Brett Weinstein
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Brett Weinstein tells the story of COVID, the deadly virus that wiped out millions of people in China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and how it changed the way we think about pandemics and public health. He talks about the lessons he learned about infectious disease, pandemic response, and the role of pharma in shaping our understanding of infectious disease and pandemic medicine. Dr. Weinstein is the host of the Darkhorse Podcast and the author of a new book, Pandemic: How to Stop Pandemic Pandemics from Happening, and How to Fight Pandemic Illness: The New Science of Pandemic Preparedness. He's also the host and co-host of the podcast, The Darkhorse podcast with his wife, and author of the bestselling and very excellent book, Pandemic, which came out not long ago. In this episode of his new podcast, Darkhorse, he talks about what happened in the wake of the COVID and what we can learn from it, and what it means for the future of public health and public policy in general, and why we should be worried about what's to come from this new pandemic. It's a must-listen-to episode for anyone who wants to know what's going on in the world of pandemic public health, public policy, and infectious disease research. and why it's not over yet. This episode is a must listen, and is not to be missed. To learn more about the impact of this new virus on our world, check out this episode on Pandemic public policy and the impact it has had on our current understanding of the past and the future, listen to this episode by listening to the story by Brett Weinstein on this episode and listen to it on Darkhorse's Darkhorse podcast, "P pandemic: Pandemic in the past, and learn from Brett Weinstein's book, "Pandemic: Why Pandemic is Not Over yet, but Rather, It's Not Over Yet." on his new book "P Pandemic?" Click here. Thank you for listening and share it on your socials! on Apple Podcasts and wherever else you get your news and tips about pandemic health and medicine, including your thoughts on pandemic epidemiology, vaccines, vaccines and vaccines, and so much more. Subscribe to our new episodes, subscribe to our newest episodes on social media! Subscribe here.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Amazingly, it was four years next month that the first stories appeared in the American
00:00:15.800
news media about a virus spreading through a city in central China, Wuhan.
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Over time, it was named COVID, and it changed world history.
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It wasn't that long ago, but we don't talk about it very much anymore in the way that
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you don't talk about traumatic things that happened to you.
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But that doesn't mean it's over, and it doesn't mean that huge decisions aren't being made
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right now that will affect your life and the lives of your children.
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The story is not over, and so we thought it would be worth taking just a moment to explain
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what that looks like, and there's no better person to do that than Brett Weinstein.
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He's got a fascinating bio, which you should look up because it's an amazing story.
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He's now the host with his wife of the Dark Horse podcast and the author of a bestselling
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and very excellent book that came out not long ago.
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So instead of peppering you with all kinds of pointed questions, I want to guide you and
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sit back mostly as you tell the story of COVID in condensed form.
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What are the outlines of what we know now, and where are we going?
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Well, first, let me just respond to something you said up front.
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Nobody wants to be thinking about COVID anymore.
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I don't want to be thinking about COVID anymore either.
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But what I find is that every time I look away and move on to other topics, things move
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And these things couldn't possibly be more important.
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So I'm going to try to explain where we are and how we got here and what the implications
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are in the present that people are largely not noticing.
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So I thought maybe it would be worth starting with just some parts of the education that
00:02:13.260
I know that I learned a tremendous amount about not only viruses and pandemics and public health,
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but also about pharma, which is something, frankly, I thought I knew a lot about.
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I had run into it earlier in my academic career.
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So I thought I was something of an expert, but I got schooled over the course of COVID.
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What I've come to understand is something I call the game of pharma.
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If you think about what pharma is, we tend to imagine that it is an industry that is hell-bent
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In fact, pharma is healthy when people are sick.
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And many people have noticed this, that, of course, it depends on ill health, so it has
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But what I think most of us did not realize is how elaborate its bag of tricks is and what
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And to describe it, I would say pharma is an intellectual property racket, or at least
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And what it's looking for is a disease to which these things plausibly apply.
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And its profits go up to the extent that the disease is widespread, to the extent that the
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disease is serious, to the extent that competing drugs are unsafe or ineffective, to the extent
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that the government will mandate a drug, to the extent that the medical establishment will
00:03:59.220
Well, that I did, and that's where I learned all of these tricks, was that basically every
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day of the year, pharma is engaged in portraying the properties that it owns as more useful
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than they are, safer than they are, and persuading the medical establishment, the journals, the
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societies, the hospitals, the government, to direct people towards drugs they wouldn't otherwise
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And it is necessary to understand that because you need to realize that before COVID ever happened,
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pharma was expert at figuring out how to portray a disease as more widespread and more serious
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than it was, it was excellent at portraying a compound as more efficacious than it is, safer
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And so when COVID happened, all of this occurred at a different scale.
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COVID was bigger than anything that had ever happened before, but none of it was new to pharma
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and all of it was new to us in the public trying to understand what we were supposed to do about
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So I'm now going to put a hypothesis on the table about why things unfolded the way they
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Why was it so obsessed with making sure that we all took the so-called vaccines that were
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Why was it so obsessed with making sure that we didn't take the alternative repurposed drugs
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that so many doctors claimed were highly effective?
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Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, these things were demonized and we were told not to take
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them and we were mocked if we distrusted that advice.
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And again, this is not certain, but what I've pieced together is that pharma owned what
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was potentially the biggest pharmacological cash cow conceivable.
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And I mean that sincerely, something truly brilliant that would potentially not only allow a bright
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future from the perspective of creating new treatments and new, I hesitate to use the word
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vaccine because it doesn't really apply, but new vaccine-like technologies, but that it could do
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this indefinitely into the future and it could allow you to reformulate every vaccine currently
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And what's more, the property in question would allow this whole process to be streamlined at
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an incredible level because effectively all you needed was a sequence, a genetic sequence from a
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pathogen and you could literally type it into a machine and produce a vaccine that was already in
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use, but for the swapping out of the antigen in question.
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Yeah, it's exactly like Legos and presumably with some justification to the extent that this
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technology was safe, pharma would be able to argue, well, we don't really need to go through
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thorough safety testing of the entire platform each time we deploy it.
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All we need to do is figure out if the antigen that we've loaded in this time is in some way more
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The problem, so that the technology in question is the mRNA transfection platform, which was
00:07:51.000
It solves a really important problem from gene therapy, which is oftentimes you want to get
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Let's say that you are missing a functional copy of a gene that produces some product like
00:08:06.260
Well, you could take insulin or it would be great if we could convince your body to produce
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Very hard to do that, though, because the body is composed, an adult human is 30 trillion
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So how do you get cells to take up the message and produce enough of the product to matter?
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Well, the mRNA technology allows you to induce cells to take up an mRNA message, which they
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And it does this by encapsulating these messages in lipid nanoparticle.
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And you may remember from basic chemistry, like attracts like, like dissolves like.
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And so these fats get taken up by cells very regularly for simple chemical reasons.
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And voila, you've gotten cells to produce something that they didn't know how to produce
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The problem, however, is that this amazing technology, which it's very hard to estimate how
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I think hundreds of billions of dollars is absolutely certain.
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Trillions of dollars is not off the table, given that this would allow patentable drugs
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But the technology itself has a terrible safety flaw that, in my opinion, never would have gotten
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And that flaw is that there's no targeting of the lipid nanoparticles.
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The lipid nanoparticles will be taken up by any cell they encounter.
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And while that's not perfectly random, it will be haphazard around the body.
00:10:02.920
Now, if they were limited, if they simply stayed in the injection site, as we were told when the
00:10:08.780
vaccine rollout began, the vaccines, the so-called vaccines stay in the injection site, well, then
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the cells that took up these messages would be in your deltoid, and what happens next wouldn't
00:10:22.700
The problem is we learned very quickly, and should have predicted from the get-go, that
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All of anything you inject in that space is going to leak out, and it's going to circulate
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I know that, but it involves understanding how immunity naturally develops.
00:10:47.260
So when you become sick, let's say with a virus, some particle has gotten into a cell
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of yours, and it has hijacked it, and it has tricked that cell into producing copies of
00:11:03.080
itself more viruses, which affect or infect adjacent cells, and if the virus is an effective
00:11:09.500
one, they will also figure out how to jump out of you, like when you cough, and get inhaled
00:11:17.840
The body's response to seeing a cell of yours, which it recognizes as yours, that is producing
00:11:26.320
an antigen, that is to say a protein that it doesn't recognize, is to assume that that cell
00:11:35.740
That is the only correct thing for the body to do when it encounters a cell of yours making
00:11:42.260
Now, this transfection technology, the mRNA vaccine technology, as they called it, does
00:11:48.960
It tricks your cells into producing foreign antigens, which the immune system cannot help but
00:11:54.700
recognize as an indicator of infection, and it destroys those cells.
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If those cells are in the muscle in your arm, not a huge deal.
00:12:04.900
You get a sore arm, presumably, and we might be able to measure a decrease in your strength,
00:12:12.320
However, if these transfection agents circulate around the body, as we know they do, and get
00:12:19.040
taken up haphazardly, then whatever tissue starts producing these foreign proteins is going
00:12:25.620
So you definitely wouldn't want any of this getting near a person's heart or brain?
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It's particularly critical if it happens in your heart, because your heart, for reasons
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we can go into if you want, has an incredibly low capacity for repair.
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What it does, you get a wound, lose cells from your heart, your heart then scars over.
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That will affect your heart rhythm, your capacity to transport oxygen and CO2 around the body.
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It will potentially shorten your life, and it will also create a vulnerability that you
00:13:11.880
So if you imagine somebody has received one of these transfection shots, and especially
00:13:18.400
in the unfortunate case where it has been injected intravenously, which isn't supposed to happen,
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but the instructions on this shot were not to aspirate the needle.
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A proper injection should involve pulling back on the plunger in the syringe in order to see
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If there's blood, that indicates that you've landed in a circulatory vessel and that you
00:13:43.860
should back the needle off or plunge it farther so that you're not injecting it directly into
00:13:48.820
But in the case of these shots, amazing as this sounds, the advice was don't do that because
00:13:55.420
it requires the needle to be in the person's arm longer, might create extra pain, and they
00:13:59.660
didn't want to create vaccine hesitancy was their excuse.
00:14:02.000
So anyway, you might get a big bolus of this material, and it might flow right through your
00:14:11.440
And just for perspective, do we have any guess as to how many of these shots were given out
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I mean, in addition to the technology itself being remarkable, the rate at which this was
00:14:36.340
I don't know if we'll have time to get to the downsides of the way they scaled up their
00:14:42.340
But if we can separate the marvel of what they did, yes, there's an awful lot of stuff here
00:14:53.080
Could, so, I'm sorry, I don't want to take you off track, but you were describing what would
00:14:57.220
happen if it went to various organs that would damage them.
00:15:05.620
We clearly are seeing an uptick in cancers and an uptick in cancers that are unusual,
00:15:14.160
So, maybe if we have time, we can come back to the reasons that that might be occurring.
00:15:19.860
There's a lot of discussion amongst the medical dissidents about why that pattern exists and
00:15:25.760
But yes, clearly cancers are one of the failure modes of the body, and this highly novel technology
00:15:33.900
clearly had that as a risk, even if we didn't know what mechanism it would happen by.
00:15:39.420
But yes, if you, let's say you're a soccer player and you've been injected with this stuff
00:15:43.780
and a bolus of it has hit your heart and caused a bunch of your cells to be destroyed by your
00:15:48.880
own immune system, by cytotoxic T cells and natural killer cells.
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If you manage to survive to have it scar over, then that wound will be less of a vulnerability
00:16:05.000
But if in the period after you've been damaged, before your heart has fully scarred, you were
00:16:10.140
to push yourself to some new athletic limit, let's say you're in the middle of a particularly
00:16:17.080
That would be exactly the time when a weakness in a vessel wall might cause a critical failure
00:16:25.500
So this was a very plausible mechanism to explain the pattern of sudden deaths that we have
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seen oftentimes in people who are unusually healthy and athletic.
00:16:41.880
Pharma had a potentially tremendously lucrative property that it couldn't bring to market because
00:16:49.380
a safety test would have revealed this unsolvable problem at its heart.
00:16:55.380
And so what I'm wondering, my hypothesis, is that it recognized that the thing that would
00:17:01.480
bypass that obstacle was an emergency that caused the public to demand a remedy to allow them
00:17:11.980
to go back to work and to living their lives, that would cause the government to streamline
00:17:17.940
the safety testing process so that it wouldn't spot these things.
00:17:22.500
And indeed, one of the things that we see in addition to a lot more harm in those safety
00:17:27.720
tests than we were initially allowed to understand, but also the safety testing was radically truncated
00:17:36.220
so that long-term harms were impossible to detect.
00:17:41.140
So the hypothesis in question is pharma used an emergency to bypass an obstacle to bring an
00:17:51.000
incredibly lucrative technology to normalize it in the public and the regulatory apparatus,
00:17:58.040
to sneak it by the things that would ordinarily prevent a dangerous technology like this one
00:18:04.800
So I think that sounds entirely plausible, in fact, likely, in fact, very likely.
00:18:11.560
But the downside for pharma, and of course for the rest of us, is that if you roll out
00:18:16.180
a harmful product evading the conventional safety screens, you're going to hurt a lot of people.
00:18:24.480
So just the first part of the question, what do you think we're going to see in terms of
00:18:30.460
a death toll and injury toll from this vaccine?
00:18:34.800
A lot has gone into preventing us from answering that question, and some very dedicated people
00:18:41.100
have done some very high-quality work, and the numbers are staggering.
00:18:48.900
Now, I'm hesitant to say what I think the toll might be, because this is not my area of expertise,
00:18:58.320
I would say John Campbell would be an excellent source to look at.
00:19:02.400
There's some new material out of New Zealand, which is jaw-dropping.
00:19:06.020
I haven't had time to look at it in depth, so I'm a little concerned about putting my weight on the ice.
00:19:17.060
Joseph Freeman and his colleagues, including Peter Doshi, did an evaluation of Pfizer's own
00:19:34.920
In fact, Pfizer only allowed one month before it vaccinated its controls and made it impossible
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And what they found was a 1 in 800 rate of serious adverse event.
00:19:58.220
1 in 800 rate, which in one month, that suggests a very high mortality risk.
00:20:08.720
And in fact, we saw mortality in the safety trials.
00:20:11.960
What happens over the long term, we've certainly seen such a range of pathologies that have
00:20:17.780
crippling effects on people's health that I shudder to think how many people have actually...
00:20:24.740
So I'm not a math genius, but 1 in 800 shots times billions is a lot of people.
00:20:37.700
I was recently at a conference in Romania on the COVID crisis.
00:20:43.440
And so there was a lot of work trying to unpack what we actually understand.
00:20:47.240
And I saw a credible estimate of something like 17 million deaths globally from this technology.
00:20:59.020
Well, when you scale up to billions, it's not hard to reach a number like that with a
00:21:07.980
Now, to your deeper question, I think let's steel man...
00:21:14.780
Just for perspective, I mean, that's like the death toll of a global war.
00:21:26.760
And amazingly, there is no way in which it's over.
00:21:32.180
I mean, we are still apparently recommending these things for healthy children.
00:21:37.020
Ever stood any chance of getting any benefit from them.
00:21:39.840
Every chance of suffering harms that are not only serious, but tragic on the basis that children
00:21:49.620
If you ruin a child's immune system in youth, they have to spend the rest of their presumably
00:21:58.280
So it never made any sense that we were giving this to kids in the first place.
00:22:02.100
The fact that we're still doing it when the emergency, to the extent there even was one,
00:22:08.560
And when there's never been any proper justification of administering it to healthy kids.
00:22:18.120
And the shot doesn't prevent you from catching or transmitting it.
00:22:21.600
So there was just literally no justification you could come out.
00:22:26.260
But I think a lot of us, maybe call us normies, have a hard time imagining the breathtaking evil
00:22:39.800
that it would take to allow such a tragedy to unfold or to cause it to unfold for profit.
00:22:56.900
Pharma on a normal day is composed of people who have to become, even if they were doing
00:23:02.060
their job exactly right, they have to be comfortable with causing a certain amount of death.
00:23:08.260
If you give a drug to people, if the net effect is positive, but it's going to kill some people
00:23:12.720
who would have lived if they never got it, somehow you have to sleep at night having put
00:23:17.880
that drug into the world. And, you know, we want, if we had a healthy pharma industry,
00:23:23.800
we would want them to produce the drugs that had a net benefit. And that benefit includes some
00:23:30.640
serious harms. So once you have stepped on that slippery slope, though, once you have become
00:23:37.140
comfortable with causing deaths, then I believe it becomes very easy to rationalize that the greater
00:23:43.520
good is being served by X, Y, or Z. And then there's some point at which you're causing enough
00:23:48.160
harm and you're, you know, when pharma takes an old out of patent drug and supersedes it with a new
00:23:58.240
highly profitable drug, they've done something that's negative. We should almost always prefer
00:24:03.760
the older drug unless the evidence is extremely convincing. The new drug is just worlds better
00:24:08.760
because an old drug, we know something about its interactions with other things. We know
00:24:13.660
something about its safety profile. New is not better when it comes to molecules that you're
00:24:18.080
going to be taking into your, your biology. Fair. But pharma has to be in the business of getting
00:24:26.280
you to take the new and having you distrust the old. And so anyway, I think, I think there's a way in
00:24:31.680
which the rationalization has no limit and they've gotten to the point that they are willing to cause a
00:24:37.700
huge amount of death apparently. Um, and even at the point that it's been revealed in public,
00:24:42.120
uh, they don't stop, which is another amazing fact. You would imagine that they would have been
00:24:48.360
embarrassed into stopping this vaccination program at this point. So the problem though, I would say
00:24:54.440
for, for pharma and for the politicians who, uh, support and promote them in the media who do the
00:25:00.040
same, is that, um, there are people like you who are not crackpots, who are scientists and physicians,
00:25:08.100
long-time researchers with fully credentialed work histories, not too many, but a sizable number
00:25:14.160
who will not let go, who are completely dogged in the pursuit of more data about this. Um, so like,
00:25:23.040
what do they do with you and people like you? Well, I think the astonishing thing is that a,
00:25:29.320
as you point out, small group of dissidents upended their narrative. Uptake rates on the new boosters
00:25:37.960
are in the low single digits. So a large single digit. Yes. So nobody's taking it. Nobody's
00:25:44.720
taking it. Now I'm troubled by the fact that at the same time, we don't see, uh, a massive majority
00:25:52.580
acknowledging the vaccination campaign was a mistake in the first place. They got it and they don't want
00:25:56.980
to think about it. And I get it. I get it. Um, I wouldn't want to think about it either, but the
00:26:03.900
problem is it's a moral obligation. I mean, we're still injecting these things into kids for God's
00:26:09.600
sake. So, um, it is important to stand up and say I was had, and I think all of us were, uh, I, I believed
00:26:17.740
that this vaccine was likely effective when it first came out. And the thing that triggered Heather and me
00:26:24.460
to question it was the fact that we were also told that it was safe, which couldn't possibly be true.
00:26:29.820
Might've been harmless, but they couldn't say safe because nobody on earth knew what the long-term
00:26:34.480
impacts would be. And when you say safe, you're not, uh, if I say I drove home drunk, um, but I made
00:26:44.340
it without harm. So it was safe. You know that I have said something foolish. Yes. And in this case,
00:26:49.400
even if the thing had turned out to be harmless, nobody could know that it was, so it wasn't safe.
00:26:53.920
And for them to assure us that it was, was a lie from the get-go. That's what caused Heather and me
00:26:58.560
to start looking into it. And the deeper we dug, the crazier the story got. Not safe and ineffective,
00:27:04.820
in fact, harmful and, uh, shockingly ineffective at everything that you might want it to be effective
00:27:10.760
at. Um, so the story is a, an odd one. The fact that that small number of dissidents was able to
00:27:20.580
upend the narrative, was able to bring people's awareness to the massive levels of harm and the
00:27:27.100
ineffectiveness of the shots is in some ways, um, the most surprising element of this story.
00:27:33.540
And I think it truly surprised, um, pharma and its partners in social media, in government, in
00:27:42.040
non-governmental organizations. I think they thought that they owned enough of the media that
00:27:49.960
they could sell us any narrative that they wished. And I think surprising as it is, they didn't really
00:27:56.460
understand that podcasts could possibly be a countervailing force of significance.
00:28:07.320
You would say, right? You know, it's a, it's a, it's failing to update from the buying by the barrel
00:28:12.400
aphorism. Um, so what happened was it turned out that a number of us were willing to make mistakes
00:28:21.540
and correct them in real time to talk about this in plain English with the public, um, to do so,
00:28:27.200
you know, in Joe Rogan's man cave. And the fact is people listened because of course this was on
00:28:33.620
everybody's mind and what they were supposed to do to protect, you know, they'd been terrified and
00:28:38.060
they, what to do to protect your family's health was a question that everybody wanted to know the
00:28:42.620
answer to. So our ability to reach millions of people surprised those who thought they were just
00:28:48.920
going to shove this narrative down our throats. And this gets me to the, the WHO, the World Health
00:28:57.000
Organization and its pandemic preparedness, uh, plan modifications. What I believe is going on
00:29:04.460
is the World Health Organization is now revising the structures that allowed the dissidents to upend
00:29:13.560
the narrative and they are looking for a rematch. Um, what they want are the measures that would have
00:29:21.240
allowed them to silence the podcasters to mandate, uh, various things internationally in a way that
00:29:29.040
would prevent the emergence of a control group that would allow us to see harms clearly. Um, so that's
00:29:37.640
the reason that I think people, as much as they want to move on from thinking about COVID, maybe stop
00:29:43.840
thinking about COVID, but do start thinking about what has taken place with respect to medicine, with
00:29:50.900
respect to public health, with respect to pharma and ask yourself the question, given what you now know,
00:29:57.680
would you want to relive a pandemic like the COVID pandemic without the tools that allowed you to
00:30:04.700
ultimately in the end, see clearly that it didn't make sense to take another one of these shots or
00:30:09.340
to have your kids take, right? We want those tools. In fact, we need them. And, um, something is quietly
00:30:16.060
moving just out of sight in order that we will not have access to them the next time we face a serious
00:30:23.180
emergency. So you're saying that an international health organization could just end the First Amendment
00:30:28.940
in the United States. Yes. And in fact, um, as much as this sounds, I know that it sounds preposterous,
00:30:36.620
but it does not sound preposterous. The ability to do it is currently under discussion at the
00:30:44.780
international level. And it's almost impossible to exaggerate how troubling what is being discussed
00:30:53.580
is. In fact, I think it is fair to say that we are in the middle of a coup, that we are actually
00:31:03.420
facing the elimination of our national and our personal sovereignty. And that that is the purpose
00:31:13.660
of what is being constructed, that it has been, um, written in such a way that you are, your eyes are
00:31:21.340
supposed to glaze over as you attempt to sort out what is it, uh, what is under discussion.
00:31:28.700
And if you do that, then come May of this year, your nation is almost certain to sign on to an
00:31:37.500
agreement that in some utterly vaguely described future circumstance, a public health emergency,
00:31:44.700
which the director general of the World Health Organization has total liberty to define in any way
00:31:50.860
that he sees fit. In other words, nothing prevents, um, climate change from being declared a public
00:31:57.820
health emergency that would trigger the provisions of these modifications. And in the case that some
00:32:05.100
emergency or some, uh, pretense of an emergency shows up, the provisions that would kick in are
00:32:13.180
beyond jaw-dropping. So, before you get into it, and I just want to thank you, by the way,
00:32:21.820
for taking the time to go through this proposal, because you're absolutely right. It's impenetrable.
00:32:27.260
It's designed to be, to cloak what they're saying rather than eliminate it. Um, what's it called?
00:32:32.940
Well, the funny thing is actually, I was looking, um, this morning to find out what the current name is,
00:32:39.820
and the names have actually been shifted slightly, clearly a feature.
00:32:43.180
Oh, it's a shape-shifting. Yeah, it is. So, what I would do in order, and, and I, it's unclear to me
00:32:52.140
how much that's just simply designed to confuse somebody who tries to sort it out and how much
00:32:57.260
that's designed to, for example, um, game the search engine technology that might allow you to
00:33:04.300
crack the changes because to the extent that the name has shifted. Um, so smart. I call it the, um,
00:33:11.580
World Health Organization Pandemic Preparedness Plan, right? And what is under discussion, uh,
00:33:19.580
are some modifications to the global public health regulations and modifications to an existing treaty.
00:33:28.620
But all of this makes it sound minor and procedural. What has been proposed are, uh, and I, again,
00:33:38.060
the number of things included here is incredible. It's hard even for those of us who have been focused
00:33:43.740
on this to track all of the important things under discussion and to deduce the meaning of some of
00:33:48.700
the more subtle provisions. But, um, they, uh, the World Health Organization and its signatory nations
00:33:57.020
will, um, be allowed to define a public health emergency, uh, on any basis that having declared one,
00:34:07.180
they will be entitled to mandate remedies. The remedies that are named include, um, vaccines,
00:34:18.700
uh, gene therapy technology is literally named in, uh, the set of things that the World Health
00:34:28.140
Organization is going to reserve the right to mandate, um, that it will be in a position to,
00:34:33.180
um, require these things of citizens, that it will be in a position to, uh, dictate our ability to
00:34:41.980
travel. In other words, passports that would be predicated on one having accepted,
00:34:47.580
uh, these technologies are, um, clearly being described. It would have the ability to forbid
00:34:57.020
the use of other medications. So this looks like they're preparing for a rerun where they can just
00:35:03.100
simply take ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, uh, off the table. Um, they also have reserved the ability
00:35:12.540
to dictate how these, uh, measures are discussed, that censorship is described here as well. The
00:35:21.500
right to dictate that's that, of course, misinformation is how they're going to describe
00:35:26.140
it. Well, in fact, I want to ask you to pause and play a soundbite from Tedros, um, in which he
00:35:32.700
alludes to this and I want to get your assessment of it. Here it is. We continue to see misinformation
00:35:37.500
on social media and in mainstream media about the pandemic accord that countries are now negotiating.
00:35:45.340
The claim that the accord will cede power to WHO is quite simply false. It's fake news. Countries will
00:35:54.300
decide what the accord says and countries alone. And countries will implement the accord in line with
00:36:02.940
their own national laws. No country will cede any sovereignty to WHO. If any politician, business
00:36:11.340
person, or anyone at all is confused about what the pandemic accord is and isn't, we would be more
00:36:19.340
than happy to discuss it and explain it. So he's going to be more than happy to discuss and explain
00:36:26.460
the misinformation that you're now spreading. That is comforting. Um, well, on the one hand,
00:36:33.900
I must say, I had not seen that. And, um, it is tremendously good news, actually. What it means
00:36:40.300
is that once again, we have managed to raise awareness of something in time that there is, uh,
00:36:46.860
conceivably a better outcome still available to us. They're spooked enough to bother to lie.
00:36:51.820
There's, there's, you couldn't have said it, uh, more accurately. Yes. Those were clearly lies. And
00:36:58.220
of course, uh, his saying that into a camera is supposed to convince you, you know, nobody could
00:37:03.740
possibly lie so directly. So there must be some truth in what he's saying, which is of course,
00:37:08.140
nonsense. And anybody who goes back through, uh, Matt Orfala's compendium of various things that
00:37:15.660
people have said into cameras over the course of COVID that they then swear they didn't say,
00:37:19.740
you know, months later, um, knows that these folks are very comfortable at saying totally false
00:37:25.100
things into a camera. It doesn't cause them to think twice or sweat or anything. Um, but it's
00:37:31.820
great that we have managed to raise enough awareness that Tedros is actually addressing, uh, our spreading
00:37:38.140
of what it actually is, is mal-information. Um, you're aware of this, uh, this extension now.
00:37:44.300
Yeah. Oh, it's a beautiful. So I was, I was, I'm so old that I was still stuck in the truth
00:37:49.260
or falsehood binary. Yeah. Where, what mattered was whether it was true or not. No, no, no,
00:37:55.500
the, uh, mal-information is actually exactly what you need to know about to see, um, how antiquated
00:38:00.860
that notion is because, um, this was actually the Department of Homeland Security actually issued a memo,
00:38:06.620
um, in which it defined three kinds of, I kid you not, terrorism, mis-dis- and mal-information.
00:38:14.460
Mis-information are errors, uh, disinformation are intentional errors, lies, and mal-information
00:38:21.420
are things that are based in truth but cause you to distrust authority.
00:38:25.260
Oh, so mal-information is what you commit when you catch them lying.
00:38:29.820
Yes. Um, exactly. Um, yeah, it is, it is discussing the lies of your, your government,
00:38:35.180
uh, is mal-information and therefore a kind of terrorism, which I should point out as
00:38:38.700
funny as that is and as obviously Orwellian as that is, it's also terrifying because if you have
00:38:43.900
cracked the history of the spreading tyranny from the beginning of the war on terror, you know that
00:38:49.820
terrorism is not a normal English word the way it once was. Terrorism is now a legal designation
00:38:56.940
that causes all of your rights to evaporate. So at the point that the Department of Homeland Security
00:39:02.220
says that you are guilty of a kind of terrorism for saying true things that cause you to distrust
00:39:06.380
your government, they are also telling you something about what rights they have to silence you.
00:39:11.820
They are not normal rights. So, um, these things are all, uh, terrifying and I do think as much as
00:39:19.660
my jaw's open, the, the COVID pandemic caused us to become aware of a lot of structures that had been
00:39:27.100
built around us. Something that, um, former NSA officer William Binney once described as the
00:39:34.780
turnkey totalitarian state. The totalitarian state is erected around you, but it's not activated. And
00:39:41.180
then once it's built, the key gets turned. And so we are now seeing, I believe something that even
00:39:47.180
outstrips William Binney's description because it's the turnkey totalitarian planet, right? The World
00:39:53.420
Health Organization is above the level of nations and it is going to be in a position if, uh, these
00:39:58.940
provisions pass to dictate to nations, how they are to treat their own citizens, to override their
00:40:04.540
constitutions, despite what Tedros has told you. Um, so that is, um, frightening. It's not inherently about
00:40:13.420
health. What I think has happened is the fact of a possible pandemic causes a loophole in the mind.
00:40:27.420
It's not a loophole in our governance documents. Our constitution doesn't describe exemptions from
00:40:34.620
your rights during time of a pandemic emergency. Your rights simply are what they are and they're
00:40:39.980
not supposed to go anywhere, um, just because there's a disease spreading. Um, but nonetheless,
00:40:46.940
um, people's willingness to accept the erosion of their rights because of a public health emergency,
00:40:54.380
um, has allowed this tyranny to, to use it as a Trojan horse. Yes. And I think that's also, um,
00:41:03.340
um, it's something people need to become aware of that, uh, there are a number of features of our
00:41:11.980
environment that are, um, basically they are blind spots that we can't see past. Vaccine was one. And I
00:41:20.380
know I was in an enthusiast about vaccines. I still believe deeply in the elegance of vaccines as they
00:41:29.420
should exist, but I'm now very alarmed at how they are produced. And I'm even more alarmed at what has
00:41:34.700
been called a vaccine that doesn't meet the definition, right? That because many of us believe
00:41:40.780
that vaccines, uh, were an extremely elegant, low harm, high, uh, efficacy method of preventing disease.
00:41:50.380
When they called this mRNA tech technology of vaccine, many of us, um, gave it more credibility
00:41:56.860
than we should have. If they had called it, uh, a, uh, a, a gene transfection technology,
00:42:03.660
we would have thought, wait, what, you know, that, that's, that sounds highly novel and it
00:42:08.460
sounds dangerous. And how much do we know about the long-term implications? But because they called
00:42:12.460
it a vaccine, people were much readily, much more willing to, to accept it. Public health functions
00:42:18.780
the same way. Um, if you think about it, public health, step back a second, your relationship
00:42:27.420
with your doctor, your personal health, uh, ought to be very important to you. But there are ways
00:42:33.580
in which things that happen at a population level affect your personal health and your doctor's not
00:42:38.220
in a position to do anything about it. So somebody dumping pollution into a stream from which you're
00:42:43.180
pulling fish, you know, you might detect the harm at the population level. You might need a regulation
00:42:48.380
at a population level in order to protect you. Your doctor's not in a position to do a pill to
00:42:52.780
correct it. So the idea that public health is potentially a place to improve all of our well-being
00:42:58.780
is real. But once you decide that there's something above doctors relative to your health,
00:43:04.860
then that can be an excuse for all manner of tyranny. Public health has been, um, adopted. It's like,
00:43:13.740
it's like the sheep's clothing that has allowed the wolf to go after our rights because in theory,
00:43:20.060
it's trying to protect us from harms that we would like to be protected. And it generates such
00:43:24.060
fear. It's such a huge scale that it, it weakens people's moral immune systems.
00:43:28.540
Absolutely. They will accept things they would never accept otherwise.
00:43:31.180
Absolutely. And, uh, as you know, and as, as I know, when we raised questions about what was being,
00:43:39.180
uh, being delivered to us under the guise of public health, we were demonized as if we had a moral
00:43:47.980
defect. It wasn't even a cognitive defect where we were failing to understand the wisdom of these
00:43:52.460
vaccines. It was a moral defect where we were failing to protect others who were vulnerable
00:43:57.100
by questioning these things. Um, so, uh, the idea that health is at stake in some vague, larger sense
00:44:05.180
that requires us to, to override the natural relationship between doctors and patients
00:44:12.540
is itself a coup against medicine by something else. And we need to become aware of that.
00:44:18.460
Okay. Just, just to check kind of like the souls of the people who are running all of this,
00:44:24.540
the public health establishment, international public health establishment. Now that, you know,
00:44:29.500
some researchers believe up to 17 million people could have been killed by these MRNA shots,
00:44:35.180
has any international public health official said, well, hold on a second,
00:44:38.460
we need to get to the bottom of that. Has that provoked any response when the people in charge
00:44:42.540
of our public health? Well, I'm trying to think globally, whether they're good examples. There's
00:44:47.980
certainly some folks who have stood up in the European parliament. Um, but I mean in world health
00:44:54.300
organizations, CDC. No, I don't think so. I don't think we have, we have not seen an acknowledgement
00:45:00.460
of the harm and error. Um, they don't have internet access. They don't know. Like, what is that?
00:45:05.900
Well, that's the incredible thing is I still see claims, um, that just simply,
00:45:13.020
if they initially had believed them, then they are long ago falsified, but they're still being
00:45:18.220
advanced for whoever hasn't noticed, you know, the idea that it's a good idea to vaccinate your kids
00:45:23.100
with MRNA shots being one of them, right? To the extent that there was a panic that caused us to
00:45:29.900
give these shots to people who couldn't possibly benefit from them. You would expect us to have
00:45:35.820
backed that off extremely rapidly as it became impossible, uh, to defend those shots. And yet,
00:45:43.020
because there's still presumably some market for it, um, we are, we are still doing it. So we are living
00:45:50.860
some crazy story in which things that are perfectly obvious are, um, still somehow have not lodged
00:45:56.940
themselves in the official public record. And, you know, I think that has a lot to do with
00:46:03.740
frankly, the death of journalism. Yes. A lot of us are doing jobs that we didn't train for. Heather
00:46:09.820
and I are doing some journalistic job that we certainly didn't train for. We trained to think
00:46:14.060
about biology and, you know, we do that in front of a camera. And so that functions as a kind of
00:46:19.660
stand in for journalism, but the handful of journalists who still exist, um, I think without
00:46:26.780
exception are not scientifically trained, right? You know, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, you,
00:46:34.860
we don't have very many people doing investigative journalism and the ones who, uh,
00:46:41.980
are doing it. They don't have the skillset that would make this a natural topic to investigate.
00:46:48.300
So we have to boot up some kind of new institution that will allow us to do this job well. And
00:46:56.060
presumably that will involve taking the few investigative journalists, uh, who remember
00:47:01.500
how to do that job and the few scientists and doctors who are willing to still do their job
00:47:06.940
and, you know, put us together, right? Podcast isn't the right place to do it. If that's all we got,
00:47:12.940
that's all we got. But, um, there's got to be a better, a better method.
00:47:18.540
So if this is ratified or signed onto by the United States in May, six months from now,
00:47:26.220
um, it sounds like that's it. We don't know. Um, I will say I have very little hope
00:47:32.860
that the U.S. will derail this. I have the sense that whatever has captured
00:47:38.700
our government, um, is driving this as well. And so in effect, uh, the U S wants
00:47:46.540
this change. It will in fact, you know, in the same way that the five eyes nations
00:47:51.900
agree to mutually violate the rights of each other's citizens, because
00:47:57.180
that was not prevented in any of our constitutions.
00:47:59.820
I think the U S wants something to force it to violate our constitutional protections and the
00:48:07.100
World Health Organization is going to be that entity. That said, uh, I have recently been to
00:48:15.580
the Czech Republic and I've been to Romania and I've, uh, heard from other parts of the former
00:48:22.940
Eastern bloc that there is resistance, that people who have faced tyranny in living memory,
00:48:29.740
um, are much less ready to accept these changes and that they are actually beginning to, to mount a
00:48:39.900
response. I worry that it will be too thin and easily defeated, especially if they do not understand
00:48:49.020
that actually the world is depending on them, that the traditionally, the countries we traditionally
00:48:54.060
think of as part of the West are compromised and that, uh, these countries, which have more recently
00:49:03.900
joined or rejoined the West are the best hope we've got that they are in a position to derail, um,
00:49:11.340
this set of provisions and that we are depending on them to do it.
00:49:16.700
So I, I just want to end for a few moments on your, on the overview here. So you have all these
00:49:21.500
remarkable things converging in a single 12 month period. You have war, pestilence, political unrest,
00:49:30.540
apparently unsolvable political unrest. What do you think we're looking at in the West? Like,
00:49:35.660
what is this moment and how does it end? Well, um, so I have long been interested in questions of
00:49:44.860
good governance and the West. And, um, um, I'm sad to report that I think the West has actually
00:49:54.540
collapsed. And what we are left with is now, um, a nebulous echo, the values of the West still function,
00:50:03.180
but they function, um, in a vague way. And we have seen that they can evaporate quickly under the right
00:50:09.500
circumstances. Um, I suspect, um, I suspect, and I really don't know, I don't think anybody knows.
00:50:16.620
Um, but I suspect that some powerful set of forces has decided that, um, consent of the governed is too
00:50:30.140
dangerous to tolerate and that it has begun to unhook it. And we do not know how this works.
00:50:43.340
We can see some of the partners who are involved in this, but I don't think we know ultimately who's
00:50:50.380
driving it or where they're going. I think many of the notions that we picked up about, uh, nations and
00:50:58.620
who our friends are and who our enemies are, are, uh, they are now more misleading than they are
00:51:05.900
informative. In other words, uh, I don't think the U S has an enemy called China. I think there are
00:51:14.220
elements within the U S that are partnered within, uh, with elements within the Chinese communist party
00:51:21.500
for practical reasons. And so our, you know, the, the notion that these, uh, two parties are competing
00:51:30.540
with each other, just distracts us from what's actually taking place. But let's just put it this
00:51:38.780
way. We have a large global population. Most people have no useful role through no fault of their own.
00:51:49.740
They have not been given a, uh, an opportunity in life to find a useful way to contribute.
00:51:57.020
And I wonder if, um, the rent seeking elites that have hoarded so much power, uh, are not
00:52:08.140
unhooking our rights because effectively they're afraid of some global French revolution
00:52:16.300
moment as people realize that they've been betrayed and, uh, left without good options.
00:52:23.580
Is that what we're seeing certainly feels like we're facing, um, an end game where important,
00:52:30.460
uh, properties that would once have been preserved by all parties because they might
00:52:35.580
need them one day are now being dispensed with. And we're being, um, you know, we're watching
00:52:42.140
our governmental structures and every one of our institutions captured, hollowed out,
00:52:46.700
turned into a paradoxical inversion of what it was designed to do. That's not an accident.
00:52:54.620
Whether they, you know, the thing that worries me most actually is that whatever is driving this
00:53:00.540
is not composed of diabolical geniuses who at least have some plan for the future, but it's being driven by
00:53:06.940
people who actually do not know what kind of hell they are inviting. Yes. They're going to create a
00:53:15.340
kind of chaos from which, uh, humanity may well not emerge. And I get the sense that, um, unless they
00:53:24.060
have some remarkable plan that is not obvious that they are just simply drunk with power and putting
00:53:32.460
everyone, including themselves in tremendous jeopardy by taking apart the structures on which we depend.
00:53:40.860
How do you see my last question? How do you see your, I mean, you're, you're, you're speaking in,
00:53:46.060
in grand terms that three years ago I, I might've laughed at. I'm not laughing at all. And I think
00:53:50.860
you're absolutely right. Um, but you're also choosing as you know, a 50 ish man, your old man,
00:53:58.620
to say this stuff out loud and to pursue the truth as you find it. And then to talk about it. Like,
00:54:04.620
so how do you, why did you decide to do that? And how do you think that ends? Well, you know,
00:54:09.580
we are all the products of whatever developmental environment produced us. And as I've said on multiple
00:54:17.340
topics where, um, my family has found itself in very uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous
00:54:24.860
circumstances, um, because we speak out, I don't think I had a choice. I just, I, I literally cannot
00:54:35.100
understand how I would sleep at night, how I would look at myself in the mirror if I didn't say what
00:54:41.660
needed to be said. And, you know, um, I heard of a very good speech by Bobby Kennedy, Jr.
00:54:53.820
though neither of us are libertarians. He was at the, uh, Liberty conference in, in Memphis.
00:54:58.780
And the last thing he said in that speech, um, struck me to my core and something
00:55:03.500
I've thought often and said almost never, but there are fates far worse than death. And I think
00:55:18.220
for my part, I have, I have lived an incredible life. I have, I, there's plenty I still want to do,
00:55:29.820
and I am not eager to leave this planet any earlier than I have to. I have a marvelous family. I live
00:55:35.660
in a wonderful place and I've got lots of things on my bucket list, but I got lots of things on my
00:55:41.740
bucket list. However, humanity is depending on everybody who has a position from which to see
00:55:50.380
what is taking place, to grapple with what it might mean, to describe it so that the public understands
00:55:56.460
where their interests are. It is depending on us to do what needs to be done. If we're to have a chance
00:56:03.820
of delivering a planet to our children and our grandchildren that is worthy of them, if we're going
00:56:12.540
to deliver a system that allows them to live meaningful, healthy lives, we have to speak up. And I don't know,
00:56:22.380
I don't know how to get people to do that. I, I'm very hesitant to urge others to put themselves
00:56:31.260
or their families in danger. And I know that everybody's circumstances are different. Some
00:56:34.780
people are struggling just simply to feed a family and keep a roof over their heads. Those people
00:56:39.420
obviously have a great deal less liberty, uh, with respect to, to standing up and saying what needs to be
00:56:45.580
said. But this is really, it's what we call in game theory, a collective action problem.
00:56:53.180
If everybody responds to their personal well-being, if everybody says that's too dangerous to stand up,
00:56:59.500
um, you know, I'm not suicidal. I'm, I can't do it. Then not enough people stand up to change the course
00:57:07.100
of history. Whereas if people somehow put aside the obvious danger to their ability to earn and maybe
00:57:16.780
to their lives of saying what needs to be said, then we greatly outnumber those we are pitted against.
00:57:26.700
They are ferociously powerful, but I would also point out this interesting error.
00:57:35.180
So I call the force that were up against Goliath, just so I remember what the battle is.
00:57:42.540
Goliath made a terrible mistake and it made it most egregiously during COVID, which is it took
00:57:49.980
all of the competent people, took all of the courageous people, and it shoved them out of the
00:57:59.020
institutions where they were hanging on. And it created in so doing the dream team created every
00:58:09.180
player you could possibly want on your team to fight some historic battle against a terrible evil.
00:58:15.420
All of those people are now at least somewhat awake. They've now been picked on by the same enemy.
00:58:21.980
And yeah, all right, we're outgunned. It has a tremendous amount of power, but we've got all
00:58:26.620
of the people who know how to think. So I hate to say it, or maybe I like to say it, but
00:58:34.540
I don't think it's a slam dunk, but I like our odds.
00:58:36.780
I've never met a more fluent biologist, I have to say. Brett Weinstein, amazing conversation.