Taste the Science: The 253rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 253rd 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 follow the science to fewer cow farts. Bovear, an FDA approved product that is fed to cattle to reduce their production of methane, is the result of yet more reductionist, metric-heavy research that conflates complex systems with complicated ones. Bill Gates approves, though, so what could go w...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream episode number...
I forgot to look it up.
Is it 254?
3. 253. Yes.
253. I know nothing about its status being divisible or not divisible by things.
It is not prime.
Not prime.
That's sad, but I'm over it.
I know.
I knew you would be.
Yep.
Quickly.
Yes.
That's the thing.
You got to move on past these things.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You're Dr. Heather Hying.
It is...
I would say it's now very late November.
It is very late November.
Tomorrow is American Thanksgiving.
Which is a freaking rad holiday that I don't know why other people don't just simply adopt it for the turkey alone.
Yeah, you know, a lot of people do not like turkey.
I don't know what's wrong with them.
I don't get it.
It's really, I mean, it's not the most overwhelming thing, but it's very satisfying and properly cooked.
It's lovely.
I think in part because, especially in the United States, so many industrially produced turkeys have been bred for massive breasts, and it's hard to cook a bird that has been bred in that way.
And so you end up with really dry It's stringy, flavorless meat and people are like, why would I eat that?
To which I would say, yeah, why would you eat that?
Yeah, why would you eat that?
Yes, well, I will say over the many years of you cooking turkeys, you have absolutely mastered the art.
They are awesome year in and year out.
And I think if the world were to taste that turkey, it would change its tune.
It's good.
I'd say three things.
As close to an heirloom breed as you can find and afford, brine it in advance, and then make some really good gravy.
Make some really good gravy with the turkey bits and good salt and just good stuff.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that's the podcast for today and we're going to get to making that turkey.
Yeah, that's right.
Yes.
So thank you for those of you joining us from locals where there's a watch party going on right now.
Please consider joining us there.
And as always at the top of the hour, I'm actually not first.
We have three ads right at the top of the hour.
All right.
I'm so ready.
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Yes, I am going to be working here without Annette, because once again, she didn't show.
It never does.
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I would say that even the virtual metals, the paper they're printed on, it's made of atoms.
It's just not the same kind of atoms.
It involves atoms.
It's unavoidably involving atoms.
But the metal itself is made of atoms rather than zeros.
The zeros that are printed on paper.
That are conceptual.
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They write to atoms.
No, but they're made of atoms.
They're just not made of gold atoms or silver atoms.
All right, that's a fair point.
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You're the one who invoked Adams.
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You're nowhere close to top of class.
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I don't think even you get to new depths.
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I would hope not.
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No, I think I just replaced the T's with G's.
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Yes, if I never run into another one in my life, it will be too soon.
They're terrible.
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We struggle with this every time.
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I don't even know.
It's little pouches.
Little pouches, yeah.
And dissolves quickly in water.
Trot, a gallop, and a sachet.
That's the...
I don't think horses sachets.
They do.
You just have to get them going fast enough.
No, I think it's a slow...
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You would want to do it with a travel mug that had a lid.
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Maybe a travel horse, too.
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I know this is trivial and I think I've mentioned it before, but the beaker that they send you is actually really nice.
Yeah.
And I use it in cooking as well.
It's not an ingredient so much as a tool.
But where does it go in the kitchen?
That's the question.
Yes, when I got home from my trip last night, I found where you would put it and I put it back where it goes.
Yeah, we can talk about that when we get back to the kitchen.
We can diagram it so in the future I'll know.
Yeah, it goes with the glass measuring cups.
That makes sense.
This is a glass beaker with some...
Yeah, thematically speaking.
Yeah.
Now, the Peaks Nandaka with the sachets do not go with glass measuring cups.
They go with the part of the pantry that I have labeled morning drinks as separate from evening drinks.
Wow.
Yeah, I know, right?
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You do not need to have a special place in your pantry for it, but it does make it easy to find, and this stuff is great.
Easy to find and hard to file sometimes.
If you tuned in two weeks ago and saw us wrestle with those ad reads, you might think, oh my god, they're dry fasting again.
What is wrong with these people?
No, we're not.
It would be too soon.
Really not.
This was just, I don't know, it's pre-turkey whimsy.
Yeah.
It's, yeah, it's the, uh, it's not the Jitters.
It's not the Jiggers.
No.
And we've had nothing from Jiggers.
Nope.
Nope.
Nothing.
All right.
It's, it's, it's some sort of endogenous something, undoubtedly.
Awesome.
Yes.
So it looks like you're just ready to go.
Those notes are impressive.
Oh man, yes.
It's a wide open piece of graph paper on which we could do almost anything.
It's up to you.
I've got something.
You've got a couple things.
Why don't you start and I'll follow up.
I did not expect you to say that.
Then we're going to have, we're just going to start by having you, Jen, show the tweet from Arla Foods.
And from there, the video, about a minute long video, in which Arla Foods is introducing bovier for trial use in several of their farms in the United Kingdom.
And this is...
I guess I don't want to say a lot before we see the video.
So...
Yeah, the tweet.
Yeah.
Okay, so this is Arla Foods, which is not an outfit that I had heard of before.
We've just announced a new project with Morrisons, Tesco, and Aldi UK to trial the use of feed additive Bovier on about 30 Arla farms.
Bovier can reduce emissions from cows by 27% and this represents an amazing chance to reduce emissions on farm.
Hashtag agriculture, hashtag climate.
Let's check out what Arlen Foods has to say.
Fantastic new product.
I'm already inclined to welcome these people to complex systems.
That's the lesson here.
I'm Jade.
I'm Adam.
And we run a family dairy farm with 420 cows.
We've been ALA members for the last ten years and we've been in the innovation farm for the last five.
The latest innovation we're looking at is Beauvoir.
Beauvoir is a feed additive developed by Dutch company DSM that allows farmers to reduce enteric methane emissions from our dairy herds.
Enteric methane being what the cows produce during their natural digestive process.
Today we've been working with Arla and DSM as part of the Beauvais setup process, learning about what's involved and how we can make the pilot as successful as possible.
So the reason we're so excited about Beauvais is it's not just some fairy dust that somebody thinks might make some improvements, but it's been really rigorously and extensively tested.
Trials like these are really important to help reduce our carbon footprint.
We're really pleased that customers are joining us in investing in sustainability on-farm.
Farm Ahead custom ship.
All right, so that's happening.
This is a product that has been approved by the U.S. FDA already, although there are some computing products which we'll also talk about, which are even more impressive, apparently.
So let's just, if you can show my screen here, this is coming out of a, I think it's a Swiss-Dutch firm called DSM, and here is their product description of this Beauvier, Beauvier.
The proven solution for methane reduction.
Beauvais contributes to a significant and immediate reduction of the environmental footprint of beef and dairy products.
Just a quarter teaspoon per cow per day reduces methane emissions from dairy cattle by 30% and up to 45% for beef cattle on average.
So, mostly until the end here, I want to just put aside the assumption that what we need to be doing is reducing methane production across a lot of domains.
Just like, let's take that for granted.
Even if we assume.
Even if we assume that methane is a big part of the problem on the planet and that we need to reduce methane production.
And it is true that cows do produce a fair amount of methane.
And presumably the assumption here is that methane is worse than CO2. Yes, that is the assumption.
Okay.
And maybe you're going to tell us this, but are they pushing the carbon that would end up in methane towards CO2 or towards something else?
Do we know?
Boy, I have not seen that analysis here.
What I see them talk about is, yes, of course, it costs some carbon to produce this, but you save more by shutting down the methane production within the cow.
But then what happens?
Yeah, I mean, that can't be.
The carbon is going somewhere.
Right.
Yeah, so there's some sort of chemical transition into some other...
Of course.
Something or other.
There's a number of places we can go here, but I want to just show us what they're claiming, but also specifically then go into why...
You know, why do cows and other ruminants, specifically ruminants, produce methane in the way that they do?
And, gee, what might the trade-off be?
And what might it cost the cows and therefore the people who are eating the cows and their products, like dairy, if you have just shut that part off of what it is that they're doing?
So now available, DSM, the maker of Beauvier, says, a proven solution.
This is so tiny on my screen.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Why does Adobe always do that?
Okay.
Now available, a proven solution.
Bouvier is the most extensively studied and scientifically proven solution of the challenge of burped methane to date, with 100 plus on-farms trials in 20 plus countries and more than 70 peer-reviewed scientific studies.
Incidentally, it was not particularly easy to find those scientific studies that they are claiming have been done.
So here's their tick.
This is the maker of Beauvier's take, how it works.
In a cow's rumen, microbes help break down food.
This releases hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
An enzyme combines these gases to form methane.
Beauvier is a feed supplement that suppresses the enzyme.
So less methane gets generated.
Just a quarter teaspoon in a cow's daily feed takes effect in as little as 30 minutes.
As it acts, Beauvais is safely broken down into compounds already naturally present in the rumen.
Okay, so they've got, you know, why we really, really, really need to focus on methane in cows, a bunch of numbers because numbers mean science, And then they've got a bunch of their press, including their pamphlet, their brochure.
So we're going to go to their brochure next, which, you know, how cows can help us fight climate change.
No, that's just not...
Yes.
The proven solution to immediately reduce enteric methane from dairy and beef cattle.
An urgent focus.
Again, they are convinced, and we are taking it as an assumption that they are allowed to make at this point.
That, okay, methane is something that we need to get rid of.
All of these numbers, consumer preferences are shifting.
They are talking about what it's made from.
Nitrate in a bio-based alcohol sounds totally innocuous.
And look, if you do this, you can eat more ice cream, seems to be the message there.
And that's it.
It all seems very nice and kind, right?
Now, if I can just have my screen back for a second so I can figure out what to talk about next here.
Oh, I know what I've missed in that brochure.
If you want to show this again, here we go.
In this brochure next to the girl drinking, drinking, eating ice cream, we have a testimonial from Bill Gates.
One promising exception is a compound called 3-nitro-oxypropanol, which reduces methane emissions by 30%.
He writes that in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.
So if Bill Gates thinks it's safe, it must be fine.
Of course.
Right.
We also have the World Resources Institute saying this is one of 10 breakthrough technologies that can help feed the world without destroying it.
And the EU Commissioner for Health and Food Safety arguing that cutting farming-related methane emissions is key in our fight against climate change, and today's approval of Beauvais is a very telling example of what we can achieve through new agricultural innovations.
This is almost exactly the same playbook as what Pharma is doing with things like Ozempic, with everything that it's doing to our internal stuff.
Biological pathways.
Our pathways, our physiology, probably also our anatomy with regard to bone density and such, but certainly our physiology.
So let's just talk a little bit about where ruminants are.
So ruminants include cattle and goats and sheep and deer and antelope.
And there may be some things missing on that list, but that's a pretty good list.
So it's not a phylogenetic group.
It's a functional group.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a...
I think that's right.
Yeah.
Oh, it is.
Yeah.
Because you've got cervids and bovids.
Yeah, but...
I actually don't know for sure if cervids and bovids aren't sister to one another.
So I'm not actually sure about that.
And I did not look into it.
And...
But also deer and antelope playing on the range.
Which I don't...
Yeah, I don't think it's a phylogeny group.
So they're able to, because they basically have multiple stomachs and they eat food first that almost nothing else on the planet can take in and can digest.
And they mash it up with not very sharp teeth, and they send it to their first stomach, and then it goes through a fermentation process, it comes back up, they chew their cud, it goes back into a different stomach.
And it's this repeated—it's the multiple stomachs, it's the fermentation process, it's what are called the methanogens in the various parts of the stomach that are breaking down both dry forage, dead grass on prairies,
and also wet grass, live grass, that almost nothing else can do, that allows basically us to eat— Delicious ruminant meat and the dairy products of ruminants that they have made out of food that we could not begin to digest.
It is akin to the magic that plants do, turning sunlight into sugar.
These ruminants turn some of those Gosh, it's going to be mostly starches and grasses.
It's going to be polysaccharide chains.
Yeah, cellulose.
That no one can digest, no humans can digest into not just easy to digest meat and for some of us easy to digest dairy products, but delicious and nutritious and absolutely fantastic for us meats.
Yeah, it's a classic case where...
Ancestors use an animal to solve a problem that they cannot solve directly.
You know, you might also make the argument that the Salish use salmon to farm the seas.
The Salish can't access the deep ocean, but salmon do and the salmon reliably return and you can harvest them.
So it's that kind of trick.
I want to add one piece of color to what you described.
Yeah.
So ruminants are grinding up the cells of plants.
And then they are using this fermentation process to do a trick that it's not just humans can't digest these molecules.
No animal can digest cellulose without a symbiont.
So all of the animals that do this, including things like termites, have to use...
Cows of symbionts.
Right.
So you have these bacterial symbionts that are able to do a chemical trick that no animal has figured out how to do, which is an interesting question.
Why can't animals access the same chemical library?
You know, what is it?
Is it just simply because There are symbionts who can be partnered with, so there's never been an evolutionary pressure to do it, or something else.
Is there some reason that an animal can't do it directly?
Is there a chemical barrier, or is the selective pressure too low because these ones already exist?
Because symbionts are always easier to partner with.
And, you know, I don't think we know the answer to that question.
I certainly don't.
But anyway, the idea that there is vast...
Biological resource that is unavailable to us chemically, that we have animals that are an intermediate step because they've partnered with a bacterium that does this fermentation process is, you know, A, it's a really cool story, and B, it tells us something about The importance of these partnerships, right?
How rich is a habitat if you are lacking an animal who can do the intermediate step of turning this into meat which you can readily eat, you know, is quite good for you, right?
So, you know, it's a very different world if you don't have access to that.
And we're dealing with utterly ancient pathways, right?
The domestication of these animals on behalf of humans is, you know, thousands of years old.
So, you know, Okay, suddenly Bill Gates shows up, and he wants to alter that partnership, and he's sure it's safe, and it's obviously necessary to, you know, save us from boiling the oceans away.
It really is perfectly analogous to the human drugs for pharmaceuticals.
It's being touted as a feed additive, but it's a drug for cows to reduce methane emissions.
Right, and...
If you're a longtime viewer of this podcast, you can see this coming a mile away, right?
This is obvious complicated systems mindset intervening in a complex system, right?
This animal is involved in a complex relationship with both its human partners and its bacterial symbionts.
And Bill Gates shows up with an idea.
I know there's an enzyme that makes methane and methane is bad.
We're going to interrupt the enzyme.
You're going to do what?
All right.
So I do want to share a little bit of some of, a bit more, maybe just more flesh on the bones that you just did.
This is not a peer reviewed paper, but a high quality, pretty straightforward analysis from Mississippi State University Extension.
It's called Understanding the Ruminant Animal Digestive System.
And I'm going to just read a little bit from a PDF, but I'm going to include the links here in the show notes.
It's quite good.
It's quite thorough.
They talk about how the various parts of the stomach change over the lifespan of the animal as they're getting more and more grass.
But just the very end here, importance of ruminant livestock.
The digestive system of ruminants optimizes use of rumen microbe fermentation products.
This adaptation lets ruminants use resources, such as high-fiber forage, that cannot be used by or are not available to other animals.
Ruminants are in a unique position of being able to use such resources that are not in demand by humans, but in turn provide man with a vital food source.
Ruminants are also useful in converting vast renewable resources from pasture into other products for human use, such as hides, fertilizer, and other inedible products, such as horns and bone.
One of the best ways to improve agricultural sustainability is by developing and using effective ruminant livestock grazing systems.
More than 60% of the land area in the world is too poor or erodible for cultivation, but can become productive when used for ruminant grazing.
So, you know, this right here is in part an argument against feedlots and for actually letting cattle graze on land that are, as Mississippi State University Extension is arguing here, too poor or erodible for cultivation.
Ruminant livestock can use land for grazing that would otherwise not be suitable for crop production.
Ruminant livestock production also complements crop production because ruminants can use the byproducts of crop systems, not in demand for human use or consumption.
And developing a good understanding of ruminant digestive anatomy and function can help livestock producers better plan appropriate nutritional programs and properly manage ruminant animals in various production systems.
So there's that.
There's also this.
This is a...
Peer-reviewed paper from 2008, published in the Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture, in which these authors are beginning to try to figure out, because this is, you know, climate change is already a bug-a-bear.
Is that the right thing?
A bug-bear.
Bugaboo.
Bugaboo, a bugbear.
I don't even know.
I've forgotten what a bugbear is.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Climate change is already something that people are concerned about.
They're already talking about cow farts, right?
And so these guys are trying to think about whether or not this is something that could be done.
So the article title is Redirecting Rumin Fermentation to Reduce Methanogenesis.
And just a little bit from the abstract here.
The microbial ecology of the rumen ecosystem is exceedingly complex, and the ability of this system to efficiently convert complex carbohydrates to fermentable sugars is in part due to the effective disposal of H2 through reduction of CO2 to methane by methanogens.
Although methane production can be inhibited for short periods, the ecology of the system is such that it frequently reverts back to initial levels of methane production through a variety of adaptive mechanisms.
Hydrogen flow in the rumen can be modeled stoichiometrically, but accounting for H2 by direct measurement of reduced substrates often does not concur with the predictions of stoichiometric models.
Clearly, substantial gaps remain in our knowledge of the intricacies of hydrogen flow within the ruminal ecosystem.
So, yes, that's from 2008, you know, 15, a decade and a half ago, but they went looking for ways to deal with what is being touted as a problem, and again, we're just taking that on face value for the moment, and are saying,
you know, The models aren't working out, the stoichiometry doesn't quite match, so we've clearly got stuff missing from our models, and even when we do manage to reduce methane in cow guts such that they fart less, those systems adaptively revert back to having the methanogens basically, you know, take apart the byproducts of the fermentation and digestion happening in the cow stomachs, and methane is once again produced.
So, what this paper would seem to argue is whatever this Bovere and the other products that we'll talk about a little bit, or at least one of them, may be doing, even if it's a good thing to do for the climate, and even if it doesn't have downstream effects on the cows and therefore the meat and the dairy that we're eating of them, neither of which I think are Are positions that are actually defensible.
But even if both of those things are true, the likelihood that this is going to be a sustainable static thing that you could just keep giving these cows this feed additive all the time and methane production is magically going to disappear without anything else happening is highly suspect.
Yeah, in fact, I think you can make two highly likely predictions.
One is that the...
Carbon footprint and the ecological damage will go up because undoubtedly what selection has done is created the most efficient mechanism from the point of view of the cow that results in the production of methane.
So if you disrupt that, let's just take one highly likely example.
You've got all these feedbacks built into every biological mechanism.
If you dump, I don't, I'm curious, I bet you didn't run into it, but I'm wondering, there are a couple of different ways that you could disrupt enzymatic function.
So two general classes would be something called a competitive inhibitor.
A competitive inhibitor would be something that's shaped like the molecule that's supposed to interface with the enzyme so that, you know, some fraction of the time the enzyme gets something it can't process rather than the thing it's supposed to process, which would decrease the rate of function.
The other thing would be a non-competitive inhibitor.
A non-competitive inhibitor would be like a, imagine that you've got this machine, this squishy machine, and some magnet affixes to it and causes it to distort so that it doesn't function anymore.
Yeah.
I don't know what Bouvier is doing, but from this paper again, this Macalester Newbold paper from 2008, they talk about some of the attempts that have been made to reduce methanogens and immunization is one possibility.
So let me just share this.
Research in Australia suggests that vaccination against methanogens may be another plausible method for mitigating methanogenesis.
Immunization of sheep with a mixed whole cell preparation from three methanogens reduced methane production by 7.7%.
But when a mixed whole cell preparation from seven methanogens was used for immunization, no reduction of methane emissions from sheep was observed.
Great.
So that would function like a biological non-competitive inhibitor, which destroys or permanently gums up But here's the point.
Let's say you did that, okay?
Well, you've got a system.
Well, the immunization wouldn't be coming up enzymes.
It would actually be preventing the methanogens from showing up in the body at all.
I would think it's...
It sounded to me like they were going to immunize in such a way that was going to interfere with the processing that produces methane.
So it did sound to me like an immunization against...
Methanogenesis as opposed to the actual.
So basically they're going to create an autoimmune disorder in the animal where the animal is going to attack its own enzymes, which is a completely inelegant way of doing this, by the way.
But anyway, let's say you do that.
Okay.
So one response that you would expect the biological creature to have, I mean, imagine here's what you should imagine.
These creatures are out there eating stuff in the wild.
Their ancestors were.
Yeah.
The stuff that they're eating doesn't want to get at.
So what it does is it fights back with every known chemical interfering thing it can come up with.
It'll come up with non-competitive inhibitors, it'll come up with competitive inhibitors, it'll come up with triggers for autoimmune disorders, whatever it can find.
So you would imagine that the system built into the critter is going to have to respond to, all right, we've produced the amount of enzyme that should work.
It's not resulting in the product.
Therefore, we increase the amount of enzyme.
So what does that predict that we will see is an animal that will have its natural reaction to something interfering with a natural pathway within it, and it will ramp up the production of these enzymes.
What will the consequence of that be?
Well, let's imagine best case scenario.
Best case scenario, it doesn't have any impact on the creature's health or well-being.
All it does is we have to factor in the inefficiency of the organism and it has to forage over a larger piece of land to sustain its body mass.
Right?
So the point is, how much does each cow cost?
That's not a simple metric, you know, and you can just shift this one, you know, you can shift carbon away from methane.
The point is, well, what's the net impact?
Does the animal, you know, have to eat more?
And therefore, what's the net impact on methane production?
Does it...
There will also be drug tolerance, of course, because the body will be adapting to To have enough methanogens to do the job it needs to do in order to make nutrients from this low-quality forage.
And so you will need to add more and more of this feed additive to do the job that Bouvier is trying to do.
God, that must horrify the manufacturer.
Yeah, that you would need to use more and more of its product over time, right?
So one thing I would predict is slam dunk.
If the animal was producing methane and you're interfering with that, the animal is going to need to feed over a larger piece of land and eat more stuff in order to get where it's going.
Except most of the cows that are getting this are feedlot cows.
Even so.
So then the point is they are indirectly foraging on fields of corn somewhere.
And so you're going to need more of those fields of corn, which must horrify the corn producers, right?
So inefficient cows is one thing.
You can just say that that's essentially certain here because you're interfering with some process that evolved in a mechanism that prizes efficiency.
Here's another not quite as certain, but pretty damn close.
This is going to create meat that is less healthy.
Absolutely.
And so, I mean, that's what I went looking for.
When I saw this video this morning, I was like, oh my god.
This is appalling.
These cows can't be as healthy as they were when their methanogens were what they were.
So what is the effect going to be?
And I see no evidence of that question having been asked, aside from the most reductionist, most short-term level.
Yeah, and it's not just the meat, too.
Dairy cows.
And so one thing you might imagine, okay, so you've got a mother cow who you're feeding this garbaged up food, and this mother cow is parenting calves, or you're milking her and she's as if parenting calves.
And of course, milk isn't just food, is it?
We've covered that on the podcast multiple times.
So there's immunological messages in there.
Is the mother expected to put immunological messages about this poison that you've introduced into her food, into her calves' food, which you will then be drinking, and then you know what's going to happen?
Oh, this is so predictable.
The FDA is going to discover that it can't tell the difference between the milk that has this stuff and doesn't have this stuff.
And any source of dairy that hasn't used this stuff will be forced to put a label on it saying that the FDA has declared there is no clinically...
They have found no...
...difference between, you know, milk-containing RBST and not, to use the actual historical example here.
Right.
The recombinant bovine and somatotropin.
And of course, the same flaw in the logic will be there, which will be completely invisible to customers, which is, you know, if you're talking about a hormone or you're talking about a antibody, you are literally talking about nanotechnology.
These are not things where the amount of toxin is proportional to the effect.
You're talking about biologically tuned molecules where an individual molecule can have an impact.
A hormone molecule finds a receptor.
The fact that the FDA can't find the hormone molecule is irrelevant because the point is biology created these things to be hyper-efficient so that one tiny molecule that, yeah, the FDA can't find, has an impact on a receptor somewhere.
It's nanotech.
Yeah, it's nanobiotech.
It's nanobiotech.
And so, you know, okay, so you're going to raise these cows on this forage.
And mind you, you can't really add this to grass.
Well, there's the new product, which we'll get to shortly.
They've got three different form factors that they are hoping to deliver it to, so including for free-ranging cattle.
Oh, so you can spray it on the grass?
Great.
Yeah, and boy, that's low carbon footprint.
So, okay, it's hard to add to grass because you got to get it on all of the...
I think it's actually like a slow-release pill.
I don't know.
I didn't pay a lot of attention to the drug delivery system from the various...
One of the reasons I didn't go into farming was I didn't ever want to have to pill a cow, but...
It might be a lot easier than pilling certain cats.
I still don't want the job.
You know, it was one reason on a list of a thousand reasons, but...
Made the list, though.
Oh, yeah.
Doesn't want to pill a cow.
I don't want to pill a cow.
But, I mean, for lots of reasons, I don't want to have to look in the eye afterwards.
Like, why'd you do...
You know, it's hard enough with a dog, and you can talk to a dog.
Yeah.
The cow's just going to fart on you.
You stand at the other end.
But the...
You're doing something to the animal that causes it not to be able to process its food in the way that it has been, its ancestors have been processing food for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years.
Literally the result of the fermentation process that is what allows them to make themselves out of such low quality food that nothing else can do it.
Right.
Okay.
So here's one thing you're going to do.
I mean, almost just by definition, you're going to stress the cow.
Okay.
Having stressed the cow, How healthy is the meat going to be?
I mean, we know that feeding it stuff that it's not, I mean, the obvious example here is corn, right?
We now know that there's a health difference between cows that have been eating the stuff that they're supposed to eat and cows that are eating the stuff that's economically convenient for us to feed them.
That's a good segue here.
You know, that damages the meat from the point of view of the human consumer, right?
And that's a pretty, you know, that's a pretty comparatively elegant intervention.
I think part of what's going on is that some of the would-be overlords have finally figured out that there's a bunch of us who are like, I'm not eating your fake meat.
I'm not interested in all of your totally fake products.
And so there was a move to transform something that can still be called by the same name it used to be called into something that is actually radically new.
And so just like with appeal, which we talked about some amount of time ago, where they're going to be putting a coding On fruit, including fruit that could still be slapped with the label USDA organic, which is going to absolutely affect the rate at which that fruit ages and you won't be able to tell.
And so while it is absolutely imperative as a human being that when you are choosing fruit, be it off a tree or in a market, that you hold it and you smell it and you feel it, this appeal product basically prevents you from using your senses to know how old or fresh this fruit is.
Similarly, there will be no way to know, especially if it is not necessarily labeled.
And yet, you know, yes.
You know, is this a hypothesis?
Sure.
Is the meat and the dairy from cows that have been treated with this Bouvier crap going to be of lower quality and potentially even bad for human health in a way that actually grass-fed and finished and free-range cattle and dairy from those cattle is not?
Yes.
Yes, it will.
Yeah.
So, all right.
We got two predictions.
One is the meat's going to be less healthy.
The meat and the milk are going to be less healthy.
Subsidiary predictions, the FDA will not be able to detect that.
It's going to take decades for that information to...
They probably just need better instrumentation.
They need to start over with a fresh sheet of paper.
But okay, so the meat and milk are going to be lower quality.
The impact on the net contribution to climate via chemical production is going to be really disappointing if you do a full accounting because of the inefficiency that you're introducing into the system at multiple different levels, which of course will not Um, disturb anybody who's making money off this.
Um, and then I would say a third prediction, which isn't so much about the biology, but about the sociology here is just like appeal.
We are not going to be allowed to know where it is.
We are going to be told there's no distinction and it is going to be excluded from our right to know, which, uh, Again, breaks informed consent.
Exactly.
It breaks informed consent, which I will remind people for the thousandth time, used to be a hanging offense, a literal hanging offense.
Violating people's right to informed consent was a hanging offense at the end of World War II, and we are now violating it on the regular across the food supply and pharmaceutical companies.
And again, I think that part of how it's being done is that we are still calling things by their old names, even when they have been so modified that they really want a new name.
But you call it beef.
What do you mean?
You bought beef.
It's just beef.
We don't need to tell you about it.
It's beef.
No?
No.
You have done something fundamentally different to it.
Yeah, and this began, I would point out, I think it began, maybe there's a history beyond this, but with the idea of natural flavors.
Natural flavors has an obvious intuitive meaning that does not match the definition that we now apply.
It now applies to things that conceivably could be in nature rather than, oh, this came from nature.
And that's an egregious violation of reason.
So, Cirrus on our Discord server pointed this book out to me and actually has asked for our next Q&A for me to talk about it.
So it's called The Ecology of Care, Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.
I'm not fully done with it yet.
By and large, I'm pretty blown away by it.
I find it is naive in a few regards, mostly over in climate change territory.
But again, the subtitle is Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.
And she does a lot of talk about soils, soil health, soil ecology, the microbial communities and soils.
And there's a bit in here, page 179, a little offset thing called, But I Thought Cows Were Bad for the Climate.
She says, feedlot beef is one of the most fossil fuel-dependent foods we eat.
For a single calorie of industrially farmed, grain-finished beef, farmers use 35 to 40 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce it, and that does not include transportation or processing.
So, and this is me now, not her, that's the thing that we always hear about, right?
Like, beef is not just bad for you, wrong, but inherently bad for the climate, also wrong.
She continues, If the land is managed properly to mimic natural grazing patterns, actually becomes a negative footprint, turning atmospheric carbon dioxide into living carbon in a multitude of forms.
Those fuel-efficient grass-fed calories also translate into an exceedingly nutrient-dense and therefore efficient form of calories for us.
Arctic explorers and Inuit hunters lived for months at a time, with no adverse health effects, on nothing but pemmican, dried meat and fat from grazing animals mixed with a few berries, because it was the most dense and efficient food they could carry.
One of many reasons to disbelieve the fear-mongering over eating beef, and there are many, many more reasons, but compare that analysis to the reductionist, Follow the science TM style analysis that we're seeing come out of this DSM company, which is making Bouvier.
And when I went and looked to see what else DSM was making, I found This.
So we have, this is a PDF of their website, but I'll link to the website also.
This is, you know, our science and research.
Science holds the key to progress.
Our research unlocks the door.
Proven science that improves lives.
Innovation with purpose.
What's not to love?
How the numbers add up.
Again, numbers because numbers say science and you can just like not pay attention because we got this.
We got the numbers.
We're hungry for progress.
I'm gonna just, the stuff that I've got highlighted here.
This is some of the products that they've got in the works or happening right now.
Natural, this is too small again.
Natural extraction.
They've got Vertis Canola Pro, our new plant-based protein isolate.
They've got dynarome, a delicious culinary paste that recreates the juiciness and succulents of animal fats.
They've got the one we've been talking about under the category cutting-edge chemistry, bovir, a first-in-class small molecule that selectively inhibits enteric methane formation in ruminants.
They've got under microbiome support Glycare, the broadest portfolio of human milk oligosaccharides for healthy microbiome development in formula-fed infants.
And under data science, the world's first ever flavor created by artificial intelligence, a delicious, lightly grilled beef taste for use in plant-based meat alternatives.
High-precision engineering of proteins and strains with sustainability in mind, all in a fraction of the time needed for traditional approaches.
You know, you can almost taste the science.
And it's probably happening at the speed of science, too.
Undoubtedly.
Yeah.
Under the great and benevolent science, Anthony Fauci.
Yes.
He's probably on the board.
You will be pleased to hear there's plenty more where that came from.
And let's see if there's anything else.
Ah, we're not comfortable sitting on the fence, they say.
Sometimes you have to pick a side, and we're on the side of life.
Really?
On the side of life now?
Oh, okay.
Well, that's a fascinating self-delusion that you've got going.
Yeah.
So, just one more.
Actually, I don't remember.
Okay, I'm not going to show that.
MIT Tech Review, this October, October 1st, 2024, published a piece as one of their 2024 climate tech companies to watch, Ruminate and its bovine supplements.
So this is a competitor to Bovier, to the product made by DSM that I was just showing you.
Cowburps, MIT Technology Review writes, Are one of the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
Ruminate is designing supplements to cut down on the methane.
Now, wait a minute.
Yes?
That is the second time that cow burps have shown up here.
As opposed to the farts.
Yeah.
Yes.
And my sense is that there was a meeting somewhere and they decided, you know, if we're going to sell this stuff to the public, we've got to stop talking about farts.
And so anyway...
This just sounds like cows are being polite.
Right.
So somebody in PR land decided to sell, you know, the idea of this technological improvement of food, but, you know, prettied up so that we don't talk about the entire...
Yeah, because their hooves won't reach, so you have to reduce it enterically.
Yeah, I guess so.
Yeah.
So just a couple things from this...
It's the same kind of product, but their pitch in themselves is even more strong than Bouvier.
So, Ruminate's technology works by interrupting the steps within a cow's rumen that lead to the production of methane.
Upwards of 10% of a cow's energy goes to making methane as a byproduct of digestion.
The methane is just a side effect of fermentation in the stomach.
That's the piece I really want to put here.
They've added the word just there.
They don't know, and I'm pretty certain they're wrong, but they've added the just there to make it seem like they're just dealing with this little side effect.
It wouldn't be better for us, for the cows.
They don't have to burp all the time.
I mean, who would, right?
The methane is just a side effect of fermentation in the stomach, and by interrupting the process, the treatment lets the animals save energy, which can then go towards producing more muscle and milk.
The greater the methane reduction, this article claims, the greater the productivity gain.
Now, wait a minute.
You're going to interrupt a process and claim that there's an energetic benefit to doing it.
You've just spoken illogic.
This is how they're pitching it to the cattle owners.
They're pitching it on the basis that, yes, you have to buy this thing, but not only will your cows burp less, and therefore maybe you get some carbon offset credits or whatever, but you're actually going to get more meat and dairy out of those cows because they're turning that methane into meat and dairy, which Really?
Why weren't they doing it all along then?
Right.
You know, I mean, actually our book gives you the perfect tool for this.
The enzymes with which the methane is being produced are the consequence of an adaptive process.
These are highly complex molecules that exist over evolutionary time, are not reduced even though the amount of them in these animals will vary.
So, the point is, for the animal to be going through the step of producing those enzymes, those enzymes have to be producing more value to the animal than they are costly, and they are significantly costly.
You know they're there for a reason.
And here you have classic laboratory bio bullshit where because we don't know what the value of this pathway ending in methane is, they're going to claim it doesn't exist.
If you're a byproduct, there's no cost to interfering with it.
In fact, there's a benefit, right?
You know, you can smell this one a mile away.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I think we already did it, but let me just read one more paragraph from this MIT Tech Review article from October of this year.
What I just read, they say, that's Ruminate's pitch.
The company says its treatments can reduce methane by more than 50%, significantly higher than competitors like Bovier, the only such additive approved by the US FDA so far.
So again, Bovere, although it's hitting the news right now because of what's going on in the UK, it's already been approved by the FDA. So I don't know to what degree it's already being used in the United States.
But the cattle's measurable improvements in productivity with Ruminate products means they should be an easier sell to farmers.
Their extra spending on a supplement that reduces methane not only is good for the planet, arguable, but could also pay for itself by generating more meat and milk, extremely arguable.
And then just finally, key indicators.
Notable fact, Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures led fundraising for the company, helping Ruminate secure $12 million last year in its third investment round.
Oh my god.
That's just insane.
And I would...
It's implicit in much of what we've said.
But the only way to know what the net impact of this is would be to analyze the entire system.
You cannot zoom in on the rumen of these animals and know what the impact is.
You have to zoom out.
You have to understand how much land they're going to need to feed them, whether it's from corn farmed elsewhere or they're foraging on grass in a local environment.
You need to know how long it takes them to get to market because they're spending energy even just staying warm.
You know, if it takes them an extra half a season because they're being less efficient about processing their food, that all has cost.
The number of different things you would have to analyze is gigantic.
And of course, these biotech morons have an incentive to not analyze it all.
Because what are the chances that this is actually net positive, you know, from the point of view of impact on cow health, impact on human health, impact on environment, impact on climate.
And those are two separate things.
Yes.
Right.
So what are the chances?
I would say the chances are approximately zero.
Approximately zero.
But this, I mean...
Full circle here.
What do the tech utopians always get wrong?
Is the distinction between complicated systems and complex systems.
They think of themselves as gods and they look to the limited number of past successes wherein either there weren't any downsides or much more likely they have hidden the downsides from themselves or the downsides haven't yet revealed themselves.
And It would be hard to feed as many humans as want to be eating cows with entirely pastured cattle at this point.
Although, again, they can make more cow out of such unproductive lands, and specifically if they are in situations in which they are bunched together as if they were herding themselves in protection from predators,
they end up creating Better soil health, better regeneration of the plants on which they are grazing, and you can rotate through and get actually regenerative agriculture with cows that actually taste delicious and are nutritious as opposed to this Feedlot garbage,
where the cows are unhealthy, the corn that's being fed to them is being raised in an unhealthy way off-site, and then those people who are living near those fields are eating glyphosate and runoff and all the other crap.
None of this matches how humans were eating even 150 years ago.
Even 150 years ago.
I'm struggling for the analogy.
I mean, it is the complex versus complicated systems thinking.
You can see it in the way that they describe it, right?
The way they describe it is the type specimen of complicated mindset rather than complex.
And it's hard to describe how insane this is.
It's like if I said, you know what?
We're going to run an experiment.
We're going to sideline all aviation inspectors for, you know, Friday the 12th of February.
Right?
Okay.
And then we're going to measure the impact on aviation.
Maybe there isn't any.
I got an idea.
If we eliminate the inspectors altogether, look at the savings that we'll have.
For one thing, we'll get an increase in the rate of air travel because the amount of time that aircraft are sidelined in inspection will go down.
The number of people that we have to pay to do this job will go down, so the price of tickets is going to go down.
So, one of the pieces in that allegory?
I don't know.
I don't think it quite got allegory.
Reducto ad absurdum.
Very good.
One of the lessons there is another thing that we have been talking about for decades, but I don't think have invoked that recently, which is...
In our world, it's the ecology versus evolutionary lens.
Ecological perspective versus the evolutionary lens.
And it's basically saying, why is reductionism so dangerous?
Why is reductionism masquerading as what science is so dangerous?
Because you can almost always pick a moment, a particular instantiation of a thing and go like, Careful, careful, careful.
Ah, see, no effect.
We're good.
We're good.
On Friday, February 12th, we took out all the inspectors and nothing bad happened.
Therefore, we can just get rid of them all together.
This one particular moment that tends to be the way ecological analysis works Which is short-term snapshot, that's the thing, inherently misses the longitudinal, which is to say the temporal aspect of, you know, what is the process?
What is the trajectory?
What kinds of things have this system looked like in the past?
What kinds of rare events is it likely to be able to withstand?
What kinds of rare events won't it be able to withstand?
Because they've literally, they're so rare, they've never happened.
And this one day that we were looking at it, was that even typical?
And what does typical mean?
Because it's focusing on, at some level, matter versus energy.
It's focusing on a thing as opposed to the entire process.
And in the case of anything biological, which is going to involve all of agriculture, immunology, medicine, all of these things, psychology, you're dealing with a system that is inherently built out of layered negative feedback systems.
So, you know, the first question, were there any honest journalists left?
The first question they would have to ask in a system like this is, can you describe the negative feedback systems in which the process you're interfering with is embedded?
What is your mechanism for detecting feedbacks that you are interfering with that you did not spot on the front end?
Right?
None of this complicated thinking Deals with this at all.
The point is, hey, I know this one thing.
I read it in the textbook.
And wouldn't it be cool?
Methane is bad.
In my religion, methane is bad.
And methane is produced here, a lot of it.
And you know what?
It's produced by an enzyme.
What if we interfere with the enzyme, right?
What if we take the alternator out of the car?
It'll still run.
It will, for a little while, right?
It's that.
It's, you know, how many of these systems are we going to let the morons ruin?
Well, and that's why, just to go back to this paper, this Redirecting Ruin Fermentation to Reduce Methanogenesis.
Macalester and Newbold from 2008. They're agriculture and agri-food people, agri-food people.
They're actually, they're trying, they are, I think, on balance, kind of on the wrong side of this.
However, they say in their abstract, although methane production can be inhibited for short periods, the ecology of the system is such that it frequently reverts back to initial levels of methane production through a variety of adaptive mechanisms.
That's it right there.
I was just so pleased, and they do a decent job in the paper itself of expanding on that.
It is a rare acknowledgement to see in a paper, especially a paper that is effectively applied science.
This isn't, you know, how do cows work.
This is how do cows work on behalf of us who want to eat them, which is applied science and which will tend to be driven by a particular preferred outcome, which is not how science is supposed to work, but it so often does.
Yeah.
I mean I agree that that sentence captures it all of course biology you know because of course plants will have interfered with this and every other process that a cow uses to steal their leaves right you know I mean that's such is nature welcome to complex systems yep there it is okay all right well that was fascinating and disturbing thank you um All right.
I wanted to talk about a piece of correspondence that showed up in my email, which suggests another landscape of horror.
Oh, good.
So actually, Jen...
Today in landscapes of horror.
If you would show the email that I received from a reporter at the BBC. Okay.
So the letter reads, Dear Brett Weinstein.
That's me, by the way.
That's not in the letter.
I was just commenting.
I am a journalist with the BBC World Service Languages Disinformation Team based in the UK. We are currently looking at the disinformation being amplified on, quote, the Diary of a CEO podcast.
We have found that in the episode you were invited to, you shared false information which, if followed, could lead to patient harm, i.e.
negative outcome for those following that advice.
We plan to publish a story on the BBC's platforms in England and by BBC... Oh, in English, right.
Which is what they speak in England, so it's related.
And by BBC World Services in other languages and would like to provide you with the opportunity to respond to our findings.
Specifically, we are likely to make reference to the following.
Before appearing on the podcast, you spread climate change conspiracies and anti-vaccine conspiracies, among many others.
Could you?
On the podcast, you promoted 17 harmful claims.
These include widely debunked statements such as that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are more effective than the COVID-19 vaccine and that the COVID vaccine was a kind of gene therapy.
I know.
We would be grateful for a written response.
Oh, but wait a minute.
So, harmful.
They didn't say that those were disinformation, actually.
They just said they're harmful.
We would be grateful for a written response by no later than 17 o'clock GMT, UK Local, on the 28th of November, 2024. If you have any further questions, feel free to email me, Jackie Wakefield.
Now, I will say, Jackie Wakefield gets a point.
Does she?
Yes, she does get a point.
She actually reached out, and she actually gave me enough time for me to respond to her.
Not a ton of time, but enough time that I could, in principle, write back to her.
Now, what she would do with what I wrote back, I don't know.
But I do, you know, as much as I find this ridiculous...
The opportunity to actually respond is journalistically responsible.
And so anyway, Jackie, thank you for doing that.
I do want to say that she is part of an endeavor.
I've lost track of the title of it, but she is effectively...
On the BBC's disinformation beat, which is preposterous on its face, right?
This is just more of the same bullshit that we saw at the Stanford Internet Observatory and the ill-fated Ministry of Truth.
The whole idea that there's a group of people who are possessed of the facts, who are in a position to say who amongst us is speaking about things that are counter to the facts, is of course insane on its face.
The facts are something that we arrive at having had a vigorous discussion in which different perspectives that can't be reconciled are allowed to compete with each other.
And we discover, frankly, Jackie, I don't know if you know this, but the test is who has predictive power.
That's how we know which facts are correct.
Not because we looked them up on some official looking website in which the CDC told us what was true or something like that, which is presumably the method that you are using.
The CDC, which during COVID at one point, the head of it admitted that she was getting her information from CNN. Right.
So it's a circle jerk at best.
A circle jerk at best.
I'm going to try not to name the episode that, but...
In any case.
So, A, I find something interesting about this.
For one thing, that episode of Diary of a CEO has been widely circulated and very well received in a lot of different quadrants.
I was not aware of Diary of a CEO until they invited me to go on the program.
I was very impressed with what they did.
And so they came to LA, they flew me down, and were very well researched on topics that I was interested in.
The host, Stephen Bartlett, was excellent at engaging in dialogue, giving good pushback.
Anyway, I thought it was a great podcast.
And the audience seems to have really liked it as well.
And fascinating because, as you said, you hadn't heard of them.
There's just not that much overlap before then between what has become your and to some degree our audience and what is their audience.
So it's a great way to actually cross-foster and actually...
Have conversations across significant differences, if you will.
Used to be something we talked about at Evergreen before Evergreen melted down.
But yeah, and in fact, this, I believe it addresses one of the major mysteries here, which is this podcast didn't just emerge.
This podcast came out in August.
Oh.
And somehow now the BBC has decided to report on all of this dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Well, I'm sure they're backlogged.
There's a lot of disinformation to cover.
Well, I suppose.
But I think what's really going on here is that this actually was a crossover episode.
You know, if you or I go on Joe Rogan's podcast, most of the audience is already familiar with the heterodox take and it won't be the first time that they've heard skepticism about things that the New York Times assures them are true and all of that.
So how much danger does it pose?
Mm-hmm.
Well, a lot less than going on a major British podcast where the audience is much less familiar with these things.
So maybe the thing to do is actually to show a couple of clips from this podcast so people can get the sense that this was not a, you know, Wild-eyed, uncareful, you know, romp through conspiracy land.
This was a reasoned discussion and that what Jackie Wakefield is suggesting is the promulgation of conspiracy theories was a discussion about these things.
You know, the usual kind of self-skeptical discussion that you get here on Dark Horse or when you and I go on Other podcasts, it was us being careful scientists and, you know, yes, discussing heterodox ideas, but doing so carefully.
So let's show a clip or two.
And what mission are you on?
And when I asked that second question, I'm looking at the full body of your work and I'm trying to encapsulate it maybe in just a couple of sentences.
Sure.
I am an evolutionary biologist.
Okay.
So anyway, you get the sense of what Stephen Bartlett is like, and I found him to be not just very good at his job as podcast host, but also kind of a lovely person who is deeply interested in things and deeply concerned about the well-being of Earth and civilization and his audience and all of that.
All right, do we have another clip?
I've done a lot of thinking about the game theory of human competition.
And one thing has struck me in recent years, which is that there's a reason that communism continues to reemerge.
It doesn't work, so why would people keep landing there?
And I think it is unfortunately the natural consequence of a meritocracy that does not take care of those who lose.
If you have a meritocracy where the way to have a decent life is to figure out how to provide something that people want, right?
But you don't have a plan for the people who try that and it doesn't work for whatever reason.
Then what you'll end up with is a large number of people who will correctly understand that they are on the losing end of a bargain.
Those people don't have an investment in keeping that system running.
They want to overturn it.
In fact, with some cause, they will look at all of the fortunes that have been created in that meritocracy and they will say, do you realize how much of that is illegitimate?
Do you realize how much of that was parasitic?
We want it back.
And so I think communism is, you know, game theoretically, it can't be made to work.
It has a fundamental flaw at its heart, which is that it punishes those who contribute and it rewards those who don't.
Such a system will inherently be unproductive.
Okay, so you get the sense of the tone, and it was a long podcast.
It was three hours, and we covered a lot of topics, including concerns that have been aired here on Dark Horse about, you know, the danger that the sun cycles pose to planet Earth, skepticism about the conventional climate narrative.
All of these things, you know, and we talked a lot about COVID and what happened to civilization as a result of it and what sorts of technologies were imposed on us and what their physical harm was and all those things.
And you can see in Jackie Wakefield's letter to me That she just simply takes the conventional wisdom as if it were simply true, right?
She says that I trafficked in the idea that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine work better than, quote, the COVID vaccines.
Well, I'm sorry, Jackie.
There is evidence that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin do work better than the so-called COVID vaccines.
In fact, I would ask you to look into Norman Fenton and Martin Neal's work on what they call the cheap trick.
Right.
The cheap trick, which you are undoubtedly unaware of, is the mechanism by which the efficacy of the so-called vaccines was simulated, right?
And what it involved was a statistical manipulation in which by counting people as unvaccinated until they were two weeks out, From the vaccination process, all of the COVID that they came down with was credited to the unvaccinated group, which creates something above 80% apparent efficacy for vaccines, and it would do so even if those vaccines contain nothing but saline.
It has nothing to do with the impact of the vaccines themselves.
So I will say, in case Jackie Wakefield wants to find that, I find that we talked about that in episode 185. In an episode we called, Why Would They Lie About That?
And that will link to Fenton and Neil's work.
Yes.
So, in any case, yeah, what you think is a fact about the efficacy of the mRNA COVID vaccines was actually a trick that was played on the public.
And you will find similar tricks were played to produce the impression that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine did not work on COVID. Now, if you had been a viewer of Dark Horse, you would know that actually there's every reason to expect that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would be effective on the basis that they are highly effective across mRNA viruses.
And B, you would know that even the studies that are used to portray them as ineffective, if you look past the presentation of those studies into the actual evidence, the data within those studies, you will find that even though the studies were badly structured, they were effectively self-sabotaging studies, that the efficacy was high enough that it showed even in those data sets.
So I'm not telling you what to believe.
What I'm telling you is that if you think the truth is simply over here and that I somehow am either unaware of the truth or am dishonest about what I know, you are misunderstanding how it is we come to find out what is true.
That is a process from which there is no cheat sheet.
There is no There is no institution that can hand you a list of the things that are simply true and that you can depend on.
And any understanding of the history of science would tell you this, right?
What we now understand to be the truth about everything, including the earth going around the sun...
Was once thought to be misinformation.
So what the hell are you doing with your life?
Right?
You have decided to become the finger-wagging hall monitor of truth because you think you can look it up somewhere?
No, you can't.
And you are not doing the public a service.
That is what we would have expected to be downstream of the way that children are taught in school now.
Right.
That knowledge comes from the authority who already has the knowledge and from the books on the shelves.
That is where knowledge comes from, not from personal discovery and creativity and direct experience.
Not from a process.
Right.
It is the process that matters.
And, you know, one of the reasons that you will find that Heather and I take the approach we do, that I took the approach that I did in the podcast that you're analyzing, is because people need to see that process in order to understand what they could possibly trust.
Yes.
Right?
Not, here is what I believe to be true and you should believe it, but here is what I believe to be true and here is how I arrived there.
Here's the point at which my position changed and here's the thing that changed it.
More even to the point then so that people can know what they can trust.
So that people can learn to execute the process themselves.
Because we all, almost every single human being has the capacity to think scientifically in this regard.
And that doesn't mean that we're expecting that everyone is going to go out and start running PCRs.
No, it's this process of both induction and deduction and falsification and prediction by which you arrive at answers that you become ever more certain without ever being actually certain that you have probably arrived at the right answer because you have tried and tried and tried to falsify your most cherished beliefs.
This is what we all need to be doing.
And if COVID didn't reveal that to you or anyone else, then you probably ended up making some decisions that even if you don't regret them now, you will.
Because we got sold a whole bill of goods about what was right for us and what was wrong, and pretty much always it was backwards.
Yeah.
Yeah, backwards and dangerously so.
And I want to switch from the COVID narrative to the climate narrative, which she takes me to task here.
Now, I have not gone back to the podcast and listened to what I said, but I certainly know what my position is, and so I know from what it will have been derived.
Yeah.
What I have said many times is that I believe the Arrhenius equation is correct.
The Arrhenius equation tells us that there is a heat-trapping capacity of certain things, including CO2. Okay?
So, the fact that we are elevating CO2, which is not toxic, but it is a product of industrial processes like internal combustion, will tend to trap more heat.
All else being equal, the increase in CO2 will trap more heat.
That does predict a certain amount of warming.
Is it enough to matter?
Does it dominate other things like solar forcing?
We don't know.
That's an open question.
But am I denying the Uranius equation?
No.
In fact, I'm one of the few people I know who ever mentions the Uranius equation.
I also say, while I am highly skeptical that the field of climate science is capable of giving us an honest accounting because it will penalize anybody who says things aren't as bad as we fear...
That there are things that do tell us where we are in this process.
I have pointed to glacial retreat.
Is there glacial retreat?
There is.
Is the glacial retreat a match for what we've been led to understand?
No.
I keep being promised an ice-free Arctic.
It never happens.
I keep being promised that Mount Kilimanjaro will lack glaciers.
It doesn't.
I keep being told that Glacier National Park will also lack glaciers.
It hasn't happened.
So, is there global warming?
Yes.
Is it the result of human activity?
Undoubtedly, some of it is.
Is it important?
We don't know.
Are we being led to believe that it is much more important than other things that actually threaten us a great deal more?
Yes, and if you listen to the entire podcast with Stephen Bartlett, you will know what I think we should be worried about.
And you will also know that I think there is a major unknown in the entire landscape that people have to be worried about, which is you cannot extrapolate linearly from something like glacial retreat and understand what the hazard of frozen methane in the Arctic might be for humanity.
It is possible to have a gradual, not very important warming process that results in the so-called methane gun hypothesis.
The sudden release of massive amounts of methane that change the temperature in ways that will be completely outside of human control.
Do I think that's going to happen?
I do not.
But do I believe it is a possibility?
Yes.
And I talk about it.
Why?
Because I'm trying to show people what you do when you're dealing with an actual complex system.
How do you think about these things?
And what do you do when your information is compromised by broken fields and bad institutions?
You know, you have to reason through this stuff yourself.
So if you're thinking that I'm irresponsible, you are misunderstanding what landscape you're in.
Now, oh, go ahead.
Well, that's brilliant, and I actually just wanted to tie it back to what we were talking about in the first part of the podcast, which is where I didn't get in being deeply concerned about attempts by, you know, tech utopians to control how much methane cows are producing is...
That entire thing hinges on we need to reduce methane, because methane is the culprit, because climate change is the biggest existential threat facing humanity, and it's anthropogenic, and we aren't allowed to discuss whether or not any of that is true.
Regardless of whether or not it's true...
Once you have that conclusion, you have, again, a gameable system in which, oh, we can start selling carbon credits to people.
We can start, we can put any number of Businesses can spring up to supposedly reduce the thing that everyone has now acknowledged we have to reduce, even if it's not true.
And you're going to mess with the cows, you're going to mess with the humans who are eating the cows, you're going to mess with the ecosystems, all in service of this one false god, which is reducing carbon in the atmosphere.
Even if it's not a false god, it's one, one thing among many That we need to be concerned about.
And whenever, even if it's true, even if reducing the methane would reduce the anthropogenic climate change sufficiently that we could get ahead of other things that the chicken littles with regard to climate change are claiming are going to happen, even so, it can't possibly be true that focusing almost entirely on that one thing is going to lead us to a better and more productive future.
And actually, Jackie Wakefield, you are involved in an auxiliary business.
You are trying to police information.
And I think what you're doing here, whether or not you understand it, I don't know whether you gave yourself this assignment or somebody decided to assign this project to you, but why is it that so many months after this podcast was released and well-received, you're writing this exposé?
Well, I have a guess.
My guess is that something understood that having somebody who does engage in this in a responsible way, who talks about the failure of the institutions and who believes that we absolutely need institutions that do not fail in this way,
and talks about the scientific process that allows us to figure out which models have predictive power and which ones lack predictive power, That having such a person talk about their own skepticism regarding what we're being told over climate change or vaccine safety and efficacy, right?
That must not be allowed to encounter large new audiences of people who haven't heard it carefully presented because in order to control those people, you have to...
Keep them in the mindset that people who talk about these things are out of their gourds.
So I don't think you're going to have any impact on me at all by writing this, but I think what you're doing is you're punishing Stephen Bartlett for talking to me because his audience has now heard somebody talk about these things in sober, scientifically rigorous terms, and that can't be, now can it?
So you are part of an industry, and frankly, I think you've got to repent.
I did some looking.
I tried to find more information on what you've been doing with your life, and frankly, there wasn't very much.
So I know that you're part of this effort to police misinformation, preposterous and insane, and frankly, immoral on its face.
You live in the West.
Free speech is an important value.
But what I did find was an article on another topic that gave us a clue as to from what mindset you emerged.
Can you put up this article that Jackie Wakefield is responsible for?
Okay.
Far-right videos distorting the truth of the Bangladesh minority attacks.
Now, There's a lot to be said about this story, but I just want to focus on the emphasis on the idea of far-right videos.
Far-right is a prejudicial term that is being used, in this case, on an article that you wrote.
And to be fair, I cannot say that you wrote the title off, and that is not the case.
But the fact is, this is a...
Article designed to scare people away from one perspective and towards another.
Your obligation as a journalist is to present them the facts so that people can evaluate their own perspective on them.
But instead, you're stigmatizing one perspective by portraying it as far-right and as people who actually emerge from the left, who are routinely dismissed as far-right by people who do not want audience to listen to us, This is an easily recognized tactic.
The last thing I will say is that You exist in a profession that has an obligation to inform people so that they can evaluate the truth of things.
What you are doing is you are presenting them with an officially sanctioned set of beliefs and attempting to demonize those who have an alternative perspective.
It is a violation of the most basic principles of journalism and On a more personal note, it is, at best, a complete waste of your life.
You're going to go around telling people who understand topics far better than you do that they've got it wrong because somebody in an official position told you that that was the case.
That's not how any of this works.
So, please, get over yourself.
And if this is being handed to you by bosses, tell them to go fuck themselves.
All right.
All right.
Did you want to talk about...
I think I'm going to hold off on that last topic.
There is one last thing I think we should discuss before we close this out because simply it needs to have been discussed.
And I unfortunately did not prepare the screenshot that would make it clearest.
But...
Over the course of the last week and a half, there is a story that has been circulating and the New York Times acknowledges, yes deeply buried in their article, but acknowledges that the Biden administration has been floating the idea of returning nuclear weapons to Ukraine as an obvious mechanism for turning the tide of the war there.
And It is hard to overstate the degree of insanity that a lame duck president and, you know, it's not going to be Biden who's making this decision, but a lame duck administration using the waning weeks of its power to inflame a conflict and drive it into a potentially nuclear phase.
If you ever thought that these people, that their excesses and errors were the result of the fact that they were just so obsessed with your safety and well-being that they forced a shot on you that was premature, right?
If that's what you think, then think about the fact that they are right now in flaming a nuclear conflict for no reason.
If you think that they were motivated by concern that the Russians were interfering with our electoral system because the Russians are terrible people and Vladimir Putin is a monster, well, they are now putting you in a situation where you're depending on the restraint of that monster, right?
This is a domestic process that is now forcing you to depend on the fact that Vladimir Putin doesn't want to go down in history as, you know, the first person in this century to use nuclear weapons in earnest.
So, I really think This story, the fact that these people are cynically amplifying the conflict in Ukraine, attempting to make it impossible for the Trump administration to solve it, you know, playing these nuclear games in the waning weeks of the administration, that tells you everything you need to know about who these people actually are.
And if you voted for them, you need to think about what that means.
They tricked you.
They led you to believe they care deeply about your safety.
And that that was what was motivating them.
It was never true.
These people don't give a shit about you.
These people give a shit about power and they are actually willing to risk the fate of humanity over it.
And I don't know how to make it clear what new level.
I really think we...
We lack the words to properly describe this level of insanity because it's never happened before, right?
We've never had people who were willing to cynically play that game.
We've had people play that game reluctantly, but we've never had people who were actually, you know, Let's take Hitler, right?
Did Hitler gamble the entire fate of humanity?
No.
He was a depraved, evil motherfucker.
But that guy was doing something that was comprehensible, right?
He was trying to advance the ball for his people.
These people are willing to actually risk our entire species and, frankly, every other species along with us?
Like, this is a level of evil that we just simply lack...
the language for because it's new and so for those of you who are despairing about the the outcome of the election we dodged a bullet a big one and whatever you think of the incoming administration we have to give them the chance to solve this problem because we can never afford to be back in those shoes again I don't have anything to add Yep,
it's one of those things.
Yeah.
There is a lot to be thankful for.
Tomorrow is American Thanksgiving, as we started out the hour, the show by saying.
And hopefully all of you who are celebrating that can remember many of the things that you have to be thankful for as well.
There's a lot of stuff online about how difficult it's going to be this year.
For many people, one of the things that prompts me to think, and indeed I saw, actually maybe I'll pull it up if we talk about this for just a couple of minutes here, Back when Trump was president the first time, there was always a lot of hand-wringing about how difficult the holidays were going to be for people.
And you never saw that sort of mainstream media hand-wringing or concern for the difficulties during the Biden presidency.
Even though, presumably, there are exactly as many people who are having trouble with their relatives because that's the nature of this moment that we are living in.
But we don't care about it when the mainstream media doesn't care about it.
Hollywood doesn't care about it.
We're not supposed to talk about it when it's the Democrats in office.
And all of those deplorables, like us now, should just be content that we aren't being locked in our houses because we refused a shot or something.
Yeah, it's actually a really good point, and I haven't heard anybody else make it, that you can read the bias in the media by virtue of the fact that when certain people have the political upper hand, The other side has the upper hand.
They view Thanksgiving as, you know, some sort of a catastrophe.
Right.
And the point is, no, it should really be the same catastrophe either way, as long as we disagree in these terms.
And so I guess I hope that as people...
I hope people will find it in themselves to recognize that either way, and if our side had lost this election, I would still be saying this.
I would be fearing of what a Harris administration would do.
And I think for very good reason.
I would be hoping to be wrong.
And if you didn't get your way in this election, you should, you know, Investigate your fears.
I think you'll find they're overblown.
I hope you find they're overblown.
But at the very least, you should be looking across the table at people who did end up prevailing in this election.
And you should be thinking, I sure hope they're right.
I sure hope they're right.
So just the Oregon Health Authority, I guess it is, that I still get emails from, which I started getting emails from when we lived in Oregon during COVID, and I found them to be consistently ridiculous.
And so I continue to get these emails.
This week I received, is the election affecting your mental health?
The U.S. election is affecting people across the United States in a wide variety of ways, and if you're finding it hard to focus or sleep or if you're feeling anxious about the future or how politics may affect your relationships, you're not alone.
Help is out there.
These weren't happening when Biden was president.
This is not what these things sounded like, these missives from the Oregon Health Authority.
If you need help during this time, some free resources include the Election Anxiety Crisis Text Line.
Ha ha ha!
The racial equity support line.
The LGBTQ plus mental health resources.
The trans lifeline hotline.
That's a lot of lines.
The bias response hotline.
Check this out.
If you experience or witness a hate crime in Oregon, you can call the bias response hotline to receive support, help you understand your options and make choices about next steps.
You can also report hate crimes directly to law enforcement here.
Hate crime is not actually a thing.
However, to be fair, the last bullet list on the Oregon Health Authority's ridiculous list about how distraught everyone is obviously about the election, they do point to Braver Angels, which is a great organization, and kudos to them for actually having at least one, and maybe only one, reasonable option here.
Once you've ratted out your neighbors for being hateful and called law enforcement on them, you can call Braver Angels and see if maybe you can talk to someone who doesn't think the same way you do.
Oh, man.
Until you get to the Braver Angels thing, this reads like a push-pull, where the idea is, here's a bunch of different categories you might be in that should be terrified about what's just happened to your country.
And, you know, it just...
It makes it impossible to be pleasantly surprised.
You've just been told that you're being targeted when in fact you and I know from interacting with a lot of people on the prevailing side that the hatred isn't there.
Right?
There's definitely a perspective, but the hatred is not there, and people have been whipped into a frenzy by their media diets into believing that there are demons at their door that just simply aren't.
Yeah.
So...
Whoever you're gathering with for Thanksgiving, if you are gathering for Thanksgiving, be open.
Go with an open heart and ready to eat good food, but also share with one another your humanity as opposed to your anger and anxiety and stress.
It will be a far more interesting and better day if you do that.
Yeah, and this is, I would point out, exactly the inverse of this extremely terrifying culty approach of banish those who disagree with you over politics from your life, right?
There's a reason that cults do that, right?
They don't want you to have access to a person who can make a reasonable case.
And so, you know, if you change one thing, if the Nuclear insanity or whatever else causes you to want to rethink your position.
If there's one thing you should change, it is be open to hearing what is being said by people on the other side.
If the other side is us, you will almost certainly discover that the perspective is more nuanced and concordant with your own values than you've been led to believe.
Yeah, I guess just one more thing.
Jordan Peterson talks a lot about the Big Five personality assessment, right?
And from what he has talked about and some of the additional research that I've done, I find As he has talked about, there are a couple of these big five measures that women tend to be higher on than men, notably agreeableness and eroticism.
But then there's also one of the five that has a political valence, or at least historically has, which is openness.
That historically, liberals have had higher degrees of openness than conservatives.
Conservatives have had, I believe, higher degrees of conscientiousness than liberals.
And then the fifth of these measures, which is extroversion, or maybe it's called introversion, whichever one it is, I don't think has reliable...
It is reliably either left-right or male-female or really any of those sort of demographics that we tend to think about.
But it feels like further evidence of Of the shift that many of us who were always Democrats, who have not been voting Democrat for a little while now, have been saying, which is, you know, yes, our eyes are open to some things that they weren't open to before, but our values haven't changed, and a lot of what we believe now is what we believed then.
Which makes us feel that the party that we had been voting for, yes, is changed.
Like, it has become something actually fairly reprehensible.
But even in the sort of non-reprehensible part of it, it's moving away from us.
And this thing about, like, go to your holiday party.
Family meetups with family and friends with openness, that we need to be advising the so-called liberals of that feels like evidence that the people who are calling themselves liberals, at least insofar as these personality assessments that have withstood the test of time are true, the people who are describing themselves as liberals are not engaging like liberals.
They are engaging like closed-minded bigots.
And it's happening because you're having your fear used against you and your anxiety used against you.
Your desire for certainty.
And none of those things are good for us.
We shouldn't be certain of almost anything, and we should not be driven by our fear and our anxiety.
And if we can escape from those things, we can get back to greater openness, which, you know, my bias is all of us benefit from greater openness, regardless of what political valence you hearken from.
That if you are If you are closed-minded, if you only like what's familiar, if you feel scared of the thing that's on the other side of the door or the other side of the world, you're going to make less nuanced and more bigoted decisions about things, and that's what the so-called liberals are doing now.
That's what the Democrats are doing, and it doesn't look liberal in Yeah, actually, trying to figure out what the best terminology for it is.
But basically, we need a re-liberalization of liberalism.
That literally everything that it once stood for has been inverted.
You know, Democrats are now the party of war.
They're the party of racism.
They're the party of unequal treatment.
And mandates.
And as you point out, the party of censorship.
What the hell is all this?
But as you point out, that is not just a question of policy.
It's a question of personality traits, too.
And the lack of openness is an indicator that it's just a complete reversal of all of the values.
So, yeah, I would echo your suggestion that liberals open their eyes and go back to the things that liberals actually have to be proud of.
All right, so we'll be back next week.
In the meantime, check out our sponsors, which I have failed to update from last week, so I've got the wrong ones listed here.
It was American Heart for Gold and Armra and Peak Life, all fantastic.
And all related by the fact that they are vendors of atoms.
Yes.
Sorry, I got there before you, but vendors of atoms.
Vendors of atoms.
As it turns out, all of our sponsors.
I don't think that's true.
There are atoms involved.
There are atoms involved with every one of ours.
Most of our, all of our sponsors are made of atoms, at the very least.
Ah, that's good.
Atom vendors, one way or the other.
Mhm.
Okay.
So, yes.
They're fantastic and their atoms are involved as tomorrow during Thanksgiving there will be many atoms involved.
Get yourself some atoms.
Get yourself some atoms.
I hope they taste good.
Check us out on Locals.
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I posted some suggestions for how to improve K-12 education this week.
Just a little light reading for pre-Thanksgiving.
If you don't want to argue about the election, you can argue about education.
Yep.
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