Is Cell Phone Radiation Good For You? The 317th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Summary

---

DarkHorse Podcast #317: Is Cell Phone Radiation Good For You?

Hosts: Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying
Date: March 18, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Bret and Heather—both evolutionary biologists—use their "evolutionary lens" to discuss controversial contemporary topics. The headline investigation focuses on cell phone and Bluetooth radiation and its impacts on biological health, inspired by a recent large-scale government animal study. They also dissect a recent Ninth Circuit Court decision on gender and public accommodations, explore updates in phylogenetic classification of sharks, and reflect on the problems of scientific models and public discourse. As always, their scientific background and skepticism lead to deep dives on data, methodology, and meaning, often spiced with wit and cultural criticism.

---

Key Discussion Points

1. The Costs and Rewards of Public Discourse

Timestamps: 00:05–04:40

• Heather reflects on the personal toll of speaking publicly about controversial topics (e.g., Israel, Iran), including recent backlash (02:00).
• Despite public vitriol, private messages from thoughtful people provide insight:

  “So much of what comes back privately is extraordinary and eye-opening and elucidating and kind and generous and human.” –Bret (02:30)

• They reinforce the idea that public shaming often intends to silence dissent (03:12).
• Heather:

  “We must not be silent ... what actually comes back includes evidence you didn’t know of, that suggests you’re on the right track ... my sense is yes, this was worth it as awful as the cost taken in isolation.” (03:12)

---

2. Orcas and the Restorative Power of Nature

Timestamps: 05:37–09:37

• Heather shares an uplifting ferry encounter with a pod of orcas.
• Discussion of local sea mammals (transient vs. resident orcas, environmental pressures, dialect differences).
• Personal rule:

  “Any day on which you see whales is a good day ... It’s a big gift from God, whether he exists or not.” –Heather (06:41)

---

3. Episode Roadmap

Timestamps: 09:37–10:52

Plans for the episode:

• Cell phone/AirPod radiation: mouse model evidence.
• Ninth Circuit decision on gender accommodations.
• New findings on shark phylogenetics (“sharks aren’t real?” as a playful tagline).

---

4. Deep Dive: Cell Phone Radiation – Science, Study, and Interpretation

Timestamps: 25:23–87:27

a. Study Overview

Timestamps: 27:19–30:07

• Prompted by a viral thread by Zane Koch reanalyzing a $30 million NIH study where nearly 2,000 mice and rats received high-dose cell phone radiation for two years.
• Surprisingly, the irradiated animals lived significantly longer (lower mortality hazard ratio), with variable cancer impacts.

b. Experimental Design and Complexity

Timestamps: 31:22–33:14

• The study used exposure levels 10x cell phone and 100x AirPods; different tissues, durations, and endpoints.
• Bret and Heather praise the care in the study but note layered complexities and interpretive ambiguity.

c. The Non-Ionizing Radiation Paradox

Timestamps: 35:21–42:06

• Non-ionizing radiation (cell phones, Bluetooth) is low-energy—can't ionize molecules.
• The common reassurance "non-ionizing = safe" is challenged:

  "There is evidence that there are harms of non-ionizing radiation, which is not always admitted." –Heather (36:37)

• Main concern is thermal effects: tissue heating can denature proteins, disrupt enzymes, and, over time, accelerate tissue aging.

d. Interpreting the Results: Hormesis or Mouse Model Failure?

Timestamps: 42:06–87:27

• Podcast hosts question whether the observed lifespan increase is real benefit—or an artifact of the mouse model.

• Review of prior research on telomere biology and lab mouse breeding:

  • Lab mice are bred with ultra-long telomeres and high tissue repair capacity but little cancer resistance, causing them to die of tumors at young ages—making them poor models for normal human aging/cancer risks.
  • The “reserve capacity hypothesis” (Heather’s earlier work) is revisited:

    "If you give a mouse ... a toxic insult ... you will paradoxically increase the length of its life if it doesn't kill the animal outright." –Heather (56:34)

  • This paradox happens because breeding prioritizes tissue repair (for productivity) at the expense of tumor suppression. In these mice, toxic exposures (like non-ionizing radiation) can kill cancer cells, so the mice die of cancer less often/faster, making the mice appear healthier but misleading human implications.

• Broader critique: Decades of scientific findings and regulatory standards based on these misleading mouse models.

• Key conclusion:

  “If you're a mouse where do you get AirPods, you probably want AirPods, maybe more than one set. If you're not a mouse then this is an indicator that it's actually dangerous—the fact that the mice live longer is not good news...” –Heather (86:03)

e. Notable Quotes

• “Mice lie.” –Bret (71:02): Lab mice as fundamentally misleading models for human biology.
• “What they're dying of is cancer, which they start getting in youth as a result of this madness with the breeding protocols.” –Heather (83:28)

---

5. Ninth Circuit Court Ruling on Korean Women's Spa and Gender Identity

Timestamps: 87:32–117:04

a. Background

A Korean women-only spa near Seattle was ordered to admit a “pre-op trans woman” (biological male), despite customer and employee objections.

b. The Court's Rationale

• State law interpreted to equate gender identity with protected sexual orientation.

• Majority dismissed the spa’s First Amendment/freedom of association claims.

  “None of them are implicated here. To begin, the spa is not an intimate association ... the price of admission [is] payment of the entrance fee and any woman, except a transgender woman who has not yet received gender confirmation surgery … can be admitted.” –Reading from the decision (94:02)

c. Dissent (Notably Judge VanDyke)

• Expresses outrage, bluntly highlights the real-world implications:

  “This is a case about swinging dicks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa, a traditional Korean women-only nude spa, understandably don't want them in their spa ...” –Judge VanDyke (102:54)

• Criticizes the majority for being disconnected from reality and endangering women/girls for ideological reasons.

d. Hosts’ Response

• Heather:

  “The spa is being forced to participate in a perverted delusion ... you're talking about a version of misunderstanding reality that is actually materially dangerous and well understood to be one of the most terrible crimes.” (110:23)

• Bret:

  “Having judges that are not trustworthy undermines trust in the court.” (115:37)

• Discussion links language games (trans women as women) to legal confusion, policy overreach, and real harm.

---

6. Shark Phylogenetics Teaser

Timestamps: 117:04–118:17

• Quick aside teasing a future discussion: new findings challenge the idea that sharks are a single evolutionary group—skates and rays may be embedded within sharks rather than separate.

---

Memorable Quotes

• On lab mice as models:
  “Mice lie.” –Bret (71:02)

• On the problem with cell phone radiation studies:
  “The fact that the mice live longer is not good news ... it's bad news because a toxin that you will not tolerate well will function like chemotherapy or ... radiation therapy does on a cancer patient.” –Heather (86:03)

• On language, science, and reality:
  “If you allow that, ok I’ll call you what it seems like I should call you based on your presentation, then the point is ... that creates the impression that actually you agree that this person is actually a woman and ... turns it into a fact from their perspective even though it's not a biological fact.” –Heather (96:22)

• On judicial reality:
  “What undermines trust is not being trustworthy ... are you worthy of trust? No, obviously not...” –Heather (115:24)

---

Important Timestamps

• Public Discourse & Vitriol: 00:05–04:40
• Orca Sighting & Nature’s Impact: 05:37–09:37
• Roadmap for Episode: 09:37–10:52
• Cell Phone Radiation Study Deep Dive: 27:19–87:27
• Ninth Circuit Court Decision: 87:32–117:04
• Shark Phylogenetics Teaser: 117:04–118:17

---

Overall Tone

• Witty, skeptical, and deeply analytical.
• Mix of technical rigor, cultural commentary, and vibrant personal anecdotes.
• Willing to question “official” knowledge and call out failures in both science and policy.

---

For listeners: The episode delivers a rigorous yet accessible discussion of how scientific models (particularly lab mice) may systematically mislead our understanding of risks (e.g., cell phone radiation). The broader social segment offers a passionate, unfiltered critique of recent legal and social developments around gender identity and women’s spaces, situating legal and linguistic confusion as not just philosophical, but materially consequential.

If you have not listened, this summary delivers both the factual structure and the lively, irreverent flavor of the conversation.

Transcript

[Bret Weinstein]

foreign

[Heather Heying]

welcome to the dark horse podcast live stream number three hundred and seventeen i'm so on my game i know it's three hundred and seventeen but do

[Bret Weinstein]

you know if it's prime i have

[Heather Heying]

a strong sense that it is strong sense but you're right no actual work on the subject you're correct i am correct it is prime but it's not like cosmological prime in some special it's not a perfect prime or a stellar prime or a neptune prime whatever you know the mathematicians they they don't get much excitement and so finding a prime that has some other property causes a

[Bret Weinstein]

partner in prime for instance yeah partnering

[Heather Heying]

in prime that is so good we are part i think your standards may be low at the moment they are rock bottom yeah well i've been having kind of a rough week you know it turns out there are certain topics that one dare not speak out loud or hell breaks loose i knew that and i i must tell you friends you are mostly friends who watch this podcast i feel compelled to do these things i'm probably as well built to endure what comes back as anybody but it's not fun it's really not enjoyable and especially when it's in close quarters i will say however as much about here no no here it's lovely this is the closest quarters the closest quarters are so rock solid i can't even tell you but obviously you can see a lot of vitriol on the internet you cannot see the number of kind decent people who show up out of the blue and tell you things you would have no access to if you hadn't spoken publicly and so anyway it's a painful process it's a fascinating process each and every time and so what

[Bret Weinstein]

you're currently enduring is having dared to speak both to tucker carlson and about israel and iran but that that thing that you just described is something that those who haven't been in a position of speaking publicly about things which some people feel vehemently opposed to your position on will not know which and so we experience this with evergreen we experienced this with COVID you are experiencing this now where yes publicly a lot of what people can see is oh my god i know better than to do that then because that is horrifying but so much of what comes back privately is extraordinary and eye opening and elucidating and kind and generous and human so you know thank you for that and also recognize those who are seeing what you are going through right now what we have gone through in past versions of these that it's not all terrible like you get raked over the coals but that is in fact and this is a point you have made often that is a large part of the point whether or not the people doing it know it or not that is a way to scare other people into

[Heather Heying]

silence yep and we must not be silent because as much as the outcry is you're so wrong it's incredible you finally completely lost your marbles the point is what actually comes back includes evidence you didn't know of that suggests you're on the right track all sorts of things so there's a it's a very mixed bag but my sense is yes this was this was worth it as awful as the cost taken in isolation

[Bret Weinstein]

is getting back to our prime discussion a little bit where you were you were talking about the intrinsic boredom of mathematicians and them making up things like you know twin primes not making up but like just finding connections this makes a person wonder how many third rails there could possibly be it doesn't seem

[Heather Heying]

like they should be multiples of three or something something yeah something fourth fifth

[Bret Weinstein]

sixth rails but you know no no it's always the third rail it's always

[Heather Heying]

the it's hard to get past the third rail it's very energetic so but you know we've we've touched a number of third rails live to tell the tale you know anyway all sorts of stuff i will just say a tantalizing hint for the future one of the things that i mentioned on tucker was that very few analyses of what we are currently doing in iran add up even superficially the administration hasn't given us a coherent rationale and frankly that's been freaking me out why do we you know even if it were a cartoon at least just some picture of what we're even supposed to be thinking they haven't done that somebody without even a

[Bret Weinstein]

coherent cover story how can you not be wondering what the hell is going

[Heather Heying]

on right exactly they're throwing a lot of us somebody somebody i know and like approached me this morning actually with a at least coherent explanation of what we might be doing that was not on its face easily falsified by anything i know so anyway i can't imagine why we would have a coherent rationale and not at least have the administration hint at it but anyway that is something i am now looking into and you know if there are forces interested in doing away with me they should wait because who knows what it is that i'm please wait yeah please wait forever thank you all right i will say out of nowhere i was returning this morning on the ferry no you

[Bret Weinstein]

were returning from the mainland i was returning qualify as nowhere right it wasn't

[Heather Heying]

out of nowhere i wasn't out of nowhere i was coming back from redmond where there was a brownstone supper club which are very fun where i was giving the first supper club in the seattle area talk and oh my god there's video of me giving talk in any case great supper club and anyway i was returning this morning from the mainland and something that occasionally happens but is not very common at all happened which is a large pod of orca showed up and reminding me that the world is actually is orca the plural i i think it's octopi why is

[Bret Weinstein]

the island near us called orcas and not pronounced orcas but orcas if orca

[Heather Heying]

is the plural this is a fine question we can here are some of your orca here are the orca and

[Bret Weinstein]

that in fact maybe orcas in the background i don't know i don't know

[Heather Heying]

exactly where you were so it restored my faith in planet earth and humanity because the fairy even though they take no end of crap for being late which is sometimes their fault but not always and they were a little bit late already were a little bit late already they stopped and fully allowed us to watch this amazing display now i have a rule that i live by i there are no exceptions to this rule any day on which you see whales is a good day okay and that includes mind you dolphins and porpoises of which orca are the largest and fiercest yeah but the point is people you know they see dolphins or porpoises and and they think oh that's nice but no you're seeing that whales it's whales they're just small that's not their fault so anyway if you've seen whales that's a good day and you know i don't care that it's a you know a harbor porpoise or something like that this is this is a big grip it's a gift from god whether he exists or not right oh yeah first time i saw that so was

[Bret Weinstein]

there anyone on board you and i don't know all the local orcas but many people in the area do yeah i guess there's a lot of study of them do we know what what

[Heather Heying]

pod this is no we don't i'm pretty sure it's transients but so that means mammal eaters they you know we have a population of residents that eat salmon and they are on the back foot despite not having feet doesn't help as a result of various environmental influences it's very sad used to be able to watch the resident orcas just simply by on from land just looking out for them in certain places and they're still out there but they look like

[Bret Weinstein]

you got a juvenile here not there but i thought i saw a small

[Heather Heying]

fin i agree there's a calf it's

[Bret Weinstein]

hard to know though sometimes they just

[Heather Heying]

come up a little bit yeah but anyway so i saw whales and so

[Bret Weinstein]

there are a ton of seals here so the the transients have a lot of food whereas you know the salmon populations are having a bit of a tough time too there's a lot of reasons that the residents are declining the transients which are named differently based on their home ranges but also they have very different diet habits as you said

[Heather Heying]

and so dialect but like we we

[Bret Weinstein]

can watch you can often you can tell that the whales are around when you see the whale boats going yeah and you can also tell that there are whales around when you see all the seals freaking out yeah that's true

[Heather Heying]

the seals have an uneasy relationship with the transients so anyway that was glorious and i was glad for it it came just the right moment to make this an excellent day no matter what

[Bret Weinstein]

else happens that's fantastic and so at the end of today we're going to talk a bit about whether cell phones and airpods are bad for you with evidence from mice and we're going to talk about the ninth circuit decision to let men go into a korean women's spa here in washington and the amazing descent by one of the judges and we're going to talk a little bit about the finding it's in preprint it's not been peer reviewed yet but the phylogenetic findings suggesting that sharks aren't real so whales include orcas birds are real and that wasn't a phylogenetic argument it was a i don't know what kind of an argument that was but that sharks appear to be potentially two two groups within which are embedded the skates and the rays and this may sound like something you don't care about at all but if you get to say sharks aren't real it's kind of fun

[Heather Heying]

going to be never endingly confusing to you know average people who have pretty good assumptions about what it is to be real she's not arguing they don't exist he's making a point about whether or not they belong on a single branch of the tree so anyway it's

[Bret Weinstein]

probably time to pay the rent yeah

[Heather Heying]

we should probably do that oh we're

[Bret Weinstein]

gonna have a q a after after today's show we got a locals watch party going on right now join us there and that's where the q a will be after the show please consider joining us there but for now top of the hour we have three as always carefully chosen sponsors to start us off even though we've been going now for a while already okay our first sponsor this week is crowd health crowd health is not health insurance it is better health insurance in the united states is a mess to put it mildly from overpriced premiums to confusing fine print endless paperwork claims that don't get paid customer service that is unhelpful and hostile these complicated systems aren't functional and they wear us down we used to contend with this madness but not anymore there is a better way you can stop playing the rigged insurance game you can use crowd health instead crowdhealth is a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly no middlemen no networks no nonsense with crowd health you can get health care for under one hundred dollars per month for your first three months and it's not that much more after that including access to a team of health bill negotiators low cost prescription and lab testing tools and a database of low cost high quality doctors vetted by crowd health if something major happens you pay the first dollar five hundred then the crowd steps in to help fund the rest crowd health is not health insurance it's way better after we left our salaried jobs as college professors we spent years buying health insurance in the marketplace it was awful our family of four insurance for emergencies only and we were paying more than one thousand five hundred dollars a month for a policy with a seventeen thousand dollars annual deductible to a company that was unresponsive and unhelpful tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever i went looking for alternatives and i found crowd health we have now had two great sets of experiences with crowd health our younger son toby broke his foot in the summer of twenty twenty four and i slept on wet concrete and he had a head cat scan a year later both times we went to the er and got good but expensive treatment from the medical staff there in both cases crowd health paid our bills with their app was simple and straightforward to use and the real people who work at crowd health were easy to reach clear and communicative with crowd health you pay for little stuff out of pocket but for any event that costs more than dollar five hundred a diagnosis diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment a pregnancy an accident you pay the first dollar five hundred and the crowd pays the rest seriously it's easy affordable and so much better than health insurance we can still hardly believe it when we tell people that we don't have health insurance they look at us like we're insane but so i know it sounds scary to go without health insurance but i can assure you this is so much better you are so much more safe with regard to risking your money on an out of control health insurance system if you go with crowd health instead it's it's way better the health insurance system is hoping you'll stay stuck in the same in their same overpriced over complicated mess but you don't have to do it this year take your power back join crowd health to get started today for ninety nine dollars a month for your first three months using code darkhorse at joincrowdhealth dot com that's joincrowdhealth dot com code darkhorse remember crowd health is not insurance opt out take your power back this is how we win join

[Heather Heying]

crowdhealth dot com crowd health is awesome i was thinking about that as i got up i had to pee and anyway i was thinking about how great crowd health is the entire time i was gone excellent that might be too much information i don't know that it's too much information okay it's information okay

[Bret Weinstein]

for our next ad i have got a couple of props this is only the second time we've had these guys as a sponsor they're new to us this month it's toupes t o ups which makes amazing skin care products most skincare and makeup is chock full of toxins and plastics the trendy brands may have nice packaging and seem clean but they almost never are people in the united states respond maha with enthusiasm let's source good meat and grow our own food filter our water purify our air get additives and colors out of the food that we buy and reduce exposure to pharmaceuticals and over the counter drugs that's all fantastic but if we continue to slather mystery chemicals onto our skin our body's largest organ we aren't doing enough if you want to make yourself healthy again don't bathe yourself in toxins try any of tupes amazing products and you will come back for more when tubes approached us i figured that they were just another supposedly clean brand that actually hides lots of ingredients in their product i was wrong tubes makes excellent products with just a few ingredients they are real and pronounceable and actually support your skin the tallow balm that tupes makes is made from one hundred percent grass fed tallow which mimics our skin's natural biology beautifully it's smooth and creamy and feels great use it as moisturizer during day or night and this frankincense frankincense face balm is their tallow balm but just with frankincense it has two different frankincense oils it smells fantastic it's got serrata and carterii it's amazing to put on smells great and excuse me i also love their glow serum which includes oils of primrose and immortelle magnolia and jasmine and smells utterly gorgeous tupes also makes sunscreen and deodorant cleansing oils and exfoliants and a complete array of beautiful makeup too and their list of never ingredients is comprehensive and impressive including but not limited to artificial colors and fragrances synthetic chemicals and fills gmo's aluminum microplastics and silicone tupes is made to standards much higher than those required in the united states higher even than standards in the eu but tubes is handcrafted in coastal alabama right here in the united states every one of their products that i've tried has been wonderful truly if you're ready to simplify your routine and actually feel good about what you're putting on your skin head toupsandco t dash o dash u dash p dash s dash a dash n dash dash c o dot com darkhorse they're offering our listeners twenty five percent off your first order with code darkhorse that's toups and co t o u p s a n darkhorse use code darkhorse for twenty five percent off your first order

[Heather Heying]

have you noticed that we seem to attract sponsors who are creative when it

[Bret Weinstein]

comes to spelling yes it's the only it's the only thing that makes me wonder if we're doing something wrong no

[Heather Heying]

we're doing something right but if i

[Bret Weinstein]

were because you were also creative with

[Heather Heying]

regard to spelling yeah creative is generous but chaotic when it comes to spelling isn't the obvious way to spell tubes two ps

[Bret Weinstein]

i mean there's three ways

[Heather Heying]

to spell two no no i mean the number i've gone too far finally

[Bret Weinstein]

you know what that would spell no swaps tw o p s no no

[Heather Heying]

the number two psych the obvious way to spell it now that you've heard

[Bret Weinstein]

it right my point about your spelling being creative was as you said generous

[Heather Heying]

yes it was beyond generous and thank you our next creative spelling sponsor the final one for this episode is also new to this year it's puree you'll never guess how they spell it it's p u o r i and they make a wide array of supplements and powders from vitamin c to magnesium b complex to creatine collagen and protein powders what makes puri different nada is more than just spelling it is how clean and pure all of their products are all of them puri was founded in two thousand nine by two men who wanted to create the cleanest and purest products to support their own active lifestyle since then their product portfolio has grown to address common nutritional deficiencies in the developed world as they have never compromised on quality from the fundamental understanding that health requires a good diet physical activity recovery and balance the founders of puri reject quick fixes and have insisted on the most stringent purity testing on all of their products from the very beginning we're using purees magnesium which is excellent like all of fury's products their magnesium complex is third party testified testified that's not a thing third party tested and certified see i shooting for a contraction but it was a bridge too far it is tested and certified by the clean label project against over two hundred contaminants and at any time you can scan the qr code on your bottle for the test results for your particular batch holy moly is that good they didn't just test a sample you can look at the results for your batch that's and they send it super cool

[Bret Weinstein]

they send it with the product that's

[Heather Heying]

amazing heather's mom is expecting her first shipment of multivitamins and fish oil from puri any day oh i haven't updated

[Bret Weinstein]

that yeah she's got them she's got

[Heather Heying]

them great what did she think she loves it awesome yeah okay so yeah heather's mom's got them and she thinks they're awesome or so i've heard just now and our son toby has been making protein rich smoothies for a couple of years now but has had a hard time finding a protein powder that he liked most of them are strongly flavored and gritty but he wanted one that would disappear into his shake letting the other flavors shine now at nineteen he's found the protein powder puri's grass fed whey protein powder bourbon vanilla flavor i mean he's closing in on old

[Bret Weinstein]

enough for bourbon flavor bourbon vanilla is somehow a description of a branch of

[Heather Heying]

vanilla oh is it i think oh it's a bourbon hinting vanilla that's cool yeah all right i liked rum raisin as a kid and i wasn't old enough to be drinking rum so anyway it's a flavor live with it toby says out of all the protein powders i've tried this is the best the flavor is mild it doesn't intrude on other flavors it's smooth going down and is full of grapes great whey protein

[Bret Weinstein]

that was a quote from young toby

[Heather Heying]

right he could have said it's full of whey grape protein that would also have made sense but again spelling most protein powders aren't just gritty and artificial they're actually toxic several studies including those done by consumer reports show that a significant fraction of protein powders on the market contain lead in amounts that are known to be dangerous frankly any lead is dangerous you shouldn't be eating lead at all much less in a supplement you're taking to improve your health not only is puree whey protein powder free of lead it also delivers a whopping twenty one grams of whey protein in each serving and is free of gmo's pesticides and exogenous hormones toby loves the bourbon vanilla flavor despite his age but they've also got a dark chocolate flavor made from organic cocoa powder did i get it right whether you're looking for magnesium or multivitamin collagen or protein powder you can't go wrong with puri use the code darkhorse at puri dot com darkhorse to get thirty two percent off puri grass fed whey protein when you start a subscription in addition you get a free shaker worth twenty five bucks on your first subscription order which brings a total savings of dollar forty nine go to p u o r i dot com darkhorse and use the code darkhorse checkout to get this exclusive offer

[Bret Weinstein]

okay i did a quick little check on why some vanilla is called bourbon vanilla okay i have not fact checked it yeah if this is true it makes me wonder why we don't know this already as you know i spent a lot of time madagascar yes you did you also spent a lot of time in madagascar somewhat less but that's where i did my dissertation and as we have talked about before and as i've written about vanilla which is the only it's a it's an orchid and it's a it's the only human cultivar that we eat of the entire orchid family and it is native to mexico where there is i think it's a solitary maybe like a melaponine bee or euclosine bee it's pollinated by a very particular pollinator in mexico but it's such an amazing flavor that it has been taken and is now also grown in madagascar where most of the world's vanilla comes from and part of indonesia and also tahiti near madagascar is the island of reunion right reunion used to be called apparently il bourbon so bourbon vanilla bourbon vanilla refers to madagascan and environs vanilla only wow that was grown in in the western indian ocean mostly in madagascar because madagascar is huge bigger than california whereas reunion which i've never been to you've never been to is tiny

[Heather Heying]

all right that's fascinating and toby is forgiven for liking bourbon flavor because it's not bourbon flavor it's madagascar and environs flavor all right cool and it is going to be a euclosine b right that natively pollinates that isn't in madagascar and therefore all the madagascar vanilla has to be hand pollinated yeah every everywhere

[Bret Weinstein]

but mexico where vanilla is grown it's hand pollinated which is part of white vanilla it's a long process just like with chocolate and coffee right it's a long process to turn what grows into something that we want to eat but it's a particularly arduous process to hand pollinate pollinate each individual bean with regard to vanilla which is what happens everywhere that vanilla is grown outside of its

[Heather Heying]

native region of mexico which causes the vanilla farmers in madagascar at least the one that we came to know well to hate vanilla because they have such intimate contact with it all the time that it just just hate the smell

[Bret Weinstein]

yeah and i mean and he reported solo reported that this was he was not unusual yes that he just like yes i don't i don't want to be around it whereas to us you know the idea that you can walk into a rainforest and come across a little cultivated patch that smells somewhat of vanilla is is remarkable and you know delightful not so remarkable for the farmers who were doing the arduous work yeah

[Heather Heying]

someday when the world is not melting down maybe we will have a discussion about you glossine bees orchids speciation and all that glorious stuff because man is that a good topic it is a good time this is not that day

[Bret Weinstein]

might be a day for sharks though

[Heather Heying]

i thought sharks weren't real

[Bret Weinstein]

i suppose

[Heather Heying]

i deserved that yeah you did you did all right so are we starting on the the biology sure so but not the sharks no no there's a lot of biology it's not all sharks

[Bret Weinstein]

it's all biology the ninth circuit is

[Heather Heying]

biology too you're right yeah you're right

[Bret Weinstein]

we'll go there next yeah that's grizzly

[Heather Heying]

but all right so those of you who were around last week i think it was last week we had what i thought was a pretty fun discussion about my old work on telomeres senescence and cancer and how that work keeps spitting out tests where predictions that i have made turn out to be true and many of you will remember that i made a rule that i would accept the argument that i'm an idiot from anybody who's done work of that quality at least once in their life but the rest of people are forbidden for leveling that particular accusation that you're an idiot yes so far it has not been effective but no i wouldn't

[Bret Weinstein]

i wouldn't think so for one thing i mean then no one gets to criticize you that's not fair i don't

[Heather Heying]

know about that you know i mean i'm willing to be generous about whether you got a piece of work that good but i don't want to take it from you know you've either done some good work or you haven't and it would be greatly beneficial if we could filter the noise of those who have not contributed much from the accusations but anyway i have digressed as you

[Bret Weinstein]

all noticed but apparently it's great fun to yell at you on the internet

[Heather Heying]

oh my god it's like it's gotta be i mean i've never tried it it's gotta be thrilling it's it's gotta be and you know and the and

[Bret Weinstein]

frankly the few times that i've yelled at you in real life i haven't found it thrilling so i don't get what they're all on about yeah you

[Heather Heying]

would know yeah and yet on the

[Bret Weinstein]

internet it doesn't turn out to be

[Heather Heying]

enjoyable things are different i'm glad to hear that it does explain why it doesn't happen very much so anyway back to the biology although obviously this was too but here's the thing it just so happens that it happened again this week something came to my awareness well

[Bret Weinstein]

yeah came to your word this is

[Heather Heying]

actually from twenty eighteen yeah but it came to my awareness because of a thread that i happened onto on x as i was taking a break from being browbeaten so can we show this thread all right we're going to put up this thread the threads topic is about it's a person i don't know zane coke or koch who says for a while i've had a slight fear that the bluetooth from my airpods could be frying my brain this weekend i pulled the wrong data raw the wrong data i didn't see wrong i didn't mean to say wrong i'm sorry zane it says this weekend i pulled the raw data from a thirty million dollars government study of sixteen seventy nine mice blasted with cell phone radiation and reanalyzed it what i found was not what i expected so he goes on it's a little hard to read you want me to read it yeah would you

[Bret Weinstein]

read it okay this is zane in a tweet thread from march fifteenth for two years eight hundred and twenty mice and eight hundred and fifty nine rats lived in specially designed metal enclosures that scatter radio frequency signals uniformly so every animal gets a consistent whole body dose they were exposed to zero point nine to one point nine gigahertz radiation nine hours a day for context this is the same radio frequency used on your phone's two g three g signal i don't know if two g three g means two g and three g but and is similar to the two point four gigahertz frequency used in bluetooth the intensity of radiation is roughly one hundred times more powerful than that emitted by something like airpods and ten times that of a cell phone so what happened in the study he continues the radiated mice lived significantly longer they had a fifty three percent lower risk of death hr zero point four seven five p of less than a p of zero zero three then the mice dosed with no radiation maybe something weird was going on with the mice he asks nope exact same thing for the rats the rats that got the highest dose of cell phone ra lived the longest and this is not some tiny study there were two hundred and ten mice and rats mice or rats in each group almost two thousand total so what happened with cancer rates the rats had an increased risk of heart malignancies but decreased risk of liver adenomas and the mice had no significant change in cancer risk

[Heather Heying]

at all okay so i want to just flag the distinction between heart and other cancer risk it may become important that's it oh oh yeah

[Bret Weinstein]

the cell phone radiation led to twenty eight significant health improvements including decreased inflammation less brain cell death necrosis less kidney disease nephropathy less mineralization of organs mineralization of organs it's weird there was also there were also five significant harms including an increased risk of hemorrhage and a few other things if this was a pill i'd be buying he says so why might this be this continues the thread from sky zane my guess is it's sort of a hormesis effect where a little of a bad thing ends up being good kind of like exercise wear and tear on your muscles causes them to grow back bigger and stronger maybe here the amount of dna damage and other harms from the radiation is slight enough that it causes cells to upregulate repairs proteins and such leading to net good effects side note we know from a companion study that there really was an increase in dna damage from the radiation the mice and rats were bathed in radio frequency radiation at doses ten to one hundred times higher than airpods nine hours a day for two years and lived longer and were healthier so at thanksgiving this year you can tell your crazy uncle that the cell phones are actually making him live longer and he has the original paper which we have

[Heather Heying]

taken a look at yes and i will just say up front this paper is nothing if not complicated and so i'm not going to tell you that i completely understand it because it's actually technical on multiple different fronts it's technical at the level of the experimental design the way they dosed these mice and rats with radiation is it takes a certain amount of work to understand frankly it looked very careful to me i think it was a well designed study it is also biologically complex the protocol for the necropsy where they're looking to see how the mice were is you know takes some work to understand and you know there's also a lot of theoretical discussion in here about the particular kind of radiation that's being tested why it relates to the technology at the time that the study was done so

[Bret Weinstein]

there are a lot of there's a lot of complexity and there's a lot of many decisions being made each of which could affect the results downstream and it's hard to know how many of those compound each other reverse each other right and there's just a lot of decisions by the scientists here because of the complexity of the study which inherently

[Heather Heying]

makes it difficult to assess right and it's a big study there's lots of noise in it in other words patterns that are ambiguous and in fact their conclusion in the study is ambiguous the evidence that they saw did not tell them that there was a clear pattern but let's just say the following things are true they were testing they were specifically trying to understand dosages that were reasonable to understand what the health impacts on humans would be of radiation emitted by cell phones they were trying to

[Bret Weinstein]

mimic the dosages in mice that humans that weird weird human beings using cell

[Heather Heying]

phones would be exposed to right which is not necessarily a good model for airpods although airpods emit the same kind of radiation they do so in very close proximity and the radiation decays as an exponential matter with distance so being some of you may remember back in the day when we got our first cell phones i think roughly twenty one ish years ago as you were pregnant with zach if i remember correctly somewhere in that neighborhood yeah that's i don't

[Bret Weinstein]

know why they would know that they

[Heather Heying]

wouldn't know but we got our first cell phones then and at the time we had nextel cell phones the major feature which has now disappeared from planet earth was that they could function as walkie talkies using the cell network so you didn't have to be near somebody but you had effectively a walkie talkie so they were very popular on work sites sides whatever point was they looked

[Bret Weinstein]

like walkie talkies they did they were

[Heather Heying]

cool yeah i miss it but they came with a kind of an odd clip to put it on your belt right that was strangely like it didn't hold it right to your side the way you would want it it was kind of stuck out from you a half an inch and that made it more likely to catch on things and it was just an odd design turns out the reason for that design was that the manufacturers understood that the difference between it being pressed right against you and an inch away was significant with respect to risks and they were worried about liability there may have even been regulations that required a belt clip to look like that of course they don't tell you this when you buy a cell phone and you think you're going to put it in your pocket and you don't realize that you know the difference between a little bit away and in your pocket is significant but anyway the point is airpods similar radiation but the proximity is so close and the tissue to which it is close is also unique so you need it you're using it not everybody's using it i'm

[Bret Weinstein]

using it a little bit you know

[Heather Heying]

yeah we're getting around i guess but okay so what are we talking about when we say radiation well one thing that you should know a key key factor in this discussion is that much of the comfort about the radiation emitted by things like cell phones and and routers and stuff like that comes from the fact that the radiation is low energy it is non ionizing and what that means is that there's not enough energy for it to knock the electrons off of the atoms and molecules that make you up that is reason for comfort if it was knocking that right

[Bret Weinstein]

there right there that's worth the price of admission non ionizing radiation means it's low enough energy that it can't knock electrons off that's just like that's clarifying

[Heather Heying]

it's very clarifying and it is a reason for comfort things would be way worse if we were talking talking about

[Bret Weinstein]

i didn't say comfort i just like i think that that putting those two things next to each other non ionizing radiation and low risk are things that people will hear like what it's not ionizing the idea that it's low enough energy that it can't knock electrons off molecules is you know it's it's a level of chemistry that most people i think can can grok and and then move forward in the world knowing something more about how to interpret claims made

[Heather Heying]

by others right right and i do take some comfort from it because if you start knocking electrons off the point is it causes atoms to react with each other that wouldn't otherwise right they try to balance the loss of the negative charge and one way they can do it is by forming a bond with another atom so you don't want radiation that is causing your atoms to seek each other in ways that they weren't doing before so it's a good thing that that's not there however as they discuss extensively in this paper however there is evidence that there are harms of non ionizing radiation which is not always admitted by people often people say it's non ionizing don't worry about it sorry not true there is evidence of harms poorly understood in the paper they discussed that the best explanation for the harm done by non ionizing radiation is thermal that this radiation actually warms up your tissues and obviously your tissues can handle a certain amount of that but if you warm a particular tissue enough times or to a high enough degree that starts changing things because even if it's not stripping electrons what it is doing is it is you know causes proteins to denature it can interrupt enzyme function so that it has a route to potentially disrupting your genes and you

[Bret Weinstein]

know we have a set of body temperature for for a whole slew of reasons mild fever can actually disrupt a lot of pathogenic pathways why don't we all just walk around with mild fever all the time we don't walk around with mild fever all the time in part because that increases the rate of reactions and increases the rate of of tissue turnover and thus will increase the

[Heather Heying]

likelihood of tumors yes it can increase the rate of reactions i once foolishly stated in front of a chemistry colleague that i was teaching with at the time that increasing the temperature increases the rate of all reactions and she said not so fast i was like oh boy she's like enzymatic reaction it's like yep you're exactly right why because if you get enough increase in temperature that the natural confirmation of the string of amino acids that makes up the enzyme becomes dislodged if you introduce enough energy two atoms that are supposed to be ionically attracted to each other not covalently bonded but ionically attracted can become unattracted which causes the enzyme to change shape and so what you get is the rate of reaction goes up until it starts going down so this is a

[Bret Weinstein]

pedantic response in light of a mild fever a mild fever will increase the rate of reactions well actually is can't would anyone normal would anyone who's thinking about it claim that you just increase temperature and all reactions increase in terms of their weight of course not well

[Heather Heying]

i did claim it and you know

[Bret Weinstein]

across no i basically don't believe i

[Heather Heying]

wasn't thinking about enzymatic reactions at the time okay and it was obvious very quickly what she was talking about but

[Bret Weinstein]

i mean i know the colleague you're talking about she's she's good she's lovely

[Heather Heying]

yeah lovely wonderful person person paula if you're out there but i wouldn't necessarily say that a mild fever doesn't have

[Bret Weinstein]

this potential of disrupting enzymatic reactions right in fact given the very narrow tolerances at which the at which human physiology

[Heather Heying]

operates it is possible it is possible that part of the reason that you feel so cruddy is that the stuff that makes you work isn't working so well in the context of that fever

[Bret Weinstein]

but that's consistent too with the idea of if you are effectively giving yourself a highly localized very low grade fever over and over and over again in the same place because most people who wear their phones on them put them in the same pocket all the time then you are effectively dosing yourself with temperature and now that doesn't sound it's non ionizing radiation what could be the harm well you are messing with a very local part of your body repeatedly

[Heather Heying]

yeah you are and as you know from the discussion last week you have a certain amount of capacity to repair damaged tissue but it's not an infinite capacity so the point is you may be able to get away with that for a certain amount of time and not detect anything because you're doing some damage it gets repaired but the point is it's actually accelerating the aging of that particular part of you okay so you got this large i think very well constructed complicated study of the effect of cell phone type radiation on the body and well what the what zane in the thread is saying is actually it's weird but if you look at the data from this study what it says is that actually contrary to the expectation that there's harm coming from this you actually have both mice and rats living longer if they got the dose than the control animals who lived in the same compartments just insulated from radiation so he's scratching his head and he invokes hormesis which is a known phenomenon in which a little bit of a toxin actually paradoxically makes you healthier rather than sicker and hormesis is a real

[Bret Weinstein]

thing and and it's the principle on which on which homeopathy is based which which seems to have some reality to it despite what many of us have thought for a very long time but

[Heather Heying]

the the hormetic i think that would be the way you would say it the hermetic effect let me go back to something some of you will have heard me say before i think we fear radiation too much and radioactive particles too little there's all the difference in the world between being exposed to radiation and ingesting a particle that is emitting radiation right particle that you take in that lodges in your bone and it radiates the tissue immediately surrounding it is a huge freaking hazard and that's one of the reasons that we have to be very worried about things like nuclear meltdowns that release this stuff into the atmosphere and it gets dispersed and it gets bio concentrated in the fish or whatever whatever i don't think we are afraid enough of that but i think we spend too much time afraid of radiation in general the body's built to deal with radiation there's radiation in our world naturally our ancestors experienced it and we've got pretty good systems to deal with it but they don't anticipate the kind of technological emitters that you might put in your pocket i mean your ancestors didn't have pockets so having an emitter in your pocket is abnormal and it's going to irradiate the tissue right locally so in any case good quality study here and what does it find so let's put up the longevity data maybe put up the table first so i can barely read it so here's a table and it's separated they've separated the male and female mice which is good because they have different susceptibilities and things so they've analyzed and this is

[Bret Weinstein]

the two year so they did they did twenty eight they had some populations they just looked at for twenty eight days and then for longer which is better so you've pulled out the two

[Heather Heying]

year yeah and we're going to concentrate on the two year ones because the effect is really seen there the twenty eight day ones you don't really have longevity data because they sacrifice the animals to survey their tissues and and basically they didn't have death they didn't have natural death so there's no longevity difference so we're looking at the two year studies in the first column it says sham control what that means is they did everything they could think of to make the environment of the animals in the control group look identical from the point of view of the enclosures the way the enclosures are put into the racks everything about it is the same as for the treatment group i always

[Bret Weinstein]

wonder about this name for the group i mean you're exactly right but it sounds like it's not a real control what they mean and what it actually means is it's an excellent control it's like if vaccine manufacturers were actually comparing their products to true placebos those would be true placebos rather than what they're actually doing which is comparing them not

[Heather Heying]

placebos i think the term sham originates with sham surgeries so you can imagine if you are testing a surgical procedure to see whether it actually let's say increases but then it should be sham treatment

[Bret Weinstein]

this is just a semantic issue no but it's just confusing it's an

[Heather Heying]

interesting one yeah so if you're testing an arthroscopic surgery that addresses arthritis in the knee you want a group that got the surgery and a group that didn't and then you want to see whether the functioning of their knee is any better or whether the pain is any reduced right but if one group has a scar and the other one doesn't have a scar then you've got a polluted experiment because the ones with the scar have a sense that they got an actual treatment and the ones that didn't get it may reason that there's no reason they should feel better so created this is actually done creating a scar so that from the outside you feel like you got a surgery whether you did or not is that's the sham surgery as there was no

[Bret Weinstein]

arthroscopic this is a real control though

[Heather Heying]

it's a sham treatment it's a sham treatment i agree the terminology is upside down but anyway that's what it means

[Bret Weinstein]

here is that the left hand the left column both for males and females is the group of mice that weren't messed with except to mimic what all of their compatriots experienced yeah so what

[Heather Heying]

you see here focus on the males okay so just the top half top half you've got the sham control which got no radiation at all and their mean survival is six hundred eighty seven days and then you got the two point five i think it's watts per kilogram something like that yeah live for seven hundred fifteen days the five watts per kilogram if that's what it is for seven hundred and six days and the ten watts is seven hundred and four days so all of those numbers are greater than the animals that didn't get any radiation and in two of their cases if i'm reading this correctly these are statistically significant results one of

[Bret Weinstein]

the them just just the lowest dose

[Heather Heying]

yeah oh yeah okay so it's the two point five so we've got a we've got an interesting paradox which is they were looking for damage there is extensive discussion of the the histology the cellular dynamics in these animals which is two too in the weeds to go into here but from the point of view of overall longevity which is really the most important thing of all is this good for me or bad for me overall longevity is an integrative measure it means that the body worked for longer before death okay now do you want to show the chart for males so here we're going to look at a graphical chart and zane in his thread remakes these charts using the raw data but anyway here what you see this is a little hard to interpret but what you've got this is a chart of male mice the probability of survival to a particular number of weeks is what's being measured so you've got the probability stop at two years so one hundred and four weeks yeah so you've got the probability of survival on the y axis and the x axis is time so the point is if you die before the study is over you show up on this chart and you show up on one of these different lines based on whether you got no radiation because you were in the control group you got a little radiation a little bit more radiation a little bit more radiation and interestingly all of the lines in which there's some radiation are above the line of of the animals in the control group again consistent

[Bret Weinstein]

i mean because it's the same data consistent with what you're just looking at the control group which is the dark boxes and the two sets of mice that got the highest doses of radiation are pretty close to one another although there's greater survivorship in the high dose radiation than the no dose radiation group but they're not apparently statistically significant if you trust their analysis whereas the mice who got some but not very much radiation did have a significant survivor bias

[Heather Heying]

right and if you think well that's just some kind of weird anomaly the fact that it shows up in both males and females in both mice and rats begins to suggest that actually there's something real here now my claim is that i actually know what pattern we're looking at here because i've described it in another context i didn't think to describe it in this context but it's so similar that you can't miss it

[Bret Weinstein]

so can i can i show the breeding protocols before you embark on it or you want to you want to

[Heather Heying]

go there first i think i should lay out the prediction and why it exists so i've seen pattern where in my original paper both the original paper which we talked about last week which was rejected by nature and then the revised version of it that was ultimately published in experimental gerontology in two thousand two in those cases we were focused on the fact that drug safety testing utilizes mice that are known to have ultra long telomeres and that that we argued creates an alarming problem the problem is that in fact maybe should we look at the abstract of that paper

[Bret Weinstein]

yeah jen you can show my screen if if you can show my screen so this is the this is your

[Heather Heying]

paper this is the ultimately published one in experimental gerontology a couple years after the one that we discussed last week it's kind of a long abstract but do you want to read it sure

[Bret Weinstein]

antagonistic pleiotropy the evolutionary theory of senescence posits that age related somatic decline is the inevitable late byproduct of adaptations that increase fitness in early life that concept coupled with recent findings in oncology and gerontology provides the foundation for an integrative theory of vertebrate senescence that reconciles aspects of the accumulated damage metabolic rate and oxidative stress models we hypothesize that's brett and debbie csak your co author that one invertebrates a telomeric fail safe inhibits tumor formation by limiting cellular proliferation two the same system results in the progressive degradation of tissue function with age three these patterns are manifestations of an evolved antagonistic pleiotropy in which extrinsic causes of mortality favor a species optimal balance between tuber suppression and tissue repair four with that trade off as a fundamental constraint selection adjusts telomere lengths longer telomeres increasing the capacity for repair shorter telomeres increasing tumor resistance five in environments where extrinsically induced mortality is frequent selection against senescence is comparatively weak as few individuals live long enough to suffer a substantial phenotypic decline the weaker the selection against senescence the further the optimal balance points the weaker the selection against senescence the further the optimal balance point moves towards shorter telomeres and increased tumor suppression the stronger the selection against senescence the farther the optimal balance point moves towards longer telomeres increasing the capacity for tissue tissue repair slowing senescence and elevating tumor risks six sixth hypothesis of the paper in iteroparous organisms that is organisms that tend to breed more than once in a lifetime in iteroparous organisms selection tends to coordinate rates of senescence between tissues such that no one organ generally limits lifespan a subsidiary hypothesis argues senescent decline is the combined effect of one uncompensated cellular attrition and two increasing histological interpolation entropy increases due to a loss of the intertissue positional information that normally regulates sulfate and function informational loss is subject to positive feedback producing the ever accelerating pattern of senescence characteristic of iteroparous vertebrates though telomere erosion begins early in development the onset of senescence should on average be deferred to the species typical age of first reproduction the balance point at which selection on this trade off would allow exhaustion of replicative capacity to overtake some cellular

[Heather Heying]

lines okay let me just summarize what's been said so far before you get to the part that's relevant here yes what that says so far is we hypothesize and now multiple predictions from this paper have turned out to be true suggesting the hypotheses were correct we hypothesized that your tissues have limits on the amount of cellular reproduction that that is a protection against the growth of tumors and cancer that selection adjusts how much protection you have based on how likely you are to live a long life in an environment where things are very very dangerous so let's say that you're a rodent in an environment with a lot of predation risk it doesn't make sense to give you the capacity to live a very long life because you're unlikely to live one so your cancer

[Bret Weinstein]

given that that capacity will exert a

[Heather Heying]

cost elsewhere right and the cost elsewhere is the risk of generating tumors so our point is that selection is constantly balancing these two risks based on your particular likelihood of living a long time or not in your habitat and so punchline so far is the environment that you're in is adjusting that balance and therefore having powerful impacts on how quickly you're going to age and how likely you are to get tumors all right

[Bret Weinstein]

good okay so i just scrolled up to the top here so that we can see again this is the two thousand two paper from brett and debbie c sec published in experimental gerontology the reserve capacity hypothesis the final part of the abstract

[Heather Heying]

it says we observe do you want to read it no i just want to get you back to

[Bret Weinstein]

the slide i know brad okay we observe the captive rodent breeding protocols designed to increase reproductive output output simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression this appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice with their telomeric fail safe effectively disabled these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent acceleration senescence okay so

[Heather Heying]

the argument there is that in a captive rodent population especially one that's being bred for profit so that they're highly sensitive to how effective animals are at producing more animals they want to produce the maximum number of mice per unit of mouse chow they have altered the environment in a way that eliminates selection to protect from cancer because the animals don't live long enough to die of it in the colonies okay so the value of being resistant to cancer drops at the same time that the animals are effectively in competition with each other for how much reproduction they can do so to the extent that they're built to fix any damage to their tissues really easily they produce more offspring that then contribute to future generations in the population okay so in light of that the pattern that i believe has emerged and that we should predict for future observations is if you give a mouse that came from one of these colonies where they have been bred so that their tumor resistance is non existent and their tissue repair capacity is through the roof that's the result of the breeding protocols if you do that and then you give one of these animals a toxic insult you give it some poison you will paradoxically increase the length of its life if it doesn't kill the animal outright you can give it a toxin that's so deadly that it won't survive it but if you give it something that's less deadly than that it will tend to lengthen its life for the following weird reason the logic of chemotherapy what they say in medical school when you study oncology is that chemotherapy's purpose is to kill the tumor faster than you kill the patient everybody understands that it's toxic to the body and the point is tumors are vulnerable more so than the regular parts of the body because they are constantly the cells are constantly divided dividing and when a cell is divided and its dna is separated it's susceptible because if you do damage to one of the strands of dna the information to fix it isn't

[Bret Weinstein]

nearby it's a fragile moment because the error correction mode is offline yeah among

[Heather Heying]

other things so it's a fragile moment which means that your tumors are more susceptible to being poisoned than you are and so the oncologist tries to poison your tumor at a higher rate that he poisons you and hopefully you survive to the tumor getting to zero and you're still alive that's the basic logic of chemotherapy if therefore you use these mice to test the safety of drugs you are giving them toxins because all drugs are toxins and these animals what they don't tell you in medical school or in science grad school is that they're all dying of tumors anyway why because the breeding protocols turned off their tumor suppression and and we have no idea how many tumors we never find out about that started but that got arrested by the property that we described in that paper the point is tumors are starting all the time cells go haywire they start reproducing they run into the limit on how much you can reproduce you never find out about them as i pointed out last time every mole you have is one of these we now know that that was a prediction of this moss model we now know it to be true moles are what we called prototumors they're cells that became unregulated and then stopped growing because they ran into their hayflick limit okay so this this paper that reports a paradoxical increase in longevity in mice and rats who are exposed to radiation i believe is detecting the very same thing thing that the radiation is actually bad for you and that if you understood the mice and rats that they tested this on you would understand that it should not comfort you that these animals lived longer it should alarm you because what it's saying is they've gotten a toxic dose that interrupted their tumors and increased their longevity because they died of cancer slower all right so a lot of sleuthing goes into figuring out whether that's true you've done some sleuthing on

[Bret Weinstein]

a little i mean it's hard to know the the breeding protocols that you became intricately and intimately familiar with were coming out of the jackson labs yep in maine jack's labs colloquially known the mice that are and i just i just went down the mice road i and so i haven't i haven't thought explicitly about the rats in this particular research the mice that they were using in this paper paper were hybrid strains between two strains of lab created mice and this hybrid strain are not actually coming out of the jax labs but they're coming out of nih labs which are using protocols which are remarkably similar and so i don't know for sure but i am directed to and you can show my screen here these protocols this is in a text at a twenty eighteen called the management of animal care and use programs in research education and testing testing second edition chapter twenty nine management of research animal breeding colonies so and this is just this is potentially generic but i think this is a match for what what the nih labs are doing which is where these mice that are used in this study are coming out of and they're just general information about mice so this is their imagining these are wild type mice is what we're hearing about now number of chromosomes twenty gestational length eighteen twenty one days birth rate litter size wean age sexual maturity twenty eight to sixty days they breed fast adult weight doesn't matter estrous cycle reproductive lifespan for female six to twelve months reproductive lifespan for male twelve to fourteen months lifespan one and a half to three years that throws an error for me right there that doesn't make any sense right because menopause which we know from humans and actually from orcas and or from elephants and a little there's some weird stuff going on with orcas but really from no other mammals at all is a termination of reproductive capacity in females before average expected age of death and these numbers don't match that these numbers would suggest that you've got menopause in mice

[Heather Heying]

right which you don't you don't and and if you did it would force us to rethink everything we know about menopause because the tiny number of species in which we see it have the same characteristic which is that they have important culture to pass on so the

[Bret Weinstein]

point is they have grandmother work to

[Heather Heying]

do they have grandmother work to do exactly right and so that's not true in mice and we know from lots of different things that what they're not saying here is that the end of their reproductive life is because the protocol for breeding them specifies that that be the end for very explicit reasons which i will show you in a second

[Bret Weinstein]

right okay so i already question these data about supposedly wild mice because they just they don't match from what must be true but then with regard to optimizing breeding performance i made it a little bit too big here they recommend and again this is i think the protocols going into the nih breeding colonies which are the source of the mice being used in the paper that we've been talking about replacements maintain breeder units of various ages by replacing a percentage of the monthly or weekly a colony of mixed age breeders produces a more consistent number of pups that does a colony of even age breeders okay good interesting yep np breeders as a general rule replace breeders that do not produce that's going to be non productive i guess as a general rule replace breeders that do not produce litters within ninety days of their birth date if it has been sixty days since the last litter or if they produce two or three consecutive litters that do not wean any pupil so subfertile individuals get wiped and are not in the breeding pool most important for our purposes in this discussion here use young mice mate mice that are six to eight weeks of age pairing young females with older males may also improve breeding six to eight weeks when they say the lifespan if they're if they're not calling which of course they will is one and a half to three years that's going to be you know whatever seventy five to one hundred and fifty weeks and they're breeding them early and they're culling them early and that is exactly the breeding protocol that you and debbie were referring to in life's slow fuse your hypothesis your your paper that was published as hypothesis but was actually a slew of very careful hypotheses with predictions yeah yep

[Heather Heying]

all right so let's look at what the jax lab has to say because it's interesting too so the jax lab is the big source for mice and i don't know if these subsidiary labs are originally jax derived or not but nonetheless the breeding protocols appear to be synchronized across these populations so let's look at the the two pages from the jax lab okay so this is just an informational page intended for people working with lab mice ordered from the jack's lab so that they will know how to think about patterns that they're seeing and how to treat their animals for best success in fact one of the pages is like how to manage you know is your is your mouse colony draining your resources here's how to manage it but in any case do you want to read this sure so again

[Bret Weinstein]

jack's lab retirement age for breeder mice this is this is up now this is a contemporary live web page yeah after their litters are weaned breeder mice may have excuse me after their litters are weaned breeder mice that have reached specified ages are removed from the breeding colonies at the jackson laboratory these breeder mice are known as retired breeders retirement age is the age at which reproductive performance declines below acceptable levels this age varies among inbred strains mice from inbred strains that develop tumors at an early age have relatively young retirement ages for example akr j mice are retired at six months of age because many of these mice develop lymphocytic leukemia by eight to nine months of age mrlmpjalpr mice retire at four months of age because these mice develop massive lymph node enlargement the lymphoproliferative disease that is characteristic of these mice begins around eight weeks of age and by four months of age interferes with the well being of the mouse holy cow yes most mrlmpjlpr mice die between seventeen and twenty two weeks of age so that is half a year less than half a year whereas wild type mice are living at least a year and a half on average if not more you want me to

[Heather Heying]

keep going yeah well i would just want to point out a couple things here one just the simple fact which is you know one of the things that carol greider told me in our very first conversation when i called her up out of the blue and just started to ask her about my hypothesis and how it might fit with things was all mice dive cancer that is already telling you that these are not well constructed animals this is not a wild animal that's not true if you

[Bret Weinstein]

go there is not a species in existence for which all of them die of cancer that's not how selection works

[Heather Heying]

and why why would there be right especially an animal that has telomeres that are five to ten times as long as humans you could dial that back and get a lot of cancer protection these animals are all dying of cancer so the irony here is that the short lives of mice aren't inherently this short that these ants animals are dying early from cancer but late enough that it doesn't show up in the breeding colony so the point is well except

[Bret Weinstein]

it apparently even does well we've pushed

[Heather Heying]

it so far that you begin to have these effects but the basic point is an animal that could live four years is living a maximum of two years because it's being overrun by tumors that's insane and the idea that we

[Bret Weinstein]

and that we're using them as our healthy specimens in which to test our

[Heather Heying]

new drugs right oh it's it's it's

[Bret Weinstein]

and to test the possible toxicity of cell phone radiation not ionizing it must be safe right think again this is

[Heather Heying]

madness and you know why are we using these animals well they do have one advantage the inbreeding and they're literally breeding brothers with sisters so this is like the highest level of inbreeding you could get creates a uniform genetic background so why does that matter matter well because if the mice varied genetically the way wild mice would it would introduce some noise to your experiment the way humans do right of course but here's the point you are obsessed with doing away with genetic noise genetic noise is bad for an experiment it makes it harder to understand what you're seeing because you could get patterns just by random you could group mice that have a greater propensity for this or a lower propensity for that so yeah noise is bad all else being equal but all else isn't equal the obsession with getting rid of that noise has resulted in mice that don't have noise what they have is a radically distorted signal that misleads us scientifically right in fact in scientific circles they say something like monkeys mislead mice lie right what does mice lie mean well it means that they exactly mislead you in the wrong direction here's one of the reasons okay so you want to go back to reading that jack's lab piece mice from other

[Bret Weinstein]

frequently used inbred strains you don't have

[Heather Heying]

to read all those you just retire

[Bret Weinstein]

from breeding colonies at seven or eight months of age inbred mice from one strain that are made to inbred mice of a second inbred strain tend to have a longer period of efficient reproductive performance no duh then inbred mice made it to other mice in the same strain that's because they have outbred them i'm sorry this is sorry to read mice used in hybrid matings retire between eight and eleven months of age okay

[Heather Heying]

now let's go to the other informational page that i just found this morning

[Bret Weinstein]

at the jack's lab so before before i start reading from before as jen is finding that i understand why especially for lab scientists you want to control as much as possible this is this is one of the fundamental differences between field science and lab science actually and i think one of one of the one of the things i'm developing in my head is that actually the mistake that most of the modern world is making people who think of themselves as scientists and not with regard to what science is is a is a misunderstanding of science as the highly controlled reductionist environment of lab science so i i do understand that you would prefer to be able to control everything however if what you're fundamentally doing is biology and you're not working on asexual organisms the idea that you have an invariant gene pool in your population is insane it is it is so unlike what the circumstances would be that i can't actually figure out the just justification beyond an economic and an efficiency one well

[Heather Heying]

the irony here is that you don't actually have to create this problem with the telomeres in order to get the uniform genetic background so i agree i agree

[Bret Weinstein]

with you i think there's i think there's two different problems you know we're focused on the telomere one here and it's and it's huge but you know imagine back back when back when the human genome project was in full swing we're like oh we're gonna get it we're gonna have the human genome and everyone who knew anything about anything it's like well we're gonna have the genome of one person it's gonna be one guy one guy that's cool that's awesome but it's one guy we don't have the genome for humanity right we don't we're nowhere close we don't know what all of the allelic variations are across across any of the genes i think probably well right so the you know the idea that the one like what if everything that was decided about what is healthy for humans in which genetic testing could be done was based on that one guy that the human genome project managed to map we'd we'd be

[Heather Heying]

screwed yes that certainly a problem was a problem to begin with although i will say where did i did i read last week that the full genome sequence is now down below one hundred bucks so you know the point we got there fairly fast we got there fast but the irony is the answer isn't in the genome although hold up

[Bret Weinstein]

i in in recent years full genome sequence still didn't mean full genome sequence it meant introns exons sorry about exons

[Heather Heying]

yeah so yeah and the you know as that discussion i did with joe rogan about this other part of the genome that isn't written in the language and may in fact be a massive power increaser in terms of the power of natural selection the point is there's a lot about the genome we don't understand and the fact of having the raw transcript of the gene the protein coding sequences just isn't as useful as you'd think because selection is so good that you wouldn't expect there to be you know we do have single gene errors that cause pathologies but those are pretty rare because selection gets rid of them and so the point is the pathologies that we were promised would be fixed when we finally had this transcript just weren't because that's not the cause of disease so anyway there's a lot down that road but the irony of the elongated telomere telomeres carol greider back when this was a live issue tested the hypothesis not mine mind you it was one that was on the table that the elongation of the telomeres was the result of inbreeding itself in other words inbreeding causes lots of harm maybe this is one of the harms she showed that it wasn't leaving my hypothesis for what it was as the only hypothesis standing and it's never been addressed but one of the consequences of my hypothesis is if uniform genetic background is what you're after and maybe it shouldn't be but we all understand why it's good all else being equal you don't want genetic noise misleading you you can get that without elongating the telomeres there are lots of ways to do that right you could monitor telomere lengths and you could breed animals that have a telomere length shorter or longer than the average in your colony in order to push it one way or the other i noticed actually in one of the things that you up there that males and females are bred for different lengths of time what's that about well one of the interesting facts that i ran across in my original research was that telomere lengths in males go in the reproductive cells of males go up the older the male is why would that be because you remember a few minutes ago we were talking about the fact that if you live in an environment that's very very dangerous it doesn't make sense to give you a lot of longevity because you're not going to be able to profit from it so it's better to protect you from cancer when you're young than it is to make you have a capacity for a long life well what if the environment is safe enough that you might well profit from a very long life how is selection going to discover that and alter your telomeres well the older a male is when he breeds the longer the telomeres are and the sperm that he passes on his genes with and so the point is that's a mechanism whereby selection in one generation can make an alteration in the right direction right that's an amazing discovery so anyway there's lots going on here but you could push the telomeres around either through monitoring and pushing them intentionally in the direction of whatever's best for a study animal animal you could make animals that were cancer prone at some useful level or cancer resistant at some useful level that you could run an experiment if you were trying to understand the tumor dynamics maybe you want some prone to cancer mice and some resistant to cancer mice and some normal mice you want to run three of these experiments in tandem that's perfectly foreseeable you could also stop throwing out the older mice right it's economically more efficient to breed younger animals but if it produces better test subjects you could allow them to have slower breeding and have their telomeres correct there's all sorts of things you can do in fact i tried to patent these methods went through the process got to the point where we had satisfied all of the complaints of the examiner we were right there they swapped out the examiner all the complaints were restored and it dropped was like this is pointless so we walked away but anyway there's lots

[Bret Weinstein]

that was fun

[Heather Heying]

the whole story is madness but okay you want to read the other jack's lab page okay so check this one out i am about to yes you are telomere length in

[Bret Weinstein]

animals is not significantly affected by inbreeding and domestication so that's going to be citing without citing the result that the greater lab did it varies across strains and substrains of mice as does lifespan and there is no direct correlation between telomere length and longevity within a population the telomere conundrum the use of mice as a model for human biology as a stand in for ourselves began more than a century ago since that time and for more than ninety years at the jackson laboratory countless discoveries in mice have taught us about mammalian genetics cancer immunology reproductive biology neuroscience and much more nonetheless there have been questions about how well discoveries made in mice actually translate to human clinical care recently conflicting data about the biology of telomeres the specialized structures at the ends of chromosomes oh recently conflicting data about the biology of telomeres the specialized structures at the ends of chromosomes has led to an assumption that puts into you know what they need there is an em dash two

[Heather Heying]

of them actually they should consult the ai yeah i think gives those things out like candy okay i'm going to

[Bret Weinstein]

start i'm going to read the sentence again recently conflicting data about the biology of telomeres the specialized structures at the ends of chromosomes has led to an assumption that puts into question the usefulness of mice for pre clinical discovery and therapy development the problem is the assumption is wrong why are telomeres important telomeres are needed for cell division and because they shorten with each cell division over time cells become unable to divide this has obvious implications for aging as well as for cancer because cancer cells overcome the limitations of the telo telomeres and just keep dividing if mouse telomeres have significantly different properties from human telomeres that would certainly affect findings from aging and cancer research in mice i just keep going yeah okay what do people assume about mouse telomeres carol greider who won the nobel prize for discovering and characterizing telomeres observed more than twenty years ago that telomeres and some inbred mouse strains are significantly longer than they are in

[Heather Heying]

some wild species okay so so yeah she did testing my hypothesis which they don't say anything about go ahead the

[Bret Weinstein]

data indicated that telomere length isn't a major factor in determining how long the mice live but some researchers inferred that inbred laboratory strains because of their controlled breeding regimens and other factors had developed longer telomeres over time if true that inference had the potential to skew cancer in aging research data and the quality of the drugs and therapies ultimately produced based on mouse extract experiments okay so

[Heather Heying]

the other researchers is at least an oblique reference to me i'm saying it's me alone but they know that this question circulates and so they're trying to address it and dispel it yep how

[Bret Weinstein]

do you know the assumptions are wrong the jack's lab continues further inquiry at jacks and its efforts to fully characterize the mice it uses in its own research and distributes to the global biomedical community wait they do their own research

[Heather Heying]

too they have they actually have a guy who specializes in telomeres yeah they

[Bret Weinstein]

have a research wing okay further inquiry at jax has revealed that telomere length varies between mouse species and subspecies length is not determined by whether a mouse is inbred or wild derived see that's

[Heather Heying]

carol's proof maybe there have been others but inbred is not the key yeah

[Bret Weinstein]

okay got it and it is not but you could totally read that if you don't you didn't if you weren't paying close attention that can sound like lab mice look the same as wild

[Heather Heying]

type mice it is i believe intentionally vaguely intentionally obscuring of reality yeah length

[Bret Weinstein]

is not determined by whether a mouse is inbred or wild derived and it is not affected by how long an inbred strain has been domesticated indeed various wild derived mice have telomeres that are shorter or longer on average than those of of c five seven bl six j one of the original inbred mouse strains and as greider hypothesized twenty years ago telomere length does not predict lifespan

[Heather Heying]

okay so we can stop there so this is all confused right telomere length does not predict lifespan because it's having a paradoxical effect here the telomeres are so long that the animals aren't dying from a failure to repair their bodies as we discussed last week actually their tissues look young even when they're old old unlike human tissues and other animals because they have a capacity to repair their tissues what they're dying of is cancer which they start getting in youth as a result of this madness with the breeding protocols so and it's it's

[Bret Weinstein]

hard to compare across species with such wildly different lifespans but their tissues continuing to look young when they're old are still new tissues in comparison to what

[Heather Heying]

mammal tissues can be right exactly exactly so anyway i think the whole thing is just so fascinating and i will remind people when i did this work back in ninety eight ninety nine i thought that the result was going to be profound embarrassment ass covering i was not expecting this to be well metabolized by the scientific community community but i did not imagine that they were going to just stare it down and keep doing what they do i did not imagine that they could possibly fail to fix the problem because the problem compounds itself when you start building a literature based on mice that are broken in a very systematic way that literature starts informing future experiments and so the point is you build a house house of cards and no reasonable scientist could want a house of cards they should want to actually to fix just if you it's like if you had a broken apparatus that kept giving you skewed results you would want to fix it because you're hollowing out your own you know source of well being you want to be able to predict things that are true and relevant to humans you don't want a mouse that lies to you so anyway i didn't not think that they would simply stare this down and yet here we are more than twenty years later yep and they're staring it down and it just i i don't get it i don't get it but that's where we are but but the

[Bret Weinstein]

upshot is which you you did mention in the middle of all of this is that the expectation is that the non ionizing radiation being that is being that the rats and mice in the study are being exposed to is acting the same way way that toxins in drugs are acting in in other studies and that we can see as evidence in the recall of drugs from fen phen to i can't remember all the

[Heather Heying]

drugs that have been pulled seldane vioxx

[Bret Weinstein]

and presumably many more warrants being pulled

[Heather Heying]

absolutely and it just takes forever to find out how much damage they do to people but the point is the mice lied to us in the first place which i didn't think pharma knew at the beginning beginning but they figured it out pretty quickly and now they have an incentive to preserve it which might be why the system is staring this down because there's a huge there's a couple of financial incentives for maintaining this one pharma the business model doesn't

[Bret Weinstein]

benefit when humanity gets healthier it doesn't

[Heather Heying]

benefit when humanity gets healthier and it certainly does benefit by mice that lie and say whatever you think is toxic isn't right that means you can bring a lot of stuff to market that would never get there otherwise and as i've said before the federal government after vioxx did a three hundred page report on the future of drug safety you can find it online you can search it online you will not find mice mentioned you will not find the genus muss mentioned and you will not find telomeres mentioned so they're trying to explain what happened during vioxx they do not touch this issue they get nowhere near near it which i tried to alert them to and they blew me off but anyway from your perspective how good are your airpods for you the answer is that depends if you're a mouse that was bred in one of these idiotic protocols if you are a mouse where do you get airpods you probably want airpods maybe more than one set if you're not a mouse then this is an indicator that it's actually dangerous the fact that the mice live longer is not good news news it's bad news because a toxin that you will not tolerate well will function like chemotherapy or in this case like radiation therapy does on a cancer patient

[Bret Weinstein]

fantastic man

[Heather Heying]

it just gets weirder yeah it does

[Bret Weinstein]

just get weirder so okay we're we're going to talk a bit about the ninth circuit here we're going to save sharks for next time time i know you're relieved okay yeah fair enough so

[Heather Heying]

is the ninth circuit composed of judges who are below average in height it would be cool if we could call them a short circuit i just think that would be all right yeah well

[Bret Weinstein]

i mean if they we got some live ones there okay okay so we have talked before i think about this korean women's sports spa of which there are two branches in washington state where we live both one north of seattle one south of seattle it is a traditional korean spa where most of it is a series of baths of different temperatures and there's a dry sauna and a steam sauna and then there are services you can get like a traditional korean body scrub and there are showers both sort of western standing showers and more traditional seated showers and then there's another part of the spa where you are not expected to be naked where you wear a robe and those are where the infrared sauna rooms are but in everything in the first part that i was just i was describing you are required to be naked that is traditional and it is women only a few years back a dude who decided that he got off on having the world view him as female female tried to gain access to the spa and the not just korean but conservative christian korean owners of the spa said sorry sir no no penises allowed and he

[Heather Heying]

i believe it's peni i think it's

[Bret Weinstein]

peens actually if it's if if what's going on in squamates is any indication

[Heather Heying]

well and hammers where it's ball peens so those things travel together i think

[Bret Weinstein]

that's a different peen

[Heather Heying]

i think it

[Bret Weinstein]

is a different peen lizards have hemipenes right right and and i every time i talk about hemipenes someone is like it's penis like you know what freaking herpetologist i'm not saying that all of us aren't pronouncing it wrong but in herpetology where we study these things we call them hemipenes hemipenes yeah i i'm going to go with penises for now what did you correct peni oh peni obviously penix perhaps okay so dude walks in tries to get access to the traditional korean women's spa a spa that i have been to both places many many times it's wonderful and when this was first beginning to get public attention actually i tweeted about it so i wanted to start start start there if if you can see my screen here so back in this is november twenty twenty four i think i was quote tweeting a katie davis court tweet saying she was saying i'm maybe mispronouncing people's names judge margaret mccown appointed by bill clinton pushed back on snider and argued a business cannot discriminate based on gender identity she said it's not biological women oh my god god it's not biological women are welcome she said oh this is just this is confusing so i'm going to go back this is talking about this judge is saying no that dude who claims he's a woman has to be allowed because he's actually a woman this is you know the confusion is they call themselves trans women therefore they're women so i said olympus spa a fantastic korean female only nude spa with two locations near seattle was told in twenty twenty two that it needed to stop being so bigoted and just let in dudes who were pretending to be wealthy women the fight continues if this judge gets her way olympus spa will surely fail i won't be going back if naked cosplaying men are there who wins then only the delusional and the predatory the rest of us lose someone responded to me and said i like koreans and i like nude women tell me more about this gender id thing lol yep it's going to fail and i said yep this is exactly it isn't it straight men like naked women the idea of an all women nude spa is therefore of interest to straight men add a strong dose of depravity with a dash of cult behavior and you've got a perfect storm the all women nude spa has to go because its existence isn't fair to depraved men and the my original interlocutor said the depravity barrier would mean you would only get depraved or inebriated men showing up it would be a horrible experience this is exactly right so what has happened now now is march twelfth a few days almost a week ago we had the ninth circuit of appeals finally bring down decision on this matter and wouldn't you know it they sided with the dude so i'm just going to share a few things i've got a number of bookmarks here this is in the in the decision siding with the dude they say among other things that the hrc which is the washington washington's human rights commission which is who is actually bringing this case on behalf of the dude who's declared that he's a woman the hrc alleged the entrance policy violated wlad a state public accommodations law that prohibits public facilities from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation under washington law sexual orientation is defined to include quote heterosexuality homosexuality bisexuality and gender expression or identity so that was news to me yeah a because like that would seem to be washington state conflating all people who are claiming they are trans with oh autogynephiles because autogyphiles you know men who walk around like getting off on the idea that they are perceived as women that is a kind of a sexual orientation that that is a that is a kink right but the vast majority of people who are pulling this are claiming it's not that it's it has nothing to do with sexual orientation but the washington washington state law says it does and that is the basis on which the judges said yeah you got to let the dude in because this is his sexual orientation that you are acting against not so so

[Heather Heying]

twisted it is so twisted effectively the logic is is you couldn't prevent lesbians from going to the spa good shouldn't be able to but because you can't prevent lesbians you can't keep a straight man out as long as he pretends to be a woman and therefore a lesbian or something like that yeah wow

[Bret Weinstein]

yep okay so next one we have in in the same case it just got released we turn to this and this is still this is still the majority opinion we turn to the spa's final first amendment claim that the hrc's enforcement of wlad interferes with both the intimate and expressive association between women at the spa the constitution protects the freedom of association as quote a fundamental element of personal liberty and quote an indispensable means preserving other individual liberties that right protects both intimate association that is the choices to enter into and maintain certain intimate human relationships and expressive association which is quote a right to associate for the purpose of engaging in those activities protected by the first amendment speech assembly petition for the redress of grievances and the exercise of religion these are fundamental and important rights but none of them are implicated here to begin the spa is not an intimate association the bottom line is that payment of the entrance fee is the price of admission and any woman except a transgender woman who has not yet received gender confirmation surgery affecting her genitalia who can pay the fee can be admitted so this is them just being confused about what a woman is yep again all the activists had to do was start getting the majority of us for a very long time to say okay i guess i'll call you a trans woman even though you're a man and suddenly a whole bunch of people are very confused apparently or pretending to be confused about that making them somehow magically transforming them into women which of course it doesn't we had three dissents the first so hold

[Heather Heying]

on before you get to the dissents i want to point out that the people who were actually four dissents most alarmed by the linguistic changes were right yes that the point is getting people like me frankly to behave out of courtesy by calling someone i did it

[Bret Weinstein]

too for a while it's been longer

[Heather Heying]

for me but yeah but nonetheless the point i mean and it was well intentioned and i still believe in it in a decent world the point is you do not want to confront somebody who has gender dysphoria and has decided to live as the other sex you don't want to be constantly rubbing it in their face but it's a matter of courtesy as jordan peterson famously said back in in twenty fifteen or sixteen but the point is if you allow that okay i'll call you what it seems like i should call you based on your presentation then the point is oh well that creates the impression that actually you agree that this person is actually a woman and once you have this agreement then the point is the court is composed of people who've been circulating in that milieu where it's understood that this is the right thing to do and it may turns it into a fact right from their perspective even though it's not a biological fact so anyway i just think that's stunning that the language stuff actually turns out even if you just try to do the right thing linguistically it ends up coming back to haunt you in some material way well and i mean i think

[Bret Weinstein]

this does point out and you know we've talked a lot privately and you know maybe some on dark horse as well about about some of the extraordinary differences between science and the law science ultimately is not a semantic game although it can be played that way but science is about discovering the truth and if it turns out that we're using the wrong words for things that are themselves misleading we change the words and that can mean the communication going back into history can get confusing and in our world this happens the most when we discover cladistic relationships that we misunderstood before and we change the scientific names of organizations and people are like what what is that i don't even know what that is now it's like well we are trying to match up we are trying to communicate but we are also trying to describe history accurately and that is you know sorry if it's confusing but ultimately what we are beholden to is the truth and the law is inherently a social construct in which it is beholden to pre existing writing that can be interpreted and so it is always a human game it's always a social construct and that's not to say that many in the law are not trying to discover what is best and what is true but if you have people who are actively engaged a professional level with the interpretation of what people say they are more likely to get confused when people walk up to them and say well i'm a woman because i'm a trans woman now that what i just said would seem to suggest that scientists would be more resistant to this nonsense they don't seem to be so i have no experience excuse for the scientists who have fallen prey to this but i think it is not okay but a little bit understandable that people who have devoted themselves to interpretation of words should be confused when words have been weaponized and then you know thrown at people as if they

[Heather Heying]

are the truth yeah well you know there's this sapir whorf hypothesis which in its strong form just isn't true the idea is if you don't have language for something you can't even even comprehend it and that's not right but well

[Bret Weinstein]

and that what what languages have words for tells you something inherent about the the brains of the people who are

[Heather Heying]

using that language right and the point is it's not true in its strong form but in its weak form there's a lot to it right the idea that things that for which you have language get elaborated in the mind you you can deal with them more easily than something for which you just don't even have the materials with which to handle it and so the point is maybe this is why this is why orwell's frankly ridiculous proposal about what would happen to language turns out to be exactly true and literal right is because the point is that's going to be the first front is we're going to we're going to we're going to grab your mind by altering what is said and once we alter what is said then the point is all of the stuff the actual material shifting of stuff becomes way easier yep i bet that

[Bret Weinstein]

is it yeah okay so i've read a couple of little excerpts from from the majority opinion that says olympus spa the korean women's spa with a couple of outposts outside of seattle has to let in dudes as long as they say they're women and the primary descent begins as such this is a three three judge pan panel from the ninth circuit that made this decision two judges on the majority and lee he writes korean spas are not like spas of the four seasons or ritz carlton with their soothing ambient music and lavender aroma and private lounges steeped in and he his last name is lee he may actually be of korean descent i'm not i'm not sure stepped in centuries old tradition korean spas require their patrons to be fully naked as they sit in communal saunas and undergo deep tissue scrubbing to their entire bodies in an open area filled with other unclothed patrons given this intimate environment korean spas separate patrons as well as employees by their sex the state of washington however threatened prosecution against olympus spa a female only korean spa because it denied entry to a preoperative transgender female that is a biological male who identifies as female but has not undergone sex reassignment surgery now under edict from the state women and even girls as young as thirteen years old must be nude alongside patrons with exposed male genitalia as they receive treatment treatment and female spa employees must provide full body massages to naked pre operative transgender women with intact male sexual organs this is not what washington state law requires so lee goes on to write a very considered dissent actually i know i got a little brief thing there if you could just give me my screen back for a second in i don't i don't know the legal stuff you may know it better than i do but the full court so that was a that was a three judges from the ninth circuit that we've heard a little bit from the from the main majority opinion majority opinion and the dissent the full court was asked to rehear the case en banc is i'm using a french pronunciation but i don't know the court refused and one of the other judges in the ninth circuit van dyke disagreed with that refusal writing his dissent which is technically a dissent from denial of rehearing on bunk and so there's actually three of these descent from denial of rehearing on bunk so she

[Heather Heying]

thought it should be he thought should

[Bret Weinstein]

be reheard yes yeah and okay or maybe there were two of these i don't remember you know there were there were three descent descent of these um again i just don't know the language um can you see my screen now now yes okay so one of them i'm not going to read anything from it basically agrees with this guy tung he says you know fairly measured let us be clear about what the law in washington requires under its law the state can disregard a small business owner's christians beliefs christian beliefs and force her family run korean spa to allow a nude man who claims to be a woman into an intimate space right reserved for its female patrons yet under that same law private clubs embracing secular values can refuse entry to that man schools and cemeteries can refuse service to that man too so long as they are run by institutions deemed sectarian thus while the law purports to protect any washington resident from so called gender identity discrimination the state's prohibition exempts some secular organizations and certain religious ones it just does not exempt the small business in its exercise of its religious beliefs here how is it that how is this at all how is this at all a neutral law of general applicability it is not the panel's conclusion to the contrary immunizing the law from any serious first amendment scrutiny should have been vacated i dissent okay and then we have the dissent that got the attention on social media this week which begins as such from van dyke this is a case about swinging dicks the christian owners of olympus spa a traditional korean women only nude spa excuse me i'm going to start again writes circuit judge van dyke this is a case about swinging dicks the christian owners of olympus spa a traditional korean women only nude spa understandably don't want them in their spa their spa their female employees and female clients don't want them in their spa either but washington state insists on them and now so does the ninth circuit you may think that swinging dick shouldn't appear in a judicial opinion you're not wrong but as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion i hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at olympus spa some as young as thirteen to be visually assaulted by the real real thing sometimes it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing even eager to ignore the consequences that their frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls yet if harmful and unfortunate consequences were all this case was about we'd have to shrug and say that's what comes with living in a democracy unless the constitution is implicated we get what we voted for good and hard hard he goes on but the judges who wrote the majority opinion are outraged really so and this actually shows up earlier in the published set of opinions which is why i have it outlined here the way i do they respond to him van dyke they said the american legal system has long been regarded as a place to resolve disputes in a dignified and civil manner or as justice o' connor put it to quote disagree without being disagreed agreeable it is not a place for vulgar barroom talk nor is it a place to suggest that fellow judges have collectively lost their minds or that they are woke judges complicit in a scheme to harm ordinary americans that language makes us sound like juveniles not judges and it undermines public trust on the courts no no it does not do you know what undermines public trust in the courts it's you guys and your majority opinion and the fact that you are letting a dude with yes a swinging ball dick show up in a traditional korean women's spa that's not van dyke writing it into his opinion because it's the only way apparently to get anyone's attention that is you they write again that language makes us sound like juveniles not judges and it undermines public trust in the courts the lead dissent's use of such coarse language and invective may make for publicity or entertainment value but it has no place in a judicial opinion the lead dissent ignores ordinary principles of dignity and civility and demeanour this court neither the parties nor the panel dissent found it necessary to invoke such crude and vitriolic language decorum and collegiality demand more these are such clowns these judges are such clowns and one of them is a woman who apparently gives no about the women and girls as young as thirteen who might go to this amazing spa and be exposed to a very confused and mentally unstable man who's got his balls and dick out more likely frankly most of us who once went to this amazing business are not going to go anymore they're going to have put out of business a korean family who happened to be conservative christians because of what because of confusion about basic biology and ideology that is driving the entire state mad all of the west coast certainly the state of washington it's frankly unbelievable and i just i love their outrage that is directed at the one guy who stood up was like you know what this is actually about i'll tell you what this is actually about since we're so busy having decorum that no one is talking about it this is actually about the swinging dicks and the fact that women who've gone to a naked spa for women don't want to see him at the

[Heather Heying]

moment i love the construction that it makes them look like no it's it's like imagine that you know the king's court had a rebuttal to the little boy who pointed out that the king was in fact not wearing any clothes and it's like this makes him sound naked it's like like no he is naked but it makes him sound so

[Bret Weinstein]

no it's preposterous feelings have to be protected you know the kings the emperor's the naked emperor's feelings have to be protected the confused mentally unstable perhaps the mentally unstable man who thinks he's a woman's feelings have to be protected you know who doesn't have to be protected the child who points out that the emperor is naked the women who are or having body scrubs next to some dude doesn't matter we don't matter it's the feelings of the deranged people yeah

[Heather Heying]

the feelings of the that's what needs

[Bret Weinstein]

to be protected that is what the state of washington and the ninth circuit is protecting correct good job guys especially

[Heather Heying]

you know deranged is one thing there are a lot of ways to not understand reality you're talking about a version of misunderstanding reality that is actually materially dangerous and well understood to be one of the most terrible crimes yeah right rape is a crime that is perpetrated by men on women because of differential biology and so the point is this

[Bret Weinstein]

is not to be fair rape is very unlikely to happen in the middle of a spa where you're the one

[Heather Heying]

guy yeah okay but let's follow follow this through then the idea is you have a pervert and i'm not synonymizing a trans person with a pervert but i'm saying this is a trans person

[Bret Weinstein]

any dude who's trying to force his way into this spot is a pervert

[Heather Heying]

that's what i'm saying yes that's a pervert and so the point is okay how many ingredients do you have to add to this stew before you've created the very toxic environment in which that crime is going to happen not necessarily in the spot but the point is you're talking about a pervert who likes the idea of bringing his dick into this environment because of a legal loophole that somehow the ninth circuit can't see or refuses to acknowledge right that is a dangerous situation and it is going to result in actual women being hurt right so there is a part of me that wonders if there is not some creative solution here like imagine six large level headed men go to the spa declare themselves women and stand at the entrance and make sure that nobody would want to come in right in other words i don't want those guys in there but if the loophole is carved out then maybe the loophole could be used to actually protect the women who want to be in the part of the spa where you're naked by you know saying hey who are you to say i'm not one right if you're going to let that guy in then guys who are willing to stand up to this madness could potentially use that loophole to protect the women there

[Bret Weinstein]

i don't see how that would work at the spa i mean even if i could see how it worked i

[Heather Heying]

can't imagine cost effective i've never seen the inside of the spa for reasons

[Bret Weinstein]

you'll have you have never tried to see the inside of this spot that is true and but i will i will actually say you know i was i was very quick to say you know i don't rape's not really the issue here actually you know the the spa it's they've got two of them they're a little bit different but the the idea is the same and they're really there are two there are several parts of each of them one of them is naked required you are not allowed to wear clothes but for something on your hair so that your hair doesn't get in the pools and such and then in the infrared sauna parts of the spa which is a series of which is a bunch of different rooms at different temperatures most of which are fairly small all of which are hard to see into all of which have closed doors you only have on a light loose fitting rope in the a very brightly lit big open part of the spa where everyone is required to be naked you know a rape is not going to happen but in those in those infrared sauna rooms where okay fine you're not technically naked someone could get but actually so i think there is actually there is actually risk there is actually physical risk in addition to psychological harm and and you know just just the harm of continuing to live under orwellian conditions in which we pretend that up is down and black is white and what we all know to be true because we are part of a lineage that's half a billion years old at least in which it has been true isn't true because some idiot judges don't want to be told they're juvenile but are acting like babies

[Heather Heying]

the danger i was pointing to it's not necessarily in the spa the spa is being forced to participate in a perverted delusion in somebody who is dangerous presumably in the rest of their life so the point is the encouraging of that delusion in this case by the courts even is a dangerous thing in and of itself but short of rape what the court is doing is it is sanctioning threatening an assault assault is not battery assault is a threat and the point is a guy who gets off on the idea of being allowed into a naked female space and having his dick show that guy is in a position to be threatening just by his very nature in that condition the fact that he gets off on that threat he gets off on the fact that fact that he can he can get into this place is an assault and the court is facilitating it yes

[Bret Weinstein]

they are yes they are yeah i think i i think they did all the work here for us all i did was find the right sections and read them in the right order but yeah that language makes us sound like juveniles not judges and it and it meaning the language that van dyck used undermines public trust in the court no no no no no that is you

[Heather Heying]

people well it's not even that undermines trust no what undermines trust is not being trustworthy just think about the word trustworthy are you worthy of trust no obviously not you're obviously not smart enough

[Bret Weinstein]

to protect women having judges that are not trustworthy undermines trust in the court

[Heather Heying]

yeah that's the thing that does it right there yeah that's it's stunning but i also think it reminds me a little bit of the i've told this story before but at some point my wonderful grandfather got very angry at my brother for a cursing in some context long forgotten i think although eric might remember but i don't remember and what he said to him was what my grandfather said to eric was don't you dare do that someday you're going to need those words words right and his point was don't burn them out because there's a reason that we have the capability to do that and my point would be that descent as much as it is absolutely jarring to encounter that kind of language in a descent boy is this the place for it absolutely

[Bret Weinstein]

and you know and it it's literally relevant yes so it's not it's not just i am i'm fed up and i'm going to swear now to get your attention like can anyone else see that what we're actually talking about here is letting a dude fully intact into women's faces what's the difference how would you tell i know there's an easy

[Heather Heying]

one here yep yeah yeah all right well that's wild yeah that is wild

[Bret Weinstein]

next time on dark horse sharks aren't real

[Heather Heying]

surely surely even if the worst is true and sharks are maybe not even paraphyletic but polyphyletic even if that's true some group is going to retain the designation shark you know what's actually

[Bret Weinstein]

going to end up being true if this phylogenetic work is true i will come back to it even though it might bore the pants off almost everyone is that skates and rays do you know what the latin name for the skates and rays are who is the

[Heather Heying]

skates and razar and how did he get that awesome position so rays like

[Bret Weinstein]

stingrays and manta rays which we've talked about recently and skates which like no one ever really thinks about them very much except the skates themselves but rays and skates are a monophyletic group they have the batoidia batoids nice yeah because they perfect yeah yeah but it's going to turn out to be i'll just you know maybe i won't even come back to it because i'm just going to give the punchline here of this work if it's true the phylogenetic work is that the raisins skates the batoids are also sharks

[Heather Heying]

they're they're also sharks

[Bret Weinstein]

yeah they're embedded within the sharks they're

[Heather Heying]

embedded within the sharks so so it's monophyletic but had excluded a group that needed to be included rendering it it was paraphyletic got it okay that's wild i would point out out that in a sexual context yes it is more normal to bore the pants onto someone

[Bret Weinstein]

this is not a sexual context no

[Heather Heying]

it's not but that's a great joke and i think i got the timing right even though nobody laughed you don't jen might have snickered but go back and watch the tape it's a good joke and it was pretty well delivered

[Bret Weinstein]

all right okay we're going to take a little break and then we'll be back with the q and so join us please consider joining us at locals and and if you can't join us right now you can ask questions now but it'll it'll still be up as are all the past q and a's and and some other original content so check us out there and also take a look at our sponsors this week which were crowd health and toops and puri that's toops t o u p which makes among other things this fabulous frankincense face balm and puree which makes great really clean supplements and yeah we'll be back next week same time same place and until you see us next time be good to the ones you love eat good food and get outside

[Heather Heying]

be well and don't read the comments

[Bret Weinstein]

it