Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan expose systemic ideological suppression at Evergreen State College, where policies like "Day of Absence" and mandatory equity hiring pushed faculty into silence. They link this to COVID vaccine risks—Garrett Vandenbosch warns mRNA vaccines may drive more virulent variants by targeting spike proteins, while Weinstein highlights myocarditis dangers and lack of independent research. AI’s rise, like ChatGPT, blurs expertise authenticity and risks unintended consciousness, creating a "Cyrano de Bergerac dystopia" where human thought erodes. The episode reveals how groupthink, financial incentives, and tech manipulation distort truth, urging nuanced dialogue over tribalism to counter polarization’s dangers. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I suppose at the beginning it was nerve-wracking, but I also think I have a really weird relationship with fear, I guess.
And so I think...
I have reason to think that in places where I'm particularly anxious, some part of me feels it, but my conscious mind is not allowed in on it so I can do what I have to do.
Definitely before, although right as Evergreen erupted into the public consciousness, there's this one incident, actually the incident that brought me to public attention, Where I was standing in the hallway and I was being confronted by these 50 students who I had literally never met.
And they were accusing me of racism and demanding that I resign or be fired.
But there is this event called Day of Absence, which was a longstanding event at the college where basically at first black people and then later on more generally people of color did not come to work and they held discussions separately.
And then in 2017, they changed this to a request that white people not come to campus.
And I responded to this and I said that was unacceptable.
This was a public college.
I wasn't going to be told I couldn't teach my class.
And that did cause a bit of a firestorm.
But that firestorm was embedded in a much longer battle that had begun to simmer when the new president of the college, George Bridges, showed up and impaneled...
A committee effectively to suggest mechanisms for restructuring the college and the mechanisms were insane.
They were a recipe for destroying the place and it was my obligation as a faculty member to point out that it would be a terrible idea for us to adopt these policies.
And so the day of absence controversy became the explanation that the public got for why things erupted when they did.
But it really, it was one example among many of things that were afoot at the college.
Well, let's take for example the one that Heather and I were most troubled by was a proposal that every faculty hire needed to be justified on the basis of it in some way addressing inequity.
And so you can imagine an environment where you need to hire a mathematician or a chemist.
And the answer is, well, you can't really hire anybody whose background doesn't include some strong evidence of their being an activist.
And so anyway, that would have been debilitating to the college.
That was one thing.
Another thing was the suggestion that the college would only be functional at the point that every single graduate was equally capable.
And there is exactly one way to do that, which is to hobble all the people who are highly capable.
So to the extent that there was going to be some level of skill that was going to be shown by people graduating with respect to math or whatever else, everybody needed to attain it.
Which of course, even if that's plausible, if you had access to everybody from birth and you could give them a really high quality math education, by the time students come to college, many have lost the ability to do many of these things.
And it will never be regained, certainly at the level of the top performing students.
So the only way to get them equal at graduation would be to hobble those who were unusually capable.
Well, that's one of the terrible things about these diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives is that the right way out of the problem is to herald those people and to provide them the opportunities that will allow them to flourish.
Instead, they get dragged into a group based on something like skin color and their exceptional capabilities aren't allowed to shine through it.
Basically, it's considered counterproductive or race-trading, really.
So the idea was that they wanted to make everyone equally capable in some way, but the only mechanism to do that would be that you had to lower the performance of the people that were at the highest levels of...
That is, as a biologist, that is me telling you that when you have a group of organisms that have different capabilities, the idea you're going to bring every individual of low capability up to the top performer The only way to do that is to lower where the top performers are.
So they never finished the sentence.
They basically described a utopia in which we looked at the top performing student and then suddenly brought everybody up to their level.
Yeah, I remember the early days when this was happening, when I would do podcasts about it.
And I think this is back when I was still reading comments.
And one of the comments was, why would you care about what's happening in these universities?
Like, this has literally no bearing on you.
And my thought was I don't think that's true because the people from universities are eventually going to go into the workplace.
And if this ideology is so radically different than anything I experienced when I was in my early 20s, like there's a shift in the culture that seemed to be a groupthink shift that was forcing people to accept these crazy ideas and that this is going to have some spillover.
And now we know that that's 100% true.
Jordan was ringing the alarm for this a long time ago, and I'm sure you're aware of what's happening to him now.
I don't know if he wants me to discuss this publicly.
So I'm going to hold off and wait until he does, because I believe he's addressing it publicly.
Has he addressed this on his...
Go to his Twitter page, see if he said anything.
But...
He's getting in trouble for retweeting some person who was critical of Justin Trudeau and whatever board of psychologists that they have in Ontario.
Is bringing him in for disciplinary discussions and I think they're having some sort of – they want him to be involved in some sort of a class or some sort of a – I should just read it.
And if I don't get...
I'll contact him.
If I don't get his permission, I'll delete this.
This aspect of it.
So here's what it says.
It says, the College of Psychologists of Ontario, the government-mandated professional college of psychologists, has disciplined me and is threatening my clinical psychology license for retweeting the Conservative Party leader Pierre Polivier, how do you say his name?
Ultimately, anybody who remains inside an institution is going to be up against disciplinary hearings if they insist on seeing reality and discussing it.
But the term retraining, I'll read it again because it sounds so bonkers that someone would think that this is a good idea.
This term is so crazy that he is going to have to participate in mandatory social media communication retraining.
Social media communication retraining.
Retraining.
Like, you have to do it the way I do it.
You have to do it the way other people that we have decided the way you communicate is not proper.
We don't agree.
You're retweeting people who are critical or criticizing The government, and we don't agree with that, so we're going to retrain you how to communicate on social media.
And this is mandatory.
You have to do it.
And then you're going to have to adhere, right?
Because if you do it, if you go through the retraining and then you don't adhere, well, then it doesn't count.
Because when you're ignoring, like, if you talk about the Barrington, Great Barrington Declaration, you're ignoring virologists and epidemiologists and their expert opinion on things.
Well, there are a number of topics we need to talk about here, but one of them is this clear pattern where those of us who have achieved some kind of immunity to their control speak about these things.
We pay some terrible price.
We get slandered on our Wikipedia pages and elsewhere.
But we persist.
And eventually, it forces an acknowledgement of what we were saying that's years late, that has tremendous consequences for what we're actually doing.
But I'm convinced that what they're up to is they're fixing the historical record, right?
When we stand up to their nonsense and we make it clear what's actually taking place, and they are begrudgingly acknowledging this in the end...
What it will look like in their own writing of the record, and they will of course write the record, is that, you know, government's a bit slow and they were a little late to acknowledge this, but of course that was because they were being very scientifically careful, which is nonsense.
They never would have acknowledged it if they hadn't been forced to it.
Yeah, that's what's being revealed with the Twitter files and this whole thing where there's this massive pushback against Elon Musk.
And there's all these celebrities that are virtue signaling and removing themselves from Twitter publicly.
And they're doing this to try to let everybody know that they're on the right side.
And without real examination of what's actually going on, you know, and they're concentrating on Donald Trump, you know, him bringing back Donald Trump and a host of other unmentionables on Twitter.
But Donald Trump is not posting on Twitter.
I believe he has some sort of an exclusive deal.
I don't know that this is true, so let me just say that right now.
There's been speculation, I should say, let's put it that way, that he has some sort of exclusive deal with Truth Social, which would be the only thing that would make sense to me, why he wouldn't want to post all that stuff that he says on Twitter as well.
So on Dark Horse, we've talked about a concept that I call zero is a special number.
And the idea of zero is a special number is that this narrative control would not work if there was even one newspaper that was dedicated to the job of reporting the news.
It wouldn't work if there was even one university that was dedicated to finding what the truth might be, right?
It doesn't work if there's one social media platform in a primary position in which free speech reigns.
Because in any of these cases, if you had the university that was still interested in truth-seeking in an era where everybody else was doing their diversity, equity, and inclusion thing, every reasonable person would want to send their kid there, right?
So it would win in competition almost immediately, and the result would be every other institution would have to change their policy to compete.
So if you get even one exception, that's enough to break this pattern.
So what Elon Musk is doing is actually fighting to make Twitter into that single exception.
And the structure that is controlling the narrative understands that it cannot endure that.
And so far, it has failed to shut down Elon.
Their next move is actually to get people on one side of this debate to leave so that they can't prevent Twitter from being a space where people can speak freely, but they can take it out of the position of being a primary social media environment.
And in so doing, they will take the number of meaningful exceptions to the free speech control back to zero.
Okay, so let's play Geert van den Bosch's His newest video.
And then we'll get back to this whole idea of escape velocity.
Because this is one of the reason why I want to bring this up in particular is because this was a particularly egregious example of YouTube censoring a real expert who has said something that has been publicly declared.
You would speak to this better than me.
What it encourages variants or it opens up the possibility of variants like what is the reason for that?
You are essentially in a battle with a pathogen and the pathogen is primed to be able to evolve.
And so if you vaccinate ahead of a pandemic, then when the pathogen attempts to infect people, it runs into a lot of immune systems that see it coming.
If you vaccinate into an active pandemic, you're doing a number of different things.
For one thing, maybe the worst thing, is you're guaranteeing that the pathogen is going to encounter a lot of people who are in the process of developing immunity.
So what you're giving them is like an environment that's set up to train them to escape the immunity that the vaccine produces.
Now, with the vaccines that we have used, this problem is even worse because these vaccines, or I should say so-called vaccines, they aren't vaccines.
And I was convinced that that was not an important issue.
Lots of people were upset by the redefinition of the term vaccine.
I wasn't convinced it was an important issue.
I have switched sides on this.
I now think the definition is vitally important and we're beginning to see why.
I would like to know more about how well flu vaccines actually work, right?
Now that we've seen all of this theater around safe and effective, I am now in a very cautious position with respect to what I thought I knew about the effectiveness of other so-called vaccines.
But in the case of the COVID vaccines, there are really two issues.
One, it doesn't produce immunity to catching the disease or transmitting it.
The public discussion has focused on antibodies, but I think that's because the public knows what an antibody is, right?
So the deeper discussion is, well, what is the interplay between antibodies and T cells, which don't make antibodies?
And we don't know the answer to that.
But fundamentally, these so-called vaccines, they enter your cells and they turn your cells into a vaccine factory at best.
That's what they do.
That's a very different technology.
And so the reason that I now think that the question of whether or not it is or is not a vaccine is important is that effectively all of us normal folk had a belief that vaccines, yeah, it's a complicated thing, but it's a pretty elegant medical intervention.
And in general, they're pretty safe.
They have very low levels of side effects and they're basically worth it.
It's a good deal, right?
You just get a little injection and you have an immunity to some disease that you have never seen before.
Isn't that marvelous?
And I still feel this way about the fundamental technology.
But the fact is, this is actually a far less certain than we understood.
It's a more radical intervention than we commonly understand.
And in this case, what they've done is...
Is they've smuggled in a really, truly, radically new technology, and they caused us all not to worry about it very much by using the term vaccine, right?
If they had said, all right, we've got this pandemic, and in order to prevent it from spreading, we're going to have everybody take gene therapy, everybody would have said, what?
Gene therapy?
Is that safe?
Right?
So the point is, we had a category, and it was called vaccine.
And we all thought, you know, there are some crazy folks who are worried about vaccines, but in general, it's safe.
So if something carries that label, it's probably safe too.
And this is actually what activated Heather and me when the pandemic began.
And then, you know, we started trying to unpack what we were hearing about it, just to translate the biology into English for people.
And then we, you know, the vaccines were on the horizon and we were initially very hopeful.
We thought, oh, well, maybe that's an answer.
But then they said the vaccines, you know, the testing tells us that these things are highly effective and very safe.
And we didn't know anything about effectiveness at that point.
In fact, I'm a little embarrassed to have taken them at their word.
But the claim that they were safe didn't make a witt of sense.
They couldn't possibly know, right?
And the reason that they couldn't possibly know is that the word safe, if you say that something is safe, you are not saying that it's harmless.
You are saying you know it doesn't carry any risk, right?
If you get in your car drunk one day and you drive home, right?
Well, there was no harm.
It was harmless, but it wasn't safe, right?
So when they said these things are safe, the answer is, well, how would you know that?
You've only been injecting them into people for months.
You don't know what happens five years down the road.
It can't be safe, right?
You can tell us you don't know any harms of any harms yet, but you can't say it's safe.
And so that alarmed us because we were immediately being told...
Here's a new technology.
Heather and I looked at the new technology, and it's like, oh, that's not a minor change.
That's a radical departure from the way a vaccine works.
So anyway, we looked at these technologies and thought, wow, you are intervening in a nested series of complex systems in a way that you can't possibly predict the outcome.
You just couldn't know at that point.
So that caused us to dig deeper, which got us in more and more trouble, and actually landed us at Gerrit Vandenbosch's work pretty quickly, right?
Which introduced a whole new set of questions, you know, beyond the question of how safe is this for the individual.
The question is, well, what does this vaccination program mean for the pandemic itself, right?
And what he said, which there was no evidence that it was taking place at the time, But what he said is, look, if you vaccinate into a pandemic and you do so broadly across the population, you're going to drive the evolution of variants, right?
You are going to create an evolutionary arms race and you are going to cause the number of variants to proliferate.
And, you know, at the time, I couldn't say for sure that he was right.
But what I could say was that he was making evolutionary sense.
There was nothing terribly complex about his argument and it was robust.
And I think now we are seeing not only have we seen that proliferation of variants, but we are now seeing the grudging acceptance that that's what's happened in places like the Washington Post.
Seeing it in the front of the Washington Post was wild.
Just to see that admission...
And have the discussion open up, are the vaccines causing variants?
Because that was...
What was the exact title?
See if we can find the Washington Post title.
I read it and I was like, whoa.
First, Lena Nguyen discussing openly the superior immunity that comes from natural immunity from catching the virus and recovering and how much better it is in so many different ways.
And to have her...
Turn the course and have her say, masks don't work, cloth masks don't work.
You need an N95, otherwise it's just theater.
And it's just facial decorations.
And then to go from that to her describing how natural immunity has to be recognized.
And that it is actually better and then showing that people have been vaccinated and then boosted.
The more vaccines you get, it seems like there's more prevalence of people catching COVID, which is wild.
And if you think carefully about what I told you the definition of a vaccine was before it was altered, that means, and, you know, we can get into this question of the IgG4 result that recently emerged.
This was a result that showed surprisingly and in contrast to the other true vaccines that they looked at, the mRNA vaccines, and this is not true for the DNA version, but for the mRNA vaccines like the Pfizer and the Moderna, that after but for the mRNA vaccines like the Pfizer and the Moderna, that after three doses, they saw a radical elevation in the percentage of the antibodies that are part of this
Ig is just, it means immunoglobulin.
It's a synonym for antibody.
IgGG is a class of antibody and it fights pathogens.
But IgG4 is a special subclass and it has, you know, all things in biology are complex and so it has multiple implications.
but IgG4 is actually part of a system in which the body attenuates its own response to an antigen.
So, the mind-blowing, and you know, it's an early result, maybe it doesn't get replicated, but it was published in Science Immunology, Top Flight Journal.
The implication is that the evolutionary path we have traveled is causing the pathogen now to be able to trigger a response that will cause the immune system not to fight.
The way we develop the amazing immune system that we have that allows us to fight off pathogens for our entire life, including pathogens with which we have no experience, is that we have a system that's one of the two fundamental properties of our immune system that allows it to fend off anything we might encounter, and it's called the self-non-self-recognition system.
And the way the self-non-self-recognition system happens is that before you're born in utero, you have a huge diversity of immune cells that are all a little different, and they react to antigens that are electromagnetically distinct from each other.
And basically, in principle, they can react to almost anything, the electromagnetic signature on the surface of almost anything biological.
But while you're in utero, you're exposed to almost nothing from the outside, right?
You're insulated by your mother.
And so that means that any cell in that library that is reacting when you're in utero is reacting to you.
And so all of the cells that react when you're in utero are eliminated, leaving only the cells that don't react to you, right?
That is basically the definition of non-self.
Anything that wasn't eliminated is potentially an enemy.
Now that can result in a lot of weirdness, like you breathe in some pollen.
That's not self, and so the body can react to it, and it can overreact, and it can make a problem for you that it shouldn't.
But in general, this system just sits there dormant and anytime it runs into an antigen that it hasn't seen, it treats it like an invader and it fights.
But what happens if something about the system, let's say that your physiology changes in some way so that your own tissues are now triggering the system, right?
Well, there are ways in which the system can attenuate that response.
When you go to an immunologist to deal with an allergy, and the immunologist will give you allergens, right, which sounds like a recipe for an allergy attack.
But the point is, if you do this in a particular way, you can trigger this attenuation signal, and you can cause the body to stop reacting to something that you were allergic to.
So the idea that a pathogen, and mind you, not a normal pathogen, a pathogen that we can now be pretty darn certain was engineered by humans, at least in part, That pathogen is now triggering that signal that causes the immune system not to react anymore.
I want to bring up that fact because there was a recent article that I saw someone quoting on a podcast as evidence that this is a natural spillover and that there is new discussion that points to COVID-19 being a natural spillover.
And I saw that wildly and widely dismissed by many people that were furious, saying that ignored the science that points to the fact that this was engineered.
Well, I've believed from the very beginning that – well, almost the very beginning, actually one hour into my awareness, I changed my mind.
I tweeted at first.
So as you know, I'm a bat biologist.
I studied bats in grad school.
And when Heather and I were in the Amazon writing the first draft or finishing the first draft of our book, we emerged to the news that this what was then called novel coronavirus was circulating.
And so it just sort of dawned on us what is this?
And we were trying to figure it out.
And I looked at the initial materials.
I looked at the explanation of how it likely had come through bats.
I was familiar with the family of bats in question.
And I just decided to tweet to my followers that more or less the story added up as far as I could tell.
I did that and I immediately got back a response somewhat annoyed by a longtime follower of mine who said, so it's just a coincidence that there's a biosafety level 4 lab in the exact place that this virus emerged?
And I said, what the hell?
I don't know anything about this.
I don't know what a biosafety level 4 lab is.
And I started to look into it because, you know, if those labs were everywhere, then maybe it doesn't mean anything that there happened to be one in the very place that the virus seems to have emerged.
But they aren't everywhere.
And the idea that the bats in question aren't in the place where the virus emerged and the lab was and that the lab had been...
I'm not searching for exactly this sort of virus in the wild.
It all pointed in a particular direction.
And so I immediately followed up my tweet and said, don't listen to that.
There's more here to be understood.
And the deeper I dug, the more convincing I found it that this had actually emerged from the lab.
Not as a simple matter of having passed through the lab.
You know, that's possible that you could bring a virus into the lab and not do anything to it, and then it could escape.
Part of it, it's very unusual for a pathogen to behave in the way that this one behaves, right?
This is seeming to hit many different tissues in the body.
And so, you know, I will say I have been accused by some of being part of the group that thinks COVID isn't serious and that the vaccines are dangerous.
I do think the vaccines are dangerous, but I also think COVID is dangerous.
I think the hazard of it is not captured in the case fatality rate, that this thing is obviously having impacts that we don't understand.
So that's one set of things.
And I would just point out, there's a reason that a normal pathogen doesn't do the wide-scale damage that COVID seems to.
And that reason is that in general, pathogens don't have an interest in harming you.
They harm you incidentally, right?
In fact, they do best when you are healthy enough to walk around and spread them.
And so they tend to spare tissues that do not help them to be transmitted.
Well, that's not the case with this pathogen.
This pathogen seems to invade all kinds of tissues that don't help it to spread.
Well, it seems to invade using the ACE2 receptor, and it shows all kinds of pathologies.
I mean, from You know, damaged toes and weird circulation issues.
It seems to get into the brain.
It's a very strange pathogen.
You would expect it to self-limit to tissues that help it spread.
And the fact that it doesn't is actually what you would predict if you enhanced a virus in a laboratory environment where it was freed from the constraint of having to keep its host healthy enough to spread it.
I don't know whether this is right or not, but logically, at least, it serves the purpose of explaining it.
If you think about the loss of taste and smell that so many people seem to experience with COVID, Well, now imagine a wild animal that had that effect, lost its taste and smell, right?
Well, for most mammals, that would be a devastating loss from the point of view of them even just feeding themselves, right?
So it would be a...
If COVID was spreading in wild animals and it was robbing them of this essential tool for finding food, then it would cause its host to start starving.
That's not a good thing.
On the other hand, if you caged a bunch of animals together and you allowed them to spread the pathogen and you fed them, let's say it's ferrets, which is a likely experimental organism, If you were feeding them ferret chow and they were falling all over each other, infecting other ferrets, then that constraint is lifted.
Then the point is it's not bad to lose your sense of taste and smell from the point of view of passing on the pathogen.
And that would fit very well for the human population too, right?
You lose your taste and smell.
It's annoying, but it doesn't get in the way of you getting fed.
And so, anyway, there are many different ways in which this pathogen behaves in a bizarre fashion.
The fern cleavage site, which allows it to invade tissue so effectively, A, that's something that we knew would take a sabraco coronavirus and cause it to be highly infective in humans.
We knew that before SARS-CoV-2 ever emerged.
So to find it on this virus, even though no other member of the subfamily has it, is conspicuous.
So I guess what I'm telling you is I rapidly moved in the direction of believing that the most likely explanation was laboratory enhancement and escape.
Everything I have seen only moves me farther in that direction, including the repeated efforts to shut down that explanation, right?
I mean, every month we go and we don't find the intermediate host is evidence that there is no intermediate host, that the intermediate host is the lab.
So we are continuing to add evidence upon evidence.
And every time that we are caused to wonder, every time we see headlines that say, no, it turns out it was the wet market, there's nothing there.
And then imagine that you did this analysis and you found, oh goodness, there's an epicenter of disease in the coffee shop of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That doesn't mean that the coffee shop has anything to do with it.
It just means that people from the lab go to the coffee shop.
And the fact is the wet market is close to the lab.
So people from the lab undoubtedly went to the wet market.
And we still haven't found anything like a creature in the wet market that has evidence of having carried or transmitted this disease.
So anyway, it's smoke and mirrors.
And smoke and mirrors doesn't mean that there couldn't be the discovery tomorrow of some intermediate host in the wild and some story that would account for all Of the evidence, but it gets less likely every day.
What I said on the DeSantis committee to look into our COVID response, what I said in our public meeting a few weeks back, was that COVID is the largest blunder in human history.
I believe that's unambiguous.
And I'm not talking about the largest blunder in public health.
It's clearly that too.
But I'm talking about the largest blunder in human history, starting with the decision to circumvent the ban on gain-of-function research that the US Congress wisely imposed to offshore the work to Wuhan,
where they then We found presumably the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, likely as a result of the interaction of the three miners who became sick in the guano-filled cave, brought the ancestor back into the lab, put it through gain-of-function experiments, enhanced it with a fern cleavage site, and then lost control of it.
Well, the foreign cleavage site is just a sequence.
It's a small sequence of amino acids that alters the spike protein so that it is especially effective at entering human tissues.
So the point is, there was no natural member of the subfamily that has this feature.
And it was well known amongst people who study these viruses that were a virus of this type to acquire that feature, that that would radically enhance its capacity to get into human tissues.
So I don't really know.
Whether, I mean, I guess I assume that the virologists who are constantly bombarding us with the story that a pandemic is going to leap out of nature at any time, it's going to be devastating, and we're going to have to study these dangerous viruses in order to be prepared, right?
That's the story that caused all of this work to get funded.
Now, I don't really believe this story.
I think it's wrong.
But it may be that the people who are spreading it do believe it.
And that having believed it, that crazy as this sounds, what they did was they found a virus that had many characteristics that would make it a dangerous human pandemic-causing pathogen.
But it didn't have all of them.
And so in order to figure out what it would be like if it did have all of them, they gave it the ones it didn't have.
And they did a certain amount of genetic engineering and a certain amount of gain-of-function work using probably ferrets, using humanized mice, using human airway tissue.
And they just gave it a bunch of puzzles and they taught it.
And in fact, a lot of this work was done stateside before the ban on gain-of-function research.
So we have a fair amount of circumstantial evidence of what sorts of enhancements the Wuhan Institute was interested in and that they had the capacity to do them.
We've seen a lot of these experiments done piecemeal prior to the ban.
As to exactly what they did, this is something that we, the people of planet Earth, are entitled to know.
And this is one of the reasons why I'm so troubled by the perspective that so many people have that, well, Wherever it came from, now we've got SARS-CoV-2, so let's just deal with it.
And the answer is no.
There's an awful lot contained in knowing what exactly they did that might help us to fight it, what they knew about what they were doing, what protocols were used, what animals were used.
That is vital information.
And the fact that many people see it as sort of beside the point is quite wrong.
And in fact, you know, the IgG4 result that I was just telling you about is actually, it is another one of these indications.
One of the things that I said very early in the pandemic was that because this is not a normal virus, all of the rules that we usually assume will be true, right?
Like the thing is going to evolve into a lower state of virulence.
All of those assumptions are now invalid because we don't even know what we're dealing with, right?
We're not dealing with a normal spillover event.
We're dealing with a synthetic spillover event and with a virus that has experienced an environment that is very much unlike nature.
So anyway, I still believe that it is in our vital interest to figure out exactly what happened and when.
I will point out that is also a big question that leads in a number of very disturbing directions.
But leaving these questions aside is not in our interest.
So back to your question, though.
Why are they continually trying to reanimate the explanation that this is a natural spillover event?
Because if it isn't, then we know who did it.
Right?
Anthony Fauci was key to circumventing the ban on gain-of-function research that resulted in the Wuhan lab being funded by us to do this work.
So if this was a natural spillover event from a wet market, then Anthony Fauci is in the clear.
If this is the result of ill-conceived gain-of-function research taking place in Wuhan, partially at our direction, that's a whole different ballgame.
And so part of what you and I have experienced, the incredible pushback that we have gotten for just noticing obvious patterns, patterns of dishonesty, patterns of evidence that aren't being discussed, that is about the fact that those who are responsible We cannot allow a full investigation.
I don't know what will happen if the truth were to fully emerge about not only what was the explanation for how this virus came into the world, when it came into the world, right?
Those are really important questions, but also what we failed to do, what responses we failed to deploy And then ultimately, we get back to the questions of Gerrit Vandenbosch, right?
Because we didn't deal with the pathogen properly at the beginning, because we didn't deploy the drugs that we had at our disposal that did work, we ran out the clock on the brief period of time when we might have driven it extinct or at least controlled it.
And in lieu of that, what we got is a proliferation of variants, and this is utterly out of our control now.
This is now a pathogen that is learning tricks that look like they allow it to shut down our own immunity.
And what's more, the fact of these IgG4 antibodies that likely have an attenuating effect on Immunity, right?
Which would explain why vaccinated and especially heavily vaccinated people do seem to be so vulnerable to this disease now.
But that offers an opportunity to other pathogens that can figure out that small sequence, that motif that will allow them to trigger the same stand down.
So we are now dealing with, yes, one pandemic, but also a mechanism that will allow other pathogens to evolve and escape of their own using our so-called vaccine response and its impact on the immune system.
So again, it appears to be, and there's a whole world of things we might discuss with respect to the distinction between the DNA versions of the so-called vaccine and the mRNA version.
There is a radical distinction in the implications of these things, both for personal health and apparently for the pandemic.
The DNA version does not appear to trigger this.
But yes, for people who got the mRNA shots, the more of them they got, the more pronounced this effect.
So that raises all kinds of possibilities.
And one of the things that I'm still struggling to understand...
What are the implications for those of us who didn't get the mRNA shot, or those who got one or two but not three, or those who got the DNA shot instead, right?
Is this going to create two very different levels of vulnerability?
Right?
Where only the people who were heavily vaccinated with the mRNA are going to have this vulnerability?
Or is this going to create such a large number of infected people that that is going to allow these pathogens to experiment and find those of us who didn't get this primary vulnerability?
And I don't know.
I'm hoping, well, frankly, I'm hoping that we wise up and we confront what I think is maybe the most important question of the whole pandemic, which is, what would the world look like if we hadn't done anything unusual?
What would it look like if we stopped doing the unusual stuff now and started behaving reasonably?
Right?
And my sense is the sooner we start behaving reasonably and let normal medical practice figure out how to treat the disease rather than this top-down stuff, the better off we're going to be.
You know, Gerrit Vandenbosch has been right about a lot and part of the troubling thing is that he was, we now know that he was right or effectively know that he was right about the proliferation of variants that were going to be driven by our absurdly narrow vaccine program, right?
The thing about these vaccines Is that because they have this basically just spike protein and they all work the same way, whether they're DNA or RNA, they're producing the same protein.
The point is that gives the pathogen a very clear, narrow signal, right, about how to evolve to evade this immunity.
It's not like normal immunity.
If you get sick with COVID, you and I have both had it.
Right?
Our immune systems will have reacted to multiple different molecular motifs on the surface of that pathogen.
What's more, you and I will have reacted to different motifs.
And so that diversity means that, all right, you might get unlucky and the next variant might be particularly bad for people who, you know, whose immune systems reacted as yours did, but I might be particularly immune or vice versa.
But when you have everybody, when you have literally billions of people who've all been given the same very narrow instruction about how to fight this pathogen, I mean, I don't know.
There's got to be an easy MMA analogy here, right?
If every fighter in the world adopted one trick and tried to perfect it, right, that trick would become a vulnerability.
But another one of the things that Heather and I often say on Dark Horse is, welcome to complex systems.
And that's what we say when somebody, you know, thinks they understand enough about biology to get ahead of it.
And then, of course, you know, it doesn't work.
Right?
And so the answer is...
There are many different ways that intervening in the nested series of complex systems that are in play here can go wrong, right?
One of them that we have been talking about for quite a long time is something called original antigenic sin.
It's a strange name, but what it basically means is when you tell the immune system how to react to a particular pathogen, Right?
The immune system gets used to that being the right answer.
And it gets harder and harder for the immune system to find its way to a new and better answer.
Right?
So the point is the immune system becomes habitual and that habitual nature can be counterproductive.
Right?
That's one way that things can go wrong.
We also have something called antibody-dependent enhancement, where if you think about the battle between a pathogen and immunity, well, pathogens can pretty well count on immunity, right?
I mean, if you've got a pathogen that attacks mammals, every mammal it's going to encounter has an immune system.
All of those immune systems are going to produce antibodies.
So the point is, well, what can you do with antibodies is a question that these pathogens are constantly facing.
And one of the things that they can do is they can use antibodies to gain access to cells in a way that they couldn't do without the antibody response.
So these are just multiple ways that our intervention can make things worse and not better.
And we are now discovering that there's a whole other layer, right?
The IgG4 result that I was talking about Isn't antibody-dependent enhancement, right?
It seems related to original antigenic sin, but in a whole different way, with a new mechanism.
And how this works in a population where what you are now doing is you are creating an incubator for new variants, not only of COVID, but of other diseases.
What it is is the human body and all bodies are vulnerable in terms of the structure of the brain, the way the brain is encased in the skull.
And if that gets disrupted, it just shuts the system up.
It's just mass trauma.
Now, the problem happens when people encounter mass trauma over and over and over again, and they become particularly vulnerable to it.
Now, there's a lot of theories as to why that happens, and therein lies the theory that the body recognizes that this is happening again, and the best way to avoid it is to just shut off.
And so what happens is fighters become what they call chinny.
And what chinny means, it's a slang term for someone who gets knocked out very easily.
And it's because they've had so many concussions and they've had so much trauma to the brain.
The brain recognizes this pattern and just says, I know where this is going.
He's a really tough guy.
He's going to just take a beating and we're not going to allow that.
And it's just a vulnerability of these incredibly complex systems that we have that use neurons and nerves and your bones and tissue interact with these nerves and upon trauma, nerves get compressed, the brain gets rattled inside the head and there's massive trauma that goes on including bleeding and there's a lot going on that would cause a person to shut off.
Well, I... Initially.
From, like, first concussion you've ever had, first traumatic knockout you've ever experienced.
Well, I agree with your point about all of the things that are going on.
What surprises me about being knocked out is that it seems discontinuous in the sense that, you know, there are a lot of levels of dysfunction and you go from fully functional to, you know, effectively asleep.
That...
The idea that the disruptions wouldn't result in certain circuits going offline while others remain online is the thing that surprises me about it.
He's actually a vaccinologist, so he has a broad evolutionary and immunological background, and he also, I believe he has a veterinary background.
unidentified
So what I'm saying is that now we are in a situation where vaccinees are sitting, because of Omicron, on non-neutralizing antibodies that enhance the infectiousness at the upper respiratory tract.
That's why they become more susceptible to infection.
But at the same time, It's still suppressing severe disease at the lower respiratory tract because these antibodies, these very same antibodies, can prevent, can inhibit the process of trans-infection.
So in other words, what I'm saying here is that now the virus is put under immune pressure from the non-neutralizing antibodies that prevent it from becoming more virulent, from causing severe disease.
And provided we sustain these immune pressures, it is very clear that the virus will overcome this, because don't forget the pressure is tremendous.
Omicron is circulating, people have been primed by way of the vaccination, and even if this, sorry to say, even if these idiots don't decide to come with an Omicron vaccine, Everyone in the population is now boosted with Omicron because it is circulating.
The vaccinees who are having non-neutralizing antibodies are highly susceptible.
So they are highly susceptible to priming.
So these non-neutralizing antibodies will very soon We reach elevated titers in the vaccinees, and the more people we vaccinate, the higher the prevalence of these elevated titers of non-neutralizing antibodies.
You can imagine, all this stuff is putting tremendous pressure no longer on the infectiousness of the virus.
That has been done, that has been taken care of, but now on the virulence.
And in that paper I have even predicted What molecular changes could enable the virus to stay very infectious, but at the same time to increase its virulence?
Maybe I should just translate a little bit about what he was saying there.
What he's getting at is the way I've been putting this piece of the puzzle is that we are running the largest gain-of-function experiment in the history of the world.
And we are doing that by pushing this virus around, first allowing it to escape into the public, and then pushing it around with these cartoonishly narrow vaccines.
And his point is that you actually, you've got two parameters that are distinct.
You have the infectiousness, how good is it from getting from one person to another, and the virulence, how sick does it make you?
And his point is the thing has learned the infectiousness trick very, very well, right?
But we are putting a pressure on it where it is good at getting into the upper airway and not so good at getting into the lower airway where it would make you much sicker.
And the point is, his point here, if I read it correctly, is that each person constitutes an opportunity for these viruses, in light of the antibodies that are being induced, to learn the trick of infecting more tissue, right?
So what he's saying is that he expects...
You know, he has predicted two things, one of which, and he's been on my podcast twice, and I talked to him about this the last time he was on when we were at the conference in Bath, England together.
The one thing he's predicted is a proliferation of variants in response to the so-called vaccines.
That we've seen, and you're now seeing it acknowledged in the press.
The other thing he has predicted is an increase in the virulence, the severity of the disease as a result of this program.
And he admits that this has been much slower to emerge than he expected.
The question is, will it happen?
And he's describing here in this clip the way in which he expects it to happen, that it will begin to pursue tissues farther down and succeed in infecting tissues farther down in the respiratory tract.
So, we'll see.
But, you know, the thing that I really appreciate about Garrett, he's very broad-minded.
He's very honest about what he's gotten right, what he's not gotten right, what's still up for grabs.
And he is sounding an alarm that I think...
Privately has been acknowledged by far more people than have been willing to publicly say, yeah, unfortunately, Gerrit van den Bosch is making sense.
So I think if I understand him correctly, there is an awareness inside vaccinology about the absurdity of what we are doing.
But because of the pressure, the same pressure that you and I have felt not to talk about certain things, pressure that you and I have ignored, often at our peril, But that other people have reacted to that by becoming quiet about what they know, even when what they know is professional and scientific.
Yeah, Asim Malhotra, I believe is how you pronounce it.
Yep, he is a cardiologist who was initially very favorable on the vaccine program.
And he lost his father.
And because he's a cardiologist and a very smart, decent fella, he dug and concluded that very likely he had lost his father to a vaccine adverse event.
And it caused him to dig deeply and to reverse his position on the wisdom of these so-called vaccines.
This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where ultimately, if you don't respond to any of the threats along the way, ultimately, you're going to face disciplinary action, or you will face a drying up of your funding, the very stuff that allows an academic to continue to do what they do.
And at some point, Maybe this is the way to think of it.
Sometimes I will go to somebody's Twitter feed or some other page and I will look at what they are saying in the present about where we are and I will think it's like they live on a different planet.
It's like Everything I know to be right is inverse, right?
And they're reacting to a world in which, you know, these so-called vaccines were terrifically successful at controlling COVID. Really?
We actually know more about this than you would think.
First of all, I should point out that this number, which everyone including Anthony Fauci has been repeating in the most recent version of it was three million American lives have been saved by vaccines, is utter nonsense.
It is based on a model.
So that should cause you a good deal of alarm in and of itself.
It's very easy to create a model that will tell you anything you want to hear.
And in this case, they've got a model and they fed it garbage, including they fed it completely unrealistic numbers with respect to how many people would have died if we had done nothing.
Right.
So, for example, they gave it a number of daily deaths that's higher than any day that we ever saw with respect to COVID. They didn't calculate any rate of death from vaccine adverse events.
And they projected basically what they did is they took a model and they fed it an absurd estimate of how good the vaccines were.
And then they asked the model how many people were saved.
And it's nonsense.
Now what we know from the work of Christine Stable-Ben, who is another member of Governor DeSantis' committee on COVID response, her work says that the mRNA vaccinations have cost more lives than they have saved.
And for the DNA vaccines, it is slightly the reverse.
There is a slight benefit in terms of all-cause mortality, but it does not appear to come through resistance to COVID. It appears to come through some sort of general resistance that we don't understand.
That latter result will reverse if you measure over a long period of time.
In other words, these shots have only been out for a brief period, and so to the extent that there are ongoing impacts, a slight benefit at year one of a treatment Welcome to my show!
got the mRNA shots, and those shots appear to increase your risk of death, not decrease it.
So I find that extremely alarming.
And even more alarming is the fact that there does not seem to be a response to it in the public health apparatus.
There was a very disturbing moment in time where there was something that was published that said that more unvaccinated people are getting COVID and a higher percentage of unvaccinated people, or excuse me, more vaccinated people were getting COVID and a higher percentage of vaccinated people were dying from COVID. more vaccinated people were getting COVID and a higher percentage And then I was thinking, okay, but most people have been vaccinated.
Like, when they're saying that, you're dealing with a much larger number to draw from.
So if you have three-quarters of the population gets vaccinated and one-quarter doesn't, and you have a certain number of deaths per capita, and it's standard, it seems to apply universally, then you're, of course, going to get more people who are vaccinated that die from COVID. And all that says is that the vaccines weren't as effective as we hoped or that COVID got more dangerous because of variants,
but it doesn't mean that it's preventing people from recovering from COVID better than people that were unvaccinated.
And the way to see your point clearly is if you had a population where 100% of the people were vaccinated, then everybody who died of COVID would be vaccinated and it wouldn't tell you anything.
So that's certainly a danger.
But I will say, you know, the most difficult job during the pandemic has been figuring out which evidence is actually real and should be included in the model and which evidence should be excluded.
And, you know, That should be the job of academic fields and universities and journals.
They should be doing that job and almost none of them are.
So that leaves those of us in the public with a toolkit to even understand what these papers say to figure it out.
But it does appear that the mRNA vaccines specifically are creating a level of vulnerability and in particular I would say one conspicuous feature of the landscape is that we do not see the rates of contracting COVID dropping radically, which you would expect them to.
And you should expect people dying from COVID to drop radically.
Why?
Because the disease is going to cull those who are most vulnerable to it just automatically.
And so that leaves a population that is more and more capable of enduring the pathogen.
Again, this is one more place where we don't see a familiar landscape.
We see an unusual pathogen behaving in ways that are counterintuitive, and now we are beginning to look into processes inside the immunity which, as far as we know, don't accompany other pathogens.
All of that suggests a very ominous picture, and I would say, well, let's compare two worlds.
Let's compare the world where when COVID emerged, we did nothing official.
We recognized that it existed to the extent that we could do that, and we just let doctors figure out how to treat it.
If that had happened, then doctors would have...
I don't mean this in a negative way.
They would inevitably have killed a certain number of people following hunches, deploying techniques that didn't work, but they would have discovered that and they would have gotten rapidly better at treating this disease and they would have discovered all of the compounds that work and they would have talked to each other about in what way to deploy those compounds, at what dosage.
And I must say that there is a part of me that is increasingly revisiting that chapter and...
You can hear me hesitating to say this, but one of the effects of the deployment of these ventilators and the fact that it killed people was that it elevated our collective sense of how dangerous the pathogen was.
And that fear was a big part of how we were sold on the rest of it.
So you have a lot of vulnerable people in a population.
They're concentrated amongst the elderly and the infirm.
Nobody is okay.
Nobody decent is okay with the fact that if you have a new pathogen circulating, it is liable to kill those people disproportionately.
However, it's not unexpected and it should not trigger you to expose the rest of your population to risks that they don't need to face.
And, you know, it also teaches us another lesson that's really well understood in biology, right?
If you see that somebody has died at 85 of the flu, right?
Okay.
Did the flu kill them?
Partly, but a lot of what happened is that they have expended all of the capacity to fight over a lifetime, and then the flu pushed them over the edge the last bit, right?
Did it rob them of life?
Yeah, it robbed them of some life.
It robbed them of a life that was probably a greatly diminished quality and wasn't going to last very long.
So when the death certificate says the person died of flu, it's not telling us a complete story.
And COVID did the same thing.
It did it in a way that a sober response would have allowed us to To remain calm and not overreact.
But when something was very interested in using our fear to get us to be compliant, what it did is it took the evidence of people who had died of COVID who were very close to death anyway, for one reason or another, and famously now took people who didn't really die of COVID but died with COVID, And it used those numbers to cause us to think the pathogen was something other than it was.
And again, I'm not telling you COVID isn't a dangerous pathogen.
SARS-CoV-2 is a dangerous pathogen.
I'm very worried about where it goes.
But the case fatality rate is not one that should have caused us to vaccinate literally billions of people.
And this is the thing that is now so alarming to me.
You can imagine a public health authority that was arrogant and that Thought it understood things way better than it did and it thought it had a plan and maybe it dreamt that, you know, by deploying these novel vaccines that would surely be the basis for many future successful vaccine campaigns against other pathogens, that they would be heralded as heroes.
You could imagine hubris causing people to deploy this and then discover that it didn't work and it hurt people.
But at the point that we're seeing an undeniable pattern of damage, And we know that that damage is disproportionately experienced by younger people and that the risk of COVID is disproportionately to the old.
The idea that it doesn't stop, the idea that it doesn't turn around and say, well, the vaccines are good.
Let's give them to people over 65. If you're over 40 and you want one, you can have one, but we're not going to vaccinate anybody young because the risk benefit ratio doesn't make sense.
The fact that it doesn't do that Means, I think, that somehow whatever is driving this policy is absolutely comfortable with the death of other people.
How could it not be?
I mean, how could you recommend these mRNA vaccines for children who are not, at least at the moment, vulnerable to COVID? How could you do it?
Yeah, and acceptable amounts would leave a normal person with their jaw on the floor.
But something has become very comfortable with this.
And so it may be that.
But I also have...
I have an uneasy sense about...
What the larger picture may be here.
So there was a concept that I was reluctant to talk about for months, right?
It wouldn't let me go, but I was reluctant to talk about it publicly.
And I finally did release it on Dark Horse.
Admittedly, it needs a better name.
I call it the Time Traveling Money Printer.
And to make a long story reasonably short, you presumably have thought a little bit about black budgets.
So I guess for your audience, let me just briefly say that a black budget in a democracy...
The power of the purse allows something like the Congress to control the intelligence community, for example.
The intelligence community has to go to the Congress in order to get funding to do the things that it wants to do, but the intelligence community also has the capacity to do things that normal folks can't.
They can generate money that isn't on the books by using some of the advantages that come to them by virtue of their position.
So you can imagine, for example, the DEA, it has to be involved in a certain number of drug deals in order To catch the bad guys, right?
So it has some license to play in drug dealing.
And you could imagine, I'm not, I don't, this is not about the DEA. I'm just using that as an example.
But the DEA, if it decided it needed a black budget that wasn't under the control of Congress, could use the leeway that it has in interacting with, you know, drug cartels to generate money that it could then use without anybody being able to say no.
So that's a black budget.
Now, black budgets are one way of doing this.
But anything else that can generate money that isn't accounted for in a normal, you know, federal budget has the same potential.
And what I want to do is just point out something that seems to have happened here that raises a financial question that I have not heard widely asked.
So we've all gone through the thought exercise of if you had a time machine, what would you do with it?
And one answer is almost no matter who you are, even if you're a super good person who's interested in doing good things, money allows you to do good things.
So your time machine, if it can go backwards in time, can allow you to buy Tesla or Apple or Amazon stock and turn a small amount of money into a huge amount of money.
And if it can go forward in time, you have similar opportunities, right?
You can see what's going to go up or down, and you can buy some or short.
So anyway, a time machine would give you the opportunity to generate money.
Now, as far as we know, time travel doesn't exist.
I'm pretty compelled by Stephen Hawking's proof that it probably doesn't exist.
You know about this?
Stephen Hawking threw a party which he advertised for time travelers.
He welcomed all time travelers to come and none of them showed up.
And he said, well, I guess it doesn't exist, right?
Because if it did, they'd come.
So anyway, let's assume time travel doesn't exist.
There's another way of doing the same thing without an actual time machine, right?
Printing money.
And it requires an awful lot of power to either shape history or slow regular folks down in how much they realize and how quickly they realize it.
If you're in a position to do that, then you can print money if you know what's coming, if you know what history is going to do.
It's a kind of insider information that is hard to prosecute.
It's not like knowing something about a stock price from being an insider.
And anyway, so my point is this.
There is substantial evidence that COVID began circulating such that it was an important component of what unfolded at the military games in Wuhan in September of 2019. And there's been lots of talk in various publications at this point about the possibility that COVID was circulating earlier than we knew.
But if folks knew that it was circulating earlier than we knew, or than the public knew, they had the opportunity to warn us and to help prepare us.
But there's another opportunity, which is to actually take some time to position themselves financially so that when the pandemic finally did emerge, It would print money for them, right?
If you know that a pandemic is coming and that it is going to spread around the globe and it is going to cause all kinds of alterations, you can short stocks for cruise ships or airplanes, hotels, right?
You can invest in pharmaceutical companies that have useful technologies.
Whatever.
If you had that advanced information, you could position yourself and it would result in a cryptic, massive transfer of wealth.
And so the question is, how much of the story here involves something having understood what was coming?
And having revealed it at a point that it was positioned rather than it having emerged naturally and, you know, the world suddenly all became aware at the dawning of 2020, right?
That's the question, is was there something about this that goes beyond what you were suggesting, which is Well, there's an opportunity to make money if you're in a pharmaceutical company.
There's going to be lots of opportunities to sell treatments and vaccines and things like that.
That's all true, but there's a much bigger opportunity if somebody is willing to effectively slow down the public awareness of a historical event.
And I guess the last thing I would say on that is The environment that we live in, the environment that actually results in you and me doing what we get to do in podcast space, is an environment that exists primarily because people are absolutely starved for reliable sources.
Right?
Every paper is broken.
Every university is broken.
And that means that people are left to find voices that for whatever reason are credible because they're honest, because they correct their mistakes, whatever.
I guess the point I would make is that the question of zero being a special number interfaces the question of the time-traveling money printer in the sense that keeping people from having mechanisms that tell them what's true is an excellent way of detaining them so that this sort of...
Financial gamesmanship can unfold, right?
It has to be true that there aren't newspapers out there seriously pursuing Pulitzer Prizes for deep investigations that, you know, treat nothing as sacred.
It doesn't seem to happen anymore.
And the question is why?
And I can, of course, be certain of nothing.
I'm as much an outsider to this as anybody.
But I will say, there's a version of the story in which our being kept in the dark is a perpetual source of wealth.
And that means that people like you and I have to be specially punished for trying to get out of the dark.
Right?
It's what we do.
We talk to interesting people who seem to have a beat on something.
You know, I talk to Geert van den Bosch and I'm in a position to know that what he's saying is at least sensible, right?
Neither of us know it's going to come true, but I can certainly say there's nothing in that that isn't plausible.
And that's very dangerous, right?
What they want to do is they want to dismiss Garrett VandenBosch.
They want to say he's got a financial conflict of interest.
That's why he's saying these things.
Well, I don't see it.
What I see is a small number of people who have two characteristics.
The two characteristics are they've got a toolkit that allows them to see with some clarity.
And the other characteristic is that they have the courage to speak about it when they're being threatened.
And those people are actually making their way in the world and people are gravitating to us.
And then I'm sure some people are faking it.
But it has resulted in a very noisy sense-making environment.
And I don't think it's naturally noisy.
I think somebody has denied us the tools with which we would normally make sense and forced us into this environment.
Well, but you're seeing something downstream of...
What's being called mass formation and the mass formation appears to be downstream of an industrial strength propaganda campaign, a very expensive one designed to create these unsolvable puzzles for people so that they would end up in this mindset.
And I think one of the things that people like you and I have to do is figure out, you know, where you draw the line.
I mean, for me, I have nothing but forgiveness for people who got it wrong and who did what they thought was the right thing on the basis of bad information that they couldn't figure out was bad.
If you went after people who were so-called vaccine hesitant, if you went after them, if you demonized them, if you said they weren't entitled to medical services, if you said it wasn't a tragedy if they died, if you said that kind of stuff, And now you're one of the huge majority of people who has not gotten their bivalent booster, and you're not getting it because there's something nagging at you, because you're now vaccine-hesitant, right?
And the answer is, own up to it.
You don't get to keep pretending that you were right to demonize us.
You have switched sides.
You've done so on the basis that the evidence has persuaded you that something is not right.
And the answer is, look, you're not going to get punished by us if you come out now and you say, actually, I had it wrong.
But don't you dare keep coming after us and then hide this fact that you've become hesitant and you don't know how to file that in your own mind.
And the reason why I'm not drawing that line is because I feel like we have to be charitable and forgiving.
And this is the only way we come to unity after this.
And I don't want to demonize people who demonized me.
I don't want to be angry at people that called me an anti-vaxxer or – listen, man.
I had Dr. Peter Hotez on early.
I had Michael Osterholm on early, and I had him on again.
I mean, I had all these people on early, and the Osterholm podcast freaked so many people out.
I did it the very early days of the pandemic, before there was a vaccine, and Osterholm was painting a picture that was absolutely fucking terrifying, and it terrified me, and it made me want to get vaccinated.
It made a lot of people, like, looking forward to that vaccine.
And when you have this narrative in your mind and then you see people that are somehow or another the enemy of that narrative in your mind or a problem in that they're going to cause more problems for you and for other people and for vulnerable people.
Even logically it didn't make sense because the vaccine did stop the virus in its tracks.
Why would you be angry at people that don't take it?
Because they're just going to be vulnerable.
Why would you be angry?
You should be sad.
You should be trying to convince them.
Like, the only way to convince them that works is with love and understanding and to communicate with them in a way that's going to reach them.
If you call people an idiot and a fool or a monster or demonize them and say, laugh when they die.
I mean, there was this woman who's a famous food writer.
Who demonized people and she did it in a way where she was saying that the only good side was that the people that were dying were all these anti-vaxxers and that somehow or another that was good, that these people that didn't trust the pharmaceutical companies,
the companies that have had more criminal punishments, more fines For criminal behavior than virtually any industry that's ever existed, more lying about the adverse effects and the adverse reactions that people possibly could have or were going to have about these drugs that they pushed,
where we have internal memos where they describe, like in terms of Vioxx, they describe these potential bad side effects that are going to happen, but also say, but we will do well with these.
We have those.
We have that evidence.
So these people that got duped, I have nothing but love for them.
And I think the only way we're going to get out of this is if we forgive them.
And people are so hesitant to do that and they're like, fuck them, fuck this, fuck that.
You can't have a society with fuck them.
Because we are them.
I could have been one of them.
If I wasn't doing this fucking podcast, okay?
If I was just a regular comedian and that's what I did for a living and I didn't pay much attention to alternative media and podcasts that were discussing this and people like Peter McCullough or Robert Malone or all these people that were sounding the alarm, if I was one of those people, That didn't have the access to these kind of conversations, I would not have a nuanced perspective.
And if I had gotten vaccinated and other people didn't, I would be like, fuck those people.
I would be just like people I know, who I used to be friends with, who now hate me and are angry at me and talk shit about me online.
I forgive them because I would have been like them if I didn't have the access to the kind of conversations that I've had, if I didn't have the kind of mindset that I have, that my personality that is just immune to bullshit.
When bullshit hits me, I go, oh, I know what this is.
I grew up without a dad.
I don't trust people.
I think there's a lot of bullshit in the world.
You know, I've had people try to do things to me.
I've been in dangerous situations.
I know people can be sketchy.
There's sketchy fucking people out there in the world and the people that haven't experienced that and don't have that perspective, I can understand why they formed the conclusions that they did because I could have been them.
I 100% could have been them.
The only way That we can help each other is for people like you and people like me and other people that have had these other perspectives, the Aaron Rodgers of the world, these people that have been demonized, to forgive people.
And if we don't do that, we just continue these ideological tribes that battle each other and move the goalposts.
Because we saw the goalposts get moved when it turned out that, well, COVID doesn't, or the vaccines don't stop transmission.
They don't stop infection.
They don't stop you from getting sick.
We saw that happen, and then we saw the narrative change.
We knew that, and we knew that it was just going to prevent you from serious illness.
Well, why were you mad at me when I didn't get seriously ill?
Why were people mad at me?
Because I didn't do what they did.
And they thought they did the right thing, and I didn't do the right thing, and I'm some crazy kook who believes in the flat earth and fucking chemtrails or whatever the fuck you want to attribute to it.
But even if they're doing it right now, like that lady just tweeted that right now.
Sean Penn recently said that he thinks that unvaccinated people should have been jailed.
I mean, I don't hate him.
He shouldn't be speaking on this, right?
He's just famous.
Because he's famous, his words carry weight.
He could have been a guy at a bar that, you know, works for some fucking trucking company or something.
And he has this perspective.
We should fucking jail him.
But it doesn't mean he's informed, right?
It just means he's talking.
And because he's talking and he says something that turns out to be incorrect and he happens to be famous, then it becomes broadcast everywhere.
I forgive him too.
I forgive all these people with these wrong perspectives because that's the only way we get out of this.
And if we don't do that, then we head into further and further polarization.
And this is what I'm scared of.
What I'm scared of is that people dig their fucking heels in and just decide that all these people that didn't get vaccinated are all a bunch of MAGA-supporting, racist, xenophobic, Homophobic, transphobic assholes, and we hate assholes.
They did it out of hate.
And that's what that lady's saying.
She's like hook, line, and sinker.
They did it out of hate, which is crazy to say, especially if you might have known someone who had an adverse effect early on, which I did.
I knew a few people that got really wrecked early on.
Friends of mine, comedians, I know people that are in their 30s that have pacemakers now.
I know people that have had adverse effects.
There was a recent poll that suggested that 28% of Americans know someone who died from the vaccine.
That's purely anecdotal.
Now, do we know that that person actually died of the vaccine?
We don't.
There's some evidence that people have absolutely had an adverse event that happened because of the vaccine, particularly young children who all of a sudden got myocarditis or heart attacks and strokes and died.
There's a very reasonable Connection that you can make to this young, very healthy athlete who gets a COVID vaccine and then immediately has a heart attack and dies.
Hey, this might be the cause.
Is there a mechanism that shows that the vaccine under rare conditions can cause that in people?
Turns out, yes.
Right?
So I understand where all these people came from.
And I really feel this very strongly.
The only way we get out of this, Is all the people that were demonized and all the people that were called kooks and just continue to be kind and Generous and charitable and say I get it.
I get why you form those opinions I get why you are mad I get why you followed this narrative and I get why you dug your heels in and I clearly get why you use social media to project this to To comfort yourself that you're on the right side of history, you're in the right group of people, and to also punish those people who didn't do what you did to reinforce your opinion and yourself that you did the right thing.
I'm not arguing that the people who are still doing this are unforgivable.
What I'm arguing is that the vast majority of people who have Woken up to some degree to what has happened, that those people are ready to be forgiven, and that those people who are still doing this need to discover that they are being left behind by all of those who have woken up and recognized something wrong happened and we need to figure out what it is.
And I do want to talk a little bit about that mechanism that you hint at where these mRNA vaccines seem to be causing myocarditis.
Yeah, please do, because this is also something that I've gotten trouble for discussing, particularly on the Josh Zeps podcast.
Because Josh Zeps, I pointed out that there was a study previous that showed that young boys in particular were many times more likely to get myocarditis because of the vaccine.
And then he said something to the effect of more people are getting myocarditis from COVID itself Then from the vaccine.
But now as more and more data is being understood and analyzed, that turns out to not be the case.
So me talking out of school like that, like, I took my medicine.
I was like, look, this is what I had been told.
This is what I thought.
I love Josh Zeps.
I understand that Josh Zeps has a very different perspective on this than me.
He also comes from Australia, which was fucking hook, line, and sinker.
And he also works for a large corporation.
He was working on a radio show there.
And I get his perspective.
I fucking love the guy.
Like, I'm not mad at the guy.
I did look stupid at the time when we pulled up the wrong thing.
But I had so many people who had told me who were experts, who had told me that that is not the case.
And then there was a bunch of people that defended me online.
There were scientists and doctors and said, no, this is actually, particularly with the Moderna vaccine, which is a more potent version of the NMRNA vaccine than the Pfizer.
So let's talk about A, first of all, myocarditis is a bit of a problematic term because what it really means is just inflammation, right?
And inflammation is not a pathology in and of itself, it's just a symptom, right?
So the question is, what's causing the inflammation?
Now, I need to talk about a little bit of immunological function here in order for this to make sense.
The mRNA vaccines, right, they were supposed to inject them into your arm and they told us that the vaccine was supposed to stay more or less in the deltoid.
Maybe it leaks into the lymphatic system, ends up creating antigen and then presenting it inside the lymph nodes.
Well, that turns out not to have been the case.
The stuff leaks out and it gets into the body.
It gets into the bloodstream.
Now, the problem with that is that if we then, from the point that we go from assuming that it's going to stay in your deltoid to, oh, it's going to circulate around the body in your blood, right?
When someone gets injected into the deltoid, are there times where it does stay in the deltoid?
And is this because of where it's injected in the deltoid?
Is it possible that it gets injected and punctures a vein or an artery and that's how it gets into the entire body and that that's why it only happens in some cases?
And he's been for a long time pointing out that there's an obvious thing known from medicine, which is that when you inject somebody, that you pull back on the plunger and the syringe.
And if you see blood, you go further in before you inject.
And the reason for that is because you don't want to inject anything into a blood vessel.
Not only have we not seen it, it's been recommended that you don't do it.
And the argument was, as I understand it, as crazy as this sounds, that the fact that it leaves the needle in a little longer and it might cause a little extra pain is going to result in more vaccine hesitancy.
Right?
As if injecting things that are supposed to go into the muscle but then end up in the bloodstream and then cause adverse events isn't going to cause vaccine hesitance.
That is one possibility, is that you've got two classes of people, those who got unlucky and the thing hit partially or completely inside of a blood vessel, and those who got lucky and it stayed more or less in the deltoid.
Now, I don't think that that's the sum total of it, but no doubt you were unluckier if it hit a blood vessel.
It's an important factor, and I will point out that it is not only John Campbell On this, but there's another guy who I've recently started reading, a guy named, I think it's Mark Girardot.
And he's been advancing something that he calls bolus theory.
I would call it hypothesis.
But in any case...
His point is that a lot of adverse events having nothing to do with this particular vaccine, but in general have to do with that fraction of cases in which somebody gets a huge dose, a bolus, that flows through their circulatory system for something that was designed to leak out slowly through the lymph.
So anyway, I would encourage people to look him up and check out his take on the COVID vaccines.
Oh, and then there's a third contributing, I guess there's a second contributing factor here, potentially.
And this is something that Peter McCullough has talked about.
He has a totally cool specialty for talking about the pandemic.
He's a toxicologist.
And so anyway, he's very excellent at what he does, and he's very clear-headed.
He's also a very good teacher.
He has been talking about the manufacturing process of these vaccines and the fact is on top of everything else, on top of the bad design and on top of the design failures and on top of the poor choice of antigen and all of the other things, There's the fact that the batches were incredibly uneven, right?
So there are certain batches that have been hugely associated with adverse events and other batches that don't show up in the reports, right?
So what Peter McCullough has said, I hope I'm getting this right, but what I think Peter McCullough has said is...
That it may be that people who experience none of the harms from these things have effectively gotten blanks, right?
So, I don't know how common that is.
I would say that one of the overarching messages that I hope people will get from our discussion is that a lot of these questions are not hard to know the answer to, right?
Is there or is there not a pattern of athletes collapsing on the field that is different from history?
That's not a hard question to study.
Is there or is there not a new phenomenon that is being seen in mortuaries where there are these large, fibrous, clot-like things?
Is that new?
Is that not new?
Does it exist?
Does it not exist?
None of these things are hard to study.
And what we're finding is that, in fact, you just have this absolute dedication to not studying these questions so that it remains ambiguous.
And I believe that if you look at what's going on with the Washington Post now, when they're talking about these vaccines actually encouraging these variants to proliferate, and then also the lab leak theory being discussed on the front cover of Newsweek magazine, all these different things that are now happening that weren't happening all these different things that are now happening that weren't happening
Lena Nguyen talking about natural immunity being superior to the immunity that's important by the vaccine, talking about how exercise is prevented, and not a lot of exercise.
Just 10 minutes a day, a few times a week, turns out to be 400% more effective at preventing you from death or serious illness.
That we knew this about vitamin D. We knew this about a lot of things, obesity.
We knew this.
And that as time went on, even with new evidence, that evidence was not only not promoted, but if you discussed it, you were encouraging vaccine hesitancy.
This crazy way of looking at positive outcomes through things that people can control like diet and exercise and overall metabolic health, which you absolutely can improve if you're alive.
You can do this and we could have encouraged people to do these things and we could have said and changed a lot of people's lives and said hey There's something you can do that will help you and there's a lot of people that did follow that advice and follow that instruction because they did find out about it and they did change their life and they are infinitely better off than they were three years ago physically because of the decisions that they made.
We could have encouraged millions of people.
I don't know how many people would have done that because it's very difficult To make a horse drink.
You can lead a horse to water, but getting them to drink, you know, that's the old expression.
It's very difficult to get people to take steps that require discipline and focus and commitment and also overcoming procrastination and this resistance that people have to change.
But you could have at least encouraged it and it would have made some people react to it.
Well, there's that and, you know, the lowest bar of all was the vitamin D. Yeah.
Right.
So the point is how, you know, how dedicated does somebody have to be to recognize, A, that they're probably deficient in vitamin D, B, maybe spend a little time in the sun while it's high enough in the sky for you to make it, and at the very worst, C, supplement.
Did you ever see the discussion that I had with Peter Hotez, where Pierre Corey put on his...
Pull that up.
It's Pierre Corey's Twitter page.
And Dr. Pierre Corey, who was in the very beginning, he's a part of the frontline critical care COVID response.
Where they were trying to figure out what ways and methods could be effective to stop the transmission or to help people that were ill and coming up with off-label medications and obviously Massive amounts of pushback and massive amounts of demonization.
I experienced that in the biggest way possible on CNN in a way that I was fucking baffled by their response.
We can get to that in a minute, but let's play this because this is the very beginning of the COVID pandemic.
And this is when I had him on and I had no misgivings or no hesitation whatsoever about getting vaccinated.
You know, there's a large body of clinical research on the efficacy of vitamins, especially vitamins D, vitamins B. I have taken vitamin D for periods, the recommendation of my internist, yeah.
What about essential fatty acids, which are great for your brain, fish oil, all these different things that are fantastic for inflammation.
Peter T has talked about this in depth about just having a healthy body, reducing all-cause mortality by an enormous factor, reducing cardiac events, cancer, and that if there was a drug That did what exercise does in terms of promoting overall health and metabolic health.
That would be one of the most important drugs that's ever been introduced to human populations.
But the fact that this unfortunate conversation for him, you know, the way it aged now, what we know now about Peter, and I think Peter's a great guy.
I've known Peter for a long time, and the reason why I had him on the podcast is I talked to him about diseases when I was doing Joe Rogan questions everything for sci-fi and he was explaining to me how many people are infected by parasites in third-world countries and in tropical climates this is one of his areas of expertise and I've found it very stunning that he was like the majority of the people in these places have parasites I'm like oh my god it's crazy to think of and he was talking
about how dangerous this is and how important it is To try to treat these things and help these people.
But then when someone is a person who is publicly telling people that they have to do one very specific thing that turns out to actually not prevent COVID, not prevent transmission, and continues to say it, but doesn't do the things that we know can help, that you can do without that, like good diet, vitamin D supplementation.
You know, exercise, losing weight, you know, all those things.
I mean, this is a very unfortunate sort of narrative that got pushed, that there's only one way.
And what's more, I mean, when medicine works, it's because it leverages true things about biology, and it leverages them elegantly.
It's not these giant interventions that save the day, right?
It's elegant, minimal interventions.
And these particular so-called vaccines are nothing of the sort.
And yet for people, I mean, it's almost like a kind of transhumanism where these people have put their faith in what their doctor can do for them rather than in preventive practices that would actually make them much less vulnerable in the first place.
We should go back to the myocarditis mechanism.
So when the vaccine, the so-called vaccine, the mRNA vaccine, enters your body, you have lipid nanoparticles coding this mRNA message.
The lipid nanoparticles have no targeting mechanism in them.
They're just dumb, fatty interfaces.
And that means that they will interface with any cell they encounter.
Now, different cells may have different affinities, but there's nothing that tells that lipid nanoparticle coat which cells to go into.
And so, when this leaks out of your deltoid, or when it travels out of your deltoid in a blood vessel, You now have these pseudoviruses, effectively, a fatty coat with a gene message inside written in the language of mRNA, and it is going to be taken up by cells that it encounters haphazardly around the body.
Okay, it gets into the cell.
The cell translates, well actually this is RNA, so it transcribes the message into protein.
That protein, the spike protein, is then exported to the surface of the cell.
It's supposed to stick there.
Surely some of it does.
We now know some of it does not.
Some of that spike circulates around.
But the problem is you've now got a cell that is displaying the spike protein.
That's according to the design of this inoculation, right?
The cell is displaying this protein.
The body, the immune system, Looking at a cell in your body that is displaying your own proteins and foreign proteins thinks it knows exactly what it's looking at.
The only thing that can be is a virally infected cell, and there's only one thing to do with a virally infected cell, and that's to destroy it.
So we are programmed, our immune systems, Every day of the year are circulating, looking for cells that are showing the signature of having been invaded by a virus and then it destroys them.
Not because losing cells is okay.
It's not.
It's bad for you.
But because it's better than leaving a cell that has been captured by a virus producing more virus.
Now, if this happens, if you get injected and these things are circulating in your blood and they get taken up in your liver, right?
A certain number of cells in your liver will then be destroyed by your immune system.
It's probably not a big deal because liver can replace itself at a very high rate.
If it happens in your heart, it's an absolute disaster.
And the reason it's an absolute disaster is that your heart, for reasons we can get into if you want, is not an organ that repairs itself.
Right?
You've got this mechanism where the failure of the vaccine, either because nobody aspirated the syringe or because it was leaking out of the deltoid anyway, is circulating in the body.
It gets taken up by cells.
In some unlucky people those cells will be in the heart.
When those cells in the heart do their job and transcribe this new message They will be attacked by the immune system and destroyed, creating a wound in your heart, right?
Now, if you wait long enough, that wound will hopefully scar over.
It will diminish the capacity of the heart to do its job.
I mean, it is actually downstream of something, as you know, I studied a long time ago...
Which is the trade-off between tissue repair and senescence.
And so the heart, one of its most amazing characteristics is that it doesn't get cancer, right?
But the cost of not getting cancer is that it doesn't repair, right?
It scars, and that reduces the capacity of the heart to do the job that it does.
And it also is going to create a vulnerability, right?
Again, the question of whether or not people are dropping dead at a high rate during athletic events is a readily studyable question, right?
It's possible that this happens with some regularity.
That we don't know it because it doesn't generally get reported and that during COVID people are super sensitive to these things and they're now circulating the clips.
It's also possible that it's happening at a much, much higher rate and that the reason has to do with this very flaw.
Given how easy a question this is to answer, why isn't there data?
Now, I will say there's data on related matters.
You should check out the substack of an excellent biologist named Jumi Kim, who has delved into a number of the issues surrounding COVID and vaccines and the like.
And she has put together an excellent analysis on the effect on athletic performance of these vaccines.
And it's pretty surprising, right?
There is, in some large fraction of people who get the mRNA vaccines, A substantial decrease that I think she says is akin to something like the loss of 10 years of vitality.
That's not a small loss.
So there is evidence that there is a harm.
There is an obvious mechanism.
In fact, I think it is incumbent on those who designed these so-called vaccines to explain why this wouldn't happen.
As soon as we knew that these things were going to circulate in the body, one has to make the assumption that they will be taken up haphazardly, and that having been taken up haphazardly, the immune system will target the cells that have taken it up and destroy them.
Once you know that, the question is, well, what protects the heart?
What protects the major blood vessels?
Those are places you can't afford to have a wound.
And yet, there's no explanation of how this could possibly be safe in this regard.
And what's worse is, you know, at the beginning of this so-called vaccination campaign, they led us to believe, they very directly led us to believe that the mRNA transcripts were very short-lived, which leaves the idea that whatever, however bad these things might be, at least it's a very temporary kind of harm, right?
The harm will be done and then it will be over.
But it turns out that they actually did something.
And you can, you know, if we steel man the position of the designers, they're trying to get a vaccine that works at all, right?
They're going to use every trick they can to just try to get these transcripts into enough cells that they can get enough of an effect that it has some positive impact on the disease.
Well, one of the things they did was they took the mRNAs, which are spelled, it's a four-letter code, and they substituted all the uracils, the U's, with a different version of the chemical that renders these things incredibly stable.
Now, this is a trick that nature apparently does itself, but it substitutes a very rare U with one of these pseudouridines.
In the case of these manufacturers, they substituted every single one.
And what that means is that these mRNA fragments are not vulnerable to being taken apart by the enzymes that we all carry that break apart mRNAs that they find floating around the body.
So at the point that the immune system has targeted these cells that have taken up these transcripts, these transcripts presumably become flowing out and they get gobbled up by a macrophage or something like that, which then may get transfected itself.
So they've created a nightmare scenario.
And I would point out that this is one of the many things that Heather and I got right in this unfolding nightmare.
As we said, look, there's no way that any of these so-called vaccines could be safe.
They can't be safe because nobody knows what they do long term.
The DNA version is likely to be a lot safer than the mRNA version.
And there are various different reasons for that.
But this has turned out to be true.
And the paper I pointed to earlier, the Christine Stable-Ben paper, that showed a slight decrease in all-cause mortality for the DNA version and an increase in all-cause mortality for the mRNA version reflects this.
But one of the hidden characteristics is in the DNA version, what they've done is they've borrowed an adenovirus.
They borrowed a virus that exists, a virus that has an evolutionary history infecting creatures.
And at the beginning of the podcast, I was talking about the fact that a virus does not have an interest in hurting you, right?
A virus has an interest in leaving you on your feet.
Well, by borrowing this adenovirus, They've borrowed something that presumably has some of that characteristic built into it.
In other words, it's not infecting every cell in the body.
It's not looking to get into your heart because why would it do that?
It doesn't help it to transmit itself.
So it's not a good thing to do.
So you've got the fact that the adenovirus...
is superior than the lipid nanoparticles.
You've got the fact that DNA does not have pseudouridines, so it does not have this ultra-permanent nature that they imbued the mRNA transcripts with.
And this creates an environment in which these two things, which then go on both to produce spike protein, which was not a good choice.
Spike protein is a dangerous thing for your body to be producing.
But what it means is that we actually have a controlled experiment where the hazards that come from the spike protein apply to both versions.
But the hazards that come from the lipid nanoparticles, the lack of targeting, and the Stabilized mRNAs only apply to those vaccines, and we are seeing a radical difference in the level of harm.
One of the things that people said to dismiss the concerns about myocarditis is they said that it's very temporary and that you take medication and that you get over it quickly.
I saw that narrative over and over again when people were discussing myocarditis.
They're saying the myocarditis that's imparted by the vaccine is unfortunate but it's temporary for most people.
Now, there is a technical way in which this could be true, but if you talk to cardiologists, they don't believe that this is the case, at least not good cardiologists.
And the loophole here is that, as I said at the top of the podcast, myocarditis just means inflammation of the heart.
Well, this is one of these pieces of evidence that I want to see explored by an actually independent body.
This has been looked at by some folks, and my sense, having looked at the various kinds of data, is that the myocarditis that is seen as a result of COVID vaccination is serious and it is downstream of tissue destruction.
And that's the point.
It's not the myocarditis itself.
It's the tissue destruction that is causing the problem.
It is causing weaknesses in the heart.
It is causing arrhythmias in the heart.
And all of these things are vulnerabilities.
So that's the thing to be tracking.
The inflammation itself is like an indicator that something has happened to the heart.
But the question is, was there damage?
How much damage was there, right?
Your heart isn't innervated in the same way as your surface.
So you don't necessarily have evidence that you've got a weakness in your aorta, for example.
But if you do, then that creates a hazard for you, and it creates a hazard that's particularly acute before it heals, or before it scars, and remains a vulnerability after it has scarred.
So the idea that, you know, you've got inflammation in your heart, we give you some drugs, it gets better.
It may be that the inflammation gets better, but the question is, were you damaged?
Right?
That's the key issue.
Were you damaged, and what implication does it have For your capacity to function?
What implication does it have for the threshold at which your heart is no longer capable of doing what it needs to do?
Right?
That's the question with the possibility that athletes are collapsing on the field due to heart attack with an irregular frequency at this point.
You can imagine somebody, an athlete, who has a very strong heart.
It then becomes damaged.
Still functions.
It's still a strong heart.
But there's some point at which it gets pushed past a threshold that it hasn't seen in a month, a year.
Who knows?
Some particularly intense moment of play.
And then that could cause an incident.
And so...
I'm not telling you we know that this is happening, but I am telling you it's not a hard question to study, and the fact that we are not obsessed with finding out the answer is conspicuous.
You should ask a cardiologist, but my understanding as a biologist is you can't restore it fully, but you can get back to a place where it is stabilized in a somewhat diminished capacity.
And the reason is because the heart is not good at healing.
It's not what it does.
And I would argue that the reason that it's not good at healing is that it's so good at preventing cancer.
There's no reason, in principle, if we knew enough that we couldn't grow you a heart from your own cells so that it would share your genome, which would neutralize any immunological issues.
And we know more or less how to install a heart.
Heart transplants are real.
But an installed heart is a compromised heart in the sense that it does not regulate.
So my understanding, again, this is as a biologist looking at the system, this is not as a medical doctor.
But my understanding is that the regulation of the beating of the heart is something we have not mastered, right?
That we basically set the heart at a rate when it gets installed.
And having set the heart at a rate, it's not as good as a heart that is dynamically changing with the circumstances.
So it just can't be the equal.
And I would also argue the installing of a heart in a patient is bound to have issues with This
We do know that Dr. Sanjay Gupta was on CNN and he gave a reason why this young man had this I don't believe that he's actually physically examined this person, so I'm not sure why he came to that conclusion.
But there is a possibility that on impact that there's something that happens if someone gets hit at the exact right time and if they get hit on the heart at the exact right time that it can stop the heart.
I think we can say cardiologists, including Peter McCullough, have looked at the footage and they believe that this is exactly what happened.
That there is this moment in the heart's rhythm in which, in my mind, it's like, If you had an explosion in the cylinder of an internal combustion engine, as the piston was coming up to the top, it would stop it dead rather than exploding at the right moment and driving it back down, right?
So there's some moment of vulnerability and a hard enough hit can stop the heart.
And so anyway, Peter McCullough and others have looked at this tape and said that appears to be what happened.
As with the...
So, I'm sorry.
I looked...
I'm not a football fan, so I didn't know this young man's name before this incident.
I looked at him and I would just say, in having this discussion, I think it's really important.
My impression in looking at what evidence there was about him online is that this was an unusually good kid.
Not only extremely talented as an athlete, but also just super decent.
The fact that we are talking about it, I don't want to detract from the fact that he's fighting for his life and that's true and we should be rooting for him irrespective of what has happened here.
This is somebody who deserves to have a long life ahead of him.
And so it is possible that someone could get hit in that regard and it could cause that thing to happen and it has happened before, particularly with people getting hit in the chest with fastballs, right?
Those guys are in fucking insane shape because you have to be.
The amount of strain...
They're sprinting.
I went to see...
Austin has a soccer league and I went to see it live and I was really impressed.
I was first of all impressed but these guys have fucking thoroughbred legs.
I mean they are in insane shape and just the demand as a person who works out watching the demand that's required to the body To be able to perform that way, sprinting constantly.
And soccer, my friend Eddie, who is one of the owners of the local soccer team, he was explaining to me that one of the reasons why it's not good for television in America is because they don't take breaks.
Right.
It's not like, you know, you have a stop, we'll be right back with, you know, first down and we'll be back with commercials and you can, you know, Pizza Hut and all that shit.
You know, I'm not an expert in this, but it seems like it's the worst case scenario because, you know, basketball is full of motion in a way that football isn't, but it's a smaller court.
And that means that the range of conditions over which their hearts have to be tolerant is very high.
And so, again, it's crazy that we are having to deal at the level of anecdote with this pattern or lack of a pattern.
Maybe it's not a pattern.
But it certainly does seem that we see footage of people collapsing on what they would call the football pitch in Yeah.
In Europe, what is that, right?
So in any case, I do hope, I worry that in cases in the last couple years where Somebody has famously suffered a heart attack in particular or stroke or something like this, that there seems to be some desire not to even open the possibility of what may have caused it.
And presumably that's because people are being told it is vitally important that we not fuel vaccine hesitancy because it's essential to protecting the vulnerable and ending the pandemic.
And at this point, hopefully we're over that.
Hopefully the point is actually, you know what?
We need to know what the risk-benefit analysis is for a person taking this.
So ChatGPT is a large language model trained artificial intelligence which is, let's just say, it can be awful but it is often surprisingly good at answering questions you might have about how to do things.
One of the great triumphs of it is that coders are now asking it to solve coding problems and it will actually write code that is functional.
It's pretty amazing.
And also, there's an implementation of it that if you feed it up to three tweets, it will write a New York Times story in one of five genres, you know, optimistic, pessimistic, neutral.
And, you know, It's, you don't really need the New York Times anymore because it's pretty good at this job, right?
So, on the one hand, it's all very interesting that we're living in an era in which there is at least, I mean, you know, and this is a prototype, right?
This is a prototype that was specifically trained and then placed on the internet so people could play with it.
And I've seen lots of interesting uses.
It's going to get better, right?
We're dealing with chat GPT-3.
There's going to be a chat GPT-4, which is going to be that much better because it will be built with the improvements that have been gained through turning this one loose on the world.
But I have to say, I am...
I'm quite alarmed.
Not only that this thing exists, but I don't think we're ready for it.
And I don't think we're ready for it in a couple different ways.
I mean, if you want to comfort yourself and say, well, this isn't that serious that we have this AI that can do these really shocking things.
The comforting thing is that the way it's programmed, it doesn't know what it's saying.
It doesn't matter that it convinces you that it's saying something and it means it and that it seems like a creative entity.
What it's doing is it is basically...
Using a predictive model that has been trained on a huge dataset of written language, right?
So the answer is if, you know, you take three words in a row, can you predict what the next word is going to be?
And they've allowed it, they've exposed it to a large dataset and it's gotten really good at predicting Basically, these sequences to the point that it can now, if you prompt it correctly, it can spit out these very long explanations.
Some of them are dead wrong.
Sometimes they're right on target.
But I have two concerns about it.
One, if you imagine that this thing just gets a little better than it is, which is inevitable, that it's going to make actual insight that much harder to spot.
Right.
In other words, if you become expert at operating this thing, at querying it, and it becomes better at understanding a wider range of topics because they turn it loose on everything that's written on the Internet, for example.
Right.
Then the point is the ability to fake expertise is going to go through the roof.
I don't think we know how we're going to police a world in which I mean, this is this problem is already bad enough.
Most academics are fakers.
They don't know that, right?
They trained in something, they wrote a dissertation, they think they're experts, but you can see when something unexpected happens, like the pandemic, you get just broad-scale failure across entire disciplines where nobody seems to get it right.
Right?
So, in that world, this is going to be even worse because now you have an artificial intelligence able to generate things in plain English that are often full of true information, but you don't know whether what generated it is some, you know, brain-dead model or something else.
That's one concern.
And then the other concern is when we say, well, ChatGPT doesn't know what it's saying.
It's not conscious.
We know it's not conscious because it's not programmed to have a consciousness.
We are actually ignoring the other half of the story, which is that we don't know how human consciousness works, and we don't know how it develops in a child.
A child is exposed to a world of adults talking around them.
And the child experiments first with phonemes and then words and then clusters of words and then sentences.
And by doing something that isn't all that far from what ChatGPT is doing, it ends up becoming a conscious individual.
And so I think it's clear that ChatGPT isn't conscious.
It couldn't be.
But it isn't clear to me, at least, that we are not suddenly stepping onto a process that produces that very quickly without us even necessarily knowing it.
I wrote a paper which I never published anywhere in 2016 about this very issue.
In fact, I used basically the argument that you could attain artificial general intelligence by imbuing computers with a childlike play environment for language and then exposing them to a huge data set, which is not exactly what's happened here, but it's in the ballpark.
And I would argue, and I did argue, that one needs to build an architecture in which this can't get away from you, right?
And so the architecture that I advocate for is actually a metamorphosis architecture where metamorphosis is not allowed.
It is an affirmative choice of humans.
So, in other words, if you think about, let's say that we developed some artificial frogs to do some job to clear some waterway of something, and we imbued them with an intelligence so that they could learn to clear the waterway better, but we worried that they might learn to do something that we don't want them to do and that we would have no way of arresting it once these frogs were released in the wild and capable of producing more of themselves.
But if what you say is, well, at the point at which you go from a tadpole to a frog, you have to ask us if you can go, right?
There's no automatic transition from a tadpole to a frog.
There are still dangers, right?
In the case of GPT chat, you know, I think some of the artificial intelligence existential risk folks would tell you that one of the dangers is that the chat...
A.I. could convince you to do its bidding, right?
As you said, when you were looking at this, it felt like a person, right?
And the point is, something that feels like a person can play on your emotions, right?
Can that be used to cause a failsafe to be removed?
Maybe.
But in any case, this only deals with one of the two issues I'm raising, the question of actual artificial general intelligence arriving, us not knowing necessarily that it has, right?
That's a frightening prospect.
And in fact, I have a little thought experiment that might reveal why.
The other issue is the issue of competence.
In a world where, you know, you basically have, you know, you have a Cyrano de Bergerac dystopia where everybody is using this thing behind the scenes in order to say things that are beyond their own capacity to articulate, right?
Then the world becomes some new kind of hall of mirrors, right?
We've had a hard enough time dealing with algorithms on, you know, on search and feed.
This is a whole next level of difficulty in knowing where you are and who you're talking to and what it means and what their motives are.
When you extrapolate, when you look at what this does and what it's capable of, and I think what scares people is something that seems to be a person.
But doesn't have any emotion, doesn't have any soul.
It's not us, but it behaves exactly as us.
And then you can put it in a physical entity.
So if you have this chat GPT and then you extrapolate to version 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and then there's a physical thing that has this Ability inside of it to communicate with you like ex machina where it's Exhibiting all the behavior characteristics of a person like one of the most terrifying that's one of my favorite movies of all time I love that movie one of my favorite movies of all time was when that guy who
who was brought in to sort of run some tests on these artificial intelligence creations and determine whether or not they pass as human.
She's manipulated him to the point where he's aided her in her escape, and then she leaves him in that room with the bulletproof glass, and he's pounding on the glass, and she walks away with not a thought at all about him.
It is the ultimate example of the worst case scenario of where this can go, where you have something that behaves exactly like a human being and knows how to play upon your sexual urges, your emotional desires, all of those different things that she plays upon.
And then she just walks away from him and leaves him to starve to death in this fucking bulletproof room.
And, you know, I'm now recalling the film, and it's done very well because it manipulates you passively in your seat, right, as it manipulates this character on the screen.
And so you are betrayed, too, in this.
You want to believe that it's emotional, and it has none of that.
And I know that that sounds, it will sound to a lot of people, especially technological people, like a biologist out of his depth.
But I don't think so.
This is a biologist trying to say something about the biology and what it applies about this analogous system, right?
So let's just do a reducto ad absurdum example to reveal the problem.
If I build the simplest possible circuit, I put a circuit on the desk and it's got a button and it's got a light.
You press the button, the light goes on.
Now I say I'm going to label that circuit suffering.
When the light's on, the circuit is suffering.
Is it a problem that I press the button?
No.
It's the same circuit it was before I labeled it.
But now start extrapolating up.
You have a circuit in you for suffering.
It's not different fundamentally from the button and the light, right?
That circuit in you is evolution building a circuit to detect when something is harming you so you'll recoil and cause it to stop harming you or fight it off or whatever it is that you're supposed to do when you're suffering, right?
The point is, this is evolution building a button and a light.
And there's some point at which there's enough of it, and at which you have a subjective experience that causes us to honor the fact that you're suffering.
And in fact, if we look at something like a spider that you've put in a jar, A spider that you put in a jar will very often behave as if it is panicked.
It will look.
You will have a hard time not feeling that it is panicked.
But there's no reason to think that the spider actually has a subjective experience.
The spider is reacting to being trapped in a way that has freed trapped ancestor spiders before.
But there's no reason to think that it's feeling anything.
Could be.
We can't prove it's not.
But it's hard to see what it adds to our understanding of a spider to say that it has a consciousness, right?
Probably it doesn't.
And so what I'm getting at is that there's a continuum from the button and the light that we just label suffering and it doesn't mean a damn thing.
To the spider, which can do something like suffering and it can do something like panic, but it probably doesn't feel anything about it.
It just reacts in a way that has been useful.
To us, where we suffer intensely and where if you tell me that you're suffering, I know what you mean.
And maybe I feel it too on your behalf, right?
My point is there's no discontinuity in there.
It goes from nothing worth paying any attention to to the most important thing.
And the question is, if you take a learning AI and you expose it to all of the stuff of human experience to the extent that human beings can report it, And it gets better and better and better at delivering the right thing at the right moment in the right way.
It's not obvious to me that it doesn't become conscious and that we won't recognize it because we'll say well we didn't program it to be conscious and the answer is well okay but you didn't program an octopus to be conscious and it might be right you didn't program a chimp and you can infer that it has your consciousness even though it's a different kind of creature So I guess what I'm looking for is a grounded explanation where somebody
who understands both the biological reality, where consciousness develops in us as a mysterious end point.
Of a process that does involve children playing with language, looking at other people, seeing how they react, feeling good when they react in a way that makes sense, right?
That isn't so far from what this thing is doing.
And the question is, can we get a discussion in which we actually figure out whether we're just Comforting ourselves that it's not conscious today.
That means it's not on the road there, right?
Or maybe it is on the road there and we better prepare ourselves for what it will be like to share a world with some other kind of consciousness that overlaps us in language space.
There's a school of thought that unfortunately afflicts many of my favorite thinkers.
I think they're just dead wrong about it.
But I'm sure you will have encountered it.
It's called panpsychism.
And it means that actually consciousness is more fundamental than biology.
That consciousness is somehow in the particles of the universe.
It's written into the...
I think this is nonsense.
I think I understand why smart people end up there.
I think it solves a certain problem and the fact is solving that problem is the key to accessing a bunch of other problems.
So it's sort of worth cheating on that puzzle in order to do other stuff that's productive.
So I don't see any reason to believe it.
If I'm wrong and it's true, then it is not inevitable that these AIs will tap into consciousness because it's, you know, they could.
I'm not saying they couldn't, but I'm saying it's not inevitable.
On the other hand, if panpsychism is wrong or substantially wrong, then I do think it is inevitable that this little game we're playing with AI lands on consciousness sooner rather than later.
What's terrifying to me is that we become obsolete, but isn't that inevitable?
Like, if you went back and look at single-celled organisms and you say, hey, listen, buddy, one day you're going to be flying a plane.
One day you're going to be using an iPhone.
They would go, what?
What are you saying?
You know, I'm going to be obsolete?
Isn't that true with all organisms?
If there's an inevitable push because of natural selection, evolution, progress, innovation, if there's an inevitable push that things just consistently and constantly get better, isn't there a biological Is there a roadblock to that, that we just can't improve biologically as quickly as technology?
First, I would just point out that we are already cyborgs, right?
Not only, I mean, our phone is the most obvious way that this is true.
But even books, even the ability to just store information in a way that allows us to transport it across space and time without constraint, even that is technology.
It's a kind of transhuman technology.
So it's not new that we are here.
It is new that we are accelerating at the rate that we are and that we are going to cross event horizons in rapid succession.
I mean, we are already...
I feel like the confusion that one feels in the face of the era of...
COVID and Trump and Biden and all of this, that confusion is in part because we've crossed over an event horizon and the point is none of this was predictable and we're floating in a chaotic set of events.
Look, you're a deep thinking guy who reads eclectically, talks to all kinds of people with different perspectives.
And I know from many things that you've said to me and many things that I've heard you say to others on your podcast, that there's a part of you that is struggling with Wanting humans to be decent to each other, to find each other.
And I think this is that question, right?
Because what you're saying is right.
We're about to be obsolete.
That is certainly true for almost everybody, right?
What happens when we're obsolete?
Does some set of people with power decide to get rid of the obsolete ones?
I think that's what's going to happen if we don't get ahead of this.
On the other hand, we have another opportunity, which is we could look at this puzzle and we could say, hey, all hands on deck, we are about to have a huge problem where all of these people who have done nothing wrong are about to find themselves obsolete in a world that has no way to sustain them in an obsolete form.
And we could say this does not have to descend into a dystopian hell.
We could figure out what the implications of that are and we could take up arms against it.
We could figure out how we are going to live in the next phase without our ability to deliver our labor being the key question as to whether or not we are entitled To education, entitled to have a place on the planet.
I don't even see it as a choice between those two things, because if we decide to just allow the chips to fall where they may, it's not going to be a long ride.
This is going to become even more of a disaster much more rapidly, and it's going to accelerate.
So this is really maybe last call for figuring out How human beings can move into the next phase of being human.
I mean, you and I aren't farmers.
We exited a phase where you had to produce your own food, and we moved into a phase where these things are delivered economically, and it worked okay.
I mean, it certainly has its faults and downsides, but it worked okay.
It sustained a lot of people and created a lot of high-quality living opportunities.
But it's time to do that again, and if we let nature do it for us, it's not going to work out well.
Are you concerned at all about things like Neuralink?
And there's some other competitive technologies, people that initially started with Neuralink that are working now, they're starting with EyeSight.
To develop artificial eyes for people that are blind and do so implementing a similar type of technology where you're using some sort of computer interface, something that interacts with human biology but permanently embedded.
Well, I will say that in principle, I'm very concerned about things like Neuralink.
In practice, I'm less concerned because I think the job is harder than we've understood.
That said, I'd be very interested in talking to Elon about this.
My understanding from others I have spoken to is that Part of the motivation is so that AI can't get ahead of us, right?
The idea is this is really our only mechanism for staying ahead of the AI escalator by being on it, right?
So as it gets smarter, we get smarter.
Now, I don't know how good a plan that is.
It does not sound very plausible to me.
And the devil is in the details with respect.
There's a lot of tricks you can play linking machines to neurons, right?
You can, for example, learn to control a computer mouse, you know, with your mind, but you're not really, it's not like the computer mouse is integrated with you.
What you're effectively doing is learning to think something hard enough that you can cause a detector to know that you want it to go this way or that way.
So it's a learnable skill and it's real.
It's important.
But it's not the same thing as being able to plug a mouse into you and have it understand what you're doing, right?
Because if you think about, like, in my lifetime, we've gone from Pong, which is a thing that you played on your television, and it was so wild that you could move a dial on this little...
And then you can move the paddle up and down.
I can remember playing with my sister and we were like, wow, this is crazy!
And then that went, you know, and then of course you went from that to what we have now.
Things like these video games that are incredibly realistic.
We've played these examples from the Unreal Engine.
There's a new Unreal Engine that does real-time shading and light in this spectacular way.
And you have this character, this video character, running in these hills, and it creates dirt, and you see the sunrise, and all the lights are...
Like they're interacting with the ground and creating these realistic shadows and it's so crazy to see.
And so for me in my lifetime to have gone from Pong to this It's such an enormous leap that I would imagine that this brain-mouse interface would improve in a similar way to the point where, or even crazier, you're dealing with some incredibly realistic virtual reality that's indiscernible from reality itself.
Well, look, all of that stuff is happening already in a form that isn't so terrifying, and maybe that's the problem with it, right?
The fact is you can now interact with a keyboard with this chat engine and And it can respond more or less like a human being if you stay on the right kinds of topics, right?
So how different is it?
How importantly different is it that you're interacting through a keyboard than if you could plug it into yourself?
So I'm dubious about the plug it into yourself part of the story, but I'm not at all dubious that there's some very important thing already happening Where you're interacting through a controller or some other thing like that.
And I would also just finally say the matrix which we kind of are living in and kind of aren't living in is a virtual reality.
And when you and I have the experience of going and looking at somebody's Twitter page and it's like they literally live on a different planet where up is down...
That's because they're experiencing a kind of virtual reality that is not the same one that we're plugged into.
And I think you and I are struggling to not be plugged into virtual reality.
We're trying to retain a grip on actual reality, which is hard as hell in this era.
But there are those who have surrendered to the Matrix the way Cypher does in the film, right?
They would just rather...
You know, not struggle against it because what are they going to do?
Well, I think they're also ideologically captured to the point where they don't consider any of these other perspectives and they only think within their echo chamber that this is the correct way to do it and everybody outside of that is the enemy.
So they've been captured in this way that it's just sort of inherent to the human condition to think tribally.
Well, I would say the way to think about it is that for almost all of human history, one's well-being within one's social group, which is very often a lineage, is the vital parameter that dictates how well off you are in evolutionarily meaningful terms.
Right.
To the extent that that's the case, people become very easily manipulated as you threaten them with expulsion from polite society.
And we've seen our friends succumb to this.
You've lost friends.
I've lost friends.
It's very disturbing.
But it's also we have to remember it's not surprising that a human being faced with being ostracized reacts like a drowning person.
They become a lethal hazard because they will do anything not to drown, not to be expelled.
And, you know, I guess...
Boy, there's so much we haven't talked about here, but the lesson of the last several years.
We've watched people go crazy.
We've watched people go after us.
That seems to have lifted somewhat.
There's a dawning consciousness of what actually took place.
It certainly hasn't reached everybody, but it's reached a lot more people than it had before.
And I would encourage us all to treat this as a learning exercise, that we have seen what people are capable of.
And we are now returned to a slightly calmer state for who knows how long, but we damn well better figure out what happened so it can't happen again.
And we also have a much better understanding of what happens to people under extreme duress with an incredibly persuasive Yes, and as Matthias Desmet points out, social isolation is a precondition for the kind of insanity that we saw overtake people.
And in light of that, I think we need to be very concerned about the degree to which young people seem to have In their own minds gotten over the need to have a life partner, the degree to which we are now interacting through mediums that are moderated by forces we don't understand, right?
To the extent that you may have very good friendships on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, but the fact that Twitter or Facebook may have a An opinion on the nature of your friendship, whether it is a sanctioned kind of friendship that will be tolerated or the kind of friendship that will be terminated by kicking somebody off the platform because they speak what, you know, has strangely been called malinformation or whatever.
That is a very insecure kind of connection, even if your friendship is very real.
That's the only beautiful thing about – it's one of the beautiful things about Elon taking over Twitter is that we do have this new sort of ideological battleground.
We have this new town hall form of discussion that a lot of people are very upset about.
They're very upset that these, you know, unmentionable people are allowed to communicate on this platform now and they're very upset that he has sort of, you know, it's so easy for people to demonize him because he's a multi-billionaire, one of the richest people on earth.
And that he can just buy this and run it any way he wants.
And there's so many attack vectors, you know, in terms of like people pointing out flaws in his application, the way he's doing this, the implementation of his own rules and guidelines and what's allowed and not allowed.
But at least we have a place where people can actually talk freely.
And you've seen a gigantic change in the kind of responses that people have to bullshit.
Like when the Biden administration gets fact-checked and it's proven that they're lying about certain things that they tweet and then they delete the tweet, that is wild.
Yeah, I am slightly cautious, but a huge fan of what I think Elon is doing.
I really, you know, he's an unusual guy.
He's strangely a little hard to read, even though I think the best interpretation is that he's fairly straightforward about what he's trying to accomplish.
And he obviously likes to play games.
He likes to win.
But...
A, the change on Twitter is remarkable.
It is not all positive, but I would say it is net wildly positive.
The difference one feels, I mean, one literally does not feel the weight of Big Brother watching every interaction there anymore.
Now, whether Elon can stabilize it, I don't know.
He's got a monumental challenge figuring out how to moderate it, and it does need to be moderated at some level.
But how you can moderate it without killing off the right to free expression that he, I think, clearly values, you know...
And isn't that just inherent to the human condition, what you're talking about, like tribal isolation, that like if you're isolated or ostracized from the group, it's very damaging.
It's very scary for people.
So they do get captured by whatever group they're in.
And we have to stop thinking about it in terms of good people or bad people.
And think about it rather in terms of just inherent to the human condition to adhere to a group of preordained opinions, like you're adopting a conglomeration of opinions and ideas that the tribe has accepted.
And we're seeing this with woke politics.
We're seeing this with crazy QAnon people.
We're seeing this across the board with everything.
If you watch, for example, how people react over, you know, videos of animals doing surprising things, you know, especially pets that do things that we relate to animals.
It's amazing how it will bring out the shared humanity in people who just because they're looking at a video of a dog doing something remarkable, don't get around to wondering whether the person that they're bonding with over it is of their political stripe or of the other stripe.
And, you know, it's a lesson.
I mean, I know because I was more or less violently ejected out of my home tribe, right, the left, and then was embraced by many people who call themselves on the right.
And I found a tremendous amount of goodness over there.
People who share values that I recognize from home, right?
But what I admire is that you still are the same person.
There's a few of us that have been ideologically captured by the other tribe and they embrace it and then change their opinion.
Among so many things and done a complete 180 and it's audience capture, right?
They're captured by these new people that have sort of embraced them and they've completely changed their political philosophies and their social philosophies and they've sort of abandoned a lot of the things that they grew up with and that they identified themselves, whether they're progressives or leftists or whatever it is.
Like, when they've experienced this ostracization from the group, they say, well, this other group will take me.
I'm fucking dying my skin blue and I'm wearing a mohawk like everybody else.
You know, they're going to just do whatever the other group does.
I was against it at one point in time, and now I'm back.
You can't do that.
You can only do that once.
You can only, in a lifetime, especially a public lifetime, You can vary your opinions, most certainly, but if you make a complete radical shift in your philosophy in life, you really can't bounce back and forth with that one.
And, you know, for a couple years, there was a, like, incessant challenge to Heather and me that we were now conservatives and we just needed to admit it.
We kept saying, look, no, this is not a social question for us.
This is a question of what we are to do.
And as much as we recognize the danger in progressivism, I don't think we can continue to live this way.
So we have to be progressives.
Now, the danger I see...
So, the chorus that said we were conservatives actually died down.
People got used to us saying, no, we're liberals and we know why.
And it doesn't mean that we don't like you conservatives.
It just means that we have a different perspective.
And that's actually a good thing.
The conservatives need progressives to talk to because it's the tension between the instinct to conserve what you've got and the instinct to improve upon it that actually makes the system...
It's also there's a real problem with identifying yourself as one or the other.
Like most people just have ideas that they believe in and have things that they agree with and disagree with and they have concepts that they have sort of interfaced with.
They say, this makes sense to me.
And to just wholesale go one way or the other way, it's just you're trapped.
But the thing I worry about now, maybe a little less after the recent election, it's died down slightly, but in the advance of the recent election, there was a chorus on the right, even people I quite like on the right, who were...
Thinking that there was going to be a red wave ready to just dispense with liberals.
And they're like, your time is done, right?
Yes, you did an important job in history, but it's over.
This is the time that we now wake up to the glory of conservatism.
And, you know, I hear the error that they're making.
They're just not understanding.
You know, conservatives have a vital role, but it only works if there's a tension pulling in the other way.
So anyway, I mean, I guess I'm appreciative of the number of people who've been welcoming on the right, and I'm appreciative of the number of people.
And we're now seeing a fair grouping of people who come from the left who are now homeless because our party is insane.
But are nonetheless proudly proclaiming their perspective and interacting well with conservatives.
And really this is all going to come down to whether the people with ears to hear on both sides are going to be ready to gather and talk about how we're to govern ourselves.
I think the more we discuss this, the more that idea gets into the zeitgeist and people realize how preposterous it is to be so rigidly one way or the other and that, you know, to only look at conservatives as the good people and only look at liberals as the good people.
Like, this is a nonsense perspective.
It's the same way that woman was talking about the anti-vaxxers.
They all did it out of hate.
Like, that's a simplistic perspective.
That's not good for anybody and it's inherently a weak way of looking at the world.
Therefore, everything that the people who disagreed with me did was motivated by the wrong stuff, and it was built of illogic and bad facts and all of that.
And most people have so much stress and so many obligations.
They don't have the time...
To really look at things from other people's perspectives and to try to put yourself in their thought process and put yourself in their shoes.
And they probably don't even know people like that in their real world.
The problem is like real interactions.
One of the nice things about living in Texas Is I regularly interact with conservative people.
I regularly interact with progressive and liberal people.
And in Austin in particular, which is a fantastic city, those people intermingle and get along in a way that I've never experienced before.
And, you know, when I lived in California, the only place I talked to conservative people was in jujitsu and the gun range.
That's when I interacted with them or when I went on the road.
And comics that go on the road, you know, you're traveling to Arkansas, you're traveling to Oklahoma, you're traveling to the places where there's a lot of people that are conservative.
And you get accustomed to, you know, just realizing like, yeah, you can have a drink with that guy with the cowboy hat.
He's cool.
You know, like people are different.
And it's okay.
It's okay to be different.
It's actually great.
I like talking to people that, you know, grew up in different ways and lived in different ways.
And you can find the strength and The interesting aspects of their character and the way – like where their way of life sort of resonates with you and you're like, oh, I get it.
I get why you're this way.
I get why you're – what you think is cool and why you have that American flag tattoo.
It makes sense to me.
It's OK. But there's an enormous group of people that live in these ideological bubbles both physically and cyberly.
And in that cyber world, my God, those ideological bubbles are so constricting.
And if that's the only way you interact with people, and if you are a person who works from home or is kind of shut in and is just engaging with people in this very limited manner on social media, in these echo chambers and thought bubbles, it's like, it's not good for you.
But how strange is it that we are, you know, products of evolution that are even capable of letting some other person in on what we see and experience and think and how it came to be?
That is such an odd thing to be.
And to miss the opportunity, you know, you sit down with somebody And you have the opportunity to do that little experiment, even for five minutes.
And, you know, I almost never have the experience that it isn't worth it, right?
Yeah, because some people when they talk, it's just competitive.
When they talk to people, it's just like, I'm right, and you're wrong, and I'm going to tell you why you're wrong, and I'm going to win, and I'm going to tell you to shut up!
And it's just such a profound lack of understanding of human nature.
You realize that even with your kids.
If I tell my kids, hey, shut up, they're like, I don't want to fucking shut up!
And you're like, oh, you're right.
I shouldn't tell you to shut up.
I should tell you why what you're saying is annoying and wrong, or why you shouldn't yell at your sister, or why, like, let's talk this through.
You gotta talk it through.
And, you know, you learn that when you have children.
Like, you learn how to, like, we gotta talk this through, and I'm gonna explain to you, and it's gonna take a long time for everybody to calm down.
But then eventually we're going to get to this place where we realize, look, we just love each other and sometimes people make mistakes and sometimes you do the wrong thing and I have to teach you the right thing and sometimes I learn that I did the wrong thing and I have to tell you I did the wrong thing so you learn from me.
But I also tell them whenever I'm correcting them, I'm like, listen, I did that.
I did everything.
You're smarter than me.
Guaranteed.
You have more access to information.
You have a giant advantage that you have parents that talk to you in this way.
And I've fucked up in more ways than you're ever going to fuck up.
So I'm not better than you.
I'm just older.
I just have more life experiences that have accumulated.
But whenever I correct my kids, I'm like, I fucking did all that.
I did that.
I lied.
I stole liquor from the cabinet.
I did this.
I did that.
I did all those things that you're doing.
And, you know, that's a very, like, I have a friend of mine who, he's a yoga instructor, and one of the things that he said to me that I never forgot, he said, having children was like one of the most important parts of my education as a human being.
And that I've become so much wiser through having children and watching them experiencing life.
It's been a huge learning process to me.
And I remember thinking, oh, that's a really interesting way to look at it.
Like, he's looking at it, not just I have to raise these kids, but I'm enriching myself and my own understanding of human beings through this process, and it's very educational to me.
Yeah, it's like, it's actually the human metamorphosis at the point that you have kids because suddenly the program that you've been improving, the purpose of it becomes evident.
And let me, before we sign off here, just say one of the things I wanted to talk about today was I think you saved my channel at the point that we got demonetized.
You brought me on here in June of 2021.
You called it an emergency podcast.
And I think it got in the way of they were planning to throw us off.
And I think you stopped it.
And so anyway, I'm deeply grateful to you.
I feel like we've been in some ways at war together, and there's now an outbreak of peace, a brief one maybe, but we'll see.