The History of Vaccine Hesitancy: Jeffrey Tucker on DarkHorse
Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute critiques vaccine history, exposing how 1902’s Biologics Control Act—lobbied by the industry—prioritized eliminating competition over safety, mirroring 1906’s meatpacking reforms. He reveals Benjamin Justy’s 1756 cross-immunity discovery predated Jenner’s 1796 smallpox vaccine, yet fame and privilege went to Jenner, not the farmer. Tucker links COVID-19 mandates to utilitarianism’s Jacobson precedent (1904), where individual harm was justified for collective gain, unlike clean water or other public goods. Lockdowns, he argues, were designed to create vaccine dependency, while dissent—like ivermectin’s effectiveness or hydroxychloroquine’s suppression—was punished, deepening class divides and economic exploitation like 41% grocery price hikes since 2019. Brownstone’s interdisciplinary retreats, from Polyface Farms (400+ attendees) to annual conferences, offer a rare model of truth-seeking over conformity, contrasting with modern science’s "gentleman science" decline and institutional capture. [Automatically generated summary]
I am sitting with my friend Jeffrey Tucker, who is the president and is it fair to say founder of the Brownstone Institute, where I am a proud fellow.
Before I say more about what I see at Brownstone and ask Jeffrey what he sees, Jeffrey, welcome to Dark Horse.
Well, it's so nice to be here.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm really looking forward to this discussion because I think I'm going to tell you some things that you don't know.
Wow.
You know, it would not be the first time.
In fact, I would say I was thinking back in preparing for today's podcast.
I don't think I've missed a gathering of Brownstone since the first one you invited me to.
I can't remember exactly when that was, but I'm hooked because Brownstone is many things and describing it is not a simple matter, but I think it is the only institution of any size that I have been part of or witnessed from the outside that seems to function as intended.
It's quite an accomplishment.
Well, and that's a consequence of a lifetime of experience in seeing things go wrong.
Right.
So once you eliminate all the things that you know go wrong, then you're left with maybe an institution that could possibly function well.
And I'm going to knock on wood, but so far, it's really, I'm just thrilled.
We have a tiny staff and you see what's happening to the separate clubs.
We've got now 15 separate clubs.
I think we're going on 20 all over the country.
Most of them sell out every single week.
We've got now, we're working on our 22nd book.
I'm putting the finishing touches right now on a book that I think you're just going to love.
It's the first book on the Gray Baronson Declaration.
And the book is edited by Martin Kuhlberf and Jay Bhattacharya.
And the purpose of the book is to just provide a thorough documentation of the Declaration, the FAQs, the defenses of it, the attacks on it, the disputations, the debates, the disputes, and everything that unfolded from that.
And if you can believe it, this book is going to be, I think, we haven't done the index yet, but it could be, it's about 750 pages.
All right.
So this, this, I don't know how many in my audience will be well familiar with Brownstone.
I think everybody will have encountered it somewhere and probably scratched their head as to what it is.
And it's hard to put your finger on.
It's part publishing house.
It's part, you know, I would say it's a salon in the best sense of that term.
You have gathered people from widely divergent backgrounds, many different walks of life.
Maybe I'll name a few people who show up there.
Ron Johnson and Thomas Massey, Robert Malone, Warner Mendenhall will be less well known, but he's kind of the tip of the legal spear on fighting COVID tyranny.
Darkhorse's Tallow and Honey Balm00:05:13
Josh, there are so many fascinating people.
And so the salon part, I will say, you have wisely, and to go back to your point about avoiding all of the mistakes that you've seen, my favorite aphorism with my children, they're absolutely sick of me saying this, is that good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.
And if you could just figure out all of the things you've seen that don't work and avoid them, you're well on your way to something that might work.
And anyway, Brownstone works.
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Academia's Silo Problem00:08:39
Brett, one of the things that I think you'll recognize from academia is that the intellectual world in general has a major problem that people get burrowed down in their specializations and don't end up communicating outside their specialty.
And this is true ideologically too.
It's like, okay, I'm a conservative.
Here are my conservative friends.
I'm a liberal.
Here are my liberal friends.
I'm an economist.
I like to be with economists.
And so I'm a monetary economist.
So I like to be with other monetary economists.
Trade economists, I don't care about, right?
So natural sciences don't talk, social sciences, lawyers don't talk to, don't talk to medical people.
For whatever reason, in 2019, we were a seriously intellectually segmented society where we just didn't have occasions for these masters of these various disciplines to share information with each other, which is to say, they were not in a position to learn from each other.
And I think this is a lot of the reason why the world broke, right?
So we had the microbial kingdom acting up.
And then the economists would say, well, I don't know anything about that.
Lawyers, that's not really my area.
You know, preachers, theologians, I don't know anything about viruses and how to control, you know, epidemiology.
Nobody ever taught me about that.
So everybody just kind of bowed out to the entire intellectual world just said, well, we'll let essentially Fauci, you know, handle this for us, right?
And it was tragic.
People are scared to engage in areas that are not their area of codified, certified specialization.
And that left the world in the hands of fanatics who ended up launching a kind of a crazy tyranny.
And we were all dancing around this crazy kabuki dance scripted by some wackos in Washington who had only one concern, which is to preserve the immunological naivety to this particular pathogen for as long as possible in advance of deploying an inoculation, an innovation on the public to see how this new technology works.
That was the agenda.
And everybody else was just supposed to shut up.
And it kind of more or less worked.
So when I started Brownstone, I really thought, you know, we need serious environments for all these different people to talk to each other so we can learn from each other.
The lawyers can learn from the medical doctors.
Medical doctors can learn from the economists and so on.
That, and also, we have no ideological litmus tests, right?
I'm not demanding that people fly this flag or that flag.
And as a consequence, I mean, you say how exciting these things are.
This is why they're exciting, because you've got collegial engagements with people who have a different intellectual formation.
They have different books that are their favorite books.
They have a different apparatus in their minds and they're willing to share that with people.
And that forces us to talk in ways that are communicative and make sense.
So it serves as a test of our own ideas against extremism, against dogmatism, just to know you're sitting in front of a lot of really intelligent people who might not know anything about your field of study.
So now you've got to make sense.
That is a brilliant opportunity.
I think that's why you like it so much.
It's why I like it so much.
Well, if I can add one piece that I think it'll be obvious to you in retrospect.
But this is the conundrum of being a broad-minded evolutionary biologist, is that you're over in the biology wing of the academy, but cellular biology, the geneticists, the molecular biologists, they do not think in evolutionary terms.
Why not?
Well, it's a pure accident of history that their field developed when there wasn't a lot of opportunity to say very much about how it interacted with evolution.
And so they sort of take evolution as, you know, the one sentence, survival of the fittest, whatever they have in their minds.
And so they assume, well, I don't understand why that's a field, but I can do that.
I understand the basics.
And they don't realize that actually evolution is the interdisciplinary glue that holds all of biology together.
So when COVID happened, Heather and I were simultaneously not a specialist in any of the disciplines, but were, as much as an evolutionist is specialized, specialized in the stuff that links all of the things under discussion.
Everything from the human interactions to the evolution of the virus to the impact on the immune system of an inoculation, all of these things are viewable from evolution.
So, yes, the fragmentation of the intellectual world is a disaster to lip service to interdisciplinarity, but we don't do it well.
And so, and I also think what you've described, I've often argued that peer review is not the same as review by peers.
If it was, we'd all be for it.
But what you're talking about is defining peers differently.
When we say peer review, we're talking about your immediate competitors and friends in your tiny little corner of the discipline, right?
That's not the standard that we should judge whether your work is any good.
If you can't explain it to somebody in an adjacent discipline, you probably don't understand it very well, if it's even true at all.
So you've gathered people.
You've very wisely set essentially no rules.
You've purged all of the stuff that people don't like from your gatherings, which is jarring at first.
It's like there's not a lot of structure, but it leaves, as you say, the lawyers free to learn from the doctors and vice versa.
And it's mind-blowing what you come across because everybody is forced to speak in English, not jargon.
And I learn things.
I think the real test is people get up to go to the restroom during the conference, but nobody wants to be out of the room.
People hurry back.
If they have to go to the restroom, they don't feel good about having to leave.
And so, you know, what conference have you ever been to where people are so eager to be in the room that, you know, everybody's there and nobody's taking an excuse to go outside and chat?
Yeah, it's a little disorienting, I think, for people who have been socialized in the modern economic life.
You mentioned the segmentation within the field of biology.
I'm just going to give you a quick example from economics.
I mean, first of all, economics long ago separated itself from the other social sciences and social sciences from the national sciences.
So we've already got an isolated group here.
Well, they've now broken down into tiny little groups.
So we have a major problem in this country with trade controversies that are intersecting with the role of the dollar as a world reserve currency.
Okay, so that requires at least two fields of economics, monetary economics and trade economics, coming together to try to understand something.
Well, those are completely separate fields and they don't talk to each other.
The trade people don't know anything about money, or if they do know, they don't feel like they have the right to talk about it.
And the opposite is true, too.
So as a result, we've just got, it's like, it's a crazy chaos out there, and it doesn't make any sense.
So I just give that example just to affirm that this is true in every discipline, not just biology.
So yeah, bringing people from all different, all these different fields together to learn from each other.
You know, a lot of this grows out of when COVID happened, all our intellectual communities were shattered.
Bringing Fields Together00:04:02
I mean, we didn't have them anymore.
All the friends we used to know, the institutions around which we once rallied, the safety net, the social infrastructure that we all depended on just sort of weirdly went away.
Our friends betrayed us.
Our institutions betrayed us.
We found cowardice when we least expected it.
We found people pursuing careerist strategies for survival.
We never would have expected that.
So we came into 2021 without much.
And during those, I started Brownstone over the course of the summer and the fall, and then had the occasion to meet with Tom Harrington.
And Tom comes from a completely different field of studies, humanities, a language professor in languages and Spanish language, Hispanic studies, a man of the left, for sure, but just a really engaging kind of person.
And he and I sat in my living room and we couldn't stop talking.
I mean, we would talk, I'm going to say like three or four nights a week.
We would sit.
He would sit on one sofa, I would sit on the other, and we would talk for four and five hours at a time.
And why were we doing this?
We were both thrilled.
It felt like the first time in years that we were in a position to share ideas with each other, disagreeing on a ton of topics in good faith, pushing back on each other.
What about this?
What about this?
You know this thinker.
I don't know that thinker.
Tell me about that thinker.
Well, he's this.
Do you know this thinker?
I don't know that thinker.
Tell me about him.
And so it was this magical evenings, and they just went on for, I'm going to say like two months or a month or two.
And then out of that experience, I thought, everybody needs to see what this is like.
Like if you care about ideas and you care about just understanding the world around you, you can't just do that in isolation, much less with just people who are agreeing on your dogmas, right?
That's just not going to get you to where you want to go.
The progress in understanding comes only through this confluence of differences put together in good faith without a lot of ego and a burning passion to know what's true.
So the supper clubs were founded with that idea and they're open to the public and they better come.
And I try to keep a lid on them for a long time until they finally, at the end of this year, you know, they just went wild all over the country.
So yeah, it's because we need this.
That's it.
We just need it.
So again, I'm sort of focused on why your project works.
And, you know, if I try to reverse engineer what you've got, A, when you see it and you experience it, it feels like the intellectual life that I think we all naively thought was widespread and occurring differently in all these institutions.
And, you know, for those of us who've been in the academy, it's shocking how little of it there is.
You know, I had a very good graduate lab that I was in that did have that characteristic, but it was very rare elsewhere that I could see.
So you sort of get the sense that maybe it doesn't exist or it hasn't existed in a very long time.
And then in the Brownstone context, I would say, if I'm to describe what I think you're doing, you're bringing people together who seem to have two characteristics.
There are two fundamentals that you have to have.
One is you have to bring something to the table.
You have to understand something or have an approach to something that is generative.
Bring Something to the Table00:05:38
And you have to play well with others.
You have to be able to be a part of a good faith discussion.
And what that means is there are lots of people who have something to bring to the table, but who are, you know, what you might call in computer terms, read-only.
You can hear what they have to say, but you can't affect them.
They're not listening.
Those people aren't there.
Instead, you have people, you know, Ryan Cole would be, you know, it's amazing how many people who have been on Dark Horse are circulating in Brownstone.
But, you know, what exactly is Ryan Cole?
Well, he's obviously a pathologist, but he's also, you know, a philosopher and, you know, a farmer with a million really difficult hobbies, like making musical instruments and things.
Anyway, that's a rare mind.
And he doesn't come through the door as just a doctor expert on the pathology side of things.
He comes through as a wise person who's seen some stuff that almost nobody else has.
So anyway, the magic of gathering people who all, you know, very little ego, lots of interest in adding to the discussion things that actually enhance it.
Anyway, it's a market.
One of the things that you have to be willing to change your mind, too, right?
I mean, it's not, we don't have a form yet for time, but that helps.
So we had David Stockman, I remember at one retreat, and there was, I guess, his Toby Rogers was raging against the Baidole Act, you know, passed in 19, what, was that 80, 82?
Which allows the NIH to share in patent royalties with pharmaceutical companies, right?
And billions of dollars are shared in these patent royalties, which you look at that, you think, well, that's really corrupt.
But we were talking about, well, it turns out David Stockman was in Congress at that time, and he was sitting right there.
He was Reagan's first budget director.
And he spoke out and he said, you know, I can't believe it.
I voted for this thing.
Why so?
What is what was I thinking?
And so I said, well, David, what were you thinking?
He said, well, I think the attitude back in those days was that private enterprise was coming up with amazing innovations every day and bad government bureaucrats who are risk averse were blocking them and stopping them from giving their great products to the country.
So we were trying to find a way to break through the bureaucracy.
So how about we give the rewards to the bureaucracy for when they approve drugs and then those rewards will be contingent on the profitability of the product?
It seemed to make sense to us.
That is a wild story.
I mean, and it makes sense on both sides, really.
I mean, Toby Rogers, who has also been a guest on Dark Horse, is in his quadrant, he's a walking, talking red pill.
It's terrifying, actually, because much of what he has to say is beyond horrifying about what we've done and what he's unearthed.
So anyway, amazing that Stockman is not defensive in light of this, but he's actually searching his own mind to figure out what his motivations were in light of Toby Rogers presenting it in a context in which it's obviously insane.
He was raging against himself.
He said, I can't believe I bought this.
And another example of this was the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act or whatever, the thing that indemnified all the vaccine companies against liability for harm, so long as they ended up on the schedule.
So he explained that this one was a very similar situation.
Recall that this happened under a Republican Congress with a Republican president, right?
So Stockman said, if you think back to those days, there was clearly a manufactured liability crisis.
There were books coming out.
Oh, what are we going to do about the liability crisis?
The courts are being clogged up with these superficial lawsuits.
Frivolous lawsuits.
Frivolous lawsuits.
We're going to destroy America.
They're going to destroy free enterprise because you can't make some pay.
And the famous example, the lady gets burned by the McDonald's coffee cup and the drive-through sues McDonald's.
Oh, McDonald's now has to pay all these litigation costs.
The judges are like, oh, there's another stupid lawsuit.
The juries are bombed.
So you got this impression at the time in the mid-1980s that the entire world was collapsing because of frivolous lawsuits.
Well, it turns out there's only one industry that actually managed to use all that propaganda to its advantage.
And that was the vaccine.
They're like, yeah, that's a great point.
There's too many frivolous lawsuits.
You need to indemnify us against any lawsuits.
So they end up being the only industry in the country that has a complete ability to crank out product after product with absolutely no accountability from the public whatsoever.
So now looking back at it, to what extent was all that the crisis of liability actually generated by the industry that ended up benefiting from the crisis, right?
Clear Nasal Spray00:02:27
Very interesting.
So Stockman is reflecting on that too, saying, this is a disaster.
I can't believe I believed that at the time.
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Vaccine Industry's Liability Shield00:05:07
The propaganda, you know, when you're in the line of fire, the propaganda is strangely compelling.
But if you figure out where to stand outside of it, you realize, you know, a couple of things about the liability shield for vaccine manufacturers.
One, it was specifically granted because vaccines are not safe.
This is what the industry said.
And they couldn't be made safe.
And therefore, the industry effectively threatened the Reagan administration, saying, we're not going to produce them if we don't get this.
So, you know, all of this safe and effective stuff that we've been told downstream of that is a direct contradiction to the reason that they have this immunity from liability.
But the other thing is, as an evolutionary biologist, if you tell me, here's what we're going to do, we have a reason, maybe it's even a good reason.
We're going to give this industry immunity from liability.
I can tell you what's going to happen.
Wildly dangerous products for very simple reason.
The fact is, if you're limited to only selling safe products, your profit is going to be X.
And if you can sell any product and not suffer the cost of the harm you do to other people, you'll make vastly more.
So even if there were companies that intended to sell good vaccines, they will be out-competed by the ones that sell crappy vaccines and pretend they're good.
So this was just a guaranteed evolutionary outcome of that piece of legislation.
Any economist or any evolutionary biologist would have predicted it.
And now we're living with the consequences.
And this is what got me into this very interesting industrial history of vaccines.
How come this one industry keeps, which is arguably the most powerful industry in the world?
I mean, what other industry was able to prevail upon 194 nations all at once to shut down their economies and destroy civil rights to wait for them to produce their product?
I mean, like, nothing like that has ever happened in human history.
I conclude from that that vaccine industry is the most powerful industry probably in the world.
So what is it about this industry that makes it so mystically the benefactor of government privilege?
And how long has this gone on?
So I began to go back in history and landed in 1902 with the Biological Control Act, which is a fascinating history.
We can talk about that.
But then through the origin of public health in the 1880s, why did vaccines get grafted onto that?
That's very interesting because you think about public health, public health is obviously a benefit to everybody, right?
So clean water benefits everybody, harms nobody.
Clean air benefits everybody, harms nobody.
Good sewage benefits everybody, harms nobody.
Vaccine industry is like, hey, don't forget about us.
Well, what are you bringing to the table?
A lot of benefit.
Yeah, but I mean, a lot of harm too, right?
Yeah.
Utilitarian calculations show us that we produce more benefit than more harm.
Okay, so that makes it a complete outlier in the suite of causes we consider to be public health.
All the other causes, clean water, clean food, good sewage, refrigeration, whatever you want to talk about it, clean streets, those are good for everybody.
Vaccines kind of rode the coattails of public health to gain this industrial privilege, which they almost lost entirely after 1901 when about five cities simultaneously experienced a vast injury and death from the new diphtheria and tetanus vaccines.
And there was massive public outrage.
We're sick of these people.
What do they think they're doing to us?
We've put up with this crap long enough.
And so the vaccine industry went to Washington in 1902 and said, listen, you've got to do something.
We're losing, quickly losing public support.
You've got to declare us safe and effective by cracking down on bad vaccine manufacturers.
Get rid of the riffraff out there and just codify good, safe vaccines from us.
And the result was the Biologics Control Act, which is a complete product of industry lobbying.
And that's the beginning of what became the NIH.
So it was an industry creation to rescue the industry from the consequences of its own failings.
So now you've got government going, this is safe and effective.
And people are like, oh, well, there's a lot of injury and death, but I guess they fixed that.
This just keeps happening.
And so anyway, I traced it all the way back to the origins with Edward Jenner in 1776, who incidentally was not the interventor of the vaccines.
Edward Jenner's Legacy00:15:43
That was invented by a farmer 20 years earlier named Benjamin Justy, who never got the credit because he was a mere farmer, whereas Edward Jenner was a fancy scientist who became surgeon general to King George IV.
Okay, so the farmer gets no credit for cross-immunity, but Jenner gets all that.
Well, that's a very common pattern in the history of science.
If you look at the great discoveries, it's amazing how frequently somebody had it who didn't have the skills or the position to get the credit.
And, you know, even in Darwin's case, where I will say Darwin is the right person to have gotten the credit, there are two things that are important to understand about how that happened.
One, there is a very early, somebody writes a paragraph in which he outlines the theory of natural selection 100 years earlier.
It's fascinating.
I don't think Darwin ever saw it.
So I think Darwin genuinely created the idea, but somebody was way ahead of him.
But maybe even more to the point, Darwin did not have the features of character that would have allowed him to get the credit.
He needed a bulldog.
And the point is that de facto partnership between Darwin and Huxley is why we correctly record that Darwin was the inventor of this idea.
What's more, in the first edition, maybe it's in all of them, but certainly in the first edition of The Origin of Species, Darwin does something that would be ludicrous in modern times, which is he pleads for the scientific community to take care of Wallace.
So his direct competitor, who also independently had nailed the theory and had emailed, he wrote a letter to Darwin.
It was not an email at the time, but wrote a letter to Darwin saying, Mr. Darwin, I understand you're working in this area.
Could you take a look at my work?
So he knew that Wallace was going to get the prize, which spurred him to finally complete his work.
But Darwin, instead of trying to hide Wallace, actually pleads for him to be taken care of financially and otherwise, which anyway, that's very sweet.
Yeah.
Jenner never credited Benjamin Jestie.
It was just a poor farmer.
You know, there's another funny thing about this, Brett.
I've been wanting to talk to you about this because I think it's a little bit mysterious.
When Edward Jenner came out, this is 1796, he did some experiments.
So did Chesty, by the way.
His experiments were just simply taking pus from Kelpox, right?
And applying it to open incisions.
There weren't injections in those days.
So they're still doing the strategy of variolation.
So you open up a couple of incisions in the wrist, rub the pus on there, and then test to see if you've created immunities to smallpox.
The result was you have.
Okay, so Jenner somehow, like, I don't understand how this happened, but just all throughout the Western world was celebrated not just as a great discoverer, not just as a great scientist, but the prime example of what enlightenment values can achieve for the world.
Enlightenment values, enlightenment strategies, enlightenment evidence-based testing and so on.
So to the point that Thomas Jefferson became a wild fan.
And imagine writing a fan letter to a scientist from America to Britain, which he did in 1801 or something like that.
So he's like president, but he writes a love letter to Jenner.
What you have done is going to go down and history is the greatest thing.
So there's something mystical about this.
First of all, Jenner's achievement here was not uncontroversial.
In fact, the surgeon to the Princess of Wales, who hilariously is named John Birch, if you can believe it.
But anyway, his name is John Burch, raged against the vaccine and went around the country chronicling vaccine injury, saying this vaccine is dangerous.
You've got to stop it.
Published monograph after monograph, ran polls.
He tried to collect vaccine injury stories, and he did.
There was a publication in 1807.
It was reprinted again in 1817, published and circulated all over the country.
These were extremely controversial products.
So I guess From the beginning, they were controversial, you know?
So I just don't understand how it is that vaccines as a technology or as an insight across the immunity.
And injections didn't come along until 50 years later.
Why did they benefit so heavily from almost a mystical belief in them that they represented the best that modernity had to offer?
All right.
I want to address that.
But before I do, let's just say you've written a very concise piece describing this full history, including what you blazed through a few minutes ago, which is that although most of us think that the NIH was created with a noble purpose and then captured by industry, in fact, it was created by industry and it was sort of captured from the get-go, which puts our modern circumstance in a very interesting way.
I definitely proved that in my article.
Definitely.
That took me a long time.
So I'm very proud of that.
Well, I mean, the article is mind-blowing if you've been embedded in this battle.
You know, if like me, you've been waking up to not only, you know, initially Heather and I woke up to the horror of the COVID vaccines just based on the fact of how novel they were, how poorly tested they were, and how incapable of doing the job they were supposed to do, they obviously were.
But then, you know, once you start looking under that rock and you start thinking, well, what's under the other rocks?
And you look into the rest of the vaccination program, it's pretty scary that none of these things are tested against an inert placebo.
They're required by government.
There is a clear embedded transfer of well-being.
You are taking a risk and it may not be you that you're trying to save.
So there's a lot to be said.
And I really appreciate that your article, for the first time I'm aware of anybody doing it, goes back and says, well, how far do all of these patterns that we now are fighting about go back?
And it turns out that vaccine injury goes all the way back, not surprisingly.
The industry strong-arming government goes back.
The mythology that doesn't match the evidence goes all the way back.
And I do think that there's a piece of this, which is civilizations function based on mythology.
And I'm not saying that in a pejorative sense.
I'm not saying that it's lies.
I'm saying that we tell ourselves stories that allow ourselves to function.
And those stories get captured.
So the point is, there's a mythology about the founding of the U.S. that isn't exactly true, but it's true enough.
It allows us to understand who we're supposed to.
Yeah.
And, you know, sometimes I say you can't write a myth.
You can write a narrative.
And if it's a good one, evolution will turn it into a myth over time.
But anyway, the point is what we're really talking about is the mythology that is necessary for us to function and what happens to it in the context of power players and money and things like that, where they capture the mythology and they convince us that we know who the good people are.
The good people are the ones who go to the doctor and get the injection that makes us all safe from disease.
And the bad ones are the crazies or the selfish ones who, because there's some tiny little risk of something, aren't doing their part to protect the entire planet or whatever the thing is.
And the point is, this mythology is somebody's position statement that they have lodged in a kind of religious place in the population.
And of course, this would be the result of it.
But you know, why is it, why is it, why is it vaccines in particular?
Like, we never had this religious attachment to steamships or steam power or the telegraph to get people to accept internal combustion.
You know, it didn't require an official internal combustion agent by the U.S. government, but it's propaganda and demonization of people who are against it.
This is very strange that vaccine as a product has always had this huge thing.
One of the things that's fascinating is there's always a vaccine agent, right?
So in the U.S. case, it was James Smith, right?
Who's considered to be the Edward Jenner of America.
And he writes James Madison a letter saying, you know what?
We just had this terrible war of 1812.
You know what that means.
Wars mean sickness and death to smallpox.
So you need to appoint me the vaccine agent.
I've got the stuff.
Make me the sole vaccine agent for the country and I will inoculate the population, especially the troops.
And James Madison says, wow, excellent point.
Okay.
So here you have a government that barely exists.
I mean, what was the federal government even doing in 1813, right?
But now suddenly James Madison is rallying around a product to distribute to the American people for free and even mandating that the Pony Express has to deliver it if requested by a single monopoly provider named James Smith, who claims to be the Edward Jenner of America because he's got all the vials in his lab.
This actually happened.
Why did this happen?
What is it?
I don't know.
It's just mystically interesting.
Of course, the result was vast injury, vast death.
At some point, he mixed up some vials.
He started giving smallpox vaccinations where you're meant to give cowpox vaccination, created a smallpox epidemic in like three cities.
One, I think it's called the Tarborough Institute.
I have it in my article.
Finally, the public was just fed up and raging against these vaccines.
And Congress repealed the act in 1822.
We were done with it for a while.
But anyway, I just, I don't know.
Maybe there's no answer to this, but like, why vaccination in particular?
I think you nailed it up top where, I mean, if you think about it, obviously early, well, maybe I don't have it because the early vaccinations weren't injections, right?
They were.
They were not injections.
They were not injections.
Yeah.
Only innovation was the discovery of cross-immunity from cowpox to smallpox and that you could do this from an animal to a human and improve the health of the human being.
Yeah, the mythology, the mythology around this was that milkmaids were seemingly immune to smallpox and because they had gotten cowpox, which is a nearly harmless disease that they pick up while milking cows.
But okay, I still think we can rescue this.
If you are living in an age where enlightenment is changing the landscape in palpable ways and you are told that all of the terrible misfortunes that come from pathogenic disease are actually addressable if we elegantly intervene in this way that we have discovered through you know experiment and observation that
promise of that seems so great that the consumer, the citizen, ends up doing a lot of the work on their end, convincing themselves that it's true, talking themselves into the idea that this is elegant and all benefit.
But again, something I learned from your article, which, you know, in retrospect, I should have expected it.
But the idea that there was an anti-vaccine sentiment from the beginning and that there were embarrassing cases in which massive harm was done to people, it's like, oh, well, of course, if this is the style of intervention you're going to do, you're basically, yes, in principle, you can inform the immune system of something it should know ahead of time.
That's a beautiful idea.
But all of the ways that it can go wrong need to be in the calculus.
And they aren't because, well, frankly, because of bad motives and self-delusion.
And confounding variables, right?
So like in the case of the Civil War, we had vaccine mandates for both sides.
The North and the South both wanted their troops vaccinated, thoroughly vaccinated, because they didn't want sudden epidemics of smallpox breaking out in the middle of a war that would guarantee that one side would lose, right?
So they wanted mass vaccination, but in the pursuit of which they would go to the hospitals, find people who died from smallpox box, scrape off their scabs, and essentially reviving the old practice of variation, right?
But the problem was that, yeah, the person might have died of smallpox, but they're carrying a lot of other diseases also because it's friggin' wartime.
So syphiletic infected smallpox scabs were very common.
So the vaccination spreads syphilis all over the North and the South.
And we have huge records of vast injury and death from diseases other than smallpox because of the attempt to variate against smallpox.
Vaccines and Wartime Pathogens00:14:45
So that's just one example.
Well, hold on.
Sorry, I don't mean to keep interrupting you, but there's so many examples.
Oh, that's great.
I'm sorry.
That's what's going on.
But okay, so there's an error, obvious in retrospect, where, okay, you're trying to get effectively an inoculant from sores of a person infected with smallpox.
As far as the argument goes, that's sensible enough, but you're taking it from a human being.
And a human being is capable of harboring many different human pathogens.
And this same, so the point is you should expect, what else am I bringing in along with this?
It's an obvious question.
But this mistake is then repeated with the polio vaccine, which is grown in monkey kidneys.
And the point is, well, okay, yes, you're concentrating on the thing you're trying to do.
I'm trying to grow polio virus in monkey kidney cells because it will grow there.
Okay.
Do those monkeys have anything that a human could get that you don't know about yet?
This is what, you know, this SV40 promoter that's in the COVID vaccines, this is where it came from.
SV40, simian virus 40, came accidentally from the cultivation of polio vaccine in monkey kidneys.
They didn't know it was there.
And so the idea that, well, okay, I know what a vaccine is supposed to be.
It's supposed to be a killed pathogen.
It's supposed to be an attenuated pathogen or it's supposed to be fragments of a pathogen.
That means I have to grow pathogen.
The part they don't tell you is that they're going to have to grow it in something.
And if they're going to have to grow it in something, and it's a pathogen of people, it's probably going to be something close enough related, closely enough related to people that they will have other pathogens in there that we've never even named or noticed.
And we will discover after we have used this stuff that it wasn't perfectly purified out.
And, you know, how many people have died of cancer because of SV40 from a polio vaccine?
And this probably also accounts for all the vaccine injury in the early 1800s that were carefully chronicled by John Birch.
I mean, if you're even under perfect conditions where you've got cowpox from the hand of a milkmaid and you scrape it off and you've got this vial of it, well, there's other things you don't know.
What other diseases was the milkmaid carrying besides the cowpox pus?
What diseases was the cow carrying that she milked?
So you're actually, so it's very interesting.
And John Birch makes this argument that you're spreading disease.
You're not preventing disease traction, but yet.
So I don't think there's an obvious answer here.
It could be one or the other.
But as you said, there's so many variables, so many things that could go wrong.
Yes.
And, you know, boy, there's so many threads here.
But to go back to your very first point, I think, not only did the public health top officials take control of civilization and stage a coup against medicine, but they happened to be people who were also involved in creating the damn pathogen in the first place.
The ultimate irony, right, that Fauci had offshored bioweapons research to the Wuhan Institute for reasons I still have never heard properly explained.
But the idea that the guy who screwed up and was doing work that was too reckless to be imagined caused a pandemic, and then he's the guy in charge of saving us is ludicrous on its face.
But the part of the story that you have to be, I think, evolutionarily aware, deeply aware to understand is that the bioweapons research is motivated.
Bioweapons makers are bored with the very short list of weaponizable human pathogens.
It's well explored.
None of them work in a way that is suitable.
But they are also aware that for the 16 or so weaponizable pathogens that they've found, there are millions of undiscovered pathogens in other creatures.
And they are eager to find ones that have the two characteristics that make them useful as a weapon.
One characteristic is that they can infect a human, and the other is that they can transmit between people.
And I think...
What about the third characteristic, that it can be something against which we can inoculate?
Well...
Well, the third characteristic would be you can inoculate.
And then there's a whole thread about whether or not the bioweapons research with COVID and the vaccines actually turned the whole thing on its head because the vaccines, since they cause the body to produce IgG4 antibodies, actually paradoxically attenuate the immune response if you've had two or more of these shots when they are exposed to the spike protein.
So I don't know quite what to make of that fact.
It's very frightening that it seems to accomplish the goal of bioweapons makers, but if you reverse the two populations, the inoculated people were not immune.
They're vulnerable.
But anyway, so I think what happened is they found, because there were six miners in Yunnan province in China who got sick from a bat coronavirus, three of them died, and none of them ever transmitted it to anybody else.
But when they got news of that, they thought, aha, we've got a pathogen that knows the first trick, and we know how to teach it the second one, which is how to jump between people, right?
Gain a function.
So the point I'm trying to make is if you are interested in making human beings safer from pathogenic disease, the absolute worst thing you can do is give any pathogen that is not currently infecting people a route to start infecting people.
So the idea that you're going to grow the substances you need for your vaccine in the tissues of some creature that isn't a person opens the door to things moving into humans that would never have gotten there in the first place.
So it's insanity that you would do that.
You would need a mechanism that didn't require you to run that risk for this to be even something worth contemplating.
You were at the retreat, I think, when we had a very knowledgeable and important person at the stand.
And I asked a burning question that I've always had, which was, did they know that the vaccine wouldn't really be effective from the beginning?
And that it might even be dangerous.
And if you already knew that, why would you risk the sort of moral status or reputation of an entire industry by promising that you're going to use this shot to get out of the pandemic?
That actually you knew was not going to actually produce any public health benefit.
Why would you do this?
And the answer came to us, a very credible answer, that it was a test of a technology.
Do you remember that moment?
I sure do.
You know, this is Brownstone has many threads and many purposes, but keeping the proper most important questions of COVID alive so that we ultimately come to understand what happened to us and why seems to be central.
And I will say I'm still wrestling even with that answer, because although it very much does feel that this was a test, not just of a technology, but of an entire program of control, a program that was previewed in event 201 in 2019.
So, you know, I've asked myself and asked publicly if there's something special, if they needed us inoculated for some reason, because if they didn't, first of all, they could run a test on a much smaller population.
You didn't need to inoculate billions of people in order to test this.
That could be done at a much smaller scale.
Excellent point.
And if they had given us shots that were basically empty, maybe technically contained something, but not enough to matter, then given the sleight of hand they played with all of the data and the statistics, they could have pretended that it worked.
They could have declared that it had ended the pandemic.
The injuries that you and me and many others feared would emerge wouldn't have, and we would have looked like we had been worried for nothing.
So I think they would have won if they had used shots that just didn't have an effect and pretended that they had saved us.
And the fact that they didn't do that is still a head scratcher to me.
You know, you make an excellent point.
And I think all the research we have bears it out.
We had achieved very high levels of seroprevalence by the late fall of 2020 before the shot release.
And you've seen the studies of South Dakota were showing 50 and 60% seroprevalence before the vaccine was ever released.
So you're right.
If they had just come out with a saline shot or just nothing, everybody would have, we would have achieved endemicity regardless.
Already probably had.
Then you could have just said, look, see, we fixed it with the vaccine.
They didn't do that.
They didn't do that.
And it is the reason that so much of the public is awake.
And they're not fully awake.
They don't know what they're awake to.
But a lot of people know that something terrible happened.
A lot of people fear the shots that they themselves took.
And that was either about something, either injecting people had a purpose that we don't know, or it was the greatest own goal in history because they revealed how ready they were to lie to us,
that their quality control didn't exist, that they didn't think twice about it, that they would inject people who stood to gain nothing from this, people who had natural immunity, as you point to, people for whom the risk couldn't conceivably be justified, like pregnant women, young, healthy children.
And the fact is, the disease, as much as I think it's more dangerous than we now give it credit for, is certainly not deadly.
You know, the data shows that it killed very vulnerable people, people who were already either very old or very sick or both.
Ready to die from something, which was, you know, it pulled them forward a few weeks.
But if they had just let it run its course and run in front of the parade and pretended that they were leading it, then the fact is COVID would have ebbed and the evolution of the virus itself would have made it less dangerous, which maybe is what happened.
People who were vulnerable would be eliminated from the population, so the vulnerability of the population drops.
It looks like, you know, it looks like the vaccine campaign worked.
And in fact, there's this question across many vaccines.
Is the stuff that they're given credit for addressing was ebbing rapidly in the first place?
And, you know, is this just case after case of this industry running ahead of the parade and pretending to lead it?
The great promise of the mRNA platform was that it was going to finally win the race against mutations, which has been going on for 75 years.
You know, the 57-58 flu pandemic, they developed an inoculation, but only after the thing became endemic.
Losers.
Same thing happened in the 68-69 flu pandemic.
There was an inoculation.
By the time it came along, there wasn't a market for it.
This kept going.
So the great industrial challenge then was we've got to speed up the process.
We've got to get the shot out before natural immunity makes it irrelevant, right?
So and you can imagine there's a thinking here that, well, in the past, we were always late to the by the time we got shot out, the virus had mutated or zari endemic.
So it was a loser.
Well, if we can get the shot out really fast, then we can save a lot of lives.
Okay.
It makes sense.
And this was the time that they were going to deploy this great new technology, which is all about speed.
But they didn't quite make it, right?
They didn't make it out in time because there's logistical issues.
There's all sorts of things.
There were also political issues that delayed the release of the shot, right?
They didn't want it coming out under Trump.
Right.
Eric Topol, in fact, argued to delay it, revealing that he didn't care about human life either.
Pharma's Intellectual Property Game00:07:19
Yeah.
Fauci sent Moderna back to the trials because they didn't have enough diversity, racial diversity in their trial subjects.
So, yeah.
But the whole goal was to get ahead of the mutations, really, to outrun nature, essentially.
But they didn't, but that was the goal.
But they tried, and it was the fastest vaccine that we have on record, right?
From detection to inoculation, we reduced the time by, what, a year or two or something like that.
But it wasn't fast enough.
Like I say, in domesticity, it was probably here in November and December of 2020, which is a fact that is so mind-blowing to me when you think about it.
Oh, it's stunning, and it's hard not to be cynical about it.
Okay.
So it is in its own way impressive that we have radically sped up the timeline for creating vaccine injuries, but I'm not sure that's a good thing.
Frankly, I think a little slower would be better.
It's a really interesting point.
But, you know, Brett, to a larger point, and I hope you kind of get my theme here.
As an economist, I'm very interested in the question of product viability.
Like, what is an innovation that has its own energy?
You know, where it's a customer base, it's efficiently produced.
You've got manufacturers that can profit by making it.
People benefit from it enough so they're willing to trade their own property in exchange to get it, like hamburgers or air conditioning or anything else you can think of, right?
So, the question is: do vaccines qualify in the same way as any other consumer product?
I think by looking at the history, going back 225 years, the answer is apparently in question.
We don't actually know.
Because at every single stage of this, there's been some intervention that's sort of provided a subsidy, provided a mandate, provided some propaganda.
Here's your agency, here's your indemnifications, here's your wartime mandates, here's your fancy philosophy called utilitarianism.
It's just been so much apparatus thrown at this one thing for two and a quarter centuries.
You at some point have to ask the question: is this a really viable product in a normal society with a producer-consumer relationship?
And I don't have the answer to that, but I would like to find out the answer.
One possible answer is that there has been an ongoing revolt for more than two centuries that keeps being stamped down.
Like one of the things that's interesting, you think about 19th century media, not very big, not a lot of newspapers.
There certainly wasn't an internet or even cable news shows.
But when the news papers of several cities would simultaneously get wind of a tremendous amount of vaccine deaths, they would run it on front page.
And then the public would panic.
And then the industry had a problem.
All right, what are we going to do now?
So that's when they go to government.
Various things happen.
Or in the case of 1822, Congress just said, just stop this nonsense.
This has got to stop.
But so every time there's public interest, the industry gets set back.
They panic.
They regroup.
They find a new strategy, a new philosophical justification.
They buy out some more doctors, some more journalists.
So here's how this, here's how this.
This has been going on for all this time.
So what I'm wondering is if maybe this time they went too far.
I think they did.
And I think it's clear.
And we have to consolidate our gains in revealing what they did.
But a couple points along the way.
One, I'm convinced by your article that once again, what we have discovered is that pharma is vastly more sophisticated than we understand in its ability to pull one over on us because it is the product of a long-running arms race that we only just started paying attention to.
So the selective environment in the arms race has turned it into a ferociously capable bender of reality when we've only just woken up to the fact that reality is being bent.
So we're playing catch up with a very sophisticated creature that is very well armed.
A long institutional knowledge there on how to get along.
Long institutional knowledge.
So I've given a couple presentations at Brownstone and I've talked about it on Dark Horse about what I call the game of pharma, right?
What I learned dragged into thinking about pharma in a way that I never had before during COVID is that we saw a game play out in which treatments for COVID that were good were portrayed as bad and dangerous.
Treatments that weren't any good were portrayed as effective and safe.
And effectively, underneath pharma, pharma is, I would argue, an intellectual property racket.
The game is you own a piece of intellectual property that has some plausible connection to health.
It doesn't have to be true.
It just has to be plausible.
And once you have that thing, now what you need to do is it's patented and you need to create some research that makes it look promising.
You need some research that makes it look like it out-competes what we've already got.
You need to make it look safe enough.
And then at the higher levels of the game, you need to get it declared the standard of care so that doctors are afraid not to prescribe it and afraid to prescribe anything else.
If you're really on your game, you get it mandated.
You get it paid for by the government, et cetera.
So the point is, it's levels of the game.
And we all caught up to this during COVID.
But the point is, no, this is 24-7, 365 pharma on every one of these things.
They're playing these games.
And no kidding, they're better than us.
We're like novice tennis players who just walked out into the court with pros.
Well, you can imagine what farmers' reaction is to something like RFK showing up at HHS or Jay Botatrash on HHS.
We are going to end the corrupt capture of this agency by industry.
Oh, really?
Are you going to do that?
You think you're going to do that?
Yeah, this could be a fun little game we can play, right?
But that's just going.
I mean, the hope is brilliant and it's dreamy.
And I want it to happen.
But I mean, would these agencies even exist apart from industry capture?
Regulating Meatpacking: A Misguided Solution00:16:05
That's what's not clear.
It's so baked into the institution of the agencies, of the journals, of the science, of the media, of so many institutions in this country.
It's just politics.
I mean, Trump is trying to get some sensible reforms through, but he can't even convince Republicans of them because they're all in the pay of the industry.
They're all bought.
Well, there's a great line.
Maybe you can resurrect it.
There's a great line in your piece about the near impossibility of distinguishing between regulation and regulators on the one hand and some kind of cryptic competition where you point out that the meatpacking reforms loom in the public mind as this great moment where industry was,
you know, brought to heel.
But in fact, it was industry.
It was big industry stamping out their little competitors by using the government to make it impossible for them to survive.
It's a classic.
So that was 1906, and everybody kind of knows about this.
They don't have the story, right?
But the theory was the meat packers were poisoning everybody.
So the government said, oh, stop doing that.
And showed up and cracked down.
And therefore, we had safe meat from then on.
The actual history then, I didn't even mention this, but meat got less safe after it started being regulated because they started, because the government was typically using a shoddy, much less strict method of testing safety of meat than the industry had been previously using because they didn't like having to test all the meat for safety.
The government, they worked with government to lessen the cost of testing.
So they had government agencies.
This is their true history.
They used what they called the poke and sniff method of finding rancid meat.
They come in with a pole and go carcass by carcass like that.
Pull it out, sniff it, pull it up, sniff it.
This went on for decades.
Pull it out, sniff it.
What's that going to do?
It's going to spread it.
It's going to spread it, which is exactly what happened to the meat.
Meat was less safe after than before.
It's an unbelievable story.
But my point is, and I think this might have been, well, for me, this was a new discovery.
This very same dynamic had happened four years earlier with the vaccine industry, with the Biologics Control Act of 1902.
And you know, Brett, it's a very interesting thing because I suspected this, but it took me several days of reading and research to be able to prove it.
Like, I just knew the industry was involved here.
If you know anything about the progressive era and what was going on and how government works, at this point, I've got a very sort of dark worldview, you know.
I thought, you know, I bet this is actually an industry racket.
And it took me about three days, but I finally found it.
And I put all the evidence in my article.
This is an entire industry scam.
But the great thing about doing this research is it enabled me to go through all the pharmaceutical journals of 1901 and 1902.
Wow.
Reading this crap that they're saying.
What I'm telling you, Brett, I think I mentioned this to you already.
There's, I quote this in the article, very common belief in the vaccine pharmaceutical industry at the time that vaccines would grant, would end the problem, the real problem of human beings, the real flaw of biology, which is mortality.
And, you know, one of the top guys in there, I quote him in the article, he says, you know, if we can get the, if we can get the vaccines right and mix these substances the right, we, there's no reason why we shouldn't have, no reason why anybody should ever die.
Yeah, I mean, let's give it its credit.
That's a hypothesis.
It's not likely, but it's, I mean, in 2026, it's so obviously wrong.
But at the time, it is a valid hypothesis to imagine that maybe all the degradation of the body is the result of pathogenic infections that we don't know.
And so if we can focus on these things and knock them down one by one, voila, sure.
But it is just a wild hypothesis and obviously not correct.
But the idea that they work themselves into a lather selling this stuff.
And then, I mean, if I can go back and just retell a piece of your story here with an evolutionary lens.
The problem, as I argue everywhere, is that we people with incomplete expertise, which is to say all of us, have a strong tendency to not distinguish between things that are highly complicated, which we don't understand, and things that are truly complex, which we don't understand.
And we don't realize that those two things are very, very different.
And, you know, your computer is completely understood, if not by one person, by a collection of people.
There's nothing unaccounted for going on in there.
It's complicated.
It's not complex.
A complex system like the human body, which is actually many complex systems layered in on each other, and then civilization is more complex systems, economic, social, and otherwise.
But the point is anytime you cross the boundary from complex, from complicated to complex, you have entered a realm which is fundamentally unpredictable.
And so that haunts the story that you're telling in so many places, because on the one hand, excellent point.
You're injecting something into a human complex system.
You do not know what it's going to do.
If you're lucky, you'll get the thing that you were trying to do right.
But all of the other things it will do, you're going to have to discover in the aftermath of having done it.
And if you blind yourself, you won't discover them.
But at the same time, this weirdly, look, I'm a born, I was born into a liberal family.
I still have strong liberal sympathies.
But the liberal wants to prevent any harm.
And the idea that we might release a product and then discover its harm is anathema.
I still feel like it's a terrible idea.
So I don't want to wait for lawsuits by harmed people to solve a problem in the market.
But what you're describing is a system in which that mechanism has been removed.
It becomes impossible to settle these questions in the court.
So the manufacturers don't live in fear of being ruined if they hurt people.
I want them to live with that fear because it's the thing that keeps me safe, most safe of all.
And so, you know, at the economic level, we've disrupted a complex system with strange interventions that break the magic that makes it work.
At the physiological level, we're intervening in these complex systems in ways that are guaranteed to cause unintended consequences, which we then pretend we don't see.
It's like, how many different layers of the story are we going to make that same error?
You know, and you think about that 1986 indemnification.
A century earlier, vaccines had already received a philosophical indemnification in the form of the utilitarian calculus.
You have to break some eggs to make an omelette, right?
So yes, some people will be harmed, but the overall good will be there.
And we can figure out this through mathematics or whatever.
That's a strange thing because that same philosophical justification was never there for like why we should have clean water, okay?
But you didn't need that fancy, fancy pants rationale.
You know, it's like, well, this is going to be a benefit.
And so it is with like practically everything else.
But vaccines uniquely require this philosophical indemnification that happened sometime in the 1780s, 1790s.
And then in 1904, we got the ultimate thing.
We got a Supreme Court decision that said, you got to take it, even if you don't want to.
That was Jacobson.
A decision worth reading over because it is entirely sort of codified into law this utilitarian calculation.
You know, you've got to take one for the team.
That's interesting.
I think you're the funny thing is, so during COVID, public health staged a coup against medicine.
Doctors were not allowed to treat their patients based on what they saw, based on their best guess at what was causing it.
They weren't allowed to pool their insights and discover what a protocol was that might properly treat a patient.
They were told from above, here's what you do for COVID, and you better, right?
If you don't, you're going to lose your career.
So that coup of public health against medicine means that we have jumped from treating an individual, which is something we can do, to imagining a population-level solution, which, you know, obviously if it's clean water, that we can do, but not when we're talking about intervening in their individual physiologies.
That's a whole different ballgame.
But what I'm getting anew here is I've been railing against utilitarianism because although in general you probably do want whatever does the greatest good for the greatest number, at the most important best possible outcomes for the most possible people, of course.
Right.
But utilitarianism can be used to justify absolutely anything, including slavery, genocide, concentration camps, you name it.
You can come up with a utilitarian reason for doing that and it doesn't make it acceptable.
So I guess the point, what I'm seeing newly here is public health and utilitarianism have a direct connection, which is they're both population level.
Individual utilitarianism doesn't make sense because it's the greatest good for the greatest number.
It's already a population.
It's baked into utilitarianism.
So, you know, the utilitarians have taken over civilization.
They literally shut it down.
It's an amazing fact.
That is an amazing fact.
And so now we have the perfect demonstration of what's in practice extremely dangerous about this.
Your point about the disregard for the doctors, I think, is extraordinary, right?
So the people who actually have experience dealing with respiratory disease, who have vast knowledge on what kind of therapeutics are perfect for a coronavirus, were shut down in favor of the theoreticians on behalf of this new industry.
Shut down and denied the right to treat their patients.
I mean, that is an incredible thing.
And I guess your point is that the justification for that was like, it doesn't matter what happens to your individual patients.
Like, yeah, I know you've got somebody who wants some ivermectin.
That hardly matters.
We're dealing with a much bigger issue here.
We're saving the world, right?
Yeah, it's preposterous on its face.
And, you know, you mentioned ivermectin, which the public still does not understand what was done to it over this drug.
But the problem with ivermectin is that, so if I can just juxtapose a couple of things.
Hydroxychloroquine was taken off the map with a diabolical study in which people were wildly overdosed with hydroxychloroquine and people died.
So it was made to look dangerous when it wasn't.
You can't do that with ivermectin because it's not toxic enough.
It's like literally almost impossible to give somebody enough to kill them.
So they did other things.
They ran studies in which they wildly underdosed.
They treated very late.
They had cryptic caps in the protocols that caused fat people who were the most vulnerable to COVID to be underdosed relative to the rest of the population in the study.
Every trick in the book was played to make ivermectin look useless.
But the real question is, why would they bother?
If it's really useless, what's the harm in letting people try it?
And I'm afraid that the answer to that question has to be something like the following.
If you allow people to use ivermectin, they will discover how effective it is against COVID.
Why?
Because like hydroxychloroquine, it is actually generally useful over RNA viruses.
It's not like it was briefly hopeful.
It would be weird if it didn't work for COVID because it works on all the other RNA viruses.
So if they let people experiment with ivermectin, doctors will quickly discover how useful it is.
At the point you introduce the vaccine, nobody will want it because there's a safe alternative.
And why would I take something that turns out to be a gene therapy if there's an off-the-shelf drug that does it and it costs nothing?
Brett, I'm pretty sure that this, I think what you just said makes perfect sense.
The idea is you have to keep the population panicked and focused on the single solution to everything, right?
I am pretty sure that this explains a lot of things.
I think it explains the panic over the Great Brampton Declaration.
If you think about that, I couldn't understand why everybody was against it because you look at it.
It looks like just a very plain statement about public health, right?
But it had these phrase in there that drove Fauci and everybody crazy, which was, we can get through this with national immunity, right?
Through exposure and recovery.
So that document comes out like three weeks before the shot rollout.
And that was the reason that they had to stop that.
They had to eliminate every possible other avenue apart from injection as a possible solution.
I mean, vitamin D, forget it.
Good sunlight, you know?
How about if I hang around with my friends and oh, you don't want to do that?
Yeah, no, they literally sent you home, which was the most likely place to get it.
Yeah.
But I take something slightly different.
So just in case it's not clear to people, you and Brownstone are at the core of the Great Barrington Declaration, right?
You were there at the inception.
Is that fair?
Yeah, that's correct, yes.
Okay.
So here's what I take.
The issue with ivermectin was about keeping people panicked, denying them a remedy.
The issue about lockdowns, which is what the Great Barrington Declaration challenged, wasn't necessarily about panic.
It was about motivation, keeping people locked down so they couldn't live a life and then saying, actually, there's a solution to this.
Virus Pandemic Rhetoric00:08:50
It's in the form of a vaccine.
And then I want to add one other piece to the puzzle, which, you know, as COVID was happening, this was also happening to Heather and me.
And so we watched it very carefully.
The BLM riots, the George Floyd-inspired riots, the weirdest thing happened in the midst of telling everybody you couldn't possibly have an excuse good enough to be allowed out into the world unless you're a so-called essential worker and even then only for your essential work.
And then BLM happened.
And instead of cracking down on the protesters and saying, no, you can't do that, too dangerous.
There's a virus about, they decided to give some weird rationalization where they said, actually, the real pandemic is racism or something.
And it was like total non-sequitur.
So here's my conjecture.
They let the BLM riots happen when they were locking everybody else down because if they had told those people to stay home, it wouldn't have worked.
That they were actually afraid of the BLM protesters revealing to us that this lockdown was paper thin.
And if we just don't abide by it, it's gone.
Yeah, what would you call this like the safety valve theory of BLM?
You know, that they knew that the public was, they couldn't keep this up for a much longer time.
Yeah, the pressure release.
Pressure release, yeah.
Yeah.
They got a gas can you have to have a thing or something like that.
Yeah.
And I do recall that people were going out of their minds by the time those riots came along.
Lockdown just could not keep going.
Like every day, just like every other day, it was just like Camus describes in his book, The Plague.
You know, it's like time just went in a sort of circular fashion.
You wake up in the morning, not even sure why you woke up.
What are you here to do?
I guess I have to scroll the internet.
You get tired.
So five o'clock comes, you hit the bottle, you know, you pass out early, you binge old movies, you wake up the next day.
What's that?
This went on for months, right?
Crazy.
So they had to do something.
Something had to give.
Somebody had to do something.
So, yeah, it's a very interesting theory that you've got sort of ruling classes that say, look, people are pretty upset.
So let's just pretend to sort of encourage this.
And I remember the newspapers were saying things like mask, well-masked protests.
You know, so this is why they're not.
Do you remember that?
They said they're not spreading COVID because they're wearing masks.
Well, some of them were, but it's so crazy.
Like, you can't even believe it.
Every day just seemed like, I couldn't believe this was happening.
But if you ride a motorcycle in South Dakota at the whatever, that little festival thing that you're spreading COVID and you hate.
You're killing grandmas along the entire route that you're riding.
But if you're protesting Atlanta, Georgia, out in the streets with a mob of people, that's just not, you're killing the real virus, which is racism, but you're staying safe because you're wearing a mask.
You're wearing a mask.
Well, I mean, you know, this was before you and I knew each other, but Heather and I were trying to unpack the raw information, not peer-reviewed because there wasn't time.
So there were all of these papers on the preprint servers, and, you know, the quality was rough because it was just whatever people thought they wanted to publish.
However, it had not been filtered by peer review for allowability.
So there was lots of information in it.
And we became very focused on the idea that this virus actually showed no capacity to spread outdoors.
And that's A, pretty odd because, you know, bats live outdoors.
And somehow this virus, you know, it kind of suggested that maybe their gain of function experiment, which was definitely not done outdoors, had created an artificial condition for the spread of the virus, which was that it had to be indoors.
So I still don't know if that's true, but I think it's a valid hypothesis.
But in any case, if, you know, we have a saying here in the Pacific Northwest: there is no bad weather, only inappropriate equipment.
And so the point was, if you could figure out how to live your life outdoors, you could do it perfectly safely.
You go fall in love.
You just got to, you know, figure out how to do it outdoors, gather with whoever you want, go to the beach at the same time that they were telling us, oh, the beach is closed.
The hiking trails are closed.
And it's like, well, this is the exact, if you're trying to protect a population from a virus that spreads indoors and you're afraid that they're psychologically fragile because of the fear of the virus, because of the disruption to their lives, encourage them to go outdoors is what you should be doing.
And so we were shouting at the top of our lungs, like, what is this policy?
Why would you close a beach?
Well, let me ask you this, Brent.
Do you remember that there was an indiscernible moment where the prevailing wisdom was that there's always this pretense of knowledge with this thing?
Like they knew where the COVID was, right?
I mean, this is always, you know, we know where COVID is.
We don't know that well, but we have an intuition.
There was a perception that the virus is outdoors, so everybody should go indoors.
But at some uncertain moment, and I'm not sure when that was, there was a decision made that the virus is indoors, so we should all go outdoors.
Well, am I describing this more or less correct?
You know, I will never know the answer to this question, but Heather and I were, I think we were certainly at the beginning.
And for a long time, we were singular in pointing out how strange it was that we were not focusing on this fact and the connected fact that the environment you were in could be rendered much safer, even an indoor environment, if you understood that you were trying to change the effective volume of the space, right?
So a room has a volume.
If you open the window, the volume goes way up.
And the point is, if you get to the infinite volume room that is the outdoors, the transmission goes to zero.
So you should always be focused.
If you have to get into an Uber during COVID, roll down the windows.
I don't care that it's January, roll down the windows, right?
So this was a thread for us.
And I think it caught on and it got so embarrassing that they were telling us, don't go to the beach, don't go hiking.
And we're sitting there saying, there is nothing better you could do.
Any minute you're hiking is a minute you're safer than any indoor place you would be.
Why are you telling them this?
So I think the point is this is one in which we forced the change because what they were saying was too ridiculous and it could just be said out loud.
Why are you telling me not to go to the beach?
That's where you should want me.
So what you're telling me is that it's your fault all New York restaurants had to build outdoor version of their indoors in order to open up.
I don't know.
I'm sure some of this was not my fault, but I guess I'll take the hit on that.
It's the strangest thing.
I'm sure I've told you this story, but I was at a train station once, waiting to board a train or something, and there was a place open.
And I said, well, I'll have a glass of wine.
And this plexiglass, masked lady, whatever, in a plastic cup, she shows a plastic cup.
And she said, drink it outdoors.
But it was freezing cold.
And right there was an entirely empty room that they would usually use for dining and sipping.
I said, why?
How about I just go in there?
And she said, I can't let you do that because of COVID.
And I said, do you think COVID is in there?
And she said, yes.
Not-So-Well-Written Ghost Story00:04:04
Well, it's funny.
It is.
It is like some kind of a not very well-written ghost story.
I mean, you know.
Well, it's good we can laugh about it.
Oh, my Lord, what tragedy.
I mean, what else are you going to do, really?
Yeah.
But, you know, I think your large point here is I think it's very beneficial for us.
That's part of what we're doing, Brown.
So we're using what happened over these traumatic three, four, five years as a prism to understand the world in a more precise, truthful way, you know, because it just told us so much about so many things that we didn't know before.
agencies, medical journals, the cowardice of academia, the fragility of freedom.
So many lessons that we learned or that we're still learning.
No, it I sometimes say certain stories diagnose the system.
And this story is the best chance we are likely to get in our lifetimes to understand the system that we live in because it took over everything.
And it's not a pretty picture, but the worst part, and I give you tremendous credit for keeping this alive, is the urge.
Everybody is so embarrassed about what they got wrong or what they allowed to happen that everybody wants to move on.
And it's one thing to move on from the particular virus.
It's another thing to try to move on from the lessons about everything from bioweapons to academic rot to regulatory capture to the subservient press delivering dangerous propaganda.
All of it is captured in this story.
And frankly, I don't want to let anybody off the hook until they remember what role they played.
As soon as they do that, I'm absolutely ready to welcome them back.
But the point is that I would like a little bit of honesty about that.
And I think we have, I've tried to be as honest about things I was wrong about.
Like I thought testing was essential.
And in the early days, it's like, yeah, we're at the test.
Get us our test.
I think I was just wrong about that.
And I was wrong to believe our world and data, that it had a perfect real-time accounting of who's getting infected, at what level.
So I believed all that stuff.
So I try to admit that, but I think we all should.
But you know, there's other things that keep lingering that upset me.
And I truly try to move on.
I don't want to get stuck here.
But I was looking at beef prices yesterday.
And I'm looking at hamburger for $7 a pound.
I remember just a few years ago was $4 a pound.
And I went back and looked at industry data on what happened to groceries in general since 2019.
They are up 41%.
The reason, you know, the reason for that was that the Federal Reserve created $6.5 trillion to fund the stimulus payments that Congress voted for because everybody had to be paid to stay home and be lazy for a few years.
So everything's connected.
And it was this amazing wealth transfer.
There's another thing that overwhelms me.
It's the role of class.
Americans don't like to talk about class, but the role of class in the construction of policy.
I mean, for several years, we lived in a world designed and constructed by on behalf of the ruling class, the laptop class, and at the expense of everybody else.
World Designed by the Ruling Class00:03:37
I never imagined a time in my life when I would see, you know, this sort of the world according to Marx, you know, just put a full display for us.
Well, you mentioned the massive transfer of wealth, and I wanted to connect it back to what you were saying earlier about industry creating regulators to do away with their the little guy competition, right?
Create regulations that the little guy can't endure.
We saw a different version of that with the lockdowns that effectively, you know, they kept Walmart open, but they clobbered the mom and pop shop down the street.
And was that the plan?
I tend to think it was probably somebody's plan.
It had to be.
Let me just give you one other example of that, which takes just a little bit of thought to realize it.
Do you remember the reopening plans?
They would say, okay, business can open, but everybody has to be at half capacity, right?
So you can only let half the normal number of customers in that you normally would.
Okay.
All right.
I live a little bit block away from a bakery that has about eight chairs in it.
Okay.
They can only have four customers.
On the other hand, if you're the Olive Garden down at the suburban mall, you've got a capacity for a thousand.
Now you can let 500 people in.
So these capacity restrictions were designed as a, well, I don't know if they were intended to be, but they became a massive industrial subsidy.
Even during the reopening period, big business massively benefited from these capacity restrictions at the expense of small business.
Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense.
And totally, there's a way in which it felt, you know, there's always a question about how much of this was intentional and how much of it was happenstance.
But if you imagine that Event 201 tells us that they knew this was coming, they had their plans, they were already, they weren't scrambling the way they told us they were.
They already had procedures that they were ready to deploy.
They needed to bring in people from media and whatever to do their particular role.
The question is, how much did just simply how much of the game was, okay, we're going to turn civilization into a game of Simon says.
And the point is there are certain authorities who are in a position to grant you rights and they can take away your rights.
And if you don't listen to these people, you're a grandma killer.
That's the penalty.
So if, you know, and many things worked like this, like the vaccine requirements in the military caused everybody to submit and those few who wouldn't submit were driven out, leaving a force that's much more compliant, the kind of force that is much more likely to act on immoral orders.
Was that intentional?
Was somebody planning to deliver immoral orders and they needed to go through a purge of people who would stand up and say no?
Hammer Dance Accountability00:15:21
Along the same lines, academia purged of all the true dissidents, like the people who didn't want to get shot, wouldn't get shot among faculty, among administrators, and among students.
Yeah.
You're not welcome here if you're not compliant.
Which was insane for young people who stood to gain very little from the shot, even if it had worked, because they just weren't vulnerable to COVID in this way.
So, you know, let's put it this way.
It is unfortunate that when I put on my how much of this was about compliance rather than health, that it fits very well, that across elements of civilization, somebody was given the power to tell you that what to do.
They trained us not to be free people.
And there's so many industrial conspiracies here overlapping not just pharma, but big tech, you know, the stimulus payments.
Everybody's spending their money on laptops and gaming platforms and everything.
But do you remember very early on?
I'm going to, I'm going to say like the first week of March, like, or maybe just after that, just about the time, this is 2020, when we realized we were going to descend into total madness.
The top most performing article translated into many languages called, do you remember this?
The hammer and the dance.
The hammer and the dance.
Yeah.
So it was a heavy statistical article with all sorts of models in it.
The hammer is the crackdown.
It's the closures.
It's the lockdowns.
And the dance is that, you know, we're going to crack down the virus, flatten the curve, and then we're going to be happy as a result.
All right.
The author of that article is a guy named Thomas Puello.
This thing received millions of views back when nobody could understand why this is happening.
Here's a guy saying, it's the hammer in the dance.
This article just went hundreds of millions of views, translated to every language.
Thomas Wellow is the CEO of an online learning platform.
So let me understand what this guy was putting out a hypothesis that we were being led to engage in a dance.
But the real story is the hammer?
Is that the...
Well, you said the hammer is the lockdown.
The dance is getting rid of the threat of the disease.
But we're going to need the lockdowns to get over the threat.
Oh, I see.
This is an argument.
Yeah, this is for the mainstream, and nobody could understand it.
And this Puello guy with lots of data and grass and fancy language said, look, it's just the hammer in the dance.
But, and the way these algorithms work, there's a reason this article went viral, but this guy had never written about any subjects of infectious disease in his life.
He doesn't know anything about infectious disease.
He's a businessman who runs an online learning platform that he hoped to be used during lockdowns.
So he becomes the author of this article that shapes the entire public narrative around what is about to happen at a time when nobody could understand.
So you see my point.
I mean, like he was probably tasked with this by somebody, but he was glad to take on the job because he had an online learning platform that he hoped would make bank very soon because of school closures.
And he was probably right.
Yeah, he was right because I looked at the data as companies company made billions of dollars.
I draw a distinction between people who are actually working for those who are colluding and those who are freelancing.
So if you are an amoral person, let's say you're a journalist and Anthony Fauci is consolidating power and deploying a control architecture over civilization.
If you try to figure out what's in Anthony Fauci's head, what would he like said?
And then you say it, and then you get wealthier because it catches on unnaturally, because it starts getting amped by the people who are in on whatever it is.
You're not actually working for somebody.
You don't, you've never met them.
You don't know for sure that they are the reason that you're succeeding.
But the point is there's a hunt, a cryptic hunt for noises that if I make them, my life gets better.
And I bet there's a lot of power over there.
They're refiguring civilization.
I'm going to start saying the things that they want said.
We'll see what happens.
So this could be a case in which a guy with a platform that stood to make a lot during a lockdown, either he was deluded himself or he's cynical.
But the point is, not surprising that he would find himself saying things that just so happened to make his business more valuable.
And it wouldn't be surprising if the power structure decided to reward him so that he would do more of the same.
That's true.
Well, you've heard Thomas Harrington talk about this a lot, but he says, he says a lot of academic training and training in general for professional life, you know, to be to be an aspiring professional is learning what to believe at the right times, what to say at the right times, learning how to extract the right information, an agenda from what's around you.
That's a skill.
You learn that.
That's how academia socializes you.
You learn a language, but mostly you learn an instinct.
You get really good at finding out what you're supposed to say when.
All right.
I want to pick up on that theme.
Let's imagine that that's a general architecture for all environments, but that what the environment, what you're supposed to say in an environment is a very different thing.
So during COVID, out in the social media world, there were very definitely things you were supposed to say and things you were not supposed to say.
And if you said the things you weren't supposed to say, you got thrown off, you got demonetized, all the bad stuff happened to you.
And if you said the things you were supposed to say, well, you were celebrated, elevated, all those things.
But if we take Brownstone or the graduate lab that I was in many years ago, well, what are you supposed to say?
Actually, you're supposed to say the thing that causes an upgrade in the model of the room, right?
In a proper scientific environment, what you're supposed to say is the thing that others aren't seeing that causes the puzzle to be more tractable than you realized, right?
That's a good way to put it.
I'm going to have you introduce our retreats from now on and say that very thing because that's exactly what I've been going for.
That's what I was going to say is that is the ethos of the room, right?
You are rewarded for upgrading the conversation.
And so I think the point is it's exactly the sort of friendly, competitive environment that you would want where everybody is looking for what they can add that causes the conversation to get smarter.
And it's like, well, what more could you want?
That is what you want.
Yeah, it doesn't always work.
And sometimes, you know, we'll have presentations that didn't quite achieve that.
And then there's a sense of, well, we'll be friends again during cocktail hour.
But, you know.
Yes.
Yeah.
Right.
But it's, you know, it's a culture is the thing.
And so Brownstone culture is kind of a standing wave.
The people in the room aren't always the same people, but there is a thing that carries through one to the next where the idea is this is where we don't bludgeon each other.
We do try to upgrade each other's model.
We try to give proper credit where it's due and all of those things.
We admit our mistakes, which is so crucial.
It's painful, but it's way better than maintaining your mistakes.
You know, a lot of this, Brett, I meant to say this earlier.
I might as well just interrupt you and say this now.
A lot of this comes out of what I imagine was true in interwar Vienna, say 1930, 31, 32, 30, 31, 32.
We had these circles and they would meet in salons all the time.
So you had the positivist circle, and then you had the legal circle.
But they would trade amongst each other so that you would have deductivists sitting around next to positivists, you know, in casual serious conversation, but disagreeing profoundly, but maintaining personal friendships and learning from each other.
And this was true across all disciplines.
This is the culture that created the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century.
So I developed in my mind a model of how this works with my limited understanding of the empirical reality of what was going on in those coffee houses and clubs and restaurants and academic circles of those times.
And I missed, I'm just, yeah, I've always believed in that.
And maybe it's a fantasy.
Maybe, you know, some of it's certainly reality, but it is an ideal that I've always wanted to experience for my own selfishly.
I want to be there, right?
That thing.
Well, I will, from my perspective as a biologist who is fascinated by the very special animal that humans are,
the key features that make humans truly unique are our ability to plug our minds into each other in an almost literal fashion, that the ability to take an abstract idea and pass it off more or less faithfully from one mind to another, parallel process it, pressure test it, hand it back and forth, is a kind of superpower.
And so those great minds that you're talking about are simultaneously what we understand them to be.
And also they are a central node in a network that is highly vibrant.
It's very rare that one of these people is truly independent.
And that's not to take anything away from them, but it is to say that the quality of the immediate social environment is a catalyst for the highest quality thought.
My advisor used to say that great evolutionary biologists rise in threes.
It was just a pattern that he had noticed, that they pushed each other around in a way that they exceeded what they would have done if they had worked alone.
And so in any case, we are breaking that dynamic.
We are causing people either to be in an echo chamber, which does not cause that benefit, or isolating them, which does not cause that benefit.
And if the purpose was really for civilization to get smarter, because we all end up, I hate using the term wealth, but loosely, we all end up wealthier the better civilization runs and the smarter it is.
It's just such a crime that we are sabotaging that basic human superpower over nothing.
Let me ask you a question as an evolutionary biologist.
What is the point of being together physically?
I sense that it's really important, but I'm not sure I know why.
I've been wrestling with this too.
I think one of the things that you are clearly doing is following an intuition that meeting in person is just, it's non-negotiable.
And I know that you don't exactly know why that's your intuition, but it's your strong intuition.
And I agree with you about it.
Let's just notice a couple things in the adjacent territory.
One, there is a tendency to moderate your own behavior in person.
I take it to be the result of the fact that it's dangerous not to.
So we see online people saying the most vile things to each other.
And it's like you wouldn't say that if we were in the room together.
For one thing, you'd detect my humanity better.
And for another thing, you'd be afraid I'd hit you.
There's accountability for what you say.
There's a feedback.
And so the point is the room will maintain it.
People will detect that something in that corner is getting loud and tense.
So anyway, the benefit of us moderating, I think of us feeling that we are linked together, that our fates are linked together.
The fact that we have extra cues that we can detect.
And this is going to sound far afield, but there's this result that says that talking on a cell phone while driving is as dangerous as being drunk.
But talking to the person next to you in the car isn't.
It doesn't have a negative impact.
Why?
Well, in part, because you're responsive to the same physical environment.
So the point is you're in the same space.
Whereas if I'm talking to you on the phone, my mind is partly in the room you're in.
I'm imagining where you are and how you're seeing it.
So there's something about just pooling minds that are really, this is why Heather and I use the metaphor of campfire, that human beings gather around the campfire when they can't be productive out in the bush or farming or whatever they would do.
And they use their amazing minds and tap into each other, but it's a physical place.
And in fact, you're looking at each other around a circle at a campfire.
So I think I didn't answer your question, but there was lots of things.
No, I think you did.
I think you did.
I think that's really interesting.
And a sense that that's true.
The accountability aspect of things is interesting because when you're surrounded, it can be an intimidating, it's wonderful, but it can be a little scary and stand in front of 30 other really intelligent people and be physically there for them.
You listen to yourself through their ears a little more carefully than you would if you were just talking on a Zoom call or something like that.
I mean, people strive to make more sense to themselves so that other people can understand them better because you don't want to be negatively judged.
Electric Moments in Symphony00:04:51
And as you say, you want to reward people with insight.
That's the driving thing.
That's what you really want to do.
You want to cook up a glorious little dish of ideas that everybody's going to enjoy eating right then, right?
So that's very exciting.
And if you don't do that, you feel this.
And so everybody's watching the cook, but you're watching yourselves in that physical space in which that doesn't happen.
Nothing like that happens in the digital world.
Yeah, I agree.
It's not really possible.
And actually, there's an analogous situation that I think would tell us something about this.
There are live performances of certain, I'm thinking of popular music, popular music of the modern era or 20 years ago, where the band not only nailed it, but they nailed it in a way in which the feedback from the audience was palpable to them.
And so the point is it was an electric moment.
It happened once.
It was captured.
But we can still hear that it happened.
And the point is, it wasn't just that there was a band and these people happened to be lucky enough to be in the room.
It's that the feedback, the band is detecting what the audience is hearing and they're feeding it and vice versa.
And I think the point is, I don't know what that is.
I don't know how it works exactly, but that it exists.
If you've ever experienced it where you're resonating with a room, you know, for you and me, it might be at the podium, but it's a real thing and it's very powerful.
Let me just tell you very quickly, Brett, something that I find.
So Mahler composed nine symphonies and he was afraid to compose the Ninth Symphony because he was certain he would die, just like Beethoven did, right?
But he went ahead anyway.
But as the ending of the last move in the Ninth Symphony, he basically put the sound of the end of time as part of the music.
So it's dramatic.
It's brilliant.
It's maybe his best symphony, but the ending lasts like maybe 15 minutes of increasingly smaller sounds and less movement to the point that you can't really tell the difference between the music and the silence.
And at some point, it just stops.
And by tradition, the conductor, it's probably been going on for 100 years, the conductor just holds the baton.
And the violinist.
So everybody's frozen in place for a surprisingly long time.
Okay.
So I knew this.
I knew this legend.
And you can watch it on YouTube.
It's like, oh, that's great.
You listen to it.
But to be at the New York Philharmonic and be in the presence of whatever that is, 1,500, 2,000 people, and a live presentation, like, I can't describe it to you.
It was one of the most exciting moments of my life to be sitting in this mob of people in the stillness of death in the presence of what seemed like eternity all together.
Yeah, I get it just from your description.
I can imagine a room full of people that are like hanging on the tip of the conductor's movement.
I mean, and, you know, and the fact that it seems to allude to like the heat, not just death, but the heat death of the universe, you know?
It's amazing.
They say you got to be there.
You got to be there.
Well, but, you know, and it also is like a transcendent insight that Mahler was apparently recognizing that although you go to the symphony and you watch, you know, some sort of awkward devices being wielded by people sitting in awkward chairs in an awkward half circle, you know, with a guy with his back to you, it's all very, you know, the point is the music.
It's not the visual of it, but the idea that actually, no, there is something in the visual you could do that would stun the entire room simultaneously.
They would be of one mind, all transported to the same place that they'd never been before and in perfect silence.
It's like, oh my God, that's genius.
The silence is the most magical music.
I think maybe that's the message.
Rationalism's Fragility00:14:58
I don't know.
But anyway, that experience was it's, Brett, to be there, you don't want to breathe.
Like you only breathe if you just have to.
Right.
The mob would turn on the guy who coughed.
Yeah.
All right.
Maybe one last thing before we go.
Okay.
One of the patterns that I think all of us who were in the wilderness as dissidents of some kind.
Yeah.
Many of whom you've gathered together at Brownstone.
One of the things that we've observed is that we were embedded in communities that wildly disappointed us.
And I will say it's not the first time I've been there.
That was not my first rodeo.
In fact, 2017 at Evergreen, where a mob came after me for a false accusation of racism, and my faculty colleagues almost to a person were silent.
It's like, oh, I've been in this community of people, and I needed to know this about them from the get-go.
It's not safe to feel that you've got a community that will literally say nothing when you're falsely accused of something.
So anyway, the question I wanted to ask you is you've spoken about communities that you were part of gathered around ideologies or economic beliefs or whatever.
And, you know, certainly the medical establishment as a whole seemed to have failed spectacularly under the pressure test of COVID.
And the ecclesiastical establishment.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine this.
The Vatican had vaccine passports.
Like, how can you even is that, I mean, if you read the Bible, Jesus had this thing where he would just like hang out with the lepers all the time, right?
He would cure the sick and heal the sick.
I think that was part of his mission, right?
It's part of his ministry.
And the Vatican closed to the unvaccinated during high holy days for like a year?
Yeah, that is the great, that's the greatest, most ironic of examples.
So something primordial was drawn upon to get almost everybody to snap into line, and it worked on people that you would imagine it would never work on.
And the malleability of the rationalistic mind is alarming.
So let me just tell a quick story about libertarians.
So the idea of libertarianism is like people should be free and stuff like that, and the government shouldn't make you do stuff.
So you think, this is basically the idea, right?
So you think of all the people in the world who would be raging against the COVID controls and libertarians about front.
I realized very early on that I was pretty much alone and I didn't know where my community was.
I couldn't figure it out.
Well, as the months went on and I began to poke around on the intellectual leadership and the publications, the institutions to find out what was going on, it turned out they were able to manufacture a rationale.
And the rationale goes something like this.
Well, there are flaws in the market, among which negative externalities, negative, negative externalities.
And so getting a disease is like a negative externality, you know.
And so if somebody gives you a disease, like if you cough from action, that's kind of a tort, a kind of an act of violence.
So to the extent that government can use a precautionary principle to prevent that from happening, it is in a way become an instrument of Social peace and reducing the level of violence in society and reducing the amount of negative externalities that are imposed upon each other.
So, in this rare, rare case, government is actually become the handmaiden of exactly what we're going for, which is more liberty, more prosperity, more social flourishing in a non-violent environment.
So, I'm listening to this rationale and thinking, you know, anything's possible.
You know, I suppose if you're clever, you can come up with an apparatus to justify anything.
Well, that's a fascinating tale.
I agree with you.
The failure of libertarians to show up on the right side of history with respect to COVID is shocking precisely because they should have been allergic to all of the tyranny and warrant.
I would say something I've become increasingly sensitive to, I would not call it a rationale.
I draw a distinction between a rationale, which is the reason that you do something, and a rationalization, which is something you impose in retrospect.
And to that point, I would say this was not the only community that found itself turned exactly against that which it held most dear for reasons that sounded reasonable, but at the end of the day simply weren't.
And I would say-sophistry, I guess, the old word, right?
Sophistry.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So the rationalists' failure on COVID was, I thought, equally jaw-dropping because it revealed the fragility of their method, which on any normal day, I would say it's a little overly formal, but it's a reasonable approach to the universe.
You certainly do want to understand what is taking place and why, and you want to use Bayesian reasoning so you don't fall into traps.
But it became obvious that there's assumptions built into it about the weighting of how likely things that you're being told are actually true.
In other words, you can't do rationalism by algorithm because at some point, you're going to have to make a judgment call about what evidence to process and which to discount.
And if you are anything but a very high integrity person, you're going to end up doing that cherry-picking badly.
You want to prioritize evidence that stands a high likelihood of being accurate, not evidence that flatters your perspective, right?
That's the trap people fall into.
But the fact that these folks ended up on the exact wrong side of this and got belligerent and mean over it rather than recognizing the possibility that this was not easily calculated and that they couldn't be certain of any of the things that they were so sure of.
Are we talking about epidemiologists or the rationalist community itself?
These are people.
What is that community?
It is a community of people that aspires to be better and make the world better through unflinching exploration of the evidence processed by reasonable Algorithms and updated based on the change of the Bayesian priors.
And one outgrowth of this movement are the effective altruists who say, actually, there's a game theory problem that causes the world to be worse than it might be, and it's tractable.
So we're going to look at what should happen but won't because of the game theory and figure out how to rearrange things to make it happen.
Frankly, the whole project is laudable at that level, but impossible and lends itself to utilitarianism and apparently lends itself to being propagandized into foolishness.
So anyway, I don't want to dwell on any of these communities in particular.
Rationalism, you think of rationalism as a camp of thought or a really existing community that's sort of the successors to the purest form of enlightenment idealism.
Yes.
I mean, it is a real community.
They do meet.
I think a lot of their stuff is done, is intermediated online too.
But no, it's a real group of people with intellectual leaders and all of that.
And it just did so spectacularly badly in this puzzle that, frankly, the ragtag fugitive fleet did pretty well.
Like, so it, you know, the community you've assembled at Brownstone proved this was not a puzzle you couldn't figure out.
I don't think we have it all nailed, but we've certainly made great progress and hit well above our weight class.
So why is it that these other groups that ostensibly are built to sort out what's true and what we should make of it and what it suggests about how we should act, why did they fail so badly?
You know, Brett, I've concluded very reluctantly over time that I know you're not really asking me that question, but I'm going to offer this: that I do think that there was a big professional cost, a social cost and a potential financial cost to being correct during these years.
And it was just a lot easier to go along and much better to, yeah, to invent a rationalization for why all this stuff was justified in some way.
I mean, that's where the social and fiduciary advantages are.
And I'm sorry to put it that way.
I mean, it took me a long time to finally just say this seems to be the driving thing.
What I've called careerism, but really it's just a survival instinct, right?
I think you've nailed it.
And I want to encapsulate it, see if I've got it right.
There's something that, you know, I don't know if you know this, but Heather and I trained as field biologists.
So we do science wearing rubber boots, sometimes with a machete.
It doesn't look, it's not like a laboratory environment.
And so we're comfortable with that.
We know that science works in an environment in which you can't control all the variables.
It does impact what you can know, but nonetheless, I think the problem is the communities in question have prioritized a certain precision and cleanliness.
And those things turned out, they prioritized them, but they turned out to be much less important than courage, which is in very short supply.
And I think this is a key lesson, actually, of COVID: I would much rather have courageous people confronting a puzzle like this than cowards.
And I don't care how articulate or even smart the cowards are.
The cowards aren't going to get it right because they're too easy to manipulate.
And that's what happened.
But can I ask you to fill out this word a little bit, coward, because it just sounds like just an insult.
I wonder if there's a way we could reframe it as not an insult, but a rational impulse.
So to not be cowardly during COVID meant, I think, at minimum, that you had to be willing to risk your social status and social circle and then possibly risk your financial well-being.
All right.
You had to be, it wasn't a guarantee that you're going to lose all things and everybody's going to hate your gods or you'd lose your community standing or you'd fall and culturalize or be attacked by them.
None of this was certain.
But you had to be willing to hold out the possibility that this could happen.
And that the willingness to do that is the act of courage, I would say.
Love it.
All right.
Now let me reflect this back at you and see if we've nailed something.
We talked earlier about the problem of utilitarian calculus.
And we talked about the fact that utilitarian calculus is inherently a population-level phenomenon.
I think what we're detecting, where you don't like my use of the term cowardice, but we both see that there is a set of personality traits that makes you the pawn of an Anthony Fauci in a case like this.
You know, Brett, just interrupting your narrative here, but let me just be clear that I don't think anyone has a moral obligation to be heroic.
Well, you know, look, I can agree with that.
On the other hand, what we saw, the cowardice turned them into bullies on behalf of those who were out to oppress us.
So it's one thing if you want to stand aside.
It's another thing if you're going to become an agent of the oppressive force because you yourself don't want to pay a price.
So I draw that distinction.
If you stood aside and were quiet, that's one thing.
But I would say what I'm calling cowardice, what you're calling an unwillingness to face substantial personal consequences or even the strong chance of them, I would say is what happens when you do utilitarianism at the individual level.
That the people who failed were looking at their own lives and they were thinking, well, if I say this, then bad things are going to happen to me.
Insecurity's Grip00:08:36
And if I don't, in fact, if I say the thing that I'm being told all reasonable people say, then actually I can sleep at night.
So I would argue that that same failure of utilitarianism actually does exist at the level of the individual.
We just don't call it utilitarianism.
It's incentivism.
Kind of.
I don't know about you, but my feeling during COVID and frankly during the evergreen meltdown is like there wasn't really a choice.
I don't know how I would say the wrong thing and then go on about my business.
It would tear me up.
No, no, I get that.
And you find this, you find that it's all great heroic intellectuals throughout the 20th century.
I mean, you look at a person like Ludovic Mises.
He had to say what he was going to say.
Yeah, he got driven out of Vienna.
Yes, he got driven out of Geneva.
Yes, he landed in New York without a job at the age of 60, but he just had to say what was true from his point of view.
The same thing was true of Freud.
I'm not sure if you're a Freud fan.
I am.
He was very courageous in his own actions.
And I'm not saying I'm courageous, but I will tell you that when COVID hit, I just had to say, and I knew, God, I could tell you stories.
But there were times when I knew that this is going to be a personal disaster for me.
But, you know, you just have to keep going.
That's courage.
Well, you know, if you have committed yourself to what we call the world of ideas, I don't know what we call it, but the intellectual world.
Your primary obligation is to say what's true as you see it.
And if you're not going to do that, I think you should be doing something else.
Learn how to install drywall.
You know, something.
But get out of the world of ideas.
If you can't just say what's true, this is why we pay intellectuals.
This is the whole point of them.
All right.
Now maybe we should close this out on Brownstone because I think this actually, this is a great place to view what it is you're doing.
So when we are manipulated, we are manipulated based on insecurities, right?
And they can be very real.
Like if you're financially insecure and somebody's in a position to threaten your career, it's not any of our business to say, oh, don't worry about it.
In fact, I'm very careful not to tell people, say the right thing and nothing bad will happen because I don't know that nothing bad will happen.
And you may have a family and kids you're protecting.
But the point is the thing that wants to control us cultivates our insecurity because that insecurity is useful to it.
If you want people to behave honorably, to say the right thing, then cultivating security is the way to do it.
And what I see, whether it was your intent or not in starting Brownstone, is that you have created an environment where at the very least, it is safe to say what you see and to explore what it might mean.
And I think you've cultivated security in other ways, but that seems to be, if it's not the core mission, it's one of the main missions of the place, is to create safety so that people do say what they need to say.
And they do so in person in a room where it elevates the conversation.
And frankly, I think you've got the smartest crew anywhere because of that instinct.
And also not afraid to say, I don't know.
I just don't, I don't know.
And that you're not going to get degraded or miss a promotion because you don't know something.
You're there to learn from other people.
It takes a while for people to get used to the environment, as you know, right?
The very first day.
So the very last retreat you went to, I had to introduce it.
And I wanted to present my great research on what I think is really good research in the history of the vaccine industry, right?
Because I think it's all new and fresh.
And I don't have a lot of time to speak at these things.
And I don't want to abuse my position.
So I thought, I got to present that paper.
I stood under the microphone and I thought, you know, I can't do that.
I can't do that.
I've got to like lay out a framework here that's going to determine, you know, help create a culture that's going to set the agenda for the next few days.
Right.
So that was, but so, but yeah, so because it's so unusual, people are just not used to it.
And it's a shock that so often people come to me and they think, I found my home.
These are my people.
I've never felt so free to think and learn as I do here.
Isn't that sad?
I mean, it's thrilling, but it's also sad.
I mean, that's the whole purpose of academia was to be the way things are at Brownstone Event.
But it's falling short of that.
It's tragic.
But at least we can present a model that maybe other people will pick up on the future.
Well, I think it's sort of the phenomenon of keepers of the flame during a dark age.
But this, I've argued this is a dark age.
I think that's becoming more obvious.
But the idea that in every dark age, there are those who maintain the rights and belief structures and they keep track of how to do this work.
And so those are the greatest people.
Brett, if I can just bump back slightly, you so intrigued me, but you were talking about this individual utilitarianism where a person's making a rational, looking at their incentive structures and making a rational decision to be a coward, to be heroic based on their individual self-interest.
There's one thing there that is an interesting little confounding element to individualistic utilitarianism, which is the intertemporal consideration, right?
So when Martin Kuldorf decided to speak out, he said repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, constantly, implausibly, like a mantra, this pandemic will end and everyone will know that I was right.
Yep.
I mean, he said it with not, it wasn't, not as a forecast, right?
But just as a truth.
He knew it from the very first.
He knew it.
And he said it all the time.
I remember he would say that to me.
I think, I don't know.
Can you, are you sure?
Yeah.
Yep.
I'm sure.
Well, that is, you know, back in the heyday of gentleman science.
And I'm not defending gentleman science because I'm glad that you no longer have to be rich to do science.
But one of the good things about that era was that there was no point in talking yourself into lies or presenting those lies in a compelling way because your goal was to discover something so important that your name lasted longer than you did.
That's not a bad, you know, it's not a perfect motivation, but it aligns pretty well with making discoveries that are actually true.
And that's just not the ethos in science anymore.
So anyway, it does fall to the keepers of the flame to keep that alive.
And in that spirit, I would point out people have heard a lot about Brownstone in this conversation.
Great Conference Ahead00:03:37
And I want to encourage people, there's several different ways that you can tap into this community.
You, among other things, Brownstone is a publisher, both of real physical books, but also of a great many very insightful articles.
So we will link the website.
There is the supper clubs that you mentioned, which are proliferating.
They're a very good time.
You can go and you can gather with other people who have been watching the world and reach some sort of similar sense that things might not be right, but there might be a way to figure out what is going on.
It's a good time.
We're going to have one in Seattle-ish.
Boy, if I was a better human being, I'd know when it was, but it's upcoming.
I think I'm the speaker at it.
There are conferences.
The last one was in Salt Lake.
The one before that was in Pittsburgh.
There's a very special conference, if that's even the right word, that you held at Polyface Farms this last year where Joel Salatin is doing his heroic work on this very enlightened version of farming.
And am I right that you're going to do Polyface again this year?
Last year, we had a limit of 400 people and we had a waiting list of 400 more.
So the form to register just went up with no content at all, other than the fact that this is happening.
We're already half sold.
So yeah, listeners of this podcast, this is your chance because it's going to be the same thing as it was last time, right?
Just crazy demand and limited supply.
It's great.
It's not to be missed.
Polyphace Farms is in and of itself a marvelous thing, and you should definitely see it and get the tour that Joel gives.
So you see how he thinks about farming.
It will change the way you see farming.
It'll be cool if a lot of dark horse people sign up for this conference.
We can have a little dark horse gathering.
It just makes me laugh when you think about the implausibility of Brett Weinstein and Jeffrey Tucker hanging out at an organic farm.
Feels like home to me.
But it's a great event.
You should, if you're listening to this and you're debating whether to do it, it's totally worth it.
I will say I learned a very important lesson at the last one, which is you never want to follow Thomas Massey as a speaker.
He was great.
You were wonderful, though.
Everybody loves you.
You were fantastic.
It was a great event.
It was a great event.
But anyway, I think this year's will be equally great or even greater.
So anyway, between the supper clubs, the polyface events, the annual conference, and the stuff that you can find on the website, whether it's books or articles, there's a ton of ways to start tapping into the marvelous phenomenon that is Brownstone.
Jeffrey Tucker, it's been a real pleasure, and I'm looking forward to the next event already.