Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Fog of War: The 316th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

Fog of War: The 316th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 1:00:01
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream.
• 1:00:08
  I believe it's 316.
• 1:00:10
  It is 316.
• 1:00:11
  Very unlikely to be prime.
• 1:00:13
  I'm Dr.
• 1:00:13
  Bret Weinstein.
• 1:00:14
  You are Dr.
• 1:00:15
  Heather Heying.
• 1:00:17
  It is once again and maybe just permanently a fascinating moment in our history of species.
• 1:00:23
  Here we are, mid-Cartesian crisis.
• 1:00:25
  Mid-Cartesian crisis closing in on the end of winter, which I'm ready for.
• 1:00:30
  That's nice.
• 1:00:31
  Yeah, it is nice.
• 1:00:34
  Here on a rare Saturday, not that Saturdays are rare, but the combination and union of us being in front of cameras and it being Saturday is somewhat rare.
• 1:00:44
  I mean, they are pretty rare.
• 1:00:46
  Not unusually so.
• 1:00:48
  No, no.
• 1:00:48
  Not in the category of days.
• 1:00:49
  Equally rare is the other days, but as days go, pretty rare.
• 1:00:53
  I'd like them to be more common and maybe we can do something about that.
• 1:00:58
  So here we are Saturday.
• 1:01:00
  We're not going to be around next Wednesday, but so we're going to do what we can to make this extra special for you guys, I guess.
• 1:01:08
  Join us on local.
• 1:01:10
  That's the watch party's going on.
• 1:01:11
  Bret had a great Patreon call this morning.
• 1:01:13
  All these ways to find us and interact.
• 1:01:16
  But before we get into the meat of today's episode where we will be talking about health as affected by both infection and frailty and also the Cartesian crisis and how it is being realized in today's news.
• 1:01:34
  Yes, I'm going to share with you how things look from behind my screen and you're not going to believe it because it's crazy.
• 1:01:43
  And you're talking about like a silicon screen as opposed to the screen that is your eyes interpreting the world directly into your brain on your behalf.
• 1:01:51
  Right.
• 1:01:51
  The pipe that puts the matrix into my mind is telling me things about what's going on.
• 1:01:58
  The system of tubes.
• 1:01:59
  It is a system of not very reliable tubes.
• 1:02:02
  And in any case, I think it will be fascinating to you to hear how things look from my feed and compare them to yours because from my feed things are out of control.
• 1:02:12
  Anyway, we will get there.
• 1:02:14
  And you know, you probably want to be sitting down for that or.
• 1:02:17
  No, I wouldn't.
• 1:02:18
  Yeah.
• 1:02:19
  You know, that's always the advice you give.
• 1:02:21
  You say it so facetiously.
• 1:02:23
  You sit down for this.
• 1:02:24
  And really, I began to realize I'd rather not be sitting down really ever, frankly, but certainly not when you hand me crazy news.
• 1:02:32
  You know, I don't need a fainting cash.
• 1:02:34
  No, I like to say it to people who are sitting down.
• 1:02:36
  Like, you better sit down for this.
• 1:02:38
  No, actually, what you like to do is look them in the eyes where you can see fully the position they're in and ask them if they're sitting down.
• 1:02:44
  Yes, exactly.
• 1:02:45
  It puts them somehow on their back footed.
• 1:02:50
  Yes.
• 1:02:50
  Even they're sitting down.
• 1:02:51
  So it shouldn't be an instability inducing maneuver in your part.
• 1:02:56
  And yet it does cause them to wonder what the hell is coming next.
• 1:02:59
  And then that gives you your opening.
• 1:03:00
  Well, if I reverse engineer why it is I take such closure in that little joke, it does force you into consciousness because to be asked if you're sitting down when you are obviously sitting down is jarring.
• 1:03:15
  Yeah, but.
• 1:03:16
  Yeah, but.
• 1:03:17
  Here's the thing.
• 1:03:19
  What is the thing in this case?
• 1:03:22
  You're forcing into consciousness, which is also part of what puns are doing, right?
• 1:03:27
  It's just, it's juxtaposition.
• 1:03:30
  It's the juxtaposition of two things that aren't normally exactly in juxtaposition wherein if you were living in a certain framing that was working as a was receptive to information, it causes you to jump out of that for a bit such that if you just keep going with whatever it is that you want to tell people while they're sitting down, it's harder to catch up because you're not there from the beginning.
• 1:04:28
  And so you have something to add no matter what.
• 1:04:34
  It's struggling.
• 1:04:35
  All right.
• 1:04:37
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• 1:10:36
  Let the record reflect that episode 316 is when Heather literally apologized to the Southern Hemisphere for the fact that winter is coming.
• 1:10:48
  The people in it.
• 1:10:50
  Oh, sure.
• 1:10:52
  No, no, no.
• 1:10:52
  I agree, but I still find it amazing.
• 1:10:54
  Yeah, that would, the hemisphere has been through it before.
• 1:10:58
  But not all of them.
• 1:11:00
  They're not going to accept your apology anyway.
• 1:11:03
  I digress.
• 1:11:03
  Yes, exactly.
• 1:11:04
  The newborns.
• 1:11:06
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• 1:11:09
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• 1:11:12
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• 1:11:26
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• 1:11:35
  For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping them get birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down.
• 1:11:45
  Breathing polluted air and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health, cleaning up the air and water, clean up the air and water, and people get healthier.
• 1:11:54
  Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked.
• 1:11:57
  But consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick through our mouth, make us sick through our mouth and our nose.
• 1:12:03
  It has become the cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop spread disease from person to person, but it's rare to get sick through your hands.
• 1:12:09
  Rather, we get sick through our mouths and our noses.
• 1:12:12
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  I get a B- on the intonation in that paragraph, but, you know, it's a good idea.
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  I'm still giving you a B-.
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• 1:12:46
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  I get a B+.
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  Live with the discomfort.
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• 1:13:34
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• 1:14:00
  Yes.
• 1:14:00
  Yes.
• 1:14:02
  All right.
• 1:14:04
  You want to start with the Urgus et al paper, and then I'll introduce it, and then you'll take it from there.
• 1:14:13
  Sure.
• 1:14:14
  Excellent.
• 1:14:15
  So Heather just wanted to introduce a paper that emerged kind of strangely prior to its official publication 6 or 7 days ago.
• 1:14:25
  February 25th, actually.
• 1:14:27
  That is the publication date online.
• 1:14:29
  Word of it began to spread on social media.
• 1:14:32
  We were unable to get the paper itself from the normal sources, and then one of the authors sent it to me.
• 1:14:40
  Because you asked for it.
• 1:14:40
  Because I asked for it, which was nice of them.
• 1:14:43
  Thank you.
• 1:14:43
  So you could show it, Janet, this time.
• 1:14:46
  I believe that was Dr.
• 1:14:47
  Luigi.
• 1:14:48
  Cool.
• 1:14:48
  The corresponding author.
• 1:14:49
  Yeah.
• 1:14:50
  The final author.
• 1:14:52
  Okay.
• 1:14:52
  So we've got a...
• 1:14:54
  Oh, no.
• 1:14:54
  What?
• 1:14:56
  I think Luigi's last name is...
• 1:14:59
  I don't remember.
• 1:15:01
  From Hachu.
• 1:15:02
  Okay.
• 1:15:05
  So...
• 1:15:07
  Is there...
• 1:15:07
  No.
• 1:15:08
  Okay.
• 1:15:10
  So this is a preprint, or this is the submitted manuscript, but apparently it's at least very similar to what is online, which we just don't have access to on account of not being professors anymore, and not being allowed to pay the exorbitant and predatory fees for every single journal in existence.
• 1:15:31
  By way of background, before we get to how this relates to work that you have done in the past, I will say that upon reading it, I was reminded of something that is not explicit in the paper, but which came up a lot during COVID, which is the distinction between two terms that many people will now have heard of, even if they're not sure exactly what they mean, which is germ theory versus terrain theory.
• 1:15:53
  Very often these terms are invoked as complete competitors for one another, as ideas between which there can be no common ground, which if you actually think about what they mean, the idea that there can't be common ground between these makes no sense at all.
• 1:16:11
  In fact, there has to be common ground.
• 1:16:12
  So let me just define a few terms here.
• 1:16:14
  Germ theory, of course, which sort of emerges with pasture especially, identifies pathogens as the causal agent of infectious disease.
• 1:16:26
  That seems tautological.
• 1:16:27
  It's inherently true if you believe that pathogens exist.
• 1:16:30
  I know some people don't, but whatever they're on about, I'm not that interested because pathogens do exist.
• 1:16:38
  But the strict and extreme adherence to germ theory will say, therefore, that germs, pathogens, are the only thing to be focusing on with regard to reducing infectious disease in the world.
• 1:16:53
  In contrast to terrain theory, in which the terrain is your body, and perhaps terrain-sensu latte is even the broader environment, including your prenatal environment in utero and the environment of your body.
• 1:17:07
  Basically, terrain theory suggests that it is the health of the terrain, it is the health of your body, that affects how sick you will get from infectious disease, which, yes, are brought by pathogens.
• 1:17:17
  Now, are there extreme versions of terrain theory which don't believe in pathogens at all?
• 1:17:21
  And are there extreme versions of germ theory which don't think that the health of the body affects how infectious agents are and how sick you will get?
• 1:17:28
  Sure, but it's not really worth spending much time on either of those.
• 1:17:32
  So, thinking about terrain theory in its obvious and normal form, the idea is that the health and robustness of your body is predictive of how well it will be able to fend off infectious agents when your body encounters them.
• 1:17:50
  So you've got two things, broadly, infections, the history of infection or exposure to infectious agents, and robustness of your body.
• 1:18:01
  And terrain theory has a causal relationship between those two, which is that the health of your body affects how likely you are to get infected.
• 1:18:15
  Can I pause you there?
• 1:18:16
  Yes.
• 1:18:17
  I just want to point out that the madness that we went through over COVID is part of the obsession with germ theory, which says the only way to interfere is to break the ability of the pathogen to affect you by alerting your immune system of its nature with the vaccine, which...
• 1:18:40
  And our discussion, quite extensive and repeated during COVID, of comorbidities, and of risk stratification of COVID, was specifically, at least implicitly, about the terrain.
• 1:18:51
  Right.
• 1:18:52
  Like if you were obese, if you were old, if you had pre-existing conditions like diabetes or kidney disease, you were much more likely to get very, very sick from COVID than if you had none of those comorbidities.
• 1:19:04
  Right.
• 1:19:04
  And so what we see is that we've got a public health apparatus that is absolutely, germ theory-obsessed.
• 1:19:11
  And it is natural for the response to it, the rational response, to be, "Hey, there are a bunch of other things here, and that leverage point may not be very good because you may not have a vaccine, the one you can bring to market quickly may be leafly dangerous in its own right." And there are so many other things you could do.
• 1:19:28
  For example, you could notice that people who are vitamin D deficient are tremendously vulnerable.
• 1:19:34
  And so what we are caught in is a cycle of reactionary postures rather than a strictly analytical approach which says,"What is the admixture?
• 1:19:46
  What are the contributions?" So anyway, getting out of that reactionary mindset into a mindset that just simply says, "Well, what is true about why people get sick, and what does that therefore suggest about the low-hanging fruit with respect to keeping them healthy?" And in fact, when Kennedy was running for president, and then once he stepped down and threw his fork behind Trump, and still as Secretary of HHS, one of his big pushes that has been reacted to in a reactionary way by many on the left is, "I, Kennedy, want to move what is such a large proportion of our current health spending, health research spending on infectious disease and moving to chronic disease." And people are screaming about, "My God, you don't care about infectious disease," but this is in effect a move from a really limited and pharma-intensive interpretation of the germ theory of disease into a much more expansive, "Hey, how about we understand pathogens and the terrain and think about how the terrain, that is to say, our body and our environment, are contributing to our health." And that's something that we can do something about without having to be under the thumb of a corporate machine that inherently is interested in profit as opposed to us.
• 1:21:04
  And the side effects of dealing with the terrain side as primary are positive.
• 1:21:11
  The side effects of pharmaceutical drugs are negative.
• 1:21:15
  The side effects of getting your BMI under control are that you're healthy in many other ways.
• 1:21:22
  So you should always pick the stuff where the unintended consequences of what you're doing are good ones.
• 1:21:29
  Yeah, and we could talk about it here later if you want, but I actually, I just read another ridiculous piece in New York Magazine about Casey Means, who is Kennedy's pick for search and general.
• 1:21:44
  Kennedy's pick or Trump's pick?
• 1:21:46
  Who gets to pick search and general?
• 1:21:47
  I don't know actually whose pick she is.
• 1:21:50
  I think Kennedy's, but I don't accept it.
• 1:21:53
  Anyway, she, you know, she sat through hearings recently, and of course the sort of pseudo left, the babbling pseudo left represented in New York Magazine and other places, won't hear any of it.
• 1:22:05
  And the idea of root causes, which is Means's pet phrase that she borrows from naturopathic medicine, which itself, you know, I am not completely on board with naturopathy.
• 1:22:17
  I think naturopathic medicine is far too happy to be reductionist and send you out for a lot of lab tests and have a lot of supplements and all of this, but the idea of root causes is so obvious that we would want to understand what the root causes of the symptoms that we're experiencing are so that we can deal with them as opposed to merely treating symptoms.
• 1:22:37
  And yet this article is just endlessly like mocking the idea of root causes as if because it came out of the mouth of someone that they've decided they don't agree with, it couldn't possibly be true.
• 1:22:47
  Which again, is actually very much like what pharma is doing with symptoms like, oh, I've already had to come to a conclusion about this person, and I will have no nuance.
• 1:22:57
  I will not grant that they could ever say anything that has veracity to it or analytical clarity.
• 1:23:03
  Therefore, root causes has to be ridiculous, just as, and at this point, I agree with some of the critics, aren't you kind of shilling for some products that you will benefit you, the Means's, the Means siblings, will benefit from if they get widely adopted by the American public.
• 1:23:19
  So, you know, there's plenty of room for criticism, but there's, it's also absurd to suggest that trying to understand the root causes of your health conditions is some sort of a wacky simultaneously like Wiccan, she literally invokes Wiccanism, not Means, but the author of the article, Wiccan and Far Right.
• 1:23:37
  Like, no, that's about first principles, root causes, understanding what the underlying causes are, ought to be really basic, like, like, really like frankly kindergarten level, how do we figure out how to solve the problem.
• 1:23:51
  Yeah, now it's probable in that case that this person was pandering to the far right Wiccan community.
• 1:23:59
  I do want to say, I just want to correct, I think you and I both concluded that Kennedy at HHS likely nominates the Surgeon General, I think that's wrong.
• 1:24:10
  I think in this case it's clear that Casey Means was Kennedy's pick, but it would be the President who nominates.
• 1:24:18
  So, the thing I wanted to get to, why are we talking about germ theory and terrain theory, given that this paper that has just come out doesn't mention either explicitly is that for me, upon reading the paper, and here, actually, let me just, one of the sentences from the paper is, most investigations have focused on the causal effect of frailty on infection risk, but there is a paucity of studies that explore the role of infections on the development of frailty in older adults.
• 1:24:48
  So, I bring that out because, to me, that reads as there's a lot of established work supporting the idea of terrain theory, that the health of the body, that the frailty or the robustness of the body, and in this paper they're using specifically a frailty index that they have developed, it seems quite strong, maybe counter-judically, that the frailty of the body affects risk of infection.
• 1:25:12
  Okay, that's terrain theory, and it has been well established, but they're trying to establish whether or not past history of infection induces people to become more frail, which of course then would also create a greater risk for infection.
• 1:25:27
  And so, if true, you have a cyclic relationship between these two, whereas terrain theory and the research that has tested it and come to some credit has only established one-way relationship between these two variables.
• 1:25:44
  So, let me just say a couple more things about this paper before we get into what you've done in the past.
• 1:25:48
  Specifically, their hypothesis, reversing the causality implied by terrain theory, they're looking at frailty, which is the inverse of health and robustness, which they define as "a geriatric syndrome characterized by reduced reserve and diminished resistance to stressors." But even though they call it a geriatric syndrome, young people can be frail.
• 1:26:09
  In fact, we see many young frail people if we just look now.
• 1:26:13
  And the authors of this present work define this via a 44-point frailty index that they have created, which I can share later if we're interested, but I think it's pretty strong.
• 1:26:22
  And then they're looking at history of infection, and this is just a little bit of a, it seems a little bit of a squidgier metric because they can only use official recognition of infection.
• 1:26:34
  And of course, many of us will have infection that doesn't get officially recognized.
• 1:26:39
  But the dataset is so massive that that should be noise rather than creating a system bias.
• 1:27:20
  And this is a hypothesis, therefore, that you actually proposed, back in your initial submission of your telomere work to Nature back around the turn of the millennium.
• 1:27:28
  2000.
• 1:27:30
  That infections increase, past infections increase, greater frailty in later age.
• 1:27:38
  And so it was a lot more to be said, but maybe you want to pick it up from there.
• 1:27:42
  Yeah, what I wanted to do when I saw this paper, I was very excited because as long time viewers and listeners will know, the way I work, I'm a theoretical evolutionary biologist.
• 1:27:55
  And so the coin of the realm in theoretical work is hypotheses that make predictions that allow you to later test them.
• 1:28:04
  And when they are tested by you or better by somebody else who doesn't have the perverse incentive of having provided the hypothesis, when the prediction turns out to be true, what it does is suggest that the model that was used to generate it has some credibility.
• 1:28:21
  And so, as long time viewers will know, I did some work, starting in somewhere 1998, working through 1999, on an evolutionary hypothesis for the pattern that we call senescence.
• 1:28:39
  And senescence is what in common parlance we would call aging.
• 1:28:42
  There's a reason not to use the term aging.
• 1:28:44
  Aging is imprecise.
• 1:28:46
  But senescence is the thing that causes the body to grow feeble and inefficient with age.
• 1:28:53
  And I came up with a model that united what we knew about the evolution of senescence with emerging work in molecular and cellular biology.
• 1:29:04
  And in any case, that work has produced a number of predictions which over the intervening years have turned out to be true, reflecting positively on the model.
• 1:29:20
  To be very brief about the model, the model is that we as organisms, this is true for most vertebrates, presumably and certainly all mammals, we are composed of hundreds of billions or trillions of cells.
• 1:29:37
  In the case of an adult human being, you probably have 30 trillion cells at any one time as a full-size adult, and most of those cells have the potential to become tumors and then cancers, which are obviously potentially fatal.
• 1:29:53
  So, in an organism with that many cells, in which most of those cells have the potential to turn lethal and kill you, just simply by becoming deaf to the signals that they shouldn't grow anymore.
• 1:30:07
  And evolution has built a system that reigns in tumors that begin to grow, or would be tumors, but in the paper that Debbie Cizak and I ultimately published, we call proto tumors.
• 1:30:18
  So proto tumors are things that are one step short of becoming a tumor, and the one step short makes them a patch of cells that has grown out of control and then self-arrested.
• 1:30:29
  And one of the predictions of this model was that all moles and probably freckles are manifestations of cells that have been damaged, because they're on the skin, probably damaged by UV light, that has run away from their developmental program and begun to grow in an unregulated fashion, and then been stopped at something called the Hayflick limit, which was known before we did our work.
• 1:30:53
  Hayflick limit arrests cells at a number of cell divisions that is programmed in, in general, from birth.
• 1:31:00
  Which is different for different cell types.
• 1:31:02
  Yes, it is.
• 1:31:03
  The Hayflick limit is a number for any given cell, which is different between cell types and presumably between cell types, within cell types, between organisms, too.
• 1:31:14
  Oh yes, absolutely.
• 1:31:15
  And it is set in development differentially.
• 1:31:19
  So that our argument in the paper was that selection will set all of those different limits so that they provide you the ability to replace that tissue for a full-length life.
• 1:31:33
  And any excess capacity you have gives you a cancer risk that isn't compensated for.
• 1:31:38
  So selection has an incentive to back off the limit, to reduce your risk of cancer, and to provide you enough repair capacity to get through your life.
• 1:31:48
  If you do a kind of work that damages one tissue over and over again, then, you know, if you're a guy who operates a jackhammer, your elbows are probably going to age faster than other people's, because you're doing more damage every day.
• 1:32:02
  Repetitive stress injuries, same thing with damaging your lungs repeatedly through inhaling combusted combs.
• 1:32:10
  Yeah, if you're a smoker or a coal miner, you're accelerating the aging of your lungs.
• 1:32:16
  If you're a heavy drinker, you're accelerating the age of your liver, a tissue in which you have an anomalously large capacity for repair.
• 1:32:27
  Why?
• 1:32:28
  Because your ancestors encountered lots of things that damage the glivers, and so having-- And its job is detox.
• 1:32:34
  Right.
• 1:32:35
  So anyway, we published a--ultimately published in 2002 this model, which we tried to publish in 2000 and were turned down by nature.
• 1:32:47
  So Jen is showing the 2002 paper that was ultimately published.
• 1:32:52
  Anyway, there's a long-sorted story about the blocking of publication of this work and how it ultimately made it into publication.
• 1:33:00
  But the interesting thing for me in reading this paper-- The very regular at all paper that just came out.
• 1:33:06
  Yep.
• 1:33:06
  Is that it says there is a relationship between infection and senescence, the degradation of the body.
• 1:33:20
  Yeah, and I was thinking, actually, their 40-plus-point frailty index is basically a quantitative measure of senescence.
• 1:33:27
  Yep.
• 1:33:28
  Now, when I saw that, I was very excited because that was a prediction.
• 1:33:32
  But not--you just said relationship.
• 1:33:34
  They have attempted to describe a causal relationship in which earlier infection predicts later frailty.
• 1:33:41
  Yes.
• 1:33:42
  And I believe that they have done so.
• 1:33:43
  Yes, and I believe the work is very good and that it demonstrates this.
• 1:33:47
  Now, interestingly, they didn't spot our work.
• 1:33:52
  It doesn't surprise me so much because our work was not as widely circulated as I think it should have been.
• 1:33:58
  So they may have been unaware of it.
• 1:33:59
  They also didn't mention telomeres or haeflich limits.
• 1:34:05
  So I found that an interesting omission.
• 1:34:07
  It doesn't degrade what they've done, but it does sort of reduce its power for no reason.
• 1:34:12
  Now, they do mention it obliquely.
• 1:34:16
  You want to read the sentence in the paper?
• 1:34:18
  Me?
• 1:34:19
  Yeah.
• 1:34:19
  Yeah.
• 1:34:20
  Let's see.
• 1:34:21
  So you can show my screen if you can show my screen.
• 1:34:24
  So this, again, is the paper we were showing earlier, "Can Infections Drive Frailty Insights from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging?" That just means that the data that they use for data that had been collected previously and then they went into a set of hypotheses with those data-- there's a number of things that I've highlighted in here, but there's a particular thing here.
• 1:34:43
  We're still in the introduction.
• 1:34:45
  So this is not their work.
• 1:34:47
  They are setting up the problem that they are investigating.
• 1:34:51
  "Line 77-78, infections could lead to frailty through mechanisms including heightened inflammation, tissue damage caused by pathogens, or faster cellular aging due to increased cell turnover." And I will say-- and you're going somewhere-- but I went and looked up their reference 10 that they've got here.
• 1:35:09
  And it's this paper called "Aging an Infection" by Gavazio Krause.
• 1:35:16
  Oops.
• 1:35:18
  I was trying to find people who have worked with Adobe to know what just happened.
• 1:35:24
  So this is published in Lancet Infectious Disease the same year and early in the year that your paper was published.
• 1:35:31
  And so they also don't cite you, but I think their paper actually came out before you guys.
• 1:35:37
  Yeah.
• 1:35:38
  And this is a very well-sited short theoretical review of the very idea that is being postulated in the New York Zoo paper.
• 1:35:48
  All right.
• 1:35:50
  So I want to just read a section.
• 1:35:52
  So what I have here, actually, for reasons that aren't worth going into, I didn't have access to the electronic version because it's on a different computer.
• 1:36:00
  I actually dug out the physical file that contains our original submission to nature.
• 1:36:06
  It contains the recommendation letters from George Williams and Dick Alexander to nature that they review it and publish it.
• 1:36:14
  So it got the widest possible circulations, got their rejection letter with the absurd claim here.
• 1:36:23
  I think it's-- let me see if I remember.
• 1:36:25
  This is not of sufficient general interest.
• 1:36:28
  It said, "We do not feel that it would be of sufficiently strong interest to a general audience to justify publication in nature." Now, this is a paper that unites-- it builds a model that addresses cancers and senescence, builds them together, and hybridizes them with the well-established evolutionary theory of senescence penned by George Williams that came to them with a recommendation from George Williams and a recommendation from Dick Alexander.
• 1:37:06
  So George Williams and Dick Alexander are both members of the National Academy, strongly recommending to nature that they take this paper seriously.
• 1:37:16
  This is from Dick Alexander's letter.
• 1:37:18
  He says, "I wish to offer my strongest support for the manuscript herewith submitted by my two doctoral students, Bret Weinstein and Deborah Siesak, titled Life Slow Fused, Delumirous Tuners, and the Evolution of Reverts and Essence.
• 1:37:29
  This is the first written support by me for a student paper in my 43 years of academic life, during which period I have guided more than 30 doctoral students in evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan." Anyway, he goes on, but the point is, "Very strange.
• 1:37:44
  This is two members of the National Academy, which is the elite of the elite, are recommending that nature take this seriously.
• 1:37:51
  It is about cancer and aging, two very important processes that have very important medical implications.
• 1:37:59
  And nature says they do not believe that the paper would be of sufficient interest to a general audience to be worthy of publication." It just looks like a pull-down menu of reasons to reject.
• 1:38:10
  Right.
• 1:38:10
  And they just picked one.
• 1:38:12
  Yep.
• 1:38:12
  It's what's called a desk reject.
• 1:38:14
  They didn't even send it to a reviewer.
• 1:38:16
  The editor just decided, "Ah, not worthy of our attention.
• 1:38:19
  We're too good for that." So anyway, the fact that the paper keeps producing, keeps revealing that it had accurate and risky predictions in it.
• 1:38:29
  Right.
• 1:38:30
  Things that are manifest, including, as people who have heard this story before know, the prediction that the long-established, ultra-long telomeres of mice that suggest that telomeres themselves are not an important regulator of senescence in mammals, because if they were a tiny, short-lived animal, it wouldn't have extremely long telomeres.
• 1:38:56
  This invalidated that work through a collaboration with Carol Greider, who, working with her graduate student, Mike Heeman, tested my hypothesis that wild mice wouldn't have long telomeres, and therefore established that the breeding colonies were producing long telomeres, which have a direct implication for drug safety testing, because what long telomeres do is give mice short lives that end with cancer and give them an indefinitely large capacity to repair damaged tissues.
• 1:39:28
  So if you give a toxin to a mouse, you may actually extend its life because you're giving it effectively a form of chemotherapy that is harder on its cancers than it is on the rest of its body.
• 1:39:39
  If you give a toxin to a labibrat mouse using these protocols, which breed them early and kill them young.
• 1:39:46
  Right.
• 1:39:46
  And then if you give that same toxin to a person, you will shorten their lives, and if you were to give it to a wild mouse, it would shorten their lives.
• 1:39:53
  But because we're using these broken mice without knowing that that's what we're doing...
• 1:39:57
  So anyway, there's all kinds of interesting stuff, including that highly unusual prediction.
• 1:40:02
  Why do I say highly unusual?
• 1:40:03
  Because how often does evolutionary biology, working strictly from logic and the evidence in the literature, successfully produce something in a cellular molecular biology lab of medical importance.
• 1:40:19
  It's not a common phenomenon.
• 1:40:21
  So anyway, major success that the model was able to predict at that level.
• 1:40:26
  But here's another one.
• 1:40:27
  We now have a paper in 2026, strongly suggesting a causal link between infection and accelerated senescence through frailty.
• 1:40:39
  So I want to read to you a section from the paper that Nature refused to publish because it wasn't...
• 1:40:44
  So this is your original or...?
• 1:40:45
  This is the original.
• 1:40:46
  This is not...is it published in experimental gerontology or is it sent?
• 1:40:48
  No, this is the submission to Nature, but never published anywhere.
• 1:40:52
  It was revised into that paper, published in experimental gerontology.
• 1:40:56
  It was shorter.
• 1:40:57
  We had to cut things out in order to get it in.
• 1:40:59
  But what we actually thought, what we were ready to publish is all here in this original longer manuscript.
• 1:41:05
  So in a section called"One Source, Three Sinks"(I'll Try To Translate This Part That Is Unavoidably Technical)"Vertebrates use reserve capacity in growth, maintenance, and repair." Reserve capacity being how much replacement of tissues you can do in a lifetime.
• 1:41:26
  And each process, that is to say, growth, maintenance, and repair erodes telomeres, reducing proliferative potential, reducing the amount of later repair and maintenance that you can do.
• 1:41:37
  "Through antagonistic pleiotropy, an accumulated damage hypotheses have traditionally been viewed as alternative explanations for senescence." The finite reserve capacity approach, the model we present in this paper, integrates them.
• 1:41:54
  Do you want to explain if that should be an accumulated damage, or does it not?
• 1:41:57
  Yeah, no, it's probably a good idea, as long as we're here.
• 1:42:01
  Okay.
• 1:42:03
  You are composed of something like 30 trillion cells.
• 1:42:07
  Your genome has something like 20,000 active genes.
• 1:42:15
  On average, those active genes have something like five different edits apiece.
• 1:42:19
  So at maximum, you have something like 100,000 genes to work with.
• 1:42:23
  When you compare 100,000 genes to 30 trillion cells of 200 at least different cell types, you don't have a lot of genes in order to result in the remarkable complexity of the organism that is produced.
• 1:42:36
  What that suggests is that the genes in your genome don't all do one thing.
• 1:42:41
  In fact, almost all of them do multiple things.
• 1:42:45
  We call that pleiotropy, when one genetic element has multiple consequences.
• 1:42:52
  Because of the fact that your genes do multiple things, it will logically be true, and this is George Williams' work, which was written in 1957.
• 1:43:02
  George Williams argued that your genes will do multiple jobs, they're all multitasking, and that some of those jobs will give you a benefit early in life.
• 1:43:11
  They will give you what he called"youthful vigor" at the cost of inevitable senescence.
• 1:43:18
  So his point is there's a trade-off.
• 1:43:20
  And my dissertation was on trade-offs.
• 1:43:22
  I was inspired by Williams and the power of what he had done in this case, and I said, "What if trade-offs is a way to look at all of biology and understand all the things we don't get understand, and why did that turn out to be powerful?" But his point was, there will inevitably be things in your genome that benefit you early at a cost late.
• 1:43:42
  When that happens, selection will tend to favor them, even if the late life cost is high.
• 1:43:50
  Why?
• 1:43:51
  Because the earlier stuff in life counts more, evolutionarily speaking, than the late life stuff.
• 1:43:59
  If you have a pathology that strikes you dead at 80, you've done most of your reproducing, you've even done most of the passing on of your wisdom to your descendants.
• 1:44:10
  So the point is the cost to you of dying at 80 from something is comparatively low.
• 1:44:16
  In fact, lots of people never make it to 80, so you have a pathology that kicks in around 80, you get away with it scot-free if you get run over by a bus at 60 or eaten by a tiger at 37.
• 1:44:27
  So the point is, it's always a bargain to pick the stuff that helps you early in life, even when the delayed cost is substantial.
• 1:44:35
  So, Williams, building on Peter Medawar's work, where he argued the force of selection drops off the older you are, Williams said, "There are trade-offs, and when there are trade-offs that benefit you early at a late life cost, selection will collect them, and our genome should be full of these antagonistic pliotropies." Pliotropies, that is, genes that do two things, working across purposes to themselves.
• 1:44:59
  He said, "The genome should be full of them," and that accounts for why the body degrades over the course of a lifetime.
• 1:45:05
  A very elegant theory.
• 1:45:07
  It was a theory at the point that I got to the work.
• 1:45:10
  Why is it a theory?
• 1:45:11
  Because indirectly, we could test many predictions of that model in nature.
• 1:45:16
  And we could see, for example, that possums that lived on islands where the predators were reduced tended to live longer.
• 1:45:28
  They aged slower because their likelihood of living longer was greater, and therefore the cost of those late life effects was greater to them, so selection backed off the system.
• 1:45:41
  So, anyway, we had many of these tests where, in nature, we could see that the exact strange patterns that George Williams had predicted turned out to be true.
• 1:45:49
  We knew his theory was at least very close to right, but we hadn't found any antagonistic pliotropies.
• 1:45:56
  So, anyway, that's where I entered the picture.
• 1:45:58
  And you say in the bit from the paragraph that you're reading from that your and Debbie's hypothesis here integrates antagonistic pliotrope, which you just described, with the other main model, which is accumulated damage, which is just exactly what it sounds like.
• 1:46:15
  It's very simple.
• 1:46:16
  The idea that you just accumulate damage over time, and therefore, at some point, you're going to hit some limit in some tissue that sends it into a tailspin in your gut.
• 1:46:24
  So, neither of the models that were pre-existing were fully satisfying, either in the antagonistic pliotropy case, because we didn't have any genes that match the description that George Williams said should be common in the genome, and accumulated damage didn't work because the body is capable of producing new cells.
• 1:46:39
  So, why, in what way, it's not like you're a car that wears out.
• 1:46:43
  You're like a car that comes with a factory that can produce a new alternator every time you need one.
• 1:46:48
  So, why is the car getting worse?
• 1:46:50
  So, this fixes that, and says, actually, these are two sides of the same coin, and that there is a limit to cellular reproduction.
• 1:46:59
  The reason for the limit is to prevent you from getting cancers, which would overrun your body before you ever got around to reproducing if you didn't have this limit.
• 1:47:07
  I get that limit was already established by Hayflick.
• 1:47:09
  By Hayflick, yep.
• 1:47:11
  And it was increasingly understood that T-limbers were the likely thing that set the Hayflick limit.
• 1:47:16
  And as you point out, the Hayflick limit is set on a tissue-by-tissue basis in development, and our argument was based on pre-existing evolutionary theory that it should be set in a way that the body kind of comes apart in a coordinated fashion over time, rather than everybody dies from, you know, the failure of their liver because it doesn't have a high enough limit.
• 1:47:39
  Okay, so, the antagonistic biotropy and accumulated damage hypotheses have traditionally been viewed as alternative explanations for senescence.
• 1:47:48
  The finite reserve capacity approach integrates them.
• 1:47:51
  Dammit, even if it is functionally repaired, will accelerate the aging of tissue by limiting the capacity for future maintenance and repair.
• 1:48:00
  There's mechanism, right?
• 1:48:02
  The liver of a heavy drinker, for instance, may function essentially as well at 40 as it did at 25, but should fail more rapidly than the liver of an on-drinker, even if alcohol consumption ends before damage is evident.
• 1:48:15
  Any factor that damages tissue, including mutagens, pathogens, mechanical wear or trauma, oxidative stress, and free radicals will promote the local increase in a tissue's rate of senescence.
• 1:48:27
  So, that's the prediction right there.
• 1:48:30
  Pathogens are on the list of things we said would borrow from the ability to do future maintenance and cause you to age faster, and here we have an empirical result that says that seems to be true and causally linked slam-dump.
• 1:48:48
  Alright, feel good about that.
• 1:48:49
  Beautiful, as you should.
• 1:48:50
  It's fantastic.
• 1:48:51
  Now, as long as I was here, I wanted to point out that actually on the prior page of this is another one of my favorites from this paper that I believe has turned out to be highly valid based on later work.
• 1:49:07
  Oh, is this going to be my favorite, too?
• 1:49:08
  It is going to be.
• 1:49:40
  It's going to be a very good explanation, including to a long-discredited explanation for senescence, which is that the body, like everything else, degrades from regions of simple...
• 1:49:51
  It's a cumulative damage.
• 1:49:53
  Well, it's not even a cumulative damage.
• 1:49:54
  It's just basically thermodynamics.
• 1:49:57
  Oh, yes, okay.
• 1:49:58
  Different.
• 1:49:59
  Right, so to the extent that people read the word entropy in their eyes glazed over, they didn't take in the meaning.
• 1:50:06
  Yeah, but so you're going to read from that.
• 1:50:07
  I have since you first proposed that just thought that it captures perfectly what you were describing.
• 1:50:15
  And even at that time, we were in our late 20s, early 30s, at a moment in life when most people, if viewers are at that age, you already have begun to see that tissues in your body and repair does not happen as smoothly and seamlessly and invisibly as it did when you were age.
• 1:50:36
  Right, you heal from injury, you heal from a wound, soft tissue, tears, so smoothly when you are 18 that it seems to leave no trace.
• 1:50:51
  But as you age, the repair itself of tissue, histology, histological entropy, becomes more scattershot.
• 1:51:02
  It becomes more scattershot for a reason that, let's put it this way, this idea has been reinvented and it's been reinvented under the term epigenetic drift.
• 1:51:17
  Now, epigenetic drift, I believe, is the same idea.
• 1:51:21
  And what it means, and what you will hear we proposed in this paper, is that there is an informational component to senescence.
• 1:51:31
  If you think about the way you came into being, you started out as a zygote.
• 1:51:36
  Sperm meets egg, produces a single cell, it's got all of your genes present, and then that cell goes through a programmed series of divisions.
• 1:51:45
  And as it does that, it becomes, each of those cell divisions, you know, the first two cells look very much alike.
• 1:51:52
  And the farther you get down that road to being your 30 trillion cell adult organism, the more narrow each of those pathways become.
• 1:52:03
  So at some point, you know, your arm develops and the cells in your arm don't have to worry about being a liver or an eye or anything anymore.
• 1:52:11
  They're no longer totipotent.
• 1:52:12
  They're no longer stem cells.
• 1:52:14
  Right.
• 1:52:14
  Totipotent means they have the potential to become anything, like your zygote or early stem cells.
• 1:52:22
  Pluripotent means that you have the ability to become many things and then you become committed to a particular function over time.
• 1:52:30
  And so you can imagine in the isolation of the womb or the egg or however it happened to you, in your case, it would have been a womb.
• 1:52:39
  But in that isolation, it's a very controlled environment.
• 1:52:45
  You know how many chickens are watching?
• 1:52:47
  Sorry.
• 1:52:48
  That's true.
• 1:52:50
  And I wouldn't want to count the ones that are watching and have not yet been hacked for reasons I'm not clear on.
• 1:52:54
  Sorry, that is so derailing.
• 1:52:57
  Turnabout is fairly obvious podcast.
• 1:53:00
  But OK, so you're in this isolated environment.
• 1:53:03
  The maternal body protects you from all sorts of outside influences.
• 1:53:08
  And so you have this elegant environment in which these cells can go through all of these doublings and the cells can become increasingly committed.
• 1:53:15
  And they know exactly where they are.
• 1:53:17
  Right.
• 1:53:18
  The cells are in a position to know how far down the road they are from their initial zygote single cell stage.
• 1:53:26
  And therefore they can produce an organism in a very predictable way because there's a certain number of cell divisions you have to go before you start producing an eye.
• 1:53:35
  And there's a certain number of cell divisions you have to go before you start producing a retinal cell.
• 1:53:41
  So they have a knowledge of number of divisions and they have a knowledge of position and neighbors.
• 1:53:46
  Right.
• 1:54:18
  You would have thought.
• 1:54:20
  But in any case the cells know a lot about what they're supposed to do next when they are properly insulated from the outside world and the genome as well structured which it almost certainly is or it wouldn't have gotten to the stage in the first place.
• 1:54:33
  But if we then fast forward and you take that person at 30 years of age and they damage some piece of tissue right.
• 1:54:43
  They get a burn.
• 1:54:45
  Now you've lost a bunch of cells and the ideal thing to do would just be to regrow what was there from the outside.
• 1:54:54
  But you can't because for one thing the cells that put that put themselves in the location that you've now burned are not from the same starting position as the cells that will now be filling in.
• 1:55:05
  What's more there has been damage over the course of those 30 years and it has continually eliminated cells that knew exactly where they were and replace them with cells that only approximately know where they are.
• 1:55:17
  And the more approximations it's like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox.
• 1:55:21
  For those of you old enough to remember Xeroxing.
• 1:55:24
  But in any case the point is there is a loss of information from the system.
• 1:55:29
  So it is informational entropy that Debbie and I were pointing to in this paper.
• 1:55:35
  And let me read that to you now.
• 1:55:37
  So this section is titled somatic senescence due to cellular attrition that is loss of cells and increasing histological entropy loss of information.
• 1:56:48
  We propose that the uncompensated loss of some cellular lineages coupled with the replacement of other lineages by neighbors adapted to slightly different roles diminishes the optimal arrangement of cell types.
• 1:57:02
  By our model body wide senescence results from the combined effect of a uncompensated cellular attrition.
• 1:57:11
  That is the loss of cells and B increases in what might be called histological entropy, both of which will diminish an organism's efficiency and accomplishing whatever tasks differentiation initially evolved to address.
• 1:57:22
  Senescence of this type should progress at a nonlinear rate accelerating with age as fewer cellular lineages maintain and repair an ever larger proportion of the body.
• 1:57:35
  And then we go on to provide examples.
• 1:57:37
  The aging of human skin appears to progress as our model predicts.
• 1:57:40
  Skin thickness decreases by 25 percent as the uncompensated cellular attrition between the fourth and eighth decade of life and entropy increases.
• 1:57:48
  And we then quote from another paper.
• 1:57:50
  The epidermis of an older individual exhibits a marked variation in thickness often in the same histologic section and a disparity in size, shape and staining quality of the basal cell nuclei under a light microscope.
• 1:58:03
  There is also a loss of the orderly alignment of cells along the basement membrane and a disruption of the gradual upward uniform differentiation present in the epidermis of younger individuals.
• 1:58:15
  Electron microscopy studies show that the basal cells of the flattened dermis of old individuals lack villi.
• 1:58:24
  Deletion and derangement of small blood vessels is found in aged skin with sun damaged skin being most severely affected.
• 1:58:31
  So that is a place where damage from the sun has resulted in the acceleration of the informational loss and the derangement of the tissues.
• 2:00:10
  I thought you were going to raise again the observation, the true observation about science that without prediction you weren't doing the work.
• 2:00:27
  There is no such thing as data first, data driven science.
• 2:00:31
  You don't have data if that's where you started.
• 2:00:33
  If you just went out and started measuring things without a hypothesis about what you thought was going on and therefore what you should be measuring, you weren't doing the science.
• 2:00:41
  If you had a bunch of ideas that didn't predict anything and some of the ideas turned out to be right, you don't really get much credit for that because you need to make predictions that could be falsified.
• 2:00:54
  And these pieces that you're sharing, specifically with regard to the paper that's just come out, the Ragusa et al.
• 2:01:02
  2026 paper is a reinforcement of the hypothesis that you and Debbie first wrote about, although it's not published, back in 2000.
• 2:01:14
  And that was itself a risky prediction and risky in this case is a good thing.
• 2:01:19
  The riskier it is, the higher the chances to be not true at the point that it is demonstrated to be true or it fails to falsify, you have even greater support for what it is that you proposed than if you had made a prediction that sort of seemed obvious.
• 2:02:07
  It's observational data, but whatever.
• 2:02:09
  The point is it's not science requires the complete process.
• 2:02:12
  And if you're just collecting data and then looking at patterns, you're doing observation, you're not doing science.
• 2:02:19
  If you misrepresent the order of operations and what you do is you collect data without a hypothesis, you look for patterns, you then define them as hypotheses and pretend that your data collection was a test of them.
• 2:03:05
  And if you're doing science progresses, it has been this way for thousands of years, and it's not going to change the underlying philosophy of science is the same.
• 2:03:15
  I think it's too insight based.
• 2:03:17
  I'm not going to go into what I disagree with about the particulars of what you just said, but let me just say that observation is just as good a test of hypothesis depending on what the hypothesis is and what it calls for as is experiment.
• 2:03:33
  In those cases where the hypothesis is best tested through careful observation versus experiment observation in that case is a test of hypothesis does not mean what did you see.
• 2:03:44
  It means careful rigorous predetermined what you looking for and how will you record it in advance.
• 2:03:51
  And so, you know, the idea that observations inherently pre hypothesis is not right.
• 2:04:00
  And the specifically manifests over any of your space.
• 2:04:03
  Well, okay.
• 2:04:04
  Not all observations are in that stage and they can be a test.
• 2:04:08
  Let me give an example of what Heather's saying.
• 2:04:10
  So it's clear.
• 2:04:12
  Let's Some of you know, I worked on tent making bats in Panama for my field work, which did not make it into my dissertation.
• 2:04:24
  But anyway, tent making bats was a really cool topic.
• 2:04:28
  The thing is, most of the time, a tent is a leaf that's been modified into a shelter.
• 2:04:34
  But most of them are empty.
• 2:04:37
  I can sometimes find 100 or 200 of these things.
• 2:04:41
  Very few of them have any bats in them.
• 2:04:43
  So in the early days, people had seen the structures didn't know what was making them.
• 2:04:48
  You could say, well, this is a habitat in which there are a lot of different types of bats.
• 2:04:56
  And we've got these structures, and maybe the bats are making them.
• 2:05:01
  Okay, that's a hypothesis.
• 2:05:02
  You made an observation, there are structures, something's making them hypothesis, bats are making them prediction.
• 2:05:09
  If I find enough of these things, I will eventually find bats in them.
• 2:05:13
  And I won't find other things that have the potential to make them in them.
• 2:05:17
  And then you make an observation, a single family of bats hanging under a leaf, it's not proof, but it is a successful test of the hypothesis where the prediction there will be bats reached in under these things has given strong evidentiary support to the hypothesis that it is bats that produce these structures.
• 2:05:37
  Yeah, although I think, you know, you had stronger evidence than that, because you actually found a bat in the process of making a tent, because we know theft happens throughout the animal world.
• 2:05:47
  And you could definitely find something that hadn't made a tent.
• 2:05:50
  We see that in humans, we see that all over the place with various domiciles, you know, squatters exist throughout the human kingdom.
• 2:05:58
  So, you know, that particular prediction isn't actually a rock solid test of the hypothesis, but it is, it is inconclusive but suggestive.
• 2:06:42
  Despite this nearly 100 year history of field biologists thinking about the tents that they were finding in the tropical forest and who was making them, you were in fact the first person to see a bat making a tent.
• 2:06:55
  And so, you know, that provided conclusive evidence that bats make tents.
• 2:06:59
  Yeah, that is the conclusive evidence.
• 2:07:01
  You know, still don't notice that possible that some other things are making tents of exactly the same structure.
• 2:07:07
  I mean, theoretically, but it's not a possibility worth keeping alive in hypothesis space because the chances are so astronomically small.
• 2:07:18
  Well, interestingly, as you as you remember, I think I'm still the only person, certainly in the Neotropics, who has seen a bat make a tent.
• 2:07:26
  I was able to do it.
• 2:07:29
  A friend of mine, friend of ours, John Cooley, suggested that I make use of bank surveillance cameras and infrared LEDs from television remotes to...
• 2:07:41
  This is back in like, 97, 98.
• 2:07:44
  Yeah, you suggest, you know, you can use these LEDs as illuminators and these cameras to sense infrared and this is a way that you could film stuff in what appears to you and the bats as the dark.
• 2:07:54
  And thereby not disturb them, which is the reason I think nobody else has seen it.
• 2:07:58
  And so anyway, that worked.
• 2:08:00
  And I got a bunch of video of a bat make a tent and it was wild.
• 2:08:03
  But among the things that my work did demonstrate was that some of the bats that the literature said made tents actually didn't.
• 2:08:11
  That they were thieves, that they stole it.
• 2:08:14
  And activity as germane census is anomalous in this regard in that at least a batch of males are rampant thieves of tents.
• 2:08:25
  And because they are larger and more ferocious, able to evict residents or steal the tents that are empty.
• 2:08:32
  But also if memory serves very bitey.
• 2:08:34
  In fact, the key that you use to figure out what bat you're going to have.
• 2:08:39
  That economist key is you're holding a bat and trying to figure out, okay, how many scales, whatever the key, whatever the economist key suggests arrives you at AJ arrives you at Artivious Jimmy census and says, Bites ferociously when handled with kids.
• 2:08:52
  All right, well, this has been a weird trip down memory lane.
• 2:08:57
  We reduced the number of people who are likely to call me stupid.
• 2:09:02
  Not at all, but at least set a proper rule for it.
• 2:09:06
  Which no one will abide by.
• 2:09:07
  Exactly.
• 2:09:08
  That's why we haven't reduced it.
• 2:09:09
  But okay.
• 2:09:11
  I think we're done with that topic.
• 2:09:14
  All right.
• 2:09:15
  The next topic is a little odd.
• 2:09:19
  I have been looking at my feed, my social media feed and other sources that I can find.
• 2:09:27
  I'm trying to make sense of the world and very specifically what is taking place in the Middle East.
• 2:09:38
  I have been getting an increasingly a sinking feeling that just deepens over time.
• 2:09:46
  And on one hand, I could just look at it and say, well, that's a pretty frightening picture that is emerging.
• 2:09:54
  On the other hand, I know from all that we've been through from COVID and the woke revolution and all of this stuff that the SIAP never stops.
• 2:10:06
  And that the problem is once upon a time we had media that got piped into every home.
• 2:10:13
  I'm not saying it was true, but we all had the same primary, I don't want to call it a primary source, but the same primary script for what was taking place in history.
• 2:10:26
  The same facts were on everybody's table and we could talk about what they meant and what they suggested we should do.
• 2:10:35
  But in the era of social media and the utter destruction of a central news media apparatus that agrees on the basic facts, we are left as individuals to try to cobble together an understanding of even just what took place that is subject to two things.
• 2:10:59
  One, it's incredibly noisy because the stuff you happen to have seen and the stuff you happen to not see results in the fact that you and the person sitting right next to you can be working from totally different what seem like data sets.
• 2:11:15
  That's the less pernicious part.
• 2:11:17
  The more pernicious part is that from the point of view of manipulating people into thinking that they are somewhere that they aren't, the opportunity for your feed to amp you up about something and for it not to amp you up if you're somebody else with a different search history or somebody who hasn't made trouble or whatever it is.
• 2:11:37
  So we all have to look at what we think we're observing.
• 2:11:41
  I think I tweeted a couple weeks ago that we all think we are eyewitnesses to history.
• 2:11:44
  In fact, I think we talked about it on the podcast.
• 2:11:46
  We feel like eyewitnesses to history because we see so much video and everything.
• 2:11:50
  But we're not eyewitnesses.
• 2:11:52
  We are downstream of a filter that has its thumb on the scale.
• 2:11:56
  It's a lot of fun to take what you can get.
• 2:12:05
  But we're downstream of a filter that is not neutral and different filters for each of us.
• 2:12:13
  This will be obvious, but the particular moment, on the last livestream you mentioned the first Gulf War.
• 2:12:19
  1991, where we were 22, 21 at that point.
• 2:12:25
  The first Gulf War was famous for launching CNN as a global phenomenon.
• 2:12:34
  Because they had a few guys, including Bernard Shaw, who's the correspondent who's on the ground there, who I remember most.
• 2:12:43
  You and I spent a lot of time in front of the television watching the first Gulf War emerge when we were in college at the time.
• 2:12:52
  The guys, including Bernard Shaw, were justifiably terrified and also professional in doing their job.
• 2:13:01
  As I remember it, Shaw kept repeating the same word over and over again.
• 2:13:07
  In Tehran, as the terrifying strike of Tehran, Baghdad.
• 2:13:15
  He and his crew were there and bombs are raining down on the city.
• 2:13:23
  I don't remember the first part precisely.
• 2:13:24
  He keeps saying something like, "Saddam Hussein wants something, and the Iraqi people just want to live their lives." The Iraqi people just want to live their lives.
• 2:13:33
  As I remember it, he said this often enough that you and I are both like, "Oh my God, the man is...
• 2:13:38
  He's traumatized.
• 2:13:40
  He's watching this from his balcony or his window." He doesn't know if his hotel is about to get struck.
• 2:13:45
  He has no idea if he has minutes or decades left in his life.
• 2:13:49
  As it turns out, he was fine.
• 2:13:51
  All of the CNN correspondents were fine.
• 2:13:53
  We were certainly not the only ones to be glued to our television screens at that moment.
• 2:13:59
  Anyone who was was watching CNN.
• 2:14:02
  There was this unifying moment when the war was televised.
• 2:14:09
  It was televised basically by one 24-7 news outlet that until then had been some little niche podunk thing that no one had really heard of.
• 2:14:17
  It was a Ted Turner...
• 2:14:19
  So the problem was, it was the invention of the 24-hour news cycle.
• 2:14:25
  CNN was.
• 2:14:26
  The moment that which had actually happened was the Gulf War because there was something to watch at any moment.
• 2:14:31
  You could tune in and get updated on what the hell has been going on over the last day.
• 2:14:36
  Because it's far enough ahead of those of us watching the US too, usually when we would be glued to the set, there was activity happening.
• 2:14:46
  The 24-hour news cycle didn't make any sense until Gulf War I.
• 2:14:50
  At which point CNN turned its investment in the idea that 24-hour news caught fire because we were literally watching.
• 2:14:57
  In some ways, we went through a moment at which the average person was watching CBS, but there were a lot of people watching ABC and NBC.
• 2:15:07
  There were three major networks delivering news and five or six highly credible newspapers in the US at the time.
• 2:15:20
  Maybe I'm being ungenerous, but there were at least five or six good ones.
• 2:15:24
  The point is that Gulf War I, CNN moment took...
• 2:15:30
  The newspaper was too slow.
• 2:15:32
  You can't wait till tomorrow morning to find out what's going on.
• 2:15:35
  Things are happening too fast.
• 2:15:37
  You're not watching ABC.
• 2:15:39
  It's the same problem.
• 2:15:42
  Everybody's watching CNN.
• 2:15:43
  It caused a centralization of our viewpoint.
• 2:15:47
  Never before and never since.
• 2:15:50
  We were all watching the exact same thing.
• 2:15:52
  It's notable, therefore, that you had this contraction of diversity of media sources so recently.
• 2:15:59
  A contraction of funneling, a narrowing to a single source not that long ago.
• 2:16:07
  And now we are at the other extreme.
• 2:16:09
  Now we are living in the other extreme.
• 2:16:10
  The absolute other extreme.
• 2:16:12
  Where the sources that might draw you towards a shared basic understanding of the facts of the last 24 hours or whatever.
• 2:16:21
  That that is gone because we don't trust anything that looks like CNN or CBS because they're not trustworthy.
• 2:16:27
  We don't trust the New York Times, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune.
• 2:16:31
  They're all compromised.
• 2:16:33
  So you're better off trying to cobble together an understanding from people that you trust or sort of trust or think you should trust.
• 2:16:42
  But it's a crappy substitute.
• 2:16:44
  It's terrible.
• 2:16:45
  And worse, I mean...
• 2:16:48
  A good editor does a tremendous value.
• 2:16:50
  Just as a museum curator does a tremendous value.
• 2:16:53
  Someone who actually has insight and experience in a particular field or domain can help you make sense even while their hand is invisible to you as they are choosing what to put in front of you in a newspaper, on a news show, in a museum exhibit.
• 2:17:10
  Yeah, in fact, the algorithm is like an anti-editor.
• 2:17:17
  It's editing for a purpose that is not your clarity.
• 2:17:21
  It's editing for purposes that might be to keep you engaged so you don't leave the site and go do something else.
• 2:17:27
  That's at best.
• 2:17:28
  At worst, it's editing to lead you to a belief that isn't even true.
• 2:17:34
  If somebody has commandeered the algorithm and they have a purpose, they want you to support this or oppose that, then they have a mechanism to do it.
• 2:17:41
  And you can't tell unless you have a major investment in getting a bunch of people who have different internet histories to compare notes on what they're being told.
• 2:17:50
  I always think that there are various projects that will compare the right view and the left view, but I really think there needs to be a...
• 2:17:57
  How profound is the skew that each of us is exposed to?
• 2:18:04
  That should be readily determinable by having a bunch of different things pull in different feeds and compare them.
• 2:18:11
  And why is there not a major project that allows us to assess bias by that mechanism?
• 2:18:16
  Or maybe there isn't, I don't know about that.
• 2:19:47
  Otherwise, the question of extrapolation of airline ticket pricing being sensitive to a detection algorithm that figures that you're trying to buy a ticket since it's name Vienna was not a casual search.
• 2:19:59
  You really want to have either that.
• 2:20:00
  Okay.
• 2:20:01
  On second search, I'm going to raise those prices.
• 2:20:04
  You're back again three days later to the same search.
• 2:20:07
  Those prices keep going up.
• 2:20:08
  And so it gives you at home the sense that "I better buy these right away" because they're getting more expensive.
• 2:20:10
  the sense that I better buy these right away because they're getting more expensive.
• 2:20:14
  When in fact, no, that's just, they're getting more expensive for you, pal, because you telegraphed your intent.
• 2:20:18
  So, but the point of my raising that is that one of the things in that article was, you are not going to defeat this with a VPN and incognito window.
• 2:20:29
  Too many dollars have been invested in detecting your existence and figuring out what your behavior implies for you to defeat it in that regard.
• 2:20:41
  And so my suggestion would be, at least for those of us who might be targeted because we have influence, the likelihood that an incognito window allows you to check these things, I think is pretty low.
• 2:20:55
  So suffice it to say, my feed that tells me what's going on in the Middle East is beyond terrifying.
• 2:21:08
  And I don't know what to make of it because I know that the PSYOP never sleeps.
• 2:21:14
  So part of me feels like that terrifying thing is actually my ability to use my own theoretical evolutionary toolkit to make sense of a world that's hard to make sense of.
• 2:21:27
  I know I'm trying to do that, but I'm making sense of a dataset that isn't a dataset.
• 2:21:32
  It's selective.
• 2:21:33
  And so anyway, I'm hoping that what I've seen is not true.
• 2:21:42
  That said, the impression that I have for my side of the screen is that what most people are seeing is not true and that there are hints of what is actually true.
• 2:21:55
  And when you peer under that rock, the truth is terrifying.
• 2:21:59
  So what I wanted to do is say a little bit about, I'm not telling you that my understanding of what's going on in the Middle East is insight.
• 2:22:07
  It may well be a PSYOP acting on me, presumably to get to you, right?
• 2:22:15
  Or it may be that I am able to see something that others, that most others are not seeing and a small number of others are seeing because I'm not seeing primary sources for the most part.
• 2:22:28
  I'm seeing a selection of the things available, mostly on X.
• 2:22:33
  And in any case, the picture that is being painted for me, whether it is targeted at me specifically or not, is that we have been lured into a war.
• 2:22:51
  And many people took me to task the last time I said the attack on Iran was a war, it's not a war.
• 2:22:57
  Well, I think it's close enough to a war that that term applies.
• 2:23:01
  That we have been lured into a war, either the timing of our entry or the fact of our entry are the result of a long-standing plan to get the United States to attack Iran.
• 2:23:23
  The ostensible reason is because it is in our interest, in the world's interest for us to do this, but narrowly speaking, because it is in Israel's interest or at least the interest of the Israeli regime, that it perceives this war as in its interest and that we, the United States, have been lured into a war on false pretenses, that we cannot and will not win.
• 2:23:49
  Some of this, I think I know from before there was social media, right?
• 2:23:55
  The fact that the neocons have had Iran on their agenda and that I've been saying, I've got a tweet out there from a month or two ago where I said, "Look, in the case of Iran,"we are not gonna be given a choice.
• 2:24:08
  "We will be going to war with Iran." And there's nothing that we are able to do to stop it because it's on the agenda of people who have a lot of power and will not take no for an answer.
• 2:24:18
  That's a tragedy.
• 2:24:20
  So that part I think I know.
• 2:24:23
  It's been on the agenda and somehow we find ourselves at war in Iran.
• 2:24:28
  And the question is, is this a mirror of the recent limited engagement where we dropped some very powerful bombs on what we're told is a nuclear facility inside of a mountain.
• 2:24:41
  We are told to be disabled, the facility, and there's a success, no boots on the ground.
• 2:24:48
  See, it worked out great.
• 2:24:50
  Well, or as I said last time, was that the equivalent of Gulf War I, which caused us to become complacent about the idea of war with Iran because it seems like a walk in the park and we've been lured in that specifically, again, this is what my feed is suggesting to me, that the president has been lured into a war that is spectacularly not in our interest, spectacularly not in his interest because there's no way out.
• 2:25:21
  And further, again, this is my feed and it may be misleading me.
• 2:25:28
  The implication is that the president is surrounded by people who are controlling his effective feed, that his information about how well the war is going and what to expect in the coming weeks is inaccurate, causing him to do damage that he would not do on his own.
• 2:25:54
  Now, even more frightening is the implication that the battle so far has revealed the inverse of what the strike in, was it June, on the nuclear facility revealed.
• 2:26:16
  In other words, that in spite of having decapitated the Iranian regime, we can come back to the decapitation and whether or not we paid an immense price for the way that happened.
• 2:26:31
  But the decapitation of the regime, which appears to be real, did not result in the destruction of command and control of the Iranian military, much to the contrary, that we are actually seeing ferocious capability on the part of that military that is in a position to exhaust what supplies we have for this conflict.
• 2:26:56
  Now, again.
• 2:26:59
  Because what you've been seeing is that American bases in the area have been successfully gone after by Iranian military.
• 2:27:09
  Yeah, and nobody disputes that there have been successful Iranian attacks on military bases in the Middle East.
• 2:27:19
  But the degree to which these attacks on those military bases and on Tel Aviv, again, I don't know.
• 2:27:28
  I'm not, for some reason, what I don't have is what I would expect is a huge amount of video evidence of attacks on all of these things, or the aftermath of those attacks, that would give me at least some basis to assess am I seeing the same video of the same smoking building on a base again and again, or am I seeing an indefinitely large number of distinct camera angles seem to be different bases?
• 2:27:56
  That would give me some ability to calibrate how much damage we're looking at.
• 2:27:59
  But let me just read a, I don't know this journalist.
• 2:28:03
  I find something strange about the way this journalist is introduced, but I read something, again, on my feed from an Israeli journalist, that stopped me in my tracks.
• 2:28:13
  I don't know if it's true, but if it is, it is not matching what an awful lot of people are seeing on their feeds.
• 2:28:22
  Jen, can you put up that?
• 2:28:24
  Okay.
• 2:28:27
  This person making the tweet has a Russian flag and they say, "Elon Mizrahi, an Israeli journalist, "one of the most worthy Jews in the world." I don't know what the phrase worthy Jews means, but it's conspicuous.
• 2:28:42
  Nonetheless, that's not this journalist speaking, that's the person who made the tweet.
• 2:28:47
  So it doesn't really, it doesn't cast any doubt on what the journalist says, which-- It's just a crazy thing to say.
• 2:28:55
  I mean, replace Jews with any group, right?
• 2:28:57
  It's a weird thing to say.
• 2:29:00
  Okay, so it says, it's a little bit of a strange distance, but it says-- You want me to read it?
• 2:29:06
  Yeah, when you do it.
• 2:29:09
  We are witnessing history.
• 2:29:11
  Iran, to everyone's surprise, is destroying American bases so thoroughly on such a large scale and so decisively that the world is not ready for this.
• 2:29:19
  In four days, Iran has managed to expand its sphere of military dominance in the region.
• 2:29:24
  Iran has destroyed the most valuable and expensive military bases, property, and equipment in the entire world.
• 2:29:31
  The American bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are among the largest military facilities in the entire world.
• 2:29:38
  These facilities have cost trillions of dollars over several decades to build.
• 2:29:42
  We are talking about the fact that the bulk of the military spending that has been made over more than 30 years has gone up in smoke.
• 2:29:49
  We see radars costing hundreds of millions of dollars each being destroyed in an instant.
• 2:29:54
  We see entire military bases being abandoned and burned, looted and destroyed.
• 2:29:58
  And I'm telling you, as far as I know, the US has never suffered such destruction in its entire history, except perhaps for Pearl Harbor,(Clears Throat) except perhaps for Pearl Harbor, but that was just one attack.
• 2:30:10
  No enemy in a conventional war has ever done this to American military forces, as Iran is doing right now.
• 2:30:16
  It is hard to believe.
• 2:30:18
  The military situation is so serious that censorship is blocking almost all new information about this war.
• 2:30:23
  If you've noticed, we're getting less and less information every day.
• 2:30:28
  35 years ago, during the first Iraqi war, we were shown endless footage from Iraq.
• 2:30:32
  Back then, smart bombs and cameras were a novelty, but every night we were shown nighttime footage.
• 2:30:37
  Now, we hardly see any videos at all.
• 2:30:40
  But understand this.
• 2:30:42
  Supposedly, this is the world's largest military power with the world's largest air capabilities.
• 2:30:46
  And on the fourth day of the US offensive, supposedly and supposedly breaking through Iranian defenses, we don't see any signs of American dominance in the Iranian sky.
• 2:30:55
  Where are all the video recordings of our planes flying over Tehran or any other part of Iran, for that matter?
• 2:31:01
  (Clears Throat) American soldiers can't even dream of setting foot in Iranian soil.
• 2:31:06
  And understand how desperate this war is.
• 2:31:08
  On the fourth day, we're already hearing the most insane proposals and ideas from the Trump administration.
• 2:31:13
  They're proposing sending military S-squares for oil tankers leaving the Persian Gulf.
• 2:31:17
  What are you even talking about?
• 2:31:18
  You wanna send American ships into the zone of destruction of thousands of Iranian missiles?
• 2:31:23
  Now, no one can get through the Strait of Hormuz.
• 2:31:25
  The Iranians have been preparing for this for decades.
• 2:31:28
  They're flaunting the idea of arming Kurdish militias to invade Iran.
• 2:31:32
  What the hell are you talking about?
• 2:31:34
  Have you seen a map of Iran?
• 2:31:36
  It seems the Trump administration has never seen a map, a map of Iran.
• 2:31:41
  Do you know how fast it is?
• 2:31:42
  What does it mean to invade Iran?
• 2:31:44
  Do you think a militia of 10,000 people can invade Iran or even 50,000 or 100,000?
• 2:31:49
  Iran will swallow them up.
• 2:31:51
  The US and Israel have already lost this war.
• 2:31:54
  The US and Israel can kill millions of civilians in their homes.
• 2:31:57
  They have powerful bombs and can blow up buildings, but they won't win this war.
• 2:32:02
  Iran's military infrastructure and weaponry is deep underground all over Iran.
• 2:32:07
  Neither the Americans nor especially the Israelis have any chance of reaching any of it.
• 2:32:11
  They're in deep shit.
• 2:32:13
  They started something they have no chance of finishing.
• 2:32:15
  When the cell limbs, the US will never return to West Asia.
• 2:32:18
  There will be no American presence in the Middle East.
• 2:32:21
  I'm telling you this now with certainty.
• 2:32:26
  All right, now I'm gonna keep saying it because-- That's a guy who has reportedly, you haven't looked into it, a journalist out of Israel with the last name Israel.
• 2:32:36
  Yeah.
• 2:32:37
  I don't remember his first name.
• 2:32:38
  It's a name on it.
• 2:32:39
  So again, I don't know whether what I'm seeing is motivated by some sort of perverse incentive that somebody want that, I have no reason to doubt this journalist, but I also can't validate.
• 2:32:56
  You have no reason to doubt your marriage and to trust.
• 2:32:58
  Right, I have none.
• 2:32:59
  And so the question is, is that report highly misleading and American bases are mostly intact and the war is going much better than that report?
• 2:33:11
  Or is that report somewhere in the neighborhood of accurate and the massive destruction of American infrastructure in the Middle East is being suppressed so that we cannot understand the conduct of this war, maybe so that the president cannot understand where he is?
• 2:33:29
  So the picture, again, based on the most important thing, the most skewed worst possible source of information, which is my personal feed, which I don't even know looks like your personal feed.
• 2:33:43
  Based on that, what this feels like is we were lured into a war that either completely caught us off guard, all of us, the Israelis, the Americans, with respect to how powerful the Iranians are and how powerful they would remain after the decapitation of their regime, or there is some purpose here.
• 2:34:05
  And again, this is hinted at across my feed.
• 2:34:08
  I don't know if it's garbage, but it's terrifying.
• 2:34:11
  Or the idea is that for somebody, the derangement, the hobbling of the US and the hobbling of the Trump administration is actually on the agenda.
• 2:34:24
  Now, I find that a preposterous idea, but for one thing, there is a strange arrangement of beliefs and commitments that I cannot think of an analog for in my past experience on planet Earth.
• 2:34:46
  The neocons have become Democrats, okay?
• 2:34:50
  That's insane, that's a, they are.
• 2:34:52
  The Democratic Party has embraced them because the Democratic Party has no soul.
• 2:34:56
  Okay, the neocons are now Democrats.
• 2:35:00
  The neocons and Democrats and the New York Times and all of the stuff that travels in that circle simultaneously detests Donald Trump and he's kind of on board with this war.
• 2:35:18
  And I cannot understand why, given what we understand about Donald Trump, it is very strange to see him doing what people who hate him want done.
• 2:35:34
  It's very odd.
• 2:35:35
  Now, obviously it's not clean because there's plenty of support for this in both of our parties, but this feels like a president, I mean, we're facing midterms.
• 2:35:50
  The president had an uphill battle before there was a war in Iran.
• 2:35:55
  He had an uphill battle, he was gonna lose the House.
• 2:35:59
  The chances that he's gonna lose the Senate were on the table already.
• 2:36:04
  A disastrous military invasion for which we have no plan to extract ourselves is the biggest setback on the table of potential self.
• 2:36:20
  With regard to the midterms.
• 2:36:21
  With regard to the midterms.
• 2:36:23
  So, and as I will point out, I pointed it out before, for Trump, he can lose the House.
• 2:36:33
  He cannot lose the Senate.
• 2:36:35
  If Trump-- If he wants to accomplish anything in the last two years of his presidency.
• 2:36:39
  There will be over two years of his presidency if he loses the Senate.
• 2:36:42
  The House is gonna impeach him, they've done it before.
• 2:36:45
  The only thing that keeps this from turning into a total debacle is the fact that the Senate won't convict him.
• 2:36:54
  If the Democrats hold the Senate, they will convict him.
• 2:36:59
  So, on the one hand, you've now got a setup for the same kind of, you know, we've had kind of a cold civil war in the US.
• 2:37:11
  It's heating up and the battle in the Middle East is throwing gasoline on that fire.
• 2:37:17
  Unless Trump has something up his sleeve, a spectacular loss in the Middle East, he cannot afford it.
• 2:37:27
  And frankly, as much as I'm very upset with Trump and the Trump administration, we can't afford it either because, as I've pointed out a thousand times, the Democratic Party is completely without a soul.
• 2:37:41
  We don't even know what it is.
• 2:37:42
  They ran two candidates in the last election who were not capable of doing the job.
• 2:37:49
  Two non-serious candidates, one of them demented and the other one an empty suit.
• 2:37:55
  And the idea-- That's being kind of both cases.
• 2:37:58
  Kind of both cases, but the point is the idea was, we were somehow supposed to be okay with the idea that as long as their advisors are good, that's fine.
• 2:38:05
  Which is, frankly, it's a coup.
• 2:38:07
  We do not have a system of government in which a system of advisors governs and you can have a non-compass figurehead, obviously.
• 2:38:15
  So the Democratic Party is somehow cool with this and that means we can't be cool with it.
• 2:38:20
  I think Trump has made a colossal error in initiating this campaign in Iran.
• 2:38:27
  But he's still, at least a human being who can be answerable, who can make decisions.
• 2:38:34
  It's still better than the Democratic Party.
• 2:38:38
  I see.
• 2:38:40
  So, and then, okay, so on the one hand, something, either because it's too dumb to understand how dangerous this was and lured us into a fairy tale like they will welcome us as liberators and then, of course, Wagner follows, right?
• 2:38:55
  Maybe it was that, a colossal error of hubris marching into the most dangerous situation in the world.
• 2:39:04
  Or maybe-- Or all fantasists.
• 2:39:06
  Or maybe the idea is the neocons who simultaneously need Trump to do their bidding at this moment and hate him, wanted to burn him down and this was the way to do it, get him to do something that would simultaneously advance their agenda from which he couldn't recover, right?
• 2:39:24
  That's a dark idea.
• 2:39:26
  But it doesn't explain why he said yes, why he's doing it.
• 2:39:29
  Because he doesn't have good information about where he is.
• 2:39:33
  That's the implication of what I'm seeing.
• 2:39:35
  Well, but that's now.
• 2:39:36
  Yeah.
• 2:39:36
  What made him, what caused him to do it in the first place?
• 2:39:42
  Well, let's imagine that the same process that we described on our last live stream where Gulf War I broke Vietnam Syndrome and allowed Gulf War II, when it became a quagmire, that that happened on an accelerated time scale here and that the brief bombing campaign in, I think it was June, was it June?
• 2:40:05
  I don't remember.
• 2:40:06
  Last year or something.
• 2:40:07
  Last year sometime.
• 2:40:09
  That brief bombing campaign gave the president a sense of how asymmetrical our power was and what would likely happen if he...
• 2:40:20
  Yeah, and as I mentioned last time, there's been a series of these things.
• 2:40:24
  It looks like he's looking around the world going like, "Who do I topple next?
• 2:40:27
  "Let's get rid of the bad guys." And so this was presented to him as one in a series.
• 2:40:33
  It might have slipped through and not been obvious this was actually a different sort of thing.
• 2:40:39
  And yeah, I could say that feeling like what happened in Venezuela and Mexico were also mistakes, but this is like a whole different level of mistake.
• 2:40:48
  This is a whole different level of mistake.
• 2:40:50
  This is a level of mistake.
• 2:40:52
  I will rephrase what I've said previously about this.
• 2:40:57
  Israel is, by my estimation, it is a state with a lineage view, an Old Testament view fused with a modern Western view.
• 2:41:14
  It has one foot in the Old Testament and one foot in the modern West.
• 2:41:18
  And it can go either way.
• 2:41:20
  But the current Israeli regime seems, died in the old Old Testament.
• 2:41:26
  And we, I have said, are depending on Israel putting both feet in the modern West.
• 2:41:35
  I'm not saying it can do anything.
• 2:41:39
  It can't just decide to be Western and ignore the fact that it's in a bad neighborhood.
• 2:41:43
  It is, it's in a neighborhood, it kind of is a hate of them.
• 2:41:46
  But from the point of view of where it wants to go, it can either go towards the Old Testament, one population destroys another and displaces it view.
• 2:41:55
  And that's the evolutionarily speaking, I would say it is the lineage against the lineage violence and the mode.
• 2:42:01
  Or it can attempt to step into the modern West.
• 2:42:07
  And yes, there are real questions to answer about how it could possibly be safe to be met in a neighborhood where it's neighbors hated.
• 2:42:15
  But nonetheless, Israel is caught in this tension between these two ways of thinking.
• 2:42:21
  And I would point out while we are here that we in the West do not intuit what the Old Testament mindset does.
• 2:42:34
  It's just not something we don't live with.
• 2:42:39
  So my concern has been that Israel will fall into this Old Testament approach, lineages displacing other lineages through violence.
• 2:42:51
  Displace or be displaced, that's the mindset.
• 2:42:54
  To give it its due, right?
• 2:42:55
  It's not that you choose to do this because you want to, you choose to do this because the alternative is to have it done to you.
• 2:43:03
  And if Israel defaults to this lineage against lineage violence mindset and behaves in a belligerent way, which I believe it has done here, Mark Rubio acknowledged seemingly that we were forced, our hand was forced by Israeli action that was going to happen.
• 2:43:25
  So whether that was simply a question of the time it was forced or the whole thing was forced, doesn't really matter.
• 2:43:31
  The point is Israel is acting in a belligerent way that is causing us to make moves that would presumably not have been desired.
• 2:43:41
  So if that is what is unfolding, the danger I have been saying since October 7th and before, is that the conflict that is the result of that belligerent action is going to drag the entire world backwards into the Old Testament and the Quran.
• 2:44:01
  And that is what my feed is telling me.
• 2:44:03
  And maybe my feed is telling me that because I've said that into a microphone and a camera and something wants me to think it's happening.
• 2:44:10
  So I'll freak out and say embarrassing things.
• 2:44:13
  I don't know.
• 2:44:13
  Maybe that's it, hopefully that's it.
• 2:44:15
  Well, you know, or so that you trust your feed because it's verifying you and giving you feedback that you're right about things so that when it gives you other things, you feel like, oh, that's right too.
• 2:44:24
  Yeah, no, it could be any one of a number of things.
• 2:44:28
  But as this scenario seems to have set up a heating up of the cold civil war that we Americans have been living with for a decade, it also seems to be putting a match to and throwing gasoline on the tinderbox that is the Middle East, right?
• 2:44:53
  You now have Iran attacking its neighbors and doing substantial damage and the United States apparently not defending them.
• 2:45:01
  These are places that have made a deal with us.
• 2:45:02
  That's why we have bases.
• 2:45:04
  And yet we seem to be allowing Iran to attack them.
• 2:45:08
  So what I'm trying to say very carefully is that if my feed is any indication and it probably isn't, we are being headed towards World War III as many of us feared would happen if we launched a sustained attack against Iran.
• 2:45:32
  Now finally, I will say prominent in my feed has been this question of the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock, which is a Muslim holy site that is apparently symmetrically important as Mecca and Medina.
• 2:45:53
  It is a profoundly important place to Muslims, which is obviously vulnerable in a highly kinetic battle between Iran and Israel.
• 2:46:07
  And so there is the danger that something happens to that.
• 2:46:12
  Could happen by accident, but it could also happen because some force that wants to push history in a particular direction decides that this would be a fine moment to do away with this holiest of sites for Islam and replace it with the Third Temple, a replacement for the Second Temple, a Jewish temple which stood on that spot.
• 2:46:39
  So for those who talk about the destruction of the Second Temple and this is the Wailing Wall is right next to this, there is this question about this vulnerable site that could ignite a terrifying conflagration between the West and Islam, between Judeo-Christian, the Judeo-Christian world and Islam, and well, I looked it up.
• 2:47:16
  I looked up the ranking of world religions in terms of population.
• 2:47:23
  Christians, about 2.4 billion people and Muslims, they're two billion.
• 2:47:32
  So you're talking about the two largest religious groups on earth that are now battling physically in close proximity to a contested holy site.
• 2:47:44
  Retreating Americans as a de facto Christian.
• 2:47:48
  Well, it's a long story, but I basically think that the West, what I call the modern West is actually downstream.
• 2:47:58
  It's an intellectual descendant of Christianity.
• 2:48:00
  Yeah, that the broadening of the in-group is fundamental to what the West is.
• 2:48:06
  It's the alternative to lineage against lineage violence.
• 2:48:10
  And so I think Christian values did have a fundamental role in the creation of the modern West, even if the founders weren't strictly speaking believing Christians who wanted this to be a Christian country.
• 2:48:23
  Yeah, so I do see that conflagration as likely at the same time that we've had this massive influx of migrants from all over the world throughout Europe and the US.
• 2:48:38
  And so it just looks like Tinder everywhere that is, yeah, I'm not talking about the site.
• 2:48:49
  It looks like kindling everywhere and that children are playing with matches and gasoline and other explosives with only everything riding on it, not going badly.
• 2:49:06
  Yeah.
• 2:49:07
  All right.
• 2:49:09
  And how could at least some of it not go badly?
• 2:49:13
  Right, and that's the question.
• 2:49:14
  Is it already going so spectacularly badly that we in America should be having a conversation that sounds like, wow, that didn't go as planned.
• 2:49:22
  It's going to suck if we pull out now, but it is way better than doubling down at this point.
• 2:49:29
  Right.
• 2:49:29
  Right?
• 2:49:31
  It doesn't get easier from here.
• 2:49:33
  It gets worse.
• 2:49:35
  And so anyway, hopefully I'm privately being frightened by something that has commandeered my feed and fed me a terrifying set of pseudo information that is not representative of what's taking place in the Middle East, but I have a sinking feeling about it.
• 2:49:54
  And in this case, I can't contest your feed because I'm mostly off the platforms entirely because they basically give me AI slot of animals.
• 2:50:07
  But for now I can tell is AI slot, but I'm just done.
• 2:50:11
  Yeah, I get it.
• 2:50:13
  You could take my feed away from me, which might improve my activity.
• 2:50:16
  As you know, I have tried to do that in the past.
• 2:50:20
  I mean, you don't get angry, you're not being violent because you don't do those things, but it's not really effective.
• 2:50:25
  Yeah, it's not really effective.
• 2:50:27
  Yeah.
• 2:50:27
  All right, well, maybe I need to do a hobby.
• 2:50:29
  Oh, for sure, yes.
• 2:50:32
  All right.
• 2:50:33
  Well, all right, I'm sorry for dropping that all on you.
• 2:50:35
  I'd be very curious whether or not what I'm seeing is completely at odds with what the rest of you are seeing, in which case we can all have a good laugh about it.
• 2:50:43
  That would be lovely.
• 2:50:46
  But otherwise I would say, hey, it is actually time.
• 2:50:49
  Look, maybe the punchline to this is this.
• 2:50:52
  We should all be checking with other people to see how different what our feeds are telling us is.
• 2:50:58
  And maybe we can figure out some sort of an indicator of what is reliable information and what it's not.
• 2:51:04
  Because at this moment, we may have made a colossal error and doubling down on it's a bad idea.
• 2:51:12
  And I think it's just all hands on deck.
• 2:51:22
  All hands on deck.
• 2:51:24
  Yeah.
• 2:51:25
  Sounds like an order.
• 2:51:28
  Sounds like action has been specified, but it has not.
• 2:51:34
  That is so deeply in the metaphorical here that what actually can be done here is utterly unclear to me.
• 2:51:42
  Right, I'm just suggesting-- It sounds like a phrase in which like, okay, you know what to do, man.
• 2:51:49
  Yeah, it does sort of sound like you know what to do.
• 2:51:52
  I don't mean that.
• 2:51:52
  I mean, I can think of one thing to do, which is try to correct the bias in your own information stream by comparing notes with people you trust who are likely to be seeing something different.
• 2:52:04
  At least figuring out, let's put it this way.
• 2:52:07
  We're blindfolded.
• 2:52:10
  Job one, almost no matter what the emergency is, is to get the blindfold off and just figure out what's true.
• 2:52:16
  Once we know what's true, then a discussion about what to think about it and what to do about it becomes rational.
• 2:52:21
  But if we're guessing about what's actually going on, there's nothing to be said about what to do about it.
• 2:52:27
  So that's my advice is think outside the box and try to figure out what's taking place by correcting for the thing that we don't generally correct for, which is that we are all seeing a different world.
• 2:52:42
  And I will reinvigorate the metaphor of, this is Plato's cave, except that we each have a personalized wall of shadows.
• 2:52:51
  We see the wall of shadows.
• 2:52:53
  We think the person sitting next to us is seeing the same wall of shadows.
• 2:52:56
  In fact, they are seeing a personally tailored wall of shadows.
• 2:52:59
  It doesn't look like ours and the smartest thing to do-- From when we look around, and I think you used this phrase before, when we look around, it reveals itself as Plato's cave of mirrors.
• 2:53:07
  Yes, Plato's cave of mirrors.
• 2:53:08
  And I would argue, I mean, imagine just, you did find yourself in Plato's cave and you're staring at the wall and beginning to suspect that something is up.
• 2:53:16
  The first thing you wanna do is, I'll build a person next to you and say, all right, listen to me.
• 2:53:23
  I'm going to tell you what is in front of my eyes and I want you to tell me what differs from what is in front of your eyes.
• 2:53:30
  You do that and then you can discover whether these are subtly different movies or radically different movies and you can try to deduce what it is the purpose of these movies might be.
• 2:53:41
  So there is, when we were talking about this last night, you began talking about the skillset in which we came of age as scientists, which was generated by having the experience over and over and over again across myriad ecosystems, but used the jungle as the defining one, the lowland, the interactable rainforest.
• 2:54:07
  You walk into a jungle and you have no idea what to make of it.
• 2:54:12
  It's chaos, it's simultaneously much quieter and less full of charismatic megafauna than you were led to believe by David Attenborough documentaries.
• 2:54:20
  And also there's so much more going on and it's all green and it's just, it's a morass.
• 2:54:24
  You have no idea where to start even with the questions.
• 2:54:27
  And what you do as a field biologist, as an ecologist, if you're good at it, as an evolutionary biologist, if you're good at it, is you begin to hone your skills of observation.
• 2:54:38
  And to, once you think you see something, try looking at it from a different place and you ask the person next to you, who you also trust, who's also been honing their skills of observation, do you see this thing that I'm seeing?
• 2:54:49
  You have to, if you stand where I'm standing, how would you stand over here, just to look the same?
• 2:54:52
  What is that?
• 2:54:54
  And so that, I mean, those are the sort of founding principles by which we came to develop many of the skills that we have, right?
• 2:55:04
  It's an evolutionary lens, yes, but it's also a field biologist lens, right?
• 2:55:08
  It's not a lab scientist lens, it's a field scientist lens.
• 2:55:14
  One of the incredibly difficult things about this landscape is that you cannot make your own observations, that as you began this section with- This landscape, not the forest, but the- This social landscape, this war landscape, this modern social landscape, is that we are not actually eyewitnesses to anything.
• 2:55:34
  And to some degree, back in Gulf War I, with Bernard Shaw saying the Iraqi people just wanna live their lives, you knew that what we were being sure on the television was a decent match for what Shaw was seeing with his eyes.
• 2:55:51
  You could see the cameras next to him in the pan.
• 2:55:54
  That just was true, and you're not in it, and you're not at risk, it's still not the same.
• 2:55:59
  It's a two-dimensional flattened, curated version of what he was seeing, but you were second order eyewitness.
• 2:56:06
  And we're not second order, we're not eighth order, we have no idea what level, if what we're seeing is true at all, how many filters it's gone through, or if it's completely created from scratch by something that doesn't have our interest at heart, or does.
• 2:56:21
  So how do, if everyone should, and this has been one of the implicit themes of what we've done in Dark War since the beginning, which is how do you develop a set of observational skills and evolutionary tools such that you can make sense of the world around you?
• 2:56:41
  That is necessary, valuable, all of this, but how do you apply those to a world in which you can't even tell what you're seeing, when you don't know if what you're seeing is what you're seeing?
• 2:56:52
  I don't know.
• 2:56:54
  And so when you say, all hands on deck, I can't accept that because I have no idea what it means in this case.
• 2:57:01
  I simply have no idea what it means.
• 2:57:02
  Yeah, well, I agree with your correction.
• 2:57:04
  I wanna just add one thing to the analogy to the forest.
• 2:57:08
  The thing about walking into a tropical forest is not only are you not in a good position to make sense of the chaos, nobody has made sense of the chaos.
• 2:57:18
  So the point is it's not like you can go look this up when you get back to the field station.
• 2:57:22
  But it exists, it's reality.
• 2:57:24
  It is, the forest is a true thing.
• 2:57:26
  Yeah, the forest is true.
• 2:57:27
  Other than that, you will never understand how it came to be or why it works, or what the failures are when they surprise you.
• 2:57:34
  But it's there.
• 2:57:35
  Yeah, and so that's the point is, if you go into the forest and you look around and there are 300 species of trees doing almost the identical thing, turning sunlight and carbon dioxide into sugar and cellulose.
• 2:57:52
  Whereas there are less than 10 in most forests in the United States.
• 2:57:55
  Right, but if you look at that forest with 300 and then you go back to the field station and you pick up the ecology textbook and it says, no two species shall exist indefinitely in the same niche doing the same thing.
• 2:58:10
  That ecology textbook which was written in the Northern Temperance Zone where 10 species of trees may exist in an intact forest and they're all doing different things because you can't if you're only one of 10.
• 2:58:20
  The book tells you that nobody knows how that forest works.
• 2:58:24
  We have spent five decades trying to rescue the principle that says you can't have two species competing indefinitely in the same niche.
• 2:58:35
  Try to rescue the principle from the forest rather than recognizing that the principle is wrong.
• 2:58:40
  That's how little we know about these things.
• 2:58:43
  But that's why you start with the observation.
• 2:58:46
  You don't start with the unvetted and when it has been attempted to be vetted, falsified ideas of someone in a textbook who were never in the place where you are, you learn how to see, you learn how to use your senses and the biases that they are filtering on your behalf and not on your behalf to as much as possible since the world as it exists.
• 2:59:11
  But when there's a screen between you and it, you can't do it.
• 2:59:14
  You don't know and in fact, to bring one other particular component of the puzzle to the table, I am scratching my head over claims that Tel Aviv is devastated by the Iranian attacks.
• 2:59:31
  I'm stifled by it because on the one hand, I would imagine if that was true, at least on X, we would know about it.
• 2:59:41
  On the other hand, there's the claim that anybody who publishes video of devastation in Israel will go to jail instantly for five years.
• 2:59:53
  Now, I find that hard to imagine, presumably you would have to be convicted of something, but there does appear to be a prohibition against sharing video from devastation while Israel is in conflict.
• 3:00:09
  So what that means is that if that's true, there is a formal censorship that is built.
• 3:00:17
  Now, I know what the defense for it is gonna be.
• 3:00:20
  We don't want the enemy to have good information on their targeting.
• 3:00:24
  We don't want them to know what they've hit and not hit because that will improve their targeting.
• 3:00:28
  I get it, I would want them to have it either.
• 3:00:31
  On the other hand, the ability to hide the level of devastation that the enemy has produced means that we who are paying for this and whose population and soldiers are being put at risk over it have a right to evaluate whether or not this continues to be in our interest.
• 3:00:55
  And if you shield us from information that it's not going well, then well, that invites you into a crime.
• 3:01:03
  So anyway, we have a right to some information.
• 3:01:05
  The president has a right to as perfect information as he can have because life and living depend on it.
• 3:01:12
  We in the public have a right to high quality information to not be treated as children and not to be psy-opt into military adventures that are not in our interest.
• 3:01:24
  It's obvious.
• 3:01:26
  And yet we are at the level of elowing the person in the cave next to us saying, what do the shadows on the wall that we see look like?
• 3:01:34
  They don't look like the ones on my wall, that's the problem, okay?
• 3:01:38
  We've gotta start from there.
• 3:01:39
  So not all hands on deck.
• 3:01:41
  Hey, what do you see on the wall?
• 3:01:43
  Fair enough.
• 3:01:45
  All right.
• 3:01:47
  We'll be back in a week and a half, not this Wednesday, but next before then there will be some awesome inside rail episode coming out.
• 3:01:54
  Certainly maybe even tomorrow.
• 3:01:56
  I think tomorrow.
• 3:01:59
  Check out our sponsors for this week, which were NOBS, Caraway, and Clear, all fantastic sponsors because we do not accept any that aren't.
• 3:02:08
  And until you see us here next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
• 3:02:14
  Be well everyone.