Interesting Times, A survival Guide: Bret Speaks with Chris Martenson Live
Bret and Chris discuss medical tyranny, the rapidly unravelling public health narrative, and the upcoming anti-mandate march on Washington. Find Chris Martenson on Twitter: @chrismartenson Find Chris at Peak Prosperity: https://www.peakprosperity.com/*****Find Bret Weinstein on Twitter: @BretWeinstein, and on Patreon. Please subscribe to this channel for more long form content like this, and subscribe to the clips channel @DarkHorse Podcast Clips for short clips of all our podc...
Hey folks, welcome to this very special mashup edition of Peak Prosperity and the Dark Horse podcast.
This is my good friend Chris Martinson.
I should say Dr. Chris Martinson.
And for those of you who don't know me, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is an experiment that we are running here.
We are streaming to both of our channels.
Chris and I have come to know each other over recent months, and it is one of those delightful discoveries.
I won't speak for him, but I will say for me, To find someone else who has arrived in a similar position having traveled a very different path is an extremely rewarding and fascinating experience.
Chris and I have talked a great deal not in public and the last time we did We were left with the strong impression that probably people would benefit from hearing what two people who see a similar picture surrounding the collapse of the public health narrative and the coming storm, what we sound like to each other as we attempt to make sense of the world and figure out what it is we're supposed to do now.
So, I don't know if I should be welcoming you, Chris, or what, since we're both on each other's channel, but it's good to see you, buddy.
Hey Chris, I'm being told that there is some technical problem that is preventing people from hearing you, and I'm thinking that's a bad thing.
Right.
For one thing, it makes me sound like I'm talking to myself, which is an indication of possibly organic disorder, which I don't have, but anyway, they don't know that.
So we're going to try to fix this.
Let me consult with Zach here and see what's up.
Excellent.
All right.
Well, Chris, this puts us in a terribly awkward situation because you said a bunch of lovely and incredibly cogent things, and maybe repeating them would be a good idea.
Well, I'd be happy to repeat them.
It's fabulous to be here with you, and I know that you and I have had some incredibly good conversations that I found gratifying, heartwarming, reassuring, because, as you mentioned, You and I have walked very different paths, and we've arrived at a similar sort of set of conclusions.
And that means a lot to me, because if 100 people walk a single path and get somewhere, that's not as relevant to me as if three people using different tools, different things, different approaches come and have that consilience of coming towards that point that makes sense.
So I found in this whole COVID experience, there aren't that many people who've managed to Keep their head about them, be able to shift with the data as it's been unfolding, to not only understand what's happening with COVID itself, but maybe to understand that there's something else working here.
And so, yeah, our conversations have been fantastic, and I'm really excited to be bringing this out to more people, because I think it's a valuable conversation to be had in public.
It is a very valuable conversation.
I know that you and I are also both hoping that, I don't know, I don't want to describe it as a team, but the people who are listening to each of our channels and coming to make sense of the world through them will recognize that they are a great deal stronger than they had understood.
Because there are so many more of us, and the fact that your work does not show up frequently inside the circles that I travel is a fascinating fact to me.
I can't imagine why a perspective that is as similar wouldn't be ever present.
And, you know, so I've had to tune into you actively.
I'm hoping that my listeners will realize what that implies.
I mean, the most obvious thing Is that they should most certainly go and they should follow you on Twitter, they should find your YouTube channel, and they should discover that there's a large community of people who has a similar perspective that was built with different tools.
And, you know, that couldn't possibly be better news.
So I hope they will do that and I hope your listeners will come find me and come find my listeners and that That big bump in capacity will be something we benefit from from here on out.
This is my theme for 2022.
It's bringing bringing these different groups together as much as possible.
And I don't have a good explanation for why you're we have sort of like bumped around in different territory without more overlap.
Is this is it just That's just how it is.
Is is there some active sort of sheepdogging by the big tech media to keep people away from each other?
I mean, I certainly have some evidence that that I I don't have the same easy free run in social media that say the Kardashians do.
But I don't want to ascribe at all to that.
So I don't know.
It's kind of been a it's an interesting phenomenon.
It's a head-scratcher.
All right, so let's just say what we're shooting for here is to kind of carve out a new mode where we talk between our two different but aligned perspectives and we get That's the most productive thing that we can do if we can spot things that we haven't come to agreement on.
If this works, I think at some level, it is your channel being peak prosperity, mine being dark horse, it will be an exercise.
In Dark Prosperity, and if we screw it up, I feel certain it will be Peak Horse.
Well, let's go with Dark Prosperity!
Yeah, yeah, I'm definitely shooting for the Dark Prosperity.
Alright, so let's get to some of the heart of the matter here, so people know really what the topic of discussion is.
I think we are in, almost undeniably, suddenly a new phase with respect to COVID.
Omicron threw a curveball to the stewards of our perspective.
And they fumbled it.
All right, I've just mixed sports metaphors, but let's go with it.
They did not switch gears and recognize that even if they were inclined to continue deploying the exact same prescription that they had been on for Delta and the previous variants, that the public was going to detect that as an error, because Omicron certainly demands a different approach.
So their The fact that the approach that they had deployed over Delta and the other variants made no sense whatsoever was suddenly validated by the fact that they made even less sense against Omicron.
And this has forced a lot of pivoting.
It has forced a lot of acknowledgement of things that you and I and our friends have been saying for many months.
And it has effectively caused the narrative that they had so carefully constructed to begin to collapse.
And we now see things like mandates being withdrawn around the world.
We see it being done at the level of corporations that say we're no longer going to enforce this on our employees.
We see nations backing away from them.
And that's all very good news.
But again, I think a lot of people who have been paying attention and maybe have paid a high price for being on the unpopular side of this discussion are thinking, well, thank God it's finally over.
And my sense is something is over, but something else is about to begin.
And I think people need to see it clearly so it doesn't catch them off guard.
Do you see something similar?
Unfortunately, I do.
You know, I guess my background where I started with this kind of a long origin story, but it really began with with the first foray into Iraq.
And that was back in 2002, I guess.
So there was all these ideas of weapons of mass destruction.
And I guess that's the second one.
The first one was a poppy bush.
But I mean, this was this was that that piece under George W. And I had Gone into because I'm this kind of guy.
I went into the data and I found out this doesn't make sense.
You know, they couldn't possibly have what Colin Powell was saying they had.
And so I went out and organized a protest march in Mystic, Connecticut, where I was living at the time.
And I quit.
And we had, I think, 17 million people around the world rose up and said, let's not do this.
Let's not go to war.
And the agenda just went right along anyway, as if People didn't matter, as if voices didn't matter, as if, you know, none of it mattered.
And so I see the same strains today, right?
It's the same playbook, in essence, where there's an agenda and it's out of step with the narrative.
So the narrative, Omicron just shredded the COVID narrative, just broke it, right?
Beautifully just smashed it to smithereens.
And just yesterday, I think it was Rochelle Walensky of the CDC was saying, Well, we really need to do is pivot and be sure that everybody understands that everybody needs a booster.
Right.
I don't know how to make sense of of that, because what she's doing is she's clinging to an agenda that's clearly broken.
And a narrative that was really failing all on its own anyway, even without Omicron, but it's really, really failing under Omicron.
And so it speaks to this idea of what's next that you brought up, which is that my experience watching The Iraq War unfold was that these people, when they prove to be wrong, they never they never go, oops, are bad.
Now, where was the we got the mission accomplished?
We never got that.
Hey, we're so sorry.
It turns out there never were weapons of mass destruction.
Here's some consequences for the people who architected that bald face lie.
Right.
That didn't happen.
Instead, we just rolled from one thing to the next.
So I agree with you.
This once this agenda narrative is over, I think what we have to be alert for is the next one that they're going to I mean, we always trip over this sort of thing, because there clearly is a they, but the they has components, right?
There's clearly, you know, you can see in the emails that there was a they orchestrating the Lab League cover-up, right?
And it involved many of the names who were prominent in the phony public face that was put forward.
There's also a they that involves lots of surrogates in the media, many of whom probably have no idea what they're doing and are just, you know, ambitious in the negative sense of that term, where they are vying to curry favor with power and to get ahead.
And then there is a vast brigade Of useful idiots and I would say in Walensky's case, I have the sense that she does not know where she is and what she is doing.
She is a true believer in something or someone.
And it's breathtaking to watch her hold on as the narrative crumbles around her.
It's clearly... it's not a good look, I gotta say.
It does not look like a wise person trying to scramble for higher ground.
It looks like a person who was dispensable to whatever the they is.
Yeah, I would agree.
I don't put her up on the top shelf of Venus.
She's clearly a useful front for it, but not even all that good at her job.
So I actually cringe and I feel bad for her from time to time because I think it's clear she's way out of her depth.
I don't know that she really understands the game that she's a pawn in, so she plays it badly and with not a lot of sophistication.
You know, the next shelf up, certainly we've got Fauci.
He's a very skilled player of whatever the game is.
But even there, I'm not sure that we're looking at the true face of the they in this story.
It feels... The horsepower that was involved to get this whole narrative off the ground was breathtaking to me.
I'm a very deep student of this.
When I watched every single European country, with the exception of Sweden, which is an odd story here, I watched Israel, I watched Canada, I watched New Zealand, Canada, United States all fall into lockstep around this one narrative.
That's power, right?
Even, even as India was like, nah, no thanks, we'll do it kind of different for most of it, not Kerala, but most of India was like, yeah, we got this.
Bangladesh, Africa, Indonesia, like everybody was kind of doing it a little different with stunning success in some of those locales.
And we just kept going.
Across a lot of different cultures.
I don't think of Europe as one, so... Well, let me... This is not something I've talked about with anybody.
It's just sort of a thought that was running around in my head.
There's some sort of narrative, clearly not organic, that was constructed that its purpose was to lead people to a particular set of behaviors and beliefs.
Now that many people I think have very clearly mistakenly understood it to be noble lies, but I don't believe it could be.
I don't believe it could possibly be as far off the mark as it is if it was a mistake.
But what I see is a kind of proximity effect.
It's like Fauci is a megaphone broadcasting this message, and the closer you are to Fauci, the more distorted your civilization has been around COVID.
So it's like we are the epicenter of confusion, and Europe is very thoroughly confused, right?
But as you get farther from Fauci, you begin to see experiments in reason, and you see them in the oddest places.
You do see them You see them in Africa, you see them in Indonesia, you see them in Japan, right?
You do see them in Mexico, you see them in South America, and that is interesting because in some sense what it means is whatever this game is, it's hurting us worst because the they is Closest to us it has the best access to our minds and it is unhooked reason most effectively right here, right?
And that is an amazing fact right like once again, we're gonna end up with worse access I mean just the simple fact that Medications that we know work have been made scarce and in other parts of the world It was hard to make them scarce and less important that they be made scarce And so people actually have them right that is an amazing inversion of Of the usual, this is the opposite of privilege is what it is.
Yeah, that's right.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
No, that's a great point.
So, um, you know, I, I've, uh, I just tested positive for COVID a few days ago.
Um, I've had some symptoms.
I've had this conversation with people who said, so if it gets bad, are you going to the hospital?
I'm like, no, no.
Like you want to talk about an inversion of privilege.
I'm actually first time in my life.
legit scared to go to the hospital because I checked my local hospital is all about rim desivir and ventilators.
They are they are stuck in something that the most third world nation you could find wouldn't dream of doing because they have access to a better route of they know the data all says that is the wrong thing to do.
And it's still being done.
And plus, if I get pulled into that system, my partner Evie can't come with me.
There's nobody there to advocate for me.
You get you get sucked into this place where you have no rights anymore, not even the right to determine what treatments you want.
It's bizarre.
And I'm not sure if it's always been that way or if covid made it worse or something.
Something new arose, but that's that's it's legitimate Brett.
This is a weird place for me to be I would not go to the hospital It'd be my last right I have and this is one of these places.
We've never had this conversation I have exactly the same sense is that at this moment?
I mean this is a weird thing to say right the hospital has a tremendous number of very important tools it can deploy on your behalf But I actually think we are worse off in that context.
I am probably in a better position if I come down Let's say it's COVID, right?
And I get a bad case and I'm in jeopardy.
I am probably better off with Pierre Cory on the phone telling me what I should do than a hospital full of tools and experts going by the narrative.
And that's a frightening place to have landed.
That is not a good sign.
That is a sign things are desperately off.
And, I mean, it's also, you know, I thought a lot because various people, I guess most recently, it's been, wow, I'm blanking on his name, which is probably a good idea, Howard Stern, right?
Howard Stern was mouthing off about how the unvaccinated should not be granted access to hospitals.
And, you know, there was a part of me that months ago was thinking, all right, I'll take that deal, right?
If I am making a decision to forego the vaccine, I am willing to endure the consequences.
But then I realized something.
You know what?
I'm not in a generous mood about this point.
And the reason is, but you robbed me of all of the tools that I would use.
If you want to make a deal with me that says, look, you can do whatever you want, but you can't make use of our hospital if our hospital Is advising you to take a vaccine that you won't.
That's a deal I would make.
But then, I get access to all of the other stuff, right?
I get access to the things that have been deployed around the world that we know work.
The things that doctors have figured out how to deploy that they are saving patients at an amazing rate.
I get access to those things?
Yeah, I won't go to the hospital for COVID for sure.
Now, what you and I are talking about is actually probably I don't want to go to the hospital anyway because they might give me remdesivir, right?
That's counterproductive.
So, yeah.
And actually, I screwed up.
It was me entirely.
If people don't know who you are, where your expertise comes from, could you tell them a little bit about your background?
Sure.
I got a PhD from the Department of Pathology, where the subspecialty was toxicology.
Actually, I went into a toxicology program, but they don't have a Department of Toxicology at Duke.
housed under pathology.
So my PhD from Duke is in pathology.
And the way that program works is the first two years is with all the medical students, and then years three and four, they put the white coats and the stethoscopes on and I went into the lab.
So I was doing surgical pathology, histology, things like that.
So got a standard pathology training and then did a couple of years of postdoc, very basic cell biological work in the department of cell biology after that.
Neurotoxicology is where I started to focus down.
So, a lot of time behind a microscope looking at, you know, live cells, which is the most magic thing ever.
We could have a conversation about that sometime.
Then, after that experience, I went and got a, they have a one-year MBA program at Cornell, so I got an MBA, and then I went off and worked.
First job out of that was actually at Pfizer in the Department of Corporate Finance down in Groton, Connecticut.
Then one thing led to another.
Later, I was vice president of a company called SAIC, doing basically body shopping, consulting back into the pharma business I just left.
And then after that, I left and started a blog.
So nobody should ask me for career advice.
I'm just wrong guy.
But that blog was my mission.
And I was talking about the housing bubble at that point in time.
I had just come across peak oil as a concept.
I started to work things, and I really took a full three-year sabbatical and created something called The Crash Course, which is now 28 video chapters that connect economy, energy, environment, sort of at a systems level, very high level.
So I'm not an expert in any one of those, but I know enough about each to have this synthesized view that says, we need to look at all of this in context if we want to have a chance of understanding where the puck is going to be in this story.
Yeah, where the puck is it?
Unfortunately, it's on some really thin ice right now.
Yeah, so all right, this is great, and this also gives a window into why you and I find so much analogy between our perspectives, which is being a generalist is different, and doing synthesis is different, and one of the things that has absolutely unhooked reason from most of the intelligentsia is that they actually think
That there is a method to go to a place called the literature and look at something they call the data and derive from it a description of what is taking place.
And the answer is, wouldn't it be lovely if that were true?
But it isn't, right?
This is a complex dynamic phenomenon that is being analyzed by a corrupt and in many ways feeble academic structure.
And what it comes up with Doesn't add up so what you need is a toolkit that allows you to borrow from various different disciplines borrow from various different vantage points to be able to put together the best explanation for the phenomena that you can be pretty certain are actually real.
Right?
That's a whole different game than sitting down at, you know, some data and drawing a conclusion.
It's not that it doesn't involve data, but you have to understand how to weight it, you have to understand what experiment was actually run, and therefore what the data actually imply.
And this is not something that people are in general used to.
So most people have punted.
And what they've done is they've said, here's a voice that sounds good to me.
I'm just going to go with what they said.
Right?
And if it's Eric Topol, you're cooked.
Right?
You're just cooked.
You just signed up for nonsense.
In any case, very interesting that you have these specialties.
I'm especially delighted to hear things like toxicology and pathology in there, right?
These are windows in that very few people have, right?
Especially toxicology.
You lived through the madness surrounding claims about ivermectin.
As a toxicologist who was in a position to say what the reality there was.
So, you know, it's an amazing toolkit and the generalist approach is absolutely crushing the narrow specialist, what did the data say approach in this pandemic?
You know, we are the sum of our trainings to a point.
I mean, I was born a certain way.
I think that's part of it.
But the pathology training, You know, it's all statistics.
Somebody says, hey, my uncle smokes four packs a day.
Is he going to get lung cancer?
And, you know, the answer is maybe.
Right.
And here's some odds.
And so we were very statistically trained.
But more than that, when you have a slice of tissue and you're trying to determine the degree of dysplasia or, you know, the abnormal changes in cells, like is it fully cancerous?
There's a whole sweep and series of changes.
And it's very subjective if you were.
I mean, I know they've got machines that are starting to hone in on it, getting it better.
But when I was there, Like you had to really use your best interpretation and there were associated changes.
It wasn't just the cells themselves that you're looking at.
It was the ones around them.
It took a lot of, it's sort of educated guesswork as it were.
And the more, more experience you have with it, the better you get.
But what I learned from it was that there's no, there's no right or wrong.
There's no crisp line ever that says, cancerous, not cancerous, you know, there's this whole gradation and then there's a different, even if it is cancerous, there's a whole gradation of how it's going to present and how malignant it's going to be and all of that.
So it's, I think through all of that and, and my background as a scientist, you know, I was in the biological sciences.
You can run in about six months, you can go from the, what's known to the edge of what's known in any particular branch of biology and start doing really cool research.
Right at the frontier.
And there are very few people at the frontier who have the right toolkit for it.
But I want to correct you.
I'm going to correct you in a way that I feel certain you're going to agree with, right?
You said it's educated guesswork, and I know that that calls up exactly the wrong image in people's minds, because what it really is, is something like, A process, an iterated process of self-educating guesswork.
Right?
The point is, somebody who does this well walks into a situation in which they know they are not experts.
And they begin to try to make sense of patterns that they can detect.
And the point is, OK, here's what I think I see.
Here's what would be true if I am correct.
And then I'm going to go look.
And I'm going to do an honest job of saying, well, did I get it?
And the point is, the extent that you keep predicting things, then your model is pretty good.
At the point your model stops predicting things, it isn't.
And then the question is, well, what would have to be true for my model to be failing in this case?
Oh.
Now I see it.
And so, you know, every cancer is its own phenomenon, as you know better than I do.
A forest is a chaotic environment, right?
In order to make sense of any such phenomenon, you have to have this toolkit in which the point is you know that you walk in with near total ignorance.
And the way you walk out with something much better than the near total ignorance that you walked in with is an iterated process of educating yourself.
And if you have a taste for it, you know, it's a tremendous amount of fun.
If you don't know where to start, then it's like, well, I don't like any of this chaos.
Maybe I'll go look at a paper and it will tell me what to think, you know, and that's just not a functional mode.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
And and to get back to to the I think something we share is is.
I have I read a lot of books.
I have a special shelf where the only books on that shelf, there's something they all share, and that is they changed how I thought.
Right.
I just I know at the minute I read it doesn't have to be the whole book.
In the middle of a perfect paragraph, but it fundamentally changed how I saw the world.
That's what I value most highly.
I love having my mind changed and opened.
Uh, and so that's just an attribute.
I don't know if I was born with it or it was a nurture thing.
I don't know, but it's certainly a, that's like, I love, I loved what I was able to learn through COVID.
I was offended by the people who are trying to shut down that open inquiry.
And I was really, I loved all the people I found who were the open, you know, explorers out there.
You're among them.
And Pierre Corey, you mentioned a name, but we found out in this whole thing, like who was legit, honestly curious and open-minded and that is amazing to me because I trust you now.
I trust Pierre.
I have about 20 people sort of in that bucket.
Some of them I've never met.
I was supposed to meet him this weekend in DC, but COVID.
But I trust them more than people I've known my whole life in other circumstances.
So it's been a, that's been a good thing.
Oh, it's been a great thing, right?
No, I mean, it's more than ample compensation for the tragedy of all of the people that you wanted to be good at this who turned out to be terrible and then got vicious, right?
So, anyway, all of the wonderful people that we have discovered who are actually have a taste for this, are good at it, are, you know, open to being wrong and fixing their model because that's the point.
That's been a delightful discovery and I have described it to my viewers as an upgrade, a very painful upgrade process that happens anytime you run into a situation this charged because people will disappoint you right and left and then suddenly you'll learn about people you didn't know existed who are actually courageous and highly capable and it's like okay well yeah I'll make it that trade anytime right Disappoint me, go away.
And then I meet someone and I say, well, all right, I've just, you know, I've just picked up this person who was much more capable and frankly, somebody that if you land in a foxhole with them, you don't have to worry that they're going to panic.
Yeah.
Well, are we in a foxhole?
We're in a modern foxhole.
Yeah.
I absolutely, I absolutely believe this and most people just aren't up to it.
It's a pretty big stretch, right?
I mean, it's, it's to really, I wonder if I, if I even have my arms fully around exactly what's going on, but you know, so again, from my background as a person who's a biologist, fundamentally looking at whole system biology, meaning at least at this whole cell level is, is where a lot of my research was done.
I understand intimately the role of energy and resources and you know, you either, Remember to plate your cells out with appropriate levels of medium and glucose or you didn't, you know, and if you didn't, they would all ball up and get very simple and very unhappy looking.
And I understand where we are as a species in this story.
And so that's a frame I bring to this and I'm open to all the other ones too.
But my frame says we're at a really critical moment in our species history.
I think people are detecting that on many different levels, but of course you can't even open up the newspaper or online news source without finding out.
There's something not quite right with microplastics and where'd the fish go and what's up with the insects and can we really suck this aquifer down at 6% a year when it takes 10,000 years to recharge and on and on and on, right?
And from that, COVID then becomes the backdrop, which says, look, we couldn't even discuss ivermectin without losing the plot line.
How are we going to manage disappearing ecosystem services that we haven't even properly mapped yet, let alone begun to appreciate?
This is such a beautiful point, right?
If you are going to be bewildered by a campaign as transparent as the, I don't know, the great horse dewormer gunshot victim yes debacle if you're going to be fooled by that you know you're not going to get the question of pesticides and its implication right you're not going to be able to navigate the question of how does um you know a mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccine compare to a live attenuated virus you know
You just don't have the tools, right?
You're easily fooled.
And it's one thing to know that and to say, hey, look, I'm out.
It's another thing to think you do get it.
And we've been... I don't know.
We've been...
Quite buffeted by many, many people who pretended to have good tools and just didn't.
But I want to switch gears a little bit here.
And we have been, so far, talking kind of generally about where we're going.
You said you don't quite have your arms around where we are.
And I would say, actually, I think that this is sort of the primary entrance requirement to the adult discussion.
Right?
If you're really paying attention to what's going on, you know that you don't know where we are, right?
There are possibilities.
You may have a sense that it's this and not that.
You can say certain things aren't likely to be true.
But I don't know anybody, right?
The most informed people in the world who are not on the inside, Don't know what this is about and therefore don't know what it is that will be protected and obscured in this phase where we go from the public health narrative collapsing on the public health authorities to whatever they're going to do in the great scramble to come.
And I fear That because people have the sort of sense of relief that, you know, I mean, I don't know what you've seen.
You're out east.
You're in Massachusetts.
Is that right?
So I'm out here in Oregon, we're living physically very different existences among people who aren't connected.
What I'm watching is Omicron completely overwhelmed even the false impression that control was possible and it
caused everybody to kind of surrender and they just stopped taking COVID seriously and that was interesting and they frankly with Omicron it's probably the right approach for many reasons because a you're not going to control it with masks right you're not going to control it with masks boosters make less than no sense given the evidence of the vaccinated being so very vulnerable to contracting and transmitting Omicron
But, in any case, people just sort of... I think they breathed a sigh of relief and moved on.
And the problem is...
We are dealing with a self-inflicted wound.
COVID appears to be a self-inflicted wound of unprecedented scale, right?
Two years of turning the entire world upside down over a virus that appears to have been enhanced and then escaped.
Now, that is an amazing error to have made, and the costs will never be fully understood.
Right?
The costs are absolutely gigantic.
So, it stands to reason that our top priority ought to be figuring out exactly what happened and building the best protections we can to make sure nothing like this ever happens again, because frankly, as
Bad and unprecedented as it was it could have been worse so then we are left with the question of well, what should happen now and my Increasingly I am preoccupied with the way that those who did this are going to escape being Properly
um revealed and the reforms that are necessary will be avoided because of course this was whatever its fundamental nature This was the mother of all opportunities for certain people, right?
The amount of wealth that was generated on the back of COVID, the amount of power that was concentrated, the amount of progress that tyrants have made in getting us to surrender our rights and getting used to the idea that that's a normal thing to do, right?
These were spectacular changes and they are now going to do everything in their power To avoid us understanding what happened so that they can do it again.
And we must stop that.
But that involves recognizing where we are.
This is not the end.
It might be the end of COVID.
It might be that another variant pops up and returns us to some place or takes us someplace new.
Those are live possibilities.
You can tell me if you see reasons to think they aren't.
But, at the level of what happens to society, which frankly, I think you'll agree, is much more dangerous than what happens to us as a result of this particular virus, we are still in grave jeopardy and the game is only just beginning.
Thank you.
I love having this conversation.
It was May of 2020 when I put out a first video where I was like, this thing kind of looks like it came from a lab, right?
And I was using the genetic information on it, in particular the PRRA furin cleavage site.
I was like, that's, that's weird.
And I couldn't find any other nearby viruses that had that particular sequence, you know, so it had to have gotten it from somewhere.
And so there wasn't a molecular or biological or evolutionary explanation for it that made sense.
So you weigh the evidence and I was like, pretty sure this came from a lab, right?
So I was a conspiracy theorist for a full year in the press, and then somehow that story changed one day.
Then all of a sudden it was okay to talk about it.
And that is interesting watching the narrative control.
But I agree with you completely that if we don't not only find out how it arose and how it got to escape, not only find the people who were responsible for that and find out if they broke any laws or rules, right, if we don't do that, They've just learned, oh, we can get away with this.
And when people have no consequences and they learn they can get away with something, they'll do it again, particularly if they get to make trillions of dollars and, you know, secure vast new rights and powers and things like that.
So I think it's really troubling that my culture in the United States, that our press is, yeah, they sort of weekly sort of look at this lab leak thing, but they're not really on it.
It's like they don't have an interest in finding out why or how that might have happened.
And I think that's an error.
a big error, because it'll just happen again.
That's not a prediction in the sense that I'm trying to tell you something in the future that's uncertain.
That's like saying, if I let go of a hammer, it's going to fall to the ground.
I don't think it's an error.
And I don't want to describe it in overly deliberate terms, because I think a lot of this functions subconsciously, that people detect that there is something desired from them, and they do it, and it rewards them, and they don't exactly I don't really know why they were invited to do it.
But the whole idea that, you know, the horses are out of the barn, Why are we so concerned with the origin?
Yes, it's kind of interesting.
It would be nice if we knew someday what happened, but what does it change?
This is very wrong on two fronts.
I mean, for one thing, if it did come from a lab, and it seems almost certain that it did, we have a right to know the protocols that generated it, which might well tell us something useful about how to address it, and The idea that anybody has the right to say, no, you won't find anything interesting there is preposterous.
But what I really think is happening is that a lot of people who weren't ahead and who didn't suffer the stigma of saying, hey, this looks like a lab leak.
It's not making me happy to say it, but it looks like one.
People who didn't do that and people who said terrible things about folks like us who did, are signaling to power that effectively they're advertising a willingness to embrace amnesty for the lab leak.
Right?
I'm not going to go after this.
And the point is, I see a negotiation unfolding in the world at the moment.
And the negotiation involves people, you know, the public is going to want an explanation of how the public health authorities got it so wrong.
And so there's a scramble to fill that need.
But the point is the people who got this so wrong are connected to the most powerful forces in the world.
And so they get some say in who they have to confess to and how much they have to confess and what they want to do.
is confess enough that it is satisfying and not so much that anything changes.
And I really think that this is what happens next, right?
They are bargaining with the middle ground.
Those who got it wrong are going to move in the direction of right.
But the whole idea is to save the elite rent seekers who, at the very least, took merciless advantage of the situation from the reckoning that would be natural and from the reforms that would plug the leak.
So, So, yeah.
The lab leak is a good model because we won that battle, for the most part, early.
And we can say what happened, right?
There was a mad scramble amongst people who had gotten lab leak wrong to become the new voices of reason who acknowledged that there was a lab leak and were able to point to indications that they may have left that possibility open before, but anything was better than going to the people who said, actually, you have no idea how high the chances are and how much evidence there is And the fact that there is exactly zero evidence pointing in the other direction, and, you know, you ought to be thinking about this.
So, yeah, I see a kind of de facto negotiation, and I wish there was some way to describe it so that people did not hear it as the allegation of a smoke-filled room in which people are actually talking, because that's not the kind of negotiation it is, right?
It's an as-if negotiation.
You know, there's I agree with that.
I agree with that.
So there was a chart in a book that showed, and this was by Ralph Baric, and it showed, this is pre-COVID, but it showed all the things that we humans have been doing with coronaviruses.
And so the first time that we'd taken a chimera and taken a piece off of one and put it in and made it more infective in an animal model was 1998.
And there might have been earlier stuff, but that's the first publication on this chart.
And then there's like all these seminal things people are doing, including by 2002, Ralph Baric had figured out how to do the no-see-um inserts so that you could actually build an entire viral construct without anybody being able to detect that it had been through a lab.
He got a patent on that.
It was 2003 when SARS broke out.
So prior to SARS, we'd never had a pandemic coronavirus.
Prior to humans monkeying around trying to make them more infectious, we'd never had one.
So, my questioning about this whole thing goes back a long way now.
And so, then you watch the MERS thing come out, and you watch this thing come out, SARS-CoV-2.
It's clearly been manipulated.
And, you know, I have a whole story about Omicron, too, which looks even more manipulated.
It's pretty obvious.
So, I think we have to have that conversation, though.
I don't know that we ... It's pretty clear that whether people meant well, they had a white hat sort of a reason, they thought that this was going to advance knowledge so that we could learn things that would be important.
I think what's missing in that is the hubris has overshadowed this idea that even 30,000 tiny strings of letters, which we'll call the RNA code of this particular virus, is too complicated for us to understand or manage.
Like, it just did wildly complex things inside the human body when it got in there.
I don't know if you saw this, Brett, but there was a study that showed that not only is this 38 kilobits of information come forward and enter a cell and do all this stuff, but it has little proteins that it shuttles into the nucleus to turn certain genes on and off.
It's just so ridiculously complex, but there are people who think we can control that and learn from that and fiddle with that.
So in essence, what we're dealing with with SARS-CoV-2 now is humans as a species, we're having to adjust to A virus that didn't go through the normal, call it normal, pathways.
So it got a big sudden jump in evolution.
And that's not a normal condition.
So we're going to we're going to learn some things about this.
And I don't think we're over yet in learning some things.
There might be things we discover in three, four or five years, like real long haul covid.
We don't know.
We don't know.
And that's what bothers me is that these people who did this, Brett, they still are operating with that sort of hubris and impunity that says, well, even if it escaped, we can do better next time.
But I don't I think we're Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park, you know?
Yeah.
Or the fly.
It's like just because you can just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
So this is a battle that, I'm going to avoid ranting, but this is a battle that has been going on forever and that animated me when I was a graduate student, right?
Because the lab that I was in was actually a lab of effectively refugees from the rest of the biology department.
These are people who understood the power of selection.
And so, you know, the funny thing is I graduated having come from the entomology lab.
I'm not an entomologist.
I studied bats.
And most of the people in that lab under Dick Alexander didn't study bugs.
They studied dolphins and birds and every other thing, right?
And the reason was that that was the place where people who understood the power of selection had gathered because it wasn't all that hospitable anywhere else in the department, right?
The ecologists, by and large, didn't get it, right?
The cellular molecular people didn't get it.
And so the point is, look, You don't, you believe in the evolutionary story in the textbook, which is a feeble cartoon compared to the real thing, right?
The idea that you think you know anything about the virus that you've created when what you've really done is put something on the foothill of some mountain range you don't know anything about and what you do know is that it's got a program for climbing, right?
It's going to become something.
It's not under your control.
The question is what niche did you just bring it to?
And we can there's a perfectly good example of this.
Hawaii is a tropical landmass, right?
It's a tropical archipelago.
You would expect high biological diversity because tropical habitats tend to have high biological diversity, but it doesn't because it's so remote, right?
It's remote, and that means things don't get to Hawaii.
And so what's there are things that we're very good at crossing extremely long inhospitable distances.
Right?
So it's an interesting habitat.
Lots of unique things there, but it's not high diversity.
You can take almost any mainland creature there that finds it climatically hospitable, and the thing will take off, because you've solved the hard problem of getting to Hawaii by taking it there on an airplane, and now it's a better competitor than all the things that were adapted for getting to a place like Hawaii and persisting there.
So, the point is, we've introduced creatures.
We've introduced, you know, mongoose, for example.
You can't get rid of them, right?
What you've just done is solved an evolutionary problem that evolution couldn't solve, and then you've let evolution take it from there.
And this is a recipe for disaster.
The idea that you're going to create something in a lab and think that you're its master?
Come on!
This is natural selection.
It built you, right?
This is the most powerful process for, you know, upending plans that could conceivably exist, and you're just playing with fire.
And what's more, you're not playing with fire in the way that people used to play with fire, where they would blow themselves up.
You're talking about the whole world.
Somebody made an error.
In fact, in this case, people were wise enough to see it coming, and they tried to ban this research, and Anthony Fauci decided to override them.
Right?
That error, Anthony Fauci overriding a gain-of-function research ban, very likely resulted In a particular viral particle escaping off a particular lab bench into a particular human being and then COVID-19, right?
That is the capacity of selection to take a tiny error, right?
Literally a microscopic error and turn it into a global catastrophe.
That's the power of the process you're fucking with and If you don't respect it, you know, we're going to be facing this again and again because our power is only growing with respect to starting these things, to setting them in motion.
And, you know, it's such a terrible, terrible failure of wisdom.
I completely agree.
So yeah, rant on.
The older I get, the less I know.
And so I loved the evolution and Darwinism that I was taught in grad school.
And about five years out, I realized it was complete junk.
I'd been trained that Lamarck was wrong, and Darwin won, and this guy was an idiot, and this guy was super smart.
And then I came across this study that I had to read and check and recheck and check, and it blew my mind.
They'd been trying to look at up-regulation of nasal tissue, the receptors, and so what they were doing was they took male mice and they spritzed cherry scent into the cage, and they shocked them at the same time.
And as these stories often go, one day there was a Sharp graduate student who noted that they forgot to shock them, but they spritzed the cherry scent, and the mouse all acted with this PDSD, right?
Because they'd been habituated to associate the cherry scent with a painful shock.
Well, what they found was that the pups from the offspring of those male mice, when they bred them, would display that PDSD behavior upon exposure to the cherry scent, no shock.
And then that persisted through multiple generations.
So it means that our DNA has a way of taking experiences, saying, that sucked, let me help pass that on, coding it up and giving it to our offspring, right?
That's not what I learned.
evolution, right?
That means our DNA is in communication with the world.
Now we have this epigenetic and there's offspring of Auschwitz survivors who have more anxiety.
We've got the Dutch studies of the babies that were that were fasted while they were in utero gaining weight afterwards.
We understand now that our DNA is not this static thing.
It's busy in a call and response dynamical process with the world.
The complexity of that is not something I can even begin to think we have our arms around.
Oh, we don't.
And what's more, so I do think the epigenetic revolution is one of the reasons for hope in what is otherwise a desert of recent progress in evolutionary thinking.
But the problem is it was implied by many things we knew very well back when I was in college.
We didn't know what we were dealing with in terms of the mechanisms, but the point is development actually implies all of these mechanisms.
The very fact that you can take a genome and it can create hundreds of different cell types that are well organized into a coordinated organism And that the pattern involves those cells being able to count, you know, their progress from the zygote and being able to respond, as we know that they can, to different environmental cues during that process.
So for example, you know, a tadpole that ends up in a puddle that has other things, other meat to eat, develops one kind of dentition.
A tadpole of the same type that is left in a puddle that only has Vegetable matter develops different dentition.
This implies a system in which the genes are able to read the environment and alter their own expression, right?
It's all there.
And the problem is, if you took, back in the 80s, a what-do-the-data-say approach, and the point is, well, the data don't yet say what the epigenetic landscape is capable of.
But the point is, yes, but it has to be.
There's no way this could fail to exist.
And so you could either anticipate it and say, I don't know what that layer looks like, but there's a missing layer.
And, you know, people, I agree with what you said, except for Darwin did get it right.
And what I mean by this is Darwin was a generalist.
He was in some cases, a few cases, overly specific.
But in general, he did a good job of laying out the logic by which selection would function without being so specific that he is upended by history.
And so, in some sense, it's what happened later.
The discovery of DNA and its nature as the fundamental genetic storehouse caused a narrowing of focus where what happened is Darwin said something very general.
He didn't say there was going to be one mechanism, right?
But then at the point that we had this very compelling mechanism, it was like, ah, that's Darwin's mechanism.
And no one stopped to think maybe it's one of Darwin's mechanisms.
And so my sense is more and better Darwinism is the solution to the flaws of modern Darwinism.
I love it.
Oh, thanks, Ted.
Yeah, no, I guess it, you know, it had to have been the overlay, because I guess what I'm really reacting to is the overlay of saying, well, the way Darwin's evolution must work is there must be this random mutation.
It confers a set of attributes, and some of those are selected for, and some are selected against, but those never made sense to me, because I'm like, so ducklings, there was a random mutation where a duckling would freeze when a certain shape went overhead, and so that was the one that didn't get picked off, so it survived?
Like, it didn't make sense.
I think now it makes more sense to me that the duckling is like, oh man, that sucked, let me pass that on, right?
There's some more rapid, more elegant way of communicating.
But at any rate, I came up through molecular biology at a time when it was, here's DNA, it's in a string, stop codon, start codons, you know, and it codes out, and if you've got this mutation, you have sickle cell anemia, right?
It's like, it was very dry.
Now I understand it's a little more liquid.
Yeah, I mean the problem is that we write the the bio textbook in the same voice that we write the chemistry textbook.
And the fact is we're a lot farther along in chemistry.
We know more of what there is to know and we're really at the very beginning with biology.
And so what I tend to say is The story in the biology textbook about random mutations being selected, most of them being bad or neutral, the occasional one being good, that story isn't false.
It's true.
But that's the original thing that set the ball in motion.
We're looking at selection 10.0, where selection has done amazing things to enhance its own capacity.
Right?
And so if you use an understanding of Evolution 1.0 and you try to understand things that are unfolding in Evolution 10.0 space, you're just not going to get anywhere, right?
This is a very powerful process and I mean even the tools that we're using to have this discussion These are tools selection built to enhance the capacity of its own products to do jobs that the genes themselves couldn't do.
Right?
We, you know, people will swear to you as they're training you to think about evolution.
Evolution cannot look forward.
Really?
Well, can it build creatures that can look forward?
Because I think we are those creatures.
And if evolution can build creatures that look forward on its behalf, is it really fair to teach people that evolution can't look forward?
Because the truth is not exactly that.
It's more misleading than it is helpful.
So we're constantly stuck in that bind, and what you're saying, which I of course completely agree with, is that that stupid hubris that should have made somebody look foolish in a lab meeting actually resulted in us crashing the functional structures of civilization over what at best was, you know, an error.
A lab error.
Right?
That is an unacceptable cost-benefit ratio for such experiments, right?
We should not all be suffering from some, you know, naive person's attempt to do something on their lab bench that just so happened to, you know, walk out of the lab on their shoe or in their lung.
Yeah, yeah, and then it... So the thing I've been struggling with COVID wise is is the degree to which then that error was seized upon really quickly by some people who seemed almost quite ready for it.
We know they were right.
They were doing these event to a one trainings that people don't know what that is that they would bring together a bunch of interested parties who would talk about how would we manage a A viral outbreak across the globe, right?
And so, who do they bring in that room?
Well, you're not invited, I'm not invited, I don't think any scientists are in there.
It's like J&J executives, some people from the CIA, every major news media outlet, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you know, etc.
And they bring them in, and when they ran those events, what was startling to me, Brett was watching, that they never, I don't, I watched the whole thing and I didn't see them ever go, here's how we limit the loss of human life.
You know, there's this bad narrative that might get out and people are going to be spreading misinformation and they had sub teams and here's how we would control the narrative.
And it was really just all about how do we control this thing.
But back to our point, when you unleash a virus on the world like this, it is fundamentally an uncontrollable.
It's going to do things.
It's going to get out and do what it's going to do.
It's good.
Virus is gonna virus.
Right.
And it's done that.
It's made new variants.
It's it's it taught us that putting a leaky vaccine into a pandemic was a really bad idea, like your van den Bosch said it would be.
And on and on and on.
And we got thank goodness that Omicron came along.
We could have a different conversation about that.
But what's astonishing to me is how many people were gleefully anticipating this exact sort of an outbreak so that they could do the kinds of things they wanted to do, like covid passports and Shutting down sectors of the economy, right?
And getting us to think that it was in our interest to surrender our rights, that the key to accessing our rights was surrendering them, right?
These kinds of upside down bits of logic.
And, you know, I fear that one of the facets of the game that is about to unfold is interrupting the natural process of learning that people and societies go through.
What do you mean?
What I mean is, the lessons here are fairly obvious.
I mean, for one thing, if this, you know, let's imagine that this happened at a much smaller scale, or that something analogous happened at a much smaller scale, you know, a town, right?
And people had been very, very wrong, and they had been very, very convincing, and a disaster of one's size had been made much worse through their inaccuracy, right?
There would be a discussion, and the discussion would say, well, I don't know how you got it so wrong, and frankly, I don't know why I listen to you, but I do know that you're not the expert on this anymore.
Right?
Your advice caused us to harm ourselves.
You are now the last person we will go to for advice on these kinds of situations.
Right?
And those people that we went after, that we tried to silence because we thought that what they were doing... You told us that what those people were saying was dangerous to us, and that we needed to silence them, and we needed to punish them.
Right?
You were wrong.
And in fact, it turned out they were right.
So, believe it or not, I'm going to them next.
I'd like to know what they see.
Doesn't make them right, but it does mean that they have a toolkit that has proven out.
We are going to be prevented from learning that lesson.
We are going to be prevented from understanding, you know, effectively, as much as possible, we'll be driven to a muddle that does not produce the proper reaction to correct the process.
So exactly the thing that we were talking about earlier that makes a biologist smarter, Where you walk into a system you know nothing about, you take your best shot, you see what worked, what didn't, and your model that you carry around in your mind gets improved by, you know, by just simply actually the human desire to figure it out, right?
The human desire to figure it out says, damn, I thought that prediction was going to be right.
Why wasn't it?
You know, I want to be right next time, whatever it is.
That process would upgrade our thinking, but that's bad business.
This happened for a reason.
You and I don't know what it is.
Let's assume that it started with a well-intentioned but crazy research project that got out of hand, collapsed many of the functional structures of the world, and that the right thing to do now is to figure out, holy crap, what did we do wrong?
What's wrong in our granting process?
What's wrong in our governmental agencies?
What's wrong in the kinds of projects that exist?
What does dual use mean?
Should there be this dual-use argument, right?
You can study how to cure diseases with dangerous viruses as long as they also have some utility as weapons.
What?
None of this makes any sense.
So, I don't know whether there's any stopping the process that is about to recapture the narrative and steer it into some In effectual state, but I do think that this is something that we have to focus on because Everything is riding on this.
I mean you and I both have children, right?
They're going to have to have a planet that functions and the power to cause catastrophes like this is going to grow so our wisdom at how to prevent them from happening needs to as well and Even if, you know, this just freezes our knowledge in place, that's a disaster.
So, I don't know, we've got to get better at this, and we've got to get good at recognizing that there's a spectrum of possibilities about what actually happened here, right?
The story that you described there I think is probably at least partially true, where people, when they saw this thing emerge, they had plans already in place to allow them to capitalize on it.
To use it for things they wanted to do anyway, right?
For making tyrannical incursions into our rights, right?
They had that on their agenda and they needed a way to do it and suddenly, oh, COVID, that's it.
All right, let's do that.
So we need to recognize the possibilities.
And I think a good healthy dose of agnosticism about what has taken place is important because it may be actually that there's more to this than we know.
Yeah, the idea that you mentioned is about what kind of world are we leaving behind here for the kids?
Um, it's so I'm of an age where I remember what the world looked like when I was a boy.
Cause I was out, I was, I was called nature boy.
I was always outside and I delighted in just catching things.
And I didn't realize, to me, I just took it for granted, like this is the world I live in, right?
And I distinctly remember when my family's from, has a summer place, upstate New York, on a Finger Lake.
And I remember as a boy, literally being wonderfully frightened.
I love this kind of frightening.
When you would turn on the porch light, and if you came back later, the screen door would be covered with this terrifying array of things, right?
Giant walking sticks, huge staghorn beetles, big sphinx and luna moths, things banging in that you couldn't quite resolve.
And last five years, nothing.
You can leave the window open all night with a light on inside, and if you get one lonely moth, you're lucky now.
So that level of horrifying change, to me, Tells me that we don't just need to sort of like point out that Anthony Fauci is a bad guy, that what we need is, is if we're going to, if evolution, you know, if consciousness can come in and help redirect itself a little bit, we've got some growing up to do as a species.
Like COVID can be a wake up call, and I think it has been for many people, but I think it has to wake us up to something even bigger than a failure of the CDC to be an effective institution.
It has to wake us up to something bigger than Geez, can we get a couple of better candidates for president next time?
It's, it's, it's much bigger than that.
And so that's, I don't know how to get at that yet at this point in time, but, but that's really where I'm steering.
My efforts is using COVID as a means of reaching people who are ready to wake up and, and use our brains towards abundance and regeneration rather than just extraction depletion.
Um, and, and that's as close as I've gotten to it.
And I'm not remotely smart enough to know how to begin doing anything other than having the conversation and hoping people are attracted to that.
And that's what I see this year is about is we have to have that conversation because in my lifetime, I've seen the oceans have become almost sterile.
And I'm using that word very carefully compared to what they were when I was.
Yeah, I've seen exactly the same thing.
And this is, you know, it's funny, the folks on the center right, who we end up interacting with now, are correct about a good many things.
And this is one of the things I think they're way wrong about.
And I think we have to have that conversation with our natural partners on both Left and right so that they, so that we can upgrade our collective model.
And let me just be candid about your observation about the insects.
I've made exactly the same observation and I was a very creature-oriented kid too.
And so I played a lot in nature as much as possible and I caught creatures just like you.
And I remember a world in which a drive, a summer drive down the highway resulted in It's just an awful, very difficult to clean up mess on the windshield, right?
The number of insects that died on the windshield of your car was a real problem, right?
They were sticky and there were products that were sold, you know, you could read in a magazine products to get the goo off your windows because it wasn't an easy job.
But the point is the world has changed.
The oceans are so much less diverse than they once were, or maybe diverse is the wrong word, but there's so much less in them, right?
And the number of insects is way down and there are places you can go where you used to hike and see, you know, a diversity of birds.
You couldn't avoid seeing it and now you see nothing.
And here's the part I got wrong.
I would have said as a 20-year-old that if the collapse of the insect population was as severe as you and I both know it is, that that would have had catastrophic effects on agriculture, for example.
And I don't think it has.
I think agriculture has pivoted and it functions differently than it once did.
It is a much more robust process because it's high-tech.
It's robust to this particular insult.
It's feeble with respect to many other things.
So, for example, the super crops, right?
Super corn isn't super at all.
It's incredibly weak.
The point is it grows incredibly big if you dump fertilizer on it, but it's completely incapable of growing with any sort of natural competition in the absence of those inputs.
So anyway, we're living in some system that didn't behave according to the fears that I had.
But nonetheless, the collapse of the insect population is every bit as severe as we worried it would be, and maybe more severe.
So, I don't know.
We have to have the conversation, and we have to have the conversation about what it implies, right?
And in some sense, The good news about COVID-19 is that it showed how vulnerable we are.
And not just at the level of our biology, it showed how vulnerable we are to propaganda and to being induced to viciousness toward each other and demonizing those who are trying to tell us things we need to know.
Right?
So this was a trial run, and if we learned the lesson of it, we could come out of it much stronger.
But then again, that's the reason that I'm afraid the lesson is going to be buried.
So I'm keen on this, like how we get out of this.
It's a multi-step process.
So you've bumped into one of the aspects of this for me, which is the mass psychosis story.
Mass formation, more technically.
I like the word psychosis because, well, it's sort of more evocative, but the idea that there were a group of people who fell prey rather easily to a set of narratives that were not just provably false, but demonstrably, ridiculously provably false.
But I understand the process that we got here, and it's disappointing to me because these events, we're spending so much time in this mass formation event.
And we're not using that energy for other things that I think really need and deserve our like full full full full attention And there's so many I love how John Michael Greer put it a long time ago.
He said, you know problems have solutions That's fine.
We can all talk about problems, but predicaments have outcomes.
You got to manage those right so So I see us facing a number of predicaments and we have to decide as adults how we want to begin managing those Energy is a huge one, when you look at where we are in fossil fuel consumption.
Still plenty there, it's not forever.
When you really understand that what has to happen at scale, time, cost, sociologically and culturally, in order to get there, even if we have 50 years, you realize the best time to have started this would have been back when Jimmy Carter put the cardigan on and the solar panels on the roof, right?
That would have been a great time, and we haven't, and we've sort of dilly-dallied along, so I'm worried that what I'm seeing now is that they have a really powerful set of tools to distract people and keep us focused on things that are of no importance, and I hope I don't piss off too many people saying that, but we have been focusing, we've been navel-gazing in this country, and on things that are fundamentally not even on the problem scale, let alone the predicament scale in this.
Right.
So I know a lot of people take it super important that, you know, are there 50 genders or 60?
I mean, it's just like in the scheme of things, once you understand what we're up against with with the species issues and with energy, you might say, OK, we'll put that on the list.
But it's not it's not on my it's not at the top of my priority list.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm worried about that.
I think people have no idea.
You have to have traveled somewhere that's really dysfunctional to understand how much trepidation you should have about disrupting a system that works, even if it has terrible flaws that you dislike.
Right?
There should be trepidation about upending a civilization that functions.
And look, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.
I grew up in a liberal household.
I'm as troubled by the failure of our system to be fair and decent as anyone.
But the solution is to improve it.
The solution is not to wreck it, because we invite absolute catastrophe.
By wrecking it and by concentrating on things that shouldn't be at the top of the priority list.
That is exactly what we will do so I Wholeheartedly agree that that's a tremendous hazard.
I will point out for my listeners that Mass formation psychosis suddenly became a feature of people's thinking at the point that Robert Malone talked about it with Joe Rogan and You had had Matthias Desmond on your program because you saw how important this was.
That was before Robert Malone went on on Rogan and talked about it.
And it had been a concept that was being circulated amongst people who were thinking clearly about this before that.
So you saw That this bubbled into the conversation of people who were making sense.
You recognized how important it was.
You amplified it to people who follow you.
And then, I don't know, a month later, it became something that dawned on people was important.
And what I would point out is that This is a general pattern.
There is a conversation of people who stared down the stigmas that were thrown at us.
It's a much better, smarter conversation than what the public is being exposed to.
It's a conversation that sees things coming, right?
If you were paying attention to Gerrit von den Busch, then you know that variance was an issue.
You were thinking already about the insanity of an absurdly narrowly targeted vaccine that couldn't help but drive the evolution of this virus to some new place.
You knew that it was nonsense that this was going to be a pandemic of the Unvaccinated that the variants were going to be the result of the large population of unvaccinated people You knew all that way ahead of time and if you're standing where they expect you to stand you hear about these things late You hear about them right along with the phony Debunk bullshit and you don't know what to think and so part of the question for people is
Who are trying to figure out how they can protect themselves from this, whether or not civilization learns the lesson, how they can get smarter so that they don't end up victims of this again.
Part of the question is, how are you going to figure out what conversation to tune into so that you'll see all of this stuff coming?
And the unpleasant answer to that is the stigmas The vilification, that was used to prevent people from figuring out who to listen to.
The point is, when those of us who did stand up were vilified publicly, that was to persuade other people not to come near us.
It's too expensive, you don't want to do it.
And, you know, I can't say it isn't expensive, but I can say if you wanted to know what was coming, that was the way to do it was to ignore those stigmas and listen to people who were trying to warn you.
That it's that's where all the all the actual information was at the edges.
It wasn't coming from the center was all at the edges.
It's kind of like Jordan Hall talks about, like, you know, that the the that's the great part of the Internet.
So so I found all All the value I had was from listening to people like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough and, and yourself and, and, um, Pierre Corey and all the FLCC doctors, Paul Merrick and on and on and on.
These were people who, who they didn't always get it right, but I could tell that they were intensively caring about trying to get it right.
Um, and so it was amazing that way.
But I'm wondering, um, like what was the cost to you?
Uh, it, Because you in many ways took way more slings and arrows than I did.
You paid some prices.
I don't know whether I should talk about this publicly or not, but I'm going to do it.
This has been a process of the creation of anti-fragility, and the stuff that was pointed at Heather and me was It was incredibly difficult.
I mean, just the simple volume of it at its worst was... There was no way to grapple with it, right?
You just knew that there were vile slanders being delivered that you'd never even know were said because you just couldn't even look at it all, even if that was your instinct.
So, it was very unpleasant.
It was also not our first rodeo, and so there's a way in which, yeah, this one was the worst one I've ever seen by far, but there was also an awareness that there's a process to it, and that one gets through that, and the point is live to fight another day, and this process actually makes you stronger in the end.
So there were moments at which I doubted that, and I mean, I still do.
I still wonder if the vindication of all of the points that have been correct is going to be buried specifically for the purpose of preventing me and others like you from speaking up again in the face of the next one, right?
So I know that the thing is still very interested In capitalizing on the progress that it made psychologically, I also know from talking to people that people have a very wrong impression of where we currently are.
In other words, they directed this incredible onslaught at us, and it was... I don't even have the words for what it was like.
It was just like, you know, it was a firehose of awful.
But In the end, we are now in the position of watching this large, this ever-growing population of people recognize who was trying to warn them and who was actively steering them into danger.
And that is incredibly gratifying.
It was bad, but every time they do this and they leave us standing, we get stronger.
That's the thing.
So.
So you had some dark days, but you, but you, you'd been there before.
So you kind of knew what was coming or did you ever lose hope?
Like that?
Oh my God.
Yeah.
I mean, I still, I still worry about that.
Um, but again, A, I think that we are at a point where the scale of the disasters is now, is now so great.
That in effect they have tied our hands, right?
We might as well fight, right?
Because the solution of not fighting, that's going to be a short ride.
So we have to fight.
That would have been my inclination, and I know your inclination also.
And yeah, they created some dark days, but in the end I'm not At all convinced they didn't, uh, their plan didn't backfire and that they didn't, you know, let's put it this way.
I told people who were close to me back when the lab leak story broke, right?
And of course, nobody has formally acknowledged that this is what happened, but we all know that the evidence has gotten stronger and stronger.
I told them, look, that was a surprise win.
I didn't think we were going to win that one.
I knew we had to fight it, but I didn't think we were going to win.
Having won it, there are now two others.
Right?
There's the question of early treatment, and there's the question of vaccine safety and efficacy.
If the public wakes up on all three of those fronts, suddenly we now know something.
We know that the following systems have completely failed to protect us and in fact have steered us into greater danger.
The academy, the press, big tech, The public health apparatus and all of the governmental structures it is plugged into?
That is an amazing across-the-board failure.
And no one who is paying attention could possibly look at a failure of all of those things and come away with the impression That anything small could possibly put us back on track.
So the reason that we put ourselves in danger in this case was that there's a process I describe, which is that certain stories diagnose the system.
Right the evergreen story diagnosed the press right part of the press couldn't report it because it went in the wrong direction for their audience and another part of the press could report it and so it Revealed this process of like everybody can report the stories About the other side and they don't report the stories about their own side.
So the New York Times completely fucked it up Well, they have fucked it up.
There were people on the editorial page, but never mind the point is And across the board, failure, as we have seen with COVID, is a dire emergency having nothing to do with COVID, pandemics, drugs, vaccines, anything.
It is a dire, dire failure of the systems on which we are depending.
And my hope is That this failure, having been revealed at great cost to many of us, now allows us to have the conversation we need to have, which is the same one that you raised about the insects and their collapse, right?
We are screwing up the things on which we depend, and that is a suicidal thing to do.
So I don't know.
I'm hopeful.
And you know, before we close this out, we should talk about this march that is upcoming tomorrow, which you and I both have a relationship with, but neither of us will be at.
But I think we are at that moment where the system has revealed itself.
And I don't know that in our lifetimes, we will get a better opportunity to have the conversation we need to have about civilizational collapse, which is looming because these systems have stopped doing what they're supposed to do.
That's it right there.
And so that's my actually my greatest fear is I'm going to wake up one day and Biden and Macron and all the other leaders and are going to just go, oh, yeah.
Hey, this is just like the seasonal flu.
Let's endemic.
We're done.
Let's move on.
Because why is that a fear?
Because it means that we won't we won't have that accounting of it that we need, that we'll just try and like slide past those failures.
I think those failures need to be brought forward, not not not to rub their noses in these particular failures, but because of what you just said, that They're indicative of a larger systemic sort of an issue that's been going on.
And I don't know really how big or how deep it is.
Is it just the Peter principle played out over too many generations, you know, where the inept rise well past their abilities?
Or or is this just, you know, Strauss and how forth turning?
Guess what?
Late stage empire.
Things get overcomplicated.
Joseph Tainter style.
And, you know, this is just how it is.
You know, you got to go through the decay function at the end of these things.
But my view, Brett, is that we don't have.
So there were plenty of times for empires to sort of wax and wane in times past.
This time is different.
And I know those are dangerous words to say.
And why is it different?
It's because we're just in the resource story.
We are just not we don't have a lot of fat left on this particular animal to live off of and make mistakes.
So I just feel like the mistakes we make today are more profound than the ones people made in times past because we were younger then.
It's like, you know, you drive to the hole too hard in basketball as an 18-year-old and, you know, break something, you recover, you know?
You slip on the ice as an 80-year-old and it's just a different story, right?
So, at any rate, that's my concern, is I want to make sure we're having those proper conversations, because I actually think this is one of the most pivotal moments in human history, that It's extraordinary time to be alive.
And the way we begin to address this is we have to have really open, honest conversations where literally, you know, no ox is too sacred to go or everything on the table.
We need all hands on deck on this thing.
I, I, I believe in actual diversity, like real diversity, but that diversity is in here.
Right.
Um, and so that's what I'm really kind of hopeful for is that, is that, you know, we get to join forces.
We find these other people to me, that's what this next part is about is,
Gathering us and maybe the march is a great segue into that people are gonna gather around a set of purposes Nominally, you know defeat the mandates but but it has to be bigger than that I see the march needs to be the start of something not that not the cherry on top of yeah Let's get to the march in a second and let's just sort of collect our gains on what you and I have both just said I think painting with a broad brush what we've said is the level of dysfunction in the system is
will be fatal for humanity in short order.
COVID reveals those failures and it reveals them in a case that is obviously survivable but the point is it says none of the things somebody has unhooked all of the things that are supposed to allow you to steer the ship back on course and away from the iceberg right and that doesn't mean that there's an iceberg but there will be sooner or later so That is an emergency of the highest order.
It's not a COVID emergency.
COVID reveals the emergency, right?
The second thing to say is that COVID, because of the across-the-board failure of everything, reveals the problem.
And there's no reason to think we are going to get a better chance in our lifetimes to actually discuss it, right?
The curtain is never going to be pulled this far back again, right?
Or if it is, it may be too late, right?
The next emergency may not be such a survivable one.
So, we have to talk, we have to figure out what's gone wrong, and we have to fix it because our job is to leave the planet intact for future generations.
They have to have a decent planet to live on and this is going to screw it up permanently, right?
So we have to talk about it and we're never going to get a better shot and that tells us where we are and what has to happen next, right?
And yes, the gathering of people who get some fraction of that story or see it from some perspective that they can translate it between what we've just said and what they're saying, those are the people that need to be talked to and now is certainly the time.
Now, Let's talk about the march, right?
You and I were both involved in planning the march and discussing what its focus should be.
I know that I have hopes for what will happen.
I have concerns about what will happen.
My concerns motivated me to decide not to go to the march because my thought was the march contains so many of the voices who have been important in revealing the COVID-19 catastrophe.
That it is an obvious vulnerability and that, you know, while I don't really expect somebody to commit violence against speakers, I do worry that an all-out effort will be made to portray the march as something other than it is.
And I felt it was important to stay away so that if that happens, there is somebody who is involved in the planning who can say, you know what?
I was there.
I know what the intended message was.
I know what the view was on violence and, frankly, ideology of all kinds.
And let me tell you what that looked like on the inside.
So basically I was hoping to function as a dead man switch.
Now, I know that you were thinking about the same thing, and then I know that you ended up with COVID, which effectively meant that there wasn't even a decision that needed to be made in your case.
But what do you see?
Well, what I saw was Ivermectin, go from a toxicology standpoint, it's literally the safest compound I've ever looked at.
Like, it's literally that safe.
Its curve between effective dose and lethal dose is so wide, you know, you'd have to be a real moron to somehow, you know, jump over that.
In fact, when we saw that there was this incredible study by Jacques Ducote, you looked at 500 different things, studies, and zero deaths had ever been recorded that they could directly ascribe to it.
So it's that safe.
And then we watched the farm again to campaign come out where I woke up one day and all of a sudden it was horse dewormer everywhere because somebody had decided that's what needed to happen.
Now, obviously, that wasn't organic, right?
It had a lot of useful, willing idiots who were ready to parrot that because it was a team sport or something.
But but somebody we know some people sat in a room said, look, we can't get this on safety.
What do we do with this?
And they had enough power to blanket the airwaves, have major articles all appear in all the major newspapers, have it show up on all the major, you know, CNN, MSNBC, have it even have the FDA itself tweet out a little y'all stop taking horse to warmer.
Right.
So that's power.
And so we know that there's like lots and lots of money interested in making sure that this march is not successful or is seen a certain way.
And we've seen their early sort of entrees.
There was a an article which I'm air quoting because it's it was really an opinion piece in the Washington Post that said anti-vaxxers gathering to revel in their in the games of their once fringe movement or some garbage like that.
It's an intelligence test.
that yes so yes it's you know it's an anti-vax mardi gras it's gonna be amazing we're throwing beads you know but it's just seeing so that i i think that old trope of calling everybody you disagree with either hitler or an anti-vaxxer is wearing thin that's that's not like a really compelling argument i don't it's an intelligence was involved in that if you're still buying it you can see you fail Yes, exactly.
So, so, but, but the point is that there are, I guarantee you, there are people who are very smart sitting in a room thinking, how do we make this?
How do we, how do we shape this?
How do we, how do we use this to our advantage?
How do we make it not be what it needs to be?
Or how do we recast this?
And so we know there's going to be an effort to January 6th, which is a, which is a shorthand for saying cast it in a whole new light other than it actually occurred under so that we can, A minimize it or worse, right?
So so I do.
I have my concerns.
It's not a concern.
I'm positive.
That there are people thinking how to harm that particular thing, because it upsets their plans, it upsets their their income statements, it upsets their political ambitions, whatever the story is.
So I know I know there's going to be a yes, they're going to be people who are going to be trying to disrupt it.
Yeah, there's too much at stake.
There's profits at stake.
There's the potential for criminal trials.
If you hold what I hold to be true about the suppression of early treatments, I see that as a As beyond civil, that's a criminal act.
So there's a possibility of trials.
There's the possibility of congressional hearings with musical interludes from Hamilton.
I mean, you know, that sounds like a joke, but we've seen this.
We know, we know how the people in power are playing a narrative game and that they are basically I'm tempted to say shameless monsters, but I will stop at obviously shameless, right?
Their willingness to portray something as something else is without limit.
And you know, the thing that I found myself, you know, the people I met organizing the thing, I think are very good, patriotic, decent people.
Right?
And I think this was, you know, they were called to do something that was not in their skill set because they were just simply moved by human suffering and the need to do something.
And this seemed like the obvious thing to do.
It was, however, a little bit hard to convey.
Look, the game theory here is not favorable.
We've got, you know, and I keep saying, hundreds of billions of dollars at stake In COVID and the public health response, and people who have been slightly deeper into the finances keep telling me, no, it's a trillion at least, right?
But even if it's hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, That means that it makes sense to spend many millions, it would make sense to spend billions, to derail an effort that is potentially going to interrupt their ability to sell their garbage narrative and impose their mandates.
So you can be certain that it's not a small effort that is being pointed at figuring out how to derail the march and what it stands for.
So I do have concerns, and my sense is Maybe the collapse of the narrative and our absence from that stage and therefore our ability to speak to what actually took place inside of the planning, maybe that is sufficient to drive them off so that the only thing they do is say nasty things that nobody's really paying attention to anymore in all of the outlets that they've captured, right?
That's inevitable, and as you point out, has already begun.
If that is the limit of what they do, I think that's a tremendous success.
So let's hope that that's what unfolds tomorrow.
Well, and yes, since this is going out before the march, I can tell you flat out, obviously, every conversation we ever had, this is a peaceful gathering.
These are people wanting to have their voices be heard.
These are people who want to let other people see that other people care.
They want to just exercise their basic rights to gather, which is a very basic right in this country still.
And that the organizers have put out things that I think are right, which is to say, hey, If you see somebody trying to stir up some trouble, stop them, point them out to the authorities right away, stay within the lanes that we've agreed to, all of that stuff, because nobody's here to cause trouble, right?
If trouble is being caused at any point, that's because somebody showed up wanting to cause that trouble, and those could be Antifa guys who just like to cause trouble because that's what they're up to, or it could be agents provocateurs, or it could be paid paid actors from, you know, certain companies.
I don't know, but I, I, Brett, I'll tell you my, I know a lot of people going to this, um, and, uh, from, from my, my tribe and my side and as well, all the other people who are going to be on stage there.
I don't know anybody who's showing up with anything other than peaceful intent at this point.
So I just want to get it out there right now because it's actually 100% clear that the intent is, uh, a, an exercise of speech, um, fully peaceful and.
There's nothing past that, but you know, the reality is we have no idea how many people are showing up, right?
We know what it looked like to the website, and the number of people who signed up suggests an absolutely gigantic crowd, because most people don't sign up for a free event that you could just go to, right?
So the sky is the limit with respect to how many Americans might show up to this thing.
On the other hand, we don't know that somebody hasn't decided to mislead the organizers by, you know, using bots to sign up with, you know, burner email addresses and maybe, you know, it's going to be, I don't know, 10,000.
But nonetheless, we do know the people who are going.
I know, I will just tell you, It was not even discussed inside of those meetings who had been vaccinated and who wasn't.
It was a mixture of people, right?
Some of the people organizing are vaccinated, some of them are not.
That wasn't the point.
The point was these mandates are un-American, draconian, and dangerous, and they are being motivated by something that has nothing to do with protecting the public, and they have to be opposed.
And so it was time that Americans join this global resistance to this fervor for mandates, which is obviously about something else, even if we can't say exactly what that something is.
Yeah, no, it had nothing.
There was not a single conversation on any of the planning meetings I was on that talked about vaccination status.
Nope.
I know there are people on there who are very pro-vaccine, who are anti-mandate, and there are people on there who have not been vaccinated but aren't anti-vax because they're just not these vaccines.
Right.
And and and I put myself in that in that camp is just yeah.
No, it's not about that.
But, you know, they're going to try and characterize it as anti-vax because because that that's a that's a that's a that's a dog whistle for for certain people in this story.
Right.
Soon as you call this like calling somebody a conspiracy theorist, it's just that you just get to paint them with that brush.
And it's really you're one of those.
A.
Yeah.
It's a scent that is applied to you to keep others away, right?
They're not going to convince you or me, right?
Or anybody who knows us well.
I mean, you know.
Am I an anti-vaxxer?
I don't like these vaccines.
I don't think they're wise.
They're too narrowly focused.
There are too many design failures built into them.
They're too novel.
We know too little.
We know that the trials that were done to establish their safety were not high quality.
They weren't large enough.
They didn't go on long enough.
There are problems here that a reasonable person can look at.
Does that make me anti-vaccine?
Well, let me tell you something.
I have given I don't know how many lectures to my students about the glory of the mechanism by which vaccines work.
I think it's one of the most beautiful stories I know.
I'm extremely pro-vaccine in a general sense.
I will tell you that watching Pharma do this has made me concerned about adjuvants in a way that I wasn't before, right?
I worry that there's something about the way we generate vaccines now That we and the public need to know more about, because it's having effects on our immune system that are more general than this basic vaccine mechanism, which I find so beautiful.
But there's no way, I mean, you know, this Michael Gunner, this Australian guy, who every so often says the quiet part out loud, and we get to hear what the plan really is, you know who I'm talking about?
I think he's from Northern Australia, and he every so often he says something colorful about, you know, Your personal vaccination status is irrelevant.
If you are anti-mandates, you are anti-vax, you know, that guy, right?
Yeah.
So anyway, that's the plan, is that they're going to use that stigma against anybody who has any reservation about any vaccine or any measure that might be used to get people to take it.
And the point is, anybody With any level of intelligence whatsoever knows that that is not a definition that one could reasonably plot.
If anti-vaxxer is a thing, then surely somebody who is pro-vaccine and anti-mandate doesn't warrant it.
Somebody who is pro-vaccine in principle but not pro every single vaccine doesn't warrant it, right?
It's obviously a trick.
It's a magic trick and frankly it's not a very good one, right?
It's not compelling.
You have to want them to fool you if you're buying that stuff and If that's you, you know, uh, you have to look yourself in the, in the mirror.
Yeah.
And the whole, the whole, again, the whole mass formation idea is to get you focused down on stuff, right?
It's like hypnosis.
The idea is to get you so that you're just focusing on this dot at the tip of your nose and you can't even resolve it's a dot.
I mean, it's that, it's that hyper focus.
And so we've been hyper focused for a long time on COVID deaths, right?
Then you scratch at that a little bit and you find out what was out of death with or of.
And next thing you know, we're battling over am I an anti-vax or a vaccine?
Again, it's too narrow.
The point is that if we'd had a complete and authentic public health response, we would have said, hey, how are we doing in terms of all cause mortality?
You know, a lot of reasons people check off this mortal coil.
How are we doing?
And the answer is we're sucking at it, right?
2000 was bad, but 2001 was even worse.
So by that objective measure, we can say whatever it is in total, we're doing worse.
And that's the conversation we should be having.
So I worry every time it gets pulled back down to.
You know, is it about these vaccines?
You know, because that's that's not they are a component of what should be a very rich tapestry of of things that we would have in our toolkit at at the public health level.
But it's always about that.
And that's it.
And, you know, we don't even have read at this point.
I can't even point you to a single study that says let's compare unvaccinated people to vaccinated people.
But these people got early treatment, too.
I don't know what that data looks like.
I have strong suspicions.
I can infer it from studies that don't, you know, that sort of triangulate on it, but we don't have the actual data.
How is that possible to not have that data two years in?
Yeah, I mean, we've seen this general pattern, which is, I mean, I hate to say it, but you can predict what the public health response to something will be if it's actually promising they don't like it, right?
And that should not be a pattern.
That is not a pattern that suggests error.
That is a pattern that suggests some other plan.
It's, uh, it's appalling.
And I will just say, you know, if you want to peek into the resistance movement, you know, there was this very good piece, I would guess that you saw it, John Campbell put out a couple days ago on his channel about the actual number of people in Britain, he's British, the actual number of people who died of COVID, right?
And it was shocking, right?
But here's my point.
John Campbell is Absolutely welcome and on the radar of people like you and me.
He's pro-vaccine.
He has been very good at analyzing the data around early treatment and ivermectin.
He's been courageous about talking about it.
That's what the resistance movement sounds like inside.
It's people who don't have the same perspective on what makes sense and what doesn't make sense.
But we are coming to agreement on what the tools of measurement are that actually work.
Right?
In the resistance movement, everybody knows that all-cause mortality is an important thing that is rarely conveyed.
We know that we want autopsies done because autopsies tell you something we can't find out otherwise, and we know that the level of autopsies has been artificially reduced, and that suggests that there is an obvious desire not to know what kind of harm is being done.
So, It is a big tent, right?
You're going to see that big tent on the stage tomorrow at this March, because you have people who have arrived from, you know, as we began this discussion, they've arrived from dozens of different paths to an agreement that something has captured our focus, as you're pointing out, and it has mesmerized us into behaving in a way that is actually harming us.
And, you know, waking up from that, it's not going to be fun for a lot of people.
But let me tell you, the longer you wait, the less fun it's going to be.
Yeah, that's the main point here is, look, we got to put a stop to this now.
And the way mass psychoses or formations are stopped is with brave people standing up saying, no, let's stop.
We just let's stop.
And so speaking of which, we mentioned that, you know, every single time if there was something favorable, they didn't like it.
That data that John Campbell was talking about where they showed that there was 17,300 people in the whole COVID experience all two years had died of COVID specifically who were otherwise burdened with a comorbidity.
That came out because of a Freedom of Information Act request.
That data had to be pried out.
And that should have been put out there and broadcast by that same organization if they were doing the right thing.
But instead, you have to pry it out.
And every time somebody says, hey, Chris, what do you think of the CDC report?
I'm like, I'm going to dig into it.
That's just going to be crap, you know, because I know that they're going to use redefinition, statistical sleight of hand.
They're going to ignore stuff that bad study design.
It's just it's just been a it's just been a horror show.
I mean, this whole thing on natural immunity.
Right.
The CDC.
As recently as just a week ago when they finally admitted, Oh, hey, natural immunity looks kind of cool.
They were using this really ridiculously underpowered Kentucky sort of database sort of sleuthing thing where they only had two hundred and ninety examples to look at.
And then they held that out.
It's like, oh, yeah, vaccines are better.
When we had this extraordinary million plus case count case matched cohort study out of Israel that said the opposite.
Yeah.
The CDC should have been there saying, oh, here's why we don't like that study, and here's why we love... They didn't.
They just put this crappy study out, and everybody sent it to me like, what do you think of this?
I'm like, uh, just... Yeah, nothing wakes them, and that tells you that what they are is somehow a PR outfit, right?
It's all broadcasting things, and you know, one thing that has been just Shockingly obvious to those of us who have dug into it is the level at which what people are claiming as evidence pointing to the public health narrative and its prescription is based on accounting fraud, right?
And you know, you could look at one instance of it and you could say, well, maybe that's an error, right?
Maybe they got the categories wrong.
As an error, but the number of places where they have created a definition for a category and they have shunted people into it in order to amplify certain very predictable messages, right?
What's the message?
The message is that COVID is very dangerous and it's killing lots of people.
What's the message?
It's that the vaccines are reducing harm to people, right?
What's the message?
Is that those without the vaccine are clogging hospitals.
It's like They will just take anything that points in that direction, and they will reorganize definitions however they have to do it to make that appear to be the case.
And any analysis that just simply doesn't start with a presupposition about what landscape we're in, sees that that's nonsense.
And so you start to tune it out, right?
What do you think of this latest CDC report?
Well, why are you asking me that?
Has the CDC gotten anything right here?
I'm not aware of it, right?
They've been wrong across the board.
So at some point you tune that out and you go looking for something that isn't consistently wrong.
Right, something that is open to various possibilities, and you'll find that that's a very vibrant discussion.
It just, you know, to your earlier point, the interesting stuff is on the fringe.
Why?
Because it was driven there, right?
The natural people who would be at the head of the conversation of figuring out what's going on in COVID and what we do about it, those people have been driven to the edge.
They've either been silenced, they've been threatened, and they've chosen to self-censor.
Or if they haven't been willing to self-censor, they've been driven to the edge.
And so you know what?
That's where you'll find them.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it was very early on, I really cottoned on to the whole FLCCC guys, and I was helping them set up early webinars.
And then I've been on the board for a while.
And, and I It's gotten a lot better since, but I remember in the dark old days, maybe, I don't know, six, eight months ago, their Facebook page would get taken down.
They were getting YouTube strikes left and right and having, you know, channels pulled down.
And they were saying nothing other than they were highly qualified medical doctors discussing data.
That was it.
They weren't out there railing against, you know, what they thought, you know, Pfizer was full of crooks or anything like that.
There was no nothing that would rise to libel.
They were very careful and and watching That level of friction and hostility that came at them was astonishing.
I'd never seen anything like that before.
Maybe you had in your battles, but that was astonishing to me.
It's astonishing in a way.
I'd never seen it with doctors, and there was something just impossible.
uh to stomach about watching these obviously highly dedicated people who actually save lives for a living they do it day in and day out being treated as if they were Up to something, right?
I mean, it just, it couldn't possibly be more the inverse of what was happening.
You had doctors trying to be doctors, trying to sort out a live situation that we've all been told is of utmost importance, and being demonized for the effort because their conclusion didn't match the public health authority, which was obviously wrong.
And then to watch the tech sector leap to attention and start treating them as if these were somehow, you know Dangerous monsters.
It was just such a preposterous Show of force on the part of whatever the thing is that is arranging the narrative that you know either you got it when you saw that or you didn't and I Yeah, I'm glad those dark days are over, but new dark days are coming.
Yeah, I agree.
So, we got a little dawn coming.
I mean, I do feel that the censorship has lightened up a bit.
Now, for the march tomorrow, I'll tell you, there's gonna be, there's this march and then there's a bunch of people speaking, so they've invested in jumbotrons and a stage and sound and all that stuff.
Unfortunately, I won't be here to speak.
That would have been fun.
History moment.
But there's a bunch of bunch of the doctors, I think, are very familiar names.
And then there's going to be vaccine-injured people there talking who finally get maybe a national platform voice.
I can't even imagine how awful it must be to be like the mother of Maddie DeGaray, Stephanie DeGaray, and know that you were doing the right thing.
And then as soon as things went a little wrong, like the system just basically said, we think your daughter's just nuts.
No, no support.
No.
It's just awful.
But to hear from there'll be union people there, firemen.
Just it's this is this is where I think we get to see, Brett, just how broad this really is, because this isn't a bunch of anti-vaxxers.
This is Americans who have some questions who feel like they weren't allowed to ask those questions and that felt wrong and they they don't want to put up with that anymore.
So that's what I'm excited to see is You know, that this is the beginning of something I hope, which is us finding our voice again.
Yeah, if I could pick up on a theme.
There's something about watching the gaslighting of the injured, right?
If this was an honest effort to control the pandemic and people had been injured because we had a vaccine that worked, it had an unfortunately high price, a certain number of people, you know, rolled the dice and it came up bad for them, we would take care of those people, right?
And the point is, you did this so that we could be safe and we could go back to life.
And the point is, these would be heroes.
We would not be gaslighting them.
We would be accepting that they were harmed.
They would be getting free care for the rest of their lives for the cost that they paid on the rest of our behalf.
And to watch them gaslit tells you what kind of monsters we're dealing with.
The other thing that does that, for me at least, is the withdrawal of treatments that work early.
The idea that you're going to simultaneously tell us we have this very dangerous disease as you withdraw therapies in which there is no profit but that work, that is a level of indifference to human suffering that is almost impossible to imagine.
So those two facts If I need to think about, well, what's really going on here?
I can check in with them and I can say, well, at the very least, whether this is people making a decision in a conference room or it's an emergent process, it's a monster, right?
It is willing to actually literally harm people with a vaccine and then gaslight them over whether or not they were harmed.
It is willing to prevent people from having medications that might protect them, might save their lives.
No process that is capable of those two things can be defended.
It's not an accident, and there is no decency to it.
At long last, sir.
Have you no decency?
Exactly.
Well, is it reformable then?
Because this is a topic like, you know, where do we go?
You're gonna be speaking at an event I have coming up at the end of this month, which is really about asking that question, what do we do?
How do we organize ourselves?
What should we do personally, individually, given all of this?
I gotta be honest, I don't think it's reformable.
When something is that far gone that it's lost all shreds of detectable decency, and it's just about the money and the power and damn the consequences of the human suffering, I don't think you can vote that into a better position.
Um, yeah, it's just, maybe that's defeatist in me, but it's kind of like, you know, if you, if you merge two companies and one's got a toxic culture, you just have to fire that culture.
Well, I've got bad news for you.
That's not how you start.
Um, I'm certain that you are right.
It is beyond reform.
I am also certain that it must be reformed, that that's actually the only thing we can do.
Right?
Rebuild the system you're going to have to take the edifice And you're going to have to figure out how to make it function in spite of the fact that it is completely riddled with corruption of various kinds and You know in the end of what you said there, maybe you're hinting at the process, but the point is look
And Heather and I talked about this on our stream yesterday, in which we explored sort of how we're feeling about the various positions that people took and what they're now doing as the narrative comes apart.
But I don't I don't need to see Fauci punished.
I think he has visited one of the most colossal catastrophes on planet Earth that we have ever seen.
And so it's not that I couldn't justify the idea that he needs to be punished, but I don't need him punished.
What I do need is for him never to be anywhere near control over anything important ever again.
Right?
He has demonstrated from LabLeak, through the vaccine catastrophe, he has demonstrated that whatever happens when you give him power is bad for people.
Okay?
He shouldn't be in power.
And we can say that about many other people whose names we don't necessarily know, right?
Who have been integral to the response here, which has been so disastrous.
Now we also have learned the names of many people who have integrity and who are willing to stand up to garbage narratives and tell us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear.
And so there is an obvious solution and my sense is you're going to watch everything thrown at the question of how to avoid it.
Right?
Everything will be thrown At the process of derailing an attempt to simply take people who make sense and put them in the positions where they can do good.
Right?
That will be avoided at all costs.
Is this a twisting of The apocryphal Churchill quote, which is, we can count on them to do the right thing after they've exhausted every other opportunity.
The technology has moved on since the moment that he said that.
And so now we can count on a smoldering fireball to persist after they've exhausted every possibility other than the right one.
And so, you know, in some sense, it falls to people like us to point out that the process is coming.
To point out that it's happening and to hopefully wake people to it fast enough that actually we do reform the system, right?
Because it's not like... It's not like you couldn't take reasonable people and put them in positions of authority and then... Here's the part, here's the good part.
I've given you the very, very dark part, right?
The system is beyond reform and yet that's our only option.
Here's the bright side.
I know from long experience that there are three kinds of people in all of these systems, okay?
There are people who will pursue their own interests no matter who is harmed, right?
They're not very common, but they exist.
There are people who will do the right thing no matter how costly it is to them.
Also not very common.
And then there is a vast middle ground of people who will do what they have to do, but they might prefer to do the right thing, right?
We can't spot them, because at the moment they are doing the wrong thing.
Why?
Because they don't have a better choice.
And so my hope is that if we actually do manage to put decent people with the proper expertise in the roles at the heads of these organizations, then the populations of these organizations, yeah, they have some bad apples in them for sure.
But what they also have is a lot of decent people who haven't been given a decent choice, and that that actually does maybe suggest that reform could work.
This is in part why I'm talking with you today is because one of the things I've noticed is that this fear that they have been putting out has been very contagious and But I've watched the opposite.
I've watched courage be just as contagious.
And so it's really important that the people who have that capability to be courageous do so.
So I'm really a fortunate person because of how the decisions I've made, because of the position I put myself in.
You know, I wasn't, I'm not going to stand here and tell you I'm a super courageous guy, because if I was working at a job that I had three kids at a certain position and, you know, I had the golden handcuffs and, you know, or whatever, there's a lot of circumstances.
I'm not going to be a brave guy.
I just know it.
Um, and I was just found myself in a position during this whole period of time where, where I could take some risks.
Sure.
I could have lost my whole business, but you know, I could figure something else out.
But, um, but I was able to really go forward and just, and just say what I thought was true.
Right.
And I saw the effect that had, and I watched, but watching somebody like Pierre Corey, who's just dripping with integrity, right.
Watching what happened when he ripped his mask off in that Senate testimony.
And I could just feel the galvanizing effect of that.
I was just like, wow, that is really impressive.
And boy, they're going to come after this guy.
And they did.
Right.
That was my first YouTube strike was just replaying that video and remarking as to how great I thought that was.
I got got nuked on that one.
Right.
But I just for everybody who's listening to this right now, like this is the time for us to stand up and stand together and just stand as courageously as we can, because I got Brett, this is like this is the biggest moment in history I'm aware of.
So many things are going to be decided in the next few years that we either go this way or that way.
And one of these ways is kind of dark.
And the other way might be might be difficult, but it's a lot less dark.
I think both both paths are kind of kind of tricky.
But I got to be honest, I think that what's been revealed here says that if we allow these people who want to go that way to win, I will regret that.
We'll all regret that.
pandemic as we were sort of all grappling with what it was and what it meant, you know, I was asked, well, when will we go back to normal?
And I heard myself say, I knew I knew I believed it as soon as I heard myself say it.
We're never going back to normal.
Yeah.
And I also remember saying, actually, this is the biggest thing that's ever happened on planet Earth.
And I still believe this, right?
Now you have things that are bigger in terms of megatonnage, right?
You have the use of nuclear weapons, you have world wars, you have things like that.
But this is a process, this is a truly global process that has unfolded here.
And the irony that it begins with something that is literally microscopic, Is a big one.
The point is you're looking at something that can amplify a microscopic error into a global catastrophe.
That tells you where we are and how much danger there is.
And so your point about if we go that way, we will all regret it.
Inevitably, that is exactly what will happen.
We're looking at an amplifier that can take a microscopic error and turn it into a global catastrophe.
If you don't get, if you don't rein that in, if you don't figure out what's going to misplay that, then you're done, right?
I can't tell you if you're done 10 years from now or 50 years from now, but I can tell you, you can't roll the dice with those processes running loose for very long and have it always come, come up your way.
So this is it.
And you know, This is, therefore, this is telling us that our lives, whether we like it or not, our lives are overlapping a moment on which everything hangs.
These are interesting times and we are We are stuck with the responsibility of solving a problem no one has seen before, and we have to get it right.
So, you know, let's recognize that that's the responsibility that history has handed us and let's shoulder it bravely.
Oh, indeed.
Hey, would you mind, can I mention this event that I have coming up?
At Peak Prosperity, for everybody listening, once a year we hold a virtual event, and it's a seminar, and Brett will be a headline speaker there, as well we'll have Royce White, he's an amazing gentleman, Pierre Cory, myself, Marjorie Wildcraft talking about how to grow food and things like that.
But it's really about how to, we're billing it, the title this year is Surviving the Great Reset.
So we believe there's a big agenda coming and there are things we can do.
To get ourselves organized around that.
And the biggest thing this year is to get connected.
So right now we actually have, even though the event is being held next Saturday and Sunday, which is May 9th and 30th, there are already servers open where people who have signed up for that are chatting and finding each other.
Because that's what I'm trying to encourage most here this year is that connection.
So people can find that if you go to PEAK, P-E-A-K 2022 dot events.
And I would just like to revisit the point early in our discussion.
See if that interests you.
Even though events is longer than the usual suffix.
Dot com is a, it gets you someplace.
Dot org.
It turns out events.
Dot events is actually a thing too.
Yes.
All right.
And I would just like to revisit the point early in our discussion.
There is a lot to be said for pooling our resources.
And the discovery that our two channels have some overlap.
But much less than you would imagine in terms of who's paying attention to each of us.
And that those who are hearing this discussion and thinking wow that's pretty interesting.
It would be a great idea Whichever path you traveled to get to this discussion if you went and followed the other channel, right?
You Chris Martinson on Twitter.
What's your handle?
At Chris Martinson.
At Chris Martinson.
All right, and I am at Brett Weinstein.
Brett has one T. And then on YouTube, my channel is Brett Weinstein.
Your channel?
Peak Prosperity.
P-E-A-K.
Cool.
Like, you know, mountaineering.
All right.
Yep.
And Peak Prosperity is my website, too.
So yeah, and I would love to see our two groups come together, and then other ones as well, because we've got to band together.
I might be wrong, but I'm not confused.
You're right, that's exactly what should be happening, and let's hope it happens.
What do you think?
This is our first experiment in a joint livestream.
Did we get to Dark Prosperity, or did we end up at Peak Horse?
Well, I think we're... That's good enough.
We avoided the horse side of this.
So I see 3.9 thousand people chatting away on my side of things, so that's good considering it's a Saturday and people had very little warning that this was upcoming.
So I think that's, um, and it just, the number grew the whole time we were talking.
All right.
Well, fantastic.
I'll take all those as good signs here.
Um, Chris, it's been a real pleasure as always.
And, um, I hope we, uh, we take this prototype and figure out what to do with it so, um, we can make some progress and, uh, you know, gather the people who need to gather.
Absolutely.
And my only regret that we couldn't do this live because I just can't wait to see you in person.
