Fear the Reaper: The 255th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 255th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss how to avoid confusion between moral and analytical differences, especially when it comes to politics and the state of America. Probably you have people in your life whom you love, with whom you disagree adamantly about politics. If you believe those people to share your values, then yo...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 255 if I'm not mistaken.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Not a normal show.
You are feeling a little under the weather as a result of a series of events in which our son left his spot in Italy to come home.
Rather, well, he became sick in transit.
And I would point out, as I pointed out at the beginning of COVID, that there's no guidance on exactly what you're supposed to do.
What was he going to do other than just complete his travel home?
But anyway, he's come home sick.
And several of his friends that he was hanging out with apparently also became sick in their travels.
And anyway, you seem to have caught it.
I think you're doing great.
He was pretty sick.
You're on your feet.
Not entirely helped by you forcing me to drink textile dye.
All right.
Well, in my defense, this particular textile dye is...
My tongue is still blue.
I'm going to try not to open my mouth much.
Your tongue is still blue.
Yeah.
It's on my teeth.
Which skinks.
It's skinks.
Skinks, not skanks.
I said skinks.
Okay, skinks.
I'm talking about skinks.
Right.
Herpetologist, man.
I know.
There are no skanky skinks.
No, but there are blue-tongued skinks.
Yes.
Yes, there are blue-tongued skinks.
And I would point out that the textile dye, which I administered in good faith and in the hope of improving your situation, caused some technical issues with the podcast.
Oh, did they?
Yeah.
How's that?
Well, it caused a Bluetooth problem.
Hmm.
I mean look, how many times in life is the universe gonna set you up for that joke?
Never, but it's apparently going to set you up once.
Once.
This is once.
And so what was I going to do?
Pass it up?
You know.
Not you.
Right.
Exactly.
So anyway, I apologize for the Bluetooth problem and the skinky situation of a blue tongue.
And anyone who's watching at home, that's not your set.
Don't attempt to adjust it.
That's metal in blue.
Yes.
All right.
Here we are.
Alright, so an unusual Tuesday podcast because we were supposed to be both going to another event.
Unfortunately, I can't because I'm a bit sick, but you're going to be going after this.
So here we are on Tuesday.
Start off top of the hour by thanking our supporters on Locals who are watching a watch party right now, some of them, and with our three sponsors right at the top of the hour.
So let's do that.
Yeah, let's do that.
And I happen to know, because I did a little reconnaissance, that I'm reading the first ad.
You're not as impressed as I was hoping that you would be, but you're not impressed at all that I knew that.
I mean, only because I told you?
Oh, you did?
I don't remember that.
I read it here.
It says our first sponsor this week is Caraway.
Yes.
I mean, it all comes down to you.
There's no question about that, but the mode of communication.
Here's the thing.
I just feel like there's so much to be impressed by about you.
This isn't it?
Every day.
And you asking for me to be impressed about things that don't warrant it, it could cause a person to wonder if one is being duped in the other spheres where you are clearly impressive.
I wonder enough to leave me.
Okay.
I don't think the fact that you laughed means that you had at least that had not occurred to you this morning.
So that's good.
All right.
Our first sponsor forcing me to drink textile dyes.
All right.
Well, I will take that under advisement for future scenarios.
Yes.
Our first sponsor, Heather, is Caraway, which makes high quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
They've got a brand new line of enameled cast iron as well.
The United States is about to usher in a new era of health.
I was not expecting to hear that kind of exuberant noise from you this morning in light of the health situation and then the Bluetooth conundrum.
It's so exciting.
Yes, it is exciting.
It's so exciting.
I'm excited and I am, for the first time in my life, lamenting the long period after the election, before the inauguration.
Right.
Let's get on with it.
Seems like a lot of exposure.
But back to the enameled cast iron and the United States, which is about to usher in a new era of health.
Whoa.
On Dark Horse, we have talked at length about the risks of agricultural chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, fluoride in our water, dyes in our food, that hits hard today, seed oils, and so much more.
One thing we haven't talked much about are the hazards of nonstick coatings on cookware and bakeware.
In our house, we threw out all the Teflon decades ago.
Teflon is toxic, and either by flaking off in your food or releasing its toxins when it gets too hot, People who use Teflon coated cookware and bakeware are ingesting and inhaling Teflon.
Enter Carraway.
Carraway makes several lines of non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
They've got their ceramic-coated aluminum cookware, which we've talked about before.
It has a slick finish like that of Teflon-based non-stick pots and pans, but without the Teflon.
Carraway's ceramic-coated aluminum cookware is so beautiful and functional and light.
It's easy to pick up.
One of their skillets and slide an omelet right into your plate or remove muffins from their muffin tins.
Carraway also got...
Again, read what's on the paper, Brett.
Carraway also has, that's English, a stainless steel line, and now they've got enameled cast iron too.
Yes, they do.
Yep.
All of Carraway's products are free from Forever Chemicals, and their new enameled cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors.
These pots are strong and highly scratch resistant the last generations.
We used enameled cast iron pots to braise large cuts of meat, cook stews, soups, and even roast chickens sometimes.
Because one of the great advantages of enameled cast iron is its uniform heat retention.
Easy to use and beautiful too.
You can't go wrong.
This holiday season, consider upgrading your cookware and bakeware and making everything from roast to gingerbread men with ease and without toxins.
The holidays are closer than ever, so make sure you order by December 16th to get their gift or yours underneath the tree in time.
Visit carawayhome.com to take advantage of this limited-time offer for up to 20% off your next purchase.
Again, that's carawayhome.com to get new kitchenware before the holidays.
Caraway non-toxic cookware is...
Breathe.
That's what I'm going to do.
Carraway non-toxic cookware made modern.
I think there should be a comment there.
That's the CTA, man.
I don't get to change that.
Oh, God.
I don't even get to add punctuation.
I'm going to mentally throw a comma there.
I could probably add punctuation as long as we don't talk about it on air.
Yeah.
As long as we...
I think that ship has sailed.
However...
All right.
I believe you're up.
I am.
I am.
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A lot of the honey on grocery market shelves isn't even real honey.
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Can I just say, what an era of farce and fabrications we are living in.
And alliteration.
Yes, locally anyway.
It's just unbelievable how much awareness a person has to have or to make several things in their lives almost full-time jobs in order to actually continue to To have the downstream effects of the choices they make to live better, healthier lives for themselves and their families actually manifest.
So the fact that much honey on grocery store shelves isn't even real honey, how diabolical is that?
And again, you're not going to have that problem with Manuka honey, or Manukura.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
The degree to which you have to engage your conscious mind over mundane stuff, it's through the roof, and you can't live like this.
You can't live like this.
And living consciously a lot of the time, forever, chronically, is never going to be good for you.
And we talk about this on Hunter Gatherer's Guide.
But it's going to be less compelling, even as a short-term strategy, when there are so many choices.
And, you know, the living consciously when you're dealing with an array of, you know, 80 different kinds of salt, for instance, is fundamentally different when you're going like, oh, I've got two salt choices, which do I go to, right?
So, Monocor is great.
I mean, I think actually part of what part of why we ended up deciding to do ads was because we knew that we would be careful about who we chose.
And possibly if you're watching, you trust us.
And we are telling you that we have vetted the products that we are reading ads for very carefully.
And so Monokura Honey, it's certainly not the cheapest sweetener that you could buy, but it's awesome.
And it is absolutely what it says it is.
And we know that, and so we can tell you that.
Not only that, I can tell you in good conscience that we had Monocora honey.
Was that last night and the night before on cornbread?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That was good.
Spectacularly good.
Yeah.
So...
Yeah.
A little awesome butter, some honey on warm cornbread.
Beautiful homemade fresh cornbread.
So good.
Yeah.
Really excellent.
Along with some brisket on the side.
Didn't put any monocora honey in the brisket.
It got there though.
It kind of fell off the cornbread and that was all right too.
Yeah.
Okay.
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It is amazing.
This has really changed since you and I were in grad school, but it is amazing how much the story of mitochondrial senescence turns out to be central to much of overall somatic senescence and disease.
That story has really taken off.
Yeah, and that's going to be a big piece of the metabolic disorders narrative that sort of is running in tandem.
But it seems very likely that a tremendous percentage of human disease comes down to metabolic dysfunction.
And, you know, of course, far, far less than what Then what the current funding agencies would have us believe and most of the labs that are doing work into human disease are just looking for genetic origins and at some level all you have to do except of course you're looking back through time with the lens of history and so you can't know for sure is say is the disease that you're looking at that is so common now Found,
findable in the historical record.
And if it's not, or it's extraordinarily rare, or anything that you could think might actually have been called this number of things, and now we're calling it this thing, is rare and nonexistent in the historical record, it's probably not genetic.
Yeah, yeah, it really can't be.
Yeah, you said that story was running in tandem, and I would point out it is also biking and kayaking in tandem.
Yeah, there really isn't a running in tandem.
I mean, what are you sharing a differential?
I think if you're side by side, That's it.
I guess.
Not really coupled.
I don't know.
I mean, when you're on a tandem bike together or tandem kayak, it puts shared fate in an entirely new context.
Do you remember in Santa Cruz, I've always been a bike geek, there was a shop that had a buddy bike, a side-by-side tandem on two wheels.
Do you remember taking that thing for a spin?
Or have you blocked it out because it was so terrifying?
Was this the same shop that also had like the six-person bike?
I don't remember that bike.
Well, we didn't have four chickens to put on.
Right, right, right.
I think so.
Oh man, it was crazy because, you know, as it is always the case on a tandem, one person has control of it.
You know, whatever experiments existed in dividing control didn't work because you don't want one person accelerating out of traffic and the other person trying to hit the brakes.
So anyway, one person has control.
One person has the brakes and the transmission.
And so for the person who doesn't...
No, there's brakes on both handlebars.
There is sometimes...
No, there's sometimes a drag brake for the person who's riding Stoker.
That's the back person on the tandem.
But a drag brake is different.
A drag brake is if you're...
So you've got so much mass on one bike...
That if you're descending the Alps, let's say, what you want is a brake and the design considerations are substantial because what you don't want is to leave a brake dragging that heats up, just as in a car.
You don't want to ride the brake and, you know, get the rotors red hot.
It's better if your vehicle not burst into flame while you're on it.
Well, let's put it this way.
If your bike has a rim brake, and you leave that on in drag mode, you can actually blow the tire off.
The rim can get so hot it can burn up the tire, and that's really dangerous.
If you have a disc brake, You could get the rotor so hot, especially if it's on a tandem, you're very likely to have a hydraulic line because the hydraulic doesn't have increased drag over the long distance from the hydraulic brake line.
Yeah, but if you put the rear brake on in drag mode on the rotor, you can get the thing so hot that it can actually cause the hydraulic fluid to boil, which then gives you no braking.
So I don't think you defined what drag mode Drag mode is you leave a brake on at some degree, so it just gives some drag to the bike, so it just doesn't...
Always?
Yes, so that you're not constantly hitting the...
If you're descending the Alps, if you've got thousands of feet...
Okay, but not always.
Not like, I mean...
Right.
No, you would only do it when you're descending, and you want to...
So it's a brake that only has the capacity to put a light amount of pressure on the rim if it's a...
Well, rim is a bad place because you could burn up the tire.
But you don't have the ability to stop the bike with a drag brake.
Right.
If you're going at any speed.
Right.
But the drag brake is often under control of the person in the stoker position.
But the rest of the controls are on the...
The person who could see.
The person who can, yeah, oddly, that choice.
Selection, if nothing else, would have made that choice.
But anyway, in the buddy bike, the control is also in one person's hands, but you're both sitting forward, and so the person...
And this is just a different balance game.
Oh, it's crazy.
It's terrible.
Yeah.
But the person who has no control has the feeling of, actually, I'm hurtling forward and wobbling back and forth.
And so anyway, there's a reason that this design.
It's like mono skis.
You have occasionally seen somebody on a mono ski.
Back before there were snowboards, it was two skis.
It was like a water ski where your bindings were right next to each other.
Excuse me.
But anyway, it's like that.
It's like an idea that couldn't possibly mature.
Whose time will not come?
Yes, whose time.
It exists.
It works.
You know, it's interesting to do, but there's a reason that monoskis didn't take over the mountain and side-by-side buddy bikes didn't take over the tandem bike industry.
But tandem biking and tandem kayaking are actually great.
And, you know, as everyone knows who's trying to make a good test of your relationship, There's a reason they call them divorce bikes and divorce boats.
And, you know, that's funny.
But you probably should ride one of these things or paddle one of these things with somebody before you sign up for a lifetime just to see whether you can figure out how to navigate this stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, we've done both.
But I will say, and this is a far field from where we thought we'd be here, but...
I only recently have come to really feel like I know how to kayak now.
And I love it now.
And you tried to get us into it when we first moved to the Pacific Northwest when we first moved to Olympia to teach at Evergreen back in 2002. And I was not convinced.
And we finally actually got boats and like literally within a week I found out I was pregnant with Zach.
I was like that's my excuse right there.
I'm not learning to kayak in cold water while I'm pregnant with our first point.
And so it was a very long time but we did sometimes get into a tandem kayak and you know I don't we did okay and we've been on tandem bikes a fair bit but I never really got it.
I wasn't sure what Why you would ever choose to go through all the hassle, because it's always a hassle to get a boat into the water and have to get it out and all of this.
And now that I actually feel like I get what the movement is, and I love the movement, and I still wish I had more skills, like I don't have self-rescue skills in a kayak yet, open water kayak, but I feel very confident in both my skills and in the boat.
And now when we're in a tandem kayak, I love it.
But I wonder if...
I doubt that if you're not really a biker or you're not really a kayaker and you get into a tandem with someone, if it wouldn't make things seem like they are worse than they are.
Oh, it would, but that's the point.
It artificially creates that situation, and so you find out whether or not you can laugh at yourselves and all of that.
But is it fair to say, of your experience, that you were not at all sure about the kayaking, but now you're into it?
That feels like cultural appropriation to me.
Definitely.
That was cultural inappropriation.
Okay.
Tandem talk, done.
Completed.
Yes, absolutely.
Hopefully we've given you something to think about.
Alright.
Looking for a really expensive gift that your spouse might hate?
Consider a tandem kayak.
Right.
Also consider how you're going to get it to the water.
That's really the key problem with kayaks.
It really is.
This is part of why...
Well, I also, because I can self-rescue from a paddleboard, I now will go out alone on a paddleboard, you know, 20 times more than I'll go out alone on a kayak, but it's largely because I can carry a paddleboard myself easily, and I can get on top of the car myself if that's what I'm doing, and kayaks are just a different deal.
It's a different deal.
But the other thing, as you will remember from Olympia, is that in Olympia, although the water is everywhere, because you're at the south end of the Puget Sound, public access to the water is nowhere.
There's only a couple places you can put a boat in, and that is a serious problem.
It takes a sport.
So the point is...
Unless you own some waterfront, it's a sport that requires your car.
Right.
And that's...
And therefore, you know, although if you're close...
So we were close-ish.
We never actually did this, but we lived close-ish.
We lived right across the street from the Evergreen Campus in Olympia.
And there was a trail that you could theoretically, you know, walk a mile down to the water, to the Evergreen Campus.
And, you know, we could have put kayaks on wheels and pulled them down there.
Well, I don't know if you'll remember this, but I did.
I became aware that it was possible to pull a kayak from your bike.
That's right.
Built a prototype of this device and I took my bike and I took my kayak and I did bike to the nearest place and it worked.
You were a very long biker.
I hope you put like a big tall flag on the back of the kayak.
Yeah, it was a crazy contraption, but it worked.
There was nothing about it that wasn't viable, except that the place that you would naturally put the boat in was so muddy that, you know...
Just a strike.
It's like, okay...
You know, how this does not, it is not making this viable as a sport that doesn't require your car taking it to some place where it makes sense to put it into the water.
So anyway, I only did it once.
This is part of why people with small human-powered boats often look for boat ramps and docks and stuff, and then the people with motorboats get irritated at us.
I'm like, well, this is better than getting in up to our knees in mud, getting into our boats.
Totally.
All right.
Anyway, we have digressed, but now we're back.
Are we?
I'm not.
And now we're back.
Okay.
All right.
There were a couple things I wanted to...
Actually, there's one thing that I think we have to address, and then there are a couple things that I was hoping to address today.
I know they dovetail with some things that you wanted to talk about.
First thing is, there's obviously something going on with this...
Apparent murder in cold blood in the streets of New York of the CEO of an insurance company that I'd never heard of.
And there was all kinds of scuttlebutt back and forth because, of course, the CCT video showed a fair amount.
Everybody saw this video of this guy being shot dead in the street.
There was lots of discussion about whether this was a professional hit based on the oddity of the way the thing went down.
It turned out it was not a professional hit as far as we could tell.
But anyway, the story's been...
Hard to look away from because it involves all kinds of intrigue and who is this person and why did they go off the rails in this way?
And there's been a lot of, in my opinion, kind of off back and forth online about, you know, because people often have a very antagonistic relationship with an insurance company, there's lots of hatred for them.
And so there was lots of sympathy for this shooter in this case, even though we have no idea Who he really is or why this happened or anything like that.
It's in the same vein as the people who said they wished that the bullet hadn't missed after the first assassination attempt on Trump.
Right.
And I would say...
I will say this carefully.
I'm not one who believes that every death is a tragedy.
There are bad people in the world.
I have no idea anything about the CEO. I don't pretend to.
Murder in cold blood.
This guy was literally shot in the back in an American street.
That's a tragedy and that's a bunch of other things too.
So anyway, it's essentially impossible to imagine a justification.
So, all that aside, the reason that I feel that we are compelled to talk about this is that it turned out that a person of interest was arrested.
That person's identity then showed up online and the person had a fair footprint online.
So, I don't know that this person is guilty.
Presumably a trial will tell us.
But the person who was picked, we are now seeing a large collection of what seem to be facts that allows us to ask a lot of questions in this case in a way that, as many people pointed out, we know more about this suspect than we do about Crooks, the guy who ostensibly took a shot at President Trump in Butler.
Now, I will say that there's an awful lot about the story that seems strange and hard to fathom.
And unfortunately, there's a lot about many of the famous murders and other historical events in the U.S. that has that nature.
And I don't know what to make of it.
But nonetheless, there's a question about whether or not...
A shooter is a shooter or a shooter is a patsy.
There's lots of questions about whether or not we are being fed a script that we can't resist or whether this is some person who had their, you know, whether this is all driven by somebody's anger about something in which they decided to leave a tantalizing set of clues, like having inscribed things on the shell casings of the bullets that they used, having dropped a backpack full of Monopoly money.
Having dropped a backpack full of Monopoly money, a backpack that was famously seen in the CCT video, but apparently having what appears to be the weapon in question on them at the point that they are arrested, there's lots about this that doesn't make sense.
And I think we would be wise to be ultra cautious as to whether or not we are processing evidence or we are being fed What masquerades as evidence for some other reason?
Who the hell knows?
But among the things that emerged, Were the fact that this guy actually has a Twitter presence.
It has not been wildly active, but he has a Twitter presence.
So his name is apparently Luigi Mangione.
Has a Twitter presence, and he followed, I think, something like 72 people.
I was among them.
Now...
There is literally nothing important to make of that.
For one thing, are we responsible for people who follow us?
Of course not.
Could somebody follow people they wanted to harm and then commit a crime so that the two things would be connected?
Of course.
Could the powers that be, if they were engaged in some kind of manipulation, create the impression that so-and-so followed these people and then committed this horrible crime?
So the point is, It doesn't mean anything.
What's more, Crystal Ball made some ill-considered tweet in which he said, plot twist, you know, the guy follows these, you know, right-wing influencers, whatever.
Well, and then she named some people.
She didn't name me, but she named some people.
And the list wasn't right-wing by any nature.
It was sort of people who had been tarred with that label.
But I would also point out that I went to the list and looked at all of the people he followed.
It wasn't many.
And he followed Tim Urban.
He followed AOC. It wasn't a...
It was eclectic.
It was eclectic and there's, you know, nothing that you could make of it.
Nothing obvious anyway.
The pattern, you know, he followed an eclectic list.
Okay.
So that literally says nothing to me, but it did feel important to just simply recognize it was a short list.
I was on it.
I checked.
The guys never reached out to me that I can see.
Um, so I don't know that he followed me because he liked stuff I said, didn't like stuff I said, no clue.
Um, Yeah, I don't know what to make of this story at all.
There's lots of ways that it doesn't feel organic.
Obviously, having a group of people who are followed...
Haven't we lived through the guilt by association stage of societal collapse?
Aren't we done with that part?
Yeah.
Because they tried that on us back when our group was falling apart.
And then with COVID, Okay, guys.
It just doesn't track.
Like, if you know what social media is, you know that you have no control over who chooses to sit next to you on the train, effectively, right?
Well, that does point to something.
So, guilt by association is even a higher standard.
That's true, yeah.
Guilt by association, where you've chosen to associate with somebody and then they do something, right?
That's not a crime, but this is something else, where somebody chooses to associate something with you, you have no control over it, and then a crime is committed.
So I agree with you.
Haven't we learned the lesson that guilt by association, even that higher standard is garbage?
So then, you know, what are we to make of these correlations?
Yeah, to my mind, it's not worth bringing up, actually.
I wouldn't have brought it up because everything about the story feels weird, and I don't know what kinds of things they're going to pull in.
Who knows what's coming?
Who knows what's coming and how much of what we've already been told will turn out not to be as it appears.
Giving error time to absurd concerns increases the chance that those absurd concerns land with some number of people.
Yeah, I mean, I have the sense it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But, okay.
Anyway, it actually does lead to the next thing I was hoping we would discuss, which is We have a fairly large social circle as a result of all of the craziness that we've been through since 2017. I'm hearing lots of stories about people who,
I don't want to say see the world as we do, because I think, you know, you and I don't see it exactly alike, and it's very unlikely that people are going to see it exactly as you and I together see it.
But lots of people have found themselves politically homeless, viewing the world with a kind of New skepticism based on the collapse of the quality of our information.
And they, obviously it's not universal, but largely ended up embracing the Trump campaign as a result of the fact that, you know,
there was a MAGA contingent, there was a Maha contingent, there was a MAGA contingent, there was a Maha contingent, and there is a larger unity movement, all of which I believe saw the blue team and the Harris campaign as an existential threat.
Not so much that Harris was distinguished, but in fact, Harris was effectively a non-entity as ancient Joe Biden was a non-entity that was providing a front for something unholy.
So whether that perspective is right or wrong, lots of people ended up departing from their historical political perspective and embracing a new cobbled together picture in which we had to do something unusual in order to escape this death spiral.
And that has created a social conundrum in the lives of many people we know.
And I was noticing that you and I are actually in a rather unique position, which is we obviously were very vocal and prominent in that movement that departed from our historical political roots.
But You tell me if I've got it wrong, but I think that our families, specifically those who did not see things the way we ended up seeing them, have done spectacularly well at keeping the disagreements Non-personal.
And I wanted to just highlight a distinction that I'm seeing in other people's lives from what we're experiencing.
There are two components to what happened.
There's a question of What you thought was going on and what it meant relative to this election, right?
There's the evidence that you're processing, how you're treating it, what model you're passing it through, and what implication it has for how you should cast your vote.
I've gone from being a almost consistent third party voter to voting for one of the major parties because if you take the model that I was running, which didn't change that much, but you process the new information through it, it resulted in a requirement that I not cast a symbolic vote in this case, but cast a vote that made a particular outcome, in fact the one that happened, more likely.
That's the analysis part.
And then there's the question, what you might call the normative question.
Normative meaning moral.
And what I'm watching is that lots of people who saw things in some way analogous to how you and I saw them are facing reactions from their families that suggest it's as if they have...
Engaged in something downstream of some profound moral failing, right?
And we have not faced this.
And what I think is going on, in part...
Is our families have watched us be slandered for years across multiple different topics.
And we've had all of those conversations.
And there isn't any concern that you and I have morally changed or lost our way or anything like that.
What that means is that the disagreements that we do have are effectively understood to be the result of us having processed what we've encountered and reached a different conclusion.
They're analytical.
They're analytical rather than...
Well, they are just analytical.
And so applying an emotional overlay to having come to different conclusions...
Doesn't make sense.
And if they were analytical and moral differences, then the interweaving of emotional angst and hue and cry might be warranted.
But given that not, like if you have people in your lives who see the result of the election in distinctly different terms than you do, but you understand them to have the same values that you have always understood but you understand them to have the same values that you have always understood them to have, then this is an analytical difference in terms of you took in probably very different data and then also
Although you may just simply have been exposed to different things about what is happening in the world.
And therefore, what you should be able to agree on with the people who see things entirely differently with regard to the election and what you were saying that we have been able to do with many of the people in our lives is say, you should hope that we were seeing things correctly you should hope that we were seeing things correctly and that this does happen.
Harold, change that everyone can recognize we need and that this is going to be the way forward that actually allows both individual Americans and the entire country to get headed in a positive direction.
Yeah, so that's one of two points I take from this.
One is, let's say that our side had lost.
I would be very frightened about what was coming.
No question about it.
But I would be hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
And that makes sense.
That is the way the nation is supposed to work.
You are supposed to want the best for the nation.
You can fear that the other side doesn't know what it's doing all you want, but you should always be hoping that they succeed at making the nation stronger.
Rooting against the nation is a moral failing.
The other thing is, if you think about the...
A person has access to some information.
It's imperfect.
They have a mind that runs some sort of model about how the world works.
It's imperfect.
But if a person taking the evidence that they've got access to and running it through the model that they've constructed for the purpose of understanding the world around them, and they reach the conclusion that they should vote in X direction, then There's no position from which you could morally judge them.
Because what you want, first of all, the whole structure of democracy, the reason that it stands any chance of working at all, is that the idea is people using their models, looking at the evidence, will bias us in the positive direction more often than the negative direction.
That's the whole premise.
So if you've calculated that Kamala Harris is better for the country than Donald Trump, I'm going to argue with your model, and I'm going to argue perhaps with your source of evidence.
Maybe it's slanted.
But I can't fault you for making the vote that you thought was better for the country.
That's exactly what I want you to do.
This is true, although I guess when you frame it like that, I think about what does better for the country mean?
And you will have some people saying, mostly not people who have thought about it much, but you will have some people saying, for instance, we need open borders.
Mm-hmm.
open borders are better for the country.
Now that does go into a values question, because you can still be framing this as better for the country.
But I don't think I could hear any set of analyses or data that could compel me that open borders could be better for any country.
Right.
Honestly.
So there are some things that people are defending, just like in the summer of 2020.
uh You know, because ACAB, because all cops are bastards, let's defund the police.
Oh, they don't really mean that.
Oh, yes, they do.
And they did.
And, you know, crime rates went up in cities, you know, certainly on the West Coast and across the country.
And, you know, now finally that's being pulled back.
And that was, people thought that was better for us.
Yeah.
In that case, then, there is actually a values disagreement hidden cryptically in the, this is better for us.
Well, I don't disagree with that.
And it may be that the, and frankly, I think one of the most important issues that we face are differences in values.
But the problem is when you mix the difference in analytics and the difference in values, you end up with an incoherent argument.
So I do agree that there's lots of stuff you could want for the country that I don't think you're entitled to want for the country.
I still do.
If you're trying to make us better, then I don't think the failure is a moral one.
If you're trying to tear down the country because you think it's a force of evil, that's a different question entirely.
That is a moral failing, in my opinion, and an analytical failing.
But...
If you're doing the analysis, well, actually, it reminds me, in one of my conversations with Bobby Kennedy in the heat of the COVID madness, I said to him, this was when he was still understood by the public to be crazy.
And I'm embarrassed to say, as I've said publicly, that I took what was said about Bobby way more seriously than I should have.
It seemed impossible that it was complete garbage.
And I now believe it to be complete garbage.
It doesn't mean I believe he's right about everything, but it does mean that I... I have extreme respect for his analytical capability, his dedication to processing all of the evidence, and I believe that he turns out to be right about a lot of stuff that I was initially very skeptical of.
But what I said to him is, look, this is, again, this is coming from a place of my being cautious, confronted with this person that I was still coming to understand.
And I said, look, I am compelled that you are Analyzing the evidence to the best of your capability and that you are proceeding from it, that what you're trying to make happen is coming from a desire to make us better off.
In that case, Anytime somebody meets those two criteria, I can't fault them morally.
And he said, actually, I would add one criterion.
He said, you have to be open to the evidence that you've got it wrong.
You could imagine somebody...
Walling off their analysis and that that would be a way of continuing to do something that was in the end bad for other people while not knowing about it.
His point is that's not legitimate.
But if you take his amendment to my formulation, then the basic point is, hey, Americans, you're talking to family members and one of two things is true.
Either those family members want Things that are bad, in which case there's a moral question.
If they don't want things that are bad, it doesn't matter how confused you think they are.
It's not a moral issue.
So all of this stuff about, you know, we don't know how to deal with you.
We don't know whether to toss you out of our lives.
You know, your father thinks one thing, your mother thinks another thing, and we're trying to figure out what to do about you.
All of that is out of place.
Well, yes, it is.
But I also think a lot of it is not organic.
I think it is intentionally divisive.
And frankly, what is happening now with the election, we saw it, frankly, even more so in 2016. And interestingly, not at all in 2020. Because, you know, the other side, such as it is, doesn't behave this way.
But I feel like it's downstream of what the trans activists encourage, which is itself borrowed from the playbook of cults.
This is, you know, we're not the first people to point this out, but the idea that if your parents don't think you're the sex that you're not and don't embrace everything about this new thing that you're going through, what you need to do is shut them out of your life.
That's a horrifying piece of advice, and a number of young people have taken it at their peril.
And so that began to normalize, I would say, back in 2014-15, when we were beginning to see the uptick in the trans stuff.
That began to normalize the idea that If you have come to a conclusion about yourself, first of all, be utterly certain that you're right.
No matter how young you are, no matter how impossible the thing that you're certain of is, be absolutely certain, and then look around you and basically do a purity test on all of the people who love you, and if they fail, strike them.
And it's terrifying and, you know, dare I say, borderline demonic.
Yes, and I agree with you, not organic.
That cults do this for a reason.
In order to survive a cult, and mind you, a cult is the pathological version of something that exists in human nature, I would argue, that is not inherently pathological.
But a cult Survives by booby-trapping the exit.
And booby-trapping the exit means breaking your relationship with people who might be able to say, hey, this isn't like you.
Let me remind you of who you are and point out that you are now in conflict with your own values, that kind of thing.
Well, if you shut those people out, they can't say it.
So anyway, what we are watching with all of these people facing moral accusations within their family where there's really only an analytical difference of opinion is the cult, in this case...
The Blue Team, Deep State, Five Eyes, Goliath, whatever that thing is, trying to hold on to its base because it needs that thing from which to reboot.
So if I strawman, as if from within, as one of the people who was devastated by the results of this election, I will say, yeah, that's great.
You say I'm in a cult, but obviously MAGA is a cult.
Yep.
How are what you are doing not a cult?
Yes, I would say the following things.
One...
Um, I am MAGA. I embrace MAGA to the extent that, uh, we have common cause.
I've pointed out what my concern is about MAGA. I've pointed out, you know, let's put it this way.
I've been open about my critiques of it and much as, uh, you and I invited, you know, challenge when we were teaching students and that was, you know, A powerful piece of evidence that we were really trying to get to the bottom of scientific questions.
The honest critique back and forth between MAGA, MAHA, unity movement is evidence that it's not that way.
And I would also say the asymmetry in the reaction is really the key piece of evidence for me.
I did not watch a wave of Red team advocates threatening to throw people out of their lives for voting for the blue team.
I saw that in one direction.
And, you know, again, if somebody is saying, you know, if somebody is an accelerationist and their point is actually, I want Kamala Harris to win because I think it will accelerate You know, the decline of the Republic or the West.
My feeling is, oh, yeah, I don't respect your view of the world.
I think you don't understand how important the West is, but I also think you're broken, and I don't really want any part of it.
But I wasn't going to throw anybody else out of my life because they voted for Harris.
I just think, hey, there's stuff that we disagree on, and frankly, I'd like to talk about it.
Yeah.
I guess I would say just one more thing in response to the, you know, the person who thought Harris was the best move forward to the country, saying, you know, you can think we're in a cult, but MAGA is a cult.
Your response was very personal, and it began with, yeah, but I'm not MAGA. But there are a lot of people who proudly identify as part of MAGA, some of them newly, some of them for four years, some of them for eight or more.
And I'm also not someone who's ever thought of myself as MAGA, but it has not looked like a cult from the outside.
And it is in part because it appears to allow for different ideas to flow.
And it doesn't shut the door on people who disagree.
Yeah.
It is more likely to use male typical forms of shaming and humiliation, and the blue cult is more likely to use female typical forms.
And so it may mock you roundly for being an idiot for voting for, you know, for the blue team, but you're still going to get together over beers and watch the game.
Yep, and actually, if there's one experience that I could grant people who have this confused view of the folks who voted red, especially MAGA, it would be just...
To be able to spend time in a large group of the people who self-identify this way and notice that they are actually the tolerant people at the moment, right?
They will disagree with you over many things, but, you know, frankly...
It's almost impossible to imagine if you were well-intentioned and patriotic, what characteristic you would bring to the table that they wouldn't be okay with hearing, right?
You can be a liberal, you can be gay, you can, you know, you can be all sorts of stuff.
And I find them tolerant.
Yeah.
Okay, I did want, I hope I don't regret doing this, but...
You don't too.
I don't know what you're about to do.
Well, exactly.
I really hope you don't regret it.
Yeah.
My dad sent us something, and I've sent a response, and I want to just, the reason I want to read that, I did not write it with the intent of reading it, but having written it...
What are you responding to?
What did he say?
He sent a link to a Slate article, the title of which is, I took the test RFK Jr. is using to determine who should work at his health department.
We are extremely doomed.
Okay, now unfortunately, I found the article paywalled.
No, I've got it here.
You've got it.
Yeah.
Okay.
In any case, so again, I think our family across the board gets A plus marks for not confusing an analytical disagreement with a moral failing.
And, you know, there isn't any, there just isn't any tension over, nobody thinks anybody else is a bad person.
So I wrote back to my dad.
Thanks, Dad, but it's paywalled and it's guaranteed to be dogshit.
I don't know how to say this in a way that can be heard, but the regime, both red and blue, destroyed all our institutions.
The universities can't figure out that men aren't women or that healthy people shouldn't take an experimental vaccine for a disease that doesn't threaten them.
Newspapers bow down to the very government they're supposed to keep in check.
The courts have imposed on themselves a cryptic reparations program in place of equal protection.
Do I need to go on?
getting out of this hole we are in is going to be messy or worse.
And all the forces that put us here are going to crow throughout.
If you want to understand what's going on, you can't consume the stuff that you're being fed.
Nobody knows what to do instead.
That's a genuinely difficult problem.
But it's as if you live in the USSR in 1978 and you're reading Pravda.
It's not information unless you're trying to determine what your oppressors want you to think.
Respectfully and with love, Brett.
So anyway, my feeling is that's how this is supposed to work.
We are supposed to be Without any emotional implication, or certainly no moral implication, talking about why we see things differently.
And as I've said to my dad many times, you know, I don't really expect...
You to solve this problem, but your media diet is going to produce this effect.
Your media diet, the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, LA Times, that media diet is, in some way that none of us really understand, owned by something that has a perspective that it is It is uploading to you on the regular.
And if you process that and only that, it's going to result in you seeing a world that I would argue doesn't exist.
It's the shadows on the cave wall.
And, you know, that's an analytical argument.
You're looking at a cave wall that's not telling you the truth.
Yeah, and the institutions, the mainstream media and other institutions, have managed to take scientific thinking out of the equation for most people.
They've managed to convince most of the so-called elite, the educated class, That unless they themselves are scientists, science is something best left for the experts.
And obviously, you're a smart person, you're a child of the Enlightenment, you're going to follow the science, and you just have to wait for them to deliver it to you.
This from people who would never accept that in philosophy or literature or history, right?
It is understood that there is nuance, there is interpretation, there is subjectivity.
And of course, the scientific method is precisely about reducing subjectivity as much as possible, but that doesn't mean that it's not humans doing the thing.
And so the segue here is, I don't know who this is, but someone on Twitter, a Dr. Neil Stone, who calls himself an infectious disease doctor, wrote, It is deeply unethical to waste time, money, and resources on research questions that have already been answered.
And a second thing is from him, is there are so many real questions to answer.
Why waste time trying to answer fake ones?
Hashtag vaccines work.
In case you were confused about what questions he was concerned might start to be funded, it is questions...
It is precisely the research that RFK is saying, I don't want to take vaccines off the market.
I don't want to prevent people from getting vaccinated.
What I want to have happen is to have the trials against placebo actually done so we know.
And that is baseline.
So what we have is a whole population who has become convinced that science and medicine are too complicated, therefore I can't possibly do it, so I'm going to leave it to the experts.
And then the experts say impossibly ignorant things like this.
Again, it is deeply unethical to waste time, money, and resources on research questions that have already been answered.
As if...
As if anyone is ever in full possession of the unalterable truth for now and forever.
Anyone who could write this after COVID, this idea that this doctor is presenting here is exactly what we were teaching against for 15 years as college professors, teaching evolutionary biology to undergraduates.
So long before COVID. The fact that there are still people who think that once research has been done, the answers are the answers, and it is unethical to ask questions, to ask research questions that are along the same lines that we already have answers, is remarkable.
I think it will work for people.
I think people will be compelled by this in part because, A, we like certainty.
And this is, you know, this is one of the things that you've already brought up today and one of my drumbeats now that, you know, we need to be less certain.
That I am certain.
But, boy, I just lost what I was going to say about...
Well, I just want to point out It's hard to get more wrongness in as few words as this doctor has managed in these two tweets.
It is deeply unethical to waste time, money, and resources on research questions that have already been answered.
First of all, replication is part of science, okay?
So it's not deeply unethical.
In fact, some rate of it is utterly required in order to do science correctly.
Required and mostly not happening.
Right.
Required and mostly not happening.
What's more, because we know from his hashtag that what he means is that vaccines work, then the point is, okay, Now we know what you mean by answered.
Because, look, the first time I heard Bobby Kennedy tell me that vaccines on the vaccine schedule had not been tested against the placebo and that he's been challenging people to come up with an example where one has been, I thought...
That can't possibly be right.
Yeah, I didn't believe it either.
I went and looked.
And I went and looked at the research that the producers of these vaccines themselves claim to have done.
And Kennedy is right.
Kennedy is right.
So what that means is a question that has been answered.
Oh, by what process was it answered?
Scientific method.
Really?
Can you show me where it was demonstrated that this compared to a placebo is efficacious, right?
Yeah.
And or safe.
And the answer is no.
There's the impression, lots of science was done on these things, to be sure.
It just was.
But it wasn't science that adheres to the method enough that it would answer the question in a way that you would justify that hashtag.
Well, there's a question, too, about what counts as science.
There was a lot of R&D done.
Yeah, there was a lot of...
So R&D, research and development, being like the corporate wing of science, which is the opposite of so-called basic research, which we've talked about this before, but basic research is research done out of curiosity, with no motive towards getting the thing to market, anything to market.
It's about like...
It's not about practicality.
It's not about practicality, whereas applied research, you know, within this rubric, it's basic versus applied.
And applied research is where everything in engineering or technology would land, and also anything really in medicine, medical research, because the point is to, you know, increase human health and flourishing, supposedly.
But let's just take the hashtag, right?
The one that Dr. Neil Stone put, hashtag vaccines work.
Vaccines work.
Okay.
Does that mean that they inherently work?
That it is inconceivable you would produce a vaccine that did more harm than good?
Of course not.
We have many such examples, right?
Yeah.
So, what vaccines work must mean, the only thing it could logically mean, in light of the fact that we've had vaccines pulled off the market, they're so dangerous.
What vaccines work must mean is that the process leaves you with vaccines that work, that are net beneficial.
So then the point is, oh, then I'm entitled to go back and check the process.
And if the process that you're telling me guarantees that vaccines work wasn't done, then of course this work has to be done in the first place.
It's not even redone, right?
You have to do it for real once.
So the point is that there's...
He's left us with, unfortunately, such clarity, unfortunately for him, such clarity about what his thought process is that we can see, oh, that's a very tight loop in which you're wrong, right?
The work wasn't done, and you're telling us it would be immoral to redo it, right?
I would like it done in the first place, and then I would like it redone to make sure it was done correctly, and you've decided it was done because it would have to be, right?
So it's nonsense.
It's sort of nonsense.
So I could show a couple of these broadsides, or you could talk about follow-on effects and excess deaths.
Yes, good.
Yeah.
So let's segue now from this question of families and how to deal with analytical disagreements over political stuff to this other question, where There is a statistical concept that increasingly is important to understand in order to evaluate claims and counterclaims with respect to things like the hazards of mRNA vaccines.
That is poorly understood.
And it occurred to me, we've talked about it, you and I have talked about it on the evolutionary lens.
I had a conversation with Ed Dowd in which we talked about it.
And it occurred to me that there's an analogy that will make it so crystal clear that people will understand it.
From here on out, so I thought it was worth exploring it.
The effect in question is called the pull-forward effect.
Pull-forward.
Pull-forward.
And I'm going to put it in the context of senescence because it will help people understand.
If you think about, if you're a long-time Dark Horse listener, you're aware of my work on telomeres.
And to refresh people's memories, All of our somatic cells, with a couple of exceptions, have a sequence, just a repetitive sequence of DNA at the ends of all of the chromosomes.
And every time a chromosome is divided in the process of a cell duplicating itself, A little bit of this repetitive sequence is lost and so it's like a counter and the amount of telomere that you have at the point that you're born basically sets the amount of cellular reproduction that a given cell line can do over your lifetime and so that means That growth, repair, and maintenance are all drawing from the same account.
If you do a bunch of damage to a tissue, you're burning up the capacity to maintain that tissue over time.
So you can do a certain amount of breaking your arm and it heals, but the point is, lifetime, there's a total number of cell divisions that can go into repairing your arm and you're burning it at some rate.
So, if you imagine that all of that Essentially creates a scenario in which at the cusp of maturity, you know, at 18 years old, we're as physically vigorous as we are ever likely to be.
And the pull that the grave has on us is very remote.
An 18 year old in good health is a robust critter.
And the older you get, and the more of your cell lines have lost their capacity to maintain themselves, the more vulnerability you have.
And so as you get older and older, you know, at first the rate of vulnerability declines very slowly, and then it accelerates until you get really, really old, and then you're vulnerable, which is why something like a flu kills a lot of old people, right?
It's not that the flu is so bad, but it's that they're hovering very close to death and the flu pulls them over the line.
So, point is, you've got some spectrum of vulnerability in all people across a population.
And a bad year, whether that bad year is not enough nutrients in the food, or not enough access to water, or the temperature was really harsh, whatever it might be, those bad years...
So, a bad year causes excess deaths.
The pull forward effect is if you have a bad year, then you will get a bunch of people who will be pulled forward into death early.
And what that means is that the population after that bad year has fewer vulnerable people in it because some people were accelerated in their demise.
So what you expect is that a bad year in terms of excess deaths Will be followed by a good year or if it's three bad years in a row that it'll be followed by several good years in a row because the vulnerable people have effectively been culled by the bad conditions.
So actually maybe do you want to show the Ed Dowd clip that we have from our dark horse that we did?
Do you agree that consecutive anomalously high years tell an even starker story?
Yes.
There's something called the pull-forward effect.
And if it was all COVID, let's say it was just all COVID, we know that the initial strain was more virulent than Omicron.
So we should be normalized now.
In fact, we should have gone below trend because of the pull-forward effect.
We have not.
Now, one of my insurance whistleblowers told me that the old folks, because there was a huge pull forward effect in 2020, 21, and 22, the old folks are running at 5% below, so negative 5% excess mortality.
But That's because of the pull forward effect.
But the millennials, the working age, I think it's 25 through 64. That's not necessarily millennials, but that working age group is still experiencing 10% to 20% excess mortality.
And the reason why is because the absolute numbers are a lot smaller because people that age aren't expected to die.
So the absolute numbers are smaller, but the trend is still going on.
So the pull forward effect is less severe.
Otherwise, we would have the same thing going on with the older folks.
But what we suspect is going to happen is the pull forward effect will not normalize and excess death and older folks will start to go back up again.
So we expect Excess mortality has come down, and then when the older people pull forward effect is washed through, we think overall population level excess mortality will go back on the rise.
All right, so I wanted to show an example or two, and then I can't decide whether I should give my analogy first.
Maybe I should give my analogy first.
Okay, so in order to understand what the pull forward effect is, I want you to think about, for us this is very concrete because we've been living in the Pacific Northwest since 2002, and what happens every year is that The wind blows really hard at some point in the winter and starts knocking trees down.
It's especially, you know, there's some combination of rainfall that causes things to be soggy, whether it's the soil and the roots are less secure than they might be, or, you know, dead branches suck up a Trees fall, it wreaks havoc, it takes down power, and this is just a regular future of living up here.
So anyway...
Like clockwork, the first big storms in November or December, you're going to get trees down, branches down, electricity out, sometimes depending, it could be weeks.
Right.
So what I want people to imagine is that the summer here is typically not windy and dry and...
It's perfect.
Yeah, it's perfect.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
So you get all of these months...
Of great weather in which a rickety tree just continues to stand because nothing's pushing on it, right?
The wind blows at the beginning.
First big storm, especially the first big storm after it's rained a little bit.
And a bunch of stuff that has been standing in a very broken form, very weak form, comes down.
And the point is, okay, that means that a big storm brings down an excess number of trees, but what it does is it takes out the trees that are vulnerable and That means the next time the wind blows similarly, especially from the same direction, it tends to pull down fewer trees than the average because the ones that were vulnerable already came down.
So anyway, that's the expectation.
And what it means...
Your caveat being important, that all of the conditions need to be as similar as possible to have the expectation that there will be the dip In mortality with the next storm.
If the wind is now coming from 90 degrees different from where it was coming from before, say it's coming from the south rather than the east, then you should expect to get some additional trees that weren't going to get dragged down by the previous storm.
Yeah, and there's all kinds of nuance.
You know, if somebody has modified, you know, if you've cut down some trees to put up a house, then suddenly other trees are exposed in ways that they weren't.
But if you integrate across the entire landscape, the basic point is a big blow causes an excess number of trees to fall, and then the next such blow causes fewer.
So that should make it crystal clear why some bad event that kills people, especially if it kills people You know, in a way that the vulnerable are more likely to have died rather than something, you know, an airplane crash doesn't pick on the vulnerable especially.
Right.
I mean, they do, I guess, a little bit because people survive plane crashes more than we think.
But a plane crash that kills everybody is obviously completely...
Arbitrary with respect.
Yeah, it's much more like drift.
Okay, so anyway, let's show...
I've got some graphs here that will show you this excess death pattern that ought to be much more alarming to people than they initially think.
So you want to put up maybe the bar graph.
Okay, so here, this is from, Ed sent this to me, excess deaths, zero to 24 years of age.
You see an uptick starting in 2020, continuing through 2021, which is the vaccine rollout.
And if you look at this graph, you might think initially, well, the Blue bars are getting taller, and then starting in 2022, they start to decline.
But notice that these are excess deaths.
This should all be at the x-axis.
Absent anything explanatory, they should be at zero.
On average, excess deaths are zero because excess is inherently a move away from average.
Right.
And so each one of these years of excess death for the 0 to 24 group ought to predict a bar that is below zero in the upcoming.
And the fact that we have four consecutive years here of excess deaths is alarming, even though the number of excess deaths is going down slightly.
The number of excess deaths, the percent of excess deaths is still above normal, which becomes a very unusual event the more years it goes on.
Yeah, no, it's completely alarming with just, again, the little caveat that Ed Dowd made, which is that, you know, 20% excess death rate seems impossibly high, but the age group 0 to 24 normally has such a low mortality rate that It takes fewer actual deaths to increase the excess death rate by a lot in an otherwise young and healthy population than it would in an elderly population.
Yep.
Now I think if you show the line graph, so this is excess US deaths per 100,000 population with and without the pull forward effect age 75 to 84. So these are old folks.
And what you see, actually this graph does a really good job.
The line, so up until 2019, you see the line bouncing around, oscillating around zero percent, which is what you would expect.
You have slight anomalies in the positive direction, slight anomalies in the negative direction.
Around 2017, you see a fairly significant And this is European date style, right?
So these are four-month increments on the x-axis.
Yep, and you see a slight increase followed by a dip, and then 2019 happens.
And you have a slight dip in excess deaths below, so fewer deaths than you would expect for some reason.
Maybe something like, I don't know, 2019. That's right, that's actually the very beginning of 2020. The very beginning of 2020. That's like January, February 2020. So you have an initial spike of excess deaths in 2020, significant, and that's, you know, the beauty of measuring excess deaths is that it Combines all of the effects.
So, you know, some of those will be COVID, some of those will be iatrogenic deaths that are the result of the treatments of COVID, like ventilators.
But what you see is that the line after 2020, Never hits zero again.
And yeah, go ahead.
So this is the first time I've seen this chart.
I don't know what it means with and without pull forward effect.
What data are being used here or what is the different tweak that's being done to the data to include or exclude the pull forward effect?
Yeah, I don't know how the effect is corrected for there in the two lines, but the idea is the pull forward effect is happening.
The reason that we are seeing consistent elevation above that zero line is that something bigger is also happening.
In other words, it is impossible that these excess deaths would not be pulling people forward across the line, but in spite of the fact that they're pulling people across the line early, there's always a...
There's still a lot of people who continue to die.
There's still a lot of people who continue to die more than you would expect.
So it is culling whatever these forces are, whether it's one force or multiple forces, whatever the sum total of these forces are, are actually culling this age group substantially and consistently over a long period of time.
And that ought to be extremely alarming.
So if you saw this with the trees, for example, if you saw that the fact that a big blow that brought down a lot of trees didn't reduce the number of trees in the next batch, you might say, well, Mm-hmm.
weakening the trees, right?
Do they have a blight so that their rate of vulnerability is going up even faster than they're being culled by the wind?
That would be something to notice.
It would be implied by the fact that the pull forward effect was not visible or was being overwhelmed by this larger, hey, more and more trees keep falling down effect.
So that's where we are.
We're watching a lot of old people being felled above expectations year after year, every year since 2020. And it's not showing signs of doing what you would expect, which is now spending a bunch of years below zero.
And that is truly alarming.
So I think we had one other chart to show here.
Maybe the ethical skeptic.
So, all right, this is all natural causes of death.
Ages two through 17, 2018 through 2024.
And you see exactly the same thing you saw in the last chart, which is hovering around zero.
which is what you would expect it to do, and then you see elevation, At the beginning of 2021 and a continued pattern of excess deaths through 2024. I guess week 20 is the last...
Weak.
So this visual has a ton of analysis and statistical complications behind the scenes that the viewer of this cannot just look at it and go, okay, data have been put onto a bar chart or a line chart.
So there is a ton of analysis and conclusions here that I am in no position to assess.
You know, they're claiming vaccine deaths.
They're claiming natural causes of death.
You know, alpha variant.
There's a lot here.
Well, some of this stuff is just simply, you know, alpha variant deaths.
This was CDC circulating variants.
And one of the reasons that this...
Right, but COVID deaths wither of.
Yeah.
Right.
The question, though, or one question that's hidden here, is the pattern that we saw.
So the Alpha variant was the initial one.
We had the Delta variant, which was particularly virulent, particularly harmful.
And then we had Omicron, which was particularly mild and functioned effectively like a vaccine, triggering natural immunity without severe disease.
And so, this is another reason to be alarmed at this pattern of continuing excess deaths, which is that you had the strongest, the delta wave, which should have been the most extreme culling force, and then you had a relatively mild variant circulating,
and so you would expect a mild variant triggering natural immunity following a very destructive variant, Would result in exactly a profound pull forward bounce.
So we should be spending time below that zero mark and we just don't see it.
Yeah.
I just don't know what this or the last graph means by does not include, or what are they pulling apart?
This is the first time I'm seeing these and I don't know how to interpret the assessment on the graph itself.
I don't know how these things were made, so I just don't know how to respond to that.
Agreed.
Well, we'll provide a link and people can take a look at it.
I think we've covered it.
What I wanted people to understand is just simply that a pattern that would lead you superficially to feel like, well, okay, COVID was bad, but, you know, that Graph is not continuing to skyrocket,
is actually much more disturbing than you would expect, because what it is actually doing is staying above that zero mark year after year, and this is already highly anomalous because of the near-universal nature of vulnerability.
Yeah, okay.
Actually, there was one more graph I wanted to show because I thought it raised a question, and this was the graph of disabilities.
This is new data.
Yeah, here it is.
Here's Ed Dowd.
He says, U.S. disability data hit an all-time high in November, breaking out from the prior high in June of 2023. November saw an increase of 787,000 over October.
I'm fairly certain it's not.
Fruit Loops causing a 4.8 million increase starting in 2021. Recall these poisonous therapeutics.
So Ed is suspecting that it's the vaccines.
I just wanted to point out that...
One of the reasons it's important to know about the pull-forward effect is that there's a question about to what degree does it apply to something that isn't deaths.
So these are disabilities.
So these are people who were able and then suddenly are not able, which is certainly a plausible impact of especially the mRNA And this also has this highly anomalous trend where it's accelerating alarmingly.
But the question is, does disability function the same way?
Do people hover just above the disability line where they're capable of working and then the shot pulls them into being disabled?
Or is this different than deaths in the sense...
That we wouldn't expect a pull forward effect and you just expect effectively an accumulation in the category.
Yeah, there's obviously a socio-political game that can be played with disability because you can accrue benefits for having a disability, whereas you presumably do not accrue any benefits for being dead.
And with the changing definitions of what is a disability, disability has not met the same thing since 2009. And there have certainly been a number of ways that The category has been expanded in ways that people have objected to for good reasons,
but still over time, absent, and I would expect Ed Dowd to have included this in his thinking, absent there being a concomitant rise in the number of categories that qualify you for disability, there is a trend here.
Yeah, oh, there's definitely a trend, and the question was whether we should expect the pull forward.
I wouldn't say there's definitely a trend.
You're right, you could have a...
has gone up and so we're seeing more people.
But ruling that out, if that's not what's going on, there's definitely an anomalous trend.
I would say mRNA vaccines are a hypothesis, a prominent hypothesis one should have here.
And I did, in thinking about this, conclude that there ought to be at least some pull-forward effect.
That there are some, you know, if you imagine somebody who is infirm, but working, who is damaged by one of these vaccines, Then they could easily go from the category of able to work to unable to work, which would cause them to show up here as a novel disability.
And so the point is not everything works that way.
Right.
Enough things do work that way that you would expect at least some significant pull-forward effect here, which would also predict that a year of anomalously high disabilities would be followed by a year in which they were less than expected.
Yeah, especially given the additional observation that people are getting boosted at lower rates, and so new vaccine injuries will be going down.
Okay, I wanted to finish just by showing, we get some amazing gifts from people, from fans, and we have an address on the Dark Horse site that people can send stuff to, and it's just a real joy.
It's been a while since we received this set of broadsides from an outfit called Obvious State, and I'm going to show their website too, and I'm going to put that in the show notes, but I just wanted to show a few of these.
I've been meaning to frame a number of these for a while, and I haven't, but they've been sitting in my office, and they are just, and so this is going to be a sort of a half-assed way of showing them.
But these are printed by this, I can't remember, I think it's a couple who are doing this work.
So this one, how do I, where do I go?
It is dangerous to be right when the established authorities are wrong.
That's a quote from Voltaire.
And for those just listening, the graphic is a lovely two plus two equals four or is it five?
We're just going to show like five.
That hits a little close to home.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And they have so many.
These are so great.
Here we go.
How do I do it?
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
That's John Stuart Mill with the Scales of Justice.
That's one of my favorite quotes.
It's wonderful.
Here we have, everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves.
It's Leo Tolstoy.
And again, an amazing sort of totalitarian graphic.
Two more here.
Again from Voltaire, who knew some things.
Doubt is unpleasant, but certainty is absurd.
That's great.
Never heard that before.
It's fantastic.
And then, in a different vein, but no less important, we have Thoreau with a quote under an arch of trees.
How do I get this to flatten out?
My brain isn't working.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.
That's a great picture, too.
Yeah, and these guys just make such gorgeous, gorgeous work.
We have more than that.
You can show my screen here, and again, we will link to these guys' work in the show notes.
Obvious states, they tell you about them, and they have a blog, but they also just do a ton of amazing.
They have so many gorgeous, gorgeous Pieces of work, all of them with all of these prints with meaningful, deep quotations from thinkers who have been important in human history.
So I highly recommend these guys.
Yeah, and what a great gift to give somebody.
Yeah.
So I don't think this year we're probably going to end up doing a gift episode, but I thought I'd mention Obvious State.
And actually, as long as that's where we are, I think, are we done?
Yeah, I think so.
Excuse me.
The goods in the store are once again being done by a family print shop in the U.S. It was always coming from the U.S., but we've been moving back and forth a little bit.
And stuff is great.
So we have a couple things to show you that are available at the store.
And the store is at...
Gosh.
I don't know.
You can go to darkhorsepodcast.org to find the store link.
Oh, darkhorsestore.org.
So here's...
Can I put this on you?
Me?
Oh yeah.
Can you cut that shit out?
No promises.
Yeah, so cut that shit out.
Toby had worn this as a shirt or a hoodie for a while in his senior year of high school.
He was asked to stop.
I think we created one that said cut that shirt out.
Yes, we did.
I'm not sure that's still on the site, but cut that shit out.
We have Goliath stickers.
Do not affirm, do not comply.
Hopefully this will become less and less relevant as time goes on.
Hopefully it will be relegated to collector's item.
Yes, yes, exactly.
Le Tour de France, it's like bike racing on steroids.
And my favorite, and this is a hoodie, but we also have a great bag, the Epic Tabby.
This is our Fairfax, the Epic Tabby and a hoodie.
And Toby took this, not this one, but an Epic Tabby hoodie to Italy, where he is recently back from.
And it was apparently much beloved by his new friends there.
So you can get all that stuff at our store and then Obvious State is the place with the amazing art prints, broadsides and notebooks and cards and calendars and such.
Anything else we have to say before wrapping it up?
I don't think so.
We're returning next week on our regular day.
Yes, I believe so.
And then the following week we'll be coming to you on Christmas Eve, so as not to be coming to you on Christmas.
So we're going to go back and forth between Tuesdays and Wednesdays here for a little bit.
Both of our sons came back this week, so you may be hearing from Zach a little bit as well.
Zach, our former producer.
And we've got Jen here now, who is awesome.
Thank you for joining us.
We have a Locals where we encourage you to join us.
There's Watch Party going on there, all of our Q&A's there.
We put the Inside Rail episodes that Brett does with people like Edward Dowd up early on Locals.
I, of course, write on Natural Selections.
This week I published The written version of the comments that I made to the DOJ, the Department of Justice, back in 2018 on the question of how do we foster free expression in higher education.
So that's up on Natural Selections as of today.
You have your great monthly conversations at your Patreon, as always, and we are supported by our sponsors, first and foremost by Carraway, by Monokora, and by Timeline this week.
We appreciate you.
We appreciate you subscribing, liking, sharing, all of that.
And until we see you next time in this season of holidays and gatherings, remember to be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
