Ted Hesser

Building the Ted Hesser Podcast - a place for the exchange of big ideas, and inquiry into great minds.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

Fauci taking the fifth was quite the spectacle yesterday.

By his own account, it was the first time in more than 250 appearances before Congress, across 40 years, that he refused to testify. He may now face contempt, as Biden’s pardon likely removes the privilege of the 5th for federal conduct it covers. We’ll see.

This does not prove COVID came from a lab, but it does change the optics.

For anyone keeping score, the FBI favors a lab-related origin with moderate confidence. The Energy Department and CIA favor it with low confidence.

WHO says zoonotic, but also says it could not evaluate a lab accident hypothesis at all — because China withheld key lab records, biosafety documents and staff health data. After their headline report last summer, one member resigned. Three more asked to have their names removed. The WHO director said all hypotheses stay on the table.

It’s been six years and no intermediate animal carrying the virus has been identified. Hundreds of animals sampled from the Huanan market tested negative. SARS-CoV-2 was found in environmental samples, sometimes mixed with raccoon dog DNA, but no sampled animal itself was shown to be infected.

With SARS 1, infected civets were found within months. Though with Ebola it’s been decades and also no animal of proximal origin has been found.

But then there is the furin cleavage site.

It’s not exactly a genetic barcode reading MADE IN WUHAN. But it is absent from SARS-CoV-2’s closest known relatives and materially changes infectiousness in humans.

Then there’s DEFUSE: a 2018 EcoHealth proposal to DARPA, with Wuhan lab collaborators, to insert novel cleavage sites into SARS-like bat viruses. DARPA rejected it. No proof it happened elsewhere.

But come on. That is highly relevant circumstantial evidence.

This has made me curious about older origin controversies too.

Lyme from Plum Island is one. Probably proven wrong… Still, Cold War vector research plus a secretive animal-disease lab near where Lyme was first recognized earns curiosity.

Then there is the oral polio vaccine theory of HIV.

That one is harder for me to dismiss. The theory says some polio vaccine used in the Belgian Congo may have been grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with SIV.

Surviving stocks tested as macaque, not chimp and Phylogenetics dates HIV’s emergence decades earlier. Which is strong evidence against the oral polio theory.

But a few surviving vials do not represent every batch. Records were incomplete.

And inference models make a lot of assumptions. Molecular clocks are powerful, but they are still estimates built from sparse samples and model assumptions.

Maybe the human-origin theories for COVID, Lyme and HIV are all wrong.

But in each case, human causation would implicate scientific, medical or government institutions. Those same institutions fund much of the research, hold much of the evidence and help decide which explanations are respectable.

That does not make them wrong.

It does make conflicts of interest and cognitive bias reasonable things to consider. We already know human-caused epidemics are possible. The 1977 H1N1 outbreak is widely suspected to have come from a lab or vaccine-related release.

COVID was one of the defining events of our lives. Millions died. Families were separated. Children lost years of school. Small businesses vanished. Governments assumed extraordinary powers. Big tech played along.

I for one am deeply curious and want to know the truth. This Fauci thing will take a long time to play out but hopefully more information comes out eventually.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

Been thinking about why the Elliot Page casting in The Odyssey made people so insane, and I think the angry people are actually closer to what Nolan did than the people defending him.

Here's the thing. Nolan tweaked every character in that movie. He only fully inverted one. Sinon is basically the patron saint of lying in the classical world (Virgil's great deceiver, Dante literally put him in hell for fraud) and Nolan rewrote him as the only completely sincere person in the film. A true believer who gets used and killed for his sincerity. Then he handed that role, of all roles, to a trans actor who half the country has spent five years accusing of pretending to be something he's not. You can call that a coincidence if you want. Nolan has never done a coincidence in his life.

But the casting fight is the shallow layer. The real renovation is Odysseus himself. Homer's Odysseus doesn't feel guilt. That machinery doesn't exist in the poem, there's reputation, glory, what will people say about me, but there's no guilt. The guy dooms his whole crew by bragging his name at a blinded cyclops and never loses a minute of sleep over it. Nolan's Odysseus is the opposite animal. He's Oppenheimer at the end of the Bronze Age. Tired, wrecked, dragging his sins around, and the sin that cuts deepest is Sinon, the kid he lied to so the kid's sincerity would sell the horse to Troy. The Hades scene where Sinon confronts him about it is the best acted scene in the movie, honestly Page is phenomenal in it.

And once you see it you realize Nolan's been making this exact film forever. Bruce Wayne. Cobb. Oppenheimer. Man of action grows a conscience, conscience destroys him.

Which is the actual thing the right is mad about, underneath the casting stuff. He took the founding war epic of western civilization and installed introspection in it. The right is at war with his introspection, and conscious, as it is anathema to what they believe has allowed western civilization to flourish. Whether that's vandalism or the completion of the text kind of depends on which side of the culture war you're standing on. Which I'd argue is exactly what he wanted. That’s what commentary around Art looks like in a polarized terminally online world. He put a stake in the ground and the screaming around it is part of the piece.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@tylertringas @bkup_climbing Legend

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@AutismCapital Buy real estate in SLC. Utah. That’s what I do.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@jonbrooks You need to compare / contrast with money supply. 80% of all money created in past 5 years. Trump has Fannie/Freddie now purchasing $200bn MBS. Perhaps just the beginning of more QE and support. Home prices aren’t going down they are going up as rates gradually decline.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@MortConsumCoach Good trolling. Your logic is perfectly stupid. Bravo.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@jonbrooks You seem to argue against real estate as an asset class regularly, but also point out here that value has increased far faster than income. Given that real estate is often leveraged, it’s hard to square these contradictions.

In my mind, real estate is a good investment.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@MauiBoyMacro @cherrygarciafan Yep I agree. Ran out of characters… your point is consistent with my point, which is that there any many variables more important than fertility rate on housing / prices for the foreseeable future. And yes obviously babies grow up (or don’t grow up if unborn).

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@BestinMode29699 @cherrygarciafan The world is a big place… a lot of wealthy people want to own assets in the US.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@Anon36834 @cherrygarciafan For housing forecasting,

Family formation often means people pairing up and living together, moving out of their parents house, and some other things. It’s a housing statistics term. It’s not babies.

Family formation is also more colloquially used to describe having kids, yep.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@cherrygarciafan Birth rates do not impact home prices as much as the other variables listed. In 30 years, birth rates could be a larger variable. Sure. That said, I wouldn’t bet long term against real assets in America. That is foolish IMO.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@cherrygarciafan Net deaths is projected to exceed net births in 2031 per CBO. That is ex immigration, which pushes the cross over year out much further, perhaps well past the lifetime of anyone alive today.

Your ad hominem attack is childish. Your argument is too simple.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@unusual_whales $RIVN

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@tylerhnorris @Google Congrats Tyler. Big role!

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@thesamparr Totally disagree. (1) leverage (2) 100% bonus depreciation (3) It’s technocratically managed by the Fed (4) It’s hyper regional, location location location.

Most wealthy people either get there through real estate, or diversify into real estate once wealthy.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@VladTheInflator Imagine X hacking your nervous system so completely, that you live in a constant state of fear for the future.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

China is uno-reversing the US’s industrial policy.

[Ted Hesser @tedhesser]

@shl 👋