PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT: DARK HORSE EPISODE 187, "OUTSIDERS" - AUGUST 18, 2023

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Broadcast

Transcribed from YouTube by Jessica Hockett

[15:51] BRET: All right, here's why we are outside. Heather has come down with a respiratory ailment that we strongly suspect is - at least what is being called the current variant of - COVID.

HEATHER: Well done. 

BRET: Yes, thank you. And let's just update people on where we are with COVID. I - would you tell me if this doesn't match your your sense of things - but our sense is COVID is very definitely not a highly deadly disease and people were spooked into all sorts of dumb behavior with the false impression - and in fact the cultivation of the impression - that it was deadly, including by treating people in ways that made them more likely to die and then counting those deaths as COVID deaths, rather than iatrogenic deaths.

But, that said, COVID is not enough from our perspective – we've had it, we've had it a couple of times. I don't know how many times because the tests are unreliable, but we've each had it a couple times at least and the negative effects are both substantial during the disease and everything that I know from my work on telomeres tells me that the damage is not just occurring and then over when you get better. Not only are there holdover effects from COVID, but there is also the long-term degradation of your capacity to repair whatever tissues are under attack. 

HEATHER: Yeah, so when you say “not as deadly a disease by a lot as we were led to believe,” you are also implying - but not, it's not in that statement - something that you said very clearly somewhat early in our live streams, which is that just because a thing doesn't kill you doesn't mean that it doesn't bring death closer.

BRET: Right, and in fact almost every disease even presumably something like a cold does this so trivially that it's negligible in its impact. But the point - and you know if you have a bunch of damaging diseases and then you die because you don't look both ways and you get hit by a bus, obviously it didn't hasten your death. But on average you die from the failure of whatever organ is essential and collapses first, or you die of a cancer. That's basically the two general ways to die naturally.

HEATHER: Yeah.

BRET: In the case that you die from organ failure, each organ has a capacity to repair damage and do maintenance, and that capacity is finite and anything that does damage reduces, it borrows from that account. And so, you know, if you do a lot of damage to - let's say you do a lot of damage to your kidneys early in life, and then you wise up and you stop doing damage, you know, you can compensate a bit. You can't buy back anything you lost, but what you can do is you can reduce the rate of damage to below average and you can sort of catch up. But all of that –

HEATHER: You can do that better in tissues that actually have some repair capacity and not in, for instance, the heart, as we have talked about a lot.

BRET: Right. Even though your behavior should be the same.

HEATHER: Right.

BRET: You can't recover that capacity, uh by – well I guess you could reduce the rate of damage of your heart by being super vigilant of new damage to your heart. But yeah the heart doesn't repair in a classical sense. It scars over, which is still much better than having an open wound in your heart, which is a lethal vulnerability,. Anyway, this is a bit of a digression. We treat COVID seriously, even though we don't fear that we're not going to get through a case of COVID. We just don't want to hasten our demise or decrepitude or anything like that by allowing extra damage. So anyway, when one or the other of us has this - and you know we do this for other ailments too. We might not do it for a cold, but for any significant disease we tend to isolate. And, in this case, we needed to do a live stream and as there was – I want people to think back to early in our live streams. We spent a lot of time pointing out that the advice, the directives that we were being given, the policy changes that we were witnessing made no sense.

HEATHER: The bulldozing of sand into skate parks

BRET: Right.

HEATHER: These – stopping people from running on beaches and from surfing. The closing of parks. This was some of the earliest, most obviously completely wrong-headed COVID policy that was, frankly, part of what opened the door and opened many people's eyes to, “Well, if they're that wrong about those things, what else are they wrong about?” 

BRET: Yeah, and let's just put it to you this way: Wrong isn't pointlessly wrong. The fact is, to the extent that there was some disease that we were trying to not catch, “go outside” was, like, killer advice. “Go outside,” right? “Oh, your life is being disrupted? You're facing psychological torment? Go meet your friends outside. Too cold and rainy? Figure out how to do it,” right?  

So, in any case, we are outside today, because although you are - you haven't had it very long - we treated too [you?] early. Of course I went on prophylactic treatment, now you and I, we’re in close contact as you were beginning to come down with it, and so it's possible that I got it and I will manifest symptoms. It's also possible I got away with it, or it's possible because I went on what we think is prophylactic treatment, that my symptoms will be so mild I won't even notice it. 

But, in any case, I thought it would be interesting in light of the fact that we are broadcasting from outside, solving a problem - which is how do we do our job while you may have a still-active and contagious infection? Well, okay, this is imperfect. The lighting's not great, it's a little hot, um, there are airplane noises. 

HEATHER: It's good to see you though. 

BRET: It’s very nice to see you. It's great to sit next to you.  

HEATHER: The last time we saw each other, when we had to curtail a short trip that you had planned for us, was on our 25th wedding anniversary 

BRET: Yep, 25th wedding anniversary And it was a delightful trip and I really wish it hadn't been cut short but anyway that is the reason that there was nothing to be done. So I was exposed to it… [22:40]

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[25:19] BRET [Reading from his and Heather’s book, published in 2021]: …no matter what Humanity ultimately concludes about the pandemic's origin, there is a deeper truth hovering just outside our Collective awareness. Covid-19 is a product of Technology nopandemic's origin. Covid-19 is a product of Technology no matter what path it took to humans. Consider this fact: From the beginning of the pandemic the virus showed essentially zero capacity to transmit outside. Put another way, COVID-19 is a disease of buildings, cars, ships, trains, and airplanes. More than 99 percent of the earth's surface is a COVID-safe Zone. Even in your own backyard the virus will struggle mightily to infect anyone. It has no meaningful impact, unless you caught it before you walked out in the park on the balcony at the beach. We are at least for now immune. 

The dependence of the virus on enclosed spaces also means that had Humanity agreed to avoid vectoring environments for a few weeks, the pandemic could have been quickly brought to a halt. But this scenario, in which we free ourselves and lock down dangerous environments instead, is little more than an idle thought experiment. Even though in evolutionary terms these dangerous environments are all brand new to humans, the idea of humanity staying outside them even for just a few weeks is unthinkable. Many individuals could do it but a majority would be at a total loss even though we evolved outside and despite the fact that most of our ancestors would have spent every hour of their lives in what we now strangely call ‘the outdoors.’ 

We have forgotten the skills we once knew so well. That knowledge of and comfort with our natural environment has been replaced with a different skill set – one tuned to pursuing value and avoiding harm in a synthetic environment of our own device. Our cognitive software has been rewritten and we have forgotten too much to ever again be what we were. 

The result: We are condemned to battle this pathogen in bespoke environments in which we and it have both grown to depend.

That's the view from the ground. But the human dimension of this pandemic is even clearer from 30, 000 feet – or, more accurately, at 30,000 feet. For it is the way we have begun to travel that really sets us up for the pandemic disaster. SARS cov2 crossed oceans in hours, and it didn't pioneer some ingenious new mode. Where once an epidemic might have been held back by barriers that limit human travel, humans now regularly transmit communicable diseases from their continents of origin to every corner of the globe. Much as people thought little about washing their hands prior to the germ theory of disease, we give no thought to the scale of misery caused by a given person transporting a new and nameless cold virus to some continent that was free of it the day before. Novel coronavirus took advantage of that nonchalance before the pathogen even had a proper name. 

The COVID 19 pandemic is itself a symptom of another disease entirely. The pages of this book we call that disease hyper novelty. It is caused by a rate of technological change so rapid that transitions in our environment outstrip our capacity to adapt. 

You will not find the covid-19 pandemic specifically dissected here. But you will find a full exploration of the hyper-novelty crisis that left us vulnerable to this virus – a virus so weak that it could have been cured with a bit of well-coordinated fresh air.

[Bret Stops reading from book and continues]

So I thought that revisit was worthwhile, in light of the fact that we are still all dealing with the consequences of this. The people who have decided it's no big deal that the world is over COVID and they're just not going to think about it; they're not going to do anything special. And the people who still treat it seriously, as you and I do. And the people who still panic over it and are wearing their masks outside as they walk around – we still see these people occasionally. 

The answer is there's actually a loophole with this disease: The fact that it doesn't transmit outside was a loophole. And a properly-run Planet – a planet in which experts weren't just simply idiots who held a high position – would have told us here is how you go about not disrupting your life: Try to figure out how to do as much as possible outside, and we can retain as much normalcy as we can arrange. 

HEATHER: But they didn't tell us that.

BRET: No, they told us exactly the opposite. 

HEATHER: Yes, they told us, “Go inside, go home. Go home, get the people you love sick. If you're sick, don't come back and see us until it's close to too late – at which point we'll inflict our worst harms on you.”

BRET: We'll put you on a ventilator and give you a Remdesivir.

HEATHER: I don't know when that started. That was it was a little later but um you know since replaced with Paxlovid, but none of the solutions, so-called, have been actually solutions. And that, of course, as we have said over and over and over again raises questions about why. To what degree can we imagine they were actually intended as solutions in the first place?

[END at 30:28]