Has Bret Strayed from Reason? Bret Speaks with Robert Wright on Darkhorse
Bret speaks with Robert Wright on the Darkhorse Podcast. They discuss Robert’s suggestion that Bret’s ideas have strayed from plausibility. Find Robert on Twitter: @robertwrighter (https://twitter.com/robertwrighter)Find Robert on bloggingheads: https://bloggingheads.tv/ *****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 ...
I am sitting this morning with Robert Wright, who is the author of Non-Zero, The Moral Animal, and other books.
Robert, what else have you written?
Most recently, Why Buddhism is True.
Before that, The Evolution of God.
And my first book was called Three Scientists and Their Gods.
There you go.
Um, so you and I are meeting this morning in part because you, uh, you raised my hackles with a tweet that you made, um, effectively, uh, in not such subtle terms, suggesting that I might have lost my marbles.
Does that, um... Actually, it's interesting that you should put it that way.
First of all, I'm glad mission accomplished, I got your attention.
I noticed that, you know, so I tweeted about a tweet that featured a video segment of your show.
I might as well, I'll just read the tweet, and then we can get to the interpretation, because I know that you and Heather disagreed about the interpretation, and I think she was a little closer to my intention, but anyway.
My tweet says, so Brett Weinstein is seriously suggesting that Democrats have maintained the vaccine mandate for the military because their goal is, quote, degrading military readiness, unquote.
In the past, I've argued that some of his crazy sounding theories aren't completely crazy.
I'm not arguing that now.
And the disagreement between you and Heather was whether I was saying now I'm arguing he's Brett is completely crazy.
Heather said, well, maybe he's just saying this one thing you said was crazy.
Actually, she's closer to right.
In fact, if you look at my tweet, I think you'll find it's like 219 characters long.
If I recall correctly, I'd first written, I'm not arguing that in this case, didn't fit.
And I changed in this case to now.
Now that said, I should say that, you know, I don't listen to your podcast regularly.
I'm sure you don't listen to mine regularly, so neither of us needs to take offense at that.
But I'm not familiar enough with your output to pronounce on the general state of your mental health, so I'm not going to start off with a clean bill of health, I guess.
I'm not going to start off with any bill of health.
I do think this What you said in this show, and I went back and listened to the whole thing after this tweet, along with some other positions you've taken and the way you've taken them, suggests that you're not viewing some things with as much balance as maybe you're capable of.
In some sense, that's true of all of us.
You know, you and I know that motivated reasoning is part of human nature.
So I'm sure I'd be subject to some kind of critique along these lines, but today I guess I'm going to make the critique about you, and you're going to fend it off masterfully.
Well, I think I'm frankly going to fend it off easily, although I believe it is interesting that you intended, and I certainly take you at your word, especially in light of the Twitter character limit, that what you had originally written would have made very clear that Heather's interpretation was closer to right, and that it was only Your edit that led me to conclude that you were drawing some sort of global conclusion.
On the other hand, you are saying here that you believe that some sort of motivated reasoning is behind what you described more or less as uncareful positions that I've taken in recent memory.
And I I take some exception to that, because...
It's when you say motivated reasoning you are making an appeal to a very specific process and the fact is You know, look I respect you as a scientist.
You're not trained I'm actually not a scientist, but I but I'm happy to be called one on TV.
Sorry don't accept it As I mentioned the last time we spoke I think very highly of nonzero as as book it influenced me and I don't care how you've come by your scientific thinking, you clearly have, and the fact that you do scientific thinking at a high level, inside a discipline that I know well, tells me you're a scientist, whether that's training or not.
Okay.
I'll accept the honorary degree, thank you.
Very good.
But when you say motivated reasoning, I believe I understand my motivations pretty well, and I'm not saying that there isn't noise in my process.
I'm not saying that I do not, you know...
over weight certain people's opinions.
You know, obviously there's noise in all of our thinking process, but what I'm motivated to do is get it right.
And at this moment in history, that's become extremely difficult to do well.
In part, it's extremely difficult to do well because we no longer have an agreed-upon
Set of or source of factual information from which we proceed We effectively have been denied Among other things a paper of record that simply records the basic consensus surrounding the facts and so we are all now driven into pockets of sense-making that are isolated from each other and your pocket is different than mine, which I understand but
The problem is... I agree with that characterization largely, by the way.
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I have my own issues with, you know, New York Times in particular.
I think the Trump era, you know, left the media environment in worse shape than it than it found it.
I think the reaction to Trump.
You know had in some ways a corrupting effect on on some media, but go ahead well, I even Find that description a bit troubling because although Trump was certainly a unique phenomenon The idea that it was the Trump era that drove this it was an era that may have been characterized by the oddness of Trump and everything that was extreme, but Trump didn't cause this and
I actually didn't say he did.
I didn't attribute any responsibility to Trump the person.
I said the Trump era, I think, or the Trump, you know, left the reaction.
And I said the reaction to Trump by the media, I think, had a corrupting effect.
I'm not sure we want to spend a lot of time on this.
But I should say, in terms of my own, you know, my own kind of credentials, in a certain sense, although I'm very anti-Trump and I generally vote Democratic, I've been specifically critical of the so-called resistance Uh, for, um, the way it's reacted to Trump.
And I think that has, to some extent, infected the New York Times and other media outlets, along with, uh, what changes in the kind of digital media and the economy, the clickbait economy and everything.
Um, I think that's had a bad effect.
I suspect we largely agree in a generic way on this, whatever our view of the specifics.
I'm not, I'm not blaming Trump.
I don't think we need to get sidetracked on that.
Well, let me say this.
I'm not going to defend Trump.
I'm no fan.
I really think his temperament was completely inconsistent with the office.
That said, I also have been watching both of our major parties for many decades, and I understand the And there had been growing polarization and so on for a long time.
to exploit and step into.
And so I don't think of it as the Trump era.
I think of it in more holistic terms.
But nonetheless, I think you're right.
We don't want to get sidetracked on this.
And there had been growing polarization and so on for a long time.
You're right.
There were things happening already.
And I would just say, we said neither of us monitors each other's media products, but my newsletter, the Non-Zero Newsletter, and to some extent, the Non-Zero Podcast, has spent a lot of time criticizing, even recently, Joe Biden characterizing MAGA Republicans even recently, Joe Biden characterizing MAGA Republicans indiscriminately as a threat to the republic.
So I really tried to be critical of both sides in this context.
Yeah, there's plenty of room for that in this era.
But what I wanted to point to is more just the simple fact that in the absence of, let's say, a paper of record and the scientific equivalent, we are left with a sense-making problem that is Extremely fraught.
And so when one person, especially one evolutionary thinker, looks at something said by another evolutionary thinker and leaps to the conclusion that something might be off to the point of mentally dysfunctional, that's significant to me.
And so, you know, frankly, Robert, you pissed me off, right?
Because in my opinion, The bar I have to clear here isn't a very high one.
Am I sane?
Yeah, you'll find out that I'm sane.
Not only that, but you will find out that the hypothesis I advanced, if you look at what I actually said, is well within the rational range in light of the highly unusual historical moment that we seem to be living in.
And I will point out that you imposed something on what I said that wasn't there.
What's more, I did say, I know how this sounds before I said what it is that you inferred I might be mentally off from.
So let me put the puzzle in the context in which I believe it belongs.
We have a political apparatus that is behaving in an utterly mysterious way.
If you look at the policy surrounding COVID, its prevention and its treatment, what we got from all of the official medical and epidemiological institutions was pretty close to the inverse of the advice we should have gotten.
That is to say, you would have been vastly better off if you did the opposite of what you were told than if you did what you were told.
That's your view.
Yeah.
I'm very familiar with your view, and I suspect your listeners are, but go ahead if you want to elaborate.
Well, what I want to say is, look, let's just agree that whether that view is right or wrong, if it is correct, it is not consistent with a normal explanation like incompetence.
And An incompetent authority would have come up with a garbage set of recommendations.
They wouldn't have come up with the inverse of good recommendations.
That is an unlikely place to have landed, right?
It's like accidentally assembling a car.
Yeah, that's the kind of thing you said in the podcast we're talking about.
So can I respond to that?
Please.
Now, first of all, I'd say, you know, you mentioned the environment we're speaking in and what the standards should be that prevail.
I personally believe something that you may not subscribe to, but it is that Especially in this environment, given how incendiary it is.
If you're going to suggest that the executive branch, the Biden White House, and for reasons we'll get to, that's what I took you to be saying.
I'll quote the things you said.
But if you're going to suggest that the Biden administration or powerful people in there are enemies of the state, which I think you did, Current environment.
Maybe your standards of evidence should be a little higher than for the average hypothesis you just throw out there because it occurs to you.
And I'm going to argue that this is not the most your hypothesis.
There are a number of hypotheses that are stronger than yours to explain what you've seen that seem to have escaped your attention.
And this is what I mean by motivated reasoning.
And again, we all do it.
I'm just saying you did it.
No, I don't think I did it because I don't think you've understood my hypothesis.
Well, fine.
But can I go ahead and say what I want to say?
Sure.
You haven't even heard what I'm saying.
All you've seen is one tweet.
Well, no, I've just heard what you've said about my position and it isn't my position.
Let me read what you said.
OK.
And I just want to ask whether it is or is not the case that especially in the environment we're in, a number of people would take this to be a serious suggestion that there is some kind of conspiracy in the executive branch Uh, which is run by Democrats to undermine the military readiness of our country.
So here's what you said.
Now, this was a podcast.
Featuring several people from the armed services who did not want to get vaccinated and they were talking about the toll of the mandatory vaccine policy.
You know, some people get sidelined because they refuse to get vaccinated and so on and that was a big part of the toll, I guess.
We've had people Discharged from the military dishonorably.
We've had a court-martial.
We're talking about something beyond just being slighted.
Right.
I just meant you mean there's been a loss of manpower.
There's been a loss of manpower and a crippling decline in morale, understandably.
Okay.
Now this is, again, this is your view.
And I want to, I kind of get the idea that you often, when you're trying to figure out what the motivation for like a policy may be, you assume everyone shares important parts of your view.
And I assure you, what you just said is not necessarily shared by everyone.
Right.
I mean, you have talked to a series of people in the military who share the view.
The reason they're on your podcast is because they share your view.
But I doubt that Joe Biden spends a lot of time with these kinds of people.
Now, you may say that leaves him deluded or something, but I suspect it's the case.
And if his perspective is different from yours, I think that needs to be taken into account.
So can I get to what you actually said?
Please.
OK.
Here are a few things.
You're right.
The policies that are so devastating here are being advanced most aggressively by what I call the Blue Team, the Democratic Party, of which I've been a lifelong member, but I can't even recognize that party now.
So if you were interested in keeping that party in power so that it could continue to advance bad policy, but you were also interested in degrading military readiness, Then the mandates might persist in the military while they were withdrawn in advance of midterm elections or something like that in the civilian population.
I hear myself saying that and I know how it sounds.
On the other hand, I'm a scientist.
What I do is I look at patterns and I eliminate potential explanations based on the fact.
That they don't fit until we're down to a small number of explanations that might underlie the pattern.
In this case, that is a very unfortunate process that I think ought to alarm every American.
So you seem to think this is the most parsimonious explanation, or close to that.
A few other things you said in the course of the same podcast.
Has something gotten into our system that is unhooking our readiness because it doesn't want us ready?
Here's another thing.
It's hard to explain that pattern by anything other than some form of sabotage.
Here's another thing.
We're looking at something that behaves like enemy action.
Now, I submit that anyone who listens to this podcast and is already inclined to not be big fans of the Biden administration, specifically with respect to this issue, and I suspect that description fits a fair number of people in your audience, Could take you as suggesting that in fact there is a conspiracy in the executive branch to undermine our military readiness.
You don't think so?
I know exactly what error you're making.
What is it called?
Let me ask you a question.
Do you believe that our system has a problem with corruption?
Most systems have some kind of problem with corruption.
I would agree.
I'm a fan of... Were you a fan of The Wire?
I didn't watch it, no.
It was excellent.
And there was a particular scene in which An individual involved in city government was talking to another individual walking down the street, and their point was, you have to expect a certain amount of corruption, but the level of corruption has become obscene.
And that is where we are.
I do not expect a system without any corruption.
But the level of corruption in our system, I would argue, is utterly obscene.
Does that sound like a crazy position to you so far?
Well, you'd have to define terms.
My main point is that there are other explanations for the phenomenon you're describing that are much less incendiary and actually more plausible.
You have laid out your case.
I get it.
No, I haven't.
I haven't gotten to the other explanations.
You have laid out your case that what I'm saying is beyond the pale.
You're not going to let me get to the alternative explanations, Brett?
Is this a scientific discussion?
You seem a little defensive, Robert.
We are having a conversation.
I would like to respond to them because I think you so far haven't even understood what it was that I was putting on the table.
Okay, what were you putting on the table?
I believe we have a problem with obscene levels of corruption in our system.
I believe that COVID policy reveals this.
Now, if you want a little historical background, I would say that Before the Clinton administration, the GOP was the party of business, that it had a business model in which effectively it peddled influence to wealthy, mostly corporations, when those corporations wanted to do something that was not in the interest of the public, right?
And there's a natural tension between these things.
You tend to pay In order to influence things when what you're doing is not in the interest of those who are being governed, because you wouldn't have to pay if it was.
We would just simply do it.
That's what corruption is.
Now, the Clinton administration, I believe, changed the Democratic Party.
That what it did was it took up the GOP's business plan.
And it abandoned the public and started serving different corporate interests.
And we effectively ended up with two corporate parties and nobody representing the public.
And so these parties both pay attention to the public periodically when they have to because there's an election, but by and large, what they exist for is to serve the interests of wealthy donors at the expense of the interests of the public.
That's what they do 365 days a year.
Okay?
Now the problem is that once you have a system that is informally about corruption, there are no good safeguards for preventing things that you don't anticipate from getting into that system.
And so what I was suggesting was not that Joe Biden or anyone else in the executive branch is actively interested in harming the country, but that something has purchased influence that might be.
What do you think that thing is?
Well, I don't know.
If it's not, I mean, a limited number of people can sway our vaccine policy in the military.
So either they are unwitting dupes of something, and I'm waiting to hear what you think that is, or they are intentionally implementing this policy.
And I venture to say, by the way, that based on the things you said, the average naive listener would think you're suggesting Well, let me ask you a question.
that there are actually conspirators in the executive branch.
But if not, what scenario do you have in mind about how they become unwitting dupes and who is pulling the strings and how?
Well, let me ask you a question.
I mean, it seems to me.
Why don't you ever answer my questions?
You know, what is the answer to that question?
What do you have in mind?
First of all, Robert, there is a reason that I phrased this as a hypothesis.
Now the fact of it being a hypothesis does not mean I do or do not believe that it is the explanation.
It means that it is a proposal for something that might explain a pattern, something that makes predictions, and that it deserves to be on the table of potential explanations.
Okay, now it happens that I do think that this one is plausible.
But you do not have, logically speaking, you don't have the right to try to get me to fill out the picture of how this corruption might work.
I don't know.
You don't have to state what your hypothesis is.
I took it to be that there's somebody in the executive branch corrupting our policy intentionally.
You're saying, no, I didn't mean that.
Well, then what did you mean?
What is your hypothesis?
Let me then look, we are going to get to the approximate answer to your question.
Do you think we have enemies who would consider attacking us militarily?
Sure.
Okay.
Do you think we have enemies that would contemplate sabotage against us rather than attacking us militarily?
Sure.
Do you think they have noticed that we have a pay-for-play political system?
And do you think they have contemplated paying to get us to do things that they would have a hard time doing from the outside?
Well, I know for a fact that foreign interests, as well as a number of domestic special interests that are also corrupting, make donations to politicians.
They also try to influence think tanks.
There's a lot of there's a lot of corruption of clear thinking out there.
Sure.
Then what are we disagreeing about?
I just want to hear what your actual hypothesis is.
You told me I was wrong.
You weren't even suggesting that Joe Biden or anyone in the administration is intentionally undermining our military readiness.
So, OK, who is and how are they pulling these strings?
Because it's not that easy to manipulate a policy like this.
So what do you have in mind?
Again, I'm not sure why you feel entitled to demand of me particulars that I, of course, have no way of knowing.
The question is, are there powers out there that have a large quantity of financial capacity who might have noticed that we have a system in which you can pay for play, who might be feeding something into it that isn't good for us?
And that the people who are going along with this are not actively interested in harming us, but they don't give a shit about us.
That's why they're in this pay for play system.
You mean there are American actors who don't want to harm us but don't give a shit so they're being bribed or something?
Look, you know, I was attacked for simply paying attention to the Hunter Biden laptop story during the last presidential election.
Now, it turns out the laptop was what it appeared to be.
And it obviously doesn't, you know, make it an open and shut case with respect to Joe Biden's corruption, but it is certainly suggestive The things that Hunter Biden said, his presence in Ukraine in a field where he was not expert, making lots of money, is certainly suggestive that what we have is an administration with an influence peddling problem.
Now the question is, Do we believe that influence peddlers have some sort of code that they live by where they will peddle influence to certain people, but certainly not other people.
They will sell us out to some, but not others.
Now, I would guess there's something like that, but I don't know what the code is.
And so when I see an obvious pattern of the degradation of military readiness, And I say, does the military know that it is degrading its own readiness?
How is it conceivable that it is okay with degrading its own readiness?
Why would you take pilots in whom you've invested millions of dollars in training and sideline them?
This is a dangerous world.
We build those aircraft for a reason.
We train those pilots for a reason.
Why would you sideline them over a vaccine that does not prevent transmission of a disease and that is not necessary for a young person who is fit enough to be a fighter pilot?
Why would you do it?
Want me to give you some hypotheses that have escaped your attention?
You are welcome to give me some hypotheses.
Okay.
Now, first of all, I assume you can see why Biden might have Implemented the vaccine policy in the first place?
I think your question is why didn't they modify it?
Robert, you keep invoking Biden as if he is playing an important role in decision making.
Well the administration, okay?
Somebody implemented the policy.
I don't want you skipping ahead like that because the fact that you and I sitting here, I a lifelong democrat, you as somebody who says that you have In general voted Democrat.
That you and I don't exactly know what's president because the guy who sits in the office is obviously at the end of his cognitive life.
That's a problem.
That means something is president outside of our constitutional structure.
And somehow you're okay with this?
You're invoking Biden as if he's president.
You and I both know there's something wrong.
Brett, I revised the question immediately and said, do you agree that the Biden administration's decision, which surely you would accept as a characterization of orders that come down from the Biden administration, right?
Is that OK?
Can I talk like that?
Well, look, you can talk however you want, but I want you.
You don't keep changing the subject.
No, we have been as critical.
If you did listen to my podcast, you'd know that virtually every week I say we got to get this guy off the ticket.
He's not all there cognitively.
We agree on that.
Okay, good.
But then, then, Robert, why can we not hear each other?
Okay?
Something is very seriously wrong in this country if we have a president who is not all cognitively there, and yet we're going to skip right into the next sentence and say, well, then the administration.
What is the administration?
What administration would allow a senile old man to inhabit that office with that kind of power?
Look, I've said on my podcast that Kamala Harris, as much as I detest her, should be president tomorrow.
That would not fill me with hope and joy, but whatever.
It would make me very upset, but at least it would make sense.
At least there's somebody you can make a phone call to and you can say, Kamala, here are the nuclear stakes.
Here's what they mean.
Can I get back to the alternative theories to explain what you see as intentional degradation of our military?
Presumably they are hypotheses, but go ahead.
They are hypotheses.
You're correct.
I was using the term theory colloquially.
Um, so first of all, the only reason I use the word Biden, sorry about that.
Was I meant that it seems to me not hard to explain why someone who was in charge of executive branch policy, whoever that may be, would have instituted the vaccine back when they did.
After all, unlike you, I think they're fans of the vaccine.
They think, you know, it works.
And they were certainly thinking that and, you know, and they wanted to bring the pandemic under control as soon as possible.
And so one reason you would do it is say, well, the military, that's a place we can order it.
We know that we can.
We have that power.
We don't want to go that far as civilians, but we can at least start there.
That might be one reason.
There might be plenty.
But in any event, I think, I assume that the main question you're asking is, once they saw what you see is the very damaging, devastating fallout of this policy, why didn't they change it?
That's what I have hypotheses about, okay?
Okay, can I pause you there?
I want to hear them, but let's just notice a couple things.
The people, so I accept as a plausible hypothesis that the people who made the decision believed that the so-called vaccines were an important component in controlling the pandemic.
I once believed that that was likely too.
There comes a point at which you can no longer believe that because you know that they are not effective at controlling contraction or transmission of the disease.
And you also know that to the extent that they might be effective at anything at all, they are extremely age stratified for risk.
Now, at the point that you have made a bad decision in your hypothetical world for honorable reasons, And then you have come to understand that they are not a useful tool in controlling the spread of the disease, that this is a population that needs them far less than the public, and that this is having consequences for things like readiness.
You do alter the policy.
And if what they had done was said, well, it turns out That the, you know, instead of lying, which is what we've gotten so far, that, oh, we never said it controlled transmission.
Well, bullshit.
It's on video all over the place.
They said it repeatedly.
Okay?
If what they had done is owned up to it and said, look, this was a fast moving situation.
We made the best call we could on the basis of the information we had.
As the information that we had changed, it suggested a different policy, which is why we've lifted the mandates.
Had they done that, I wouldn't have had a podcast.
That's not what they did.
They still haven't done.
In fact, they are doubling down on this and they are doubling down on ignoring the risk stratification.
It's not just the military.
It's now children.
Something has gotten into our system that is making the opposite of sense.
Let me say, you know, I think when it became evident on Twitter that you and I were going to have this debate slash discussion, some people got excited and like, OK, you're really going to, you know, you got to lay down the law to Brad about ivermectin vaccines.
And like, I'm not here to debate ivermectin vaccines.
I don't spend nearly as time thinking about that stuff as you do.
So that's not going to happen now.
After I lay out these hypotheses, if you would like me to explain why I quit thinking of you as a credible source on this information, I'd be happy to because I remember the moment and I remember the podcast.
I'd be happy to talk about that, but I'm not here to debate.
I'm not up on the latest stuff.
And by the way, I was, you know, open-minded.
I think it was on the Decoding the Gurus podcast that I said, I think we were talking about you specifically, I said, I think the jury's still out on ivermectin.
I've seen a number of studies.
Some of them seem to suggest benefits.
You know, I am really not, I try very hard not to be kind of a tribalistic thinker, okay?
But there was, I'm happy to describe what you said, that That made me gravely doubt your credibility, but first let me get through these hypotheses, okay?
So, if the question is, and by the way, you seem to be ruling out a lot of hypotheses.
I mean, you say things like, in this podcast, The absolute least pernicious explanation is total indifference to the well-being of service members and the readiness of our military force.
That's the least bad it could be.
You know, I would say that assumes they share your view of all the stuff we've described, which is the magnitude of the fallout, the benefits of the vaccine and so on.
And I just wouldn't I wouldn't assume that.
But that aside, let me let me mention some hypotheses, OK?
Why wouldn't they not change a policy?
A.
Bureaucratic inertia.
The military is a famously irrational institution.
I was brought up in a military family.
My father was a career army officer.
It has been a running joke for a long time how irrational the military is.
Like, why are we following this rule?
Well, the base commander 10 years ago implemented it and nobody, it wasn't in anybody's particular interest.
Nobody thought they could get a promotion by changing it.
You know, it's just like, Uh, the military is not some kind of lean and mean corporation constantly competing and looking at its bottom line.
It is a classic bureaucracy bureaucracy bureaucratic inertia happens all the time now granted if These people at the top of this bureaucracy shared your views, then you could say, well, in not changing the policy, you know, you are subject to certain criticisms about your indifference to military readiness or something.
But I would contend they don't.
If you want to contest that, fine.
Let me move on to another one.
You realize they have their own system.
Completely within the military for assessing the level of harm from vaccines and it has the same off-the-chart signal that we see in the public VAERS system.
The military has a system for assessing harm.
I don't want to get into a discussion about VAERS.
I assume you'd agree that one thing about VAERS is that if you're going to compare data, this is the public place that people can say, I had a symptom after a vaccine.
It's very hard to compare different episodes in history, because sometimes the public becomes more alerted to the possibility of reporting things to VAERS than others, and now I would think we're in an all-time high, but I don't want to argue about VAERS.
You realize it's a crime to report things that didn't happen to VAERS and that this question has been studied and the majority of the reports in VAERS are from medical professionals or pharmaceutical professionals.
This whole idea that this is just some free-for-all where the public is reporting things that didn't happen is nonsense.
What's more, we have exactly the same pattern in the VAERS system, the European Yellow Card system, and the military system.
The military system is completely immune to what you're talking about.
And yet it shows the same pattern.
Okay.
I want to, I want to get back to this question about, uh, about assessing data about the vaccine, because it is, it is in that context that I first not, uh, started, uh, not thinking about you as, as an especially, uh, reliable source.
And I'll explain what I mean.
Let me, let me quickly say here are the other hypotheses.
Okay.
Another one is just, uh, They don't want to admit error.
Now, interestingly, on the podcast of yours, the first one of the three military people, one of them threw that out.
And I think you missed it.
But one of them said, look, if you're Joe Biden, you're not going to issue a press release saying I got that one wrong.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Even if he starts thinking he got it wrong, there's a strong incentive.
And we see this in all kinds of bureaucracies to not report it.
Now, you may say, well, if he shares my view of the damage being done, he's a horrible person.
Well, there are a lot of horrible politicians, but that's different from saying there's a conspiracy to undermine our military readiness.
OK, third hypothesis.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
No, no, no.
Let us look at that hypothesis.
Fine.
You're telling me that privately these people have come to understand that what they believed wasn't correct and there was some risk and that they are- No, I'm not telling you that, but go ahead.
You're putting that as a proposal.
I'm saying if you believe, if you start with your premise that they must know that this isn't working and it has downside, if you just told me that the average politician had run into a case where they realized that a policy they are identified isn't working and asked me, are they going to admit it?
I'll say probably not, unless it's a different species of politician that I'm familiar with.
My hypothesis is better than yours.
My hypothesis, yeah, is that our system is riddled with people who are willing to peddle influence, which means willing to sell out the public, and so they're not especially interested in the truth of what these things do or don't do.
My guess is we would learn something interesting if we found out how they personally behaved with respect to issues like COVID vaccinations.
But with respect to the public, I don't think they're sitting around fretting about whether or not these things do or do not block transmission.
I think they have higher priorities.
I actually agree.
That's part of my point here.
A lot of your thinking assumes the opposite.
They're just as aware as Brett is of how horrible these things are.
No.
Look, my hypothesis requires them to be indifferent and it requires something else to be interested in either profit making or In the case of the thing that got me on your radar again, the question of military readiness.
Yes, there are things in the world that are powerful, that have lots of monetary resource, that are not interested in us being militarily ready and we prefer that we are not.
The question is, what is it that blocks them from buying influence in our pay-for-play system?
Do you know?
I would say it's your hypothesis and yet I can't get you to flesh it out and tell us.
I told you.
Who are these players you envision?
How are they manipulating the system and what specific policy interventions?
Okay, just for the sake of argument.
Yeah?
What if China decided that it wanted our, instead of making itself more militarily ready, it decided it would be a bargain to make us less militarily ready, and it decided to buy influence and advance policies that would have that consequence without announcing themselves as sabotage?
Would they be able to do it?
I would think this wouldn't be one of the first 10 things that came to their minds, first of all.
What?
They would much rather know things about our weapon systems, undermine the weapon systems, you know, infect our communication systems.
There's all kinds of things.
Bob, Bob.
I mean, this would only occur to a small number of people, what you're suggesting, because most people don't share your view.
In what universe are those things mutually exclusive?
No, but they have priorities.
I mean, they can't spend their money on everything.
They can't focus on everything.
I'm just saying this is very unlikely to occur to them.
Influence in our system is inexpensive compared to things like building new weapon systems or investing in the covert sabotage of weapon systems.
Influence in our system is cheap.
Why wouldn't they buy it?
Of course they buy it.
I'm not saying that.
So let me just back up.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Did you just say that of course they buy influence in our system?
Yeah, foreign actors try to buy influence on our system.
So do domestic interests that can be just as corrupting.
Yes, of course.
Why is my suggestion that this policy might be advanced to reduce military readiness in any way indicative of my failure of cognition?
Well, first of all, I've already listed a couple of alternative hypotheses that are the kinds of things we see every day.
We all know they happen all the time.
And so I think they're actually more parsimonious.
But I want to back up and just be clear.
Not mutually exclusive.
There is no place in my entire history of public speech that I have ever said incompetence was not rampant.
It is.
What I've said is that it doesn't go far enough to explain some patterns.
This being one of them.
Let me just quote you again.
So if you were interested in keeping that party in power so it could continue to advance bad policy, but you were also interested in degrading military readiness, Then the mandates might persist and blah, blah, blah.
So the you you're saying is a foreign power that both wants to keep the Democrats in power, kind of mysteriously if you look at Biden's China policy, by the way, and given some of the things he's been handing down, but you were also interested in degrading military readiness.
So now I think a reasonable person would have thought you're talking about the Democratic Party.
That's clearly the most superficially But you're saying you don't mean that.
You mean a foreign actor wants to do both of these things.
Keep the Democrats in power and undermine military readiness.
This is why I go through the formalism of calling this the Blue Team.
The Democratic Party has a history.
It has things to be proud of.
I don't think the thing that is currently in power has much of a relationship with that historical entity.
I mean, for one thing, notice there is essentially not a single likable person in this party anymore.
Why are we stuck with Joe Biden?
I wouldn't go that far, but go ahead.
Who could they advance who could win the presidency?
Who inside the Democratic Party?
Who could beat Trump or somebody?
A lot of people.
The trouble is they won't nominate him.
Ah, exactly.
And the people they won't nominate are leaving.
Yeah, well, this is a common party.
In a two-party system, the nomination tends to cater to the extremes, the right and left extremes, and you wind up with candidates who aren't necessarily well-suited to win the general.
But can I finish my list of hypotheses?
You're bending over backwards to rescue the idea that the Democratic Party is an organic entity rather than the more parsimonious hypothesis that in a completely pay-for-play system things will take up that space and they will walk around in a suit that looks like the Democratic Party doing whatever they want for whatever reasons that they've bought access.
By the way, do you deny that Republicans are also susceptible to the same kind of influence?
In fact, I believe they invented this.
That's what I told you is I think that Clinton took the Democratic Party and he muscled in on the racket that the Republican Party had innovated.
And that's where we're stuck.
We've now got two corrupt parties.
Now, ironically, because of the role the Democratic Party is playing, you now have conservatives in the Republican Party who are actually speaking in defense of the values that made the country special.
So there is life inside the Republican Party.
I don't think it's universal.
I still think the party is corrupt beyond rescuing.
But no, I think you have two teams.
And to think of this as an organic political party is a mistake at this point.
It's not behaving like one.
It's behaving like an influence peddling racket.
OK, you use the term blue team.
So I don't know.
I know something inorganic.
I don't know.
But.
Anyway, I'm just being clear.
I think any person would have taken you to be meaning that the entity that both wants the Democrats to win and wants to undermine military readiness, and you are asserting there may well be such an entity, is somebody in the executive branch.
That's what I thought.
But now you're saying there is a single, there's some kind of foreign entity that wants both.
I'm clear on that.
No, I want to clean something up.
I believe A, as you apparently also believe, that foreign actors will have noticed that one thing they could do, should they wish to alter our course, is to buy influence in our system and steer.
Okay?
That is something you and I apparently both believe is likely to be happening.
So the question is, is the magnitude of that large enough to create a policy that would, for example, cause us to degrade our own military readiness, not because it makes any sense and not because we're being bureaucratic, but because something that has bought influence wishes us not to be ready?
I believe that is plausible.
At least, I believe it is not crazy, which is what you suggested in your tweet.
I think it is so far out there that given the number of alternative hypotheses that you don't seem to have even considered, and I haven't even gotten through my list, it suggests that you are under the influence of highly motivated reason.
Now wait a second.
First of all, let us be clear.
What I am saying is that It is a viable hypothesis that something or more likely multiple things that don't want us ready are acting through the executive branch.
We have left a loophole in our system.
and that they have taken advantage of that loophole.
And our policy doesn't make sense because it is not intended to better us.
That's the hypothesis.
And you seem to agree to all the components.
And your complaint is that there are other things that may be in play here.
And my point will then be they are insufficient to explain the level of our self-harm.
But again, Brett, your view of the level of the self-harm is not widely shared in the administration or in most parts of America.
Your podcast is this distinct thing with its own audience that is very distinctive in its orientation, and the guests you bring on tend to agree with you strongly, I'm just here to tell you, Brett, most people out there aren't sitting there thinking like, oh my God, you know, they're giving vaccines to fighter pilots.
What if they have a heart attack?
Most people don't think vaccines give you a heart attack.
Yeah, most people don't think that.
Right, okay, that's my point.
Most people probably think it's not that weird that the CDC just recommended that the states put those same mRNA so-called vaccines on the regular childhood vaccine schedule.
Right, but what does that matter?
You are smart enough to understand that the CDC recommending that the states administer these so-called vaccines to children is not only absurd, but it is indefensible.
I like I said, I don't spend much time reading up on this stuff.
I'm sorry.
I'm here to discuss the military.
That's the problem, Robert, because let's just put it this way.
This entire conversation is unnecessary.
If the following thing is true.
Yeah.
The age stratification of the risk of COVID and the inverse age stratification of the risk of the vaccines in and of themselves mean there is no reason in the world that we should be recommending these things for children.
What's more, the fact that they don't block transmission means it's absurd on its face.
This is not defensible logically, it's not defensible medically, it's not defensible epidemiologically, So, there is nothing normal that could explain why we would administer these things to children, given that it's going to shorten the lives of many of them.
Yet we're doing it.
So my point is, nothing that can't explain that is worth talking about.
So now you're asking me to explain why vaccines are being administered in children?
I'm asking you to notice that the very same blue team, which I am saying is for some reason degrading our military readiness, while it is a pay-for-play system with few, if any, safeguards against who buys access, that that same thing is also taking actions that are completely inexplicable with respect to school children.
Well, actually, I mean, look, again, I don't know enough to talk about this stuff.
But if you're asking why are vaccine, you know, if I were to be asked to accept your premises, like the vaccines, They don't do much of any good.
Maybe they do net harm.
Why would they be so widely administered?
I would resort to the Big Pharma explanation, OK?
But that's a different question.
If I were to accept those, that would be my go-to conspiracy hypothesis.
But that's a different question.
I thought we were here to discuss what you claimed on this podcast, which I think is an irresponsible thing to claim in an era.
I mean, ask Nancy Pelosi's husband How careful we should be, maybe, before declaring people enemies of the state.
That's the environment we're in.
And what you said certainly would give people the impression you're suggesting that people in the Democratic administration are enemies of the state.
Now you're telling us it's different.
I don't buy what you're saying now.
It doesn't make sense to me either.
But please let me get to my next two hypotheses.
Please?
I don't understand what conversation we're having.
I mean, you specifically say, look, I don't know enough to assess this.
I'm saying, look, it's transparent on its face that we are making an error as large as administering a dangerous, highly novel treatment to children who don't need it and won't benefit from it, And for no reason, it would still not be justified if it did block transmission, because it's not reasonable to harm children to save vulnerable old people.
But even that explanation has fallen by the wayside.
And yet we're still doing it.
I know that's your view.
Robert, this is since my podcast.
We are still doing this.
The policy marches on, completely divorced from reality.
Right, right.
I know that's your view, but I didn't tweet about that part of your view.
I tweeted about your claim that someone is intentionally undermining military readiness via the military vaccine policy.
Can we get back to that?
Or do you just not want to discuss it?
Cute.
It's not that I don't want to discuss it, it's that I do not want you framing it in isolation as if we don't have multiple, extremely difficult to explain things happening across many different domains simultaneously.
Because the point is, You can say that my hypothesis is irresponsible and maybe even crazy if you can isolate it, but in context, the fact is we are dealing with something that has caused our system to go completely insane.
And it is not only going insane, but it is targeting children, right?
You have to look for an explanation big enough to deal with that.
Is pharma corruption big enough?
Maybe.
Maybe.
I accept that as a possible hypothesis, but it is hard to understand why a civilian authority that can recognize that these mandates needed to be lifted for the public still maintains them for the military.
What is that?
What happened?
Let me just repeat that for the purposes of the argument I'm making, what you just said Doesn't matter, okay?
I know you believe that.
For the purposes of the argument I'm making, it doesn't matter—let me finish—whether what you just said is true.
It does matter to some extent whether what you just said is a view widely shared, like in the Pentagon and in the administration.
I'm here to tell you it's not, okay?
And I hope there's some logicians out there who understand the argument I'm making And understand that it doesn't rise or fall on whether Brett Weinstein's view of COVID is right.
It rises or falls, parts of some of the hypotheses, rise or fall on the question of whether Brett Weinstein's view is the view that prevails in America.
And you know damn well it doesn't.
That's what's No, that is logically false.
Why is that?
Because the hypothesis I advanced is that you have a pay-for-play system in which people aren't paying close attention to what is or isn't good for military readiness or children or the transmission of the disease because they have higher priorities.
That's what I'm saying.
No, actually, the hypothesis you advance is that some of these people are paying attention to military readiness and want to degrade it.
No.
That's different.
No.
You absolutely did.
No, because as you read it, you even noticed as you were reading that quote, you said you, in that case, was a foreign entity that might have wished to accomplish these things acting through the blue team.
Right, okay.
That's the hypothesis.
Are you saying somebody wants to undermine military readiness?
Well, look, our military enemies certainly want to undermine our military readiness.
But the point is, you're even positing that the people in the administration must be indifferent to, like, good and bad consequences depends on their accepting your view of COVID and vaccines and so on, and they don't.
They're influence peddlers.
They're indifferent to our well-being.
That's why they're selling us out.
You know, it's possible that they are, but the assertion that the vaccine policy unambiguously indicates that they are, depends but the assertion that the vaccine policy unambiguously indicates that they are, depends I said hypothesis.
No, let me read you a quote from yours.
Whatever it is, you're talking about this entity out there, this is what you said, whatever it is, is at the very least Completely indifferent to our readiness.
It doesn't care if we're at our best or maybe it wants us unready.
Then you also said the absolute least pernicious explanation is total indifference to the well-being of service members and the readiness of our military force.
You're saying there is zero probability that the people responsible for this policy are not indifferent You're saying there's zero chance.
That's the logical meaning of those two statements.
Do you agree?
You are playing a shell game because I do believe that whatever engineered the policy has to be at least completely indifferent.
That does not mean that the people who made the policy happen are indifferent.
I do believe they are de facto indifferent because they are corrupt.
They're allowing themselves to be steered by things that have something other than the public's well-being at their core.
That is what they're doing.
They're doing that for money or power or both, I don't know.
They're de facto indifferent, not de jure.
Say again?
Never mind.
I mean, I think...
It's clear in your podcast that you're saying it must be the case they just don't care about the well-being of service members.
Whatever designed the policy must be indifferent.
Okay, that's your claim.
There's no chance that it could be anything else.
Whereas I just, you know, and what you just said is whoever designed the policy, well come on, it's very easy to explain how it was implemented.
Now you're playing philosophical games, okay?
If I say That we exist and are having a conversation.
Am I saying there is no chance that one of us is a brain in a jar being fed information to see what we will do?
No.
I'm not going to technically rule that out, but yes, from the point of view of what plausibly explains the conversation that we are having, you and I are two human beings with a disagreement interacting over the internet.
Okay?
Okay.
So I am saying the same thing here.
Is it, you know, is it possible, you know, who knows?
Am I a schizophrenic who, you know, imagined that there was something called COVID and that this is all happening in my head?
I guess, but I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time worrying about that.
What I think I've got, is a lot of information about how this system is behaving.
None of it makes a wit of sense.
It does appear to be rather completely, I mean, again, you decide that you get the right to rule out the question of, well, okay, we've got two completely irrational, seemingly indifferent policies in two different realms, seemingly indifferent policies in two different realms, right?
You don't want to talk about why, even though I'm sure you have enough information to know it makes no sense to administer mRNA vaccines to children for COVID.
I literally haven't looked at the data.
I'm sorry.
I don't have young children.
I'm a horrible person for not being conversant in it.
I'm sorry.
Look, my intuition is if I were a policymaker, I wouldn't do it.
I wouldn't do it.
I agree.
It's just not worth the blowback.
What I'm telling you is you're living in a phase of history in which we are actually contemplating mandating of radical therapies that do not benefit the individuals in question without giving informed consent to them or in this case their parents, right?
We are actually contemplating doing this Even though we know that the risks from these things go heavily to the young for multiple reasons, both because they're more dangerous to the young and because the young have longer lives ahead of them, and that the benefits go in the opposite direction.
If there's any benefit at all to these treatments, they do not go to young people.
And yet we're doing it.
So my point to you is, Probably a couple hours work on your part would reveal to you that we have some crazy policy in motion that cannot be explained epidemiologically or medically or logically or any other way.
That that policy is actually happening.
That it's not something that happened and has been slow to be reversed.
This is more recent than the podcast you were complaining about.
This is taking place.
Now, The problem is the level of dysfunction exceeds normal explanations.
And what I see you doing is wanting to narrow down the question to exactly one dysfunctional thing and then stretch the hypotheses that you consider reasonable to the extent that they can cover that one thing.
And my point is, well, that's not the context they exist in.
You're existing in a moment where we have somebody who's president who is exhibiting extreme cognitive decline, which means you and I don't know what's president.
It means we've effectively elected a party at best.
That party is corrupt, so we don't really know what we've ushered into the executive branch.
And we have all of these policies that are emerging that make no sense at all and do appear to emerge from complete indifference to the well-being of Americans.
So, I don't know why you want to limit the discussion.
If I were in your shoes... Because it's what we agreed to talk about, Brett.
It's what this conversation was supposed to be about.
Right, but... You should have told me if you wanted to have a whole conversation.
Now, I can get to the why I consider you not a credible source on COVID.
You want me to?
But first, can I finish these last two hypotheses?
Because you're going to like these.
You're going to like one of them because it's very cynical.
It's just not as cynical as yours, okay?
You're going to like this.
Okay, here we go.
So suppose somebody comes to, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or whoever makes these decisions and says, you know, we're suffering from more manpower loss than we thought because of the vaccine thing.
There's a lot of people who don't want to take the vaccine.
We're having to, you know, and then there may be people not signing up because of that.
Now one, Real possibility, it's a hypothesis worth considering, is that the general says, you know, those are the kind of guys we don't want in the military.
We want people who follow orders just as well without them.
That could well happen.
It's a hypothesis.
It's possible.
Holy moly!
How well did you pay attention to the podcast that you're critiquing?
Did somebody say that?
Well, my point was the effect Whether it is intentional or not, the effect of booting all of the people who ask questions and are inclined to say no is to almost instantaneously create a force that is much more likely to accept immoral orders should they be handed down.
Yeah, but you did not posit this as a motivation.
You did not posit what I just posited as a motivation.
You only entertained one hypothesis on that podcast, as far as I recall.
So let me get on to my next one.
You did not entertain the one I just articulated.
No, no, no.
I certainly entertained... First of all, there are two podcasts with members of the military who are now whistleblowers.
I don't remember what was said.
One happened after the one this was about and the one I listened to.
Nonetheless, if you're saying that it has not occurred to me and I have not said that making a force that is more compliant in the face of immoral orders, that that's not been on my mind and that you're advancing it and that's why I'm getting it.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying you did not posit I'm not talking about moral or immoral.
I'm not talking about generals who say, I don't want moral officers.
I'm saying, I mean, look, it's a widespread sentiment among military officers that they want people who will unquestioningly follow orders.
Remember, one thing we do is take them to foreign countries and say, you have to kill this guy just because he was born in this other country.
Yes, however, you're talking about people who are in one of very few professions where you take an oath.
And officers who take that oath, upon becoming commissioned officers in the military, take an oath to defend the Constitution, not to follow orders.
This is completely consistent with Nuremberg.
The idea is, their obligation is to defend the Constitution against enemies, foreign and domestic, and that means immoral orders are not to be followed.
If you want to say that the motivation I am suggesting could be at play in hypothesis number three is an immoral motivation, fine.
Have fun with it.
I'm indifferent to that question.
I'm just saying it is a common desire in military officers that their soldiers reliably obey orders.
So I can imagine that being a reaction.
I mean, especially again, there is this bureaucratic inertia.
It's like, oh man, I don't want to have to change the whole policy.
They say, but General, they're dropping out.
And he's like, you know, we don't want these people in here.
Final hypothesis is even more cynical.
Maybe you'll like this one.
I'm surprised it escaped your attention.
And I don't believe it has a high probability true, but I can certainly imagine it is that you come to a Democratic administration and you say, there's these soldiers dropping out, we're losing them.
And they say, well, you know, there's probably a correlation between soldiers who don't want to get a vaccine and soldiers who support Trump.
And one concern we have, in the wake of January 6th and various other things, is that conceivably this country could enter a crisis where there could be a coup and you could want the military to be loyal to democratic institutions.
Or even more cynically, just say, we don't want Team Red, we want Team Blue.
Be as cynical as you want.
I have a whole spectrum of cynicism, from bureaucratic inertia, to the people not wanting to admit policy error, to them wanting guys who just follow orders, to them wanting people who are not Trump supporters, fine.
You didn't entertain any of these.
I think, frankly, all of them Are more plausible than the one you entertained, which, by the way, is the most explosive one in a very incendiary environment, suggesting at least to read what you said in the obvious way, you think it's meant to be read, that there could be enemies of the state and the administration.
You're now saying you didn't quite mean that, but no, no, no.
Why didn't you?
Do you do you agree that you don't agree that my hypotheses are worth considering only yours?
I didn't say anything like that.
I do think that the idea that a guy who just advanced the hypothesis that perhaps what's going on is that the military brass was trying to create a military force that it would be less likely to stage a coup, And you think my hypothesis is crazy that we have a corrupt system in which our enemies might have bought some influence?
No, you mischaracterize what I said.
I didn't say stage a coup.
I said, and I wasn't necessarily talking about officers.
I was saying I can imagine people in the administration.
I'm not even, I mean, I don't think this is the case.
I'm just saying that, that in the list of plausible hypotheses, I think it's at least more plausible than yours.
And it's pretty cynical.
You should like it.
It is a kind of conspiracy theory.
First of all, listen to yourself.
It's cynical.
Maybe you should like it.
You're calling me cynical.
I'm not cynical.
Right?
You are characterizing me as a cynical person who might like a hypothesis on the basis that it is cynical, rather than on the basis that it makes some kind of prediction that's manifest in the world.
Frankly, that's beneath you.
Or I hope it is.
No, I think you have a cynical view of the world.
I have a pretty cynical view.
It's just not as dark as yours.
No, I have a deeply skeptical view of power.
I do not have a cynical view.
Okay.
Cynicism is reflexive.
Okay.
So you're reflectively suspicious, not reflexively?
Look, I am suspicious of our political apparatus after decades of watching it carefully.
But you know what?
A cynical person would not have advanced the Unity 2020 concept, which was designed to put good people in office in a place where they could actually rescue the system from the top, which I think is frankly the only plausible way to do it.
Okay?
That is not the move of a cynical person.
That is the move of somebody who deeply loves his country and does not want to see it fail in this way.
So, you can take your sense that I am a cynical person and do with it what you will, but I am not a cynical person.
Now, your hypothesis about what may have been on the minds of military brass, I find Preposterous.
The idea that that would drive them... Which one?
The one that they want people who will follow orders, or... No, look, I believe... Because the other one I'm not attributing to the military brass.
Well, who are you attributing it to?
I'm saying conceivably people in the administration.
And it's not that this is the plan.
I want to be clear.
I'm not saying the vaccine mandate was a plan to get rid of Trump supporters.
I'm saying if somebody comes to them and says, yeah, we are losing, you know, a fair number of soldiers, I can imagine in the current political environment, Somebody's saying, yeah, just as well, man.
I mean, if push comes to shove, you saw what happened January 6th, if push comes to shove, do we want a ton of Trump supporters?
And of course, the military already at that level, at the, you know, kind of enlisted man, NCO level probably is, or enlisted, whatever.
You know, it is probably pretty red.
Anyway, again, I'm not saying that would be the motivation behind the mandate.
Your question is, why wasn't the policy changed?
I'm saying there's a whole ton of reasons.
The two most plausible, in my view, are bureaucratic inertia and assuming people share your view of the policy's downside, not wanting to admit error, These things, and there's probably more, and I just want to emphasize, there's only one that you virtually ruled, your language virtually ruled out.
Yeah, because what they suggest is a pattern of incompetence and noise.
And that's not the pattern that we see.
And if you want to isolate this to one question, which is why are military mandates maintained when civilian mandates have largely been lifted?
If you want to isolate it to that, then you can say, well, there are lots of hypotheses.
But if you put it in the context of all of the other bizarre things that have happened surrounding COVID and mandates, then you will understand that can't possibly be the explanation.
There's too much of it.
But what I really don't get is you've already agreed to all of the logical links necessary for my hypothesis to definitely be in motion.
Now, that doesn't mean it's the only thing in motion, because it's a question of whether it's mutually exclusive, but you've agreed to a system in which there's pay for play, a system in which we don't really even know what our executive branch is because the president can't really be playing that role.
So, and you've agreed that our enemies will certainly have noticed the pay-for-play nature of our system and will certainly be utilizing it to some extent.
So you have agreed that all of the ingredients necessary for my hypothesis to be at least relevant to the question are, you know, not worth arguing over.
And yet, you look at my putting those dots together and saying, well, are we being induced to harm ourselves because something is driving that doesn't have our well-being at heart?
You think that's beyond the pale.
And frankly, I don't see the difference.
I'm just connecting the dots that you and I both agree on.
No, you're not.
Putting together the dots that I've agreed to do not turn this into a very plausible hypothesis.
And they do not answer the question... No, logically wrong.
Logically wrong.
Are you saying those dots point to your hypothesis?
No.
And don't point to any of the four that I mentioned?
Here is the way you deal with this logically.
Okay.
Brett and Robert agree that there is some degree of foreign influence over our policy, which is likely to be against our interests.
And the question is, to what degree does that factor account for the policy in question?
Could be anywhere from zero to one, right?
No, you demanded that I tell you who it was and I said, for the sake of argument, let's imagine it's China.
I don't know if it's China.
over whether or not that hypothesis is plausible, because you and I apparently both believe it is.
The question is, to what degree?
No, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Do I agree that, yes, there's foreign influence?
Of course, but your hypothesis is China, of all places.
No, you demanded that I tell you who it was, and I said, for the sake of argument, let's imagine it's China.
I don't know if it's China.
How would I know?
Well, who else?
I mean, well, then you're saying it's China, not me.
No, I'm not.
I'm not saying it's anybody else.
You're suggesting that somebody in China or Russia thought how we can undermine the military.
I got an idea.
Mandatory vaccines.
I'm sure both of them have mandatory vaccine policies of their own.
So why would they think that undermines the military, Brett?
They're probably both doing it.
First of all, do you deny that they're both doing it?
I'll bet they are.
I haven't looked it up.
Wouldn't that be bad for your hypothesis that one of the major foreign powers sees mandatory vaccines as a way to undermine our military readiness?
If it turns out that they're doing that, that would be really, do you agree?
That would be really, really bad for your hypothesis, right?
I don't know what the answer is, but it would be super bad.
My understanding is that the Chinese have not used any spike-based vaccine.
They certainly are not using mRNA-coded and lipid nanoparticles.
So this is a very different question.
Now, I don't pretend to understand the inner workings of China, its authoritarianism, its governmental structure, the tensions within the administration, but all I know is that We have enemies, they have money, and our system allows anybody with money to buy in.
Now, you seem to agree with those things.
You seem to think China is the most likely entity to be wielding this power.
Well, yeah, it allows them to make campaign donations.
That's a primary way.
But I really think you need to sketch out the way this works.
Because if you're talking campaign donations, then you are ruling out everyone in the Pentagon, per se, because they don't get campaign donations.
No, I don't.
You know, maybe I've misunderstood you, because, as you say, you're not a scientist.
Now, I am a scientist.
I'm glad you're finally agreeing with me.
I'm glad I've gotten you to a point where you want to agree with me.
I'm not being glib here, okay?
I'm a scientist, and what's more, I'm a biologist.
I work in complex systems.
If you say to me, Well, you're alleging that there is a system in which some signal triggers some pathway.
And you would need to explain to me where all of the molecules come from that would be in that pathway before I even believe that there is one.
I'll just say nonsense.
Right?
The fact is, you can infer that there's a pathway, you can know certain things about it and not other things about it, and you can find out an awful lot about how it works without having all of the details.
And you're effectively holding me to a standard where in order to say, hey, this pattern of policy matches corruption by an entity that does not wish us well, that in order to advance such a hypothesis, I would have to have all of the details nailed down?
No!
Sorry, logically that's not how it works.
Well, when I have a hypothesis, I try to flesh it out.
And if I can't figure out the exact mechanism by which it would work, I don't cling to it the way you're clinging to this one.
I fill in the details or I give up.
You have to at least have a conjectural explanation of the way it would actually work.
I did.
I said, for the sake of argument, let's imagine it's China.
Okay, and how do they do this?
They campaign donations get Biden to order this or what?
Well, you know, I don't think they can donate to campaigns, but the fact is we're talking about clever people who have huge quantities of resource at their disposal.
So the question is, how can they purchase influence in a system in which influence is for sale?
I don't think you or I have any doubt that the Chinese, were they to decide they wanted to use money to influence our political system, that our political system being open for business would allow them to find a way to do that, that didn't make their fingerprints obvious, and then having done so, that they would be inclined to steer us not well, not for our well-being, but they would be inclined to steer us in a way that worked for their interests.
You know what I'll bet the Chinese think?
I'll bet they think If you've got a way you can give a test to soldiers to find out which will willingly follow orders and which will ask troublesome questions and say, I don't want to do this.
And you can give them the test and the people who don't want to follow the orders can be banished from the military.
I think they'd say that'll make your military stronger.
I'll bet you anything.
So again, this is a case of just, you keep assuming your view of this whole thing is widely shared, even in the administration or by the Chinese, and it's not.
It's a very distinctive worldview.
You're gonna shout anecdote, okay?
But I was recently on a plane, and I sat down next to a guy.
I hadn't done anything to choose him as a seatmate, okay?
I just sat down next to a guy.
He didn't know who I was, and we started talking.
Turns out he's from a multi-generation military family.
Currently, he's in.
And he's highly trained.
He's a mechanic who works on aircraft.
And he didn't know that I had done a podcast.
He didn't know my political bent.
He didn't know anything.
And I just started to ask him about the conclusions from that podcast.
And I said, can you tell me about readiness?
Can you tell me about morale and retention?
And he rolled his eyes and he told me just how frightening the situation was on the inside.
And in fact, even though he's from a multi-generation military family, he was looking to get out.
Right?
Now, I didn't choose him.
And you said it was because of the vaccine mandate?
Yes.
Because of the vaccine mandates and because of the way people who didn't want to take them have been treated.
Because there are no religious exemptions.
Because people are being forced.
Nobody wants to live in a military like that.
This is bad for morale.
Well, you know, I just talked to a guy who's a military veteran.
He said, He doesn't think the military is ready for a major war, and when I asked him why, he talked about things like drug abuse.
And so there's lots of problems in the military, maybe, that aren't being addressed, but... That's not a separate problem, okay?
I'm sure there is a drug abuse problem that would happen absent the problem with morale, but obviously the morale problem and the drug abuse problem and the suicide problem are all related.
Now, we aren't supposed to be able to fight a war.
We are supposed to be able to fight two simultaneous wars.
That's what readiness is supposed to mean.
And we are degrading that readiness absurdly in a world where it is becoming evident that we need it more than ever.
Can I quickly get to, I promise to tell you why I decided you're not a, why I quit, I decided to quit Following you as a credible source on these issues of COVID vaccine, so on.
You seem very eager to tell me this, although... Well, I think it's related because it's another case where I wonder how carefully you're assessing the evidence.
My guess would be that somebody who wanted you to embarrass me has been feeding you stuff, and so you're trying to steer us in this direction.
No, actually, I can prove that's not wrong.
I can prove that's not right.
I've got it on the record, because I commented on it at the time, okay?
Let's hear it.
You did this podcast with Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone, okay?
And I came to doubt all three of you.
Steve Kirsch happened at the beginning, he said, I've written this down, He said he had had a carpet cleaner come into his house who said, quote, I got the Pfizer vaccine and I had a heart attack two minutes later.
The guy said, also, my wife, she got the vaccine.
Now her hand shakes when she holds a glass of water.
And then Kirsch said this, describing those two anecdotes.
He said, if it was really a safe vaccine, then what I just saw was impossible.
Impossible.
Couldn't happen by chance.
That's not right.
It's a direct quote, Brett.
I wrote it down.
I'm reading it.
I just listened to the podcast.
The word impossible is obviously not right.
Deeply improbable, but not impossible.
But he said impossible.
Oh my God.
He said impossible on my podcast?
Yeah.
I guess I'm not a credible source.
So no, well, plus, I mean, he was, there were other things, but no, seriously, I'm not kidding.
This is serious stuff.
I, you know, life is short.
So you need to find sources you can trust.
The guest on my podcast said one word that was uncareful.
No, no, no.
I haven't gotten to the point about you.
Okay.
You said, and this is the part I commented at the time, on at the time, as I will explain.
You said, quote, the data suggests that the prophylactic ivermectin is something like 100% effective in preventing people from contracting COVID when taken properly.
Then you later said in the podcast, the Argentina study would suggest 100% effectiveness of ivermectin.
I went and googled the Argentina study, and here is a sentence from the abstract.
The experimental group received ivermectin orally, two tablets of six milligram every seven days, and Iota carrageenan, six sprays per day, it's a nasal spray, for four weeks.
This was in the abstract.
You didn't have to go far to find this sentence.
What they're saying is there were two separate treatments applied to everyone in the treatment group.
And what that means, and what that means is you cannot infer anything with great confidence about either of them, because the one, the nasal spray, had been shown to be effective with other respiratory illness, and you were looking at this, all you had to do is read the abstract to get this, and saying it's 100% effectiveness.
Now, I went on my podcast and said to, I was talking to Mickey Kaus, I said, you know, Brett Weinstein said this thing.
I went and read the abstract.
He's clearly off base.
And Mickey said, you sure?
I mean, I don't, that seems like a pretty obvious error.
I said, go read the paper.
Now, weeks later, you, I don't know how word got to you that you should reread the paper.
I think you, to your credit, I shouldn't have said that, but my question is how motivated must your reasoning have been if reading every sentence in the abstract would have precluded your saying what you said on that podcast?
That's when I quit thinking of you as credible.
All right.
You have Settled, I believe, on a hypothesis that the combination of carrageenan and ivermectin might have been essentially 100% effective.
No, I mean the study showed high effectiveness in the treatment group.
Absolutely, yes.
Yes.
And so the error you're concerned about is that I elided the use of carrageenan in a protocol that might have been 100% effective or nearly so.
That's what you're concerned about?
Not that the Public Health Authority didn't notice that a combination of carrageenan and ivermectin might be nearly 100% effective?
Here's what I'm saying, Brett.
What?
Here's what I'm saying.
If I do a study Where I give everyone in the treatment group both ibuprofen and aspirin and they all say their headaches went away.
And nobody in the other group does.
And I come back and say, this study shows that aspirin is 100% effective.
That is an obvious fallacy.
You disagree?
No.
Look, we agree that I should have said a combination of carrageenan and ivermectin appears to be near 100% effective.
That's what I should have said.
Okay.
I mean, that's an important point.
Of course, which is why I corrected it.
Now, it happens.
I don't know if you know the full history of what went down with this study.
Do you?
No, it doesn't matter for purpose.
The point I'm making, but I'm happy to hear what went down.
It does matter.
The fact is, concerns were raised about this study, right?
I became concerned about it, and I pursued the data from the study.
I contacted the study's author, and I said, can I look at the data set?
And he initially told me that I could, and then I couldn't get it from him.
And after a month of trying to get the data set to look at it, I told my audience, I said, look, this study cannot be replicated, and it should be given zero evidentiary weight.
I believe the study took place.
I believe it did show high effectiveness.
And I do not believe that carrageenan was the driving factor, but it doesn't matter.
Were there a combination of two safe drugs that we could administer that would prevent COVID, it would have avoided a tremendous amount of harm and disruption to our system.
So that would be the error.
But at the point that that system That study could not be demonstrated to have taken place and given that result, because the data set was not provided, I said it takes evidentiary weight.
So that's the right thing.
Well, that part's commendable, but it's unrelated to what I just said.
No, I have acknowledged that in a live discussion with two other people, I said ivermectin when what I should have said was ivermectin plus carrageenan.
But had that been the issue, then we're talking about a minor foul where I am referencing a study that shows 100% effectiveness or nearly so, and it's two things that are safe and could be administered to everybody.
The error is that we didn't pay attention to that signal.
Well, that may be an error.
You may be right.
But my point is, this is not a slip of the tongue.
A, you said it twice.
What clearly happened...
Well, I don't know.
You tell me what happened.
All you had to do was read the abstract to know that you cannot make a confident inference about either of these things.
And yet you made one, and look, again... I freely acknowledge that.
Okay, but what do you think was at work?
Why confirmation bias comes out of emotion?
It's because you feel strongly committed to a hypothesis that you ignore evidence that's either contradictory or adds nuance or whatever.
It seems like you didn't even see this part of the sentence in the abstract, And I'm just asking why do you think you were so strongly motivated?
But this wasn't the only study that said Ivermectin was useful.
This was one of multiple studies that said that.
Ivermectin was on my mind.
I don't want to seem like I'm obsessed, but I don't agree that this is a minor foul.
I'm sorry.
- The Argentine body, which suggests 100% effectiveness.
I don't wanna seem like I'm obsessed, but-- - You do. - I don't agree that this is a minor foul, I'm sorry.
I mean, you've got a podcast with a big audience and you went and told them you had evidence it was 100% effective and you didn't.
And it was not-- - Well, let me ask you this though.
Okay, so on my podcast, I corrected my error.
Weeks later.
Yeah, fine.
I'm not saying it was intentional.
You should be commended for correcting it.
But what I'm asking you... So we're looking for scientists who don't make errors?
I'm looking for people who speak about this subject carefully and assess the evidence carefully.
And I'm just telling you when I got off the boat.
Look, I listened to the whole podcast.
At that point, I was saying, I think the jury is out on ivermectin.
I was saying it publicly and I still don't have strong views.
Even today, I haven't paid that much attention.
You should.
You should pay attention.
It's another story that will tell you something is afoot here that makes no sense.
Could be, but again, that would not be related to the military readiness thing we came to talk about.
And look, maybe people will say I'm making a mountain out of a molehill.
I'm just explaining why I've made a good faith effort to listen to the people you had assembled.
And, uh, probably time does not permit us to get into Robert Malone, but I've written a piece called, Is Robert Malone Crazy?, in the non-zero newsletter.
People can Google it.
And, and he, he was prone to a kind of conspiracy theorizing, which I describe in that piece, very much, well, hypothesizing, sorry, very much like yours in the sense that plain old, the way bureaucrat, bureaucracies work, explain the evidence he was citing.
Uh, and he didn't entertain that hypothesis.
And, and, uh, you know, so, um, that's, uh, now I would say... Well, no, look.
People who have spoken out openly on this subject, people with expertise who have spoken out openly, have faced an onslaught of propaganda and stigma and character assassination.
We now know that this has flowed through the tech platforms, that it has been in coordination None of us can ever be completely sure about this stuff.
I don't think you're in a good position to judge how people faced with that have done, because frankly, I don't think you're even in a good position to know what was true and what was propaganda that you've fallen for.
None of us can ever be completely sure about this stuff.
No, I don't know what you're referring to.
I'm referring to a campaign to stigmatize, to remove credentials from, to usher out of the public square, people who raised very legitimate concerns about our COVID policy.
I agree that this is a problem generically.
What do you mean generically?
What?
No, because I mean it's true in other areas.
It's true with foreign policy.
It's true right now with people who say that NATO expansion may have had something to do, may have raised the chances of an invasion of Ukraine being called Putin apologists or pro-Putin or whatever.
And I'm not denying.
I'm not talking about political bickering.
I am talking about the executive branch targeting citizens and portraying them as spreading mis-mal and disinformation when that is in fact not what they were doing.
I agree that the net has been cast too wide in this.
Look, I don't doubt that if you showed me particular cases of people being deplatformed on this very issue, I would say that wasn't justified.
I am not a big defender of deplatforming.
And look, I agree the Hunter Biden laptop was a case of that.
And even though at the time I was kind of hoping the story would go away because I didn't want Trump elected, but I agree that there was unwarranted Speech policing.
And it happens in foreign policy.
I don't doubt that it happens in this realm at all.
It's not speech policing.
It's not speech policing.
We had the New York Post silenced on a legitimate news story about an intimate family connection of the person being elected president.
But I conceded this point.
Why are we arguing this?
I mean, strictly speaking... We are arguing this point because, and frankly, I think it's the theme of this entire podcast.
You want to zero in on individual issues and give a particular perspective when those issues exist together in a context that demands a larger explanation.
Well, I agree that some of them are interrelated.
Now, strictly speaking, the post wasn't silenced.
It was kicked off of social.
This post was not allowed on social media platforms.
The post published what it wanted to post published.
But but I agree that the policing was unwarranted.
And I do think.
Unwarranted?
You're talking about intervention in an election.
You're talking about a country that in its First Amendment enshrines the ability to discuss things openly and you are talking about actions which frankly are unconscionable journalistically.
The Post had a right to that story.
I will escalate my adjectives from unwarranted and tell me when I've gotten high enough.
Villainous.
Inexcusable, indefensible, inimical to the principles on which our country was founded.
Tell me when to stop.
I mean, I don't know why you're arguing with me about this.
Well, I'm arguing with you about it because it was consequential.
This was a historic breach.
It might have affected the election.
That is why it was silenced.
Yeah.
Look, there is a connection, I think, among all of these things.
So we've got Evidence of corruption in the family of the president surrounding Ukraine.
We have tech giants coordinating with the executive branch and silencing a newspaper that is in possession of a legitimate news story.
How un-American would this have to get?
I thought I just said an immaculate principle on which this country was founded.
By the way, the question of the strength of the evidence is another question that I'm not addressing.
I just think they should not try to suppress that these things were found on Hunter Biden's laptop, whatever you want to make of them.
Yeah, that's all well and good two years down the road.
But the fact is, A, some of us were targeted for talking about this at the time.
Maybe you were one of them.
But The fact is Americans should not be targeted for talking about things, even if they turn out not to be true.
The way we find out if they're true is we talk about them.
We don't silence each other.
And the fact is this has been the nature of policy surrounding COVID from the get go.
We are not allowed to talk about certain things.
Many of us were demonized for talking about the connection of this virus to the lab in Wuhan, right?
That was absurd.
The fact is this is a scientific question and scientists were talking about it and they were silenced by a political entity.
What political entity?
We don't know.
We have a president who isn't really president.
I don't understand why that doesn't bother you more.
Who said it didn't bother me, Brett?
Where is this coming from?
What it's coming from is you came after me for saying something highly unusual is going on with our executive branch, where our executive branch is doing things that don't appear to be in our interest, but you seem to just blow by the fact that our executive branch isn't even built in the way the founders of the nation decided it should be.
What is president?
The Democratic Party?
I've already said I'm very disconcerted by the cognitive status of our president.
Yes, but you're not connecting these two dots.
They're right next to each other.
You've got an executive branch whose nature you don't know, and you've got policy coming from it that makes no sense.
Well, you're the one who's saying it makes no sense, and you're assuming that view is widely shared.
No, you are telling me that incompetence and the sluggishness of bureaucracy are as good an explanation for it making no sense as my hypothesis.
That is not either of us saying actually the policy makes sense.
I'm saying if I grant you your premise that it makes no sense, which is your premise.
I don't even know what discussion we're having then, Robert.
You really think this policy makes sense?
Why would you mandate a treatment that doesn't block transmission to people who are, in general, young enough that they won't get any benefit for it?
Why would you do it?
I have explained my view of why the policy was initially implemented.
It seems eminently plausible and not really shouldn't be that controversial.
It's so obvious.
The question I think you're asking is why wasn't the policy rescinded?
I have suggested that there are a number of hypotheses that are significantly more plausible than yours, and yet you did not even entertain them.
You leap to the darkest, most incendiary, most conspiratorial on the entire spectrum of hypotheses, and I'm saying that's not good science.
That's bad science.
No, I'm saying... It doesn't mean your hypothesis has no chance of being true.
It means you are not looking at things in a balanced way.
No, this is coming from you zeroing in on one issue in isolation rather than looking at a context in which policy after policy looks like this.
Like the vaccinating of children at the behest of the executive branch after we know that this thing doesn't block transmission.
That makes no sense either.
I'm telling you, the only way you get there is indifference to the well-being of Americans.
That's the floor.
This is new.
This is a new policy.
This is not an entrenched policy.
This is a new policy.
I just don't know enough to argue about this.
I'm sorry.
I wish I did.
I fully accept that you don't know, but my point is you are drawing conclusions that require you not to know.
Wait, you're saying that I've chosen not to know about this so that I can argue with you about the military?
Or what are you saying?
I'm saying that when you have this number of highly unusual decisions happening at once, and you have decided to focus in on one and then say, well, I'm not responsible for the others, then the point is, if the others Make a consistent pattern with the one that you are defending as very probably the result of much more ordinary phenomena, that that is you making an error, not recognizing something highly unusual has taken place here.
We are in a situation in which the policy emanating from our executive branch does not make any sense from the point of view of even an inept attempt to protect Americans.
That's a problem, and that problem may require you to branch out and look further than you have looked so far.
I think evaluating your hypothesis doesn't require more than I posited.
I mean, it would if you were like See, the thing is, the two are not even connected in your mind in a grand conspiracy hypothesis.
You're not saying the Chinese are trying to get vaccines into the schools, I assume.
And you haven't said that Big Pharma is trying to get vaccines into the military.
So it's not like there's even a really deep organic connection in your own mind.
No.
Between these, except that you're saying that's America's... There is a deep connection.
There is a deep connection, Robert, and it's something I've been focused on for decades.
It is the absolute corruption of our system, which has now reached a point where policy cannot even be rationalized.
Now, do I believe that, you know, Whatever entity it is that decided to maintain those mandates in the military is exactly the same as that which decided to inflict these so-called vaccines on children in order for them to get educated?
No.
My guess would be that the latter is about pharma and frankly about liability protection, which comes from putting these things on the childhood vaccine schedule.
And that the former is about potentially unhooking our readiness because something doesn't care about it or is actively interested in doing so.
But I don't know.
I'm not telling you.
I'm not on the inside of this corruption racket.
But I can tell you that what has happened is a system that had some corruption has now become completely corrupt.
And what that has resulted in is something with no institutions that function.
Right?
No newspaper, no platform, no university.
None of these things work.
Neither of our parties represents the public.
This is a crisis.
No institutions that function is the kind of hyperbole I've heard from you in other contexts.
I think if you reflected on it, you'd say, well, OK, what I mean is they're pretty damn dysfunctional.
Most of them, some of them less so, blah, blah, blah.
But I mean, you do that.
You're inclined to do that.
And so I'm curious.
I mean, obviously, we could come up with some tiny institutions.
What I mean to say is no institution above some threshold size.
But what institutions are you talking about?
Well, I mean, I see, you know, I've been in journalism a long time and I'm disappointed by the current state of the major media.
But I wouldn't say they're not functioning.
I would say they've never been perfect.
They've never been perfectly objective.
Uh, and they are significantly less so now, and the norms are changing.
On the other hand, the norms are moving to a kind of norm that prevailed in journalism a long time ago in our republic, where most media outlets were partisan.
Apparently that's where we're headed.
It doesn't, it doesn't, I mean it may be, doesn't mean that they're Not functioning?
They're functioning differently?
This is preposterous.
You, just as a journalist, argued that the fact that our journalistic landscape has broken out in a hemorrhage of partisan politics is not evidence of dysfunction.
No, it's evidence of dysfunction.
You said they're not functioning.
There's always been a degree of dysfunction.
In some respects, there's more now.
Listen, I think I've made my view on your military readiness hypothesis pretty clear.
I said to you before, do you, you know, well, first I said, do you want, could I run this on my podcast?
And understandably, you're ambivalent.
And you suggested a part two, where you come on my podcast, And I'd be happy to do that, and you know what?
If you don't want to talk about this stuff, that's fine too.
We have a lot of things we can talk about.
We could talk about just this last part, how dysfunctional is the information processing system.
We can talk about evolutionary biology.
I have questions about your differences with Richard Dawkins on memes and the extended phenotype.
I'm happy to talk about anything if you want to come on my podcast, and I'm happy to stick around and And answer, fill in any blanks you feel are not filled in in this conversation.
Well, I mean, I must say you're leaving me with a big mystery about how your mind works, right?
That's what we'll solve on my podcast.
I'm not sure we're going to solve anything.
It seems to me that you are starting with a perspective and you are bending over backwards to rescue it.
And part of what you're doing is being hyper focused and deciding to exclude large areas of territory.
And then you're making claims like, well, you're obviously something wrong with your perspective if you think no institutions are functional.
And I say, what institutions are functional?
And you say, well, journalism, for example, might You know have its problems, but it's not as if it's dysfunctional and then you go on to describe its dysfunction and then you give me crap over the distinction between What was it malfunctioning and dysfunction?
I mean what is going on Robert?
What's with you?
No, I just said for you to say no institutions are functioning seems to me hyperbolic Well, that's why I asked you name one that is and you came up with journalism and then you described why it's not functioning you know, I think I know the shortcomings you would point to in the educational system, for example.
Shortcomings?
We're actively miseducating people.
It's functioning.
We are miseducating people.
We are telling them that there aren't two sexes.
We are telling them that two plus two does not necessarily equal four.
We are beginning to erode the agreement that we had that pedophilia is bad.
Yes, it's fucked up.
Actually, we're not telling them 2 plus 2 doesn't equal 4.
That's my point.
I mean, there's a lot of good mathematical education going on.
It's not dysfunctional.
No, no, no, no, no, sorry.
You can say there's a lot of good mathematical education going on, but the fact is if we are actively mis-educating people, if we are taking things that we know and pretending they aren't, if we are
Failing to allow a discussion of whether or not these particular so-called vaccines are safe, whether or not there is a increase in excess deaths in the aftermath of the vaccination campaign, whether or not there is countervailing evidence on the global warming consensus.
If we're not talking about these things, then these aren't truth-seeking entities.
The universities are not functioning.
They are not educating.
So, you can just keep naming these empty shells, and you can say, well, they're not perfect, but they are functioning.
Yeah, all right, the universities are collecting tuition.
They have classrooms.
People go to them.
They hear lectures.
That's not functioning.
Functioning involves educating.
It involves a net increase in the capacity of students to think.
And we are not doing that.
I know.
I've been a professor.
I've seen it up close.
So anything else you want to put on the list of functional institutions?
You're not teaching at a typical university, but you know, it was one of the more out there, fringy places.
Whatever it was that made my institution non-typical has now spread to the rest of them.
Not that many.
I'll tell you, I gave a talk at Marist College in New York only a few years ago, It's very different.
First of all, what you're saying was so unusual in my college was happening up till 2017.
Okay, so you gave a talk a few years ago at a small college, which you think is an indication that that college is now still functioning.
How would you know?
This stuff was far enough along that I said to the president of the college, like, I don't see any woke stuff.
And he said, yeah, it's like, there's, there's a lot of places that are like that.
So, so the woke, the woke stuff was out there and he's like, yeah, this is just, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of colleges, like that was his view.
Anyway.
Some years ago.
What?
Some years ago.
Well, I mean, like, like.
Given the rate, given the rate at which this is moving, I don't understand why you would take a data point from several years ago as indicative of anything.
Okay, look, I gotta go.
I gotta get my newsletter out.
How about this podcast invitation that I'm hoping you'll graciously accept?
I don't see the point in it.
Brett!
You know what people are gonna say.
I do.
You're gonna say.
They're gonna say you're afraid.
You think I'm afraid.
I didn't say that!
I said people are naturally gonna say it if you're not willing to accept an invitation.
You know... I won't encourage them to say that, and if they say it, I will defend your honor.
I'll say, gosh darn it, I think Brett is just busy, even though before this podcast he said he'd be happy to come on on my podcast.
You know, you have said multiple insulting things here, right?
You have told me about the point at which you stopped taking my perspective seriously, I didn't put it that way.
- I didn't put it that way.
- People can judge it for themselves, but why would I be coming on your podcast? - I didn't put it that way.
I said, like, life is short.
You're trying to get to the bottom of this COVID thing.
You know, you got to figure out, well, who are you going to pay attention to?
And maybe I'm too finicky, but you and this guy, Steve Kirsch, both said things on your podcast that made me think, well, I think I want somebody who's a little more careful in what they say than that.
I'm sorry.
People can judge whether I'm crazy.
But either I'm not careful enough or I am careful enough.
You want to have it both ways.
Those seem to me to, yeah, that pretty much exhausts the possibilities.
Right.
And so you've said, I'm not careful enough.
And then here you are wanting me on your podcast.
We don't have to talk about that.
I'm very interested in your ideas about evolution.
We can talk about the state of media, but look, it's up to you.
You know, let people say what they will.
Yep.
I will not encourage it.
I'll discourage it.
I will say, don't say that about Brett.
You know, there's something odd about you, and I can't figure out what it is.
You're a little late to that realization.
Perhaps, perhaps.
But nonetheless, I think if people listen back through this podcast, they will understand that at some level, you're willing to see lots of the pieces of the puzzle.
Can't accuse you of not seeing them, but you're not willing to connect the dots.
And I really think you owe it to your audience to do so.
I predict that different people will see different things and most of the regular listeners to your podcast will have an unfavorable view of me.
And this is the America we live in.
And, you know, where it's tribalized and the different, you know, it's part of the problem you're describing.
You have these different media outlets that have their perspective.
You don't have anything like one-stop shopping if you're trying to get at the truth.
So you have to like Try to get divergent perspectives, which I do.
During the Trump years, I listened to Steve Bannon's podcast religiously.
Now I listen to these pro-Russia invasion guys to get that side of the story.
You do what you can, but unfortunately, what's going to happen is that people who went into this with my perspective are going to say that I was right, And people who went at it with yours are going to say, I was wrong.
And they're probably on both sides are going to say we're horrible human beings.
I don't think you're a horrible human being.
I think you, you, we all do motivated reasoning.
This was a big theme in my book, The Moral Animal.
Uh, and, uh, and, and, and I, I, you know, and, and, and he who is without sin should, should, uh, cast the first stone.
So I'm not going to cast the first stone.
Second.
All right.
Well, Robert, it's been an interesting ride.
So no, the answer is no on the podcast.
I haven't decided, but I think the answer should be no, because frankly, what we've done here is we've butted heads.
I think people can get a pretty good sense of where each of us are coming from, and I'm not sure Why I would participate in a podcast for somebody who has decided on the basis of an error, which I have acknowledged and corrected without anyone needing to tell me to do it.
I'm not sure why such a person would go on a podcast with somebody who is deciding to... I'm not saying it discredits everything you said.
I'm saying it's why I decided, well, you know, I'll...
I'll try to look for people who assess the evidence more carefully.
That was my call.
Life is short.
We pick our sources.
My point is you're being inconsistent because you said, well, here's why I decided that.
But then, hey, why don't you come on my podcast?
That seems bizarre to me.
Brett, that's not bizarre.
Come on.
There's no contradiction there.
I entertain all podcasts.
Look, I've had everything from neocons.
My podcast has like the broadest range.
Everything from Bret Stephens, David from Bill Crystal, neocons, to Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Grayzone.
I don't think there's any other podcast that can say that.
That's not the question.
The question is, is it productive?
I think so.
I think we need to.
You don't believe we need to hear all views, even ones we disagree with sharply?
No, I don't believe we need to hear all views.
I believe we need to hear many views.
But what I don't dig is your blanket statements about credibility, where I lost it.
But hey, let's talk because we've got other topics.
It doesn't really work like that.
OK.
Will you at least consult with Heather?
Because she got my tweet right.
She interpreted my tweet correctly.
Maybe she'll watch this and find me charming.
You never know.
Perhaps.
In any case, Robert, I'm going to recommend that people check out your book, Nonzero.
I still think it's a great book.
I appreciate that.
Well worth the read.
I wish I could say it had been a pleasure talking, but I think it is... I can't say that.
