00:00:00.620Before we begin, we'd like to say that in our opinion, it is not suitable for children or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition.
00:00:15.800Hello and welcome to a very special live episode of Trigonometry.
00:00:47.860Before we get started, Francis and I have something to say to the gods of YouTube.
00:00:52.340We here at Trigonometry believe that anyone has any wrong thoughts about anything to do with COVID is inherently evil.
00:00:59.500We will not be talking about anything we're not allowed to by YouTube because obviously they should decide what everyone thinks and what anyone says.
00:01:30.560But the one thing we do know is you have been covering some potential alternative treatments for COVID.
00:01:37.160And you've had things taken down from your channel for doing so.
00:01:41.180So I think it's best that we stay away from that.
00:01:44.660And if people want to talk about that or listen to things about that, they can go and check it out on your channel on other platforms, which we know how to find.
00:01:53.460But they better hurry because as of yesterday, YouTube has moved even farther in the direction of hurling Dark Horse off the platform.
00:02:04.860We had another video taken down, a strike against our Clips channel.
00:02:09.840So it looks like YouTube is about sick of open discussion.
00:02:14.560And anyway, it's a good moment to get yourself up to speed before there's no place left to do that.
00:02:36.640But listen, we wanted to talk to you about the censorship which you're experiencing.
00:02:42.780But before we do that, I do think it's helpful to, first of all, having a conversation about the lab leak situation, about the oranges of COVID.
00:02:50.300And the reason I say this is not only because that in and of itself matters, but it's a crucial example of what happens when social media companies,
00:02:58.840the big tech companies are deciding what can and can't be talked about and then later suddenly find that actually that should have been talked about a year ago.
00:03:06.800So can we, first of all, before we get into lab leak and the idea that COVID may have come from a lab, why does it matter where COVID came from, Brett?
00:03:16.460Well, there are really two general reasons.
00:03:19.740One of them is widely agreed by people who've thought about the issue.
00:03:23.640And the other one, I seem to be one of the lone voices, maybe the only voice making this point.
00:03:28.100But the first reason is because if this came from a lab and it was indeed a leak, then it is the result of predictable error.
00:03:39.280And that is to say that in choosing to do this work, and in fact, what we now understand, in choosing to circumvent the ban on this work by offshoring it to China,
00:03:50.440we effectively put the world in jeopardy of a very serious pandemic.
00:03:55.700And the fact is, even if this somehow did come from nature, which is still a possibility, though the likelihood of it grows smaller with each week.
00:04:05.060But even if this did come from nature, the fact is the work in question was taking place.
00:04:09.720And it does place the world in danger of a pandemic because laboratory leaks are not rare.
00:04:16.380So the first reason that matters is because if COVID-19 is the result of a lab leak, then we can potentially correct our behavior going forward and eliminate that hazard.
00:04:28.480If we pretend that there's no chance it came from the laboratory, then we will presumably not only continue that work,
00:04:35.400but COVID-19 will be used as a demonstration that that work needs to be at a much larger scale because it was not fast enough to prevent this pandemic.
00:04:44.760So it matters a great deal, I would say, because what we do downstream of it would be potentially the opposite of what we would do if this was a natural spillover event.
00:04:55.360And how does it reflect on the Chinese, Brett, and particularly, I say the Chinese, but really the CCP, if it's found out that it was a leak from a laboratory that started the virus?
00:05:08.580Well, I think, frankly, this is a little bit of a dead end in terms of the analysis, because at some level, the sense that this took place in China in a Chinese lab and that the leak may have emerged from there.
00:05:23.200And by this, I mean the research that might have led to such a pathogen and the possible leak looks most likely to have come from the Wuhan lab,
00:05:30.040because, of course, Wuhan is the origin point of the pandemic.
00:05:34.380On the other hand, the work in question was clearly the result of a quadrant of the international scientific community deciding that this work needed to be done and innovating the techniques with which to do it.
00:05:49.360And so, certainly, the Chinese have a tremendous, and by the Chinese, I don't really mean the Chinese.
00:05:58.000The Chinese government bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for its lack of candor and for what, to all appearances, is a massive cover-up.
00:06:10.120You know, that is the responsibility of the Chinese government.
00:06:12.760On the other hand, the work in question is a much bigger failure than that, right?
00:06:17.180It certainly appears to involve Tony Fauci.
00:06:21.220It involves EcoHealth Alliance, whatever that is, whether that is actually a research organization or a laundering operation that allows money to circumvent a U.S. ban on gain-of-function research.
00:06:36.760I don't think it's entirely clear, but what is clear is that there is a small cabal of people who have been pushing this work forward over the objection of scientific colleagues who were clearly right to attempt to raise the alarm and to generate a ban on gain-of-function research.
00:06:55.660So, I think it is a mistake to focus on China because the failure is much bigger than that, and the implications are much more profound.
00:07:04.060All right. Well, let's not focus on China.
00:07:18.960The place in which I believe there is a lot to be gained from knowing where SARS-CoV-2 came from that I seem to be alone on is the belief that were we to understand, let's say that this was a lab leak, which seems highly probable.
00:07:34.260If this was a lab leak, what are the protocols that were used to take the ancestor virus from nature, which by all appearances would not have been highly infectious of humans and almost certainly would not have been transmissible between humans.
00:07:48.440What are the protocols of the experiments that produced a highly infectious agent in humans like SARS-CoV-2?
00:07:54.180If we were to find out, for example, that ferrets were used in this process, we would understand a lot about why the virus behaves the way that it does, right?
00:08:05.700Ferrets are used in the laboratory environment because they have an ACE2 receptor that looks very much like the human one.
00:08:11.000So if you were trying to produce a coronavirus that was infectious in humans, you might serially passage the virus through ferrets.
00:08:19.900If that happened, then we know, then we would know that ferrets are an organism in which we could study the progress of this disease and understand a great deal more about it because the disease is not normal.
00:08:31.820The number of tissues that it impacts is incredible, the number of symptoms.
00:08:36.400And so in essence, my point more broadly than ferrets is knowing the protocols that generated the virus, if it was generated in the laboratory, potentially gives us a tremendous leg up on fighting COVID.
00:08:50.400It would allow us to narrow our search in understanding what the virus is and understanding what its vulnerabilities might be, predicting what it might do both epidemiologically and evolutionarily going forward.
00:09:03.680And so my sense is, at the very least, we have the right to that information in order to see whether or not there are useful tools buried within it.
00:09:12.580And by playing this game where we pretend that the majority of the evidence still points toward a natural origin, which is absolutely false, by playing that game, what we are effectively doing is running out the clock when, in fact, time is of the essence.
00:09:29.480So let's get into the science of it from the beginning, because there will be a lot of people who are tuning into this who have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
00:09:38.180And I'll be honest with you, to some extent, both Francis and I are two of those people, right?
00:09:42.600What are you talking about? I understand everything, Mike.
00:09:46.400The day you start doing biology, mate, is the day we're all screwed.
00:09:49.720But look, Brett, seriously, though, from the very beginning, just take us through a sort of normal person's level of understanding.
00:09:59.280What are you talking about? What do you mean lab leak?
00:10:01.740What do you mean it was made in a lab?
00:10:04.180Like, what on earth are you talking about?
00:10:06.180So, first of all, there's been a game played, right?
00:10:09.820It is implausible that human beings could have designed a virus like this.
00:10:14.800And so by pretending that lab leak is synonymous with a designed virus, there were, for many months, a sort of false sense that people were alleging something, you know, at the remote end of science fiction.
00:10:28.360When, in fact, those of us who were pointing out that the evidence did, in fact, point towards a laboratory leak, were not making that claim at all.
00:10:36.280Our point was there are things that we accomplish in the lab that we cannot say how they will look in advance.
00:10:46.500We harness evolution in the laboratory to design things that we would not know beforehand were going to work.
00:10:52.840So, for example, the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 is spectacularly well designed to infect human tissue.
00:11:01.860But if you took the sort of state-of-the-art knowledge before SARS-CoV-2 was known in the world, we would not have predicted if you showed somebody the sequence that it would have been a highly effective pathogen.
00:11:16.600And the question is, did scientists train an ancestral virus to infect humans in the laboratory by effectively forcing it to jump from one creature to the next, possibly ferrets, possibly humanized mice, or possibly the cells of human airway?
00:11:34.120All of these things are laboratory platforms that can be used to teach a virus evolutionarily how to accomplish jumping from one cell to the next or one individual to the next.
00:11:44.200And so the question is, we know that these experiments were being done.
00:11:50.660They were being done primarily in North Carolina in the Ralph Baric lab and in Wuhan in the Zhijeng Li lab.
00:11:59.780They are effectively Ralph Baric trained Zhijeng Li in these techniques.
00:12:05.400And these are the two primary places in the world where this work is done.
00:12:10.500So when the virus emerged in Wuhan, it immediately raised red flags for some of us.
00:12:16.900Now, in my case, I didn't know that there was a BSL-4 lab in Wuhan.
00:12:21.040And when I first looked, the story is this, Heather and I were in the Amazon working on the first draft of our upcoming book.
00:12:30.740And so we were completely out of contact with the world.
00:12:33.060I mean, literally no contact for a couple of weeks.
00:12:36.440And when we came out, we were in Ecuador and we emerged from the Amazon and we're on the river at the first place where one's phone can pick up just wisps of signal.
00:12:46.080And there was a story that's stuck out from all the rest.
00:12:51.040The story was that the first case of what was then called novel coronavirus was in Ecuador already.
00:12:57.860And we didn't we'd never heard of this.
00:13:01.940And initially I thought and I had as a graduate student, I studied bats.
00:13:06.780And so I looked at the story that was being distributed.
00:13:09.620And it said that a virus appears to have jumped from horseshoe bats, probably through the bushmeat trade at the Wuhan seafood market and is now spreading in a concerning way, even outside of China.
00:13:23.540And I looked at that and I looked at the papers in question and it all made sense to me.
00:13:30.120I explained that I had been a bat biologist and that the story made sense and that the bushmeat trade is indeed incredibly dangerous.
00:13:37.980It's probably the source of HIV, for example, and that it should be shut down.
00:13:43.180And I immediately got pushback from some of my followers who said, so you think it's a coincidence that there's a BSL4 lab studying these viruses in Wuhan?
00:14:09.760And so it was this curiouser and curiouser phenomenon.
00:14:14.200The deeper you dug, the more it looked anomalous that this virus had emerged in Wuhan at the location where such viruses were under manipulation.
00:14:37.980And the more you look for a way to reconcile it, the less sense it makes.
00:14:41.740And then Yuri Dagan did the first deep investigation into the genomics of SARS-CoV-2.
00:14:49.580And in fact, Yuri, much like many of us who ended up pushing the lab leak hypothesis into the public view, Yuri was essentially trying to reassure himself that this was not a laboratory leak and that those people who were saying it was were, you know, off the deep end.
00:15:11.520And the deeper he dug, the more he found that actually the genome sure looks like it might have been the product of laboratory experiments.
00:15:20.140And we now know from Tony Fauci's emails that a lot of the experts in the field, when they first looked at the genome, that was their first thought, too, including Christian Anderson, who has been one of the lead proponents of the idea that lab leak is pure conspiracy theory.
00:15:36.260And that those who are advancing it are out of their depth and that the genome could only have come from nature.
00:15:44.180He turns out privately to have thought that the genome that he was looking at was completely inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
00:15:50.580So anyway, there are multiple different kinds of evidence that point towards the lab.
00:16:01.200In other words, there are things that we could see that would alert us that a story had unfolded that we didn't know anything about that would explain how it got from nature to people.
00:16:10.860But the likelihood at this point is very, very low that it came from nature.
00:16:14.820And does that mean that the virus is more dangerous because it leaks from because it leaked from a lab?
00:16:20.960Because in my head as a layman, I think, have they genetically altered this virus?
00:16:25.240Does it make it more deadly, et cetera, et cetera?
00:16:27.900Do we know the long term effects of it?
00:16:35.080Next, most so there are innumerable viruses in nature that could, in principle, infect humans.
00:16:45.360The problem is in order for a virus to become pandemic in humans, it has to learn two tricks.
00:16:52.320A virus that jumps from a bat to a person, for example, needs to move from cell to cell in order to be able to create enough offspring viruses to be viable in the world.
00:17:05.580And those offspring viruses need to be produced in a way that causes them to be passed on.
00:17:12.560So it has to learn to infect a person and it has to learn to spread between people.
00:17:18.640Both of those are evolutionarily very difficult jobs.
00:17:22.740It's not that it doesn't happen, but the point is the likelihood of it happening.
00:17:26.660If you were to contact an animal in the wild and it was sick with a virus and that virus managed to get into your airway, the chances of it infecting a cell successfully and then infecting neighboring cells enough that there was a substantial population of viruses and then those viruses being capable of infecting someone else are almost zero.
00:17:49.700So, again, it can happen, but it requires some very rare things to to all go the same direction.
00:17:56.000So what we know in this case is that this virus is spectacularly well adapted to humans and actually very poorly adapted to bats.
00:18:06.200So it has done a lot of learning somewhere.
00:18:08.260And the thing that is most conspicuous about the evidence is that there is no hint that this virus learned to do what it does in the human population.
00:18:19.640At the point we first know about it in Wuhan, it is already a spectacularly capable virus.
00:18:25.740So can I interrupt you there just from a layman's point of view?
00:18:29.240Is it possible for a virus to be a crappy virus in bats and a hugely effective virus in humans just by chance or accident or whatever you might describe it?
00:20:49.860Oh, the question that you asked, Francis, was, is it possible for the virus to just simply have accidentally been good at infecting humans?
00:21:00.040And the point is, is it possible to take a bucket of mechanical parts, throw them out the window and have them assemble into a robot?
00:21:09.780And the answer is a philosopher could make a technical argument that it is possible, right?
00:21:15.640But it is not a meaningful probability.
00:21:19.760Now, this might be slightly higher than that.
00:21:21.640But what you would what you would get in every case that we've seen is a virus that had maybe unusually good ability to jump between species.
00:21:31.380It would initially have a very poor ability to jump between individuals of the new species, but it would have enough that selection could fix it.
00:21:40.420That's what you would expect in a natural spillover event.
00:21:42.800But that period in which natural selection fixed the virus and made it very good at jumping between individuals of a species that it did not initially inhabit, that would leave a signature.
00:21:53.780That signature would be in the world and we would find it and we have no evidence of it.
00:21:58.380What we have is a virus that was so incredibly well adapted at the point it first shows up in humans that it does very little evolve.
00:22:06.340It just simply takes off across the globe.
00:22:21.120That's why the Wuhan lab looks to be such a likely explanation.
00:22:25.920And you say it's a likely explanation, Brett.
00:22:29.220To me, this sounds like something out of the realms of science fiction.
00:22:33.160You know, a manipulated virus is leaked out into the world, creates a pandemic.
00:22:37.600If it's, as you say, has been manipulated and, you know, created in a lab, as it were, I'm using layman's language and I realize these might be technically incoherent, etc., etc.
00:22:51.860But does that mean that it somehow it could be more deadly?
00:22:55.620It could be more it's far more infectious.
00:22:57.980We don't know what the long time implications of this virus are.
00:23:05.700And this is part of the problem is that the let's assume that everybody is on the up and up with respect to why they were working on these viruses.
00:23:14.700OK, I think we had a group of scientists who really were terrified that a spillover event was going to cause a tremendous human pandemic that would be devastating.
00:23:23.040And they were racing against the clock to prevent it.
00:23:30.780But let's imagine that that was just simply what they were thinking.
00:23:34.320And let's imagine that maybe they took humanized mice, ferrets, airway tissue, and they passaged a virus through these things in order to enhance its infectivity of humans.
00:23:46.220Part of the problem is they are making a puzzle for the virus to evolutionarily solve that is not exactly like nature.
00:23:57.120So imagine for a second that this virus, you know, got into a wild population of weasels.
00:24:06.400Well, in order to spread from one weasel to the next, it has to leave those weasels healthy enough to go about and encounter each other.
00:24:34.940So, for example, dengue, yellow fever, malaria, which are spread by a mosquito, they can knock you flat.
00:24:41.720And in fact, it might be a good thing to knock you flat because if you're knocked flat and you can't even swat a mosquito away, you might be more likely to transmit them.
00:24:48.240But for something like a coronavirus, it does not want to debilitate its host because debilitating its host reduces the chances it will spread.
00:24:58.140That's very different if you've got a cage full of ferrets, right?
00:25:03.300A cage full of ferrets that can't get away from each other.
00:25:06.460So one of the things that I think is likely to have happened here is that we made a much worse virus from the point of view of the damage it does to the body, because the damage that it did in the lab, if that's where it came from, wasn't critical in the story of how it spread from one creature to the next.
00:25:38.560It's not an especially fatal disease, but it is an extremely destructive disease and an extremely transmissible disease.
00:25:46.200And my feeling from very early on was we have a limited amount of time to drive this virus extinct and that if we don't, it's going to become a permanent fellow traveler of humans.
00:25:59.320And that will be a an unmeasurable tragedy, which I think we still don't know whether we're we're stuck with it.
00:26:07.200But because of the way we've mishandled the treatment and prevention of COVID, it's a strong possibility that we won't be able to rid ourselves of it.
00:26:15.260So what you're talking about, essentially, is every every winter we have, like with the flu, we have a wave of of this virus.
00:26:22.080But unlike flu, it leaves lasting damage in many of the people that it infects.
00:26:26.780Well, I also think we underrate the seriousness of flu.
00:26:29.720And I've been bothered for many years by the fact that I think we have a model in our heads that if you get better from a disease that you got away with it.
00:26:46.120And what we don't realize is that these things all have costs.
00:26:49.100They destroy tissue and, you know, they rob you of future life and they cause you to age faster.
00:26:54.820Um, so anyway, I regard the flu as serious, but this is much more serious.
00:26:59.260Some of the kinds of damage, the number of tissues involved, um, is, um, particularly troubling.
00:27:05.700And yes, it could become, uh, permanent.
00:27:09.480It could, you know, it will probably have some seasonality to it on the basis that our behavior is so seasonal, uh, that, you know, it will likely,
00:27:19.500even if it didn't have any seasonality built into it, the simple fact that we are outdoors more when it's warm in the, you know,
00:27:27.680in the temperate zones and that it doesn't seem to transmit outdoors will give it a seasonal signature.
00:27:33.820Um, but yeah, it could become a permanent, uh, a permanent pathogen of people.
00:27:39.520And that will be a spectacular tragedy, um, all the greater if it has come from, uh, a laboratory and is a self-inflicted wound.
00:27:47.480Brett, let me try and summarize, uh, very quickly some of the things you've said and do correct me at any point if I,
00:28:43.980Well, so let me point us to yesterday's New York times.
00:28:47.740So the New York times has been, uh, screwing the pooch on this story from the beginning.
00:28:53.760Uh, there are occasional glimmers of hope like, um, Brett Stevens recent column, but, uh, yesterday,
00:29:02.140yesterday, the New York times ran an extraordinary, uh, piece on an interview with Xi Zhang Li, uh, where the reporter almost preposterously claims she just phoned up Xi and the phone was answered.
00:29:19.060And, uh, uh, anyway, it's a remarkable piece and it doesn't really hold together as plausible, but it does participate in this very broad scale attempt to regain control of the narrative, uh, in the aftermath of, uh, of Nicholas Wade's piece, which seemed to cause the world to wake up to what was going on in the lab league story.
00:29:44.700Um, but the piece basically says that Xi Zhang Li is very upset, uh, that the world is, uh, looking at her with suspicion and that she can't produce the evidence because there is no evidence of something that didn't happen, which is something she has been saying for a long time.
00:30:04.600But of course she is a citizen of China.
00:30:11.780So there's a question about what this even is other than just a sort of formal statement.
00:30:16.360Yes, this didn't come from the Wuhan lab, which we've heard many, many, many times and does not square with the evidence.
00:30:22.260But here's, here's the point I want to make.
00:30:23.860The New York Times has not put together that their attempt to resurrect the idea that this did not come from the Wuhan lab leads you to an even worse possibility, which has to remain on the table, right?
00:30:38.720But the evidence that this came from a lab is substantial and it comes in numerous different forms.
00:30:46.260That does not go away if it didn't come from the Wuhan lab.
00:30:51.400Let's say that the Wuhan lab threw open its doors.
00:31:10.040Because the next most likely hypothesis, and I want your listeners to understand this, I am not saying that I think this happened.
00:31:18.820I am saying there is no evidence for this.
00:31:21.220But if we discover that the Wuhan lab is in fact innocent and the virus still appears to have been the product of laboratory activity, then the question is, who released it in Wuhan and why?
00:31:33.340And the obvious answer would be so that people would assume it came from the Wuhan lab, right?
00:31:41.700But if the New York Times and others are so sure that Xi Zhengli is innocent because she says she is, and we can get an investigation that can establish that in one way or another, the next most likely thing becomes it was some other lab in Wuhan was the cover story.
00:31:56.340Brett, the reason I'm asking this, if I temporarily put my tinfoil hat on and take a puff on my imaginary spliff here, is, I mean, it's a virus that's killing primarily old people in a world that feels very overpopulated to a lot of people.
00:32:13.740Well, it's not deadly enough to, you know, certainly one can imagine, I mean, one can imagine that some diabolical force might have decided that it wanted fewer people on planet Earth.
00:32:28.100But this is not a especially good virus from that perspective.
00:32:34.460It doesn't kill enough people and the people it kills are more often towards the end of their lives.
00:32:42.420So it doesn't look like an effective weapon in and of itself.
00:32:46.940Now, if you put on the tinfoil hat and pass the spleef there, thanks very much.
00:32:53.100It could be useful as a disruptive agent.
00:32:58.940Or it could be useful if others did not have a remedy for it, but you knew of one.
00:33:59.900And I went through and I gave probabilities for each of these things based on whether there was any evidence for them, based on how many different facts that are not an evidence would have to be true in order for it to be right.
00:34:12.120And basically, the point is, you can't knock the idea of it came from some other lab and was released in Wuhan so that Wuhan would be blamed for it.
00:34:21.660You can't knock that off completely because the whole point of such a thing would be to leave a false impression.
00:34:28.200On the other hand, the thing that really sticks out to me is the appearance of a massive cover up of what was going on in the Wuhan lab, which would not have occurred if the Wuhan lab was innocent.
00:34:44.240In other words, why go around and behave like a very guilty lab if you are, in fact, an innocent lab?
00:34:49.660Because the whole key at that point would be, look, you know, I know how this looks.
00:35:03.600That would have been the right approach.
00:35:05.000And, of course, there are things about the the government of China that might be inconsistent with that kind of openness.
00:35:11.080But nonetheless, if they are an innocent lab, they have behaved in exactly the opposite way, including renaming samples in a way that is against scientific protocol, deleting databases that might have contained exculpatory evidence.
00:35:26.420The whole thing looks like the behavior of guilty people who know what happened and wish to evade blame.
00:35:36.460So I think, you know, could it be that this was dual purpose research inside the Wuhan lab, that it was partly about weapons and it was partly about pandemics?
00:36:00.240And the most likely lab for it to have been released from was the lab in Wuhan.
00:36:05.720Brett, there's a question that I really want to ask.
00:36:08.580And it's a it's a tinfoil hat question in a way, but it just feels more and more.
00:36:15.060How can I put this pertinent as we go on?
00:36:17.780I see governments becoming ever more stringent with lockdown, particularly in the UK.
00:36:22.180Yeah, at the same time, we get we get told that, you know, it's it's a virus that is, you know, not particularly dangerous, dangerous to young people.
00:36:31.900It feels at times that we're not being told the truth about this virus and the impact it's having on the body.
00:36:39.600Is that a tinfoil hat question or am I asking something particularly valid?
00:36:45.920Well, first of all, I don't know how we all should be dealing with the question of tinfoil hat questions, right?
00:36:57.620At some level, we've been frightened off of talking about collusion, even though every human being should be aware that collusion is a very common feature of civilization that doesn't you know, most hypotheses of collusion are definitely going to be false.
00:37:16.420However, there's an awful lot of collusion in the world.
00:37:19.880And the the idea that we should be timid at all about asking the question about collusion when there is anomalous behavior and obvious lying, we shouldn't be embarrassed about it at all.
00:37:32.640And in fact, the right tools to use when collusion is the question are scientific tools.
00:37:37.060So what I would say is there's a reason and I was nearly alone in this.
00:37:42.800There's there's a reason that I was quite inflexible about the idea that the only right way to refer to this was the lab leak hypothesis and that the word theory was in and of itself a problem.
00:37:56.760Because, you know, if you think about evolutionary theory, we call evolutionary theory because it is the presumed right answer based on a tremendous amount of work.
00:38:07.940Right. So to call this a lab leak theory is an error to call it.
00:38:11.700A hypothesis tells you exactly what the rules of engagement are, what the legitimate tools are, what the standards of evidence are.
00:38:17.620And so my feeling is we should address all of these questions of collusion with that same toolkit.
00:38:23.120That's the right way to do it. And it doesn't involve putting on a tinfoil hat.
00:38:31.600At a level that is almost impossible to fathom, and that's one of the things about the entire story of covid, really.
00:38:41.080Right. And this starts, I see the lab leak hypothesis as one leg of a three legged stool of places where the very same people are trying to control what it is we are allowed to discuss.
00:38:55.480They are trying to shape a narrative that a small amount of investigation reveals is nonsense.
00:39:00.400And we have to figure out how, given that all of our institutions seem to be participants in this lie, whether they know that they're lying or not, we have to figure out how to make sense of what we are facing and plan for how we are going to escape it with the minimal amount of damage.
00:39:20.860We're going to have to figure out how to do that at the moment, going around the institutions.
00:39:25.060The institutions are simply an obstacle to civilization's well-being and even knowing what's taking place.
00:39:34.640I mean, that's not exactly the answer that I wanted. I'm going to be honest with you.
00:39:55.740No. So that being the case, why is it that big tech, all of these particular, you know, institutions have decided what is and what isn't acceptable?
00:40:11.460At one point, we I mean, we could still get kicked off, but we could still have a strike against our channel for this particular interview.
00:40:19.060Why is it all of a sudden that big tech has deemed it acceptable that we can have this conversation now, whereas two months down the line, it was deemed that it was unacceptable two months ago?
00:40:29.140Well, I think the way to understand this is to keep multiple conversations in mind simultaneously.
00:40:39.380So it is now perfectly acceptable anywhere you want to have a proper conversation about the lab leak hypothesis.
00:40:48.460As you point out, that was not true several months back.
00:40:51.860And what changed was not the evidence.
00:40:56.340It is not that some piece of evidence emerged that caused people to wake up.
00:41:03.180And for those of us who have been demonized as conspiracy theorists for saying what most people now regard as self-evident, the the whole thing is rather strange.
00:41:15.500It's like we against the odds managed to turn the heat up high enough on the garbage story that this obviously came from nature and anybody who thinks otherwise is crazy.
00:42:00.800This is for months. There has been clear nonsense being distributed as if as if it were scientific consensus and fact based on scientific work.
00:42:12.440And then eventually the the contradiction became so glaring that whoever was trying to maintain it decided to back off.
00:42:20.700Not all the way. It's not like they've come clean.
00:42:23.120It's not like they've admitted that a laboratory leak is the most likely explanation, which it clearly is.
00:42:28.260That what they've done is they've decided to adjust the story so that the contradictions are less obvious and then to staunch the bleeding by establishing a new false story, which we are now battling over.
00:43:14.700And the answer is, if you watched the lab leak thing happen, why are you not saying to yourself, gee, I wonder if the people who got the lab leak right.
00:43:25.320But we're revealing something about what the censorship is really for.
00:43:31.160Right. And whether or not where I see that censorship still taking place, there might be something that I desperately need to know about.
00:43:41.760Brett, do you think this is really the level of sophistication of the thinking about this?
00:43:46.860And this is a question that I really want to talk to you about.
00:43:49.420And we've we've been talking for nearly an hour and we haven't even got to the censorship part of it properly.
00:43:53.680But the the the idea that we live in a world now where essentially four people in hoodies in Silicon Valley control the entirety of the mass communication that occurs.
00:44:09.440And they are making decisions about what we can and can't talk about.
00:44:14.080And it just seems inconceivable to me that YouTube has a scientifically sufficiently educated team to even make this decision on a scientific basis.
00:44:23.180It seems far more likely to me that the big tech companies simply get a note from the presidential administration or from whoever, which says this is, you know, evil, lying propaganda that's undermining our efforts to tackle a deadly pandemic.
00:45:01.760I don't think it's it's for people in hoodies.
00:45:04.140In fact, one of the strong possibilities here is that we have a I don't want to call it artificially intelligent.
00:45:12.680It's more like artificially stupid set of algorithms that are on autopilot and that the folks in Silicon Valley who feel that they are in control actually would discover that they weren't if they tried to change course.
00:45:29.080You've got people staffing a process that is out of control.
00:45:33.380And, yes, it does seem to be taking direction from the CDC and the who and we don't know who else.
00:45:41.000But, you know, in the U.S. to have the government telling tech companies to silence individuals is a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment.
00:45:52.960I would say the defense of censorship has been these are private concerns and they have a right to have on their platform who they want and to not have others.
00:46:05.180Now, that's a very shaky defense, but it falls apart completely if what they are doing is taking directives from a government that is absolutely forbidden in our top amendment not to silence its citizens.
00:46:47.900Can't we just have this out in public and find out that I'm wrong because the evidence will go against me?
00:46:53.980And what does that say about our society, Brett, that we silence people who disagree with the narrative?
00:46:59.680It says that the it says that something that has its own incentives has taken over and that we are effectively passengers on a ship headed to a destination we do not know.
00:47:15.140Hmm. And Brett, I want to come back to the point about these decisions not being made scientifically, because I come from a family of scientists.
00:47:23.320Both my parents were biochemists in the Soviet Union.
00:47:27.060My dad actually worked on viruses and vaccines for the Soviet Union at the time.
00:47:31.900And yet in our family, conversations about alternative hypotheses, about various explanations for various events were not only regular.
00:47:40.580They were actively encouraged because I understood and I think my parents understood who were very kind of classically educated in science.
00:47:51.680It's it's a discussion and a debate and a series of investigations and experiments about what the truth may be, which produces a working theory that is the best theory available until the next one comes along.
00:48:03.660By a process of other people coming up with other quote unquote conspiracy theories about why that established theory is now wrong.
00:48:10.680So how have we got to a place where the more science advances and moves forward?
00:48:15.600We're now almost unable to discuss the next potential hypothesis that can explain something that is, as you say, currently unexplained.
00:48:24.460There are two two important answers here, I think.
00:48:28.820One is we are confused as a a as a society about what science is.
00:48:36.920Those of us who have dedicated our life to it and who are very serious about it in its detail understand that science is a process.
00:48:44.000It is not a collection of answers that we have arrived at through that process.
00:48:49.400It is not a social system of people and their beliefs.
00:48:52.740It is a process by which you find out where your perceptual biases have misled you and you find out what is true in spite of those biases.
00:49:02.620And the only way it can work is in a system that is open to entertaining all possibilities and then engaging in very serious falsification.
00:49:12.380So to have this kind of mind numbing follow the science, you know, hashtag mentality where people think that following the science is, you know, rebroadcasting the bullet points in the, you know, the press release is to invert science.
00:49:32.800That said, people, I think, especially in an emergency are prone to just want to know what they're supposed to do.
00:49:41.240And so anybody who wants to give false certainty about what the virus is, how it transmits, what one should do to protect themselves, anybody who wants to tell the right kind of story has a huge and willing audience.
00:49:55.680And those people, you know, people want to feel, for example, all right, we've just got to get ourselves to a vaccine.
00:50:04.220OK, vaccine showed up earlier than anybody was expecting.
00:50:27.520They don't want to hear about the fact that you have multiple novel phenomena being deployed at once in a process that has been shortened in order to bring it to the public more quickly.
00:50:38.220And that that means we know even less than we would know ordinarily.
00:51:10.820And this has been clear from the beginning.
00:51:12.280Heather and I have been shouting for much more than a year about the fact that this virus does not appear to transmit outdoors, that it does appear that people who have more vitamin D are better off than people who have less vitamin D, that you should go outdoors.
00:51:26.480You should not wear a mask, except in maybe very unusual circumstances outdoors.
00:51:31.280And that for the powers that be to tell us that effectively you need a mask at all times because the entire world is suddenly dangerous is wrong.
00:51:40.700More than 99 percent of the world is not dangerous because it's not inside a building or a car or an airplane.
00:51:48.120And for the last year and a half, we should have been using that fact to take a break from COVID and go talk about what's really going on outside in comparative safety.
00:52:32.440There are meetings in which people decide what to do and the reasons that they decide what we should do are not necessarily about our well-being.
00:52:44.820How do you know that those meetings are happening?
00:52:47.420Well, for one thing, you can detect the way that the lab leak hypothesis suddenly became mainstream.
00:52:54.940Involved a series of acknowledgements over the course of days.
00:53:02.920In other words, some email chain or Zoom call or meeting resulted in a conclusion, which is, okay, that story is not going to work.
00:53:14.780The new story is going to look like this.
00:53:16.940And so the people who were in on it started repositioning themselves.
00:53:21.160And in the course of two weeks, everything was different.
00:53:23.980And you had a whole new set of people championing the lab leak hypothesis who had been mum or had been demonizing it up until right before.
00:53:31.640And so the point is, you can detect that something unnatural has caused a shift in the narrative.
00:53:55.580And public health involves stories that are simple enough to get people to do what we need them to do, right?
00:54:02.280And the problem is that's in conflict with knowing what's actually happening.
00:54:05.480And it's especially dangerous to allow the thing that licenses itself to lie in order to get the public to do what it needs to do, to allow those lies to start interfering with scientific inquiry is especially dangerous.
00:54:19.140It's like, you know, putting on blinders before you run down the stairs.
00:54:46.680Or it could be somewhere in the middle.
00:54:48.140And if you're going to think about these issues, it's very important, I believe, to enter into them with the sense of, in a complex story like this, both things are going to be there.
00:55:00.100And the question is, what's the ratio, right?
00:55:03.140Is this mostly a story of collusion or is this mostly a story of emergence or is it divided between them in some, you know, haphazard fashion?
00:55:11.080The thing that I find, you know, we talk about this.
00:55:17.380The thing that I find very worrying is that when I speak to most people, they want an end to this.
00:55:39.700I said back in probably it would have been February of 2020, we're never going back to normal.
00:55:47.520I don't think we're ever going back to normal.
00:55:49.020Doesn't mean I don't think we could drive COVID extinct.
00:55:51.440In fact, what I have come to understand recently is that probably we could have driven COVID extinct months ago and that we are not doing it for reasons that are mysterious.
00:56:05.340You would imagine that everybody given the opportunity to drive COVID to extinction would be interested in doing that.
00:56:12.620And that were that were there a question about whether that was really possible.
00:56:17.560And I believe honest brokers who have looked at all the information reasonable people could disagree over whether or not it is possible to drive COVID to extinction with the tools we presently have in short order.
00:56:30.340But if you even think that that's possible and the tools are the right ones to bring to bear whether or not we're stuck with COVID, then you should certainly bring them to bear.
00:56:40.840And our failure to do that is utterly alarming.
00:56:45.940I really cannot emphasize enough how strange our behavior is in light of the tools at our disposal.
00:56:52.500And Brett, I take it that if I ask you what those tools are, you're going to give me an answer that will get us banned from YouTube.
00:57:21.340And the fact is, look, I'm probably going to lose my channel over this.
00:57:24.380But from what I've seen, if it takes losing my channel in order to make the point about what we're doing wrong, then so be it, even though my channel is the bulk of my family's income.
00:57:35.160So I understand that not everybody's in that position.
00:57:38.700But I'll tell you what the difficulty is for us.
00:57:40.840And I actually think it's important for us to discuss this.
00:57:43.060The difficulty for us is that we are not scientists.
00:57:45.800And so the stuff that, and the reason we wanted to have this conversation with you is we know you, we've met you, like we both consider you a friend and we trust that you wouldn't be doing what you're doing if there wasn't a good reason for it.
00:57:59.000But nonetheless, we don't have the ability to independently verify the stuff that you're talking about.
00:58:05.040So we're delighted that you've joined us.
00:58:07.260And, you know, you're right to call us out to some extent.
00:58:09.420I don't want to be sitting here going, bro, you can't talk about this where you can, I don't.
00:58:14.660No, no, I don't, I don't even, I don't even know.
00:58:32.340So I'm not going to put you guys in danger.
00:58:34.720I understand what you're protecting and I agree with you that my responsibility here is far greater than yours because I am in a position to look at the evidence and evaluate it with at least some of the right tools.
00:58:47.660And I'm in contact with people who have the other tools and the picture is quite clear to me in a way I wouldn't expect it to be clear to you.
00:58:53.760But I would point out that there are two questions on the table.
00:58:57.620There are a series of topics that are scientific and technical in nature and there's the censorship issue, which is not.
00:59:03.500And the point is the technical ones require the censorship one to be solved.
00:59:09.180And so my concern is that a legitimate fear that you're not in a position to evaluate the scientific questions is going to result in too much timidity on too many channels with respect to the censorship, censorship issue, which is clearly out of control.
00:59:26.260For them to come after me when I've had clinicians on who have saved many people from COVID, people who have actually innovated the current standard of care, people who are important players in the story of how we have medically addressed COVID are saying there's something that we're not doing and there's no good reason for it.
01:00:20.820Voldemort is pretty unambiguously bad.
01:00:24.820You know, you have to be pretty postmodern to not see him as sort of a negative character.
01:00:30.400And so my sense is if we use that euphemism, that it gives the wrong impression about the things that we are not saying.
01:00:38.020And so I was going to suggest that maybe we could do something we could refer to the things that we can't talk about in a more sympathetic and appealing way.
01:00:49.300Like, you know, could we refer to the central tool that we are not using in the fight against COVID as Jodie Foster in the movie Contact or something like that?
01:01:00.880Could we refer to some of the other tools as maybe Sigourney Weaver in Alien?
01:01:06.500And for people who don't swing that way, could we refer to the other tools that we're not using as Matt Damon in The Born Under a Bad Sign?
01:01:16.900Is there some way that we could make these things approachable so that we could discuss them?
01:01:22.140I think the best thing to do is maybe for you before we go to the Q&A is for you to tell people who you've had the conversations with and they can go and find that information.
01:01:32.640Sure. So the conversations that I think are most salient are I had a conversation that has now been removed by YouTube with Pierre Corey, Pierre Corey of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance,
01:01:49.460which are a group of doctors that got together when COVID began in order to figure out how you treat these patients who had this brand new disease.
01:01:57.440And they worked very hard to figure out what worked, what didn't work.
01:02:02.180They followed the evidence and they have settled on some alarmingly good treatments that are now being hidden for reasons that are unfortunately becoming quite apparent, right?
01:02:16.360There are financial reasons that we are not using our best tools.
01:02:20.380Are there other reasons? I don't know, but the financial ones are clear enough.
01:02:23.820They can be demonstrated pretty easily.
01:02:25.640So I had Pierre on and it was a great conversation.
01:02:33.160I should point out they also, and I think as shocking as it is that they removed a conversation between a biologist and a doctor about a pandemic and its potential treatment.
01:02:46.520They also removed Pierre Corey's congressional testimony.
01:02:50.360He testified in front of the Senate on the very same topic and YouTube removed it.
01:03:16.700He goes to, we go and do whatever we do on YouTube.
01:03:20.520He goes to work and saves people and he testified to Congress and it was extremely popular and it was widely circulating and YouTube took it down.
01:03:31.440Now, my claim is even if he had been a crank, a crank testifying in front of Congress is something the public needs to be able to see.
01:03:40.140There is no explanation for why YouTube would deem itself in a position to remove such a thing.
01:03:47.540And I can tell you, I've looked at the evidence and the evidence is high quality.
01:03:53.100There are meta-analyses that have been done that make it clear that even if you have complaints about the size of the various studies, when you compile the evidence, the signal is unambiguous.
01:04:02.460And so, anyway, that's one of the conversations.
01:04:04.380The other conversation was one I had more recently with Steve Kirsch.
01:04:09.780Steve Kirsch is the inventor of the optical mouse and he has done research on the impacts of the COVID vaccines.
01:04:23.380He has done research on the impact, the medical impact of the COVID-19 vaccines.
01:04:28.320And in that conversation, we were with Robert Malone, who is literally the inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology that is at the core of most of these vaccines.
01:04:41.040So we had a conversation, a three-way conversation.
01:04:43.960It is still up about the nature of these vaccines.
01:04:47.640And I only wish I could give you a summary of it, but people should look for that conversation on the Dark Horse podcast channel.
01:04:58.460If they want to see the conversation that YouTube removed between Pierre Corey and me, the FLCCC, that's the frontline critical COVID critical care alliance website, has the podcast still up on BitChute.
01:05:17.640And it is also available as audio on all of the usual podcast apps.
01:05:24.100And so one thing I would say, if you're interested in the censorship issue, then whether or not you are inclined to entertain these descriptions of heterodox thinking surrounding vaccination and other COVID treatments, you should certainly take the following to heart.
01:05:46.660If the censors are going to lose, if the censors are going to lose, their censorship has to fail.
01:05:51.960When somebody censors something that appears to be important, whether it's congressional testimony of a frontline COVID doctor, whether it's an evolutionary biologist talking to the inventor of a vaccine technology, when something is censored, you should probably take extra interest in it.
01:06:09.860Right. What is it? I am not supposed to hear. And you may find that the censors are right, that certain content isn't any good.
01:06:17.780Now, I wouldn't advise that they censor it, but it may be that what you find when you scratch the surface is, yes, there's something compromised about this discussion.
01:06:25.500It is not informative. Or you may find that it's very informative and that some force does not want you to know the content because it has interests that run in some other direction.
01:06:34.160And I would just invite people to look at these conversations and judge for themselves.
01:06:39.100And it occurs to me that our lack of a pair, as you gently put it, Brett, is also a bit of a test case because we have deliberately stayed away from the one thing your video with Pierre was banned for.
01:06:52.360And so it would be interesting whether they feel the need to censor a reference to a conversation that's now been deleted and to see how far they're willing to go in that process.
01:07:02.960Well, my sense, having looked at this, is that you're probably safe from YouTube's hammer if you are speaking obliquely and not making claims, but simply referring to the fact that claims have been made somewhere else and inviting people to look at those things.
01:07:23.000I, of course, don't know. But the important thing is that when somebody makes a decision like this, the important thing is that it actually amplifies rather than tamps down the investigation into the question.
01:07:42.600Right. The fact that something is being censored shouldn't convince you that it's true.
01:07:47.460But the fact that something is being censored should convince you that somebody doesn't want you to hear this.
01:07:53.660And then you can quickly check and figure out whether they're acting in your interest.
01:07:57.740And in this case, I believe it is utterly unambiguous.
01:08:01.420They are acting in someone else's interest.
01:08:04.200And on that rather upbeat note, we are going to cut to a commercial break and we'll be back in around three to four minutes.
01:08:12.600And we'll be facing your questions to Brett.
01:08:16.660So see you in three to four minutes, guys.
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01:09:22.480Hey, Constantine, do you love Trigonometry?
01:11:44.620There's something conspicuous about it not transmitting at all outdoors, it seems, or almost never.
01:11:51.020And there are really two interpretations.
01:11:52.740I think it is highly likely that that is the result that this virus adapted to a laboratory environment, which is obviously the sort of indoor of indoors, and that that is a signature of something.
01:12:04.700The question is, as a bat virus, how would it have normally transmitted?
01:12:11.360And my guess is that in general, the bats in question, these horseshoe bats, are forest-dwelling bats that would not be collected in large numbers in the foraging environment.
01:12:26.600So the place where the virus would have been most likely to transmit between them would have been inside a roost like a cave.
01:12:34.060Is a cave more like an indoor environment or an outdoor environment?
01:12:38.480But I would say my guess is when this is all over and we know the answer, it will probably turn out that the inability of the virus to transmit itself almost ever in the outdoor environment has something to do with laboratory origin.
01:12:50.860But it is possible that it is the result of the nature of the bat roosting environment where the virus would transmit under normalcy.
01:12:59.800Just as a follow-up from me, Brett, do we have any scientific idea of why the virus is so ineffective as transmitting itself outside?
01:13:23.340So the other factor is what I would call effective volume.
01:13:28.720This virus is very sensitive because of the way it transmits by effectively saturating the air with particles that float, some of them for a very long time.
01:13:39.420The virus is very sensitive to how much air there is, that is to say, how long it takes to saturate, how much flow there is, and therefore how quickly it is distributed, and basically things like aridity.
01:13:57.660So my point would be, if you're in a car with an Uber driver who has COVID, that's a very tiny effective volume, and it will saturate very quickly.
01:14:09.480And the likelihood that you will get it in spite of the fact that you're wearing a mask is quite high, right?
01:14:13.880If you open the windows of that car, its effective volume jumps.
01:14:18.960If it's standing at a stoplight, it jumps a lot.
01:14:21.780If it's moving down the highway, it jumps astronomically.
01:14:24.800So the effective volume is the question, and basically effective volume goes to infinity as you go outside.
01:14:30.400So it is these two things that seem to be working in tandem that make the virus so difficult to transmit in an outdoor environment.
01:15:04.800There's clearly something about – you know, I hate to use these terms, and it's in fact gotten me in trouble before,
01:15:13.540but there is something about Trump derangement syndrome that actually turns out not just to be a funny punchline.
01:15:21.740Trump derangement syndrome has made it impossible for us to think analytically.
01:15:26.260That is to say, I am stunned by the degree to which journalists have settled on the story that they could not possibly have been expected to see through the natural origin story
01:15:38.460because Trump had said some things that suggested he thought the origin wasn't natural.
01:15:43.160In what universe do you give anyone the power to get you not to look into something by them embracing it, right?
01:15:50.020If you hand your enemy that capacity, the ability to dissuade you from investigating something by simply embracing it, they own you.
01:15:58.180So I don't know what it is that happened to people.
01:16:00.640I don't – you know, if Trump lied every time he opened his mouth, that would not mean that whatever came out of his mouth was the opposite of true.
01:16:09.940It would mean there was no information in it, right?
01:16:14.040If you decide that Trump is simply a non-source of information because everything is a lie,
01:16:20.820you don't embrace the opposite of what he thinks.
01:16:24.080You just take it as non-information and you move on from there.
01:16:27.120And if people had done that, they would have found that the lab leak hypothesis was the most probable from very early in 2020.
01:16:33.800And, Brett, doesn't that also mean that you can't trust the mainstream media in that case?
01:16:42.720Because if they're not being objective about what Trump is saying, then ultimately what are they not being objective about?
01:16:50.880And this is really my point is this, I think, is the best chance we're ever going to get to see this because you don't usually win these battles.
01:17:01.560We have, in a sense, a very limited sense, won the battle on the lab leak hypothesis.
01:17:07.700We have taken it from being demonized and stigmatized as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory and gotten it to the mainstream so that we are actually now at least beginning to have a conversation about what the evidence really does suggest.
01:17:20.660At the same time, we have not jumped that gap with several other stories related to COVID.
01:17:26.200And that gives us the opportunity to just simply take what we learned or should have learned in the lab leak case and apply it to these other stories.
01:17:34.600And what that says is, wow, the sources that you would just love to trust cannot be trusted.
01:17:54.340The people who told us for sure that we were crazy to worry about it coming from a lab behind the scenes looked at it and said to each other over email, you know what?
01:18:02.660This looks like it came from a lab, right?
01:18:05.940You shouldn't have to wait for the emails to come spilling out in order to get the sense that you need to look deeper.
01:18:10.720But then the ultimate question for people is, if I can't trust the mainstream media to be objective, if I can't trust these traditional people who I get my information from, then who can I trust?
01:18:43.200And when you get people who show their work and attempt to navigate the issue honestly, then you can check their track record over time, right?
01:18:53.560Still doesn't mean that they're right.
01:18:55.320But it's a process that allows you to figure out, you know, on balance, where should you put your trust and where shouldn't you?
01:19:02.720And, you know, the thing is, it would be wonderful if we had things like newspapers that accumulated people who were trustworthy to sort these things out for us so that we could go to them and find out, you know, what somebody with resources would discover if they went down some rabbit hole.
01:19:21.280Unfortunately, somehow in 2021, there are no such papers.
01:19:32.220None of the places that you would like to go to just figure out what smart people who are in a good position to see the evidence conclude.
01:19:40.680There's no institution that can do that job at this moment.
01:19:43.340And really, that's the biggest emergency we have.
01:19:47.400Brett, Nat is asking a question that actually I care about as well and I think is an important question to ask.
01:19:52.880One of the narratives here in the UK, I don't know what the situation is in America,
01:19:56.260is that everyone must take the vaccine because even if you as an individual are, let's say, a child or a young, healthy person who seems to have a lot less to fear from this virus,
01:20:10.140by not being vaccinated, you're creating the environment which is likely to cause more variants to come about.
01:20:17.880And he says, wouldn't a vaccinated environment produce greater selection or more mutation?
01:20:22.660And by the way, let me add a question on my own.
01:20:26.420Because one of the narratives we had at the beginning of this virus emerging was that we needed to mutate more and more so that it can become less lethal.
01:20:34.040Well, the question of it evolving to become less lethal effectively assumes a natural origin.
01:20:43.540And once you discover that this is not a natural origin, the natural rules don't apply.
01:20:47.420So how it will evolve is an open question.
01:20:50.320So I would say, yes, for the moment, variants are bad because to the extent that people who have had COVID or have had the vaccine are immune to something,
01:20:59.760it's to the initial variant and that will decay over time.
01:21:03.060And I think one of the vulnerabilities of these vaccines, even if these vaccines worked exactly as we had hoped, which they do not,
01:21:11.840but if the vaccines worked exactly as we had hoped, then they are still very narrowly focused on the spike protein.
01:21:20.120And that means that that is an intense evolutionary pressure for the spike protein to evolve so as to become invisible to the immune system.
01:22:09.820Now, if the vaccines were in fact safe, that would be a different question, right?
01:22:17.140If there were no cost that we could detect in young people of having the vaccines,
01:22:22.060then we could raise the question of whether or not the risk that there was something we didn't know downstream was worth exposing them to in order to protect older,
01:22:52.340These things one cannot establish on the basis of a very noisy system of reporting exactly where they are from.
01:23:00.580But the point is anybody should be able to look at what is taking place and know that we don't know enough about the consequences of vaccinating people with these vaccines to expose children to it.
01:23:15.660And if you say to yourself, well, I differ, you know, COVID is serious enough and, you know, a human life is precious no matter what age it is.
01:23:23.320And we should we should, you know, the risk of the vaccines is small compared to the risk of COVID.
01:23:28.780If that's what you think, then you got to ask yourself this question.
01:23:32.740Why on earth are we vaccinating people who had COVID?
01:23:48.440It doesn't get us any closer to herd immunity.
01:23:50.660So there is something in the environment that is hell bent on vaccinating people, whether or not it makes sense to do so.
01:23:57.460And the proof of that is in the fact that we are vaccinating people who have already had COVID and therefore are already effectively vaccinated.
01:24:40.840My development as a kid and as a young adult set me in motion to look behind the scenes.
01:24:49.000And what happens when you do that is you do discover that there's an awful lot of cover story and an awful lot of ugly process behind the veil.
01:24:58.900Now, on the public health front, I would say the most important developmental experience was my experience as a graduate student when I started looking into the evolution of telomeres, senescence, and cancer.
01:25:14.480And what I found was that there is a flaw in our model mice that results in them being terrifically prone to cancer and terrifically resistant to toxins.
01:25:26.720And that was alarming to me because we use those animals in drug safety testing.
01:25:34.120And so I tried to raise the alarm and the bell wouldn't ring.
01:25:39.200I was unable to call the attention of the professional public to this giant hazard that our mice were predisposed to tell us that toxic drugs were safe and that this would explain things like the Vioxx phenomenon, the Seldane phenomenon, Fen-Phen, Gleevec.
01:26:00.520A whole range of drugs have shown themselves to be very dangerous when we thought they were comparatively safe.
01:26:06.980And all of this is easily explained by the fact that the mice that we use to detect toxicity are actually prone to resist it.
01:26:15.500But in any case, once you've seen the system refuse to engage such a hazard, it wakes you up and one loses their naivete rather quickly.
01:26:26.940Brett, first of all, Oksana has messaged in with a PayPal just saying how much she appreciates everything you're doing and thanking you for it.
01:26:36.260But also, we had a lot of questions about the role of the World Health Organization in all of this.
01:26:42.240So what do you make of – because some of the stuff that has come out from that particular institution over the last year and a bit has just been mind-boggling, starting from no human-to-human transmission all the way through to all sorts of other stuff.
01:27:00.940At one point, they were saying lockdowns are essential.
01:27:03.440And I think at another point, they were saying lockdowns are a temporary measure that shouldn't be used to – just completely contradictory stuff over a long period of time.
01:27:13.040What do you make of the role of the World Health Organization in all of this?
01:27:17.440And how should we see that institution in the light of everything that's been happening?
01:27:22.460I would say the central issue of our day is capture.
01:27:28.760And unfortunately, capture has become synonymous with a narrow version called regulatory capture.
01:27:36.360So regulatory capture involves a corporation or an industry gaining control over the regulators that are supposed to dictate the limits of what it can do.
01:27:46.120But that is a small version of something that has a much larger form.
01:27:53.500And I would say the signal is very strong that things like the WHO, the CDC, the major tech platforms, the universities, the journals, the newspapers, these things have been captured.
01:28:09.300And their capture renders them unreliable.
01:28:12.800Now, that's a very frightening fact to have all of those things captured.
01:28:15.300And the way in which they were captured, I think, is not understood by anyone.
01:28:19.720I think there are many different mechanisms afoot.
01:28:21.760And frankly, we may be up against evolution itself.
01:28:25.180It may be that capture evolves and has taken over each of these things in course.
01:28:30.220And that has resulted in an environment in which they're all untrustworthy.
01:28:36.160But yeah, I've looked at the WHO over the course of the COVID pandemic.
01:28:39.360And I am constantly shocked by how it distributes utter nonsense as if it were a fact beyond criticism.
01:28:49.120And anybody who looks at the series of pronouncements that have come out of the WHO can tell something's wrong.
01:29:00.760But I want to get into it and maybe push back on something that you're talking about.
01:29:05.940Because you'll remember in our conversation with Jordan and Heather only last week, we talked about the fact that technological change has been so rapid.
01:29:14.820That many of the societal shifts that we now see and many of the other problems that we're now experiencing seem to be a product primarily of that more than anything else.
01:29:24.620Do you not think that given the fact that basically in the last 10, 15 years, we've invented an uber mega nuclear printing press, which is what social media, big tech really is,
01:29:38.480that there is some responsibility on these institutions to acknowledge the huge power that they've given to ordinary people who, some of whom, like you, are acting in good faith.
01:29:56.380You know, we had the example of David Icke making comments about the link between COVID and 5G.
01:30:01.420And then, bang, the next day, people are burning down 5G masks.
01:30:05.000That's a terrible thing to be happening, in my opinion.
01:30:07.640And so, look, I'm putting this as a sort of devil's advocate argument, but I do think it needs to be put.
01:30:14.580Do you not think there has to be some regulation of what is published, particularly in a heightened situation like this?
01:30:22.960You know, the analogy might be made with a wartime, in wartime broadcasting, wartime publication, et cetera, where there is some restriction for the greater good, if you like.
01:30:32.580With very few exceptions, I would say no.
01:30:38.300And the reason is not that I don't understand the hazard you're pointing to, or I don't think it's serious.
01:30:44.900But I think this is a simple question of net effect, right?
01:30:49.120Unfortunately, the novelty of the tech platforms and the way that they have created a new pattern of collective cognition, that is a very frightening and dangerous fact.
01:31:03.640We are now linked together in not only a global industrial system, but a global proto-mind of some kind.
01:31:15.920What I am saying is that a mind in which something has the power to regulate what can be considered, by whom, and in what way, that mind is much more dangerous than one in which anything can be considered.
01:31:29.640And ultimately, one hopes that the truth has power over the nonsense, right?
01:31:35.700The danger of creating the limitation is greater than the danger of the admittedly dangerous fictions that will circulate in that environment.
01:31:45.420We have to hope that that's true, because the other route involves a very predictable collapse of sense-making that, in the context of our industrial capacity, I think would certainly be fatal in short order.
01:32:02.920I'm talking about the ability to prevent processes from happening, right?
01:32:12.640We have many different existential threats that have not yet grown to a scale of being existential independently, but they are linked together in a way that puts us in great jeopardy.
01:32:26.220The problem is the profits to be made in each of these realms from generating these things is sufficient that there is an evolutionary pressure for those who want to engage in these processes because it enriches them to do so.
01:32:39.820They have a pressure to capture the entities that might raise the alarm about the hazard of what they're doing, right?
01:32:46.380We have to be able to raise the hazard, but if every industry is able to frustrate discussion of the danger that flows out of the new process it has just invented, then one of those processes is going to get us soon.
01:32:57.740And we've seen how many of these things now, right?
01:33:00.980We've seen the financial collapse of 2008.
01:33:03.640We've seen the Deepwater Horizon blowout.
01:33:05.920We've seen the Fukushima triple meltdown.
01:33:12.380We've seen the COVID-19, which it appears probably came from the lab in Wuhan.
01:33:18.420All of these things have the same signature.
01:33:21.580Some industry is doing something that the public only finds out about once the accident has happened, right?
01:33:27.980Now, so far, all of these things, including COVID-19, have been much better than they might have been.
01:33:35.320One of these days, we're going to get unlucky, and the magnitude of the accident is going to be so great, there won't be any recovering.
01:33:41.500So it is of the utmost importance that humanity figures out how to have the discussions about which processes are safe enough for us to engage in, what is the way in which we will engage in them so that when something goes wrong, we can reverse course.
01:33:56.940We have to have that conversation, and it's never going to happen if there's a mechanism there that is allowed to regulate what we can talk about, and it is available to be captured by those with a financial incentive to do so.
01:34:07.140But what you're saying, if I can rephrase it, is we essentially now have an established system of anti-transparency.
01:34:16.440We have a system of anti-transparency where any conversation, there's a price point for shutting down a conversation.
01:34:24.620And if you just go industry by industry, right, each of the industries that is engaged in some process with the potential for a catastrophe where the costs will be borne by humanity, not by the corporation.
01:34:36.080In each of those cases, there is an incentive to use the levers that may have been erected nobly to prevent dangerous conversations, to prevent people from burning down 5G towers or whatever it is.
01:34:46.300There's going to be an incentive to capture those mechanisms and make sure that they do not talk about the hazards and the public's interest.
01:34:55.980We've seen it too many times already, and we have to get away from the idea that we are going to solve the problem by increasing the quality of speech by purging the stuff that we all agree is wrong.
01:35:06.720You can't do that because the problem, nobody on earth has ever figured out how you sort the vast array of quackery and fringe nonsense from the heterodoxy that travels in the same layer.
01:35:25.180Every great idea starts as a minority of one, and the problem is, if you had a magic formula for spotting which idea over in the fringe layer was actually the next great idea, and so you could throw out all of the nonsense ideas that are over there, you'd be king, right?
01:35:46.100There's no mechanism for sorting the really important heterodoxy that nobody believes yet but will all believe down the road from the nonsense that nobody reasonable is ever going to believe because it really is garbage, right?
01:35:56.840You have to wait for heterodoxy to either demonstrate its power or go away, and so we can't improve the quality of the conversation unless what you want to do is say, well, we've got enough progress already, so heterodoxy is done, and if you do that, we're finished as a species.
01:36:16.520We have to get out of this by innovating our way to a sustainable existence on planet Earth, so you can't freeze progress here, and if you can't freeze progress here, you can't shut down heterodoxy by shutting down every idea that isn't certified by the CDC.
01:36:30.660Brett, isn't this a symptom of late-stage capitalism in which you have four companies that have a stranglehold on the market, and therefore, because they have no competitors, they can do pretty much as they please?
01:36:45.240No, not really, because what it is, you know, what we call late-stage capitalism, and of course, I'm not entirely sure what we mean by that, but it's effectively an instantiation of a natural process, right?
01:37:03.000It's an evolutionary environment in which there are niches, and we discover them with the evolution of strategies.
01:37:09.480And so those corporations, as angry as I am at them for attempting, for the hubris involved in thinking that they can regulate the conversation into a better place, they are responding to evolutionary pressures.
01:37:25.860They are like a liquid filling a volume, right?
01:37:32.080They are creatures filling a niche, and if we want better corporations, if we want them to stand down and stop attempting to regulate discussion, we need to create the environment where the niches are such that that process doesn't evolve.
01:37:51.080So late-stage capitalism is another way of saying, you know, a political and economic version of nature's experiment, and yeah, it's red in tooth and claw, and if we don't want it to be, we have to create an environment where something better evolves.
01:38:54.600To some of us, they are very interesting.
01:38:56.280But in effect, when Ralph Baric came out in Science Magazine as co-author on an article saying that the lab leak hypothesis needed to be investigated,
01:39:08.620here you have the world's unambiguous leader, the person who has innovated more of the techniques in question,
01:39:18.900a person who knows more about what is possible and what it would look like than anyone else on Earth,
01:39:23.940telling you, I have looked at this genome.
01:39:26.540I've seen everything you've seen up to the point this paper is published.
01:39:29.520There is nothing in this sequence that is incompatible with the idea of a laboratory origin.
01:39:34.660And in fact, a laboratory origin is likely enough that it must be investigated, right?
01:39:38.940You couldn't ask for a clearer signal that what is in the genome is, at the very least, consistent with a laboratory origin
01:39:47.540and taken in conjunction with the emails that we've now seen exchanged by Christian Anderson and Anthony Fauci.
01:39:57.400Many have looked at this and they have seen the signature of a laboratory origin, that there are different techniques involved.
01:40:06.320We're talking about, in some cases, like the fern cleavage site, potentially, in fact, very likely to be an insert that was placed in the genome.
01:40:15.160And then we see evidence of serial passage.
01:40:18.600So, I don't want to engage the argument specifically, but I don't think there's any reason for people to be focused on it
01:40:26.020because what we have finally, after a year and a half of fighting over this, is a at least clear acknowledgement
01:40:33.860that what is in that genome is consistent with laboratory origin
01:40:38.740and that those who know the most believe we have to look in that direction.