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

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream. I believe it's 316. It is 316. Very unlikely to be prime. I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Hying. It is once again and maybe just permanently a fascinating moment in our history as a species. Here we are mid Cartesian crisis. Mid Cartesian crisis closing in on the end of winter, which I'm ready for. That's nice. Yeah, it is nice. Here on a rare Saturday, not that Saturdays are rare, but the combination, the union of us being in front of cameras and it being Saturday is somewhat rare. I mean, they are pretty rare. Nothing usually so. No, no. Not a category of day. Equally rare as the other days, but as days go, pretty rare. I'd like them to be more common and maybe we can do something about it. So here we are a Saturday. 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 join us on locals. That's the watch parties going on. Brett had a great Patreon call this morning. All these ways to find us and interact. 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. 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. 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. The pipe that puts the matrix into my mind is telling me things about what's going on. The system of tubes. It is a system of not very reliable tubes. 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. Anyway, we will get there. We will. You probably want to be sitting down for that or. No, I wouldn't. Yeah. That's always the advice you give and you say it's a what facetious. Are you sitting down for this? And really I began to realize that I'd rather not be sitting down really ever, frankly, but certainly not when you hand me crazy news, you know, I don't need a fainting couch. No, I like to say it to people who are sitting down like you better sit down for this. Yeah. 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. Yes, exactly. It puts them somehow on their back footed, even though they're sitting down. So it shouldn't be an instability inducing maneuver on your part. And yet it does cause them to wonder what the hell is coming next and then that gives you your opening. Well, if I reverse engineer why it is I take such pleasure in that joke, it does force you into consciousness because to be asked if you were sitting down when you were obviously sitting down is jarring. Yeah, but yeah, but here's here's the thing. What is the thing in this case? You're the forcing into consciousness, which is also part of what puns are doing, right? It's just it's juxtaposition. 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 and that 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 know, you're not there from the beginning. You're like, wait, am I say what? What is he on about? All right. Well, that hurts, but it doesn't better to hear it from you than on the street. Can we pay the rent? It's been a weird few days. It has been a weird few weeks and a weird few months and a weird few years and keep going. It's been a weird millennium so far. 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Let the record reflect that episode 316 is when Heather literally apologized to the Southern hemisphere for the fact that winter is coming. Yep. No, the people in it. Oh, yeah, you didn't have to have fun. No, no, no, agree, but I still find it amazing. Yeah, the hemisphere, it's been through it before. As if the people, but not all of them presumably, but they're not going to accept your apology anyway. I digress. Yes, exactly the newborns. Our last sponsor this week is clear, Heather. Clear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health. It is widely available online and in stores and both it and the company that makes it our fantastic. Wow, got through that sentence. Good. It's clear that's X L E A R pronounced clear throughout history improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life more so than traditional medical advances. For instance, when doctors doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down. 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. nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, 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. 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 rather we get sick through our mouth and our noses. Thus, it makes sense that we should be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose. Enter clear clear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol a five carbon sugar alcohol our bodies naturally contain five carbon sugars mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbone sugars of RNA and DNA respectively. While most of our dietary sugars have six carbons sugars like glucose and fruit dose. I get a B minus on the intonation in that you know, you did great until the very end. I'm still giving me a B minus one thing it's a comfortable grade for me to be plus live at the discomfort. Alright, that's all. Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are in our tissues in the presence of xylitol bacteria and viruses, including streps, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV. Don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our bodies natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away. Clear is a simple nasal spray that you use morning and evening. It takes just three seconds. It's fast. It's easy and decidedly healthy. If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listen to my conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Clear on the inside rail in November of 2024, or my conversation with Nate's father, Lawn Jones, osteopath and inventor of Clear on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses in May of 2025. We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Clear as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses. That's Clear with an xyl-e-a-r. Get Clear online or at your pharmacy grocery store or natural products retailer and start taking six seconds a day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health. Yes. Yes. You want to start with the recusit all paper and then I'll introduce it and then you'll take it from there. Sure. Excellent. So Heather is going to introduce a paper that emerged kind of strangely prior to its official publication six or seven days ago. February 25th actually is the publication data online so it's a little longer than that. Word of it began to spread on social media. We were unable to get the paper itself from the normal sources and then one of the authors sent it to me. Because you asked for it. Because I asked for it. Which was nice of them. Thank you. So you could show it, Janet, this morning. I believe that was Dr. Luigi. Cool. The corresponding author. Yep. The final author. Okay. So we've got a. Oh, no. What? Dr. Luigi's last name is. I don't remember. I can't read it. For nachy. Okay. So I was. Is there. No. Okay. It's good. So this is this is a pre print 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 willing to pay the exorbitant and predatory fees for every single journal existence. 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. 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 if you actually think about what they mean, the idea that there can't be common ground between these makes no sense at all. In fact, there has to be common ground. So let me just define a few terms here. So the theory, of course, which sort of emerges with with pasture, especially identifies pathogens as the causal agent of infectious disease that seems total logical. It's inherently true if you believe that pathogens exist. I know some people don't, but whatever they're on about, I'm not that interested because pathogens do exist. 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 producing infectious disease in the world. In contrast to terrain theory, in which the terrain is your body and perhaps terrain, since you Lato is even like sort of the broader environment, including your prenatal environment in utero and the environment of your body. And basically terrain theory suggests that it is the health of the terrain is the health of your body that affects how sick you will get from infectious disease, which yes are brought by pathogens. Now, are there extreme versions of terrain theory, which don't believe in pathogens at all, 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 sure, but it's not really worth spending much time on either of those. So thinking about terrain theory, and it's in its obvious and normal form, the idea is that health and robustness of your body is predictive of how well it will be able to feed the body. So you will be able to fend off infectious agents when your body encounters them. So you've got two things broadly, infections, the history of infection or exposure to infectious agents and robustness of your body. And terrain theory has a cause of relationship between those two, which is that the health of your body affects how likely you already get infected. Can I pause you there? Yes. 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 a vaccine, which in our discussion, quite extensive and repeated during COVID of comorbidities. And if risks stratification of COVID was specifically at least implicitly about the terrain, right? 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, that if you had none of those pre-inities, not those comorbidities. Right. And so what we see is that we've got a public health apparatus that is absolutely germ theory obsessed 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, maybe, legally dangerous in its own right. And there are so many other things you could do, for example, you could notice that people who are vitamin D deficient or tremendously vulnerable. 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, what is or 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 sport 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 want I Kennedy want to move what is such a large proportion of our current health spending health research spending on infectious disease and move it to chronic disease. And people are screaming about my god, you don't care about infectious disease, but this is an effect a move from a really limited and farma intensive interpretation of the germ theory of disease into a much more expansive, hey, how about we understand pathogens. And understand pathogens and the terrain and think about how the terrain that is to say our body on 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. So side effects of dealing with the terrain side as primary are positive right side effects of pharmaceutical drugs are negative the side effects of getting you know your BMI under control are that you're healthy in many other ways. You know, you should always pick the stuff where the unintended consequences of what you're doing are good ones. Yeah, and we could talk about it here later if you want, but I actually I just read another ridiculous piece and New York magazine about Casey means who is Kennedy's pick for surgeon general, and Kennedy's pick or Trump's pick who gets to pick surgeon general, I don't know actually who's pick she is. But I think, can't it is, but I think so too. 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 among other places won't hear any of it and the idea of root causes, which is means is pet phrase that she borrows from natural pathic medicine, which itself, you know, I, I am not completely on board with natural pathi I think natural pathic medicine is far too happy to be reductionist and send you out for a lot of log tests and have a lot of sense. 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. 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, which again is actually very much like what pharma is doing with symptoms like. Oh, I've already had to make it come to a conclusion about this person and I will have no nuance I will not grant that they could ever say anything that has veracity to it or analytical clarity, therefore root causes has to be ridiculous just as and on 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 is the means siblings will benefit from if they get widely adopted by the American public so you know there's plenty of room for criticism. But there's also absurd to suggest that trying to understand the root causes of your health conditions is some sort of a wacky simultaneous like wicken she literally invokes wickenism not means but the author of this article wicken and far right like no that's about first principles. 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 a problem. Yeah, now it's probable in that case that this person was pandering to the far right wicken community. I do want to say I just want to correct I think you and I both concluded that Kennedy at HHS likely nominates the certain general I think that's wrong I think in this case it's clear that Casey means was Kennedy's pick but they would be the president who nominates anyway. So the thing I wanted to get to your what why we talking about your 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 you're 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 positive study is that explore the role of infections on the development of frailty and older adults. 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 seems quite quite strong maybe counterdutively that the frailty of the body affects risk of infection 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. 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 support it has only established one way relationship between these two variables. So let me just say a couple more things about this paper before we move into what you've what you've done the past specifically their hypothesis reversing the causality implied by terrain theory they're looking at frailty which is like the inverse of health of robustness. Which they define as quote a geriatric syndrome characterized by reduced reserve a diminished resistance to stressors but even though they call it a geriatric syndrome young people can be frail in fact we see many young frail people if we just look now. And the authors of this present work define this fear 44 point frailty index that they have created which I can share later if we're interested but I think it's pretty strong. 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 squidier metric because they can only use official recognition of infection and of course many of us will have infection that doesn't get officially recognized but but the data set is so massive that that should be that should be noise rather than rather than creating system. Yeah, yeah, it should be basically a lot of infections won't be caught but because this is a large data set the basic point is people who have more infections that got recorded. The fact that they seem to have greater frailty is suggestive of that basic pattern is there you don't have to catch every infection in order for a general tendency to get an infection to be correlated with the consequence exactly and just one more thing before you pick this up. The paper tests this hypothesis therefore that you actually proposed back in your initial submission of your telomere work to nature back around the turn of the millennium 2000. Yeah, that infections increase past infections increase rate of frailty in in later age. And so there's a lot more to be said but maybe you want to pick it up. 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 and so the coin of the realm in theoretical work is hypotheses that make predictions that allow you to later test them 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. 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. Senescence is what in common parlance we would call aging. There's a reason not to use the term aging aging is in precise but senescence is the thing that causes the body to grow feeble and inefficient with age 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. 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 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 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. 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 evolution has built a system that rains in tumors that begin to grow or would be tumors what in the paper that Debby C'sa can I ultimately published we call proto tumors so proto tumors are things that are one step short and we can't 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 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 hapholic limit which was known before we did our work hapholic limit arrest cells at a number of cell divisions that is programmed in in general from birth which is different for different cell types yes it is and what the liquid 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. Oh yes absolutely and it is set in development differentially 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 and any excess capacity you have gives you a cancer risk that isn't compensated for 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 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 peoples because you're doing more damage every day you're damaging. Repetitive stress injuries same thing with you know damaging your lungs repeatedly through inhaling combusted compounds. Yeah if you're a smoker or a coal miner you're accelerating the aging of your of your lungs if you're a heavy drinker you're accelerating the age of your liver liver a tissue in which you have a anomalously large capacity for repair why because your ancestors encountered lots of things that damaged livers and so have and its job is detox right so anyway we published a ultimately published in 2002 this model which we tried to publish in 2000 and we're turned down by nature so Jenna showing the 2002 paper that was ultimately published anyway there's a long sorted story about the blocking of publication of this work and how it ultimately made it into publication but the interesting thing for me in reading this paper the regoose at all paper that just came out. Yep is that it says there is a relationship between infection and senescence the degradation of the body. Yeah and I was thinking actually they're they're 40 plus point frailty index is basically a quantitative measure of senescence. Yep. Now when I saw that I was very excited because that was a prediction but not you you just said relationship they have attempted to describe a cause of relationship in which earlier infection predicts later frailty. Yes. And I believe that they have done so. Yes and I believe the work is very good and that it demonstrates this now interestingly they didn't spot our work. It doesn't surprise me so much because our work was not as widely circulated as I think it should have been so they may have been unaware of it. They also didn't mention telomeres or hayflick limits so I found that an interesting omission it doesn't degrade what they've done but it does sort of reduce its power for no reason. Now they do mention it obliquely. You want to read the sentence in the paper. Me? Yeah. Let's see so you can show my screen if you can show my screen 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 have been collected previously and then they went in and tested hypotheses with those data. There's a number of things that I've highlighted in here but there's a particular thing here we're still in the introduction. So this is not their work they are setting up the problem that they are investigating. Lined 7778 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 and it's this it didn't help. It's this paper called aging and infection by Gavasi and Kraus. I was trying to find people who work with a doby know that this happened. So this is this was published in Lancet Infectious Disease the same year and early in the year that your paper was published. And so they also don't cite you but I think their paper actually came out before you guys. And this this is a very well cited short sort of theoretical review of the idea of the very idea that is that is being postulated in the New Regusa paper. All right. So I want to just read a section. So what I have here actually the reasons that aren't worth going into I didn't have access to the electronic version because it's on a different computer. I actually dug out the physical file that contains our original submission to nature. It contains the recommendation letters from George Williams and Dick Alexander to nature that they review it and publish it. So it got the widest possible circulations got their rejection letter with the absurd claim here. I think it's let me see if I remember. This is not a sufficient general interest. 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. So George Williams and Dick Alexander are both members of the national academy. It's strongly recommending to nature that they take this paper seriously. This is from Dick Alexander's letter. He says, I wish to offer my strongest support for the manuscript here with submitted by my two doctoral students Brett Weinstein and Deborah Cisek titled Life Slow Fuse, Telemirs, Tumors and the Evolution of Redubritz and Essence. 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. This is two members of the national academy, which is the elite of the elite are recommending that nature take this seriously. It is about cancer and aging to very important processes that have very important medical implications. Nature says they do not believe that the paper would be of sufficient interest to a general audience to be worthy of publication. They just have a cold-down menu of reasons to reject. They just picked one. Yep, it's what's called a desk reject. They didn't even send it to a reviewer. The editor just decided not worthy of our attention. We're too good for that. Anyway, the fact that the paper keeps producing... keeps revealing that it had accurate and risky predictions in it. Right. Things that are manifest, including as people who have heard this story before, know the prediction that the long-established ultra-long Telemirs of mice that suggest that Telemirs themselves are not an important regulator of senescence in mammals, because if they were a tiny short-lived animal wouldn't have extremely long Telemirs. This invalidated that work through a collaboration with Carol Grider, who working with her graduate student, Mike Heeman, tested my hypothesis that wild mice wouldn't have long Telemirs, and therefore established that the breeding colonies were producing long Telemirs, which have a direct implication for drug safety testing, because what long Telemirs do is give mice short lives that end with cancer, and give them an indefinitely large capacity to repair damage tissue. 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. If you give a toxin to a lab abroad mouse using these protocols, which breed them early and kill them young. Right. 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. But because we're using these broken mice without knowing that that's what we are doing, so anyway, there's all kinds of interesting stuff, including that highly unusual prediction. Why do I say highly unusual? 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? It's not a common phenomenon. So anyway, major success that the model was able to predict at that level. But here's another one. You now have a paper in 2026, suggesting strongly suggesting a causal link between infection and accelerated senescence through frailty. So I want to read to you a section from the paper that nature refused to publish because it wasn't. This is your original or this is the original. This is not in the published in the experimental gerontology or something. No, this is the submission to nature never published anywhere. It was revised into that paper published in experimental gerontology. It was shorter. We had to cut things out in order to get it in, but what we actually thought, what we were ready to publish is all here in this original longer manuscript. So in a section called one source three senes, and I'll try to translate this the 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. 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. Through antagonistic flyotropy, though antagonistic flyotropy and accumulated damaged hypotheses have traditionally been viewed as alternative explanations for senescence. The finite reserve capacity approach, the model we present in this paper, integrates them. Do you want to explain antiglisclips or be accumulated damage? Or does it not? Yeah, now it's probably a good idea as long as we're here. Okay. You are composed of something like 30 trillion cells. Your genome has something like 20,000 active genes. On average, those active genes have something like five different edits of piece. So at maximum, you have something like 100,000 genes to work with. And 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. What that suggests is that the genes in your genome don't all do one thing. In fact, almost all of them do multiple things. We call that flyotropy when one genetic element has multiple consequences. 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. 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. They will give you what he called youthful vigor at the cost of inevitable senescence. So his point is there's a trade-off. And my dissertation was on trade-offs. 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 yet understand. And wow, 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. When that happens, selection will tend to favor them even if the late-life cost is high. Why? Because the earlier stuff in life counts more, evolutionarily speaking, than the late-life stuff. 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. So the point is the cost to you of dying at 80 from something is comparatively low. 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. Scott free. If you get run over by a bus at 60 or even by a tiger at 37. 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. And so Williams, building on Peter Mettowar'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 plyotropies. Plyotropies, that is, genes that do two things, working across purposes to themselves. He said the genome should be full of them, and that accounts for why the body degrades over the course of a lifetime. A very elegant theory. It was a theory at the point that I got to the work. Why was it a theory? Because indirectly, we could test many predictions of that model in nature. And we could see, for example, that possums that lived on islands where the predators were reduced tended to live longer. 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. Now, 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. We knew his theory was at least very close to right, but we hadn't found any antagonistic plyotropies. So, anyway, that's where I entered the picture. And you say in the bit from the paragraph that you were reading from that your and Debbie's hypothesis here integrates antagonistic plyotropies, which you just described with the other main model, which is accumulated damage, which is just exactly what it sounds like. It's very simple. 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 and you're going to. Right. So neither of the models that were preexisting were fully satisfying, either in the antagonistic plyotropie case, because we didn't have any genes that match the description. George Williams said should be common in the genome. And accumulated damage didn't work because the body is capable of producing new cells. So, why in what way it's not like your car that wears out, you're like a car that comes with a factory that can produce a new alternator every time you need one. So, why is the car getting worse? So, this fixes that and says actually these are two sides of the same coin. And that there is a limit to cellular reproduction. 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. I get that limit was already established by Hayflik. By Hayflik? Yep. And it was increasingly understood that telomeres were the likely thing that set the Hayflik limit. And as you point out, the Hayflik limit is set on a tissue by tissue basis in development. And our argument was based on preexisting 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 the failure of their liver because it doesn't have a high enough limit. Okay. So, the antagonistic pliatropy and accumulated damaged hypotheses have traditionally been viewed as alternative explanations for senescence. The finite reserve capacity approach integrates them. Damage, even if it is functionally repaired, will accelerate the aging of tissue by limiting the capacity for future maintenance and repair. There's mechanism right there. 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 a non-drinker, even if alcohol consumption ends before damage is evident. 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. So, beautiful. That's the prediction right there. 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... And become more frail. Yeah. And become more frail. And here we have an empirical result that says that seems to be true and causally linked slam dunk. All right. Feel good about that. Beautiful. As you said, it's fantastic. 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. Oh, is this going to be my favorite too? It is going to be. Now, I do have one regret here, which is although the name that Debbie and I gave to the process that we were describing here is a very good name in its own right. It confused people and therefore didn't really even have a chance of catching on, I think. The term is histological entropy. And the problem with the term histological entropy is that many people reading a paper on senescence saw the word entropy and they thought we were alluding to a long discredited explanation for senescence, which is that the body, like everything else, degrades from reasons of simple... It's accumulated damage. Yeah. Well, it's not even accumulated damage. It's just basically thermodynamics. Oh, oh, yes. Okay. Different. Right. So, to the extent that people read the word entropy and their eyes glazed over, they didn't take in the meaning. Yeah, but so you're going to read from that. But I have since you first proposed that, just thought that it captures perfectly what you were describing. 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 18. Right. You heal from injury, you heal from wound, soft tissue, you know, tears so smoothly when you are 18 that it seems to leave no trace. But as you age, the repair itself of tissue, histology, histological entropy, becomes more scattershot. 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. Now... Then I like it nearly as much. Epigenetic drift, I believe, is the same idea. And what it means and what you will hear we proposed in this paper is that there is an informational component to senescence. If you think about the way you came into being, you started out as a zygote. 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. And as it does that, it becomes... Each of those cell divisions, you know, the first two cells look very much alike. And the farther you get down that road to being your 30 trillion cell adult organism, the more narrow each of those pathways become. So at some point, your arm develops and the cells in your arm don't have to worry about being a liver or an eye or anything anymore. They're no longer totapotent. They're no longer stem cells. Right. Totapotent means they have the potential to become anything like the zygote or early stem cells. Pluripotent means that you have the ability to become many things and then you become committed to a particular function over time. 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. But in that isolation, it's a very controlled environment. You don't know how many chickens are watching. Sorry. That's true. And I wouldn't want to count the ones that are watching and have not yet been hatched for reasons I'm not. Sorry, that's so derailing. But turn about is fair plan on this podcast. But okay, so you're in this isolated environment. The maternal body protects you from all sorts of outside influences. And so you have this elegant environment in which these cells can go through all of these doubleings and the cells can become increasingly committed. And they know exactly where they are. Right. The cells are in a position to know how far down the road they are from their initial zygote single cell stage. 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 eye. And then there's a certain number of cell divisions you have to go before you start producing, you know, a retinal cell. So they have a knowledge of a number of divisions and they have a knowledge of position and neighbors. Right. And so that knowledge results in a well-formed baby assuming you have, you know, assuming you have a good genome, which you almost certainly do, and assuming that it has been insulated from insult like chemistry, which increasingly you can't guarantee because the mother can only filter out so much stuff and the novel stuff often gets through because she doesn't have any built-in mechanism to deal with it. And don't vaccinate a pregnant person. Right. That should be obvious. You would have thought. 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. But if we then fast forward and you take that person at 30 years of age and they damage some piece of tissue, right, they, you know, get a burn. Well 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. 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. 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 replaced them with cells that only approximately know where they are. And the more approximations, it's like a zerox of a zerox of a zerox. For those of you old enough to remember zeroxing. But in any case, the point is there's a loss of information from the system. So it is informational entropy that W and I are pointing to in this paper. And let me read that to you now. So this section is titled somatic senescence due to cellular attrition that is loss of cells and increasing histological entropy, loss of information. To our knowledge, no, I should say, increasing histological entropy is the scrambling of cells based on the loss of information. That's what I mean to say to be precise. To our knowledge, no explicit mechanism linking hayflick limits to the phenomenon of vertebrate aging has been proposed. We offer the following approximation. Development continually increases histological differentiation and specialization. That is, cells becoming more and more narrowly defined, which are maximal when an organism becomes a reproductively capable adult. That is also the moment at which senescence begins interestingly. It doesn't begin when you're born. It begins at reproductive maturity. Throughout life, damage and programmed cellular turnover result in cells being lost from the soma. That is, the majority of your body, not your gonads. And being replaced. When cellular lineages exhaust the reserve capacity and are lost, they must be replaced by neighboring lineages if they are replaced at all. 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. By our model, body-wide senescence results from the combined effect of a uncompensated cellular attrition. 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 at accomplishing whatever tasks differentiation initially evolved to address. Senescence of this type should progress at a non-linear rate, accelerating with age as fewer cellular lineages maintain and repair an ever-larter proportion of the body. And then we go on to provide examples. The aging of human skin appears to progress as our model predicts. Skin thickness decreases by 25%. That's the uncompensated cellular attrition between the fourth and eighth decade of life and entropy increases. And we then quote from another paper, 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. 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. Electron microscopy studies show that the basal cells of the flattened dermis of old individuals lack villi. Deletion and derangement of small blood vessels is found in age skin with sun damaged skin being most severely affected. 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. Anyway, there's more to it. And I will also say later in this paper, where some place I have not highlighted here, we connect that idea to the issue of the mice with their unusually long telomeres as a result of a defect in their breeding colony. Because what turns out to be true is that what is true of human or other animal tissues when you look at them under a microscope, which is that they become increasingly chaotic and deranged, the older the individual you got them from is not true of the mice. The young tissue looks like the old tissue why because they have an indefinitely large capacity for replacing their tissues. Voila. So all right. Anyway, I thought it was cool. Another prediction showed up and I would like to set a rule. I think this is a rule you've tried to set before. You think so? Well, I don't know the rule. You're going to say, but what's in my head? I think you're going to see. I will probably for the rest of my life, be trying to set this rule. The rule is this. A lot of people think I'm stupid and they may be right. However, I don't want to hear that I'm stupid from anybody who hasn't produced something like this at least once in their life. I am perfectly willing to entertain the hypothesis that I'm an idiot from anybody who has, but everybody else should shut up on the top. That's not what I thought you were going to say. I thought you were going to raise again the observation, the true observation about science, that without prediction, you weren't doing the work. There is no such thing as data first, data driven science. You don't have data if that's where you started. 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 science. 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. Yeah. If I do. And these pieces that you're sharing and specifically with regard to the paper that has just come out, the Ragusa at all, 2026 paper, is a reinforcement of the hypothesis that you and Debbie first wrote about, although it's not published back in 2000, and that was itself a risky prediction. And risky in this case is a good thing. The riskier it is, the higher the chance it is 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 seemed obvious. Yeah, predictions are like investments. The risky ones when they are right pay off handsomely. The safer ones are pay off in a minor way. Let me just sum up what you said in a slightly different way. There's no such thing as data driven science as you said. If you just go out and collect data, you've done one step of science. The first one, in fact, it's an observation. That's it. It's not science. But you don't want to collect data. Right. Well, it's observational data, but whatever the point is, science requires the complete process. And if you're just collecting data and then looking at patterns, you're doing observation, you're not doing science. 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. That's not even observation. That's fraud. And between these two things, unguided research that just involves looking in data sets for patterns and claiming you found stuff, that's not science. And fraud is the opposite of science. And we have an epidemic of these things. What we need to do is go back to making observations, formulating hypotheses from them, making predictions, and then seeing what happens. When the predictions turn out to be right, they suggest that the model has some truth to it. And that's the way 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. I think it's too inside baseball for me to go into what I disagree with about the particular, so 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. 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 would you see? It means careful, rigorous, predetermined, what were you looking for and how will you record it in advance. And so, you know, the idea that observation is inherently pre-hypothesis is not right. And this specifically manifests so we're in an all-wheel-hid your space. Well, okay. Not all observations are in that stage, and they can be a test. Let me give an example of what Heather's saying just so it's clear. 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, but so be it. But anyway, tent-making bats was a really cool topic. The thing is, most of the time a tent is a leaf that's been modified into a shelter. But most of them are empty. I can sometimes on a good day find 100 or 200 of these things. Very few of them have any bats in them. So in the early days people had seen the structures didn't know what was making them. You could say, well, this is a habitat in which there are a lot of different types of bats. And we've got these structures and maybe the bats are making them, okay? That's a hypothesis. You made an observation. There are structures, some things making them. Hypothesis bats are making them. Prediction, if I find enough of these things, I will eventually find bats in them. I won't find other things that have the potential to make them in them. 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 rusting under these things, has given strong evidentiary support to the hypothesis that it is bats that produce these structures. Yeah, although I think you had stronger evidence than that because you actually found a bat in the process of making a tent. Because we theft happens throughout the animal world. And you could definitely find something that hadn't made a tent. In opening a tent, we see that in humans. We see that all over the place with various domiciles, squatters exist throughout the animal kingdom. That particular prediction isn't actually a rock solid test of the hypothesis, but it is inconclusive but suggestive. Yeah, it's not decisive, but it is evidence and supportive of the hypothesis. I will say it was pretty well established that bats make tents long before I got to that work because for 100 years people have been seeing the tents. There are a couple of the tent making bats were first understood when two guys on the same island that I worked on in separate incidents accidentally triggered a bunch of bats to fly out of these things. And that was strongly suggestive. Despite this nearly 100 year history of field biologists thinking about the tents that they were finding near tropical forests and who was making them, you were in fact the first person to see a bat making a tent. And so that provided conclusive evidence that bats make tents. Yeah, that is the conclusive evidence. You know, still don't know if it's possible that some other things are making tents of exactly the same structure. I mean, theoretically, but it's not a possibility worth keeping alive in hypothesis space because the chances are so astronomically small. 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. I was able to do it. Friend of mine, friend of ours, John Cooley, suggested that I make use of bank surveillance cameras and infrared LEDs from television remotes to. He was back in like 97, yeah, he suggests you know, you could use these LEDs as illuminators and these cameras sense infrared. And this is a way that you could film stuff in what appears to you and the bats as the dark. And thereby not disturb them, which is the reason I think nobody else has seen it. And so anyway, that worked. And I got a bunch of video of a bat making a tent anywhere as wild. But among the things that my work did demonstrate was that some of the bats that the literature said made tents actually didn't that they were thieves that they stole it. Actibious Jamey census is anomalous in this regard in that the at least the bachelor males are rampant thieves of tents. And because they are larger and more ferocious able to evict residents or steal the tents that are empty. But also if memory serves very bitey. In fact, the bitey bat, the key that you used to figure out what that economist key is you're like holding a bat and trying to figure out, okay, how many I'm thinking herbs, how many scales know, but like whatever the key, whatever the dichotomy's key suggests arrives you at age a arrives you at Octibious Jamey census and says bites ferociously when handled, which it certainly does. All right, well, this has been a weird trip down memory lane. We have reduced the number of people who are likely to call me stupid, not at all, but we've at least set a proper rule for it, which no one will know exactly that's why we haven't reduced it. But okay, I think we're done with that topic. Okay. All right, the next topic is a little odd. I have been looking at my feed, my social media feed and other sources that I can find and trying to make sense of the world and very specifically what is taking place in the Middle East. And I have been getting an increasingly a sinking feeling that just deepens over time. And on the one hand, I could just look at it and say, well, that's a pre-frightening picture that is emerging. 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 Siapp never stops and that the problem is once upon a time we had media that got piped into every home. 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. The same facts were on everybody's table and we could talk about what they meant and what they suggested we should do. But in the era of the 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. One is 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. That's the less pernicious part. 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. We all have to look at what we think we're observing. I think I tweeted a couple weeks ago that we all think we are eyewitnesses to history. In fact, I think we talked about it on the podcast. We feel like eyewitnesses to history because we see so much video and everything. But we're not eyewitnesses. We are downstream of a filter that has its thumb on the scale to mix metaphors. Sorry, I have to live podcast you take what you can get. But we're downstream of a filter that is not neutral and different filters reach to us. And I mean this will be obvious but the particular moment on the last live stream you mentioned the first goal for 1991 where we were 22, 21 at that point. And the first Gulf War was famous for launching CNN as a global phenomenon. As because they had a few guys including Bernard Shaw who's the correspondent who was on the grand there who I remember most. And you know, you and I spent a lot of time in front of the television watching the first Gulf War emerge. We were in college at the time. And the guys including Bernard Shaw were you know, justifiably terrified and also professional and doing their job. And as I remember it, Shaw kept repeating the same one over and over again. In Tehran as the terrifying strike Tehran Baghdad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's in Baghdad. And he and his crew were there and bombs are raining down on the city. And I don't remember the first part precisely. He keeps saying something like Saddam Hussein wants something. And the Iraqi people just want to live their lives. Yeah, the Iraqi people just want to live their lives. And as I remember it, he said this often enough that you and I are both like, oh my God, the man is like he's traumatized. Yeah, he's watching this from his, you know, he's balcony or his window. And he doesn't know if his hotel is about to get struck like he has no idea if he has minutes or decades left in his life. And as it turns out, he was fine and all of the CNN correspondents were fine. But we were certainly not the only ones to be glued to our television screens at that moment. And anyone who was was watching CNN. And so, you know, there was this this unifying moment when, you know, the war was televised. And it was televised basically by one 24, seven news outlet that until then had been some little niche podunk thing that no one had really heard of. Yeah, it was a Ted Turner. So the problem with it was the invention of the 24 hour news cycle. Yeah, right. CNN was. And the moment at which it actually happened was the Gulf War because there was something to watch at any moment. You could tune in and get updated on what the hell has been going on over the last day. So. And because it's far enough ahead of those of us watching in the US too, usually when we would be like glued to the set, there was there was activity happening. Yeah. So the 24 hour news cycle didn't make any sense until Gulf War one. Which point CNN Turner's investment in the idea of 24 hour news caught fire because we were literally watching. So in some ways, we went through a moment at which, you know, yeah, the average person was watching CBS. But there were a lot of people watching ABC and people watching NBC. There were, you know, three major networks delivering news. And, you know, five or six highly credible newspapers in the US at the time. Maybe I'm being ungenerous, but there were at least five or six good ones. And then the point is that Gulf War one CNN moment took, you know, the newspapers to slow. You can't wait till tomorrow morning to find out what's going on. Things are happening too fast. And, you know, you're not watching a new. The same problem. So everybody's watching CNN. And so it caused a centralization of our viewpoint, like, like never before and never since. Yes. We were all watching these exact same thing. But it's notable, therefore, that you had this contraction of diversity of media sources. So recently, a contraction, a funneling, a, you know, a narrowing to a single source. Not that long ago. And now we are at the other extreme. Now we are living the other extreme. The absolute other extreme where the sources that might draw you towards a shared basic understanding of the facts of the last 24 hours or whatever, that that is gone because we don't trust anything that looks like CNN or CBS because they're not trustworthy. We don't trust the New York Times, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune. They're all compromised. So you're better off trying to cobble together and understanding from people that you trust or sort of trust or think you should trust. But it's a crappy substitute. It's terrible and worse. I mean, for a good editor does a tremendous value, just as a museum curator does a tremendous value. 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 the newspaper on a new show in a museum exhibit. Yeah. In fact, the algorithm is like an anti editor. It's editing for a purpose that is not your clarity. It's editing for purposes that might be to keep you engaged so you don't leave the site and go do something else. That's at best. At worst, it's editing to lead you to a belief that isn't even true. 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. 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. I always think that they're various projects that will compare the right view and the left view. But I really think there needs to be a how profound is the skew that each of us is exposed to. That should be readily determinable by having a bunch of different things pull in different feeds and compare them and why is there not a major project that allows us to assess bias by that mechanism? Or maybe there isn't. I don't know about it. I think there have been various attempts, but it's daunting and the landscape is constantly changing. But even individuals in a household, you should be able to just spot check and see how similar what you're seeing is. Well, I mean, you can do it a little bit by, you know, if if you're getting much of what you're looking for on Twitter, you can go into an incognito window, not as you, logged out and see what you're fed. You know, so let me just highlight, there are two problems. We're getting different feeds that have been tailored to us for mundane purposes for the most part, mundane corrosive, but mundane purposes like selling you stuff or keeping you occupied. And different things keep different people occupied. So our feeds are individual. But then there's also the issue of targeting. And to the extent that there are voices that matter, persuading those voices that matter to freak out about this and to calm down about that is very valuable. And there are obviously no shortage of powerful forces that are in a position that monitor our lives, figure out what we are, exercised about, and ampus up or tampus down or whatever. And while I'm thinking about it, an article that maybe you and I both ran across it separately about the fact of airline ticket pricing, being sensitive to a detection algorithm that figures, oh, you're trying to buy a ticket to Cincinnati. That's a casual search. You really want to go there then. Right. Okay. So on second, on second search, I'm going to raise those prices. Oh, you're back again three days later with the same search. Those prices keep going up. Right. And so it gives you at home the sense that I better buy these right away because they're getting more expensive. And in fact, no, that's just they're getting more expensive for you, pal, because you've telegraphed your intent. 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 an incognito window. Yeah. 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. 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. So suffice it to say, my feed that tells me what's going on in the Middle East is beyond terrifying. And I don't know what to make of it because I know that the siop never sleeps. 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. I know I'm trying to do that, but I'm making sense of a data set that isn't a data set. It's selective. And so anyway, I'm hoping that what I'm seeing is not true. That said, the impression that I have from 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 and when you peer under that rock, the truth is terrifying. 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. It may well be a siop acting on me presumably to get to you, right? 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. I'm seeing a selection of the things available, mostly on X. 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. And many people took me to task the last time I said the attack on Iran was a war. It's not a war. Well, I think it's close enough to a war that that term applies, 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 longstanding plan to get the United States to attack Iran. 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 an 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. As some of this, I think I know from before there was social media, right, the fact that the Neocons have had Iran on their agenda, and that, you know, I've been saying I've got to tweet out there from a month or two ago, where I said, look, in the case of Iran, we are not going to be given a choice. 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, and that that's a tragedy. So that part, I think I know, it's been on the agenda, and somehow we find ourselves at war in Iran, and the question is, is this a mirror of the recent limited engagement where we dropped some very powerful bombs on what we were told as a nuclear facility inside of a mountain, we are told we disabled the facility and success, no boots on the ground, you know, see, it worked out great. 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. And further, again, this is my feed, and it may be misleading me, 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. 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. In other words, that in spite of having decapitated the Iranian regime, and we can come back to the decapitation and whether or not we paid an immense price the way that happened, 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. Now, again, because what you've been seeing is that American bases in the area have been successfully gone after by Iranian military. Yeah, and nobody disputes that there have been successful Iranian attacks on military bases in the Middle East, but the degree to which these attacks on those military bases and on Tel Aviv, again, I don't know. 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 bases to assess, you know, 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. That would give me some ability to calibrate how much damage we're looking at, but let me just read a, I don't know this journalist. 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. 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. Dan, can you put up that? Okay. So the this person making the tweet has a Russian flag and they say, Elon Mizrahi and 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. Nonetheless, that's not this journalist speaking. That's the person who made the tweet, so it doesn't really, it doesn't cast any doubt on what the journalist says, which is just a crazy thing to say. I mean, replace Jews with any group. Right. It's a weird thing to say. Yeah. Okay. So it says, it's a little bit of a strain at this distance, but it says, yeah, will you do it? Yeah. We are witnessing history. 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. In four days, Iran has managed to expand its sphere of military dominance in the region. Iran has destroyed the most valuable and expensive military bases, property and equipment in the entire world. The American bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are among the largest military facilities in the entire world. These facilities have cost trillions of dollars over several decades to build. 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 and smoked. We see radars costing hundreds of millions of dollars each being destroyed in an instant. We see entire military bases being abandoned and burned, looted and destroyed. 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, except perhaps for Pearl Harbor, but that was just one attack. No enemy in a conventional war has ever done this to American military forces as Iran is doing right now. It is hard to believe. The military situation is so serious, censorship is blocking almost all new information about this war. If you've noticed, we're getting less and less information every day. Thirty-five years ago during the First Iraqi War, we were shown endless footage from Iraq. Back then, smart bombs and cameras were a novelty, but every night we were shown nighttime footage. Now we hardly see any videos at all. Understand this. Supposedly, this is the world's largest military power with the world's largest air capabilities, 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. Where are all the video recordings of our planes flying over Tehran or any other part of Iran for that matter? American soldiers can't even dream of setting foot in Iranian soil. And understand how desperate this war is. On the fourth day, you're already hearing the most insane proposals and ideas from the Trump administration. They're proposing sending military escorts for oil tankers leaving the Persian Gulf. What are you even talking about? You want to send American ships into the zone of destruction of thousands of Iranian missiles? Now no one can get through the state of Hormuz. The Iranians have been preparing for this for decades. They're flaunting the idea of arming Kurdish militias to invade Iran. What the hell are you talking about? Have you seen a map of Iran? It seems the Trump administration has never seen a map of Iran. Do you know how vast it is? What does it mean to invade Iran? Do you think a militia of 10,000 people could invade Iran or even 50,000 or 100,000? Iran will swallow them up. The US and Israel have already lost this war. The US and Israel can kill millions of civilians in their homes. They have powerful bombs and blow up buildings, but they won't win this war. Iran's military infrastructure and weaponry is deep underground all over Iran. Now that the Americans know especially the Israelis have any chance of reaching any of it, they're in deep shit. They started something they have no chance of finishing. When the cell ends, the US will never return to West Asia. There will be no American presence in the Middle East. I'm telling you this now with certainty. All right. Now I'm going to keep saying it because- That's a guy who is reportedly, you haven't looked into it. A journalist out of Israel with the last name is Rahi. I don't remember his first name. Aelon. 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 there's no reason- You've no reason to doubt your nerves and to trust. I have none. 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? 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. So the picture, again, based on the most skewed, worst possible source of information, which is my personal feed, which I don't even know looks like your personal feed. 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, and again, this is hinted at across my feed. I don't know if it's garbage, but it's terrifying. Or the idea is that for somebody, the derangement, the hobbling of the U.S. and the hobbling of the Trump administration is actually on the agenda. 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 analogue for in my past experience on planet Earth. The Neocons have become Democrats. Okay, that's insane, but so they are and the Democratic Party has embraced them because the Democratic Party has no soul. Okay, Neocons are now Democrats. The Neocons and Democrats and the New York Times and all of the stuff that travels in that circle. Simultaneously, detests Donald Trump and is kind of on board with this war 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. It's very odd. 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. The president had an uphill battle before there was a war in Iran. He had an uphill battle. He was going to lose the House, the chances that he's going to lose the Senate were on the table already. A disastrous military invasion for which we have no plan to extract ourselves is it's the biggest setback on the table of potential setbacks with regard to the midterms with regard to the midterms. So, and as I will point out, I pointed it out before, or Trump, he can lose the House. He cannot lose the Senate. If Trump loses... If he wants to accomplish anything in the last two years of his presidency, there will be no two years of his presidency if he loses the Senate. The House is going to impeach him. They've done it before. The only thing that keeps this from turning into a total debacle is the fact that the Senate won't convict him. If the Democrats hold the Senate, they will convict him. 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. It's heating up and the battle in the Middle East is throwing gasoline on that fire. Unless Trump has something up his sleeve, a spectacular loss in the Middle East, he cannot afford it. And, frankly, as much as I'm very upset with Trump and the Trump administration, we can't afford it either because, as I pointed out, thousand times the Democratic Party is completely without a soul. We don't even know what it is. They ran two candidates in the last election who were not capable of doing the job. Two non-serious candidates, one of them demented and the other one an empty suit. And the idea... That's being kind in both cases. Kind in 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, which is, frankly, it's a coup. We do not have a system of government in which a system of advisors governs and you can have a non-compass figurehead, obviously. So, Democratic Party is somehow cool with this and that means we can't be cool with it. I think Trump has made a colossal error in initiating this campaign in Iran. But he's still at least a human being who can be answerable, who can make decisions. It's still better than the Democratic Party. I see. And then, okay, so on the one hand, something either because it's too dumb to understand how dangerous this was and lure us into a fairy tale like they will welcome us as liberators, and then, of course, Guagmire follows. Maybe it was that a colossal error of hubris marching in to the most dangerous situation in the world, or maybe, or all fancists, 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 and from which he couldn't recover, right? That's a dark idea, but it doesn't explain why he said yes, why he's doing it. Because he doesn't have good information about where he is. That's the implication of what I'm seeing. And well, but that's now. Yeah. What made him, what caused him to do in the first place? Well, let's imagine that the same process that we described on our last livestream where Gulf War one broke Vietnam syndrome and allowed Gulf War two, which became a Quagmire, that that happened on an accelerated timescale here and that the brief bombing campaign in, I think it was June. Was it June? I don't. I feel like last year, sometime. Last year, sometime, that that brief bombing campaign gave the president a sense of how asymmetrical our power was and what would likely happen if he. Yeah. And as I mentioned last time, there've been a series of these things. It looks like he's looking around the world going like, who do I topple next? Let's get rid of the bad guys. And so if this was presented to him as one in a series, it might have slipped through and not been obvious that this was actually a different sort of thing. And I can say that feeling like what happened in Venezuela and in Mexico were also mistakes. But this is like a just a whole different level of mistake. This is a whole different level of mistake. This is a level of mistake. Well, I will rephrase what I've said previously about this. Israel is by my estimation, it is a state with a lineage view, an Old Testament view used with a modern Western view. It has one foot in the Old Testament and one foot in the modern West. And it can go either way. But the current Israeli regime seems dyed in the wool Old Testament. And we, I have said, are depending on Israel putting both feet in the modern West. And I'm not saying it can do anything it can't just decide to be Western and ignore the fact that it's in a bad neighborhood. It is. It's in a neighborhood of countries that hate it. 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. And that's the evolutionarily speaking, I would say it is the lineage against lineage violence mode. Or it can attempt to step into the modern West. And yes, there are real questions to answer about how it could possibly be safe doing that in a neighborhood where its neighbors hate it. But nonetheless, Israel is caught in this tension between these two ways of thinking. And I would point out while we are here that we in the West do not intuit what the Old Testament mindset does. It's just not something that we don't live with. So my concern has been that Israel will fall into this Old Testament approach, lineages displacing other lineages through violence, it's displaced or be displaced. That's the that's the mindset to give it its due. Right. 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. And if Israel defaults to this lineage against lineage violence mindset and behaves in a belligerent way, which I believe it has done here, you know, Mark Rubio acknowledged seemingly that we were forced. Our hand was forced by Israeli action that was going to happen. So whether that was simply a question of the timing was forced or the whole thing was forced, it doesn't really matter. The point is Israel is acting in a belligerent way that is causing us to make moves that would presumably not have been desired. You know. 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. And that is what my feed is telling me. Now 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. So I'll freak out and say embarrassing things. I don't know. Maybe that's hopefully that's it. 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. Yeah. No, it could be could be anyone of a number of things. 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 tender box that is the Middle East, right? You now have Iran attacking its neighbors and doing substantial damage and the United States apparently not defending them. These are places that have made a deal with us. That's why we have bases and yet we seem to be allowing Iran to attack them. 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 happen if we launched a sustained attack against Iran. 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. It is a profoundly important place to Muslims which is obviously vulnerable in a highly kinetic battle between Iran and Israel. And so there is the danger that something happens to that. It 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. 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 you know well I looked it up. I looked up the ranking of world religions in terms of population. Christians about 2.4 billion people and Muslims there are 2 billion. So you're talking about the two largest religious groups on earth that are now battling physically and close proximity to a contested holy site. You're treating Americans as a de facto Christian in the circle. Well it's a long story but I basically think that you know the West, what I call the modern West, is actually downstream. It's an intellectual descendant of Christianity. Yeah, that the broadening of the in-group is fundamental to what the West is. It's the alternative to lineage against lineage violence and that 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 but 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 and so it just looks like Tinder everywhere that is... Yeah I'm not talking about these. It looks like kindling everywhere and that you know children are playing with matches and gasoline and other explosives with only everything riding on it not going badly. Yeah. So all right. And how could at least some of it not go badly? Right and that's the question 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 it's going to suck if we pull out now but it is way better than doubling down at this point. Right. Right. It doesn't get easier from here. It gets worse and so anyway hopefully I am 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. And in this case I can't contest your feed because I am mostly off the platforms entirely as they basically give me AI Slop of Animals that for now I can tell is AI Slop but just done. Yeah. I get it. You could take my feed away from me which might improve my feed. As you know I have tried to do that for the past. I mean you don't get angry. You don't be violent because you don't do those things but it's not really effective. Yeah it's not really effective. Yeah. All right. Well maybe I need a new hobby. Oh for sure. Yes. All right. Well all right I'm sorry for dropping that all on you. I'd be very curious whether or not what I'm seeing is completely at odds with what the rest of your seeing in which case we can all have a good laugh about it. That would be lovely. But otherwise I would say hey it is actually time. Look maybe the punchline to this is this. We should all be checking with other people to see how different what our feeds are telling us is and maybe we can figure out some sort of an indicator of what is reliable information and what is not because at this moment we may have made a colossal error and doubling down on its bad idea and I think it's just all hands on deck. All hands on deck. Yeah. Sounds like an order. Sounds like action has been specified. But it has not. That is so deeply in the metaphorical here that what actually can be done here is utterly unclear to me. Right. I'm just I mean it's it sounds like a phrase in which like okay you know what to do man. Yeah it does sort of sound like you know what to do. I don't mean that. 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 and at least figuring out I mean let's put it this way. We're blindfolded. Job one almost no matter what the emergency is is to get the blindfold off and just figure out what's true. Once we know what's true then a discussion about what to think about it and what to do about it becomes rational. But if we're guessing about what's actually going on there's nothing to be said about what to do about it. 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 and I will reinvigorate the metaphor of this is Plato's cave except that we each have a personalized wall of shadows. We see the wall we think the person sitting next to us is seeing the same wall of shadows. In fact they are seeing a personally tailored wall of shadows that doesn't look like ours and the smartest thing. When we look around and I think you've used this phrase before and we look around it reveals itself as Plato's cave of mirrors. Yes, Plato's cave of mirrors and I would argue I mean imagine you did find yourself in Plato's cave and you're staring at the wall and beginning to suspect that something is up. First thing you want to do is I'll blow the person next to you and say all right listen to me. 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. 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. So there is when we were talking about this last night you began talking about the skill set 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 use the jungle as the defining one the lowland neodropical rainforest. You walk into a jungle and no idea what to make of it. It's chaos. It's simultaneously much quieter and less full of charismatic megafauna than you were led to believe by David Attenborough documentaries and also there's so much more going on and it's all green and it's a it's a it's a morass you have no idea where to start even with the questions and what you do as a field biologist as an ecologist if you're good at as an evolutionary biologist if you're good at it is you begin to hone your skills of observation and to once you think you see something try looking at it from a different place and you ask the person next to you whom you also trust who has also been honing their skills of observation do you see this thing that I'm seeing how but if you stand where I'm standing how but if you stand over here just look the same what is that 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 it's as an evolutionary lens yes but it's also a field biologist lens right it's not it's not a lab scientist it's a field scientist lens the one of the incredibly difficult things about this landscape is that you cannot make your own observations that as you begin this section with this landscape not the forest but the this this social landscape this this war landscape this modern social landscape is that we are not actually eyewitnesses to anything and to some degree back in Gulf War one with Bernard Shaw saying the people the Iraqi people just want to live their lives you knew that what we were being shown on the television was a decent match for what Shaw was seeing with his eyes yeah you could see the cameras next to him when they paned like you like you that just was true and you you're not in it and you're not at risk and like it's still not the same it's a two-dimensional flattened curated version of what he was seeing but you were second order eyewitness and we're not second order we're not eighth third we don't know 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 so you know how do how if everyone should and this has been one of the implicit themes of what we've done on dark horse since the beginning which is how do you develop a set of a set of observational skills and evolutionary tools such that you can make sense of the world around you 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 I don't know and so when you say you all hands and deck I'm like I can't accept that because I have no idea what it means in this case yeah I simply have no idea what it means yeah well I mean I agree with your correction I want to just add one thing to the analogy to the forest 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 so the point is it's not like you can go look this up when you get back to the field station but it but it exists it's reality it is it the forest is a true thing yeah the forest you will ever understand how it came to be or why it works or you know what the failures are when they surprise you but it's so it's there yeah it's and so that's the point is you know 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 whereas there are less than 10 in most forests in the United States 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 that ecology textbook which was written in the northern temperate zone where 10 species of trees may exist in an intact forest and they're all doing different things as you can if you're only one of 10 the book tells you that nobody knows how that forest works we have spent five decades trying to rescue the principle that says you can't have two species competing indefinitely in the same niche we've tried to rescue the principle from the forest rather than recognizing that the principle is wrong that's how little we know about these things um but that's why you know that's why you start with the observation you don't start with the 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 you know on your behalf and on your behalf to as much as possible since the world as it exists but when there's a screen between you and it you can't do it you don't know and in fact to 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 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 um on the other hand there is the claim that anybody who publishes video of devastation in Israel will go to jail instantly for five years now I find that hard to imagine presumably you would have to be convicted of something but there does appear to be a prohibition again sharing video from devastation while Israel is in conflict so what that means is that there's a if that's true there is a formal censorship that is built now I know what the defense for it is going to be we don't want the enemy to have good information on their targeting we don't want them to know what they've hit and not hit because that will improve their targeting I get it I wouldn't want them to have it either 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 or you know whose soldiers are being put at risk over it have a right to evaluate whether or not this continues to be in our interest and if you shield us from information that it's not going well then well that invites you into a quagmire so anyway we have a right to some information the president has a right to as perfect information as he can have because life and limb depend on it we in the public have a right to high quality information to not be treated as children and not to be siopped into military adventures that are not in our interest it's obvious and yet we are at the level of elbowing the person in the cave next to us saying what do the shadows on the wall that you see look like they don't look like the ones on my wall that's a problem okay you know we've got to start from there so not all hands on deck but hey what do you see on the wall fair enough all right we'll be back in week and a half not this Wednesday but next before then there will be some awesome inside rail episode coming out I'm certain of it maybe even tomorrow I think tomorrow um check out our sponsors for this week which were knobs, caraway and clear all fantastic sponsors because we do not accept any that aren't and until you see us here next time be good to the ones you love, be good food and get outside be well everyone