← Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels
Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels
The Vaccine Debate, Stargate mRNA Tech, Lab Leak Theory & more with Heather Heying Ph.D
01:34:11
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- [00:02]
Jillian Michaels
Remember last year's amazing trip?
- [00:04]
Dr. Heather Heying
That cute first birthday party?
- [00:06]
Jillian Michaels
All those photos, all those memories can be freed from your phone with a Shutterfly photo book. Rediscover and share your favorite moments with those you love.
- [00:15]
Dr. Heather Heying
You'll be amazed how easy it is.
- [00:17]
Jillian Michaels
To make a photo book with Shutterfly and enjoy it for years to come. Get 40% off orders over $29 with code pod40utterfly.com and make something that means something. The PC gave us computing power at home, the Internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language, using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift, a new podcast for Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Ettlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us, listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:59]
Dr. Heather Heying
This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast and even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply.
- [01:30]
Jillian Michaels
Today I'm joined by evolutionary biologist Dr. Heather Hang.
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Dr. Heather Heying
The best move with regard to the authorities is just do the opposite of what they're saying and you'll be better off.
- [01:40]
Jillian Michaels
She's a renowned author, podcaster, and former professor at Evergreen State College. She's here to explore the complexities at the heart of the vaccine debate.
- [01:49]
Dr. Heather Heying
An adjuvant is specifically a thing added to a vaccine in order to trigger the immune system to wake up and get alarmed. Some famous adjuvants have been Mercury MRNA.
- [02:03]
Jillian Michaels
Technology, the controversial world of gain of function research, and the sobering history of pathogen leaks from laboratories. With her expertise in evolutionary science and her sharp analytical lens, Dr. Hang helps us explore the delicate balance between scientific innovation and global safety.
- [02:23]
Dr. Heather Heying
It has been plausibly proposed that Lyme disease is a result of work that was being done by the military.
- [02:33]
Jillian Michaels
Let's dig in. Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels. This one is long overdue. I'm so excited to have you on. Heather Heng, welcome to the show. How are you?
- [02:47]
Dr. Heather Heying
I am so glad to be here, Gillian. I'm thrilled. And yeah, I'm just. I'M thrilled to be here talking to you.
- [02:54]
Jillian Michaels
I wanna mention you and I have discussed this briefly when we met at Dave Rubin's party, but I have been a fan of yours and your husband's since March of 2020. And I discovered the two of you because at that time, I was deep blue. And what I mean by deep blue is that I just ignore. Accepted what was fed to me. Like Covid came from a wet market. And we need to shut down wet markets. And anybody who thought this was from a lab was full blown QAnon, tin hatter, conspiracy theorist. And all of a sudden, I am listening to your husband and yourself break down the reasons you guys thought this came from a lab. And it had to do with something about the fear and cleavage site that was spliced into the virus's genome and the fact that there's the Wuhan Institute of Virol and there was no host animal and there was no incubation population. And at that moment, the two of you, I felt like I was Neo in the Matrix. Heather and I have never looked back. And that's why your work and your husband's work and I was insane when I got to first meet you. I was so excited. Is because you guys have changed me. I would say on a cellular level, you gave me that red pill. And I don't mean the Republican pill, but the kind of wake up down the rabbit hole, nothing ever looks the same, you're changed forever moment. And as you mentioned, you've been right about nearly all of it since then. And now today or a few days ago, the CIA has just come out and said, yeah, Mia Coba came from a lab and it has destroyed people's faith in the legacy media, in the powers that be. Which is why.
- [04:48]
Dr. Heather Heying
As it should.
- [04:49]
Jillian Michaels
As it should. Which is why your work and your husband's work has been so influential, in my opinion. I wanna talk a little bit, first off, about the Dark Horse podcast. Can you tell me a little bit about it?
- [05:02]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah, absolutely. So, Brett Weinstein, my husband, and I are both evolutionary biologists who got canceled in when a mob showed up in his classroom claiming he was a racist. He's not. He wasn't then. He never has been. Neither am I. They later claimed the same about me. And so we were, for the first time since finishing grad school in the position of trying to figure out how to make a go of it in the world. And for the next couple of years, we began to do speaking events. We got a book contract. We wrote a book together, which is something we've been talking about doing forever. And as Covid hit, we were having these conversations around our dinner table with our sons about what it was, what it meant, where this virus is from, what the lockdowns were about, whether masks were effective. And Brett had already launched Dark Horse as a podcast that he was having with guests. And I said, you know, we should be doing. We should be having these conversations in front of an audience. And so we began doing so in March of 2020. We had at that point a podcast studio in downtown Portland, Oregon, where we were. The lockdowns had hit and Brett and our then, gosh, he would have been 15 year old son Zach, went downtown, broke lockdown protocol middle of the night, three nights running, dismantled the studio in downtown Portland and rebuilt it in our home. And we started podcasting less than a week later from our house, which they built it with cedar behind us, a little bit like the cedar behind me now. But at first people are like, where are they? A sauna? What is going on? But there were a host of other.
- [06:49]
Jillian Michaels
Things to pay attention to. But I'm glad people were concerned about the wood in your podcast.
- [06:56]
Dr. Heather Heying
The wood, yes, it was alarming to some people. Got it. And so, you know, we're not. Neither of us are virologists, vaccinologists, epidemiologists, public health experts. None of this. What we are is scientists. We're evolutionary biologists, we are generalists. We look at patterns and try to figure out if they are actually real patterns or if they are coincidences that our human brains have made into patterns when there aren't any real patterns there. We made mistakes and then we always came back and corrected them. We disagreed with one another, but with affection. And yes, we began getting into the technical stuff. And this was, man, it felt like the wild west then in terms of scientific publishing, Suddenly all of these papers that normally would have been paywalled, they would have been in peer review forever. They were just flooding the preprint servers. And I have always been both a fan and a critic of the scientific literature. And since not being a professor anymore in 2017, I hadn't had very good access to the scientific literature because it tends to be paywalled unless you have a university cred. And so suddenly, everything was available. And not only was everything available, but it was just, it was coming out fast and furious. And for a moment, you know, for a few months, there was just everything to be seen. And we both like, I'm more into the literature than he is. We're Just, you know, reading it voraciously. I got some stuff wrong. I got some stuff right. But as we read it, we just talked about it on air. I went like, oh, huh, it looks like. Let me see. I think it was in New York that the, you know, from on what they did was they said, okay, we're going to cut out all of the direct trains, but we're going to let. Because essential workers have to keep doing their essential working thing, we're going to let the trains that stop everywhere keep running. Well, you have trains that stop everywhere and you're letting in virus and in people constantly. And so these are the trains. And there was a really good, I think, an epidemiological study that looked and went like, you know what? If you kept the fast, if you kept the direct trains running and cut some of the trains that stop everywhere a little bit, then you actually will do a better job of getting people where they need to go and of cutting access the virus to people. So part of what we were doing in the early days of COVID was like, oh, this hadn't occurred to me. But yes, this hypothesis that this paper tests, which is, are the public health measures that are being handed down by the authorities exactly the wrong thing to do? Oh, yeah, it turns out they are. Oh, go figure. And so, you know, once that starts happening, once you start like, huh, okay, well, if they got the trains wrong, I wonder what else they got wrong. And of course, you know, now we're five years later, almost like pretty much everything. And, you know, what we started saying on Dark Horse within months, certainly within a year of COVID breaking onto the planet was if you don't have the time or the wherewithal or whatever to be assessing these things independently on your own. Even though I would argue that everyone should be doing that to some degree for themselves, for themselves. The best move with regard to the authorities is just do the opposite of what they're saying and you'll be better off. Definitely. If you get sick, don't go back home with your family and lock yourself inside with them. Definitely. If you're sick, don't go to a hospital and get put on a ventilator or their newfangled drugs. What you should do is spend time outside getting sunlight, make sure your vitamin D levels are up, be active, you know, eat good food. All of these things that they had, the authorities had nothing to say about. And in fact, they were telling us to do the opposite. You know, they were locking down beaches and parks and skate parks, filling skate parks with sand. You remember this? It was a sea.
- [10:50]
Jillian Michaels
Oh, absolutely. Do I remember? They filled the very famous skate park in Venice beach with sand. And I remember thinking, this is dystopian. I want to talk a little bit first about how you've been. Both of you have been absolutely crucified for being right. Now, can we go back to the beginning, the racist piece? And I want to talk about this just for one second. What I have found is that when they, whoever they may be, go after somebody, or in this case, you and your husband, when they don't, you. You come back stronger than ever. I've seen it with Joe Rogan. I've seen it with Megyn Kelly. I've seen it with the two of you. It's like being forged in fire. They tried to kill you, calling you racists, excommunicating you in 2017. And essentially you survived it. They weaponized you, and here we are. So let's. Let's start with what happened there, and then what happened when you guys started telling the truth or what you perceive to be the truth with regard to Covid. Vaccines for Covid and so on.
- [12:03]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah. Well, let me start with the end there and say the expression I started using when our college, Evergreen, The Evergreen State College, blew up on us and made us public enemies, number one. Whereas before we'd been their, you know, their top professors, their favorite professors. And, you know, I should say none of our students ever turned on us. None of our students ever turned on us. Our students remained loyal and staunch and defended us, even though that cost them as well. And what it felt like was. Was going through the looking glass. That was the phrase that I started using. Like, okay, we're here. Like, oh, my God, don't call me a racist. I'm not a racist. That's terrible. Oh, don't. And what you see is other people going like, oh, shit, that thing that's happening to them. What if they call me a racist? That's terrifying. I can't let that happen. And so any of these epithets, racist, transphobe, anti vaxxer, all of them, like, you know what, you called me that. I checked. I'm not. And you know. Or that word you're using, it's not even a real thing. Or, you know, in the case of, like, transphobe or anti vaxxer. Yep. No, Very much still a fan of the idea of vaccines. But these things you're calling vaccines, they're not. And also all the things that are vaccines that are being given to children that have never been tested against placebo. Also not a fan anymore, so still love the idea in principle of vaccines. And I'm. Both Brett and I are super vaccinated because we're tropical biologists. Like against yellow fever, against rabies, against all these things. Right, right. I don't trust any of them at this point. Oh, Jesus. Because almost none of them have been tested against placebo. And add to that, what happened to the childhood vaccine schedule? Like, you're a few years younger than me, but what we got in the 70s and 80s, it was a tiny fraction of what kids are getting now. And why? Is it because the threat of infectious disease is way worse. No. No, it's not. So to go back to your question, which I, which I evaded, there we were at the Evergreen State College, which was an amazing, amazing experimental public college with full time programs. I took, I did so I ran several study abroad trips for my students in Panama and Ecuador. Took, took students, some of whom had never been more than 50 miles from their birthplace. Helped them get. And took them to the Amazon. Blew their minds. It's such a gift to be able to do this for students, with students, for people, and to just really come to know the incredible capacity that most humans actually have. Like I have said that I had always been kind of a misanthrope. Like I preferred the company of non human animals to most humans. And when I became a professor at Evergreen, that changed. Because almost to a person at this non elite, non selective college, my students were capable and amazing and open and generous with their time and their efforts and they were just remarkable. So it wasn't them that turned on us. There was, as we all know now with diversity, equity and inclusion, a movement that had been growing by some measures, depending on when you count, since the 60s, since the 90s, for sure, in which what had been called political correctness was now being called wokeism, dei. Whatever it is in which it's not merit that you should focus on, it's not the quality of the ideas, it's your immutable demographic characteristics that matter. And so those things that are true of you that may mean that in a previous world or even in today's world have meant that you don't have as much privilege as someone else. We are supposed to reverse the tables of privilege, reverse the levers of privilege, and give voice preferentially to those who have not had voice before, regardless of whether or not they have anything to say. And so not only did of course men and white people and straight people get sort of demoted in this ideology, but so too did science. And so what happened at Evergreen was one of the things that's really remarkable is that the activists, the student activists who first showed up en masse at Brett's classro and demanded that he resign, and then it became a full fledged, just a takeover of the college over several days, they took video and uploaded it to the Internet. And without that, without them having done that, because they were so certain that they were in the right, they were so imprisoned in their own ideology, they thought that they were the ones who were going to be lauded by the world. We might like, the world might not know. And in the first terrifying days of that, when Brett and I are looking at each other going, like what? Like our entire world is not what it seemed. Everything is upside down. We are actually concerned for our lives and the safety of our children. No one will ever know. We really thought, no one's ever going to know. Because if we try to describe this, it's going to be, it's going to seem like we are the deranged ones. But then these videos got uploaded and you could see a lot of it. And of course, because the world is not filled entirely with ideologically deranged people, so many people showed up electronically to say, oh my goodness. I knew there were problems on college campuses. I knew that in the corporate world we were beginning to sacrifice quality for immutable characteristics. But I didn't know, I didn't have any idea what was actually possible here. The activist students who were sent by activist faculty in combination with a, we still don't know why, activist administration, a new president at the college managed to get rid of us and destroy the college. The college now has a third the enrollment that it did when that happened. And it's basically being, it's on life support by the taxpayers of Washington because it's a public school. It was an extraordinary institution that got destroyed and, and it's a shame, it's a shame. But as much as it felt at the time, like, what are we going to do? Like, I love this job. I got to take students to the Amazon. I got to know 25, 50, 75 students at a time in intense like 10 week, 20 week full academic year programs and teach them not just comparative anatomy and animal behavior, but philosophy of science. And we got to read literature and do art because they were these expansive big interdisciplinary programs, which is not like, like what you can do really anywhere else. It was a unique educational model and I still hope that somewhere else can create that Again, I think it's doable, and there are definitely some changes I would make. But that did forge us in fire, as you say, it was a crucible. And therefore, when Covid hit. And at first, we didn't see it as the same kind of thing at all. What we saw for sure was people who are trusting the authorities because their authorities aren't doing the right thing. Like, you need to have skepticism. You can't have full faith, and you can't have full cynicism and be assured of making the right decisions. You, of course, never can be assured of making the right decisions. But let's thread this needle. Let's listen to what the authorities are saying and see when it makes sense. See when they show their work. Right. And Fauci never showed his work. He just told us to comply because it was him saying it. Well, let's get the cdc.
- [19:43]
Jillian Michaels
There's no evidence for the six feet. There's no evidence for the mask. That's what you mean by show. There's no. Got it. Exactly.
- [19:50]
Dr. Heather Heying
Okay. Just like I am. You know, famously, he would later go on to say, I am science. Right. Like I am science.
- [19:56]
Jillian Michaels
Right.
- [19:57]
Dr. Heather Heying
And you know, therefore what you do.
- [19:58]
Jillian Michaels
Oh, yes.
- [20:01]
Dr. Heather Heying
Wow.
- [20:02]
Jillian Michaels
Yes, I remember that. Heather. When your metabolism is working properly, you're going to feel the benefits in pretty much every aspect of your life. And for me, there's an invaluable tool that gives insights to help maintain a healthy metabolism, and it's called Lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. And they have an app that lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs. Gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, your sleep, even manage your stress. All you've got to do is breathe into your lumen first thing in the morning, and you're going to know exactly what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fat or mostly carbs. And then you get a personalized plan for that day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after your workouts or your meals so you know exactly what's going on with your body in real time. And Lumen gives you tips on nutrition, fitness, sleep, and stress, as mentioned, to help you get your metabolism humming optimally. Your metabolism is your body's engine. It's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel. It keeps you going. It helps you stay focused. It can even allow you to track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause and adjust your recommendations. Keep your metabolism healthy healthy through hormonal shifts. Guys, if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to Lumen, Me forward slash Jillian to get 20 off your lumen. That's L U M E N dot me Jillian for 20 off your purchase. Thank you, lumen for sponsoring the episode. You think about companies with healthy sales like Chubbies or alo Gymshark Magic spoon skims. Sure, you think about a great product, an attractive brand, and marketing that lifts a heavy load. But an often overlooked secret is actually the business behind the business making, selling and for shoppers, buying simple for millions of businesses. That business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, period. Home of the number one checkout on the planet and the not so secret secret with shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Chubby's uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period@shopify.com Jillian all lowercase. Just go to shopify.com Jillian to upgrade your sewing today. Shopify.com Jillian Talk to me about this piece because I actually don't understand it. The gain of function research piece. So you and Brett had identified this very early on because you saw, and maybe you can elaborate on this, something in the virus's DNA that would not have evolved in or is very rare to have evolved naturally. This fear and cleavage site. And you guys nailed it from go first people I ever heard talk about it. What is gain of function research? Just broadly and as an evolutionary biologist, I mean, I mean, I would presume you're pretty damn qualified to talk about it. Or what do you. Yes or no?
- [23:37]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah, well, I mean, it's. Honestly, it's not a term I had ever heard before COVID hit because, you know, it's just not the realm where either Brett or I spend our time. I don't think either of us had ever heard of it. But the concept is really simple. The concept is we can do something to an organism that exists either with technology or with serial passaging, in which we basically put it on repeat for many, many generations and select for particular things in the virus. And you know, it can be done in anything really.
- [24:12]
Jillian Michaels
You control for evolution basically, is what you're saying.
- [24:15]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah, it's a kind of high tech, usually artificial selection to get to a result that you, the researcher are hoping to get to. Or it could just be like, let's see what happens and then you end up with something. So, yeah, there are a number of things and I think, you know, I mean, you mentioned of them at the top of the hour. So there's the furin cleavage site, which exists in SARS cov2 and nothing like it exists in any closely related wild type virus. The bats that they were blaming on this virus don't exist for hundreds of miles. There is no evidence of it jumping of its closest relative jumping from bats to humans. Except in one cave a long way away, a long time ago. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is right there in Wuhan. It has been collecting grants from the NIAID overseen by Fauci and Passaged, as it were, through Boy oh ecohealth alliance in concert with the lab in North Carolina, Barracks lab. And so there's all of these coincidental observations that suggest that actually we know that they had applied to and received money to do gain of function research at that lab with these kinds of viruses.
- [25:48]
Jillian Michaels
Right.
- [25:50]
Dr. Heather Heying
Why would you blame the wet market? And then this is maybe a little far afield, but you will remember, your audience will remember that anyone who talked about lab leak was accused of being a racist, right?
- [26:05]
Jillian Michaels
Oh, because yes, the China virus, we were all anti Chinese people, if you think, yes, of course.
- [26:11]
Dr. Heather Heying
And so, you know, again, a little bit having been forged in fire, but now we're like, yeah, that again, like, still not racist. Also, why is it more racist to talk about a US China research collaboration that went awry than to blame the crazy traditional culinary traditions of the Chinese? Which, you know, frankly, the wet market explanation is more racist. It's a lot more racist if we're gonna go there.
- [26:37]
Jillian Michaels
I totally agree with you.
- [26:38]
Dr. Heather Heying
Right.
- [26:39]
Jillian Michaels
Oh my God, Heather, it is so much more racist because as an American, I actually had this conversation with a friend who was Chinese before COVID but about, you know, I struggle with these cultures and the fact, or I'm sorry, the fact that you guys eat xyz and she ripped me a new one, a hole to elbow and was like, wow. Well, first of all, all animals are sentient. And second of all, look at your conventional farming practices and this, that, the other, and we were starving in China while you were going to Taco Bell. And it gave me the whole history of it. But arguably it was an absolute bias. And fortunately I have a good friend who's Chinese and grew up in China that was willing to discuss it with me and expose me. But without question, I would argue it would make more Americans prejudice against people who are Chinese because of that. You're totally right, 100%, absolutely. Sorry, go on.
- [27:36]
Dr. Heather Heying
Forgive me. No, I mean the idea of wet market is dangerous. The wild is dangerous. Wild animals are dangerous is one of these ways. I think that both researchers and gain of function research and the authorities are trying to keep us compliant by keeping us scared. And it's crap like there is no evidence that we should be expecting a greater number of zoonotic jumps, I.e. jumps from wild animals to humans now than we have before. Does it happen? Has it ever happened? Yes, there are, you know, absolutely that has happened. But there is no reason to expect that this is going to be happening with more, more frequency now. And I mean anthropologically, my undergraduate degree is anthropology and I did my graduate work in Madagascar on the sex lives of poison frogs. But in.
- [28:32]
Jillian Michaels
Sex lives of boys and frogs, you're the coolest person I know.
- [28:35]
Dr. Heather Heying
It's a narrow description, but it does the trick. Got it in Tana. In Tana Rivo, the capital city of Madagascar. So Madagascar is this gigantic island, fourth largest island in the world, off the east coast of Africa. It looks small on maps because the Mercator projection, but it's actually bigger than California. And it has been. Yeah. And it's been separated from all other land masses for many tens of millions of years. And so it's got more endemism. More of its organisms are there and only there on the planet than any place else on the earth. So, you know, there's lemurs there and only there. Most, you know, birds are an exception because birds can fly. And so there's some birds that have gotten there from Africa, but almost all the terrestrial stuff is there and only there. And included in that is some of the flying foxes. Flying foxes are bats, big old world fruit bats, like big bodied fruit bats. And they're gorgeous and, you know, kind of scary if you've never run into them before and some of the people in Madagascar eat them. And so there's like, at the time in the 90s when I was working there, there was one supermarket in Tanna and I was just. It's always interesting to go into markets and into hardware stores whenever you're in a place that isn't your own and just figure out like, what are people eating? How are they getting things done? What, you know, how are they building fences? Like, what are the problems that are trying to be solved. And how are they solving them? And in the market, there was next to, like, ground beef and pork. I think there were these bats on ice. And I never saw anyone eating the bats, but they were there next to the ground beef in the market in Tanna. And when. Okay, that's something that happens here. Fair enough. And, you know, the fact that we never heard of any zoonotic diseases coming out of Madagascar doesn't say that it's not possible. But, yeah, people eat different things in different parts of the world. And we in the weird world, you know, in the Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic world, have become so removed from our food, so removed from, frankly, the brutality that is necessary to eat. If you are eating at anything like a carnivore diet or omnivore diet, which, frankly, I would argue you need to if you're gonna be healthy. Vegetarianism, I don't think is particularly a healthy way to live. People can, but it's tough, and we should all be a little familiar with what it takes. And so the idea that, oh, well, people are eating things that I don't approve of, I don't like, that feels icky to me. Like, oh, but, you know, how about considering what went into the steak on your plate or, you know, the bacon?
- [31:10]
Jillian Michaels
You know, it's literally. I don't know why I had that mindset or mind frame, but I absolutely did. And it really was this friend of mine pushing me to suggest, like, what makes you think, you know, pigs are incredibly sentient. What makes that okay? But eating a turtle, not okay? And one of the things she said to me that struck me to my core was, here in America, you live to eat. In China, we eat to live. And, man, did I walk away from that conversation having to really reevaluate my values and my perspective on things. But the ability to have these conversations safely is what's so important. And nowadays, you're right, it's like, oh, racist up, transphobe up, fat shamer. All these different names that people just exist in their silos. And they don't have the ability to ask honest questions and learn things and change things in themselves that need to be changed. Coming back to the gain of function for a second, there is something I want to point out, and the only reason I want to point it out is because I'm wondering what your concerns are for the future. So I looked this up, Heather, and you probably know this, but there's actually a long history of lab leaks, 1977, influenza epidemic, H1N1 what happened? And then it talks all about how there are many different scenarios, but people in the lab get exposed, leave the lab. It gets out through sewage systems, it gets out through air ventilation Systems. SARS virus 2003-2004 in China, Taiwan, Singapore. Smallpox 1978 smallpox. A woman got it at the photographer at the University of Birmingham in the UK contracted smallpox. Left, died. They quarantined her mother. Anthrax 1979, hand, foot and mouth, 2007. Ebola virus 2014. Obviously we know about COVID and other speculation about H5N1 avian flu possibly being like Covid. Gain of function research result. Trump has now. Okay, so last Trump has put a supposed another moratorium. Cuz I guess Obama put a moratorium on gain of function research. Trump had lifted it at the behest of Fauci and Trump just put a federal ban on it again. But how many of these labs are out there? What the hell's going on? What are your thoughts about this? This?
- [33:55]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah, I, I don't know how many there are out there. There are a lot we should be able to know. I don't even so I know that I don't know, I don't know if we can know. I don't know if it is knowable, which is not okay if that's true. But again, I, I, I don't know. It has been plausibly proposed that Lyme disease is a result of, of work that was being done by the military. Uh, and you know, there's, there's this sort of tell tale, like bullseye distribution of it early gosh, when is it going to be? I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, but sometime in the last 20, 30 years on the east coast where Lyme has been propagating ever since. And all of these, if you are doing gain of function research, and the logic behind it is we need to know what's possible so that if it happens, we have an answer. But you don't see the research into the answer once they've created the Frankenbird. Right, okay. You don't see that research. And frankly, it's a terrible argument when you're talking about, for instance, splicing something completely foreign, like a fear and cleavage site into SARS CoV2 into a coronavirus. It makes no sense. That's not going to happen in nature. So is it actually bioweapons research? Some of it probably is. Is all of it? I don't think so. Like not all of it. And most of the people who are doing this aren't actually evil. Most of them probably actually believe their own press. And you know, part of, part of how modern science gets funded is you have to write these grant proposals that explain in advance what the value is going to be before you even know what it is that you're going to find. And part of what that does is it changes the people who are doing the research into people who can't be as skeptical as they need to be if they are to be good, honest scientists about the research that they're doing. It makes people less good as scientists. So of course there will be lab leaks. Of course, anytime that you are trying to enhance the function, and in all of these cases, I think that you have just mentioned, the gain of function was gain of virulence. So function can mean a lot of things. You could be. Gain of function is a very generic term. You could be trying to enhance the function of something in a good way. And I'd like, I don't know if any of that research has ever been done.
- [36:36]
Jillian Michaels
It could be right.
- [36:37]
Dr. Heather Heying
But artificial selection for, you know, for. Boy, I'm not, I don't think we would call any of it gain of function, but we certainly have artificial selection for increased muscle mass in animals that we are then going to be eating.
- [36:54]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [36:55]
Dr. Heather Heying
There are trade offs, though. There are always going to be trade offs. So even if you've got a positive, a positive intention, but especially if you have a negative intention, there will be trade offs that you have not foreseen. Because that, and maybe this is the fundamental error with these gain of function researchers and the AI people and all the tech bro types is they are conflating complex systems with complicated ones. So an engineered system is one that humans have built. And so it's built of pieces that humans put together. And if you take out one piece, you can totally accurately predict what will happen. If, if you take out that piece, how is the thing going to fall apart?
- [37:35]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [37:36]
Dr. Heather Heying
An organism isn't like that organisms. And you know, this is frankly, mistaking organisms for being like engineered systems is a religious.
- [37:44]
Jillian Michaels
Can you give me an analogy, Heather? Like an organism versus an engineered system, just so I could follow it. Like, an organism is obviously a living thing, a human in comparison to, though an engineered thing, meaning a living thing that we Frankenstein out that doesn't exist naturally.
- [38:01]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah. So a mouse that you take a gene out of.
- [38:08]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [38:09]
Dr. Heather Heying
Or you know, let's see. You know, from, from when I was in grad school, this was, we were just beginning. We Science was just beginning to do to make GMOs to make genetically modified organisms. And famously, there were tomatoes, I think, that had had a arctic fish gene.
- [38:28]
Jillian Michaels
Jellyfish or something like that. Yeah, I vaguely remember this because of.
- [38:32]
Dr. Heather Heying
Fruit, so that the tomatoes could withstand frost. Okay. And this feels like. This feels like just like a win. Cool. Anyone who's ever tried to grow tomatoes or has experienced tomatoes after, you know, if they've been put in the refrigerator or something, they get kind of gross and they fall apart and, you know, they just. They don't last. But. But of course, a tomato that now has a fish gene in it is going to have other things wrong with it that we can't predict. Got it. So now you've got a tomato that isn't exactly a tomato, it's a Franken tomato of some sort. And maybe in that case it's fine. Like, maybe nothing bad happens downstream. And my guess is that's not gonna taste quite as good as a tomato that has evolved on its own without human intervention for. For millions of years. But maybe not. Maybe you can't even tell, and maybe it's totally fine. But we don't know. That's the problem. We cannot know what happens when we start messing in these systems. And the argument is we have the technology to do it. We can put gene from here into organism, from here, we can put them together. It's going to be fine. We can put fear and cleavage site from here into virus from here. It's going to be fine. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, God. Well, why do you guys get to make us your lab rats? Right? So lab leaks will happen because mistakes happen, human error happens, and, you know, systems fail, lab leaks will happen. If these things are being made in labs, lab leaks will happen. There's no avoiding that. Of course, everyone is going to be trying to prevent that as much as possible, but they will happen. And. And it is actually no one's. Like, no one should be allowed to make the entire world their experiment. And that feels very much like what happened with COVID Right? And I don't. You know, it's possible that five years hence the CIA will say, yeah, actually it was bioweapons research. I don't know. That's not where I suspect things to go. So assume not that for the moment could be, but assume not assume that this was just gain of function research co funded by the US And China happened to be happening in China because the moratorium had been put on this research in the US by Obama back in 2014, something like that. And oopsie, it escaped. Well, yeah, sometimes they're gonna. Not always, not usually, probably, but sometimes they're going to. And then the COVID up, and then the scientific cover up on top of that, and all the most famous and camera facing virologists in the world getting up and shaming the rest of us for talking about it. And then of course, and this has nothing to do with the science, but then you had the tech involvement in which those of us who were talking about it were first censored and then demonetized. We got demonetized in July of 2021 on YouTube and have not been remonetized since.
- [41:35]
Jillian Michaels
You. You still haven't?
- [41:38]
Dr. Heather Heying
That's right.
- [41:38]
Jillian Michaels
Oh my God, Heather, that is madness.
- [41:42]
Dr. Heather Heying
It's insane. And it was. And specifically what we were demonetized for, but they told us, insofar as they told us anything, was our discussions of Ivermectin as a repurposed drug that could be effective against Covid, which guess what, it was not as much with the modern Covids. Right. The COVID has evolved a lot and it doesn't seem to be quite as effective against the variants that are circulating now. But then at that moment, Ivermectin was effective against Covid and it's super safe.
- [42:13]
Jillian Michaels
You know, I had Dr. Sabine Hazen on specifically talking about her research on Ivermectin and how her hypothesis was pulled. She was silenced, her research was pulled. She wasn't able to advertise for study participants on social media anymore. She'd done 30 clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies over the course of her long and distinguished career. Same story, shamed, slammed, demonetized, threatened, crucified, literally. Do you think I'm going off piece for a second here? Do you think that's going to change under Trump actually, do we think that will effectively happen?
- [42:57]
Dr. Heather Heying
I have hopes, but I think in both directions. I think if Kennedy gets into HHS and if Jay Bhattacharya gets into NIH and a few other appointments that are hopeful, then things really could change. Okay, that said, the. What is it? Operation Stargate with.
- [43:22]
Jillian Michaels
Yeah, I have that on here. Trump throws his weight behind new generation of MRNA therapy. But that's in my whole MRNA set of questions for you, so. Okay, I got it. Well, hold table that then. I'm gonna get there in just a second. Cause I have some questions leading into that conversation really quickly, just so people understand. And I want you to tell me if I'm getting this right or I'm getting this wrong. There is a huge difference between taking a red rose and a white rose and cross pollinating these things to get a pink rose. Correct. And taking a fish gene and putting it into a tomato. Am I right? And can you just explain that real.
- [44:09]
Dr. Heather Heying
Quick with regard to. So red rose, white rose, crossbreed them end up with a pink rose, maybe, depending on how the colors are encoded, versus take a fur and cleavage site, take a coronavirus and put them together. What's the big deal? And this is what you will hear from people who say, why are you concerned about genetically modified organisms? We've been doing artificial selection. Humans have been doing artificial selection for at least 12,000 years because that's about how old agriculture is. And we've probably been doing it since before then. Right?
- [44:41]
Jillian Michaels
Right.
- [44:42]
Dr. Heather Heying
So the difference is that if it can be, if you can, without using fancy technology, coerce two organisms to breed, then there is history there of those genes in those two organisms having had what we call in evolutionary biology, shared fate. If there has been. If there, if there has been a shared history before and they can move together in the future without any help from. Without any outside help, exogenous help from humans, then it might not be a good offspring. It might die in your womb. If it was a mammal, it might not set seed. If it's a plant, it might fail in a number of ways. But if it does succeed, it still might not be a fantastic offspring. But there is history there. All of the genes in that resulting organism, in that F1 generation have been together before, even if they've never been together in exactly this organization. Whereas when you're talking about genetic modified organisms, which, again, like gain of function research is sort of a vague term that could be used to mean something fine. But genetically modified organisms usually are. That term is usually used to mean exactly what you said, like a furin cleavage site over here, SARS COV 2 over, you know, coronavirus over here. Let's put them together in a way that these things have never seen each other before.
- [46:07]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [46:09]
Dr. Heather Heying
What might happen? Maybe nothing. Probably. My guess is that most GMOs that have been created, probably fine, but we don't know. We have no way of knowing. This is, again, this difference between a complex system and a complicated system, a complex system where you've got a history hundreds of millions of years old for some organism into which you introduce genes that have never been in that organism before. Maybe it'll work out, but how would you know? How would you possibly be able to predict that? In advance. You can't. And so, I mean, this is part of how it was clear to many of us, including Brett and me early in Covid, that they weren't telling us the truth. When they started claiming, for instance, that the vaccines were definitely safe and effective. It's like they might be. They might be. And it turns out they weren't. But they might be. But you can't know that yet. If you just generated these.
- [47:02]
Jillian Michaels
Know that, of course, would not know that.
- [47:04]
Dr. Heather Heying
Right.
- [47:04]
Jillian Michaels
And that's how you know they're full of crap. Because there's no possible way what they're telling you could be true with absolute certainty.
- [47:12]
Dr. Heather Heying
And then you have to ask, what else are they lying to us about? Right. If they're clearly lying to us about that. And again, at the time, it's not that we were sure that they weren't safe and effective. We just could be sure that they couldn't know that they were safe. Therefore, they were lying to us about the safety. And as it turns out, they were wrong. Right. So the lie wasn't necessarily, I don't know, the lie wasn't necessarily they're not safe. And we know what we're telling them they're safe. The lie was we can't know if they're safe yet, but we're going to tell them they're safe. And then later on, this is like, it's nuanced, right? It's like, safe, yes. Safe, no. Like, no. All we know for sure in, let's call it like November 2020. So we've got Biden now coming into office. Suddenly all the Democrats are rah, rah in favor of these vaccines where Kamala Harris have been saying, I would never accept, never touch it vaccine. Right? So nothing has changed except the person whose, like, name is at the top of the bill and, and we're being told, oh, they're, they're safe and effective. Like, you can't know that. You cannot know that. And they couldn't.
- [48:22]
Jillian Michaels
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- [49:24]
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- [50:47]
Dr. Heather Heying
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- [50:49]
Jillian Michaels
Again, go to eatiqbar.comand enter code BAR20. Heather, are you do you have any sort of understanding? I know you've said specifically like Jill, this isn't my specialty, but what MRNA tech actually is or how this this Covid I'm gonna say shot, even though they call it a vaccine is different than previous tech for vaccines because that sort of leaves us into this whole like Stargate Thing and people are deeply concerned. And to be honest with you, I don't understand it at all. All I know is I've had Senator Johnson on the show who had raised the alarm bell about this. And what is it? What is mRNA? Do you have, I don't get it.
- [51:43]
Dr. Heather Heying
Do you have it?
- [51:43]
Jillian Michaels
Can you give me like the 101?
- [51:45]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah, I can try again. You know, not my usual wheelhouse, but let's start with what a vaccine is. Okay, so vaccines were originally created by Jenner for smallpox. Okay. And basically the idea is you expose a potential host, a host who you don't want to get sick person, to a little tiny bit of the antigen, that is to say the pathogen, if you will. And the hope is that you expose them to so little of it that their immune system, which our immune systems are amazing marvels of evolution, the immune system will recognize it as not self, as foreign and create a, an ability to both kill off that thing and to create memory cells that then remember it if they see it in the future and mount a defense very quickly. Because the first time you're exposed to something that's not self, it takes a while. Like I definitely know that's not me, but what do I do about it? How will I dismantle it? So the first time the immune system gets exposed, if it gets exposed to a little tiny bit, it's going to take a little while, but maybe it's not so much to get you sick and that, that's the logic behind the original vaccines. Okay, so then you have live virus vaccines where you're getting exposed to just a little tiny bit of the actual pathogen. Those are very effective, but they're dangerous because it's a live virus. Then you could have an attenuated virus vaccine where you've done something to make the virus not alive anymore, but still itself. And those are less effective because it's not alive. And so the body may just ignore it. And so with attenuated virus vaccines or with, sometimes you'll get a vaccine with just like pieces of the antigen in it. Those are also not dangerous because you're not gonna get sick from it. But the body also might ignore it again because you're not gonna get sick from it. So there's this trade off. Like you want the body to be able to recognize the thing so that it can protect against future infection. But if it's not actually at risk of infecting you now, why would the body. So there's this, there's, you know, there's this Trade off. So with the vaccines that are made with, like, attenuated viruses or parts of viruses, what you have to do to get the body to care, to get the immune system to wake up, is include adjuvants. Adjuvants, which again, is a word that became, you know, that everyone learned in 2020, except for people who were already working on viruses and vaccines. An adjuvant is specifically a thing added to a vaccine in order to trigger the immune system to wake up and get alarms. Some famous adjuvants have been mercury. Right.
- [54:32]
Jillian Michaels
So the thimerozole. Thimerozole in all the vaccines up until 2005. That's why that was in there.
- [54:39]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah. And now we've got aluminum, which is also not okay for humans to have injected into them. Okay.
- [54:50]
Jillian Michaels
So I didn't know any of this other there. None of it. I'm shocked. I'm actually shocked that I did not. You're like, adjuvant. Everybody knows that. In my brain, I'm like, I don't know that. Okay, I'm sorry.
- [55:00]
Dr. Heather Heying
I'm. I also had never heard that word before 2020. And, you know, I'm an evolutionary biologist. I just. And. And I'm. I'm well, well vaccinated, or at least I was up until then. And, well, well, vaccinated as well. And I'd had, you know, and I'd had, like, live virus vaccines and attenuated virus vaccines, and I knew the difference between those. But the. The logic of, under what conditions do you need an adjuvant to wake up the immune system? And under what conditions do you not like, which risk are you more willing to take? So there has been a campaign to silence those of us who are saying now, like, it's the adjuvants. Like, the adjuvants are a problem. The adjuvants are a problem precisely because they are toxic and they're there precisely to wake up the immune system so that hopefully the immune system will also pick up the attenuated virus for whatever vaccine it. I did not understand this at all, but none of that is actually relevant to the mRNA. And I think shots is a better word. Transfection agents is another way of describing them. If a vaccine is a piece of the antigen, a piece of the pathogen, if you will, either a whole living thing or an attenuated one, or a piece of it that your body then will, your immune system will respond to and create an ability to respond to the. A real virus. If it gets exposed to it later on, that's a more traditional definition of a vaccine. What the MRNA technology does is it's so DNA gets turned into mRNA, which gets turned into protein.
- [56:35]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [56:35]
Dr. Heather Heying
MRNA is so therefore a piece of genetic code that is not the actual antigen. It's not SARS CoV2, it's not the spike protein. It's just the code to make. In this case, they picked the spike protein. Protein. It's just the code to make the spike protein. It's not the spike protein itself. So instead.
- [56:57]
Jillian Michaels
I'm so sorry. I should not have even responded. I just can't help like, you're absolutely blowing my mind. I didn't understand any of this. Okay. I'm so sorry. Okay, so MRNA is not the. Got it. It's not the virus, it's not the dead virus. It's not a piece of the virus. It's a code to make the virus. I'm with you. Okay, got it.
- [57:15]
Dr. Heather Heying
Exactly. Exactly. And so in the case of the MRNA shots that were actually delivered to market, it wasn't the MRNA to make the whole virus. They just happened to choose the spike protein. Okay, whatever. That's the thing that sticks off the virus, and therefore the body could easily recognize it. But by every previous definition of vaccine until 2020, it's not a vaccine. It's gene therapy. It's a transfection agent. It's not a vaccine. But they had to call it a vaccine a. Because uptake of vaccines and enthusiasm for vaccines was until 2020, very widespread. And because to call it a vaccine meant that they didn't have to then do additional work to test for things like, oh, something that's new in the news in the last couple of weeks. The idea of shedding from these shots from people who've been quote, unquote, vaccinated, even into people who have not. So there's now. And I'm shocked by this because.
- [58:13]
Jillian Michaels
Why? What. I'm sorry.
- [58:15]
Dr. Heather Heying
When people.
- [58:15]
Jillian Michaels
Okay, go.
- [58:16]
Dr. Heather Heying
People have been talking about shedding for a while. Like, oh, you know, I. I'm not vaccine. I'm not. I didn't get the COVID shots. And when I'm around people who did, I get sick. I thought, yeah, I don't think so. I. Like what? Like what. What would be the mechanism action? It just seems unlikely, like, the. The concentration is going to be so low. There is some new work out this week that is suggesting that shedding may actually be real. And what Robert Malone, who was one of the creators of the MRNA platform, has said is this is precisely one of the reasons that they called them vaccines rather than gene therapy, because if they'd called it gene therapy, they would have been required to test before bringing to market these products to make sure that they didn't shed onto people who had never been transfactic.
- [59:02]
Jillian Michaels
Hold on just a second. Hold on a second. Okay, so just a minute. Sorry. Okay, we're giving somebody the code to make the spike protein of the virus. This creates immunity. How though? Because now you've got just the spike protein of the virus. So arguably, the spike protein won't kill you. Cause it's not the whole virus, but your body knows how to take out the spike piece. So if you get Covid it'll kill it. Am I sort of right there?
- [59:36]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yes, exactly. In theory, assuming, and you know, there's a lot. A lot of black boxes in there, but assuming that SARS COV2 never shows up without the spike protein.
- [59:46]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [59:47]
Dr. Heather Heying
If your body is making the spike protein and your immune system goes, oh, spike protein, that's foreign, that's not self. I'm definitely gonna be able to respond to that if I ever see it again. When SARS cov2 shows up up covered in spike proteins, your body doesn't notice that it's got the SARS CoV2 part. That's not the spike protein. Doesn't matter, because it's covered in spike proteins, it's gonna go after the spike protein.
- [60:08]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [60:09]
Dr. Heather Heying
So that's the logic. And that part of the logic seems kind of elegant with so many caveats. There's no way to make sure that your body stops making this. So you've now got a code to make spike protein that's going into your cell. That were perfectly healthy cells, and now they're producing spike protein. And your immune system's like, oh, that cell, which is actually you, but it's now making spike protein is now recognized as foreign by your immune system. So your body starts go. Your immune system starts going after your own cells, which is, you know, not a disaster if it's a cell in your nose, probably, or in your deltoid. But what if it's a cell in your heart?
- [60:54]
Jillian Michaels
Oh, my God.
- [60:55]
Dr. Heather Heying
Then you start to have problems because those cells are not going to regenerate. So you also have the mRNA that's being injected is not actually the original SARS COV2 mRNA. It's been stabilized to make it more permanent by replacing one. By replacing the uracil with something called pseudouridine so that it doesn't decay even at the rate that it normally would.
- [61:18]
Jillian Michaels
Oh God.
- [61:19]
Dr. Heather Heying
Okay, and one more thing. And there's probably more, but just off the top of my head, the MRNA doesn't tend to exist just in your body. You have these things called rnaases, which ACE just is the name for an enzyme that takes apart a thing. So you have these enzymes in your body that take apart RNA when it's just free floating in your body because it's not where it's supposed to be. And so in order to get this transfection agent into the cells where supposedly you want it, I don't, but supposedly you want it, you have to protect it further. And so it's coated in these lipid nanoparticles which themselves cross the blood brain barrier.
- [61:57]
Jillian Michaels
Oh my God, Heather.
- [62:02]
Dr. Heather Heying
Oh my God.
- [62:02]
Jillian Michaels
This is the first time I've ever understood this in five years. Why are younger people more prone to vaccine injuries? Is this because their immune system is healthier and therefore going to make more of this spike protein?
- [62:18]
Dr. Heather Heying
I don't know the answer to this. This is one of the things that was speculation. That was. It was fascinating to me and fascinating to me during COVID like, okay, Covid is real. It's more likely to affect the elderly, the already infirm, those people with multiple comorbidities like obesity and type 2 diabetes and kidney disease and all of these things. Right. Vaccines. The vaccine injuries are much more likely to be found in young people and young people who are healthy. So some of that, some of the like athletes falling over on the field thing is going to be about having gotten into the heart and basically using your heart more may prompt a problem on the field specifically. But why young men in particular? Why are young men particularly prone to being at risk from these MRNA transfection agents? I don't know. I do know, and this is not an answer to your question, that given that healthy young people are the least susceptible to having damage from COVID There is. Even if you could make an argument, and I wouldn't, but even if you can make an argument that those shots did have utility for the elderly, the infirm people with three or more comorbidities, et cetera, the. They never should have been allowed in. I don't know healthy people under 50, honestly, and I've talked about this before, but I happened to be at the pediatrician's with my then, gosh, what it would have been, this would have been in like 2021. So my then 15 year old son who was getting a physical for camp and camp had been closed in 2020, but his favorite summer Camp. He was going to go, he needed a physical. It was a week after the emergency use authorization had come down for 12 to 16 year olds. This pediatrician and Toby, my younger son, wanted me in the office with the pediatrician for the physical. He said, okay, we're just going to give him his Covid shot today. It's like, no, you're not. This pediatrician proceeded to inform me that I was a bad mother, that I was going to regret not giving my son his shot, and that when, not if, but when something happened to him, I would know who was to blame.
- [64:48]
Jillian Michaels
Oh my God, Heather.
- [64:50]
Dr. Heather Heying
It was unbelievable. And he said, and I know that you're just forcing this on your son. And I stood up, I said, and he was like stripped to the waist. He's just had a physical, he's got his pants on. Everything. I said, I'm happy to leave. You can have this conversation with him and you can do whatever he says you want. Because I trust my son, that he is a smart young man who I've talked to about what the risks are and why he doesn't have particular risk from COVID And the doctor sort of panicked at that. He's like, oh, no, no, no, you don't have to leave. Like, yeah, you don't want to have kicked the parent that the child wanted in the room out, do you?
- [65:24]
Jillian Michaels
This is madness, by the way, without him even. Does he even know that you're a PhD and far more qualified to talk about this than. Than he is? Did he know that or to understand the science? I'm horrified.
- [65:39]
Dr. Heather Heying
I'm actually, I think he did. And you know, I try. Both Brett and I try not to use the credentials because you have to. Plenty of people.
- [65:47]
Jillian Michaels
I think you have to.
- [65:48]
Dr. Heather Heying
There are plenty of people who are credentialed, who are, who don't know what they're doing.
- [65:51]
Jillian Michaels
Okay, Right, Okay.
- [65:52]
Dr. Heather Heying
And double edged sword.
- [65:55]
Jillian Michaels
Double edged sword. Okay.
- [65:56]
Dr. Heather Heying
And so, you know, it's better. And I did this in the classroom as well. It's always better to try to actually have the conversation and to talk through. What do you think you know? And what do I think I know? And let's see, actually on what point we disagree. But this doctor, of course couldn't do that because he had just received from on high the authorities, you know, Fauci, Walensky, whatever it was, this is what we must do. The EU, it went through 12 to 16 year olds now get their shots, shots in arms. And that was all he could say to me. And then try to use Fear to get me to.
- [66:28]
Jillian Michaels
And shame.
- [66:29]
Dr. Heather Heying
Fear and guilt.
- [66:31]
Jillian Michaels
So just real quick, so I understand that piece. You're telling me that if, let's say, my wife got a Covid shot, and this I understand. Shedding, like, with cold sores. My understanding is, like, somebody could not have a cold sore, but the virus could be shedding and you could kiss them and still catch it. So what I'm trying, I'm guessing you're saying is that if somebody got a COVID vaccine, they're shedding spike protein, and you could get Covid or you could get a vaccine injury.
- [67:08]
Dr. Heather Heying
The thing that is being said is vaccine injury. But, you know, honestly, what is not clear to me, and I don't think it's totally clear to anyone, but there are a lot of. Lot of people who are focusing on. Who are more specialists than I am on this, who are trying to tease out, like, COVID vaccine injury. Long Covid. And a lot of people are like, long Covid is a fiction. It's a psychological condition. No, there's real damage that people who have been.
- [67:38]
Jillian Michaels
I have friends who have. I have one friend that it changed the nerves, like, the olfactory, and she would smell certain things, like celery, salt in particular, and she would just spontaneously throw up. She couldn't drink wine. She couldn't. I mean, it had, like, rewired the connections of the. Something in her nose. Never the same.
- [68:05]
Dr. Heather Heying
Never the same. That's that weird, the anosmia, the, like, loss of smell and taste that happens with COVID for some people. Like, that's. People also are like, oh, Covid isn't real. It's like, nope, that's a. That's a unique disease right there with some very strange features. And yes, some of the people who are experiencing long Covid either weren't vaccinated at all, or the vaccine injuries that tend to happen don't look like that, you know, like the nerve damage that you're talking about. So. But. But there's obviously interaction between all of them because the. Because the MRNA shots, as we talked about, are just producing. Just producing the spike protein, but they do. So they make your cells into producers of spike protein. And so you're gonna have the creation of autoimmune disorders because your body's going after itself. Does long Covid also involve some autoimmune stuff? It seems like it does. Are people who suffer from long Covid more likely to have been previously diagnosed with autoimmunity? I think so. That's my anecdotal experience in Talking to people. But I don't know. I haven't seen that in the literature. So there's a lot of things connected here that I don't think we know. I hope we can know. This is what science is supposed to be able to do, is ask all the questions and sometimes be disappointed in the answers. But if it's true, it's true. Isn't it better to know? And the shedding. I think you're right. I think the analogy is exactly that. A cold sore, even if it's not active, if you didn't know you had one, virus can shed. The idea is shedding can happen from vaccinated people onto unvaccinated people. It's surprising because it seems like the concentrations are so low. On the other hand, you've got this stabilized pseudouridine MRNA in being produced in cells in your body for a long time. Indefinitely, I wanna say. Hopefully not forever, but, like, do we know how long? No, no. Last time I looked, there was some research that said, like, at least 12 months, I think it was. But that's just because they stopped looking at 12 months. So we don't know. We don't know. Okay, we don't know.
- [70:15]
Jillian Michaels
Got it?
- [70:16]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah.
- [70:17]
Jillian Michaels
Okay, so now back to what you had brought up. Stargate. It's like $500 billion to create an MRNA vaccine. Protest, print, press, I think. What is this? Do you know what this is? I, I, I, I, I don't, I don't really flipping the F out.
- [70:41]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah, well, I mean, so I can't, I don't get. I.
- [70:46]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [70:47]
Dr. Heather Heying
People are flipping out for a number of reasons. A, you know, we've already talked about all the reasons that the MRNA platform is not ready for primetime and probably never will be. Be like, it probably never will be.
- [70:59]
Jillian Michaels
Okay.
- [71:00]
Dr. Heather Heying
I think so. Like, that's my opinion, but certainly it's not ready. Now, this, though, coming in an era before which, because I hope it is happening before which there has been that acknowledgment. So in an era when these people are still pushing boosters from Pfizer and Moderna on people, they think it's working. They think it's effective. They still think it's safe and effective. It's neither. So that platform is now being proposed to be part of a MRNA personalized vaccine for cancer. Well, again, still not a vaccine in the traditional way, but also vaccine for cancer. Those words together don't make any sense because what they're talking about doing is going like, okay, we see that you have produced one of Your cell lines is producing something that we're calling cancerous, and it's out of control. And we're gonna try to stop it. Great, let's do that. Because cancer is obviously a big problem for people. Let's stop it. We're gonna go in, we're gonna get the code for that, and we are going to create a way over here in our lab to. I don't even. I don't know what they're proposing to do. They want to find your cells that are producing, that are. That are cancerous.
- [72:24]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [72:24]
Dr. Heather Heying
And make a printing press over here with the MRNA and probably stabilize it again and then put it back into you. But they still don't have the capacity to localize it where it needs to be localized. And it's not a vaccine because you've already got the thing. And I'm sure I'm missing some pieces of it.
- [72:42]
Jillian Michaels
I think it's there to prevent it. But this wouldn't be like immunotherapy, where they take your own immune cells, train them to kill your type of cancer, turbocharge them, put them back in your body. That's not this.
- [72:57]
Dr. Heather Heying
Is there a situation in which, with more technology than we currently have, this could be an excellent last resort for people with metastatic cancer that cannot be attacked with the means that we currently are using, which are really gross in terms like gross versus fine. They're very scattershot and, you know, like chemo and radiation kills everything. The hope is that it kills the cancer before it kills you.
- [73:24]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [73:24]
Dr. Heather Heying
And so this could be targeted if we had the ability to target it, but we don't, and we're pretending that we do. And frankly, I don't trust the people who are imagining that AI is our future and our savior to understand the complexity of human bodies enough not to create many more problems. So I also have a frankly, somewhat unnuanced reaction of like, oh, God, no, Keep that away from all of us. With the one caveat that, with a bit more understanding, which I hope we develop, there is a possibility for this maybe to be useful for people in end stage cancer when all else has failed.
- [74:08]
Jillian Michaels
I get it.
- [74:09]
Dr. Heather Heying
I could at that point, why not?
- [74:11]
Jillian Michaels
Like, in my line of work, it's like, all right, if you're morbidly obese, you have advanced type 2 diabetes, you have atherosclerosis, you know, you, fatty liver disease, dysfunctional vagus nerve. You tried everything. You're on death's door at that point with ozempic, like, okay, go that's where you twist my arm on it for sure. I don't know where we end up down the road, but I would absolutely be willing to say and in this cost benefit analysis is for sure, if you've tried everything and nothing's worked, roll the dice on it. So I see what you're saying, like if you're going to die anyway, if there's hope here, considering that the end on the alternative is death. Okay, maybe understood.
- [74:55]
Dr. Heather Heying
But just like with Ozempic, just like with all those GLP1 agonists, like okay, maybe that is where it started. But now you've got totally healthy people on these drugs, which boy like that. It does feel like Covid vaccines number two. And obviously it's a totally different system, totally different mechanism of action, but it's a disaster across the board. And maybe exactly as you say, obese, diabetes, atherosclerosis, fatty liver disease, all of these things may be okay, but for no one else should those drugs be be going into arms or mouths. They just should not be.
- [75:36]
Jillian Michaels
What are your top concerns with regard to side effects on the GLP1 drugs?
- [75:48]
Dr. Heather Heying
You know, I don't actually. Let me think. I haven't sort of framed it in terms of effects or top consumption. Forget.
- [76:00]
Jillian Michaels
Yeah, I mean I've listened to your talks on this. I've watched you disseminate some of the studies they put out and it has helped me stale man many different arguments. What are your top concerns?
- [76:11]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah, so it's glucagon, like peptide. One charmingly named hormone that we have, that we endogenously produce is prompted in us by signals from the body when we eat and from the brain. That's that basically it's a complex system that has all of these inputs. This GLP1 is produced when lots of things happen in the body and it produces feelings of fullness, of physical feelings of fullness in the gut because it actually slows the passage of food to the gut and the psychological feelings, feelings of fullness so that we stop wanting to eat, putting that into the body whenever we feel like it, as opposed to when the food that we've eaten has prompted that is likely to a decrease the endogenous production of GLP1. So the drugs like Ozempic, which is usually what I just call the whole class of drugs, are what are called GLP1, just the name of the hormone, GLP1 agonists. So they act in the same way as opposed to antagonists, they act in the same way as the GLP1 itself.
- [77:36]
Jillian Michaels
It's a replica of the hormone as well.
- [77:38]
Dr. Heather Heying
It's a hormone mimic, basically.
- [77:39]
Jillian Michaels
Got it.
- [77:40]
Dr. Heather Heying
So Ozempic is basically a mimic of a naturally occurring hormone. Whenever you provide a hormone to a body that it could be producing endogenously or a neurotransmitter, but in this case, it's a hormone, one of the things that happens is your body stops producing as much of the thing natively. So one of the things that's gonna happen, I think for sure is that you're either gonna have to be on these drugs forever, or at the point you go off your production of the endogenous hormone GLP1 is hopefully going to, with time, start ramping up again. But it's probably gonna take a while, which means that as soon as you go off the thing, gain it all back, you're gonna have even bigger problem problems with controlling your food intake than you had before. And so you're likely to gain a lot of the weight right back more proximally. I think the idea of keeping food in your gut as opposed to processing it through the GI tract like. Like, I don't usually. I'm usually pretty. I usually keep the disgust response down to things. I've. You know, I've had a lot of weird experiences in life. Like, you just disgust. It's not usually the right response. This one prompts such a strong disgust response for me. Our GI tract is designed to have peristalsis throughout it. Basically, we're supposed to keep moving stuff through and in the stomach. We pull out what we need, we start digesting, we move it into the intestines, and then out it goes. The idea of keeping stuff there is likely to a pull out even more of the toxins in our toxic food supply from whatever you've eaten into the body. You're probably going to be toxifying yourself. You are going to, I suspect, have an increase in things like stomach cancers and other GI tract cancers. Because now you've got things just sitting there where they're supposed to be moving through. And just in terms of like, forgive me, but like, the lived experience of being an active, healthy human being. When your gut is empty, you are like on fire. You're like, you are so capable. And it feels remarkable to have an empty gut regularly, once a day, once every couple days, if that's the periodicity you're on. But the idea of just always having food in your gut feels so gross and so unhealthy and so potentially toxic. You know, what are the specific side effects? It's gonna depend on what you ate. But given our food system, most people are not eating well. Most people who are choosing to be on Ozempic are probably not making the choices to eat, you know, organic, non gmo, local, non toxic food. And therefore that stuff that's now sitting in your GI tract is gonna have even longer for your body to be absorbed into the rest of your body and then to be incorporated into hopefully just your fat, but probably also your bones, your soft tissue, your brain, all of it.
- [80:52]
Jillian Michaels
I've talked to different people who are brave enough to speak out. And whether I'm speaking to a gastroenterologist, one whose name I won't mention because she's actually asked me not to, has obviously talked about the fact that when food sits there, you run a greater risk of SIBO down the line. The small intestinal bacterial overgrowth because it's associated with a lack of gut motility. Could it. The way you're suggesting, like when you look at the body as a complex system, when food is in there for such a long period of time, could it create disruptions in your gut microbiota? Dr. Hazen's actually looking at that. She's like, you're not even gonna believe what I'm coming up with or what I'm discovering. I'll come on when the study is done. But I have Dr. Hazen's telling me about that. There was a study actually done where they looked at, I believe it was 100 individuals. And I might be wrong on how many people, but I think it was about 100 individuals that were going to get gastric bypass surgery. And they put like something in their stomach to be able to see what was going on. And they found gastric bezoars in like 23 people out of, I think, like out of the hundred. And it's like this ball of undigested gunk. And this is people that are on Ozempic, the people that weren't on Ozempic, the other group, none had a gastric bezoar. And you think, like, I encourage everyone look up a gastric bezoar. It will be quite gross.
- [82:27]
Dr. Heather Heying
It will ruin your day.
- [82:28]
Jillian Michaels
It will ruin your day. And you just think, nobody is looking at these drugs and these medications the way you are, of like, well, listen, if one plus one equals two, you know, maybe this will end up being the downstream consequence. But people are just kind of, they're not even guessing. It's kind of like what you said of how long do we create the spike protein from the vaccine? Well, they only looked at a year, so we don't really know. They don't.
- [82:57]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah, yeah, no. And of course, you know, the, the flip side of this, if I were to steel man this, and I've heard this argument a lot, is, well, you can't expect us to do really long term studies on every drug we want to bring to market, because if they're actually life saving or, you know, life enhancing, then we want them available to people now, not in 40 years. That argument makes some sense. But if you can clearly put together the arguments against the thing now, then you should be listening to the arguments against. You can't just say, well, we aren't gonna do any long term studies because there's not time for them because we are already certain a priori before doing any work at all that this is safe. That sounds a lot like what was happening with the COVID vaccines and that, you know, that's why this just feels so analogous. This feels like the same kind of thing. It's being pushed on people. You know, it's different in that there's no mandates for Ozempic. Right. But people are so excited about it. Oh yeah, they're so thrilled. And they look at jabs 6 year.
- [84:02]
Jillian Michaels
Olds are trying to get approved and.
- [84:04]
Dr. Heather Heying
They get angry with you if you say bad things about it. Just like with the COVID vaccines.
- [84:08]
Jillian Michaels
Yes.
- [84:09]
Dr. Heather Heying
Yeah.
- [84:11]
Jillian Michaels
Okay, Heather, in summation, what would be your top warnings to the audience or advice on how to proceed in modern life? Taking these things with a grain of salt, trying to make the best decisions in real time and then subsequently, obviously, where can they get more from you? Where do they go? Because I just watch your show so that I can ask a lot of the right questions. But, but what would be your, hey, watch out for this, or hey, do these three things? Or is there even such a. Yeah.
- [84:51]
Dr. Heather Heying
I'm actually, I'm working on another book, thank God, which, the point, the goal is to help people learn how to think scientifically. Because I think, I think, and this is what I did as a professor and it's not that I want everyone to know how to run a PCR or what a PCR is. Like, I know, know. And like, just like, you know, several of the questions you asked me, I was like, yeah, I don't really know that. That's not like that. That's on my wheelhouse. It's not really what I do. And that's like, once you know how to listen to people make claims and say, okay, but on what basis are you making those claims. And if they never provide any of their evidence, if they don't show their work, as I said, right. With regard to Fauci, then you should begin to be skeptical and, and say, you know what? I'm not going to do the thing you said because the only basis on which you told me to do that was authority. So that's a first thing. Like, on what basis are you making your claims? If you never show me, then I have no reason to trust you. And so you walk around the world going, okay, I know some things. On what basis do I know these things? And it gets a little exhausting after a while. Like, you can't be questioning absolutely everything in your world. But once you get this habit of mind of being like, huh, I wonder if that's true. How would I know? It becomes a game, and it's fun. And it's exciting to also discover, like, oh, my predictive powers are getting better and better. I didn't think those were going to be safe and effective. And turns out they're not. Right. And also to discover your own errors and be like, oh, I can get better at this. And it is so freeing to discover I've been wrong. Maybe I even shared it with people, my wrongness. I'm gonna go back to them and say, I was wrong. Here's how I know. Here's how you can avoid being wrong in the same way I was in the future. So it's this like, educating yourself, improving yourself, improving others. And it is, I think, just a fundamentally scientific way of wandering around the world. But that sounds terrifying to people. Cause people are like, oh, I'm not science, I'm not sciencey, I'm not a scientist. Like, no, we all can do that thought process. All can do this, right?
- [87:00]
Jillian Michaels
It's how you think. And I, I've learned to start doing that, even questioning. There was a letter about Kennedy that was circulating. It was like I was going to get asked about it on News Nation. It's like, oh, 17,000 doctors signed it. And I thought, like, really? So of course I looked into who's the group that organized the letter. Oh, I found out that anybody can sign the letter as many times as anybody wants to sign the letter. Letter. And then I looked at who I was, like, well, hold on, who funded the group? And then I looked at who funded them. And it turns out it's like filtering through this dark money organization through a bunch of shell corporations. I mean, it was. But I never. And every single news organization, the Hill, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the This, the. That, whatever. Oh, 17,000 doctors have signed this letter, you know, denouncing Kennedy, and you just be like, oh, 17,000 doctors. Okay, I guess he's bad. Without previously, I would never have thought twice. And it's just, like, deeper. I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [88:02]
Dr. Heather Heying
No, I mean, I think it just. It's again, this. This thing about numbers that I mentioned before, that we love numbers. And so you put a number, even a number that doesn't sound, like, particularly round or something like 17,000. Like, ooh, 17. I can repeat that. 17,000. Then everyone's gonna know it's the same story. 17,000. Do you hear? 17,000. Like, okay, but you went, you dug and you found, I think, that most of them were even doctors, right?
- [88:28]
Jillian Michaels
Like, most of them aren't even real, if they're real at all. Yeah, I mean, I'm two of the names, and they're definitely not real. I am definitely not an anesthesiologist or a podiatrist, and my name is not Dr. Fake or Dr. Bullshit. So I know that two of those doctors on the list are not two of the 17. I mean thousand are, in fact, not real. I can guarantee that craziness.
- [88:54]
Dr. Heather Heying
So, yes, beginning to be skeptical and trying to avoid either faith or cynicism. And it's real hard to avoid cynicism in this era after the last five years. And like, I started your show here today by saying is like, if you really can't take the time to think through something in particular, then at the moment, doing what the authorities say don't to do is probably the best move. But overall, developing a habit of mind, a process by which you say, how would I know? I wonder if that's true. How would I know? How would I figure it out? Maybe I don't have the capacity to figure it out, but if they, the people who are telling me to believe them, never show their work, never provide any evidence, then there is no reason that I should be listening to them. And then sort of the evolutionary approach which Brett and I write about in A Hunter Gatherer's guide to the 21st century, that's the book that we've been talking about writing for 15 years as professors, and it came out in 2021. And it basically, the premise is, we as modern humans, as weird 21st century humans, have created a world with such speed of development of new things, hypernovelty is everywhere that even we as humans, the species best able to deal with new stuff, have outstripped our own ability to keep up and there are chapters in that book on food and health and medicine and sex and gender and relationship in school and society. And. And we go after. Like, how would you make an evolutionary argument for what to do in the face of the hypernovelty of seed oils? I don't know if seed oils show up in the book, but fluoride does. And what about in the face of porn with regard to the sex and gender chapter? And in the face of advertising, both to children and adults? What do you do in the face of these hyper novel things that modern humans are facing? And what we all want to do is live, engaged, productive, creative. Joyous, which is a word I have a hard time using anymore, but like joyous lives. And we can, we actually can. Like we actually can through connection with individuals and assessment of the things that are coming our way. But what we can't do is just take the authorities word for things like that's, that's the big lesson of, of COVID And now I would say of Ozempic, of the AI, like, of. Of. Of all of these people who would show up and say, don't worry, you don't have to think for yourself. I got this. Like, no, no, that's okay. I'm happy to think for myself and I insist on it. Actually.
- [91:57]
Jillian Michaels
Heather, where can. I mean the podcast. Go ahead though. Dark Horse podcast. Where do. I strongly encourage everyone to subscribe to the Dark Horse podcast because it has. My God, has it opened my eyes. But anyway, please tell everybody where we can get the podcast.
- [92:16]
Dr. Heather Heying
Thank you. Yeah, so Brett and I do weekly live streams of the Dark Horse podcast. He also has guests on regularly and they're some of the really amazing, amazing conversations we have. Hunter Gatherer's guide to the 21st century, which is the book that we co wrote in 2021. And I write weekly at my substack Natural Selections. And I wr everything from butterflies to viruses to sex and gender to exploration of the waters of Mexico. It's across the board and I have fun with it. So Natural Selections at my substack is another place to find me.
- [92:57]
Jillian Michaels
Thank you for everything. This is long overdue and I hope that you'll be semi regular, let's just say, because I had like 10 other things I could talk to you about. So thank you for everything, Heather. And I don't know, I'll just continue to bother you and hammer you with text messages whenever I'm confused in the interim between this podcast and hopefully our next one.
- [93:23]
Dr. Heather Heying
Oh, that's fantastic. I hope that we actually end up with another party or more together.
- [93:28]
Jillian Michaels
Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the podcast, please like comment, subscribe and share. And make sure to let me know what guests you want to see on in the future.