#159: Monkey Business at Pfizer (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 159th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we discuss how to predict things that reliably turn out to be true, especially in the public health sphere: use the scientific method, employ a generalist toolkit, and engage in campfire conversations. We also talk about the Project Veritas video of a Pfizer executive discussing what Pfizer may be discussin...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse welcome to the Dark Horse podcast where we have just been singing Jefferson Airplane to each other, but it is what it is.
You ever feel like you've been given a pill that makes you larger or smaller, 10 feet tall?
Crazy pills.
Yeah.
I think that's what it is.
Yeah.
Yes.
Well, all right, let's begin at the beginning.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
And this guy is not a doctor at all.
That we know of.
That we know of.
This is Tesla, named after the scientist, not the car, thank you very much.
Exactly, exactly.
For those only listening, he's a cat.
He is a cat.
He identifies as a cat, identified as a cat at birth.
You know why he doesn't?
Because identity is not a thing in non-humans.
Is that right?
I think so.
Really?
Yeah, I mean maybe not, maybe once you have theory of mind you kind of got identity because if you can identify someone else then you sort of have a sense of self, but I'm pretty sure cats No sense of identity.
No, no.
I actually think you have... I appreciate your conjecture, I get of what it is made, but tell me that this cat sometimes does not identify as not having been fed yet, even when he's been fed.
That's a state of being.
This is the distinction between ser and estar in Spanish.
That is a different kind of identity.
That isn't a permanent identity.
No, it... Alright, but are these other identities that you're complaining about in human space, aren't they temporary?
Oh no, because, you're right, because the only people who are not allowed to transition are people who have transitioned.
Right.
It's temporary until you've done it once.
Right, it's required until you've done it once, I think.
Yep, and then there's no going back.
No going back, alright.
Because once you've seen your true self, only the others can tell if you were actually right.
Well, I apologize for doubting you.
You had it right.
I don't even remember what I was right about at this point.
You were alleging, based on very little, that his identity as not having been fed yet was a temporary state and therefore not an identity in the human sense.
Yes.
Yes.
And, uh, yeah.
If Katz could be bored by conversations, he would be bored by this one.
Right, although I will say that we have now, we have done the right thing.
We have established something important up front, so no matter what else happens today, we have made progress.
Oh wow, that's a really low bar.
We're going to talk today about Project Veritas's reveals this week around Pfizer, broadly, right?
That's sort of it, broadly.
But first, some top of the hour stuff.
We've got Dark Horse... accounts?
Channels?
No.
Now at Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and on Twitter, which are going to be the places to go if you are on any of those platforms to know if we're going to be live-streaming or if there's another guest episode coming out, etc.
We follow these live streams with the live Q&A.
Some people have already asked questions for this week.
You can go to darkhorsesubmissions.com to ask questions.
We'll be doing that after this hour to two hours.
Take a little break and then come right back here.
In that break between, you could start reading Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
You could.
If you wanted to.
Or Natural Selections, which is where I write weekly.
This week I wrote about 15-Minute Cities, about sort of the top-down attempts to create something that seems more livable, and the problems with the top-down approach to urban rejuvenation.
If you're watching on YouTube, know that we are also on Odyssey, and that's where the chat is happening.
Not that we can see it, but that's where it's happening and we hear about it.
Sometimes you can get some stuff that we think is cool, that came out of our heads and the fabulous artists we work with rendered the drawings and now they're being sold at darkhorsestore.org.
Things like Pfizer, where the breakthroughs never stop.
Yep, and lie to a tyrant.
And lie to a tyrant.
And finally, we are supported by you, our audience, so we appreciate you subscribing, liking, sharing the videos, sharing clips.
You can find clips on Dark Horse Podcast's Clips channel, both on YouTube and Odyssey, and of course the audio for the main broadcast is available everywhere podcasts are broadcast.
Podcasts are broadcast?
Is that how you would say that?
That is how I would start a poem about it.
Okay, excellent.
You can join our wonderful Discord community at either of our Patreons, and tomorrow at my Patreon we're doing our monthly private Q&A.
You can join us there, join Brett's Patreon for access to one of his monthly conversations, but at either of them you get access to the Discord where You can engage in honest conversations on difficult topics by text, by voice, by video.
They've got all sorts of meetups and conversations and topics, and it's all over the place in a really interesting way, and we encourage you to go there.
Karaoke, and I'm imagining we can't be far from rap battles on important topics.
That's bound to happen.
Really?
I think so.
Okay.
I might be tempted to try that.
You thought it here first.
I thought it?
Yes.
Okay.
Fair enough.
And we have sponsors.
We only take sponsorship from companies that make products or services that we can either personally vouch for or we have someone who can personally vouch for them.
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You're not saying it tastes better than you can imagine the other stuff tastes based on how it smells.
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That seems like a high bar to me.
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I don't actually know what that was, but that is burned into all of our memories, is it not?
It's not more used cars?
Lots?
No, I think it's like parts you might buy to soup up a car, but I don't know.
I don't think it's still happening.
I have no idea.
Yeah, so you just stopped at the 90s, figuring you were safe there.
I left.
I see.
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No, that was a used car.
No, that was new cars I think.
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Off in the weeds.
Off on the weeds!
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CBG and You have something to say?
I think everyone who watches weekly knows that I've always wanted to go to Ashwagandha, but go on.
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I hope for Jonathan's sake, I hope for any other Jonathan's sake, that there's only one in Paonia, Colorado.
Because this Jonathan, Farmer Jonathan in Paonia, Colorado, is a little bit famous at this point.
Yes, I think the other Brett Weinstein on Twitter can attest to the problem.
Yeah, poor guy.
Sorry, man.
He handles it well.
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I have an idea before I get to my ad here.
Yes.
Inflammation is obviously adaptive, but a lot of inflammation is in places that you don't want it or triggered by things that shouldn't be triggering it.
That's misinflammation.
Mmm.
See?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I thought you were going to say that we're seeing a scourge of fatheads lately and you think that's inflammation in the wrong place.
Actually, now that you mentioned it, I think both apply.
It's misinformation.
We are having a pandemic of fatheads.
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That's nuts, right?
That's nuts.
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Yeah, I don't actually know what palmitoleic acid is.
Oh, palmitoleic.
Ooh, that's a much better pronunciation.
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Sorry.
Damn.
All right.
Somehow I knew that was coming.
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All right.
All right.
Did it.
Did it.
All right.
All right.
Well, we are going to talk about a number of things this week around Project Veritas and Pfizer and what all that means.
We're not going to show the videos that were released because YouTube struck Project Veritas' channel and removed the first video.
But we will talk about it for those of you who don't yet know, but we're not going to start there.
We're going to start with something that ends up feeling a little bit related, but may feel orthogonal at first.
After you.
Yeah, orthogonal.
Good one.
Oh, thank you.
That is a $7 word if I recall correctly.
Is it?
Is that with inflation or without?
No, it's like a $40 word now.
Thank you.
Because it's made with eggs.
All right.
First thing we're going to start with, Only pastured eggs for us from now on.
Only pastured eggs for... right.
Yeah, the domestication of everything, including the food that the domesticated animals that we eat, or that produce the food that we eat, eats, is causing a health scourge.
And that is not what we're talking about today, but I just thought since you mentioned eggs, I would say that.
No, it's good.
In fact, I think we should just get all the asides done now.
Are there any other asides that we can see coming?
That's not the way with the sides, is it?
I guess it isn't.
Yeah, all right.
So later on there may be a side of sides we will have with the main course, which begins with Scott Adams.
Cracker?
Me?
You're not the first person to level that accusation.
No one's ever found anything to suggest that it's accurate, so... You are a white guy.
Spicy.
I have the prerequisite.
It doesn't make me a cracker.
Man, I swear we're sober.
Yeah, let's get serious.
Scott Adams has turned the world somewhat upside down with At first, his acknowledgement that those of us who had resisted this so-called vaccine campaign had actually turned out to be right, and that he had in fact been wrong, and that seemed like a generous, forthright, proper admission of having changed his position.
He then followed it up with a slew of like, I don't know, it's like 60,000 tweets at this point that are confusing and seem to muddy the waters.
And the gist of at least many of these follow-on tweets is that Although he acknowledges that he got it wrong and that those of us who resisted... Some other people didn't get it wrong.
Some other people didn't get it wrong.
His point is it was a coin flip.
So you could either go with the official narrative or you could resist the official narrative.
And some people resisted and they turned out to be right.
But there was no method to figuring out what the truth was because the information stream is so polluted.
one interpretation of which is i didn't have a method therefore no method can exist yes and you know i must say scott is an interesting character and i like a good deal of what he does so The way he prods people is, I think, quite useful often.
And there is an aspect to this prodding that I think is positive, but there's also a weird feature of it where it seems to be that he is resistant to the idea that there might even be a method.
And his basic point is, well then teach it to me.
Right?
The answer is, there is a method.
It's not teachable that way.
And, go ahead.
Well, I guess, as I said in the one response that I gave to him online, you know, it's It can't be a static strategy, right?
Like you can't, that they teach it to me seems to be, if it's in good faith at all, which of course many people are convinced it's not, but seems to imagine a, just tell me the thing and then I'll do that thing next time.
Tell me the people and I'll just do what they did next time.
And you know, this is not the way complex systems works.
And frankly, the thing I said to you was, I really would have expected that the
The genius mind behind Dilbert would understand that, because the recognition of the gaming of office politics at every level would seem to be easily generalizable to, like, okay, static strategies and, you know, people who come at you with patently easily falsifiable claims aren't the things that you should be relying on.
Right, like that would seem to have been something, I would have imagined that that would be something that would be in Scott Adams head, given Dilbert.
It would be native to him, yeah.
Okay, so A, I will say I was gratified to see the number of people who said, what about Brett and Heather?
What about Dark Horse?
Right?
Because frankly, people who are longtime listeners have They've seen something that is not an easily described method, but it's clearly methodological in its own way, and they've also watched it be vindicated on issue after issue.
So there is a question about, you know, if you take Scott's claim that this is coin-flipping, it is not impossible that you could flip eight or ten heads in a row, but it is exceedingly unlikely.
And I would also point out...
Right, the Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern segment is quite the right model, because basically the playwright takes the liberty of writing an improbably long string of coin flips, which is then what the actors deliver.
And the actors are therefore in a position to detect that they are in a play or something is off because it's so unlikely, but because it's no less likely than any other sequence.
Anyway, there's lots of philosophical drilling down on that question to be done.
But here's the thing.
Scott, you have delivered a hypothesis.
It is a perfectly valid hypothesis that everybody who got it right is guessing.
That they are simply choosing between binary alternatives and some people will be improbably lucky.
However, Scott, that hypothesis makes a clear prediction.
Okay?
If you take somebody who has had an improbably long sequence of correct guesses in your coin flip universe, they will, going forward, have no more success at being accurate than anyone else.
Because there's nothing about having been right that predisposes you to be right in that coin flip universe.
Ipso facto.
If random, then random.
Then random.
If random, then random.
Like it.
That's exactly what it is.
So, Scott, you've signed yourself up for that.
Now, The issue then is if we are claiming that there is something that is not exactly a method, it is not something that we can, you know, let's take an example of what it means that it's not exactly a method, right?
If you saw an amazing feat of archery, and there are indeed some Favorites of mine.
I'm now forgetting the name of the fella who... Me too.
But anyway, there's some people who demonstrate some incredible archery skill.
And, you know, some of it could be faked a little bit.
Like, you know, throwing a bottle top... No, not a bottle top.
A can flip-top piece into the air and shooting an arrow through it.
You could shoot a million arrows and then film the one that did it.
But if the guy throws one up in the air, shoots it, throws another one up in the air and shoots it, That you can't.
Without an edit.
Right, and so the point is how many hundred million shots would you have to do in order to get lucky twice in a row like that?
And there's actually a great channel, I forget what it is, but there's a channel of trick shots where, you know, somebody will set up a You know, shot glasses sitting on a turntable and you know, they're bouncing pennies off of something and it will go in and it's done.
They obviously are using the method of shooting a million times, not a million, but that's an exaggeration, but they're shooting a huge number of times and they film the ones that work.
And then they cheer because, you know, they're bored out of their minds trying to get these things to happen.
And that's archery as well?
No, it's not archery.
It's a million different trick shots.
It's pretty cool stuff.
But anyway, the point here is, if I say, oh, this person that does these amazing archery trick shots has a method, right?
And you say, method?
What is that method?
Show me.
Right.
Well.
Let me in on the method.
Right.
Let me in on the method so I can do those things.
No, it's not that kind of a method.
Is there a method running inside the head of a fantastic archer who can do amazing things?
Of course, right?
Or somebody who does trick shots in pool, whatever it might be.
But the point is, that method is not A, an explicit method necessarily, and B, it is not simple.
It's a hard thing to learn.
Well, and it's also very, it feels very precarious if you're accustomed to the landscape in which certainty is necessary.
It feels very precarious at first to learn, and you know, we had this experience in our classrooms quarter after quarter, year after year, and you know, and in grad school before that, but you know, welcoming students into a classroom saying, we're going to learn how to think evolutionarily here.
And very often we're not going to know, and we're gonna sit there in the not knowing.
And yes, that sounds philosophical and vaguely Buddhist or something, but it is.
There's a reason that many traditions converge on this.
Actually, The uncertainty and the spending the time trying to figure out what the question is, and not having come to a conclusion so that you can be open to the various sources of information that are coming at you, is part of what is necessary.
And you can't just hear that and say, oh okay, I'll do that then.
Because you can try, and you should try, and you will get better at it over time, but you won't be as good at it the first time you do that as you are the hundredth time.
You just won't be.
Yep.
So I thought what we should do is we should actually describe a few things that have gone into what you and I are doing that you could describe as methodological.
And, you know, we could move on from there.
But I think the first thing for somebody like Scott, who I assume is genuinely curious about how you would improve your chances in a garbage information landscape, right?
And a couple of things that are relevant are, one, recognizing that the garbagey nature of the information is in some sense reliable because there are processes that have turned our truth-seeking mechanisms into paradoxes, right?
Basically, the answer is a stuck field is easy to beat, right?
A field that becomes overly concerned about profitability or about reaching a conclusion that is politically viable and understood to be morally good, those fields are going to be hobbled in their own truth-seeking.
And so the point is you're not beating A world full of experts who are doing their best and screwing it up.
You're dealing with a world full of experts who are compromised by, you know, careerism, for example.
You know careerism exists, as Heather points out.
You're the Dilbert guy, right?
Imagine that what goes on in offices goes on with fancier jargon and bigger, better equipment in laboratories, in universities, right?
That's what's going on.
You've got careerism, credentialism, territoriality, all of these things compromise these fields.
And if you don't have obligations to those structures, you are actually free to do something that they can't do.
So one thing I'm just going to repeat that point, which is that many people outside of science, even if they can see the inanity, which sometimes verges into insanity, in their particular domain, be it office culture or entertainment or the law or government or whatever it is,
Somehow assume that what happens in science – often now people don't assume that what happens in academia is pure because, you know, I don't even know what, like something's been torn off, like we can all see this now, right?
But people still imagine that, well, if you call it science, The people who went into science must have done so for only the purest of reasons.
There must only be the most honorable and upstanding moral players in science.
And therefore, if it comes at you under the imprimatur of science, it must be sciency.
And, you know, honestly, the last three years have been the repeated constant proof that that's not the case.
But from within science, since the early 90s, when we started in grad school and even in undergrad, when we were working with some of the best scientists in the world, It was clear that science is no different, right?
That there are brilliant players and there are ridiculous players, and there are naive ones and non-naive ones, and the entire gamut of human experience is represented there as well, as of course it would be.
And, of course, if you are in the world and you see, ah, what has replaced, frankly, religion as the thing that everyone looks up to and doesn't question?
Oh, it's science.
Well, all I have to do is get myself some glassware and a lab coat, and maybe I'll have to get that fancy degree.
But then, then I'm unquestionable.
And so, you know, we've been doing this for decades, but in part what we've been doing is saying, you know, we've got lots of scientists in our audience, but for the people who don't think of themselves as scientists, saying, not only can you, but you must.
You know, question the stuff when it comes at you when it's dressed up as science, because of course that's going to be a thing that they do when they're not actually revealing science to you.
Yeah, or another way to say it is questioning the science is how you do science, right?
Yes.
That is the thing.
Much tighter.
It's much tighter.
So anyway, I mean, at one level you've got a system that if even from the outside you can see it's riddled with perverse incentives, right?
You can see that the way funding is done is going to result in people who play the game outcompeting people who do the job exquisitely well but don't play the game.
That's true, and it's true at a level you probably can't imagine if you've not been inside of a university setting.
But alright, so you've got a bunch of fields that are underperforming is a severe understatement.
You've got a bunch of fields that have gotten themselves stuck in a ditch for no reason, and the question is, what can you do outside of those fields?
Now, you and I, first of all, there are just a bunch of things that belong on the table here.
One of them is How did we get it right?
Well, we didn't get it right.
That's not what happened.
What happened was we started with our best understanding of what was taking place, which was clearly wrong in some ways, and we moved in the direction of getting righter and righter.
That's the way it's actually done.
It's not a method for being right.
There is no method for being right.
There's a method for taking your understanding and upgrading it based on information.
And I will say, one of the most important features of this environment is figuring out how not to process everything.
If you feel responsible for processing every fact relevant to a question that you are interested in, you will end up processing some facts that aren't facts, that are simply untrue.
And if your point is, what we do in science is we reconcile all of the facts so that they fit together in a model, but a third of your facts aren't facts at all, they're the result of corruption or error or something like that, then your model will not work.
It will not, you know, And it's anti-scientific to say, well, but it's a fact, therefore it must work.
Like, okay, you have to keep going back down the decision tree, the assumption tree and saying, which of the things that I know to be true aren't in fact true.
That is how you reconcile irreconcilable facts.
You figure out which of them isn't in fact a fact.
Which of them isn't in fact a fact?
And there are, you know, there are, there are, I don't want to say tricks, but there are ways to spot them, right?
So, for example, if your model is getting better and better, how would you know it's getting better and better?
Because it gets more and more predictive.
And then it stops doing that.
Well, that suggests that you picked up something that you thought was a fact that wasn't.
Right?
And so the ability to back your model off and say, when did it stop improving?
And what happened at that place?
And then looking at the thing that you picked up and you say, why did I think that that was one of the ones I could rely on?
So anyway, it's things like this.
And what was the source of that?
And do I have any other facts from that source?
And how reliable are they?
And so, you know, it's many tentacled in terms of like how you assess both, you know, starting with as few assumptions as possible.
Being absolutely sure of them, it's sort of like the axiomatic level.
And adding facts, sometimes liberally, but if you do, being aware that some of them may turn out to be something that you have to reverse and try not to build too much on the things that you haven't fully, fully vetted.
Right.
And we don't, this last three years, we didn't, like, no one knew.
For many moments, like what landscape are we even in?
What are we actually even trying to figure out?
Yeah.
Right?
And, and the early days, as we talked about here on Dark Horse, like, you know, almost three years ago, like, oh, my God, it's the Wild West in a good way out there with regard to scientific publishing, all of those preprint servers that were just churning out papers without the peers The peer review process, which is supposed to be this great thing, which has actually become a scourge on science, without the peer review process getting in the way and the delays associated with it, suddenly there was all of this often really high-quality science available.
Right, but the other thing about it was because it was happening so quickly that we were all driven to the preprint servers rather than the so-called peer-reviewed literature, what that meant was you didn't need to explain to anybody why you were processing this paper and not that one.
The expectation is not that you were going to process the entire, you know, group of unpublished results.
Some of them are garbage and won't make it, right?
And they were coming out, like, just so, so fast.
Right.
And so the point is, look, this is the problem.
It is the selectivity, right, where you decide, hey, that result actually would make a lot of sense.
I think that one might be valid.
Now I'm going to go look at the method and see whether it actually says what I think it says.
And if it does say what I think it says, here are the cascading consequences of it, logically.
And then, if it turns out that result is bad, you have to have kept track of what you stacked on it so that you remember to reverse those things.
And there's something critical and slightly obscure in what you just said with regard to the selectivity, that it is often considered a given that in literature review, in assessing what is known in a field before perhaps you embark on testing a hypothesis of your own, that you do a thorough literature review, right?
You're supposed to know everything that anyone has ever thought, at least if they've thought it and published it on a topic, And for some topics and under, you know, more slow-moving times, that is in many ways an honorable approach.
Although, you know, we used to in our classrooms argue that it might be better to go in, especially if you're an undergraduate doing a research project, go in without knowing what other people have thought and then afterwards, after you have figured out, after you have designed your experiment and taken the data and analyzed it and now know what you think you know, know what you think you found, then go and see what other people have thought.
That actually helps you hone your understanding of the universe better.
But that aside, one thing that is being gamed now is this idea that you aren't really allowed to speak on a topic until you know everything there is to say about it.
So this is how we get siloed.
This is how specialists become the only people who are allowed to speak on a particular topic.
But what do you do when, is it public health?
Is it virology?
Is it vaccinology?
Is it immunology?
Is it, in fact, evolutionary biology?
Which, of course, is at the interface between all of those.
Because evolutionary biology has a lot of specific parts to it.
You know, there are phylogenetic systematists, for instance, and within that there are cladists and there are, you know, maximum likelihoodists.
Evolutionary biology writ large is the interface of all of these evolved, complex systems coming together.
And frankly, it gives you the bigger view down than if you are just narrowly going like, well, if it's not about viruses, I don't know anything about it.
Right?
So that is part of what it is to be thinking evolutionarily, is to have the broader view.
Yeah, that was one of the things on my list.
Primary contributors is that you know almost everybody in almost every discipline is over specialized because Competition which is the thing that is being used to drive this forward competition, which is unfortunately not so much about being right anymore it's about publication and other proxies for being right which turned out to be pretty bad and But that competition has created an environment in which people become the experts on something so narrow that it doesn't apply to anything else.
And that is a recipe for becoming a fool with an advanced degree.
So evolutionary biology, as you said, is The generalist paradigm that allows you, without being a specialist, to understand how vaccinology and immunology integrate, and how epidemiology and vaccinology and epidemiology integrate, for example.
So, in any case, you and I have a toolkit, right?
It's not specialist in any of these domains, but it is capable of dealing with all of them.
That was one of the things that we heavily leveraged.
The other thing is central to what we said in our book about how you navigate novel problems, right?
What we say in the book about novel problems is, we use the moniker campfire.
Campfire is how human beings bootstrap solutions to problems they don't already have and they do it by talking to each other.
The idea is the campfire happens in the evening when you're not busy looking for roots and tubers or huntable animals.
Navigating phone trees.
Navigating.
I'd rather be hunting for roots and timbers.
That raises for me the image of hunter-gatherers in the Serengeti and the occasional phone tree from where they presumably get their phones.
Anyway.
We have digressed.
Sorry.
But anyway, the point is evolution is a generalist toolkit.
It allows you to process these things.
Campfire is the process of more than one individual pooling what they know, pooling their different skill sets.
Individuals don't tend to have the identical skill set.
You and I are both evolutionary biologists, but we take very different approaches to it.
But the point is...
And coming at each other and saying, oh, I think this.
Like, I don't get it.
What do you think?
I think this.
Oh.
Oh, you think that?
No, you still don't have it.
Oh, I think this.
Oh, I see what you think now.
Here's why I think you're wrong.
And, you know, doing that with, you know, with love, if you have it, or at least some affection and recognition that the person that you're talking to is another human being, As opposed to the way that argument and conversation in quotes tends to happen in, you know, on social media and in sort of cartoonish fashion these days, which is, well, if you disagree, you must be evil.
Or if you disagree, you must not be human.
Right.
And, you know, no.
What we're doing by disagreeing like that, that's the love.
Like that is the sign that you actually care about the other person, as opposed to saying, Oh, I'm just, it's too much work.
I'm just not gonna, I'm not gonna do it like that.
That's actually giving up.
And that's a sign of disrespect.
Absolutely.
And I'll say two more things before we move down the road here a piece.
One is the ability to filter out stuff you don't want to process is essential.
Or don't think that you should process because you have doubts about it.
Even though it will result in you throwing out things that are true.
Right?
The point is you want to bias in that direction.
Including garbage in your model is much worse than failing to include something true or being delayed and waiting to include it, right?
So a preference more or less for type 2 error over type 1.
But the problem is, and Actor who is perversely incentivized and liberated to pick and choose what they process will of course engage in confirmation bias.
Somebody who has written a book on a premise that is incorrect, right?
That person is much harder to back off that premise Because they now have a lot riding on it.
It will be embarrassing and it's hard to unpublish a book.
Or even more so, build a career on.
Late-career stage academics who have built everything on something very rarely say, "You know what?
Not so much.
Right.
There are a couple of famous examples, which I'm forgetting at the moment, but it is stunning when you see these sort of late career reversals in which the person says, well, okay, you know, glad I know.
And maybe that too.
I've been in other contexts recently, I've been reminded of this, I'm glad I know revelation.
Like, well, that sucked.
Now, you know, now I saw how many people weren't courageous, or weren't telling the truth, or that the thing that I believed and built all this other stuff on was wrong.
Well, glad I know.
Okay, sunk cost is sunk cost, and let's move forward now.
Yep, and I will point out, you and I have a book out that is not yet available in softcover, right?
That's a pretty new book.
We have acknowledged a couple things in it that we believe to be accurate when we wrote it, that we have Come to a different understanding in even that short period of time.
So the point is that commitment to what's actually true.
So I'm thinking specifically of what we said about supplementation.
And yes, well, although I will.
So let's just since you brought it up, right?
I stand by the idea that we should prefer To get our nutrients from our diet, or in the case of vitamin D, from the sun.
Me too.
But, especially with regard to vitamin D, which is the one that we called out by name in the book, the number of people living in high latitudes, mostly inside, mostly covered in clothes when they're outside, and actually live at a latitude above which for some of the year they literally cannot synthesize vitamin D from the sun,
Vitamin D supplementation seems to be quite the opposite of what we argued in the book, like an actual, a true good that actually enhances immune function and is contributing to people's health.
Right.
Now, I will say that this is again a place where the model keeps getting more refined, right?
There are caveats about this.
There are apparently multiple kinds of vitamin D, and so depending upon what you measure, you'll see different patterns.
My current model, which I think you and I share, is sunlight is by far the best way to generate or to acquire vitamin D through this photosynthetic process, and that supplementation, while it is important, I think that was confusing the way you said it.
It is much better for driving up levels in the blood to prevent vitamin D from being lost.
So the deficiency- I think that was confusing the way you said it.
I think supplementation is better for maintaining levels as opposed to for driving up levels.
That's what I mean.
So the basic point is make vitamin D while the sun shines as we said.
And that means not just, "Hey, I'm out in the sun.
I'm making vitamin D." Well, you're making vitamin D on your face and maybe your arms, but you're probably wearing long pants or whatever.
So make as much vitamin D. So we're encouraging you to get naked.
As close to it as you can while your app or whatever you're using tells you the sun is high enough in the sky during the right part of the year that you can actually make vitamin D. On the right part of the planet.
On the right, yeah.
These things have to align.
The fact that the sun is shining isn't enough, but make as much vitamin D as you can so that you're not deficient, and then dramatically slow the rate at which you lose vitamin D and become deficient with supplementation, something like that.
So anyway, this is a, and you know, that model, I'm not telling you that's the final state.
I'm telling you that having refined the model three or four times, that's the current state.
So, all right.
You raised that as, you know, even our book, which just came out a year and a half ago, has some things in it that our positions have evolved.
Right.
Vitamin D being one.
And I would say we said something absolutely unequivocal in the book about vaccines and the miraculous contribution they have made.
to human health, which I still believe, but I would certainly put a caveat in there now and say there are different vaccine technologies and that the value of this technique has to now be re-investigated With respect to, is there a level of vaccination against too many pathogens simultaneously that causes it not to be good?
Is there a protocol that should be deployed in which you are told that you should avoid certain antigens within a certain period of time after you've been vaccinated?
Are adjuvants just simply a dead end to begin with?
Okay, but it's not a book about vaccines.
It's mostly not a book about health and medicine.
Although there's a chapter in there, two chapters, on health and medicine.
And what we say specifically is the three great successes of Western medicine are surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines.
And we also say all of them They can be used in times and contexts when they should not be used.
We did not go into, I think we tell one story about the Cipro, whatever that class of antibiotics is that's got a long phloxamine something, that probably contributed to my rupturing my Achilles tendon many years after we'd both been on Cipro a lot.
So we do tell one specific antibiotic story, but it's not a book that explores all of the places where things have gotten right and things have gotten wrong.
And unlike vitamin D, the information was out there and available and we didn't have it.
Whereas, largely what has happened since, you know, since the book went out of our hands and we had no more ability to change it, has been most of the reveal of what, you know, like an update based on things that have happened since publication is different than an update based on actually, we kind of got this wrong and we had the ability to know better.
And I think this is two different situations.
I agree.
I think we're deep in the weeds.
But the basic point was, Things like having built a career, having written a book, make it hard to update a model because you have now a risk of embarrassment, and a commitment to updating these models is essential.
In fact, you probably shouldn't write the book if you can't update the model later, if the book turns out to be in some way imprecise or inaccurate.
All right.
Generalist toolkit, active discussion between people who don't feel the obligation to validate what the other person is saying, but understand that proper science is done when you push each other around, and that that's not personal, right?
That's how we were both trained, that's how the cultures of the laboratories in which We learned to think evolutionarily.
That's how it went.
And, you know, that's how you learn the method.
It's not the kind of thing, Scott, that you can, you know, see on a piece of paper and know it and not be wrong again.
That's not going to work.
Yeah.
You can't do anything to guarantee that you'll never be wrong again unless you never make any claims again.
Right.
So, all right.
Scientific method, generalist toolkit, campfire discussions, and don't expect to be right.
Expect to get more right over time based on processing information that's actually likely enough to be correct or close to correct that processing it makes you smarter rather than dumber.
So anyway, that's... we can maybe leave this there unless there's something you want to add to it?
No, that's good.
All right.
I hope people figure this out, though, because it would be great.
You know, there are some... Oh, I guess one other thing I would add.
Go for it.
There are people that we talk to when we're not talking to each other that contribute... Yeah, it does happen.
Oh, that's not what I'm saying.
Yeah.
When we do not happen to be in conversation with each other at that moment, there are other people that we interact with.
Also true.
I'm not making this better.
You're not saying anything wrong, it's just funny.
Go on.
I'll try to be quiet.
There are people that one comes to trust based on the fact that they seem to be doing something parallel to what you and I are describing that we do here.
Right?
Figuring out who to pay attention to when somebody says, actually this is a really interesting result.
Giving it an extra boost because that person tends to have a really good nose for results that turn out to be right and important.
Right?
That's a very useful thing.
Um, so I should probably point to a few of these people.
Uh, Chris Martinson, right, has been just so spot on so many times.
It's incredible.
If you don't follow Chris, you should follow him.
So we'll link his like YouTube channel in the show notes.
Yep, I would say I have more recently become aware of Brett Swanson, whose sub stack we have talked about, but he does some very good explorations of claims, where people make a claim that something is
Seen in the data and he'll say well is it so for example his sub stack on the question of were three million people Saved by the vaccine the kovat vaccine campaign was a slam-dunk Jumi Kim does deep dives on Biological topics where she's very careful to
Process them in a way that you can just see what the evidence actually for and against particular claims is.
It's very uninflected with ideology or emotion.
It's just here's what a highly competent person sees when they use their tools to explore a question.
Alex Marinos has been excellent.
He's not a biologist by training.
He does have an advanced degree, I guess, in computer science.
There's many, many, many more, but I think listing everyone is a mistake.
Trying to be exhaustive is going to be unfair to the people we forget.
That's certainly true.
I'll just finish by saying that Alex has approached questions that impact us Like, well, does Ivermectin work?
Right?
And he has explored those, and he's delved deep into these large-scale randomized controlled trials that are claimed to prove that it doesn't, and it's amazing what's in there.
You find fraud, and you find that actually in spite of the fraud, the pattern that it does work is present, and it's obscured by the way they wrote it up.
So it's an amazing thing but figuring out who to listen to who tends to have a good hit rate is key and I guess all of those people show their work and which is what we do All right, so we're going to segue now to talking about Project Veritas's revelations this week.
For those who are listening later in time when it's not so present, or if you have just not watched the video, we'll link to the Rumble video.
But as I said at the top of the hour, So Project Veritas is an organization started 10-15 years ago, something like this maybe, basically to do undercover investigative reporting.
And they had someone apparently go on a date this week with a guy named Jordan Tristan Walker, who's an MD and the Director, Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning at Pfizer.
He's had that title since 2021, Walker has.
And so the Project Veritas guy who is not seen on camera, you can hear him, is pretending to be on a date with Walker and basically asking him Open-ended and leading questions about what is happening at Pfizer.
So just a few more things about Walker before we do some quotes and talk about what we think is going on here.
Walker was a consultant at BCG, that's the Boston Consulting Group.
Before he was the Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning Director at Pfizer, which is itself interesting.
You know, he's a consultant guy, which is consistent with something he says in the second video that Project Veritas releases when he's sort of gone into scared and trying to fix the problem he's just created for himself and for everyone mode.
And then he got his medical degree, it looks like, in 2018.
So, you know, he does have a medical background, but it seems like mostly he's been doing consulting and sort of strategic planning for Pfizer.
So, like I said, YouTube removed their video for a, guess what, violation of their community guidelines.
We've been there.
Without any more specificity, at least, that has been shared with us publicly.
But the video is still up on Rumble.
So, you basically have a... there must be a hidden camera in, like, the guy's glasses or something.
Showing Walker, again the consultant medical doctor at Pfizer, saying, for instance, quote, You know how the virus keeps mutating?
One of the things we're exploring is why don't we just mutate it ourselves so we could preemptively develop new vaccines?
So this would seem to imply that Pfizer would be mutating viruses and then releasing them into the world so that their newly developed vaccines would then be effective.
But that seems even too far for Pfizer.
Well, I have to say I was alarmed when I saw this interaction because what he says they are doing does not make sense. I have to say I was alarmed when I saw What he says they are doing does not make sense.
I'm going to just share the rest of the quotes though before you respond.
Why don't you share the rest of the quotes?
As you can imagine, Walker continues, no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating fucking viruses.
The anonymous state says, so Pfizer is ultimately thinking about mutating COVID?
Walker, well, no.
Well, that's not what we say to the public, no.
It was a thought that came up in a meeting and we were like, why do we not?
It was like, we're going to consider that with more discussions.
Then Walker says a little later, the way it would work is we would put this virus in these monkeys and it would successfully cause them to keep infecting each other.
And we collect, I'm actually going to gray out the extra words here to make it easier to hear what he's saying, and we collect samples from them.
And then the ones that are more infectious, we'll put them in another monkey and then just constantly actively mutate it.
I don't know if you want to hear all the things.
Let's stop there.
This is the thing that threw me.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that is serial passaging is what he's talking about.
He is talking about serial passaging in monkeys to make the virus more infectious.
Now this Does not add up, as stated.
And so there's a question.
This guy appears to be, we can debate how high level he is, but he does appear to be at the top of some sort of directorate of mRNA.
So all right, he's involved in strategy, but he's deeply inside of Pfizer, dealing with the mRNA technology, telling us that they are doing serial passaging with the virus.
But it is not obvious why Pfizer would want to do that.
So I want to make the biology a little bit clearer.
Not only isn't it clear why Pfizer would want to do that, it's not clear why Pfizer would want that result.
And it's really not clear.
I mean, it's actually clear that that approach to getting that result would not garner that result.
The science is just wrong.
Well, as stated, I think it's nonsense.
It seems to be actual nonsense.
And the reason that I say that is, let's compare to what was done, we think, in Wuhan, okay?
In Wuhan, you had a viral ancestor taken from a bat cave, probably a mine, The viral ancestor, we are extrapolating a little bit from a complex story some of you will know, but that viral ancestor was weakly capable of infecting humans but not capable of jumping between them.
That ancestor brought into the lab in Wuhan, we think, was then probably serially passaged through human airway tissue, that's cells in vitro, human airway tissue, humanized mice, these are mice that have been molecularly altered so that they function from the virus's perspective as a human background, and ferrets.
Those are the three likely candidates.
Now, in that case, you're taking a bat-adapted virus, and then you are exposing it to environments that will enhance its function relative to human infectivity.
Just, let's say, also ferrets, for reasons that I don't... must be interesting, and I don't know what the explanation is, are immunologically very similar to humans, and actually more similar than most monkeys would be.
It's not immunologically.
It's the ACE2 receptor.
Oh, it's just the ACE2 receptor.
Right.
And with regard to monkeys, are they all... he only says monkeys.
It's a good question.
They're presumably not looking at tamarins.
But for our purposes it doesn't matter.
Okay.
Because the point is, you've got a virus that's not adapted to humans at all, and then you expose it to three selective environments that lead in the human direction.
Ferrets, because the ACE2 receptor, which this virus in particular utilizes, is a match.
Right?
You've got human airway tissue, which is human, and you've got humanized mice, which have been made more human-like for this purpose.
So, in that case, you take something that is remote, that would need an intermediate host.
Remember, we've never found the intermediate host in the wild that would explain how this virus got from bats to people, right?
So what was the intermediate host?
It was the laboratory with these three environments, right?
Okay, now the virus has spread around the world, billions of people have been infected, right?
This is now a very well adapted virus to people.
If you take it to monkeys, it will evolve away from human adaptation.
Maybe not very far, because maybe monkeys are close enough, but it's not positive from the point of view of enhancing its infectivity of humans.
So, It's like, it's like virulence or infectivity is an abstraction.
And once infectious, you know, infectivity would apply equally to anything that you're talking about.
It's like we know, and certainly the people who really know what's going on at Pfizer know this, that, you know, infectious, high infectivity in a human does not mean high infectivity in a cockatoo.
Right.
So you could produce, maybe, in fact I don't think it would work even, well, you could produce a variant, right?
Or maybe a few variants through this experiment in a small number of monkeys.
But those wouldn't be useful variants from the point of view of predicting what the virus is going to do in people, which is why he says they're doing it, right?
They want to know what it's going to do beforehand so that they can get ahead on vaccines.
But that won't happen from this experiment as he described it, which raises the question of what exactly is going on here?
And I think there are really three broad possibilities.
One is, this guy's just shooting the shit on a date and he's making stuff up, maybe loosely based on something, but this is about the date and not about biology.
That it's nuts enough that it doesn't mean anything.
Second possibility, which is what he basically what he claims in his incoherent way when he is it is revealed that it wasn't a date Right.
I'm a liar.
Right, right.
So we will come back to that the second possibility is that There is a Absolutely monstrous explanation for what he's talking about, that we can infer from what he said, but I'll come back to that.
The third possibility is that he's not really very good at the biology at all, and that he is reporting something real, but he doesn't get it enough to report it properly, and that something is missing from what he said.
But also in that possibility is he was in a meeting.
He was in several meetings, but he refers to a meeting that day, you know, the day of the date, in which they were spitballing, right?
That, you know, the the visor execs in the room with him were talking about what they might do and You know, he says it was a thought that came up in a meeting and we were like, why do we not?
It was like, well, we're going to consider that with more discussions.
That, you know, that framing, and it's, you know, we're so many levels deeper, it's really hard to know, but that framing does sound like someone who, given that what he says is fairly incoherent, That he heard some real stuff.
It's going to impress a date.
He, you know, heard conversation that was just in the sort of nascent, well, let's talk about this.
And no, those conversations, the people at Pfizer never want to get out there, of course, because they're terrible.
But given that what he reports on this Project Veritas video doesn't make scientific sense, that does seem like it is a real possibility.
A real possibility.
Now there's of course more to the story because Pfizer has finally responded, but let's just fill in the monstrous but unlikely possibility.
The monstrous but unlikely possibility is that if you changed this virus in the lab by letting selection modify it in monkeys, and then it were released And you know, you knew that that was now going to be spreading and you had your vaccine ready.
That could be a very effective I don't really put such a plan past Pfizer.
for making your products necessary.
Yep.
Right?
Now, I don't really put such a plan past Pfizer.
After all, these people have been eager to vaccinate kids who aren't threatened by COVID with a vaccine that does threaten them.
That doesn't seem to faze them.
So I don't really think there's any moral obstacle to such a plan.
But I don't think the people at Pfizer may be a lot of things, but they're not dumb.
And the thing is, if Pfizer was caught mentally, making new viruses that they would then have to release into the world, then that is going to make these people, you know, it's going to put them on a very short list of extremely evil people from history.
And they don't have any reason to do it.
They have a very good business model.
It's immoral for sure.
But it's much safer than running that kind of risk.
So I just don't see them pulling that kind of shenanigans because it's not in their interest to do it, right?
They've gamed the regulators.
They don't have to do this.
They game the regulators.
They've got the government mandating their product and buying it.
This is the next level of organized crime.
To me, that's the crux.
It would be extraordinarily evil, obviously, but it would also be unnecessary at a business level.
Unnecessary and very, very risky.
Yeah, very risky.
So I don't think that that's what he's telling us.
It just doesn't add up.
I will take a lot of convincing to believe that that's what they're up to.
Should we take a quick look at what Pfizer says?
Sure.
So you can-- A video got released on Wednesday, January 25th, the Project Veritas video.
And then at 8:00 PM-- last night, on Friday, 8 p.m.
on Friday, a sort of classic move there for a moment of release.
Oh, it's called, it's called Taking Out the Trash.
I am, but, you know, the cat's sitting on the cord and all this, so I'm plugged in.
So yeah, it's called taking out the trash.
Taking out the trash.
When you report something on a Friday because people aren't paying attention and you don't want it to, you have to report it, but you don't want people to see it.
Yeah, well, obviously a lot of people are going to see this, but no one in the mainstream media, I think.
So, anyway, Pfizer... Are they still around?
I think so.
Last I checked.
Pfizer responds to research claims.
This is, again, Friday, January 27th, 2023, 8pm.
Allegations have recently been made related to gain-of-function and directed-evolution research at Pfizer, and the company would like to set the record straight.
Would you?
I don't think so.
But actually, before we go on, gain of function versus directed evolution, because that's one of the quotes I didn't transcribe or didn't read here is, what's his name, Walker says, oh, you know, we're doing this, and the anonymous state says, oh, that sounds like gain of function.
And Walker says, no, not really, it's directed evolution.
So, serial passage.
Serial passaging is directed evolution.
It's like, oh, what kind of selective pressure can we add?
Or what kinds of hosts can we serially put this, in this case, virus through, such that we can then select for a particular outcome that we like?
Directed evolution isn't, I think, a term of art?
No, it is.
It is.
Okay.
So, but, you know, it's not over in like basic evolution space, but in, you know, Yeah, I think I got the distinction as these people see it.
Yeah, but gain of function is basically a GMO, right?
Like, when they're saying gain of function, they mean, did we take something from Organism A and put it into Organism B?
I don't think that's the distinction.
Okay.
I think the distinction is So, serial passaging is a mechanism that can be used for gain-of-function, but it can also be used to do other things.
For example, you can attenuate a virus to make a good vaccine.
This is one of the techniques that they use, and so by serially passaging it, viruses tend to evolve towards lower virulence, and so the point is you can make a benign version of a pathogen And that's not gain of function.
Okay, so gain of function is an outcome.
If you have decided in advance what you want to be gained, regardless of how you get there, it could be gain of function.
And serial passaging is a method.
And directed evolution is not a method, but it's closer to, it's more mechanistic.
It's not an outcome.
I guess if I read them correctly, and frankly I don't really want to do their homework for them.
They figure out what we, you know, in the skeptical public think and exploit it.
But I believe the idea is serial passaging is a technique.
Serial passaging can be used to enhance function.
It can be used for gain of function.
There are other techniques that can be used for gain of function, and so the point is by saying this is a directed evolution but not gain of function, what they're saying, and frankly I'm not even gonna say that this is incorrect, what they are saying is we are doing something that is within bounds because we're not trying to make this virus worse.
Our goal was not to enhance, in this case it's a negatively enhanced virulence or infectiousness of this virus.
Therefore, the research can't be accurately classified under gain-of-function, even though we are using a method that we could have used to do gain-of-function research.
Right.
Now if they are doing what I, at the end of this process, and I, you know, I will say this fits very well with what we discussed in the first part of the broadcast today.
We are, this is brand new stuff and we are working our way through it and we are talking about it over dinner and we are talking about it with our friends and we are coming to understand what all of this means.
It doesn't mean that the version that we've got on our minds at the moment is right.
I think it's getting righter.
But it may actually be correct that this is not gain of function research in the sense I'm not sure that that is a defense in light of what I suspect most parsimoniously completes the puzzle of what he said they were doing.
So let's go back to Pfizer's response here.
I directed us away because their first sentence, and Zach you can show my screen again, the first sentence of their response from last night is, allegations have recently been made related to gain-of-function and directed evolution research at Pfizer and the company would like to set the record straight.
I'm not going to read the whole thing although it's not that long and we'll link to it in the show notes.
They say, In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain-of-function or directed-evolution research.
First point, this, unlike the guy on a date, this is written by a team of very careful people, and it's been vetted, of course, by lawyer after lawyer after lawyer, right?
So, in the ongoing development, Pfizer has not conducted these things.
They are not saying that they have never done this kind of research.
But in the ongoing development of this particular vaccine, it's not even clear in the ongoing development.
Does that mean it stopped or it's continuing?
It's not clear from the way it's written and I think intentionally vague.
Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.
Now when I first read that, I was like, why would they even do that?
And you had a possible answer that makes sense.
Like, why would they take the original virus and use it to express the spike protein from new variants that are already out there?
And I think your answer makes good sense.
It at least fits as a reason one might do that.
If you had data, if you had evidence that had been accumulated from original Wuhan strain virus and you were in the process of investigating updated vaccines that used a new code for the modified spike protein that has come about in one of these variants that you might want on the original background so that effectively in comparing the two things you were
data on this new spike, you were not also swapping out changes that had occurred to other parts of the virus.
Which only works because this vaccine is so specific to the spike.
Right.
Right.
Like that's that's the only piece that I heard missing.
Right.
Because the because the virus is only I mean, the Because the vaccines, so-called vaccines, are only using the spike protein, there is... You don't need the rest of the virus, and indeed the rest of the virus might produce noise that could get in the way of the efficacy of the so-called vaccine.
Right.
It would be noise that is counterproductive to your understanding what the alteration in the spike sequence had done.
Right.
This work has undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities.
This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern.
We then make this data available through peer-reviewed scientific journals and use it as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required.
That's not the most surprising thing in here, but I thought, do they?
I haven't seen these papers.
Well, and they must have the fast track through peer review, and I have not seen these papers.
Right, this strikes me as a description of a pharmaceutical utopia in which people are actually hard at work.
This is how science is done.
Right, but here's the thing, they describe, you know, we're constantly checking to see whether an update to the vaccines that we have deployed is necessary they have delivered exactly one update right it's not like so are they telling us that they didn't spot the need for an earlier update is that what they're saying because based on what based on what well they were working at the speed of science sorry okay um
so here then in the next paragraph and again like we could spend hours trying to understand what this crazy little document is but these two this one phrase and then the sentence after it that i've got Contradictory-ish.
With a naturally evolving virus.
Now, are they claiming that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally evolving virus?
Is that what we have to accept now, or is this irrelevant?
Well, it's not even parsable, because do they mean it evolved naturally, or do they mean it is now evolving naturally?
Right, or could they say, well, we just mean anything that has a natural ancestor, as opposed to entirely synthesized.
So with a naturally evolving virus, it is important to routinely assess the activity of an antiviral.
And it wouldn't be with a non-antiviral.
The sentence feels like it's doing some important work, and we can't figure out what that work is.
The next thing I've got highlighted here, in a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain-of-function mutations, again said this one, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.
So, a limited number of cases.
Like this one?
You're not going to tell us?
Gain-of-function mutations.
Okay, a lot of us out here, given the evidence for lab leak and the serial passaging and the ferrets and the humanized mice and the human airway passage tissue, feel pretty confident there are gain-of-function mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, in which case this sentence is irrelevant?
Or, like, what job is this sentence doing here?
This sentence is highly technical, right?
The bodies are buried right under this sentence, and you can tell because of the absolutely tortured way in which it's phrased, right?
I mean, for example, just notice.
Such virus.
In a number of cases, in a limited number of cases, when?
How is the sentence different if you take... How would it not be a limited number of cases?
Right?
Isn't it inherently a limited number of cases?
Right?
It's like saying, you know, when vaccinology is performed on Earth, right?
It does not... So, let me try to steelman that part.
Sure.
Sometimes, when a full virus does not contain any known gain-of-function mutations, we might do some of this fancy engineering behind the scenes.
But not always.
We've got some subset of viruses that we're doing stuff on and in some of the cases within that subset we do this additional thing.
So should we expect a shell game later on?
Yes.
Where the point is, oh, you didn't ask about those cases.
Right.
Is that what's going to happen?
Well, we didn't say which limited number, like which limited, which number, which cases.
Tell us which number case you want to know about and we'll let you see those files.
Yeah.
So anyway, there's something very odd about this sentence.
Yes.
I do think I understand what they want us to infer.
Okay.
Which is that when They know that they have to stay one side of the line about enhancing function.
And so they're telling us, in cases where that's not a risk because the thing that we're using as a source doesn't contain them, we may do this other thing that allows us to, et cetera, et cetera.
So anyway, this is, of course, I've now forgotten who coined this phrase.
This is a non-denial denial.
Oh.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a denial in form, but it doesn't really deny what Jordan Walker said.
Right?
So, anyway, it's about something else.
It's about establishing a narrative about what they do.
But, I mean, clearly you didn't read the last sentence of their statement.
Fact-based information rooted in sound science is vitally important to overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic, and Pfizer remains committed to transparency in helping alleviate the devastating burden of this disease.
They are increasingly transparent.
I just feel like what you said runs exactly counter to that final sentence in their statement.
Isn't that odd that they've contradicted themselves?
When has that happened in the last three years?
Right.
All right.
So let us talk.
I think that I think the right order in order for this to make sense to people is to talk a little bit about the second video that Project Veritas released, what it might imply, and then for me to tell you at the end of all of this, including Pfizer's non-denial denial, what it is that I think We've talked about it, right?
Yep.
So anyway.
We've talked about it, right?
You're not revealing stuff to me.
I'm not revealing it to you.
But so let's talk about the second video and the.
Yeah.
Sure, I mean I don't have any quotes from it.
I ran out of time.
I have the gist.
Presumably most of our audience will have seen it, and again I think it's actually fascinating that YouTube struck this video and struck Project Veritas' channel.
Yeah, I don't know if they struck the second video, presumably, but maybe, I don't know.
It's possible the strike happened before that video was released.
Yeah, in any case, the question is, you know, this is obviously a matter of global importance.
The fact that Pfizer has responded in the tortured way that it has says it's a completely responsible thing to be talking about.
What is the meaning of what Pfizer said versus what their executive said?
What are we to understand that they are actually doing and how okay should we be with it?
Is it within the law?
Right?
Is it tolerable?
But anyway in the second video what we see is the fact that Jordan Walker has been Lured into saying things on the record that he did not know were on the record.
He thought he was on a date He says things about his work and they reveal James O'Keefe comes out and replaces the CEO and the head guy at Project Veritas comes in and tries to interview him about what he said and And I think it is fair to say, you tell me if I've got the description off.
My notes say he freaks the fuck out.
He freaks the fuck out.
Yes, I was going to find euphemisms for freaking the fuck out, but that is what happens.
I mean, as you would.
I think.
Well... If you had just said those things while you were trying to get laid, and instead it turns out it was for the whole world, I'm not excusing him, but the fact that he doesn't take it calmly is not surprising.
No, no.
I'm not surprised that his blood pressure goes through the roof.
Obviously, he shouldn't have said the things that he said for professional reasons.
Obviously, the things he is reporting are disturbing in and of themselves.
As he says, as he's telling his date these things... He keeps saying, you're not going to say anything, right?
Don't tell anybody.
I promise.
Right.
So, it's not surprising that his mind is going a mile a minute.
However, his reaction is very, very terrible.
I think.
I think we have not mentioned because so far it has not been relevant.
He is black.
It is implied by what we have said that he is gay.
He is on a gay date.
His reaction involves a tremendous amount of drama.
And he's trying out various different approaches to somehow rewrite the history of what's happened here.
And he says... He calls the police.
And he says to them...
Well, he calls the police.
Before the police arrive, he... No, he says to them on the phone.
Oh, on the phone.
They never see him in person.
I think before he calls the police, he says that he was lying.
In fact, it's his first instinct is to say, I was lying.
And that doesn't change O'Keefe's approach.
Then he says, you're in trouble.
You screwed up.
Right.
But then on the phone with the police, the thing that is maybe the most remarkable is he says, I'm surrounded by five white men.
No one has mentioned race at all.
It's true.
I mean, we don't, we can't see all of them, but presumably he's correctly identified their race.
It is clearly irrelevant to what has happened, but it is a very interesting phenomenon to have emerged here.
Oh, hold on.
We haven't, so if you haven't seen it, they're in a restaurant.
Yeah.
And so the restaurant staff are there, and also Walker, Somehow blocks the door or locks the door.
It's a little bit unclear exactly who did it what happened But the restaurant staff want everyone to get out of there because this isn't good for business and Walker insists that you know The five white men of which he is supposedly scared or something according to what he says the police they must stay there They it's absolutely mandated that they stay there, right?
And in fact, he says that it's not surrounded.
They are making him unsafe Yeah, he says that okay.
So when I saw that I I thought, wait a minute, maybe this is a, you know, despite the fact that the biology that he reports doesn't make any sense, maybe this is a big story, but it's not the story that Project Veritas thinks it has.
Maybe this is a story of incompetence and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Because the point is, on the one hand, he has said lots of biological things that don't add up, okay?
And on the other hand, he's in this reasonably high position at Pfizer, responsible in some way for something about mRNA, the exact topic on which he's saying things that don't add up.
And then his first instinct upon being caught having said these things about his work environment is, this is about race, and I feel unsafe, which he's obviously not.
His first instinct is, I was lying.
But that doesn't immediately dissolve the situation.
He makes it about race.
He talks about not feeling safe.
He goes there.
He goes the place that everyone is being encouraged to go now and often will completely shut down a conversation or a situation.
Right.
So one possibility here.
is, as those who are in corporate environments presently know, there is all of this energy around ESG.
ESG being Environment, Social, and Governance, right?
These supposed scores that But nonetheless, that's the claim about what these ESG scores are about.
a corporation is.
It's a total nightmare and a debacle, and it's going to make the world much worse, much faster.
But nonetheless, that's the claim about what these ESG scores are about.
In a world where corporations are minding their ESG scores and in which there are woke mobs everywhere, weaponizing HR departments and all of these things, there are going to be lots of people weaponizing HR departments and all of these things, there are going to be lots of people hired who are not qualified to do the thing for which they are hired in order to placate the
I don't know if this is the moment, but I've got a couple of pieces of evidence that that is exactly going on at Pfizer.
Okay.
Not with regard to ESG, but with regard to the EI, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion.
So, in an undated post on Pfizer's site, it has to be from the second half of 2021 or later, they celebrate their new hire, one Ramses Jean-Louis, who I may be mispronouncing his name.
It's their new hire to lead the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion office.
He's the global chief.
He says, Jean-Louis says, I feel as if I've joined an organization that has the mentality and philosophy that nothing is impossible.
When we apply that same urgency and attention to the area of diversity, equity and inclusion, the possibilities are endless, says Jean-Louis, who started the job in July 2021.
Equity has been one of our core values for a number of years now.
It wasn't reactionary, it wasn't an impulsive response to the racial crisis that climaxed in 2020.
Then he talks a little bit about having grown up in Brooklyn, his family's from Haiti, and later in the same post they quote Pfizer's chairman and CEO Albert Bourla.
Pfizer's commitment to equity is all-encompassing, and defines who we are as a company.
It's about ensuring every person is seen, heard, and cared for, reducing healthcare disparities, and making sure that everyone has an opportunity to express themselves and bring their authentic selves into the workplace.
It's also about holding our leaders accountable for living these behaviors every day, said Borla.
We are taking a data-driven approach to our equity commitments, and I am thrilled that Ram has come aboard to lead these efforts.
A data-driven approach to equity commitments is a horseman of the apocalypse phrase if ever I've heard one.
Data-driven is itself a disaster.
For me, it's become a tell.
If you're a scientist, you're like, I'm all data-driven.
I don't think you know what science is.
Go back to the drawing board and bring me a hypothesis.
But a data-driven approach to our equity commitments?
They're just counting up demographic markers.
That's what that means.
They're just counting them up and saying, oh, we don't have enough of this type.
Go out and find me some of that type and bring them in.
It's insane.
Right.
So you've got evidence from inside of Pfizer that they're counting demographic markers, which implies the existence of a certain number of positions in which the person in that position isn't expected to be competent or doing anything.
It would be helpful.
I guess, but the fact is you've then got this guy who doesn't really seem to fit the seriousness of the position that he appears to be in, and what he reports when he's talking about his professional life doesn't add up biologically, right?
Now what are the chances that his, there is something odd about his work history, right?
This is a urologist who spent one year at a hospital, right?
And he was at a consulting firm.
Right.
And then he comes in through the door of a consulting firm into Pfizer.
And so, anyway, who knows what that all means.
But it is possible.
But we've seen, as we'll have maybe all, but presumably most of our audience have seen examples Among friends of people we know and colleagues and acquaintances of people being advanced, not because of what they know how to do, but because of what they look like or where they come from.
And in fact, they are advanced in lieu of other people who actually have skills being advanced.
And we've been talking about this for a very long time.
We've been talking about this for a very long time.
Now, the most tragic thing about it is that when you have something like Pfizer counting people of different races as a matter of checking off some boxes, what that does is it invites in people who are using that mechanism to rise to the exclusion of people who might meet those same demographic criteria who are highly qualified.
In other words, this is a system that's going to play towards the people who are inclined to game it.
And here you have somebody who does seem like they are gaming the system, right?
He just doesn't seem scientifically competent.
He doesn't seem scientifically competent.
He seems, frankly, at best, completely amoral.
He is reporting with glee on the enhancing of viruses by his company in a way that the public would obviously be upset about if they knew.
And he talks about the risks of one of these things getting out, risks that are obviously real and profound.
He is not speaking with any seriousness about this.
So anyway, this is a lightweight.
And this lightweight is in a position that doesn't make sense for a lightweight in the corporation.
And then his first instinct upon being caught having said things he shouldn't have is to resort to, these are white men, I feel unsafe.
So the point is, this does seem like somebody who games systems.
In this point, he's trying to use the police to get himself out of having said stuff that was irresponsible, right?
He wants the fact that the police come in and they see white men challenging a black man to be the sum total of the story.
He's trying to create an architecture to escape responsibility for what he said.
All right, now we've got two questions on the table.
Uh, about biology taking place inside of Pfizer in a way that is informative in some fashion, but hard to parse because it doesn't make sense.
That's the story that Project Veritas thinks it has.
Then there's another possible story in which this is really incompetence rising through all of the mechanisms of society through diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And isn't it a little bit ironic that it's even, you know, wrecking corrupt organizations like Pfizer?
It comes for everyone.
Right, that's comedy right there.
But, here's the question.
After I keep thinking about everything I heard him say, and then the incredible spectacle of what happens when he's revealed, I think it's both stories.
I think that this is a lightweight and incompetent person reporting something he did not understand that is of consequence.
That's my best guess.
And so here I want to fill in what I think is most likely to explain this mysterious experiment in which serial passaging is taking place in monkeys in a way that does not appear to serve Pfizer's interests.
Here's the missing element.
You vaccinate the monkeys.
If you vaccinate the monkeys, and then you serially passage the virus through them, you detect the leak in your vaccine, and you do see something like the next variant coming.
Right?
In other words, he never says you vaccinate the monkeys, and that's why this is such a head-scratcher.
But if you did vaccinate the monkeys, and then you serially passage this vaccine, what you will get is an environment in which they... Wait, you serially passage the virus?
The virus through the monkeys.
The virus will find the leak, and it will evolve to exploit it, and it will become... the vaccine will be less and less effective, which then... If the vaccine works on the...
Oh, the vaccine will work.
That's the beauty of the mRNA technology, isn't it?
Right?
If you can infect the monkeys, and you deliver this mRNA so-called vaccine... I guess, yeah, if they're infectable with the virus, then yes.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, look, it's an mRNA transcript.
Their ribosomes will transcribe it as well as ours.
So, okay, the vaccine works in the monkeys.
Serially passage it, the virus defeats the vaccine, because of course it will, which is what you and I have been saying forever, right?
This is too narrow a vaccine, so you can predict the vaccine will fail, the virus will evolve to overcome it, and what I think Jordan Walker is saying And then we will know the next vaccine we need way ahead of time.
And so the point is we can accelerate our development cycle by exploiting the defects in our own vaccine and delivering supposedly curative vaccines that will also leak.
We can just get ahead of this thing, right?
That would make a lot of sense and frankly it sounds a hell of a lot like pharma.
Right?
Pharma is rather profoundly indifferent to the side effects of its own treatment.
Why?
In part because those will require other drugs and so to the extent that it makes you sicker by giving you something that cures something you've got or helps, you know, the point is that we've got a drug for that too.
You know, it's we've got an app for that.
Pharma version.
It's interesting.
I wonder, you know, it would be interesting to see the whole video, because obviously Project Veritas has edited it to provide the most interesting parts, but the quote that I have here is him saying, the way it would work is we would put this virus in these monkeys and then we successfully cause them to keep infecting each other and we collect serial samples from them and etc, etc.
But these monkeys could just be like, we got these monkeys.
Or he could be referring to, I've just been talking about these monkeys that we're vaccinating.
Yes.
Like he could have actually said that piece and we just don't know.
That's true.
It'd be interesting.
It's at least, you know, if it's not in the video, it doesn't tell us anything.
It is in the video it helps us test this hypothesis.
Yeah, that's actually what he's Referring to I did want to point out a couple things.
Yeah, right So we've got a hypothesis on the table about what he might actually have meant that he's misreported this and that the reason that doesn't make any sense is because he forgot an element or didn't understand that that element was required he just knew that there was some Okay, a couple things.
head business-wise by creating variants that absent this wouldn't help.
You will create variants, maybe, but they won't be useful.
In this case, they'll be absolutely useful because basically you're using the virus to find your leak, right?
How will a virus respond when the immunity is non-sterilizing?
Okay, a couple things.
One, if this is what Pfizer is doing, doing, then it validates the idea which was central to the contentious battles we were in when the variance problem first emerged about whether or not a trial was enough to cause the emergence of variance, right?
Because the challenge that many people offered to us was that it can't be that the vaccines, the so-called vaccines, are triggering the The emergence of variants because the variants show up too early.
Variants, however, show up in places where trials were held.
And so the point is, well, look, if you can do this in a, you know, how many monkeys do they have?
Let's say it's a thousand.
That'd be a lot of monkeys, right?
But, you know, if a trial on a small number of monkeys is enough to give them information on variants, Then the point is, well, it doesn't take very many.
So that would sound like a trial.
So anyway, that's one connection here.
The other one is strange.
Do you remember, you and I never delved very deeply because it's not our area of specialty.
You know, you and I are not jean chucks.
But you remember Chris Martinson went after the question of why is Omicron so weird?
That question has never been answered.
Yeah.
Okay.
Omicron.
It seems novel.
Not only novel, it seems to be, it seems that it was frozen in time.
That it is not descended from anything that was circulating at the time that it emerged.
Right.
Right?
Yep, that's right.
And the other thing that was weird about it was that it had an incredible ratio of non-synonymous mutations to synonymous mutations, right?
So something had, it was like a hundred times the other variants.
What do you mean by non-synonymous mutations to synonymous mutations?
The mutations that were recorded in this new creature, Omicron, were heavily biased in the direction of mutations that actually changed the protein sequence.
Oh, okay.
So the ratio of mutations within Omicron was biased, okay.
By a hundred times the others.
And what's the, I can't, I'm trying to think of like, what's the math on the usual ratio?
The usual ratio in the other variants was less than 1%.
Okay.
- Okay. - And it was like 80% in Omicron.
So what does that even mean?
What is Omicron?
Where did it come from?
And you know, there are various possibilities, right?
You and I talked about the possibility that it was a white hat attempt to vaccinate the world to shut down the pandemic, that somebody tried to take this out of the hands of the incompetent people who had driven it in the first place.
That was one possibility.
Another possibility was that I mean it's possible it was circulating in some way that we couldn't see it, though that would be very weird given how contagious the thing was, right?
It's possible that we just didn't detect it because it was far enough off that the PCR test didn't register it.
But another possibility is that somebody was playing games like maybe Jordan Walker is telling us we're going on at Pfizer.
And they lost their vaccine.
I mean, they lost their test environment, right?
They lost it into the world.
They lost it into the world, which, if you think about it, if his experiment that one he's describing is Just fixed so it makes sense in the way I'm suggesting it would have to be, right, if they vaccinated the monkeys.
And then they serially passaged this thing, right?
It's actually very similar to the attenuation program that you would use to generate a real vaccine.
If you weren't so hell-bent on doing this with mRNA, right, you would maybe serially passage your virus to get a virus that wasn't so virulent, right?
And This could be an intermediate.
Right?
That got out.
They were planning to release a booster, an mRNA booster, and maybe... I don't know.
So, anyway, I don't want to go too far down that road.
I'm not saying I think this happened.
I'm saying it belongs on the list of possibilities because the anomalies of Omicron are profound.
They have never been explained.
The experiment that seems to be described by Jordan Walker doesn't make sense in and of itself, but there might be an experiment that he heard about and didn't completely understand that would make sense.
Or didn't completely describe.
Right.
So anyway, it's certainly a fascinating story.
Yeah.
And it brings together, just to wrap it up, it brings together these two domains about which we spent a lot of time talking, right?
The corruption and decay of actual science.
And science-ish domains, which includes like public health and public health organizations like the WHO and the CDC, federal granting agencies like NSF and NIH, and pharma, right?
Such that so much of the science being done, and of course in academia as well, is just either inexplicably badly designed such that it could not possibly reveal what it's supposed to reveal, Or the people doing it are so misunderstanding what complex systems are and how many things that they are messing with by changing, they're claiming one variable and often they'll be changing lots of them, that there's no chance of success.
So we've got like that space, which many people who can see the other space, the risks of DEI, of the woke ideology, Many people who can see that other thing, the woke ideology thing, have not been willing to say, maybe it's going to affect science.
And also, what happens if the two of them come together?
And it's, and you said this, I don't know, 10-15 minutes ago, like this, this is a story where they appear to come together.
You've got, you know, the failure of science-ish domains, as a result of greed and corruption and careerism and all of these things that we talk about all the time.
With the ascent of, it appears, someone, and presumably someones, lots of someones, through the ranks, making decisions that affect the entire planet, who don't appear to have the skills, the understanding necessary to even be able to describe it to a layperson.
How is it that those are the people who are making decisions on behalf of all of us?
And what happens when that process, you know, as you and I have been warning, interrupts all functional systems?
Yeah.
Right?
You know, we are playing with the fate of the world here, and the bridges don't fall down right away, the airplanes don't fall out of the sky right away, but we're working on legacy competence, and we are eroding the competence of the people who are actually needing to manage The new stuff as it arises and, you know, disaster, it's not even coming.
It's here.
Bigger and bigger disasters are going to happen as a result of this.
Actually, there's one more thing that may be in this.
I mean, this does come sort of full circle to what we were talking about with regard to Scott Adams and like, you know, how do you do it?
How do you end up predicting correctly time and time again?
And one other thing that is true is that we have, because of the training that we had, in what is broadly referred to as skin out biology.
So there's lots of ways to split up sort of the study of life on earth.
But one of them is sort of is it at the level of smaller than an organism skin in biology or at the level of an organism or larger skin out biology?
And we used to joke with our other skin-out biology friends, our other evolutionary biology friends, but not without truth to it, that the skin-in biologists liked to talk about, well, yeah, I work on the molecular pathways of such and such in Mongolian gerbils, and then they'd show a picture of a Mongolian gerbil, because everyone loves to see a cute and fuzzy mammal, right?
And the joke was, yeah, but if they literally stumbled across a Mongolian gerbil in the street, they wouldn't know it.
They wouldn't know it if it dropped on their head.
They'd be like, oh my god, it's a terrible thing!
They wouldn't know it was their supposed study animal.
This is about the reductionism and the data-drivenness and the tech-happy approach to science that so many people are engaging in now.
This isn't relevant so much to the question of SARS-CoV-2 and virus and vaccine development, but If you can go outside and see the thing in its habitat, that is going to give you a lot more insight than sitting around thinking about it from your armchair, right?
And whenever you can see the thing that you are supposedly studying in the context in which it evolved, you are going to gain more insight and you are going to be much less likely to engage in these tech-heavy, overly simplistic, overly reductionist solutions.
Yeah, I mean, in some sense, you at least need to know what your creature, what problem your creature is a solution to, right, before you're going to be really good at thinking about it.
Yes.
I did want to add one other thing, though.
All right.
When I first, as I alluded at the beginning of this discussion, when I first ran into this story, I was really alarmed.
And I was really alarmed because of the nonsense biology that Jordan Walker was reporting.
And that many dissident voices who have been tremendously important in pursuing the various anomalies that have happened during the pandemic, weren't talking about the absurdity of the biology that was being described.
My guess And so I did worry that this could be a trap, that there's so many hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, that a sophisticated trap that caused all of the people who have successfully, you know, survived the onslaught of slanders In order to report to the world what is actually going on and translate it into English so people could understand what was happening, that this was a great danger.
If he was reporting gobbledygook from inside of Pfizer and people were embracing it too easily without thinking about the biology, that's obviously a big hazard.
And so there's a question about whether this is even real or whether somebody had fed Project Veritas nonsense.
That's never a zero possibility in an environment that's this charged on which so much rests.
I am much less concerned about that now, having seen both the reaction of Jordan Walker to being caught, right?
I think that was authentic.
It looked authentic.
And it does hint at this larger story.
And there is a relatively small alteration to what he said that then makes the rest of it sensible enough, right?
So, you know, the parsimony has been restored to this and I'm less concerned that it could be some kind of Trap, but I will say that does then cause me to want to give the other dissidents a caution.
Because what I think they must have done is in their minds connected dots that hadn't been connected in the video.
They assumed an experiment that would make sense in place of the experiment that was described that wouldn't make sense, right?
And so that does create a vulnerability.
I think for sure on my first watch that's what I did.
I think it's dangerous, right?
It does open the possibility of somebody ensnaring the world of skeptics.
Well, I mean, there's all these terms that may be terms of art, but are used differently by different people.
So, you know, even just the ones we talked about here, gain of function, serial passaging, directed evolution.
Yeah.
Right?
The distinction there is, I think we arrived at a relatively clear taxonomy of distinction between these things, but it's not at all clear to me that those are either stable definitions or the ones that are being used by people in meetings at Pfizer.
It does make me want to go back to Rand Paul's interaction with Tony Fauci, where Tony Fauci, senator, you know, where he's saying that we do not do gain-of-function research, and it's pretty obvious that any normal parsing of the language Uh, would tell you that they do.
It's Clintonian, right?
I mean, it depends on what the definition of is is.
We're back there.
We are back there.
On the other hand, the point is, okay, give me all of the definitions in this quadrant of the glossary so we can talk about what you are and aren't doing and why you feel entitled.
Right.
So anyway, um, all of this is to say, I think, um, I think this isn't a trap.
That's not a zero possibility, but it's a lower possibility than I initially feared.
But it does suggest that we should all be more careful and we should all be talking to each other more and sooner, right?
Leaping to conclusions about what's being described, you know, before we've had a chance to discuss it as a mistake.
And it's one that's induced by social media.
Because the idea is, oh my god, you know, Project Veritas has just released this thing.
I'm going to be expected to say something on it.
And so anyway, that pressure to talk is making people uncareful.
And, uh, that's, um, that's a problem.
All right, I think we're done.
I think so too.
All right, so we are going to be back here again next week and we're going to be back here again in 15 minutes as well to answer your questions.
You can ask them at darkhorsesubmissions.com and consider joining us tomorrow at 9 a.m pacific.
We're doing our two-hour private Q&A Two hours earlier than we usually do this month.
That'll be tomorrow.
The questions are in.
They're great.
That's a small enough group that we are able to interact with the chat.
And then we do leave that up also for people on my Patreon.
Yeah, lots more to say always, but we're very, very glad to have you, our audience.
We get great communications and sometimes gifts from all of you.
In fact, there's a book right there that came in for you.
Yeah, I noticed that.
Beautiful.
And until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
