Confirmation of Cool: The 262nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this week’s episode, we discuss the Senate Confirmation Hearings of Bobby Kennedy Jr., in which the Democrats reveal a preference for anecdote over science, and work hard to maintain the status quo. As RFK seeks to Make America Healthy Again, he answers questions about infectious and chronic disease, SSRIs, Covid, farmers, autism, conspiracy theories, Medicaid and Medicare, and says with no equivocation: “I am not afraid of vested interests.” Also: Trump signs an Executive Order that will ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number X-V-I-I-I. You don't understand Roman numerals at all, do you?
Well, I was hoping that no one else would.
Some of our audience does.
Some of our audience.
I promise you.
It is number 262. 262. Here we are, end of January 2025. What a January it has been already.
It's kind of hard to believe that this is not a dream.
That we are in danger of waking up into the same boring world we used to live in, where everything was rotten and continued to be so.
Yeah.
You know, I will say, I keep on trying to remember what it felt like eight years ago now.
And, you know, our world, our particular lives were very, very different, of course.
We were still professors at Evergreen, among other things.
And we were more...
In tune with and believed ourselves to be in line with more of what the mainstream media was telling us about what was happening.
And I am trying to compare what I'm hearing from the mainstream media now to what we were hearing eight years ago.
And it is really hard to know how they have changed if they have.
Yeah, I don't feel...
I think if we went back to...
My social media feed from eight years ago.
It would be hard to square it with being in any way accepting of the mainstream media, except that it felt like more of reality had to come through that channel.
It wasn't as completely fictionalized.
Well, I'm thinking specifically of the...
The panic that happened this week around loss of benefits, loss of drugs, loss of services to millions of people that associated with failure of what turns out to be a website that was a glitch that has been fixed.
And I remember similar panics happening eight years ago around, look what he's going to do.
He's going to destroy all of the things that are functioning.
And I think the big thing for me that has changed.
And, you know, there have been many, is the idea that there was a lot functioning.
And so, you know, and that's what we're going to talk today about, about the Senate confirmation hearing of Bobby Kennedy that happened this morning.
And what, you know, I watched nearly the whole thing.
And what I saw in so many of his interlocutors was a, if not explicit, sometimes explicit, But implicit defense of the status quo on the side of the Democrats, which is, of course, and I'm sort of stealing my own thunder here, but this is exactly the opposite of what liberals are supposed to be doing.
So I've started again, as I used to, frankly, 8, 10, 20 years ago, calling what I was seeing.
It's like, what is happening?
These are pseudo-liberals.
These are not liberals.
They're Democrats, but they're not liberals.
Yeah, it's basically, and we can go into the strategy that they're deploying here, which is ever less effective.
But it's really just kind of cover for something.
And it's more transparent.
I will say, before we get to the heart of the matter, I have heard something this week which is interesting.
You and I both felt...
That President Trump had leveled up after the assassination attempt.
Yeah.
The first one.
And that we were seeing a different person.
And I don't know about you.
I certainly know that I took a lot of crap for that perspective.
Many people alleged, no, you didn't see it.
Now you do.
Welcome aboard, better late than ever, that kind of thing.
I'm now hearing many of the president's staunchest supporters make this exact point.
Really?
That he is a different person and that he has leveled way up.
And so a point that is worth making is history is a strange beast.
And I do not believe if he had taken...
a second consecutive consecutive term that it would have worked out this way yeah and as much as i have doubts about what took place during that election i think the degree to which you have someone who is laser focused is wiser with respect to who he's talking to right um and and just in terms of sorry but just in terms of the people he surrounded himself with which is what you just said
but you know we would we would have had a second term of pence as vice president instead of vance uh which is a totally different thing but But, you know, Kennedy gabbard so many other people, but, you know, especially Kennedy.
Just was not in his sphere, I think, at all.
Right.
Likewise, the vast coalition of people, which we partially brought along, the unity movement is not synonymous with Maha.
It certainly has an overlap.
the Maha movement and the MAGA movement together are a force of nature.
And it means that this leveled up president also has a whole lot more firepower to bring about a radical change in the way our system functions or a radical increase in the degree to which our system functions.
Indeed.
Now, I got excited and started talking before I even let you introduce us.
Right.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, which most of our audience probably knows.
You are Dr. Heather Haring.
I would imagine they know that also.
Indeed.
And this is the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 262.
Can you believe it?
262.
262. We've been doing this that many times.
262, which in Roman numerals is XV. I'm not going there.
Okay.
No Q&A today, but there's a watch party going on on Locals.
Please consider joining us on Locals.
We've got lots of great content there, including watch parties during our live streams and Q&As, which we did one last Sunday.
It was fantastic as usual.
And before we go any further down into the conversational topics we want to go to today, we start, as always, top of the hour with our three sponsors.
It's the only time you'll hear us reading ads during our podcast.
And we choose carefully whom we read ads for.
If we are reading ads for any products or services here, you know that we have actually truly vetted them and we vouch for them.
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You know, you say that there are an infinite number of distractions, but I think that may even be an underestimate.
I thought you were going to suggest counting them as a way to distract yourself.
That's not a bad idea.
Yeah.
All right, I'm going to...
You're going to go off on the count.
I'm at least going to start, see how it goes.
Terrible use of his time.
You all know that.
That is...
Yeah.
There are better ways to waste my time.
Let us enumerate all of the ways in which I can procrastinate.
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Yes, sachets.
Next time I read this, I'm going to have you sachet behind me.
That's what you think.
That, I think, is spelled differently.
Pronounce the same.
That's why it confuses me every time I run into the word.
Anyway.
Pronounce the same.
Spelled differently.
Yeah.
So that's a hominid.
Usually I All right, we're going to add this to the list of things that we can waste our time on.
I'm not making that list.
You are.
And the fact is, you aren't.
You're just talking about making the list.
Right, which is pretty meta.
Yeah.
Yeah, which is another great way to waste your time.
Yes, it's top of the list.
Talking about making the list.
No, no, I thought meta.
Waste to waste your time.
No, I think talking about making lists is top of your list.
It's top of my meta list, yes.
You waste no time on Meta.
No, I don't.
Ever.
At all.
I have walked away since the Evergreen Fiasco.
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I really like their glass beaker.
Have I mentioned that?
I don't know why I care about it so much, but it's actually a really nice beaker.
I use it for all sorts of stuff.
I think you could imagine somebody sourcing a beaker-like vessel.
And in this case...
This reminds me of actual labware, but it's clean.
It's really nice.
And I'm not going to go on and on about the glass beaker, but...
The product is amazing, and it comes with the frother, and lots of stuff comes with frother, so that's cool.
But, you know, you can get that through a lot of places.
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Now, Heather, our final sponsor this week is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.
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Avenger, did you say?
I did.
He's not known as that in every circle, but I guarantee you there are some circles in which he's known as that.
The olive oil Avenger.
Yes.
Okay.
I am one of those circles.
I know.
You are the circle.
You are the point.
May the circle be unbroken.
At the moment, the circle has a cold, but...
May the circle be unbroken.
Stressed, but where was I? Yes, a light dressing on a caprese salad, a marinade for grilled chicken, tossed with carrots, and coarse sea salt before roasting.
That's the chicken.
We've made olive oil cake with these fantastic oils, and we drizzled steak.
No, that was the carrots.
Wait, wait, wait.
Okay, you're right.
You're right.
So in your circle, this reads a whole different way.
The olive oil is so good.
It's really good.
And we've had, I feel like we might have even gotten some more, but at least six varietals now.
It's so good.
It's really good.
It's one of those things that when it arrives, you're excited that you have it.
And when you see that it's one you haven't tasted, it's all the better.
And they are all ones we haven't tasted so far.
We have made olive oil cake with these fantastic oils, and we drizzled steaks with TJ's fresh olive oil before adding a nice dose of salt and letting them sit for several hours before grilling the meat.
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We add a splash of vinegar to bone broth.
And to roasted vegetables and so much more.
Drizzled on some grilled halloumi also, I would add.
But too late breaking to be in the script.
Too late breaking, yeah, on grilled halloumi.
But I want to just add the bit about bone broth.
It occurs to me that some people may be like, what?
What the hell?
What are you doing?
Bone broth is amazing, succulent, full of umami, full of collagen, so good.
And it often, to makes it pop, just wants a little salt, a little acid.
Awesome vinegar is the perfect acid to add to a really nice bone broth.
I do think lots of people would be like, what the hell?
But not our audience.
They know.
They do know.
They do know.
Yeah, they get it.
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A smoking deal, if I do say so myself.
And I did say so myself without any help.
So I have a question.
Yes.
I see this beautiful dung beetle on the table.
In front of us, which we talked about a couple weeks ago when it showed up.
We have the beautiful art behind us made by local artist Teresa White.
No, sorry, Teresa Smith.
Teresa Smith.
And this beautiful dung beetle made by South Spring Island artist Sean Goddard.
Yep.
And I hear snores.
And I'm wondering if the snoring is coming from the dung beetle, which surprises me because, A, I don't know them to snore.
They don't snore.
They never rest, in fact.
Well, I've never...
So it may be just...
It's maybe a failure of mine because I have...
I have seen and documented dung beetles in the wild.
And the thing is that you don't really happen upon them when they're sleeping.
Right.
And so I don't know.
I haven't actually done the research to find out if they do, in fact, when they sleep snore.
But it sounds more like a mammalian snoring, yet I see no source of snoring anywhere in the room.
Yeah, I forgot to bring the dog bed in.
So the dog is snoring off camera.
Off camera, okay.
I see.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
Not the dung beetle.
Not the dung beetle.
And I don't think it's a sign of boredom.
I think it's just...
I think she's just weepy.
That's what dogs do.
You know why?
Actually, you know what she just had?
This is not one of our sponsors this week, but she just had some Sundays.
She did.
And she is in ecstasy now and sleeping off some of the ecstasy.
Sleeping away some of the ecstasy.
That's right.
Yeah.
All right.
Senate confirmation hearings for Bobby Kennedy were today.
Overseen by the Finance Committee.
Senator Crapo is the chairman of the Finance Committee.
He was running these hearings.
And I watched nearly the whole thing.
I missed little bits and pieces here and there.
We have a couple little clips to show in line once we get there, but I just want to share some of the highlights that I heard, and I don't think you were able to watch most of it.
I watched a lot of it, but I also watched where there was commentary, which in retrospect I wish I hadn't, but I hadn't found a stream that didn't have commentary, so a commentary sort of prevents you from hearing certain things.
Yeah, so I have not heard what anyone else says about these things.
I prefer to keep it that way, usually.
I do, too.
So, we started with introductions and opening statements, and very early on, of course, as you would expect, you see the Republicans more or less friendly.
With questions about Kennedy's stance on reproductive rights, interestingly, on abortion, and the Democrats more or less hostile, although they did a varying job of just coming out of the gates shooting, as opposed to at least trying to have a semblance of civility.
As, for instance, Senator Sanders, Bernie Sanders from Vermont, does not end up particularly pleased with the idea of Kennedy, clearly, although honestly, given what he purports to care about, he should.
But he at least kept things relatively civil.
And, you know, civility should not be the highest standard here, but it was remarkable how entrenched and ideological many of the people on...
On the historically Kennedy side of the aisle were.
I will say, I agree civility is not the highest order of the day.
But there is a reason, actually, that it should dominate a hearing like this.
And that is because these hearings, especially in their televised form, which of course is not ancient, are an opportunity to push an agenda.
And so to the extent that you have people grandstanding and attempting to trap the nominee into saying something awkward or making speeches that really, you know, advice and consent of the Senate.
The Senate's role is actually to vet the person and barring something extreme to consent to the president's choice.
Yeah, and there were actually a number of senators who were explicitly not vetting Kennedy.
They had already come to their conclusion.
Some of them even said, I don't have a question for you.
I'm just going to talk.
And they didn't explicitly, that's not a direct quote, I'm just going to talk.
But at least one senator said explicitly, I don't have any questions for you.
And then they proceeded to talk.
And then several of them clearly had way more than five minutes, which is what they were allotted.
And some of them went on as long as nine, way more than five minutes worth of material prepared just for them to say, such that they pretended then when they had at the end of their little tirades, do you see that the dung beetle is moving on its own?
They do that.
Usually not one made of metal, but okay.
They would have more than their allotted time's worth of comments for themselves to say and have at the end a list of what they called yes or no questions for Kennedy.
The vast majority of which were not, in fact, yes or no questions, which Kennedy, as a lawyer, is well able to see coming.
And so when he would, you know, sometimes he did just give yes or no answers, if he could, but many of the questions were traps or simply not framed in a way that you could answer yes or no, he would then be told by his interlocutor, you're evading the question, you're not prepared, you know, you're not qualified, here's the evidence.
So, and at some level, this is...
All very typical.
And this is the first one in a long time that I've paid this close attention to.
But it was still remarkable.
And I have some particular examples here.
Yeah, I would say this was a nightmare for the detractors.
And the reason that it's a nightmare for the detractors is that Bobby has two things going into this.
He has two aces in the hole.
One is that he is a lawyer and a very well-practiced one.
He's a litigator.
And what that means is that his use of language is extremely careful because it has to be.
In a court setting, you can't be sloppy because the difference between saying it this way and saying it that way is the difference between it being right or wrong, perjury or not, suborning or not.
He's very good at this, but most litigators are not also practiced public intellectuals with the breadth of understanding that Bobby has.
So the point is, you can try to trap him into saying yes to an acknowledgement that he said something adjacent to what he actually said, but the problem is Bobby knows exactly what he said.
Because it comes from a very precise model of the universe, whether the components are right or wrong is immaterial, because he can just simply go back and know that he wouldn't have said that because it doesn't comport with his model.
And if something is being put to him, as was done a few times today, you know, you said this, I wouldn't have said that.
Oh, you said it.
Don't think so.
Oh, here it is.
And then, you know, it's red.
It's like, see, that's not actually what I said.
What you told me I said is not what I said.
And so, you know, he ends up hoisting these senators on their own petards.
Well, if it was wrestling, it would be a two-point reversal, right?
You take something, somebody is alleging you said something awkward, and then they're forced to report a quote, and then it turns out that, no, you were right about what you said, and they, despite the fact that they apparently have it in print in front of them, were misrepresenting it.
So, anyway.
As far as I'm concerned, the more that happens, the better.
Absolutely.
The thing about Bobby, who we know personally, is that he says some stuff that really sounds almost impossible.
And then you chase it down.
You know, the idea that vaccines, for example, have not been tested against an actual placebo.
To me, as a scientist, as an academic, I feel certain that has to be wrong.
And then you go and you check it out and it's like, oh my God.
That's just a literal description.
So anyway, the more people who see that, the more people who hear that he has said something completely preposterous, and then they discover that in the chasing it down, either he didn't say what he claimed to have said, or that what he said is actually accurate, even though it sounds like it couldn't be.
Yes.
The better.
Yes, I agree.
I'm not sure exactly how to do this.
You know, this just ended shortly before we came on, and I just have my sort of notes in chronological order.
Rather than go through in just chronological order first, though, measles comes up a number of times.
And you all should go and listen to Bobby's description of what happened in Samoa in 20...
14, 15, 16, I'm sometime in the 20-teens.
But there's a recurring theme from some of the senators, including Senator Wyden from Oregon, who's super hostile.
He just says, the first yes or no question that I recall from the hearing, is measles deadly, yes or no?
And this is one of the questions that Kennedy basically doesn't want to answer as a yes or no question.
And he then explains the actual history of what happened in Samoa.
Later in the hearing, we have Senator Maggie Hassan, I think is how her name is pronounced.
She's a Democrat from New Hampshire, who says, and I don't think this is a direct quote, but it's close.
She says, I'm concerned about your support of radical fringe ideas, vaccines, for instance.
She then goes into a personal story, which is acceptable.
But this is, remember, the party that is proclaiming itself as the party of science.
And throughout these hearings and throughout his life, Kennedy is saying, I am I'm not a scientist.
Well, I'm sure she did.
And that's...
And he probably was not lying to her, and that was probably accurate, but a number of things.
A, she's bringing up anecdote in the face of someone who has tried to get funded and has helped implement research to...
Look at whether or not the modern childhood vaccine schedule is in fact at this point saving lives.
And I don't know how old Senator Hassan from New Hampshire is, but at the point that her grandfather was raising her, we were talking about a very, very different childhood vaccine schedule and therefore very different childhood vaccines than what we are seeing now.
Sheep continues, and this I believe is a direct quote from the senator from New Hampshire.
Before the measles vaccine, about 500 children died of measles every year in this country.
This is too big a risk for our country.
Now, a considerable risk of sounding like I think 500 children dying is cool?
Are you fucking kidding me?
500 children a year?
That's terrible.
We should want no children to die ever, right?
That's not going to happen.
You cannot have this conversation absent the discussion of what is happening on the other side.
500 children a year dying of measles.
And so, I don't know, she says, before the measles vaccine, about 500 children died of measles every year.
So, I don't know.
I didn't go back.
I didn't have time to go back and look at, like, when was measles vaccine introduced?
What was the population of the country then?
How many children were there?
What proportion of children was 500 children of the...
Population children in the country at that point, it was a bigger proportion than it would be now.
But how many children every year are being destroyed by, well, the adjuvants in the non-placebo-tested childhood vaccines?
From SSRIs, from the toxins in our food supply, from the food dyes, from the agrochemicals, from all the other stuff that Kennedy is trying to get out of our food and pharma and ag supply.
So the idea of naming, of having a number that sounds like a nice round number and getting people to be scared of that.
I said to someone recently that we love our numbers, but you know who loves numbers most of all is the people who don't understand them.
The innumerate love numbers, most of all, because they like to trot them out and use them to scare people.
And 500 children dying sounds really, really awful.
And we'd all wish it didn't happen.
But that doesn't exist in a vacuum.
The trade-offs are there.
The trade-offs are there.
And the desire to place this in a yes or no context is obviously a trap.
And let me just say, Bobby Kennedy may say he's not a scientist.
You and I have spoken to him.
He is scientifically minded and tremendously informed, much more than many scientists across a much wider swath of territory.
However, I am a scientist.
If I was sitting in that confirmation hearing and you asked me if measles was deadly, yes or no, I would refuse to answer the question.
And that would look however it looks.
But there's a reason for it.
I mean, not only am I a scientist, I'm a scientist who has studied senescence, and that means I have studied mortality.
And the problem is, if I say yes or no, are sounds deadly?
Do sounds ever cause somebody to have a heart attack?
No doubt they do.
Does that make sounds deadly?
I suppose technically it does.
You know, does measles kill everybody who gets it?
Of course not.
Does it ever kill anybody?
Probably.
So you can't answer it as a yes or no question.
If forced into that binary, you will give an unsatisfying answer.
You'll give an answer that is wrong or misleading.
And I would just point out, if I say, you know, Senator, are seatbelts deadly?
Yes or no?
You can't answer.
Are seatbelts ever deadly?
Absolutely.
People drown because their seatbelt caused them not to be able to escape the car.
On balance, seatbelts are better than not having seatbelts.
That does not mean that seatbelts never kill people.
They do.
They are responsible for people dying.
Some people who would be thrown free of an accident end up incinerated.
It's a terrible thing.
And the exceptional cases make the better stories, too.
Right.
And likewise, you know, to the question of, you know, your grandfather says vaccines saved lives.
A, the idea that before the measles vaccine, X number of people died of measles is not the same thing as saying that the measles vaccine saved X number of kids.
That's right.
Because there's a question about what the trajectory was at the time.
And what else was happening in the country with regard to especially things like access to clean drinking water and sanitation?
There's, you know...
As you point out, you need a net analysis, but the net analysis isn't just how many children die from the vaccine schedule versus how many children die of measles absent a vaccine or something like that, because there's also a question about the quality of life, right?
If I say, I don't know what the statistic is on how many Americans die in car accidents every year, but if I say, you know...
10,000 Americans die from car accidents every year, and that's intolerable.
Well, why are we still driving?
And the answer is, oh, because most of us have signed up for a world in which we take some risk of dying in a car accident in exchange for the benefits of being able to use the roads and vehicles and all of those things.
Yeah, it's fear forward, it's risk averse, and it would like to take all agency away from the people who should be able to make decisions for themselves.
Yeah, it's...
Manipulative.
The question is manipulative.
It's designed to not be answerable when Bobby Kennedy, left to his own devices, would be perfectly capable of answering it.
In a similar vein, so we're still on the vaccines question, and there were more, but Senator Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, Kennedy, of course, does not acquiesce on this.
And then, and I believe this is a direct actual quote from Senator Whitehouse from Rhode Island, So we went from, and actually that was before Senator Hassan from New Hampshire, and she invokes the 500 children who were dying of measles, she claims, before the measles vaccine was introduced.
Now we have Senator Whitehouse trying to stoke fear and get, you know, get canceled.
What's the word for not being confirmed?
Disconfirmed.
What?
There's some good word.
Denied.
Rejected.
Yeah, okay.
Scorned.
None of those work in the sentence that I was building.
But trying to get rid of Kennedy as the candidate for...
Candidate is also the wrong word.
I don't have any other right words.
Nominee.
Nominee for Health and Human Services.
And what's his fear tactic?
We've just had a single case.
of measles in Rhode Island, the first since 2013, while also the first since 2013, as if because Kennedy is sitting in front of them right now and Trump has been president for a week, that is somehow the responsibility of the Trump administration for even daring to talk about whether or not the risk-benefit analysis of these Of these vaccines is worth it.
Frankly, you frighten people, White House says, as if also that's an argument.
So then at the end, Senator Wyden from Oregon, who's a real piece of work, as a number of them are, who asked Chairman Crapo for several of the colleagues to get more time, and they'd already gone well over, and they couldn't.
So Crapo gave Wyden five minutes, and Wyden proceeded to, you know, Dole out one-minute pieces to four of his colleagues, and he took one minute for himself.
So this is the very end of the hearing.
He says, even though he says, he's going off on Kennedy about basically how dare he, how dare he question things like the measles vaccine.
He says, even though American families are still concerned about measles.
So again, there's this conflation of...
What people have been convinced to be scared of, oh my god, there's been a measles case in Rhode Island.
Oh my god, before the measles vaccine, someone claims that 500 children a year were dying of measles.
Even though American families are still concerned about measles.
You know what else American families are concerned about?
Everything else that Kennedy is talking about.
The disgusting food supply that we have as compared with basically everywhere else in the world.
The agrochemicals that are on everything.
The chronic health problems with everyone.
Kennedy says multiple times in this that 66% of, I think he said children, rather than all Americans, 66% of American children have chronic disease.
66%.
And they're concerned about a measles case in Rhode Island as a way to get rid of this man.
It, of course, raises the question of what Senators Whitehouse and Hassan and Wyden are you actually concerned about?
Because it's not the health of the American people, clearly.
One more thing here.
We have lots more stuff to cover, but one more thing here.
Wyden then gives one of his minutes that's been gifted to him to Senator Warren, Elizabeth Warren, who has already had her five minutes or seven or whatever she took.
She comes back to the measles and Samoa question.
She says to him, she says to Kennedy, you are an influential man.
In fact, you are called the leader of the disinformation dozen.
Remember the disinformation?
Oh, I sure do.
Yeah.
So, I don't even remember who put it out, but one of the crazy media outlets that was busy trying to make those of us who were trying to speak truth out to be crazy loons and discredit us.
And, you know, Kennedy, as the so-called leader of the so-called disinformation dozen, Of course, has not been spreading mis, dis, or malinformation.
And one of my thoughts on listening to Elizabeth Warren at the end of the hearing today and in the middle as well was, what did I ever see in her?
This is one of the places where my position has just completely flipped.
I was encouraged by her as a potential nominee years and years and years ago for president.
And I see nothing.
Honorable or straightforward or upright about any of what she did in this hearing today.
Yeah, I agree.
And I was never as compelled by Elizabeth Warren, but I was compelled by Bernie Sanders.
And, you know, I haven't seen anything from him in years that tells me what I saw there.
I guess somebody willing to buck the trends of power, but, you know, having buckled to the Clintons.
I think he's a lost cause as well.
Yeah.
I did want to point out, though, in my mind, watching these confirmation hearings, A, I do have the sense that they didn't land enough punches to explain a negative vote so far, at least.
There's another hearing scheduled.
But I'm running in my mind the question of, would he be better placed?
If he simply adopted the position that what he is attempting to bring about is informed consent plus liability, as we have been talking about here on Dark Horse.
And I guess my point is, in all of these cases, you can just simply say, I want people, I want us to collect the information so that we know what the net analysis on each of these vaccines is.
I want people to have that information, and I want them to be able to decide for themselves, and I want the manufacturer's libel if people are harmed in ways that they shouldn't have been.
If he were to adopt that position, it strikes me that it would turn the tables on these senators because, in my opinion, There's really nothing you can say on the other side, right?
It justifies all of the science that Kennedy is advocating for.
That's how you get informed.
Well, so I think most of them are trying to ask questions that trap him.
Largely, the Republicans weren't.
Largely, the Democrats were.
That was not true across the board in either direction.
There were a few very open-ended questions from a few Republicans that allowed him to speak what his vision actually is to make America healthy again, which were...
You know, appreciated by many of us, I'm sure, including me.
And Kennedy did brilliantly with that.
I would say that actually, I never heard him use that phrase, but what I did hear him say multiple times, which seems to be the catchphrase that he came to beforehand and was trying to basically lodge inside people's minds, is radical transparency.
Radical transparency.
And so with regard to sort of government functioning in general.
So not with regard to vaccines in particular, but it applies.
So I feel like informed consent is in some ways a subset of radical transparency across the board.
And that, you know, that is what he came back to over and over and over again.
Like, you know, do you approve of this, that, or the other?
It's like, well, what I want to do is...
Open up the records and let people see what we're doing and let us know what is true and have the science be done and that.
Well, I don't...
I see that they are related, but the problem is we've already won the battle of informed consent and then it has been quietly eroded in the background.
We won the battle at the end of World War II. And so it's unassailable because nobody has acknowledged that we've gone back on our word with respect to informed consent.
But across...
Zone after zone, that answers the question.
Really, the point is, Kennedy is portrayed as a radical.
He's not radical.
What he wants is good science.
He wants only things for which there is a net benefit provided to people.
He wants them to have the ability to choose.
And so, again, it's a ship that's already sailed.
But I do think portraying himself as the reasonable guy that he turns out to be by simply advocating for things That obviously every reasonable American should support, informed consent and liability, right?
When did we ever depart from that standard?
Well, that's an interesting story, isn't it?
We departed from that standard in the Reagan administration.
Right, but this was not a hearing about vaccines.
To begin this discussion, just pick the ones where that was coming up explicitly.
Right.
And that is the place where he is, of course, most under fire.
And so, you know, this is not the place to litigate the question.
No, no, but it works for all of it.
That's my point.
Well, I think radical transparency works for all of it.
It does, but the problem is, are you for radical transparency?
I'm actually not an expert in what that would mean.
Am I for informed consent and liability?
Absolutely.
I know exactly what that means.
It's not radical.
In fact, it's careful and conservative, and it does the heavy lifting.
But, you know, it works for the SSRI questions that there was an attempt to trap him over.
It works for the Food quality questions.
It works for all of it.
So anyway, I won't dwell, but I do think it's the efficient way to turn the tables on the people who are trying to trap him into saying something that sounds awkward.
So, Kim, the last place that I went to with Elizabeth Warren saying, you are an influential man.
In fact, you are called the leader of the disinformation dozen.
Maybe this is the moment to show the little clip of Senator Tom Tillis asking Kennedy, after a lovely and friendly intro, are you a conspiracy theorist?
I got a real quick question for you.
Are you a conspiracy theorist?
That is a pejorative, Senator, that's applied to me, mainly to keep me from asking difficult questions of powerful interest.
I was told that I was a conspiracy theorist.
That label was applied to me because I said that the vaccines, the COVID vaccine, didn't prevent transmission and it wouldn't prevent infection.
When the government was telling people, Americans, that it would.
I was saying that because I was looking at the monkey studies in May of 2020. I was called a conspiracy.
Now everybody admits it.
I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said red dye caused cancer.
And now FDA has acknowledged that and banned it.
I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said fluoride lowered IQ. Last week JAMA published a meta review of 87 studies.
Saying that there's a direct inverse correlation between IQ loss.
All right.
So I'm going to assume a lot of those.
I can go on for about a week.
Is there any one of them that you can say, you got me?
That really was a conspiracy theory?
Are you in a position to submit for the record?
I think I just.
Yeah.
This is such an odd line of questioning.
I mean.
No, no.
So this is friendly.
I know, but.
This is.
Friendly, precisely in order to allow Kennedy to basically respond to what hasn't happened yet, which is Elizabeth Warren saying, you're the leader of the disinformation dozen.
Like, why is he the leader of the disinformation dozen?
In part because he was making claims like these vaccines are not safe and effective.
You know, he gets declared a...
You know, an agent of disinformation and later the government changes its mind and we don't get to put the government on the leader of the disinformation dozen, do we?
We just silently, quietly, without any fanfare at all, but also without any acknowledgement, they're like, oh, I guess you're right.
Sorry.
And no one is sorry.
So I agree it's friendly.
It at least gives him the opportunity to defend his position in a way that's unassailable.
It's an incoherent question.
What does it mean to be a conspiracy theorist?
We've never answered this question.
You know, it is a pejorative.
You know, Kennedy does not say that, in fact, the idea of conspiracy theory was at least fostered by the CIA in the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination, when many people were speculating that there was more than one gunman.
And the CIA decided to quash those inquiries by spreading the idea that there was something called a conspiracy theorist and that it was a bad thing to be.
So are there conspiracies?
Yes.
Is it fair to theorize about them the way one theorizes about anything else?
Of course.
But I feel like this is the point.
Like, I don't know who you're arguing with here.
You're not arguing with me.
You're not arguing with Senator Tillis or with Kennedy.
I think this is precisely the point, that this is a rhetorical trick, a way to get at the rhetorical question of, you know what, just like...
Most people who are being called racist for the last 10 years weren't.
Most people who are being called transphobes weren't.
Most people who are being called vaccine skeptics.
What's the term for?
Anti-vaxxers.
Anti-vaxxers, yeah.
You know, aren't.
So conspiracy theorist is yet another one of these dominoes that's ready to fall.
And I think this is the way to make it fall.
Well, I agree.
It's ready to fall because...
Frankly, us conspiracy theorists have a pretty strong track record here of being right and being early about stuff.
But, you know, even the phraseology of his retort, which is, you know, is there one case in which you can admit, yeah, you got me, I'm a conspiracy theorist on that one, or I was a conspiracy theorist?
It's synonymous, the term is synonymous with being wrong.
Which is strange.
No, I think you're being too hard.
So this is a friendly interlocutor.
There are plenty of hostile ones there.
This guy is not hostile at all.
And he is trying to set it up to, like, in part, because, like, remember how many different audiences there are, right?
Like, this is going to be clipped and clipped and clipped and clipped.
Half-ish of the country is not going to be able to abide is hearing Kennedy make sense on the question of conspiracy if he appears to be being questioned by someone.
Wink, wink.
We all know that conspiracy theorists are all correct all the time or something, right?
Like, so, you know, I wish...
Perhaps that we didn't live in the world where we needed to be that kind of careful.
But I think thinking about the different audiences and how this will play and, you know, it doesn't matter, frankly, if Kennedy knows that that guy's friendly, although I'm sure he does, that I think that was actually brilliantly done and exactly what needed to happen.
It was the only moment like that in the hearing that I heard either.
I was like, oh, that did not go as I expected.
I didn't expect to hear either of those questions from one of the senators.
And it played well, I think.
So, we have Senator Bennett from Colorado saying that RFK has spent his career peddling doubt about things that we know are safe.
This, again, Democrat, party of science.
The real science party over there.
They've been doing the speed of science.
Yeah.
They've been doing the meth of science.
Well, all right.
They've been doing the meth of science.
It's a total meth.
They've been doing it at the speed of science.
Oh, my God.
There was so much throughout this hearing in which...
People who were claiming to be on the side of righteousness and right and caring about children, who just asserted without evidence that things are safe because they are how they have been.
Anything that is already established must be safe, therefore how dare you question it.
So Senator Bennett from Colorado asks a series of questions, and again I don't have exactly the direct quotes here, but it's...
The three of them are, did you say the following thing?
She was like, yes or no questions.
Come on, Kennedy.
I just, you know, my time is limited here.
Mr. Kennedy, would you please answer my questions?
Did you say the following thing?
COVID was engineered in a lab and affects white and black people, but not Ashkenazi Jews.
Did you say that Lyme disease is probably engineered?
Did you say that pesticides cause transgender children?
And, you know, she just...
Goes, and she's like, okay, now go back and answer them.
He's like, okay.
Did you say the following thing?
COVID was engineered in a lab and affects white and black people, but not Ashkenazi Jews.
He says, I was quoting an NIH-funded and published study.
But did you say it?
I was quoting a study that was published and that was funded by the NIH. I didn't say that it is true because I said it's true.
I was saying that's what they found.
She doesn't accept that.
That's not a yes or no answer, right?
Did you say that Lyme disease was probably engineered?
Yeah, I probably did say that.
Because you know what?
It probably was.
Did you say that pesticides cause transgender children?
No, I did not.
Will I have evidence?
No, I did not say that.
Later on, with some other senator, he says, look, there are a lot of causes for a lot of things.
And someone brings up school shooters.
Apparently, at one point, he said, maybe SSRIs has something to do with the epidemic of school shootings.
Who was this?
I can't remember who.
She says, I was on SSRIs, and I know that it helped me.
Like, again, with the anecdotes, you know, standing in for science, he says, look, I'm not claiming that SSRIs have never helped anyone.
But I am saying that it, along with social media, along with video games, along with all of these other things that were indeed on my list of things that I thought might be contributing to the rash of school shootings, should be considered and studied.
And the idea that you, Senator, are telling me that we shouldn't study them, well, who's on the side of science now?
Yeah, and he also pointed out that Getting off SSRIs is, in fact, I was interested that he did this, he said, harder in many cases than getting off of heroin, basically establishing that he is not running from his own past, effectively inviting somebody to ask about it.
Anyway, I do, again, think informed consent and liability satisfies the question completely.
But anyway, yeah, I thought he decisively won that exchange.
Yeah.
Okay, a few more tasty bits from this.
Senator Lankford from Oklahoma, a Republican, says, citing Kennedy's opening statements, you've made it very clear that you're not going to tell Americans what to eat, but you do want to tell them what they're eating.
And I think that's a great synopsis, right?
And again, I think that's the direct quote, but I'm not totally sure it didn't go back.
Senator Danes from Montana, a Republican, says something like, I listened to your opening remarks.
You said that you want to make HHS the gold standard of science.
I thank you for that.
There are three medical doctors on the side of the dais.
I'm a chemical engineer.
I thank you for standing up for science.
And he's the only...
One that I remember hearing up there who specifically says, yes, this is what we need to be doing.
We need to be standing up for science.
And then he's from Montana, so he has a big, you know, I think he just said farming, but in his answer, Kennedy talks about farmers and ranchers.
There are a few senators from big ag and ranching states who are concerned.
That you go after big ag, not the states where there's a lot of ag, big states where there's a lot of ag, and will you hurt farmers and ranchers?
And Kennedy, of course, has no interest in hurting farmers and ranchers.
But what he wants to do is ensure that the policies and the protocols and the products that they are allowed to use are actually, well...
Safe and effective for Americans.
And what we know for sure is that some of our farmers and ranchers sell to Europe, and they have to be much more restrictive about what they've put on their crops when they're selling to Europe than when they're selling to Americans.
And where is the logic in that?
And what a low-hanging fruit to go after that one.
Right there.
To not let Americans be eating more toxins than our European counterparts.
Yes.
This does raise a meta-issue across much of what President Trump is trying to do.
And I think this is a good place to mention it.
It is not clear to me what we should be doing, what we should never have allowed onto the market, what we should have allowed.
Make sure people were aware of the risks they were taking.
All of that is perfectly clear.
But having built a system that is involved in poisoning us for profit, it is not clear how you move in the direction rapidly enough of the system that we should have without collapsing the system that we've got.
A second reason to be focused on informed consent and liability, because as much as, you know, in my heart of hearts, I believe the COVID vaccines should be pulled from the market instantaneously, and therefore informed consent and liability feels weak because informed consent and liability leaves them on the market and means some people will get vaccinated with them who wouldn't otherwise.
In that case, you could pull the COVID vaccines off the market and not collapse our system, so I would like to see it.
However, across, let's take wheat farming and glyphosate.
The fact that glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat at the very end of harvest, which is the most dangerous time to spray something on a crop that's going to be consumed.
Nonetheless, it's how we do it.
And then let's just look at all of the various practices that look like this.
The atrazine that is used, all of the various pesticides and practices that put Americans in jeopardy.
If you declared a halt to those things tomorrow, it would hurt farmers.
And it might create a kind of...
Soviet, you know, supermarkets bereft of food scenario because we produce food.
It's toxic, but we produce food in a particular way, and it's not immediately toxic.
And if you suddenly declared everything that shouldn't be on the market unavailable, you don't necessarily have the seeds that can grow without the inputs that should never have been put on them.
Your soils can't support organic farming practices right away.
Right.
So the point is, what you need...
Is a mechanism for moving the system at the fastest rate it can go in the direction of the things that it should be doing.
That doesn't allow cheaters to not actually be trying to move in that direction, but still trying to benefit from the old system.
Right.
And so let me point out why informed consent and liability is the answer to that problem.
Because informed consent and liability lets the market fix the problem.
To the extent that you tell people what's in their food and it makes them go, that doesn't really sound very food-like to me, and they become willing to spend a little extra in order to get food that doesn't have those components in it, there's now an incentive to move in the direction of, let's say, organic food, right?
The market will then set the price of these things, and to the extent that the organic food is going to command a premium, which it already does, the point is it...
Leaves the system doing what it does that's feeding people with stuff that isn't so great, and it leaves the incentive to move rapidly.
If you do it as a command and control dictated from above thing, you're very likely to cause a disaster for which you will then be blamed for having starved people or whatever it might be.
I don't love the idea.
This seems to me like a perfectly legitimate place for regulation.
The regulation should never have allowed glyphosate onto the market or atrazine or any of these other toxic, you know, red number five or whatever it is.
However, now that we've got ourselves in this bind, we can't collapse our system by imagining that we know more about the complexities of it than we do.
Deciding to blueprint it.
That's the error.
You cannot blueprint a complex system.
You have to navigate, you have to prototype, and letting the market solve the problem by, you know, making the wheat that we're already producing in large quantities, selling it at a discount until we've figured out how to move to something better.
That's probably the best solution to a very dire problem.
Good.
Yes.
All right.
Then we also had Senator Ron Johnson, the amazing Senator Ron Johnson, who gave such a nice preamble to his comments that I thought we'd share the video from him.
I can't say I'm surprised by the hostility on the other side.
I'm highly disappointed in it.
I don't know if you remember when you called me up and you were contemplating setting your political differences aside.
Joining forces with President Trump on an area of agreement, addressing chronic illness, trying to find the root cause of all these problems facing this nation.
My first response was, Bobby, this is an answer to my prayers.
We need to get to the answers of this, but even more, we need to heal and unify this divided nation.
I'm not necessarily the most optimistic guy because we've got enormous challenges facing this nation, but I thought, wow, here's somebody from the left, somebody I don't agree with on many issues politically, coming together with President Trump and focusing on an area of agreement, something that the American people desperately want.
Finding out the answers.
What has caused autism?
What is causing chronic illness?
Ms. Kennedy, I know, I think I've come to know what's in your heart.
I think I know the personal and political price you've paid for this decision.
I want to say publicly, I thank you for that.
I truly appreciate what you're doing here.
Can't we come together as a nation and do this?
Can we do it?
Aren't you getting tired of this?
I'm getting tired of this.
So again, Mr. Kennedy, I need to enter in the record.
These are just 11 letters of support signed by 63,000 people, thousands of doctors.
From the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Independent Medical Alliance, the North Carolina Physicians and Freedom Group, Governor Jeff Landry from Louisiana.
These are Americans, nonpartisan.
A lot of these people, I know because I've advocated with you, a lot of them are Democrats.
They put their political differences aside.
So, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to enter this in the record.
Without objection.
All right, that is the marvelous Ron Johnson.
I should say this is instructive for me because I remember almost the instant I became aware of Ron Johnson and I was really not sure what to think because, of course, to the extent that he is a courageous fighter against people to whom the American public is being sold out, there's a lot of...
Bad press about him.
And so I know that this is true for us, people who don't really know who we are.
They have to get past a bunch of slander before they get to something they can evaluate on their own.
Ron has become a friend.
We've now encountered him multiple times in person.
He's an extremely genuine guy.
Here he is actually just the day after the Inauguration.
In his office.
In his office with our family.
We are standing there under the 10th Amendment.
But he didn't have to make time for us, but he made time for us.
I actually feel included in what he said there, you know, that he's come to know many of the people in this movement.
Many of us are Democrats, right?
And that we've put our political differences aside.
That's a very...
It's at least a very accurate description.
But in any case, he is...
He's incredibly down-to-earth patriotic.
He is the essence of unity.
And anyway, it is a great pleasure to discover that there is such a person in the U.S. Senate, and it's great to see him at the forefront of this battle.
And that's been a long road for him, because many of the positions that are now becoming mainstream with Kennedy's confirmation hearings Yeah, absolutely.
So I don't remember exactly what question of Senator Johnson's Kennedy was referring to or was answering when he said one of my favorite quotations of his from the hearings today, he said, I'm not scared of vested interests.
And this, I think, is at heart what...
What those who have vested interests are scared of, right?
And what many of the Democrats on the Finance Committee that we heard from today and many of the lobbyists and the big fill-in-the-blank ag, food, pharma are scared of is that he's not scared of vested interests.
He says, I'm not here because I need a job or position.
I have a good life and a happy family.
He's not mid-career.
He's not trying to make a name for himself.
Yeah, and actually...
It's a characteristic that is very rare amongst famous people, but is very common in the Unity movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement.
You begin to spot it.
So I would say it's true of both Ron Johnson and Bobby Kennedy.
Both of them are not doing this because they are hungry for power.
They are doing it because they don't feel like they have a choice.
And I would say the same thing is true of us.
We didn't have a choice.
Robert Malone was, you know, an influential, powerful guy who ended up having to reveal the defects of his own invention.
You know, he didn't have to do that.
And the fact that people don't feel that they have a choice is exactly what you want in these positions.
So Ron Johnson can be courageous because in his mind, it's very clear when you talk to him, he doesn't think of himself as a senator first.
Senator is what he's doing at the moment.
But he thinks of himself as an American and a family man.
You want people like that, people who are ambitious, so they have to keep their seats.
Those people are manipulable.
Yeah, that's right.
So maybe just a little bit more on what I saw from the Democrats in this hearing in general.
Prompted by Senator Warnock from Georgia, where, of course, Atlanta is in Georgia and the CDC is in Atlanta.
And so he's got concerns, just like the senators from big ag states are concerned about the effect on farming and ranching, Senator Warnock is concerned about the effects on the CDC because it's a giant employer.
But it was interesting to me that he doesn't...
Pretend that's not the case.
He doesn't do a compelling job, and maybe he was trying, but he didn't do a compelling job of arguing that the CDC was controlling disease, effectively, that it was actually making us healthy.
What he comes off as doing is basically simply trying to protect what he's got.
And we know this.
We know that legislators are most responsive to their home districts and that that is what we expect them to do.
Yes, they should be patriots, but they're also most patriotically defensive of either the state or, if it's from the House, the district from which they're coming.
But when you're talking about someone who...
The very previous question he was asked by Senator Marshall, what are you going to do to make America healthy again?
And Kennedy, you know, waxes eloquent on this topic.
And then we have Senator Warnock basically saying, I'm concerned that you're going to take some power away from the CDC and that, he doesn't say this explicitly, but what it sounded like was like, I don't want people who I represent having jobs lost.
The question always is, but were they doing good work?
Were those jobs honorable jobs?
Were those jobs necessary?
Were those jobs important?
And I think if we didn't learn from COVID that not only were some number of the people at the CDC not doing good and important jobs, but they were far from neutral.
The CDC is one of the agencies that did so much harm.
So much harm.
To Americans, and in fact, to people worldwide.
The idea that what we should be doing is simply defending what we already have.
Because, what?
It works well enough?
It's cool?
It's fine?
Like, this is such the opposite, and this is where I started, but this is the opposite of what...
Democrats are supposed to be liberals, and liberals are not defending what's always been because it's always been.
That's the conservative stance.
And I'm not making a political statement here.
I'm just saying conservatives is about conserving things that have been, and liberals is about seeking new solutions to problems that are emerging, or new solutions to old problems.
And obviously there are places in your life where you should be thinking conservatively and places where you should be thinking liberally.
No one should be across the board simply conservative, looking backwards, or simply across the board liberal, looking forward or progressive.
But what I heard from the Democrats in this hearing today was Almost across the board, and actually Bernie Sanders is one of the few exceptions.
He started by saying, like, we're going to disagree about a bunch of stuff, but I understand that we need to make America healthy again.
He actually embraced the phrase, okay?
But you had Democrats embracing the idea of the existing Medicare and Medicaid.
Like, really getting upset about the idea of fixing it, right?
Of the CDC, of the vaccines and the vaccine schedules, even of DEI. The senator from New Mexico, Ben Lujan, I think is how it's pronounced, was arguing to reinstate DEI policies.
Like, this is his issue.
Like, that's the thing.
Like, okay, guys, you've picked a bunch of things that aren't functioning or were absolutely either literally or metaphorically toxic to begin with.
What are you doing?
This is the opposite of what the so-called Democrats are supposed to be doing.
So I want to connect a few dots here.
The day after the election, I tweeted something that basically said that all Americans, whether they had voted for President Trump or had opposed him, were actually depending on his victory.
You have since pointed out that you're hearing a lot of Murmurs of people who may very well have voted for Kamala Harris, who were nonetheless relieved at what happened.
We saw during the inauguration and all of the events that surrounded it a very, I would say, surprising, it's both surprising and not surprising change, of course, that lots of people who would have been fully on board with the idea that, you know, Trump was a dangerous demagogue.
Something like that appeared to be treating him civilly.
We saw Barack Obama talking in a cordial way with him at Carter's funeral.
So there's an acceptance of Trump this time that just simply didn't exist any time in the eight years prior.
What did 20 years ago?
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
When he was chummy with the Clintons, etc.
Yeah.
The folks from The View, all of that stuff.
But I think some of what you are seeing in the Congress and the Democrats is they're trying to figure out what world they've landed.
And because most of them are not extraordinary people.
These are people who don't know what else they would be doing and would like to keep their seats and can't keep their seats.
Either by embracing the Trump agenda, and they don't want to become the tip of the spear opposing it, because they can read the writing on the wall.
They have constraints that we can't see.
They have people threatening them.
In the case of the senator from Georgia, somehow he has to go back.
And face his constituents who are facing a significant loss of jobs for which he will be blamed.
Right.
And Atlanta's got to be the bluest part of Georgia, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Right.
So he's at risk of losing core constituents.
So what does he do?
He has to voice their concerns publicly so that they will not feel that they have been abandoned by somebody who saw a bright, shiny object or something.
It also empowers him.
Let's say that the vote comes down to a battle.
That, you know, there's a couple of votes that are hanging up the confirmation.
And so they can now approach him and they can say, well, what would it take to bring you on board?
And he can say, I've explained that I have a jobs problem in my district if Kennedy ascends to the office.
And they can say, well, there's a something or other that will create a certain number of jobs, you know, in your state, blah, blah, blah.
We can't see those negotiations.
They obviously happen.
So it may be that what he's doing is he's carving out a negotiation position, which is actually good for us from the point of view of he's going to be ready to sign on if something can be delivered to him that explains to his constituents that they actually came out ahead.
One thing that occurs to me, one of the threads throughout the hearing today was you, Kennedy, Or maybe it's Trump also, but Hugh Kennedy, I believe, have said that you want to basically put a moratorium on, that's not the word he's used, on infectious disease for eight years.
Like, he wants to focus on chronic disease rather than infectious disease.
And this is in part, of course, a response to the former head of the NIAID, who was Fauci, who did nothing but run our health into the ground for 40-odd years, something like that.
But, you know, there's objection to this, including from one of our senators, Maria Cantwell, who says, like, I'm from the state of Washington, where we've, you know, we're leaders in infectious disease, you know, and NIH is bringing in grants, you know, we're getting grants to, you know, Fred Hutch Cancer Center, and, you know, she just, she talks about all the money that's coming in, and of course, there's, provides no evidence that it's actually gone to.
Gone to do good things.
I'm sure that some of it has.
I'm also sure that some of it has not, and some of it has been effectively bad science masquerading as good science.
But Centers for Disease Control doesn't, in its name actually even, and I don't know about its founding documents, but isn't inherently about infectious disease.
So it feels to me like the CDC could be reframed as Centers for Disease Control focusing on chronic disease.
Also, yes, infectious disease.
There are emerging diseases.
Infectious disease is real.
It is something that we have actually overcome quite remarkably as a species, more than other species have until recently.
But chronic disease is the new thing that we've created for ourselves that we absolutely...
Have the wherewithal and the intelligence to deal with.
And why couldn't that be part of the purview of the CDC, of a reimagined CDC? Right.
And of course, it should be because the root cause is hypernovelty.
Yes.
The root cause of the chronic disease epidemic.
Basically, we're well designed.
If you put us in an environment that fits us, we're healthy, almost without exception, until very late in life.
So what we've got is a system where we are constantly fish out of water.
And of course, the CDC should be absolutely obsessed with discovering in which ways we have been led into ill health, which actually makes us vulnerable to infectious disease.
The two aren't even separable.
Exactly.
And actually, someone, I don't remember who...
Makes a vague claim that Kennedy has gone after germ theory of disease.
And she doesn't...
I don't remember what senator it was.
I think it was a female senator.
She doesn't call it by that name.
But I remembered in the Fauci book, in his second-to-last book...
Reading a section, and it was like one of maybe two things in that incredibly long and well-referenced book that I had like a twinge of like, hmm, what is he talking about?
And have since then, and he does basically appear to go after the germ theory of disease, but what he's actually doing, what I now know more about than I did when I first read that, and what Kennedy clearly knew about when he was writing the book, is that germ theory of disease and the terrain theory Aren't antithetical to one another.
That they, like, both of them have to be true.
Both of them on this planet in which there are pathogens, germs, that do infect organisms, such as us, and make us sick, that is the germ theory of disease, and also the host that is infected, the terrain, the human being,
if you're talking about human disease, that is infected, the health of their body and their mind will also affect how The health of the body affects how sick you get from the pathogen, and the particular pathogen affects how sick the body gets.
Both of those things are true.
So whenever you see someone saying, oh, it seems like you probably just don't believe in viruses, that's not what he said.
There are some people who are saying that, but that's not what the vast majority of us who are saying.
Hold up.
It's both.
It is both germ theory and terrain theory that...
Are necessary to understand how to maximize human health.
100%.
Now, years ago, as part of my teaching, I put together a taxonomy of disease.
I got sick of the idea.
The idea of disease, dis-ease, is a bad concept.
And the reason that it's a bad concept is that it causes you to do absurd things like make war on cancer.
You can make war on gangrene and you can win.
You are not going to win a war on cancer because cancer is not an entity that has a separate evolutionary incentive to harm you.
It's a failure of the body.
Now, there are cancers that are transmitted by a pathogen, but in general, as far as we understand it, cancers are a failure of a repair mechanism.
And so making war on it doesn't make any sense because the fact of cancer is part of a trade-off.
Now, the commonality of cancer has everything to do with the exposures that we have, the fact that we live in environments where we don't...
You know, produce vitamin D, for example.
You mean, when you say commonality, you mean how common it is in the human population?
Yes, how likely you are to get one has a lot to do with the garbagey nature of your food and your, you know, sedentary lifestyle and all sorts of other things that contribute.
But the fact of cancer itself, it's a failure mode, right?
There's a trade-off.
You want to be able to repair your tissues, you have to experience some risk of a tumor, right?
Because it's the repair mechanism that runs away that causes the tumors.
So, in any case, there's a lot to be done if we started thinking of disease not as something to go to war with, but as separate categories.
Are you dealing with a creature that has a hostile interest to you, a fungus, a virus, a bacterium, or even a prion?
A prion can be argued to be virus-like in the sense of it's a pattern that propagates itself.
It can also be argued to be terrifying.
It is terrifying.
But the point is, those things require a different approach than a design failure.
A design failure like senescence or cancer, right?
There's a lot that could be done, but the idea of Centers for Disease Control, what do we do?
We confront disease.
Have you noticed that it's a bunch of different things?
Because that would seem like day one.
You want to think about it in these terms, and they don't.
Yeah, so better...
More natural for the current national conversation to split it into infectious and chronic, but perhaps more useful, ultimately, to split it into five or seven directorates within the CDC that have to do with the nature of the illness in response to the evolved body.
Right.
And, you know, of course, the taxonomizing, you know, you've got...
Chronic, but even chronic is a problem.
Because is it chronic because your developmental environment misprogrammed you and so you're stuck with it?
Yeah, it's chronic, but it's not inherent to the human.
Whereas cancer, if you live long enough, you're going to experience some risk of it.
Now, I mean, what you just said raises, of course, this issue of like, okay, chronic disease.
We have a chronic disease epidemic.
I always stop at like epidemic with such phrases, but like...
Let's call it that, chronic disease epidemic in this country.
As we have talked about endlessly, more privately than on air, but we have talked about it on air.
In order to right ourselves as Americans, as a population in this country, we need to deal with...
Multiple things.
We can't just, and there's no just there, we can't just clean up the food, ag, and pharma supply, right?
We have a population of adults who have chronic disease whose developmental environment was so damaged that they will never be healthy at the level that someone born in 1900 could be.
But they could be healthier than they are now, and we owe them that.
There are a number of adults like us who probably have been damaged to some degree by the food, ag, and pharma supply, even though we have been more aware and awake and careful and privileged to be able to purchase higher quality things for our entire lives than most Americans, and so are not mostly damaged, but are still somewhat damaged.
But we could probably get to a level of health that someone born in 1900 had.
And then there are the children, some of whom are already irrevocably damaged, but many of whom are not.
So they are the most urgent group.
It is clearing this crap from the children, the exposures to the children who are right now developing and who are at risk of growing into the population that then can never be fully healthy.
Yeah.
Urgent attention, precisely because it's a developmental problem.
The not yet damaged are the lowest hanging fruit, by far the biggest bang for the buck, and the most innocent.
They have contributed not at all to the harm that will come to them.
Yes.
I did want to defend the idea of chronic health epidemic, though.
Before you do that, can I just, because this is a good place to...
To put this in, even though it doesn't relate to the hearing today, speaking about defending the most vulnerable, Trump has slowed somewhat the number of executive orders he's been putting out since we came on last Thursday, and I walked through a bunch of them.
One that came out yesterday, you can show my screen here, is protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation.
And is it not working?
Okay, let's try flipping it over and seeing if it works.
Oh, the USB, yeah.
Yes.
How about now?
There it is.
All right.
So, an executive order from yesterday, protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation.
This follows before I read just the first paragraph here.
This is a natural follow-on to one of the EOs I talked about last week, which is about basically establishing the reality of the binary of biological sex and the immutability of biological sex in humans, and of course all mammals.
That was important, necessary, real, never should have been necessary, but...
You know, an idea whose time had long since come.
I wrote about that a little bit in Natural Selections this week.
Here's the next necessary one, and let's just read the first three paragraphs.
Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child's sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.
This dangerous trend will be a stain on our nation's history, and it must end.
Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.
Moreover, these vulnerable youth's medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and tragically, sterilization.
Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called transition of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.
I just get chills reading this.
Such a relief.
It's so extraordinary.
And they go on, it goes on to specifically list WPath as one of the leading enemies and saying basically you cannot follow the rules and regs established by WPath anymore.
That's over.
I have come to know Many families in which children and now young adults believe themselves to be trans and have gone either partially or nearly entirely down this path and are still struggling with it.
I also know several detransitioners at this point, young women who believe themselves to be men for a while and went through varying degrees of either, as the EO says, either Chemical or chemical and surgical mutilation.
I don't think anyone gets the surgical mutilation without going through the chemical first.
So this is exactly as the EO states, going to be seen in not too distant a future as a stain on the nation's history, and it's being reversed as much as possible, as much as those children and young adults who bought the ideology, who were sold a bill of goods by irresponsible and should be called criminal health professionals and mental health advisors,
and will never be the same as they would have been had their development been allowed to continue uninterrupted, at least can now know that the generation and will never be the same as they would have been had their development been allowed to continue uninterrupted, Yes, and it fits perfectly with the point about the yet unharmed being...
The lowest hanging fruit.
Precisely.
We've got people who we will have to help for the rest of their lives.
But the people who haven't yet been confronted by these demonic transitioning doctors, we can protect them fully.
And, of course, that's our obligation.
And the idea that it can be done with a swipe of a pen is, well, once again, as with removing us from the World Health Organization.
This was worth the price of admission right there.
If the president did nothing else for his entire term, this would be such an important upgrade to the quality of our nation that it would justify everything we put into it.
And I will say, the UK was leading the charge in this.
The UK was ahead of us on this.
But with this executive order, now we see other countries.
Falling in a good way as well.
Like, I think this particular barbaric charade is being revealed.
The curtain has been pulled back.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
All right.
I wanted to defend the idea of chronic health epidemic.
And the reason, it's a little, it's going to sound convoluted, but to me, it's the right term for the following reason.
Okay.
What is really causing the degradation of humans?
Bad ideas.
Let's take the idea of treating a complex system, the human body, as if it were a complicated system where you can know the consequences of your interventions fully.
That's a bad idea.
How does it spread?
Well, it spreads by mimetic transmission.
It spreads by people exchanging wrong notions and getting adulation as they voice them and those notions becoming contagious.
And my point is that the contagious in that sentence is exactly analogous to the contagiousness of a disease.
It's effectively, and I give people like Dawkins a hard time over the accusation that something like a religion, an ancient one, is a mind virus.
That literally cannot be true.
However, lots of new notions can be mind viruses.
That's to say, they transmit themselves at the expense of the people who believe in them, or the people who listen to the people who believe in them.
So, what I would argue is that, think back, if you haven't seen the Forrest Moretti Dark Horse, you should go watch it.
In that discussion, Forrest and I talk about the incredible story which he, essentially a historian, has surfaced about How it is that the gypsy moth, which escaped from an ill-fated experiment in which the resistance to predation by gypsy moths was,
somebody was trying to breed that resistance into silk moths, Whose silk was necessary to be produced, but the silk moths were very vulnerable to, I think it was blue jays.
And so somebody was trying to combine these moths to imbue the silk moths with the resistance that the gypsy moths had.
But the gypsy moths were already doing huge damage in Europe.
And the entomologist who was trying to hybridize them had a set of gypsy moth, I think they were eggs.
On his window sill, maybe they were caterpillars, and a wind blew and it escaped into the environment.
And the entomologist, to his credit, knew what he had done, that he had effectively created an invasive species that was going to do terrible damage.
But the problem is that the polio that resulted from the heavy metal exposure effectively tracks The spreading of these caterpillars, which results in the application of these new heavy metal-based pesticides.
You said it all, but the caterpillars grew up to become gypsy moths, which take out, is it elms?
Take out a huge number of things, but especially elms.
They take out many of the deciduous trees on the East Coast in order to try to stop that.
There is a huge uptick in the application of pesticides.
Because the East Coast is losing its trees, the pesticides in, it's going to be the late 19th century, are filled with arsenic and, I can't remember what else, but heavy metals.
And the application of those heavy metal-filled pesticides in response to the gypsy moths, which were the result of a bunch of gypsy moth eggs falling out of a window, tracks the...
Spread of polio in the U.S. Right.
And the point is, well, you can see if you were to look at a map of cases of polio and you're watching what's really the spread of a caterpillar and the human response to it, which is toxic, it does spread out like an epidemic.
But it's an epidemic of caterpillars and bad ideas about pesticides.
Well, the fact that, you know, as you know...
We talk about adaptive radiations in evolution, and basically you can begin to get a sense of the biogeography of species by its current place in time.
We can't go back in time actually and say, okay, where were they?
But you can begin to get a sense of, for instance, oh, salamanders seem to have originated in modern-day Appalachia, which is pretty cool.
And then they show up other places in the world, but the highest species The species density of them is in, like, southeastern United States, and then there's, like, a circle out from there.
And any time that you have one of these sort of concentric circles of movement of something, you can say, well, there is probably a point origin.
And so Lyme disease the same way, and polio in the late 19th century the same way.
Polio, which does involve a virus.
People are going to...
Clip this and say terrible things about denying the poliovirus.
There is a virus, but the point is that virus doesn't ordinarily have access to the spine, and the heavy metals are the link.
But anyway, the point is, something does spread in an epidemic-like fashion, right?
Because some element of it is biological.
It's caterpillars, and they grow into moss, and they spread out into adjacent territory.
Ideas like, hey, let's use a pesticide to rid ourselves of the gypsy moths.
Spreads like a bad idea because you're not spraying it where the gypsy moths haven't been.
So you see that same pattern.
And then, you know, somebody realizes, well, we're having to spray every time it rains because the stuff we're spraying is water soluble.
So they start spraying something.
Sticky.
And then the thing starts to spread out even faster because that means that the fruit that's harvested that has had the stuff sprayed on it has the poison on it when it gets to the kids and so it has a seasonality.
The basic point is...
You should...
We are looking at a biological phenomenon.
Yeah.
It is not a...
Chronic health epidemic in the sense that there is a pathogen causing it.
But it spreads in an epidemic-like fashion for very comprehensible reasons.
And it's basically because ideas are contagious.
Yeah.
It's organic.
It's second-order organic.
Yep.
The right term.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm compelled.
Good.
All right.
That's what I got.
All right.
Well, I had a few things that I wanted to mention.
That felt like they were worthy of some discussion.
One is the acknowledgement this week.
And by the way, it is refreshing to see the president's press secretary is like a human being.
And, you know, she says things and she answers questions and it's in English.
And anyway, there's something refreshingly human about it.
It's not like this.
Highly digested talking points designed to bamboozle us.
So anyway, I'm enjoying that.
I hope they stick with it.
They have actually announced that they are opening the White House press room to us off-brand, non-mainstream media types, which I think is pretty cool.
Yeah.
In fact, I applied.
They're probably going to need a bigger room.
I think they need a bigger boat.
But anyway, I applied.
Did you?
Yes.
Right away, as a matter of fact.
That's what you're doing instead of making a list of lists like you said you were going to do on top of the hour.
Well, here's the crazy thing.
I have had more than my share of confrontations with government websites in the last couple of weeks.
You could waste an infinite number of hours.
In fact, I kid you not.
And actually, you've encountered the same phenomenon.
Oh, yes.
There is a program, one of the trusted traveler programs of the Department of Homeland Security that allows you to expedite your transition through borders.
Yeah, over land by sea.
And it involves a step in which you've been provisionally granted your application, but you have to go for an interview.
Or they now have Zoom interviews so that you can do it remotely.
Which if you live on an island, it's the perfect thing.
But you click, I want a remote interview.
And it says, oh good, pick a date.
It is literally impossible to pick a date.
So I've been trying to do this since July.
I gave up in September.
I just threw up my hands.
You have recently taken up the mantle.
I have taken up.
And you've come to me with all the same, like, but it keeps changing the day.
I'm like, I know.
But I can't seem to do it.
I know.
I reboot it.
I'm like, I know.
In fact, I started to speculate.
I was losing my mind.
I started speculating that the web page is what you would design if you wanted to leave the impression that there was a program that you could sign up for, but it didn't actually exist.
You did.
And then.
And I was like, come on, man.
It exists.
I actually got on the phone with somebody at our local office.
Which was better than I did because I called that guy three times.
He never called me back.
Okay.
I got somebody who was actually quite knowledgeable who told me all of the inside scuttlebutt.
Get this.
The option, the clickable option for a Zoom appointment that then results in you not being able to click on a date.
That's not a live option.
There have never been.
Zoom appointments.
Not only is it not a live option, it has never been a live option.
It has never been a live option.
Apparently it was a proposal during COVID when they thought maybe not having you come in would be a cool idea.
They built it into the website and it just remains there as a dead end.
You could spend your entire life trying to get an appointment and you'll never get it through that route.
But anyway, the reason I raised that is because the process of applying as a...
Podcaster, non-mainstream media press type to the White House?
Not like that.
My God, it took me like two minutes.
Simple questions, provide a link to your channel.
So to be fair, new things are easier to make functional because they don't have history.
So there's no old code to get messed around with.
There's no established personnel that's going to have their toes stepped on if you don't use their aesthetic.
That said, I'm very glad that it was easy.
Painless.
Safe.
It was lovely.
It was safe and effective, which I'm not used to.
Right.
No, you wouldn't be.
But anyway, so among the things revealed in that newly human press environment...
Was the fact that apparently the New Jersey drones were FAA authorized, which I find absolutely ghastly.
Yeah.
Because whatever they were doing...
Not that they did it, necessarily, right?
Are you objecting to the fact that the FAA had any involvement in drones?
drones i am objecting to the fact that we had a phenomenon in close quarters with an entire state full of americans that the federal government knew something about and pretended it didn't and the fact that that's the ghastly part right yeah they ran an experiment on the citizens of new jersey
and indeed the citizens of the united states in which the possibility that these were not of terrestrial origin was discussed the possibility that these were actually hostile that these were chinese drones um And we don't know what...
I don't even know if we know what they're saying the experiment was supposed to be testing, but it doesn't matter what they say either, because part of what they learned was how a piece of the American population responds when this sort of thing happens.
So it's another one of these tests, just like all the COVID stuff.
Right.
And the answer is you're not allowed to do that.
Why?
Because it's a violation of informed consent, goddammit.
You are not allowed to experiment on Americans like this.
And every time we do it, whether it's this or it's Tuskegee or any, you know, MKUltra, you are violating rights that we have literally hung people over, right?
You don't get to do this.
And the fact is, that was not a trivial amount of trauma that they induced in people who were seeing these drones show up every night, right?
That was a...
Pretty serious experiment, even if they had a legitimate purpose, even if all they had said to us was, those are ours, they are not a threat.
Right.
Right?
That would have been leaps and bounds better than what they did.
And so, anyway, my belief is a serious crime took place.
It was a violation of informed consent.
And, you know, it's the Biden administration.
Who knows whether Biden had anything to do with it?
But whoever...
Did that, committed a crime, and we need to get to the bottom of it.
It's not a small matter.
I also wanted to talk about the weird idea that the candidacy of Tulsi Gabbard might be voted on in secret.
You've not heard this?
No, I have not.
So the idea is there is some special way that the Senate could vote in secret on...
Meaning that their votes would never be, how everyone voted would never be public.
Right.
So there will be hearings.
Yes.
But the vote might be secret.
Right.
I assume that the hearings would be public and the vote would be secret.
Now my feeling is...
Is there any precedent for that?
Do you know?
Undoubtedly there's something.
But irrespective.
Here's my feeling.
If you need your vote...
To be private in your role in providing advice and consent to the president on his nominees.
You are not working for the American public.
Your vote should be recorded and we should be able to know it.
And if it does not stand up to scrutiny, you have no right to cast that vote.
You should be seriously considering that you are doing somebody else's bidding and you are voting against the interests of the American public.
So my solution here would be, if they pull this bullshit and they vote in private, that we need to ask every single senator, we need to ask them in public, how did you vote?
And we need to go after anybody who refuses to answer.
If you want to keep your vote secret, you are telling us that you are hostile to the interests of the American public.
And that is grounds for driving you from that chamber.
I don't like the idea of keeping lists or going after people, but this is ridiculous.
This president won a decisive electoral victory.
Tulsi Gabbard is fully qualified for the position.
If you think she isn't, make your case, cast your vote.
But to hide your vote from us is despicable, and it tells us that you're working for somebody else, which is frankly what the oath of office is supposed to prevent.
You cannot be an antagonist to the American people and call yourself a senator.
So anyway, I think that that's an important principle.
And I guess lastly, I wanted to cover the fact that the CIA is now acknowledging...
It's not the last thing.
The CIA is now acknowledging the laboratory origin of...
COVID, which is, A, an amazing fact.
If you think about the history of the declarations that people who spoke of this were spreading misinformation, that it was preposterous, all that was put into pretending that somehow the science told us that this obviously came from nature and anybody who dared to consider anything else was a crazy person who mustn't be listened to.
Right now, finally, the CIA is on board with what many of us figured out five years ago.
Right?
That is remarkable.
And somehow we need to remind ourselves the next time that we have Americans demonizing other Americans for a belief like this, you have to say, hi, is this going to be one of those things where I'm going to be slandering people?
And then five years from now, I'm going to find out I was on the wrong side, that I was in fact buying misinformation from my own government and going after my fellow citizens over it.
This can never happen again.
And really, I think we have to make our peace with the idea that there is some net analysis on governmental secrecy.
and Yeah, there are some places in which we have to keep secrets, but the idea of lying to the American public is, in my opinion, never acceptable.
Well, so we come full circle back to Kennedy's critique, radical transparency.
This is what we need.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it feels radical, but it's not.
That is often the way.
Well.
But I guess I feel like saying radical transparency is a concession, that this is somehow radical rather than what we are doing currently is radical and, you know, are any of these remedies really radical?
Is halting, you know, the surgical transition of kids radical?
It's not radical in any way, but it could be...
Long overdue and never should have been necessary, but...
Radical transparency captures...
I feel like it captures it, even though you can make legitimate objections to some of the transparency actually being radical.
But it prevents what Kennedy is trying to do from being lost into a haze of generic regulations and counter-regulations.
Yeah.
You know, I guess I'm also concerned that every so often somebody advocates for what they will call radical honesty.
I haven't heard this.
These are people who feel like all of the stuff that human beings do that is not perfectly straightforward is somehow a breach of our sacred obligation to be straightforward with each other.
And the problem is...
Try it for a day.
You'll lose some friends.
Well, you do look fat, and I don't think it's the pants, right?
You don't want to be the person saying that, right?
Even if it's true, the point is actually human beings have worked out a mechanism for conveying information that reduces damage.
There are all kinds of reasons that...
Human beings, even totally honorable human beings, are not perfectly transparent about their every thought.
And it's because civilization would last about four minutes if we all tried that.
So, I mean, that's an interpretation of radical, that you're using those people, as you were reporting, you're using radical to mean complete and total.
And I don't...
I don't hear it that way.
I mean, I see that you could interpret it that way.
And, you know, we can get lost in semantic weeds here.
When I hear radical transparency from Kennedy, I do not go to, oh, he means no secrets at all.
The government must reveal absolutely everything at all times.
Like, obviously, no government will function that way.
Right.
But then the problem is it's a standard where you have to draw a line.
Sure.
Right.
But informed consent and liability, we've already drawn that line.
If you're going to give me something.
If you're going to put something in my food, I have a right to know it's there.
I have a right to know whether or not...
But informed consent and liability doesn't cover all of the issues that he's being asked about, and that he will be responsible for dealing with.
No, I think it does, and I'm perfectly open to the discovery of some realm where it's...
So I don't...
The realms where I think it's least true are the realms that I know the least about, and I suspect you do as well, but there's stuff around Medicare and Medicaid.
What is it?
The CPM, I want to say.
Also, well, PEPFAR is a different thing, but I'm not going to be able to find it here in my long, long notes.
Apparently, Trump has said he wants Medicare and Medicaid fixed.
There's concern that that means less funded.
Kennedy is saying...
I don't know anything about less funded.
I'm not signing on to that.
I'm saying that Trump has given me a mandate, that's not the right word, to fix it, to make it better.
I don't know how what you're talking about meshes with we need to fix a system by which tens of millions of Americans are getting their health care when it's a combination of like, well...
They're paying too much, and some of the service providers are corrupt, and some of them are just incompetent, and also a bunch of the medicine and the research and the clinical trials that went into the things that they're having done to them are wrong, and so they're having the wrong stuff done to them.
It's a much more complicated hydra, multi-headed hydra, than I think is encompassed by...
By informed consent and liability.
I agree, but it's also not covered by radical transparency, right?
You're going to fix the system.
You're going to do some structural stuff.
And so I would say, so one for one, radical transparency versus informed consent and liability.
I believe informed consent and liability has more teeth.
It is a well-established standard that already exists.
Radical transparency would have to be defined, and I don't think you really can, because radical is going to be subjective.
But that ultimately, even the job, which I'm not claiming that informed consent and liability covers, where you're going to restructure Medicare and or Medicaid, even in that case, informed consent and liability does a lot of the heavy lifting.
Because a lot of the stuff that gets paid for, a reasonable person would not accept if they had all of the information.
And in many cases, those who are creating the stuff wouldn't leave it on the market if they were going to be held liable.
That's over on the science and medicine side of it.
I guess what I was hearing from a lot of the back and forth that is, again, the place where I know the least, I'm least interested, I don't claim to be informed, was...
Actually, the way you get things done, you know, basically, I heard senators saying to Kennedy, even if you're well-intentioned, we don't want you doing stuff behind closed doors that are going to create more of a mess going forward.
And his response is, you're going to be able to see what I'm doing.
Yep.
Well, I am in favor of transparency.
But in terms of a standard, I am in favor of informed consent and liability.
And I think it does a lot more heavy lifting than people realize.
And it has the secondary advantage of allowing the market to set prices that will give us the maximum rate of change that doesn't collapse a system we don't fully understand.
So I still think it's the right way to go.
I guess I don't think they're competing.
I think they're going after different, somewhat overlapping.
But not entirely overlapping.
And I think with regard to this job, I think the radical transparency one is a bigger piece of the job, and I may be wrong about that.
So, you also have a film to announce.
Yes, a film that we debuted this morning at 8 o'clock Eastern Time.
I think it was 8 o'clock Eastern Time.
What's the film?
The film is a documentary made by the wonderful Mike Naina, who was present at Rescue the Republic.
He has put together quite a beautiful film.
You can find it on my X account at Brett Weinstein.
Brett has one T.
We are going to put it up on Instagram as well, on the Dark Horse podcast site.
Presumably it's on X at the Dark Horse podcast profile as well.
And we have, I think we have a clip of it.
Is that right, Jen?
Anyone want to show that?
And then the worst president in the history of our country took over, And look what happened to our country!
Probably 20 million people!
If you want to really see something that said, take a look at what happened.
Friends said, turn on your television.
Trump has been shot.
The thought was, oh, my God, what's happened?
He's on top of the roof.
Do we need a medic here?
Give me a f***ing hard one!
Give me a f***ing hard one!
Give me a f***ing hard one!
All right.
So anyway, I hope people enjoy it.
It's...
What is it called?
Coalition of the Weird.
Weird.
Yes.
Weird, but not spelled in the standard way.
Anyway, it's quite good.
I think people will enjoy it.
Highly relevant to the battles over confirmation that we are going to be involved in here.
So in any case, people should check it out.
Beautiful.
Alright, anything else?
I think that's it.
The dog freaked out at reliving the assassination attempt, sounds it like.
Yeah.
She dropped something on herself.
I don't think she understands the idea of a replay of a past assassination attempt.
Yeah, his dogs do not do history that well.
No, it's not their strength.
No.
All right.
Check out our website, darkhorsepodcast.org, to find updates on schedules.
We're going to be doing some weird scheduling stuff upcoming, including, I think next week we're back on Monday, I think, and then the following week on Tuesday, and then from a new location the following Wednesday, and then we're going to take a little break, and all of these things will be explained in time, but not yet.
This is a place where I would embrace radical transparency.
No you wouldn't.
I mean, if you wanted to, you could say whatever you want.
I just think they should know the schedule.
I'll bet many of them know the schedule better than you do.
Oh, that's true.
That's true.
Yeah, transparency doesn't mean it sticks.
Okay, so we've got stuff for sale at our store.
It's at darkhorsestore.org, but that, like everything else, the schedule.
Ability to find us on Locals.
Join us there.
You can find at darkhorsepodcast.org.
I run a natural selections every week.
Our sponsors this week.
Those are last week's sponsors.
Our sponsors this week were...
Fresh Pressed.
Dude, that's not helpful.
That was the third one.
Yep.
Brain FM, Peek Nandaka, and Fresh Pressed Olive Oil.
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And until we see you next time in, I think, five short days, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
