The Fight Over Fat: The 254th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 254th 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 science, scientists, and the mainstream media. How can the New York Times and The Atlantic simultaneously be so opposed to Kennedy, and so in favor of the industrial sludge being promoted by Big Pharma and Big Food? A new research result finds that women who move for a few seconds every...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 254. So for those of you with synesthesia, that's kind of a mauve with a peach overtones.
You know it's different for everyone.
Actually not totally different for everyone because apparently synesthesia is in large measure downstream of toys that associate numbers.
I don't believe this.
I know.
We've talked about this before.
I get those mats that you put down at the bottom of our stairs in the house that our boys grew up in because we had slate tiles.
Put those mats, those intersecting squares with numbers.
Close cell foam mats.
Yeah.
I imagine that if you spend a lot of time with that, that you might begin to precisely associate two with blue or whatever it was.
But that synesthesia is not a modern thing.
I think actually all of us have some of it, that our cross-sensory modalities are far older than closed cell foam mats.
Is that what it was?
Yes.
Yeah.
All right.
Fair enough.
Also, tell me what mauve looks like.
I have not a clue what mauve looks like.
Let me think.
See, the thing is, I think that when I don't know a color by name, that I tend to think it's over in a kind of a muddy purple space.
Is mauve in a muddy purple space?
Yes.
Really?
Yeah.
Okay.
But...
I mean, it's pink, more pink than pearl, but yeah, it's like a gray-pink pastel thing.
All right.
So I would also intuitively think that Chartreuse is over in that neighborhood, and it ain't...
No.
Yeah.
Nope.
It's...
I think you have, well, after laughing at me, told me that it's somewhere in the neighborhood of a green...
I'm now kind of actually blanking on it, but I believe, and I'm sure we'll hear about it if I'm wrong, that chartreuse is like a light neon green.
Green, it really doesn't sound like it should be.
Yeah, and I actually, I have to look it up now because I am, this is one of these things, you know, names of colors cannot be derived from first principles.
And it is a French herbal liqueur.
We've been over this in green and yellow versions.
So, of course, I'm only finding the liqueur.
I would actually prefer the color here, but I think right away, I think, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, that's not what I would expect at all.
No, it sounds prettier than that, doesn't it?
Yes, it sounds, yeah.
Yeah, lime green is kind of jarring.
It is.
Even though limes are not.
They can be if you take them straight.
Whole.
Even worse.
Yeah, yeah, that can be rough.
Yeah.
So here we are.
Yep.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
This is the Dark Horse Podcast, and I think I may have mentioned that at the top of the podcast, but I'm re-mentioning it for anyone who's forgotten.
For those in our audience with extreme short-term memory loss.
Yes.
Right.
Thanks for joining us.
And thanks for joining us.
So we're going to do a Q&A today after our live stream.
And the way that you can ask questions is going on our Locals right now.
Locals is where the Watch Party is going on right now.
And that's where the Q&A is going to be.
So do join us there.
We've already got a couple of great questions about fasting and about something else that I've already forgotten.
But fasting, a follow-on to our livestream a couple weeks ago in which we were talking about dry fasting.
So that and presumably lots of other things going on in the world will be happening in our Q&A. Thank you for joining us there, and without further ado, let us go to our sponsors, all three of whom, as always, right at the top of the hour, are Make Products or Services, in this case, Products, all of them, for whom, about which, we truly vouch.
That did not sound like English.
No, it was good.
It was a little formal, but it was good.
Here we go.
A little formal.
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It's the most formal month, by far.
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Yeah, we do.
So we've got a number of things we want to talk about today, but I'm not sure.
I'm feeling disorganized.
I know where I want to end up.
Talking about what has happened to science in the United States.
But there are so many mainstream media articles right now out, some of which I intend to show some of, from the New York Times and the Atlantic in particular.
You know, these once amazing I think, once amazing bastions of journalistic integrity, now much, much failed, that are remarkably un-nuanced in their attacks on the amazing groundswell of public support for actually fixing the problems that ail us.
You know, for Trump, for Kennedy via Trump, Trump via Kennedy, to be going after, to be naming and going after big pharma and big food and big ag, all of them.
And to have what were these liberal institutions where you used to have critique of corporate culture inflicting itself on human health and autonomy, instead embracing the despicable and unhealthy status quo in service of what?
Who are their overlords?
Who do these individual so-called journalists imagine themselves to be working for?
Or, you know, maybe they just know.
Maybe they actually know who signs their paychecks.
So this is one of the most important topics.
And there is a question about how to make it obvious what the topic even is.
But I would point to two things.
One, I probably should have forwarded it to Jen, but I saw Claire Lehman was tweeting about her doubt that there even is a crisis with respect to chronic disease.
And she points to the increased longevity of Americans in this tweet.
And so you find something interesting in the juxtaposition of that perspective.
You know what?
We're living longer.
There is no epidemic of chronic disease.
Versus the public, which knows for certain that there is.
They are experiencing Well, it's like being told for the last several years the economy was thriving.
You may not be able to buy eggs the way you used to, but trust us, we would know the economy is thriving.
It's like, actually, no, guys, you're lying.
There are a lot of ways to describe what's wrong with that, but lifespan versus healthspan is one of them.
But also, at least in the United States, our lifespan is not continuing to grow.
It hasn't been for years.
Not only that, but you have lots of conditions that are afflicting.
You know, Claire's argument was that basically we're living long enough to see lots of pathologies that emerge only if you manage to make it into your 80s.
And, you know, that is a real pattern.
As somebody who's studied senescence, that exists.
But it doesn't explain why, you know, kids have diabetes or why autism rates have skyrocketed or any of the other conditions.
Or why the streets of American cities or airports or beaches look fundamentally different than they did even 20 years ago, but certainly 50 years ago.
Right.
And I think what we're going to find today is that science, you know, looks like science.
It sounds like science, but it has become something else.
And the, you know, What are you going to believe, you know, my scientific paper or your own lying eyes?
The answer is most people are increasingly distrusting of what science tells them for very good reason because it keeps telling them things with great certainty and then reversing course or disappearing some form or conclusion and not even acknowledging that it's wrong.
And so anyway, people are reverting to something that, sure, doesn't have the power of science.
But common sense beating science?
That's not supposed to happen.
Science is supposed to be able to see things that are subtle enough that they contravene common sense or elude detection superficially.
And the fact is, no.
We are stuck in an era where actually common sense, our own ability to experiment on our own health and be left with an anecdote is more powerful than much of what we are told by these gigantic scientific studies, which frankly are more misleading than they are enlightening and for powerful reasons.
Yeah, I mean, I think there are a number of things happening to discourage people from believing that science is actually a way forward.
And, you know, the big crappy indecipherable studies is certainly one of them.
The perverse incentives of how those studies get funded and what gets funded and then what gets published.
Is another.
And the seemingly, but almost certainly not entirely, grassroots rot that came up into science, came up in science, but laterally moved from the social sciences and the humanities, what was called political correctness in the 90s, and became woke.
I remember in 2017, after Evergreen had blown up on us, but we were at this This interesting gathering on a mountaintop in Utah.
And there was, and this was shortly after the Demore memo, the Google James Demore memo.
And there was kind of a, you know, there's an attempted coup at this little conference by a small number of young women in attendance who believed that the sex ratio not being even was evidence of patriarchy and misogyny and all of this.
And I, along with several other people, including basically all of the middle-aged women who were there, fought back against this thing.
And I was asked by one of the young men who was there with one of the young women, and who therefore, of course, was torn between, frankly, batshit insane claims of misogyny at this conference and not wanting to alienate the young woman he had come with.
I said to me, why do you care about this so much?
Maybe they're wrong, maybe they're right, but what actually do you care about whether or not this conversation happens in a way that seems sane?
I said, this is going to sound presumptuous, but I feel like Science itself is at risk.
I think science is at stake here, and we're gonna need it.
I need it all the time, but we all do, and many of us don't know that.
And here we are seven years later, and, you know, we of course have been talking about the funding problems, the corruption problems, the, you know, the statistical, the inability for people to actually do their own stats, and so they outsource them to heuristics and then claim that they know something that they don't know, they can't know, the black boxes everywhere.
The inability to think logically and rigorously, on top of which you've got this like, you know, rancid frosting of wokeness.
Like, well, of course people don't trust science anymore because most of the stuff being passed off as science is insane in one of many different ways.
All right, so I want to make two points.
One, 500 years ago, a person did not need science to navigate their daily life.
Daily life was simple enough, intuitive enough, and the complexities that had been introduced by technology were minimal enough that common sense would get you an awful long distance.
It's not to say that science didn't work.
It did.
But the point was, it wasn't a requirement.
We are in the unfortunate situation of requiring science to let us know that some food additive is or isn't safe, right?
Some pharmaceutical does or does not, is or is not indicated in light of its cost-benefit ratio for your condition, or worse, some metric that stands in for a condition.
So we are simultaneously in great need of science to be able to tell us things that we cannot intuit.
And our science is corrupted by forces that create a brand new puzzle that has never really existed.
And so the second point I want to make is The context for this conversation is really very much the context of the reformers who have now taken over or are in the process of taking over the institutions that fund science.
And the question is, well...
I have to say, it's an unenviable task because one of the things that I'm sure we'll end up talking about today is the fact that our system of science, because it is corrupted by financial incentives and other processes, is effectively a training ground for conclusion-driven pseudoscience.
It teaches people to do this and to sound extremely scientific while peddling something that is in fact PR of some kind.
And so the question is...
And they believe that what they're doing is science.
Yeah, that's the key, is they don't even know that they're doing it, right?
They've been trained to do it because they get a fish every time they spit out a conclusion that makes something wealthy happy.
And so they've gotten good at it and they go to conferences and they actually imagine that they're doing science because many of the trappings are similar.
But what do you do if you end up in charge of one of these corrupt entities?
It's all well and good to say, well, what corrupted it?
Bad incentives.
But you've got two things.
You've got those incentives, which you could fix, and you've got the population that was trained by those incentives.
And, you know, people change slowly.
So the question is, what can you do to infuse science back into these once scientific, now pseudoscientific institutions?
And that's not a simple question.
It's not a simple question at all.
I think you really do, as you alluded to, you have nearly a generation of people who have been trained, who understand themselves to be scientists, who are now up and coming, you know, still doing postdocs, assistant professors.
Maybe tenured as associate professors who, you know, came of age in a moment when and largely institutions that did not benefit from actually educating them in the messy, inefficient ways that science actually happens because that takes time and that costs resources and materials and it's cheaper and more efficient.
To have people slot in, have graduate students slot in directly under some PIs, some advisors, work that they're already doing.
Oh, I have all these questions here.
Choose among the questions that I'm already kind of working on.
We can write you into the next NIH grant, the next NSF grant, the next DOD grant.
And we'll have the weekly lab meetings and you'll be able to get pushed, hopefully, even in this basically mundane and banal system, still get pushed a little bit with regard to what it is that you're doing, what kind of experimental design you've got going, how it is that you're going to analyze your data.
But if what you've done is entirely within the scope of what someone else has already imagined, which is true for so many people who are getting PhDs now, Those people haven't actually been tested in any regard as to whether or not they can think scientifically.
They can do pieces of it.
But many, many of our scientists now, including increasingly the people who are ascending the ranks at tenure-track institutions and in industry too, Know how to follow recipes and do pieces, but they don't have either the creativity or the rigor that scientists have in the past and that would allow people to actually see when a system is going off the rails.
Actually, I think it's even worse than that.
You would, wouldn't you?
Yeah, I would.
That's my way.
But as you're describing a system that I obviously know because I went through it, I'm thinking something new about it.
Although our institution didn't do what I described.
That's right.
And actually, so I went through the system, as did you, but we actually went through a piece of the system that functioned in a very different way.
We can get to that distinction in a second here.
The pattern you describe where you've got some PI, some primary investigator, this is a principal investigator who is good at getting grants out of the system and ends up being an administrator, effectively, of a lab, which then, you know, may have many different experiments running under the umbrella of the larger laboratory mission.
But that system, which is the common system for high-tech science these days, Not only does it cause you to be schooled in something that is a piece rather than an entire scientific project,
so you're not a scientist, you're like a specialist on some subunit, but it also inhabits It inherently brings you in on a school of thought that you are not in a position to critique.
Because, effectively, the laboratory comes from a school of thought and you are coming in under an advisor, the point is there's all kinds of structure there that will steer you away from conclusions that are inconvenient for that school of thought and towards things that will make that school of thought look more robust and therefore better able to get grants from the system.
So anyway, being brought in on a school of thought while you have no power at all and while you're being trained to do a sub-piece of science rather than an entire scientific project means that effectively you can't understand the biases, the blind spots, etc.
because you have effectively taken on the culture of that school of thought as a requirement for employment.
Yeah.
There used to be informal expectations that would, if not in force, strongly encourage people who ended up with PhDs in sciences to have had multiple influences from multiple schools of thought.
For instance, that most schools would not admit to their PhD program people who had already gone through the undergraduate program there.
That you were expected to switch institutions because the idea is even though within institutions there can be many dueling schools of thought, going to someplace entirely different is going to have, you know, even not just with the greater schools of thought, but like how are institutions run?
What does the administrative, you know, framework look like?
It's just, it's useful to see more of the world, right?
You know, especially if you are trying to make sense of it, which is after all what scientists and artists and frankly all of us are supposed to be doing.
Yep.
I just wanted to complete the thought.
Michigan, where we went, had a different culture and it had defects to it.
One of them was that it had a sink or swim modality where they brought in more graduate students than they could support.
And the idea was you sort of let natural selection find the capable ones.
More than half tended to drop out.
Right.
In a class of 18 or 20. Right.
But it does leave the institution capable of claiming great successes, which were more a matter of selection than they were a matter of training.
You know, because effectively if you bring in lots of people, you know, you bring in lots of people who on paper look great and then the point is some of them can't handle it and the ones you're left with tend to be the ones who can't handle it.
So that was one distinction.
And then the other distinction is that you and I were in laboratories within Michigan in which we were expected to do an entire project of our own.
And in fact, I know that in my lab we were forbidden to work on the head of the lab's project, which we were forbidden to do it because it would be inevitable that you would trip over credit and things like that.
And he wanted you to figure out how to do science Uh, on your own, which I think was the right way to do it.
Yeah.
I mean, there are, there, there are many models, um, for how education at every level, uh, might work best and some and, and few are terrible for everyone.
And I don't know that any are excellent for anyone, for everyone rather.
Uh, so, you know, the, the, the idea that you should be choose early, uh, And then be canalized into that thing will allow you to go farther faster as a specialist.
But having to choose early before you have been exposed to all the diversity of possible questions you might want to ask in the world means you may well choose something that ceases to excite you once you discover all the other sorts of questions there are in the world.
So one of the other things that Michigan did, which is unlike, and I don't actually know if it's still how they operate, At a time when most PhD programs in biology were expecting that you don't get in, you have to get admitted both to the university, to the PhD program at the university, but also to someone's lab, which meant that if you ended up there and that the The chemistry didn't work out for whatever reason.
You either had to scramble to find someone else at the university and that was going to be difficult, or often that meant the end of your tenure at that place.
Whereas at Michigan, part of how they did the sink and swim model was said, okay, you know, we're going to let in X number of students knowing that there aren't that many spots available in people's labs right now.
And so people will have to figure out what it is that they want to do and see if any of the professors are interested in Overseeing that work.
And that means that very early on, you are both completely open to all of the possible questions that are out there, which is wonderful, and also that you are not beholden to the particular culture, the particular worldview, the particular theoretical framework of any one in particular.
And I assume that many graduate programs do this, but we also had a sort of I don't remember what the official name of it was, but like, you know, once a week for the first 13 weeks or so, the first semester, maybe it was the entire first year, one of the professors at the, at that point, Integrated Department of Biology, so across all of the domains in biology, would come and talk to the incoming PhD students about their work.
And it was incredible to see how much actually there was at one school, granted, you know, a giant R1 university, In terms of the diversity of kinds of questions that were being asked, and asked well, and asked with rigor.
So I want to introduce one sort of structural element for thinking about what's happened to science.
I don't know if people are going to be able to see it.
I guess they can see it.
This is a diminishing returns curve.
I'm going to argue, I have argued, that a diminishing returns curve is automatically the production, the product of any complex system in which there is an objective, an identifiable objective.
And so the reason I'm raising it here is that this school of thought thing ends up interfacing with this feature of the natural world in a very counterproductive way.
So if you imagine that this chart actually is describing the...
So ROI over here, return on investment, and this is the amount of investment.
So as the investment goes up, The return on each unit of investment levels off.
You get a BART. I cannot do this back.
You get this bargain phase.
That steep face is a bargain, right?
That bargain peters out and it becomes incredibly expensive to make even the next little incremental improvement.
And Actually, I will point out that each school of thought is going to follow this graph.
And the problem is that that bargain phase, this phase here, the bargain phase, is so compelling.
So the school of thought discovers something novel.
That unleashes a wave of further discoveries, right?
Some new way of looking at something, some technique that allows you to look into genes or whatever it is.
And you get this huge burst of productivity.
And my claim is that that burst of productivity convinces everybody that this school of thought is the answer because it's producing useful product at such a high rate.
And what happens is...
Convinces people who are here that the slope is going to do that.
Right.
And so they kill off all the other schools of thought which aren't paying back in this way because they haven't just discovered something new.
And the problem is that then you get stuck here.
And the natural thing to do would be to realize, well, we are on the plateau phase of the diminishing returns curve.
And what's the right thing to do?
The right thing to do is to actually boot up the next best school of thought.
And then you get this pattern, which actually, this is a graph that should be everywhere.
The only place, or maybe there's one other place where it shows up for unrelated reasons, but each of these schools of thought can produce another wave of improved understanding.
But the problem is the people in this school of thought have an economic reason not to want that next school of thought booted up.
So, effectively, they become defenders.
Oh, can you put that image up?
That's us.
Yeah.
I don't know why my copy of the book says not for distribution, but this is...
We're going to distribute it anyway.
This is from the final or the penultimate chapter of Hunter Gratherer's Guide, where we talk exactly about what you're talking about now.
Right.
So that stepwise progress is what we should be doing in science.
But the way that we fund and support science produces this other counterproductive mode where something that was once promising Peter's out and is in a position to stifle any competition where that competition would immediately embarrass it, right?
So the holding on to this niche because you have the ability to make everything else, you know, die of starvation Is not science at all.
It's anti-scientific.
It's very human.
It's very normal competitive.
But the idea that once you're on one of these diminishing returns plateaus, that what comes to you and sounds like science, and well, I went to the Science Institute, and this is what the science people told me.
You know, it's got to be pretty good.
It's cutting edge, right?
And the answer is no, it's not cutting edge.
What it's doing is killing all its competitors in their crib.
So you're not seeing the things that it can't answer because it's learned how to keep them out of the conversation entirely.
So another way it's winning is by having convinced so many people that the original conversation wasn't worth having, that we don't need to go back there.
So I did want to talk a little bit about the Atlantic's attack on Tallow, which is just, it's just, it's incredible.
It's so laughable.
But it's...
I guess I'm still surprised at the vigor and the venom with which they're going after Kennedy.
It is shocking to me.
Again, in the vein of big food, big pharma, big ag, they're all the enemy.
Sometimes they're in cahoots and sometimes they're not.
We talked about Bouvier last week, the methane-reducing food additive for cows.
And many months ago we talked about a peel, the food grade coating that gets put on, that can be put and has been put on produce, including sometimes organic produce, which reduces gas exchange between the outside and the inside of the fruit and therefore allows them to be stable for transit for longer.
But it also means that you can't rely on your senses to tell you how fresh a piece of fruit is.
There are many examples of new fangled technologies that solve one little problem that the market has identified.
In the case of appeal, how do we keep fruit fresh for longer so that the fact that our long supply chain doesn't get in the way of making a profit?
And also, people in North America want peaches in January, right?
And so, you know, it is our demand for it.
Or the problem has been in part created by a description of something real wherein carbon is the thing that needs to get reduced.
And so that's where we have bovier and the other methane-reducing food items for cows.
But into that insane mix, we now have Atlantic this week talking about Tallow.
America stopped cooking with tallow for a reason.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s view on fats is about bucking convention, not promoting health.
So let's just start with that subtitle, which again, the author may not have anything to do with the subtitle, but I've seen this critique before.
It's, oh, he's just a contrarian.
And we've been called just contrarians, and it's one of actually the most insipid and wrong and ridiculous I think we're good to go.
Here's why I think this is true.
You're likely to have predictive power.
So the idea that Kennedy is just a contrarian is based on no fact at all, but it's an easy thing to accuse someone of.
I would also point out, if you look at any of the places where Kennedy is present for this accusation, he always pushes back and he says, show me any case where the evidence is not supporting my position.
The person, of course, fumbles.
Sometimes they come up with something, and then what you get is an encyclopedic response from Kennedy, where he's looked at this countervailing argument, and here is why he doesn't believe it.
That is not the hallmark of a simple contrarian.
That is the hallmark of somebody who has evaluated all the evidence and for whatever reason, reasons that have a lot to do with this, the actual highest quality analysis is not the one that you are hearing from the institutions.
Right.
Which would look like contrarianism, but it ain't.
Well, and in fact, what the Atlantic is doing here is reinforcing the status quo and being knee-jerk negative about anything that Kennedy says.
So we have here, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s latest spin on MAGA, make frying oil tallow again, is surprisingly straightforward for a man who has spent decades downplaying his most controversial opinions.
I know that sentence is just insane.
Last month, Kennedy argued in an Instagram post that Americans were healthier when restaurants such as McDonald's cooked fries and beef tallow, that is cow fat, instead of seed oils, a catch-all term for common vegetable-derived oils including corn, canola, and sunflower.
We've talked about seed oils recently on Dark Horse.
In his view, no, Americans, he wrote, are being unknowingly poisoned by seed oils.
In his view, we'd all be better off cooking with solid fats such as tallow, butter, and lard.
In a video that Kennedy posted on Thanksgiving, he deepfries a whole turkey and beef tallow and says, this is how we cook the Maha way.
I've just highlighted in the next paragraph some of the ways that this author is making her arguments.
Conventional medical guidance in contrast to a fringe theory.
Most nutrition scientists greatly dismiss this idea as a conspiracy theory.
As if science is a democracy, which it's not.
What is true is true regardless of whether or not the majority believes it.
And this is the mistake that many in journalism are making and convincing hapless members of the population into believing as well.
If only a few people believe a thing, it must be wrong because science says, and no, it's not science says, it's Simon says, as you have said It is, Simon says, but I would also, I would remind people that every great idea, the stuff that becomes the bedrock of science, starts as a minority of one.
So if you have the naive notion that, you know, either a consensus or the majority tells you what's true, then the point is, Progress is over.
You are taking the thing which allows us to overcome the places where we are confused, and you are ruling it out going forward.
But if you go back to that sentence, it's not on your screen here, but it said something like, most nutrition scientists dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.
Exactly.
That describes something this author could not possibly know.
First of all, what does it mean?
Most nutrition scientists squarely dismiss this idea as a conspiracy theory.
Where is that recorded?
Right?
The viewpoint of a majority of nutrition scientists.
A, if you think about what Heather and I were talking about at the beginning of the podcast, you've got a system in which somebody who came through the system and said, you know what, this is actually not true.
Seed oils are dangerous because of the extraction methodology and the impurities that are left in the oil that is produced.
Somebody like that would not likely survive to get into the category you're talking about.
Nutrition scientists, right?
They would leave because they would not find any support in the system for their heterodox perspective, which would then leave you some majority that, yes, had reached some kind of agreement.
But as the result of the fact that you threw out the people who didn't agree with it.
But beyond that, it's one thing to say this is not the mainstream view within the current academy on this question of nutrition.
It is another thing to claim that you know what it is that the majority of nutrition scientists would say about this.
Conspiracy theory is an accusation.
You are putting into the mouths of the majority of nutrition scientists a specific accusation about why they don't believe something and other people do.
And the point is, you just made that up.
Yeah, I guess I find that the least of my complaints about this piece, because I actually, having now gone into a number of these papers that are written by so-called nutrition scientists, they don't have a lot of thinking.
They are not evidencing thinking, and many of them are cited in places like The Atlantic and The New York Times, and they just Talk about authority.
They just talk about, well, if the FDA approved it, I'm sure it's safe, right?
It's those sorts of claims.
Again, a complete reversal of conventional health beliefs.
This article just is totally insane.
You can be showing my screen here.
Here we go.
The research has continued to bear out the dangers of saturated fats.
This is one of very few supposedly scientific articles actually cited here by The Atlantic.
And what it links to is a review in the journal Circulation in 2017 called Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease, a Presidential Advisory from the American Heart Association.
The American Heart Association.
This is from the leadership at the American Heart Association, which when you click through to them, incidentally, you find that right now, 24 hours only, you can make an eight times life-saving impact with your donation.
That strikes me as really familiar.
Yeah.
Isn't that bizarre?
That's the same Kamala Harris election playbook.
Yeah.
So, you know, I don't know what necessarily to make of that.
Let me see.
Where was I? I'm not sure.
Here, give me my screen back if I can, because I have too many tabs open here.
But...
Oh, no.
So, the Atlantic article is...
Yeah, my...
There we go.
They're using as evidence, the Atlantic article, that this Presidential Advisory for the American Heart Association, which seems to have scrubbed its sight of exactly how it was formed.
It's celebrating 150 years, I think, now?
Maybe it's 100. I can't remember.
I guess it's 100. And they do have some of their financial reportings on their site.
And they're not getting that much of their funding from actual pharmaceutical companies.
But the vast majority of their funding is from non-specified, non-corporate donors.
And I feel like that's where the bodies are buried.
I don't know what all is there.
But just one more thing from this Tallow article.
Wait, wait, wait.
The American Heart Association, if I remember correctly...
Well, I'm saying that I couldn't find the claim that you're about to make.
I cannot establish the claim that you're about to make that the American Heart Association was founded As a trade group that effectively was pushing seed oils.
And what I'm saying is I... You don't find that on their site.
And I don't find it elsewhere with a relatively quick look.
So I have seen that claim.
I've heard you make that claim.
There is nothing easy to find about the origins, about their origins.
The author is going through why you should want animal fats.
The first question is the validity of the research that established the harms of saturated fats, right?
As if margarine is good for you and anyone thinks that is the case.
The second category alleges the harm of saturated fats, which questions the harms of saturated fats.
These are the claims that people like us are making, that butter and lard and tallow are actually good for you, in part based on really basic evolutionary analysis that that's what humans were eating all along and didn't have the number of cardiovascular events that they have now.
Secondly, the harms of seed oil, the polyunsaturated fats.
And then third, which is perhaps the most puzzling, she says, comprises a bona fide enthusiasm for tallow.
Americans aren't just eating beef tallow, they're also smearing it on their faces as a supposedly natural alternative to conventional moisturizer, despite a lack of scientific evidence and sometimes the faint smell of cow.
Wait, wait.
Supposedly natural?
What's supposed about it?
So what I did not have time to do today was go and find some of the moisturizers that presumably women like authors of this piece are using.
I don't actually even know what those might be, but some of these elite expensive beauty brands, right?
And just look at the list of ingredients, which are not going to be supposedly natural.
They're going to be explicitly and undeniably unnatural from a lab, synthesized from things like petroleum products.
And what they're trying to do here is use disgust to sway you.
You don't want to smell like a cow.
You don't want to put beef fat on your face.
Isn't that a little gross?
I actually find it much more gross to put the refined oils from the petroleum industry on your face.
And also surprising that you don't think that that might have long-term negative health benefits.
So this is another thing we cover in our book.
Yes.
Once upon a time, prior to the massively technological phase of humanity, your senses were a decent indicator of hazards.
They were a decent indicator of hazards because natural selection would endow you with the capacity, you know, if a fish smells funky because it's been in the sun, it doesn't make you want to eat it, right?
It's not good to eat it.
It has microbes that you can't detect, but you can detect this proxy of the way that the fish comes to smell.
The problem is that modernity breaks this pattern so that things that are dangerous to you do not trigger your warning senses.
In fact, one of the things that was done to seed oils is the off flavor notes and smell has been deodorized away so that this unnatural, unfood-like substance can be embedded into a food and it tastes good.
The point is they're gaming your senses and increasingly the story of their gaming the narrative over, you know, how healthy Americans or citizens of the West are is an analogous process.
Are they gaming your olfactory sense so that you will ingest a fat that you shouldn't eat?
Are they gaming?
You should have the sense of risk when you are taking a synthetic moisturizer and putting it on your face.
Does it cross through your skin?
Does it carry things with it in that crossing?
What is the effect on your health long term for using it, etc.?
You can't intuit those things.
And so you should have a sense of peril that you don't have when using the synthetic stuff.
And they're trying to trigger your sense of disgust to turn the tables on this, they say, supposedly natural, unarguably natural alternative.
Well, less natural if the cows from which the tallow has been pulled have been treated with bovier.
True.
Yeah.
So, I'm not going to read from this piece, but here's another article that came out this week in the New York Times, titled, Ozempic could crush the junk food industry, but it is fighting back.
As revolutionary new weight loss drugs turn consumers off ultra-processed foods, the industry is on the hunt for new products.
This is an incredibly long article.
It is so deeply sympathetic to both sides.
It is extraordinary.
Like the author of an article, a giant article, I feel like it's going to be in the magazine.
So, you know, this is going to probably be the cover article in the magazine.
I don't know if it's the cover article.
One of the prime places in the New York Times is concerned for Big Food because Big Pharma just had this win.
Now, there's nothing in this article about how Ozempic is going to backfire and cause a ton of health problems down the road, because no one is allowed to talk about that over in Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Ag Land yet.
I'm just going to read a couple of paragraphs.
I'll read the first two paragraphs here.
Trinian Taylor, a 52-year-old car dealer, pushed his car through the aisles of a supermarket as I pretended not to follow him.
It was a bright August day in Northern California, and I had come to the store to meet Emily Auerbach, a relationship manager at Mattson, a food innovation firm that creates products for the country's largest food and beverage companies, McDonald's and White Castle, PepsiCo, and Hostos.
So right there, we just have so many layers of corporate intrigue, right?
Auerbach was trying to understand the shopping behavior of Ozempic users, and Taylor was one of her case studies.
Okay, we don't need the rest of that paragraph.
Auerbach watched in silence as Taylor, who was earning $150 in exchange for being tailed, propelled his cart through snack aisles scattered with products from Matson's clients.
He took us straight past the Doritos and the Hostess Ho-Hos without a side glance at the Oreos or the Cheetos.
We rushed past the Pop-Tarts and the Hershey's Kisses, the Lucky Charms and the Lays.
They all barely registered.
Clumsily, close on his heels, Auerbach and I stumbled right into what has become, under the influence of the revolutionary new diet drug, Taylor's Happy Place, the produce section.
He inspected the goods.
I'm on all of these, he told us.
I eat a lot of pineapple.
A lot of pineapple.
Cucumber.
Ginger.
Oh, a lot of ginger.
This is a problem for big food.
This is intriguing.
I'm curious what has people on this horrifying new drug at least temporarily going after fresh produce and preferring it.
But what But what the article proceeds to do is basically describe, without ever calling it this, the arms race that is developing.
That Big Food is going to figure out ways to undermine whatever pseudo-successes, short-term though they certainly will be, that Ozepic is Revealing for people.
And it's going to short circuit those.
And of course, at the moment, it's like, well, OK, so now you want more protein and fiber.
Let's see how we can literally one of the suggestions in there is add fiber to beef jerky.
So or you could separately eat real food that has high protein and high fiber.
Just a thought.
This is amazing at many different levels.
Yeah.
One.
You've got corporations studying the psychology and behavior of citizens who cannot fight back.
We cannot study in reverse and understand what it is that's being done to us.
But the point is, a normal human You should be appalled to discover that you've got dueling corporations studying, first of all, where'd the obesity epidemic come from?
Well, it came from these second motherfuckers who are now back on their heels, right?
They studied how to addict you to foods that you shouldn't be eating.
Oh no, it was Impicai's buying ginger.
Right.
So the food guys had the upper hand for decades, right?
Getting people to eat more than they should, you know, studying the psychology of children, getting children to take on food habits that would then plague them for life, right?
So the food guys had the upper hand.
And then the pharma people are like, well, people are not happy with how fat they've gotten.
Yeah, big shock.
So what are we going to do?
Well, instead of curing the addiction to the food, they're going to interrupt the digestion process, right?
As if that's not obviously going to have major health impacts.
And so they temporarily have the upper hand because they can charge, what is it?
A thousand dollars a month or some insane, something like that to fuck up your health even further.
And now the food people are going to fight back.
How can we re-trigger that addiction, right?
It's like, okay, here's the question.
And meanwhile, the mainstream media thinks Kennedy's the devil here.
Like, who's the bad guy?
It's the guy who's named the things that are going wrong and said, I'm coming for them.
Yeah, and has fought courageously against corporations to better your health, right?
So here's the nugget that you gotta see.
The New York Times is a very mainstream publication.
This is not a trade publication describing an arms race between two industries.
This is a mainstream publication in which you in the public who are being targeted by these two evil entities are taking on their mindset.
Ooh, who's going to win?
Is it going to be the food addictors or the pharma maniacs?
And as you talk, actually, Jen, if you want to show my screen here, the food styling, the photos for this piece, as you talk, this is one of them.
Oh no, it's a, what to some people would look like a delicious hostess cupcake, I guess, smashed pork cupcake.
Here's, I mean, there are ads for other things too, but oh, it's a Dorito that's been crushed.
Poor Dorito chip.
And then, oh, this disgusting thing.
Easy Holiday Recipes by New York Times.
Look at how many non-food things are in those cookies.
Cookies are not good for you, but you can have cookies made with real things.
I make them more often than I probably should.
But the sprinkles and the M&Ms, anyway, more of that's just an ad.
Oh, the poor smashed Kit Kat.
So, at some level, the food, the photo styling here would have us root for the food, but that's only because food is appealing to us and pharma isn't at the visual level.
Right.
But I don't know how to frame it, but the point is they are creating a sympathy In average people who are being targeted by corporations that are destroying their health, they are creating a sympathy for the health destroyers.
And they are creating suspicion of the people who are trying to help you, right?
The villains are heroes and the heroes are villains.
And the New York Times is, you know...
With high production values, creating the narrative to get you to take on this upside down way of viewing the world.
And, you know, the thing that surprises me more than anything else is how many rounds of this everybody's been through.
Yeah.
And yet they still don't get it, right?
They're still, well, maybe they do get it and they're fleeing the New York Times, but the ones who are still reading the New York Times somehow don't understand that they are being caused to sympathize with villains who are targeting them specifically and their children, right?
That's an amazing trick of all the magic tricks.
Getting you to side with the villain who's attacking your children, right?
That's power.
And that's where we are.
It is where we are.
Here's someplace else we are.
There's some research that came out a couple months ago on what is being called, the benefits of what is being called VILPA, Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity, VILPA. Over the last several years, people have been increasingly talking about high-intensity interval training.
Go as hard as you can or 90, I don't know what the specs are, but go something like as hard as you can for relatively brief periods and then take a break and then do it again.
The relatively well-known 7-minute app, which is something that I actually do, right?
That you do, you know, 12 high-intensity exercises for 30 seconds at a time with a 10-second break between them.
And, you know, you're done in, depending on how many sides there are, etc.
You know, something between 7 and 11 minutes.
And you've actually, you know, broken a sweat and breathed hard and moved your body in all the ways, in many of the ways that you might want to move it.
And it's not a replacement for going on a bike ride or going out kayaking or going on a hike, but it gets you moving, right?
And there are known benefits.
But there are apparently a lot of people out there who, some of whom can't, But many of whom describe themselves as non-exercisers, which means that on a given week, they at the most go on one walk that they call recreational.
That is the most activity that they get in a week on average.
Which I would have to think is more than a lot of people.
There got to be lots of people who go on none.
But that includes, that's this group.
Oh, I see.
One or less.
This is this group.
Got it.
So the non-exercisers are, of course, not engaging in high-intensity.
Intermittent, what is it called?
I always forget what HIIT stands for, and I had it before, but now I've lost it.
You don't remember it, do you?
Intermittent high-intensity...
Well, that's the wrong order, but if you're doing it in Spanish, maybe.
I don't think I was, but...
High-intensity intermittent training.
We need a randomized controlled trial to know for sure.
I I don't think that's how language works, but we'll come back to that.
Actually, we won't.
But so there's this paper out, and here I'll show, published a month or two ago, called Device Measured Vigorous Oh, man.
Is this the right one?
Yeah.
Let me make sure this is the...
Yes, this is the right one because the same authors had one from a couple years ago in which they defined VILPA. Device measured vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity and major adverse cardiovascular events, evidence of sex differences.
So just to translate that title.
Again, we're not talking about high-intensity interval training.
We're talking about vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity.
Which means something like, I kid you not, climbing stairs.
And not like running up six flights of stairs, but just like going up a flight of stairs.
Or carrying your groceries.
So these things are counting in this rubric.
And the events tend to last 20-30 seconds, a minute maybe.
A major adverse cardiovascular event, of course, is, for instance, a heart attack.
And the question is, I hope that they went in with it, but I have no evidence that they did, are there differences between men and women in terms of whether or not the rate of heart attacks are affected by the amount of VILPA that you engage in?
So I'm not going to walk through.
The data are messy.
They've done some, frankly, grotesque looking, but how could I know, statistical analyses that are impossible to fully assess, especially given that we don't know what the actual data looked like.
But when they found exactly the group of people who don't exercise, and it's women who don't exercise at all, but who do exercise, Engage in 30 seconds or a minute of vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity on most days, such as carrying groceries to the car or going up a flight of stairs.
It is those women have a considerable reduced likelihood of having heart attacks.
Men also, non-exercising, totally sedentary men also have some slight benefit, but it's not as much.
And so, you know, this is sort of blowing up as if this is this amazing, huge result, right?
Like, oh my God, all you have to do is carry your groceries a little bit or go upstairs and you're going to be so much at reduced risk of having a heart attack.
It's like, that is only in.
The most unhealthy, most sedentary, most unlike any evolutionary history situation we have ever had before population.
And yes, it would be great if those people were in better health.
But this is not either a surprising result, nor an impressive result.
You're talking about the most unhealthy people who, when they move themselves 30 seconds a day compared to zero seconds a day, have better health outcomes.
Well, of course they do.
Because if you move some versus zero, you're going to do better.
Well, here's the thing.
That result doesn't even necessarily mean that.
I agree that intuitively that makes a great deal of sense.
But this is a strange piece of work in many ways.
It is.
One thing, it's got 11 authors.
Yeah, I mean, that's just that.
I mean, that's another problem.
Right, but hold on.
Diminishing returns, right?
You need 11 authors.
You've got people in two categories.
Well, no.
So here I can scroll down.
The data such as it is, original research, table one, participant baseline characteristics by VILPA duration and sex, non-exercise.
So they're looking at...
There's a number of characteristics about all these people, though it's only one set.
The end is they've got 22,000 people, and I don't know what all these authors did.
Usually on giant multi-authored papers you have to wonder this, but 11, frankly, is not that much in the general scheme of modern scientific things.
I haven't read the paper.
It doesn't look to me.
You don't need to.
They are over-complicating something that isn't that complicated.
And what's more, although it is very easy to abuse the idea that correlation does not imply causation, because correlation can imply causation when there's a pre-existing causal hypothesis on the table, in this case, The distinction that they found could easily be generated on the negative side.
That is to say, there is no benefit to a brief burst of activity.
The point is, who doesn't have the brief burst of activity?
People who are truly, desperately infirm.
Right.
And so it can be that this is not evidence for that having a positive health benefit.
It's evidence that if you categorize people as having these bursts of activity and those who don't, the ones who don't, have something seriously wrong with them that also has implications for their likelihood of a heart attack.
Yeah.
Now, I hope and presume they dealt with some of that because they are looking at other Currently respected indicators of health, most of which I do not particularly trust, but they're looking at the degree of medication for cholesterol, insulin, blood pressure they're on, diagnosis of cancer, family history of cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke, etc.
Although I guess those heart failure and stroke are the types of major factors.
Heart incident, whatever it stands for.
So I'm not sure that they did a terrible job of what you're talking about, but even if these 22,000 people have been partsed out into their various positions appropriately, And there are other things about the differences between their lifestyles that don't turn out to be telling.
And it does turn out that actually some people just don't feel like moving and they don't.
And some people occasionally move for very brief bouts and even those occasional movements help.
And there is a way in which if that is true, you know, how terrible is it that I would suggest that we shouldn't spread the word because those people who are moving zero seconds a day should be encouraged to move 40 seconds a day.
Like, yes and How low have we gone?
Like, this is amazing.
We have the New York Times writing an extended puff piece trying to figure out if it's rooting for big pharma or big food in the fight to destroy America's health.
And we have outfits like CNN and NBC who are reporting on this study crowing from the rooftops about how a few seconds a day of activity can reduce the chances of a future heart attack, whether or not it's true.
And in the same era, we know for sure that Bobby Kennedy is the enemy.
I can't believe that they're still putting this stuff out there and not ever asking themselves, wait a minute, what are we doing?
Is this at all consistent?
Do we actually care about R or anybody else's health?
Well, but I mean, I think...
It intuitively doesn't make any sense because were you to find yourself in their position, you'd last all of five minutes before you stood up and shouted, hey, what the hell is wrong with all you people, right?
But if you have been fed a diet of narratives that cause you to be sympathetic with villains and to view saviors as the enemy...
If you have been trained in a graduate program that caused you to feel the incentives of the funding apparatus and its corrupters as if they were personal to you so that you learn how to create the study that reflects,
you know, If seed oils own the universities, then the point is, well, how good are you at figuring out how to generate a new study that will get published that will reflect that seed oils are actually pretty darn good for you and that beef tallow isn't so hot, right?
And it makes you smell like a cow.
It's all a question of niches training these people to take on...
Let me put it a different way.
You have to understand that Conspiracy is a richer landscape than we give it credit for.
People understand the conspiracy where somebody has gathered a group of people in a room and they discuss how to accomplish something that they shouldn't be accomplishing.
They don't understand how those rooms, which do exist, you know, people, oh no, Ozempic is cutting into our Pop-Tart margin, you know, how are we going to address that?
So people go back to eating Pop-Tarts.
People get that part, but that part then flows into a system in which lots of things participate in the conspiracy in the same way that the engine of the getaway car participates in a crime, right?
The engine doesn't have any particular reason to want the crime committed or to want people to be able to get away with it.
But it does help them.
And so you've got all of these people who went into science because presumably they thought that that was a cool thing to do, who then get trained into doing something that is actually the inverse of science.
They have been trained into phrasing conclusions that aren't even true as if they were true and as if they support a narrative that was based in market forces to begin with.
And The crazy thing is that they don't even realize, most of them do not even realize what they've become part of.
They actually think they are doing science.
They go to their conferences and they talk to each other in very sober, scientific-sounding terms and they do not understand that they actually are the engine of the getaway car of the people committing the crime.
Yeah.
I think that's a decent segue, too.
In Science, the journal, this week, there's an editorial published called A New Vision for American Science.
It is written by the Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is the publisher of Science, the journal where this is published.
Also written by the president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious academy that invites scientists into it in the United States, and the senior vice president and director of research at IBM, Yorktown Heights, just IBM, and chair of the National Science Board.
So I don't know exactly what that third guy is doing on here, but okay.
So a new vision for American science.
This seems Okay, cool.
Let's go there.
Now, the problem is, and you'll see usually I highlight some stuff, and this is only a one-page piece, and I could read the whole thing.
I think I'll just start reading it.
There's no actual, just to cut to the chase, the punchline is there's no vision here.
This is a full-page editorial.
Written by the editor for science and the president of the National Academy, suggesting that we need a new vision for American science, but they don't actually provide any indication of what that vision should be.
America's scientific success is no accident, they write.
It has been powered by decades-long commitment to federal investment in fundamental research.
Oh my goodness, I did that again.
Excuse me, I'm gonna make it just a little bit bigger this way.
America's scientific success is no accident.
It has been powered by a decades-long commitment to federal investment and fundamental research that, in turn, nurtured both domestic and foreign talent and prompted the translation of breakthroughs to fuel the economy, improve health, fortify national security, and inspire awe.
The world has benefited from the proliferation of this model, and partnerships between the US and other countries have resulted in game-changing discoveries, from medicines to machine learning.
Yet, what got America to this point will not get the country to where it needs to go.
A new vision is required to respond to an evolving global science and technology ecosystem.
Discovery and innovation across the world have changed in profound ways that require the US to find new approaches to how it develops people, builds and maintains infrastructure, and funds the scientific enterprise.
And it goes on like that, precisely like that, with vague claims that change is necessary, that we can't go on, that we need to go someplace else than where we've been, without anything that is precise.
Now they say here...
There are 70 influential leaders across science, industry, academia, philanthropy, and policy from graduate students to executives with a mission to crystallize a, quote, vision for American science and technology, vast.
The goal is to equip decision makers in Washington, D.C. with an evolved idea of what science and technology can be and concrete policy recommendations to push American science and technology to new heights.
One thing to note here is that this is no longer about science.
It's about science and technology, which, of course, is different.
It's more than, but I thought we were looking at science, and now we're looking at science and technology.
So just the entire thing is like this.
The final paragraph is, change is essential to progress, but what must not change is the goal of a more prosperous, healthier, and safer world, and the fact that science and technology remain among the most potent tools to achieve this for all.
Just so many words.
There's nothing here.
It's a boilerplate essay.
It's a boilerplate essay with two of the three authors being as high up in American science as you can imagine them being, published in one of the world's two premier science journals.
We need a vision for science.
We need a new vision.
We need change.
We've been great places.
We will go great places again if only we...
To be continued.
We don't know.
Either we don't know or we're not going to tell you, or hold on, we are coming to the rescue, but we're not going to tell you yet how we're going to do that.
Well, but it also speaks to the capture of the idea of science by some unimaginative, bureaucratic, pseudo-scientific regime, right?
Even the portrayal in that first paragraph about what has made American science great.
You know what it is?
It's the funding and the decades-long commitment.
It doesn't say how many decades, so we don't even know how to evaluate that claim.
Decades long could be a decade.
Are you saying that the greatness of American science is the last decade?
Are you saying it goes back several decades, like, you know, along with peer review?
Right?
Or are you going to acknowledge that actually American science has nothing whatsoever to do, the greatness of it, has nothing whatsoever to do with this vast federal funding apparatus, which, you know, has actually allowed a narrowing and a steering of the scientific apparatus Into those things that the regime wants legitimized or delegitimized, right?
It has become subservient and science is not supposed to be subservient to anything.
Science is supposed to.
It is the process that actually allows you to discover that which you need to know rather than what you want to hear.
And that vast federal funding apparatus has turned it into something that will tell certain people what they want to hear, no matter how wrong it is and how much harm it does to others.
So, the ridiculousness of that essay is that it actually portrays the collapse of science under this, you know, vast, grey bureaucracy as if it was the glory days of science that brought us all of the marvels of modernity, which is nonsense.
It didn't happen.
That is exactly it.
Actually, America, Americans, American scientists Are best as a ragtag fugitive fleet.
Yep.
As a bunch of iconoclasts who don't always get along, and when you put them in a room together, they're gonna get into it with one another.
And out of that will emerge better thinking and ideas that are more likely to be true because they have all been put to rigorous testing.
The science, the brilliance, and the creativity, and the innovation of the science never lives in the gray bureaucracy.
It may, under some circumstances, be somewhat enclosed by it and not harmed by it.
But that is it.
It is never the bureaucracy that has housed the innovation of science.
So I think what must be going on here is that they know that a bunch of revolutionaries have just earned power.
And a lot of people don't want to be sidelined by a bunch of revolutionaries who have declared war on that bureaucracy and what it's done to science.
And so by saying, well, actually, of course we need a new vision because You know, the bureaucracy brought us this far, but that same bureaucracy is going to have to continue in the future.
And if it keeps doing the same bureaucratic thing, we won't get there.
So we've got a, you know, we're going to need to refresh the bureaucracy.
It's like, no, I don't think you understand a damn thing about how discovery happens.
And in fact, that bureaucracy, if it's great at one thing, it's preventing the natural progress to new schools of thought.
What is supposed to happen is when a school of thought...
Look, if you were smart, you'd build the system so it never killed off the schools of thought that were not top dog at any moment.
You need at least two schools of thought alive at any one moment just to keep each other honest.
But...
At the very least, when a school of thought runs out of power because it's hit this inflection point of diminishing returns and it's getting less and less for greater and greater investment, then the point is the person who knows what to do and says, oh, actually, you know what?
You guys are screwing up.
I know what to do next.
No, you don't.
Yes, I do.
And I'm going to show you how I know that.
Then the point is now you're on the next one of these diminishing returns curves and you get all this big burst of, I cannot follow the line, but you get that next burst of discovery.
So that's the process and the bureaucracy thwarts it because what it does is it keeps handing power to the same people, irrespective of whether or not what they are doing is continuing to provide a good return on investment.
That is all true.
So this is going to seem, not to you, but to many in our audience, I think, a sideways step here.
But I wanted to share the piece that I wrote for Natural Selections this week, and then a type of response that I saw to it, because I think it is exactly in the space of Actually, what is it to think scientifically and to live a life in which you understand yourself, to have the autonomy to figure out what you think is going on by yourself?
So, this was prompted, this piece.
You can show my screen here.
By us spending an evening in the darkness of our home with a fire watching the night sky just a couple of days ago.
Objects in the night sky.
What we see versus what it means.
On a new moon night in December, the sky is at its deepest dark, abyssal, endless.
Except when it is not.
Night follows in the vein of day, and the day before this night was crystalline.
Distant mountain ranges show jagged glacial lines, the peaks of the Cascades and the Olympics so new they are still pushing up out of the earth.
Sun has set on this unexpectedly clear December day, no water in the air, no discernible particles, and yet the sky holds light.
There is glow on the horizon from faraway city lights.
Closer in there are planes and lights from people's homes.
Farther away, satellites circle.
And we sit, lit inside by only a wood fire as the stars become visible.
This is no typical winter-night sky.
All of the cosmos is on display.
One object, brighter than all the rest, appears above the eastern horizon, yellow and pale.
It does not move at the speed of something humans have made.
It is on a plane or a satellite, and it is too bright to be a star.
A planet, then.
But which one?
It is too high in the sky to be Mercury, too far from the Sun to be Venus, not red enough to be Mars.
That leaves Jupiter or Saturn.
The others are too far away.
We use objects that seem wildly insufficient for the task to help us diagnose our planet.
Binoculars with 10x magnification bring us closer, but they don't add much detail to that plain, bright, pale yellow disk.
Galileo designed a telescope with 20 by magnification, with which he first saw the four largest moons of Jupiter, the Galilean moons.
They circle the great gas giant, Jupiter, the Roman sky and thunder god whose Greek counterpart is Zeus.
The Galilean moons are named for lovers of Zeus, Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.
As we continue to look, perhaps there is resolution.
I see a fatness around the middle of our planet, a regularity, which I believe to be rings.
It is Saturn, I proclaim.
I think I see moons, he says.
It is Jupiter.
We watch our fire and the changing sky and the slow movement of that giant planet in the night sky.
We do not consult experts.
There will always be time for that.
Whichever planet this is, we can find out tomorrow.
For now, let us watch and think and consider.
Hours later the bright planet has yielded no more secrets.
Our lenses are not quite powerful enough to discern the truth.
I think I have seen rings, and so rings are difficult to unsee.
He thinks he has seen moons, and so moons are difficult to unsee.
One of us is not seeing accurately.
Both of us are looking at the very same thing.
The next morning dawns with atmospheric clarity again.
The only planet still visible is the one in which we live.
We look it up.
There were many planets visible in our night sky the night before.
Had we been looking west, we might well have seen Venus.
Mercury briefly made an appearance right next to the Sun, and Mars was up most of the night.
Even Uranus and Neptune were above the horizon, although not visible with the naked eye.
And both of our contenders, Saturn and Jupiter, were visible in our night sky, although in different places.
Which one was it?
This planet, our planet which we tracked for hours, was Jupiter.
I was wrong.
As I write this 24 hours later, Jupiter will soon rise again, surrounded by his lovers, the Galilean moons, which I may yet see, or I may not.
I now know that what I perceived as rings were actually moons.
The observation is the observation, but now I know the correct interpretation of the observation.
That should not change what I actually see, just what I think it means.
So that is...
A number of things.
It is an accurate, I think, reflection of our experience of watching the night sky and refusing to get a quick answer because it is both more interesting and more educating to rely on what you believe that you already know and what you can discern from what you can experience.
And so what I've written into here, you know, we...
Mercury and Venus, being inside of our orbit from us, tend to be in the same part of the sky with the Sun.
So we thought it wasn't them.
And Mars tends to look red.
And Uranus and Neptune are basically not observable with the naked eye.
And so we were seeing it very clearly with the naked eye.
And so that left these two big gas giants.
And we knew some things about how they should look different.
But each of us came to a different conclusion.
And it was sort of fun.
We both arrived at a conclusion and were amused to stick with it.
And the stakes were low.
Nothing was reliant on it.
But one of the things...
So I tweeted this piece, as I do, and the only thing that I said in the tweet was, this is no typical winter night sky.
All of the cosmos is on display.
One object, brighter than all the rest, appears above the eastern horizon, yellow and pale.
It is too high in the sky to be Mercury, too far from the sun to be Venus, not red enough to be Mars.
And then I go on.
To which someone says, download Stellarium and you'll never have to wonder again.
And I suspect that this is a good app that is valuable and accurate.
And in my piece, I say, you know, the sources that I went to to find out what was going on in our night sky the night before.
But my response to him is, why would you choose to minimize wonder?
And that feels to me that it has been one of the first things to go in the modern technocracy that we are living in that is masquerading as a pro-science democracy.
That this is a world in which certainty is paramount.
That if you don't know, you shouldn't speak.
And if you don't know and you have a way to figure it out, you are negligent for not having figured it out right away.
And as we, gosh, it was back in like 2015 or 16 when we gave a talk and wrote a piece called Don't Look It Up.
Speaking precisely to the benefit of taking students into remote parts of the world where they could not look it up, those parts being ever more rare as cell towers and Wi-Fi becomes nearly ubiquitous.
But the idea of going someplace, in this case, it would have been the Scablands of Eastern Washington that we were specifically talking about, being in a landscape that is unlike a landscape that almost anyone has been in before and saying, what caused it?
What do you think?
No, you can't Google it.
The idea that it would be better not to wonder.
This feels to me like one of the actual horsemen of the apocalypse that I hope we are not living through.
Because being in the space of not knowing and becoming comfortable with not knowing and training your brain to figure out what it is that you can infer and what must be true for that inference to be true and what's downstream of it and what branching point you have to come back to if that turns out to be wrong.
Is how we become more knowledgeable.
That is how we become more capable and actually autonomous in our navigation of the world.
Yeah, I would put it slightly differently.
I would say you've got a competition between having an answer, which people increasingly synonymize with being smart, right?
Having answers.
You're like an encyclopedia that can spit out answers.
And what is atrophying is the ability to...
You can deduce answers without the capacity to look something up.
In other words, the coin of the realm is predictive power.
You train your ability to predict things on a world where you're not looking things up, and then ultimately looking things up can tell you how well you did.
It can enhance the process.
And then you can refine your inference.
Right.
But the idea that Let's put it this way.
Not knowing something is an opportunity to do one of two things.
One of them is to know it.
And the other is to use it as a mechanism for getting better at deducing things without looking them up.
And one of these things is vastly more valuable than the other.
It's great to have knowledge.
It's better to have the capacity to generate knowledge without having to resort.
To an authority, and in an era where your authorities are increasingly doing insane stuff like trying to bring you in on sympathy for corporations who are studying how to dysregulate your physiology, what you want is a system in which you do have a tool that is highly attuned to nonsense and false claims and things like that.
Because frankly, your life may depend on it.
Yeah, and so that may sound overwrought when the subject is, which of the gas giants outside of the asteroid belt were we looking at?
And in this case, not only are there no moral stakes, but the answer is clean-cut.
Our astronomy is certainly good enough, the world's astronomy is certainly good enough, that having discovered an answer and then seen it in various places, Clearly what it was that we were looking at was Jupiter.
500 years ago we wouldn't have known.
But all such questions that one has about one's universe, where one can make an observation and say, I want to know, I want to record what I am actually seeing as opposed to what I think it means.
And this is one of the absolutely first skills that I used to teach my students of animal behavior, that that is the thing that is maybe hardest, to see without overlaying your understanding or your sense or your guess about what it means.
You don't record they were fighting.
You record what was actually happening and after you've seen 70 of these events and you have the pieces of them and you can begin to shorthand it, but you don't start that way.
And the better we can get at splitting apart the observation of what is true from the inference that either we have made or the authority has told us is the only possible interpretation, the more able we're going to be to walk through our world and actually make sense of it.
And not fall prey to more of these charlatans who clearly want us in their sway forever.
So I just want to add the punchline to our Don't Look It Up presentation.
Because the punchline really is that in the case that something is known, you actually have the best of both worlds.
Yeah, sure.
Because what you get is the training device of a world in which you don't know the answer and you have to make use of the evidence you have and figure out what it means and how you're going to test your idea.
And then you have the ability to very quickly figure out whether you did the work correctly.
And so what we said in that presentation is that reinventing the wheel gets a bad name, right?
Reinventing the wheel gets a bad name because you don't get credit for a wheel if somebody's already invented it, as you shouldn't.
But, to the extent that you go through the process of reinventing a wheel, you pick up all of the understanding of how a wheel comes to be.
That's right.
And it is really, it is the overrating of the product of study and the underrating of the skill that is overtaking us.
The process.
It's process versus product.
Yeah, but I even want to say skill, because the point is you're training your mind to do this thing so that you are not dependent on the ability to look it up, because it's all well and good to look it up in the end when the knowledge is there, but you're going to be faced with, you know...
You're going to be faced with COVID, and they're going to tell you, take the shot.
And then they're going to say something like, it's safe and effective.
And the question is, can you figure out how you would evaluate a claim like that?
Or are you just going to either take it on faith or reject it out of reflex, both of which are dangerous?
You need to figure out how you would know so that you can figure out how to defend yourself.
Yeah, and that is precisely a large part of what we were doing early in COVID, beginning to say, okay, wait a minute, this seems age stratified.
It doesn't seem to be killing young people at all.
Wait, there seem to be big comorbidities explaining deaths and hospitalizations.
Obesity is a big one and kidney failure and metabolic disease and diabetes.
And sunlight seems to help.
They're telling us to stay locked in our homes and bribing us with pizza and cookies later on if we get the shot.
All of their recommendations seem to run counter to what a normal human being should be doing in response to this pathogen.
Actually, I think there's a very good example of why the look it up because you can't stand not knowing mentality is dangerous.
There's something about the way...
COVID unfolded chronologically, where we now know that doctors using ventilators killed a lot of people.
Why?
These were doctors faced with sick patients.
Why did they put them on ventilators if they shouldn't have been put on ventilators?
The answer is These doctors did not know that they were downstream of what we now understand to be false information coming out of China about how severe the disease was.
So doctors had been primed for a much deadlier disease than actually arrived.
They had watched people collapsing on the sidewalk in Wuhan, right?
And What they needed was a tool that would have allowed them to evaluate what they were seeing so that when the patients walked through their office door, they would realize, you know what?
That's not a match for what I saw on my computer screen.
Therefore, maybe I need to rethink what the right approach to this patient is rather than assume they're, you know, about to die and I'm in hero mode and I'm going to stick them on the ventilator as a last-ditch effort to rescue them.
So, you know, our doctors failed to have the tool.
What they had was what masqueraded as knowledge and wasn't because those videos were in large measure fake.
Yes.
Well, okay.
I think we've arrived there.
We've arrived here.
No, we've arrived there.
Wow.
I was unaware of that.
Yeah, now you know.
Before we leave for the week, you can show my screen here again.
We've got a new store.
Basically a combination of our two past stores, which means the quality, the website should be easy to navigate and the quality of the products should be awesome.
We've got all the stuff that we've had before.
Do not affirm, do not comply.
I turned around when I did it.
Lie to a Tyrant, Psyop until proven otherwise, Goliath in the Google font, Pfizer, the breakthroughs never stop, all of these things.
So I've got t-shirts, hoodies, bags, my favorite, the epic tabby tote.
I love this bag.
It's great.
I love this cat.
He's a real charmer.
You guys haven't seen him in a while, but we have.
He's extraordinarily charismatic.
So lots of great stuff here.
If you're looking for any of that, you find that at darkhorsestore.org.
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We are also doing a Q&A in just a few short minutes after we stop this live stream.
We're going to start off with a question that someone asked about fasting to continue our conversation from a couple weeks back when we I told you about the results of our seven-day dry fast.
And there are other great questions, I'm sure, that have accumulated in locals.
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