Ep 544 ｜ Why American COVID Policy Has Failed Us & How to Fix It ｜ Guest： Dr. Bret Weinstein
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Summary
Evergreen College professor Brett Weinstein joins us to discuss the events that took place at Evergreen in 2017, and the lessons he has learned since then. Dr. Weinstein also discusses his new book, The Hunter-Gatherer s Guide to the 21st Century, which he co-authored with his wife.
Transcript
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Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. Today we are talking
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to Dr. Brett Weinstein. Now you might know this name. Maybe you listen to his podcast,
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the Dark Horse Podcast. Maybe you have read his new book that we're talking about today
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that he co-authored with his wife, A Hunter Gathers Guide to the 21st Century. Or maybe
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you started following him when I did back in 2017, where there was this big debacle at the university
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where he was teaching called Evergreen College. He was accused very wrongly, he and his wife,
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of being racist because they opposed in a very logical and measured and truthful way
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some of the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that were being put into place in a
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very destructive way at his college. And he was almost literally chased off the campus by an
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irrational, angry mob of students who were calling them all kinds of crazy things like
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white supremacists. And so we're going to talk to him today. We're going to talk to him about
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what happened there, what he has learned since then, if he still considers himself
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liberal, and if he still considers himself someone who, you know, believes in some of the solutions
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or some of the policies suggested by progressivism. But perhaps the most juicy part of the conversation
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will be when we talk about COVID and his disagreement as a scientist with the response to COVID from our
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so-called public health experts, why they seem to be suppressing early treatment options and
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prevention options, what he thinks about the vaccines, why he's skeptical about them,
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and what he thinks about some of the policies surrounding these things. We will also talk
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about his book, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. So I know you're going to love
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this conversation. He's fascinating, he's brilliant, and you are going to learn so much. Before we get
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into that conversation, if you love this podcast, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.
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Just tell us a little bit about why you like it. That would mean so much to us. So just leave that
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five-star review if you love Relatable. Thank you so much. Okay, without further ado, here is Dr. Brett Weinstein.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Just in case there are some people out there
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who don't know, can you tell us who you are and what you do? Yes, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein. I'm a
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biologist. I was a college professor teaching at the Evergreen State College for 14 years. I was
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driven from the college by a mob of crazed students, students that I had in fact never met,
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who falsely believed that I was a racist and demanded my firing and my resignation. The reason
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that they demanded that was because I had opposed some policies, diversity, equity, and inclusion
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policies that were being advanced by the college president and a committee that he had impaneled
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that jeopardized the college. And it was my duty as a professor to block those things so that the
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college could continue to serve the student population, many of whom were not economically
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advantaged. In any case, that event got quite widely publicized as a result of the fact that the
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protesters who became rioters filmed everything they did and then uploaded it to the internet thinking
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that the world would see them as heroes and it saw them as quite the opposite. Of course, now what
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they did at Evergreen has spilled out into the world and people have seen that it was not just
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a quirky left coast college that had gone nuts, but a preview of what was coming to the world.
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Yes, I'm glad you started there because that's when I first heard your name. I think maybe you
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were on Fox News, maybe it was Tucker Carlson where I first heard that story and as it unfolded and as
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I saw some of those images that you were talking about, just stunned. Knowing that, of course,
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academia leans to the left, but just the kind of almost barbaric and irrational reaction you got
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that seemed to be not necessarily just a symptom of a political ideology, but I don't know, almost a
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taking over of the mind that occurred in a lot of the students there that I guess, like you said,
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is indicative of a lot of young people in general today. When you look back at that incident,
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I'm sure you've thought a lot about it. You've considered, you know, what started that? What was
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the impetus? What drove the students to react the way that they did? What would you say that you have
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learned about the ideology and about some of the motivations that were driving the students to
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react the way that they did to you and some of the things that you were bringing up at the time?
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Well, I think the incident is almost perfect in the lesson that it teaches because although as it was
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happening, I was quite concerned that nobody would really ever understood what had taken place,
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ever understand. It has now been so thoroughly explored largely as a result of the work of Benjamin
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Boyce, who has cataloged documents from the college, video from all angles throughout the entire
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process, video that led up to it over the years preceding. And so there's so much documentation that
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we actually know a tremendous amount about what was going on in the college, where, and then how this
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boiled over into spectacular riots and witch hunting. I do want to point out there is at the core a basic
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problem driving the psychosis that clearly took over my college but is now taking over the world. There is a
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basic dissatisfaction with a system that has betrayed people. It has treated them terribly. It has not
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given them tools that are appropriate to the adult lives they need to lead. And so there's a basic level
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of distrust that is not unjustified. The problem is that that distrust is all too easily captured by those
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students who are simply interested in acquiring power. And so people, students, for example, are very easily
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turned into tools by unscrupulous faculty and administrators that wish to accomplish things and
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can utilize the dissatisfaction of the population to get there. And that really is the story of what took
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place at Evergreen. What I think is probably most useful for people is that because people had not
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heard of me or my wife before this incident, I should say my wife was actually literally the college's
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most popular professor when this happened. And she was driven out alongside me, also accused of racism,
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completely nonsensical, not even just false, but upside down accusation.
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Um, that people can see that the story that was being advanced about who we were was completely
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divorced from reality. And we are now seeing that same thing take place on other topics, topics that
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have nothing to do with race or sex or gender. Now they have to do with things like the pandemic and our
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public health policy. And we have to stop and recognize whenever that happens, whenever we are
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being sold a story that bears no resemblance to reality, we have to say, who is it who's on the
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move? And what is it they're trying to accomplish?
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And I want to get to the detachment from reality, uh, as it pertains to the pandemic response, but
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specifically, why were they calling you a racist? And then I guess just by association,
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they were calling your wife a racist, what was the specific charge they leveled against you?
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So this is, I think, a pattern of history. They came after us because we were the primary obstacle
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to the plan that was being advanced, which would have changed our college into something very different.
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And I don't know how interested your audience will be in the way our college functioned, but
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it was a very unusual place where students took one class full-time, professors taught
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one class full-time, and those classes could go on for a full year. And what that meant was that we
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knew our students incredibly well, and we were capable of teaching to them in a way that was
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tailored to their individual viewpoints. That's not possible at a normal college. And that means it's
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a particularly good place for students who are not a great fit for school, as I was not a great fit for
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school when I was in it. But in any case, the problem is the president of the college wished to
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change it into a very different place. That would have been bad for the students. It was my obligation
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and my wife's obligation to oppose those plans. And once we opposed those plans, we needed to be removed
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in order for the plans to continue. That's how we ended up on the wrong end of those accusations.
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Now, it's relatively easy to put somebody on the wrong end of such an accusation when you have to
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stand up and say this policy, which is labeled as an anti-racism policy, is actually dangerous to the
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college and itself racist. Once you have opposed a policy that is described as anti-racist, then it is
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very easy to portray you as racist. And that is what happened. And part of the policy, I think,
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if I remember correctly, had to do with white students not being allowed to come on campus one
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day. Is that true? Well, let's put it this way. The narrative as it unfolded focused on this issue
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is a tradition at the college called Day of Absence. And it had been there since the founding of the
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college in the early 70s. And what it was originally was black students and faculty, later students and
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faculty of color more generally, would not come to school on one day to emphasize the importance of
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the role they were playing there. Now, when we arrived at the college, this was already not an
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important fact in our quadrant where we taught. We were science professors. But nonetheless, it was a
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tradition. And then in 2017, the organizers decided to, as they put it, flip the script. And what they
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did was they asked white people not to come to campus. And then something very unusual happened,
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which was the administration started pushing us into signing up for this plan. And I sent an email
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to all of my faculty and staff colleagues saying that it was completely different for people to
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decide to absent themselves as an act of protest, which I, of course, support, versus asking other
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people not to come to a public college because of the color of their skin, which I absolutely cannot
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support as a patriotic American, as a human being. It is offensive. And so I said that I would be on
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campus that day and that people should take it as a protest. So that's kind of what kicked all of this
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off. Were you surprised by not just the initial reaction, but how you were almost literally kicked
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off campus by pitchfork-wielding students who seemed committed to misunderstanding you and to
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mischaracterizing both you and your wife? And then the aftermath of that, in which you were,
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I'm sure that you were criticized by a lot of people on the left and you were comforted and
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welcomed by some people on the right, considering that I think, if I'm correct, you did consider and
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perhaps still consider yourself a liberal, someone on the left side of the aisle.
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Well, okay, let me deal with this as two separate questions. The reaction of the right shocked me,
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and I am heartened by what happened. I'll describe that in a second if that's all right.
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As for whether I was surprised by what happened when I stood up, you know, if I, a version of me
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from 10 years prior would have been absolutely stunned. But I was watching this process on the
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march. And so as it began to target me, as I stood up to oppose these diversity, equity, and inclusion
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measures because they were mislabeled and dangerous to the college, I knew what accusation would come
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back. What I did not understand was that no amount of evidence that the accusations were false
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would be sufficient to persuade people locally. And I was also shocked by
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how the population of people that knew me well reacted. I saw people
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break in both directions. I saw people who I had thought were my friends who knew full well that the
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accusations were false. And they nonetheless said nothing. Some of them even attacked me.
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I also saw incredible courage from quite a number of people, especially students, and especially
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students of color who knew me well, knew the accusations were false. Some of them stood up
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and spoke on my behalf during the riots. And I must tell you, there was a special punishment for people
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of color who stood up and said, you've got this wrong. He's not a racist. They had to be
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punished publicly in order to prevent that behavior from upending the story.
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By other students who didn't want them to raise their voice in that way.
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Absolutely. Because you can imagine that the students who were engaged in this phony protest,
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they required that there not be evidence of students of color saying, I flatly disagree. And there were
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those students. And so when those students stood up, they needed to be ridiculed so that others would
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know not to try the same thing. Okay. And then you said that people on their right, you were heartened
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by their reaction. And you said that you were shocked by it. Can you tell me what you mean by that?
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As this was unfolding, it became, it was understood, it was circulating online, and people were discussing
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it. The mainstream press absolutely would not touch the story. There was no interest. The opposite.
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There was, as my brother calls it, anti-interest. Tucker Carlson reached out and said he wanted to put
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me on. And I would have gone on any major program because I felt very strongly then, and I know that
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I was correct now. This needed to reach a larger audience in order to staunch the bleeding. And so I
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accepted Carlson's offer. Now, when I went on his program, the next thing that happened was my email
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inbox started to fill literally thousands of pieces of correspondence and thousands of reactions on
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Twitter from people who were in Carlson's audience who said that there was a theme. It ran throughout
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these things. And it said something like, I'm sure that we disagree over many, if not all, political
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issues, but it's wonderful to see somebody on the opposite side who I can respect. Now, this is not
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the audience I was led to believe existed on the right. And that lesson has been reinforced many,
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many times in the years since. There are a lot of people on the center-right who have the same
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basic values that I hold as a liberal. And the fact is these are unifying American values. And
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if you live on one side of this political divide, you have been led to believe that the people on the
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other side of it are monstrous, dimwitted, something like this. And in this case, it was just fabulous to
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discover all of these patriotic Americans who, in fact, were glad to see a liberal stand up for liberal
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values. Have your political views changed over the past few years as you have kind of come into more
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conversations and have found more common ground with people who maybe before you thought that you
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just totally disagreed with on the right? Well, I have to be careful with this one. Overall, no. And I
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will say this, I'll try to say it in a way that it makes sense for people who haven't thought about it
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this way before. But I was never on the left because I liked the people on the left. I certainly
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did like some of the people on the left, but I was on the left because I believed that it was the
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correct position to be in. And the reason for that is not because I think progress for progress's sake
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is always a good thing. In fact, I know what many liberals don't know, which is that there are always
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unintended consequences when you try to solve problems. And so one should engage solution
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making with a great deal of caution. And I think that's something that that's effectively the job
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of conservatives in the system is to keep the desire to solve problems from running away and
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creating lots of new problems. And the job of progressives is to figure out what problems can be
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solved at a reasonable risk and to push us in that direction. And it is the tension between these two
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things that creates the dynamism of our system. And my point is at this moment in history,
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we need progress because if we continue doing what we are doing, it will self-destruct, right?
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We are not in a sustainable place and that's true ecologically, but it's also true politically.
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For example, we have an expectation of growth that simply cannot be maintained. And when growth
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is expected and not maintained, it results in basically violent confrontations between people.
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So my feeling is progress, the attempt to make progress is dangerous, but we have no choice but
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to contemplate it at this moment in history. And I have always said from long before this,
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that I am a progressive who wants to live in a world so good that I get to be a conservative.
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That is to say, if you've got the system really functional, right, you would say, well, we would
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be fools to try to fix this and make it better because what's wrong with it is very small and
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the chances we'll mess it up are very large. And so becoming a conservative is a natural thing at
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the point your system has succeeded. And so I'm a progressive because I think we have to be
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in order to have a nation 200 years from now. But I'm hoping that we can solve what problems remain
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well enough that it would be foolish to continue to try to improve it.
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So in any case, what happened when all of this went down at Evergreen didn't change my viewpoint.
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It does make me think that most of the people who describe themselves as on the left aren't really
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progressives or liberals in any meaningful sense of the term, right? We have anarchists and
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authoritarians who are, you know, they basically wear a blue jersey, but that's about it.
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So it didn't change me in that regard. On the other hand, the way history has progressed over the
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last few years has altered my thinking on a few issues. And I think it would be unfair to say I'm
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unaltered by what I've seen. In particular, I'll point to the issue of the Second Amendment.
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I have never been an enthusiast for the Second Amendment. I've never been enthusiastic about the
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idea of banning guns, but I've always been very ambivalent about the huge price that we Americans
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obviously pay for liberal gun laws. On the other hand, I do believe that there is more credibility to
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the argument that these are in the Constitution, that our rights to bear arms are in the Constitution
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as a hedge against tyranny, and that that hedge is not an anachronism, that it may actually
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plausibly be the difference between us falling under the spell of tyrants and resisting them.
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That's one issue. And then I would also say I'm recently persuaded that although if we had highly
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functional governance, if we had good governance, I would probably be in favor of single-payer health
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care. But what I'm watching unfold with respect to COVID now has me concerned that the danger of
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single-payer health care if you have malignant governance is so large that as terrible as our
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health care system is with, you know, predatory insurance practices and the like, it might be better
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Right. There are so many different parts of your answer, but it all makes sense going to the beginning
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of your response and saying that you aren't on the left simply because you or because you like the
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people on the left, but because you believe that the ideas are right or the solutions that are
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posited are good, at least for the most part. That will definitely make sense because as a
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conservative, when people have said to me over the past few years, how can you still consider
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yourself on the right because of Donald Trump? Or how can you consider yourself a Christian?
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I'm a Christian when all of these, look at these Christians and all the terrible things that they
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have done. Well, I'm not a Christian because, you know, Jerry Falwell Jr. said that he was a Christian.
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I'm not a conservative because Donald Trump said that he was a Republican. I actually believe in the
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tenets of both of these things. And so that's going to make sense to a lot of people. And
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I'm glad that you explained it that way. The other part, when you're kind of describing progress
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and progressivism and why we need that tension between conservatism and progressivism, I also
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agree with. The thing that I think I, that turns me off most to progressivism, maybe in the same way
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that someone on the left looks at someone on the right, maybe it's a caricature and maybe it's my bias
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creating this caricature. But when I hear people on the left say progress or progressivism,
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I think what you really mean is simply destroying the system that's in place without,
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without a feasible solution to replace it. So when I hear abolishing the police or the justice system,
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I know that's not, that doesn't characterize the beliefs of probably most people on the left,
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but you're hearing those loud voices. Certainly over the past year, you have heard those calls for
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anarchy and destruction by people who say at least that they are progressives. So I look at that.
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And then I also look at what, of course I want to talk to you about is what seems like a detachment
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from reality when it comes to COVID, what the numbers are, the effectiveness and the lack of
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effectiveness of some of the, you know, the therapeutics and the preventatives and things like
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that. And when I look at progressivism, I see not progress, but a lot of destruction to me
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and a lot of mythology that they just won't actually have a conversation about while they
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are calling constantly people on the right conspiracy theorists. So I find it difficult
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to give credit to progressivism at all, especially right now when it just seems like a whole lot of
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Well, let me just clarify that when I say that I'm a progressive, I do not mean to imply that if you
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were to take a list of things that progressives tend to advocate, that you would find me in favor of
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those things. I don't mean that at all. What I mean is that if I, as a scientist, look at where we
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are and I just simply extrapolate what happens if we keep doing this and we adjust it in the way we've
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been adjusting it. We're not here 200 years from now.
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So are you talking about the climate specifically?
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I'm not talking about the climate. I have my own beliefs about the climate and we can certainly talk
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about them. But what I'm saying is that our mode of existing cannot continue. We've gotten lucky.
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You cannot exist in a state where you have ferociously powerful arsenals of nuclear weapons,
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depending on the fact that everyone will have judgment at least good enough to avoid launching
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them. And, you know, you can see as, you know, tensions are mounting over, you know, the border
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between Russia and Ukraine, how this could get out of hand and then suddenly that's unleashed on the
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world. So you can't, you've got a clock ticking. You have to solve that problem in some useful way.
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And that problem, frankly, we have gotten lucky, but the number of things that threaten to destroy us
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is many and it is growing and we don't even commonly recognize some of them. So for example,
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we have an electrical grid that is structured in such a way that a bad solar storm, the kind of thing that
00:25:53.020
happens frequently that ejects a coronal mass in the direction of earth could knock out a third of
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the U.S. power grid and leave it out for months or years. Now that power grid is linked up to nuclear
00:26:08.120
power plants that absolutely require power in order not to melt down. Now they all have provisions for
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a week by regulation that they can run on diesel power, right? And presumably there would be a huge
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effort to keep diesel flowing to these plants to keep them from melting down. But the system
00:26:26.680
is incredibly fragile and we are banking on the fact that the sun is not going to hurl plasma at us
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in an unfortunate way that could cause a decohering of civilization. It's also a problem that's easily
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fixed and there's no good reason we aren't fixing it. So my point is we have to change because at the
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moment we've got 18th century solutions to 21st century problems and those solutions aren't up
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to it. Even if the values that were described by our founders were correct, they couldn't possibly
00:27:01.380
have imagined the world we live in. You can see that our speech rights are poorly protected in a
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world where the public square exists on private servers. So there are all kinds of problems that we
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have to solve. And my point about being a progressive is not, I align with the things that
00:27:17.880
those people are advocating. My point is progress is required for us to survive. And as long as we can
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say that, then I will be a progressive advocating for that progress. That said, if you want to understand
00:27:30.940
what that means, my wife and I wrote this book and this book ends with us describing the path forward as
00:27:39.660
we see it. And one of the things we say is we can't blueprint the future system that we need. We
00:27:44.680
don't, we literally don't know enough to do it from here. We have to navigate to it. We have to prototype
00:27:49.340
our way there, but at least recognizing that we can't stay here because it's unstable. We must therefore
00:27:55.660
confront the frightening prospect of change and we must do it as responsibly as possible. We must do it
00:28:01.160
partnered, conservatives and liberals partnered in that process. And we must get to somewhere that
00:28:06.720
actually liberates people. That's one of the things conservatives have absolutely right. It is
00:28:12.240
the liberation of people that is the objective of the exercise. Yep. And just for the people who are
00:28:17.560
only listening and they're not watching, so they might not have seen the book that you held up.
00:28:21.240
It is a hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century.
00:28:29.740
Let's talk about one unifying issue that I would say a lot of people on the right, and then some people
00:28:35.360
on the left, a lot of people on the middle can agree with that the response to COVID by most
00:28:40.640
governments, including our government has not been good. There's a lot of misinformation,
00:28:45.420
a lot of straight up propaganda about things like ivermectin, you might say about the vaccines,
00:28:52.660
and we are not logically making policy that benefits, I would say, especially children.
00:29:00.060
And a lot of people are being pushed in certain directions just by paranoia and fear, not that
00:29:08.560
there is no concern about the virus, but people are being motivated just by fear-based propaganda.
00:29:14.180
And you've talked about this a lot. You had Dr. Pierre Corey, who we also had on the podcast,
00:29:18.800
a wonderful conversation. You recently had Dr. Peter McAuliffe, and you might've had him on more
00:29:24.180
than once, but I listened to that recent conversation. Why is this something that you've talked about so much
00:29:29.600
in the past year? And what are some of your concerns that you have seen with the media's response and
00:29:35.700
politicians' response to COVID? Yeah, you've landed on the big issue, and the big issue isn't COVID.
00:29:44.200
I would say something is riding on the carrier wave of COVID, and it is doing something that looks
00:29:51.360
not exactly like the slide into tyranny that we've seen many times in history, but it is in that same
00:29:58.320
quadrant of the library somehow. So what I would say is, I hear people often say something like what
00:30:05.300
you just said about how bad our response to COVID has been. And I want to refine that a little bit
00:30:11.200
so that people understand what's really going on. You could imagine a completely incompetent response
00:30:20.300
to COVID that would be effectively random, where we would recommend things and how well those things
00:30:27.460
worked was arbitrary. That's not what we have. We have a response to COVID in the U.S. that so far
00:30:35.160
has been upside down. That is to say, we are recommending things that don't work, and we are blocking the use
00:30:43.220
of things that do. And the degree to which this is true across the board is stunning. Now, I know how
00:30:49.300
remarkable and maybe even crazy that sounds. I check in with myself multiple times a week to say,
00:30:56.880
can I possibly be seeing this? Is it more likely that I'm crazy? Because how could the world possibly
00:31:02.300
allow that to take place? On the other hand, we know, for example, that vitamin D is extremely likely
00:31:10.840
to be deficient in people who do not live close to the equator, people who live their lives indoors,
00:31:17.460
which our ancestors did not, people who live their lives more fully clothed than our ancestors did.
00:31:23.400
Because vitamin D is produced by an interaction with the sun on bare skin, and it can only happen
00:31:29.600
when the sun's high in the sky, our modern lives leave us deficient. And we know that this creates a
00:31:35.140
tremendous amount of vulnerability to diseases, colds, flu, and the like. And we know that this is also
00:31:42.140
true with COVID. Now, the fact that we are two years into a pandemic that we know would be
00:31:50.060
tremendously well addressed if people were to get rid of their vitamin D deficiency by seeking the sun
00:31:59.000
during the summer while it's high in the sky and supplementing in the winter when it is not.
00:32:03.700
We know that that would save at least tens of thousands of lives. A strong argument can be made that
00:32:09.960
it actually could be a decisive game changer with respect to the pandemic, that it could effectively
00:32:15.860
end deaths that result from COVID. The fact that that's true, as far as we can tell, that the drug,
00:32:23.680
drug, that the vitamin is safe. And that even if this was wrong, even if somehow we were
00:32:29.980
misunderstanding the interaction between vitamin D deficiency and COVID, vitamin D is so useful in
00:32:36.400
preventing other diseases, that the side effects of giving it to people or advising them to take it,
00:32:42.740
even if it didn't work for COVID, the side effects are positive.
00:32:48.520
It's much better than no harm. There are collateral benefits that we would get,
00:32:53.020
even if it didn't work for COVID. And yet we're two years into this pandemic and public health
00:32:56.620
authorities are not recommending it. Right. So that's one glaring fact, right? We could tomorrow
00:33:03.420
recommend it and we could save thousands of lives. We are, we are ignoring early treatments. We now have
00:33:11.400
quite a number of drugs that people have clinical experience treating COVID. It's now a very manageable
00:33:16.920
disease if you have access to these drugs, but not only are we not recommending them, not only are we
00:33:22.320
not making them the standard of care, but we are interfering with a doctor's ability to prescribe
00:33:28.220
them for their patients. Right. That is a preposterous thing for us to do. What do we do instead of early
00:33:33.940
treatment? Well, when you come and show up positive with a COVID test, you are supposed to go home.
00:33:41.480
You are supposed to not treat it until your lips turn blue and you need rescuing. Right. Now this is
00:33:47.340
wrong in two ways. Going home means you're very likely to transmit it to the people with whom you live.
00:33:53.240
This is the most likely place for you to get COVID is from somebody that you're sharing a living space
00:33:58.340
with. So we send you home where you're going to infect people. And we tell you to come back when
00:34:06.160
it's now too late to help you because all of the treatments work best when treated early, right? By
00:34:10.820
delaying, we, we hobble ourselves in our ability to even help you, right? What do we then give you?
00:34:16.260
Remdesivir, which is dangerous and doesn't work. Right. Right. So that doesn't make sense. What did we do at
00:34:21.960
the beginning of the pandemic? We closed the beaches and the parks. These are places where
00:34:28.720
the virus doesn't transmit from the point of view of people's psychological wellbeing, if nothing else,
00:34:33.480
leaving them 99% of the world, which turned out to be completely safe from COVID for them to go and
00:34:38.820
feel like normal human beings. We told them, no, we told them stay home. None of this makes any sense.
00:34:44.560
It's the inverse of a rational response to COVID. And you cannot get to the inverse of a rational
00:34:53.120
response through incompetence, right? You can get to random, but you can't get to the inverse. And
00:34:58.560
that's where we are. Right. And that's what I heard you say in your conversation with Dr. Peter
00:35:03.260
McCullough, that you just cannot take the suggestion that this is because our public health experts,
00:35:11.080
so-called are incompetent because like you said, okay, that could maybe explain a haphazard response
00:35:18.940
started out haphazardly, but then, okay, we got on track once we had more information, but there does
00:35:24.460
seem to be something sinister going on. There's actually this chart that was tweeted out by some
00:35:30.200
journalist on Twitter named Abby Richards, where she puts up this big conspiracy chart and the top of it
00:35:36.880
is detached from reality. The bottom of it is grounded in reality, but it's speculation. Well,
00:35:41.680
one of the biggest conspiracy theories that she says is detached from reality is that Ivermectin cures
00:35:48.660
COVID. And this is, this is not just a random tweet, by the way, this has 75,000 likes. So this has been
00:35:54.100
retweeted, 20,000 retweets. A lot of people think this way. Of course, we've been told this by the media
00:35:59.820
when, when Joe Rogan said that he took Ivermectin and felt better. He of course was lambasted,
00:36:05.740
dragged through the mud, basically called some kind of crazy Neanderthal that is pushing horse
00:36:10.420
paste. And this is what we have heard over and over again. And yet in the conversations that you
00:36:15.100
and I have both had, and I've heard you talk about this a lot, there's a lot of evidence that shows
00:36:20.020
that Ivermectin can be helpful. So if it is sinister, which it seems like it is in some ways,
00:36:26.040
what, what do you think is behind that? What would be the why?
00:36:28.820
Um, I don't know. I mean, I, let's put it this way. At the point that people are willing
00:36:36.960
to allow tens of thousands of people to die rather than to recommend that they supplement
00:36:43.620
with vitamin D, my ability to understand how such a mind works is not very good. It's really a very
00:36:52.360
foreign thought process. And at the point that we are willing to vaccinate children for a disease
00:36:59.660
that doesn't threaten them, right? We're talking about vaccinating healthy children. The only
00:37:04.540
argument for vaccinating healthy children against this disease, which doesn't threaten them, and that
00:37:10.020
if they got it would leave them as far as we know with lifelong immunity. Only reason to do that,
00:37:16.580
you know, if I give the benefit of the doubt is to protect old and infirm people. And that is not
00:37:23.420
something a decent society does. We are expected to protect the young. And if there's a cost to the
00:37:30.620
old and infirm, so be it. That's the natural order of things. These are children. We are supposed to
00:37:35.640
protect them. And so the, the idea that somebody, some thing, some group, whatever it is that's making
00:37:42.320
decisions, is failing to recommend obvious safe remedies, is demonizing those who would pioneer
00:37:49.120
new mechanisms for managing this disease, has frankly left us in a terrifying state. Now my position,
00:37:58.100
which has changed over the pandemic, but my position at this point is that we have a disease.
00:38:06.280
It's actually a very serious, dangerous disease. It's not as dangerous as it might be,
00:38:11.840
but it's nothing to be trifled with. It's not the flu. But in 2021, in late 2021,
00:38:19.760
it is a highly treatable disease. It is a disease that does not need to threaten people who are in
00:38:26.520
good health and for which we have a large arsenal of very effective tools. And we have now have a lot of
00:38:34.580
knowledge about how to use them. We just have to listen to the doctors who have been successfully
00:38:39.380
doing it. The idea that we have the solution to manage COVID and make it into a minor disease from
00:38:46.600
the major disease that we were handed, and that we would not deploy those things in favor of a policy
00:38:51.780
that clearly doesn't work. I mean, if you thought that vaccines were going to, or these vaccines were
00:38:57.640
going to control this pandemic by vaccinating the whole population, Gibraltar tells us very clearly
00:39:03.300
that's not true. Gibraltar has vaccinated its entire population and it hasn't solved its COVID
00:39:07.700
problem. So, you know, and we have many examples of states in India, of Japan. We have many examples
00:39:17.280
of places that have experimented with ivermectin and the pattern is always the same. And, you know,
00:39:22.460
you can dismiss each one of these, but, you know, at some point you've got enough of these examples
00:39:26.500
where you introduce ivermectin into some population and suddenly your out of control COVID problem
00:39:32.860
vanishes, right? Even if you weren't certain, it would make sense on the off chance that that was
00:39:40.060
going to work, that you would just try it. It's a cheap, very safe drug. And if you deployed it and
00:39:45.440
your COVID problem didn't crash, then, uh, you know, you would have lost nothing. But if you did manage
00:39:52.740
to drive COVID to extinction, wouldn't that be great? I mean, it's what we should be trying to do.
00:39:58.020
Right. I think a lot of people point to the money that the pharmaceutical companies make
00:40:02.200
on the vaccines and the lack of money that they make on ivermectin. That would be, I guess,
00:40:08.380
the, the why, um, that some people would just, just based on conjecture would point to when you're
00:40:14.360
talking about trying to understand the mind of someone who maybe wants more people to die or is okay
00:40:18.920
with more people dying by not recommending vitamin D or not allowing for, um, other kinds of treatments
00:40:24.240
like ivermectin. How plausible do you think that is just in your opinion, that this really has to do
00:40:30.320
with the power and the profit of these pharmaceutical companies that have more control than I realized
00:40:36.040
possibly over our government and over our media? I have a very hard time imagining that people get
00:40:42.420
together in some conference room and they talk about the deaths of thousands of people, hundreds of
00:40:48.020
thousands, millions, and are indifferent to it. I, those people exist, but they don't tend to exist
00:40:54.500
in such high density that a boardroom would be filled with them, frankly. And I've met lots of
00:40:58.960
people who are in various boardrooms and they don't sound like that, right? They're people. So I don't,
00:41:04.300
I don't really think that this can be the wanton indifference of the, you know, the boards of directors of
00:41:12.620
corporations that, you know, are just casual about causing that much harm. It has to be something
00:41:20.000
else. As for what it is, I don't know. But again, I'm stuck with the fact that provision after provision,
00:41:27.520
we are looking at a response that is the inverse of what a rational society would do. And that can't
00:41:34.160
be accidental. Right. So it's not incompetence. It is sinister, but we don't know exactly what, why, who,
00:41:42.840
how far this reaches, all of that. I hear you. Tell me a little bit more about your concern with these
00:41:50.300
vaccines. I've heard you say that technologically, they're a marvel. I think those are maybe your words, but they
00:41:57.200
just don't seem super effective. Is that your concern? Well, you know, I think what they are is a
00:42:04.640
prototype. And a prototype is a proof of concept. It tells you that you have something useful that you
00:42:12.160
could build into a product that would be worth deploying. But somehow what we've got is a prototype
00:42:17.360
that isn't highly effective. This is not preventing people from contracting COVID. It's not preventing them
00:42:24.220
for transmitting it. It doesn't control the pandemic. Gibraltar will tell you that. So that's a very
00:42:32.000
disappointing vaccine if that's all we had to say about it. But there's also a huge adverse event
00:42:39.100
signal. Now you can dismiss the adverse event signal. You can say the VAERS system isn't reliable,
00:42:44.580
but at best then what you've said is we have no idea how safe these things are because the system we set
00:42:49.500
up to tell us isn't reliable. And that's not a very comforting thing in light of the fact that these
00:42:54.840
vaccines are incredibly novel with respect to the way they interface with the immune system. So, you
00:43:03.440
know, as far as effectiveness goes, they aren't effective. As far as hazard, the best thing you can
00:43:09.100
say is we have no idea and we won't for a very long time. And we probably never will because we're not
00:43:14.060
actually collecting the evidence in the way you would want to if you wanted a full accounting.
00:43:19.120
And then I will also say that there's, if you go looking for it, there's lots of evidence that
00:43:25.580
these things are in fact not safe at all. And so, you know, we keep circling back to the same thing,
00:43:33.000
but we have lots of tools in our toolkit to make COVID a manageable disease. We aren't using them.
00:43:40.040
We have one tool that's being recommended. It is not only ineffective, but also seems to harm lots
00:43:47.900
of people. And you can make the argument that those harms are worthwhile because it's better than
00:43:53.480
COVID. It's a dubious argument, but you could make it, but you can't make that argument in light of the
00:43:58.120
fact that we have alternatives that are far safer and work very well. Yep. And it would be one thing if
00:44:03.540
it was just one tool suggested in a toolkit, but we are told that this is really the only tool and anyone
00:44:09.200
who suggests any other tool is crazy, a conspiracy theorist, and that they're the ones who want
00:44:13.580
people to die to the point to where people are losing their, their civil rights over this. You
00:44:18.800
also, you talked to someone from Australia who couldn't even get a medical exemption for the
00:44:24.720
vaccine and she's completely lost her livelihood. So it'd be one thing, even if it were ineffective,
00:44:30.420
if the, if the government were suggesting a prototype and saying, take it your own risk,
00:44:35.600
maybe it'll help you, maybe it won't, but they're mandating it to the point of violating people's
00:44:40.560
most fundamental human rights throughout the world, even in countries where the vast majority of the
00:44:45.480
population is vaccinated. Everyone in one way or another is having their freedoms taken away
00:44:50.780
that as a conservative and really just as a human being is very frightening to me.
00:44:55.440
Yes. Now I will say, uh, you know, I, I, there are diseases for which I could imagine a justified
00:45:06.220
mandate. There are diseases that could justify that, but it would be essential that we had
00:45:13.600
an incredibly good sense of how much risk we were taking in vaccinating the entire population.
00:45:21.180
We would have to have public health authorities that were absolutely clean of any hint of corruption
00:45:27.760
so that when they said, actually in this case, although, um, bodily autonomy is a vital
00:45:34.380
principle in this case, we have to mandate it, right? If you had an authority that was trustworthy,
00:45:40.860
that explained that, and it was actually based on the science, we can imagine a disease and a vaccine
00:45:47.620
for which their risk benefit profile would justify it. We are nowhere near that here. And our authorities
00:45:57.060
are behaving in a completely unscientific way. They are absolutely drenched in, uh, corruption.
00:46:04.820
It is riddled through our system. I'm not claiming that it is illegal. In fact, it's built into the way the
00:46:10.260
system is funded and managed. It's built into the way the safety trials are done. And so what we have
00:46:17.540
is a situation. And I, I know that the analogy seems extreme and I, it's not a good one, but what we have
00:46:25.140
is effectively a violation of principles that were settled at Nuremberg, implying that we are running
00:46:32.340
experiments where even if, even if the Nazis are not a good analogy here, somehow that's the quadrant of the
00:46:40.900
library. We have to search for analogies because we don't have better ones, right? It's something like
00:46:46.580
Nuremberg. This has something to do with the errors of the Tuskegee experiment, right? Why are we in that
00:46:53.540
quadrant of the library? We should never be there, right? That's the, that's the message of that quadrant of the
00:46:58.980
library is anytime you're forced to come here for analogies, you've made a dire error.
00:47:03.860
That's a really good way to put it, that it's just in the same quadrant of the library. Because as soon
00:47:08.020
as you say, as soon as you make a Holocaust comparison, I think rightfully people say,
00:47:12.820
whoa, whoa, whoa, this is nothing. This is not like the Holocaust. You're crazy. And then that does make
00:47:16.980
you sound like a conspiracy theorist and a fear monger and all of that and all that stuff. And like you
00:47:20.900
said, it's not a direct comparison. It's not exactly the same, but it's almost like we don't have
00:47:27.140
anything else in our Rolodex to compare it to when we're talking about, you know,
00:47:32.020
we're talking about discriminating against a certain group of people, violating their most
00:47:35.460
fundamental civil rights, saying that you can't interact with polite society or be a part of
00:47:40.260
public life at all because of the, of your medical status. It is very reminiscent of a time in history
00:47:45.860
that none of us want to go back to, even while we don't want to compare everyone we don't agree with
00:47:51.540
to Nazis. It's a quadrant of the library that we just don't want to visit and we shouldn't visit.
00:47:57.620
Anytime you're there, you're making an error. And I will say, if you, if you want to say,
00:48:01.620
well, what about in fiction? You know, is it Orwell? Is it Kafka? Right? Again, you're stuck
00:48:08.340
in a quadrant of the library that's telling you something's off and it's not, you know,
00:48:12.660
okay. It's a little bit of Fahrenheit 451 and you know, it's a little bit of brave new world.
00:48:17.460
It's a little bit of 1984, but okay. Uh, how about we get to a better part of the library?
00:48:22.020
Exactly. I was about to say, we are pretty squarely in that quadrant in a lot of different
00:48:26.020
ways with a lot of those dystopian novels. Um, speaking of books, let's talk about your book a
00:48:31.140
little bit more. We mentioned it earlier. Um, it is the hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century.
00:48:36.900
This is going back to what you said, that the current state of how we are running things just
00:48:40.820
as it's sustainable. We won't be here in 200 years. You guys in your book, you and your wife
00:48:45.140
talk about a bunch of different ways in which that is true and talk about some of the science-based
00:48:49.860
solutions to the problems that we're facing today. Can you expound upon that a little bit more?
00:48:54.660
Sure. Uh, the basic thesis of the book is that human beings are the most adaptable species that
00:49:02.980
has ever existed on this planet. And you can see that if you just take what any of us know about,
00:49:11.220
uh, the many different cultures that have existed, they've done hundreds of different things as a way of
00:49:16.740
making a living. Everything from, you know, hunting large marine mammals to terracing hillsides in the
00:49:24.740
Andes and farming potatoes to harvesting bird's nests from high inside of, uh, caves with ladder
00:49:32.740
systems, all kinds of different ways of, uh, finding enough resource to survive. And that doesn't look
00:49:39.940
like any other species, right? If I say, you know, what does a sage grouse do for a living? It's not that
00:49:45.300
there are 20 different ways to be a sage grouse. There's one way to be a sage grouse. So we're unique
00:49:50.580
in this way. We're very adaptable. And the way we are so adaptable is that we have a generalist
00:49:58.180
body that has a computer that rides on its shoulders. And that computer has a very interesting
00:50:04.180
mechanism for bootstrapping new software packages for new environments and new challenges. That's what we
00:50:10.980
do. So we are the species that deals with novelty best, far better than any species that has preceded us or that
00:50:18.340
exists here alongside us. The problem is the rate of technological change is so fast that even our
00:50:26.260
amazing capacity to bootstrap new software programs for new challenges isn't even close to being able to keep
00:50:32.340
up. And you can see that this is true because we all know that by the time that we're adults making our way in the world,
00:50:38.980
we don't even live in the same world that we were children in, right? So there's no way that you could
00:50:43.300
possibly write software fast enough to keep up with a world that's changing so that the lessons you learned
00:50:48.740
as a child are only partially applicable as an adult. We call this hypernovelty. And our point is hypernovelty
00:50:55.700
is making us sick. It's making us sick physically. It's making us sick psychologically. It's making us sick
00:51:02.180
socially. And it's threatening to ruin our marvelous planet and our ability to continue to exist here.
00:51:08.180
So that's a problem that needs a solution. And the book is about understanding how to think about this
00:51:12.900
so we can navigate to that solution. Got it. Well, that is fascinating. And I appreciate all of the
00:51:18.820
work that you and your wife do and all of the work that I'm sure I think it's like over 20 years of
00:51:23.540
research that went into this book, correct? That is correct. We've been working on these puzzles for a
00:51:27.940
long time. A long time. And I appreciate that. I know everyone in my audience does too. And I appreciate you
00:51:34.260
taking the time out of your busy schedule to come on and talk about these issues and your book. Where
00:51:39.140
can people buy it and learn more about it? Well, you can now buy it anywhere. It's sold out very,
00:51:44.260
very quickly, but it is now back in stock. Amazon, your local bookseller in many cases.
00:51:50.660
You can find me on Twitter at Brett Weinstein. Brett has one T. You can check out the Dark Horse podcast.
00:51:58.260
We do live streams every Saturday and we put out other interviews. As you mentioned,
00:52:02.820
Dr. McCullough is the most recent one. So those are some pretty good places to find us.
00:52:07.860
Yes. And I highly recommend your podcast. It's very good. I learned a lot from it.
00:52:12.020
Thank you so much, Dr. Weinstein, for coming on and for talking to us today. I really appreciate it.