In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I'm joined by evolutionary biologist and evolutionary biologist Dr. Carl Sagan. We discuss how evolution works, the role of DNA in evolution, and the role that computers can play in the process.
00:00:15.000So the reason why we had such a quick turnaround is because the last episode, one of the main reasons why you wanted to come on in the first place is you wanted to further discuss some discoveries about evolution.
00:00:32.000Yes, specifically, I have alluded in a number of different places, including here, to there being another level to Darwinian evolution that does a lot of the heavy lifting that we require in order to explain the diversity of forms that we see in biology.
00:00:51.000But I haven't been specific on what I believe that layer is.
00:01:24.000And let me just say, you know, I know it's not everybody's bag, but I do think just about everybody has at some point listened to the story that we tell about adaptive evolution and wondered if it's really powerful enough to explain all of the creatures that we all know and love.
00:01:44.000So the classic story is that you have a genome that it contains a great many genes.
00:01:52.000A gene is a sequence in DNA that results in proteins being produced.
00:01:59.000The DNA describes exactly the sequence of amino acids in a protein.
00:02:03.000And a protein would typically be one of two things.
00:02:06.000It would either be an enzyme, which is a little bit misleading as a term, but an enzyme, well, enzyme isn't misleading, but an enzyme is a catalyst.
00:02:53.000Each three letters specifies a particular amino acid that gets tacked on.
00:02:58.000You get a sequence of amino acids that then collapse into whatever they're going to be, whether it's an enzyme or a structure based on little electromagnetic affinities that they have, little side chains that have a positive or a negative charge that attract each other.
00:03:15.000So basically, these machines assemble themselves by folding in very complex ways that then causes them to interact with the molecules around them in very specific ways.
00:03:27.000Ways that greatly reduce the energy necessary and make the reactions much more likely to happen.
00:03:37.000But really the way to think of it is a little molecular machine.
00:03:41.000So we say the way evolution works is random changes happen to the DNA because DNA is imperfectly copied or is impacted by radiation, which will eliminate a letter in the DNA.
00:03:56.000And then that letter will get replaced by a different letter.
00:04:28.000And in fact, that's the story that is encoded in what's called the central dogma of molecular biology.
00:04:37.000Now, the problem, most people will have thought about that, and they will have heard: okay, random mutations that change this code in ways that alter proteins.
00:04:49.000That doesn't sound that sounds like a very haphazard process and a very difficult way to get from one form of animal or plant or fungus to another.
00:05:00.000So if you've had that thought, that just doesn't seem powerful enough.
00:05:05.000And then biologists have said, well, you're not realizing how much time elapses that allows these very occasional positive changes to accumulate.
00:05:17.000If that's a thought you've had, this process isn't powerful enough to explain the creatures I'm aware of, then what I'm going to tell you is a way in which that process is not the only process.
00:05:29.000And by adding a different process, very much a Darwinian one, we can see that the power to create all the creatures that we see is much greater than the story that we've been told.
00:05:39.000Okay, so I'm going to put a hypothesis on the table about what enhances this.
00:05:45.000And essentially what I'm arguing is if you sat down to a computer game, right, something very realistic, and somebody says, well, that's all binary.
00:06:00.000But what they're not telling you is that there's an intervening layer that greatly increases the power to use binary to make something like a computer game.
00:06:08.000So there are multiple different levels inside your computer.
00:06:11.000One of them is that your computer can be programmed in a language that is much closer to English, and then a compiler can take what you've written that a computer can't understand and turn it into a computer understandable code.
00:06:26.000And so the ability to make powerful programs depends on our ability not to have to program our computers in binary, but to be able to program them in C or whatever.
00:06:38.000That's the kind of thing I'm pointing to, is a mechanism that enhances the power of evolution to do the stuff that we know evolution accomplishes.
00:06:47.000Okay, so here's what I think is the missing layer.
00:06:51.000And I will say I've done a bunch of research to figure out how much of this is understood.
00:07:32.000Evo Devo has been making progress from the developmental side on a number of different questions.
00:07:39.000Okay, so now let's talk about adaptive evolution and what adaptive evolutionists seem to be missing that I think does a bunch of the heavy lifting in terms of explaining creatures.
00:07:53.000So let me just start by saying the thing I said at the beginning about protein-coding genes being altered by random mutation resulting in changes, I'm not arguing that that is in any way a false story.
00:09:41.000Now that wing is a highly modified front foot.
00:09:47.000The ribs that suspend, that hold the membrane, what we call the patagia, apart, are highly elongated fingers.
00:09:59.000So what you're seeing are the phalanges of that little shrew's foot, elongated, very much so.
00:10:08.000Now, what the EvoDevo folks will tell you, and they are right about this, is that the difference between that bat's wing and its fingers and that shrew's foot and its toes is not a molecular difference.
00:10:26.000There may be molecular differences between the foot and the wing, but you could build that wing and that foot out of the very same molecules.
00:10:35.000What you're doing is distributing them differently.
00:10:38.000You have different amounts of molecules distributed in different ways to make these elaborate structures from the primitive structures.
00:10:50.000So what I realized more than 25 years ago, many people who've heard you and me talk before will have heard us talk about my work on telomeres.
00:11:02.000So telomeres, you'll remember, are structures at the end of every chromosome that are not genes.
00:11:13.000They're written in DNA, but it's basically just a repeated series of letters again and again and again.
00:11:21.000And the telomere, basically the number of repeats that are there, dictates how many times a cell line can duplicate.
00:11:32.000It loses repeats each time it duplicates.
00:11:36.000And when it gets down to a critically low number, it stops reproducing.
00:11:41.000Now, we've talked before about why that system exists.
00:11:47.000The short version is in creatures like us, it prevents cancers from happening because if a cell line runs away and just starts reproducing, it runs into this limit, the Hayflick limit, and stops reproducing.
00:12:00.000So it prevents cancer, but it limits the amount of repair that we can do in a lifetime, so it causes us to senesce, to age, and grow feeble as we do so.
00:12:12.000But what it said to me when I was doing that work was that there is a kind of information that can be stored in genomes in DNA that is not protein-oriented.
00:12:51.000And what occurred to me all those years ago was that the ability to store a number in the genome is fantastically powerful.
00:13:03.000What it means, if you could store a lot of numbers in the genome, is that you could describe creatures by allotting something, either a quantity of material or an amount of time in development, that you could specify things in the language of numbers that you can't specify in the language of amino acids.
00:13:27.000So the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table is that the evolutionary process has built a system in which variables,
00:13:42.000in which integers are stored in DNA, and those integers dictate phenomena like developmental timing, turning on and off something like the growth of one of those phalanx, the phalanges in the fingers.
00:14:01.000If you could radically increase the number that dictated the length of one of those bones, then selection would effectively be in a position to play with adjacent forms.
00:14:16.000So am I confusing you, or is this making sense?
00:14:20.000Okay, so the question is: all right, the telomere is a special case.
00:14:26.000The telomere exists at the end of a chromosome, and it can only exist at the end of a chromosome because of the way it functions.
00:14:34.000So a telomere is not actually just a string, it's actually a loop.
00:14:38.000And the telomere loops back, and at the very tip, there's a little section where the DNA is not double-stranded, it's single-stranded, and that single-strand inserts between two other strands of DNA.
00:14:52.000So if you loop the DNA at the end of the chromosome back, it's called a D-loop.
00:14:56.000And then you get this one little single-stranded DNA that inserts between a double-stranded and makes a very tiny triple-stranded cap so that it holds the loop in place.
00:15:09.000You can't do that in the middle of a chromosome.
00:15:10.000So it's not like there are telomeres all over the place.
00:15:13.000But what there are are a bunch of sequences that were traditionally dismissed as junk DNA that have been used as a molecular marker in biology for decades.
00:15:32.000We use something called microsatellites.
00:15:35.000So a microsatellite is a repetitive sequence in DNA that does not code for a protein.
00:15:40.000It's just like a telomere in that way.
00:15:48.000So that you may have a species in which the genome is very homogeneous, but between populations, there will have been change in the length of these microsatellites, changes that, as far as we know, don't make any difference.
00:16:04.000But if you're a biologist in the field and you want to know if the trees in this valley are more closely related to the trees in valley A or valley B, you can look at a particular microsatellite and you can say these trees have a microsatellite at this location that is more similar in length to population A than to population B. Thus, with some confidence, we think it's more close, it evolved from population A, something like that.
00:16:30.000So we use them as a tool for assessing things like relatedness.
00:16:36.000But we don't typically think of them as a storage modality for a kind of information that might be useful.
00:16:45.000So the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table, and by the way, these things are extremely common in the genome.
00:16:52.000There are many more variable number tandem repeats in the genome than there are genes.
00:17:01.000And my point is, I don't know whether evolution uses them as a place to store variables that then become important in describing creatures, but evolution is a very clever process.
00:17:18.000And the ability to store a variable, I feel highly confident that there will be many variables stored in many different ways.
00:17:25.000That there are ways in which you can store a variable in triplet codon language, but they're clumsy, they're crude.
00:17:35.000So you can have things like a dosage compensation.
00:17:41.000You can have a gene that's repeated multiple times, and the more copies you have, the larger dose of the product that you get.
00:17:49.000So if you have three copies of alcohol dehydrogenase, you'll have more alcohol tolerance than two copies, something like that.
00:17:57.000So that demonstrates a way in triplet codon language that you can store a variable.
00:18:03.000But what I'm arguing is that there's, at least in principle, the possibility for a vast library of variables that have developmental implications for the way creatures look that allows you to go.
00:18:18.000I mean, imagine for a second the most recent common ancestor of all bats.
00:18:26.000Most recent common ancestor of all bats is an animal that has gone from no ability to fly to the ability to fly.
00:18:37.000As soon as you have the ability to fly, the number of things that you could do, the number of niches that are available, is very large.
00:18:48.000So here's the real question, specifically in regards to flying.
00:18:54.000How does an animal go from being a shrew or some other rodent-type creature to something that eventually can fly, and what are the steps along the way?
00:19:07.000And how would that even facilitate itself?
00:19:09.000Like, how would you get an animal that's completely stuck on the ground and can only hop a little bit to something that can literally traverse 3D space?
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00:21:20.000Like, this is one of the reasons why this argument has come up, because intelligent design asserts that random mutation and natural selection does not account for the vast variety of species, and it could not account for a rodent or a shrew, which is believed to be our common ancestor, eventually becoming a human being.
00:21:43.000Let's just say I have, you know, initially I thought that all of the intelligent design folks were anti-scientific and really basically just religious people wielding sophistry.
00:22:03.000I now know several of them in person and quite like them, and I quite like them scientifically.
00:22:09.000I think they actually have done an excellent job of pointing out the folly in evolutionary biology.
00:22:15.000And in part, what I'm saying is I appreciate their pointing out that the mechanism that we teach is not powerful enough to do what we claim it does.
00:22:25.000My argument is there is a mechanism that is powerful enough, and we haven't been looking at it because we've been telling the story that we've got it nailed already, and I just don't think we do.
00:22:37.000So let's go to your question about how you get from a creature that can't fly at all to a creature that does fly.
00:22:44.000And now, my feeling is actually this one is pretty easy.
00:22:49.000And I'm not saying that we know how it did happen in the case of a bat.
00:22:54.000We are hobbled in the case of bats by two things.
00:22:59.000One, the fact that bats are primarily tropical.
00:24:22.000I would argue that that's actually not a really good distinction because at some level what they're doing is powering flight by climbing trees.
00:24:29.000So they climb a tree, you know, they've got potential energy, and then they glide to the next tree.
00:24:35.000They'll go from the end of a branch and they will glide much farther than you would think is possible.
00:24:52.000They land on the trunk so it doesn't make a big noise as they hit some branch and the leaves rustle and all of that.
00:24:57.000But anyway, if you've seen these creatures do it, then you can imagine a pretty clear story.
00:25:05.000Imagine a squirrel that doesn't glide, a regular garden variety squirrel.
00:25:10.000Well, that squirrel certainly faces gaps between trees that push it to its limit, and then there's gaps that are just a little beyond its limit.
00:25:19.000And you could imagine lots of scenarios in which a predator is chasing a squirrel, and it's got it out onto the end of a branch, and the squirrel has to leap, and so it's got to be pretty durable in case it can't make it to the next tree.
00:25:36.000But any squirrel that had just a little advantage in getting to that next tree would out-compete ones that got consumed or died because they, you know, hit the ground too hard or fell in front of a predator that took advantage of it or something like that.
00:25:53.000So there is an advantage that comes from even a tiny little increase in the distance you can jump.
00:25:59.000So that gets you pretty clearly from no ability to glide at all, ability to jump as is, to the ability to glide a little, to the ability to glide a lot, to the ability to glide the way modern flying squirrels do, which is like so impressive, right?
00:26:17.000But it's still not, it's not flapping flight.
00:26:21.000So you can imagine a story in which the shrew ancestor climbed things and had the same situation.
00:26:28.000And maybe it starts out, in fact, it probably does start out, with maybe a little webbing between the fingers that gives it just a little extra lift, right?
00:26:40.000And you could imagine once you get onto that little foothill, a little lift, well, a little more lift would be good.
00:26:47.000So those individuals that had just slightly more webbing outcompeted those individuals that had slightly less webbing.
00:26:52.000But what would cause them to develop the webbing in the first place?
00:27:26.000This is a concept I've taken a certain amount of crap over, but I'm quite convinced of it.
00:27:31.000I would argue that our consciousness is an explorer mode.
00:27:35.000Our consciousness allows us to come up with ideas that might be useful and to kind of test them in our heads and to figure out how we would try them out in life and then to build a prototype and see how it works and then discover how it might be improved.
00:27:53.000And sooner or later, you get from the Wright Flyer of 1903, which can stay off the ground for barely half a minute, to not so many years later, a modification of the same aircraft that can circle the Eiffel Tower.
00:28:10.000That is the ability to explore design space in some way that is not random.
00:28:16.000And to the extent that the genome is capable of storing a large number of variables and then applying them, what that means is at the point that you have the first true bat, the first flyer, that animal has discovered an adaptive landscape, a series of opportunities that we represent as peaks that is unknown.
00:28:43.000What can you do if you can fly that you couldn't do when you could only climb?
00:28:48.000Well, you can move between distant trees and collect fruit.
00:28:53.000You can catch insects that are flying on the wing.
00:28:56.000You can seek out mammals and birds and slit them open and drink their blood.
00:29:04.000You can catch fish that come to the surface and cause ripples.
00:29:10.000And the point is the initial bat presumably didn't do much of any of that.
00:29:15.000It did some, probably a generalist something.
00:29:18.000But having achieved flight, there's a question about how evolution can find all of the opportunities that are now suddenly available.
00:29:27.000And the idea that this happens through occasional random mutation of a protein-coding gene that alters something important is, in my opinion, ridiculous.
00:29:41.000That more likely, vastly more likely, is a system in which parameters like finger length and the length of each phalanx in the finger is stored as a variable, and those variables get readily modified.
00:30:01.000In other words, if you looked at the hand of every human being, you would see that there is already a ton of variation in the relative lengths of the different digits and the relative lengths to each of the knuckles.
00:30:18.000And that if those things are reflective of a particular state stored as essentially an integer in the genome, that all of the adjacent states are very available and therefore evolution can explore what Stuart Kaufman would call the adjacent possible.
00:30:48.000So Stuart Kaufman is a complex systems theorist and his point, one of many, is that effectively the creatures we see exist in a design space and that selection finds the things that are similar to what you've got near enough to be accessed and advantageous.
00:31:16.000So if you have a rodent of one size and there is, you know, let's say you have a rodent that specializes on a particular seed and it exists in a habitat where there's another seed that's similar but much bigger.
00:31:34.000Well, then you need to access the adjacent possible in order for a second species or subspecies of this rodent to evolve to take advantage of this untapped resource.
00:31:45.000So if you think of, you know, all of the things that you've got and then all of the things that you might want that are similar, that's the adjacent possible.
00:31:55.000And my point is variables as one of the primary modes of information storage in the genome provides a mechanism for evolution to explore the adjacent possible in a radically more effective way than the story we typically tell about random mutations to protein-coding genes.
00:32:20.000There's nothing undarwinian about this.
00:32:22.000Darwin didn't know anything about genes, probably to his advantage in the long term, because if he had understood genes, he might have made many of the same mistakes that we made in the middle of the 20th century in evolution where we became overly focused on the genes we understood.
00:32:38.000But basically, everything that Darwin said was about a vague hereditary information, and numbers is no less a candidate for that than triplet codons stored that code for amino acids.
00:32:55.000So my point is Darwin is untouched by this.
00:33:02.000And this is just as Darwinian as protein-coding genes.
00:33:07.000It's just vastly more powerful with respect to taking a form that you've already got and finding a similar form that you don't yet have.
00:33:15.000Now there's lots of nuances about how this could work.
00:33:18.000There's lots of questions I certainly can't answer.
00:33:20.000I will say, as I was mentioning at the top, this story seems to be largely unaddressed in adaptive evolution space.
00:33:30.000If I come at it from the Evo-Devo side, I see much more description of mechanisms that work like this.
00:33:41.000But I don't see the revolution that should happen when you've come to understand that you have this very powerful additional evolutionary mechanism that should be causing a massive uptick in the power of what we can address adaptively.
00:34:35.000The selfish gene provides us a mechanism.
00:34:41.000It's basically a synthesis of what we understand about adaptive evolution.
00:34:45.000It provides the first gateway to understand cultural evolution in rigorous Darwinian terms.
00:34:54.000I don't think that that gateway, I don't think we ever went through it.
00:34:59.000In fact, when I've talked to Dawkins about his effective discovery, the meme, he doesn't seem to understand the power of it.
00:35:10.000He thinks of it as, I mean, he says in chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene, he says that the landscape of memes is like a new primeval soup, which is not what it is.
00:35:24.000It's actually a solution that the genes have come up with for how to evolve things like humans more rapidly than can be done at the genetic level.
00:35:36.000We can evolve at a cultural level, which solves a problem for the genes that the genes can't solve directly.
00:35:41.000And that means that all of the space of human culture and the culture of other creatures, but our culture is vastly more refined and powerful and diverse.
00:35:54.000But that space is basically an enhanced, it's another enhancement to the toolkit of Darwinian evolution, which we have unfortunately often dismissed as non-evolutionary or as a parallel kind of evolution,
00:36:14.000rather than as a turbocharged adaptive evolution that is targeted at the same objectives as our genes are, which is what it really turns out to be.
00:36:31.000The thing that has been a revolution since then was Evo Devo, evolution of development.
00:36:40.000But it didn't come from the Darwinists.
00:36:42.000It came primarily from the developmental side.
00:36:44.000These are people who were focused on mechanism.
00:36:48.000And so in some sense, the story of the failure of biology to update our evolutionary model is the result of a historical accident.
00:37:03.000So the first Darwinists, including Darwin himself, were not focused on molecular scale mechanisms because they couldn't be.
00:37:12.000They didn't have any tools to look at those things.
00:37:14.000And so they looked at the creatures and they saw patterns.
00:37:19.000And so they became very focused on recognizing the patterns and what they imply about what must be going on inside.
00:37:26.000But they got out of the habit of thinking about mechanism because the mechanisms weren't available to them.
00:37:31.000The developmental biologists were exactly the inverse.
00:37:35.000They didn't really have patience for evolutionary thinking.
00:37:38.000They were purely about mechanism and all kinds of experiments, like, you know, taking a piece of one egg and grafting it into another egg and watching the weird monster that is created when the egg is getting the same signal from two different directions, right?
00:37:57.000And, you know, Evo Devo is a very good start on bringing these things together, but I don't know if it's academic territoriality or just lack of imagination seems to be preventing the revolution in our understanding of the most powerful process that exists.
00:38:21.000So anyway, I hope others will take this to heart.
00:38:27.000It could easily be that the larger point is right, that variables in the genome are very important and that the variable number tandem repeats are not the way that they are stored.
00:38:40.000Maybe the variable number tandem repeats are the way it's stored, in which case there's an awful lot to be learned about how that information is read.
00:38:47.000In other words, once you know that that's true, if it is, then the question is, okay, well, how do we look into a particular genome and see the mapping of those variables onto the creature that we see running around in the forest?
00:39:01.000That would be an amazingly powerful mapping to have.
00:39:06.000So anyway, I didn't want to leave it as a vague allusion to a hidden layer.
00:39:17.000I wanted to point to a hidden layer that would explain how this process that we've all learned about might be much more powerful than the story we've been told about it.
00:39:27.000I was watching a documentary once on the BBC about the Congo, and it's a really amazing documentary.
00:39:34.000And one of the things that it points out, too, is the rapid development of new abilities that these animals have that live in the Congo that used to be on the plains.
00:39:43.000And as the rainforest expanded, they were kind of trapped in here.
00:39:48.000And one of them they pointed to was dikers, you know, those little small antelopes that now have the ability to swim underwater for as much as 100 yards and they eat fish.
00:40:00.000And they were talking about it, like, this is this fantastic development because they know how long it took for the grasslands to have been overtaken by the rainforest, and it wasn't that long.
00:40:11.000And it didn't seem to account for the adaptation that they were seeing in these animals.
00:40:17.000This is exactly the thing that bugs me, is imagine what would have happened if there was not an enhanced evolutionary toolkit to that creature.
00:40:36.000It's a story with people that live in extremely cold climates, right?
00:40:39.000They've developed all these adaptations to be able to survive in this intense weather where people who live in the tropics, if you've moved them to that environment, they would die.
00:40:51.000It's a story with every clade of creatures.
00:41:00.000At levels that I think maybe we don't even fully yet appreciate.
00:41:04.000The difference between committing to a particular way of existing that seems really awesome for some period of time and then is suddenly impossible and the ability to leap from one way of being to another is the key to getting through time, which is what evolution is doing.
00:41:22.000I always phrase it as the purpose that evolution points towards is lodging your genes as far into the future as you can get them.
00:41:32.000And people don't, I think, fully appreciate when I say that that it's not just a clever rephrasing of what might be more standard might be found in a textbook.
00:41:42.000The point is anything that satisfies that objective is valid.
00:41:50.000So for example, if you have, so we have a process.
00:41:55.000It's one of my favorites to think about, which is called adaptive radiation.
00:42:00.000Adaptive radiation is where you get some creature that either solves some problem or gets to some new place and then diversifies and we get 50 or 100 or 1,000 species that are derived from that initial discovery, right?
00:42:17.000So you get this blooming of forms, right?
00:43:14.000And it turns out most of those niches are durable on the scale of 10,000 years, but not 50,000 years.
00:43:22.000So you get a bunch of them going extinct.
00:43:26.000But as long as one of them or two of them have gotten through that bottleneck, right?
00:43:31.000The huge blooming of branches and then the pruning of branches.
00:43:35.000The ancestor has now gotten to the future in the form of however many species made it through that destructive process.
00:43:44.000It is selection at a different scale than we typically think of it.
00:43:48.000And so thinking of evolution as this dynamic process that is not only searching design space, but learning to enhance its capacity to search design space in order to get into the future is the way to think of it.
00:44:04.000It's much more powerful than the clumsy version that we describe, even if we don't yet understand where that power is lodged.
00:44:11.000If we were imaginative and we said, okay, what would I do if I was evolution to enhance the likelihood of getting to the future?
00:44:19.000Well, then you start finding these explorer modes.
00:44:22.000And, you know, I understand that I will be ridiculed for saying that because it imposes on selection a directionality that probably at a technical level we are right to assume does not exist.
00:46:10.000And so anyway, when you see one of these creatures that has been very little modified, it's because it did find a form that's durable over a very long period of time.
00:46:21.000And in some ways, that's the greatest strategy.
00:46:26.000Having to change in order to deal with the changes in the environment is perilous.
00:46:35.000Having found something that is so durable that it consists, that it persists era after era, epoch after epoch, is at least a very comprehensible strategy and arguably the better one because anything that has existed that long, maybe we talked in a past podcast about the Lindy effect.
00:46:58.000The idea that we tend to think that the longer something's been around, that it's overdue to be destroyed, but that often the answer is something that's been around a long time is actually built to last.
00:47:10.000And so if it's been around a long time, you might expect to see it last a lot longer.
00:47:16.000It's the Lindy effect in animal or plant form.
00:47:20.000So it's just essentially evolution nailed it.
00:47:24.000They developed an animal that's so adaptive and so designed to succeed in its particular environment that it doesn't really need to change.
00:47:33.000Yes, and in fact, you know, we are in some ways, we haven't been around that long, but it looks like we are a variation on that theme, precisely because we have a generalist body plan.
00:47:53.000The physical robot, that is the human being, is capable of doing a tremendous number of things.
00:47:59.000And the software program can be essentially entirely rewritten.
00:48:04.000The culture that you inherit can take a person and it can rewire them for a very different niche, including the ability to avail themselves of whatever tools are necessary to do whatever things the body plan doesn't do on its own.
00:48:23.000To have a generalist robot and a software program that can be swapped out as needed, that evolution can rewrite very rapidly, that evolution can rewrite on the basis of not only the conjecture of an intelligent creature, but the pooled parallel processing of multiple individuals of the species.
00:48:49.000This is what Heather and I describe in our book as campfire.
00:49:13.000And they parallel process the puzzles and they come up with ideas which, you know, the most amazing adaptation of all is the one we're using right now.
00:49:25.000The ability for me to put an abstract idea into your head over open space by vibrating the air molecules between us.
00:49:40.000And that we can prove that we're not fooling ourselves.
00:49:43.000I could say something that nobody's ever thought of, like, I don't know, potato rocket ship, right?
00:49:54.000And you could draw on the piece of paper your interpretation and I could say, yeah, that's the thing I was thinking of, right?
00:50:00.000That ability to prove that we are, in fact, exchanging abstract ideas across open air and that that allows multiple minds that are not physically touching each other to process together concepts is.
00:50:17.000It's truly stunning and, in conjunction with the generalist robot that can use tools, it's a it's an amazingly good strategy.
00:50:26.000When you talk about humans, one of the things that fascinates me about people is the, the changes in human beings because of the environment, because of input meaning, like certain chemicals we're exposed to, sedentary lifestyle.
00:50:44.000There's changes that are taking place that we can measure from human beings that lived in the beginning of the 20th century to people that live now in the beginning of the 21st century.
00:50:55.000One of the things that people are talking about with a great concern, like Dr. Shanna Swan has done a lot of work on this, is the impact of microplastics on our endocrine system and how it's greatly diminishing males' ability to procreate and females' ability to bring a baby to term.
00:51:14.000So you're getting many more miscarriages and lower testosterone counts, smaller testicles and penises, reduced size of the taints, all these different things that she attributes to phthalates and various chemicals that are endocrine disruptors that are ubiquitous in our world.
00:51:32.000Is this something that you think about?
00:51:36.000Is this something, are we in the middle of an adaptation or some sort of a change of the human species?
00:52:09.000Every so often, a generation finds itself in a brand new circumstance.
00:52:14.000You know, you kayak, kayak across some body of water and you end up in some foreign place in which the animals and plants aren't the same and your old way of life isn't going to work and you have to bootstrap something new.
00:52:31.000It's the same as it's similar to the first flying mammal is suddenly faced with a whole set of opportunities that it has to figure out how to solve.
00:52:45.000But the point is, every so often a generation gets a wild curveball and it has to start not from scratch, but close to it.
00:52:53.000But in general, okay, that first generation figures out how we're going to make a living here and it passes that information on to its descendants who have a lot of room to refine what their ancestors figured out.
00:53:05.000And for some generations you get this rapid refinement process.
00:53:09.000And then eventually you kind of figure it out.
00:53:12.000I know how we're going to live in this valley.
00:53:23.000Humans are excellent at dealing with it, right, because we're good at parallel processing puzzles, right?
00:53:30.000A population of people can figure out how to live here when the way to do it doesn't look like how we lived there.
00:53:38.000However, there is a threshold at which our amazing ability to adapt culturally and physiologically is outstripped.
00:53:49.000And that is the point at which technological change is so fast that you're not even an adult in the same environment you grew up in.
00:53:59.000That's what we now consistently live in.
00:54:01.000The world you and I now live in doesn't look anything like the world we grew up in.
00:54:05.000A number of radical differences in terms of the chemicals that we encounter, in terms of the behavior of other people, in terms of the information that comes into our eyes.
00:54:16.000These things have all been revolutionized.
00:54:18.000I've frankly seen several revolutions.
00:54:20.000You and I have both seen several revolutions already.
00:54:24.000You know, we had the computer, then we had the internet, then we had the smartphone, then we had social media.
00:54:34.000Each of these things would take time to metabolize, to deal with the harms of them, to learn how to address them in a wise way.
00:54:43.000But we never get the chance to figure that out because the next one is already upon us.
00:54:48.000In fact, it's you ever go body surfing and you get into a situation where the waves are just coming too quick, and as soon as you catch your breath from one, the next one is on you, right?
00:54:59.000It's just like that, you can't do that, right?
00:57:03.000ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.
00:57:06.000Well, I agree, and I think we need to think outside the box with respect to what kinds of inputs might be affecting us.
00:57:15.000I will say, in parallel with what I think is a much more toxic environment, you know, and developmentally toxic environment, we have a radical change in the way human beings are interacting with each other.
00:57:35.000And it is unclear to me how far-reaching the consequences of that might be.
00:57:43.000But, you know, we talked last time about the impact of the sexual revolution and of reliable birth control and abortion on the way males and females interact with each other.
00:57:58.000that basically sex being the ultimate reward, the most powerful motivator that exists, when birth control made sex common or made it possible for sex to be common by virtue of radically reducing the risk that females face in engaging in sex with men who won't invest,
00:58:24.000it robbed us of the central organizing principle of civilization, and the consequences of that central organizing principle evaporating are incredibly far-reaching.
00:58:41.000In effect, we do not know that there is a way for us to live without that central organizing principle.
00:58:49.000And we are running that radical experiment and then we're going to augment that radical experiment now with AI and presumably AI-powered sex robots and companions and other things that the mind is not built to properly understand.
00:59:11.000So what effect are all of these things having?
00:59:15.000Is there a feedback effect from your perception of the sexual landscape onto the development of your children?
00:59:23.000It's conceivable that there is such a thing.
00:59:27.000But I do know that if we were wise, we would slow the pace of experienced change way down.
00:59:39.000But how is that even possible at this point?
00:59:42.000I'm not saying it is, but I'm saying if we don't, I think we know that we're doomed.
00:59:47.000So in light of that, what would you do if you knew that down that path was destruction?
00:59:53.000You would start thinking about the question of is there some way, maybe you can't rein in the pace of technological change.
01:00:01.000You can certainly, and we should, if we were wise, we would insulate young people from exposure, especially to new stuff.
01:00:14.000There's a question about what stuff that we already have, what effect it's having on them.
01:00:19.000But the fact that we're just going to expose them to every new revolution without figuring out what its consequences are, is insane.
01:00:29.000We need to provide young people with a chemically and informationally stable environment where the puzzles are solvable and they are relevant to the adult world we expect them to live in, which is difficult because we don't know what world they're going to live in.
01:00:48.000But not immunizing them is a terrible error.
01:00:57.000The reason human childhood is the longest developmental childhood in the animal kingdom by far is that it is the training for adult life.
01:01:11.000If the training ground doesn't match the world that you're going to be an adult in, because the world you're going to be an adult in is something nobody can predict, it is guaranteed to make you a fish out of water as an adult.
01:01:27.000And essentially every new groundbreaking technology, every new breakthrough, every new paradigm shifting thing that gets created is a completely new environment for these children.
01:01:42.000And no roadmap, no manual of how to navigate it.
01:01:46.000And then we're seeing all the psychological harms, increase in anxiety, self-harm, especially amongst young girls, suicidal ideation, actual suicide.
01:01:56.000Well, I mean, in other contexts, I have said, I've probably said to you, you know, there are no adults.
01:02:06.000That's one of the shocking discoveries of becoming adult age, is that it's not like there's some set of adults who knows what to think about this and how to approach it.
01:02:16.000One of the reasons that you would have no adults is that it's kind of impossible to imagine where they would come from.
01:02:23.000An adult is somebody who has picked up the wisdom for how to deal with the world that you live in.
01:02:31.000Where would that wisdom have come from if the world just showed up five minutes ago?
01:02:35.000It's in principle impossible to deal with this level of change.
01:02:39.000So at most, what you can do is become very robust.
01:02:46.000Do you think that this is where rites of passage ceremony come from?
01:02:51.000That there's a thing that differentiates you between the younger version of yourself.
01:02:56.000You've gone through this thing, and so it requires a shift in the way that you view yourself and the world.
01:03:02.000Now you have passed, now you've gone through whatever the ceremony is, depending upon your culture, now you are a man.
01:03:09.000Yeah, in fact, in A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Heather and I argue that rites of passage are the place.
01:03:20.000So they're artificial in a sense, right?
01:03:22.000We dictate that this is the moment at which you go from being a boy to being a man who is eligible to marry or something like that.
01:03:30.000And the point is, you know that that date is coming.
01:03:33.000There is a thing that causes you to have made that transition, right?
01:03:39.000Maybe it's a vision quest of some kind.
01:03:40.000Maybe it's an animal that you have to hunt and bring back or something.
01:03:45.000But the point is, you grow up with the knowledge that I am a prototype until that marker.
01:03:52.000And after that marker, it's for real, right?
01:03:55.000So you pick up an increasing level of reality until you hit that agreed upon boundary, at which point everybody is in a position to hold you responsible for your behavior and to expect you to have certain skills on board.
01:04:13.000And the abandonment of these things, right?
01:04:17.000What we have is such a preposterous dim shadow of what once was.
01:04:44.000And you're out there in the world and very confused and trying to figure it out along the way and also trying to pretend that you're a man because maybe that somehow will make you feel more like one or take on male behavior, start smoking cigarettes, whatever it is.
01:04:59.000Like whatever you see adult people do, go to the bar, like whatever it is, and try to emulate what you think are men or women.
01:05:09.000Especially, you know, if you think about what we actually do to these kids, we put them in schools where the adults are in some sense themselves immunized from the realities of the adult world and they end up having these ridiculous notions about, you know, whatever it may be.
01:05:30.000It's very easy to pick on, you know, gender ideology or equity or— But those are good examples, though, because they're preposterous.
01:05:38.000And they get adapted or adopted, rather, by enormous groups of people and then reinforced violently.
01:05:59.000It's—they're solving some other problem.
01:06:01.000But at the level of how civilization is going to run, we are signing our own death warrant, putting our children in environments in which what they pick up is a determination to be unrealistic in the face of evidence that they are wrong.
01:06:23.000I mean, people complain about it when their kids are going to that school, but more kids are going to that school.
01:06:29.000And it just keeps happening over and over again.
01:06:31.000And then they go into the workforce, and they have these crazy ideas, and they tank companies, you know, because they try to impose these ridiculous ideologies in the real world.
01:06:39.000And actual people that have become actual adults and are out there working and struggling go, this is fucking horse shit, and I'm not going along with this, and fuck your company.
01:06:50.000And then all of a sudden, that company gets— And then there's some adaptation that way, because people realize, like, hey, we can't do this anymore.
01:07:00.000But that seems like it's one of the only ways that they do is by real-world application and it being soundly rejected and financial consequences.
01:07:10.000The problem is that all those consequences are way too indirect to correct the people who are driving the change.
01:07:17.000Right, and the people that aren't connected to that world at all, because their entire existence is based in this La La Land, where they're being funded by La La Land, they're teaching La La Land ideology, they're reinforcing it, and then they're in a position of authority.
01:07:33.000So they are the person that these young people look up to, and they're very articulate, and they string words together well, so they look impressive.
01:07:40.000I said, well, this guy must be right, you know, and my parents must be really stupid, and they've ruined society.
01:07:46.000And, you know, we've got to give communism a shot.
01:07:51.000Right, we've just got to go far enough.
01:07:53.000Well, the problem is the thing that does turn you into an adult is a world of consequences, right?
01:08:03.000Now, as a child, somebody should prune that world of fatal consequences or, you know, ones that would get you maimed.
01:08:11.000But allowing you to experience the harm of your wrong understanding of the world is how you improve your understanding of the world.
01:08:20.000And so, A, we're not even doing that, right?
01:08:24.000We've got this system in which we are allowing people who know nothing to teach children the nothing that they know as if it was high-minded and important.
01:08:34.000And then they're immunized from consequences by what I think you and I would agree was initially a well-intentioned attempt to protect people from bad luck, you know, that people who are liberal-minded as you and I both are don't want to see people suffer because of bad luck.
01:08:57.000But when you start immunizing people from the consequences of their bad decision-making, whether the people you're immunizing are corporate executives who have gambled badly with the resources of their corporation or, you know, children who make bad decisions and it causes them to be disliked at school, people have to have those consequences come back to haunt them so that they will stop making the same mistakes and get wiser.
01:09:24.000And any place that you break that with the equivalent of a welfare program, you are guaranteeing that you will end up with an infantilized adult population.
01:09:47.000But making people reliant on that social safety net and then having generation after generation reliant on that social safety net, you stifle all growth and development and make people dependent.
01:10:03.000My argument would be a system functions really well when people are immunized from real bad luck, right?
01:10:13.000Things that they – it's not the consequence of their bad decision-making.
01:10:16.000It's actually, you know, you happen to get a tumor because of a genetic vulnerability or an encounter with some chemical that you had no ability to know was there.
01:10:26.000But that as soon as you start immunizing people from the downstream effects of their own bad decisions where they had better decisions that were available to them, you just get the evolution of civilization into a quagmire.
01:10:43.000Well, this is my fear, my great fear about the concept of universal basic income.
01:11:17.000And what we really need to do, and I do not see any mechanism that is capable of it, but what we really need to do is figure out how we want people to allocate their time, what problems we would like them to address themselves to, right?
01:11:37.000And then we need to reward them for success relative to those problems and allow them to suffer from the failure to make progress relative to those problems.
01:11:45.000Now, I don't exactly know what those problems are because civilization is changing so fast that it's very hard to even define what it is that will need to be done.
01:11:54.000But I think we talked about this last time.
01:11:59.000People are not going to be coherent, absent purpose.
01:12:08.000And it used to be that biology itself forced purpose onto you, right?
01:12:13.000On the frontier, the ability to win a mate, to provide enough shelter, consistent enough food, all of the things necessary for life, that that was a full-time occupation.
01:13:05.000Are they interested in raising children?
01:13:08.000Are they going to, you know, farm that job out to some crazy person who believes you can switch gender by just saying you've done it, right?
01:13:23.000The subordinate purposes, which came later, right, the ability to invest in a career to climb some corporate ladder, that doesn't sound very appealing to me, but at least I understand what it is, right?
01:13:37.000At least, you know, okay, there's a game.
01:13:40.000The company wants certain things accomplished.
01:13:43.000To the extent that you accomplish them better than your competitors, you rise farther.
01:13:47.000It leaves you an income that you can spend in whatever way you want.
01:13:53.000The puzzle that we have given people now is completely incoherent.
01:14:00.000And universal basic income, I presume, will keep people from starving, but it ain't nearly good enough.
01:14:12.000People have to know what they're supposed to be doing because not doing it causes them to suffer and succeeding at it causes them to feel good.
01:14:23.000They need at least that much direction.
01:14:26.000But is it possible that we can move past the idea that providing people or a person being able to provide themselves with shelter and food, which is essentially what we're saying with universal basic income.
01:14:39.000We're saying you will have enough money to have shelter, you will have enough money to have food, and you could acquire basic goods.
01:14:46.000That this is not really what we should be working towards in life anymore and that it's possible to find some other purpose, goal, or task that would replace those things and money would just be a thing that you're using to acquire the means to survive and now you pursue this other thing,
01:15:10.000maybe not necessarily for a monetary reason, not necessarily to acquire wealth, but instead to educate yourself.
01:15:19.000Instead, you know, as a process of human development, a skill that you're learning, a thing that you're competing in, something.
01:15:54.000Being able to buy stuff is a decent enough motivation to the extent that there is stuff that's desirable that's out of reach unless you get enough wealth.
01:16:08.000The nothing, I think, nothing is going to substitute for the difficulty of, well, for males, the difficulty of winning the ability to have a sexual relationship with a desirable female, right?
01:16:34.000We now have all sorts of things that cause people not to want to pursue that.
01:16:40.000There are things, you know, obviously there's porn, there's going to be sex robots.
01:16:51.000And, you know, part of me is wondering why women are not up in arms over the fact that they are being competed with with ever more sophisticated technology.
01:17:07.000I'm confused by why that is not an affront.
01:17:12.000They're definitely at arms about porn and they think that not only are they competing with this, but it's changing young men's view of sex.
01:18:02.000There are plenty of voices out there that are focusing on the defects of modern women.
01:18:11.000I don't want to add to that chorus, but I do think there is something shocking about the degree to which young women seem to have signed up for the idea that being liberated, that the measure of whether or not they have been liberated is how much they are behaving like men at their worst.
01:18:35.000Like, the boss lady is the lady that behaves like a man at work.
01:18:52.000The woman's just a boss bitch and she doesn't give a fuck and she kicks these men to the curve and they're distraught and they're, like, emotionally wrecked and she's just back to business.
01:19:15.000Well, I mean, if I was a woman and a guy that was just wholly desiring, conquering, and moving ahead and didn't give a shit, if he's like, fuck off, everybody eat shit, like, no compassion for other people, just only focused on success and winning, winning, winning, it's Gordon Gekko, you know?
01:19:33.000It's like the most unattractive characters in films, the greedy billionaire character that doesn't give a shit about the consequences of his actions and what happens to the world.
01:20:04.000But I will just say, I have puzzled over the fact that our culture does not have a profound relationship with the symmetry represented by a yin-yang symbol.
01:20:18.000The yin-yang symbol is profound as far as I'm concerned because it describes a perfect symmetry that is not superficially symmetrical.
01:20:43.000You are not looking for somebody to be the same as you.
01:20:46.000You are looking for somebody to be as perfectly complementary with what you are as is possible in essentially every regard.
01:20:56.000And what we are getting instead is this sort of mind-numbing belief that, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, which, as I keep saying, it has robbed us of all coherence.
01:21:11.000And I think it also, you know, I've started paying attention to a bunch of these male accounts that are fed up with females.
01:21:26.000People that I consider insightful but who are not in any way where I am with respect to this topic.
01:21:33.000You know, so people, I don't know, do you know the account Homath?
01:21:51.000He's just bitter about the state of modern women and has given up on finding anyone because he thinks he's discovered that it's impossible.
01:22:04.000I mean, I think you and I are in the fortunate position of being happily married to wonderful people and I will tell you that having two sons and looking at the world that they are supposed to be finding a mate in, it's not obvious how this is supposed to work.
01:22:24.000It wasn't obvious when I was young either.
01:22:26.000But you just got to pick wisely and you also have to find people.
01:22:31.000You have to find them the type of people that you're actually interested.
01:22:36.000Yeah, but imagine the following thing.
01:22:39.000Imagine that, first of all, who you are as a sexual being is the result naturally of your exposure, right?
01:22:53.000You come to understand what sex is and how you're supposed to behave from stories in ancient cultures you would observe a certain amount because perfect privacy wasn't a thing.
01:23:08.000That has all now been disrupted by porn, right?
01:23:11.000So people get developmental experiences of sex from this commodity which is not accurate.
01:23:19.000It is not a description of the way people actually interact, right?
01:23:22.000It's meant to captivate you and the different pornographers are in competition with each other.
01:23:27.000So they're providing you an increasingly extreme view of sex in order to get your attention.
01:23:38.000But given what a human being is and given that it doesn't come wired with a sexual persona that it acquires a sexual persona through exposure, the fact that we are flooding that channel with this very unrealistic stuff means that, well, what do women discover when they end up in bed with a guy?
01:23:57.000Well, that guy is like the cartoon that men have been painted as, right?
01:24:07.000You and I bristle at what the Me Too movement portrayed men as.
01:24:19.000And the story of how men and women are supposed to interact, you know, in terms of flirting and dating and all of that is not as straightforward as people will paint that picture.
01:24:31.000But if you've got a generation of men that's being exposed to the same, frankly, violent garbage and that is informing them about what sex is and then women are discovering that, oh, yeah, men are kind of brutal and awful, you know, in the bedroom.
01:24:49.000So that reinforces their sense of, well, you know, these aren't decent people.
01:24:56.000They're putting on an act when they're in public.
01:24:59.000So it creates the exact thing that men were falsely accused of.
01:25:06.000And it makes women, I think, become very unsympathetic as people, right?
01:25:15.000That to the extent that women start viewing sex as antagonistic, which is what men at their worst are, is they are sexually, they're predators, right?
01:25:27.000They're men trying to have sex with women they have no intention of investing in are, whether they understand it or not, engaging in behavior designed to impregnate that female and stick her with the job of raising the offspring.
01:25:48.000That is a mode that exists in men, but it's not the only male mode.
01:25:52.000And it's a mode that is a relic of ancient times when it was just an opportunity to spread your genes because you weren't going to live very long.
01:25:59.000So you had this built-in desire to try to spread your genes as much as possible.
01:26:05.000Yeah, but I would also say that women were wise about not getting stuck with offspring.
01:26:15.000So the fact that men may have that mode built into them did not manifest as successful males behaving in this way because in general women shut them down.
01:26:33.000And basically what you have is people exploring some landscape that's been primed with porn violent porn because that's how pornographers compete with each other and it is causing them to live an entirely different life.
01:26:53.000And I think frankly I think sex is really important.
01:27:00.000That in a marriage it is playing a very powerful dual role.
01:28:21.000And so the idea that we've disrupted this with a consumer good that pushes men into the worst of their modes and is now exposing women to that and that women are now being induced to think that that's sophisticated to behave in this way that men at their worst are behaving and so women are now behaving this way.
01:28:43.000It's like well you couldn't ask for a better recipe for disrupting functional relationships and those functional relationships are vital to civilization working.
01:28:55.000The family unit is profoundly important and we are disrupting not only are we disrupting the way it functions but we're disrupting whether or not it even forms because frankly it's not that attractive a deal to sign up for a lifelong relationship with somebody who's been broken in this way.
01:29:15.000It's just it doesn't paint a very rosy picture of the future.
01:29:20.000You know when you look at where this is going and then the possibility of AI porn that's you know virtual reality porn and then the sex robot thing which is they're getting really close to that.
01:29:34.000It's hard to tell what's real and what's not online with AI, but there's definitely work being done on lifelike robots to be housekeepers or to be companions or someone you could talk to in your home, and it's just a matter of time before those become sexual companions and they replace regular sexual companions.
01:29:55.000And then all of the motivation to be a better person, to be successful, to be someone that's good at conversation, so that someone who's reasonable, so you form a great bond with your partner all that goes away because the robot just loves you.
01:30:10.000The robot loves you and your potential partners are getting less desirable.
01:30:15.000The robots are getting more desirable.
01:30:21.000So I think that look I keep waiting for a movement to start in which young people who have yet to form these relationships put out a set of rules and they say here are the rules I'm going to abide by and I'm only going to date people who abide by them too.
01:30:46.000I would say this is you know if I was writing the rules one of them would be no sex with somebody that you know is not a long-term partner.
01:30:54.000You're not committing to a long-term relationship when you have sex with somebody necessarily but if you know somebody is not a candidate you shouldn't be engaging in baby-making behavior with them.
01:32:16.000And I think that's a dangerous thing and I would love to see I mean and maybe it's happening in religious communities that people are opting into a different set of rules and looking for mates within their community because those mates will abide by it.
01:32:33.000That is the place where people are going and I think it's probably one of the reasons one of many reasons why you're seeing an uptick in religious participation amongst young people.
01:32:45.000Especially if they're looking at the world that you know they find themselves and they find their friends in that are just crashing out left and right and it just seems like a very bad path.
01:32:57.000I will say I wish that the religious communities had navigated the landscape of COVID and gender ideology better that there's you know I don't know how healthy those communities are in light of the fact that they seem to have I don't think universally but largely failed those tests.
01:33:20.000There's a lot of wokeism in some some religions but not traditional religions.
01:33:26.000It's almost like these break off versions of a traditional religion we have a transgender pastor and LBGTQ flag behind them and you get like but you're always going to have these weird yeah offsets.
01:33:41.000Well I'm glad to hear if you well did any major religion pass the COVID test?
01:33:49.000In terms of well first of all almost no institutions passed the COVID test correctly.
01:33:57.000none of them and I think you have to look towards what they know.
01:34:04.000It's very easy to look back in 2025 and say all of these institutions failed the COVID test.
01:34:10.000Well I think I probably would have failed it you know if I had been a different person in a different job in a different part of my life and I didn't have access to the information that I had access to.
01:34:21.000I didn't know what games were being played and I didn't know the landscape.
01:34:25.000I didn't know what games had previously been played especially in regards to the way the pharmaceutical drug industry distributes propaganda and information and then hires people to gaslight folks.
01:34:40.000You're seeing this now right it's a good way to pivot to this conversation now you're seeing now this most recent study that showed that without doubt children were killed by the COVID-19 vaccines.
01:34:52.000So that's not surprising but what is surprising to me is the enormous number of gaslighters on social media that are not just denying this data saying this data is inaccurate and saying far more children healthy children were killed by COVID-19 than were killed by these vaccinations.
01:35:16.000There's a bunch of problems with that.
01:35:18.000First of all the problem is the reality of the VAIR system.
01:35:22.000It is a very small percentage of people that have actual vaccine injuries that get recorded into the VAIR system.
01:35:28.000And then of course the opposite side of that they would say yeah but anybody can say they have a vaccine injury and anybody can get their vaccine injury put into the VAIR system even if it's not accurate.
01:35:41.000That's kind of true but also not because doctors are very incentivized to not put you into the vaccine injury category for a bunch of reasons.
01:35:52.000doctors are financially incentivized to vaccinate people and this is something that I was not aware of at all until the COVID lockdowns until the vaccination push.
01:36:06.000Mary Tally Bowden, who's been on the podcast before.
01:36:09.000She said that her own practice a very small practice in a strip mall she would have made an additional 1.5 million dollars had she vaccinated all over patients.
01:36:21.000That's a huge financial motivation for one person with a private practice.
01:36:31.000You scale that out to large hospitals, large medical institutions, large establishments, and then you have financial incentives that businesses had to vaccinate their employees.
01:36:43.000And then you had these punitory punishment that would be befalling upon your business had you not met the threshold.
01:36:56.000If you have more than X amount of people, everyone must be fully vaccinated, not just had COVID and recovered from it.
01:37:07.000You have the antibodies, you're protected.
01:37:09.000No no, it's vaccinated and then boosted.
01:37:13.000And then they continue that practice, even when it was shown that the vaccine, unlike what we were told initially, did not stop transmission, did not stop infection.
01:37:23.000It didn't do anything, which meant that, even saying well, far more people got myocarditis from COVID than the vaccines, which is not true.
01:37:33.000If you look at the data, it's clear that there are shenanigans with categorizing people.
01:37:38.000In order to get that, they did that by measuring troponin levels correct.
01:37:43.000There are multiple mechanisms, but the way they were trying to phrase it that more people are getting myocarditis that are unvaccinated than are vaccinated.
01:37:55.000What they're doing they're measuring while they were infected, they're measuring proxies, but the problem is the category, vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
01:38:05.000Right, right they're, by categorizing people as unvaccinated until they reach the category fully vaccinated.
01:38:13.000Not just that, but two weeks or plus after the injection you're still up to, you're still considered unvaccinated.
01:38:24.000So if people died during that time period, they were listed as unvaccinated deaths, even if they potentially died from the vaccine itself.
01:38:36.000I believe it is fraud and I believe the evidence will ultimately reflect that myocarditis is not being caused by Covid and that these are miscategorized vaccine injuries.
01:38:46.000But nonetheless, there's also a mechanism for what would cause these vaccine injuries, multiple mechanisms yes, multiple mechanisms that actually arise because of the defects of the platform itself, not even the particulars of the Covid vaccine.
01:39:00.000So I will say I am very heartened and surprised to see Vinay Prasad putting this memo out within FDA, saying that at least 10 children seem to have died from the vaccines.
01:39:19.000I don't know if you've read his letter.
01:39:24.000It is clearly the tip of a much larger iceberg.
01:39:28.000Those of us who have circulated in communities of the vaccine injured know just how many orders of magnitude more we're really talking about.
01:39:39.000But he says in the letter, look, the number of people, of kids, who were killed by this is actually higher, but these 10 are ones in which it was so unambiguous that their analysis regards it as causal right.
01:39:55.000In other words, they threw out all of the cases in which somebody died, a child died days later.
01:39:59.000They took only cases where, you know, a person got the vaccine and died.
01:40:05.000So anyway, I'm heartened because Vinay Prasad has been a mixed bag, in my opinion.
01:40:15.000He's been rather terrible on Ivermectin and in some ways he, you know, he's one of the academics who managed to hold on to his position through all of the tyranny right.
01:40:31.000Most of the people that you and I know the Pierre Corey's, the Robert Malone's, Ryan Cole's these are people who were driven from jobs, had their licenses threatened, that sort of thing.
01:40:43.000Vinay held on and then he got a position in the administration and now he's on the right side of history and he's being cautious, but nonetheless it's.
01:40:56.000It's a very positive sign, as is Marty Marquet's recent set of podcast appearances in which he talks about the reality of all sorts of things, including bio weaponized ticks and things.
01:41:10.000So we have people in the administration who have managed to hold on to their position in the institutional world, who are seemingly either waking up or telling us what they have understood, and it's a very positive sign.
01:41:29.000Can we talk a little bit about ivermectin?
01:41:32.000Yeah, because I think he's just going to ask you about that, like, what is?
01:41:38.000Well, he has regarded it as not useful, based on the randomized control trials which claimed that it wasn't useful, and in my opinion, he fell down on the job, not pursuing what actually happened in those trials.
01:42:36.000And you almost I mean I think everyone knows anecdotally somebody who was fucked up by the vaccine.
01:42:44.000Almost everyone that I've ever talked to other than Sam Harris, almost everyone that I've ever talked to claims they know someone who was irrevocably harmed by the vaccine oh yeah, if not killed, yes.
01:42:59.000This is such a gigantic population of people, not to mention all the people who don't know, who have some sort of new pathology that they've not connected to the vaccine right and whose doctors have gaslit them and said they're totally unrelated.
01:43:14.000You are going to get this no matter what right.
01:43:16.000So we see all of this in actuarial data.
01:43:21.000There are large populations of people who have put two and two together and, but it's a difficult equation because you have to be confronted by so many different realities that are incredibly uncomfortable right.
01:43:33.000Then you also have the problem of people that have asserted a very specific thing and done so very aggressively, and now realize they're wrong and do not want to admit they're wrong and will fight vehemently to somehow or twist gaslight obfuscate, use data that they know to be incorrect to try to prove a position that intellectually, they must know is not accurate.
01:44:00.000You see a lot of that to protect themselves, protect ego, to protect their reputation, their very careers, like.
01:44:07.000The longer they can keep this ruse going and the more they can make the data foggy in terms of like.
01:44:22.000Those people probably don't listen to your podcast, but to the extent that they might hear this, there is a piece of wisdom that you need which is, however painful it may be, to face the error that you've made, you are far better off to face it right.
01:44:41.000I'm not saying there's not a big cost, but the weight off your shoulders of setting the record straight with respect to your errors.
01:44:52.000Yeah, we will get back to Sam Harris in a second here, but I wanted to talk a little bit about you know people and this recent memo inside of FDA about children who had no reason to get the COVID vaccine in the first place because they stood to gain nothing from it.
01:45:13.000Dying of it is beyond criminal negligence.
01:45:26.000It's a very positive sign, but you and I know that the vaccine story has been breaking because I think in large measure, so many people virtually everybody knows somebody who was injured, and so it's very hard to keep people in the dark about that, and people's acceptance of the boosters has plummeted.
01:45:49.000People do need to understand that there's a huge number of mRNA shots that are being cooked up at this very minute, that the damage is not from the COVID part of the shot, it's from the platform itself, and so we need to stop that vast array of mRNA shots from ever making it to the market and we need to get the COVID shots pulled which, again another thing I want to get back to is Charlie Kirk and
01:46:19.000I were working together trying to get the shots pulled.
01:46:23.000He had the president's ear, I was helping to inform him about what's really going on with the mRNA platform and anyway, we were making great progress.
01:46:35.000He sent me a text at one point I had congratulated him on, I think, the shots having been pulled for no longer being recommended for kids and pregnant women, and he said something I think it was, we're doing holy work together and it meant a lot.
01:46:55.000I'm obviously not a religious person, but it meant a lot for me to hear that from him, and I do think, among the many tragedies that are the result of his terrible death is the fact that it slowed progress on getting these shots removed from the market.
01:47:29.000The vaccine committee that Robert Malone is on with Martin Kulldorff and Ratzif Levy is also doing excellent work.
01:47:42.000So there's lots of positive signs on the vaccine front, although it's painfully slow from the point of view of shots that shouldn't be on the market are still being injected into people.
01:47:52.000The story that has not properly broken is the Ivermectin story, right.
01:47:58.000More generally, the repurposed drug story.
01:48:00.000But this is when you and I lived very personally.
01:48:10.000Yeah, they made me green on CNN and basically, even people who are awake about the vaccines largely have arrived at the conclusion that Ivermectin showed promise and that it turned out it didn't work and that the evidence is overwhelming that it didn't work and that those of us who said otherwise.
01:48:34.000And this is a maddening nonsense story, right, even the trials that say that Ivermectin didn't work.
01:48:43.000If you dig into what they actually found?
01:48:45.000You find a huge amount of fraud designed to produce the impression that Ivermectin didn't work and, amazingly enough, even in trials that are designed to give that result, it still shows that it's effective.
01:48:59.000And there is a something I want to show you, one of these that I think you probably haven't seen yet, that makes this point really clearly.
01:49:10.000So can you bring up that tweet, Alexandros Marinos tweet on the I think it's called the Principal trial.
01:49:39.000It says, I think that's supposed to be.
01:49:43.000No, did you know that the principal trial out of the UK found that ivermectin was superior to the usual care in practically every subgroup it tested, but it sat on the results for 600 days.
01:49:55.000When it finally published, buried these results on page 364 of the appendix.
01:50:53.000So even the one case people greater than 65 years where it's touching that line, it's still to the right of that line.
01:50:59.000So in every single case ivermectin is superior to not giving ivermectin.
01:51:04.000Even though these people were given ivermectin late, they were given ivermectin in a sneaky way where the regular dose is supposed to be something like three milligrams per kilogram of body weight.
01:51:18.000But there's a sneaky thing that they slide into the methods where, if your weight is above a certain number, they cap the dose.
01:51:26.000So you're under dosed, so you don't spot it unless you go looking for it.
01:51:30.000But in any case and overweight people are the most vulnerable, right?
01:51:33.000Exactly so it's a great way of making a drug look not very effective.
01:51:37.000And a lot of people are overweight, absolutely so.
01:51:40.000On this plot every so you see those horizontal lines.
01:51:44.000You've got a box in the middle of a bunch of horizontal lines.
01:51:47.000The horizontal lines are confidence intervals.
01:51:49.000If they don't touch the 1.0 line, then the result is statistically significant.
01:51:58.000So in all of these categories, ivermectin is statistically significant in its efficacy.
01:52:04.000In the one category where it's not, it's still effective.
01:52:07.000It's just not statistically significant in its effectiveness.
01:52:10.000Okay, and they buried this in this appendix, page 346 right, and actually, can you scroll down to the next tweet in this thread?
01:52:31.000Stop, go back up a little bit interpretation.
01:52:35.000So this is their take home message from the paper.
01:52:38.000It says ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide a clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions or longer term outcomes.
01:52:48.000Further trials of ivermectin for SARS-CoV-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted.
01:52:54.000So here you have a trial that overwhelmingly shows, ivermectin is effective.
01:52:59.000It reduced the recovery time by a couple of days, even though they gave it super late which, with all antivirals, makes them very much weaker than they would otherwise be.
01:53:11.000And here they are reporting that the answer is it's unlikely to create meaningful outcomes and there's no further work needed.
01:53:27.000You and I said, look, the evidence suggests that this stuff works.
01:53:32.000It's quite safe compared to almost any other drug you could take in fact, I can't think of one that's safer and that therefore, in light of the evidence that it seems to meaningfully improve outcomes, it's a good bet.
01:53:47.000Right, they mocked us over that conclusion.
01:53:51.000This study makes it very clear that, even when people are trying to hide that conclusion, that it's there in the data.
01:53:59.000If you go looking now there's an even better one, though.
01:54:08.000Have you read uh, Pierre Cory's book, the war on Ivermectin?
01:54:11.000No okay, there's something reported in this book that um, it really stops you in your tracks.
01:54:19.000It is an accidental uh, natural experiment.
01:54:24.000Okay, so a natural experiment is something in science where maybe you happen on an archipelago in which you have a bunch of different islands that have different conditions, and you can go to each island and measure the you know whatever parameter it is, because nature has given you an experiment that you can analyze.
01:54:40.000You don't have to build islands, right.
01:54:42.000In this case, what Pierre reports is that there were 80 court cases in which a family sued a hospital that was refusing to give ivermectin to a desperately sick family member and they wanted the courts to intervene and force the hospitals to administer ivermectin 80 cases.
01:55:10.000In 40 of those cases the courts granted the family's request and ivermectin was administered.
01:55:18.000In 40 cases they refused to intervene and no ivermectin was given.
01:55:22.000In 38 of the cases where ivermectin was given, the patient survived, and two the patient died anyway.
01:55:30.000In 38 of the cases where no ivermectin was given, the patient died, and in two the patient survived.
01:55:39.000Now I find this like this is incredibly.
01:55:46.000I cannot vouch for the data itself because it's not published in the scientific paper.
01:55:52.000I can't go look at the methods, I can't go find the court cases, but assuming that the data is accurately reported and I know Pierre well, he didn't make it up so, assuming that the data is accurate.
01:56:05.000The level of statistical significance on that accidental study is absolutely astronomical right, I had Heather, run a chi-squared calculation and the p-value.
01:56:23.000I checked it also with two different Ais.
01:56:26.000The p-value comes out to be 5.03 times 10 to the negative 15, right?
01:56:35.000So what that means is that the chances of a result that strong if ivermectin does not work are something like the chances of you guessing a random 15 digit number on the first try.
01:56:53.000I mean, it's through the roof right, this is a level of statistical significance we essentially never see.
01:57:02.000And CNN turned it into a veterinary medicine right, it turned you green hilarious, right.
01:57:13.000One, the ivermectin story and the repurposed drug story more generally, is a very important puzzle piece.
01:57:23.000Because if repurposed drugs had been allowed to be used, if doctors had been allowed to go through the normal process of medicine that doctors go through, where they look at a patient who's ill, they see what their symptoms are, they try to figure out what might work for them, they talk to other doctors, they pool their information, if that process had been allowed to unfold, Covid is an entirely manageable disease in all but the most compromised people right,
01:57:53.000there was no important pandemic repurposed drugs could have addressed instead.
01:57:59.000What pain in which people like you and me were gaslit and slandered and the public was fed a story in which we did the work.
01:58:10.000Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of science and they tell us that ivermectin is not effective against Covid.
01:58:59.000Well one, the evidence is actually really powerful that ivermectin works.
01:59:09.000It also reveals something about what's wrong with medical science at the moment, because what's really going on here is we don't correctly respond when we are told that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of scientific tests.
01:59:28.000Randomized controlled trials, in principle, are capable of doing something best in class and that is revealing very subtle effects.
01:59:38.000However, they are very prone to being distorted by biases of the researchers and, in these cases, of the Together trial and the Principle trial and the others, what you seem to have is a cottage industry of generating results that are favorable to the pharma regime, and what we in the public should want are tests that are
02:00:12.000So randomized control trial, in this case, where you have multiple drugs being tested, where they share a placebo group, where end points are adjusted midstream, where the particular end points that are targeted are adjusted to make some drugs look good and other drugs look bad all of those are places where fraud can hide.
02:00:40.000It is way more important to have good experiments than to have highly sensitive experiments that are very prone to fraud, because there's so much incentive for fraud in our current system.
02:00:53.000The accidental experiment that I described, that the courts ran, is incredibly powerful evidence.
02:01:05.000The statistics are literally something that you can do on one sheet of paper.
02:01:12.000This is the simplest conceivable test, the chi square goodness of fit test.
02:01:17.000There's no place for anything to hide either.
02:01:20.000The data is what it says it is or it's not.
02:01:23.000But if the data is what it says it is, then the result leaves no question whatsoever that ivermectin works in very sick people relative to an end point of death.
02:01:35.000That's a very powerful kind of evidence and you know, I was recently on a podcast called why should I trust you, with Pierre,
02:02:04.000and the allopathic doctors were curious about the medical freedom movement, but they certainly weren't on board with this, and Pierre and I told them about the accidental experiment run by the courts, the Natural Experiment, and it was clear that these doctors couldn't grasp the significance of the evidence.
02:02:28.000Right, it's too mind blowing that this very simple circumstance reveals the overwhelming power of this drug, and it was like well, that can't be right.
02:02:38.000But it can be right and so, in any case, I would just say fraud is a serious problem.
02:02:46.000Why did they have a problem with the data?
02:02:49.000I think you know let's give them their due.
02:02:54.000They're sitting down talking to two people who, I think they don't know, can't assess whether or not we're being honest, whether the data is as reported, but so I think there's a natural reaction to reject that, which seems, I think,
02:03:22.000when you've been lied to as much as these doctors had been lied to about repurposed drugs for covid and vaccines and things that being confronted with very powerful in fact, if the data is what it's supposed to be incontrovertible proof and I don't use the word proof lightly, but you know, p equals 5.03 times 10 to negative 15.
02:03:47.000That is an amazing level of statistical significance.
02:03:51.000How did the conversation play out like when you gave them this data, when you discussed this?
02:03:56.000Well, what they said was, well, there could be lots of explanations for that, which is not true.
02:04:02.000Right really, what explanations do they provide as possible?
02:04:09.000I think they were reserving the right to go find some explanation, because think about it this way, let's let's let's, let's.
02:04:17.000In front of a crowd no no okay, let's imagine how this experiment could not, could be something other than it seems to be right.
02:04:28.000Let's say that the courts were biased in who they granted the right to have ivermectin administered to.
02:04:37.000If the courts were biased, then the test isn't what it appears to be.
02:04:40.000However, you would expect the courts to be biased in exactly the inverse way.
02:04:46.000As the result, in other words, you would expect the court to grant access to ivermectin in more dire cases, so you expect that access.
02:04:58.000You would expect the people who got ivermectin to be more likely to die.
02:05:01.000Because yeah, and so the fact that we see exactly the inverse means that actually, the result, if there's any bias at all, is probably conservative.
02:05:09.000Right, it's probably more effective than we think, right?
02:05:13.000So, in any case, I just think we've forgotten how science works.
02:05:19.000Right, it doesn't take any all of the money and the complexity of running one of these multi arm trials is huge, and yet an accidental experiment run by the courts gives you a powerful result like this that tells you without a doubt that this is effective, which is actually what you find when you go and look at all these trials that attempted to sabotage ivermectin, and you discover that actually, you know they,
02:05:50.000they're playing games they're telling you.
02:05:52.000Let me give you, you can create the impression that a drug doesn't work by setting an unrealistic end point.
02:06:04.000Right, like if I let's say that I had a drug that was perfectly successful at stopping the common cold right, you take it, and one day later your common cold is gone okay, and I decide to run an experiment.
02:06:20.000But the end point of the experiment is hospitalization right, and I say okay, was there any difference in how hospitalized patients who got my drug are versus those who didn't?
02:06:37.000Well no, nobody goes to the hospital over a cold.
02:06:40.000So the point is it makes the drug look totally ineffective.
02:06:46.000You know, one of the games played in the principal trial is, they detected no difference at all in the patients who got ivermectin and didn't get ivermectin six months later.
02:06:56.000Well, i'm not sure you would expect a difference between the population that did and didn't get it six months later.
02:07:06.000So anyway, there's all kinds of games and the point is, actually we do not.
02:07:11.000You know how, when you go to buy a car, nobody prioritizes the simple vehicle, right?
02:07:20.000The point is, what they sell you is the features.
02:07:22.000Right, this car has all of these different new features that your last one didn't, but there's no value placed on.
02:07:29.000Actually, I want fewer features, I want a tiny number of features that I actually use and I want the car to be, you know, capable of dealing with everything, never need any service, all of those things.
02:07:41.000So scientifically, we're in the same boat where it's like the fancier trial has the priority in our mind, just as the new drug has the priority in our mind.
02:07:51.000You want the one that all of the interactions with other drugs have already been spotted, that your doctor has a lot of experience knowing how people react to it.
02:08:11.000So i'm just advocating for simpler experiments where nothing can hide and simple statistics can be used and us normal folks can understand what was done.
02:08:23.000So in the case of this podcast, how did you resolve it?
02:08:29.000The positive thing about it was we clashed, we definitely disagreed, but it was all quite respectful and I feel like Pierre and I both felt that we were heard in a way that is not the usual these days.
02:08:48.000So anyway, I thought it was a very encouraging well, I think even people that were initially highly skeptical and very pro vaccine have had their eyes opened a bit.
02:09:01.000The window has shifted yes, although I find it shifted radically on vaccines, and in large measure because ivermectin was made difficult to get and people were spooked away from it.
02:09:17.000It's a much more abstract question to most people.
02:09:20.000Just the sheer propaganda that was the amount of propaganda was preposterous.
02:09:29.000Rolling Stone magazine remember that article that they had about people that were waiting in line at the emergency room for gunshot wounds because so many people were overdosing on horse medication, overdosed on ivermectin, which is virtually impossible.
02:09:58.000It was designed for idiots by idiots for idiots.
02:10:01.000They just like they didn't care how provable it was, how quick it was to.
02:10:07.000You could research it very quickly and find out that this is not true.
02:10:11.000You could visit those hospitals and find out it's not true.
02:10:14.000You could look up the cases of people that were overdosing on ivermectin, which didn't exist, right.
02:10:19.000There's a few people that called the poison control hotline because they panicked yeah, they worried.
02:10:23.000Yeah, that's not the same thing is being poisoned, right.
02:10:26.000Well, what I want people to understand is that all of those vaccine injuries are actually downstream of the propaganda campaign about repurposed drugs, that because this was a manageable disease with well-known repurposed drugs that were readily available, there was no argument for these vaccines in anybody right.
02:10:48.000This was experimental technology that was fraught with dangers that turned out to be massive harms, but the gaslighting was all about profit because of the emergency use authorization.
02:10:59.000So to have the emergency use authorization, you couldn't have any effective drugs that existed to treat it right, otherwise you wouldn't have had an emergency use authorization for a new drug that hasn't really been tested.
02:11:13.000I did think that's what happened, but I don't anymore.
02:11:16.000Oh interesting because also, my suspicion is that the mRNA platform needed to be debuted in an emergency, with radically reduced safety testing, because the dangers of the mRNA platform are so great that they would have revealed themselves under any sort of normal testing regime.
02:11:43.000So you think this was all about rolling out the mRNA platform for many other purposes other than just COVID.
02:11:51.000This is just the introduction to this and we've actually talked about this.
02:11:55.000It's going to be used to treat all these different diseases and cancer and this and that.
02:12:00.000They're already in the pipeline and I think people need to be aware that the plan is to blame the COVID shots, not the platform, so that people will take the new shots that come out and I wouldn't touch them with a barge pull.
02:12:20.000So did you want to talk about, given that we are in this quadrant?
02:12:29.000Well, I'm not sure quite where to start, but Sam has been, he's continued to be aggressive, going after you and me over COVID, where my impression is that you and I turned out to be right pretty well across the board.
02:12:48.000I've acknowledged the significant place where I believe I was wrong.
02:12:52.000I don't think I was way wrong, but what was that?
02:13:09.000I still think you know, given that we didn't know at the beginning, whether or not COVID was transmitted by fomite, in other words, by droplets on surfaces, something that covers your face.
02:13:22.000Coughing out droplets or touching a droplet to your mouth is a decent bet, but anyway, okay.
02:13:34.000I don't think Sam has acknowledged any of his errors and he said some really aggressive stuff about me and I think recently he said some stuff about you and he's actually still beating this drum about your podcast killing people.
02:13:55.000Allegedly, I don't listen to any things he says anymore because it's depressing.
02:14:00.000Sam is the reason for the joke that I had in my special.
02:14:03.000We lost a lot of people during COVID and most of them are still alive.
02:14:07.000Yeah, I feel like we lost Sam and I think, whether Sam realizes or not, it had a massive impact on the number of people that take his position seriously, because he's unwilling to acknowledge that the vaccines clearly damaged a lot of people, unwilling to acknowledge that they weren't necessary, especially in kids and younger people and, I think, any healthy person under a certain age.
02:14:34.000Unwilling to acknowledge that many other things could have been done to prevent serious illness and hospitalization other than just this vaccination, and that this vaccination is seriously flawed.
02:14:48.000I had a conversation on the phone with them.
02:14:50.000I've only had a couple over the last few years.
02:14:53.000I always thought of him as a friend and I think he's a very interesting guy.
02:14:59.000The first one was after I recovered from COVID, where he was trying to convince me to get vaccinated and I was like this is the dumbest conversation I've ever had.
02:15:37.000I am a healthy person who exercises all the time.
02:15:41.000I take a fucking slew of vitamins, I sauna every day.
02:15:45.000I do all these different things that make my body more robust than the average person.
02:15:49.000I got through this disease relatively easily with all the ways that I prescribed and only one of them was problematic, one of them being ivermectin.
02:15:58.000Nobody said a damn thing about me taking IV vitamins, monoclonal antibodies, all the other things I described.
02:16:05.000Guys, the kitchen sink at it and i'm better.
02:16:14.000And Cnn's response was to turn me green and say that i'm promoting dangerous horse dewormer and that it's misinformation that's going to cost people's lives.
02:16:24.000And the fact that Sam is still saying that it cost people's lives is fucking crazy and all.
02:16:30.000I don't know if he's just convinced that he can convince people that he's so good at debating, and.
02:16:43.000And, in fact, if you promoted the use of vaccines and it's been shown that these vaccines have caused serious injuries and death to people that didn't need them.
02:16:53.000I would say you cause death, especially if you're a person that people high, that people hold rather in very high esteem.
02:17:02.000For someone that people respect their opinion and take it very seriously and would refer to them with you.
02:17:12.000And there's something just weird about the fact that here we have a highly intelligent person who prides himself on analytics and yet, even as the story is breaking, even as the evidence of vaccine harms becomes unambiguous and maybe more to the point in
02:17:42.000this case, even as Paul Offit has now in several different places said, that all the top people in the public health regime who were issuing these diktats all knew that natural immunity was the best immunity you were going to get right.
02:18:00.000So the evidence is right there that they lied to us in public that you had it right.
02:18:06.000There would have been no purpose in you getting a vaccination after you had already recovered.
02:18:10.000And I would add one other thing, the evidence that vaccinations often make you more vulnerable is unambiguous.
02:18:21.000In the case of something like a COVID vaccine or, you know, in the recent revelations about flu vaccines making people more susceptible to flu, there's a strong argument to be made that what's going on is, you have acquired an immunity through an infection.
02:18:44.000Now somebody injects you with something that either, in the case of the flu shot, has a bunch of antigen in it or, in the case of the COVID shot, causes your body to produce a bunch of antigen.
02:18:57.000That is going to attract the attention of all of the cells in your immune system that are supposed to be surveilling for the disease in question, and it's going to occupy them.
02:19:07.000So one of the mechanisms by which a vaccine can actually make you more vulnerable is that it can take an immunity that you've already gotten through fighting off an infection and it can draw it to the wrong place when the disease is still circulating.
02:19:21.000So Sam is saying something nonsensical.
02:19:25.000Sanjay Gupta was saying something nonsensical.
02:19:28.000They were actually giving you advice that has a very clear mechanism by which it would make you more vulnerable to the disease that they think you should do everything in your power to make yourself less vulnerable to they're.
02:19:38.000They're just simply not saying something analytically robust.
02:19:41.000And I would also point out, you know, this question about whether or not Sam is responsible for people's deaths.
02:19:49.000I want to do this carefully because I think it matters.
02:19:57.000If he's saying that I am right, that's.
02:19:59.000It's not something that I would go out and say I wouldn't right.
02:20:03.000Here's how I would do it, rigorously, okay.
02:20:06.000I think the discussion a robust, open discussion about a complex set of facts that discussion is how we find the truth right.
02:20:18.000The truth gives us an opportunity to become safer.
02:20:21.000So everybody gets credit for participating.
02:20:25.000Anybody who participates in good faith in the conversation about what the right thing to do is is part of the solution, even the people who get it wrong.
02:20:34.000However, as soon as you start making the argument that you're wrong and that means you're putting people's lives in jeopardy, my feeling is, well then, you're changing the rules.
02:20:45.000You're setting a standard that we have to be right or we're responsible for whatever deaths might befall us.
02:20:52.000We have to do more than just participate in good faith in the conversation.
02:21:31.000I think Sam has a real problem with admitting wrong.
02:21:34.000Admitting you're wrong requires you to admit that you're fallible, that your intellectual rigor in pursuing this very complex scenario that we all find ourselves in that's very novel.
02:22:01.000You had to get vaccinated and I think a lot of it was.
02:22:05.000He had an initial experience with someone that he knew that had got COVID, that got very sick and was a young, healthy person who was a skier relatively young in Italy and I don't know what treatment they got.
02:22:21.000I do know that supposedly they had been heavily drinking while they were there, like on a ski chip, getting drunk, get COVID got really sick and wind up getting very fucked up by it.
02:22:34.000I think that scared him and I think he was initially.
02:22:37.000He was one of the bigger, like the people that I was in contact with, that was warning me that this is not the flu, this is really dangerous, and I took it to heart and, like I've publicly said many times, I was not just willing to get the vaccine.
02:24:20.000But I also don't think you should punish me and force me to take a medication under the guise that it to protect the people that are unhealthy, if this fucking stuff works because if it works, they should take it and they'll be protected.
02:24:33.000It didn't make any sense that everybody who is not vulnerable was going to have to take this medication.
02:24:39.000It was just complete illogical thinking.
02:24:49.000Right, they need to take it and I'm the fool if I don't take it.
02:24:53.000None of this made any sense, but it was just like cult thinking.
02:24:57.000It was like it had become this, we had been isolated, this bizarre psychology experiment had been done on every living human on the planet.
02:25:08.000We had all been isolated, removed from everybody.
02:25:11.000A lot of people been forbidden to go to work, people were working remotely, everyone.
02:25:20.000And in California, which I think to this day is probably the most devastated by it psychologically.
02:25:34.000There's a bunch of people like that, like way more than you see in Texas.
02:25:38.000If I see someone with a mask in Texas, I assume it's either a very vulnerable person who's filled with anxiety, is mentally ill or severely immunocompromised, someone with cancer, someone is going through chemotherapy, what have you, which makes sense?
02:25:50.000Yep, but the the psychology aspect of it was very strange, because people just thought that this one solution was the only way out and if you resisted this solution, you were keeping them from returning to a normal life and you were a problem.
02:26:08.000And I saw people that plague rats online.
02:26:20.000I wanted to post, but I'm not a mean person, I want to attack people.
02:26:23.000But I was like I know you motherfucker, you eat donuts all day.
02:26:26.000You haven't worked out a day in your life and now you're telling everyone that they have to do this or they're the problem.
02:26:33.000Like you're so vulnerable to everything, you have no vitamins in your system and you're out there telling me that the only way for me to get healthy is that I have to get injected with some experimental gene therapy, and that's the only way, even after I've gotten the fucking cold and gotten over it.
02:26:54.000This is pure madness, with no objective analysis of all the details and the facts and a logical conclusion, a logical breakdown of their perspective on what this thing was.
02:28:08.000He did a lot of work on infectious diseases, particularly oddly enough and ironically enough, on parasites.
02:28:14.000You know which is what Ivermectin is so good for.
02:28:17.000He was talking a lot about parasites in tropical climates and how so many people have parasites, and this is a giant issue that he works very hard to discuss and to educate people on.
02:28:34.000Then I started saying, you know what do you eat?
02:29:25.000You probably don't take any vitamins like this is crazy that you're giving out advice and you're doing it publicly.
02:29:34.000You're publicly discussing all these things as if it's not that big of a deal that you don't do these other things because you vaccines are very important.
02:29:43.000You know it's fucking important is be healthy and the the fact that you can ignore that while giving advice is wild, just absolutely wild.
02:29:56.000One, in Peter Hotez's case, he is part of a pharma religion right, where the idea is that things happen, that they're not your fault and that they are corrected with interventions.
02:30:14.000And there has been a false dichotomy painted between what's called terrain theory and germ theory, right where it's like.
02:30:22.000Well, which of these things do you think it is?
02:30:23.000And the answer is, these things are not mutually exclusive.
02:30:27.000The health of the terrain dictates how vulnerable you are to the germs, and a very healthy person has very low vulnerability, you know, and a lifetime of abuse makes you highly vulnerable.
02:30:43.000I remember that interaction that you had with him goes to shake shack with his daughter who has autism, and he swears, it's not the vaccines, but that's the other thing.
02:31:06.000Like listen man, if my daughter had autism and I knew for a fact that it came from five things, I would tell you what those things were, because I would know what those things were, because I'd want to warn other people right, you would.
02:31:33.000Well, it's just the limited thinking and I like Peter as a person outside of all this stuff, my interactions with him, but nothing but pleasant.
02:31:40.000I, you know I try to be as nice as possible, I know I try to be as charitable as possible, but that ability to live a life that is measurably, demonstrably unhealthy, like clearly unhealthy, and yet be talking about health, that kind of thinking is wild.
02:32:06.000It's also to be a public expert and to have that kind of flaw in your thinking that exposed by a fucking comedian like I'm not even an expert, just a guy who's like asking you questions, and it's so blunt, so obvious by your response that you don't even take this into consideration.
02:32:27.000The primary factor of health, physical robustness, metabolic resistance, health you don't take that into consideration at all.
02:32:36.000The idea that there's no difference between an unhealthy unfit, obese person who eats garbage and is vitamin deficient in virtually all measurable areas, versus a healthy person with a, with a strong body and a robust immune system and constantly consuming vitamins and exercising and staying healthy and getting a lot of sleep and water and electrolytes, like there's no difference and the only difference is vaccines.
02:33:07.000That a public health person can have those points and not just have them behind closed doors, where you're not challenged, but espouse them publicly.
02:33:17.000Well, there's something very wrong with our entire approach to public health, and hopefully we are going to confront it, because they've effectively staged a coup against doctors and they're dispensing very low quality advice.
02:33:35.000I mean, it's really the inverse of good advice.
02:33:38.000But this this brings me back actually, to Sam, because there's a dire lesson here.
02:33:47.000For one thing, I quite like Sam also, and I will tell you, one of the early experiences I had as I was getting to know him was that I heard him say something that I had said many, many times as a professor, which is that and I said it, I think, at the beginning of this podcast that when you are wrong, that as painful as it is to acknowledge it,
02:34:13.000you are far better off to get it done as quick as possible so that you can get back to being right.
02:34:19.000And I heard him say something almost exactly like that right, and I thought, ah, here's somebody who has the same intellectual approach, somebody who appreciates that same, maybe slightly subtle, piece of wisdom.
02:34:32.000And yet here, in the case of the pandemic.
02:34:36.000I think he got everything wrong and worse than that.
02:34:41.000I mean, you know, you and I both think that you know you can get stuff wrong, and it was a very confusing time and the information was very low quality and lots of people got stuff wrong.
02:34:50.000However, you are now making unforced errors, refusing to see that you got it wrong.
02:34:58.000In fact, you're not even acknowledging what you know, Sam.
02:35:02.000You have stopped getting boosters for COVID, despite all of the things that you said about it.
02:35:07.000And how do you know he stopped getting boosters?
02:35:15.000That might be also part of the problem, but my feeling it could be.
02:35:18.000Well, that is an issue that people are discussing.
02:35:21.000There's a mental decline in people that have had too many of these boosters because of the impact that it has on the body, which is really wild.
02:35:28.000It is a oh, and this is another thing that people need to understand about it.
02:35:32.000We are way too focused on myocarditis and pericarditis.
02:35:36.000This is a random maybe not random haphazard tissue destroying technology, the platform itself.
02:35:45.000Right, it's like rolling the dice on destroying cells.
02:35:49.000There are cells in your body you can afford to lose and there are other cells in the body that you can't afford to lose.
02:35:55.000And if you take a bunch of boosters, each time you take one, you're rolling the dice on losing a bunch of cells that you may or may not be able to afford losing.
02:36:03.000So the fact that that includes things in the nervous system well, of course it does it's completely haphazard.
02:36:09.000So anyway, what I don't get is somebody who obviously believes in rigorous thought must believe in correcting their course when they've got something wrong.
02:36:26.000That's the key to rigorous analytical thought, and yet in this case he appears it's.
02:36:33.000I mean, ironically enough, coming from from Sam it's faith.
02:36:37.000He has faith that whatever he said must have been right, even if he has to do that little trick.
02:36:48.000That argument was the most bizarre, and that was the first conversation that I had with him where he was upset that we were making fun of that.
02:36:57.000The first one was him asking me to get vaccinated.
02:37:00.000The second one was this, we were talking about how crazy it is to say that if it killed a bunch of kids, then of course you would have to take it like what, what right?
02:37:10.000Well, if I was right, then I would be right.
02:37:13.000It's basically saying like if the disease was way worse and I was right, then I'm right, but the disease wasn't that and you weren't right and they didn't have to say, what the fuck are you saying right?
02:37:26.000And again, you could be on the same level with all the people who got it more right than you if you were simply decent about what it meant to disagree.
02:37:36.000So this conversation was after we talked about this on the podcast and I thought I handled it very charitably.
02:37:41.000He was upset that people were going to attack him, so he called me, we talked, he wanted to talk to me and I said that I won't do it until you talk to Brett.
02:37:51.000He claims to be willing to sit down and talk to everybody.
02:37:55.000He said he won't platform you or something about the disinformation that you spread.
02:37:59.000Have a conversation with him, but it's like a guy who knows he can't beat up Mike Tyson.
02:38:06.000He's like, fuck Mike Tyson, like why don't you go say it to his face.
02:38:10.000I don't have a desire to be in the room with that guy and like, oh fuck that guy if I see him, but I'm not going to see him.
02:38:17.000It's like he's avoiding you and he's avoiding you because he has said so many things that are incorrect, that are provably incorrect, and he has not admitted any of that.
02:38:30.000So he has the burden of these years of saying all this incorrect stuff and then being supported by a bunch of other people that have also said a bunch of incorrect stuff, and they all kind of group up together and gang up and talk in the comments and then they get destroyed by everybody else.
02:38:46.000It's kind of wild to watch like some of these posts and the chaos that goes on in the comment section.
02:38:54.000It's just the complete dissolving of the appreciation of him as an intellectual.
02:39:36.000But he's just been so wrong on this for so long that he's stuck and so now he's not making sense.
02:39:43.000Yeah, he's stuck and I would say, you know, look the principle that you and I shared Sam, where it doesn't matter how painful it is to admit that you were wrong, you're just far better off doing it at whatever point.
02:39:56.000But if he thinks he's right, have a fucking seat across the table from Mr. Weinstein and talk.
02:40:49.000On the other hand, on the other hand, by you know how, by what degree, did you beat Sam Harris, whose method amounted to listening to the right people right.
02:41:05.000Maybe it's a wide range of explanations, but the point is actually the method that you used, which was talking to people and hearing them out and challenging them when they said stuff that didn't make sense.
02:41:39.000These things worked well, and I guess the point is this is a classic case of the proof is in the pudding, right?
02:41:48.000I will take that accidental natural experiment run by the courts over some fancy randomized control trial, where I can't even figure out what they did and why they kept moving the goal posts in the middle of it any day of the week.
02:42:04.000Not only that, but one that was funded and designed specifically to achieve a desired result, and if it didn't, they hit it right.
02:42:12.000So the point is we should just be way more ready to say, I don't know what that complicated thing is, but it doesn't look reasonable.
02:42:25.000And then here's some stuff that actually I can be pretty sure I can check myself.
02:42:30.000There's nothing that can hide in the statistics of a chi-square test, so all I need to know is is the data accurately represented, and then the chi-square test leaves nowhere to hide shenanigans.
02:42:42.000So I I radically prefer that style of method rather than the fancy stuff, and I think people are just addicted to, you know, the highest tech version of everything, whether it's a drug or stats or whatever.
02:43:00.000It would be great if we knew that there's never been a time ever where they lied during these studies.
02:43:06.000There's never been scientists that were bribed, like the whole sugar versus saturated fat thing.
02:43:12.000There's been too many times where the course of civilization has been altered because of fraudulent studies.
02:43:20.000You could demonstrate that really quickly with a good, quick AI search.
02:43:25.000You could find all the different times where that's been the case, where studies have been proven to not just been inaccurate, but then the drug gets released, kills a bunch of people and gets pulled off of the market.
02:43:37.000And then they go through the studies and realize, well, there's 10 studies that show that there was real fucking.
02:43:42.000So they buried those studies and then rigged one study with very specific parameters to try to show some statistically significant result.
02:43:50.000That was very small, just so they could sell these drugs.
02:43:53.000Right it's, it's I call it the game of pharma, and the idea is they are trying to own a piece of intellectual property yes, to find a plausible use case for it, to portray it as safer than existing drugs, whether or not it is, to portray it as more effective than existing drugs, whether or not it is.
02:44:13.000And if they manage to do those things, it starts spitting out money.
02:44:17.000I think the best example of that is probably AZT use during the AIDS pandemic.
02:44:22.000Because AZT to come up with a new drug, it would take a long time.
02:44:25.000You had to develop it, you had to do this, but they knew that they had a drug that wasn't being used anymore because it was so problematic and used as a chemotherapy that it was killing people quicker than cancer was.
02:44:37.000They just said well, we'll take this drug that we already own and we could already sell, and now we'll prescribe it to people that have HIV, which killed them and killed a lot of people that were asymptomatic, which is really wild.
02:44:49.000You know people that tested positive for HIV, presumably probably during, with a PCR method.
02:44:58.000That was one of the things that Kerry Mullis famously was talking about Fauci before the pandemic.
02:45:03.000A lot of people attributed to him saying it about Fauci and the PCR test after the pandemic.
02:45:08.000No, it was before and it was in regards to the AIDS crisis.
02:45:11.000He'd done I believe he'd done that interview in the 1990s and he was saying that there's not a way to detect whether or not someone is infected with a fucking disease.
02:45:21.000Well right, and I mean the short answer in that case is, it's an inappropriate test because what it is is an amplifier and if you turn the cycle threshold up, it can amplify absolutely anything to a positive.
02:45:37.000And the admission and false positives with COVID is through the roof.
02:45:40.000False positives were an immense part of the situation.
02:45:44.000This is why, when you say it was about the money, that I'm just not convinced is I can certainly tell a story about lots of places where a huge profit was made but the commitment across the board to making sure that certain things happened, that we were maximally spooked, and, what's more,
02:46:13.000not only maximally spooked but primed before the thing supposedly hit our shores.
02:46:19.000We were primed to be expecting a certain disease and so we hallucinated that disease.
02:46:25.000Doctors were primed to imagine that they were about to be dropping like flies because they were going to be forced to deal with these sick people who had this very destructive disease, and I don't know why this happened.
02:46:40.000For one thing, I don't think we have properly figured out what the meaning of tabletop exercises is.
02:46:55.000So event 201 was a tabletop exercise shortly before the Covid pandemic, in which a scenario suspiciously like the Covid pandemic was portrayed, with sort of medium production values.
02:47:12.000You know, false news reports and things were broadcast to the participants, you know.
02:47:18.000And so basically, you took a bunch of people who would ultimately play some role in the pandemic and you put them through a trial run where they got to make the decisions that caused them to censor the misinformation spreaders and to mandate the this and that and to advocate for the so and so I don't think we have yet understood why a tabletop exercise happened.
02:47:45.000It's possible it was just a coincidence.
02:47:48.000I think it's highly unlikely it was just a coincidence, but I don't think we know why they run them.
02:47:53.000I think there's a, there's a meaning to it, right?
02:47:56.000I don't know if it is a pump priming thing, where the idea is.
02:48:00.000We know this is coming for some reason and in order to make it go down the way we want it to go down, everybody has to have practiced their role.
02:48:09.000They have to go through a rehearsal, right?
02:48:12.000Is it a mechanism of spreading a kind of word, you know, in a, in a way that has plausible deniability, so that people will understand that some powerful force is engaged in something?
02:48:28.000I don't know, but what I do know is that we haven't figured it out, that it's just this weird historical anomaly that oh yeah, there was a tabletop exercise, wasn't there and it looked an awful lot like COVID yeah, and people would just say that was a coincidence, that they did that, yeah.
02:48:45.000But the question is, what I want to know is, you know if you're constantly running tabletop exercises with infectious diseases?
02:48:56.000So that event 201 stands out because it just happened to be the one that was shortly before the pandemic and it got lucky with respect to some of the parameters being right okay, but it's like.
02:49:07.000It's like when I first discovered that I had I think I probably mentioned this to you when Heather and I finished the first draft of our book we were in the Amazon for two weeks, intentionally insulated from all contact with the world, and we emerged to this military checkpoint at which you transition from out of contact to back in contact, and so we're sort of looking at our phones and we
02:49:38.000start seeing this thing about a coronavirus and this is our first awareness of it.
02:49:46.000The first case in the new world is in Ecuador and we're reading this in Spanish, trying to understand what it is and it's, you know, a bat coronavirus has escaped zoonotic this, that and the other, and because I was a bat biologist, I briefly looked into it, figured out who the bats in question were, where the disease came from, all of that, and I tweeted to my followers.
02:50:09.000You know this is a developing story, but it adds up based on what I know about the bats, and one of my longtime followers tweeted back.
02:50:19.000He says, oh, so you think it's just a coincidence that it happened on the doorstep of a biosafety level 4 laboratory studying these very viruses and I thought first of all, what's a biosafety level 4 laboratory?
02:50:33.000And then I thought well, maybe that's not a piece of information worth processing if there are a thousand laboratories studying these viruses, but if there's only one, then I just got it wrong.
02:51:24.000I think this was already being discussed in public and because I was coming out of the Amazon, I was a couple weeks behind and so anyway, but anyway A I'm really glad that it got caught on Twitter, that both my error and my correction one hour later, like almost exactly one hour later, just by pure accident.
02:51:44.000So that was, like the, you know, the beginning of my being red pilled on.
02:51:49.000COVID was getting schooled over biosafety level 4 laboratories studying bat coronaviruses in the exact place where this thing emerges.
02:52:02.000Point is, if there were a thousand biosafety level 4 labs studying bat coronaviruses, then the fact that there happened to be one nearby where this virus showed up wouldn't necessarily mean anything, but if there's only one, it means a ton.
02:52:14.000If there were a tabletop exercise per year simulating a pandemic, then the fact that there happened to be one right before COVID wouldn't be very meaningful, but if there aren't one a year, then it is highly significant that something happened.
02:52:30.000It's a conspicuous piece of evidence of what I don't know, but I think we need to understand how how it works.
02:52:41.000Crimson contagion was a joint exercise conducted from January to August 2019, in which numerous national, state and local and private organizations in the US participated in order to test the capacity of the federal government and 12 states to respond to a severe pandemic of influenza originating in China whoa.
02:53:00.000I've never heard anybody talk about that.
02:53:02.000There's an article posted in the NEW YORK Times on March 19th 2020 about that.
02:53:19.000Government exercise, including one last year, made it clear the US government was not ready for a pandemic like the coronavirus, but little was done.
02:53:29.000You know it showed they weren't ready.
02:53:31.000Well, it might be they were preparing for whatever the hell this was that they knew was going to come.
02:53:36.000Well, and you know, I think what I now know as somebody who got educated by the pandemic is they were very ready, not ready in the way that you and I would want them.
02:53:48.000Not ready with cures right, not ready with ways to protect the public, to inform them and how to behave and all of that.
02:53:54.000What they were ready with was a campaign of lies designed to do what that I don't know like.
02:54:02.000If the idea was to make money, I don't know why they delivered such a dangerous shot.
02:54:11.000Seems to me and I've wondered a lot about this if they had delivered an inert shot, I don't know what world we'd be living in today, because they could have pretended that it was highly effective, that it saved us from the terrible disease, that those of us who worried about the technology were wrong.
02:54:34.000They could have used their statistical shenanigans to pretend that anything had happened, and they seemed to me to have screwed up, having delivered a shot dangerous enough that we can all detect the safety signal among our friends, right?
02:54:48.000So that raises the question to me, did they not understand that it was as dangerous as it was?
02:54:56.000I don't think that can be true, based on what we know from Robert Malone about the history of this technology.
02:55:05.000So is there something important about injecting people with it?
02:55:09.000Do they want people actually injected with the thing that?
02:55:12.000That's not consistent with the argument that they were just trying to make money right, because blanks would have been safe, not effective, but what they gave us wasn't effective.
02:55:23.000What was the purpose of injecting people with a contaminated, dangerous novel platform, so-called vaccine that just when you say contaminated, do you think they realized that it was contaminated, and when?
02:55:35.000By contaminated we're talking about SV40, we're talking about DNA.
02:55:41.000I think they knew yes, they had to know that it was contaminated.
02:55:47.000So what would be the motivation to do something like that?
02:55:49.000It doesn't even make sense, other than money.
02:55:51.000But and the money was substantial, right to dismiss the money aspect of it.
02:55:55.000We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.
02:55:58.000Okay, but if we're going to talk about the money, then we have to put the money in the proper context.
02:56:03.000Okay, the huge amount of money that was made on the mRNA platform during the pandemic is nothing, is nothing compared to the money that will be made from the mRNA platform in the aftermath of the pandemic, except that because podcast world caused the dangerousness of the vaccine campaign to become famous, and that's not an understatement.
02:56:33.000Imagine if we had to live off the narrative of the mainstream television.
02:56:36.000Well, this is why the first amendment is this, absolute must be protected at all costs.
02:57:21.000Yes, something about the way podcast world functioned allowed us to break through, but we are now in danger of whoever these people are having understood what their errors were and working to correct them for next time, which actually brings me to another matter.
02:57:49.000It's a little strange, but I do want people to be aware.
02:57:56.000They may have noticed Michael Burry, who was famous character from the big Short.
02:58:04.000The real broker who's represented in the big short by Christian Bale has been sounding the alarm about bubbles in the stock market.
02:58:22.000i'm concerned that there is also a great deal of fraud in the stock market so these are two different mechanisms by which the wealth of average people gets transferred to well positioned people who have better information
02:58:46.000The degree to which the stock market may be overvalued is substantial, and I don't know if you've been tracking.
02:58:59.000No, Great Taking is a very good, very scary short book.
02:59:04.000David Webb is the author, and what he describes is a trap that we in the public have been subjected to that we don't know is there yet because it hasn't been tripped, and what he argues is that there are a great many assets that we think we hold, that we believe we understand our relationship to that are actually poised to be taken from us in
02:59:37.000So, for example, stocks used to be held in paper form.
02:59:44.000You had stock certificates in your safe right, and so the laws that govern physical ownership governed them by virtue of the fact that this piece of paper was your indication of ownership.
02:59:57.000The way we own stocks has now changed.
03:00:00.000So if you have stocks, you don't have a stock certificate.
03:00:02.000Your stocks are held in sort of the same way that your cryptocurrency is held.
03:00:10.000If it's in an exchange where you don't really have cryptocurrency, what you have is an IOU from a company that has cryptocurrency, and as long as the company remains solvent, then it's the same.
03:00:23.000You can use it, you can take it out, you can put it in.
03:00:28.000But the problem is that these stock certificates that we no longer have have been replaced by an agreement that has contingency clauses.
03:00:37.000Those contingency clauses mean that your stock can be used as collateral by the holder and, if they need to satisfy a debt because of insolvency, that your stock becomes the way to satisfy the debt.
03:00:55.000So, in other words, there's a hidden mechanism whereby you could suddenly discover that somebody else has used your stock and not paid you in order to settle a debt of theirs.
03:01:06.000Right, it's not a big deal as long as the market remains stable, because the creditors in question aren't going to go, or the debtors in question aren't going to go insolvent, but okay.
03:01:20.000The punchline though, is this, that's not the only place where we in the public are vulnerable.
03:01:28.000Another place and this is speculative on my part I would love to be told that I'm imagining things and the danger that I see is not real.
03:01:39.000I look forward to somebody telling me that, but so far, that's not what I've heard, as I've talked to people about this concept.
03:01:45.000If the stock market is wildly overvalued as a result of bubbles and fraud and it comes unglued and it causes a run on currency, people trying to get money out of banks and the banks turn out not to be stable.
03:02:09.000Here's what I'm concerned might happen, and I'll connect it back to the question of free speech in a second.
03:02:16.000My concern is if your bank goes insolvent.
03:02:21.000A. You're now in jeopardy with your house because almost everybody it's in fact considered financially wise not to have your house paid off.
03:02:32.000If you borrowed money to buy your house under favorable conditions, then you can make more money by not paying off your house and taking the money that you would use to pay off your house and putting it into investments that pay better right.
03:02:45.000You're actually financially ahead if you do that.
03:02:47.000But if you suddenly can't pay your mortgage, then your house can be taken right.
03:02:53.000So if there's a collapse that causes us to be unable to service our mortgages not because of anything we did wrong, but because the whole system is now not in a position to allow us to just simply service our debts your house could be vulnerable.
03:03:10.000And then here's the punchline of the story.
03:03:17.000Your bank account is insured by the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, so I've forgotten what the exact number is.
03:03:27.000It might be a quarter million per account, something like that.
03:03:32.000If the banks can't deliver your money, if they were to collapse and the federal government were to say, don't worry, your account is insured, but we're going to pay you in central bank digital currency, you're going to have to take your money in central bank digital currency.
03:03:58.000You can spend it just like real money, but you're going to get it in this form.
03:04:01.000Seems to me that that, in one fell swoop, puts us into a potentially tyrannical scenario.
03:04:15.000Because at the point that you have accepted central bank digital currency, now there's it's basically programmable money that can be cut off, you can be debanked, you can be told what you're allowed to spend it on and what you're not allowed to spend it on.
03:04:30.000So the question is, if we rerun the pandemic, let's say, but all of our money is in CBDC, how likely is it that people like you and me get to put information into the public square that allows people to make higher quality decisions, to avoid the shots, to avail themselves of alternative?
03:04:55.000Very unlikely, that's what I think too.
03:04:57.000So anyway, hopefully we know this, but just based on Elon buying Twitter and the examination of the Twitter files.
03:05:09.000Elon buying Twitter carves out an exception where we can still talk there.
03:05:17.000It's not perfect, but it's so far ahead of anything else that it does create a place you can go for information that is not being filtered by the regime.
03:05:31.000But at the point, if it is true that we can be forced into a CBDC and I believe the plan to force us into a CBDC exists, whether the scenario I'm painting is plausible or not but if they can get us into a regime where we have to accept CBDCs as the means of exchange, then it seems to me we are in a much worse position to fend off tyranny of all sorts,
03:06:01.000including medical tyranny, because the ability to punish us for wrong think becomes extremely powerful.
03:06:10.000Yeah, and we're seeing the consequences of that in the UK.
03:06:15.000We're seeing places where people don't have the same laws and don't have the same rights.
03:06:20.000They're being punished in unimaginable ways in America.
03:06:23.000Are you aware of the Irishman I can't remember his name, I believe he's a religious guy who's a school teacher who refused to address someone by their transgender pronouns, and now he's being jailed?
03:06:41.000Yeah, and not not just being jailed, but a very long sentence.
03:06:46.000The other thing they're doing in the UK is they're eliminating trials by jury I'm aware of that yeah, which is crazy, and you're having trials just by judges and the judge will just appoint a sentence.
03:07:01.000It's apocalyptically bad if you understand what our, what the West, is based on.
03:07:10.000Yeah, you're watching a shining example of Western freedoms getting pushed over the cliff right, and you know it's not.
03:07:22.000It's bad enough that somebody refusing to use somebody else's pronouns is being jailed, but this is happening at the same time that you have grooming gangs raping young women, and talking about it is understood.
03:07:44.000It's wrong thing right, that acknowledging that you have an immigration problem and that there's a a dynamic in play that involves certain populations that are prone to seeing the British people and not as their countrymen, but as something else as prey yeah, that's something that obviously a society needs to be able to talk about,
03:08:14.000and this is happening at exactly the moment when the society in question is losing the ability to talk freely because it doesn't have an industrial strength constitution the way we do, and that same society is having digital ID pushed on them yes, they are and their ability to discuss.
03:08:32.000The wisdom of this is, of course, downstream of their right to speak freely.
03:08:35.000So I mean, I will say I have multiple friends in the UK who are all looking at the system and thinking about getting out.
03:08:49.000Yeah, it's spooky, it's beyond spooky because again, it's the differences in the quality of our constitution that has protected us so far.
03:09:02.000But it's not like it hasn't been targeted right, clearly.
03:09:08.000Just the twitter files alone just shows you what happens when intelligence agencies get involved in distribution of actual factual information and they suppress it.
03:09:20.000Whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Sam Harris also had a wild take on.
03:09:24.000Like that was he didn't care if Hunter Biden children's corpses buried in his basement, or whatever the fuck he said.
03:09:31.000Like what, you don't, you wouldn't care about that.
03:09:49.000What he was trying to say is that Trump is really bad.
03:09:52.000Well, as always, that's what he's trying to say, but in this case, what he was really trying to say is, Hunter Biden isn't Joe?
03:10:02.000That's not really true, because Hunter Biden and Joe are tied together in their corruption, and that's obvious from the fact that Hunter Biden was at Burisma on the board making deals in Ukraine, which then breaks out into war, a war whose purpose i'm not sure we understand seems to have multiple purposes.
03:10:24.000A money laundering operation, you know who knows?
03:10:29.000I mean all sorts of ghastly things are possible.
03:10:31.000But we out here in public are forced to guess at the meaning of all of these events.
03:10:37.000And when Sam says that it wouldn't matter if Hunter Biden had, you know, children's corpses in his basement, the answer is actually there are children's corpses.
03:10:47.000They're not in anyone's basement, they're in Ukraine, which has some relationship to Biden family corruption, which has some relationship to DNC corruption.
03:11:00.000So listen up Sam, you gotta pay attention to that stuff, because these things aren't unconnected.
03:11:07.000It's not that somebody happens to share the last name of the president.
03:11:11.000You know has a drug problem and a sex problem, it's it's.
03:11:18.000The presidential family is deeply corrupted by something which is manifest in the son who can't keep a lid on it.
03:11:27.000Well also, just the obvious take of them all being pardoned, like the whole family being pardoned for everything, like what did you do?
03:11:38.000You're being charged with anything like.
03:11:40.000Why are you pardoning his whole family if there's not some real thing that you're concerned with them being prosecuted for?
03:11:47.000Pardoning his whole family plus Anthony Fauci yes, and from 2014 on, which is just?
03:11:54.000First of all, it leaves him very vulnerable to the AIDS.
03:12:44.000Because what it effectively does is allows the person with the power to pardon to create a enabled class of citizens that are capable of simply engaging in whatever crime they want.
03:12:59.000Secondly, there's a question about whether or not Joe Biden actually pardoned Anthony Fauci knowingly, given his compromised mental state, given the likelihood that the pardon was auto pen signed.
03:13:14.000So I think there is a question about whether or not the pardon would be upheld by the courts, but I do think they're telling us an awful lot by virtue of the fact that Anthony Fauci was pardoned.
03:13:28.000Right, he's supposed to be the guy that saved us and he gets a pardon that goes all the way back to 2014.
03:13:34.000Yeah, he just so happens to be both the guy who saved us and the guy who offshored the research to Wuhan that produced the thing.