[MUSIC] Hey folks, welcome to the 331th episode of the Dark Horse Podcast live stream. >> It's from. >> Just gonna start with that. >> Yep. >> Obviously. >> Yep. >> Yeah. >> I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, your Dr. Heather Heing. It is summer. >> Finally, finally summer is here. >> It is summer and so we are going to talk about the sun. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> Which we get more hours of, well, every day we get just a tiny bit less now. But anyway, we are approximately at the maximum as of two days ago. >> And it is glorious, three days ago, but yes, it is absolutely glorious. This far north, there's already the faintest hit, hit of light in the sky by like 415 4 a.m. Even at 10 p.m. there's still light as well. So it's really an extraordinary place and time to be alive actually. >> Yeah, it's great. It's great. It's worth all that that winter in order to get the benefit of the glorious long summer days. >> Maybe. >> As someone who has long experience cheating photo periods, I'm not sure of that, but I do love this time of year here in the Pacific Northwest. So yeah, we're going to talk about, let's see, vegans and sunscreen and sun, no, my. >> Yeah. >> Today. >> Yeah. >> It's, you know, it's a lot or maybe it's going to be less, but we'll see. >> I'm not sure that it's a lot, but we are going to talk about sun and sunscreen and some of the apparently conflicting evidences to whether or not sunscreen is good for you. Go check us out on locals. There's no Q and A today, but all of our past Q and A's are on locals. And we always have the watch party going on there and a reminder that if you're watching us on YouTube, they have in theory, we monetized us, but things are weird over there. So if you are watching there, please consider subscribing, liking, sharing. So we can try to figure out what else we'll watch, watchership. >> Clicking the notification bell in addition, apparently that has magic implications. >> Is watchership a word? >> Watchership. >> Viewership. >> Viewership. >> Yeah. >> That's the one. >> That's the one. That's the ship in question. >> Viewership. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I don't like watchership. >> I like it. I'm glad it's going to become a thing. >> Yeah. >> All right. But before we get into the meat of the show or the tofu of the show spending, we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour as always carefully chosen. If you hear us reading ads here, you know that we truly do believe in these products or services in this case, three products. >> Our first sponsor for this episode, Heather, is mud water. Mud spelled correctly. Water spelled very efficiently. If you like your routine. >> I mean, if you're going to say you got to give them a hint. >> M-U-D slash W-T-R. >> Yep. All right. 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And mud water has a drink they call rest, which has roibos, tea and valerian root, turkey tail, and ashwaganda, a place I've always wanted to go. Yes, you have. You never go in though. Camamyle and passion flower. There's still time. There are more products than that too. So you should go mud water and find exactly what you're looking for. Every single ingredient in their products is a 100% USDA organic non-VMO gluten-free and vegan. That means it does not eat meat. Mud waters, original flavor is warm and spicy with a hint of chocolate, plus masala chai, which includes ginger and cardamom, nutmeg and cloves. It is also delicious blended into a smoothie. True. Ready to make the switch to cleaner energy? Head to mudwater.com, M-U-D-W-T-R, dot com, and grab your starter kit today. Right now, our listeners get an exclusive deal. Up to 43% off starter kits, plus free shipping and free rechargeable frother when you use the code at Dark Horse. That's right, up to 43% off with the code Dark Horse at M-U-D-W-T-R dot com. After you're purchased, they'll ask you how you found them. Please show your support and let them know that Dark Horse sent you. All right. Our second sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality, non-toxic cookware and bigware. Whether you're looking to make easy summer meals as things heat up outside or planning some big, shareable dishes to take to picnics and potlucks, Caraway has the right solution for you. Having beautiful, simple, functional cookware, bakeware and other kitchen essentials in your kitchen helps maintain visual calm, which is awesome, no matter the season. Caraway has everything from mixing bowl sets to cutting boards, muffin tins to big pots in which to braise a piece of meat or make a long-stimpered stew, a long-stimpered stew. Long-simmered stew. Stampered. Whether you're spending time at the grill, the stove or the oven, Caraway has the gear for you. 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Visit CarawayHome.com/darkhorse to take an additional 10% off using code Dark Horse on your next purchase. This steel is exclusive for our listeners, so visit CarawayHome.com/darkhorse or use code Dark Horse at Checkout. Our final sponsor this week is Pury. Pury makes a wide array of supplements and powders from vitamin C and magnesium to creatine and protein powders. What makes Pury different is how clean and pure all of their products are, all of them. Pury was found in 2009 by two men who set up to create the cleanest and purest products to support their own active lifestyles. Since then their product portfolio has grown to address common nutritional deficiencies in the developed world. Knowing that health requires a good diet, physical activity, recovery and balance, the founders of Pury have rejected quick fixes from the very beginning and insist on the most stringent purity testing on all of their products. 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[email protected], that's pu-o-r-i, purity.com/darkhorse to get 32% off your first Pury Grass fed way protein order when you start a subscription. Sub-scription. In addition, you get a free premium shaker bottle on your first subscription order. Subscription is going to be the word that I cannot say today. Go to pu-ory.com, that's pu-o-r-i.com/darkhorse and use the code darkhorse@checkout for this amazing limited offer. Can you say conscription? Conscription? Yeah, no problem. All right, so it's just subscription. Just subscription. Yeah. There must be other descriptions. There's a script's institute, but that's, no, I don't think there are. It's about to go. Yeah. All right. Should we talk about the sun? Yeah. Or, yeah, the sun, I guess, a bit. I'm going to finish my sort of setup of this with a short reading from our book, The Medicine Chapter of our Book, in which we talk about sunscreen and sunlight and vitamin D, and I think I've shared that on air before. But so this is not a new topic for us, but it being the summer, there is, of course, a lot of opportunity to get out.
on the sun and many people have gotten into the habit because they were advised to by health professionals, by their doctors, by their mothers, by any number of people, that what you need to do if you're going to spend time in the sun is slather yourself with sunscreen. And so the question is, does this make sense? And I was prompted to think about this in part because it's summer now, and we've been having a remarkably warm late spring and early summer here in the San Juan Islands, where usually it stays cool for a while, but it's been quite sunny, quite hot. And when I ran into this, I'm going to start with this sort of summary of a new-ish piece of research, then go to the research itself. Here we have Nicholas Hulscher, master of public health, writing on his substack focal points, courageous discourse, the headline of which is, "Study Finds Sunscreen Use Linked to Higher Risk of Multiple Skin Cancer." A 470,000-plus-person study found sunscreen users face dramatically higher risk of melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma, even after accounting for major skin cancer risk factors. UK BioBank Study involving over 470K people found that individuals who were ported using sunscreen more frequently had substantially higher risk of multiple skin cancers, even after researchers accounted for major confounding factors like age, sex, skin type, tanning ability, sunburn history, sunlamp use, and time spent outdoors. The findings are worrisome, and this is just the very quick summary of the relevant to the part of the story that he's reporting on part of this large study. Melanoma, they found an increase according to his summary here of 292% higher risk of melanoma with sunscreen use, and he's aligning some of the details. People were reporting, so this is observational, this is after the fact, people were reporting either variation in sunscreen use, and he, I believe, has just summarized and basically sunscreen use versus no sunscreen use. So he's lumping some categories. For basal cell carcinoma, you had 140% higher risk in users of sunscreen than in those without, and for scram of cell carcinoma, 126% higher risk. And again, in what this study attempted to do was control for, like it was not looking specifically at sunscreen risk. That was one of very many variables that it was assessing based on a pre-existing data set that it went in and looked at. It was actually interested in, and here's the title, Gene Environment Analysis in a UK bio-bank skin cancer cohort identifies important SNPs and DNA repair genes that may help prognosticate disease risk. Now, you know, but I have to tell the audience that as soon as I saw that headline, that now this, this title, title of a research paper, unlike a headline, the authors do it to decide what the title of their own research paper is. That's already a very long title. It's pretty informative, but no one in their right mind should have used the word prognosticate in a scientific paper when obviously what they met was predict. Same meaning, sure, but prognosticate. So I'm sort of, I'm a little bit leery of these authors to begin with because I don't, I don't trust their editorial common sense. Yeah, it's doubly bad because not only does it over complicate, everybody knows what predict means. Prognosticate is going to throw people, so it's jargon that is exclusionary with no benefit. But because prognosis is also a real thing, it sort of makes it sound more medical rather than just straightforward predict would be perfectly clear what it meant. So yeah, I agree with you that that was poor judgment on somebody's part. Yeah. Okay, so this guy again, Nicholas Holtcher, doesn't do much beyond beyond this. He's he's a short piece and at this point, I basically want to go to the paper itself and just show a couple of a couple of individual bits. So let me just get what I got so far. Yeah, the study was looking for many different factors trying to figure out what factors were predictive. It was actually really looking for heritable genetic genetic transmitters. Right. And it and it attempted to control for all these. By measuring them and so on. Sunscreen use is one of the things it was trying to control for along with age and sex and history of burning and childhood childhood burns and winter exposure to the sun, you know, just a number of things that they that were their attempts to control so that they could then know if they were finding any real variation in genetic risk in this mass at 470,000 people dataset. So that does a couple things. One, it's really good. It's encouraging that this is a real result because it wasn't that they went looking for it and then found it, which is the possibility that they fooled themselves or some for by some other mechanism. So finding something you didn't expect is interesting. Yep. But arguably it makes this an observation that now needs a test. Yes. So philosophically speaking, that's important. It absolutely is and they do not to the extent that they found this and they did, they don't want to put any attention on it all and in fact they want to basically explain it away. So this is not this is the the message of this paper in either the abstract or the discussion is not well look at what we found. It's like oh yes, there was this but here's why it's probably not real. So and that's what I'm and the effects were huge. It sounds like you know a hundred percent increase would be double and this is above that for at least two of the types of cancers. So that's that's amazing. Yes. Okay, that's the wrong paper. Here we go. Here's whoops. Here is the paper in question that is nope that came out in 2023. So it's not brand new but this is the paper that we were just seeing a summary of in Hulscher's substack this month. Again, Jeremiah and at all 2023, gene environment analyses in the UK biobank skin cancer cohort identifies important SNPs in DNA repair genes that may help prognosticate disease risk. Okay, I'm going to read the abstract and then just scroll down and show you a couple of things that they do. Background despite well-established relationships between son exposure and skin cancer, pathogenesis and progression specific gene environment interactions in at risk individuals remain poorly understood methods. We leveraged which means they went into an existing data set. We leveraged a UK biobank cohort of basal cell carcinoma, cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, melanoma and C2 invasive melanoma and healthy controls to quantify the synergistic involvement of genetic and environmental factors influencing disease risks. So there they do say it's they weren't just after the genetic stuff but my sense reading the papers that they were trying to control for the environmental steps that they could figure out if there's if there are genetic if there are predictive factors in our in individuals genes. We surveyed a little under 9,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms. That's the SNPs from the title from 190 DNA repair genes and 11 demographic behavioral risk factors. Results. Clinical analysis identified darker skin and hair colors as protective factors. That is something we all know, right? Dark skin and dark hair are predictive of being less likely to burn and less likely to get skin cancer. Where was I? We identified there we go. I'm sorry I can't even figure out where I just was. Oh clinical analysis identified. Yes. 11 SNPs were significantly associated with BCC. This is not this is not the important part. So in the results, the only thing they say with the guardian environmental factors or non-genetic factors is darker skin darker hair and then they talk about the various genetic things that they found. Conclusions. We identified novel risk factors for keratinocyte, carcinoma, melanoma, highlighted the prognostic value of several fancai alleles among individuals with a history of sunlamp use and childhood sunburns and demonstrated the importance of combining genetic and clinical data and disease risk stratification. Impact the study revealed genome wide associations with important implications for understanding skin cancer risk in the context of the rapidly evolving field of precision medicine. I read the entire abstract so that you can see that there's no mention of what culture in his substack is leading with this saying that this is the surprising finding in this paper. There's no mention of it at all and it ends with this term of art jargon if you will precision medicine precision medicine is basically a standard for how can we know your genetic so finally and and generate a therapeutic that is targeted for your genes, the particular alleles that you have such that we can fix you. That is precision medicine in the modern era. All right I want to ask you a question before you go for a comment. Yeah. I'm sorry and I thought I might have gotten this wrong. There's one more sentence in the abstract and they do actually
They do actually mention, well, they do actually mention other things. Major individual factors, including sex, heronskin color, and sun protection use, were significant mediators for all skin cancers, interacting with over 200 SNPs across four skin cancer types. So, again, they don't, they sort of circle around it, but they don't, they don't indicate anything about what Ulshar has suggested they find. Okay. So, I don't want to drag us too deep into the weeds, but I see one potential confound in the sunscreen result based on how they dealt with race. Did they deal with it other than to say skin color? I'm not sure what you mean. So let's take African Americans. African Americans do not typically burn. They do not typically get skin cancer. They do not typically use sunscreen. So, you might find a correlation with sunscreen. Your tendency to put on sunscreen is correlated to your fear of getting a skin cancer. So the fact that people fear getting them might get them. So this, this is one of the complications of all of the work, all of the decent work, which is inherently complicated in part because it's inherently about complex systems. And I don't have any way to look into the models, the statistical models that they used, nor if I did, because those aren't in the public domain, nor if they, nor if I did what I'd be able to interpret them. And this is, of course, part of, you know, part of my longstanding objection to these very complicated statistical models. Do they provide more power? Yes. But at the cost of confidence, and I'm not talking about statistical confidence, but like human confidence, that you actually know what it is that the model did and can trust that it did the right thing. Should they have done exactly what you're talking about? Yes. I don't know if they did or not. But they do address skin color that they try to control for it, right? So it's possible that it gets subsumed in that. I don't know. Okay. Yeah. I don't remember enough about what is in this long, long ornate study to say. Okay. So they go through their work here. And in the results, actually in the discussion section, we have usually the first sentence of the discussion section is what the authors think is going to be the biggest take away. So I'll just start there before going to what I've highlighted. Discussion. By leveraging robust data sets from the UKBB, we performed disease environment, disease gene, and gene environment investigations and identified key variables underlying the complex interplay between 190 DNA repair genes and 11 environmental and demographic factors in the pathophysiology of melanoma and keratinocyte carcinomas. Okay. So that's just a repeat of what it is they did and doesn't say anything about what they found. First sentence of the second paragraph of the discussion, we first conducted disease environment analyses and showed that sex, skin and hair color, skin tanning behavior, and use of sun protection showed the greatest associations with risk of all four cancers. This is consistent with previous findings. The skin associated DNA damage upon exposure to UV light is a major driver of both skin cancers while hair color is a weak proxy for skin tone and genetic makeup and is not directly related to this effect. Moreover male sex was positively associated with BCC, the basal cell carcinomas, and particularly CSCC consistent with previous findings and natively associated with MNV and MIS in contrast to the literature. So I didn't actually know that there was a sex axis along which skin cancers were predicted. Surprisingly at first, frequent use of sunscreen was greatly associated with all cancers. This surprising association was reported in prior studies. Let me take a step away from what I'm reading of this study for the moment, the study which was published in 2023. I went and looked at the references a couple of the from the late 90s, if I remember correctly, one of them is from 2019. The 2019 one is the really big one. It's called Challenges in Assessing the Sunscreen Melanoma Association which had been found before and it attempts to go in and look at all of the existing work. It's basically inconclusive but it does find some support for sunscreen actually being protective against melanomas. These authors in the 2023 paper are citing three previous pieces of work. The most recent of which tries to go in and make sense of it says we're not really sure. It's messy. All of the results seem to go in different directions but there's one pretty decent study they find that seems to suggest that sunscreen is protective against melanoma. Okay, so that's who these people are citing. They say surprisingly at first frequent use of sunscreen was greatly associated with all cancers. This paradoxical finding was the increasing risk of skin cancers with increased sunscreen use which we posit can be explained by greater exposure to UV light and or a lack of re-application of sunscreen throughout the day or due to increased use of sun protection following a skin cancer diagnosis. Collectively however these findings demonstrate the importance of adequate and frequent sunscreen use and minimization of exposure to UV light particularly in individuals with fair skin. But those last two sentences of this highlighted section of the discussion are extraordinary. This is some of the most egregious pseudoscience I have actually seen given that they they they and just like let's just walk walk through it one more time and then you could have your what reaction to get right. Surprisingly at first frequent use of sunscreen was greatly associated with all cancers. That's their result. Surprisingly actually also doesn't belong in that sentence but maybe for readers who are like wait did I read that wrong no even the even the authors they're telling you were surprised by this. Again frequent use of sunscreen was greatly associated with all cancers. That is their result. Okay it's not their only result they've got a lot of other things that they found but then they say this paradoxical finding was the increasing risk of skin cancer with increased sunscreen use. That's what they found. Which we posit can be explained by greater exposure to UV light except they're also looking at sun exposure and or lack of reapplication of sunscreen throughout the day. User error in the sunscreen use in sufficient like they were what what what or due to increased use of sun protection following skin cancer diagnosis. The idea of being that sunscreen use is itself indicative that you're more prone to skin cancer because you've already had a diagnosis which isn't a terrible hypothesis but the idea that they're putting they've got three explanations to whisk away their result and then ignore that result for the rest of their discussion the rest of their paper is extraordinarily bad for. Well it is absolutely par for the course for modern science where there is dogma in each of the fields. You can validate the dogma the more extreme your validation the faster you're going to rise and if you say anything that goes against the dogma you have to explain it away and you have to deliver the paragraph that says we found X but we still believe why. Yes. So the point is this is hey this isn't science just looking at it's something that uses the language of science it has some of the methods of science but it is not scientific because somebody's got their thumb on the scales. Now the right way to say what they found is we do not know what to make of this result. It is possible that this result does not mean what it appears to mean because for example people with a diagnosis go on to use more sunscreen. Yes. It is just their job actually to posit. Yeah. It is a way to to you don't explain your results. You say that's a possibility. It's also possible that this result means something in that sunscreen is not having the intended effect. This is a place where further study is urgent. Yes. Precisely. Precisely. So that's it. We see evidence that these authors are at least being dishonest with themselves and their intended audience. And again I went back and looked at the research that they cited which suggests that there is a relationship between melanoma and sunscreen use in some surprising directions and that too is inconclusive. Okay but I actually think this conversation so far is missing two of the bigger points. One of which is that sunscreen itself is a category error. Sunscreen isn't one thing. And most sunscreen for instance, I didn't know this until this week. Most sunscreen has aluminum in it. Luminous oxide? Lots of forms of aluminum here. I'm actually going to read. It's a most of if not all of this one page. That one here we go. Letter to the editor published in 2007 in the journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine. Illuminum
a potential pro-oxidant in some screens and some blocks. Question mark. Okay, so it's a letter to the editor. This is not a test of hypothesis. It is basically a hypothesis to the editor. We have measured, and this is written by, sorry, let's just go to the bottom so I can, where are the authors? The authors, since somehow they're not on here, are a nickel-sun and x-le. This is again published in 2007. Oops, out there there. Look at the next one. We've measured the aluminum content of sunscreens and sunblocks, which either include or do not include an aluminum salt. For example, aluminum hydroxide, aluminum oxide, aluminum silicate, aluminum sterate, aluminum starch, a seat and all, susanate as an ingredient. All those aluminum's. Aluminum was present in all products, and its content was of particular significance in three products, each of which listed it as an ingredient. That sentence is doing a lot of work too, because that sentence strongly implies that they were looking at several sunscreens, many of which did not have aluminum on the ingredient list, but all of the products that they tested had aluminum in them. Yeah. Okay. So, after numerous inquiries, the manufacturers were not forthcoming as to the role of aluminum in their product, except the manufacturer of simple sun protection cream who confirmed that aluminum hydroxide was added to their product to cost, to coat the surface and thereby prevent the agglomeration of another ingredient, titanium dioxide particles. Who guidelines for the application of sunscreens and sunblocks recommend a single application of at least 35 milliliters of product to achieve the stated sun protection factor, SPF. For three of the sunscreens and sunblocks investigate in the study, a single application of product result in about 200 milligrams of aluminum being applied to the skin surface. In addition, who guidelines suggest re-application of product every two hours, which for example, for an average down the beach would result in up to a gram of aluminum being applied to the skin surface. Skin is permeable to aluminum salts when, for example, they are topically applied as antiperspirant formulations. It will accumulate in the skin and it will be transferred from the skin to systemic sites. It is highly likely at the everyday use of sunscreens and sunblocks as a hitherto, unrecognized contributor of aluminum to the human body burden of this non-essential metal. Perhaps of immediate significance is the potential for aluminum in the skin to act as a pro-oxidant. Recent research in free radical biology and medicine, the journal where they're publishing this letter, has shown that UV filters and sunscreens promote the formation of reactive oxygen species in the nucleated epidermis of the skin. The authors speculated upon the role which might be played by antioxidants either already in the skin or included in sunscreen formulations in counteracting the pro-oxidant activities of UV filters, but they did not consider how the presence of additional pro-oxidants might exacerbate such effects. Aluminum is one such pro-oxidant and could significantly increase the potential for oxidative damage in the skin. Whereas the relationship between the burgeoning use of sunscreens and sunblocks and the increased incidence of skin cancers and a particular melanoma is highly controversial, it is not hitherto be considered that aluminum in these products could be an extremely significant contributing factor. Of course, aluminum is already in the skin surface and may not need to be a component of sunscreens and sunblocks to exacerbate oxidative damage attributed to the application of such products. Wow. Wow. And also just that is how it's done. Like put aside the content for the moment. They have built a careful argument in which they actually collected observations. They have not tested hypothesis, but they have collected several observations which will look like lab tests to many people, right? They solicited information for manufacturers. They did chemical analyses of several sunscreens. They found aluminum at various levels in every single one of the products that they found. They did a literature view. They posited a mechanism by which aluminum in sunscreens being observed by the skin might have a toxic effect on health and they have not made any claims that are beyond what they know. Yeah, that's amazing for multiple reasons. One, when you put on sunscreen, you tend to be putting on a lot. I mean, sometimes I guess you just put it on your face, but if you're out in the sun, you're likely have a lot of stuff exposed. You're putting on a lot. So you're talking about a large amount of this potentially pro-oxidant. And if I'm remembering, you know, chemistry is probably my weakest science. But if I think about what I think I know about chemistry, you've got a, you've got oxidants, which are actual molecules in a state that's reactive. Right. An antioxidant is going to neutralize it. If you put a bunch of stuff all over your surface, it's going to occupy all of the antioxidants that you have available. So one mechanism here, as to where cancer might come from, is that you're leaving a lot of reactive oxygen species now free to basically attach to and disrupt the various systems that are keeping cancer at bay. Normally, you're normal metabolism. Right. It's like throwing a bunch of stuff at your immune system. So that immune system is preoccupied dealing with garbage and it misses the pathogen that sneaks through because, you know, all of your cells are busy. So, okay. That's interesting. Did I also, maybe I just misunderstood something, but they say that the aluminum was in there to tint the titanium? I don't think tint. Let's see. They say because the titanium will tend to be white with might be off-putting. So they, they inquired after all the manufacturers of the products that they were looking at. And they only heard from one and from that one manufacturer who really I feel bad for them that they actually responded in there, of course, being singled out here. They confirmed, quote, that aluminum hydroxide was added to their product to coat the surface and thereby prevent the agglomeration of another ingredient, titanium dioxide particles. So not tint. But keep it, it's basically emulsifying it. If it were a fat, it would be it's yep. Yeah, keeping it separate rather than in a multiplier. It's one of the great evils of the modern era that turns out. Yeah. All right. Well, that's interesting. So, and I bring, I bring that out. This is this is one of my two main critiques of the really fairly pseudo scientific work that is being done. And whether or not sunscreen help, you know, protects against or against or tins to make you more likely to get skin cancer. One of one of my main issues is sunscreen isn't sunscreen, right? Sunscreen is wildly variable. According to this 2007 letter in all of the sunscreen products that they looked at every single one of them contained aluminum, I, you know, have I happen to know that there's at least one out there in the market. And I hope more than one at this point that doesn't contain any aluminum at all. And that's a van man sunscreen, which is tello and zinc and, you know, a few other things. But I went and looked, you know, and they they are a sponsor of the show, but they're not a sponsor today. They're not paying me to say this, but they, you know, they they have a, you know, rather than a chemical, a mechanical sunscreen, meaning that the zinc actually tints your skin. Yeah, it's a physical block. It's a physical block. And it's in a base of of tello and maybe beeswax. I don't remember everything else. But that is actually, you know, it's otherwise it's all the same good stuff that's in their regular tello bomb, which is fantastic. And there, you know, there are there are moments. There are situations when even people who don't want to use sunscreen in general for lots of reasons, some of which we haven't even gotten to yet may end up being sunscreen. But I would say given given what we've heard so far, you can't trust the labels on the mainstream sunscreens. Apparently even the ones that don't list aluminum often have aluminum in them. Aluminum is a known pro-oxidant. Many people by now have heard about the potential risks of wearing aluminum based antiperspirant. Why would it be any better to coat your entire skin and then bake it into your skin in the form of sunscreen? I feel like it's got to be worse. Yeah, well, and even worse, the I consider them insane, but the spray on sunscreen is that people use. You're also potentially breathing this stuff or the person sitting next to you on the beach is going to be breathing it, right? Which is like the worst possible case in terms of, you know, short of injecting it, having it come into your lungs is very dangerous. I mean, it's dangerous almost no matter what it is. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so there's that. Not all sunscreen is created equally. And my message still, not medical advice, is avoid sunscreen whenever you can, but if you're going to use it, find sunscreen that is as pure and clean as possible. It uses a physical barrier rather than a chemical change in your skin. And Van man sunscreen is the example that I know to fit that category. But there's also the question of whether or not sunscreen use has an effect on all cause mortality that is separate from skin cancer. And so much as we were talking about during COVID, if all you're looking at is, okay, we've got this product and the reason we're telling you to use [BLANK_AUDIO]
is to deal with, we got product X and we were using it to deal with Y. And the only thing you look at is when you use X, do you see a reduction in Y? Then you are potentially going to miss all of the other, possibly positive, but often negative effects of X that will not be found when all you're looking at is Y. This is true for statins, it's true for COVID vaccines, it's true across many, many pharmaceutical products. Another way to put it is because you're dealing with a complex system and your purpose is to live a long time and live well. You care about the integrative measure, you don't care that it does something positive to one metric if it does a bunch of negative things to a bunch of other factors. So the thing you really care about is, hey Doc, if I take this thing, do I live longer? Right. Exactly. Before we get there though, I wanted, I came up with five and then you have added a sixth hypothesis that I think could account for the correlation they see. And interestingly, the correlation in the diamond, the 2023 paper that finds that some sort of use association with cancer, skin cancer with skin cancer. Right. Okay. And so I think this is interesting because that that result is suggestive that something is going on, whether the something is straightforwardly, hey, this stuff causes skin cancer or not is something that needs to be understood. Okay. So here are what I think are the six hypotheses that would account for this as far as I can tell. Okay. First is that you might paradoxically have a greater risk of sun burns, which are known to be a causal to skin cancer. By virtue of the fact that sunscreen prevents you from developing the resistance to the sun that occurs over the course of a season. Right. So prediction of that would be that people who visit the sun and spend a couple days outside, otherwise don't have seasonal exposure to the sun. This isn't going to apply to this is this is going to be about establishing your baseline over a season and becoming becoming behaviorally a cultured to the idea that you're actually protected. Right. And just to make that clear, I find I'm somebody who is prone to burns. But if I expose myself to the sun rather than hide from the sun, I develop the capacity to be in the sun for a longer and longer period of time. When I get in trouble as if I at the beginning of the season go out and have a very long exposure. But if I build up my tolerance, I actually have a tolerance, which is because I have endogenous sunscreen that darkens me and protects me. And it may be so if there are people around you, if you live in a place where summer is a season where you spend time outside and there are other people around you who are generating their their skin resilience over time and you know without relying on sunscreen, then your social events over the summer are likely to involve more and more time spent outside because the people with whom you are with are going to have a greater capacity to end up in the sun. You may not, but you may not be thinking about that. Right. And so the way to test this hypothesis is to control for burns. That's one way to test it. You could also control for skin darkening, but the basic point is if you control for burns, does the correlation go away with sunscreen? That is the sunscreen is interfering with your protection against burns. Okay. The second hypothesis is chemical toxicity. Yeah. So chemical toxicity, there might be a carcinogen in many sunscreens, which would have the effect directly. You could test for that by comparing between chemical sunscreens and physical sunscreens. And so that's that's a that's in the category error. Yes. Part of the story. Right. The third hypothesis is that it blocks and this is related to the first hypothesis, but separate. If we take away the question of burns that it blocks the production of endogenous melanin. And by blocking that production, it exposes your tissues, even if they don't burn to UV radiation, they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to. So the point is you end up lighter because you're using an extrinsic sunscreen. And it may be that being lighter exposes you to UV. So that could cause it. Four is interesting. They're just talking about like sub dermal tissues. Yeah. Yeah. That your skin has a reaction that's there. It's built in sunscreen. That's not there all the time. It responds, you know, the darker you are, the more there's there all the time. But for that's your dodge in the sunscreen. Yeah. But you know, the fact that we tan, it's to happens for a reason. And there's a reason that people who are tan look good, right? That's the paradox of this whole thing. Don't tan has always been like, huh? Why does that look healthy to us? Yeah. Okay. The fourth one goes back to something that long time listeners will remember, which is that there are paradoxical results. Dermatologists have been surprised, for example, that people who have sun weathered skin, who they would have thought had a very high risk of skin cancer, have essentially not. Now, this, the paper that I was talking about in the beginning, the, sorry, Jeremiah paper actually does mention looking older than having sun weathered face, being protective against some or are showing a correlation as if it is protective against some skin cancers. Right. And so I will remind people that the explanation for that, I believe coming from my grad work on telomeres is that when you get a mutation that causes cells to divide and head towards being a tumor, the number of cells in the patch of unregulated tissue is smaller. The more damaged your skin has been ahead of time. So the older you are, the more damage you've lived through, the shorter your telomeres, the fewer cells result from that mutation. And so the point is your risk of a future cancer depends on a second mutation, which is proportional to the number of cells in which you are running that risk. So smaller that patch of cells, when you get your second mutation, the less likely it is to be in one of those cells. So residual teal, the base of point is the more you protect something early, the greater your cancer risk later. So it could be a weird paradoxical telomere result. But don't burn. Right. But don't burn. Right. Like no burns are protective. Burns are never good. Burns are the thing that causes cancer. Sonic and that's that's kind of the division that I think is straightforward and obvious at this point from the evidence in complete as it is that we have now is do expose yourself to the sun, but don't burn. Right. At all costs of void burning, even sunscreen might be a better alternative to a burn, but figuring out how to behaviorally prevent it or use a physical sunscreen rather than a chemical sunscreen. And sometimes physical sunscreens are called hats. Totally. Yes. Get yourself a thick hat. I doesn't even need to be thick so long as it's opaque. It's to be thick enough to cast a good shadow. That's pretty much all right. That's wide. All right. The fifth hypothesis is the one we mentioned earlier that there's some reason that is not causal about the sunscreen, but something like people use sunscreen and proportion to their concern about cancer and therefore cancer prone people are wearing more sunscreen. And it's really their endogenous risk, which they are correctly predicting, which is one of the ones that is close to the authors that germine at all say as they're trying to get their result. They strangely narrow it. And they said if you've had a diagnosis of cancer, maybe you're using more sunscreen. And really the point is now people who are pale or people who've had a history of well, they can't say pale because they've like they've separately assessed skin color skin tone in their work. So they think that that that peelness is not what explains this result away because they have already effectively controlled for those for that. Yeah. All right. Well, in some way, maybe maybe race then falls out as a non-exponation if they've dealt with it through skin color. And then the last one is the O2 mechanism or at least the the oxidative species. And that aluminum in sunscreens might be binding up all of the anti-oxidative oxidants that you endogenously produce to protect yourself, making yourself vulnerable. I think that that's kind of an interesting one. So anyway, that's five and possibly six different hypotheses that could account for this result if the if the result is real. And I think the result looks like it's real. The analysis is weird, but there's some reason there's a correlation there, whether it's caused or not remains to be seen. Yeah. I mean, it's hard. It's very hard to assess because there's so much.
behind the scenes invisible to the reader, complex statistical models that are complicated, statistical models that are being used. And again, I keep on saying it, but it really feels critical to me. Sunscreen is not actually a good category. I feel very strongly about the hypothesis that this result would look different if you compared all these aluminum based sunscreens, aluminum based, meaning just that they have aluminum containing sunscreens that the authors of the 2007 letter to the editor were looking at to a sunscreen like Van Mands, which has no aluminum in it at all and uses a physical barrier as opposed to a chemical element. Yeah, or even the same oxide, which is rarely used anymore, but it's just that white stuff that people. Yeah, I just don't know what else is in those. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't. I assume that many of those also had other things in them that it wasn't just pure zinc oxide. Yeah. I doubt they were. But I wanted to say too that. I guess I already did this before you went to your hypotheses, that my objections to the conversation as it seems to be happening is one sunscreen isn't one thing. The use of sunscreen in this research is a category error and there's multiple types of sunscreen, some of which I don't expect would end up being toxic in and of themselves, but also there's the question of all cause mortality. What else are you keeping your body from getting by applying sunscreen even if we accept, as you and I did in our book here, that sunscreen itself is going to reduce skin cancer incidents, which is interesting to find that here. So we have in the medicine chapter of HunterGathers Guide to the 21st century, which was published in 2021, related to the reductionist thinking around vitamin D is the fact that for decades now, we have received a nearly universal recommendation to slather ourselves with sunscreen whenever we're in the sun. Reduce your exposure to the sun, the larger it goes, and skin cancer rates fall. True enough. That's where I'm like. I don't know. Guess what goes up when sun exposure goes down though? Blood pressure. And as blood pressure climbs, so do rates of heart disease and stroke. People who avoid the sun have higher overall mortality rates than do people who seek it. A research study on Swedish women reported this remarkable result, quote, "Nonsmokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group, indicating that avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking." So, reductionist, scientism has misled us yet again and likely caused many deaths. Should we stay out of the sun and take vitamin D or seek moderate sun exposure and get the nutrients we need by seeking something close to an ancestral diet? An evolutionary analysis suggests the latter, at least on this topic, the medical literature is catching up to that conclusion as well. So that Swedish forward study is excellent and that's my nod to it with the bit from HunterGathers Guide. The idea that the only thing you should be thinking about with regard to sunscreen should I use it or not, is your risk of skin cancer is patently wrong. So again, be thinking about the effects on your overall health and whether or not being exposed to the sun might be good for you and the answer has to be yes. The answer has to be yes because we evolved outdoors under the sun. Alright, I want to add something more general consideration. I'm toying with the idea, I haven't 100% convinced myself of it yet, but I'm increasingly convinced of the following thing. All actual solutions in a complex system are simple. That if you apply a complex solution in a complex system, the likelihood of unintended consequences is so high that it can't possibly work. So at the very least there's a strong bias towards, we tend to think, "Oh, that system is complicated. We're going to need a complicated answer." And the answer is no. If it's truly complex, then you're looking for a simple answer. That's the most elegant. And it's possible. Yes, and I want- Not guarantee, but it's possible. It's possible. And you might have some chance of understanding the impact of what you've done enough to track whether or not it was actually a win. Yeah, yeah. I wanted to go back to the point about hats. Okay. A hat, sometimes I look at people wearing hats, like hats with brims. Which you do yourself. Which I do myself. And you know, like glasses, like that's a weird technology you're wearing on your face, but we have taken it as part of what it is to be human and we don't look at somebody wearing glasses, you know, they're not wearing toasters, right? I mean, sometimes. On Halloween, perhaps. But my point is this, a hat is kind of a strange object, right? It's like a shadowcaster that you, you know, ring your head with. So the shadow follows you around like a cloud, you know, you could imagine that, you know, instead if you wanted, you know, to raise the humidity, you could have a mister around your head and it would make equally as much sense as a shadowcaster. I can basically guarantee you that product exists. It probably does. Yes. But here's my point. How elegant is a hat actually? Pretty elegant. Because if you think about, you've got a complex system that is your skin that has a built-in mechanism like you have your endogenous level of melatonin based on the latitude that your ancestors lived in that does a pretty good job off fending off your regular level of incidence of sun exposure. Then you have your capacity to ratchet up your UV protection. Your skin does it automatically upon exposure to sun if you're exposed to that, you know, in a reasonable way your skin will darken and that will give you just enough protection that you don't burn, which is really the thing you're trying to fear. Okay, but what if it's not enough? Well, you could slather stuff on. Sure. Or you could wear a shadowcaster around your head. What does a shadowcaster around your head do that none of the others do? Well, because it's at a distance and because you're walking around and looking at things and walking there and then turning around and walking back, it casts a shadow. Some percentage of the time, right? If you want to go full sunbriro, it's a lot of the time because it's casting a very big shadow, right? A small brim casts a little bit of a shadow, but the point is what it's doing is it's breaking up your sun exposure. Sometimes the shadow is over your face and you are not in the sun. Your face isn't. Sometimes you turn your head and you're directly in the sun. And as you're walking around, as you're looking at different things, you're getting little bits of sun exposure. And that's exactly the right thing to basically, it's like a, what are those, like, meshy, jersey kind of things that people sometimes wear, I think. Yeah, or, I mean, a straw hat, I think, does also the job that you're talking about. Right. So the point is you can lock some percentage of the sun by making a mini purgola, right? And you know, I think the jerseys people do it because they're trying to not trap heat. They have to wear a jersey to have their number or whatever in their team affiliation, but they're trying not to trap heat. So it's like, you know, 50 percent. More space and fabric. Yeah. But the point is it's an elegant solution to the problem. Why? Because it's simple. It's simple. A parasol is similarly simple. Sun glasses, as opposed to myopia or a presbyopia correcting glasses. Also seems simple, but I think a hat will not trick your body into imagining that it's in a different sun situation that it is, especially because you do move around and you do end up experiencing these different sun exposures. Whereas sunglasses, I believe, actually trick your brain and therefore your skin into responding to a darker moment than is going on and put you at greater risk of burning. I would love, I mean, I don't know, but I would love to know that's the hypothesis. And so I love it. Yeah. And you know, so, you know, this, this will sound crazy to many people. Don't use sunscreen. Don't wear sunglasses. Like, what do you want me to do? You want me to stay inside like, no, go outside. Don't use sunscreen. It's summer. That sounds risky to a lot of people. And it may be impossible for more than a few minutes at a time, at least at first. And certainly there are a lot of people living in climates where their ancestors did not evolve. And if you, you know, if you're, if you're pale, scanned and red haired out of Ireland and living in Southern California, you're going to need to be using some protection, better to make it physical protection in the form of fabric or, you know, or zinc based sunscreen than anything chemical. But also you came up with advice when our kids were young, where, you know, they were, I was lucky just never to have had burning skin. And so I didn't, I didn't see coming that we, that children would burn and you generated advice for them that almost a hundred percent worked. And I think it did a hundred percent work. It was just sort of user error. When it didn't so. It doesn't work if you don't do it. And there are times when you can't pull it off. Yes. Okay. So what is the advice? The advice is you're out in the sun for half hour. You begin to think, maybe I'm going to burn. You spend a few minutes in the shade. Sometimes you can do it by turning so that the side of you that's been in the shade because you're, you know, lying on the beach or something.
is not the side being exposed, but the point is-- But my experience, because we all do become more susceptible to feeling the heat of the sun, and potentially burning as we age, my experience is that getting your entire body out of the sun, or call it five minutes every 30, actually almost entirely resets the clock. Yes. And I will tell you, I don't know if this is actually right in any physical way, but the experience matches the idea that there is some capacity to absorb the insult of the sun, and that it gets exhausted, like a sponge soaking up a liquid. And the point is, if you can empty it, and it empties fast, then you can soak up that same amount again. So it's not proportional. It's not 30 minutes on, 30 minutes off. It's 30 minutes on, 5 or 10 off. And the place where this fails is if you screw it up, and you forget-- forget, for example, your snorkeling. So you're cool, and you're not thinking about the heat. That'll do it. Or you're in a frickin' kayak crossing between A and B, and there is no shade, right? So there are cases in which you can't pull it off. But when you can pull it off, I think it's near perfect. And I will say, on the sunglasses thing, you did this first, but I now do not wear them except in circumstances where I have to, like driving into the sun. It's not worth the risk. Boat in the sun, even worse. And so I do have a pair of sunglasses that I very much like, and I do use sometimes, but they're very pale. So they do less to confuse my eyes when I'm outside wearing them than would very dark sunglasses. Yeah, and I almost wonder if-- I'm sure there's some research. But I would be interested in a set of sunglasses that disrupted as few things as possible. I personally hate sunglasses that change the color profile of the world. I find that awful. But you know, something for cameras, if you're shooting outdoors, there's a thing called a neutral density filter. Neutral density filter changes nothing about the photons coming through, except how many of them. So there are variable ones that you put on the lens, and you can rotate them, and it gets darker and darker. Is it polarizing? No. It sounds like a polarizing filter. Maybe not. I do not think it is inherently polarizing. Certainly, polarizing does some of this, except it polarizing cuts literally the angle of light. But in any case, something glasses-wise that disrupted as few of the channels as possible, especially something-- I mean, the problem is fashion-wise, nobody's going to want, you know, like a variable thing. Tried on the tech bros, see if they can start a thing. But anyway, from the point of view-- Totally, anything. They will. From the point of view of you're trying to live your life and disrupt your health as little as possible, a sunglasses that reduce the light as a little is necessary to do whatever it is you're trying to do, and distort the light as little as possible as likely to be least disruptive. I wonder, actually. So I said this thing about sunglasses, and a stoop viewer is my realize that that doesn't make sense, given that I always show up here in glasses. I'm actually quite myopic. I require corrective lenses to move around the world, but I normally wear contacts when I'm not on camera. I wear contacts. And so I can wear sunglasses. I have never, ever worn tinted contacts. But I wonder if tinted contacts don't have exactly the same problem. And like just being in the habit of wearing sunscreen, it may be even worse than having sunglasses on, because you don't even realize that you're sending your body the wrong signals. And I hope that regular contacts don't have this problem. But of course, wearing a form fitting piece of plastic on your eyes can't be 100% safe. Yeah, it's not. It's not going to be good. A question for I didn't know that tinted contacts were a thing. I'm sure that contacts that change your eye color for fashion reasons exist. Is that the extent of them? I think so. Yeah, I mean, I've never looked into it. But I have no idea how widespread in use they are, but they're widely available. I'm always-- it's always an option when I get my contacts. It raises all kinds of concerns. Right, imagine your single, and you fall for somebody who's been wearing the wrong eye color would result in tinted love. I just think that's-- It's terrible. It is terrible. Or maybe that's the joke I can't tell. Yeah, I don't know. But it can't be good. No. All right. One more story for today. Yeah. Yeah. I think I should just read the article. But my lead up to it is that the New York Times-- yeah, that's right. I still occasionally read the New York Times-- cannot figure out what team it needs to be on. And you've got to feel for them. They've been so-- they've been trying so hard to just have one position and one position only. But the evil is on two sides of something and they're trying to guess. It's so hard for them. Just like fuel for the New York Times. Let me see. Does this have-- yeah, OK. Here we go. Can you see my screen at this point? Good. Protect every animal from cruelty, not in 2026, Oregon Democrats say, a possible referendum in Oregon on animal rights and fishing, hunting, even pest control. Just when Democrats are trying really hard not to be seen as, quote, "weirdos again." [LAUGHS] I just-- the headline and subheadlight alone are worth the price of admission here. Like, yes, I'm still sending some of our hard earned money to the New York Times so that I can see stories like this. And so before I am in a read part of this, I will say that we've been talking a lot about California and Washington and how completely off the rails they are. So I thought it was time to spend a little time talking about Oregon and how it, too, as a Western state sandwich between California and Washington has gone off the rails. OK. Completely nuts. Completely nuts. OK, so this is published a couple days ago, January 21. This is David Michelson, the organizer of the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions, wants, quote, "a system where we're not killing or hurting animals anymore." Oh, and he says it that way. It sounds totally reasonable. Is it not? OK. Since the 2024 elections, Democrats in or seeking office have tried hard to stick to the new playbook. Focus on pocketbook worries. Criticize President Trump if you must. But for the love of all that is sacred, avoid the social issues the Republicans have used to paint the party as out of touch, and maybe even a little weird. A little weird? A new animal rights measure in Oregon has Democratic leaders like Governor Tina Koteck going out on a limb. They want voters to know they're just committed to killing animals as Republicans. I had to read that several times to establish that Governor Koteck, who is a piece of work, like she is seriously woke and very left-wing and not doing good things for Oregon, the New York Times is making sure that we know that Governor Koteck is, quote, "just as committed to killing animals as Republicans." Wow, quite a framing. The measure, known for now as Initiative Petition 28, is the stuff of political nightmares for Democratic leaders in Washington. That's Washington DC in that state. It would give all animals the same protection as from cruelty that Oregon, Grand Stogs, and Cats, and in the process remake the state's economy and dinner plates. Hunting, trapping, and fishing would be outlawed, along with scientific research on animals, lethal pest control, and conventional livestock production. It's incredible. The goal said David Michelson, a substitute teacher vegan and the Petitions organizer, quote, "is to have a system where we're not killing or hurting animals anymore." Democrats and Oregon are fleeing Mr. Michelson faster than Bambi's mother tried to escape the hunter, or perhaps faster than James Tallerica, the Democratic nominee for St. in Texas, reached for a barbecued hunk of meat to prove he's not vegetarian. No establishment Democrat and Oregon would ever support this, said John Horvick, senior vice president with a polling firm, D.H.M. research. Still, he added, Republicans see this as an opportunity to say, look at those crazy Democrats being weirdos again. Ms. Kotech, up for reelection in November, said in the social media video last month that she wanted, quote, "to be very clear. She's against something she sees as attacking the people who feed our communities." OK, I'm going to go down. I just want to tell you a little bit about the guy who's behind this. I've gotten a few emails telling me it's not the right time for this. Mr. Michelson said, by that logic, it never will be. Mr. Michelson is an unlikely candidate to upend Oregon politics. Originally from Southern California, he moved Oregon from Denver in 2020 because he figured his chances of meeting another gay vegan were better in Portland. He did part-time work gathering signature for several liberal ballot measures and realized he could use Oregon's system for his own passion, convincing people to stop hurting animals. Most people really like their companions, their pets, Mr. Michelson said. We're just trying to say these other animals have those needs, too.
IP28 is his third attempt to qualify for the ballot. His initial effort collected just 2000 signatures. This time he gave himself the full two years allowed under Ergen Laud to gather signatures and put more energy into fundraising for paid canvases. He and other supporters have collected more than 135,000 signatures, etc. One more thing about him. He's collected more than $305,000 to fund the campaign with help from PETA, the Craigslist Charitable Fund, and his own pockets where he found $35,000. I live very cheaply, said, no car, no children, or roommates. So this gay vegan who wants to sub all hunting, fishing, trapping, livestock production, and animal research in Oregon is the male equivalent of the middle-aged white woman who is looking to the state to fix all of her problems for her. Or the young childless white women who don't have a place to direct their energies that historically would have been there. So here we have a guy who is a substitute teacher and yet found $35,000 in his own pockets as the article reads, because he has no car, no children, no roommates. I don't know why roommates would make his life more expensive, but he basically has no affiliations. And so he's focused entirely on a social campaign. He focused entirely in his entire life on the social campaign. As later in the piece, you see Oregonians complaining, he's an outsider. It's like, well, okay, he's from Southern California and then from Denver, can we stop being scared of outsiders in all of their forms? That's become an easy bogeyman for people on the right. However, he's moved in, he has no affiliations. Apparently he hasn't been lucky in finding his gay vegan love of his life in Portland, although I'm sure there are others who fit that description in Portland. And so he's putting it all into a petition, which I don't think could possibly have a chance of passing, even in Oregon, even given that Oregon's population is largely centered in Portland and Eugene, which some proportion of the people might even vote for such a thing. But it can't possibly pass yet. The idea that anyone is taking the seriously is extraordinary. And the idea that the New York Times can't quite figure out which side they're on is just hilarious. Oh, that's great. Somebody finally got far enough out to the left that the New York Times is like, seems like a bridge too far. All right, I got a number of things to say. One, to your point about the driver's white women looking to the state to solve their problems. That's part of it. It's also using the state to bully others. Oh, yes. Yes. And those are two. Those are different. Two aspects of the same syndrome, but they are different. But I wanted to just point out a couple things. Animals. All animals. Yeah. I have not gone and looked at the at the petition. I don't know what, what all is written in, but it does say in this article something about pest control. Right. And my guess is they're talking about like vertebrates. I bet that I bet that he's only concerned about vertebrates. What kind of big a tree is that, dude? In which case, the New York Times, of course, is, you know, tripped over its own shoelaces because to say all animals is so unthinkably extreme, even for a vegan. I mean, you know, can you drive if, you know, insects are going to get killed on your windshield? Do you wash your face and kill some of the mites that were living in your eyelashes? Can you slap a mosquito? Right. I mean, the point is insects are animal. Clap along with a mosquito. Not something I'd be likely to do. But, but anyway, all animals is a question mark. If it really says all animals, then that tells you this is just next level. Yeah. My guess is, my guess is he's, it's vertebrates even if he doesn't know what a vertebrate is. Right. Here's another thing. And I think it's just time that we do this logic cleanly. Okay. There is something counterintuitive about animal husbandry. The desire, first of all, I should just say, I believe I speak for you. If I say something, it doesn't sound like I speak for you. Feel free to correct it. But oh, I will. I know you will. There's a lot that we do to mammals, especially, but also some birds that is unthinkably terrible and should be ended absolutely immediately. The factory farming of these creatures is completely inhumane. The use of them in testing, there is an argument, in fact, a quite compelling argument that there are some things for which you need to test on animals because they're the only complex systems that will allow you to predict impacts on humans. But what we do to animals in product testing is insane. And if you saw it, it would make you cry. So this is no defense of that at all. And some unnecessary cruelty still remains. A huge amount. Yes. Just unthinkably much. Yes. But even in research, certainly in livestock and chicken. Yes. Husbandry. And if you were to understand the massive fishing fleets, I don't mean to blame China specifically, but they seem to be a major culprit in the Pacific at the moment. These giant fleets that are just thrashing the oceans, just absolutely liquidating the wildlife there. There's a lot of unthinkably terrible stuff. And yes, animals need much better protection than they have. Including insects need protection from the insane pesticides that we're distributing. Yes. With all that said, however, the idea that you are raising those animals to kill them and eat them, and that's mean is wrong headed. And the way to think of it is this. Let's take a domestic chicken. Domestic chickens outnumber jungle foul. They're closest living relative by who knows how many orders of magnitude in terms of the number of individuals alive on earth today. Jungle foul could go extinct. The chicken can't go extinct, right? Right. Let's say that we decide not only that raising of chickens in cages and even free-range chickens are just technically free-range. Let's suppose that we decided that all raising of chickens is wrong because it either involves exploiting them for their eggs or killing them for meat or very often exploiting for their eggs and then killing them for meat and killing is mean. Okay. So we stop doing it. Chicken goes extinct. Did you do it a favor? No. The fact is the future chicken whom you saved from being killed never came into existence in the first place. Right. And if you think about whether or not you know you would be spared all of the suffering that you will have in your life by never having been, most people would prefer to have been even knowing that they will ultimately die and that they may die horribly. Most people would rather have lived a life. It doesn't make any sense. So the point is the chicken or the goat or the sheep or the cow have arranged they have evolved into a mutualism with people and the mutualism involves them living. I would have them all live under natural circumstances where they actually have joy and pleasure and and all of that. I don't want them to live intolerably but they would rather if they could speak for themselves exist and then cease to exist as a result of the deal that they've worked out with humanity rather than break that deal and banish them to extinction. But he wants to go extinct. The whole point of your evolutionary drive is to not go extinct. So you are not doing them a favor by not eating them. You are doing them a favor by eating them and recognizing that they should be raised in a way that actually matches our values rather than hidden away so that we can't see the suffering that we are causing. We should raise them honorably but we should raise them and we should eat them and we should not feel bad about it. We would not be doing them a favor by not doing it. And frankly, there are a lot of issues that work this way. If you think about what is actually in that creature's interest, it's not always what you think. And evolutionary analysis actually is very clarifying in this regard. What would the animal want? All these people who want to end suffering, that would be an insane thing to do. Actually, even human suffering, which is not good when it happens, is part of the system that allows you to have meaning in life. It is motivational. It gets you to solve your problems. If you were to try, it's like medicine sees pain as a disease. If we get rid of pain, hey, we can anesthetize that. Don't. People who have the malady of not being able to feel pain die early. All of them. They can't figure out how to live because pain is a teacher. So the point is these things are involved signal. And it's a useful one. Some things that evolved no longer useful. But before you get rid of it, go chesterton's fence on it and figure out what you're getting ready.
of. Why is it there in the first place? Which is not to say that there aren't instances where it's useless. All right. If you have lost a limb and you have pain in a phantom limb, that pain isn't helping you. Right. So we should try to figure out how to anesthetize that one. But that's the exception. In general, pain is telling you something. Either you're doing damage or you're taking a risk that is unacceptable and will cause damage. It's telling you something. So anyway, the point is enough. I don't want to be told by some vegan that I can't eat ethically raised meat. Who the hell appointed this guy? I evolved as a meat eater. I am entitled to eat meat and I am not doing the animals any favor by not eating them. You just don't understand what you're talking about, sir, at all. So go educate yourself and stop trying to boss other people around. And if you wanted to, if you wanted to make your efforts useful, you could point them at the inhumane treatment of animals in laboratories, in factory farms. If you want to talk about that, you'll find a much larger audience of us ready to listen, but you're not in a position to tell us what to eat and whether or not we can go fishing. I'm sorry. It's just not your business. Amen. All right. All right. Here it is. I hope you see that. Yeah. I hope so too. Yeah. Well, maybe maybe that's it, man. All right. So you're going to go out in the sun without sunscreen or sunglasses and just enjoy the rays on our skin. Yeah. I mean, and if it's really intense, we could put on our circular shadow casters. Or maybe I'll carry a pedestal. It's not done so much here, but yeah. Yeah. Oh, that does remind me. I got a lovely parasol from Rupert Low. Oh. What's really an umbrella? It's a it's a restore Britain umbrella, which I managed to get home in one piece. And I'm very proud to own it. But anyway, if you haven't watched the Rupert Low episode of Dark Horse, check it out. Rupert, somebody you should know about. He is a fellow traveler. I think you'll really dig it. And I think restore Britain and rescue the Republic are the right ideas. And this is how we fix the West. Excellent. Excellent. Beautiful. So check out our sponsors this week. Again, they were mudwater, caraway and puri. Join us on locals to check out previous Q&A's and such. And until you see us next time, we'll be back on Wednesday next week on our usual time and place. Be good to the ones you love, eat real food and get outside. Be well.
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