Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 544 ｜ Why American COVID Policy Has Failed Us & How to Fix It ｜ Guest： Dr. Bret Weinstein

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. Today we are talking

00:00:14.240 to Dr. Brett Weinstein. Now you might know this name. Maybe you listen to his podcast,

00:00:20.340 the Dark Horse Podcast. Maybe you have read his new book that we're talking about today

00:00:24.980 that he co-authored with his wife, A Hunter Gathers Guide to the 21st Century. Or maybe

00:00:30.940 you started following him when I did back in 2017, where there was this big debacle at the university

00:00:38.880 where he was teaching called Evergreen College. He was accused very wrongly, he and his wife,

00:00:46.380 of being racist because they opposed in a very logical and measured and truthful way

00:00:53.100 some of the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that were being put into place in a

00:00:59.380 very destructive way at his college. And he was almost literally chased off the campus by an

00:01:07.980 irrational, angry mob of students who were calling them all kinds of crazy things like 0.92

00:01:12.880 white supremacists. And so we're going to talk to him today. We're going to talk to him about 0.96

00:01:17.860 what happened there, what he has learned since then, if he still considers himself

00:01:22.580 liberal, and if he still considers himself someone who, you know, believes in some of the solutions

00:01:30.340 or some of the policies suggested by progressivism. But perhaps the most juicy part of the conversation

00:01:36.300 will be when we talk about COVID and his disagreement as a scientist with the response to COVID from our

00:01:44.780 so-called public health experts, why they seem to be suppressing early treatment options and

00:01:51.580 prevention options, what he thinks about the vaccines, why he's skeptical about them,

00:01:58.140 and what he thinks about some of the policies surrounding these things. We will also talk

00:02:02.540 about his book, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. So I know you're going to love

00:02:08.200 this conversation. He's fascinating, he's brilliant, and you are going to learn so much. Before we get

00:02:12.760 into that conversation, if you love this podcast, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

00:02:19.880 Just tell us a little bit about why you like it. That would mean so much to us. So just leave that

00:02:24.580 five-star review if you love Relatable. Thank you so much. Okay, without further ado, here is Dr. Brett Weinstein.

00:02:33.320 Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Just in case there are some people out there

00:02:38.040 who don't know, can you tell us who you are and what you do? Yes, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein. I'm a

00:02:44.940 biologist. I was a college professor teaching at the Evergreen State College for 14 years. I was

00:02:54.740 driven from the college by a mob of crazed students, students that I had in fact never met,

00:03:02.140 who falsely believed that I was a racist and demanded my firing and my resignation. The reason

00:03:09.120 that they demanded that was because I had opposed some policies, diversity, equity, and inclusion

00:03:14.820 policies that were being advanced by the college president and a committee that he had impaneled

00:03:20.400 that jeopardized the college. And it was my duty as a professor to block those things so that the

00:03:27.480 college could continue to serve the student population, many of whom were not economically

00:03:33.640 advantaged. In any case, that event got quite widely publicized as a result of the fact that the

00:03:41.200 protesters who became rioters filmed everything they did and then uploaded it to the internet thinking

00:03:48.660 that the world would see them as heroes and it saw them as quite the opposite. Of course, now what

00:03:54.240 they did at Evergreen has spilled out into the world and people have seen that it was not just

00:04:00.000 a quirky left coast college that had gone nuts, but a preview of what was coming to the world.

00:04:06.320 Yes, I'm glad you started there because that's when I first heard your name. I think maybe you

00:04:10.440 were on Fox News, maybe it was Tucker Carlson where I first heard that story and as it unfolded and as

00:04:16.560 I saw some of those images that you were talking about, just stunned. Knowing that, of course,

00:04:21.060 academia leans to the left, but just the kind of almost barbaric and irrational reaction you got

00:04:28.240 that seemed to be not necessarily just a symptom of a political ideology, but I don't know, almost a

00:04:37.320 taking over of the mind that occurred in a lot of the students there that I guess, like you said,

00:04:43.360 is indicative of a lot of young people in general today. When you look back at that incident,

00:04:49.280 I'm sure you've thought a lot about it. You've considered, you know, what started that? What was

00:04:54.300 the impetus? What drove the students to react the way that they did? What would you say that you have

00:05:00.120 learned about the ideology and about some of the motivations that were driving the students to

00:05:05.200 react the way that they did to you and some of the things that you were bringing up at the time?

00:05:09.340 Well, I think the incident is almost perfect in the lesson that it teaches because although as it was

00:05:17.840 happening, I was quite concerned that nobody would really ever understood what had taken place,

00:05:22.900 ever understand. It has now been so thoroughly explored largely as a result of the work of Benjamin

00:05:30.980 Boyce, who has cataloged documents from the college, video from all angles throughout the entire

00:05:37.100 process, video that led up to it over the years preceding. And so there's so much documentation that

00:05:42.900 we actually know a tremendous amount about what was going on in the college, where, and then how this

00:05:47.600 boiled over into spectacular riots and witch hunting. I do want to point out there is at the core a basic

00:05:57.980 problem driving the psychosis that clearly took over my college but is now taking over the world. There is a

00:06:05.400 basic dissatisfaction with a system that has betrayed people. It has treated them terribly. It has not

00:06:12.800 given them tools that are appropriate to the adult lives they need to lead. And so there's a basic level

00:06:18.540 of distrust that is not unjustified. The problem is that that distrust is all too easily captured by those

00:06:28.020 students who are simply interested in acquiring power. And so people, students, for example, are very easily

00:06:35.720 turned into tools by unscrupulous faculty and administrators that wish to accomplish things and

00:06:43.300 can utilize the dissatisfaction of the population to get there. And that really is the story of what took

00:06:50.600 place at Evergreen. What I think is probably most useful for people is that because people had not

00:06:58.400 heard of me or my wife before this incident, I should say my wife was actually literally the college's

00:07:04.100 most popular professor when this happened. And she was driven out alongside me, also accused of racism,

00:07:10.360 completely nonsensical, not even just false, but upside down accusation.

00:07:15.100 Um, that people can see that the story that was being advanced about who we were was completely

00:07:28.080 divorced from reality. And we are now seeing that same thing take place on other topics, topics that

00:07:34.300 have nothing to do with race or sex or gender. Now they have to do with things like the pandemic and our

00:07:41.080 public health policy. And we have to stop and recognize whenever that happens, whenever we are

00:07:46.420 being sold a story that bears no resemblance to reality, we have to say, who is it who's on the

00:07:52.300 move? And what is it they're trying to accomplish?

00:07:55.100 And I want to get to the detachment from reality, uh, as it pertains to the pandemic response, but

00:08:03.160 specifically, why were they calling you a racist? And then I guess just by association,

00:08:09.160 they were calling your wife a racist, what was the specific charge they leveled against you?

00:08:15.980 So this is, I think, a pattern of history. They came after us because we were the primary obstacle

00:08:23.900 to the plan that was being advanced, which would have changed our college into something very different.

00:08:30.500 And I don't know how interested your audience will be in the way our college functioned, but

00:08:36.120 it was a very unusual place where students took one class full-time, professors taught

00:08:43.260 one class full-time, and those classes could go on for a full year. And what that meant was that we

00:08:49.960 knew our students incredibly well, and we were capable of teaching to them in a way that was

00:08:55.040 tailored to their individual viewpoints. That's not possible at a normal college. And that means it's

00:09:00.800 a particularly good place for students who are not a great fit for school, as I was not a great fit for

00:09:06.020 school when I was in it. But in any case, the problem is the president of the college wished to

00:09:13.900 change it into a very different place. That would have been bad for the students. It was my obligation

00:09:18.860 and my wife's obligation to oppose those plans. And once we opposed those plans, we needed to be removed 0.58

00:09:24.920 in order for the plans to continue. That's how we ended up on the wrong end of those accusations.

00:09:30.380 Now, it's relatively easy to put somebody on the wrong end of such an accusation when you have to

00:09:38.100 stand up and say this policy, which is labeled as an anti-racism policy, is actually dangerous to the

00:09:45.880 college and itself racist. Once you have opposed a policy that is described as anti-racist, then it is

00:09:52.200 very easy to portray you as racist. And that is what happened. And part of the policy, I think,

00:09:58.820 if I remember correctly, had to do with white students not being allowed to come on campus one

00:10:06.160 day. Is that true? Well, let's put it this way. The narrative as it unfolded focused on this issue

00:10:13.460 is a tradition at the college called Day of Absence. And it had been there since the founding of the

00:10:19.580 college in the early 70s. And what it was originally was black students and faculty, later students and

00:10:27.660 faculty of color more generally, would not come to school on one day to emphasize the importance of

00:10:34.120 the role they were playing there. Now, when we arrived at the college, this was already not an

00:10:40.300 important fact in our quadrant where we taught. We were science professors. But nonetheless, it was a

00:10:46.240 tradition. And then in 2017, the organizers decided to, as they put it, flip the script. And what they

00:10:55.600 did was they asked white people not to come to campus. And then something very unusual happened,

00:11:01.860 which was the administration started pushing us into signing up for this plan. And I sent an email

00:11:09.560 to all of my faculty and staff colleagues saying that it was completely different for people to

00:11:18.380 decide to absent themselves as an act of protest, which I, of course, support, versus asking other

00:11:24.360 people not to come to a public college because of the color of their skin, which I absolutely cannot 0.88

00:11:29.500 support as a patriotic American, as a human being. It is offensive. And so I said that I would be on

00:11:36.600 campus that day and that people should take it as a protest. So that's kind of what kicked all of this

00:11:42.920 off. Were you surprised by not just the initial reaction, but how you were almost literally kicked

00:11:50.960 off campus by pitchfork-wielding students who seemed committed to misunderstanding you and to

00:11:58.300 mischaracterizing both you and your wife? And then the aftermath of that, in which you were,

00:12:04.640 I'm sure that you were criticized by a lot of people on the left and you were comforted and

00:12:09.600 welcomed by some people on the right, considering that I think, if I'm correct, you did consider and

00:12:14.580 perhaps still consider yourself a liberal, someone on the left side of the aisle.

00:12:19.880 Well, okay, let me deal with this as two separate questions. The reaction of the right shocked me,

00:12:27.160 and I am heartened by what happened. I'll describe that in a second if that's all right.

00:12:32.720 As for whether I was surprised by what happened when I stood up, you know, if I, a version of me

00:12:40.200 from 10 years prior would have been absolutely stunned. But I was watching this process on the

00:12:47.920 march. And so as it began to target me, as I stood up to oppose these diversity, equity, and inclusion

00:12:55.680 measures because they were mislabeled and dangerous to the college, I knew what accusation would come

00:13:02.520 back. What I did not understand was that no amount of evidence that the accusations were false

00:13:11.240 would be sufficient to persuade people locally. And I was also shocked by

00:13:18.240 how the population of people that knew me well reacted. I saw people

00:13:26.080 break in both directions. I saw people who I had thought were my friends who knew full well that the

00:13:34.780 accusations were false. And they nonetheless said nothing. Some of them even attacked me.

00:13:42.440 I also saw incredible courage from quite a number of people, especially students, and especially

00:13:49.940 students of color who knew me well, knew the accusations were false. Some of them stood up

00:13:55.040 and spoke on my behalf during the riots. And I must tell you, there was a special punishment for people

00:14:01.640 of color who stood up and said, you've got this wrong. He's not a racist. They had to be

00:14:07.440 punished publicly in order to prevent that behavior from upending the story.

00:14:13.500 By other students who didn't want them to raise their voice in that way.

00:14:17.240 Absolutely. Because you can imagine that the students who were engaged in this phony protest,

00:14:26.660 they required that there not be evidence of students of color saying, I flatly disagree. And there were

00:14:35.240 those students. And so when those students stood up, they needed to be ridiculed so that others would

00:14:42.020 know not to try the same thing. Okay. And then you said that people on their right, you were heartened

00:14:48.860 by their reaction. And you said that you were shocked by it. Can you tell me what you mean by that?

00:14:54.040 As this was unfolding, it became, it was understood, it was circulating online, and people were discussing

00:15:01.980 it. The mainstream press absolutely would not touch the story. There was no interest. The opposite.

00:15:09.040 There was, as my brother calls it, anti-interest. Tucker Carlson reached out and said he wanted to put

00:15:16.800 me on. And I would have gone on any major program because I felt very strongly then, and I know that

00:15:22.620 I was correct now. This needed to reach a larger audience in order to staunch the bleeding. And so I

00:15:30.400 accepted Carlson's offer. Now, when I went on his program, the next thing that happened was my email

00:15:40.720 inbox started to fill literally thousands of pieces of correspondence and thousands of reactions on

00:15:48.980 Twitter from people who were in Carlson's audience who said that there was a theme. It ran throughout

00:15:55.940 these things. And it said something like, I'm sure that we disagree over many, if not all, political

00:16:02.900 issues, but it's wonderful to see somebody on the opposite side who I can respect. Now, this is not

00:16:10.300 the audience I was led to believe existed on the right. And that lesson has been reinforced many,

00:16:16.360 many times in the years since. There are a lot of people on the center-right who have the same

00:16:22.860 basic values that I hold as a liberal. And the fact is these are unifying American values. And

00:16:30.740 if you live on one side of this political divide, you have been led to believe that the people on the 0.99

00:16:37.700 other side of it are monstrous, dimwitted, something like this. And in this case, it was just fabulous to 0.95

00:16:45.640 discover all of these patriotic Americans who, in fact, were glad to see a liberal stand up for liberal

00:16:52.080 values. Have your political views changed over the past few years as you have kind of come into more

00:16:58.780 conversations and have found more common ground with people who maybe before you thought that you

00:17:04.540 just totally disagreed with on the right? Well, I have to be careful with this one. Overall, no. And I

00:17:12.720 will say this, I'll try to say it in a way that it makes sense for people who haven't thought about it

00:17:18.840 this way before. But I was never on the left because I liked the people on the left. I certainly

00:17:24.680 did like some of the people on the left, but I was on the left because I believed that it was the

00:17:30.900 correct position to be in. And the reason for that is not because I think progress for progress's sake

00:17:37.480 is always a good thing. In fact, I know what many liberals don't know, which is that there are always

00:17:43.520 unintended consequences when you try to solve problems. And so one should engage solution

00:17:48.180 making with a great deal of caution. And I think that's something that that's effectively the job

00:17:53.940 of conservatives in the system is to keep the desire to solve problems from running away and

00:17:58.940 creating lots of new problems. And the job of progressives is to figure out what problems can be

00:18:04.360 solved at a reasonable risk and to push us in that direction. And it is the tension between these two

00:18:10.440 things that creates the dynamism of our system. And my point is at this moment in history,

00:18:16.800 we need progress because if we continue doing what we are doing, it will self-destruct, right?

00:18:25.320 We are not in a sustainable place and that's true ecologically, but it's also true politically.

00:18:30.840 For example, we have an expectation of growth that simply cannot be maintained. And when growth

00:18:35.900 is expected and not maintained, it results in basically violent confrontations between people.

00:18:42.400 So my feeling is progress, the attempt to make progress is dangerous, but we have no choice but

00:18:49.460 to contemplate it at this moment in history. And I have always said from long before this,

00:18:54.360 that I am a progressive who wants to live in a world so good that I get to be a conservative.

00:19:00.160 That is to say, if you've got the system really functional, right, you would say, well, we would

00:19:05.880 be fools to try to fix this and make it better because what's wrong with it is very small and

00:19:11.480 the chances we'll mess it up are very large. And so becoming a conservative is a natural thing at 0.98

00:19:15.820 the point your system has succeeded. And so I'm a progressive because I think we have to be

00:19:21.480 in order to have a nation 200 years from now. But I'm hoping that we can solve what problems remain

00:19:29.640 well enough that it would be foolish to continue to try to improve it.

00:19:34.080 I think, oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

00:19:35.740 So in any case, what happened when all of this went down at Evergreen didn't change my viewpoint.

00:19:42.780 It does make me think that most of the people who describe themselves as on the left aren't really

00:19:48.620 progressives or liberals in any meaningful sense of the term, right? We have anarchists and

00:19:54.940 authoritarians who are, you know, they basically wear a blue jersey, but that's about it.

00:20:00.740 So it didn't change me in that regard. On the other hand, the way history has progressed over the

00:20:07.800 last few years has altered my thinking on a few issues. And I think it would be unfair to say I'm

00:20:14.900 unaltered by what I've seen. In particular, I'll point to the issue of the Second Amendment.

00:20:21.180 I have never been an enthusiast for the Second Amendment. I've never been enthusiastic about the

00:20:30.600 idea of banning guns, but I've always been very ambivalent about the huge price that we Americans

00:20:36.880 obviously pay for liberal gun laws. On the other hand, I do believe that there is more credibility to

00:20:44.820 the argument that these are in the Constitution, that our rights to bear arms are in the Constitution

00:20:52.580 as a hedge against tyranny, and that that hedge is not an anachronism, that it may actually

00:20:58.620 plausibly be the difference between us falling under the spell of tyrants and resisting them.

00:21:06.640 That's one issue. And then I would also say I'm recently persuaded that although if we had highly

00:21:15.060 functional governance, if we had good governance, I would probably be in favor of single-payer health

00:21:21.640 care. But what I'm watching unfold with respect to COVID now has me concerned that the danger of

00:21:28.000 single-payer health care if you have malignant governance is so large that as terrible as our

00:21:33.680 health care system is with, you know, predatory insurance practices and the like, it might be better

00:21:39.820 than the alternative.

00:21:41.520 Right. There are so many different parts of your answer, but it all makes sense going to the beginning

00:21:47.180 of your response and saying that you aren't on the left simply because you or because you like the

00:21:52.740 people on the left, but because you believe that the ideas are right or the solutions that are

00:21:56.460 posited are good, at least for the most part. That will definitely make sense because as a

00:22:01.180 conservative, when people have said to me over the past few years, how can you still consider

00:22:05.320 yourself on the right because of Donald Trump? Or how can you consider yourself a Christian?

00:22:09.640 I'm a Christian when all of these, look at these Christians and all the terrible things that they 1.00

00:22:13.060 have done. Well, I'm not a Christian because, you know, Jerry Falwell Jr. said that he was a Christian.

00:22:18.140 I'm not a conservative because Donald Trump said that he was a Republican. I actually believe in the

00:22:23.400 tenets of both of these things. And so that's going to make sense to a lot of people. And

00:22:27.800 I'm glad that you explained it that way. The other part, when you're kind of describing progress

00:22:33.640 and progressivism and why we need that tension between conservatism and progressivism, I also

00:22:39.340 agree with. The thing that I think I, that turns me off most to progressivism, maybe in the same way

00:22:45.580 that someone on the left looks at someone on the right, maybe it's a caricature and maybe it's my bias

00:22:51.400 creating this caricature. But when I hear people on the left say progress or progressivism,

00:22:57.180 I think what you really mean is simply destroying the system that's in place without,

00:23:02.880 without a feasible solution to replace it. So when I hear abolishing the police or the justice system,

00:23:08.800 I know that's not, that doesn't characterize the beliefs of probably most people on the left,

00:23:13.360 but you're hearing those loud voices. Certainly over the past year, you have heard those calls for

00:23:19.000 anarchy and destruction by people who say at least that they are progressives. So I look at that.

00:23:26.120 And then I also look at what, of course I want to talk to you about is what seems like a detachment

00:23:30.500 from reality when it comes to COVID, what the numbers are, the effectiveness and the lack of

00:23:35.940 effectiveness of some of the, you know, the therapeutics and the preventatives and things like

00:23:41.600 that. And when I look at progressivism, I see not progress, but a lot of destruction to me

00:23:48.520 and a lot of mythology that they just won't actually have a conversation about while they

00:23:54.980 are calling constantly people on the right conspiracy theorists. So I find it difficult

00:24:00.120 to give credit to progressivism at all, especially right now when it just seems like a whole lot of

00:24:06.860 chaos and confusion and denial of reality.

00:24:09.800 Well, let me just clarify that when I say that I'm a progressive, I do not mean to imply that if you

00:24:19.380 were to take a list of things that progressives tend to advocate, that you would find me in favor of

00:24:26.200 those things. I don't mean that at all. What I mean is that if I, as a scientist, look at where we

00:24:32.120 are and I just simply extrapolate what happens if we keep doing this and we adjust it in the way we've

00:24:37.880 been adjusting it. We're not here 200 years from now.

00:24:42.280 So are you talking about the climate specifically?

00:24:45.200 I'm not talking about the climate. I have my own beliefs about the climate and we can certainly talk

00:24:50.960 about them. But what I'm saying is that our mode of existing cannot continue. We've gotten lucky.

00:24:58.540 You cannot exist in a state where you have ferociously powerful arsenals of nuclear weapons,

00:25:06.200 depending on the fact that everyone will have judgment at least good enough to avoid launching

00:25:12.280 them. And, you know, you can see as, you know, tensions are mounting over, you know, the border

00:25:18.240 between Russia and Ukraine, how this could get out of hand and then suddenly that's unleashed on the

00:25:24.540 world. So you can't, you've got a clock ticking. You have to solve that problem in some useful way.

00:25:29.620 And that problem, frankly, we have gotten lucky, but the number of things that threaten to destroy us

00:25:36.120 is many and it is growing and we don't even commonly recognize some of them. So for example,

00:25:44.360 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

00:26:00.280 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

00:26:15.060 a week by regulation that they can run on diesel power, right? And presumably there would be a huge

00:26:22.220 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

00:26:33.180 in an unfortunate way that could cause a decohering of civilization. It's also a problem that's easily

00:26:41.360 fixed and there's no good reason we aren't fixing it. So my point is we have to change because at the

00:26:48.780 moment we've got 18th century solutions to 21st century problems and those solutions aren't up

00:26:55.280 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

00:27:07.240 world where the public square exists on private servers. So there are all kinds of problems that we

00:27:12.380 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

00:27:24.820 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.

00:32:45.440 Right. There's no harm in taking it.

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 0.99

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 0.88

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 1.00

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, 0.72

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, 1.00

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. 0.85

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.

00:52:16.820 Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

00:52:18.900 Thanks for having me.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - January 07, 2022

Ep 544 ｜ Why American COVID Policy Has Failed Us & How to Fix It ｜ Guest： Dr. Bret Weinstein

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