Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live streamed the first one of 2025. Happy New Year to all. This is the 250th. The seventh? Eighth. Eighth live stream. uh obviating any need to discuss the primeness or not of the number we are obviously broadcasting from a brand new space we are still working on the details of it but anyway we hope that you enjoy it. I am Dr. Brett Weinstein. This is Dr. Heather Hying. Hello, everyone, and Happy New Year.
We are thrilled to be in our new studio. We've got this beautiful piece of art behind us, which we will show you different parts of as we proceed. The only thing missing really is Justin, our zebra named last week, but he got named and then he got canceled. It happens. Yeah, you know, I think of him more as put out to pasture. Oh, no, he's very much inside elsewhere. He's elsewhere. Well, maybe if he's lucky, we'll put him out to stud.
Maybe we will. So here we are. New year. We're going to spend a bunch of the day talking about... things from last year and what it looks like going forward, but various big stories from last year that we covered and some that we didn't.
No Q&A today, but as always, there's a watch party going on at Locals. We appreciate you joining us there. There's an early drop of the Inside Rail podcast that Brett does with guests happen there, and we've got other... original content our locals our discord server is there so much good stuff so join us there and as always the top of the hour we have three sponsors whom we have carefully chosen and uh and we'll start there
So, our first sponsor this week and this year is Armora. Ancient and health-giving, Armora is colostrum. Colostrum is the first food that every mammal eats. It is produced in the first two or three days of an infant's life and is nutritionally different from the milk that comes in afterwards. Colostrum serves many vital functions including that of protecting and strengthening the mucosal barriers of infants before their own barriers.
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Let's support healthy digestion and reduce allergy symptoms. I forgot how to read there for a moment. Oh man, do I relate? Yeah. Yeah. I knew you would. That's going to be 2025 for me. Terrific. You're going to forget how to read. I'm going to forget how to read.
No, that's a terrible prediction. I'm going to back that off. Armour starts with sustainably sourced colostrum from grass-fed calves from their co-op of dairy farms in the U.S., and they source only the surplus colostrum after calves are fully fed.
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well it's really not about the diagrams no it's about none of that as you know you would be that kind of year is it you were going to add something uh just that it can't be easy to get colostrum that is glyphosate free in light of what is being done to cattle um yeah so yeah glyphosate being a particular problem because the um geniuses who are scripting big ag have sprayed it on
wheat at the very end in order to prevent fungus growth which is insane because even the normal toxicity that would accompany spraying early when the crop is growing would decay to a large extent by the time you harvest it spraying on right at harvest is uh it's bat shirt crazy if you know what I mean it's also I mean I guess maybe this is the same reason but as I understand it it's sprayed at the end as a desiccant yes um
dry wheat being easier to harvest than wet. Easier to harvest and less prone to fungal growth. But whatever, it's insane to be spraying anything. on your crops at the point of harvest because the rate of consumption by the people and other creatures that eat those things will be all the higher. Yes. Yeah, we'll be...
We'll be continuing to talk in 2025 about big food, big pharma, and big ag, all of which we hope are on a downward trend. We are going to talk about that today. We are going to talk about the big picture. I think you'll all enjoy it. All right. Our second sponsor this week is delicious and nutritious. It's Manu Kora.
monokora honey is rich creamy and the most delicious honey you have ever had ethically produced by master beekeepers in the remote forests of new zealand monokora honey contains powerful nutrients to support immunity and gut health all honey All honey is excellent. I could use some right now. We don't have any, do we? Not on me, no. We forgot to bring it into the new studio. Yeah. I mean, you are allowed to use a container. Okay. Yeah. That's not cheating.
Cheating? No, I don't think so. All honey is excellent for you. Scientific research has indicated that honey has antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and anti-mutagenic properties, as well as expediting wound healing.
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In addition, a unique antibacterial compound, MGO, comes from the nectar of the Manuka tea tree. Delicious and nutritious with great quality control, that's Manukura. A lot of the honey on grocery market shelves isn't real honey. You'll never have that problem with Manukora. Manukora honey is rich and creamy with a complexity in its flavor profile that is unmatched by other honeys I've had. I'm telling you, I can't read today. It'll come back. You'll see. Yeah, I hope so.
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That's the way of the world. If these bees want proper credit, they can, I don't know, get their species to take up podcasting. Yeah, bees are going to be, they're going to grind their mandibles. Over something. Or their manacles. The beekeepers have bee manacles. Not monocles. No. Okay. Well, you know, only peanuts wear monocles now. It's kind of retro. Our final sponsor, Heather, is Helix, which makes truly fantastic mattresses, as you know.
We've had our Helix mattress for over three years now, and it continues to provide amazing sleep, just as much as it did when we first got it. it's firm which we like cooling and silent it's just perfect everyone has had bad sleep sometimes it's attributable to modernity the light shining in your window the noises of humanity that you can't shut out the churning of your brain your
God, I thought that said philosophy. Your physiology that has been mangled by fake food and pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceuticals are all too real, actually. But I digress. All that contributes to bad sleep. But so does bad mattresses. So do bad mattresses. So maybe the problem is the scripts, which is still downstream of me. These are very 2024.
No, actually, that one really isn't. That one is brand new. Well, there's a bunch of it that's been re-cycled. Still, it wasn't written in 2024? Yes. I think it may have been. It reads like it was. um helix makes excellent mattresses every one of which combines individually wrapped steel coils in the base with premium foam layers on top providing excellent support for your spine take the helix sleep quiz online and in less than two minutes you'll be directed to
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Grab it now with Helix. Better sleep starts immediately, I'm going to say. So I don't repeat now. But all right, we survived. Yeah, so I will say. the helix offer um they're doing a a number of different offers for the new year and this one is the best of the lot and uh i know it was a confusing call to action that you had to read there a couple times but they're offering a lot of stuff for If you're thinking about a new mattress, this is really the moment.
Go to Helix. Awesome. Yeah. All right. I'm going to remove that. I need that. That's my notes. Oh, that was the ad. All right. Under control. Yes. All right. So you're not going to quiz me on my... my New Year's resolution from last year. I could.
I could. I don't know if it is, in fact, what has been on our calendar for a year. But if it is, I will go ahead and quiz you. Is it what's on our calendar? I don't know if it's on our calendar, but I do remember. See, this is part of the problem, guys, right there. He has no idea what's on our calendar.
Right there. You have it in a nutshell. This is the source of most conflict that we have. Guilty as charged. No low contendere. Yeah, I'm not great on the calendar side. However. How would I know what's on my calendar? I mean, it's a fair question. For a long time, and it's been looming, and today it does loom because it is right here, one of our shared calendars. has suggested that today you need to spell necessarily and fascism.
Yes. Now, was that the New Year's resolution that you were thinking of? Yes. I took a new tack last year, which was I was going to set the bar so that instead of being a classic where you don't live up to your New Year's resolution, I could actually do it. do that here in dark horse yes i see okay so that's why it is on the business calendar as opposed to a personal calendar the family calendar oh as for why it's on what calendar i have no idea but or that it's on a calendar exactly
Okay, so can you do it? I think so. Okay. Which will you start with? Will we be able to tell? Ouch. F-A-S-C-I-S-M. There you go. Nice. Fascism. Exactly. And necessarily would be, can you use it in a sentence? No, that's, that's how a spelling bee works. It would be. N-E-C-E-S-S-A-R-I-L-Y Very well done. now i have a question for you how long did you have to study too long for sure but and also if we come back if next week i ask you
Will you still be able to smell them? Will you still be able to smell fascism next week? I can't promise you one way or the other, but I can tell you if you put it on the calendar, it's not likely to make any difference. This I know. yeah if any of you out there have any hints for um getting husbands to look at their own calendars but much useful it's not the way i was supposed to say that no but yeah
I get it. I would be much obliged. All right. All right. So I spent some time going through some of what we talked about last year and I wanted to, I wanted to just have us. go through some of these things, have a reminder and maybe in some cases some updates and some of what you've got to do this week might.
might fit in well um so can i just give i don't know whether my stuff is going to come up in line or afterwards but just so people know that it's coming i am going to discuss the rifts that have arisen in unity land between MAGA, MAHA, and unity and what they mean and what we might do about them. That's really important if we're to accomplish the things that are on our collective agenda. So anyway, we'll see if they come up in line, but if it comes up after, so be it.
Yeah, and just broadly, the sort of the topics that I found popping up, you know, what doesn't show up in this list at all is really our analysis.
And the places where we, you know, we weren't explicitly talking about something topical, but we're doing a broader analysis, which is, I think... a large part of the unique value that that we bring um but the the topics broadly uh and in the order in which i think we'll talk about them here are um diversity equity and inclusion and its downstream effects um fats and food and uh the healthy and unhealthy versions of both pharma of course uh the who's pandemic treaty right
Fell apart. Bad science proliferating and good science getting defunded. Gender ideology. The magnetic field of the earth. Immigration, Panama, the Darien Gap.
I've got one little side thing that didn't fit anywhere else, so we'll get there. Free speech, the election, Rescue the Republic, Unity, and then some randomly cool biology things that we touched on last year. So that's... that's both a lot and doesn't it doesn't begin to capture the scope but uh let's let's start excellent shall we okay so um very early last year like almost almost
to the day, I think it was January 2nd of 2024, Claudine Gay stepped down as the president of Harvard amid strong and compelling allegations that, for instance, she had plagiarized much of her dissertation. So that is one of the pieces of evidence that maybe the DEI insanity is beginning to wobble on its pedestal that many have put it on.
Not too long thereafter, a bunch of Boeing planes were grounded. Remember this? After a panel, including a window, flew off mid-flight out of Portland. And somehow everyone was fine. plane turned around because it popped off quickly after takeoff so they were at low altitude averting a disaster yeah And as we reported, James Lindsay discovered when digging into the story, Boeing had tied incentive compensation to inclusion.
starting in 2022 and so that's why that shows up on a list of uh maybe dei related madness uh that uh that You know, there are many people who were saying this is, of course, nothing to do with DEI, but if they literally had begun and there is there is the paper trail suggests that Boeing had indeed begun to tie compensation to inclusion.
and they were proud of having met their benchmarks, in fact, exceeded their benchmarks for doing so, that we might exactly expect failures to begin to happen. And I don't think it's legitimate to... claim that you can't establish a connection between these things you know you've set up a policy with a as we covered on the podcast a absolutely um
what do i want to say an obvious prediction that if you're not drawing from the largest possible pool on the basis of competence alone that you will create a less competent pool and how much less competent will your engineering end up being We don't know, but it's an obvious question. Yeah, it's a statistical argument.
um that does not depend on any population being on average more or less uh excellent than another it depends on the size of the pool being as large as possible um after the democrats excluded bobby kennedy jr from the uh gosh i can't figure out where to look i'm having a hard time figuring out how to see the things i need to see after the democrats excluded bobby kennedy jr from the presidential debate which led of course to him endorsing trump later on
The Trump-Biden debate in June somehow made half the country realize overnight what the other half have been saying for years, which is that Biden was not fit for office. So the Democrats went with the DEI hire. kamala harris biden had specifically said before he chose her you know four years earlier um that he was going to choose a i don't remember actually we've talked about this but i think he just said he was going to choose a woman
I don't think he said he was going to choose a black woman, but maybe he did say that. I think he might have said woman of color. Yeah, either way, he definitely specified some demographics. So by the same kind of...
DEI crazy logic, like you limit the size of the population, you're not necessarily going to get the best. And of course, once chosen as the pick by the Democrats for the presidency, Kamala Harris quickly revealed that she had nothing to say, and even if she did, she couldn't really say it anyway.
Even that is generous. That's very generous. Except, of course, she did have a couple of things to say, as we covered in October of this last year before the election. Her opportunity agenda for black men.
included wanting to legalize marijuana. Right. I mean, I think exactly as the reaction I had then, it's like, how is that not... the most demeaning and racist thing that you've done like what how is that specifically for black men okay um and after the election uh confused professors uh including
at Smith College said insane things like, quote, Harris ran a flawless camp. And this while... evidence uh was emerging that the campaign had wildly mismanaged funds funneling donations to already rich entertainers Right. I mean, there was plenty of evidence that that was actually probably the most flawed campaign and perhaps the most flawed candidate ever to be run. But you had not just that one professor at Smith, but others claiming that she had run an utterly flawless campaign. It was.
Flawlessly flawed. Every conceivable way it could have been flawed, it was. In much the same way that the CDC ran a flawless COVID campaign. Exactly. You just take it to the negative one and... there you've got pretty good advice and i mean this actually fits well with the ei i mean it's kind of it's it's you think you're looking at the numerator and you're actually looking at the denominator that's a good way of putting it we should uh
Figure out how to. Well, it's just the same thing, you know, to the negative one. To the negative one. It is. But you think you're looking at the numerator, but that's actually the denominator just captures it for the mathematically inclined. That's right. Continuing. with, you know, last year in diversity, equity and inclusion.
After the first assassination attempt on Trump, remember that? The first assassination attempt on Trump. In 2024. In 2024, sure. Head of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheadle, then head of the Secret Service.
Kimberly Cheadle told us that the Secret Service couldn't have been on the roof where the shooter was because of the slope of the roof. And she soon thereafter stepped down. And of course, that first assassination attempt on Trump also revealed in the... in the coverage that we saw in the immediate aftermath how poorly prepared some of the secret service were some of them appearing to be
Maybe DEI. DEI hires also. I want to be careful about saying that. I don't know. Certainly the claim that the roof was too... Steakly pitched is an insane thing for anyone to say. And it sounded like this was a person who had actually never met an angle or something. No, I think we are perfectly positioned. to to argue that these are uh that this is a pattern a dei pattern for a couple of reasons one the way science really works where you know we talk about the scientific method
You've got observation, you've got hypothesis, you've got prediction, you've got test. Up here in observation, you've got anecdotes, right? Anecdotes are not to be thrown out. Anecdotes are to be understood and they... cause you to formulate a hypothesis that you then go on to test so we've got
a whole bunch of anecdotes is it unscientific to point to the pattern and say hi wonder if that's dei coming home to roost no but even better what we have said here on dark horse many times is that correlation does imply causation
when it is preceded by a causal hypothesis. That's right. And so this was preceded by our causal hypothesis that DEI was going to result in a... catastrophe of incompetence spreading across all domains that applied it for exactly the reason you said at the top of the podcast, which is you're not drawing from the largest pool and it doesn't matter even if the populations are exactly equal in capacity.
fact that you've limited to a smaller number means you're going to get less than the top qualified person for each position, which means the overall competence of the system is going to drop. Even if the mean capacity is equal.
That doesn't suggest that the median, or it doesn't matter about the mode, I suppose, but that the median capacity is equal, nor if the size of the population uh is not equal does it suggest that the tails of the distribution go to equal places even if the size of the population were equal which they never are yep so there's there's all sorts of ways the populations can differ and they will differ and uh you don't you don't
have to go to um you're saying those people are stupid which we are not right in fact if you just take the uh thought experiment of a completely homogeneous population where all of the demographic indicators are not correlated to anything that affects competence so it really is totally evenly distributed If you were to, let's say, exclude Swedes, every so often the most qualified person will be a Swede, and you will not get the most qualified person. Not rutabagas. Wow.
hadn't considered a misinterpretation of Swedes. I think you're talking about Swedish people. Yes. If I say Norwegian, does that eliminate any possibility? I don't think the British call any of their vegetables Norwegians. Good, I think. But anyway, the point is, if you exclude any population, you're going to exclude some of the most qualified people. So it's always anti-merdocratic to do this.
And it's always going to result in a reduction in competence. If you exclude Norwegians, the effect will be small because there aren't that many of them. Right. If you exclude a large population of people, the effect is likely to be spectacular, even if competence is exactly equally distributed. We said this.
causal hypothesis and its prediction were on the table before the miraculous seeming DEI calamities of 2024 ever happened. So we're in a perfect position to come back and say, see, told you. Yep, absolutely. Just one more. We touched on several... several things, of course, last year, but this is a sort of a diverse group of DEI calamities, as you've said. California Governor Gavin Newsom, remember him? Yes. Yes.
mandated in 2024 that folic acid be added to all commercially sold tortillas, which is a terrible and unhealthy idea. And we covered this. We talked about it when it was looking like it was going to happen. And then we talked about it after it did happen in episode 246.
October it's a terrible idea a little bit like fluoridating municipal water you know for it's not it has obviously some differences but the idea that you can increase One thing that you think is important to increase and whether or not you should is its own question.
adding it to a food that people eat in uneven amounts or water that people drink in uneven amounts and uh and thus have no control at all over the dose that you are giving to people or that people are getting is an awful public health intervention so
this is what is happening in in california as of a couple of months ago the mandating of folic acid being added to all commercially sold tortillas but the reason this is a dei issue is that newsom actually claims that this is a quote health equity issue because he has come to believe that Latina women are particularly deficient in folic acid and that this is causing a higher number of birth defects because folic acid is deficient.
purported i will say um to be a common deficiency in pregnancies that result in uh birth defects like spina bifida so first of all there is a question about whether Gavin Newsom is the governor of California.
as a result of a cryptic program that has excluded smart people from the role but you can see in this the collision of two themes from our last year there's the absurdity of dei and what it does to merit and competence and you have a classic case of complicated thinking intruding in a complex system where there is apparently
concern over deficits of folic acid but no concern over having excessive folic acid because what you're pointing to the fact that you're adding it and you have no control over how many tortillas people eat and so You know, you will take care of a certain number of deficient people if the deficiency is real. But the point is you've imagined that there's simply no cost to having too much. And there are some things for which that's close to true.
You know, vitamin C, because it's water soluble and we get rid of it easily. seems to be low cost, but is folic acid in that category? Does Gavin Newsom have any reason to think it is? No. No, and I don't think that it is. We talked about this a little bit when we talked about this in the first place. this in the same era.
when the so-called public health agencies are telling us that we absolutely must not take something like ivermectin because it's clearly so toxic and is incredibly dangerous, even though until the day before that. basically uh the who's essential medicines list had um had ivermectin as one of the safest drugs to take for a wide variety of ailments so we are simultaneously living in a world in which we are told that we must focus on the toxicity of drugs that don't serve someone's hidden purpose.
And we must not discuss the toxicity of things that are going to be added to food or water sources without us being able to effectively titrate.
what we're eating so you know i i no longer particularly want to eat tortillas in california unless i mean i guess at all because commercially available um means even people making them in a restaurant themselves and selling them presumably means that in order to be in compliance and hopefully not everyone will be but presumably that means that everyone to be in compliance if you're buying a tortilla from anyone
it needs to be supplemented with folic acid now i'm imagining a black market of tortillas on the nevada border you know how when you cross between countries there's often a little currency exchange uh you know dudes making money at the border uh yeah off the books so i'm imagining uh a uh what's a resurgence if it hasn't happened before a surgeons yeah i know of really awesome food trucks at the border because the problem with
buying your tortillas at the border and having to get inland. California's a big state. It is a big state. In from the border is that they're not going to be as fresh when you get them. And a fresh tortilla, man, a fresh tortilla is amazing. Like we've had some fantastic, we've even made them sometimes. And they've been.
good but a fresh tortilla made by someone who's been making tortillas all their lives it's is really something we're missing it are we yes again i think so the comedy gold is to be found in a sitcom based on the idea that people are sneaking over our southern border with folic acid free tortillas from the home country i mean that'd be kind of funny it would be yeah Yeah. Families of folic acid-free tortillas come to make America great again. There you go. To make America great and healthy again.
full of delicious tortillas yeah yeah um okay so that um that dei food uh nugget nugget um segues into the fats and food taking center stage uh for so much of what we talked about so much with the what the world seems to have been talking about in 2024 um so very early on um in January 10th of 2024. We talked about the risks of polyunsaturated fats on human health.
And it was research from 2018, but it had just come to my attention, and the whole question of seed oils and the various kinds of fats were getting into a lot of people's heads at this point. Just to remind our audience what the research was. And so the risks of polyunsaturated fats, like, which is...
Seed oils have a very much higher both amount of and ratio of polyunsaturated fats to the other kinds of fats that they have. So that's corn and sunflower oil compared to say butter and coconut oil. uh we have a in fact i can show uh here this you can just show my screen this is something that we showed back in january of 2024.
This is from this research that was published in 2018, Grootfeld et al. 2018, in which they have... Oops, this is not showing everything. There we go. Corn oil and sunflower oil at the top. with high degree and amounts of the polyunsaturated fats with those really high curves and coconut oil and butter in the bottom two having much lower degrees lower both amounts and rates of and note the y-axis
here which is that the corn oil and sunflower oil actually have y-axis that go to 20 and the coconut oil and butter um have y-axis that only go to 10. so it's actually twice as bad as it looks yeah and what these um What this research found is that polyunsaturated fats produce, when fried, a high degree of aldehydes. You will be familiar with, for instance, formaldehyde. Everyone who's heard of formaldehyde knows that it's not good for you.
And with regard to aldehydes alone. It's not good for you unless you're dead. Unless you're dead, in which case it preserves your tissue. Keeps you looking fresh. Yeah, it keeps you looking fresh. Not being fresh, but looking fresh. Yeah. We just took a weird turn. I apologize for it. Well, so acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, other aldehydes you may have heard of are produced in abundance when polyunsaturated fats are fried. And of course, the what.
Where you will tend to get that is, to use the example that they used in this research, is french fries fried at a fast food restaurant. In fact, french fries fried almost everywhere.
are being fried in seed oils because seed oils are cheap uh you know industrial from you know from oils um from from from basically these these mass-produced commercial commodity plants that have been hot processed and detergents used to to get all of the stuff out of the seeds, that a standard portion of French fries from a fast food restaurant fried in seed oils has about the same number of aldehydes as that inhaled from smoking 25 cigarettes.
Wow. Yeah. One portion of French fries. So that's remarkable. Seed oils, of course, then grabbed the public attention in part when after... actually i don't remember the order here but uh kennedy started talking about how mcdonald's really you know used to be frying their french fries and tallow and they should be doing it again they were more delicious they were more nutritious all of this and i don't remember if that was before or after
very successful stunt i want to say but like very successful pr move in which he um in which he donned yeah in which he donned the mcdonald's drive-thru window like i think he had on the hat i think he kept on his suit and then he manned the drive-thru window at a mcdonald's this was shortly before he sat shotgun in a trash truck Yeah, he made it look good. Yeah. Yeah. Bobby's point about tallow and fries was before. Yeah. Before Trump's.
brief employment at mcdonald's no he was not employed he would not claim to be employed i think he did that in part as a way to poke kamala who had made some claim about having worked fast food and then there's no evidence that she ever did yeah i mean i don't know how long we need to spend here. But, you know, it could have been the equivalent of Dukakis in the tank.
a famous incident in which michael dukakis running for president who was perceived to appear weak on military matters decided to remedy that by riding around uh in a tank helmet out of the top of a tank and he couldn't have looked like more of a uh doofus yeah he looked like a total doofus dork and anyway it had a terrible effect on his campaign trump
It didn't look like he was employed at McDonald's, but he looked like he was having a good time with it. It worked in a way that speaks to the fact that, you know, yes, it was a political stunt, but it was a political stunt that was not. the candidate rolling his eyes at doing it. It was natural. Right. And no one will claim that eating at McDonald's is good for you.
But to Bobby Kennedy's point, were they to go back to frying their fries in tallow, which would presumably be a very expensive endeavor, their fries would be, like I said already, more nutritious and more delicious. Yeah. all at once. In response to both of these things, they might claim it wasn't a response, but the New York Times assured us that CDRLs are no big deal.
we talked about that in november and then the atlantic in december the atlantic monthly argued that tallow is really really bad for us and they had all sorts of health experts telling us that well tell i was really really bad for us they just referred to the fact that tello has always been said to be really bad for us without actually charting out any evidence because well there is no evidence that's why
That's why they didn't do it. See, here's the thing. Telling us about claims of the past that were unfounded is step one. Step two is you need a really sophisticated model to tell you exactly what you thought You just build it into the model and then you run stuff through the model and then you're shocked when the model spits out exactly what you have loaded into it to begin with.
right that's how models work that's how models work i mean that's inherently how models work and so of course you can game them and frankly it's hard it's hard not to game them right that is part of the problem which is why if you have been paying attention to dark horse you know that models could be a valid way of generating a hypothesis but they cannot be a valid way of testing a hypothesis which is what is overwhelmingly being done
When you see a claim about, for example, the millions of lives saved by the so-called COVID vaccines, and you think, oh God, now there's a study and it says millions of people were saved. I wonder if that's true. Look at the study. You'll find a model. Why does this model spit that out? Because that's what they programmed it to do. So anyway, it's a classic. Yeah, it's totally classic. Okay, so...
There has been for many years this global pseudoscientific public health push to reduce consumption of animal-sourced foods, especially mammals and birds. There is a push in some corners to... studying insects uh there is a um encouragement uh to eat you know fake meat plant material glued together with
seed oils and other garbage and the general shape of patties as if that will suffice to make you think you're eating a hamburger, which I've never had one, but I'm sure it doesn't pass. It is 100% guaranteed to be grotesque.
and yes they will they will find probably in the chem labs of new jersey ways to dress it up flavor wise and texture wise in order to get closer to the real deal but it's it's garbage yeah but there has been uh there are the beginnings the like intimations of a pushback against this agenda and so um there was an article published this year that we talked about um pointing out the pseudoscientific nature of the claims that eating an animal-based diet are bad for you. So little glimmers of hope.
But then the Tufts University originating food compass also continued to be treated seriously. The food compass finds, for instance, that Froot Loops are better for you than meat and eggs. And so are Pop-Tarts. Fruit loops are geometrically more regular than me. And symmetry is... pleasing right and what is more pleasing is not always good for you at all actually i can't even get there mathematically symmetry is often an indicator of the health of a concept
Yes, or the health of a human being, even, to pick up on the fluctuating asymmetries research that Bob Trivers was involved with back when we were his student. So that is one point in favor of Froot Loops. And 40,000 points, roughly speaking, against them. But, you know, one point. That looked at square on.
Fruit loop being perfectly symmetrical. I don't even know if they are, though. No, they're not perfectly symmetrical. See? So they probably have some asymmetry themselves. Oh, you're right. And that could be, they could be in the uncanny value of loops, if you know what I mean. Uncanny value? Valley. Yes. Not quite loop-like.
enough to really pass as a loop so maybe even that one argument in favor of root loops is not a loser loops they are a loser they're phoning it in loops they really are yep yep um Speaking of food. Were we? Oh, meat. You mentioned meat. That's food. Yeah. Speaking of food-ish, do you remember micro beef sushi? Have I blocked this out? I think you have. Here we go. Here we go. You can show my screen briefly. Rice covered in cow cells.
aims to provide nutrition sustainable food micro beef sushi costs about the same as plain rice but how does it taste so they're trying to convince us not to eat cows yes but because some part of some of them recognizes that actually cow is nutritious they've taken cow cells and coated it coated rice with it turning it pink and gelatinous and gross
And what this does is it saves people from ever having to actually have cows because all you have to do is culture cow cells in a lab and then like throw it at the rice. So microbeef sushi. I will just. Speaking of food, like I said. Yes, as an enticement for people to stick around, I am going to attempt to address all of these abominations in one fell swoop so that... Maybe by this time next year, that would be January 1st, 2026, we will be safe from these maniacs.
Okay, well, we can hope. Also, in speaking of food, sort of, we have biotech companies pushing things like the perfect potato.
Remember this with Ohalo Genetics claiming that with their introduction of a polyploid potato, which they also seemed to think was only something that ever happened in plants, that they imagined a static world and a... datic potato and there being perfection which points out not just a conflation of complicated with complex but also just a complete failure to understand an evolutionary system which if you are in the biotech business you really need to understand
Both. Complexity and evolution space. And one doesn't, well, really understanding evolution space gets you to complexity, but understanding complexity doesn't get you all the way to understanding evolution space. Yeah. Sounds like a recipe for needing...
more uh agrochemicals to grow it you know yeah in the same way that uh so-called super crops are actually inferior crops that require a whole hell of a lot of fertilizer to to make them work they sure do um speaking of let's move into pharma oh awesome shall we yes all right So there is continued lunacy around the narrative that vaccines are the only way or the primary way that you can avoid disease. We had the CDC making this claim.
And we had Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH, the head of the NIH during COVID, reimagining history, asking of the COVID era, quote, why didn't facing a common enemy bring us together? Well, Francis Collins, because you were the enemy. You were the one leading the charge of insane public health measures with Fauci as your supposed underling, but actually the evil guy behind the curtain pulling all the strings.
That piece that he wrote for The Atlantic in September of this last year that Francis Collins wrote is... truly remarkable in its just complete reimagining of what actually happened. Well, I was just going to point out that he is guilty of crimes of public health. medicine and music is he oh yeah i don't know you didn't catch his uh his um bizarre hokey
Little songs designed to get people to take deadly shots and stay away from each other. Oh, goodness. I feel like I missed that. Or I blocked it out. Yeah. Or you blocked it out. But anyway, yeah. Such an odd character. Indeed. The big pharma story of 2024 maybe wasn't the mRNA shots, although certainly there is...
There's continuing lunacy there. Or the question of vaccines in the larger context. And, you know, the... observation now you know often discussed uh that for instance none of the child none of the vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule as put out by the cdc have actually been tested against placebo um but the flashiest
of story of 2024 was it was ozempic and um the other glp1 agonist i'm just going to call them all ozempic because it's easier but um We discussed back in May a glowing endorsement, a glowing recommendation for Ozempic that the Times of London had published.
uh that claimed that ozempic and its relatives cut heart disease deaths by 20 percent now i in natural selections that i published a piece just last month in december in which i cited uh some new research that found that ozepak and its former relatives uh reduces heart size and the size of cardiomy
myocytes in, that's the wrong word, myocytes, cardiomyocytes in people who are on it. And when I published that, one person, I don't think on my substat, but over in Twitter space, responded by saying, Yeah, but fat people often have big hearts and they need to shrink them. And what this research actually found was that
People who were on Ozempic who were fat did lose weight, but also lost heart mass and their heart muscles shrunk. People who were on Ozempic who weren't fat to begin with did not lose weight. but did lose heart muscle mass and size from their heart muscle cells as well. So that would suggest that that criticism of the idea that it's a bad idea to lose your heart muscle mass is...
Ridiculous. Okay, so Times of London back in May claiming that Ozempic is just this wonder drug that among other things is going to help you with your heart disease. I think not. rendering the editorial board werewolves of the Times of London. Oh, no. Okay. Yeah. I don't think it was an op-ed. It wasn't. No. Well, but still, they allowed it.
The editorial board decides. The editorial pages and the news divisions of papers are generally not really connected. No, but the editorial board decides what the content of the paper is. we could keep doing this but i think that defending a pun to its like last possible I was trying to save you. I was trying to let you back off from your ridiculous pun, but no. It wasn't even a pun. It was just wordplay. It was a reference to a fine song.
yeah that seemed relevant in light of the despicable behavior of the times of london but so why don't you i i've heard of the song i've probably heard the song but i don't know i couldn't tell you anything about the song and often when you make music references you assume that other people
You often don't assume that I, but you often assume that other people know what the song is about. So it sounds like the song was somehow relevant here to the wordplay. Well, the idea that the editorial board were behaving like werewolves, right? Oh, that's it. Seeming. Okay. You know, mild-mannered, well-dressed and all, and then the moon comes out and they become werewolves who do despicable things and spread death and destruction. That seems fitting. Well...
Problem again is, though, that werewolves go back to their mild-mannered selves. And as far as we can tell, the mainstream media just seems... Very focused on being ridiculous 100% of the time. But see, that's where Warren Zevon's song comes in, because he is describing this werewolf that he's seen, and his hair was perfect.
Right? He doesn't look really like a werewolf unless you're paying close attention, as Warren Zeevon apparently was. Wait, so he's seen one or he is one? No, he's seen one. He's not one. So why wouldn't his hair be perfect? Werewolves' hairs are... But now you're saying he is one.
Oh, no, it's in the song. It's in the song. It's not Warren Zevon's hair. No, no, no. Oh, so you just, I think you dangle the modifiers. I apologize for that. So I clearly don't know the song. And I told you I didn't know the song. You must know the song. I will play the song for you later. As I told you, I'm sure I've heard the song.
but I have no idea what it's about because I don't hear lyrics particularly. It's about a werewolf that he saw at Trader Vic's and the werewolf's hair was perfect. The werewolf's hair was perfect, not Warren Zeevon's hair was perfect. In fact, Warren Zivon's hair is suspiciously not mentioned in the song. So are you arguing that the editorial board of the Times of London...
are filled, is filled with people with perfect hair. Is that what you were doing? No, I was really hinting at the idea that they are, um... probably misleadingly well presenting and yet when you know the sun goes down and they are not easily observed prone to create death and destruction yeah okay I'm with you there, werewolves. Okay. The New York Times in August had this fantastic line. Remember diets? Those strict eating plans we used to follow before drugs like Ozempek and Munjaro came along?
So it just, you know, and that in a piece, that in a, like a little puff piece that the New York Times did as if they aren't all puff pieces, but in which they were claiming to debunk health trends.
And they just throw in this insane pharma product that so many people are on now, and they're going to be sorry. Like, this drug is going to get pulled. I don't know when. I don't know if it's going to be in the next two years, but... it is going to become clear to people that this is a dangerous drug and here we have the new york times talking about health claims that they're debunking just as a throwaway line saying of course none of us watch what we eat anymore we just pop more pills that
mimic naturally occurring hormones that cause food to stay in our stomachs for longer, and therefore the signals to our brain that we are in fact full to be sent in greater amount. Well, I do want to... say you say this is going to get pulled i think so i mean that's that's a prediction here's the thing yeah one that will only happen if maha
And successfully finds itself seated in the administration, as we hope. No, a lot of drugs have been pulled. I mean, you know this better than almost anyone. When you say pulled, there have been these critical cases of Vioxx. Exactly. Seldane, stuff like that. But in the case of the GLP-1 agonists, so far, the case looks like... It is parallel to statins and SSRIs where they fall out of favor.
Statins aren't falling out of favor yet, but that's beginning to crumble. Right, they fall out of favor. We finally realized decades down the road that the chemical imbalances in the brain theory was garbage to begin with, which of course was obvious to...
those who understand anything about how little we know about the brain or who knows anything about evolution. And statins, we find that we are chasing a metric where we've started treating... firefighters rather than fighting fires and we think we're doing good and it turns out it's not true all of this stuff is um
It just takes decades to emerge. And then the drug still exists. It falls out of favor. Maybe it's backed off to some use case in which it's actually has some marginal value. But anyway, I worry that. Hey, the falling out of favor takes decades. And a lot of people are going to be harmed, you know, just as they've been harmed by mercury in medicines, which used to be extremely commonplace. And.
many other things so the trick would be maha gets seated we test these things we're at the end of the test we can do a real cost benefit analysis and we find out if there even is a used case where the cost benefit analysis is positive If there isn't, they get pulled. And if there is, this gets limited to that rare use case. Yeah. No, I take your critique. I think I think you're right. I hope they get pulled regardless, even if Malha doesn't manage to.
to get enough power to change the health of America, I think that then they will follow the... less impactful trajectory that as you point out the SSRIs and the statins and I'm sure there are a lot more. like that um well you know puberty blockers um i don't think puberty blockers themselves are going to get pulled you know and they have this other use yeah uh for treating precocious um
or a precocial, I can't remember which of the words is used in medicine, precocial puberty. So I don't think they're going to get pulled completely, but limiting them to... to particular cases. It's tougher with a GLP-1 agonist because they first came to market for something else. And so there will be...
There will be a lot of people with a lot to lose arguing that they have to remain on the market. And then, of course, doctors will do what doctors do and they can prescribe off-label, unless, of course, it's ivermectin, in which case you certainly can't do that.
Okay, so the New York Times, I'm picking on the New York Times a lot, but I did last year. They deserve it. Yeah, the New York Times also couldn't decide if it should root for big pharma or big food. Remember that piece? Ozempic could crush the junk food industry, but it is fighting back. That was from last month.
times in this incredibly long cover story for the for the sunday magazine the new york times in which they really seem to be torn about which side they should be rooting for how about neither like how about neither what the hell how about just across the board yeah you know you go back to that yeah yeah um so i will say that um just as a as a editorial comment here that the overwhelming mass enthusiasm for ozempic
And, you know, GLP-1 agonists broadly, but Ozempic and the disdain that those of us who are criticizing it face feels a lot like what happened with the mRNA COVID shots. It just, it feels like a repeat in some ways. Obviously, there's no mandate for Ozempic. They're not going to, we're not going to have Ozempic forced on us, but it's a huge one for pharma.
it's a huge loss for humanity and it reveals this mass formation of the population that you know just so many people are just going along with it imagining that it is the best new thing that has happened. And it's as if 2021 through now never happened with the mRNA shots. It's as if we are living in a totally different world. Well, I want to...
flip that interpretation on its head a little bit. It's not a revisit of COVID or the mRNA shots. It is... I, and I think we, did not know about COVID because it was our first, it was our first, it's not even our first pharmaceutical rodeo, but it was our first confrontation with what I've called the game of pharma.
the game of pharma is about owning intellectual property in the form of a patent for something that has an interaction with some pathway that gives a plausible benefit and then gaming the structures that cause the number of people diagnosed with the pathology that it might treat to be increased the safety of the item in question to be exaggerated, the efficacy to be exaggerated, and then the monitoring of harms to be obscured.
This game of pharma has been playing out for decades. And what those of us in the medical freedom movement, at least those of us who joined... fighting COVID and the mRNA shots, fighting for freedom about repurposed drugs, what we just got schooled about. is how sophisticated pharma is at doing these things it's not hard for them to generate a study that will claim that a competing drug is dangerous that their drug is safe that the efficacy is better these things it's just a button they can push
And we don't understand how it works because we don't understand how they've captured the journals, how they've captured the universities, the medical schools. But, you know, the point is it's. uh 24 7 365 with pharma and has been for decades and we just got a confrontation with it over covid so this is just them doing the same thing that they've been doing all along which we became hyper aware of during the so-called pandemic. But I think I wasn't...
I wasn't talking about the pharma side. I was talking about the population level response. I was talking about the, I mean, I agree with everything you just said. But the way that people embraced the apparent solution. In the case of both the COVID shots and the GLP-1 agonist like Ozempic. And... Not only did they embrace it, but they embraced it in such numbers and with such temerity, with such fierceness that they...
Felt very comfortable mocking, deriding, canceling anyone who criticized their new favorite Pharma product. Yeah. And I think in a past discussion, you've said, have they learned nothing? Right. Did they learn nothing? That's it. Maybe there's a radical distinction between those of us who got schooled by COVID and learned the lesson at great cost, some of it to reputation.
having made errors along the way, but nonetheless understood in the end what happened to us and inferred correctly at least a large amount of what it implies. And then there's the public, which is being induced, frankly. I know that Ozempic itself is an injection. Is the other competing one also an injection? One or more of them are now available in pill form. And originally they were, and I think most of them remain, subcutaneous weekly injection. So it's jabs again.
It's jabs, which, A, among the many things I learned during COVID was that... The use of a hypodermic needle, which I thought was an elegant intervention, turns out to be a radical intervention. because you're bypassing all of the protective mechanisms you take a pill at least the body has some control over what it actually imports into your bloodstream
And in fact, the body is built to be conservative in this regard. It does not transport most things. Unless you've had a lot of glyphosate and your gut's super leaky and permeable. You could have a leaky gut situation or it can be a novel compound. that, you know, the body doesn't know what to do with and diffuses across that barrier. But nonetheless, there's some selectivity if you eat the thing. If you let somebody inject it, the point is, well, that is going into your bloodstream, you know.
directly if you get an accidental intravenous injection or indirectly as it leaks out of your lymph. But in any case, there are there do seem to be a huge fraction of the population which didn't learn the lesson of covid and is now being beckoned with the thing that it has always wanted which is a i don't have to get control over my life. I don't have to exercise or control my appetite because farm is going to solve this for me being induced.
to get comfortable with injections, really regular injections. So anyway, that's an amazing indicator of where we are. It is. I guess one of the things about the Ozabic story that hadn't really occurred to me until you were just talking was, you know...
It's not that there is no free lunch, but in this case, there's just no lunch. But people on the stuff who still swear by it, who haven't experienced some of the very many negative effects... um including apparently when you go off of it um like with all of these things you just gain the weight back right and that but you also may have pancreatitis and be less able to produce the glp1 uh that you're actually uh that is actually endogenous to you yeah um
in which case you're going to have an even harder time uh controlling your appetite in the future um but eating um and this is actually the next thing i was going to say like you could go on a zempick or you could listen to the people who say you shouldn't do that why don't you just control yourself and you know we have talked about like it is hard and it is especially hard in an era
in which there are so many enticements in which your developmental environment probably poisoned you. And it is especially hard if you were already overweight as a child. There are a lot of things that make it hard.
to become healthy. And those who have willpower suggesting to those who don't that they just need to have willpower isn't really a solution, right? However, we sort of inadvertently in parallel to the rise of the ozempic story discovered something for our health not for weight loss but for our health that has the effect of also contributing to weight loss which is dry fasting
And we spent a whole episode on it. Episode 252. And, you know, which is... dry fasting which is where you neither eat nor drink anything for some specified amount of time and you can't do it go into it lightly and you know you have to be careful and and there are lots of people in positions of various precariousness with regard to their health, where they need to get healthier before they can consider doing this. But it is a absolutely remarkable way to reset your physiology.
in many ways and one of the effects that it has is that after you come off of a dry fast your appreciation for food is so intense and amazing and even if you like we are kind of foodies and have always paid a lot of attention to what we eat and have always enjoyed good food and uh both making good food and eating the good food that is produced by other people. But when you are eating good food all of the time, you become a little bit a nerd to it, right? And so we just did another very short.
um dry fast to just day and a half right before the the new year and we had our first meal last night um after it and began with just some cheese and crackers a couple of amazing cheeses and you know if you're not into cheese if you're not into blue cheeses this this won't necessarily appeal to you i know that blues um get you know hit a lot of people the wrong way but there's this one blue called Saint Aguirre which is
so exquisite it's also insanely expensive but you the fact is it has become insanely expensive for some reason yeah and also we live on an island where it is not made and you know it's all important and all this but we had a both we had a smoked gouda smoked gouda and we had this santa gr which is a creamy blue on these very nice um very salty uh gluten-free crackers that have no seed oils in them gluten-free seed oil free yeah and
They're little crackers. They're little hex crackers. And after just a day and a half of dry fasting, I could make one of those crackers with a thin smear of blue cheese on it last six bites. Yeah. Normally, I can easily pop one into my mouth and enjoy it, and it's amazing, but the amount to which you appreciate every little bit of flavor more after just effectively rebooting everything, like...
telling your body there will be no inputs for a while. You're going to breathe, but you're not going to take any inputs through your mouth other than air. And coming back to food slowly. carefully, you know, with water at first, etc., etc., just reveals, reminds us of how amazing food is, and to hear people tell it, the people on Ozempic who still think it's a good idea.
have lost all interest in food it's just not appealing anymore yeah and that's a that's a that's a huge loss actually it's like the inversion these two approaches are inverse of each other yeah in multiple ways but to your point about the radical enjoyment of foods that have even if you love them have become somewhat so normalized the marvelousness of them does not strike you. It's a little bit like, frankly,
Something like hallucinogenic mushrooms, which allow you to see with fresh eyes things that you see every day and discount. Yeah. Right. That ability to just re-encounter something. I mean. When we were new parents, I was a bit of a weirdo trying to keep our kids away from things like elephants.
Since we didn't live in Africa, it wasn't that difficult. Well, it was that difficult because the instinct of everybody is to take your tiny little kids to the zoo and have them go, which I get, you know, as a biologist, I'm.
super inclined to put the kid in front of an elephant but i didn't want yep before the child developed the consciousness in which they could understand how extraordinary an elephant was i didn't want them to have elephants normalized because i knew the story about when elephants were first brought back to europe right and how shocking they were to people right
just the encounter with this incredible creature and the fact that we can create that experience for you by denying you an elephant until you're ready to understand one but we don't we just assume that as early as possible we should make elephants normal and so you lose you know how great would it be to go back to the state of not knowing what an elephant was and see one and yeah my goodness yeah so you should let your kids
you know, explore a deck where there's two stairs at the end into the grass. And if they make a misstep, they might fall into the grass and they might bump their head. The parents are protecting their kids from that. And you should curate.
the extraordinary experiences that wouldn't normally come to them, like elephants, and reveal those to them only as they can actually really appreciate it and perhaps... have a sense of wonder about it because you show a baby an elephant there's no wonder everything like his hand is wonderful right right like every this glass is wonderful and so you know keep keep the wonder alive
for as long as possible so that in the hopes that we can have wonder-filled lives our entire lives. Now, one other thing strikes me. Also, we don't live in Asia, I will just say, because there are Asian elephants as well. So true. Slightly smaller, but still. And really the ultimate elephant we've lost. The one that I, you know, would. And we could do that right here. What? Not on this island. No, no, no. It would take time.
But the pygmy stegadon elephant is really the one that I... Oh, I thought you were talking about like mammoths here in North America. No, no. I'm talking about pygmy stegadons, which sadly are extinct. But a diminutive elephant, I think it's kind of a cool idea, you know, like a bonsai. But I did want to point out this other thing, which maybe somebody else said this somewhere. I've not heard it, but it needs to be said.
One of the things that fasting reveals, I would say both kinds of fasting. Water fasting. Even just intermittent fasting, even with water, is that you actually feel different if your gut is empty. You feel physically a lot more capable. And there's something we all have come to accept. that your gut is sort of supposed to be constantly processing things. That would not have been true for an ancestor, right? Most of our ancestors, pre-farming at least, had a kind of a boom and bust.
to their consumption that was regular and normal. And that gives the gut time to rest, and it allows you to process at certain times, but you feel different in these two cases. You really do. And when I heard how Ozempic worked, That it slows stuff down. It keeps food in your gut. That is so gross. Yeah, it sounds terrible. Literally full of crap. I mean, literally. And I know that's a funny way to put it. I don't know.
i think it's i think it's keeping the food in the stomach so it's not I will take the anti-poetic license and just say that, I mean, even if it's slowing stuff down in your stomach, my guess is it's slowing stuff down in a way that is resulting in the whole pattern. The whole pattern effectively has to slow down. Slow down. Probably so. But anyway, the point is, first of all, that putrefaction of stuff.
that you've consumed by being detained for a longer period of time. Come on. Does this sound like an intelligent mode to you? It certainly sounds, frankly, having now experimented with all kinds of fasting from, you know. from intermittent daily fasting through five to multi-day dry fasting. The consistent grade to life that comes from going through your activities with your gut empty is very clear it's also energizing yeah yeah yeah i i find um
I find I actually have more energy for physical activities. There's my stomach rumbling now, suggesting that it wants some food. More energy, more interest in specifically being outside doing physical work. Yep. Yeah, I agree. It just strikes me as having landed on something that feels right because it must be. Yeah. natural in some way compare that to bovier another pharma derived garbage
molecule that emerged this year. I think it probably existed before this year, but we began to hear about it this year and we talked about it in November. It's a new supplement for cows that reduces their production of carbon monoxide. So this is a pro-climate supplement.
uh methane you said carbon monoxide and that's what i've got written here you sure it's methane it's yeah yeah it's it's method i said yeah yeah yeah i just i just wrote the wrong thing um well what could go wrong So just like slowing the food in our gut so that it sits there for a long time, which is not something that humans have ever had happen. so too do ruminants, as we talked about when we talked about Beauvier.
have a system in which they digest in part with the help of these bacteria that produce the methane. Like the methane is part of the process by which cows do what they do. So this is going to make the cows sick in ways that we may never fully understand. We may never be able to track it to the bovir, but it's not going to be good for the cows. And if the reason you have cows is because you're drinking their milk or eating their flesh, that...
almost certainly means that what is in their milk and what is in their flesh is not going to be good for you either. Yeah, it's not even a what could go wrong. It's a what will go wrong and how long will it take for them to admit it. Yeah.
yeah or and will they and i will also point out just as a teaser for later uh my one and done solution is going to address the bovier issue as well and appeal and all of the other insanity that they have yet to unveil excellent yeah i didn't appeal doesn't show up here because i think we talked about that in 2023 really was that long ago yeah it at least didn't show up in my review of our 2024 stuff um
And then just the last thing sort of in pharma space, and I don't actually know that sunscreen counts as pharma, but it's a related thing. Something. And maybe it's just the sunscreen industry, but really, really wants to enforce the idea that sunlight is bad for people. In fact, again, New York Times in July had the president of the Skin Cancer Foundation advising against even five minutes in the sun without sunscreen. Even five minutes in the sun, he says. And he doesn't specify where or when.
Like, no, you just, like, why would you, he says. Why would you ever spend even five minutes in the sun without sunscreen? This is the present of the Skin Cancer Foundation. I wouldn't be talked about this back in July. I said, this is like, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So this is the president of the Skin Cancer Foundation. The only thing he's considering is skin cancer. But as we talked about then, as we talk about in our book, as should be, you know.
obvious to everyone but there is research that points to the fact that yes living a life entirely outside, under the sun, in the harshest environments, compared to people who cover up or who put sunscreen on, those people do have some higher rates of skin cancer, but all the other metrics of health. that are looked at in this research are better.
That people who actually get sun exposure have a slight uptick in skin cancer and a considerable downtick in all of these other bad health outcomes that are measured. So the idea that someone who's... thinking about skin cancer is saying why would you ever spend any time outside in the sun exposing your skin to the sun well for so many reasons and one of them is to build your immune system and help you protect against things like respiratory
viruses, which two, three, and four years ago was everything we were supposed to be thinking about. Yeah, which also have implications for cancer because they cause cellular turnover. And so it's a complex system, of course. I'm stunned. By the advice, five minutes. Yeah. Because I'm trying to think of what would the case be? Is there a single demonstration that a person could have? I mean, I guess. You can always catch a really inconvenient ray that causes a super unlikely mutation.
My understanding of this, which comes from when I was studying telomeres, senescence, and cancer, is that it is burns that cause an increase in cancer. It is disproportionately burns you get when you're very young. But I don't think five minutes under any normal circumstances is enough to give you a burn.
So this person, I believe, is suggesting something that is all downside, right? They're talking about not getting an exposure, even at the level that it would be purely healthy. I think it's an infantilization. I think it is as so much of the so-called health advice and general advice is that we receive from the mainstream media and from so-called experts now is, it assumes that people are too dumb.
to actually accept even a barely nuanced but like vaguely nuanced position such as you don't want to burn you want to limit your exposure you know between 10 and 2 when you're at the equator you know like you like you need to be thinking about what your skin and your body feels like and you know go inside or take cover every few minutes if you're under the hottest sun and so um you know he's got he's got the wrong default position
But I think it emerges from this infantilization where it's like, well, we got to just pick one. because the people are not going to be able to take nuance. And so given that we don't trust them, if we say you can go outside for 15 minutes, we don't trust them to do that. We don't trust them to limit their time. So we're just going to go with like no time in the sun at all.
I don't know. I think you're being generous, actually. That everyone is being evangelized? No. How is that generous? Because I think the position that is being presented is so crazy that it is not... organically the result of the noble lie position in other words i you know look we've got a hypothesis on the table it's not mine though i um
agree that it belongs in the set of possibilities, which is that something wants us unhealthy because it is profitable for us to be so. How do you get people unhealthy? Well, one way is you get them to exist under artificial light to shield themselves even when they're outside in natural light to shield themselves from the healthy rays you don't tell them about vitamin d even in the middle of something you're claiming is a pandemic right
So all of that stuff points in the same direction. And I know I'm still reeling from my own naivete the discovery that the American Heart Association has a compromised... origin story and that its relationship to food oils is essentially seed oils food oils yeah non-food oils seed oils um that its relationship to that has to do with an industry trying to sell a product that wasn't initially a food yeah um so anyway i don't know anything about
Was it the American Cancer Association? Skin Cancer Society. Skin Cancer Society. Skin Cancer Foundation. But it does strike me that, yes, this is a crazy position, but it is also consistent with the overarching pattern of, hey. Everything that sucks is recommended, right? And why would it be that everything that sucks is recommended? Well, because once you get a system in which you can buy...
the advice of the officials. You can buy the regulators in every industry that has something it wants to sell that is counterproductive to human well-being will buy the opportunity to sell it anyway. So basically you get all of the parasites in the system buying access over their particular thing. And so the point is, oh, that results in exactly the weird pattern we keep running into, which is everything they say is stupid and wrong. Yeah. So the one, the one possibility, um, that.
that we haven't talked about here that i think is is maybe uh a really nefarious and scary thing that could be going on there has to do with and i just moved it up in the target here that the um the thing that we started talking about this year and that you specifically had some conversations on the inside rail about was the magnetic field of the earth and the potential for a pole flip. Pull flip is a separate thing, but...
Given that we seem to have empirical evidence that the magnetic field of the Earth is weakening, and that this is a cyclic thing that has happened before and is predictable, and while we couldn't have predicted it... We could not have predicted it probably to within the decade, 500 or 1,000 years ago, even with today's technology. We can now see that it is happening. It is happening fast.
um and you know some of the evidence for that is these solar flares that were of a size that shouldn't have had dramatic effects on earth but produced aurora as far aurora borealis as far south as puerto rico Many people saw Aurora this year living in places where they'd never seen Aurora before. From storms that just shouldn't have created that.
magnetic storms on the sun that were not of a size that should have produced such effects on Earth. But given that it's highly likely that some of the people who are actually in control of everything do know that.
What would a weakening magnetic field on Earth do to the effects of the sun on the Earth? And might it be a... terribly misguided and you know ultimately misinformed but attempt to protect people from a growing threat from the sun wow uh okay now now you know where i was going that was going to be tough to field because you know there are effects in the upper atmosphere ben davidson has been talking about uh a suspicious collapse in the ionosphere so there's lots of impacts of the um
the geomagnetic excursion that we are very definitely in the middle of, which is accelerating and having lots of different impacts. I don't know whether it affects anything with respect to your likelihood of getting... sunburn but where i think you misstepped at the end there okay and it's i i mean i i love every single one of you who does this but that
hypothesis is predicated on the idea that they give a shit about us and that they are therefore giving us well i mean i started there when i started and said i don't like i don't right but my feeling is Every observation I've got suggests that the... vast sea of experts and regulators are acting in a way that is completely indifferent, at best, completely indifferent to our well-being. When it gets to pharma,
There is the strong implication that actually us being unhealthy is viewed as positive. But at best, the experts, field after field, seem not to care a whit. about the well-being of average people and so anyway i mean i agree with you if you take that as an assumption that yeah this would actually make sense as a kind of an error you would expect somebody to make
out of an abundance of caution or something like that. But wow, do I not believe these people care about us anymore? I just don't. If you're in the expert class. But you grant that. They produce policies for which the cover story is, here's how to be healthier. Right. But the point is, okay, you've got the cover story. The cover story is always, we're doing this in your best interest.
and then there's a question about behind the scenes are they saying you know actually people are in more danger than they know because the magnetosphere is is weakening okay but yeah i feel like you're saying A, there's a monolith in your story. All of them are the same. It feels to me like you are discounting the possibility that any of them are actually interested in the common good and putting all of your...
like every possible thing into the, it's either indifference or evil. Those are the only two possibilities left. Well, here's why. Because there's actually a process that unfolds. And the process has taken all of the people who actually are trying to do the right thing and not getting the memo that tells them what they're actually supposed to be doing and throws them out.
and so then you know one of the weird things about this this maha era at the moment is that we have the tiniest number of people who have just barely hung on inside the institutions. Jay Bhattacharya. Yeah, you've got Jay Bhattacharya, you've got Martin Kulldorff. Well, but Jay Bhattacharya as someone who's been, you know, tapped to...
To help right some of the ship. Right. But my point is, J. Bhattacharya just barely avoided being sent into the cornfield. As lovely and careful a person as he is, he just... barely eked out a mechanism for being that kept them alive into the Maha era. Martin Kulldorff, almost as careful, didn't survive.
driven up so my point is the institutions have been purged of all of the people who would make a story like you're telling um coherent it's not that they wouldn't exist of course they would exist in fact i think most people who went into these institutions probably were well-intentioned in the beginning but there's this thing that causes them to lose their minds and if they are unwilling to lose their minds to be thrown out and disavowed
And the number of exceptions is a handful. And so, you know, am I saying, you know, it's not a monolith? The point is, actually, the really most terrifying thing about it is that it is an emergent phenomenon that is downstream of a very mundane process that just simply wraps people on the knuckles when they make certain kinds of noises and gives them a fish when they make other kinds of noises. And it's amazing how effective that is.
And we like fish. Yeah, I mean, who doesn't? Yeah. Okay, but in good news, in 2024, the Who's pandemic treaty fell apart. Oh, man. That was... That was delightful. So you were in Geneva talking at a rally as that happened, like within a day or two of that happening. And now...
At post-election, Trump has said that he has plans to pull us out of the who. Yes, which he did. I know. I know he did. In his first administration. And I am thrilled that he is going to do it in the second one. I think, you know. The WHO isn't what it pretends to be. It's like the American Heart Association. At this point, it's like the CDC. Right. But it is, in fact, effectively private, masquerades as a global public health.
It's not an authority. It's heavily financed by Gates and Welcome Trust and all of these nefarious entities. But pulling us out of that is... tremendous of course what we have seen yes we actually beat the who pandemic preparedness plan uh at the who we called attention to it here on dark horse we came to it late but we we brought attention to it and however the process unfolded there was enough attention brought that they actually gutted the thing with
respect to all of the most onerous provisions save one they kept the idea that the director general having declared a pandemic has some right to tell the governments of the world what they must censor so that's onerous and terrible, but all of the worst stuff was defanged. All of their right to redistribute drugs around the world, in other words, to take your ivermectin and send it to Timbuktu. Their right to literally mandate gene therapies, if they feel like it, mandate vaccines.
All that stuff was gone. They have now moved them over to the UN. These people do not take no for an answer. They understand that public health is the mechanism they are going to use to institute whatever tyranny it is for whatever reason they want it. And so they've moved over to the UN. So basically...
There's a lot of hope in the fact that Trump is aware of this and that he seems inclined to protect us from it. Yeah. And if that means the UN too, then so be it. Yeah. No, and it's hopeful to me.
uh that in his first term before as far as i know he and kennedy had anything to do with one another had ever spoken at all maybe at all um that even then in his presumably far less informed state with regard to public health and operation warp speed points to a far less informed state even then he tried to pull us out of the hoop yep uh so that that
That suggests a consistency and a wisdom, I hope, that is is actually revealed by him following through on that promise. All right. So I will take this opportunity to say that. One of the biggest concerns in the world of Maha is that President Trump appears unbudgeable. on the question of operation warp speed for which he believes he did not get enough credit and so he has a pride in operation warp speed frankly what was not good about operation warp speed was the product over which he had
No control. So really he should back away, but he won't. However, my one and done solution also addresses this issue. Excellent. So we will get there. Okay. I'm reminded, this is hardly from 2024, that back in 2020, before the election that Biden presumably won,
Kamala Harris, as the pick for VP, said that she would not take any vaccines developed under the Trump administration. She did say that. Yeah, no, it's an amazing change. The memory holding of the... anti-trump vaccine fervor that then became a if you don't take the vaccine there's something wrong with you fervor on the change of administrations was shocking yes the uh the
the through oh my goodness i can't i can't think today the um the through line being um wow i've just forgot what you just said i just i just lost it uh yeah we're good all right we're gonna go on continue with these because i we're sort of in the part of this where it gets more and more disjunct so we're gonna segue to your stuff soon here um We had, while all this bad science is proliferating, bad medicine and bad public health, we had good science getting defunded.
and falling apart so specifically um some of the things that are near and dear to your and my heart but natural history collections and museums and herbariums duke university's herbarium is getting dismantled and the california academy of sciences is firing curator
and getting rid of curatorial staff. And what happens next is the collections get moved off site and they don't get maintained and there aren't new collections being built and people don't come and collect data from the collections. And that sounds like a... real kind of 19th century, old school, why the hell do we need to do that anymore? Don't we have molecular genomics to figure out things instead of looking at dead things in jars? But no. actually, naturalists and the naturalist tradition.
is always going to be relevant to keeping us sort of tethered to the reality tethered to the reality of our earth and the ecologies that the organisms came from and the biology so this is this is a trend that is accelerating and it's tragic and it's not something that we can recover from because once those collections um have actually been allowed to decay there's no getting them back yeah um it occurs to me i don't know if we uh discussed it in this light before but
We've talked frequently about the errors that come from taking a complicated mindset into a complex realm. What's the remedy for this? The remedy is training people. I don't even like that term, but inducing people to become as expert as possible in truly complex realms so that is to say that if you want wisdom about complex systems you need people who know some complex system really well
And that means training people for stuff that you may not be able to justify on the basis that it is going to produce a known benefit for humanity. In other words, let me just...
One of the things I learned in our time at the museum was something that you can do with a museum collection that you can't really do any other way is you can test a hypothesis about um how development works in some you know some lizard from madagascar right you can basically take a time series of different specimens that were taken at different times uh in their life and you can piece together a pattern now what's the benefit of that to humanity well
the benefit is that you come to understand something about the you know just imagine you've got this tree of life and you've got a different developmental pattern in each of the branches but they uh share a consistency and you know you can tell the story of how development evolved in each of these branches again are you likely to get a concentrated benefit an invention or something from that knowledge no but what you are going to get is by training people to think
about these sorts of questions you're going to get smart people who have come to understand something deep who can then look at a claim about something that affects human development and they can say something not on the basis that the lizard development looks like the human development but but they've become expert in the idea of development across many taxa and that that gives them a way of looking at this and not
thinking of everything from the lens of you know hey here's a pathway in people and here's a place we can interfere with it that's going to cause a benefit the idea that science needs to have a benefit in advance that
is one of my least favorite ideas in the world. And it used to be this was... as i understood it anyway this was something that was emerging from the right like i remember in the 90s and the aughts um seeing republicans complain about certain research that had been funded because it seemed ridiculous and you know how absurd that
any federal dollars for instance should go to funding research into let's call it lizard development yeah right uh and i thought sort of easily and somewhat lightheartedly at the time It's too bad that people are complaining and don't understand that there is value in what we... I think, I wish it wasn't called basic research, but we trivially refer to research that asks questions of the world without tying it to an experience.
expected human outcome, basic research. Basic research is what science is. Science is one of the fundamental things that humans do. And it was, frankly, the failure of most Americans and probably most humans on the planet to think scientifically that led us into the disaster that COVID was. It was people saying, well, the experts said...
Uh... to do this to go inside to lock myself up with my sick loved ones and to you know if i get really sick to go to the hospital i could put on a ventilator and to definitely take those mrna shots and to definitely not take these other things uh that um
been demonstrated by doctors who have now been fired to be good for you against this disease. And I definitely don't want to go outside and get sun on my skin. And I definitely don't want to do any of these things that the experts say I shouldn't do. And I do want to do all the things the experts told me to do. That is... anti-scientific thinking of course these are the same people who put the hashtag follow the science uh yard signs in their yard right that like it is basic science like
Almost everyone is not going to end up studying the developmental series of a Madagascan lizard. But absolutely everyone... with a few exceptions for people who are just actually really too mentally deficient to do it, but almost everyone, including most of the people that people will say, oh, people are just so dumb, they can't even, like, no, almost everyone.
can learn to think scientifically and to assess claims and to not accept the experts when they show up with their fancy degrees and their lab coats spouting bullshit. And that's what we need. We need an... actually scientifically capable populace. And it's possible. It is possible. It is possible. And I would also point out that the story of COVID appears to tell us exactly
What happens when you are obsessed with justifying all of your work on the basis of the benefits it's going to give humanity? Because we now effectively know that the so-called pandemic and all of the downstream effects, including. lockdowns, masks, the developmental disorders, the ventilating of people that killed them, the shots, the badly designed trials of hydroxychloroquine that overdose people.
all of those consequences are downstream of a bunch of arrogant assholes who told us that they needed to study and enhance viruses that did not infect people they had to make them infectious to people in order to know how to protect us when they inevitably emerged so what did they do they caused it to emerge what they had learned in the lab did us zero good and so it was that my work is valuable
It's going to be good for humanity that got us into the mess and failed to do anything to get us out of the mess. That's the long and short of it. If you want to avoid that kind of nonsense,
Train people in basic science. They will come up with valuable things, but don't force them to justify it in that regard. When you force them to justify it in that regard, they will tell you fairy tales that can do things like cause a, you know, global pathogenic disaster that's right yeah a lot a lot more to say here but let's uh let's move on okay next big topic um
that we touched on as we always do or i always do uh in 2024 was gender ideology sex and gender the reality of biological sex the non-reality of uh gender as it is being uh bandied about um so i want to say it's falling we have evidence that it is it is it is gender ideology is falling in the uk in particular we have the cast report we have um you have various clinics closing we have um
basically truth and reconciliation begin to happen. And we had the WPATH files, research and written by Mia Hughes, as under the auspices of Michael Schellenberger, released in March of last year, which revealed the... insane and evil criminality going on at WPATH, which is the main basically gender transition organization in the world. But...
So that's beginning to fall. And detransitioners are having more and more of a voice. People who bought... who were sacrificed on the altar of gender ideology and have figured out that they are not actually able to turn into the sex that they are not and are living the life as the sex that they were born to you know often with downstream effects from their transition that will be permanent. But their voices are becoming more and more heard as time goes on.
But then I went to a pride parade in Portland in the summer and saw pop handlers on proud display. So although we don't have pop handlers in the government keeping our nuclear...
waste safe anymore. Sam Brinton being long gone from the government, I guess he's just stole one suitcase too many and that was it. But the pub handlers are still this niche kink that is being displayed on the streets of portland and presumably other pride parades throughout the country we had the opening ceremony of the olympics in paris which matthias desmet recognized as a parody of the last supper that embraced trans
wokeries. We have also at the Olympics, Amin Khalif, the Algerian boxer who's XY, who suffers a disorder of sexual development, who literally took home gold for beating up women. And he's a guy.
and i'm sure he went through a really painful um puberty because he didn't think he was a guy but he is a guy and he now knows he's a guy and he's getting off on beating up women and somehow the world is like yay you woman that doesn't act look or in any way behave like a woman and you're not and okay um but you get to pretend you are so that's that's gender stuff from 2024 uh we've of course had your work on immigration going down to Darien Gap with Zach early in 2024 to Panama.
Yep. We will be returning to that topic here shortly. So maybe we'll leave it at that for now. But immigration is once again in the headlines. Yep. Julian Assange was released. I didn't even know where to put that here, but it felt like it needed to be mentioned. Yeah. And I must tell you, I wonder why. Yeah. I think that there was a strategic reason that he was released.
Many of our viewers will remember that we discussed a possible mechanism for getting him released, which involved making it a litmus test for who was a viable political candidate. for president and so the idea is oh i can't vote for anybody who wouldn't release julian assange who wouldn't pardon him and so i don't know if this is what happened but The only reason I can think of why this administration would do this was to neutralize the issue because it was a loser for them.
because it was now widely understood that julian assange was an innocent man who was being slowly killed though he had not been convicted of anything by a government that swears it doesn't do that so anyway
I don't know that we will ever know why Julian Assange was released. I am thrilled that he is free, and I am thrilled and heartened to see... what stella has been putting into the world where we can see julian coming back into himself it's really that was an open wound that needs to scar over and julian needs to become himself again and i hope rejoin the fight though certainly anybody in the fight would understand if he just simply
having done more than most of us by a lot, couldn't, couldn't manage it. Yeah. Um, the first movement. and free speech were of course in the news a lot but the one thing i wanted to recall from something that happened in march of last year was when the Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the First Amendment may hamstring the government. In an amazing misunderstanding of the Constitution. Yeah, exactly.
There were, of course, and I think that you will come back to this, but the election, Rescue the Republic, Unity, all of these things took up... a lot of our time and attention in the world's time and attention i hope with regard to unity and rescue um in the second half of the year in particular um and Maybe I'll wait for you to say more about that. And then let me just finish with some randomly cool biology things that we talked about last year. We have four of them here.
The oldest sex chromosomes in animals were found in an octopus, 380 million years old. We had sea robins, which is a fish. an actual fishy fish that lives in the ocean swimming like most fish do most people think all fish do yeah it's a fish that forages on the ocean floor sea robins are um have leg-like appendages that they use to walk with and they also use to taste
They're the sensory organs that they use to walk on and taste. Type. Type. Yes. Sea robins are typing. Fishy fish are typing on the ocean floor and producing, strangely, the works of Shakespeare. Yeah.
Give them enough time. Yeah. Enough typewriters. Enough typewriters. Waterproof typewriters. Yeah. Yeah. And waterproof paper. Right in the rain paper. This is getting complicated. Right in the ocean paper. We have... an orangutan using leaves to accelerate wound healing on his face he applied the leaves to his face and then he chewed them and made them into like a poultice and then applied the chewed leaves to his face from a plant species known to have healing properties both from biochemistry
that humans have done and also from traditional use by local people. It won't be long. Before pharma discovers that using leaves on your face is very, very dangerous. And that people who have been using leaves on their face are... basically using up all of the resources of emergency rooms and causing gunshot victims to go without treatment. Yeah, gunshot victims wearing parkas in August or something. Right, something like that. Yeah, oh my God. And...
Finally, this one comes with a picture. You can show my screen here. We have saunas are good for frogs too. So the chytrid fungus, which has been taking out frogs globally for a while now. part was it was understood um many years ago to be spread in part by herpetologists well-meaning herpetologists like myself i didn't do the spreading but um well-meaning herpetologists who would go from one site to another and before it was understood that the with the pathogen that was causing
uh this effectively it's not a wasting disease but something like a wasting disease in frogs was a fungus that the spores were being trans transported well saunas such as these here on the screen turn out to take out the chytrid fungus and so the frogs a like them um because who doesn't like a good sauna and uh and b it actually helps them um get and stay healthy so saunas and frogs for the win yeah it's awesome a great picture yeah
It's not mine, obviously. That's from the research, which Waddle et al., 2024, they produced that photo and that research. Awesome. Saunas and frogs. That's it. That's my recap. Okay. Well, so I wanted in the end of the podcast here to talk a little bit about that is where we've been.
in the last year, I want to talk a little bit about where we're going and just give you some of my thoughts on what I see happening and what I think it means. One of the things that seems to be happening... is that there i think predictably are a number of wedge issues emerging to drive the coalition crazy as it attempts to get its footing in the new administration. So the administration has been very forward-thinking during the transition and has
This does not look like any previous transition to me. Now, maybe that's that we are more focused on it, this having been a very contentious election won by a surprisingly dynamic coalition. We are seeing a lot of activity from this administration that tells us a lot about where they are headed and where they are not headed. We see a couple of fissures developing. I will talk about two. One of them has to do with the sudden prominence of concern over food safety.
largely driven by the sudden rise to prominence of Kelly and Casey Means. Kelly. Kelly, sorry. Kelly and Casey Means. So they rose to prominence very suddenly. They wrote a book called, I think, Good Energy or something like that. But their rise to prominence really, as far as I can tell, began with Tucker Carlson's interview of Casey Means, the female, their siblings. I think he talked to them both. Did he?
I think so. Oh, well, forgive me. Every time I've seen them, they've, they've showed up all of the big places they've showed up together. I've seen some, some independent stuff, but anyway, maybe I've forgotten what Tucker's interview looked like, but nonetheless. A discussion with at least Callie, no, Casey Means, who... went to medical school did not finish her residency left medicine and is now advocating in maha style for a major revision in the way we think about
food and novel compounds. And a lot of it sounded fantastic to many of us because those of us who've been thinking about the issue of the degradation of the food supply and all of that, you know we've been focused recently on pharma and the dangers that come from various pharmaceuticals but seeing maha take on this food health bent initially seemed very very positive the fissure that has developed surrounds the fact that
suspiciously to many of us in all of what is said by the means siblings and i wish there was an easier way to refer to them that's an awkward construction but the means siblings seem very focused on food and strangely not focused on the lessons of COVID and pharmaceuticals, especially the dangers of the mRNA vaccines. And that is giving many of us alarm.
because we have worked very hard and faced terrible stigmas and pushback over the mRNA vaccines. And what we do not want to happen is to see all of that effort diverted into a yes needed pushback on the dangers of big ag and big food that lets pharma off the hook to poison us again. So that's a Fisher, a predictable one. And it has me thinking a lot about, first of all, is the Fisher even organic?
There is something interesting about the sudden rise of Callie and Casey Means. Yes, there is. Nobody knows what it means. I'm not going to level any accusations, but it is interesting.
that these two came from relative obscurity and find themselves at the pinnacle of maha in a position to advance a very important case that just so happens to obscure another very important case They're doing so at a moment at which Pharma must have seen the writing on the wall and be searching desperately for any escape from what... kennedy and the rest of us in the medical freedom movement have been advancing so what is the solution here are we to go after each other because
you know those of us on the medical side of it suspect those of us on the food side of it of attempting to deflect attention away from the villains over in pharma that seems like a very bad plan and i would point out that it is quite typical for an insurgent movement like the medical freedom movement to be fractured by
agents that are introduced to create chaos to create distraction and to create division where there wasn't any and the sudden emergence of the mean siblings has done just that whether that was the intent or not recently caly means had the issue put to him directly as to whether or not he would agree that the mrna shots should be
banned or pulled from the market and he refused to say so which was interesting those of us who've been tracking the hazard of the mrna vaccines find this hard to fathom and i will just in passing say one thing that i would advise our audience to change about the way they approach this is the framing is everything. I have been in many battles with many of the high quality academics who still exist in the system.
who have become awake to the hazards of the vaccines who are themselves very cautious about the idea of banning
vaccines? Do we really want to ban the vaccines? Do we want to tell people they can't have them? What about the extreme cases of people who are super vulnerable to COVID who might get a benefit out of these things? I think this whole thing is wrong-headed. What we know... is that the so-called vaccines were authorized under false pretences that the trials themselves were heavily compromised did not show what we were told they showed and that
this isn't a question of banning something so that you can't have access to it it's a question of simply applying the system that we all agreed to we have a system in which we test pharmaceuticals for safety and efficacy It was violated here. These things should be pulled from the market for everyone.
because they shouldn't have been on the market in the first place. You shouldn't have access to these things because they didn't do the steps that would have been necessary to put them on the market legitimately. So I don't think there is any issue of banning. This isn't an issue of banning. This is an issue of simply doing what we say we do.
And in this case, they were released without the proper safety checks. They shouldn't be on the market at all, and that's the correct position. However, that position that I've just outlined, which I would say is my position,
is in conflict with multiple different factions over in Maga, Maha, Unity space. It is in conflict with... It is in conflict with... president trump who wants credit for project warp speed and i do think that at some level he can take credit for project warp speed without taking credit for these terrible inoculations right project warp speed is
Something that brought inoculations to market incredibly fast. Maybe he's not getting enough credit for that. But the inoculations that were brought to market, which obviously he's not a biologist making vaccines, right? He's not responsible for that. But in any case, what do you do about the fact...
that the president-elect can't acknowledge the hazard of the vaccines the maha movement is laser focused on the danger of the vaccines and we have to figure out what to do going forward when we don't exactly agree on their nature and what i want to propose is that there is a proper way to deal with this so that we don't have to decide between going after food safety and going after pharma safety.
We don't have to decide whether to sacrifice what we've learned about the COVID vaccines because the president has a particular amount of pride around the way they were brought together. to bear on the so-called pandemic that the right way to deal with this is actually very simple and i'm i'm worried that the purists who i understand but you know the purists people who've been focused on the
factual questions surrounding safety and efficacy, surrounding the pandemic, how much threat there actually was from it. Those people who have been focused on those things are not ready in fact many are unwilling to think in political terms because it's a compromise they've got a very clear picture of what happened and what it means and how much danger how much harm but the idea of stepping into a realm where you inherently have to compromise that story in order to
reduce the harm going forward is anathema to them so i'm worried that the purists are going to kibosh anything that isn't their own perspective and that their perspective can't work for all the reasons i've been pointing out so here's my proposal and again i certainly am with the purists to the extent that we know the story that's what I think is the right thing to do. But the way to deal with the political realities of this situation comes in three parts. Informed, consent, and liability.
And my point about this is, first of all, informed consent, as I've pointed out here many times, is a principle that is so deeply ingrained that after World War II, after Nuremberg, we literally hanged seven doctors for violating this principle even though it had not yet been codified it is now formally codified in the nuremberg code
And we are now routinely violating it. We are not informing people about what it is that we are, in many cases, mandating that they take. And we are not allowing consent. We are strong-arming people into taking things that they shouldn't take, or that they should at least have the option not to take. So, if we insist on informed consent across... All domains. You have a right as a human being to decide what you will and what you will not accept.
Now, the language of informed consent from Nuremberg specifically speaks to experimental treatments. I would argue that in light of complex systems, all of this stuff is experimental, right? The fact that it takes decades to figure out that yellow number five or...
or whatever it's going to be, has some negative effect, doesn't mean that that was just some shocking error. It means that in general, if you intervene in a complex system, you're going to discover down the road that you had consequences you did not anticipate, meaning that all of this stuff is inherently experimental if you're going to give it to people or farm animals or spray it on food or whatever.
informed consent and liability starts with informed consent. That means we have to know what it is that we are going to be consuming. We have to be able to know where it is. We have to be able to know what is known about it we have to know what is not known about it and we have to be able to say no i want you to think about all of the problems that it would solve if we had agreement on that
Let's take appeal. I don't know where appeal is. I am told that it is in a brand of... uh apple cider vinegar organic apple cider vinegar that we have been using i don't know if that's just a vicious rumor if that's really true but the point is i have a right to know if appeal is in that vinegar and i have a right to say no right you can't hide it from me by not putting it on the label that's a violation of informed consent okay mrna
Okay, I know it's in those damn shots. I don't know what else is in them. I needed to know that there's an SV40 promoter in the shots because of the... the shell game that was played with the various production modalities, but I have a right to know where mRNA is, and that means not just the shots. I also have a right to know if you've inoculated a beef cow or some dairy cattle that I'm going to get meat or milk from, and I have a right to say no.
Yep. Right. You have to tell me it's in there and then I have a right to say no and you don't get to belittle me for exercising that right. You don't get to tell me, but the science says this or that. I am a human being. I was born with a right not to eat stuff that I don't want to eat, and that means you have to tell me where it is. So if we had informed consent and liability, then that would cover
all of the cases across pharma and food. You tell me what's in it. I tell you whether or not I accept it. You don't get to question my judgment. That's effectively almost everything the purists would want, but in a form that the libertarians can accept, in a form that President Trump can accept. All right. The third part, so informed consent is two parts. The third part is liability.
Now for... Wait, I'm sorry. I'm confused then. I thought informed consent and liability were the first two parts. No, informed consent and liability. Informed, I need to know... Oh, informed and consent. I need to get to say no. and then liability the manufacturer has to be liable in a normal sense in court for harm done to me okay that if you think about what it is that is supposed to make us safe
Our system is supposed to be made safe by testing that happens before stuff emerges into the market. And then you're supposed to be able... to force that testing to be high quality because the manufacturer doesn't want to be caught having done a poor quality safety test and then facing you in court after they've injured you.
That is what makes the system work. The removal of that by the Reagan administration for vaccines has created a landscape in which pharma does not have the normal incentives to avoid harming you in fact it came to my attention this week i don't know why i hadn't thought of it but the fact that there is no liability for these things actually gives an incentive
for the manufacturer to not discover harms, right? They are actually incentivized not to do the safety testing that they would do for another pharmaceutical because they don't want to know. If they had liability, they would want to know.
because they don't want to get caught having done harm that they are then going to pay billions of dollars for in court. So informed consent and liability would... restore a system that works it would allow anybody who believes they want access to these things once they have passed licensure to get it but it would cause manufacturers of things like unsafe vaccines to take them from the market themselves out of enlightened self-interest in a business context so my claim is
to mend the fissure in maha and to make politically tenable all of the things that we want is informed consent and liability across all of
food manufacture, agriculture, and pharma, and then let the system function the way it is supposed to function. The one way that this does not get everything we want is that One can imagine, under that rubric, that there will be things which will be recommended to those who do not find themselves in a position to question properly where they will be technically informed but they will not have the tools to process what they've been told
in which they might end up taking things. And I don't want to see that harm either. But it seems to me that in exchange for getting safety across food, ag, and pharma, that this is the best conceivable approach because anything else is going to result in us tearing each other apart and not getting even a fraction of the value that would come from this approach. I'm in. All right. Awesome.
That's Maha. The other thing that is going on, Fisher-wise, over in the Unity Coalition, the Unity Coalition really being kind of MAGA, maha and unity rescue the republic style stuff you know the other thing that is going on is that suddenly and this is very strange for me suddenly the h-1b visa issue is front and center on people's radar now the reason that this is odd for me is that eric my brother did some work in which he discovered what appears to be a conspiracy by the nsf
partnering with corporations to lower the wages of phds by flooding the market using the h1b program now i think that i have gone decades without hearing anybody mention h1b visas except eric right that's how i know about this that's how i know it's even an issue and yet suddenly they are now front and center as a result of some tweeting by Ilan and Vivek. And now everybody's talking about H-1B visas. Well, I'm going to leave the discussion of the details of H-1B visas to Eric.
is the expert. He's the person to go to on this. But I want to talk about the fact that the arrival of H-1B visas on people's minds is like a direct hit on magamaha and unity and the reason is because there was relative agreement before h one b visa showed up
that we have a serious immigration problem that immigration problem having to do with the story that i reported on from the darien gap where we have basically the United States, the Biden administration, international organizations, including the UN, the... Organization for International Migration.
the hebrew international aid society all of these international organizations facilitating an invasion of the u s homeland across our southern border for reasons that are never made clear And that knowledge, coupled with the recognition that... The Biden administration is importing immigrants, many of whom we know nothing about. We've asked them their name. We haven't checked their identity. We haven't even recorded who they are in any way that we can check on the basis that
seeking political asylum and they're overwhelming our system that story was infuriating at a time when americans are struggling and we seem to be giving away the store to people who just illegally crossed our southern border so that was galvanizing yeah so if you wanted to upend this coalition
now would be the perfect moment to introduce an immigration story that is not galvanizing. In fact, it's polarizing. And the H-1B story is exactly that, because you have things like entrepreneurs who run businesses who see the h1b program as positive the h1b program i should say was the division of the h1 program in i think 1990 the h1 program having allowed the granting of visas on the basis of highly skilled labor in 1990 was divided into, I think H1A is nurses.
and h one b is everything else but anyway people running businesses may see this as very positive people seeking jobs americans seeking jobs may see it as negative
tailor-made to create a fight within Magamaha unity. And it is doing exactly that, utterly predictably. And so in any case, the question is, has this landed on our doorstep organically or did somebody decide you know what we can't very well have these people reorganizing civilization on the basis of their you know having galvanized around the hazard of unregulated immigration to the country. So let's make immigration complicated again and throw the H-1B visa. Micah, really? Are you for Micah?
So anyway, that's the question. Did somebody, you know, it feels to me a lot like what October 7th did to the medical freedom movement. And, you know, again, am I a crazy person for wondering if there's anything about that that was inorganic? Yeah, I kind of feel crazy. You would honestly have a massive terrorist attack that would lead inevitably to a ghastly war.
You know, you would do that for cynical reasons. That doesn't sound right to me. On the other hand, every time I think something is... beyond what normal humans would contemplate, I discover it's worse than I thought. And so that's why I came up with, I wouldn't put it past them. I wouldn't put it past any of them to use the H-1B visa cynically. start a war um so anyway we are facing these fractures i think we need to keep our eye on the ball and um
understand that something will be intending to fracture that coalition at this moment. And that every time a fracture shows up, we should ask, you know, if we engage in that fight, whose bidding are we doing? Right. And we should look for solutions like informed consent and liability, because very often the reason that we were galvanized was that the issue wasn't as complex as we thought, right? The body may be complex, but the issue is simpler to solve than we realized.
And we should push forward with those things and try to remember who the enemy really is. Yes, we should. Excellent. Well. That's the first January, 2025 is what that is. Wow. Yeah, sure is. All right. I think we're there. All right. A couple of things to mention. You and I are probably going to be in Washington for the inauguration. We're still in the process of formulating plans. This is news to me. Well, there you go. Yes, this is why I didn't put it on the calendar.
Because you wouldn't have known? Because I'm not real good with the calendar. But in any case, well, maybe we're there. That's it? You were just going to say that? Yep. Well, I'm just hoping that others might be interested in attending. It's worth looking into the Maha Ball, and we're going to... Try to be there. No guarantees yet. We have not made our plans, but we're working on it. No, we're not. I'm working on this. Okay.
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