Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 265, is it? It is 265. 265. We are streaming from Sevilla, Spain. which many of you will know as Seville. And I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Hying, which, of course, most of our audience will know. Yes, we are in Seville, where I find it interesting...
Our younger son claims he cannot find a barber. It's true. It's true. He does claim that. Now, here's the crazy part. I would say he's not trying hard enough, except you and I have been walking around here for several days, and I haven't seen a barber. I have.
Ooh. All right. I missed the Barber's. Were we together when you saw it? I think so. Yeah. All right. Then I missed it. We were together the whole time. Yeah. So, um... this is rare for us well we've never been in seville before um here we are with zach our older son who is our first producer and now our producer again and we've got this set up there's all these mirrors and i'm just taking a look at
what we might look like because we don't actually have a thing and i can see you reflected behind me whoa we are there's sort of some mirror stuff going on and you might want to talk about mirrors later on in the podcast but uh we're to talk first about, maybe a bit about Seville.
about spain perhaps a bit about antibiotics which i wrote about for natural selections this week uh about how nature hates a vacuum oh wait no it's nature hates a kennedy is what nature hates that nature yes and and then you may discuss mirrors as well mirrors and i actually maybe before we get started i had an idea today and i thought about telling you as we were walking around but it's a business idea and i actually thought it would be cooler to unveil it here
Before the ads? I think it's a million-dollar idea. Yes, before the ads. Here we go. Are you sitting down? No. Oh, wait. Yes. Here's the idea. Okay, we've now been in three different locations here. In Spain. In Spain, and a pattern has developed. I have noticed that, and I'm sure you have noticed, whether you've thought about it consciously or not, that the bathroom fans in Spain are totally superior to the ones we have in the U.S. We're going to import them.
because they are exactly as ineffective as the ones we have in the U.S., but they are so much quieter. It's true. Yes. So this is not entirely fair. We just have yet to own a wonderful bathroom fan. But I do understand that they exist. But these aren't wonderful. They don't work. I know that. But in the U.S., what we have seen is loud and ineffective. And what we have found... in Spain is nearly silent and ineffective. Yes, and I actually think I know a way to improve them.
No. Yes, which is you take the fan out altogether, you install the grate, and you install the switch so people have the sense that they've turned them on. They get the same level of effectiveness, completely silent. Excellent. All right. So good. I'm glad we're on the same page about this. I see now why we are as successful in business as we are. You're missing how business works, but yeah.
All right, on with the ads. Thank you for being here today. We are, again, here in Seville. We're not going to do a Q&A from here, but we do have our watch party going on at Locals right now. Where is the camera? Is that the camera? the camera it's the thing that looks like a camera right over there yes I was looking at Zach because it feels more natural to like look at a human being than to look into a lens
But we've got the watch party going on locals and we're streaming to YouTube and rumble not Twitter this time, but those other three places Please consider joining us on locals. We've got great stuff going on there and as always we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour
that we have chosen carefully and that we truly stand by and let us do that without further ado. I just need to find them. We don't have a printer here in Spain, so we are going to be reading from computers to do this. You do not want to show my computer for this. I'm just going to... read the ads or two of them and then you're going to read one. All right. Armora is our first sponsor this week. Armora Colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food.
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the quality control is far above industry standards including being certified to be glyphosate free i'm going to just pause for a tiny second um and i'm going to keep thinking about nope this is right i thought i was reading the wrong version of this ad We're good. You were at glyphosate free. We are. The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate free, which is in the U.S. something of a rarity.
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Armor has a special offer for the Dark Horse audience. Receive 15% off your first order. Go to tryarmor.com slash darkhorse or enter darkhorse to get 15% off your first order. That's tryarmor.com slash darkhorse. And I'm now going to out myself before I read the second ad. You guys both think I have lost my mind or I've started taking some meds that neither of you are aware of because I have reported to you for the first time apparently tonight that, or it's...
morning where we normally are but it's tonight in spain uh that the right part of my computer sometimes starts to get all buzzy and i get these electrical little these subtle little jolts through my palm when i am using my computer and it's happening again And I did get Zach to feel it a little bit. You're compelled that I imagined the whole thing. But just, you know, if I suddenly...
Conk out or something. Well, question for you. Does it feel like electricity or does it feel like a vibration? Feels like electricity. Hmm. Well, that's not good. Yeah, well, so there it is. Thank goodness you're grounded. I don't know that I am. Actually, probably it's not a good thing that you're grounded. If you weren't, you'd be safer. I don't know which of those is true, actually. Well, it's a little complex, actually.
In general, if you're grounded, the problem is it's going to take the most direct route from you to wherever you're grounded. Let's say that that's your foot and that crosses awfully close to your heart, which is not good. It's not a high voltage device at that level.
But nonetheless, it wouldn't be good. And I don't have it plugged into 220s. It's not plugged in at the moment, which is a good thing. Right. If it were plugged in and it was doing that, that might be worse. Yeah, although it's hard to imagine how that much power is going to get.
in through the usb bus which is yeah and which is already downgraded to 110 anyway but nonetheless if you were not grounded at all then you might feel something but the degree to which the power would be passing through you in a way that matters i think to be.
much less, but we're going to find out because all sorts of people who know for sure are watching and are going to tell us. And are also going to explain why I could not possibly be experiencing on my computer what I say I am. And some people will say, yes, you can. It's happened to me too. And here's why. I look forward to that.
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That's sort of interesting. So your lesin A could be effective for you, potentially, if you are in the relevant ways like mice. Can't promise what those relevant ways might be, regardless of what your diet looks like or how old you are.
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that maddie is watching she is on locals she is of course in the chat under a pseudonym however did we give her a gift subscription or did we expect her to pay out of her allowance I paid out of my allowance. So anyway, she's on under a pseudonym. Who is giving you an allowance? That's a fine question. I realized the application would have been you and that's not what's going on. But anyway.
I just thought I would make the claim and see how it went. Are you a kept man? Our final sponsor, Heather and Maddie, is one of our longest continuous sponsors and one of our favorites. It's Maddie's all-time favorite. It's Sundays. Sundays makes extraordinary dog food. Right, Matty?
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It's delicious. Actually, I don't know why that says apparently. I know for sure. It's delicious. I wrote it. Yeah, that's why. I still haven't tasted it. You know to trust me. Every time I go to try to taste it, Maddie gives me a look like, oh, no. Right. No, no, you don't. Yep. Yep. Even Fairfax, our epic tabby, likes it. And Brett claims, yes, he does. And I claim, see?
in real time seamlessly editing the ad i claim it's not bad either when we were first introduced to sundays i tried it myself because of course our pledge to our audience is that we can't vouch for things we can't vouch for It's made for dogs, tested by cats and husbands in your case.
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So here we are. Yes. Here we are. Um, should we talk about antibiotics? Sure. Nature's okay. Antibiotics first. Let's do it. Let's do that. So I have been thinking a lot lately about antibiotics because as I will share in this, wow, my computer's not behaving. As I will share in this piece that I'm going to read to you that I published on Natural Selections yesterday, this is the 10-year anniversary this month of me rupturing my Achilles tendon.
till that happened i had never really given any thought to my achilles tendons really i never had any issue with them nor that much thought to the antibiotic that you and i both took by far the most and you know still not a lot, but, you know, I was probably on Cipro. I probably ended up putting myself onto Cipro eight or ten times over the course of several field seasons, maybe even a dozen. So we should explain this.
I mean, it's all in the piece, but I was just doing a preamble. But when we went into the field, we were often in places where doctors were either extremely inconvenient, took a long journey to get to one, or they just simply weren't available at all.
and would often go with drugs that we expected we might need prescribed in advance and antibiotics broad-spectrum antibiotics were a common thing we took and cipro was the one for digestive issues that was prescribed regularly uh gi in particular yeah yeah that's what i mean um so anyway we did take it a fair amount because we spent a lot of time in the field and every so often you would get food poisoning or
some relative of it and we would take it and it would clear up and we thought very little of it because it was understood to be so safe. thought very little of it despite and again like i'm going to read this piece and you haven't so i think i'll be interested to see if if it resonates with you with regard to the parts that um that we lived together um we were always skeptical of taking pills to solve problems that happen to our bodies.
we again as i write in here you know we we became sort of walking pharmacies when we were working in the field and we carried nseds and tylenol but we very very rarely took things for pain and we carried opioids as well um for you know for extreme emergencies but we very rarely took anything for pain we very rarely took any drugs at all with two exceptions well three exceptions and I regret two of them maybe all of them
The thing that I added at the last minute in that thought was anti-malarials. Depending on where you were, it seemed necessary to take anti-malarials. At some point, maybe I'll write up the history of being in different anti-malarials at different times. And ultimately, actually, the first time I began to question the wisdom of the CDC.
which i used to call and spend time on the phone with every time before a trip when i was going to a new place and they would advise me okay in that particular place in you know madagascar that particular place in the amazon that particular place in panama
um here's what we see with regard to what species of malaria are there and therefore what prophylaxis is available and the u.s actually had fewer things available for a while and so my parents were living in london for a while we actually got some things from them that were more effective and less toxic than what was available in the US. But I started getting answers from the CDC at some point. I'm like, you know what, I know.
i know that there's not malaria where you're telling me there is because i know the people who i know not all the people but i know many of the people who live in some of these places and they're reporting they haven't seen any malaria in a generation So that was just sort of the first inkling of like, you guys maybe have your data is at a date, right? Well, I think it also speaks to a bias.
that's relevant to the whole medical catastrophe that we're becoming aware of, that we've been living through. And the bias is to assume that things that have passed through FDA testing are effectively safe enough that out of an abundance of caution, you ought to take a prophylactic to prevent malaria if you're going to be in a country where it's present.
And the truth is actually many of the drugs that have passed through FDA approval turn out to have massive downsides. And so it's not... simply that if you know there's any chance of you encountering malaria you should take this thing right there's a cost-benefit analysis and if malaria is extremely rare where you're going to be then you almost certainly shouldn't take it and So anyway, I think part of what we're discovering is that this pill happy culture, this pill happy medical culture.
conveyed to us something which you and I never bought. We were always skeptical. I remember being skeptical of the antibiotics at the level of what do they do to your gut microbiome, even then, you know.
I was not skeptical in some of the way, you know, some of these things do damage in ways you just would never anticipate. Yes, as we'll talk about here. As we'll talk about. But nonetheless, I do think the bias... of well if the thing's passed through testing it's pretty darn safe and it's just so far from accurate. Every revelation about some drug that was common, even over-the-counter stuff, we've talked extensively on Dark Horse about Tylenol, for example.
You know, a drug so dangerous that it initially couldn't even get licensed. So anyway, that bias comes back to haunt us again and again. And the other thing besides... Cipro, which we'll be talking about today, that we both took way more of than we wish we had at this point was, of course, Benadryl. And I don't spend any time talking about that here. I don't know if you want to just do a...
A brief proceed, or we should save that for another time. Benadryl is obviously an old antihistamine that has soporific effects.
especially you're out in the field things aren't comfortable it's too hot to sleep benadryl especially if you're bitten up like if you if you're bitten up with mosquito bites and that is part of what is making it hard to sleep the benadryl will have two apparently beneficial effects which is it will reduce your histamine reaction and therefore make the bites less itchy and and that in itself will help you get to sleep and then it also separately is a is sleep inducing
and so anyway what has come to light uh i guess in the last eight or so years i think is that actually benadryl causes an increase in the likelihood of dementia, and the increase is proportional to the amount of Benadryl that you've taken. It's cumulative. So it's... I would say there's one use case where Benadryl makes sense, and that's extreme allergic reactions where it is a very effective antihistamine.
But you really want to minimize the amount of this stuff that you get in a lifetime. And, you know, it's... So, I mean, if you've ever had a reaction to... a bee or a wasp that is that is scary that comes close to or was anaphylaxis you probably want To be carrying Benadryl around with you and in some cases Benadryl isn't fast enough but But you certainly don't want to be taking it as an over-the-counter way to deal with minor allergies or
Sleep issues. So anyway, yeah, that was a rude awakening. I must say I have not taken a Benadryl or I would not take a Benadryl under any circumstances other than... anaphylaxis as a hazard at this point um it's really upsetting that we did have this interaction with it yeah yeah and then the other the other thing that we took um you know again i don't know i don't
I didn't try to estimate it in this piece that I'm about to read, but something around 8, 10, 12 courses. Yeah, I was going to say 8 or 10. Yeah.
and you know and one of the things about cipro unlike other antibiotics is that actually you'll get advised that you don't necessarily have to have to finish the course so that's not necessarily eight or ten full courses but it's way too much way too much and i'm going to share why so you can go ahead and share my screen if that's actually a possibility which is kind of remarkable here in here here where we are um and
And I of course can't see. Okay, you are sharing my screen. I can't see that. So this is the piece. The Achilles heel of antibiotics on the sometimes fatal promise of fluoroquinolones. Cipro, the common name for an antibiotic once commonly prescribed is not a safe drug. Actually, would it be better if I made it a little bit bigger, Zach? Is that better? Yeah. Okay. Cipro, the common name for an antibiotic once commonly prescribed is not a safe drug.
Cipro is short for ciprofloxacin and it is the most familiar antibiotic in a class called fluoroquinolones. Cipro was one of very few drugs that I always had with me when traveling and doing research in Latin America and in Madagascar in the 1990s when I was in my 20s.
I took it more often than I'd like to remember. Cipro acts fast on many problems, including intestinal bugs. If you find yourself needing to board a bus for an uncertain duration while suffering GI distress, Cipro can solve the immediate problem. It seems to be your friend and ally.
I have no doubt that CIPRO has saved some lives. I also have no doubt that CIPRO has damaged many people beyond what should be considered acceptable, and that many of those damaged had insufficient information with which to make choices about their own health. We deserve to have informed consent.
and we do not have informed consent. Ten years ago this month, while playing ultimate frisbee barefoot on an Oregon beach with my students, I fully ruptured my left Achilles tendon. In the moment, I heard a sound so intense and shattering that I thought it was gunfire.
Nobody around me heard any sound at all. I also thought that someone had hurled a large rock at my heel. Of course no one had. My brain was searching frantically for an explanation for the experience that my body was having and it was coming up with nonsense. i leapt for the disc the frisbee and then heard gunfire felt the hurled rock i fell sprawled in the sand i knew immediately that this was not a sprain
Just before it had happened, I had been jumping in place to stay warm before the next point began, joyful to be playing one of my favorite games in the world, in a beautiful place with a group of young people who were inquisitive and open. And you. And you. Brett, Zach, and Toby were all there as well. There had been just one thing that nagged in my consciousness. My Achilles tendons hurt just a bit. I had never before given my Achilles tendons a second thought.
Achilles was half mortal, half god, and his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, felt betrayed by the fact that her son could die. So she took her precious baby down to the river Styx, that provider of immortal life, and dipped him in it, providing him protection against the slings and arrows of mortality.
But she held him by his heel, and so it was his heel only that remained at risk. Years later, while heroically giving battle in the Trojan War, Achilles would be felled by an arrow to his heel. His heel, his one vulnerability, was his downfall. He was killed. Humans became bipeds well over a million years ago, evolving away from our chimp cousins and standing tall. For all the virtues of walking on two feet, this innovation became a considerable cost to other systems.
Women must have hips wide enough to bear viable big-brained babies, but the wider our hips, the less stable our stance. Widen our hips sufficiently that we do not suffer while giving birth and we can't walk well. We fall down. The lower back pain that is common to many humans can also be chalked up to our bipedal stance.
And of course, the fact that, because we only have two legs on which to stand rather than four, the single giant tendon that connects our calf muscles to our heel bone in each of our legs, our Achilles tendon, has no backup. We are utterly dependent on it functioning.
But some of us have been taking drugs that do our Achilles tendons no favors at all. After the gunshot that wasn't a gunshot and the hurling of a rock at my heel that never happened, after I fell, I was helped to the edge of the field. I could not walk.
unlike with the sprain which provides ample evidence of injury but does allow some pressure to be applied i had no control at all if i tried to bear weight i crumpled a few hours later we went to a small town emergency room and i was seen by an excellent orthopedic surgeon whose occasional gig was helping out in the er
He did a simple test, the Thompson test, which involved me lying on my stomach while he squeezed my calf muscle. Because an intact Achilles tendon connects the calf muscles to the heel bone, when the calf muscle is squeezed in an intact leg, the heel moves. When the good doctor squeezed my calf muscle... My heel did not move.
he assured me that my achilles tendon was fully ruptured he told me that i would require surgery in fact he said he could do it sometime in the next few days but we didn't live there on the oregon coast and we had a class full of students to attend to so i held off until we returned home
This gave me several days in which to brood and dwell and feel a bit sorry for myself and also to do some research on what I should do now and on why my Achilles tendon had given out. This would turn out to be quite the pharmaceutical rabbit hole. In the 1990s when I was doing a lot of tropical field work I made myself into a walking pharmacy on my field expedition so that I could treat most ailments that were likely to come up.
I carried a few courses of Cipro on each trip, along with Zithromax and doxycycline, also antibiotics, a small amount of opioids, plus antimalarials. I also carried over-the-counter treatments, including topical antibiotics, antifungals and steroid creams, Tylenol, NSAIDs, and Benadryl. Benadryl is the only other drug that I took with some regularity then, and I now regret that as well.
At the end of those extended trips, I had often used some of the Cipro, Benadryl, and topical antifungal, and what I hadn't used I donated to a local doctor. I thought that I was being both responsible and appropriately skeptical. I did not take painkillers when I had a headache or other pain.
I drank water and monitored my activity and considered dietary and environmental exposures. I did not presume that my body needed chemical intervention to stay healthy or, for the most part, to return to health when exposed to pathogens. But I was willing to use antibiotics, mostly Cipro.
to treat the occasional bug that was going to make it impossible to do what I thought I needed to do, like take a bus ride. My bad. It turns out I learned while unable to walk and before I had been surgically repaired and was beginning the arduous return to mobility. that Cipro had already long since been recognized as putting tendons at risk. The most recognized risk was acute and short-term. People who are actually on Cipro should avoid stressing their tendons.
But it also turns out that exposure accumulates, and that taking a lot of Cipro even decades earlier could have bad effects on tendons later on. Especially that most famous tendon of all, the Achilles tendon. Fluoroquinolones, including Cipro, have been widely prescribed in part because they are broad-spectrum antibiotics. Being broad-spectrum means that the drug kills off a wide swath of bacteria.
This is useful if it's not clear what pathogen is making you sick. A broad-spectrum antibiotic is more likely to help you in such a situation than is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic, one that is targeted to particulate bacteria. The flipside of being a broad-spectrum antibiotic, however, is that it kills off your good bacteria as well. We all have a lot of those good bacteria and we depend on them for our health. We do, as it turns out, contain multitudes.
The toxicity of fluoroquinolones is not inherently related to there being broad spectrum. However, as other broad spectrum antibiotics are not yet understood to produce such a wide range of medical problems, as do the fluoroquinolones. From the abstract of a 2003 paper that I cannot access the full text of, we find the following list of long-term toxicities that fluoroquinolones were already understood to cause. This is from 2003, long before...
That moment on the Oregon coast when I ruptured my Achilles tendon. Cardiotoxicity. Aortic aneurysm. tendon rupture, nephrotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, peripheral neuropathy, vagus nervous dysfunction, reactive oxygen species, phototoxicity, glucose hemostasis, and central nervous system toxicity.
In addition to being associated with tendon rupture, fluoroquinolones are implicated in heart, kidney, liver, nervous system, and eye damage. And that's not all. In 2008, the FDA announced black box warnings on fluoroquinolones with concerns about tendon ruptures. In 2013, the FDA would add its third warning in five years to the packaging, this one advising of the, quote, potential for irreversible peripheral neuropathy, end quote, that is, serious permanent nerve damage.
Meanwhile, there is growing evidence that many broad-spectrum antibiotics damage mitochondria, and that fluoroquinolones do so most of all. Fluoroquinolones have also been known to cause such severe locomotory problems that people have lost the ability to walk,
Thousands of people have died, and this may be a considerable underestimate. The toxicity that some people get from fluoroquinolones is colloquially referred to as having been floxed. Online communities of people who have been floxed are abundant. By 2016, the FDA had seen enough evidence of the risks of these drugs that it was advising that they should be reserved for use only in patients who had quote, no alternative treatment options.
Two years later, the FDA put out yet another update, warning of risks to mental health and blood sugar disturbances. By 2018, the scientific journal Nature was finally reporting on the disabling side effects of fluoroquinolones. Therein, nature acknowledges that one of the reasons the toxicity of these drugs has taken so long to be made public is that drug companies are known to take, quote, adverse action against people who expose drug and chemical harms, end quote. Thus,
The research has mostly not been done. From a career vantage point, scientists can't afford the exposure. Despite even the FDA having gotten worked up over fluoroquinolones well before I busted my Achilles tendon, a year or so after I did so, I had some infection that a doctor wanted to prescribe antibiotics for. She suggested Cipro.
I don't want Cipro, I said, expecting a fight. I suspect that having been on Cipro a fair bit in my 20s contributed to me rupturing my Achilles last year. That sounds right, she said, nodding. Probably a good idea that you not be on Cipro anymore. She stood down easily, but had I not objected, I would have been put on Cipro once again for no good reason. Perhaps Cipro had nothing to do with my Achilles tendon rupture. Perhaps it did.
But some people are particularly prone to suffering that particular side effect, and I am just among those unlucky few. Or perhaps Cipro had something to do with my Achilles tendon rupture, and that was wholly predictable.
and those who do drug safety testing should have known and those in the medical field who prescribed all that ciprotomy should therefore also have known and they should have provided me sufficient information that i could in turn provide informed consent Ultimately, it's my decisions that contributed to me going down on that cold beach 10 years ago, and that sent me to surgery, the effects of which are still tangible in and on my body.
I am responsible for the choices that I make, what to eat and take and do, when to reject the advice of experts, and when to accept it. Eyes wide open. Even I, skeptical as I always have been of quick pharmaceutical solutions, made some bad decisions. On the question of fluoroquinolones, we now know enough to be extremely cautious about their use.
The next time you were told that you need to take X in order to treat Y, especially if you were told that you should also take Z to treat the side effects of X, ask every question that you can think of, and know that the answers that come back may not be accurate. There is risk in every decision.
Do not let fear drive yours. There it is. That's a great piece, and I've got to say, it's very... disorienting even to hear this reframing of the story you know i've of course known about the association with achilles tendon rupture since your I don't even want to say accident, but since your injury. But it's very clear, actually, in listening to the way you present this, that this is one more drug.
That needs to be on the list of drugs that I always mention that show Heart damage that likely are doing damage across the body. You read a long list of tissues that are known to be damaged top of that list is cardiac you know aortic rupture so the reason that this is tripping me out for those who in our audience who haven't heard the story i won't go through the long uh version of it but
Back in the late 90s, I was a graduate student working on an evolutionary puzzle that I didn't know had anything to do with medicine, and it led me accidentally. to discover a flaw in the drug safety system that I believed then and still believe. was the reason that Vioxx got through drug safety testing and then turned out to do quote unquote heart damage, which I believe isn't really heart damage. It's damage across the body, which is most easily noticed when your heart fails.
um so anyway there's a long list of drugs that uh has this profile cipro apparently belongs on that list and you apparently have a cipro injury i might also have a cipro injury i'm less convinced that my acl tear some years before
your Achilles tendon. There was at least an explicit aggravating event. Yes. Someone dove into your knee while also playing ultimate. Also playing ultimate. And that actually caused me to give up ultimate, which is a game I truly loved as well, but I just wasn't worth it. But nonetheless, I don't know if that injury might have been purely physical and have nothing to do with the CIPRO we took. On the other hand, it could be that it was weakened, that my ACL was weakened.
ruptured just the same way your achilles tendon seems to have ruptured as the result of a minor insult and your acl injury was right in the heart of when we were doing a lot of field work so it was much closer to the you know, to taking the drug, which is a more common, which is a way that Cipro is more commonly understood to be related to tendon rupture and tendon ligament, soft tissue.
damage but if you track all of the ways in which your life and my life and our life together intersects with the story of pharma you know the story of dark horse is in many ways you know dark horse started as a podcast about something else about dark horses really and covid took over the podcast because it was on everybody's mind and we had something to say about it and it turns out that revealed a whole bunch about the corruption of pharma and and the uh
You know, the sabotaging of good drugs and the promotion of dangerous drugs and all of those things. So it's just interesting that our lives seem to keep intersecting the story. Why? Because... you have a certain number of maladies and injuries in a lifetime and because the doctor is who you go to for these things or the doctor is who you go to if you're going to go on a trip and you think you might have these things that the question is well
if the doctor is pharma obsessed because the incentives promote pharma obsession and pharma is criminally insane and pushing drugs that no person should rationally take for most of the things that they're prescribed then you end up with a life in which, you know...
How many of these things, how many of the important stories of your life, the death of somebody who died early and you don't know why, how many of these things are really downstream of this one particular kind of corruption that shows up in such a multiplicity of chemicals? ways and this is part of why i mean this is actually a good segue i mean we can we can continue talking about this but um this is a good segue to talking about nature the journal nature's take on kennedy so kennedy
said, I believe while he was still running for president, he said that were he to take office, he would like to slow down research on infectious disease. And I think it was at that point that he said for something like eight years.
and increased research on chronic disease. And this has been, of course, met with panic and absurdity in many corners. But part of what... the pharmaceuticals are doing to people is creating chronic disease right so it's not it's it's easier and it's more obvious to talk about uh our our poor soils that create low quality food that tend to require at least at scale so many agrochemicals added on that those things are causing people to be chronically unhealthy the processed foods the
food dyes the seed oils uh the water pollution the air pollution i mean the list goes on and on there's nothing i've said here that isn't a serious problem especially for you know americans who in many of
For many of the things that I've listed, Americans are getting more of these things than most people in the rest of the world, not necessarily air and water pollution. I actually think we've been better about that, at least we were for a while. So our air and water is often pretty clean, but our soils are in terrible shape.
shape and spraying agrochemicals on everything. But the pharmaceuticals, you know, you said probably most people are impacted. Probably some people have people, many people have had someone in their sphere whom they loved. die and they didn't know and may still not know that there may have been a pharmaceutical implication but probably almost everyone is less healthy than they would be if they weren't
if there weren't so many pharmaceuticals in their domain. So, you know, it's relatively rare to just be taking nothing, right? And in fact, often doctors won't believe you if you say that. Yeah, it's funny how often that's the reaction. A doctor will say, are you taking anything? What drugs are you on? And you say nothing. And they look at you like that's not an answer they hear very often. And it's like, well, why wouldn't it be?
I mean, shouldn't every healthy person not be taking anything just on the regular? I'm not saying never take anything, but wouldn't that be the expected answer for a majority of people who are who see you sometimes? Yeah. I think I've said this before on here. I used to get laryngitis a lot, like two, three, four times a year, sufficient that I couldn't teach because I had no voice at all. And I still have...
I still have a weaker voice, I think, than many people do, but I haven't had laryngitis in a long time. And occasionally, doctors would say to me, I remember hearing twice when I was younger and I was getting laryngitis a lot, you know what? I don't know, but my bet is that it will pass at some point.
that you will sort of wake up and realize it's been years since you had laryngitis and that part of your life is done. And that does turn out to be what happened. But the more common thing that I got, especially when it happened when I was teaching and it was going to really get in the way of me doing... my job I would be told and I don't remember what drugs these were but there were a couple of different
doctors and a couple of different drugs that they assured me I definitely needed to take and that that would solve the problem. And then in both of these cases, when I followed up with, and how long do you want me to be on that drug? Oh, well, it'll be for your life. Oh, and what kinds of, what kinds of side effects?
They have, oh, well, it causes X, Y, and Z, but we have drugs for those things. No, I'm not going to do that. And again, both of these cases, the doctor said, well, then I can't help you. If you don't accept my insane solution for you, then I can't help you.
And so most people, A, don't ask the follow-up questions like, for how long? Life? Oh, really? And what other things? Oh, more drugs? Great. Just write me three prescriptions right now when I walked in here on nothing. And if you don't ask those questions, then you find yourself... week a month a year a decade down the road I'm like huh I guess as you age you just get sicker and sicker no
like you know senescence is real as you can speak to better than just about anyone else on the planet but the idea of feeling like oh i just like i kind of ache a lot and i kind of just don't have the capacity like you know wound healing is slower there are a lot of things do slow down but I've talked to so many people and I recognize in myself from 10 years ago that before I ruptured my Eccles tendon I was beginning to have a sense of like oh I guess this is just what aging is like no
No, just clean up everything in what you're doing and with regard to diet and pharma and be active and find that you can still move fast and... Hopefully not break too many things. Right. Well, I also am stunned. You've got an entire class of people, doctors, went to medical school and seemed to have walked away. with the impression that an absence of evidence is evidence.
of absence in other words the fact that they don't know about a reason not to take benadryl or cipro or a flu shot means that it's actually you know cost-benefit analysis just fine because they don't really know how to calculate the unknowns related to any kind of intervention. And that's especially troubling when it turns out...
That this industry with this massive perverse incentive has actually invested money to prevent evidence from accumulating. And the more it knows that there's something to worry about, the more it presumably invests in browbeating people who look in. to it so the point is of course there will be an absence of evidence because you've got a massive industry making sure that there is an absence of evidence which causes doctors to you know to
proceed from their position of arrogance that if they don't know about a harm, it probably doesn't exist. And, you know, of course it's, forgive me for swearing, but it's a clusterfuck. totally predictable based on the fact that you have perverse incentives allowed to dominate medical wisdom, where what should really be going on is we should be studying the body. We would, of course, discover that the number of... chemical interventions that are worth
the harm that comes along with them is actually quite small. And in the cases where there is something that is worth the harm, in general it's worth the harm only as a temporary intervention, not as a go-to for some chronic condition. Well, isn't this—I mean, there's a perfect analogy for many things in policy. You have specifically made that argument with regard to affirmative action, that it's quite—both you and I—
I've changed our position on affirmative action dramatically, and I at least, I won't presume to speak for you here, feel like it may never have been an appropriate intervention. But presume for a moment that it was short-term. it was never supposed to be permanent right just like interventions to to return you to homeostasis to a baseline that is healthy with a full and healthy good gut microbiome for instance should not
go on indefinitely. If your interventions are going on indefinitely, you're not in homeostasis. And that's what the goal is, and that's what the body does. That's what a healthy body has, is homeostasis. And, of course, it's going to result in cascading side effects for which you're going to take an ever-proliferating list of drugs, which is, of course, also not a financially small matter.
Yes. Right. You know, the idea that some doctor wants to put you on some drug that costs, you know, I don't know, 50 bucks a month. Well, you know, for a given month, that's not a huge deal. But the point is, it's actually, you know, a fraction of your income. And if you've got it. take the drug and the several drugs for the side effects you know it's
It's pretty insensitive to the well-being of the patient at every level. Well, I mean, it's part of also how the insurance racket works, that people are terrified to not have health insurance, in large part because of the drug benefits. because of how much cheaper it is to have your pharmaceuticals when the insurance companies have negotiated on your behalf. And it just feels like you're...
And because that is true, and because it is nearly impossible to get decent health insurance as an individual who isn't earning W-2 income from someone else.
You effectively are living in a company town situation where some number of people and I've actually talked to people educated people doing high-end jobs for big corporations who want to leave, could afford to leave, but say I actually can't do it until I get full benefits kicking in when I'm allowed to retire because I'm scared not to have insurance.
And these are people who are healthy, who aren't depending on this for anything, but they're scared. The very idea of having something happen, and it's not the catastrophic stuff that, you know, like, if you get hit... by a truck, and you need to be seen in the ER, you're going to need some help. And that is exactly why this episode is not sponsored by CrowdHealth, but that's exactly the kind of thing that CrowdHealth is excellent for.
But for the rest of it, the insurance that you've got with your employer is probably doing you far less than you think because it's keeping you from questioning. all the perverse incentives behind why you think you need the drugs in the first place yeah and i think actually there's a way in which um we regular folk that is non-doctors have a mirror of the doctor's distortion over the safety of whatever drugs show up in the pharmacy.
where we have a keen understanding of the terrifying scenarios, you know, the brain tumor that requires a top-flight neurosurgeon to... take it out of you and the huge amount of money you know the ruinous bills that could arise out of such a thing well that's true but we under appreciate the likelihood that your doctor is going to flat out kill you by prescribing something that shouldn't be in the pharmacy in the first
place which is way higher than we think so um and i would just to cap it all off the fact is what you actually need is an academy that studies reality without being beholden to anybody. a journalistic establishment that reports the truth irrespective of who it offends. And if you had those things, it's not like doctors would never kill anybody with some drug they shouldn't have prescribed. But the point is the system would get better over time.
We'd learn more about the general pattern. How dangerous do chemical interventions tend to be? And we would discover which are the corporations that are... indifferent to the harm they do to the families you know these exposés would reveal this stuff and the system would get smarter There would be harms, people would die needlessly, but the point is there would be a tendency to us becoming enlightened and more rational about medicine, whereas the current system, we get dumber over time.
And, you know, we may have just had a giant leap in the direction of Smarter based on the fact that they overplayed their hand, but it shouldn't have required that. Mm-hmm. So... Speaking of, let's just hear a little bit about what nature has to say about Kennedy. So this is from February 13th, so a few days ago.
uh but after kennedy had been confirmed as the new head of health and human services if you want your computer to show it's not is it did it fall out okay that's not working there we go do you want it sure in this case let it let it all think it through okay should be should be good now so this is uh nature news this is the sort of journalistic arm of nature one of the world's two
I don't even know what to say. Scientific journals. Fanciest journals. Yes. Vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. is now a powerful force in U.S. science. What will he do? Kennedy has expressed support for some fields but also declared he'd like a break in infectious disease research. So I'm just going to read the first couple paragraphs and then one down below.
Scientists are bracing for major changes in the direction of U.S. biomedical research as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promoted vaccine misinformation and public health conspiracies, gains control over a vast swath of science policy. Point one, no he has not.
point to you know he also has not but moving on the senate voted today to confirm kennedy as president donald trump's secretary of the department of health and human services which has an annual budget of roughly 1.7 trillion dollars and includes the centers for disease excuse me, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , the Food and Drug Administration , and the National Institutes of Health , the world's largest funder of biomedical research.
Kennedy has embraced some fields of biomedical research, but he has shown hostility to others and has rejected established science on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, the safety of vaccines in general, and other topics. parentheses kennedy told the senate that he supports vaccines and believes that they have saved lives um also like wrong wrong wrong but we'll get back to that um still quoting this nature article this nature news article the future quote
This is a quote from a Theodora, I'm going to destroy her last name, Hatsioanu, maybe? Hatsioanu? I don't know. The future of America as a superpower in research appears grim, says Theodora. Apologies, I don't know your last name. A virologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City who creates new models for studying HIV, which Kennedy has falsely suggested is not the cause of AIDS.
even on issues he claims he supports she continues he does not follow scientific evidence picking a person like this to lead is like having the wolf guard the sheep and just one more thing before you react to anything we're hearing here Scientists also say that the ongoing outbreak of bird flu, which has made at least 68 people in the United States ill since the start of 2024, makes this an especially bad time to cut research into infectious diseases.
just to point out the freaking innumeracy again of apparently the writers of the news articles in nature and what they expect of the readers which is supposed to be basically scientists across the board We need, this is an especially bad time to cut research into infectious diseases, they are arguing, because 68 people in the United States have become ill in the last 13 plus months. 68 people have become ill?
And no one has died. And I'm not saying this is nothing. I don't know. But 68 people in 13 plus months. my God, what is wrong with these people? Yeah, it's an absurdity. What they should be saying is that there's a concern about the evolution of the pathogen, but frankly, these people don't think evolutionarily. They don't... It's really unclear. They're taking massive efforts. They're culling.
chickens at an incredible rate that has all kinds of implications. Frankly, it has epidemiological implications that I'm not convinced they understand. Well, it also serves to help the argument that the new president isn't doing anything about egg prices. Right. So who knows what perverse incentives are driving the system, but let's just go to the most basic point here. There is a caricature of Kennedy in which he is not interested in certain kinds of science. Right.
It's nonsense. The man is incredibly scientifically literate. He has some beliefs that sound, frankly, incredibly unlikely. until you dig in and you find out exactly what he's saying and then you discover that actually there's a reason he has reached these conclusions. And so in part... And as far as I've been able to tell...
Every single time that I have gone trying effectively to fact check his opinions, some of the ones that sound crazy to me, they may not be right, but every single one that I have gone looking at... are based on published scientific papers. Right. So he's not making stuff up out of whole cloth. He's not going and talking to astrologers. Right. What they're depending on... frankly, is the failure of the public to know enough of the rarefied published literature to be able to tell.
that, in fact, Kennedy's belief structure is based on evidence. Basically, the point is that the whole thing is their tone. They have incredulity where they say, you know, in fact... You know, Kennedy even disbelieves the blah, blah, blah. Right. And the point is they're depending on people who don't know one way or another why you would believe or would disbelieve to think, oh, my God, that sounds preposterous.
But the point is we're living in a preposterous era, right? We're living in an era where, you know, Benadryl is still being sold over the counter despite the fact that there's a cumulative lifetime increase in the likelihood of dementia. Do people know that... dementia is something they're risking when they treat their allergies with Benadryl? They don't. So the point is we're living in a ridiculous era.
And they're depending on people's sense of incredulity to be triggerable based on no information whatsoever about the underlying topic. And it's obscene. And frankly, the American public is waking up, which is, you know, why they... absolutely embraced the you know the teaming up of kennedy and trump uh in this election which is so unusual yeah no that's right um and i just wanted point out as well nature's use of manipulative and
despicable frankly terms like established science in in the part of this piece that i read and they do it throughout he has rejected established science well in the particular paragraph that i read what follows that he's rejected established science on the efficacy of covet 19 vaccines really who's got that one wrong
right and um and then with regard to you know kennedy has falsely suggested hiv is not the cause of aids so did carrie mollis who got a nobel prize in medicine and physiology not saying it's true so did luke montagne the literal discoverer of hiv yes so um you're not just allowed to question these things you should be expected to and if we have someone at the head of these departments that think that once some scientists agreed on something that's
all in it that's all it takes and you should never look at it again that's the danger that's someone who doesn't understand what science is and is actually going to put us all at risk so can we have a complete free-for-all in which Nothing is accepted under any conditions, and no matter how long something has been understood to be true and how many times it has failed to falsify with excellent empirical tests, we still just treat it like...
It's as crazy as the newest idea that just got proposed? No. But that's part of the scientific process is you repeat the cycle over and over and over again. And if someone comes in and says, you know what? I know you say you did that a bunch of times, but I think your tests were wrong and here's why. Or it turns out you didn't test against placebo.
Yeah, we did. Show me the receipts. Like, show me the evidence. And with regard to, again, the vaccines in the childhood vaccine schedule, for which not a single one of them was tested against placebo, no one has claimed, oh yeah, we did. What they claim is well that would that would be immoral because they're so safe that you can't do that on what basis do you think they're safe well because We're just doing it to everyone
Yeah, they're safe because they're vaccines is basically their argument, which is not a valid argument. It's not a valid argument, and they haven't been tested against placebo, which is, you know, that is what Kennedy wants. actual safety testing for the products that we are giving to especially our children who can't give informed consent i find it funny actually that the way they now have to phrase it is
That Kennedy is, in fact, a vaccine skeptic. Heaven forbid, a skeptic? Like, in what way is that in any way damning? Right? He's a skeptic. He's a skeptic of vaccines in the era after the mRNA debacle. I would say he was way ahead of his time. I mean, you know. It's established science, Brett. It's scientific consensus, ain't it? So anyway, yeah, the whole thing, it's a manipulative trick based in language. This has nothing to do with science and the way science actually works.
That's exactly right. Well, that's what I got. All right. And my chair is crazy, so I'm just going to keep on moving around here. What I have is a vignette, but it actually, I think, in a strange way, fits exactly with this topic. There was a video that circulated earlier this week, which we're not actually going to show. We don't have the technical capability to show it with audio here. But the video, show the quoted tweet. Okay, so it's ready now.
um if my computer will let it happen show the quote and tweet though oh that's oh uh i thought that was that was the quoted tweet i don't the quote of tweet is the woman standing uh at the mirror So I don't know what you just had me do. I have no idea how to get back to it. I'm not showing it right now. Okay. So you want me to show that? Yeah. Okay. Ready? Yeah, I guess.
The tweet in question... I'm not sure why, given that the sound is everything. Can we play it without the sound? Sure. The tweet, or the video here, involves a woman standing at a mirror. holding up a towel which blocks her view of the mirror and a third person who is filming standing off to the side.
is looking at her and she is saying how exactly does the mirror know anything about me given that i'm obscured from the mirror by this towel but you can see me in the mirror how does the mirror know what to reflect And a lot of people reacted to this by effectively mocking her as if this was evidence of some terrible failure of her education and, in fact, evidence that we need to...
invest in education in some way that we haven't. And I would actually argue that we do need to invest in education in some way we haven't. But the problem is that actually it would be inobvious to most educated people in fact I dare say almost all educated people why this event
occurs this way. Why is it that she can hold this thing up that blocks her from the mirror but a camera from a third position can see her behind this towel and the mirror reflects her directly? This is not a simple matter. Do you want this? Yeah. So a response meme showed up, which I actually quite agree with. I'll have you read it. The meme is of the it's basically what.
some of us would call a pre-trans fallacy meme. But in this case, it takes three characters, one of which I would call a smooth brain on the far left. Then there's a midwit. person in the middle who sort of an average person and then there's kind of like a sensei character off on the right and so the smooth brain character says how does the mirror know what's on the other side
The midwit character says, no, it's obvious. Everyone knows about reflections. It's even too simple to explain. It's basic optics. That's why we need the Department of Education. And then the sensei says, that's a very good question. Yeah. I like this meme because the point is it captures two things here. Not only the sensei character is the sensei character properly reporting that what the naive person can't figure out about the mirror is actually tough.
figuring out how to understand it and then how to explain it, that's actually a pretty tough job. And so what the midwits do is they shut down the discussion. by pretending, and I think they even lie to themselves that they understand the answer to the question. The basic point is, it's optics. You know, there's vectors.
Light travels in a straight line. Therefore, the answer to her question is obvious. And light travels in a straight line. Yes, the answer to her question is not obvious. You have to understand a whole bunch of things in order to be able to... talk your way into an explanation and then conveying it is even harder. When I look at that video, and you just showed it to me the first time right before we started, my thought was, where would the mirror have to end?
That he wouldn't be able to see her in it. Yeah, like what what what what are the parts of the mirror that would have to not exist for this not to be working? And I don't I don't know so I want to point out a couple things. First of all, it just so happens I've been thinking about weird mirror paradoxes since I was a kid. Maybe everybody does. Can we take this off? Yeah. But the one that fascinated me as a kid...
was this one. You're standing in front of a mirror and the mirror reflects all of the objects on your side. How? I do not believe there is a
any chance at all that the following hypothesis is true, but how do you falsify it? The idea that what is on the opposite side of the mirror is just as real as what's on your side of the mirror and so there's a molecule for every molecule on your side of the mirror and they approach at exactly the same rate and therefore everything would feel like a hard surface because the whole world is mirrored on both sides, right?
The point is, it's not what's going on there in the slightest, but it is interesting that the mirror appears to reflect the entire world on your side, and therefore, if there was a...
corresponding atom for every atom, presumably a corresponding subatomic particle for every subatomic particle, the interaction with the mirror would be very like what we have because they would all approach and cancel force-wise. So anyway, that's... a question it's not exactly relevant to this but what it did raise is the fact and actually there's two versions of this i can't figure out which one is right what does the mirror reflect right if you take a mirror in a room
What does a mirror reflect? Well, it really reflects at least everything in the world on this side of the mirror, in principle, right? The mirror doesn't exactly reflect anything. What it reflects, the picture in the mirror, depends on where you're standing, right? And the point is, you've got angle of incidence equals angle of reflection.
And so the point is, she's not seeing herself in the mirror. Somebody in the third position is seeing her in the mirror in a place that you could take a Sharpie and mark it, right? Because there is a trajectory that leads exactly through that path. So in any case, I would advise people, we don't have it handy because we can't do the sound, but there is actually an interesting...
video in which Richard Feynman is asked not to explain this paradox, but to explain, or he decides to explain why it is that the mirror inverts left and right, but not up and down. Right? And he gives an explanation. It's a little hard to follow. Yeah, I remember this, and I don't remember. It's one of these explanations that you hear, like, okay.
I don't have it anymore. Yeah, well, the explanation he gives, which is right, but even somebody as gifted as he is has a hard time conveying it in a way that it's... transparent what he's talking about but what he says is it doesn't reverse left or right at all right it appears to reverse left and right because what it really does is it reverses front and back or what he calls north and south
And that basically, if you imagine, let's say you're inside of a bar looking out the window, the name on the window will be backwards, right? You're looking from the wrong perspective. So anyway.
None of this is really... So it's, yeah, your expectation is it's splitting down the sagittal plane. It's actually a frontal plane issue. It's inverting. It's pulling the front of the person through the back of the person. And so it's... appears to reverse left and right but it's really a back forward thing which leaves up and down left and right intact but anyway the larger point that i really wanted to make is not about the mirror
The larger point that I wanted to make is about education. And I do believe that this woman's confusion, which I don't see anything embarrassing about at all. I get exactly why she's confused. And she doesn't get an answer. She doesn't get an answer. But the point is, yes, we do need education. It's not the budgetary issue. We need a different approach to education in which, in fact, I think our best tools...
are some of the basic puzzles, you know, mirrors, prisms, magnets, right? Standing waves and ropes, stuff like this. All of the stuff that... fascinated the ancients is the useful way to train the mind. And so it's in some way criminal that your education does involve learning state capitals.
And it does not involve contemplating all of the weird things that a mirror reveals, right? It should involve these things. And basically, if you set kids loose... on these puzzles with a teacher who's capable of answering their questions then the point is well school becomes you know a fascinating exercise in coming to understand you know this object that sits in your house and
you know just as we've talked in some past week about the fact that you're sort of entitled to understand just how remarkable an animal an elephant is and we sort of rob kids of that by presenting them elephants from before they're even conscious right you are also entitled to understand just how amazing a mirror is and to understand that you know until you can polish metal right the reliability of a reflective surface like you know water
is not so high that you can necessarily, you don't have a photorealistic reflection that allows you to find the little defect on your cheek and think about it. You know how you look before mirrors on the basis of how the world responds to you.
as opposed to having empirical evidence yourself. Right, and how philosophically distorting has that been? Our ability to scrutinize our own image rather than come to understand ourselves as others see us, which would be frankly... on the one hand a lot less literal but on the other hand a lot more useful right you really want to know you don't want to know
if i look good to me in the mirror you want to know if the way i present to people is resulting in them you know feeling warmly towards me trusting me and all of that yeah so you know we've been go ahead no go on Well, I just think we've been radically distorted and also robbed. The cost of having a mirror that allows you to obsess is great.
But we're also squandering the benefit of it, which is that it actually reveals things about the physics of the world you live in in a way that nothing else can. And I guess most people go through a whole life without ever... It's not that they don't consider it. We probably all consider a mirror, but we're never confronted with somebody who knows enough about it to help us understand this near miraculous creation. Yeah.
I mean, a couple more things about mirrors and then something about education. I didn't have a mirror. I think I've said this on Dark Horse before, but I didn't have a mirror during my longest field season in Madagascar that you were not on. And every two and a half weeks or so, I would go, I would take a little boat across from Nosy Mangabe, where I was, which is off the coast of Madagascar, into Monsatra, the town near there.
nearby to spend a night in a little hotel and get some salad to mutt and to replenish my rice supplies basically and There was a mirror in that bathroom. So I would see I would see myself once every two and a half weeks and one time i went in after having been in the field for three months or so um you know but have having had a mirror the previous two and a half weeks or so
and i was astonished to find white spots all over my shoulder and up my neck and onto my face and i had a field assistant jessica she was amazing and she'd been looking at me and it was like jessica It was a skin fungus that was fine. I was actually told by a dermatologist back home, just tan it out. That's the last time a dermatologist ever told anyone to tan anything out.
It's like, Jessica, why didn't you say something to me? She's like, I don't know, what were you going to do about it? Like, oh, well, I guess. I guess, yeah. And I didn't need to know. And you were responding to me as if I didn't have white, as if I wasn't turning into a leopard in front of you. And okay. And it was just super instructive in every regard not to...
not to be confronted with an image of myself for weeks at a time over the course of many, many months. And then I will say I think we've also mentioned on Dark Horse that both you and I grew up in homes and failed to raise our children in a home. um i attribute that to the lack of an appropriate space but really we could have made it work but both you and i grew up in homes that had infinite mirrors that had that had two mirrors placed
opposite ends of a short enough room that you could stand in one and see yourself reflecting infinitely. And it was incredible. Yeah. So in my house, it was two. cabinets with mirrors on them and you could open the door and swing the tunnel of mirrors on the other side even better yeah and you know it raises all the right questions um but
Anyway, how much better would we be? How much smarter would we be? How much more joy would there be if we used these puzzles as a way of... Education really should be about... Training your mind to think about stuff, not teaching you things. Teaching you things is a mundane... use of educational space but enhancing your capacity to confront puzzles and there are a lot of puzzles in mirrors right teaching your mind to confront those things
is how you teach people to think scientifically, right? You can test your own hypotheses about a mirror, right? Take some crayon. and stand there and think about where you see the objects in the mirror and then have somebody else standing at a different place mark where they see the same object. You'll start to learn a lot about what's in the mirror, right? Yes.
So one more thing about school. Sorry, I'm just, this chair is so deep and so ridiculous. I'm not finding a way to be comfortable in it. I saw, I walked past... a school in Sevildaday Elementary School where there was a teacher with, I think it was 26 or 27 kids. I don't know. You saw them briefly and then you weren't there to watch the thing. I saw like eight to 10 year old kids.
Something like that. Engaged in these physical... All of them were engaged in the same game at the same time, and there were three sets of games. But the first two, and the last game that he had them playing was... one that will be familiar to most american children it was like it was a kind of um now i've forgotten what kind of tag it is it's like freeze tag or basically some of the kids were um set up as as it
uh to begin with and then they had to go and alligator the other kids who were running around and that was all great but very familiar and uh and it was amazing to see the different skills and the different enthusiasms of the children but that came after probably a full half an hour so
this was already very different from an American school and that there's a teacher sort of setting up the rules of play and you know there's a lot of reason to have free play but that doesn't mean it's the only kind of play outdoor play that kids should have setting up play and and engaging the children in physical play that involved them, you know, falling onto the ground a fair bit, actually, for a good long time in the middle of the school day. So that was point one.
The games, the two games that he had that I'd never seen anything like it, and maybe some Americans have, but he had these kids in four lines, and there was a cone in the middle, and whenever he said, go, which was...
fast and it got faster as it went or he made a sound the kids at the front of each of the four lines would run to the cone and then they had to sort of synchronize and they weren't supposed to count or say anything but they're clearly you know lock on with their eyes and then i'll jump up at the same time and
slap hands with whoever was next to them so each kid is slapping the hands of two other kids and then they land and then the kids go off in the opposite direction from once they came and they go back to the back of the line and it goes and it goes and it goes and
um you know kids are excited about the synchronization and some of them didn't have it at all and some of them really got it and then once they land because they've been so focused on synchronization maybe they forget and they try to go back to where they came from and they spin around they crash on the next kid and
Sometimes they fall down, but they're fine. There's no tears. There was one at the very end with the tag game. One girl fell, and she needed a little bit of attention, but I think she was actually totally fine. And so this is...
And he had them at first, he had them lined up in two lines of all boys and two lines of all girls. And so it got a little bit chaotic as it went on. And there were occasionally groups with all boys or all girls, these four kids coming together. But this is a mixed age group.
to begin with it was always a mixed sex group uh mixed skill group of course because any group of children is going to be mixed skill and they had to synchronize without language to do some physical task and then run off in the opposite direction and sort of keep track of
you know keep track of what they were doing and how to synchronize and how to control their own bodies and because of the little bit of chaos and the running around they were never in the same groups again either so they couldn't just like learn each other's thing and this struck me as just educational on so many levels and then and they started to get a lot of them started to get pretty good at it so he's like okay you know
Re-even the lines because, you know, some kids had not gotten it right. So one side, you know, longer line than the other side. I said, okay, same thing. Got four lines, four even lines, cone in the middle, and, you know, same deal. Four of you are going to run together and do something and then run off in the other direction at the end of the lines. But this time what you got to do when you get together is you get to get together, turn your butts to each other and jump up and hit butts.
near impossible. Like I was looking at that going like, you know, they're all different sizes again, like it's, and you can't see each other and they don't know how to synchronize because they can't make eye contact or they're not really supposed to be talking. I'm inferring they're not supposed to be talking because I couldn't hear the instructions, but they didn't seem to be. And I think some of the kids would have started talking.
if they'd been able to, like that would have been the approach that some of the kids were taking. And so with this one, there was a lot more falling, but it was also just totally boisterous and...
Everyone was having a good time. And sometimes they hit butts and sometimes they didn't. And there was only one kid in the entire lot who was clearly trying to knock over the other kids, which is surprising. Only one kid out of 26 or 27. And... overall i had the sense of like you could read that as just you know 45 minutes for kids to get their energy out before they go back inside for the rest of the day
I didn't read it that way at all. It looked like amazing education in terms of teamwork and synchronization. understanding like who your people like who the new people you just got put with are and it was just remarkable and i i can't imagine seeing that in an american school now at least not in the standard american school you know it's funny though in some ways it reminds me of what we used to do with our college classes right
we took them into the field sometimes the field wasn't necessary for the particular subject matter but the point was the students being brought into a place that took them all off kilter Came to know each other. They had time to explore to invent their own games. Yeah, you know, we would play ultimate with them stuff like that go hiking and Those you know at the end of the day
It's hard to defend it in specific terms, but that is not an argument against it. And we were lucky as college professors that we didn't have to defend these things to anybody. We could just simply decide that they were part of the course that we were teaching. and do them, but... Well, I mean, I don't think, you know, we never required anyone to play Ultimate.
No. Right. Field trips were required, and the academic portions of the field trips were required, and everyone was required to be part of some meal groups and help. plan and shop and cook and actually be participatory in the breaking of bread with people. But the sitting around a campfire and the singing songs and the playing of Ultimate and the playing of games that people brought were not right.
acquired, but almost everyone ended up participating in at least some of that, and most people participated in all of it. Yeah, and you know, my feeling is I would still, in the terms that one is expected... to present an educational plan, it's hard to defend. On the other hand, I'm absolutely convinced that it was incredibly positive, as I'm absolutely convinced that the games these kids were playing.
here today were positive in ways that would be a little hard to to explain yeah absolutely well maybe we're there yeah i think we might be all right uh so our Sponsors this week were Armra, Timeline, and Sundays. All fantastic products. Try them. Do try them. Consider joining us on Locals, where we've got the watch party going on during our live streams and lots of great content, including early release of most of the Inside Rail episodes that Brett does with guests.
We're going to be off for the next two weeks because we're going to be in Spain and we'll be back two weeks from tomorrow, the first day that we are back in the United States in our new beautiful studio there. if that's all. And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.