A Germ of Truth: The 263rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this week’s episode, we discuss the relationship between infectious and chronic disease, and between germ theory and terrain theory of disease. Pathogens are real, and exogenous treatments like antibiotics can kill them. The health of the body is affected by diet, exercise, stress, and the microbiome, all of which can affect how susceptible a person is to getting sick from pathogens. We discuss gastric ulcers, Covid-19, pneumococcal disease, and comorbidities. Also: how do traditional vs m...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 253. You know who I am?
63. You were about to impress me with how you knew that.
You can still be impressed.
I mean, I was close.
Not really.
Within an order of magnitude.
Yes, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
It is not quite seven days since the last time we sat at this desk, but there's stuff afoot that has forced a schedule realignment.
And anyway...
Here we go.
We're going to talk about chronic and infectious disease today.
A bit in light of...
The Senate confirmation hearings for Bobby Kennedy Jr., which we talked about last week after the first day, and the vote is due to happen tomorrow.
So here we are, hoping, along with the rest of the country that is concerned, actually concerned about the health of the American public, that Kennedy gets confirmed.
And we're going to talk a bit about his...
Statements that have caused apparent alarm among many in the mainstream media community that he would like to spend less money on infectious disease and more on chronic disease.
We're going to talk about why that is not the terrible proposal that some would have you believe.
So, and a few other items as well.
Yes.
We're at the end of the podcast.
No Q&A today, but please join us on Locals.
That's where we do all of our Q&As, and that's where we have a watch party going on right now, and we introduce most of the guest episodes that Brett does.
Early on Locals, a day early.
So check out Locals.
And without further ado, we have three sponsors, as always, right at the top of the hour.
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Alright.
So, I want to talk about chronic and infectious disease today.
In light of...
Comments Bobby Kennedy has made, both before he dropped out of the presidential race and has reiterated in some form during the hearings.
So let's just start with this clip from the second day of the hearings from last week, the Senate confirmation hearings of Bobby Kennedy.
During COVID, we had the highest death rate of any country in the world.
We had 16 percent of the COVID deaths.
We only have 4.2 percent of them.
The world's population.
No country did as poorly as us.
When you ask CDC why is that, they say because we are the sickest people on earth.
The average person who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.
American blacks were dying from COVID greater than almost any population in the world, about over 3,000 deaths per million population.
The only people worse are Indian reservations, which have an even higher rate.
And the only person who did worse globally were Samoans.
The American blacks were disproportionately impacted because they disproportionately have diabetes, obesity, cardiac illnesses, and other chronic disease.
We need to start studying those, and we need to get rid of the conflicts in the agency that obstructs those studies.
And that is that are focused on advancing the mercantile interests of the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry rather than the health of the American people.
So Kennedy has also said that he would like to slow down.
I don't know exactly the word he's used in various places, but slow down.
Not entirely halt, but reduce the focus on funding on infectious disease in the various agencies that both fund and do the research, and focus instead on chronic disease for, and he said, for something like the next eight years.
And this, of course, has been met with a tremendous amount of anger and disbelief and concern, both among researchers, medical and scientific, and among mainstream media.
I think if we zoom out just a little bit and think about what he's actually proposing, we will see that the ire that is being directed at him can better be understood as either simply confusion or yet again being based in, as he puts it, the mercantile interests of Big Food and Big Pharma.
So really we can think of this, I think, as a focus, as a...
As a fight between those who focus on the germ theory of disease versus the terrain theory of disease.
And terrain theory is sometimes called miasma theory.
In fact, in Kennedy's book on Fauci, which I'll read a tiny bit from today, he calls it the miasma theory.
Usually people call it terrain theory.
And for pretty much everyone who grew up with any kind of a scientific background, or even if not in the 20th century, we...
We were swimming in the water that said germ theory of disease is the model of the day, right?
And so at the point that people start saying, well, actually, maybe not.
It sounds like, what is possibly wrong with you?
What could possibly be wrong with you?
Are you saying you don't believe in pathogens?
And of course, there are people out there who are saying viruses aren't real.
I don't know if people are saying no pathogens are real.
But there are people who are saying actually some of the things that you think that you're fighting aren't real.
And those people get lumped in with the people who are saying, germ theory of disease is an important route to understanding what makes people sick, but it is not the only route, and it is being prioritized at the expense of what could be a more profitable, in terms of actually helping us, way to understand disease.
So let's just define these terms briefly.
Germ theory of disease, which focuses on infection, which is, you know, really the infectious disease thing, is about external agents.
Microorganisms like viruses, bacteria.
Fungi.
Fungi.
Larger, like multicellular parasites.
Fungi are as well.
But like worms.
Yeah, but even things like amoeba.
Plasmodium, which is the genus of...
of malaria, of which there are four species.
So external agents, the germ theory of disease postulates that.
There are external agents, such as those we just mentioned, that enter the body and cause disease.
So there is a specificity involved, wherein each disease has a particular germ pathogen associated with it.
There is transmissibility.
Via air or droplets or touch or vectors as in the case of malaria or dengue or yellow fever where there are particular species of mosquitoes being the vector in those cases between the disease and the ultimate host.
And many tropical diseases are vectored.
Temperate infectious diseases are less likely to be vectored.
They're more likely to be spread by air or droplet or touch or something.
And then control.
With the germ theory of disease is possible if you eradicate the pathogens.
And you can eradicate the pathogens through pharmaceutical means like vaccines or antibiotics, antivirals, antibacterials, antibiotics, including any of those, and hygiene.
If you keep clean, the story goes, you're not going to be at risk of encountering an intact And therefore, you will remain free of the disease that it causes.
Let's call that interrupting the ecology of the creature that makes you sick.
Yeah, exactly.
And this is germ theory of disease, which accurately identifies that there are germs, pathogens, that can enter the body and make a person sick.
The approach to it, the public health or the individual approach to an understanding of disease that follows from germ theory is how do we get in the way of the ecology of the germ, of the pathogen?
In contrast...
So let's just point out that there are lots of vertices.
It's not just hygiene, right?
So for example...
Lots of food preservation techniques create an environment that is inhospitable to a pathogen.
So jam is so dense with a soluble material, sugar, that it dehydrates any bacterium that gets in there that's not an extremophile because those bacteria are adapted to an environment that doesn't have such a high solute concentration outside of the creature.
Yes, and traditional food preservation...
Methods like preserving through either hot water bath canning or pressure canning kills off either with heat or pressure or in addition with acid or high levels of sugar or salt.
And ferment also does this.
And lacto-fermentation, when you're talking about things like cheese, does this.
And of course, we have high-tech newer versions of preservation, which also either both slow down decay and also stop the pathogens in their places, which is to say things like pasteurization and also freezing.
Yep.
Freezing doesn't work as well because many things get just paused and they get restarted.
Cheese is an interesting one because effectively cheese or yogurt or kefir or any of these things, because effectively what that's doing is surrendering to the idea that something is going to consume the thing that you want to consume, but handing it to a symbiont, basically a creature with which you have a mutualism, rather than allowing creatures from the environment to opportunistically adopt it.
So with the cheese, you're basically choosing to spoil the milk on your own behalf rather than allow nature to...
And then having both a human culture and an internal gut culture in terms of your microbiome that can eat that cheese or kefir or whatever and have a reaction that is pleasurable as opposed to a negative reaction both in terms of gut and taste.
Right.
And all of these external preservation techniques that disrupt the ecology of the creature that's hostile to you Are actually extensions of something that biology gave us that didn't involve any specific behavior.
So our stomachs are highly acidic because basically any extreme environment is a challenge to anything that lives in a normal environment.
So by creating a really low pH environment, anything you've taken in that's capable of making you sick has an immediate challenge that it has a huge problem solving.
Anyway, disrupting ecology is a key to remaining health.
Disrupting ecology, and in the case, since we've gone down this path, I don't want to pull us back and simplify again, but when you're talking about food, milk in non-human nature, milk doesn't exist outside of a body at all.
It goes directly from the mother's teeth to inside the baby, and that's it.
So we have created, humans have created ways of preserving milk outside of a body for a very long time.
And as soon as that exists, there is going to be other ecologies out there, other organisms out there who have ecologies of their own, who have interests of their own, who want to take advantage of that incredible nutrition source.
Similarly, an apple...
on its own without having you know without having a scar in it or a puncture or something is able to exist for quite a while without rotting but as soon as it has any any breach In its skin, effectively.
Then there will be bacteria, fungus, spores, like whatever.
Things from the air that are interested in getting into what was protected, the inside of the apple.
And that will happen pretty quickly.
And so you now have high-tech solutions like Appeal, which we have talked about.
The Bill Gates, in part, funded coating that is allowed to be put even on organic fruits, which preserves their appearance.
Without necessarily and probably not preserving in any way the nutritional quality or their taste, but you can no longer tell from the outside basically how long that fruit has spent off the tree.
Whereas historically, until yesterday basically, we could use our senses and we should use our senses.
And frankly, people who don't pick up produce when they're shopping at the farmer's market or the market and assess its...
It's goodness, it's ripeness, it's readiness for being eaten.
I wonder what it is that they're doing with those fruits and vegetables, ultimately, because that is how we tell.
That is how we tell.
Well, I would say, I think with something like Appeal, you and I both suspect that it's just a matter of time before we understand a wide spectrum of problems that arise from this.
It's a classic error.
Does do one of the things that humans have traditionally done, which is disrupt the ecology of pathogenic critters.
In this case, it's not even really pathogens.
They're just disrupting stuff that spoils the fruit so they can't sell it, right?
Right, but as you brought up, that's the same thing with a lot of food preservation techniques.
It's not pathogens.
It's things that would eat the food that we would want to eat.
That would spoil the thing.
So it's different.
It's a mixture.
This place where you've taken us mostly doesn't have to do with pathogens.
It's a different thing, and so we will come back to disease here.
I mean, I think it's clearly both.
In the case of the market creating the appeal solution, it is one style of very common human thing, disrupt the ecology, and it is another style of catastrophe ready to be diagnosed, which is highly novel, and the awful thing about it is in order for it to work, It's still on the fruit when you eat it.
So you're ingesting it.
So anyway, if we're going to parse this out, the humans have been disrupting the ecology of things that compete with them for their food and make them sick for longer than they've been engaged in agriculture.
And in this case, it gets credit on that one front and then is highly suspect on a different one.
All right.
So if we talk about disease again, Germ theory of disease is about pathogens, and the way that we tend to try to erect to control those pathogens is by eradicating them through drugs, through hygiene, through...
The drugs, the vaccines, the antibiotics, as we talked about before, the hygiene, the other ways that we have talked about are all really about controlling the ecology of the external force, the external thing, which in the case of germ theory of disease is the germ, quote-unquote, or the pathogen.
The model of disease that is most often proposed as an alternative, and we're going to argue here is it's not an alternative, that neither of these models of disease are sufficient on their own to explain human disease, that both are actually necessary and neither are sufficient, is the terrain theory of disease, which in Kennedy's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, he refers to as the miasma theory.
Usually it's referred to as the terrain theory of disease.
Terrain theory of disease argues that individual health is primarily determined by the internal environment as opposed to by an external force.
The internal environment, also known as the terrain, right?
Imagine a landscape.
The terrain is the environment.
And health is therefore affected by your diet and your exercise and your stress and your microbiome.
And your microbiome is, in fact, External to the human genome.
But it is internal to the human environment because these are symbiotes.
And we contain multitudes.
We now know this after a long time of imagining that we were sort of singular.
But so the microbiome is also understood to be part of what we are trying to maintain when we are thinking about ourselves in terms of a terrain theory of disease healthful approach.
So approaches like clean eating.
Exercise, elimination diets, detoxing, restoring one's gut microbiome with pre- and post-biotics are used with a terrain theory approach.
And both of these, germ theory and terrain theory, are, as I said, So if we can think of germ theory of disease being where infectious diseases are, and terrain theory being kind of the purview of when something is wrong in your gut, with your diet, with your exercise, you tend to get chronic diseases from which you cannot escape.
You know, what does it mean for Kennedy to be apparently arguing against the focus that has been in existence for so long on infectious disease and for instead of focus on chronic disease?
Well, I will, and we have several examples here, but I guess I want to start by, I've got two books I'm going to be reading from a little bit here.
This section from The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy's book from a few years back, which is Oh boy, it's terrifying.
But it's important.
So before you do that, can I interject something here?
Sure.
There is a levels of analysis problem underlying all of these discussions of human health.
And I think it is important to even just realize why the term disease sets us up for this predictable disaster.
Disease means dis-ease.
It means basically something ain't right with your physiology.
And that is a perfectly fine category.
But the problem is, It begins to take on a level of precision when the disease is, let's say, pathogenic.
And it does have an immediate cause.
And it's some species of something that you haven't found, but you can look for it.
And then you can discover something about its ecology.
Or even without knowing what it is, you can do something that disrupts that ecology.
But then when you score a win by discovering a way to disrupt the transmission of malaria, which I will remind people.
Malaria means bad air, which was initially understood to be the cause of malaria, the disease.
And the problem is that's not true.
It's caused by plasmodium transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes, but it's good enough to protect you, because if you think swampy air is the problem, you avoid the places in which those mosquitoes actually thrive.
So you score a win by doing something that disrupts the ability of the pathogen to make you sick, and you start to think, Wow, we've got a ton of power to deal with disease.
We'll just cure it all.
And the problem is, well, no, you've got 14 different categories of thing in the overarching category of dis-ease.
And the point is, some of them, you're going to score a complete win.
You'll drive the thing extinct.
And other ones, you're going to be struggling for decades.
You'll declare war on cancer, and you won't win.
Right?
And you'll be like, well, why was cancer harder than smallpox?
And the answer is because cancer isn't anything like smallpox.
Right.
So anyway, I just want to put that on the table.
Dis-ease is such a blunt term, an overarching category that lumps dozens of things that aren't anything like each other.
Of course, it's going to result in scratching our heads over what should we do about disease and not coming up with an answer because it's going to need 14 different ones.
Yeah.
And we'll come back here.
To the extent that the diseases that are attributable to pathogens, at least in part, are findable and eradicable or treatable, or you can neutralize the ecologies of the pathogens in question, that feels effective, that feels powerful, that feels like something that modern science knows what to do with.
And it also, frankly, writes up nicely into a grant proposal.
We can say, look at all the successes we have had.
We identified the thing.
We identified that it does, in fact, we identified the pathogen.
We identified that it does, in fact, cause the disease in question.
And we identified, we created...
Antibiotic, an antiviral, a vaccine, and we put public health measures in place to keep people clean, and now we've reduced the prevalence of this disease.
What we did over there, we want to do over here with this other disease, about which we are certain we can have similar success because we are certain that there is a pathogen, we just don't know it yet.
Well, it's that certainty that is in part the problem.
But a model where you can say, point, point, point, like I... I know what I need to do and in what order I need to do it, makes for a nice, clear, pretty simple and straightforward, frankly, grant application, and everyone has their marching orders.
They know what they're supposed to do.
And if it turns out that either there is no pathogen for some diseases, which of course there won't be precisely because of what you're talking about, or there is a pathogen...
But it turns out that most people who are exposed to the pathogen never get sick because it's the internal health of the body, the terrain, that renders you more or less susceptible to the pathogen.
That's a more complicated story.
Who gets the funding?
What is the work that you're proposing to do?
What is going to be the result that allows you to put those papers on your CV and get you tenure when you go up for tenure?
The perverse incentives, unfortunately, are everywhere in this system in favor of simple, reductionist, easily quantifiable, easily counted research that looks like the research that has been successful in identifying pathogens and creating therapies against those pathogens easily counted research that looks like the research that has been successful in So that's part of what is going on.
Yes.
And I'm sure we will come back to it.
But the polio story makes that point so clearly in the sense that, yeah, there's a virus and it does cause many of the cases of polio.
So, Therefore, you can create an entire career's worth of projects to do thinking about how to disrupt the polio virus so that it cannot paralyze children,
only to discover that actually the only to discover that actually the virus in question really is close to harmless, except for the disruption of the body's ability to keep it confined to where it usually thrives in the gut.
And so the point is, you would expect an honest system that was really hell bent on dealing with polio to become obsessed with the breaches in the gut and to lose interest in the virus itself because it's not worth controlling it.
And I mean, not only is it not worth controlling it, Can reduce the threat from the polio...
Sorry, what kind of a pathogen is it?
Virus.
Virus.
To near zero.
And any intervention, any pharmaceutical intervention will have costs, will have side effects in some people at least.
Why would we try to get mass exposure to the pharmaceutical when instead we could get...
The masses to have healthier guts, which is also going to have additional downstream positive effects of making them less susceptible to the other diseases.
Yes, it's going to have side effects which are positive, like vitamin D, using vitamin D. Not the vaccine.
No, no.
Making the gut healthy has side effects that are all positive.
And so, yes.
I had something else.
I've lost it.
I'll come back to it.
So Kennedy, in The Real Anthony Fauci, published in, what it was like, 2021, something like that.
I'm not finding it here.
2021. Writes about miasma versus germ theory.
And again, miasma is the term he's using for what we're calling, what most people are calling terrain theory.
Miasma theory, he writes, emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses.
Miasma exponents posit that disease occurs where a weakened immune system provides germs and enfeebled target to exploit.
They analogize the human immune system to the skin of an apple.
With the skin intact, the fruit will last a week at room temperature and a month if refrigerated, but even a small injury to the skin triggers systemic rot within hours as the billions of opportunistic microbes thronging on the skin of every living organism colonize the injured terrain.
Germ theory aficionados, in contrast, blame disease on microscopic pathogens.
Their approach to health is to identify the culpable germ and tailor a poison to kill it.
Miasmus complain that those patented poisons may themselves further weaken the immune system or simply open the damaged terrain to a competitive germ or cause chronic disease.
They point out that the world is teeming with microbes, many of them beneficial, and nearly all of them...
Harmless to a healthy, well-nourished immune system.
Miasmists argue that malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water are the ultimate stressors that make infectious diseases lethal in impoverished locales.
When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition.
Germ theory proponents, also known as virologists, blame the virus.
The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune response.
So I'll say that when I first read that back in 2021, I had a different reaction to it than I do now, which is I read it as, as I think many people who are now reacting negatively to Kennedy are doing, I read it as an attack on the idea of pathogens at all.
I read it, and because what I understood germ theory of disease to mean, as I interpret it, as I internalize it, I still understand it, is pathogens exist.
External forces, you know, evolution exists.
There will be pathogens out there that have an interest in colonizing a body and making parts of that body do what is in its interest as opposed to the body's interests.
And that remains intact in my head as what germ theory of disease is.
It's an honorable approach to understanding some disease.
But when it is taken to this sort of...
Logical fallacy endpoint of, therefore, the only thing to do if you have a disease for which there is a germ, a pathogen, is focus on eradicating the pathogen, is an absurd obstruction of what, you know...
Should be understood when you say actually pathogens are real.
And it is useful to understand the ecology of pathogens as much as possible.
Yes, it's a caricature of the germ theory of disease.
Yep.
Germ theory of disease inherently, if it is at all sophisticated, includes terrain theory or miasma theory.
Right.
And, well, I did want to recover.
The thing is, even if you count the polio question strictly in terms of polio, you still have to be in favor of the making the gut healthy response.
Because the pharmaceutical in question, the polio shot, causes a certain number of cases of polio.
And so even if your point is you're obsessed with polio, it's still the wrong approach to go after trying to amp up the immune system so it spots this pathogen.
The problem is how did the pathogen get to the place that it causes the paralysis in the first place?
Right.
So if we think about, you know, as you point out, there are lots of other diseases that maybe don't involve, that aren't relevant to this dyadic framing at all.
But infectious disease and chronic disease...
Broadly understood as mapping onto germ theory of disease and terrain theory of disease.
Let's think about chronic disease.
Things like diabetes and heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
There may, in some cases, be a pathogen that set it off.
That, you know, if you have the chronic disease, if you...
We'll get to.
If you have a chronic disease, you're much more likely to be susceptible to a pathogen.
But chronic disease does not inherently involve a pathogen.
Therefore, germ theory of disease is not inherently relevant to all of these other diseases as it is with infectious disease.
That said, some chronic disease can be prompted by an infection.
So famously, in our lifetimes, it was...
It became understood that gastric ulcers were actually caused by, what is it, Helicobacter pylori.
This discovery transformed conventional thinking, and frankly, I think it pushed us farther down the road to a focus on pathogens where we had been thinking about chronic disease as not being involving pathogens.
But that work was done in 1985 and actually ended up winning the The researchers who did that work, the Nobel Prize, but it again...
We reframed a lot of medical and scientific research to be thinking now about looking for pathogens where they hadn't been looking for pathogens before.
So I believe that that work is solid, that that is true, that there is now, we know that there is this bacterium, I believe, that is responsible for many peptic ulcers, which were understood before to not have an infectious component at all.
And assuming that that is true, that is...
You know, important and relevant research, but we tend to overgeneralize from findings like this.
We tend to overgeneralize.
So both chronic and infectious disease affect the body, but the health of the body is directly relevant, regardless of whether or not you've got an infectious agent or not.
So terrain theory, unlike germ theory, which is not relevant if there's no pathogen.
Terrain theory is relevant regardless.
The health of the body is going to be reflective of how well you are able to withstand insult and injury regardless.
But, and I said this already, it's easier to scare a population and it's easier to get funding when you have an invisible enemy, a pathogen that is acute, that is sudden, as opposed to a, you're all kind of sick.
You've all kind of gotten used to being sick.
There's nothing to be scared of because you're doing whatever you're doing and it's making you sick.
And in fact, I would not argue that we should be making people scared, but that is what the germ theory of disease is being used for.
That's what happened during COVID. And it's much harder to get people to sit up and take notice at the prospect of, actually, it's the air.
And the water.
And the food.
And the pesticides.
And the fluoride in the water.
And the food dies.
And it's everything.
And you're disrupted circadian rhythms.
It's everything.
And state of mind.
And this, of course, is exactly what we wrote about in 100 Gathers' Guide to the 21st Century.
But it feels, I think, too overwhelming.
And so the idea of, again, an exogenous agent, in this case, the magical doctors and researchers who will come in, who will have done the research off stage, and swoop in with their magic elixirs and say, I can fix that for you.
This feels cathartic to people, and they want to believe it.
Well, I think there's another thing going on.
As you know, many years ago, I wrote up a taxonomy of different categories of disease.
And it doesn't work perfectly because there's overlap between some categories, but the problem is that when you have a pathogen, you lucked out, right?
Because a pathogen is the one category here that has a conflicting evolutionary interest, it also has vulnerabilities of its own.
In other words, to the extent that it can make you sick, you can make it sick.
Right?
You can make it sick enough that you win the battle.
In fact, this is one of the things that the immune system does.
So I think there's been an accidental training program where there's often, you have a disease, that's the symptoms.
You've got a cause that you don't know.
And when the cause turns out to be a pathogen, very often there's a next stage in which you eradicate the thing or you control the thing and people get this sense of relief.
And so it's basically like the idea is...
Let's find the pathogen so we can deal with it.
And the answer is that will work when there is a pathogen, unless the pathogen is of a special nature.
Like, for example, RNA viruses change fast enough.
Why don't we cure the common cold, right?
There is a pathogen or multiple pathogens.
Why don't we cure them?
And the answer is because they change so rapidly, they evolve so rapidly that you can't get ahead of them.
But point is, we like it when we discover that there's a hostile critter.
Even if it's virus, because there's often something to be done.
And when there isn't, it takes a whole different approach.
And therefore, the public is sort of rooting for a pathogen.
The researchers are rooting for it for grant reasons and for because they dream of succeeding and defeating the disease that is in question.
But it's just an inappropriate approach to all of the things in all of the other categories.
True.
I do want to focus still for a bit, though, on the diseases for which we do understand that there is a pathogen.
Because I think this is the thing that is crippling the discussion.
That what we know for sure is that having chronic disease predisposes you to being susceptible to infectious diseases.
And that is missing from these discussions.
Not only is having chronic disease make you more susceptible to getting infectious diseases, but it makes you more susceptible to having a worse case of the disease once you do get it.
This is true across many infectious diseases.
I hypothesize that it's going to be true across all of them.
We, of course, don't know that.
But here are just a couple of examples.
Before we get into the examples, there, of course...
There will be, in some cases, genetic predispositions to some pathogens over others.
And that is true, but it's going to be a minor contributor in most cases.
Even more importantly, even in those cases where there is a potentially heritable component of susceptibility to a particular pathogen, the fact is that you can't do anything about your genetics, but you can do something about your terrain, that is to say your internal health, through diet, through exercise, through microbiome, you know, all of these other things that you can change through lifestyle choices on your own.
So why not take that locus of control back internally as opposed to say, I'm just going to have to wait for the experts, the authorities, the scientists to bring me My magical elixir, and then I really hope they got it right.
And that, of course, that fails on so many fronts, including that, to use your example of the cold virus, they evolve so fast that even under those conditions, when the experts have figured out something that is exactly right when they figured it out, these pathogens will evolve away from you because they have interests of their own.
So just two examples in which we know that having Poor health makes you more susceptible to both getting a disease and to getting worse cases of the disease.
First and obvious is COVID. We talked about this several times early in Dark Horse, including on livestream number 88 on July 17th of 2021. We talked about how the more comorbidities you had, the more likely you were to get sick and also very sick from COVID. So let me just show...
My screen, I don't know.
Can you see my screen at this point?
So we need a new cord.
This is not working.
How about now?
All right.
And of course, my screen is now freaking out.
There we go.
How about now?
So this is a piece of research that we showed back in 2021. It had just come out at that point.
Underlying medical conditions and severe illness among half a million adults hospitalized with COVID-19 from March 2020 through March 2021. And I'm just going to show a tiny bit from the results here, the abstract results, among almost 5 million hospitalized adults, a little over half a million, about 11%, were patients with COVID-19.
Of those, 94.9% had at least one underlying medical condition.
Essential hypertension, disorders of lipid metabolism, and obesity were the most common.
And they go on and on and on, and we'll link to episode 88 where we talk more about this paper.
But what you find here is that not only do comorbidities make you more susceptible to COVID. But the more comorbidities you have, the more susceptible you are.
And so if I can just have my screen back here for a moment to find the next paper.
That is true for COVID. It's also true for pneumococcal disease.
Where we have, and this is just a strange, you can show my screen here, but I'm going to read the name of the article.
It's Hanada et al., 2021, published the same year, the title being Multiple Comorbidities Increase the Risk of Death from Invasive Pneumococcal Disease Under the Age of 65 Years.
And because it's a sort of a preprint form, it doesn't look the same, but this is published in the Journal of Infection and Chemotherapy four years ago.
Similar in another study, underlying comorbidity was independently associated with a higher risk of death compared to the absence of comorbidities.
In this study, the risk of death increased in a stepwise manner with a number of comorbidities, which included chronic heart disease, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, immunosuppression, cochlear implants, interestingly, and CSF leaks.
The results of our study are consistent with those of previous studies in which multiple comorbidities have been associated with mortality in patients with IPD. Interestingly, our data demonstrated a higher risk of death not only in patients with malignancy as an IC condition, that's an immunocompromised condition, but also in those with multiple underlying non-immunocompromised diseases or conditions.
So because that's the thing that people will probably guess, like, well, of course, if you're immunocompromised, then infectious diseases are going to make you more, are going to make you sicker.
True, but it is also true that, at least as far as this research finds, and it's narrow, as all clinical research is, that with regard to pneumococcal disease, even non-immunocompromised individuals who have conditions that are chronic diseases make them more susceptible to pneumococcal disease.
So the message there is...
Having a healthy body, having a healthy terrain, is actually a kind of treatment against infectious disease.
And these are just two examples.
We have COVID-19, we have pneumococcal disease.
In both of these cases, of course, there are vaccines.
And what people are being told is, what you want, given that this pathogen is real and it has killed people and it makes people sick, what you want to do is take the vaccine.
Given the actual findings on who it is who gets very sick with these diseases and who it is who dies from these diseases, which is to say the vast majority of people who get very sick from and who die from both COVID-19 and pneumococcal disease are people with pre-existing comorbidities,
not even including those who are immunocompromised, wouldn't it be a better approach to health to study the conditions that So,
it is so universally true that the biggest bang for your buck is going to be being healthy in the first place, no matter what it is that you're going to come down with, no matter what its cause is.
That this would be the obvious thing for a system that was interested in minimizing dis-ease.
That's exactly where it would focus.
It doesn't mean that it wouldn't ever do anything else.
There are reasons to remedy a disease that you have rather than try to prevent it by making you healthy in the first place.
But it's a slam dunk.
And one of the predictions of what I would call the racket model of health management Mm-hmm.
in which the whole thing is a profit center for people who aren't really interested in making you healthier.
They may make you healthier, incidentally, as they make themselves wealthier, right?
But that's really the purpose of the system.
One of the predictions is every time there is actually a way to alleviate disease, but it does not enrich them, they won't be able to see it and they will go after those who do.
So this means that the deafness to the chronic disease gateway to pathogens is mirroring the deafness to, hey, "Hey, we've got a bunch of pharmaceuticals we know really well, and we know exactly how dangerous they are, and they aren't very dangerous, and they work better than anything you're going to come up with." Why can't you see that?
Yes.
Right?
It's the very same bias towards, hey, we're only going to do things that allow our business to thrive and claim that it's making you healthier when in fact it may or may not be.
That's the model.
But I would also just point out, subsidiary to that is the bias towards interventionist solutions.
We used to know that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure.
We used to understand that the whole point was to keep you so you didn't need to go to the doctor rather than to make sure that the doctor had some really cool chemistry to deploy when you do go.
And we've completely forgotten that.
People now think that health comes from interventions that correct for mysterious things that they have very often been told are genetic.
Oh, this is not your fault.
It's in your genome.
It's bad.
And we've got a thing that...
Corrects for it.
And the answer is, that's kind of a garbage story to begin with.
It is.
Right?
The question is, if it's in your genome, why is it in your genome?
And there are a limited number of reasons that you would find a common problem encoded in the genome in the way that we are so often told is the case.
And built into that garbage story, implicit and really never explicit, because once you hear it made explicit, it will become clear why it's so garbagey, is...
Yeah, humans just aren't very good at being humans.
We're really flawed.
We're failing all the time.
We're super weak.
It's only with these interventions that we have as much health as we do.
And so you have these stories that people have in their heads about, oh, we used to only live until 40. And we were sick all the time.
and of course people's teeth were falling out and um and this is garbage it's just not true like we we wouldn't have become the dominant species on the planet if we'd been that kind of a crap species to begin with now it is true that modern medicine has done amazing things in several regards maternal and fetal mortality are way lower than they are in the non-industrialized world
And we have identified...
And managed to stop in their tracks some number of infectious diseases, especially with antibiotics.
But the story of humans having lived nasty British and short lives absent our interventions isn't true.
And as partial evidence of that, I'm going to share some from...
From this book, which is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, written by Weston A. Price, DDS. It's now in its, or at least this version that we have, is in its eighth edition, 29th printing.
It was originally published in 1939. And what he did...
Was he went around the world and looked at populations of people who were living traditional lifestyles on traditional diets and compared them, when possible, to people from the same genetic and geographic populations who had had modern diets introduced to them.
And modern diets in 1939, of course, were nothing like the modern diets of 2025. But they were already full of sugar.
And bad fats and old and rancid fats that were not particularly good for people.
What he finds, well actually before we get there, how I wanted to segue this was, okay so if the pharmaceutical intervention is not the best way to recover health...
If we are, in fact, suffering a chronic health epidemic, which we are, how can we get back to healthy?
And food and exercise are two of the main things that are failing us.
One is we're sedentary.
We're static.
We don't move our bodies.
And there is plenty of evidence.
This is not the place that we're going to spend much time here today, but there's plenty of evidence.
That simply moving your body, simply engaging in exercises reduces susceptibility to chronic disease.
In fact, I have a paper here from 2012 that you can show briefly.
If you like, lack of exercise is a major cause of chronic diseases.
Booth et al.
Published in, boy, I don't know what comp stands for, something physiology.
Chronic...
Shouldn't be that, yeah, given how it's abbreviated, but it probably is.
They just got it wrong.
Chronic diseases are major killers in the modern era.
Physical inactivity is the primary cause of most chronic diseases.
Most chronic diseases?
I'm not sure.
That's a conclusion that I don't know if it's backed up by the research, but this is a long paper that basically reviews so many 35 chronic conditions, premature death, low cardiorespiratory fitness, sarcopenia, metabolic syndrome, obesity, insulin resistance, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, coronary heart disease, on and on and on and on, all of which they attribute in part to lack of exercise.
So that's one big thing.
The other, of course, which we have been talking about for a long time, which Kennedy has been talking about for a long time, which Maha is talking about as a movement, Make America Healthy Again, is, of course, food.
And this is where Price...
In this book in 1939, since reprinted several times, focuses.
Because he, as a dentist, began to wonder about the terrible...
The malocclusion, the narrow dental arch, the teeth not fitting, mouths being too small for their teeth.
And so he went around the world and looked again at populations of people who were and were not on traditional diets, who were on traditional diets, and who had been introduced to modern diets.
Over and over and over again, and in fact, I don't think there's a single exception in the book, although I have not carefully reviewed in recent times every single example he has in this book.
Over and over and over again, what he finds is that people, when he's controlling for the population itself and where they are, therefore he's controlling for genetics and for geography, that when they're eating their traditional diet, and of course traditional diets vary widely across the world, depending on what is actually available to them, You have zero tooth decay and zero malocclusion and, you know, just beautifully structured faces in the people who are eating their traditional diets.
And the same people within a few years of being introduced to modern diets have tooth decay, have malocclusion, have deformed faces, you know, are in need of orthodontia.
Orthodontia didn't exist before, not because we hadn't figured it out, because we didn't need it.
This is the lesson of this book.
So I would point out that this is a classic case where the interventionist paradigm has absolutely decimated its competitors because you've got an entire industry of people fixing malocclusion.
Fixing malocclusion.
And it turns out that the same story, as I'm sure you're going to get to, is probably true with respect to tooth decay.
That in fact, we are very well built to address how to manage a mouthful of teeth.
And it is modernity itself that is causing the problem.
And all of the people who are employed every day of the week fixing mouths are not all that open to the idea that there's an ultimate fix, which is to restore a situation in which biology can manage itself.
Exactly.
So just a couple of examples from this book.
You have dental caries, which is to say cavities.
Are apparently understood by anthropologists, or were in 1939, of both anthropologists who are studying both European and African prehistoric populations to be entirely a disease of modernity.
Cavities don't show up in ancient skulls.
Okay, that's one point from, again, Price's 1939 book.
Primitive versus modernized North Americans in Florida, the pre-Columbian peoples, and because of the different burial traditions, among other things, it is easy to tell when the people who existed pre-Columbian versus post-Columbian.
Pre-Columbian peoples, zero out of hundred skulls had tooth decay.
Zero.
Zero.
The same population later, so again, same genetically, same geographically, he's controlling for as much as could possibly be controlled for.
But those people who are living in contact with modern, that is to say early 20th century Americans, 40 out of 100 skulls had tooth decay.
40 out of 100 compared to 0 out of 100. Furthermore, the modern native Floridians have tooth crowding, narrowing of dental arches, Both of which are understood to be a result of inadequate nutrition and an over-reliance on soft food during the formative developmental years.
There's example after example after example in this book.
I want to share some words of wisdom from the forward to the fourth edition of this book, and I'm going to read it before I tell you when that's from, okay?
So this, again, is just some advice from...
This book that was originally published in 1939 and a forward to one edition, the fourth edition, goes as follows.
Let me see, where do I want to start?
We cannot turn back the clock.
We cannot return completely to the ways of our forefathers, wherein they always had access to fresh food from fertile soil.
However, we can and we must do everything possible to use this basic knowledge in a modified form.
Perhaps we can compensate to some extent for the mischief that has been done.
In this respect, the following suggestions, based on 35 years of clinical experience, are submitted for consideration.
1.
Reduce the volume of industrial effluents, including fluorides, now contaminating our air, water, and food as rapidly as possible through federal, state, and local controls.
2.
Ban the use of untested food additives immediately.
Reduce the number of those tested, considered harmless, and approved for use to an absolute minimum.
3.
Rapidly phase out the use of long-acting pesticides and herbicides unless proven harmless, except for emergency situations such as malaria control.
Ban the sale of these pesticides for household use.
Seek control of insect pests and weeds through other means, including soil improvement.
Well-nourished plants are most resistant to insects and fungi.
Are most resistant to insects and fungi than deficient ones.
And it goes on and on and on.
That's from the fourth, that's the forward to the fourth edition of this book, which was published in 1970. So that advice is from, so this book was originally written around when our grandparents, when our parents were born.
And that, those words of wisdom that I just read, advising us to get rid of the long-lasting pesticides and herbicides and And to get rid of things like fluoride in our air and water supply was written around when we were born.
Apparently no one was listening.
There are, of course, some people who are listening, and this book is well beloved by a small handful, a growing number of people.
But this is what MAHA stands for.
This is what Kennedy...
Is for us to return to an understanding that we are bigger than the sum of our parts, that we have emergence, that our internal health is our best defense against external pathogens, rather than relying for defense against external pathogens,
other external agents that we need to ingest or have shot into us, that our own health is Actually, largely, under our own control, except that our food and our air and our water have been so polluted, so toxified, that it is hard even for people who are trying to eat as healthy as possible to get good food into themselves.
You're right, although I remember vividly my grandparents.
My grandmother died relatively early in my life, but my grandfather carried on.
The tradition which used to be resident in the hard-headed left, which was well aware of the toxicity and the exposures that were causing all of this disease.
And I remember him being dismissed as a safety nut.
By all sorts of people who didn't want to hear yet again about the pesticides and the exposures of the farm workers and this and that and the other.
But the point is he was way ahead of his time.
But I raise it because of what happened.
You're now watching Maha show up under a Republican banner brought into relevance by an insurgent conservative candidate.
That's because what happened on the left, which used to own this issue completely.
Absolutely.
Right?
Was...
Hippie, granola, like the whole thing on the left.
Right.
The sensitivity, the concern about the fluoride, the concern about vaccines, all of that stuff.
Pesticides, all of it.
All of that stuff existed on the left.
And then something suspiciously corporate, medicalized, very...
Complicated mindset for complex problems seems to have captured.
The Democratic Party has synonymized environmentalism with climate alarmism.
There's no room for any discussion of any environmental issue other than climate.
It has become pharma-obsessed mechanism for health rather than...
Recognizing all of the perverse incentives that caused that to be a terrible idea in the first place.
Which is completely consistent with the trans madness.
Whatever you are, you can't fix from inside.
You're going to need external help from medicine in order to somehow reconcile something that you were born with.
Yep.
Bring in the doctors, the interventionists.
You know, we're going to do everything to fix the climate.
Fix your body, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's all nonsense.
And what they did was because they abdicated what's arguably the biggest issue there is, which is how we are screwing up our own environment so we can't even live in it, right?
They've handed that over.
To the opposition, which has adopted it because, frankly, Republicans don't like being sick any more than Democrats do.
We all live on this earth together and enjoy good health when we can have it.
Right.
So, you know, first of all, this is the just desserts of the moronic management of the Democratic Party, the diabolical mismanagement of it by the thoroughly corrupt DNC, right?
You've surrendered.
Labor and environmentalism to the Republicans.
Good job, guys.
Right?
But anyway, okay, so through some weird set of circumstances, we find Maha actually this close to having power, and we are finally having a discussion, which frankly I find too narrow, but finally having a discussion about prioritizing at the very least chronic disease, because actually that's probably your best approach to infectious disease anyway.
And the question is, Will the Maha movement address it correctly?
And I have concerns that because they are more correct than those they are replacing, that they are actually going to miss the big evolutionary picture.
And I really hope that doesn't happen.
One last point here.
With regard to this, you know...
Price and many others who find that actually there's no evidence of jaw malformation, tooth crowding, malocclusion, cavities in prehistoric people.
This emerges in humans with the advent of modern diets.
And specifically, as Mike Mew has talked about, whom you've had on Dark Horse twice, I think, That our reliance on soft food as babies, you know, the idea that you need to feed children and babies soft food because they clearly can't take anything harder, is absolutely helping to cause some of the jaw and tooth problems.
Well, it turns out it is also the case in squirrels.
So, Holly Miller, someone who wrote to me yesterday, pointed me to this research, published in the Rural Society this year, an article called Morphological Change in an Isolated Population of Red Squirrels, Cyrus Vulgaris, in Britain.
I'm just going to read the abstract, alighting some of the specifics.
The mechanical properties of dietary items are known to influence skull morphology, either through evolution or by phenotypic plasticity.
Here, we investigated the impact of supplementary feeding of peanuts on the morphology of red squirrels from five populations in Britain.
They used stable isotope analysis, confirmed dietary ecology.
I'm just going to skip the methods because it's not relevant to what we're talking about here.
Significant differences in cranio-mandibular shape.
That's here.
We're found between all populations, with 1990s Formby red squirrels exhibiting a morphology associated with reduced masticatory efficiency.
This effect was partially reversed following a reduction in supplementary feeding of peanuts.
We propose that these morphological changes are related to the reduced mechanical effort needed to process peanuts relative to naturally occurring food items.
This could be an example of diet-induced plastic changes to the skeleton and non-muroid wild mammals, although further research is needed to exclude other driving factors such as genetics.
Phenotypic plasticity, which we've talked about before, but is a technical sounding term because it is in fact a technical term, refers to the ability of even those parts of our bodies that feel like they are what they are and they're not going to change, like bone, to respond to environmental pressure.
So there are examples across many, many clades, across many developmental regimens.
Of, you know, hyenas having reduced canine size when they are being fed stuff in zoos as opposed to when they're having to crunch through skulls of their own prey on the African savanna.
So here we have squirrels, which are not normally chopping through skulls of anything, but they are having to get into wild nuts, right?
When they are being fed the relatively soft food by humans of peanuts, Their skulls get flatter and their jaws get weaker.
Of course this is going to happen to human babies as well.
Of course this is going to happen, frankly, to humans throughout the lifespan.
Now you can't change as much as quickly the size and shape of your face and skull as an adult as you can affect the size and shape of the future adult when you're feeding a baby, but you can change it.
We know that people can develop stronger jaws and therefore better and more attractive profiles because humans like the look of healthy people more than they like the look of unhealthy people by mewing and by chewing on hard things that actually develop the skull and jaw muscles.
So one of my concerns about the way that this discovery, which shouldn't need to be Working this late can be mishandled.
Is the failure to recognize how it is that we lost the thing that allowed us to be healthy.
And I think actually the malocclusion story makes it quite clear.
First of all, you've got the high-tech, complicated-thinking people solving a non-problem.
Babies need food.
Babies don't have teeth, right?
We are going to have to use some very metallurgically refined blades to take food and pulverize it so that it is baby-ready, right?
We're going to put it in little glass jars, and there'll be a baby on it so you know what it's for, and it'll be baby-sized jars, right?
The idea that you...
Right?
So the interventionists had a solution to what problem?
To the problem that the baby didn't have teeth.
Because before that, all babies died.
They all died, because without teeth, how would you eat, right?
And so the failure to recognize that the baby, as delivered, odd as it is, is actually well-built for some environment that it is your obligation as a parent to deliver, and that that did not involve jars of anything or metallurgy that allowed...
Any food to be pulverized into, you know, to be atomized effectively.
I mean, this does seem like kind of a radical position you're taking.
Babies don't require metallurgy.
I mean, I think patently they do, don't they?
Strange as it may sound, that is my position.
Babies do not require metallurgy.
So what problem was really being solved?
Well, A, a non-problem, which is babies can't eat human food.
No, there is some ancient wisdom by which some set of human food...
Is accessible to babies.
But more importantly, initially, the babies are drinking milk.
And for much longer than most babies do in modern circumstances.
And for a long time, there was the false belief that babies were better off with formula than they were with mother's milk, which was insane to begin with.
But there's a convenience issue.
Breastfeeding is awkwardly biological.
And so the idea that, oh, modernity has a solution to that problem, and it involves little jars and metallurgy and all sorts of wonderful things that a baby needs, right?
That results in us departing from the non-technical way of raising a healthy child to adulthood, which was all things that we were equipped with.
It's effective.
It's literally a birthright, right?
You literally are entitled to be fed things that result in your jaw being properly formed, which results in you being maximally attractive.
It results in you being healthy in all kinds of ways that you don't even foresee when somebody says, oh, your teeth don't meet correctly.
You know, that has effects on the way you breathe.
It has effects on whether you develop allergies.
It has effects on sleep apnea and attention deficit disorder and all sorts of things that just so happen to be housed in your skull.
And so in any case, it was the initial departure on the basis that there was some new technological thing to do that was going to take away the messiness of being a critter.
And then decades later, it's like, huh, can we study what happened?
And it's like, I'll tell you what happened every single frickin' time, right?
You plugged a light bulb into your ceiling and you thought, this is great, I can work at midnight.
And you didn't realize that the...
The wavelengths of light was a subset of what you were supposed to be exposed to.
You didn't realize that it was going to mess up some part of your brain that keeps track of what time of day it is, and it was going to cause you to be unable to get to sleep.
It was therefore going to disrupt your psychology, your relationships, everything, right?
It's all the same.
And, you know, as I always say, I like the title of our book, but there is a part of me that wishes we had titled it Hypernovelty.
Because...
The search for the cause of chronic disease is all going to land in this one category.
It's the hypernovelty that has caused a highly, a well-developed creature that was perfectly capable of managing its own health in almost all circumstances until very late in life.
It caused that creature to become overwhelmingly sick because it's in the wrong environment.
You know, we're just constantly a fish out of water at every possible scale.
Anyway, it's interesting that we're in this battle, but what we need in order to succeed in the quest to enhance human health and end this chronic disease epidemic is a willingness to think at the proper scale of complexity.
And I just wanted to give one other little example.
I remember back when I was studying senescence.
A little earlier than when I did my taxonomy of the various causes of disease, noticing the glaring fact that old people die of flu and their death certificate says flu, right?
This pattern becomes very obvious, right?
The coroner puts flu on there because that is the proximate cause of their death.
It's the thing that kicked them over from living into dead.
That is not the cause of their death.
The fact is they had become very, very vulnerable because they had become very old.
Having become very old, it didn't take much disruption by a pathogen to just simply make continuing as a living creature impossible.
And that, of course, I didn't include it in my discussion of comorbidities today because it has never struck me.
Age has never struck me as like any of the other.
It happens to all of us regardless, and we all become more susceptible no matter how healthy we are to infectious agents as we age.
That will always be the case.
And yet it is absolutely true.
And which is exactly why you have to look at this question at the full, you don't want it to overcomplicate it, but you want to look at it at the full level of complexity that it exists.
Why do we age?
We age because we have a cancer problem that's much bigger than we know that was solved by biology.
How is it solved?
By limiting the amount of repair that we can do.
What does that do?
It condemns you to grow feeble as you get older.
At what rate do we grow feeble as we get older?
As slow as biology could arrange to allow it, right?
But it does mean that eventually you're going to be so close to death that The tiniest little disruption can take you out.
That is not a failure.
That is the result of a whole lot of optimizations that made you capable of living to that very advanced age.
So I do want to go back to, before we move on to the next topic here, you just gave, you were just talking about three things as if they were the same, and I think they're actually different in important ways.
And identifying where We, as a species, have messed up and have made ourselves less healthy.
And we can understand what is going on at an evolutionary level is most useful if we can also say, okay, but these three things are different from one another in this way.
So there can be other things in each of these categories.
So you talked about breast milk and light bulbs and the other stuff the babies are eating.
The metallurgy.
Requiring the metallurgy in the glass jars.
So breast milk.
Breast milk, of course, is a universal human thing.
Every single culture that has ever existed has fed babies breast milk.
And so the alternative solution that has emerged...
I mean, there were other alternative solutions before.
There were wet nurses and such, but it was still breast milk.
It just wasn't mother's milk, right?
But the alternative solution of the 20th century is, well...
That's inconvenient, and it's messy, and we've got a solution for that.
We're going to put a bunch of stuff that seems to do the right stuff in a bottle for you, and you can just give that to your baby, or someone else can give it to your baby, it'll be fine.
So that's a universal, amazing solution that every human had that we are being talked out of, that some people are being talked out of, with regard to light bulbs.
Light bulbs, at least in the evening, or even inside, we're solving a problem that we had without recognizing the drawbacks.
So there wasn't a problem with breast milk.
There was a like, hmm, it's kind of inconvenient, and it seems more market-driven, whereas light bulbs, oh, that's amazing.
We do have this problem, and we haven't had this problem.
We haven't had the technology possible before, so we're going to solve this.
But it's different from Every human ever always had breast milk, and now some aren't, and what are the effects going to be?
No human ever, ever had light bulbs, especially at all, and now many people live with light bulbs, and what are the effects going to be?
And then the third one, what babies should eat after breast milk, the way that I think this is interesting is that the answer is going to be different by culture.
And we no longer know to what culture we belong.
And so this is one of the brilliant things about that Price book, this one here, the Nutrition and Physical Degeneration book, is he talks about the different foods that babies in different cultures that he's visiting are eating.
And it varies widely.
You know, an Inuit kid and a Maasai kid and a native Floridian kid and a kid from the South Pacific are going to be eating totally different things.
But it works for each of them.
And part of what we have done is, you know, melded.
The melting pot has been amazing for a lot of reasons.
I don't even know.
Like, I don't even know who to think back to among my, you know, European ancestors as the, you know, as the cultural touchstone for what we maybe should have been feeding our kids.
Other than, you know, probably some bones, right?
Like, give them some bones with some meat on them to gnaw on, right?
So, in that case, you have a, you have like, okay, well, what is the solution?
I don't know.
Because there are many, many solutions that have been a fit for the particular environment in which those cultures were.
And most people listening to us here, and it's certainly true for us, don't have a cultural touchstone to say, yeah, that's what our ancestors as babies would have been eating.
There's one part of what you're saying that I'm not certain of, which is the how different.
There may be...
Cultures for which what a baby is supposed to eat to give them proper feedback so that they end up with a properly formed skull is distinct.
But I would guess largely every culture has something that delivers enough force into the jaw that it ends up right.
And so you may not have to nail exactly what your ancestors did or something that approximates it in order to end up with a healthy skull.
But this points out another problem for humans, which is the magic of being a human is the result of the fact that our evolutionary, our capacity to adapt has been offloaded in large measure to a much larger extent than for any other creature.
From our genomes to our cultural layer.
And on the one hand, that's fantastic because the cultural layer can evolve extremely rapidly.
But the cost of that rapid evolution is that you can lose an adaptation in one generation.
And so this is what we're talking about, is the fact that your great-great-grandmother knew from folk wisdom what she was supposed to put in the baby's mouth that would result.
She may not have had any understanding that it would result in the skull morphology ending up, right?
But she just knows that this is what we do, right?
The fact that that information has been lost and that we're now going to have to study the question is insane.
We should, every time a radical departure in how we live is advocated by the interventionists or the convenientists or whoever these people are who are so sure that the primitive people did it that way.
And, you know, this is 2025, right?
We can avail ourselves of some of this technology.
It's like, yes, every time you do that, you've got to go through the question of the precautionary principle, Chesterton's fence, Are you applying a complicated mindset to a complex problem?
Because we keep injuring ourselves with the hypernovelty.
And I'm not arguing that we should go back to living in caves, but I'm arguing that we at least need to notice that pattern and get wise to it so that we begin to understand, hey, that's a radical change to how we're going to live.
What might the dangers be?
And how are we going to monitor so we can discover the dangers that we didn't even see coming that are inevitably going to accompany this change?
Yeah.
That way we can at least retrace our steps.
I wonder if some of what happened wasn't concomitant.
I always want to say concomitant.
I think it's concomitant.
With the rejection of the noble savage trope.
Anthropologists in the early 20th century had this idea of the peoples that they were studying being, some did, perfect culturally and morally.
And it became a parody of itself, that such were people living in nature with the land.
And the pendulum swung away from that.
And in fact, I think what we see from Price's work and others like him is that those cultures that persisted, of course, produced people who were healthy and beautiful and fit, almost to a person.
And the idea that we all have in our heads of, well, of course, the primitive peoples, the non-weird peoples, the pre-industrial peoples must have had all sorts of facial deformities.
And there will be a picture or two that you can come up with, like someone who ended up with leprosy or someone who ended up with an accident and had a caved-in face and managed to survive.
But in general, the opposite is true.
I don't know, if you compare pre-industrial peoples to these images of people on the beach in 1950s America, I don't know how it would compare.
I would say more or less equivalent in terms of beauty, depending on what your particular aesthetic is.
But compare pre-industrial people to the Americans of 2025, and the pre-industrial people are going to be much healthier and more beautiful than the average American in 2025. I must say, I've never liked the attack that uses the phrase noble savage.
Because it is a caricature of a perspective.
And it's one of those things in the academy, right?
All you have to do is say noble savage and everybody in the room titters because they're in the know about that thing that people used to believe that they don't believe anymore.
So every time that happens on any topic, I always think, wait a second.
Where's the truth that you're now ignoring?
Right.
And this one is clear.
I learned about it not from Weston Price, where it of course exists, but from 1491, which describes...
Charles Mann book.
Charles Mann book.
Excellent.
I think Charles Mann is possessed of a not very favorable view of you and me in light of our heresy over COVID. Nonetheless, very fond of this book, 1491, which describes the state of the Americas as best we understand it just before the Spaniards arrived.
And in this book describes something of the European mindset about the native peoples.
And it's interesting.
It's not noble savage exactly.
there is a belief in the sort of superiority of the Europeans.
But there's also what I did not expect was an understanding that that was a cultural superiority that they were aspiring, that they were appealing to, and that the expectation was given some time, the natives people would come and that the expectation was given some time, the natives people would come to But...
Physically, there was a recognition that the natives were much more beautiful and healthy-looking.
And the natives apparently had a few...
And also very much more focused on hygiene.
Like, even the Europeans recognized that Native Americans seemed much cleaner.
Right.
In fact, I remember...
Obviously, the book is about the state of the Americas right before the Spaniards arrived.
But what he's talking about is the state of European thinking, too, upon...
Upon the discovery of the North American populations, but the natives apparently thought it absolutely disgusting that anybody was going to blow their nose into a hanky and then stick it in their pocket.
That's insane behavior, which I also agree it is insane behavior born of, you know, living in buildings mostly.
But there's all kinds of solutions that were superior.
So anyway, yes, people living in an environment that approximates the one they involved in.
Evolved in are inevitably going to be healthier.
Maybe not every individual, but that's the key.
And so I guess I'm now concerned every time I hear chronic health epidemic that we're missing the real story.
And maybe we should be trying to make that clear to our friends in this movement that there's actually an underlying evolutionary story.
And if you skip the evolutionary part of it, you're going to...
Miss, you're going to leave a lot of health on the table.
Which is not where you want it.
No, health should not be on the table.
No, it should be inside.
Yes, exactly.
You, not the house.
Right.
All of us, really.
Yeah.
All right, you wanted to do one more thing before we sign off for the week.
Yeah, I had one more thing, and I guess some other time I would like to come back and talk about all the various categories of disease and what they imply about how we should be thinking about them.
For another day.
I just wanted to make a brief note of a conversation I am increasingly now hearing in the circles that I travel in.
And it weirdly matches a battle I was having internally.
So I know it's an important question that lots of people are wrestling with some version of it.
The question is, we're now in the early days of a...
An administration that is behaving in a radical fashion relative to anything we've seen in our lifetimes.
And A, I want to just point out that all of those who said to people like you and me, you're being suckers, he's just like the others, you'll see.
If he gets elected, I hope he does good things, but it's going to be more of the same.
Well, you guys turn out to be wrong.
That's not true.
However, the radicalness and the all-encompassing nature of this wrecking ball approach to what came before puts those of us who have despaired over the course of decades of the corruption of our system in an interesting new spot, one for which we do not have a well-developed perspective and we don't know how to respond.
So the predicament is, There is lots of carnage that is going to arise out of the level of disruption represented by the Trump administration.
And there's a question about what the right way to respond to it is, what our obligation is as people who have values, who are in part at some level responsible for This person having taken power because we made the case to lots of people that actually there was no choice.
I absolutely still believe that.
But is this level of carnage something that we should be decrying?
I mean, we're going to be watching thousands of people ushered out of the executive branch.
That is going to have massive implications for what the government can do.
It's going to have implications for the burden on society of people who don't have a job.
There's lots of stuff, and lots of it is going to be negative.
And there's a question about, should he not be doing these things because of the disruption, because of the unemployment, because there's no overarching plan with what to do with lots of workers who, you know, let's say they were employed in DEI, and now they're suddenly unemployed?
How are we to respond?
What is our obligation?
And there's something I want to avoid, and I want all other people in our position to avoid, which is critiquing the costs in order to maintain our credibility.
Right?
The real question is not, are there massive costs and are they horrifying?
There are going to be massive costs to this, and they will be horrifying.
The question is...
Is the opportunity to reduce those costs and still do the good that's being done there and being missed?
Or is this the expected level of cost in order to take a system that was whittled through with cancer and cut it out, right?
This is a wrecking ball going after a racket, right?
This is a wrecking ball taking down The edifice that has housed a racket for decades.
I expect there to be carnage.
I don't want to be a sucker.
I don't want to make excuses for an administration that's doing harm it doesn't need to do.
But at the level that we had, you know, we were literally sanctioning the maiming of children in the name of protecting health and honoring diversity.
Yep.
That is insane.
Ending that is a massive good.
I don't want to make excuses on the basis that massive good has been done and I'm going to look the other way if unnecessary harm is also done.
There are things you and I have talked about we're concerned over.
You know, do I like the idea of getting over climate madness and having an energy policy that is...
Rational in light of the hazard we face from our competitors, in light of the demands and their rate of change over the advent of AI. Yeah, I want intelligent energy policy, but I don't want drill baby drill.
That was never smart.
Nope.
Right?
Should we be drilling?
That's a question.
And where should we be drilling?
And what should the standards of that drilling be?
Those are all questions I want to...
I'm an adult.
I'm not saying don't drill, but I'm saying drill baby drill is like, hey, let's not be careful about this.
We know how to get the oil out and there's going to be some carnage and that's not my bag.
So I want to retain the ability to critique that which actually deserves critique, but I do not want to maintain that ability by...
Critiquing just simply in order that I can later go back and say, well, I was resisting that, you know?
Well, it's a little bit...
What you're objecting to is the same kind of conversational expectation of, well, I don't agree with everything he says, but...
Whenever you discuss anyone about whom many people have a negative impression and...
Maybe that negative impression is warranted.
Very often it is not.
It is the product of an intentional campaign to slander someone.
And so in order to get in the door, it feels necessary, less so for you and me now, but it often feels necessary, is to start by saying, like, of course I don't agree with everything but.
And I think this is at sort of a broader scale.
Like, you know what?
We can assume that As you speak, we can assume that you don't agree with everything that is being done.
We would like to assume that as adults we understand trade-offs, and that I feel like you went back and forth between two analogies there, but the cancer one is apt.
That what you're trying to do is kill the cancer before you kill the patient.
So we need a system.
We need an American system.
But the American system has been so riddled with a cancer, if you will, and the only tools that we have left at this point, because the cancer is so advanced, is going to do some harm to some parts of the system that we would rather not do harm to.
I have not seen anyone propose other ways.
The objections and the counter-proposals are, it's fine.
Just leave it the way it is.
We need infectious disease research.
We need this.
We need that.
It's not fine.
Nothing was going well.
And if that's your position, that actually what we were doing for the last four years, and in fact the last 60, was fine, then we don't see things the same way.
There's one part of that I would adjust, which is I'm not so worried about the people who think it was fine.
What I'm worried about is the people who know that it isn't fine and are now going to be hyper-focused on the part of the surgery in which healthy tissue is cut in order to get to the tumor, right?
And the point is, I don't like the damaging of healthy tissue either.
But unless there's actually a plan, In which you get to the tumor without, you know, maybe you've got an arthroscopic plan that gets to the tumor every bit as effectively and doesn't do as much damage to the surface.
Great.
I'm all ears.
If that plan exists and the Trump administration is missing it, I want to know.
And it's our obligation to point out, hey, you're doing more damage than is necessary to do the good in question.
But if the good in question requires the damage being done, I'm up for the damage because the degree to which our system was compromised in advance of this administration being seated was so profound that there was going to be no way of doing this in a non-disruptive form.
It was going to be massively disruptive.
And frankly, there's one element of this.
Let's take the unemployment part.
If you're going to take the bloated federal bureaucracy, which is full of all sorts of unnecessary things, A vast number of de facto terrorists who have been terrorizing the normal people of the world over DEI, who have been literally threatening us.
You're going to unemploy those people.
The proper, I believe, the best solution to that, I do believe we don't want people to be unemployed and to be unable to recover and go do something productive.
Right?
We want to protect people from becoming homeless.
But, to the extent that these people were employed doing something that they should never have been employed doing, and a large number of them are suddenly going to show up in the job market, and that's a problem, the interventionist response with, we have to do something about these people, is, it's one approach, but the other approach is, actually, as crude as it is, markets...
Deal with this.
And they deal with it by recognizing that the price of labor has now dropped because there are a lot of employable people and it makes use of them.
So the question is, are you going to beat the market in terms of what you do about the DEI unemployed?
Or should you place some protections?
And allow the market to figure out that it's got a lot of people who need something productive to do and that we have a lot of new opportunities that we haven't spotted before and to find some way to get those things to meet.
Yeah, my only...
The objection that comes up in my mind there is this is just the beginning because this is not...
We are not about to have...
Let's call it tens of thousands of people on the job market who really have no skills.
This is the tip of the spear because these aren't due to AI. And we are about to have an unprecedented situation with regard to many more people than there are currently jobs.
And because AI will take a number of current jobs off the market.
It's going to take a huge number off.
So I agree with you that you've got a small glut at the leading edge of what's going to be a much larger glut.
However, that's a conversation we need to have.
And as you know, I would argue that what you want the system to do is protect people from falling off the bottom of the ladder, right?
If you protect people so that those who wish to have a job And are attempting to find one, don't find themselves homeless, don't find themselves at a level of decrepitude that they can't then pick up a job that becomes available.
You protect people from those worst outcomes.
And then the question is, well, AI is going to unemploy a lot of people.
Hopefully, it is also going to employ a lot of people in ways that we don't understand.
And there's a question about how long the lag is in terms of once we know what new world we live in and people figure out what opportunities they have to start businesses they didn't know could exist or whatever it is that they're going to do, that's going to absorb this glut of people.
I don't know whether that's true, but we at least need to get to that place.
And there's no way in the world that the DEI unemployed Should be ahead of the other unemployed.
We already have an employment problem.
So if we're going to have that conversation about the carnage of adding all of these DEI folks to the unemployed, the answer is, well, let's then have the conversation about the unemployed to begin with, because there are lots of honorable people who are having trouble finding enough work.
And, you know, I don't necessarily blame the DEI unemployed for having been employed doing something that nobody should have been doing.
I do a little bit.
Yeah, a little.
In part because, you know, the DEI unemployed, as an amorphous abstract group that we're referring to, in my head, these are all college-educated.
Many of them probably have master's degrees even, or, you know, terminal degrees.
So, if they had enough wherewithal...
And resources, or the ability to generate resources to get college degrees, they have some amount of tenacity and intelligence.
But they use them, they use that to get degrees, presumably, that were largely pointless, and to some degree that is reflective of what is on offer at universities.
But I've now been talking to...
You know, both our children who have both been attending college and others as well.
And I think there is something of use in almost every college class, even as many of the college classes are now being staffed with people who don't know anything about reality.
Those who end up getting through college and taking jobs that we're doing Not only neutral work for people, but actually positively negative, like actually negative for almost everyone they came in contact with.
They had to know that at some level.
We met a number of these people.
We knew a number of the DEI employed back at Evergreen and elsewhere, and we ran into them in conferences and such.
And they certainly had drunk their own Kool-Aid.
They did believe their own press to some degree, but they could also look around whenever any criticism came their way and be like, yeah, it's true that what we're doing is actually dishonorable.
I just feel certain that every single one of them, at some level, No, I mean, like, Abram Kendi has now left Boston University.
Like, you know, they're just, they're falling.
Like, they know at some level that it was, they were involved in a scam on the rest of us.
I don't think that's true.
I think many of them believed that they were part of a revolution that needed to happen and that the carnage was justified.
Some of the people we met knew that they were part of a revolution, but not one that needed to happen.
But anyway, I want to amend what I said, because it was wrong.
I do personally fault them.
I do not believe that we can collectively hold them responsible as we are trying to figure out what to do with the numbers that they are adding to the ranks of the unemployed.
I believe at some level the DEI formerly employed are suckers who should have known better.
However, when the economy is allowed to open up a Set of jobs and the academy opens up a bunch of fields, right?
The point is, we're saying that these are legitimate things.
And you and I were complaining back in the 90s.
Early 90s, yep.
About these phony fields.
You know, it's not like we were fooled.
And it was like, hey, this is a problem.
Why are we pretending this stuff is real?
Yeah, not so much fields back then, but the approaches, the theories within existing fields.
The schools of thought that then became departments in their own right.
Yep.
This never should have happened, but it having happened, do I want to fault every women's studies major for having gone into women's studies?
I do want to say, hey, what were you thinking?
Well, no, and I actually know a number of women, I don't think I know any men, who have women's studies degrees, who have said to me, look, I got that degree back when it actually meant something real.
And, like, it's morphed into women's and gender studies.
And, you know, it's...
And I do actually...
I do think that there was something real there.
I remain to be convinced.
It's not that there was nothing to study.
Yeah.
You know, diminishing returns-wise, you would imagine that there were some years of, you know, hey, if we focus on women and the contribution that they've made, what do we find?
And you will find a bunch of stuff, and then you'll quickly run out of stuff that should be specially done that way.
But I just don't think...
The approach, let's put it this way, I don't think there should be any majors at a college that every person at the college wouldn't be equally at home in.
If you're a guy in women's studies, it's like, well, what is that exactly, right?
So take any of the studies disciplines, and the point is, well, it's like a, you know, no girls allowed thing.
On the clubhouse door.
That's going to be a little tricky.
I mean, I think I like that as a rubric.
It's going to be a little tricky because there will tend to be more men interested in physics and more women interested in studio art.
That's right.
And, you know, more women interested in nursing and pediatrics and more men interested in surgery.
But the name of the field doesn't...
Doesn't name a demographic that you are or are not a member of.
And I think that's...
I mean, really, you're talking about basically demographically specified fields.
I'm talking about the frickin' hierarchy in who's allowed to have an opinion on X, Y, and Z. And those fields...
The anti-progressive stack.
Yeah.
The point is, actually, no, you don't need to be a woman in order to have an opinion on...
The differences between men and women and how they've affected women through history.
Maybe you have some insight if you're a woman that a man wouldn't be likely to have, but there should be no bar to anybody in the academy having an insight in any legitimate realm.
And you and I know that there were a lot of realms that were set up to create room for certain people to have an opinion and to exclude others from having one.
And those were all phony fields to begin with.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Anything else?
No, I think that's it.
All right.
Well, the dog's going for a run without us.
The dog is sleep running.
She's behind us sleep running.
All right.
We are going to be back in a little over a week and then a little over a week after that.
And in that show in a little over two weeks, we'll be in a...
Temporarily new place, and we'll tell you then where we are.
We will be in a disclosed location at that point.
We will be in a currently undisclosed and then disclosed location.
Okay, so no Q&A today.
Please do join locals.
We've got great content there, and watch parties every time we do a livestream here, along with our Q&As are always there.
And go to darkhorsepodcast.org to find out our schedule.
Check out our store, which has great merchandise.
Find links to Natural Selections, where I write, and our Patreons, where Brett has conversations monthly.
And a reminder that our sponsors this week are Haraway, Manakora, and Armra, and we love them all.
We are supported by you, our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing, liking, sharing our full episodes and our clips.
You can find us in many social media places at this point.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
