Follow the White Rabbit(s): The 256th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 256th 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 resistance to Make America Healthy Again, and how beliefs that were once unspeakable become speakable. It used to be impossible to speak about the risks of fluoride in the water; now it’s not. It used to be impossible to question the safety of Mercury in vaccines; now it’s not. How safe...
It's 256. Welcome to the 256th Dark Horse podcast live stream.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
It is pretty well into mid-December here.
We're in December 18th.
Is that where we are?
Yeah.
December 18th.
So closing in on the winter solstice.
So 256 is a great number.
Yes.
Oh, that's true.
256 is 2 to the 8th.
Yes, it is.
Also a byte of information and being 8 bits spelled differently than byte as to take a byte of something in order to not be concerned that there was just a typo and there's just an E added to the end of bit.
So this is actually an important number.
An important number.
A bit being a single toggle between one and zero.
A single binary toggle.
And a byte being eight of them for reasons that...
Do we know why eight was chosen?
I mean, the history is written, but...
So ASCII has 2 to the 7th, 128 possible spots, and that was not quite sufficient.
I was just looking, there is some ambiguity, some bytes mean something different, which is unfortunate, but sometime in the 60s, after ASCII was established as 128, 2 to the 7th It was clear that wasn't quite enough,
and so a byte became the number that basically was the smallest, I'm not going to get the language right, but the smallest unit that was meaningful in hardware space.
So they had to add a single extra bit in order to encode all of the possible states for a properly large set of characters to be specified in the new ASCII, ASCII 2. No, I don't think that's quite right.
So, I mean, Unicode has a million, and ASCII is still just the first 128. So there's some ambiguity there in computing history in my head.
But anyway, 256 is a good number.
Good number.
And I would point out that the same so-and-so is not quite enough so we had to add one more which gave us quite a bit too many is also present in the triplet codons in DNA because in order to get to the 20 amino acids you needed three spots with four states each which gives you a lot of redundancy from where That's definitely the case with the codons.
I don't think that's what's going on with a byte, because the relationship between ASCII and a byte is not...
It's not that the byte was created in order to enhance the size of the printable and non-printable characters that were included in ASCII. But yes, we have, what, 64 possible permutations with...
That's going to be four to the third.
No, three to the fourth.
Three to the fourth.
Yeah, I think.
We should know this.
No, it's four to the third.
Four to the thirds.
Yeah, which is 64. Because there are four possible states at three positions.
And only 20 amino acids.
So you get a start, you get a stop, you get a bunch of redundancy, and clearly 22 is much less than 64. Yep.
Alright, so I wanted to say before we got into the ads and then the material of the hour is that last week when we were here eight days ago I was just a little bit sick and you mentioned that and I wasn't going to because it was so minor that you know it was it was getting in the way of my ability to travel because that's not okay to travel when you're a bit sick but I thought that I had avoided the worst of this Italian pathogen that he had
brought back, and he was laid out flat from it, and I thought I'd gotten a minor version of it, but it came around to smack me hard.
So I am now recovering from a really remarkable pathogen that completely laid me out flat.
You and Zach have avoided it, in part by heading to the opposite coast.
Yes, I was going to say, you have been to hell and back, and I have been to Connecticut and back.
Mm-hmm.
Similar, you think?
Or should we compare notes?
No, actually, Connecticut's quite pleasant.
It's a little cold, I gotta tell you.
I don't know how people live like that.
Try going in June.
Right, okay, yes.
Arguably, it might be.
We should predict that it will be substantially warmer in June.
I effectively just did.
Yes, I guess you did.
Not one of my riskier predictions, either.
No, I think that one's fairly safe.
But yeah, Connecticut's nice, if chilly.
Yes.
Yes, your son and I went for a, we tried to cover a bunch of distance on scooters, but I knew this was coming.
Get on the scooters in December with no gloves and hands freeze.
I also heard tell that you went the wrong direction.
Briefly, for like a block.
Okay.
That's not the story I heard.
Well, you know, you got to embellish a little to make the story work.
Yeah, but I don't know which one of you is embellishing in which direction, do I? That's true.
That's true.
Actually, there is one other thing to mention before we launch into this.
You and I had a lovely experience this morning as we were discussing various issues related to the podcast and the larger world.
We saw some orcas and happened to grab a few pictures.
Can we just...
So we had a little pod of orcas swim by.
Including, it's not totally clear from this picture, but there's definitely a juvenile.
Yeah.
A baby or a juvenile among them.
I think in the last picture in the series.
There it is on the right.
And then we got one other picture in which it's pretty clear.
Not that.
Yeah.
There it is.
Yeah.
So anyway, that's always lovely when that happens.
Absolutely.
And there are seals that hang out in the very shallow water nearest to us, which at low tide is no water at all.
But in the winter, there are often a dozen to three dozen seals.
That are splashing and playing and bottling, which is they're sleeping with their noses up out of the water.
And they were all huddled up close to the land with looking straight out at the orcas, hoping that they were not about to be noticed and killed.
Yes.
Yeah, the orcas.
These are transients and they eat seals, especially, you know, arbor seals, which are not especially large and ferocious.
All right, so...
Okay, so we got lots of good stuff to talk about today.
But first, as always, top of the hour, our sponsors, three sponsors whom we vouch for, whose products or services we vouch for explicitly.
And Brett's going to start us off.
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With an exclamation mark.
And in this case, I would argue it's justified.
Well, see, the thing is you either get explanatory pronunciation notes or you get footnotes.
You don't get both.
You don't get both.
No, no.
In this case, explanatory pronunciation notes are there and the enthusiasm is well-earned.
And, you know, in most of English, I think we need a half an exclamation mark because otherwise we all sound crazy.
But in this case, I think the full- Wouldn't half an exclamation point sort of be like the sound of one hand clapping though?
No, no, no, no.
It's perfect.
Slight enthusiasm.
Yeah, very favorable.
You know, it's not, hey, I'm nonplussed, but it's not the, whoa!
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Supplies of mornings?
Are limited, yes.
No.
That's true though.
You said start your mornings on a healthier, more delicious note while supplies last.
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Hey, if you're a believer in space weather, you know that mornings may be limited.
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No.
I also stumble every time over the concept of ceremonial grade cacao.
And it feels to me like one of these things that gets said and references the fact that yes, as we know, I think it was the Mayans and maybe people before that even Who are using chocolate and cacao in some religious ceremonies.
But the idea that we know what they were doing that made it ceremonial grade as opposed to when they were just drinking it because it tastes good, it's not clear.
So that does, every time I look at that script, I think I should probably just take that out because I don't really know what it refers to.
However, stuff's really good.
Yeah, it is.
And, you know, we could just empirically test it.
We could hold a ceremony and see if it stacks up.
That's not how that works.
I think it does.
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It's a lot of stuff so much.
No, it's a great service.
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They're the real deal.
And a lot of people...
A lot of people have employer-sponsored health insurance.
We certainly did for a long time.
I grumbled about it, but it was easy.
It was pretty cheap.
And the fact that what advice you actually get at the doctor's office is often wrong isn't necessarily the health insurer's fault, although one could argue that increasingly it is.
But with CrowdHealth, As I say in the script, your interests are aligned with the people to whom you are paying your money and not very much money for a service that is excellent.
This is what insurance was supposed to be.
Again, this is not insurance, but it's supposed to provide you a buffer for those big things that can happen that we hope won't, but that we can't avoid entirely in life.
CrowdHealth really does a fantastic job.
Yeah, it's a risk pool, which is really how insurance is supposed to work.
And the problem is that when you have a model built around market forces, the idea is actually what is the...
What is the game theoretically proper response to that market?
Well, if you're an insurer, it's to pay as few claims as possible and charge as much as you can for the service.
And so we get all of the behavior that we're all familiar with when interacting with insurance companies.
So anyway, yeah, CrowdHealth is awesome.
And it's amazing how many people are realizing that health insurance is a racket.
Yeah, and I mean this is a conversation for a longer time, not for between ads here, but Obviously, we probably all know individual doctors, but we at least all know stories of doctors who are throwing up their hands in despair and saying, I just can't do this anymore, and so I'm going to take myself out of the insurance system.
Concierge medicine is the high end of it, and I've now forgotten the name for what a lot of doctors are doing.
Which is basically saying, look, pay us X amount a month and you have access to our services.
Anything extra, labs or whatever, that we have to call in is going to be an extra charge.
But basically, I, the doctor, or I, the doctors, will save so much money.
On having to deal with billing and, you know, there are whole specialties now in medical billing.
And this is not a real thing.
This is a total fabrication based on a system that claims to be about health and is of course not.
So the idea that with, you know, the more people who end up opting out of the insurance industry and opting into something like CrowdHealth, the more doctors could actually spend on being diagnosticians and caring about individual people's health as opposed to having to push more and more patients through their offices in order to pay for their billing specialist and their insurance specialist and all this.
Yeah, we should actually do a segment at some point on different models because, you know, as you know, when we've traveled and occasionally you need a doctor and you don't have insurance that applies and, you know, you Go to some clinic and you find some surprisingly highly competent person and they charge you some very small amount of money and you think, well, how the hell did that just happen to me here and I can't even get that level of service at home?
There's a racket.
Yeah, there's a racket.
And I'm reminded of having gone to a doctor, the doctor, at the clinic in Maran, etc.
in the town in Northeastern Madagascar, nearest to where I was doing my dissertation research on Nozibangabian Island off the coast of Madagascar.
And you weren't there on this trip, but the trip wherein I was attacked viciously and unprovoked by a brown lemur.
And I don't care about the color of his fur.
That's actually just the common name of the lemur lemur pelvis.
Actually, the common name might have been Jake.
I don't know.
But I came up behind me and took a giant bite out of my tricep and then ran away and then came back for more.
And I needed quite a lot of stitching and it was a whole story.
One of the things that I got to see in that clinic as I was about to be stitched up by the doctor was he brought out a metal tray and he had all of his tools in it and he poured a bunch of alcohol over them and set them on fire in order to sterilize them.
I thought, I am now completely convinced that they're sterilized.
Okay, I actually feel pretty good about this.
It's a medicine flambe.
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Excellent.
Alright.
Can I start off?
Alright.
I wanted to talk about...
We are in some sort of an intermediate period, an interregnum period between an election in which there has been a massive swing in the consent of the governed in the direction of a new party...
And basically an overwhelming support for a change in the way we do things in the U.S. And a big part of that was the joining of forces between what has been called MAGA and what is now called MAHA. Make America Healthy Again.
Unquestionably, Bobby Kennedy is the key to why America is talking about Make America Healthy Again.
He has done an excellent job of making clear that there is, in fact, an epidemic of ill health that has been spreading for decades that is never properly explained.
And that is likely caused by many of the novel inputs that we have in our food system, in our agricultural system, in our interaction with medicine.
I would say this is perfectly in keeping with the model that you and I present in our book, in which we argue that there is an epidemic of what we call hypernovelty.
Hypernovelty being...
Things for which you do not have evolutionary preparedness, and the hyper part of it is that the rate of change, the rate of technological change of our environment, means that the environment that you grow up in isn't even the environment that you're an adult in, so even in principle there's no way for us to keep up.
You cannot become adapted to your world and maintain that level of adaptedness if the world keeps revolutionizing itself.
Such that, as we have said over and over again, even though we humans are best able to adapt to rapid change, in part because we ourselves create rapid change and are so much more software than hardware,
culture than the genetics underlying what we are, although we are no less genetic than our ancestors, we just have more culture on top of what is our phylogenetic ancestry, Yeah.
cannot keep up with the rate of change that we ourselves have created for ourselves.
And it's making us sick across every different domain.
So everything from physiological to psychological to social, all of these realms are places where we find ourselves at odds with our environment, and it's making us sick.
So in some ways, you know, Maha is one way of describing it.
Hypernovelty crisis is another way of describing it.
And we're all having the sense that we are just kind of out of our depth.
You go to the supermarket and things that look and smell like food just simply aren't good for you.
And it's beginning to dawn on us that, you know, oh my goodness, somebody took an industrial lubricant and, you know, perfumed it so it didn't smell bad.
And then they put it into those bars, whatever they are.
And it tricks us into thinking that we're consuming something Uh, safe.
And we're actually running a kind of a radical experiment, except that we're not even collecting the data on what the consequences.
So anyway, that's the world we're living.
Not only is there no informed consent, but they're not even bothering to collect the data.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's a waste on so many levels.
Right, so, okay, hypernovelty crisis comes to public attention as maha, and we are now hurtling towards a set of confirmation hearings in which there are some very prominent ones that we're going to be faced with.
Bobby Kennedy for head of HHS and Jay Bhattacharya for head of NIH. To make the story very simple, let's just point something out.
Huge amounts of money are being made doing things the way we currently do them.
If those things are not safe, and if Bobby Kennedy, Jay Bhattacharya, and Team Maha are about to go find the things that are unsafe and get us to undo them, or at least properly label them so that we as consumers can decide not to do them anymore, so that there's no coercion, so that we are informed, etc.
If that's going to happen, it is going to interrupt a huge amount of profiteering.
And you can expect, given the nature of our political system, That those who are making those huge profits are going to do everything in their power to upend everything that points in this direction, including those confirmation hearings.
And in fact, we are seeing evidence that there is a growing campaign, as of course there would have to be, behind the scenes of people who feel that their fortunes are being threatened by an investigation into what's making Americans And so, Jen, do you want to show that tweet?
There's a tweet thread I ran across which points to a strategic campaign that has been unearthed that is targeted at Bobby Kennedy in particular.
And this one, if I understood the thread correctly, the thread...
It describes lobbyists from the food industry and the ag industry who are targeting Bobby Kennedy.
Conspicuously, pharma is, I believe, a separate campaign and there may well be some interplay between these things where, for example, The food and ag lobbies might throw pharma under the bus, and the pharma lobby might throw food and ag under the bus because it's musical chairs and somebody's gonna lose.
Sure.
So, in any case, these campaigns are afoot.
We can totally predict that they are going to attempt to capture the conversations surrounding the confirmations of Bobby Kennedy, Jay Bhattacharya, and anybody else associated with Maha.
And in thinking about this, and I did a fair amount of thinking, there was a fair amount of discussion about it at the recent Brownstone retreat, which you couldn't be at because you were sick.
You were otherwise scheduled to talk there.
But there was a lot of discussion about what to do.
And one thing is very clear, which is...
That those of us who have been part of raising awareness over the course of COVID, you know, educating ourselves about what is actually under discussion and have successfully moved the conversation using tools provided by Elon Musk and discussions with Joe Rogan.
All of these platforms have allowed us to have a discussion that is much more open-minded than the powers that be would have preferred.
So there was a lot of discussion about the fact that we've done that job very well and we've learned how to do it painfully.
We've made lots of mistakes, but we've discovered how to have that conversation, how to do it responsibly, where the bodies tend to be buried and all of those things.
But that's very different than having people who are sympathetic with our perspective and have been part of that conversation now in positions of power where they are going to be taking an entirely different kind of fire.
So we have to figure out how to behave in this new world that we are about to enter, starting in large measure with the confirmation hearings.
So if I may, one way to summarize what you just said is that when a contest is decided, win or lose, all players are in a different position now and have different roles to play.
The undecided contest has one set of rules by which the ragtag fugitive fleet, perhaps, can play.
And once it is known that at least until the next time you are understood to be in the winning position or in the losing position, you are inherently going to have to come to solutions differently.
Yeah, except I would add one thing to it, which is there is a game.
Actually, Tucker Carlson talks about it frequently and I think quite eloquently.
There is a game in which there have been traditionally two teams in Washington.
And, you know, what happens is one team ascends to power and the other goes into this other mode, the rebels in the hills, and they use their broadcast networks to You know, to slander the people who are in power, and then at some point power shifts, and basically you've got these two positions, and the two teams swap between them, but they're both powerful positions.
I'm pointing to something different here.
Yeah, and I wasn't pointing to that.
That is a description of historically what American politics has looked like, but this is a much bigger thing than politics.
Right.
My point would be, this is a team, so...
Trump is his own phenomenon.
He has ascended to power once.
It frankly didn't go all that well because his team was isolated and so it wasn't as capable as it might have been.
In teaming up with the unity movement, with the Maha movement, in this case a group of people who have Always been on the outs with the power structure or have found themselves there over the COVID era are suddenly now empowered and have never held that role.
And so that is a brand new position.
And it basically means that you have people who, you know, you know, learned how to play tennis very well and suddenly they're being expected to win a downhill skiing race.
And the point is, Capable of it, maybe, but have to learn a bunch of new skills to do it is the key thing.
So anyway, okay, go ahead.
And untested in the new game.
And it will be an incredibly human reaction to feel coming off a win.
Like, that was amazing.
Let's keep doing the thing we've been doing because that was winning.
And that thing that brought you to the wind is not the thing that will allow you necessarily to actually affect a good change in a stable regime.
Yeah, actually, there is a biological analogy here, which didn't occur to me to invoke until just now.
But this is exactly why the process of ecological succession happens.
So ecological succession is a process.
Let's say that you clear a section of forest.
Well, the trees that will ultimately live there, the mature forest trees, are not the ones that are adapted to win a competition in this newly cleared landscape.
There are trees that are called pioneer species that come in first, and those pioneer species have very different characteristics than the mature forest species.
They're scrappy and they have shallow roots and they grow fast and they compete vigorously as plants do.
But because they grow fast and they have shallow roots, they're much more likely to get toppled by wind.
And as the later successional species come in, they easily outcompete the early successional species, which In the Pacific Northwest are things like alders, in the neotropics are things like cecropia and balsa, like light wood trees with shallow roots that get tipped over easily and tend to like to have their roots wet and Yeah, so, I mean, let's take the example of balsa and cecropia, which do the same trick two very different ways.
So the idea is, if you're an early successional tree, then the key to being a winner is to grow really fast, so you stay above the light competitors.
How do you grow really fast?
Well, you take a smaller number of molecules and you make them into more wood, which means that the wood is less dense.
But the less dense phenomenon happens two very different ways.
Balsa, the stuff you make model rocket fins and airplanes out of, It is like a very spongy wood where there's a lot of air and not that many wood fibers, right?
That's how that works.
And that's why balsa is special in the hobby industry.
Cecropia is actually a super dense wood, but the trees have these giant chambers that are empty in them.
More like bamboo.
It's not, bamboo is a monocot, but it's a little bit more like bamboo.
It's the exact same idea.
You get the strength in the way that a bicycle, a steel bicycle tube, gets strength, being hollow but geometrically organized in such a way that you get a lot of strength out of it.
But nonetheless, it's mostly empty space.
So, early successional plants are dominant in a cleared space, but they create a habitat in which they are no longer dominant, and they get replaced.
And so you get this pattern of succession that is well-known in ecology.
And so in some sense, what you've got now is the game that I would argue that we won, where we captured enough attention and caused people to wake up enough about the hazards that were being foisted upon them.
That that game has now put us in a position where that game is not the effective way to play, and we have to retool.
And we have to retool in a way that we don't compromise our integrity, but is aware of the fact that, you know, let's face it, when you don't have power, You are freed in one sense to just simply focus on things like the truth.
Once you have power, you can be forced into compromises.
Once you start being forced into compromises, people will look at you and they will say, you know, you've lost your moral compass.
And the answer is no, actually, you know, you do want fewer people to die.
You want less people injured.
You don't want to say false things in order to make that happen, but...
It is a more difficult venue in which to play, and so just being aware that that's where we are is crucial.
Shining light on the problem and changing the problem are different jobs.
Yep.
And so I would argue one thing is we need to be very careful with the people who have led this movement and now do find themselves in the halls of power, not as outsiders, you know, shouting uncomfortable truths, but as Insiders who are doing our bidding.
We have to understand that we need to be supportive.
We do need to hold their feet to the fire so that they don't lose track of what they're doing because they're in a world of compromises.
But we have to be sophisticated about hearing what they're trying to tell us so that the maximum amount of good can actually be done relative to the issues that we see as important.
Okay, so in traveling, it occurred to me I was looking for a description for something.
And it occurred to me that I actually already had it.
That it was actually, it fell naturally out of stuff that you and I have discussed a hundred times on Dark Horse.
So what I was looking for was the following thing.
Let's take the example of fluoridation of water.
You and I have been aware that fluoridation of water was dangerous, never mind whether it does what it's supposed to do, but that the idea of putting what is in effect an unnatural medical treatment into municipal water supplies where people...
Consume differing amounts of it and can't monitor how much of the stuff they've taken because you don't know where it's embedded in your food and where it isn't.
That that is a radical way of solving ostensibly a tooth decay problem and not safe, right?
Very hard to know what the consequences of it are.
And because it's an unnatural remedy, it's not something we find in nature in this form.
Highly likely to have unintended consequences.
We've been trying to make that point forever.
And it's in our book, very clearly.
And we took a lot of flack for it being in our book, as you've pointed out.
The world has now finally come around to this.
It hasn't universally accepted that there's a problem.
But you can now, in mixed company, assert that there's a problem with our fluoridation.
And you will at least have a discussion where there will be, you know, people Unashamed to be on both sides of it and having a discussion.
So we've made huge progress.
Now here's the thing I was looking for the name for.
All of those years where if you knew the fluoride story, you were already aware that this was a problem.
But there was no way to make the point that didn't cost you dearly.
Right?
You could be right.
In the end, you'd be right if it were a market and your point was, okay, I tell you what, I'm going to bet against fluoride and I'm going to wait 30 years and I'm going to come out ahead in the end and I'm willing to wait those 30 years.
Fine.
But that's not what it is.
All of those intervening years, you're paying this huge cost for being a kook that you're not, right?
The point is that you're paying the kook cost, but you're not a kook.
You're just way ahead of the public, right?
Right.
So, what is the name for that?
Well...
Paying the kook cost, I think.
Paying the kook cost is a good way of saying it.
But what I realized is that it's the mirror image of something that I think proudly goes to our credit, which is the idea of metaphorical truth.
So we have talked about metaphorical truth in the context especially of religion but not exclusively.
So in the case of religion what we've said is that there are many beliefs that even though they may be literally false if you behave as if they are true you come out in evolutionary terms ahead of where you would be if you behaved as if they were not true.
So they serve you as if they are true Therefore, they are true in some sense, but it is not a literal sense, it is a metaphorical sense.
So metaphorically, literally false and metaphorically true things are part of your and my toolkit that we have deployed regularly.
Well, in the case of the kook cost, the kook cost is a situation in which things are metaphorically false.
Something that is actually true costs you, if you know about it and talk about it, as if it were false, right?
So for all of those years that you talk about the insanity of putting fluoride in municipal water supplies, you're paying a cost as if you've said something insane, right?
So it's metaphorically false.
It's literally true.
Yeah, it's a dumb idea to put fluoride in municipal water supplies, but it's metaphorically false.
I like the elegance of it.
I guess, absent the pre-existing phrase, literally false, metaphorically true, that we've used for religion, as you've just talked about, I would use the word socially there rather than metaphorically.
Oh, okay.
But you don't have the same elegance and symmetry.
Yeah, but I like it.
I like your point.
I think it's more, it's literally false, or literally true, socially false.
Yep.
Literally true, socially false, I would agree, is an equally accurate description, maybe more accurate description, less elegant because it's not the exact mirror image of a concept we've already put on the map.
But nonetheless, here's the other, here's the asymmetry that I think is causing you to stumble on the idea of metaphorically false.
Is that it's not really an exact analog because it is motivated.
The reason that a metaphorically true idea is metaphorically true is in general because you can't explain the reason that...
You can't explain the complex underlying reason that behaving as if it's true is good for you.
So let me take an example.
Or you can't always.
Sometimes you can't.
Sometimes you can't, but often you can't.
And I will give some of the non-religious examples that I've given in the past.
The idea that everything happens for a reason.
Well, you know what?
Everything does not happen for a reason.
If you lose a child, if you board the airplane and it goes down because somebody put tape over the altitude port...
It's happened.
Seriously?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it has happened.
Cleaning crew puts tape over the port and forget to take it off and the pilots are blinded by their instruments and they're in a cloud and blah blah blah.
It's happened.
Well, that's horrifying.
It is.
And it doesn't happen for a reason other than, you know, the reason is cleaning the plane, I guess.
It doesn't happen for a reason in the sense that people mean it.
When people say things happen for a reason, they mean a cosmic reason.
But here's the thing.
It's good for you to think that things happen for a reason because if you don't think that and something terrible happens, then your dwelling on the fact that this means absolutely nothing will cause you to miss any opportunity that it has opened.
And often if it's a sufficiently big change, it will actually open opportunities.
Yeah.
Things happen for a reason is code for, in some ways, this is for the best.
And you can't say to someone who's just lost their child or, you know, an arm, in some ways this is for the best, but things happen for a reason is a way to get people to consider what door just opened.
Like, what is there that can be learned?
That I can't see right now through my grief or horror or terror or whatever.
Yeah, I wouldn't say things happen for the best for exactly the reason you point out.
But that's exactly my point, that people can't say that.
And so this is like a replacement for that.
Well, but I don't think it's even a replacement.
I think what it's sort of like, you know, if I was to try to describe the principle in rigorous terms, I would say, Every creature is always left to play the cards currently in their hand.
And that loss aversion causes us to record the hand, what might have been in a way that can be disruptive of your ability to play the cards that you've been dealt.
And so anyway, there's some value to having a...
A kludge that trips you out of your wallowing in pain and keeps you aware that maybe the universe is trying to get you to some other location which will cause you to play the cards that you still have to play better than you would if you were dwelling on what might have been.
So it's a belief that is metaphorically true in the sense that, yeah, you should act as if this is true even though there's really no reason to think it is.
Another one is the case of follow-through for a tennis player or a batter in baseball.
Follow-through does not matter at all.
Follow-through is incapable of having an impact on the ball once it's left the bat or the racket.
However, if you do not plan to follow-through, you will hit it differently.
And so behaving as if follow-through is everything results in better play in both cases.
And the point is...
This is one that's actually sayable rather directly, but it's not a good way to teach somebody to play.
Barking at your student on the court and saying, follow through, works great.
It actually does cause you to alter your behavior in a way that matters, even though it's not quite the right description.
You know, in this case, this is maybe drilling down on details too much, but I think people who would...
Let's just use the tennis example because I've played more tennis than I have baseball.
If you imagine that your stroke finishes at the point that the ball leaves the racket, you are misunderstanding something about your own muscles.
And frankly, something about the geometry and physics of racket on ball as well.
And so I think it's a misunderstanding of what the stroke is.
Like, oh, the stroke only...
It is from, you know, you approaching the ball until the ball leaves the racket as opposed to, no, the stroke is longer than that.
And so follow through is, you don't have to get into the analytics of like, no, your stroke's not over yet.
You just say follow through, which effectively does the same thing.
Like, just as the stroke began before the ball made contact with the racket, which everyone knows, so too does the stroke continue after the ball leaves the racket.
Yeah, the stroke continues.
Yeah, I agree.
And I think, you know, undoubtedly coaches have said every damn thing and the one that sticks is follow through because it properly encapsulates the change in the mindset that causes you to play better tennis.
So that's good.
I could make a similar argument for the idea of muscle memory.
It's not muscle memory.
Muscle memory is actually like the myelination pathways that allow you to play something so it sort of feels like your muscles know how to play the piano when in fact It's neurons that have gotten more efficient at firing these messages in the correct order at a rapid pace.
Anyway, none of this matters.
It's a kind of canalization rather than memory, per se.
Yeah, it's not memory, but the point is it sure feels like it, so whatever.
It's a good enough way to describe it.
And then, you know, I'll give the one religious example that if you've got a game theory problem, you've got a population of people, you've got innumerable collective action problems where the individual's interests are in some conflict with the population's interest, but actually everybody's long-term well-being is subordinate to the population's well-being.
Well, how do you, you know, what I just said is not the kind of thing you can say to most people who've never thought thing one about game theory and wouldn't even know what it meant or why they should care.
But what you can say Is, you know, that makes God very angry when you behave that way.
And you can't escape his gaze.
He's looking down on you all the time.
He not only knows what you're doing, but he knows what you're thinking.
And so...
Santa Claus.
Yeah.
Well, Santa Claus is the training program.
Yeah.
Right?
And it's a good one.
So anyway, the point is...
God, heaven, hell, karma, all of these things are ways of encoding something in belief that is provably not accurate, but that you should behave as if it is accurate because actually it does a really useful thing.
That's metaphorical truth.
And that was a long-winded way of getting back to what's wrong with the idea of calling this metaphorically false.
What's wrong is that it isn't the universe in which there's some hidden property that has been described in some approximate metaphor.
This is actually bad people inflicting costs on you in order to get you not to say stuff that you should say.
The fluoride industry, right?
The people who figured out how to take industrial waste and sell it to municipal government so they will dump it in the water and make it go away so those polluters don't have to figure out how to dispose of it safely.
Those people want to make the lives of those who would point out the absurdity of this bad.
Sufficiently bad that they will be very few in number.
And they did that successfully for decades.
Right?
So it is the The cynical, corrupt nature of the force that makes these things metaphorically false that you're hanging up on.
And I agree.
It's socially false.
And it's socially false because the public is, in its own way, caught in a bind.
The public doesn't know things.
The public can't be expected to know things.
In fact, the entire reason that we have a representative government rather than a direct democracy is that the founders understood the public wasn't going to be able to be well-versed in all of this stuff, and so the right thing to do was to elect representatives who could be better versed, and those representatives would have a budget with which they could hire experts who were really well-versed and get themselves informed and try to do the right thing for the population,
and they didn't count on The degree to which industries would lobby the system into a point of insanity.
There's also a numbers problem, which just as the 20th and 21st century saw a rise in the problem of hypernovelty because we have outpaced even our ability to keep up, so too have the sheer numbers meant that those of us who have our eyes open to a number of these things have a, is that the hill you want to die on problem?
Because there are so many of these, like, okay, well...
Yes, we're going to do what we can from, you know, decades ago to keep the fluoride out of our kids' water and our water.
But is that one of the things that we're going to be, you know, crying from the hilltops?
No.
No, because there are lots of these.
And, you know, we talked about these things in our classrooms.
We talked, like, how would you know?
How would you assess this?
This is what needs to be happening in classrooms.
It's epistemology.
Like, how is it that we make claims of truth?
And how would you know when you are right and how would you know when you are wrong?
Most importantly, how would you know when you are wrong?
It's much more difficult to know for sure when you are right.
But for those who don't have an ability to make a difference for their own families or in a position to be teaching young adults how to assess things for themselves, How many of these do people want to take a personal hit for before they say,
you know what, this isn't my full-time job, and there are too many of these, and so I am actually going to become mute even though I don't feel like I'm being a coward.
Right, which is exactly the intended consequence, is to cause people to mute themselves rather than pay some spectacular cost for some issue which isn't even theirs.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, do you think your standing up is going to get your municipality to take the fluoride out of your water?
It doesn't happen.
So, you know, occasionally groups of people have gotten together.
In fact, I think Olympia's water was actually not fluoridated because Evergreen faculty organized a revolt I don't know since we were on a well.
We had beautiful water and so I don't know what Olympia's municipal water was.
That was before we ever got there, but I believe there was an early revolt by evergreen faculty which woke up the city of Olympia to the hazards of fluoride and to their credit got it taken out.
But an individual is almost never in that position.
Right.
So the point is, do I want to, and it's classic game theory.
The fact is the polluters use the game theory against us.
I am in no position to get the fluoride out of my water and I'm in a perfect position to ruin my career by talking about it.
So I'm not gonna, right?
That's what most people do.
And I mean, it's the same thing with the COVID vaccines.
100%.
Yeah.
And that's the thing.
Once you see this pattern, it's like, oh, All I really want to do with this discussion is say there's a category of things where we are not yet ready to acknowledge a truth that is obvious if you dig deep enough, right?
You could know it today if you wanted to educate yourself, but it might take a ton of work and it wouldn't empower you to do anything about it.
And it...
Sure would put you at risk, which is exactly the landscape they're trying to create.
They're trying to keep you mentally constrained by driving up the horror of what happens if you even ask questions.
So...
That's where we are, and we are about to go through hell over this with respect to the confirmation hearings.
Because, I mean, I will just confess, I remember the period after the movie Thank You for Smoking, which was my first awareness that Bobby Kennedy existed.
He is the hero of this movie.
He's not in it.
He's, of course, played by somebody else.
Then there's a period at which Bobby Kennedy shows up as a swashbuckling lawyer fighting Monsanto, etc.
And then he shows up again as a kook who's lost his mind and gone anti-vax and blah blah blah blah blah.
And I'm embarrassed to say that as much as I am exactly the target audience for the idea of the swashbuckling lawyer who's going to fight Monsanto and win, because I was such a strong believer in vaccines,
I never believed they were safe, but because I was a strong believer in the cost-benefit analysis being favorable to them, I I heard the kinds of claims that Bobby Kennedy was making, which sounded like they couldn't possibly be true.
And so I was steered into thinking, maybe something's happened to this person.
And probably, correct me if I'm wrong, you believed the epithet, which is beginning to lose some of its stigma because it is clear that it is being used indiscriminately like racist and transphobe, anti-faxer.
Right.
Anti-vaxxer.
Right.
I believed in it and especially I was even particularly bad maybe because since a lot of my theoretical evolutionary work circles around concepts of game theory, I am aware that there's a theoretical problem with vaccines that's actually uh real and goes in favor of concern over an anti-vax sentiment and the idea is if these things were safe or safe enough
and if they were effective enough then People who decided not to get them would be gaining the benefit of other people's vaccinations and not taking their share of the risk.
And the problem is that would be fine, except that it causes enough people not to take them that actually the benefits are eroded and you don't get to a place where you stamp out a disease.
There is a legitimate concern between individual and population level rights.
And this is what we are perhaps coming full circle back to as a country, that it is notoriously difficult to get people to actually think in terms of populations.
And before our audience freaks out and thinks that I'm talking about becoming a communist or a socialist here, I will say that over in organizational biology land, that is to say evolution and ecology in particular, it is necessary to think at the population level in terms it is necessary to think at the population level in terms of population level dynamics and what happens to precisely because that is what the questions are.
And so many, many people in these fields in evolutionary ecology still can't do it, but what it requires to be an excellent ecologist or evolutionary biologist, you have to explicitly be moving back and forth between individual level analysis and population level analysis All the time and recognize what level you're thinking at.
And of course statistics only applies at the population level.
And so if you are relying on statistics, if you're thinking in terms of statistics, if you think that statistics have value, then you know that population level analyses are necessary some of the time.
But take that now to the personal and go, well individual health versus public health Well, you know, post-COVID, it feels to a lot of us like, actually, I don't trust any of you who are thinking in terms of public health because you have proven yourselves to be not actually interested in what is good for all of us.
But that doesn't negate the reality that there is a public and there is a game-theoretic problem with...
If there are safe enough and effective enough drugs that can actually prevent a disease, people opting out because they will get the herd immunity benefits without taking the cost of the treatment.
Right.
Right.
And I will say that now that we have circulated amongst many different vaccine skeptic groups, I will say I have never run into the person who appears to be inclined to take advantage of other people's vaccination status without taking risks themselves.
Yeah.
Now, I would not argue that any of us are required to take risks for the population.
In some theoretical world, that might make sense.
But I don't believe that that could make sense at human levels of perfection.
I think we all have a effectively sacred right to resist whatever treatments for whatever reason.
But I will also say the thing that one does discover when you circulate amongst the people who are being tarred with the epithet anti-vaxxer, what you find is this.
Scratch an anti-vaxxer and find the parent of an injured child, right?
The point is, there are lots of people who might even accept the term anti-vaxxer, but what they are, are people who started out in favor of vaccines and have seen something or experienced something that has caused them to rethink the whole matter.
Well, you're going to object to this for reasons that we can get into, but I think that they are trivial compared to the observation that that's not how we got there.
Right.
Every time I hear this, I think maybe this is part of why We have been so clearly irritating to Goliath because we got there specifically through thinking about the mRNA shots that were being trotted out for COVID, imagined that they were probably going to be something that we would end up taking, although we weren't enthusiastic about being in the first round or the second round or the third round, wanted to wait as long as possible because we understood that they couldn't.
Couldn't possibly know the things that they were claiming with regard to safety, at least, and probably efficacy as well, so early.
But came to be hearing stories, none of which were personal.
We now know many people who have been vaccine injured, but none of them struck close to home for a very long time.
And I think your objection may be, you know, how is it then that, you know, as you and I separately at first began looking into the childhood vaccine schedule and the lack of placebo testing and all of these things, I'm like, oh god, this story does in fact go deeper in exactly the way that some people have been trying to tell us for years and we didn't know.
Uh, but again, it wasn't because my child is injured or I have a particular story.
Like, it was actually, it was driven by the same sorts of things that drive our interests in, you know, orcas.
Well, it was, in my memory of it, it was driven by the fact that the, frankly, Project Warp Speed and the accelerated, uh, The accelerated deployment of a highly novel vaccine-like technology.
Well, you're talking about the mRNA now.
I was talking about the...
I know.
But the point is, the deployment of that thing caused us to say, hey, wait a minute, you just told me a story that makes no sense, which then leads very much, especially in people like us, who were already...
We're wise to the fact that regular vaccines couldn't possibly be as safe as they're claimed to be.
So the point is it was a, you know, some sort of a natural process of here's what I can see that makes no sense.
And then you uncover the next thing and it makes less sense.
And so there's a momentum to it where you, you know, finally you get all the way down the rabbit hole and you're like, There's nothing here.
This is insane that there's even a claim.
What's it based on?
I mean, and we're going to get to an example here that I find perfectly shocking, but let's start going down the road.
So my overarching point so far is There is a category of belief that is factually incorrect, but that recognizing that it is factually incorrect is so costly that it is as if it is correct at a social level.
So that category, the question is, well, what's in that category?
I sure would like to know because it actually probably affects what I should put in my mouth or allow my doctor to inject into my arm.
You know, I would love to know what things everybody sneers and says, oh yeah, it's perfectly safe.
And, you know, four decades from now, we'll realize how insane a claim that was.
I'd like to get ahead of the curve and avoid those things, right?
I got one.
You got one?
Oh, yeah.
That's what I've been thinking about all week and what I wrote about for Natural Selections yesterday.
It's the Ozempic, right?
It's the glucagon-like peptide one receptor agonist, to use the most technical term.
But Ozempic, Wegovi, however you pronounce that, the semaglutide weight loss drugs that are going to take out human health.
Yeah, and you know, you can, if you're a long-time viewer of Dark Horse, or if you've read our book, you know that this is, the error is an obvious one, right?
That you're talking about at least a complex system, the human body, and you're talking about a complicated mindset where it's like, oh, if I push this button, that happens.
And Can I say just a couple things about this here?
So I'm not going to read my piece, but I'll link it.
So it's got this crazy-sounding name, right?
It's got like six words, only one of which is a common word, one.
So glucagon-like peptide 1, GLP-1, receptor agonists.
The first four, glucagon-like peptide 1, is actually a human hormone.
So that doesn't mean that there's a human hormone in these, and I'm just going to collectively call them ozempic, even though that's not technically exactly right.
But the GLP-1 is a human hormone that has a number of effects.
It is released when you eat and mitigates things like blood sugar through modulation of both insulin and glucagon.
It slows the emptying of the stomach.
It causes reactions in the central nervous system that give you a sense of fullness.
And those last two things are the things that we have all heard about and people who've been on them have experienced of what these drugs, the GLP-1-RAs, the Ozempics, Do is that your stomach empties more slowly and your brain tells you you're full and people report feeling like I just walked to the grocery store or I look in my pantry and I don't have the cravings that I used to have.
However, the actual human hormone, GLP-1, There are receptors for it, and we call them GLP-1 receptors because we name things based on how we find them.
And these new drugs, the Ozempic and relatives, slot into those same receptors and do similar things.
Slot in and trigger them rather than block them.
Right.
They're agonists, not antagonists, which have roughly opposite meanings.
When you eat and your body produces GLP-1, the natural human hormone, it is then responding to the fact that you've eaten.
When you take a pill or a subcutaneous shot of this stuff and your body is now getting the signal that you've eaten but you haven't, what else is going to be sent out of whack?
Presumably a number of things.
Furthermore, GLP-1, the natural human hormone, and Ozempic and its relatives, the receptor agonists that are like GLP-1, are not exactly the human hormone.
They are, according to Grok, about 94% Homologous to the actual human hormone.
So in what ways are they different?
Well, there are, in terms of semaglutide, three distinct ways.
And actually, I have Grok's version of this up here.
Let me see if I can just find...
Yeah.
Molecular structure of semaglutide.
Um, semaglutide is, and this is just going to be consistent with what I've just said, a glucocon-like peptide 1, GLP-1, receptor agonist, structurally similar to human GLP-1.
Again, GLP-1 is the human hormone, endogenous human hormone, that is produced when we eat.
Here are the key points about its molecular structure.
I don't care about most of these.
94% homology with human but GLP-1, but includes two amino acid substitutions and one acylation.
What do they do?
Here we go.
The oscillation here allows for a prolonged half-life.
of about 165 to 184 hours in humans due to reduced renal clearance and protection from enzymatic degradation so you're taking this thing you're signaling your body to produce something that's like a human hormone that is normally only produced when you eat you take it when you're not eating and it has been modified in that way and in the second way as well to have a reduced half-life which means to stay in the body active for longer Which means your
stomach is going to clear even more slowly, you're going to have a sense of fullness for even longer, and your glucagon and insulin modulation are going to be modified by this thing that is like but not exactly like this human hormone that is normally only produced when you eat for even longer.
So all of these things are kind of like a human hormone, But not exactly.
And to me, this reminds me precisely of the pseudouridine substitution for uracil in the mRNA shots that were produced as if they were vaccines for COVID. There is a stabilization that has happened that means that your body isn't even going to be able to clear it at the rate that it would historically have been able to clear something very similar.
Yeah, and it's clear that it's, you know, it's an effective strategy for accomplishing a business something, right?
The idea is, oh, we would like our molecule to stick around rather than be biologically degraded, which is what the body would tend to do to it.
And people may be more resistant to taking a subcutaneous shot twice a day.
Sure.
Right?
So, like, let's just, like, let's get user error reduced and just give them something once in a while and just make sure that once it's on board, it stays on board.
Yep.
I would also point out that there's some analogy here to SSRIs, because what SSRIs do is not exactly the same.
It's not like they are producing an agonist for the receptor, but they block the reuptake of the natural neurotransmitter.
And the point is, you know, okay.
That's going to be an antagonist.
Yeah.
Reuptake inhibitor.
Inhibitor.
You're interfering in a way that, in a textbook sense, is understandable because you've got an overly simplified pathway in the textbook.
And the point is, oh, well, if we just intervene here, it'll have X consequence and done.
And it's like...
I sure hope the textbook has fully described the system.
Right.
But, you know, what does it mean to have food move more slowly through your gut?
Well, does it mean that any toxins that are in your food are more likely to be absorbed?
So does it increase the toxicity of other things?
And do we hold the manufacture of the thing that slows the progress of the stuff through your gut responsible for the uptake of some toxin that they didn't put into you?
If you're taking other medications, does it slow the passage of them through the gut, thus making uptake of those into the bloodstream potentially greater, in which case you should probably mitigate your dosage of those medications.
Right.
And what do we do with, you know, a carcinogen?
So you've taken a certain number of carcinogens and they're now going to be in contact with your gut wall for longer.
Is this going to create an increase in tumors?
You know, we could go all day with, I'm not saying any of these things are true, but I'm saying you would want a very long-term study in which an awfully large number of things were monitored in order to even begin to think that this was a safe intervention.
Because almost certainly intervening in such an arbitrary way that has all of these cascading consequences is going to have lots of downsides that apparently we don't know about.
Right.
So anyway, that's a great example.
I was reminded by a guest article on Robert Malone's Substack this week by The guest article is by Sophia Karstens and she reviews the history of the initial inactivated polio vaccine.
Well, you know, this is a classic case.
And I think we talked on the last live stream about the absurdity of the belief that vaccines are safe.
They can't possibly be safe because they've been we've had vaccines pulled from the market, which tells you that they're not inherently safe.
So what it must mean to believe that they are safe must mean that the process by which we make themself is so good that nothing ever gets through, which is also not the case.
But anyway, the case of the polio vaccine tells us a lot that should disrupt any but any model that says that this is an inherently safe technology, either in principle or in practice.
And what Sophia recounts here is the fact that the initial release of polio had two major defects that are now essentially a forgotten chapter of vaccine history.
One of the defects Was that the virus, which was supposed to be killed in the vaccines, actually got through in live form and created a large number of cases of poliomyelitis, including a number of deaths.
Yep.
Yeah, just her third paragraph here.
The flawed vaccine and associated flawed manufacturing process were licensed for public use.
This was back in 1954 or thereabouts, mid-20th century.
120,000 polio vaccine doses containing an improperly inactivated version of the live polio virus were manufactured and produced.
Of children who received the vaccine, 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis, 51 developed paralytic poliomyelitis, and of these, five children died from polio.
The exposures led to an epidemic of polio in the families and communities of the affected children, resulting in the death of five children and 113 others paralyzed.
And let me just say, abortive poliomyelitis, which is not a phrase that I was familiar with before reading Sophia's article, basically refers to a weak case, a minor case of polio.
Yeah, a transient minor case.
This tells you a lot of things.
One, those of us who have become highly skeptical of vaccines and vaccine technologies often have polio thrown at us.
Like, how dare you invite the resurgence of a disease that we've just about stamped out with the magic of vaccines?
And the answer is actually, you've caused a lot of polio with those vaccines.
We can argue about the interaction of, you know, here we've got cases of polio that, according to Sophia's description, actually spread.
We're talking about not just having given people polio who got injected, but we're talking about it spreading even to people who didn't take the thing.
So you've caused polio.
You've kept it alive in the world with a vaccine that was improperly manufactured and allowed live polio to get into humans.
So to the extent that the idea is, how dare you ever do anything that might cause a case of polio?
It's like, well, then the vaccines are square on that list of things that you need to be very careful about.
Certainly in modern times, in the last 10, 20 years, the outbreaks of polio in the world that have happened are all plausibly the result of polio vaccination campaigns.
Right.
And so now you've got a correlation causation problem, which is you've got, A, an industry that, by the way, makes money from these vaccines that now can point to outbreaks and say, well, we need an increased vaccination campaign.
And the point is, well...
Are you solving polio or are you causing polio, which then causes your product to be sold?
Right?
Do you even know?
So anyway, we've got a story that everybody carries.
Polio is nearly gone from the world, but not quite.
There are far-flung places that still have it, and we're doing our best to vaccinate them, and we sure don't want it to make a resurgence in the West, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And the point is, actually, the story does not stand up to scrutiny.
But, you know, we've talked here and I interviewed Forrest Moretti about what actually causes polio.
Yes, there is a virus involved.
No, it is not typically a paralytic virus.
It's a gut virus.
It's an enterovirus.
You know, but anyway, the story here is a at least complicated one about several complex systems.
But anyway, the point is you've got Polio cases caused by the vaccine.
You've got polio epidemics caused by the vaccine.
And then you have a whole separate thing, which people are going to do a double take on this one.
But not only was live polio in the vaccines that were given initially for polio, but SV40. And I don't mean the SV40 promoter that you have all heard about from Kevin McKernan's work.
The SV40 promoter is one component of SV40, but SV40 is simian virus 40 that was in the vaccines as a result of the cultivation in monkey kidney.
So here you have a wild virus.
Oops!
Right.
So, you know the bullshit that they always feed us with, well, humans are in evermore contact with nature because of the growing human population and the zoonotic population.
You know, virus spillover.
It's not a matter of...
No, it's the lab.
It's filled with monkey kidneys.
Right.
The point is, oh, here you have a lab leak that is the result of polio vaccine grown in monkey kidney in which an actual virus has escaped into people as a result of your manufacturing process.
And...
This virus, unlike most of them, is highly carcinogenic.
We need a new word.
We have iatrogenic, doctor-caused, physician-caused, maybe even hospital-caused.
We need research-caused public health problems.
We need a word for it not being the individual doctors or practices or the fact of the hospital setting and all of this, but probably SARS-CoV-2, almost certainly, right?
And these outbreaks, certainly, Certainly, modern outbreaks of polio in places where there's just been a polio vaccination campaign, but also Simeon Virus 40 being in these at all, to the degree that people are getting sick from SV40 after getting vaccinated with polio, is whatever this word is, whatever the scientific version of iatrogenic harm is.
Yeah, so we're going to need a Latin for laboratory, which might be laboratory, but it's going to...
It's labagenic.
Whatever the right term for labagenic is.
What's Iatro?
That suggests...
Okay.
Yeah.
But...
Okay, so here's the thing.
Not only do we have a double invalidation of the idea that vaccines are safe with the initial famously wonderful polio vaccine, which had two manufacturing defects, live polio that actually spread between people and SV40 that spread into people, but We got lucky.
It happens that SV40 is, as far as we know, not spreading between people, right?
That was not something that the crazed fools who engaged in using this technology had any right to expect.
That's just a fact.
Actually, it's downstream of what I've been talking about, which is the foolishness of this model That we keep being fed that says that zoonotic viruses are always threatening to leap out of nature and they're going to cause a pandemic and we damn well better be prepared and it's gonna happen yesterday so we gotta get right on it and more money and more regulations and all of the stuff that they want, right?
They're feeding us a nonsense story that is supposed to make us scared.
It's based on Polio, which is not the story we think it is.
You should read Forrest Moretti's Moth in the Iron Lung.
You should read Sophia's Substack article here.
And it's based on Spanish flu, which is not the story that we think it is.
Spanish flu apparently being largely the result of secondary bacteria and ammonias that today would be readily treatable with antibiotics, which we are, by the way, abusing by giving them to lots of Farm animals that aren't sick with anything.
And the result of aspirin toxicity, which we would never give aspirin in the doses that it was given to people who had Spanish flu in 1918. So anyway, the stories that tell us how common these things are are wrong.
The model that they give us about people are in more contact with nature than they've ever been, so this is about to happen all the time, is wrong.
And what I've been saying, and what I wrote in my UnHerd article back in, I don't know, was it 2022?
2021?
2022?
I wrote an article about the fact that I had been a bat researcher handling bats with my bare hands.
And I, at first during COVID, worried, hey, was I in danger of causing a human pandemic?
And I just got lucky.
And what I ultimately concluded is no, that actually I was in some very tiny amount of danger that I might contract something from a bat.
But the chances that I would contract something from a bat...
That would then also be able to leap from me into another person was almost zero, right?
So anyway, we've got all of these wrong stories in our heads and these wrong stories are shielding a rational analysis.
So it is temporarily It's very dangerous to you socially to believe that there's a lot wrong with our vaccine story.
It's very dangerous to you socially to believe that the polio vaccine is anything but a godsend, right?
This is a cancer-causing, well, the initial version was a cancer-causing vaccine.
SV40 is not just any old virus that happens to be able to get from monkey kidney into a person.
This is a carcinogenic virus.
Right?
That's a highly dangerous thing to be playing around with.
And of course, you know, you're using monkey kidney cells.
You should expect that there would be all kinds of things in there that you know nothing about because a monkey is a complex system.
So, you know, all of this is the predictable consequence of arrogance relative to complex systems.
And you see it again and again and again.
Now, how many years will it be Well, it's still expensive to talk about, ruinous to talk about, but it's still rational to hold these skeptical positions, right?
Okay, so I wanted to actually say that we can see a spectrum of different locations where we are in the story.
The industries are in a wonderful position to punish people who have skepticism, to ruin them, right?
In fact, the woman who is the discoverer of the SV40 contamination and the live virus contamination of the polio vaccines was herself fired for revealing these things.
Mm-hmm.
But, you know, some stories, the public isn't ready at all to know about.
Some stories have already broken, right?
The fluoride story has effectively already broken now.
You know, obviously...
Well, I'm trying to remember what the name of the thalidomide, you know, the thalidomide story that broke in public, you know, when we were tiny children.
So these stories exist at different stages.
The mercury story in vaccines, mercury was initially used as a preservative and an adjuvant.
And when we were quite young, suspicion about mercury toxicity, because people famously know that mercury is dangerous and they hear, you know, they hear the Paul Offit's of the world say, well, you know, there's less mercury in the flu vaccine than there is in a tuna fish sandwich.
And they don't understand what's wrong with that claim.
It sounds like, oh, well, how bad could it be?
You know, I've had 10 of your sandwiches.
And the answer is, oh, it's very different if you inject that amount of mercury into you than consume it because the body doesn't import it from the gut.
Well, it's a category error at several levels.
How is it that you're taking it into the GI tract versus into your bloodstream is fundamentally different, and we should talk a little bit about why almost all of our vaccines are injected, even though they're supposedly against, in many cases, respiratory viruses.
But then there's also, and this is something that Carstens writes about in her piece, The question of what type of mercury is it?
And, you know, most of us aren't chemists.
And mercury sounds like a category because, among other things, most educated people who aren't chemists are like, well, you're a periodic table of elements.
It's an element.
It's elements.
Mercury.
Like, there must just be one mercury.
It's like, no, there's several kinds of mercury.
Mercury is not the same as mercury inherently.
And so when you hear someone like Paul Offit making this, you know...
He's jocularly ribbing those of us who might be concerned, and not being careful about his description of what kind of mercury is it that is being talked about, be skeptical that maybe he is obscuring some more unfortunate truth.
Yes, and in fact that same game was played with fluoride, where the fluoride salt that, whether the evidence is what it appears to be, the evidence that it had some positive effect preventing tooth decay was one salt, and the fluoride that was put in our water was an entirely different salt.
So yes, these category errors are everywhere.
Oh, and the other thing to say about the tuna fish sandwich thing is, yes, injecting that amount of mercury is very different than consuming that amount of mercury.
Radically different.
But it is also true, there's not supposed to be any mercury in a tuna fish sandwich.
And it isn't safe, which we know because we tell pregnant women not to eat them.
So...
Anyway, there's lots of games played that caused the public to back off of what would otherwise be its legitimate skepticism of these things.
So long ago, the mercury was pulled from almost all vaccines.
I believe it still exists in the multi-dose vials of flu vaccine, but it has been pulled from just about everything else.
So the public got wise to it and the industry had to back off.
But what did it do?
Place it with some other adjuvant.
Yeah, it backed off and it put in aluminum, which sounds better.
However, We are not in a position at this point, in this point in history, you would have to be insane to claim that aluminum is dangerous and therefore calls into question all of the many adjuvanted vaccines that are given to children.
I believe, and maybe you're wrong about this, but I believe that there are no known human physiological uses for either mercury or aluminum.
I believe that neither of those elements belong in us at all.
Yes, I agree that they have not.
Now, here is what I have recently become aware of through the incredible work of Toby Rogers.
Toby Rogers, who set out to study political economy and found himself accidentally falling down a rabbit hole in which he ended up investigating the political economy surrounding vaccines and discovered A shocking story that none of us know.
So, there are effectively four studies that are the basis of the medical understanding that aluminum is a safe adjuvant to be used in vaccines.
An adjuvant being an irritant for the immune system that causes it to react to killed viruses so that you will get a properly large immune response that creates durable immunity.
Never mind whether immunity is ever durable from these things.
Never mind the insanity of Activating the entire immune system in a nonspecific way so that it will react to some antigen that you've injected and not telling the patient, hey, your immune system's been hyperactivated.
Maybe you need to avoid these 45 things for the next 60 days or whatever the advice would be if we were giving people advice.
So I want to read to you A section of Toby's dissertation in which he explores the studies that allow us to know that aluminum is safe as an adjuvant.
So just to repeat, you said that he found four and only four studies that are the basis for the conclusion that aluminum is a safe adjuvant to include in human vaccines.
Yes, and I'm going to link to his dissertation.
I'm going to read about the top three because otherwise it's a great deal more reading, but you'll get the idea.
So, Jen, do you want to put up...
Okay, so the word the is on the previous page.
I'm going to read it as if it's on page 302 here.
And I may ask you to take over reading since you're just simply better at that.
But...
The scientific case in support of the safety of aluminum adjuvant is based mainly on the experiments by Priest, Newton, Day, Talbot, and Warner in 1995, Flarend et al.
in 1997, and toxokinetic models developed by Keith Jones and Chow in 2002 for the ATSDR experiment.
For the ATSDR and Mitkisking, Hesse, Forshee and Walderhaug in 2011 for the FDA. So that's two different organizations have asked for those last two studies.
Taking each of these studies in turn.
Okay, this is where this gets good.
You're gonna like this.
I'm already loving it.
Priest et al., 1995, injected 0.7 micrograms of the radioactive isotope...
Aluminum.
Aluminum.
To a healthy 41-year-old Caucasian male, on page 287, blood samples were taken regularly for 880 days, urine and feces were collected for 14 days, and whole body radioactivity, radioactivity being used as a marker in this case, was measured daily for the first 10 days and then less frequently over a period of 1,178 days.
They found 65% of the aluminum was excreted.
So I'm wondering, that 26, is that an isotope marker for aluminum?
They found 65% of the aluminum 26, or however you properly say that isotope, was excreted in the first 24 hours, that the elimination continued, but at a lower rate than that, and that 4% of the aluminum 26 was still in the body after three years, Priest et al.
19...
They speculated but were not able to confirm that the 4% of the aluminum-26 that remained was deposited in the bone and that further depletion depended on bone turnover.
Two of the largest aluminum trade associations in the world funded the studies.
The Aluminum Association in Washington, D.C. and the International Primary Aluminum Institute in London.
Okay.
So that's one of the four studies looks at one guy.
Yeah.
Let's call him Bob.
Yeah.
One guy.
One guy.
Okay.
Cool.
And there's a lot of inference as well.
Yeah, a lot of inference and some conflicts of interest.
Flaren et al., 1997, injected intermuscularly 850 micrograms of aluminum hydroxide adjuvant, labeled with radioactive aluminum 26, into each of two New Zealand white rabbits.
And 850 micrograms of aluminum phosphate adjuvant, also labeled with radioactive aluminum 26, into each of two other New Zealand white rabbits.
Blood and urine...
Well, at least they controlled for the New Zealand part.
Yeah.
Blood and urine were collected before the start of the experiment and regularly for 28 days after injection.
The rabbits were killed on day 28 and tissue samples were taken from the brain, heart, left kidney, liver, mesenteric lymph node, and spleen.
Bone samples from the femur were taken but lost and the brain samples of one of the rabbits was lost as well.
Over the course of 28 days, 6% of the aluminum hydroxide adjuvant and 20% of the aluminum phosphate was eliminated via urine.
The adjuvant that remained in the tissues was distributed as follows.
More of it in the kidney, then the spleen, then the liver, then the heart, then the lymph node, then the brain.
In the discussion section, Flaren et al.
declared that since the increase of aluminum in the blood of these rabbits was relatively small, the corresponding increase in plasma aluminum concentration in adult humans could be projected at 0.8%, and that therefore aluminum adjuvants are safe.
What?
This conclusion rests on two leaps of logic.
That the conversion from rabbits to people is correct and that low levels in the blood cause no harm.
No evidence is supplied to support either assertion.
Furthermore, Flaren et al.
performed no behavioral tests on the rabbits and they have no measure of what the long-term effects of the aluminum deposits in the brain and other tissues would have been.
Well, in fairness, behavioral tests on rabbits are notoriously difficult to perform once they're dead.
Yes.
Actually, they're easier to perform once they're dead.
They're just not very revealing.
It's also clear from the discussion section and the small sample size and the fact that they did not bother to fix problems like losing the brain tissue of 25% of their sample that they saw this study as just a preliminary experiment and that other studies on aluminum adjuvant safety would surely follow.
However, further studies of this type have not been done and the public health officials Have used Flarend et al.
when they attempt to model the toxicity of aluminum in the vaccine schedule.
Flarend et al.
was supported in part by the Showalter Trust.
Robert E. Showalter was a former vice president and board member of Eli Lilly and Company, one of the largest vaccine producers in the world.
Good lord.
Right.
And then I'm not going to read much farther here, but Keith Jones and Chow, 2002. Just to remind us, there are four studies that Rogers finds that are the entire basis of aluminum is safe as an adjuvant in human vaccines.
Two of them specifically, supposedly speak to the question of safety.
And those are the two that we just heard about.
There's the guy named Bob.
I made that up.
There's the guy named Bob.
Caucasian guy named Bob.
41 years old.
And then there's the four New Zealand rabbits, two of which got the treatment, two of which got the control, but they lost some stuff and they extrapolated and they didn't do behavioral tests, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah.
One Caucasian guy, four Caucasian rabbits, and they lost the samples.
You're making this about race, aren't you?
Well, I'm just saying they were white rabbits.
And as long as we're pointing out all of the various absurdities of this story, that belongs on the list somewhere.
I don't know that it does, but okay.
So then I don't remember because I can't scroll up here, but the second two studies were somehow different.
Can we just go back up to what you were first reading?
Yeah.
Keep going.
Farther, farther, farther, farther, farther.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You're talking about...
Yeah, the top of page 302. Actually, keep going up to the top of that page right there.
Mainly based on experiments, those two that we just heard about, the guy named Bob and the four white rabbits, and toxokinetic models.
Yep.
So there's literally, like, we've just heard the entire empirical basis, the entire empirical basis for aluminum as a safe adjuvant for human vaccines based on one guy and four rabbits, and then the second two papers are going to be models, and that's not empirical.
Right.
It doesn't mean it's not right, but it's not empirical.
And, I mean, if you think about it, If you were going to attempt to test the hypothesis that these aluminum adjuvants were unsafe and then you were going to be happy if you discovered that you had falsified that belief.
Yeah.
You can't do it with four rabbits or one guy.
Named Bob.
Right?
You just can't do it.
I mean, never mind the fact that there could be, you know, let's suppose...
And it's actually two rabbits.
There's only two rabbits got the treatment.
There were two different treatments.
Each of two rabbits got two different treatments and they lost the samples from one of the rabbits, so...
No, they lost part of the samples from...
Yeah.
But the point is, you know, This is a point that Toby Rogers makes.
How are you going to get statistical significance from four rabbits no matter what happens to them?
I don't care if they all die.
You can't get statistical significance from four rabbits.
It's not a big enough study to do the job that you're claiming it did.
And certainly not from one guy.
And here we are again at this individual versus population level analysis problem where you need large enough sample sizes, not with models, but with actual empirical data that can reveal whether or not The shit that you want to put into our bodies is in fact safe.
Right.
And so, okay.
You and I are a lot of things.
Among those many things, we are the parents of two children who were confronted with the question of vaccines.
We were not in the dark about the danger of such things, and we in fact specifically made the decision to delay every vaccine as long as possible, thinking that in general those vaccines were safe enough, none of them were going to be perfectly safe, and that delaying their administration as long as possible was in the kids' interest because it meant that as much of development would have already passed.
Now it turns out I now know what I did not know then.
Which is that, at least in the case of things like autism, regressive development is one of the patterns seen, where benchmarks a child has already reached are then lost.
But the point is, look, you and I are pretty darn good at spotting stories that are too thin.
By the time we had our children, I had already gone through the madness of discovering a flaw in the drug safety system that the scientific establishment wasn't going to address.
So we were skeptical, careful, educated in the right quadrant of science.
And still, I find myself as a 55-year-old reading a dissertation that recounts the evidence that supposedly makes it safe to inject aluminum into a child.
And thinking, you know this meme, like, we deserve better psyops?
Like, this is so dumb.
This claim, it would be better if they said, oh, we didn't test it, we just assume it's fine, than to pretend that there was a test done and then it's like four rabbits and a dude and a model.
It's like, okay.
Two models.
Two models.
Come on.
So...
We are now in this period where it is still very costly to question the safety of vaccines.
It's becoming less costly.
They blew it.
They overplayed their hand with that mRNA stuff.
They sure did.
And, you know, the mercury stuff has done damage to their cause because people more or less got wise to that one.
And the point is, okay, how many, you know, maybe it's only going to be a couple of years.
Maybe Bobby Kennedy can You do what he says he wants to do, which I think is exactly the right thing to do, which is just test this stuff properly.
You test this stuff and you discover, you know, where there's a benefit that exceeds the cost.
You test it all against placebo.
And you have the hand-wringing from the scientific establishment.
Like, they're practically calling for fainting couches.
They're so concerned because he's calling for tests.
Because he's calling for the actual scientific process to be done on the things that have already been accepted as safe without evidence.
Right.
In fact, the craziest part of this is he's demanding the stuff that everybody assumes was done.
How dare he?
Demanding placebo-controlled trials.
Everybody thinks they were done, which makes him sound crazy for asking for them.
But the point is, go find them.
Right?
The fact is...
Well, no, so, you know, mostly now what I see come back, and I've had this come back at me as well, is, how dare you?
How dare you, sir, ma'am?
You must understand that because...
Vaccines have saved whatever the number they're going to trot out is.
Millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people.
It would be unethical to go back now and have a number of children not be vaccinated in service of your harebrained idea that the vaccines actually need to be tested against placebo.
Yeah.
That is what comes back.
Oh, I've seen it, and I think it's perfectly insane.
So this is this ethical standard, which in principle you can understand, but in practice is where a lot of bodies are buried, which is in a trial, let's say you're trialing a drug against a placebo for preventing serious harms from COVID. If you show that the drug is sufficiently good,
then it becomes unethical not to give it to the control group, because after all, they've participated in your study and you've given them a sugar pill.
And so you can understand in theory why ethicists would have come up with this, right?
Like, let's suppose that you participated in a trial for a, you know, cure for pancreatic cancer.
You worked really hard to get yourself or your loved one into this trial.
Right, and then pancreatic cancer is eliminated from everybody in the treatment group, and they don't give it to you in the control group.
You can imagine, I'm not saying that's plausible, it's not, but you could imagine an ethical situation in which it's like, yeah, let's just give it to the control group.
I mean, they contributed to our knowledge that the thing works, they deserve it.
But the point is, the industry now targets efficacy, which it fakes, Well, and it targets, presumably, I don't know this to be sure, I don't know this, but you would expect, given the incentives as they are, that the drugs that not only show efficacy but show the fastest possible efficacy so that you can break control as fast as possible and leave no group that can be compared to is most likely to result in a
big win down the road for the company.
Right.
Especially since...
The overarching problem is you're messing with the complex system.
How is that going to manifest as unwise?
It's going to manifest a spectrum of long-term harms you did not anticipate, which are now invisible because you gave it to the control group.
And frankly, the drugs that are produced with at least a partial goal of as fast as possible are likely to have even more negative effects down the road because of antagonisms, be they pleiotropias or otherwise, that exist.
Yep.
So, okay, so to summarize, we've got a period that we have identified where something that is true is nonetheless so costly to acknowledge that people treat it as if it's false.
You are somewhere down that road with respect to many stories.
There are stories at which we've made no progress whatsoever at getting to the truth, and there are things that we think are safe that really aren't, but everybody believes they're safe.
And then there are going to be things in which there are some wise few who pay a huge cost, and then there are going to be some things that are just about ready to break, like fluoride, Mercury is in a different place as aluminum with respect to the adjuvant story,
but if you really want to know whether or not the scientific establishment is on secure footing with respect to aluminum, you can read Toby Rogers' dissertation and you can discover how absurd that claim is.
Margarine broke.
Seed oils is breaking.
Yep.
There you go.
Margarine broke 15, 20 years ago.
I don't know.
Seed oils is breaking.
Yeah, the scare tactics over red meat are breaking.
Yeah, although the food compass thing still exists.
You know, that giant research out of Tufts, which has, you know, fruit loops healthier than eggs and all is still the basis for many dieticians' insane advice.
Yes.
So anyway, I think we've done good work.
A lot of stuff that is true is too expensive to acknowledge.
That shouldn't be true.
What we need is a system in which we fearlessly figure out...
How much risk is involved in various things that we're being asked to do, various things that were being fed, right?
We can't afford to have industries able to drive up the costs of truth-telling.
That's obviously a wrong thing.
You are about to see A targeting of truth-tellers who have gotten to a surprising level in the game, who are about to take over agencies.
They are going to be targeted with all kinds of slanders, and we need to back them up.
And remember that we're in a crazy landscape where, you know, every day of the week, doctors are injecting children with solutions that contain aluminum, The basis of the safety of which was established through administering it to a dude and some rabbits, four of them, and then some modeling, which is not in principle capable of detecting dangers.
Only as good as what you feed it.
Yeah.
And the only empirical information was, once again, the dude and the four rabbits.
Actually, you know what?
The modeling thing...
I'm curious.
I'll go back and read what Rogers wrote about the models.
Yeah, it's bad.
But of course.
But even if it were great, the point is...
It's the models.
It's inherently complicated.
Well, and given...
If I remember the dates, the modeling papers came after the Dude and the Rabbits papers.
But literally, I mean, unless Rogers fell down on his research substantially...
The models can only be as good as what you feed into it, and the only information that was had empirically then or since was again these four mammals, only one of whom was a guy.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it's, let's put it this way.
If it weren't so horrifying, it would be comical.
Right.
Right?
Like, really?
Yeah.
Four rabbits and a guy and some models?
Like, that's what you're resting this on?
And, you know, here's the crazy part.
I'm sure there are doctors who watch Dark Horse.
Mm-hmm.
There's a reaction that you should have like wait what I've been injecting what into whom based on which right either you knew in which case what were you doing or you didn't know in which case now you do so you know or figure out that it's wrong and then you should you know yeah tell us please yeah right yeah um This is taking a sidestep, but speaking of, if it weren't so awful, it would be funny.
I did have a funny moment this week in researching the GLP-1 stuff, the Ozempic research, and I feel like I'd like to share it with my audience.
I give it the award of most unintentional, best unintentional humor in a scientific abstract.
So I was thinking about...
I shared with you this line already.
Yeah, so I was looking into what evidence there is for the various, you can show my screen here, what evidence there is for Ozempic and its And its relatives to be dangerous for people.
And so, you know, people are talking about Ozempic face and Ozempic butt and Ozempic personality.
And there's nausea that happens.
And then specifically what I went looking into was the skeletal muscle loss.
And now there is evidence of both heart muscle size reduction and heart muscle cell reduction in people who take Ozempic, regardless of whether or not they lost weight on Ozempic.
So people who are obese lose weight and lose the size of their heart muscle and their heart muscle cells.
But people who take Ozempek who aren't obese don't lose weight, but they still lose heart muscle mass and heart muscle cell mass.
So that's bad, obviously.
But in looking for what else is out there, Oh, also, did you know that the first GLP-1 receptor agonist-like thing that was found is from the venom of Gila monsters?
Wait, wait, wait.
That actually rather suggests that this is a good way of interfering with the functional physiology of Maddie does not like this discussion.
It's the Gila monsters, isn't it?
Yeah.
But in the venom of Gila monsters?
Yeah.
And as I said that, I was like, Gila monsters?
Gila monsters?
Yeah, here, we'll just click through to show.
Yeah, it's a terrible...
And this is back from the 1990s sometime, but Xsendin-4 is the first known analog for GLP-1, and it is indeed found in Heloderma suspectum, which are the venom of Heloderma suspectum, which is the scientific name for Gila monsters.
So anyway, that wasn't the funny thing, but I thought that was amazing and, you know, pretty great.
Yeah.
So there's that.
But here we go.
Okay, so intestinal obstruction.
Fun, right?
And probably people have heard stories, too, about people ending up in surgery and then having problems because their guts cleared so slowly that even though they had done the fasting that is always required before going under a general aesthetic, it wasn't a sufficient amount of time.
Given that they're on these drugs that slow gut clearing and specifically, as we already talked about, have been modified from the endogenous human hormone GLP-1 to have a shorter, a longer half-life and so stay in the body for longer.
So intestinal obstruction is just one case study.
So it's like we're back to the one guy sort of thing, but I just want to read from this abstract.
First half of this abstract.
Food-induced small bowel obstruction observed in a patient with inappropriate use of semaglutide.
Abstract.
We herein report a case of food-induced small bowel obstruction while using a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist.
Ozempic-ish.
Trying to lose weight due to distorted body image.
The patient was a 30-year-old woman who was not obese.
Height 158 centimeters, weight 50 kilograms.
She's like 5'2 and weighs less than 110 pounds, so she shouldn't be on this stuff.
She started taking an oral semaglutide, a GLP-1 RA, and it was soon switched to weekly subcutaneous semaglutide because of ineffectiveness.
More than six months after titrating up to one milligram, she got drunk and chomped on a lot of...
God, I messed up.
She got drunk and chopped on a lot of scallops sandwiched between sheets of kelp, so-called kobujime in Japan, and half a day later complained of abdominal pain.
So I read that really badly.
But in the scientific abstract, we have, once again, she got drunk and chomped on a lot of scallops sandwiched between sheets of kelp.
If you look at the names of the authors, and you see that this is written in English, I think what we have here is a translation issue.
This is presumably a Japanese patient, and the story is, the research is being done in Japan by Japanese authors, and they are writing in English, and somehow she got drunk and chomped on a lot of scallops, got through the translation, and into the scientific history.
And you can imagine, you know, one of the authors says, I think the word is chomped.
Yep, it means eaten.
And drunk, we can say drunk, yeah.
I can say shit-faced.
Right, exactly.
Okay, so that's my best unintentional humor and a scientific paper award.
No, that's good.
That's good.
Alright, one other thing I wanted to do if we are...
I think we are.
Are we there?
Yep.
Okay.
Last week we talked about some work done by fans who make these broadsides and their work is incredible.
You can look at the show notes from last week to get links to their stuff and find them.
I just wanted to mention A different kind of work that is done by someone who watches Dark Horse and who sends us some stuff.
And you can also find his things online.
And I will...
Gosh, what have I done with them, though?
Where did they go?
Um...
Here, I'm gonna put them up here first and then find the actual link.
So this is, we've talked about this guy's stuff before.
This is Jonathan Schell, out of Portland, who's the guy behind Giant Herbs and Tea, and he makes amazing chais and various tinctures and herbal remedies.
He's an herbalist in the Chinese tradition.
And also bitters, and I just happen to have bitters right here.
So we have, for instance, revolutionary evolutionary bitters, mole spiced cocktail bitters.
And one of the things, do the bitters maybe not have them?
So the chai's have hilarious notes on them.
The bitters do not have the hilarious notes, but they do describe, for instance, what they would pair well with.
And we also have Coconero Cocktail Bitters, which is cacao and habanero and Red Angel's Grace, red safflower, cinnamon, Sichuan pepper, myrrh cocktail bitters.
This stuff is amazing.
It's great.
These bitters are great and the chais are fantastic.
And he makes a toothpaste, or actually he calls it a teeth paste, because he points out you're not going to put it on one tooth.
No.
You could start there.
You could start there, but why would you start there?
So yeah, teeth, spelled T, T-E-A, paste and tinctures and bitters and tea and chai.
So giant-herbs.com.
I highly recommend this stuff.
I recommend the chai's in particular.
I would say...
You often don't need as much as you think you need in the T-ball.
It's good stuff.
And really fantastic.
So if you are still thinking about holiday presents or otherwise just looking for amazing chai, bitters, tinctures, consider them.
And since we are now going to go to wrap up, check out stuff at our store.
As well, I've been handed a pile of things to show, which is the same as last time.
I'm not gonna force you to put the hat on this time, but you can if you want to.
Put it on.
Yeah, cut that shit out.
This is my message to Paul Offit.
He's not going to.
You don't think so?
No, I don't think he's listening.
No.
Not cutting that shit out pays way too well in his case.
Yeah, exactly.
So speaking of Paul Offit, we have Goliath.
Goliath, do not affirm, do not comply.
And my favorite, and this just literally came off the back of our son.
Here's the epic tabby hoodie.
It's featuring our very own Fairfax looking epic and presumably thinking wily thoughts.
What?
Oh, right.
I have not.
There is Zach.
This has not come off the back of Zach, but off the back of Toby.
With our new upgrade to our store, which has great quality products, they can also ship to Europe.
So if you are listening in Europe, we can now, for the first time, ship to Europe, which is awesome.
Anything else to say about the store?
No.
All right.
All right.
What else?
We there?
I think we're there.
All right.
Catch us on Locals.
That's where Watch Party is happening now and lots of great content.
The store we were just talking about and our sponsors this week again were Peak, Nandaka, CrowdHealth and BrainFM.
Check them out.
We are supported by you.
We appreciate you and are grateful that you subscribe and share and like and And comment.
All of those things.
And until we see you next time, we will be back in six days on Christmas Eve on December 24th.
We will have a guest producer that week.
Jen, our amazing producer, is being allowed to take the day off.
And Zach, our son, will be back in the producer role for our Christmas Eve episode of Dark Horse.
Until we see you then, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
