Hep B or not Hep B: The 303rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
On this, our 303rd Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss the recommendation to stop vaccinating newborns against Hepatitis B, as just handed down by ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) for the CDC. Why were newborns whose mothers do not have Hep B, being vaccinated against a disease that is contracted through sexual activity and dirty needles? We discuss claims of “safe and effective,” risk stratification, the childhood vaccine schedule, and what “individual-based decision-...
Hey folks, welcome to the very next installment of the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
What number is it?
303.
303 I believe unless I talk my counting is off because I missed you missed one I missed one.
I missed many scheduled.
No, I think I've missed one before.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, in any case, it is the 303rd.
303rd?
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Recovered from a prolonged excursion circling the drain at a substantial distance.
Yeah, it was rough.
This illness was quite rough.
And so I apologize in advance for the coughing that is likely to occasionally happen.
But here we are.
Yes.
Every time you cough, an angel gets their wings, I'm told.
I don't know what that means, but something, to be sure.
Every time I cough, an angel goes through the eye of a really large needle.
With a camel.
On its back.
Okay.
I mean, you know, religious myth is not always perfectly straightforward.
It takes some unpacking.
I mean, allegory is awesome.
Yes.
Allegory is awesome.
So join us on locals.
That's where the watch party is going on.
And yeah, we're going to talk about what the ASIP committee, what does it say?
I always forget what ACIP stands for.
See, here's the problem is the C in ACIP committee is for committee.
So if you say ACIP committee.
So it's like eating steak with those users.
You get three demerits and you may be reported to the Department of Redundancy Department.
Anyway, those who don't know what it might stand for have no idea what we're talking about yet.
It is the vaccine advisory committee, which yesterday made a recommendation on the HEPB vaccine, which has been recommended for newborns on the first day of life.
Sure.
And anyway, that recommendation has now been altered, which tells us something.
And we're going to go into what it tells us, both positive and negative.
Yeah.
And then, for something completely different, which is not how that phrase goes, and then for something completely different, we're going to talk a bit about the life and work of Tom Stoppard, extraordinary playwright who died this week, or last week.
My sense of time is somewhat off, but who died recently.
And really, you know, he was old, but a tremendous loss for the world of letters.
But first, as always, we will start by paying the rent.
I am, in deference to my recovering everything, going to read just one ad this week, but it's the first part.
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And although not entirely related to CrowdHealth itself, I would just point out at your appointment when you slit open your skull, crack now.
You split open your scalp.
Yes.
Failed to crack my skull.
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You declined.
Have not contracted tetanus, interestingly.
Amazing.
Yes, it is remarkable.
I mean, I declined, not in full, but in part because I had slipped on wet concrete and hit my head.
I had not, in fact, fallen into a deep dark hole that had not seen oxygen for years and run into a rusty nail.
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All right.
Shall we start with the ACIP.
The Committee of ACIP Committee?
The Committee of ACIP Committee.
Yes, let us go to the CDC's report on the vote first so people will know what it is that has been decided.
Do you want to put that up, Jen?
So we're going to look at the, it says, ACIP recommends individual-based decision-making for hepatitis B vaccine, for instance, infants born to women who test negative for the virus.
So for those who don't know, hepatitis V vaccine has been recommended and administered according to the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule on the very first day of life, the only vaccination to be given then.
Okay, so Atlanta, December 5th, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, that's ACIP, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices today voted 8 to 3 to recommend individual-based decision-making for parents deciding whether to give the hepatitis B vaccine, including the birth dose, to infants born to women who test negative for the virus.
For those infants not receiving the birth dose, ACIP suggests in its recommendation that the initial dose be administered no earlier than two months of age.
Individual-based decision-making, known on the CDC immunization schedules as shared clinical decision-making, means the parents and healthcare providers should consider vaccine benefits, vaccine risks, my God, they said it out loud, and infection risks, and that parents consult with their healthcare provider and decide when or if the child will begin the hepatitis B vaccine series.
The committee said parents and healthcare providers should consider whether there are infection risks, such as a household member who has hepatitis B or frequent contact with persons who have emigrated from areas where hepatitis B is common.
Okay, so I think.
Let me just say, when you first read vaccine benefits, vaccine risks, and infection risks, I read that as risks of infection from the shot.
But of course, that's not what they mean.
They mean, and I think it's actually part of what is the benefit of the vaccine.
You have to consider in considering the benefit of anything that you're taking, what is the risk of you contracting the thing that this is preventative against if you don't take the thing.
And so that's what the infection risk refers to there.
Right.
And what are the chances there's going to be exposure to the pathogen at all if you know, obviously, if the risk of exposure to a pathogen is zero, you should not take a prophylaxis against it.
The risk is never zero, but as we will discuss for B, for infants, it's real close.
Yeah, it's very, very low.
And this is one of the, well, what we're overall going to discuss today is what was done and why, what was not done, and we will have to speculate as to why.
By ASIP.
By ACIP.
And what it means.
But I want to talk a little bit.
There are really, this is, as is always the case with anything vaccine related.
There are two worlds, and everybody lives in one of them.
Either you live in the world where vaccines are safe and effective, where this is effectively a free mechanism for staving off a very serious condition, and hepatitis B is a very serious condition, where essentially the system errs in the direction of what it claims is caution.
But the only way that that erring in that direction makes any sense is if you make an assumption that can't possibly be true, which is that these things are without a downside.
So why was hepatitis B vaccine being given to children literally on their first day of life?
This is a question because hepatitis B is a disease that one typically contracts from reckless sexual behavior or from shared needles for IV drug users.
So it's not a set of behaviors that is going to inflict this disease on babies.
The rationale has been, actually, I will call it the rationalization because I live in the other world where vaccines have risks.
And if you do not have a substantial risk from the disease, the idea of taking, even if you don't know what the harms are, the risk of the unknowns involved in a vaccination would argue strongly against it.
The rationalization that has been presented is that although mothers in hospitals are tested for hepatitis B when they arrive to give birth, and therefore if a mother has hepatitis B, it is almost certain to be caught.
And therefore, if there is a different decision to be made for cases where the baby is going to be in contact with a mother who has hepatitis B, possibly breastfeeding from that mother, it will be caught and you could give the vaccine in that particular case if it is in fact justified, which is not certain.
But that the idea is that enough mothers would slip through, have cryptic hepatitis B, and that by not vaccinating the entire population of babies, those few babies in that rare situation might contract a disease.
And given in this rationalization that vaccines have no downside, why not give it to them all?
Now, over in the universe that you and I live in, there has long been an active discussion about why the hell this happened.
Why this vaccine this early?
And the speculation, and that's what it is, the speculation is that there was an investment in creating this vaccine.
The target audience, which are people involved in reckless drug use and sexual behavior, actually weren't all that likely to show up and get the shot.
And so it was a loser and that therefore some value was recovered by deciding to inflict it on all babies in an indefensible way.
There's also the question, the speculation, that there is something to the idea.
If you imagine especially a first-time mother or set of parents arriving nervous, they're about to bring a child into the world.
They don't know what this means.
They have all of these authorities who are derived straight from the same central casting that gave us the Milgram experiment.
People in white lab coats who have authoritative things to say and fancy titles and all of that.
And that it is very difficult for those parents to reject something that they are told may be a vital component of their child's health.
So by getting children vaccinated on day one, parents are already outside of the category of anti-vax, this child is unvaccinated, right?
If you can talk them into it on the first day, then the point is maybe that just, you know, eases the stage for all the rest.
substance of the entire CDC childhood immunization schedule.
But it is also true, is it not, that since the Reagan-era regulation, I think, that provides immunity to vaccine providers for all vaccines that are on the childhood immunization schedule,
it is of paramount importance for the pharmaceutical companies to keep vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule because that continues then to provide them immunity from lawsuits for adults who might be getting the vaccine.
So this vaccine, which was presumably designed for adults, because once again, children don't tend to be engaging in reckless sexual and drug behavior, keeping it on the childhood vaccine schedule continues to provide immunity from harm even in the adult recipients.
Immunity from liability for harm.
Yes.
Yes.
So we will come back to that because I think it actually may be related to one of the mysterious things about the decision.
And the decision, I will say, so what they have done is they have said it should not be recommended any earlier than two months.
Later, they leave open that possibility.
It's not that they're saying we recommend it at two months.
And in fact, they spend a lot of ink saying that what they do recommend is a consultation with doctors that includes a discussion of vaccine risks.
That's an amazing triumph.
An individual decision is a far cry from it's just on the schedule and you're supposed to do this.
Right.
And so you can imagine that if this if the medical community takes this as it should as an invitation to have a proper discussion on whether or not to vaccinate in each and every case, if it takes it in this one case and a doctor sits down with a set of parents and says, would you like to give your child the Hep B vaccine?
And the parents say, well, is it a good idea?
The doctor will then, if they do it right, say, well, you don't appear to have hepatitis B. Is there anyone in your family that does?
You know, and if there's not.
Is the child at risk of abuse?
Right.
Right.
You're not an IV drug user.
You're married.
The chances this child is going to encounter hepatitis B in any context where they could catch it is vanishingly small.
And what are the risks?
Well, that's a question.
Even if you don't know exactly what might happen, and we will get to some of the things that might happen.
But the point is, once the parents are given just, frankly, the information that is the substance of informed consent, the answer is, well, hell no.
Why would I give that to my child?
It makes no sense, except in very rare cases where there's an argument for it based on the contact that the child is going to have with somebody who is infected.
But I would point out, let us listen to Retzif Levy, who is on ACIP.
And Retsef is an MIT data analyst with a specialty surrounding health issues, health and medicine.
So let's hear his comment on the risks of hepatitis B for children.
If you're a baby that was born to a mother that was tested negative to Hep B, you need to realize as a parent that your risk of infection throughout your early stage of life and probably throughout most of your childhood is extremely low To the extent that it's even hard to quantify how low it is.
It's probably one in several millions.
And that means that as a parent, we encourage you, in consultation with your physician, to think very carefully, do you want to expose your child, your baby, to an intervention that could have some potential harms when the risk is so low?
And mind you, that we are talking about a very, very young baby in the first few months of their life where they are not fully developed and where we don't know the exact potential impact of exposure to vaccines, but we do know that their immune system is not fully developed, their metabolism is not fully developed, their brain is not fully developed, and we know that all of these systems are interacting with each other.
Okay, so for a child who is not in contact, the risks are vanishingly low and the risks of the vaccines may not be.
I will also say in the ASIP recommendation is also a paragraph in which they discuss serology testing to see whether or not antibodies are present, which might also have an implication as to whether or not the vaccine is needed.
I think that's the interpretation there.
In the child or in the mother?
Well, that's an interesting question.
I assume it's in the child, a mother.
It would be very surprising if there were antibodies present to be in a child.
Yeah.
Yeah, it would be.
Okay, so an unvaccinated child.
Let's talk about what the mysterious downside that you may be avoiding by not giving this vaccination to your child now at two months rather than at birth.
And before you say that, when you were imagining a good doctor in a room with parents now at two months rather than at birth, at which point I believe the rest of the childhood vaccine schedule begins to kick in.
I think I did not look it up, but it's early that all the other vaccines start to get loaded in.
And there will be some, even a good doctor who is actually trying to be honest and straightforward and is not going to take a hit to his office's profits now that this isn't on the childhood vaccine schedule in the same way.
And so not getting HEP B, not having all the children in the practice get the Hep B vaccine may not mean that all the children aren't 100% compliant.
But there will still be on the parent side.
There's still a considerable population of people who simply continue to trust that if it's available, it's good for you.
It's a form of trusting the authorities, of trusting the experts, and of figuring that if it's on the market, it's gone through all the necessary and valuable vetting.
And why would I, how irresponsible would it be for me as a parent to not give my child everything that is available that has been recommended?
And I don't, like, this is a different question for sure, but I do think that this is part of what we all need to be thinking about.
You know, how do we get through get through that sort of wall that many people engage in with regard to, like, I'm not an expert.
I don't know.
I'm concerned about the health of my beautiful baby.
How, you know, I'm not, people will, some people will say, I am not capable of making an informed decision.
Therefore, I don't feel that I should have the authority.
Therefore, if the doctor, even a good doctor, if in any way he's tilting towards just, you know, throw the whole every vaccine that's available to children, give your child all of them.
Many parents will go that way because it feels like the decision that they can live with if something bad happens.
Yes.
It involves an unwarranted bias in the direction of authority, which is a bias against nature.
That's the key thing here.
And a bias against autonomy and self-sufficiency in the ability of individuals, including especially in this case, parents, to actually be informed enough to make decisions that go against what the authorities may have decided.
Well, I will say, I think there are two concepts that need to be circulated amongst people who have to make health decisions, which is to say all of us.
But in this case, especially parents who are deciding on vaccines, there are two upgrades to the way they view things that are crucial in order to even have the discussion, in order for informed consent to have any meaning whatsoever.
One of them is the assumption of harmlessness.
The assumption of harmlessness is unwarranted on multiple grounds.
For one thing, why do these products have immunity from liability?
It's specifically because they're not harmless.
Why is there a special court and a special fund to pay parents of children injured by vaccines if they are truly just simply safe?
The answer is they aren't.
So you should throw out the assumption that these things have no downside because it's garbage.
Logically, it can't be true, and it isn't true empirically.
In fact, the vaccine manufacturers themselves made the argument that they couldn't make safe vaccines, and that's why they needed the liability immunity.
Basically threatening the government.
We're going to get out of the vaccine game entirely unless you provide us immunity from liability.
Right.
So you've got the first concept is vaccines are not safe.
There may be cases in which they are safe enough and the disease they reduce the likelihood of is sufficiently dangerous and their ability to prevent you from getting it is sufficiently good.
That's arguably true in the case of some vaccines.
And when it is, it may be justified, but it's not a zero risk ever.
Right.
Risk analysis is not binary.
Right.
So no assumption of safety.
That's been a lie from the get-go.
The other thing that people need to understand is risk stratification.
And in this case, you couldn't have clearer risk stratification.
The fact is, as you heard Retza Flevi say, a child who does not have a mother with hepatitis B has a vanishingly low risk of catching this disease in childhood, just by the nature of the disease.
So the point is, if you're thinking about, well, if the vaccine is safe, why wouldn't I give them this immunity just on the one in a million chance that they would get it?
Well, the answer is it isn't safe.
And so look at your child.
Is your child going to be exposed in such a way that they might actually contract this disease so that you will take an unknown risk?
No.
Risk stratification says if the vaccine is justified in children at all, then it's justified in children that have a high risk.
And you can get the best of both worlds by vaccinating those at high risk who will take some risk of downsides, but they are also hedging out the risk of a very serious disease.
And for everybody else, the answer is, well, no, that's an easy one.
My risk of the disease isn't sufficient to justify the risk of the shot, period, the end.
And that's the way a lot of these things work.
Also, this is, why am I blanking on the name of the cervical cancer, HPV, human papillomavirus vaccine?
There's a risk stratification there that's completely obvious as well, because boys don't have a risk from this virus, even though they do carry it.
And so at some level, if you're the parent of a boy, as much as in some, you know, if the shot really had no risk whatsoever, then, you know, there's an argument to be made for, you know, if it really had no risk, which is impossible, then vaccinating your child to reduce the spread of this virus makes sense.
But exposing your child who has no risk from the virus itself to the vaccine doesn't make sense.
There's a risk stratification there that says for boys, it's not worth it.
Yeah, it's an abuse of population level analysis.
And we saw it in COVID.
You need to vaccinate your children in order to protect grandma, which doesn't make sense on its face, but is also, again, an abuse of, you know, individuals and populations are different kinds of entities and individuals make decisions.
Populations don't.
But we live in a world in which regulatory agencies try to impose decisions on entire populations by diktat, by authority, by fear, right?
And it is true that herd immunity is a thing.
And it is also true that individuals should not, cannot have their individual rights to make decisions for themselves and for their children taken away by individuals who are speaking as if behalf on an entire population.
Yep.
Yeah.
Well, what they really do is instead of looking at a population as populations actually are, they use the excuse of a population to homogenize the benefit across people where the benefit doesn't exist, such as homogenize the benefit to people who are at high risk and homogenize the risk.
They're taking different subsets of the population when they're talking about the benefits and when they're talking about the risks.
And guess what?
That's cheating.
That's statistical cheating.
That's cheating in every regard.
But this is part of how all they have to do is dress up in their lab coats and show their shiny degrees and people listen.
Yep.
And as was the case with the COVID so-called vaccines, you had the exact inverse profile of the risk from the vaccines and the risk of the disease.
Yes.
Suggesting a extremely robust argument for risk stratifying.
And if you were going to vaccinate anybody, you would vaccinate only the very vulnerable and you would leave children out of it because healthy children weren't vulnerable at all.
Just, I mean, you just said it, and we talked about it a lot at the time, actually.
This was one of the clearest things that actually, you know, we could say that and not get demonetized because no one was denying that.
Oddly, COVID is a much bigger risk for very old people than it is for very young people.
And usually you see risk stratification for respiratory viruses in the very old and the very young.
And in this case, you don't have that.
It's not a U-shaped risk curve.
And the risk from the vaccines was much higher in the very young than in the very old.
And so it just we were handed an actually remarkably clean situation, even if you put aside all of the facts about wasn't safe, you know, wasn't effective, all of that.
Still, you could look at this and say, okay, but never for the for the young people, and especially not for the young men who were, for reasons that have still not, I think, been fully elucidated, at particular risk from harms from the mRNA shots.
Yep.
And if you think about those comments from Dr. Levy, his point is here you have a, you know, not only do you have the, you have the vulnerability of the children is at its maximum when they're just born because of all of these systems that are still forming.
And in fact, the rate of development is so high in that first year of life that the difference between, you know, one day and two months is huge in terms of the development of things like blood-brain barrier, et cetera.
Okay, so let's talk about what the downside of this shot is likely to be and why no rational person whose child is unlikely to encounter hepatitis B in any way that they could contract it should reject this shot.
Do you want to put up the ChatGPT report on sudden infant death syndrome?
Okay, so I asked the fancy version of ChatGPT about when sudden infant death syndrome happens.
And it reports.
So this is just straight from ChatGPT.
You haven't vetted any of its answers here?
Separately?
It provides sources.
I believe this is consistent with several other analyses, and it doesn't report the number I was asking for exactly.
I mean, just to be clear, so I have not used this much.
I have used ChatGPT some, never with an account, always not logged in.
But I have found that even when it shows sources, if you click through on those sources, some amount of the time, it simply reports something that's false.
And this is, of course, true of humans as well.
You often find when you're going through a scientific paper, oh, this person reports that this other paper reports this.
And you go back to the papers like they didn't.
They just made that up.
So ChatGPT is no different fundamentally.
But you always have to just take it with a grain of salt.
This with a grain of salt at some level.
Okay.
In 2022, there were about 1,529 deaths from SIDS in the U.S. among infants younger than one year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 90% of SIDS deaths occur before six months of age.
About 72% of SIDS deaths occur in the first four months of life.
Okay.
Now, this is important.
It is not 100% clear what causes SIDS.
Sorry.
What it actually says is about 72% of SIDS deaths occur between months one to four, which does not sound like birth to four.
And it may just be that it's said it the wrong way, but the point, though, is there is a lot of sudden infant death in the very first stages of life.
The idea of a medical intervention that has components which may be influencing the development of these normal systems in the body in that period is absurd when there is no benefit, no plausible benefit to be gained because the child is not in contact with hepatitis B and all mothers are tested at the hospital when they come to give birth.
So am I saying sudden infant death syndrome is caused by this shot?
No, but given that this is the only shot given on birth, there is at least that potential.
And the reason to face that risk is essentially nil for almost all children.
Okay, that's all we need from there.
So the question remains, though.
Why did they leave?
Why did they say that the discussion about having this shot should happen no earlier than two months of age?
There's something strange about two months of age, because in some ways, their argument is nonsense in the first place, given that all mothers are tested.
So the chances of somebody slipping through are tiny.
And therefore, you could target this to those rare cases where there was some argument in favor of it.
But at two months, to the extent that anybody has slipped through the cracks, the child has already now been exposed to that mother.
So what is the new benefit?
Why wouldn't you wait years given how long it takes for this child to have any substantial risk from the outside world?
And I think this goes to the, I don't know.
Obviously, this was a negotiated settlement.
You know, if you think about the question of whether or not pharma decided to inflict Hep B vaccines on neonates for its own pharma reasons, having nothing to do with the well-being of children or public health or anything like that, the idea that this, maybe the shot should simply have been scrapped, but that was apparently not going to happen.
Yes.
Right.
You could just take it off the schedule entirely.
And then in those cases where some test comes back positive, the mother has Hep B, then you could have a discussion.
It's not recommended for children generally.
It's a particular case.
However, as you point out, immunity from liability for the adult shots kicks in when the shot is on the childhood schedule.
And it does not kick in for shots that are only, that are not on the childhood vaccine schedule.
That is my understanding.
So what that means is even if the net effect of the victory in ASIP here, where they have effectively taken the shot away from the first day recommendation and then said, and at the point you get around to a place where it's now something we recommend, what we're really recommending is a discussion about whether or not the risk is there.
even if the shot effectively doesn't get injected into any children because it doesn't make sense for almost any of them, the immunity from liability for the adult shot remains, which is, of course, something that pharma would like to preserve because of course they're, you know, money-grabbing bastards and immunizing themselves from liability as a way to maintain their high profit margins.
It's just business.
Yeah, it's only business to them.
No, but I think that people who say things like that are easily labeled as conspiracy theorists.
How could they not have our best interest at heart?
Whereas, and you've said this many times before, but why don't we instead think about the pharmaceutical industry like we do all the other industries and say they're in it to make a profit.
They're in it to make a living.
And we want to think that individuals in industries, doctors, teachers, journalists, go into those industries because they have a fundamental interest in helping and healing people, in educating young people, in revealing truth where truth is hiding, in the case of doctors, teachers, journalists.
And we can hope that that is true.
But that doesn't mean that the industries themselves or the businesses that are created around them that are inherently about making a profit care about those bottom lines.
What they care about is whether or not they are profitable.
Yes.
And in fact, there's nothing conspiratorial about that.
Well, not only is it not conspiratorial, but somehow we in the public have been induced into some childlike fantasy about these things.
The fact is, not only is it perfectly valid to imagine that these companies are pursuing profits by any means that they can get them, that's their fiduciary responsibility.
They have a legal responsibility to corrupt the government, to betray the public health, whatever it is.
So they're going to take every advantage they can because that's their nature.
It's like a tiger is going to eat meat.
So we, you know, in the public and doctors who do not have a fiduciary responsibility, they have a responsibility to their patients encoded in an actual oath.
Right.
Right.
To their patients and to their discipline, career.
To their field.
Their field.
Yes.
Right.
So in any case, we need to recognize pharma is not our friend.
The fact that they are nominally in the business of health does not mean that that's their objective.
Their objective is legally required to be profits, and that can mean pretending that they are enhancing your health while they're actually putting you at risk.
How is it that it's so easy for almost everyone, at least in the United States, to understand that health insurance companies aren't your friend?
But it's almost impossible for so many people to understand that pharmaceutical companies aren't your friend.
They are both nominally, as you just said, in the business of health, health care related to health care.
But the giant corporations that are gobbling up hospitals and the health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies are all nominally engaged in the health field, but that doesn't mean that what they're trying to do is make people healthy.
Well, I wonder if it's not the mythology.
I think lots of people imagine, you know, what goes on if you were to, you know, peer into the, you know, the Pfizer building, you know, on an average workday, what would you see?
And you'd see, you know, scientists, you know, leaning over their scopes and looking at their screens and analyzing the data and trying to see, oh, this molecule has promise in improving the health.
We've seen it here in this, you know, blah, And, you know, so the point is there's a part of us that sees it as an extension of the noble scientific endeavor, not a perversion of it.
A couple things.
I think people also see it as an extension, not just of the noble scientific endeavors you just said, but also of the sort of beautiful, somewhat witchy tradition of herbalism, of apothecaries, of actually mixing drugs from scratch to suit the particular conditions of the patient.
And herbalists do not have this, have the reputation for being money-grubbing, only interested in their financial bottom-line people, just as doctors shouldn't be, right?
Because herbalists are actually interested.
It's also, you know, herbalism is also different from, say, a compounding pharmacy, because the compounding pharmacy, you can titrate.
They are titrating.
They know exactly what they are giving to you.
And when you're working with plants, the amount of active compound in any particular plant is going to vary from plant to plant, from season to season, from soil to soil.
So that is also true.
I think some people sort of overlay this wonderful image of old school herbalists onto what the Pfizer researchers are doing.
But there's also this, from our own history, in 1994, it would have been, when we were in Costa Rica doing a field course with a few graduate students, we were first year graduate students doing a field course with a few other graduate students and our professor, John Vandermeer, who took us to visit, I don't remember exactly what the lab was,
but we met a number of locals of Chicos who have been trained as what were called parataxonomists.
This is INBIO.
INBIO, yes, Institut de Biodiversidad, INBIO.
And these paratoxonomists were trained to recognize diversity and mostly plants, I think they were looking at.
And they were bringing them back.
And then at NBIO, they were cataloging the plants.
But then, you know, here's where it gets more modern sounding.
It was Merck that was funding, not entirely, I think, but largely funding NBO.
And it was Merck who was taking basically all of the things that were collected by the parataxonomists that seemed at all potentially useful back to the United States, where then the researchers in labs in the United States would try to find bioactive compounds that might be relevant to a future drug.
Okay.
If you think about the gap, so you've got the ancient herbalist tradition.
What's true in the ancient herbalist tradition?
Well, the compounds themselves are not proprietary, or maybe the mixture of them is.
But the point is the plants you're using are what they are, and they may or may not have the effects you say they do.
But the point is, you don't have the perverse incentives that you have where you're patenting a drug that you then have an incentive to manufacture a use case for, yada, yada, yada.
So the point is Merck is perverting the fact.
Maybe we should talk about, we've talked about this before, but why there are so many medicines in nature.
So you got a lot of plants.
Also applies to things like fungi, the occasional animal, though plants and fungi are much better at crazy chemistry of the sort that produces these sorts of compounds.
In part because animals tend to move, and so animals tend to protect themselves by scurrying away from danger.
And plants and fungus aren't so good at the moving thing, and so they tend to defend themselves not by motility means, by mobility, instead with either physical defenses like spines or very much more often chemical defenses.
So plants and fungi are much better at chemical defenses than are animals.
Right.
And so they produce what are called secondary compounds.
Secondary compound is a compound that has no utility inside the plant or fungus itself, but is there to poison animals that attempt to consume it.
So why does a world full of poisonous plants produce a lot of medicine?
And the answer is, well, what is a poison?
A poison is something that causes the body to dysregulate in some way.
And so plants, let's stick with plants for the moment, plants will have found, through a normal process of natural selection, compounds that cause their herbivores to fail.
How do you make them fail?
Well, you take some system that they've got that regulates itself and you unregulate it by either turning it up or turning it down, which means that out there in the forest, there are compounds to intervene in every system and amplify it or tamp it down.
And so if you're sick because one of your systems is off, there's probably a compound out there that can cause it to go in the other direction if properly titrated.
Properly titrated.
Right.
So things that would cause great harm to animal herbivores that are eating the plant that doesn't want to get eaten in the amounts the plant is usually producing it could be used to good and healthful effect in smaller amounts in some circumstances for humans and indeed other animals who might be sick with a particular ailment.
And many of the famous drugs that we have, you can see this effect.
So for example, we have taxol and digitalis.
Taxol comes from U, the plant U, Y-E-W.
Is that how it's spelled?
Yeah.
And digitalis comes from foxglove.
These are both famous heart drugs.
Well, these are also plants that deer don't eat.
Why?
Because it dysregulates their heart.
So anyway, we get these things.
And then there are some modifications of this where, you know, fungi are oftentimes not creating these secondary compounds to dissuade herbivores, but actually to fight each other, right?
So chemicals.
Fungal wars.
Yeah, you've got fungal warfare.
And so we get, you know, things like penicillin from fungi that are engaged in battle.
But anyway, the point being, there's a lot of medicine to be found out there.
But once you introduce the structure that involves patenting compounds, you get what I call the game of pharma, where the idea is you're going to own a compound.
You're going to come up with some excuse to give it to people based on some plausible story about it improving their health.
And then pharma will make sure that there are studies that say it works and not only that it works, but it works better than any competing drug.
They will make the other drugs look more feeble than they actually are, make their own drug look safer than it is, make the other drug look more dangerous than it is.
You know, if you do it all right, you end up as the standard of care.
Now doctors are in fear of being sued if they do anything but prescribe that drug, even if they privately suspect that something else would be better.
And they know that they're protected as long as they go with the standard of care.
So anyway, the game of pharma unfolds, and it is inherently unholy and not public spirited.
And it's not about producing better health.
It's about producing profits.
And producing better health is one way to do that, but it's hard to make health better.
So there's an awful lot of pharma that is smoke and mirrors.
And anyway, this appears to be a case like that.
So the ACIP decision is an utterly spectacular triumph.
Yes.
There are few cases as galling as the mass injection of hepatitis vaccine into children on their first day of life.
It's hard to find a more grotesque abuse of medicine than that one.
So the idea that the Trump administration and the folks that it has brought in to the public health apparatus, you know, Robert Malone, Jay Bhattacharya, Vinay Prasad, Marty Marquet, all of these people are Bobby Kennedy.
All of these people have actually created substantial movement that's going to save lots of lives.
That is a spectacular win.
In so doing, they are forced to negotiate with the swamp.
Compromise after compromise.
Yeah, which is horrifying, right?
These people know they're very smart people.
They know the score.
They know, for example, the COVID vaccines should have been pulled off the market, that the mRNA platform is dangerous.
And yet, you know, we're having to go incrementally.
They're having to get it, you know, the recommendation removed for pregnant women and children.
But anyway, so it's progress and it's spectacular progress.
The fact that it can't just simply do all of the things that should obviously have been done yesterday is maddening.
I will say we have gotten into a battle in the medical freedom movement where lots of people, understandably, are impatient.
Yeah, I'm watching the clock.
Like there's not a lot of time.
And so, you know, and it's not a simple question.
Obviously, there's lots of dangerous stuff left on the market for no good reason.
And negotiating our way to a less toxic childhood vaccine schedule is an absurdity.
We should simply start with a fresh sheet of paper and say, are any of these shots net beneficial?
Isn't that the obvious question?
And if any of them are net beneficial, what happens when you give more than one?
What is the combinatorics of the effects of these shots?
So, you know, it's simultaneously the most spectacular progress we've seen in decades in terms of the rationality of these agencies and their recommendations.
On the other hand, there is so much distance left to cover that it's frustrating.
But I was going to say about the medical freedom movement, the battle has unfolded between those who have become impatient with our friends who have gone into these roles because they're not doing more.
Of course, those people on the outside don't know what it's like to negotiate with the swamp.
And certainly what we don't want is no progress on the basis that we will, you know, it's a the perfect being the enemy of the good.
But wow, is there a lot of a lot of distance left to cover?
There really is.
And, you know, the swamp, swamp drags its feet.
It does.
Now, we have a tweet from Bobby Kennedy, which rebroadcasts something from President Trump.
Do you have that we could put it up and so Secretary Kennedy says, thank you, Mr. President.
We're on it.
What he's responding to is President Trump's post, which says today the CDC vaccine committee made a very good decision to end their hepatitis B vaccine recommendation for babies, the vast majority of whom are at no risk of hepatitis B, a disease that is mostly transmitted sexually and through dirty needles.
The American childhood vaccine schedule long required 72 jabs for perfectly healthy babies, far more than any other country in the world and far more than is necessary.
In fact, it is ridiculous.
Many parents and scientists have been questioning the efficacy of this schedule, as have I.
That is why I have just signed a presidential memorandum directing the Department of Health and Human Services to fast-track a comprehensive evaluation of the vaccine schedules from other countries around the world and better align the U.S. vaccine schedule so it is finely rooted in the gold standard of science and common sense.
I'm fully confident Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the CDC will get this done quickly and correctly for our nation's children.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, Maha.
So brilliantly done.
Obviously done and brilliantly done.
The presidential memorandum directs HHS to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of vaccine schedules from other countries around the world.
What is the insane pushback on the I don't question authority pseudo-left going to say to that?
What could the argument possibly be?
That are we the healthiest country in the world?
Are we doing so much better at dealing with things that vaccines are supposedly preventing that we shouldn't possibly compare ourselves to what any other country is doing, really?
Not Nigeria and also not the Netherlands?
Like, what is the insane, terrified response going to be to this?
Well, the rest of the world is obviously anti-vax.
Even all the Western European countries.
Right.
the ones that recommend not as many vaccines as we do because they're not really fully on board with the beauty and safety and efficacy of all vaccines at all times.
So the rest of the world is good.
All is better.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, and I think this has been one of the very successful initiatives of the Maha movement is pointing out that it's not, you know, that we are trying to curtail what's available to you.
It's that if you lived anywhere else, you would find, you know, many of these food additives aren't there in the first place.
There's a reason that, you know, other people who have plenty of food additives in their food don't have a bunch of the ones that we have.
Likewise, there are a whole lot of vaccine doses that they don't think are justified.
And the real question is, look, in any of those cases, you should just put the arguments in contact with each other.
If they've decided that some dose that you're administering isn't justified, what's different?
Yeah.
Right?
Let's ask the Japanese.
Right, exactly.
For instance.
Exactly.
At the moment, I'm a little concerned about the Japanese in light of their enthusiasm for crazy things like self-replicating mRNA.
Oh, I didn't, I wasn't aware of that.
Oh, yes.
It's a fiasco.
You know, again, the punchline there is the mRNA platforms are inherently dangerous.
Making them self-replicating makes the problem worse, not better.
So in any case, there's a corruption problem everywhere.
But at the very least, a rational discussion based on the comparison of our childhood vaccine schedule to everyone else's is a huge step in the right direction in its own right.
Yes.
So before we talk about Tom Stoppard, which I am excited to do, just one other piece of research that came out this week or last week that is sort of related to what we were just talking about with regard to,
you know, there has been much discussion both within sort of the health freedom movement and also on the other side, which I guess is what the health imprisonment movement, which is, you know, the mainstream allopathic health insurance big pharma movement, discussion about things like food additives and food dyes and such.
But one thing that I haven't heard discussed is the effect of tattoos.
So can you, yeah, you can't see my screen.
So this paper came out, and now of course it's way too big.
Here we go.
In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in an article titled, Tattoo Ink Induces Inflammation in the Draining Lymph Node and Alters the Immune Response to Vaccination.
So I don't want to spend a lot of time on this.
I'm just going to read their little significance bar, not even the abstract, but their significance bar on the right here.
But before I do, I'll say this is work done in mice.
So they haven't done the work in humans, but they cite in their introduction all sorts of previous work that has been done that has already established that tattoo ink stays in the body, is responded to by lymph nodes, and is tattoo inks are not even as regulated as food dyes and other food additives.
The FDA has nothing to say, apparently, about tattoo inks.
So the significance, again, this is all I'll really share from the study directly.
In this study, we characterize the immune responses to the tattoo ink accumulating in the lymph nodes.
This is very relevant as tattoo ink commonly reaches and persists in this organ in most tattooed subjects often lifelong.
Again, that is a claim from previous research that is long established.
We, the authors of the current study, have observed that ink is retained within phagocytic cells, which undergo cell death and induce a prominent and long-term inflammatory response with elevated levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines in lymph nodes up to two months after tattooing.
Furthermore, we observed that tattoo ink at the vaccine injection site modulated immune responses in a vaccine-specific manner, with a reduced response to the COVID-19 vaccine and an enhanced response to the UV-inactivated influenza vaccine, reflecting differences in the mechanisms of action between these vaccine classes.
They have no explanation for that, for what they see as vaccine injection site modulated immune responses in a vaccine-specific manner.
But they find it.
They see this in mice, and they see the lymph nodes being active for months unto years after tattooing, which I just wanted to bring this to our attention as yet another thing that has become commonplace, that is accepted among many Americans as a normal thing that many young people mostly do.
It was becoming very popular when we were young.
I remember neither of us is tattooed, and I remember noting that it had become something that was almost an expectation after some nights out and in some sort of party contexts and thinking at the time, how could you be so certain that what you think you want displayed on your body today is what you will want in 10, 20, 50 years.
How can you be so certain that it will look the same, which it won't?
And also thinking at the time as a young person, how could that possibly be safe?
Yeah.
How could that possibly be safe?
No, it really, it's an absurdity that it would be.
It's interesting.
I wonder if Maha shouldn't take it up.
In other words.
I don't know that Maha needs more enemies.
I think it could use a breather where it gets to, you know, I can't imagine the tattoo industry is.
No, but there are a lot of people.
And I think basically from Gen X through, I mean, I think there's a decline now, and that's just my sense of things.
I haven't seen any numbers, but I feel like Gen X and millennials are heavily tattooed generations.
And I, you know, just like people who had gotten the COVID jabs and don't think that they have any ill effects are very unwilling to look at the reality that they were neither safe nor effective because they did it.
And especially if they got their kids jabbed, they're just unwilling to look at it because what are they going to do now?
And so I think the same the same thing will be some of what the response will be among, you know, the million, many millions of people who are tatted.
Still, though, I think the point is America is unhealthy.
Yes.
It's unhealthy for a substantial number of different kinds of reasons.
Here's one.
You know, likewise, vaping, right?
Here's another one.
Food additives, you know, including seed oils.
So the point is, I think the beauty of Maha is that it is, it has been politicized by others, but it is apolitical, right?
The whole point is this is about healthy people.
And that should be something we all favor.
And that means that whatever it is that's making them unhealthy, whether it's sedentary lifestyles or bulbs that have unhealthy spectra of light.
Light bulbs.
Yes.
No, not crocus.
What?
You know, like camus?
Death camus.
Yeah.
Don't eat.
So anyway, I think my feeling is it's a question of return on investment.
And obviously, Maha should prioritize things in order of the bang for the buck.
And I don't know how big a contributor tattoos are to ill health in Americans.
Maybe it's not high enough to justify it being a priority.
But given the number of tattoos and it's at least, here's where the value is.
It's at least something that everybody should be aware of in deciding whether or not to get a tattoo.
Exactly.
And I guess I'd like to just finish this segment by offering an apology to the frogs that I tattooed in Madagascar in my final field season, having tried many ways to mark them so that I could tell individuals apart and thus decipher what it was they were doing and how they were competing and holding territories and caring for their children and all the things that most frogs do not do.
But my frogs, Mantella Levagata, in Madagascar did.
So it was in my final field season that I arrived at the route that best suited my needs and may not have best suited the needs of the frogs, which was that I tattooed them in unique alphanumeric identifiers on their backs.
Frogs are not humans, you may have noticed.
One of the many ways that they differ from humans is that to our three layers of skin, they only have two.
So I had to be more careful.
And they also, frogs have an ability that is at least better known and better established than anything that humans can do to eject things from their bodies.
And so they did actually lose their tattoos.
They de-inked themselves over the course of a field season.
So I hope that that means that those frogs are long since dead, but that I did not shorten their lives with the inks that I was using and a tattoo gun purchased from some nice bikers who were in the business of tattooing the toes of penguins at SeaWorld, if memory serves.
Really?
Yes.
The toes of penguins at SeaWorld.
Naturally.
Or unnaturally.
Yeah, but that's, you know, why else would there be a portable tattoo gun that I was able to take to Madagascar?
Because when you go to SeaWorld, you don't take the penguins to a tattoo parlor.
You take the tattoo gun to SeaWorld.
Yeah, that's an interesting image bringing to the tattoo parlor.
Yes.
And that, again, it was not because the penguins wanted to, you know, display their love for mom.
It was so as to identify them individually.
Yes.
This is the story I was told, again, by the dudes on the phone where I could hear the Harleys rubbing in the background from which I procured my tattoo gun.
Now, in the case of your frogs, if they were going to display their love for a parent, it's a little hard to say which one it would be.
It could be both.
Yeah.
I mean, both mom and dad, they do different jobs, as is always the case.
But both seem necessary to the success of the beautiful little frog eggs that become beautiful little frog tadpoles and then metamorphose into, frankly, the only beautiful thing of the lot, the frogs themselves, because the eggs and the tadpoles aren't really beautiful.
No, no.
There's never been a beautiful tadpol.
No, but the frogs, the frogs are beautiful.
They are.
Okay.
Let's talk about Tom Stoppard.
All right.
So Tom Stoppard died also this week or last.
He was born in 1937.
So he was old.
But I think until he died, I thought of him as the greatest living playwright.
And I was lucky to be introduced in high school to 20th century theater.
I had fantastic literature and film classes and great books, curriculum, and also film, and specifically to theater of the absurd.
I read Samuel Beckett and Eugene Inesco and Jean Genet and also some of the other playwrights that aren't considered sort of core theater of the absurd, but were doing similar things around revealing the intemperance of language, the ridiculousness of communication, the lack of ability to know exactly where you were and what you were doing.
And this includes Tom Stoppard.
So I actually started college as a literature major.
And I remember at the time, I didn't remain a literature major for very long because I was very frustrated by how I just wanted the book lists and to go and read and interpret.
And I did not like all the conversations happening in these endless seminars.
And my sense was science and literature both tell stories, but with science, we have methods by which to discern whether or not the stories that we tell are true.
And all of the endless discussion about the stories over in fiction land, in explicitly narrative literature land, just seemed like we were spinning in circles.
But one of the big theoretical questions at the time in the late 80s in the study of literature was, should you take the piece of work, the art, entirely on its own merits and know nothing about the creator?
Or should you invest time and knowledge in coming to know who the creator was, what they intended, what their life was like, and thus inform your appreciation of or lack of appreciation of a piece of art with the knowledge of the creator themselves.
And I tended to the first.
Art stands on its own.
Art stands on its own.
I didn't object to knowing about the creators, but I didn't think it should not be necessary.
And so I realized today when I was thinking about Stoppard, and I'm going to read a little bit from a couple of his plays, and how I wrote, in fact, as a young person.
And yet I didn't know anything.
And so I'm going to share a couple of biographical notes that I didn't know until today, even though Stoppard has been an important figure for both of us for a long time.
He was born Thomas Strassler in Zlin.
I apologize if I'm butchering any of those words, which was then part of Czechoslovakia to a Jewish family.
And his family fled the Nazis.
I did not know this.
They went first to Singapore, then to India, and then to Great Britain, where he spent most of his childhood.
He did not go to university.
He began working as a journalist at 17.
Could be why he was so smart.
Yeah.
And his first big breakthrough was in 1966.
So again, born in 1937.
So he was still in his 20s.
He was 28 or 29 at that point, with the premiere of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
So Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is Stoppard having a bit of existential fun with Shakespeare.
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are non-player characters from Hamlet.
So Shakespeare creates, he needs a traitor or someone that Hamlet believes to be a traitor that Hamlet can then send on an ill-fated mission in which the traitor is going to be killed.
But Shakespeare needs the traitor to be able to have conversations.
And he already has a lot of his main characters giving soliloquies to the audience, to the world.
But you don't do that with these minor characters, right?
So instead of one traitor, he creates two.
He creates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
And they're basically indistinguishable from one another in Hamlet.
And they are almost indistinguishable from one another in Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as well.
Although when I was rereading part of it last night, I realized that there are actually distinctions that I had never quite gotten to before.
But so these minor characters, these NPCs from Hamlet.
Plot devices.
These plot devices, yeah.
Stoppard picks up and makes as the titular figures, the main characters in Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
And the play begins with this series of endless coin flips in which over and over and over again, in fact more than 90 times, we see the characters flipping a coin and it always comes up heads.
And so there's a discussion of the nature of probability, of how improbable this must be, of whether or not that means that they are not living in the universe that they think they are living in, of whether or not, in fact, they might be dead.
And in fact, we enjoyed this bit so much that we had two of our dearest friends who were in our wedding read and enact that opening coin flip sequence at our wedding as part of our wedding, which I think baffled pretty much everyone.
Pretty much everyone.
But Diane and John, our friends who read the parts of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, were awesome, and I don't think they were baffled.
No.
No.
I got it.
So this, just a couple of lines from Rosencrantz and Gildenstern and Dead.
I thought about reading the whole coin flip sequence, but I think I would have had to prepare you and have us read it together.
Anyway.
Oh, before I read this, so I mentioned at the top of the hour, and regular viewers will recognize that I was away for a while and I was very, very sick.
And I wrote a piece for Natural Selections about it and about actually feeling my ghost, as it were, my essence slipping away.
And then I was imagining myself.
I could not help but be seeing myself in this rowboat without oars in a horizonless landscape that I might never leave.
It was quite terrifying.
And I realized when I went back to Stopper this week that I had actually just written in the book that I am writing about this very bit from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead in which they are discovering that they are on a boat and that they might be dead.
And so I wonder how much that informed my visualization of my own essence, soul, whatever it is leaving.
So just four lines here.
Rosencrantz, we might as well be dead.
Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern, no, no, no.
Death is not.
Death isn't.
You take my meaning.
Death is the ultimate negative, not being.
You can't not be on a boat.
Rosencrantz, I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern, no, no, no.
What you've been is not on boats.
So he's so good.
Yeah.
He's so good.
It's interesting, too, because I had not put it together before, but that exchange is two dummies from the play having the to be or not to be discussion.
but not eloquently, you know, not insightfully.
No, I mean, exactly.
It's, you know, second-order orthogonal Hamlet plus, you know, sort of theater of the absurd, plus Waiting for Godot, you know, brought together into this space of just extraordinary.
So a later play that people are not as familiar with, I mean, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Dead is by far Tom Stoppard's most famous play.
But in April of 1993, this play, Arcadia, was first produced on stage at the Royal National Theater in London.
And two years later, on February 22nd, 1995, to be precise, because I asked my mother this morning and she was, of course, able to find the exact date and place, my mother and I saw Arcadia at the Haymarket Theater in London's West End.
Rufus Sewell, who many will know as an actor today, who, for instance, he's in the diplomat playing opposite Carrie Russell, two amazing actors in that show.
But Rufus Sewell played the lead, Septimus Hodge, both when Arcadia opened in 1993 and was still playing the lead when my mother and I saw Arcadia in 1995.
My parents were living in London at the time and I always loved live theater.
And yet this production utterly blew me away.
One of the things I remember thinking at the time, as the curtain fell and a standing ovation happened, was that if I could ever hope to create something half as deep and meaningful and creative and insightful as what Stoppard did with Arcadia, then that would be a life well lived.
He is simply extraordinary, and there is, of course, no way for one person reading part of a script.
especially one person who is not an actor, especially one person who is recovering from pneumonia.
It's not going to be able to do justice to the play, but I wanted to read the first just six pages of the play to give a little taste of it, since it is less well known than Rosencrantz and Illustrated Dead.
So again, this is from Arcadia, Tom Stoppard's 1993 play.
Act 1, Scene 1.
A room on the garden front of a very large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809.
Nowadays, the house would be called a stately home.
The upstage wall is mainly tall, shapely, uncurtained windows, one or more of which work as doors.
Nothing much need be said or seen of the exterior beyond.
We come to learn that the house stands in the typical English park of the time.
Perhaps we see an indication of this, perhaps only light and air and sky.
The room looks bare despite the large table which occupies the center of it.
The table, the straight-back chairs, and the only other item of furniture, the architect's stand or reading stand, would all be collectible pieces now, but here, on an uncarpeted wood floor, they have no more pretension than a schoolroom, which is indeed the main use of this room at this time.
What elegance there is is architectural and nothing is impressive but the scale.
There is a door on each of the side walls.
These are closed, but one of the French windows is open to a bright but sunless morning.
There are two people, each busy with books and paper and pen and ink separately occupied.
The pupil, and this is a match for what we are seeing on the screen right now, the pupil is Thomasina Coverley, aged 13.
The tutor is Septimus Hodge, aged 22, and in this image from the original production, Septimus Hodge played by Rufus Sewell.
Each has an open book.
Hers is a slim mathematics primer.
His is a handsome thick quarto, brand new, a vanity production, with little tapes to tie when the book is closed.
His loose papers, etc., are kept in a stiff back portfolio, which also ties up with tapes.
Septimus has a tortoise, which is sleepy enough to serve as a paperweight.
Elsewhere on the table, there was an old-fashioned Theodolite, and also some other books stacked up.
Theodolite turns out to be some sort of like a piece of equipment used variously in, I think it was astronomy and nautical and seafaring, and I don't remember exactly.
It's got the surveying tool?
It is used in surveying, but also other things that are not surveying.
Elsewhere on the table, there is an old-fashioned Theodolite and also some other books stacked up.
Thomasina.
Septimus, what is carnal embrace?
Septimus.
Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
Is that all?
No, a shoulder of mutton, a haunch of venison well hugged, an embrace of grouse.
Caro, carnus, feminine flesh.
Thomasina, is it a sin?
Septimus, not necessarily, my lady, but when carnal embrace is sinful, it is a sin of the flesh, QED.
We had Caro in our Gallic Wars.
The Britons live on milk and meat.
Lacte et carne vivunt.
I am sorry that the seed fell on stony ground.
Thomasina, that was the sin of Onan, wasn't it, Septimus?
Yes, he was giving his brother's wife a Latin lesson, and she was hardly the wiser after it than before.
I thought you were finding a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
Thomasina, it is very difficult, Septimus.
You will have to show me how.
Septimus, if I knew how, there would be no need to ask you.
Fermat's last theorem has kept people busy for 150 years, and I hoped it would keep you busy long enough for me to read Mr. Chater's poem, in praise of love, with only the distraction of its own absurdities.
Our Mr. Chater has written the poem?
Well, he believes he has written a poem, yes.
I can see that there might be more carnality in your algebra than in Mr. Chater's Couch of Arrows.
Thomasina, oh, it was not my algebra.
I heard Jelleby telling Cook that Mrs. Chater was discovered in Colonel Embrace and the gazebo.
Septimus.
Really?
With whom did Jelleby happen to say?
What do you mean with whom?
With what?
Exactly so.
The idea is absurd.
Where did the story come from?
Mr. Noakes.
Mr. Noakes?
Papa's landscape gardener.
He was taking bearings in the garden when he saw, through his spyglass, Mrs. Chater and the gazebo in Carnal Embrace.
And do you mean to tell me that Mr. Noakes told the butler?
No, Mr. Noakes told Mr. Chater.
Jelleby was told by the groom who overheard Mr. Noakes telling Mr. Chater in the stable yard.
Septimus.
Mr. Chater being engaged in closing the stable door.
Thomasina, what do you mean, Septimus?
So thus far, the only people who know about this are Mr. Noakes, the landscape architect, the groom, the butler, the cook, and of course, Mrs. Chater's husband, the poet.
Tomasina, and Arthur, who was cleaning the silver, and the boot boy.
And now you.
Of course.
What else did he say?
Mr. Noakes?
No, not Mr. Noakes Jelleby.
You heard Jelleby telling the cook.
Tomasina.
Cook hushed him almost as soon as he started.
Jelleby did not see that I was being allowed to finish yesterday's upstairs rabbit pie before I came to my lesson.
I think you have not been candid with me, Septimus.
A gazebo is not, after all, a meat larder.
Now I lost my place.
Septimus, I never said my definition was complete.
Is Carnal Embrace kissing?
Yes.
And throwing one's arms around Mrs. Chater?
Yes.
Now, Fermat's Last Theorem.
I thought as much.
I hope you are ashamed.
I, my lady.
If you do not teach me the true meaning of things, who will?
Ah.
Yes, I am ashamed.
Carnal Embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure.
Fermat's last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y, and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never be equal to third when n is greater than two.
Ah!
Nevertheless, that is the theorem.
It is disgusting and incomprehensible.
Now, when I have grown to practice it myself, I shall never do so without thinking of you.
Septimus, thank you very much, my lady.
Was Mrs. Chater down this morning?
No.
Tell me more about sexual congress.
There is nothing more to be said about sexual congress.
Thomasina, is it the same as love?
Oh, no, it is much nicer than that.
One of the side doors leads to the music room.
It is the other side door which now opens to admit Jelleby, the butler.
I am teaching, Jelleby.
Jelleby, beg your pardon, Mr. Hodge.
Mr. Chater said it was urgent you receive his letter.
Oh, very well.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Jelleby, holding his ground.
Mr. Chater asked me to bring him your answer.
Septimus, my answer?
He opens the letter.
There is no envelope as such, but there is a cover which folded and sealed does the same service.
Septimus tosses the cover negligently aside and reads.
Well, my answer is that as is my custom and my duty to his lordship, I am gauged until a quarter to twelve in the education of his daughter.
When I am done, and if Mr. Trader is still there, I will be happy to wait upon him in, he checks the letter, the gunroom.
Jelleby, I will tell him so.
Thank you, sir.
Septimus folds the letter and places it between the pages of The Couch of Arrows.
Thomasina, what is for dinner, Jelleby?
Bold ham and cabbage- boiled ham and cabbages, my lady, and a rice pudding.
Oh, goody.
Jelleby leaves.
Septimus.
Well, so much for Mr. Noakes.
He puts himself forward as a gentleman, a philosopher of the picturesque, a visionary who can move mountains and cause lakes, but on the scheme of the garden, he is as the serpent.
Thomasina.
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round, making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas.
But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again.
Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before.
Do you think this is odd?
No.
Well, I do.
You cannot stir things apart.
No more you can.
Time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward, mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it forever.
This is known as free will or self-determination.
He picks up the tortoise and moves it a few inches as though it had strayed on top of some loose papers and admonishes it.
Sit!
Thomasina.
Septimus, do you think God is a Newtonian?
Septimus.
An Newtonian.
Almost certainly, I'm afraid.
We must ask your brother to make his first enquiry.
No, Septimus, a Newtonian.
Septimus, am I the first person to have thought of this?
No, I have not said it yet.
Septimus, if everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton's law of motion, what becomes a free will?
No!
God's will, then?
No!
Sin, no!
Very well.
Thomasina, if you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions as suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra, you could write the formula for all the future, and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist, just as if one could.
Septimus.
Yes.
Yes, as far as I know, you are the first person to have thought of this.
In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, Fermat wrote that he had discovered a wonderful proof of his theorem, but the margin being too narrow for his purpose, did not have room to write it down.
The note was found after his death, and from that day to this, Tomasina...
Oh, I see now.
The answer is perfectly obvious.
Septimus, this time you may have overreached yourself.
The door is opened somewhat violently.
Chater enters.
Mr. Chater, perhaps my message miscarried.
I will be at liberty at a quarter to twelve, if that is convenient.
Shader, is not convenient, sir.
My business will not wait.
Septimus.
Then I suppose you have Lord Croom's opinion that your business is more important than his daughter's lesson?
Chater, I do not, but if you like, I will ask his lordship to settle the point.
Septimus.
My lady, take Fermat into the music room.
There will be an extra spoonful of jam if you find his proof.
Thomasina, there is no proof, Septimus.
The thing that is perfectly obvious is that the note in the margin was a joke to make you all mad.
Thomasina leaves.
Septimus, now, sir, what is the business that cannot wait?
Shader, I think you know it, sir.
You have insulted my wife.
Septimus, insulted her?
That would deny my nature, my conduct, and the admiration in which I hold Mrs. Chater.
Shader, I have heard of your admiration, sir.
You insulted my wife in the gazebo yesterday evening.
Septimus, you are mistaken.
I made love to your wife in the gazebo.
She asked me to meet her there.
I have her note somewhere.
I dare say I could find it for you.
And if someone is putting it about that I did not turn up, by God, sir, it is a slander.
that's tom stoppard i feel like i saw it but i feel like you didn't see it with my mother no No, I didn't.
But I thought you had insisted that I see it, but I don't recall.
It's possible.
You know, we were living in an arbor, Ann Arbor, at the time, and good theater did come through.
So we may have seen it together at some point.
I haven't read all of Stoppard's work, but I have seen two of his plays and read more and am saddened by his death, but his life was truly a life well lived, and he left with us so many extraordinary creations.
Yeah, death is so different when somebody has put so much of themselves into the world and it lives on after they do.
Yeah.
Indeed.
Well, are we there?
I think we're there.
Okay, we're there.
We will be back on Thursday, actually.
Just keeping it, mixing it up for you guys.
Excuse me.
And take a look at our locals and our sponsors this week, which were CrowdHealth and Armra and Helix Mattresses.
All of which are awesome products or services.
And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love.
