A Germ of Truth: The 263rd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

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 uh chronic and infectious disease today a bit in light of uh 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.

uh early on locals a day early uh so check out locals and um without further ado we have three sponsors as always right at the top of the hour if we are reading ads uh for sponsors that make products or services here on dark horse you can be sure that we actually and truly vouch for these products or services. Take it away. I'm right on it. Now it's right set up. See? The audience at home is totally unaware.

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on a guide for those of you who don't know which is probably um the vast majority of you all but like eight uh are uh Honeyguides are birds. Honeyguides are African birds, a particular clade. And I think there are some other birds that do a similar job, but honeyguides are a clade that is to say a single evolution of... honey guiding birdness that uh that let's see are they in

uh relationships and by relationship with the people or are they um are they working with other organisms it's the people they certainly do work with people whether that evolved from a relationship with other organisms i'm embarrassed to say i don't know yeah but uh but anyway

yes they lead people to honey and then the people go you know full opposable thumb on the uh the honey store and they share the honey with the honey guides yeah it's a beautiful mutualism yeah so i wonder if uh maybe the honey guides were um trying to work with some of the old world monkeys uh the non-human older world monkeys uh where they exist before the humans came along you're like oh these humans are so much better at sharing yeah yeah or honey badger or something

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During the hearing. 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% of the COVID deaths. We only have 4.2% of the world's population. No country did as poorly as us.

And 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 worse...

who did worse globally were Samoans. We had 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 uh reduce the focus on funding on infectious disease uh 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 uh 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 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 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 really the infectious disease thing, is about external agents, microorganisms like viruses, bacteria. um fungi fungi larger like multicellular parasites fungi are as well um but like worms yeah but even even things like amoeba plasmodia plasmodium which is the um 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 uh antibacterials antibiotics including any you know any of those and hygiene You know, if you keep clean, you're not going to, the story goes, you're not going to be at risk of encountering an intact...

pathogen 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 um you know 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 versions. 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 fruit preservation. methods like preserving through either hot water bath canning or pressure canning kills off.

It 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 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 spoil it.

But anyway, it's... And then having both a human culture and a 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 uh 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. 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. So anyway, disrupting ecology is a key to remaining.

just helping ecology and you know and then the case just since since we've gone down this this path and i don't want to pull us back and simplify again but um when you're talking about food uh you know milk in In non-human nature, milk doesn't exist outside of a body at all. really like 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 you as soon as that

There is going to be other ecologies out there, you know, 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 uh the um bill gates in part uh funded coating uh that is allowed to be put even on organic fruits uh 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 table.

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 it's its goodness, its ripeness, its 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? So...

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. 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 it's highly novel and um the awful thing about it is in order for it to work it's still on the fruit when you eat it um so you're ingesting it so anyway it's um 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 and and 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 um in uh 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 so

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... 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 you know we we contain multitudes we now know this after um you know 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

necessary to obtain a complete understanding of human health, and neither are sufficient on their own. 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

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.

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 you know 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. And you'll be like, well, why was cancer harder than smallpox? And the answer is because cancer isn't anything like smallpox. 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, but to the extent that the diseases that are attributable to pathogens, at least in part, are are findable and eradicable or or treatable or you can neutralize the ecologies of of the pathogens in question uh that feels 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, you know, antibiotic an antiviral a vaccine uh and we put public health measures in place to keep people clean and now we've reduced uh 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 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 march 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 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 in the past. 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 there's a virus and.

It does cause many of the cases of polio. Therefore, you can create an entire career's worth of projects to do thinking about how to disrupt the... uh the polio virus so that it cannot paralyze children 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, and. Not only is it not worth controlling it, if a healthy gut 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. It's going to have side effects which are positive, like vitamin D, using vitamin D, not the vaccine. No, no, the 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 colonized 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. Miasmists complain that those patented poisons may themselves further weaken the immune system or simply open the damage to to a competitive germ or cause chronic disease. They point out that the world is teaming 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've read it as, as I think many people who are now reacting negatively to Kennedy are doing. tack on the idea of pathogens at all.

i read it and because what i understood germ theory of disease to mean as 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.

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... 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.

The 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 uh 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 uh if we think about you know as you point out there are lots of other diseases that um

maybe don't involve that aren't relevant to this dyadic framing at all but infectious disease and chronic disease um broadly understood as mapping onto germ theory of disease, on 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 if you have the chronic disease, 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 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 researchers who did that work, the Nobel Prize.

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. 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. 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, you know, I would not argue that we should be making people scared, but that is what the germ theory of disease is. 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

And the fluoride in the water. And the food dies. And it's everything. And you're just disrupted circadian rhythms. It's everything. State of mind. And this, of course, is exactly what we wrote about in Hunter Gatherer's Guide. 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

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 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 making 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...

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

scientist to bring me my magical elixir, and then I really hope they got it right. And, you know, that, of course, that fails on so many fronts, including that, you know, to use your example of the cold virus, they evolve so fast that even 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. And 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 from...

Oh, 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...

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 uh here is that not only do comorbidities make you more susceptible to uh 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 um and this is just it's a strange uh you can show my screen here but i'm going to read the name of the article is 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. 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.

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 you know it's it's narrow as all 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 are making people chronically ill as opposed to giving them something else into an already ill system that will of course have side effects and may protect them some but won't protect them nearly as much as having been healthy in the first place.

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.

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. health management 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

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, 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 gonna 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, that's the model.

but i would also just point out subsidiary to that is the bias towards interventionist solutions right we used to know that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, right? 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. Like 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, you know, we were sick all the time. And of course, people's teeth were falling out. And this is garbage. It's just not true. 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 okay and um 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 brutish 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 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 going, that are...

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.

at all um published in boy i don't know what comp stands for something physiology um chronic shouldn't be that yeah given how it's 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 a 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 cardiac disease, respiratory fitness, sarcopenia, metabolic syndrome, obesity, insulin resistance, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, coronary heart disease, on and on and on, all of which they attribute in part to lack of exercise. So that's...

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 um in in this book in 1939 since reprinted several times focuses um because he as a 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... were not on traditional diets who were on traditional diets and who had been introduced to modern diets and

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.

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 have you know art

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 okay 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. right 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

And in fact, we are very well built to address, you know, 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 you know the the people who existed pre 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 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... 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 than deficient ones. And it goes on and on and on. 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.

um 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 um is you know well beloved by um you know a small handful a growing number of people but this is what maha stands for this this is what kennedy wants 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 or 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 he 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 the this and that and the other but the point is he was way ahead of his time

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 right 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 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. them 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 have surrendered.

labor and environmentalism to the Republicans. Good job, guys. Right. But but anyway, OK, 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 uh i really hope that doesn't happen one last one last point here uh 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 that this is 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 um 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 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.

uh 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 with the lighting some of the specifics um of the methods 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 use stable isotope analysis, confirm 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. were 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.

um to respond to environmental pressure so you have um you there are examples across many many clades across many developmental regimens of uh you know hyenas having reduced canine size when they are not when they're being fed stuff in zoos as opposed to when they're having to crunch through the 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.

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. which shouldn't need to be emerging 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. Okay. First of all, you've got the high tech, complicated thinking people solving a non-problem. Okay. 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? 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. So, I mean, this does seem like a kind of a radical position you're taking. Babies don't require metallurgy. I mean, I think badly 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. uh 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?

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. 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 freaking 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 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 Hyper Novelty. Because... the search for the cause of chronic disease is all going to land in this one category it's the hyper novelty that has caused a highly a well-developed creature

it 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

And 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.

This pattern becomes very obvious. 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 uh as a living creature impossible and that of course i mean it's 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 because um

it 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 every that that will always be the case um and yet 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 before we move on to the next topic here um 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 and identifying where uh

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 are other things in each of these categories. So you talked about breast milk and light bulbs and the other stuff that babies are eating, the metallurgy.

requiring the metallurgy in the glass jars um so breast milk uh of course is a universal human uh thing every single culture uh that has ever existed has fed babies breast milk and so the uh alternative solution that has been that has emerged i mean there were other alternative solutions before there were uh there were wet nurses and such but it was still breast milk it just wasn't mother's right but the alternative solution of the 20th

entry 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 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 is being that we are being talked out of that some people are being talked out of with regard to light bulbs

um light bulbs at least in the evening or even you know inside we're solving a problem um that we had without recognizing the drawbacks so we did so the there wasn't a problem with breast milk there was a like it's kind of inconvenient and you know that it seems more market driven whereas you know 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 it's different from every human ever was 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 um brilliant things about that um that price book this this one here the nutrition and physical degeneration 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. I don't even know who to think back to among my European ancestors as the cultural... touchstone for what we maybe should have been feeding our kids other than um you know probably some bones right like give them give them some bones with some meat on them to to gnaw on right uh so In that case, 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

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 right 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? we keep injuring ourselves with the hyper novelty and it's 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.

that 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 sort of, it became a parody of itself that, you know, 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 like well of course uh the you know the primitive peoples the non-weird peoples the pre-industrial peoples uh must have had all sorts of facial deformities and

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.

that especially if you i mean i don't know if you if you compare um you know pre-industrial peoples uh to these you know these images of people on the beach in 1950s america i don't know how how it would compare i would say you know more or less uh equivalent in terms of beauty depending on what your particular aesthetic is but compare pre-industrial people to the americans of 2020

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. Excellent. I think Charles Mann, uh, is, um, possessed of a not very favorable view of you and me in light of our. heresy over covid but nonetheless very fond of this book fourteen ninety one which describes the state of the americas as best we understand it just before the spaniards arrived and He, in this book, describes something of the European mindset about the native peoples. And it's interesting. It's not noble savage exactly.

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 that they were uh appealing to and that the expectation was given some time the natives people would come to the same enlightenment Right. But physically, there was a recognition that the natives were much more beautiful and healthy looking.

And the natives apparently had a... And also very much more focused on hygiene. Like even the Europeans recognized that Native Americans seemed much cleaner. Right. In fact, I remember, so obviously this is... 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 the discovery of the North American populations.

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 evolved in are inevitably.

going to be healthier maybe not every individual but that's that's the key and so uh i guess I'm now concerned every time I hear chronic health epidemic that we're missing the real story. And I want to maybe we should be trying to make that clear to. 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, it 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. 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 an administration that is behaving in a radical fashion relative to anything we've seen in our lifetimes.

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 at 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 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 it. 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 they're 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. 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.

um 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, um, what you're objecting to is the same kind of conversational expectation of, well, I don't agree with everything he says, but right. Like whenever, whenever you discuss anyone who, 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 sensitive is to start by saying like of course i don't agree with everything but and this i think this is at sort of a broader scale like you know what we can assume that

uh that as you speak we can assume that you don't agree with everything that is being done uh we would like to assume that as adults we understand trade-offs and that um 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.

you know so we we need a system we need an american system but the american system has been so riddled with a cancer if you will um that it has 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 counterproposals are, it's fine. Just leave it the way it is. Like, we need infectious disease research. We need this. We need that. Like, 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 including a vast number of de facto terrorists who have been terrorizing the normal people of the world over dei

who've 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?

to find some way to get those things to meet yeah my only uh the objection that comes up in my mind there is um this is just the beginning uh 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. um this is the tip of the spear because these aren't due to ai right and we are 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, this is going to be, 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,

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 um in part because uh you know the dei unemployed as a as a

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 are who have both been attending college and um and others as well and i think um 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 were doing not only like 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 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.

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 yeah 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 but the approaches the theories within existing fields the schools of thought that then became departments in their own right yep so 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, you know, I actually I 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 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, there it's like a, you know, no girls allowed thing. on the clubhouse door. That's going to be a little, 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 what 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 yeah and those fields anti-progressive stack the 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, I think that's it. All right. Well, the dog's going for a run without us. Dog is sleep running. She's behind us sleep running.

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