folic acid, you're going to give a lot of other people way too much.
Yes. Which is directly related to the next story about fluoride.
Right. So we need to know what the consequence of that is.
Two, oh my god, the violation of informed consent is glaring here, right?
You are going to be dosed with this stuff whether you know it or not, right?
If you go and you order a taco, it's going to have folic acid added to it.
You do not know, you are not being warned about that, and you do not know what the consequence of it is because, frankly, the consequences are not being looked into.
Violations of informed consent, as I keep pointing out, that was a hanging offense at the end of World War II. The Allies hanged seven doctors over it.
So the idea that we're going to do this as a matter of public policy is absurd.
The right way to do this, if there is indeed a problem, is to provide people information and have them remedy it in a properly dosed way, if it's even an issue.
Well, that's the question, of course.
Neural tube defects, which do appear to be often a result of insufficient folic acid in the diet, the most famously named one being spina bifida, but that's not the only one.
I have been recognized for long enough that from before I was pregnant, but certainly at the point that I was pregnant with both of our children, my doctors, midwife, whatever, the health team, the OBGYN health team that was involved in the overly medicalized process, From my very first visit told me that I definitely need to be on folic acid and I definitely did not go on folic acid because my sense then as always is I eat whole real foods and I let my body tell me what I need and your body tells you what you need during pregnancy more than any other time right like that you know that is what aversions and cravings are about and The fact is that neural tube defects are recognizable and trackable,
and there is a thing which appears to be, when it is available in insufficient amounts, appears to be responsible for such problems.
That is one problem.
That does not begin, I mean, again, it's complicated versus complex.
It does not begin to understand all of the other parameters that go into creating a healthy baby.
Right, and it What are we going to find if we actually get to the bottom of this story?
We're going to find that there's an actual cause.
It may be that folic acid has a positive implication for some people, but the question is, why is this deficient?
Right, yes. We need to find the ultimate cause.
This is exactly about the chronic health epidemic.
What role are The inappropriate ingredients in processed food playing in this.
In other words, it's something blocking the metabolism of the folic acid that's present.
What role are the residues of pesticides that are in so much food playing?
What role are the ingredients that are allowed in the US and not allowed in Europe playing?
So the whole idea that we have all of these, you know, governmental officials who are just, you know, they're losing sleep over the threats to our health and they've focused on folic acid because, you know, until it's in those tortillas, Latina mothers are liable to be deficient.
Bullshit! These people do not care about your health.
If they did, they'd be much more interested in pesticides and toxins in the food supply.
The fact that they're ignoring that While they're obsessing over violating informed consent by adding some sort of a supplement to your tortillas, it's just not even coherent.
There are so many bits of lower hanging fruit.
And if you really cared about this, you'd go after the root cause.
Well, it's lower hanging fruit, but taking things out of our diet means that someone is losing revenue.
Right. Forcing something to be added to our diet means that someone, the maker of that product, will get enriched by it.
It's enriched in terms of the tortillas and enriched in terms of the person making the molecule that's now being added.
And Newsom, I don't have the details here, but I believe that Newsom also has signed a law about reducing or eliminating food dyes in school snacks.
So not food dyes across all of California, because that's just too much, but not only.
So that's him supposedly caring, right?
But if I remember correctly, this folic acid in masa products, including tortillas, goes into effect in 2026, whereas the food dyes just out of school snacks doesn't go into effect until after that.
So these are both signs sort of right now and the oh goodness we're going to affect someone's bottom line negatively by telling them that they can no longer poison the children quite as much as they are.
Well let's give them some time to adapt.
But oh we might now be poisoning another you know bunch of people and certainly making the food less traditional and more more complicated at least by adding By adding this to the tortillas, well, we can do that right away because we know that the factories can ramp up production of that thing, and we could just force people to buy bags of this stuff and put it into their tortillas.
Well, I think you're right on the money.
It is a complex versus complicated mindset issue, and our entire health system, whether we're talking about nutrition or we're talking about medicine, is predicated on the idea that You know, you have a disorder of some kind and the remedy for it is something you add rather than a hunt for a root cause and that is resulting in complete incoherence of our policy and it's resulting in a massive failure to improve health because the interventions are always suspect as we point out again and again in In our book, the fact is, human health comes from a match between a creature and its environment.
And the ill health is almost always an indicator that something is off.
Adding more things that are off is not free.
It causes a compounding of these issues.
And the fact that you can't trace the causality doesn't mean it's not there.
And you know, as we talked about, Long before we were publicly talking, we as a nation were publicly talking about the chronic health epidemic and the, you know, Make America Healthy Again movement, staying in an airport.
Watch people walk by.
Do those look like healthy wild animals to you?
No. Those look like people who are under attack by, you know, at every conceivable level.
And, you know, it's going to be all about root causes and, you know, some intervening at the level of...
One molecule in tortillas is absurd.
I did want to point to the one remaining question I have about interventions and supplementation is iodine.
Iodine violates the rule, right?
You shouldn't be adding this to salt because people's intake of salt varies so much that to give most people an appropriate dose of iodine, A, You're not discovering why it is that they're deficient in iodine.
But B, you are to dose most people well.
You are highly overdosing many other people with something that, as you and I have pointed out again and again, is not dangerous.
Salt intake has been demonized by medicine, but the fact is your body is really good at regulating salt levels.
So people's intake of salt varies a lot.
It's a matter of taste, primarily.
So, lots of people are presumably getting too much iodine by this mechanism.
However, I believe, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe somebody's gonna, you know, contact us and tell us I've got it wrong, but I think that the supplementation of iodine has actually dealt with a lot of pathology that is itself the result of modern diets and lifestyle.
I don't know. I don't know about this, and I suspect not at this point.
I haven't reminded myself of the iodine story recently, but we get most of our iodine natively in a whole foods diet from Ocean fish, is that right?
And you know, and shellfish and such.
And some in like deep leafy greens.
Yeah, exactly. And probably liver.
So the distinction that like often like beef liver and dark leafy greens have a lot of things like folic acid.
But then I think fish and shellfish, like saltwater fish and shellfish specifically is a big source of iodine.
We actually had a student for whom this was a major hypothesis that our evolution, our human evolution around and ultimately out of Africa would have inherently followed coastal pathways because the expansion of our brains seems to have been part and parcel of A reliably high amount of iodine in our diet, which was from saltwater fish.
Jeremy, if you're out there, you know I'm talking about you.
But people still eat that stuff, and why couldn't they be getting it from their diet?
And frankly, in the last, gosh, what is it?
Late 90s, early aughts, when the artisanal salt movement starts.
I remember at one point, your dad actually making fun of it.
It's like, come on, guys. It's better than that.
My dad started, as a joke, giving salt to people claiming that it was very special, and then the specialty salt movement happened and robbed him of his joke.
You have not participated, you have not contributed to this, but we probably have eight different kinds of salt, none of which have iodine or anti-caking agents in them.
But the sea salt probably has some, but none of them have iodine added or anti-caking agents added.
We don't have Morton's sea salt in our pantry anymore.
We did 20 years ago, but we don't now.
And frankly, Flirtacel, the big, fat, flaky salt, it's delicious.
Morton's salt with the anti-caking agents and the iodine isn't.
It enhances flavor of the stuff that you're tasting, but it doesn't itself have a flavor, whereas salt harvested from ancient lake beds or the sea or whatever is actually delicious.
It's the difference between vanilla and vanilla.
Ah, perfect. Okay, great segue.
We're going to do a little bit from hunter-gatherer's guide here, in which we talk about vanilla and vanilla, which you didn't know was going to happen here.
I did not know that was coming. Yeah, so that's the segue into talking about fluoride in the water.
So this is in the medicine chapter of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide section that we called, Considering the Risks of Reductionism as We Choose What to Put in Our Bodies.
Is Vanillin the same as vanilla?
Is THC identical to marijuana?
No. In both cases, a single molecule, active and important in the human experience of the larger thing is not representative of the whole.
In the case of vanillin, the effect appears to have culinary ramifications only.
Foods flavored with vanillin do not have the full richness of vanilla.
In the case of THC, which has long been understood to be the main psychoactive constituent of cannabis, breeding only for that molecule made plants that would certainly get you high, but they had insufficient antipsychotic tempering effects from CBD, another active molecule in pot.
Oops. And as of this writing, there was a new marijuana molecule getting traction in both the scientific literature and the pot breeding community, CBG. It is being purported to have benefits even greater than those of CBD, maybe, but it is the human discovery of that molecule that has elevated it to the status of being studied.
It was there all along, but now we have imbued it with mystical qualities.
Our discovery of it changes nothing about what it does.
We often mistake an effect, that is, of an action, a treatment, a molecule, for our understanding of the effect.
What a thing does and what we think or know that it does are not the same thing.
So a little bit more here as we segue into the fluoride section.
A combination of hubris and technical capacity has humans recreating this error over and over again.
From fluoridated drinking water to shelf-stable foods with unintended consequences, from the myriad issues with sun exposure to whether GMOs are safe, we are constantly seduced by reductionist thinking, led astray by the fantasy of simplicity where the truth is complex.
Reductionism, particularly with respect to our bodies and minds, is harming us.
Sometimes it is even killing us.
Early in the 20th century, fluoride was discovered to be correlated with fewer cavities.
So fluoride was put in many municipal water supplies to decrease tooth decay.
The fluoride in drinking water is a byproduct of industrial processes, though, not a molecular form that appears in nature or has ever been part of our diet.
That's one point against it.
Furthermore, we find neurotoxicity in children who are exposed to fluoridated drinking water,
a correlation between hypothyroidism in fluoridated water, and in salmon, a loss of the ability
to navigate back to their home stream after swimming in fluoridated water.
Is fluoride a magic bullet for reducing cavities with no cost to other aspects of health?
Seems not.
More to the point, the quest for magic bullets, for simple answers that are universally applicable
to all humans in all conditions, is misguided.
If it were that easy, selection would almost certainly have found a way.
Think you've found a solution that is too good to be true?
Look hard for the hidden costs and remember Chesterton's events.
Bye.
To that point, for which we got a lot of grief.
Our going after fluoride in water and fluoride in toothpaste was one of the things in the book that people came after us for.
I don't know if on that point people told us that we were killing people, but it was that sort of argument, right?
Yeah. I wanted to point out, in part, why our culture is haunted by the suspicion that people who suspect fluoride are nuts.
Okay. And then we'll go to what the National Toxicology Program has just published.
So would you play the clip from Dr.
Strangelove that I... So I'll set this up.
Dr. Strangelove is a Stanley Kubrick film, one of his early ones from 1964.
That's five years before you and I were born, a year after John F. Kennedy was shot.
RFK. No, John F. Kennedy, 63.
Oh, I thought you were talking about, okay, yes.
So, anyway, the movie, which is great, and you should see it, and spoiler alert, but the movie is based, there are actually two movies made at the same time with the same plot, one of them a comedy, Dr.
Strangelove, and the other one a serious film whose name I've forgotten.
Yeah, it's actually weird to watch them both.
But not Kubrick.
Not Kubrick. The one that survives is Dr.
Strangelove. People still love this movie.
But anyway, the movie is based on the idea that a crazed general I think I think I think I think But anyway, General Jack D. Ripper, engineers World War III, and a Colonel Mandrake, who I think is on loan from the Royal Air Force, played by Peter Sellers, is trying to interrupt this general's starting of World War III,
and so he's confronting General Jack D. Ripper, who is explaining why he's doing this.
And anyway, do we have that clip?
All right. Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?
No, I didn't think I knew, sir.
No. He said war was too important to be left to the generals.
When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right.
But today, war is too important to be left to politicians.
They have neither the time The training or the inclination for strategic thought.
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify All of our precious bodily fluids.
So that is a reference to fluoridation.
Really? Yes.
How do we know? It's clear in the film.
It is...
It has scarred the American mind because here you have the crazed instigator of World War III who's been driven batty by fear that it's the communists who have put fluoride in the water and they are impurifying our precious bodily fluids.
And it's so ridiculous and horrifying that we never got over it.
So it has...
Your hypothesis is that Dr.
Strangelove put the fear of critical investigation of fluoride into the American public's mind?
Yes, it made it very hard to voice concern because, first of all, everybody had seen...
I mean, I'm a huge fan of the film and of Kubrick, but I feel like you're...
You're putting a little much on his plate.
No, no. It's like the term anti-vaxxer or conspiracy theorist.
It's one of these things that creates a third rail so that you just can't venture into a space because you get electrocuted.
Oh, yeah. But I mean, you've talked here about conspiracy theorists having been a creation of the CIA. Right.
So that's a concerted effort to engage in subterfuge and to change how Americans feel about a concept.
You are attributing a, you know, granted, highly regarded, but at the end of the day, kind of an art film, to changing how an entire generation of people thought, which I find...
No, I'm not saying it changed the way they thought.
I'm saying it made it impossible to raise the critique.
Because the point is, that clip of this crazed general starting World War III over fluoride It creates the impression that this is the height of insanity.
You know we took a lot of flack over mentioning fluoride in our book.
It's perfectly in keeping with the rest of the themes in the book.
Why did that thing stand out?
You know, why when the blue team shouts Russia, Russia, Russia, does, you know, a third of the country start hiding under its desk, right?
We've been traumatized over certain things and all you need to do is invoke them and suddenly people go into this reflexive mode.
Yeah, I agree with all that.
I'm just not, I just am yet to be sold on the idea that that fear stems from Kubrick's 1964 film.
I'm not saying it's entirely, but I do think that that particular scene in that movie did make it very difficult for decades to raise these obviously legitimate concerns.
Yeah. Okay, well...
The National Toxicology Program, which is a branch of the U.S. Health and Human Services, has released a report called On the State of the Science Concerning Fluoride Exposure and Neurodevelopment and Cognition, a Systematic Review.
They begin by telling you what they're not doing.
What this monograph does not do, they start by saying what it does do, okay, okay, okay, what we've assessed.
What this monograph does not do, this monograph and addendum do not address whether the sole exposure to fluoride added to drinking water in some countries, i.e.
fluoridation at 0.7 milligrams per liter in the United States and Canada, is associated with a measurable effect on IQ. We're definitely not talking about that.
This monograph and addendum do not provide a quantitative estimate of the number of IQ points lost for a given increase in fluoride exposure measures.
Okay, well, that seems to be sort of not at odds with the other thing that they don't do if there are IQ points lost.
Maybe you're not counting them, but you seem to have just acknowledged that there are IQ points lost with an increase in fluoride exposure methods.
And, of course, what they are doing is, you know, just a lot of words, a lot of words.
I think there's a confound here, which is that the people who wrote this disclaimer themselves have been consuming a fair amount of fluoride in the drinking water.
Well, this may be true. So let's just...
So Table of Contents, this is a long, you know, you can see this 324-page monograph, but most of it, if you scroll down through the Table of Contents, you will see most of it is in the addendum, which is, you know, appendix, literature search, just all the...
All the appendices.
I never remember actually if it's supposed to be appendixes or appendices when it's this one.
Because there's different appendices. Yeah, I think it may be not actually, but it doesn't matter.
That's a point for another time.
So we're not going to go through all of this at all.
Let's just go right to the results.
So just a reminder, most of our audience will know this by now.
This is a monograph.
This is a scientific review paper in which they have Ordered things in the same order in which an empirical scientific paper would be ordered, that is to say they have the abstract, which is the summary, the introduction, which introduces the history of the question in terms of what already exists, although for a review paper it's going to be a little bit different.
And sets up the question that's being investigated.
The methods describes everything that they did to investigate the question.
And the results is where you find out what they found.
You don't go to the results to find out how they found what they found.
That's in the methods. And you don't go to the results to find out what what they found means.
That's in the discussion afterwards.
The results is just, what did we find?
That's what it's supposed to be. So let's go to the results.
Page 25, which because of pagination and such, It turns out to be on page 45 here.
So again, this is this monograph from the National Toxicity Center, did I say?
Anyway, some branch of Health and Human Services.
Results. What you find first in the results is page upon page of Here's what we did and here's the things that were relevant and here's how most of the studies we found seem to have a high rate of bias and here's like yada yada yada yada on and on and on and on and most of this frankly does not feel like it belongs in results it feels like it is a way to get people to lose interest and move on and not actually find the results the results more or less are finally page after page after page this is all supposed to be the results Can be found in Table 6.
And there are more results.
This is just the studies on IQ in children.
So they found that after going through, gosh, I don't remember, thousands, I think, of papers, they found 19, 19 only, that they deemed to be of high enough quality and low enough bias to include in the results here in Table 6, studies on IQ in children. And let's just go through a few of them.
They don't summarize, they just summarize each of them individually.
Significant dose-related association of fluoride on IQ score based on drinking water quintile levels.
Okay, next one.
Significant inverse association between urinary fluoride and IQ score.
Next one. Significant linear trend across quartiles of serum fluoride and children's IQ score.
Okay, next one.
Significantly lower mean IQ in the endemic versus non-endemic regions.
Next one. Compared to normal questionable fluorosis, presence of moderate severe fluorosis significantly associated with lower total and backward digit span scores and linear associations between total digit span and log transformed urinary fluoride.
All of that means, again, the same thing as what The other ones are finding significant correlation between IQ score and children's serum fluoride, significant inverse association between IQ score and log transform.
You're like on and on and on and on.
Absolutely everyone, or maybe I have not gone and looked at the individual studies, with two possible exceptions, find significant Either correlation or actual decrease, because of the way the study was done, in IQ scores in children when fluoridation in water is present.
But none of the low bias studies were in the US, so who could say?
Because maybe American children are just different.
Maybe we're just like much more resistant to fluoride, and since none of the low bias studies were in the US, we really can't say.
So they imply that?
They say that right at the top, right?
I'm going to make you guys dizzy here.
I'll go back. I'll do it this way.
But this thing here that I was reading from before, you can show it.
This monograph and addendum do not address whether the sole exposure to fluoride added to drinking water in some countries, i.e.
fluoridation at 0.7 milligrams per liter in the United States and Canada, is associated with a measurable effect on IQ. Whereas we just went and looked at the haltery number of low bias studies that they found to include.
And every single one of them, with one or two possible exceptions, finds precisely this relationship that fluoridation, high fluoridation levels in either mother's urine or in children is associated with Or causal of reductions in lower IQ in children, but because none of those studies were done in the U.S., they can put this crazy disclaimer at the very beginning and say this monograph does not address, does not address whether solar exposure to fluoride in countries like the U.S. have anything to do with childhood IQ. So I would just point out...
It's like one scientistic faint after another.
Yeah, it's one scientistic faint after another.
And the fact is, logically speaking, yes, Could imagine a scenario in which it's not the fluoride causing this, but the presumption should certainly have shifted.
Right. And once the presumption has shifted, the idea that you should continue to take a byproduct of fertilizer production, literally a byproduct that the fertilizer industry would have to throw away if it hadn't found a way to sell it to municipal water supplies, The idea that you should continue to put that in there because of an ostensible benefit in reducing tooth decay?
Tooth decay versus IQ points?
Well, this is exactly it. This is why I wanted to talk about the folic acid in MASA first.
We don't yet know what all folic acid supplementation is doing.
I suspect, and there's beginning to be research that suggests that it is not good for most people.
All in order to reduce the rate of spina bifida, which is a devastating problem.
But it affects, with no supplementation at all, it affects a tiny, tiny, tiny number of children.
And we are, I mean, just like with the COVID vaccines for children, right?
Like you're going to broadcast this thing, which even if it were effective, which it's not, but even if it were effective, Children don't die from COVID and you're creating heart problems, at the very least, and palsies and all sorts of other things as well.
You don't broadcast a supposed treatment, even if it's effective, if it causes other problems, which may in all of these, certainly in the case of fluoride and the case of the mRNA vaccines for children, we know that the negative effects are greater than the positive.
Even if you don't know about the negative effects, the presumption that it doesn't have any is faulty to begin with.
And in the case of the fluoridation of water, I would point out that even the association with reduced tooth decay, which is in no way worth losing IQ points over, even that The salt of fluoride that is produced as a byproduct of fertilizer production and then added to municipal water supplies is not the salt of fluoride that was at one time demonstrated to have beneficial effects on teeth.
So the idea that fluoride shows up in both things does not say that adding this to the water supply is buying you anything with respect to reducing tooth decay.
Look, honey, I got you a diamond ring.
That's a piece of coal. Well, it's made of carbon.
Right. I got you a carbon ring.
Right. Exactly. Yeah. So anyway, we're dumping garbage into water to reduce tooth decay.
We are assuming it does no harm until how many decades later are we?
I mean, you know, 70 years later or something?
I don't know. I didn't know that Dr.
Strangelove was invoking fluoridation.
So I guess probably the 50s at least.
Yeah, I think the 50s is where it's going to be.
But anyway, this doesn't make any sense.
And, you know, okay, maybe we can say that in 1950 people didn't Understand the complexity of biology and the hazard of novelty to biological creatures.
Essentially, the idea that you should bend over backwards to avoid disrupting these systems rather than disrupt them and then give them some other disruptor to correct for it.
None of this makes any sense.
You know, this monograph, which is full of this, you know, weaseling out of the obvious conclusion that one would naturally derive from the evidence that they have compiled.
But the point is, all of that evidence accumulated, that didn't just show up.
This is a monograph that assembles that evidence.
The signal that fluoride was causing a problem, or, you know, fluoride silicates, which is what is being added to the water, is causing a problem.
In terms of the intelligence of the entire population?
Can you imagine a bigger error than to make the population dumber?
To make the population dumber with a salt that contains one of two ingredients in a salt that was demonstrated to reduce tooth decay.
It could hardly be more insane.
Yeah. Yeah, I agree.
In that vein, I would like to share what I wrote for Natural Selections this week.
Last week I posted the speech that I gave at Rescue the Republic, and in that speech, and you can show my screen here if you like, in that speech, which I call here Childhood Under Attack, I went after a number of things, but I specifically went after what I call the new religion that is being propagated in schools, the science. And the science has no relationship to actual science.
We need actual science.
Children need actual science.
And as I say in that speech, we They need gardens and art and sport and actual science.
And what they're getting instead is being taught to, you know, subject themselves and comply with the authorities because the authorities, when they're wearing lab coats, are definitely the science and that's who you trust.
They're getting the great and powerful science.
They are, and you know, it's the science.
So this piece, this seems to be sort of what I am fated to be thinking about at the moment.
This week I wrote something that I call Technocrats in Science Skinsuits.
We're going to need science back.
So I'm just going to share this here.
Enrico Fermi wondered about her place in the universe.
The celebrated 20th century physicist was involved, among other things, in architecting the atomic bomb, so he had good reason for concern.
Sitting with scientist friends at lunch one day, considering the vastness of the cosmos, he asked, where is everybody?
Our galaxy alone has billions of stars that are similar to our sun, our sun being a fairly standard sort of a star.
Many of those billions of other sun-like stars almost certainly have Earth-like planets orbiting them, planets with a good likelihood of having liquid water at their surfaces.
And many of those other Earth-like planets are far older than Earth.
If even a tiny fraction of those life-amountable planets evolved life earlier than we did, we should expect some of them to have long since evolved sentient life, and in turn, for some of that sentient life to have invaded interstellar travel, and in turn, for some of them to have reached out by now.
There should, that is, be many other technologically advanced civilizations out there, and yet we seem to be alone.
And so the Fermi Paradox was born.
Where is everybody? Many possibilities have been considered.
Perhaps the conditions required for the evolution of life are far more unusual than we understand.
Being in the habitable zone around an appropriate star may well be necessary, but also insufficient.
Perhaps our moon is a critical piece of the equation, and Jupiter too, a gas giant of a planet that could almost have been a second sun.
Perhaps extinction events, over which a planet's inhabitants have little control, are more common than we'd like to imagine.
65 million years ago, more or less, an asteroid that was at least 6 miles in diameter smacked the Yucatan Peninsula.
This event is now usually credited with ending the age of dinosaurs and ushering in the age of mammals.
Giant space rocks are a credible threat.
Less intuitive, but also credibly threatening, are coronal mass ejections, pole shifts, and fluctuations in galactic magnetic fields.
Or perhaps sentient life has indeed evolved over and over and over again, but it keeps snuffing itself out before it manages to reach for the stars.
In that vein, some years back, I half-jokingly proposed that it was the inevitability of postmodernism that takes out civilizations and all of the sentient beings along with it.
This is a tweet of mine from 2018.
Everywhere in the universe, sentient beings will have math and a periodic table and evolution, although its instantiations will look different from ours.
These things are universal.
My fear is that they will also have invented postmodernism.
Hashtag Fermi paradox.
That's a great tweet. Thank you.
It was only kind of a joke.
Postmodernism has been defined a nearly infinite number of ways, but its starkest and most dangerous tenets include rejection of rationality and rejection of the very idea of an objective reality.
Postmodernism is destructive rather than generative.
It narrows one's field of view rather than expands it, cuts off possibilities rather than creating them.
It is, I think, anti-science.
And science is absolutely necessary for a civilization to thrive.
Science can be defined as a process by which we build knowledge through observation, hypothesis, and prediction.
By repeatedly attempting to prove ourselves wrong, to falsify our most cherished beliefs by putting our hypotheses to rigorous tests, we hope to incrementally arrive at a more complete and accurate understanding of the universe.
Science is not its results, though, a litany of facts.
It is also not inherently quantitative and certainly not inherently reductionist.
Postmodernism is adopted most enthusiastically by academics who eschew science consciously and intentionally.
Yes, its tenets and confusions are creeping into science, but postmodernism is not accomplishing the death of science on its own.
It's getting a lot of help along the way.
That's one thing. The technocrats who rule our world are bludgeoning us with something they call science.
It's not science, though.
The majority of modern people in the West were, through no fault of their own, poorly educated in the ways and means of science.
Faced with endless terms and processes to memorize, they became convinced that they're not good at science.
Once so convinced, they are easily swayed by the technocrats.
Technocrats win when the people are incapable of thinking scientifically for themselves.
The technocrats accomplish this by putting a kind of spell on the populace, placing them in the sway of something called the science, which the people cannot see has nothing to do with actual science.
Long before the rise of postmodernism, we saw attacks on actual science.
Gatekeepers arose in the form of federal agencies doling out research dollars, editors at scientific journals restricting publications, tenure committees declining to award tenure.
Gatekeeping is not the problem, though.
It's the gameable nature of the gates that's the problem.
If the gates being kept are gameable, the entire system is a farce.
Behind the facade of meritocracy is a network of connections.
You favorably review my paper and help it get published, and I'll favorably review yours.
Scientism becomes a stand-in for science.
Measurable, titratable units a stand-in for hypothesis and prediction.
Data-driven is proclaimed without irony to be the goal by generations of would-be scientists.
These are scientists with the appropriate degrees and grants and instrumentation and publication records.
These are also scientists without, apparently, any idea what it is that the scientific process is capable of.
Data do not come first in science.
Observational hypotheses come first.
Absent that, data are nothing more than numbers.
Numbers are easy to manipulate.
When data come first, data can quickly turn into propaganda.
Many would argue the benefits of science in terms of the practicality.
Look at all the problems it can solve, from curing disease to making travel safer and faster.
But I wish to make a different argument entirely.
Understanding how to wield the tools of science is an individual imperative for everyone.
For without that capacity, you are beholden to others and can be taken advantage of by anyone who claims the mantle of science.
That mantle is yours.
It is not theirs to have.
But in order to claim it and keep it as your own, you need practice discerning patterns and falsifying ideas, and you need a combination of confidence and humility.
Confidence and humility are the very things with which one does science.
I now fear, and I'm not even half-joking this time, that the resolution of the Fermi paradox may lie with the power-hungry technocrats who gatekeep actual science while wearing it like a skin soup.
Soup. I'm going to start that over.
I now fear, and I'm not half-joking this time, that the resolution of the Fermi Paradox may lie with the power-hungry technocrats who gatekeep actual science while wearing it like a skin suit.
Perhaps they do not realize that once they've killed off science, they will doom us all.
Increasingly, this feels like the key.
Yeah, I take from what you've written here that The practice of science, and I don't mean technological science, but the cognitive practice of science is something that does not, it atrophies if it is not used.
Well, and it never develops if children aren't in a place where they are encouraged to ask questions and are told by the people they're asking the questions of, wow, that's interesting. I don't know.
How would we figure that out?
Right. And so the reason I said atrophies is that I believe in ancestral circumstances, children would have been faced with adults and increasingly as they grew up been faced with each other and been able to answer questions using what we would recognize as a informal scientific method.
Now there would be elements of it.
That would be rare or absent.
Falsification is, you know, a late addition to this.
But the scientific way of approaching questions and discovering what is true and not true, utilizing it, is something...
It's like the capacity to play a musical instrument in the sense that it has to be fostered.
It doesn't happen accidentally.
So... Falsification is a late entry in terms of its explicit named role in Popperian philosophy of science, right?
But I think that everyone who has tried to make sense of their world and has done so without simply looking to the authority, be it a book or a person, to tell them what the answers are, You do that enough and you will end up having been wrong.
And you will discover that you were wrong.
And you will, if you are continuing to be an engaged, curious interpreter of the world, want to understand how it is that you came to be wrong so that you can have a lower chance of being wrong in the future.
And so there's an informal process of like, oh, that thing that I was pretty certain of turned out to be wrong, how did I miss it?
Like, what didn't I do?
What didn't I see? And I think people will, many people will discover an informal falsification process as a way by which to decrease their error rate going forward.
I agree. And I think what happens in the absence of a formalized method is actually a delicate balance arises.
Yeah. Because...
Well, that's the confidence and humility.
It's the confidence and humility.
Right. It's what Luca Turin described as the bipolar nature of science.
You have to fall in love with an idea and then you have to attempt to destroy it in order to do it properly.
Mm-hmm. Especially as you get into complex systems, you can overwield falsification.
Because the point is there's so much noise in a system that many observations appear to falsify something, but they're the result of something else you don't know.
And so knowing when you've actually falsified an idea because you've seen something that's simply incompatible with it, And when you haven't is an art.
And, you know, I agree with you.
In the absence of any of this formalization, people would develop all of this, including a degree of falsificationism, much to their benefit.
So I do think actually the last two things we talked about here fit interestingly together.
Oh, of course. There's a reason they showed up together here.
We have postmodernism absolutely destroying what would naturally be a skill that we would develop, and bureaucrats who don't know anything about all of this It's intervening in tooth health with the wrong salt and decreasing IQs.
And the point is, okay, the likelihood of you developing this on your own, A, you're going to go to school and you're going to sit in a room with people who don't know anything about this most of the time, which is going to prevent you from discovering it out in the world where you'd be playing as a child otherwise.
Yeah. And...
Well, in the... The ever greater technologizing of science makes it easier for the bureaucrats, the technocrats, to assure the public that it's not worth their time to try to learn this.
You can't possibly. It's too much.
It's too complicated. You don't have the degree.
You don't have the background. Trust us, we'll keep you safe.
COVID revealed to a lot of people that they can't actually trust those people.
They're not going to keep them safe. But it leaves a lot of people just, you know, flailing.
I'm like, well, what am I supposed to do then?
And the answer is not find a better technocrat.
The answer is, in part, do find people who are thinking carefully about these things and are willing to show you their thought processes and reveal to you when they're wrong and develop trust in appropriate people.
But even more important than that is develop enough skill in pattern recognition and idea falsification on your own such that you have yourself some autonomy and agency as you move about the world.
Yeah, it's another example where a process, an active process, has been turned into something that you consume.
Sports is once something we played, now it's something we watch, right?
Science is something that you're supposed to do.
It's a mental orientation, but it's now something that you receive from, you know, scientific oracles.
And the fact is, no, you're not going to know when they're lying to you and they have a lot of reason to.
Right. We have to get over, this consumer mentality thing has taken over life.
And increasingly, we need to, as you say in your piece, we have to recover these things.
We need that thing back. That's ours.
That's not yours to do and us to consume.
That's ours. It's ours, and we all need it.
We seem to have given it away.
But I think we can still get it back.
Yeah. We must.
We must. All right, I think that brings us to the end.
Yes, it brings us to the end. One final note.
Why so panicky?
Because the podcast could end and then it will be a week before we get another chance.
Here's the thing. Check your voter registration.
Voter registrations can be undone by people who don't want you to vote and it's very important that people I see it more like we are hurtling towards it.
It's the reference point question.
Are we moving through time and it's at a fixed point?
Or are we at a fixed point and time is moving around us?
I see us as moving through time.
I like it the other way just because it's new and different.
So I'm going to say we are at a fixed point.
Well, that would explain the panic that you introduced the last topic.
It was an actual panic, but you know, it did have...
The bug-eyed look. The bug-eyed, yes.
The bulging eyes, sure.
You did do that. Okay, so we're going to sign off with some stuff here, but then in about 15 minutes we'll be back with a Q&A. On Locals, please consider joining us there.
We will start with a question from the Discord server, which you can also access at Locals.
Lots of great stuff there. And all the past Q&As are up there as well.
We also have a number of upcoming schedule changes and such, and access to our store, all of which you can find at darkhorsepodcast.org.
And the store has a ton of great stuff, including, I think we mentioned last week, a number of people showed up at the rally wearing Dark Horse merchandise.
Including one of my favorites, do not affirm, do not comply, which is something that I also said in the speech that I gave at the rally.
And this refers, of course, to not affirming your child's gender identity fantasy with drugs or surgery and not complying with the state's edicts to poison your children because the state doesn't actually either know what's best for them nor have your best interests at heart, clearly. So Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply is up there as long-sleeved t-shirts, which you can again get to at darkhorsepodcast.org.
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