Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 5, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:51:48

Sidebar with PhD Pathologist Chris Martenson - Viva & Barnes Live

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	I'm not saying that I have gone from my mother-in-law's art studio to a bathroom.
	But legal mindset might want to reclaim his place.
	So, no joke, we're in a place now where I've got a bunch of kids downstairs who are making noise.
	I'm finding the quietest spot I can possibly find, which is in a bathroom upstairs behind two closed doors.
	Although the backdrop, although I think they call this the backsplash.
	Is actually...
	It's kind of nice.
	It's just that the acoustics, I think, are somewhat echoey.
	Let me know how bad the audio is.
	The other issue is I can't seem to use my mic because when I plug it in, it tells me that the USB device is using too much energy and it has to unplug.
	Okay.
	Let me just clear up some rumors here.
	No.
	Although...
	I'm noticing some shenanigans going on with YouTube numbers already.
	So how is it?
	Let me just see.
	Like, jokes aside, this is not going to be ideal for lighting or for audio.
	But let me know if it's good enough.
	And I'll do the standard intros while we do this.
	But with that said, first super chat of the evening.
	I'm not your buddy, guys.
	Says, please, I need some advice.
	Personally, I'm getting worried about Canada and would like to leave.
	Both my parents passed away when I was a kid.
	Although I'm still working, I am poor.
	Please help.
	First of all, I can't help you.
	The immigration laws, depending on where you want to go, you've got to find a state that's a good state to go to.
	You've got to find a reason to apply for a visa.
	A lot of people are on the same boat.
	There's actually a Facebook group, not that I'm familiar with it, but I'm familiar with it, of Canadians who want to leave.
	And a lot of people have the same question.
	So my advice, which is not advice, Check out the Facebook groups.
	Go online.
	There are communities of people who are having the exact same angst and problems in the world.
	Let's see if I...
	Oh, that's a little better.
	Okay.
	So I would check out online communities for advice.
	And then I know you're going to have to get a lawyer in the jurisdiction that you want to get a visa to.
	T-shirt night.
	This is...
	I mean, I don't think the Style Boys, Lonely Island, want me wearing Style Boys shirt, but I'm doing it anyhow.
	Blinkin' Morse...
	No, no, no.
	Not yet.
	Not yet, but...
	So, no.
	It's just the quietest place I can find.
	And the internet's good.
	I'm not even streaming off my phone today, so there's that.
	You know, step up.
	Okay, sorry.
	No more jokes about the camps.
	What do we got here?
	We got Viva taking a dump in livestream.
	Kinky.
	No, no, no.
	It's a leather chair.
	It's a leather chair.
	But this is not the first time I've done a vlog in the bathroom, people.
	I remember last year when I was on holidays as well, and I had to get out a vlog on one of the decisions that came down in the election.
	That was two years ago.
	My life is being stolen from me by the government.
	All right.
	With that said, people, standard disclaimers, no legal advice, no medical advice, despite the fact that we have a PhD in pathology, Chris Martinson, on the show tonight, who has a wildly popular...
	We talked very briefly just to make sure our audio condition was good.
	I'm curious to know how he's skirting the line in terms of the content that he puts out there.
	But there's no legal advice, no medical advice, no election fortification, undermining of the sanctity of U.S. elections, which cannot be criticized, contradicted, or otherwise undermined ever, unless you find the right language to do it as per that Time magazine and just call it fortification.
	So none of that.
	This might be one of the rare streams where I might unilaterally decide, midstream, depending on the discussion, to shut it down on YouTube.
	And go strictly to Rumble so we can have a free discussion.
	So we'll see where that goes.
	Let me see if Robert has the...
	We'll see where it goes, but do not be surprised or have any conspiracy theories.
	If I think that we're skirting a line in terms of the content, I'm going to shut it down on YouTube.
	Shut it down!
	And we're going to go to Rumble.
	Where I suggest people start following or follow me anyhow, Viva Fry on Rumble.
	There is on Rumble...
	Direct link to our Locals community.
	It's a little red tag on my channel.
	Rumble is certainly the free speech platform of the time.
	They're posting some great numbers in terms of people on platform.
	It's amazing.
	So we might do that, but we'll see.
	We'll see when I start asking Chris about his experiences with YouTube, where we go from there.
	Anyone can get a PhD.
	Heck, even my wife got a PhD, the Real Hydro PX.
	Yeah, all it takes is...
	It's the old joke.
	Being an expert is about knowing more and more about less and less.
	Someone voted for me.
	You're one of the 1,500 people who voted for me in our writing.
	Thank you very much, Pian.
	I didn't mean to be...
	Sorry.
	1,500 people is a lot of people.
	But 53% of Westbound NDG voted for the Liberals.
	And by the way, everyone has to go check out today's vlog.
	It's a barn burner, if I do say so myself.
	Okay.
	So standard disclaimers are out of the way.
	I'm going to try to bring up as many Super Chats as possible, but first time with Chris, so I don't know how many I'm going to bring up to see if it interferes or distracts with the conversation.
	If you're going to be miffed, if I do not bring up your Super Chat, do not give it.
	I don't like people feeling miffed.
	Roofed, riffed, shill, whatever.
	It is a leather chair, that's for sure.
	It is a nice chair.
	Excuse me.
	And I'm going to try to bring up as many as I can, but thank you for the support.
	YouTube takes 30%.
	If you want to support us, Rumble Rants on Rumble also has a function.
	They take 20%.
	Steven Russell, viva, don't like Canada, they move to America.
	There is something to be said about people who prefer risky freedom over guaranteed incarceration.
	Your sudden appearance gave me a fright.
	Okay, so with that said, I see our gentlemen of the evening are in the backdrop, in the background.
	I'm going to bring one more in here.
	Viva in the shower.
	No, no, no.
	Look, we do the best we can.
	The car was just, it was off limits in the car when Robert and I did the live stream with Richard Barris, and I was on an island in New Brunswick getting destroyed by the mosquitoes.
	I said never, well, we can't really do that.
	Okay, so let's do this here.
	Let's do this.
	Try the mic in red or blue USB port if available.
	I'll figure it out.
	It's whatever.
	It's a problem.
	Okay.
	Without further ado, we have Barnes is in the house.
	I'm going to bring him in.
	Robert, how goes the battle?
	Good, good.
	Now I'm going to bring in Chris and I think I'm going to move him into the middle so it'll be a lawyer sandwich.
	Okay, sorry.
	Dr. Chris Martinson, how goes the battle, sir?
	Well, very well, very well.
	It's good to be with you here.
	I'm liking the tone and tenor already.
	And I think you evaded that question about the kinky.
	I'm saying it was a leather chair.
	It did not actually settle the matter.
	Well, and if people saw the ropes in the bathroom, they would have some serious questions.
	So, Chris, I'm sorry that this is the...
	My studio is much nicer, but it's the holidays and we have to make do with what we have.
	Everyone in the chat, let me know if our respective audio levels are good.
	It looks good.
	And Chris, I mean, people were flipping out when we tweeted that you're coming on today because people love you, people respect you.
	But I think there's a lot of people watching who may not know who you are.
	So before we get into it, childhood, upbringing, all these things, influences, elevator pitches to who you are and what you're doing in the world these days.
	Well, I should probably start when I was three years old.
	No, just kidding.
	Listen, I'm a renaissance man.
	I can't seem to stick at any one thing for too long.
	This job I have running a site called Peak Prosperity is actually the longest gig I've had in my adult life.
	It's going on 13 years now.
	We've got a wonderful community of people there.
	And I think what I do is I translate complex subjects.
	That's my gift.
	I'm really good at taking complicated things and explaining them in a way that I can get it out of my head.
	Into somebody else's head in a way they find acceptable.
	So that's what I do.
	And before COVID, I was talking about resource issues, oil, economic stuff, big critic of the Fed.
	So that was kind of my angle.
	And then COVID came along and I had to dust off my background, which is in pathology.
	Got my degree at Duke University.
	Did my postdoc there as well.
	Mostly working on cell biological issues, specialty in toxicology.
	My virology was a little rusty in January 2020.
	I had to get back up the curve and started talking about COVID and a lot of people found me through that work too.
	So that's my background.
	You know, I think I first saw you on an old Frontline episode way back, you know, talking about the Fed and what they could have done and didn't do during 2008 and talking about exponential rise in money supply, which, you know, these days, that seems almost antiquated given what we've been through the last two years.
	Money supply rise.
	But what led you to break off?
	You could have taken the traditional path, made a lot of money, lived by the beach, not worry about all these things and hope that everything works out for the good.
	What helped you bridge out from your original career path?
	It's a great question.
	So 2001 happened, and that wasn't just the whole 9-11 deal.
	My stock portfolio was getting shredded, right?
	I was a genius like everybody else.
	I'd played everything by the books, right?
	Got the right degrees.
	I also have an MBA from Cornell.
	I was in corporate finance.
	I had the golden handcuffs.
	And then it was enlightened self-interest.
	I started looking into why my stock portfolio was getting so shredded because my Merrill Lynch broker was telling me things, you know?
	WorldCom, great buy.
	Anyway.
	Once I dug into it, I came across a book called Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, and I read it.
	And I couldn't believe what I was reading because it explained how the money system worked.
	And I said, this can't be right.
	And I'm a very skeptical person, so I set out to prove it wrong.
	I found people who were calling the book a conspiracy theory tome.
	I found people who were denigrating it.
	I found ad hominem attacks.
	I didn't find a single source where somebody said, he got this fact in this book wrong or this is wrong.
	So eventually I figured out how the money system worked, right?
	At my MBA, they taught me how to compete for money, but not what the arena was made out of.
	So when I finally figured out what banking was about, I looked at it and I said, this is totally unsustainable.
	Now, as you mentioned, that was back in the old frontline days, 2001, 2, 3, 4, quaint numbers by today's standards.
	If you could have taken today's information about what the Fed's doing and told me that, I wouldn't have believed you.
	I'd be like, it's impossible.
	People would never let that happen.
	But here we are.
	So that was really the first piece was I started questioning and it was a big, I'm very curious.
	So that wasn't just lifting up the corner of the carpet.
	I unraveled the whole carpet and I had a mess on my hands.
	So about, I ended up losing faith in my ability to do my job.
	I left a job as vice president at that time of SCIC, pretty big company.
	And then I started researching.
	I spent three years just looking into finance, financial systems, banking.
	Energy systems and also ecological and environmental issues.
	And ultimately that became a body of work called The Crash Course, which was a three-year sabbatical.
	I was earning zero dollars.
	I was just, I'm pretty focused when I get into stuff.
	So I built this thing and then I'm a quick learner eventually.
	So what happened was I ended up creating this really dumb product, which was about three hours of me talking over slides.
	And it became this thing called The Crash Course.
	Broke it into chapters.
	And much to my surprise, it became really popular and successful.
	It was translated into 12 languages.
	Wiley and Son said, could you write a book about it?
	That book did reasonably well.
	And out of that, I said, whoa, you know, my passion for researching things could actually become some sort of a living.
	So my mission is telling people about these things I think they ought to know about.
	And my money magically is in that same spot.
	So I'm one of the very fortunate people who gets to put...
	Those two things in one spot.
	And that's how I'm sitting here today.
	Chris, I mean, this is something we're going to get into, I think, both on the COVID discussion and on the finances.
	Your training, your education, you have a PhD in...
	Oh, geez.
	Pathology.
	From the department of pathology, but toxicology was my specialty.
	So people are going to say now you have a PhD in pathology toxicology, which is a very specific niche of study.
	And yet you're entering domains where that niche, other than the fact that it's trained you how to think and how to analyze, is totally irrelevant by and large.
	The fields in which now you found success, you got morally, I say intellectually invested, is not what you studied in.
	So, I mean, how does one translate into the other?
	It actually, I think, is helpful because what I don't have is I don't have the dogma that other people are inflicted with.
	So I can't tell you how many arguments I've had, and they're really passionate with economists who don't understand this concept, which is you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet.
	It's not part of their model.
	Every single piece of equation they have, they have all these, if you go to the Federal Reserve website, these papers, and there's like...
	Calculus in them, and they're really precise, but when you back up, you go, I don't care how precise your calculus is, you're running an infinite exponential debt model on a finite planet.
	It's going to break, right?
	And it's really not a terribly difficult insight unless you're so steeped in the dogma that you can't see it, or worse, you're like Upton Sinclair said.
	Never expect a man to understand something if his salary requires him not to.
	So I was on the outside looking in, and sometimes that's a disadvantage, but I think actually today that's more of a superpower sometimes.
	Yeah, and speaking of it, yeah, because you look at like, I have been fascinated by...
	Who responded with a skeptical mind and who didn't to all the COVID health restrictions that we've been facing?
	And that if you had a methodology that involved looking at history, being skeptical of people in power, things of that nature, and the sort of analytical rigor that you've applied, then you came at this from a very different angle than the institutional media or even people that I know and that I like and respect who fell for it.
	I mean, to be frank, the president kind of fell for it for a period of time.
	He kind of still has fallen for it.
	He still thinks he stopped the second coming of the Spanish flu.
	God bless him.
	And it's like, no, that was always a lie.
	That was a lie from day one.
	That was the lie.
	But do you think your unique background, your unique educational process led to having a more disciplined approach to this that didn't just buy into whatever MSNBC was the latest talking point or whatever the great Fauci told us was the truth?
	Yeah, I think it did.
	A lot of people, you know, try and credit me with saying, oh, you know, Chris tells the truth, and it's not accurate.
	I do my best.
	The older I get, the less I know for sure.
	If I do have a superpower, I can smell bullshit.
	I am really good at it.
	And that sets me off.
	Like, literally, if that's a spidey sense, I've learned to trust.
	And when it's my spidey sense that says, this isn't right, I'll dig until I find out either I was wrong or, you know, there was something there to uncover.
	And so early on, you know, on the whole COVID thing, here's where I knew something was really wrong in this.
	So I sent out my first alert to people on January 23rd, 2020.
	And I said, hey, there's this thing.
	It looks like a pandemic.
	I'd been tracking it for a couple of weeks, but then on the night before, Wuhan had been ringed off and shut off.
	And I knew the Chinese, they don't just shut down an industrial center like Wuhan for no reason.
	So I thought this is important.
	So I sent out that warning, that alert within three days using the WHO's own guidelines.
	I said, this is a pandemic.
	They have a six phase plan.
	We're on phase four.
	Within a week, within a week and a half, we were at phase five.
	It was a pandemic.
	But as you know, the WHO did not call it a pandemic for another month and a half, officially.
	And I'm watching FlightAware, which is a tracking software to just look where all the planes are in the sky.
	And I noticed something really odd.
	During that period of time, I saw planes not flying out of Wuhan domestically within China, but man, they were going all across the world.
	And the WHO was saying it's racist.
	If you say that, we shouldn't be doing that.
	I was like, that's a weird thing for a health body to be saying.
	So it didn't make sense.
	And here was the tell for me.
	February 5th, my wiki page, which had been up for 12 years, got taken down.
	It was declared by an editor that I was a non-notable person, that my science wasn't recent enough, and I didn't know what I was talking about.
	And all of a sudden I said, oh, there's a different story running here.
	And then I mentioned...
	This stuff called HCQ, which gets you in trouble still on certain platforms.
	Hopefully people know what that is, but it's that substance.
	And then I watched my subscriber counts on YouTube actually just flatline at that point.
	They shot up while I was doing this recording and they just flatlined.
	And I'm one of the few people I know who received hundreds of emails from people saying, hey, kind of weird.
	YouTube unsubscribed me from your channel.
	That doesn't happen to me on other channels.
	So I started to realize that I was up against something here that I didn't know what it was.
	I'm still not entirely sure I do.
	But it was clear that there was an organized opposition to getting information out really early on when we were all supposed to be so uncertain about this pandemic.
	But obviously there were people who were certain enough to know exactly what they needed to do.
	And now we find out.
	From the FOIA request that Anthony Fauci on January 29th was circling the wagons around the whole lab leak thing.
	This is January 29th, 2020.
	And he didn't call a single NIH scientist in.
	He wrote out to Christian Drosten and Marion Koopsman and all these international virologists who are up to their proverbial eyeballs in coronavirus research and chimeric production.
	And they talked about it.
	Fauci's first and most important body of work before January was even up was...
	How do we convince people that this had to have come from nature, not the lab, and that you're a conspiracy theorist?
	That's where all his attention was going.
	And I think that's the part of the buzzsaw I ran into.
	Chris, so two things.
	First of all, the video that I just put up today is now the new narrative of Fauci saying we're over-counting hospitalized children because of what people have been seeing for two years and were called conspiracy theorists back then.
	But one thing before I forget, your observation of flights going...
	Internationally from Wuhan, but not domestically.
	Obviously, the conclusion is that China knew something was up, didn't want people from Wuhan flying internally, but didn't mind them flying internationally.
	The question that I would ask then is, knowing that this is to become a pandemic, what good, like, if that's the explanation, what good does it do when you know that whoever flew internationally from Wuhan is going to come back domestically anyhow, so that explanation doesn't really answer the...
	purported reason for why they weren't doing it in the first place.
	Like they fly out of Wuhan, go to Canada, then they just go back to I mean, how do you respond to that critique of that theory of the phenomenon?
	Well, look, even George Washington facing an outbreak of smallpox knew to shut off the travel of people from one area to another.
	This is like his old, like people have known about how to...
	Stop a pandemic.
	That behavior right there was absolutely not anywhere in any textbook.
	That was just off.
	Again, though, I was falling for it at first, watching people fall over in the streets and seeing China weld doors shut.
	They let out lots of videos of people dying in hallways.
	It took me a while to catch on, embarrassingly long, that those were actually not just legit people sharing stuff.
	Those were things China put out on purpose.
	I put it in the context of that, that China, Clearly didn't have any particular desire not to have this thing spread.
	And listen, now we're speculating as to why they might have done that, but it wasn't under the principles of public health and standard pandemic practices.
	We know that.
	If we want to speculate, we can do that.
	But, you know, it was very clear that that's not what should have been done.
	And not only did China do it, but the rest of the world allowed it.
	Remember, we had this huge outbreak in Italy.
	People are dying.
	They're experiencing their first alpha wave.
	It's awful.
	It's March.
	The first thing the president did at that time said, oh, and they recalled all these people.
	And I remember seeing these images of people crammed in customs at JFK.
	Thousands of people in a hallway coming back from a hot spot.
	And I'm just like, I can't think of a better way to assure that you're bringing in as many infected people as you can.
	And those were those scratchy record moments where I was like, there's incompetence.
	This goes way beyond that.
	There's something else happening here that I couldn't...
	And again, I still don't know what or why, but it wasn't about public health.
	And how much do you think that your sort of global perspective allowed you to contextualize things that other people didn't at the time, in the sense that you're looking at things from a global economic perspective, the global nature of the financial system, the global nature of our energy processes and the limitations imposed thereupon, the old conservative liberal debate, which you've mentioned, the Gary Willsian perspective, which is we live in a world of limited resources and we have to recognize that, whereas your sort of utopian liberal types tend to ignore that.
	How much, aside from the philosophical perspective of recognizing the limits on resources that's just born from understanding the world as it exists, how much was the global aspect of understanding things, did that allow you to contextualize information quicker than a lot of other people did?
	Well, it's a good question.
	I think it really helps because I sort of live by this old Lily Tomlin saying, which is, you know, as cynical as I am, I find I can't keep up.
	I'd really studied the world enough to know that everything I'd been taught about the world in grade school was mostly bunk.
	What I learned about history in college was heavily filtered.
	And so when I started reading and understanding how the world really worked a little bit better, I came across a sort of a worldview.
	It's like a set of lenses I put on.
	And in particular, you put your thumb right on it.
	It's this idea of resources.
	I'm enough of a...
	So here's my background as a scientist.
	I worked on neuronal cultures.
	I worked on neurotoxicity.
	It was my sub-sub-specialty.
	And so I would grow these cells on plates, right?
	And so you take them out of an animal model, in this case, either a chick or a rat pup or something.
	We'd grow hippocampal neurons.
	And it's so cool, right?
	You put these things down in a little plate and you feed them the right things, and they'll make axons and dendrites and set up synapses and start talking.
	And it's a miracle, right?
	But if you're a lazy graduate student who sometimes partied a little too late and you forgot to feed them, these miracles of complexity would shrink up into little simplistic balls, you know, very unhappy.
	They would lose all the richness.
	And from that visceral experience, I know intimately as a scientist that this world we see around us, our own large synaptic connections, as we might say, global trade and international complexity of the economic functioning, is 100% dependent on the amount of energy we have access to.
	Surplus energy.
	So then I wandered over to the big world of fossil fuels and oil and natural gas and coal, because those are our primary sources of excess abundance.
	And so there's a really cool, very rich, kind of scary story there about where we are as an organism, not as a United States versus China.
	So I developed this whole point of view, and it's in the crash course.
	People should watch that if they want to see that.
	That's great.
	It's all there.
	Then I was invited to serve on a U.N. sustainability panel by a gentleman very high up in Chinese politics who saw the crash course, used parts of my course to teach and instruct his people around energy economics.
	And in talking with this guy, it was a real eye-opener because, hey, super smart.
	Ph.D. ophthalmologist.
	Talked to him about how you rise through the Chinese architecture.
	And he said, well, you know, you're not really anybody until you...
	Managed 100 million people for a couple years.
	And we started talking about this resource issue, and it was like I was talking to myself.
	He was very matter-of-fact about it.
	We were just kids trading Pokemon cards.
	Well, the last great copper mine deposit known is, he would complete the sentence, 20 miles south of Kabul in that rich valley region.
	He knew where every piece of what was left in the oil, metal story, the non-renewable natural resources, he knew it all.
	And so I asked him, do other people in China know this?
	He's like, oh yeah, we know this very well.
	I said, I don't think my country knows this.
	This was five, six years ago.
	And he said, well, that's because we don't allow community organizers to rise to the top of our system.
	He was speaking about Obama at that time.
	And then he mentioned that they don't have any lawyers.
	Sorry.
	But, you know, he felt we were overrepresented with lawyers at the top of our decision-making structure and all of that.
	And it was a very interesting And so what I took from that is China is looking at the world over the next several decades and they're positioning themselves for that.
	And some of what we have to understand about COVID and responses to it have to be set against that backdrop because that's what's really playing out here.
	And so I'm sure your listeners have heard about the Great Reset that the Davos crowd is all excited about.
	And honestly, I don't disagree with them.
	We're really perilously over the tips of our skis as a species.
	I disagree with how they're going about communicating that, but not the what of it.
	So I think that's actually the landscape that we're in.
	And so a lot of the pieces, I'm constantly trying to find a framework where it makes sense.
	And I guess the last thing to know about me in that regard is I will try something on, and if it doesn't work, I'll reject it and try something else on.
	I'm very flexible that way.
	By the way, incidentally, the Davos WEF Great Reset, those also were conspiracy theories in 2020 until screenshots and actual PDFs started emerging.
	Then everyone had to like, okay, now it goes from conspiracy theory to so what?
	That's the natural progression.
	But explain what your PhD in pathology is because I imagine, first of all, I can't imagine what it's like to have your Wikipedia page taken down.
	Because you are now deemed to be, you know, dirty or undeserving.
	But explain what your pathology PhD means.
	And then my question is, do people just discredit you from discussing anything that is not related to your PhD in pathology?
	Great.
	Thanks.
	Love to.
	At Duke University, the pathology department, when you're going for a pathology PhD, your first two years are in the Duke Medical School.
	So no difference from an MD that goes through their four-year MD program.
	The first two years, it's all anatomy, biochemistry, drug interactions, pharmacology, histology, all the basics, right?
	So we're getting trained in things like that.
	And then at the year three mark...
	The medical students put the white coats on, draped the stethoscope, and followed doctors around.
	And I went off and did things like surgical pathology and deeper histology and studies like that.
	So that was my course of study.
	It's very, very heavily medically trained.
	And the second thing is that pathology is the study of diseases.
	So what do you know about diseases?
	You know, people would ask me, hey, Chris, my uncle smokes four packs a day.
	You know, what are his chances?
	And it's always all odds adjusted.
	There's no black and white in pathology, right?
	It's all risk adjustment.
	So I'm very comfortable and got really trained in statistics, risk, gray areas, you know, trying to make things aren't really black and white in that in that area.
	You know, all I can do when you tell me about your uncle who smokes four packs is go, you know, and tell you some odds.
	So I think that that was part of it.
	And then also, you know, the disease state, it's also not clear cut.
	You know, if you're looking at a slice of somebody's lung tissue and they have COPD, that's clear cut.
	But otherwise, if you see somewhat atypical cells, is it malignant or how far along are we?
	And wait, there's some other infiltrate cells.
	And sometimes this means that it's very subtle.
	So I just got used to not really, you know, having to make decisions off of imperfect information.
	It's just part of the game.
	And so I think that training comes in.
	But ultimately, I was a scientist.
	And science is great.
	You try something out.
	You have a hypothesis.
	Most of the time, it doesn't work.
	The data just doesn't participate with your little dreams.
	So I have whole notebooks full of stuff that just didn't pan out, you know, and I'm just used to it.
	And it's just how it is.
	So I think the training does help a lot.
	But honestly, with my upbringing, however, I was always very good at smelling BS.
	Now, just to go back briefly, what was your family upbringing?
	What did your parents do?
	Any siblings?
	Where did you grow up?
	Things like that.
	Yeah, so I grew up in a household where my parents got divorced when I was 11, and then I was under a single mom for a while.
	I had a brother and a sister.
	My brother passed away a long time ago, and my sister and I carried on.
	And then my father was an insanely good musician.
	He was a bassoonist.
	Got into major symphonies and did that.
	So there's a little bit of music in the background.
	My brother who passed, he picked up all that musical talent.
	I was playing guitar for like 10 years, and within six months he had clipped me, much to my chagrin.
	But yeah, so I grew up in Connecticut, and my moniker was Nature Boy.
	I was always outdoors.
	I preferred outdoors to indoors.
	I grew up at the era where we roamed far and wide, and I was never home in time for dinner.
	You know, that was my upbringing.
	Martinson is the last name.
	Oh, sorry, say it again?
	Swedish.
	Was that the connection with the Swedes' rational policy?
	At least some of the policies being rational in the only country in the world that had rational policies.
	I'm proud of my homeboys.
	Exactly, old Swedish independence.
	Were you shocked at all about the...
	You're talking about the sort of scientific method and how most hypotheses don't ultimately work out.
	Were you surprised that we were going on hypotheses that really hadn't been tested at all based on very questionable data analysis and empirical evidence, and we basically treated the whole world as a live Milgram experiment?
	Were you surprised by this and the response to the COVID-19 and everything concerning it?
	I really was, and I was offended.
	As a scientist, I was offended for the practice of science.
	And I think in many respects, my whole video series was just me trying to defend the scientific method, right?
	Which is, you have to be, it's hard.
	You have to be brutally honest with yourself, you know, when you're off track and when you've made mistakes and knowing that we never know.
	And the things that were being presented as certainties, even to this day, you know.
	Where they're talking about, like, well, everybody has to get vaccinated because that's how we stop this virus.
	I just was reading that today, right?
	Italy's ready to, you know, enforce a mandate, a vaccination mandate for people over the age of 50. You got Macron talking about, you know, the great, unwashed, dirty, you know, unvaxed people.
	You got Trudeau comparing them to, no, not comparing, calling them misogynists and racists and all of this stuff.
	I'm offended by that because those people should be being advised by people who can tell them.
	And we've known for...
	Probably six months that every statement they're making today about vaccines and what they can do are wrong, right?
	Don't stop transmission.
	Don't prevent people from getting ill.
	Wear off relatively quickly.
	Do have significant side effects.
	These things are all known at this point in time, but we're not allowed to have those in the public conversation.
	And the thing that offended me the most, the NIH and the CDC have these multi-tens of billions of dollar budgets.
	And what they should have been doing was just collecting the data.
	That's their job.
	Sifting through it, right?
	If I'm the CDC, I de-anonymize all this patient data.
	I pull it into giant databases.
	I tell my friends in Silicon Valley, you know, a million dollars if you can figure out a signal.
	And then we find out, oh, vitamin D, really important.
	You know, selenium levels, zinc.
	There's all these things that took forever to pop out, and those almost entirely.
	Came from individual doctors who finally paid out of their own pockets to assemble that data.
	I'm not aware of any major therapeutic insight that came from the center.
	They all came from the edges, mostly kicking and screaming.
	Chris, I want to go back to one thing where you mentioned the statements about the vaccine efficacy.
	And just to clarify that, we're not talking at large here.
	We're talking specifically in this context where you had Australian news.
	It was a tweet I put out the other day.
	Australia News now saying the vaccines were never intended to prevent transmission when they literally reported a year and a half ago 90% effective at preventing transmission.
	And so you have Trudeau, speaking of the devil of the devils, coming out and saying, get your booster, that's where it ends.
	After having said, get your first shot, that's where it ends.
	Get your second shot, that's where it ends.
	Get to 70% vaccinated, we open up.
	And so every step of the way what they say is wrong.
	The question is this, you know, between the lawyers, Barnes and I, we've talked about the courts and the policymakers, but from a scientific perspective, what is the problem in terms of them getting proper scientific advice, or at the very least, having the advice that they're getting from whoever they appoint challenged by people who are able to challenge it?
	Where's the miscommunication?
	I wish I could just call it miscommunication.
	I mean, you know, a favorite saying of mine is, Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action.
	So I've seen the CDC get things wrong so many times in a row that, you know, in the law of large numbers, you can't flip heads off of honest nickel 50 times in a row, but they have, right?
	Where every single time people will send me these papers and say, but the CDC says this, and I'm like, ugh.
	Because I know as soon as I scratch at the data, it's going to be just junk.
	Right?
	And it is.
	Nine times out of ten.
	It's complete.
	Like, I can't even believe that they're doing this.
	Right?
	And I watch that often enough.
	I realize that what's happened, for whatever reason, is that policy is now being driven by politics.
	And science is really far back in this story.
	It comes in very, very late.
	But the whole thing that's probably most offensive is you have to follow the science.
	Because we're exactly not doing that.
	Right?
	That's like just psychological projection 101.
	You know?
	It's like...
	You're dishonest.
	You know, he thinks the senator doth protest too loudly.
	It's just one of these things.
	So, yeah, in the United States, at least, the state of our health system is now a horrifying, horrifying mix of policy, liability protection, and political aims.
	And I didn't hold this.
	And remember, again, as cynical as I am, hard to keep up.
	I was already like, you know.
	A little bit on that line, but I can't.
	And I don't think COVID caused this.
	COVID revealed it.
	I got to be honest with you.
	I'm this guy now where a year ago, if I catch COVID and I was feeling bad, I would go to the hospital.
	Today, I'm kind of like, I don't know, right?
	Because I know at my local hospital, we have three, so I'm not getting any trouble by one of them.
	Still to this day, if you go in there, their standard practice is a ventilator and remdesivir.
	And we know that both of those are highly...
	Toxic things.
	That you are better.
	I believe I would be better.
	I'm not giving any medical advice here, but I would be better not undergoing those treatments, and I'll do everything I can to avoid that.
	How weird is that?
	And the odd part is, all we have to do in this story, all we have to do is we could look at the collective experience of, is 2 billion people enough?
	Is that a good number?
	Because if we add up Africa and, oh, India plus Indonesia plus, well, now we're at 3 billion.
	They flatline.
	They have almost no COVID deaths.
	They have almost no COVID cases anymore.
	And we should say, well, why not?
	All three of them have something in common, and they're using a collection of early treatments that were identified in this country, honestly, in March of 2020 as being effective.
	And sometime in late 2020, they all said, well, maybe we should try these things.
	And now they're not struggling at all.
	COVID and its aftermath at all.
	Not even slightly.
	I mean, it's not even a background problem from this point.
	And so that should be indication for everybody, that alone, that there are 3 billion people having no trouble with this.
	From countries that we might say aren't advanced or have substandard healthcare systems, but they don't.
	They actually have healthcare systems I trust more than our own healthcare system right now.
	And so that's a pretty large gap right there.
	And the fourth estate's not on the job.
	They're not talking about it.
	And I don't know where the Republicans went on this.
	To me, I can't think of anything more populist than saying, hey, how would you like to not die as much as you have been?
	I think, like, somebody could make some political hay off of that.
	And it's just, it's mysterious to me that it's still not happening.
	Well, it's extraordinary in an era when we've gone to court over the past decades for a right literally to die, a right against medical interventions, a right to treat our bodies however we choose, including the right to terminate life in certain instances.
	And yet somehow it became controversial for a patient to just want their own medical treatment, even sometimes when the doctor was recommending that medical treatment.
	The hospital was blocking them.
	Because of the distorted incentives.
	And that's a lot of what you're talking about is when you're looking at energy policy, economic policy, banking policy, public health policy, incentives play a major role.
	And my concern from a legal perspective has been that we've had bad incentives in place for the legal system to basically defer to the executive branch whenever there's an emergency around and to defer to white lab coats whenever it's a public health emergency.
	The problem is you look at what the internal policies are from the very beginning, the CDC and the FDA and the various people monitoring Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates.
	Massive incentive to have, honestly, if you're just looking at it from a mathematical perspective, more COVID deaths.
	You got paid more if you identified a death as COVID.
	So all of a sudden, our causation standards, our medical causation standards just went out the door when it came to COVID.
	Standards they would never apply to vaccine-related deaths, where they would say, well, correlation doesn't even equal causation.
	Suddenly, for COVID, if you were within six feet of somebody who had COVID two months ago, it doesn't matter if you got hit by an 18-wheeler, it was a COVID death.
	And why not?
	If you're a hospital, your key, especially these same hospitals that are being prevented from doing different kinds of regular medical treatment that are like elective surgeries that are their most important source of profitability, they really were put under maximum pressure to escalate.
	The number of COVID deaths in their identification.
	And then in terms of reimbursements, they're discouraged to use ivermectin, discouraged to use certain early treatments, incentivized to use other treatments.
	You see Fauci ended up being connected to some of the people that are putting some of the early treatments that didn't work, like ventilators, like Remnisphere.
	He's connected to some of those people.
	In fact, some of us predicted in advance that that's what was going to happen.
	Whereas the drugs that don't have the big profit behind them are the drugs that are suppressed, even when they work.
	But what's extraordinary is this complete lack of confidence in allowing independent people to make their own medical choices about their own bodies and medical future.
	From, you know, coming into medical ethics and how important the Nuremberg Code was, how much did that surprise you as to how institutional medicine reacted at just discarding the principle of individuals get to make their own informed consent decisions in this context?
	Yeah, I was really surprised, and I think I have to wander slightly into this whole idea of the woke ideology or something, but what I saw happen was not medical.
	It had nothing to do with right and wrong.
	It was unethical.
	It was all kinds of things.
	And I know there was an incentive liability angle that played in on this.
	But what I was shocked by was watching what I saw was an extraordinary, I called it farmaganda.
	It's like propaganda, but it's paid for by somebody.
	Against hydroxychloroquine.
	So I'm looking at this and I happen to, I'm an obsessive saver of stuff because things get memory hold quick.
	So I had this report in my hands that the WHO had done on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine itself, which is a derivative, a sub-derivative of it, which accumulated 70 years of data, hundreds of millions of doses.
	And they said, what happened?
	They had exactly zero cases of sudden heart failure in that entire data series.
	That's the data we had.
	And that was from 2017.
	And I trust things about that compound that come from pre-2020, right?
	And then, you know, people said, oh, well, you know, it's because Trump politicized.
	And I'm like, nah, no, I'm pretty sure Trump could tell us that water was, you know, the best thing ever and people would still drink it.
	You know, I'm pretty sure that would happen.
	And so I looked at this and I was amazed at how rapidly my local doctor was parroting back to me how unsafe this stuff was.
	And they were saying it with certainty.
	Oh, as we all know, hydroxychloroquine is very unsafe.
	I said, do you have any cases?
	Do you have any cases at all you can point to?
	Cases.
	Well, there was this guy.
	He drank fish cleaner.
	I'm like, oh, that case, right?
	And by the way, if you talk to the people involved in that case, it might not be as clear-cut as you think.
	Police might have wanted to take a closer look at the wife in that story than what I hear.
	Dr. Martinson, we covered that one.
	I mean, I remember doing it before.
	She was investigated for murder because apparently she didn't take enough of the fish cleaner to die, but her husband did.
	There was a history between the two of them.
	Ultimately, they didn't press charges.
	But yeah, it was exploited and milked for political purposes.
	Sorry, sorry.
	I'm so glad you looked into that because normally I have to explain that story to people.
	So obviously not with you guys.
	So yeah, so there was that and that was it.
	That was the whole case.
	So I actually put requests into the CDC because they were putting out, it's very unsafe.
	And I said, can you please give me any cases, any cases at all?
	You can, you know, strip away the identifying stuff, but any cases, give me a hospital, give me a patient.
	Sex and age, anything.
	And I couldn't get a single one.
	But we all know how unsafe it was.
	But at least they had some light angle there.
	There was a QT prolongation.
	It does happen, but it didn't lead to torsade to point, you know.
	So there hadn't been any cases that I'm aware of of sudden heart failure.
	And by the way, we give this stuff out like candy to people with lupus and, you know, rheumatoid arthritis.
	It's just been used like for, like people take it weekly or even daily.
	For whole stretches of their life and nothing happens.
	But suddenly it's really unsafe.
	My doctor knew it.
	And so then to watch that same thing happen with ivermectin, which, by the way, I've studied a lot of different drug compounds.
	Ivermectin is the safest drug I've ever seen.
	And I reviewed a review report by this guy, Jacques Ducote.
	He's a very prominent, famous French toxicologist.
	He looked at 500 papers, went through everything and still...
	It couldn't find anything other than...
	Ivermectin is, like, ridiculously safe.
	So then I watched the whole thing spool up around.
	Well, it's a horse dewormer.
	As if this is any sort of, like, a descriptor at all, right?
	It's like, well, true, but, you know, we feed aspirin to dogs.
	Doesn't mean it's a dog medicine.
	I mean, it's just stupid, right?
	We give antibiotics to fish and horses and, you know, cows and everything.
	It doesn't make a...
	So it was just, like, the dumbest argument ever, but still.
	My own doctor's parroting this stuff back to me now, right?
	So I watched how effective that was and it has nothing to do with science.
	That was clearly campaigns to demonize these things because somebody didn't want them in the system competing with other things in the system.
	Is it about the EUA and all the strictures around that?
	Would they put that at risk?
	Was it just simply that it was going to do this or that?
	I got to be honest with you.
	I think ivermectin is a category killer.
	I think it's a broad spectrum antiviral.
	I think it kills NyQuil, Tamiflu.
	I think it's actually a huge threat.
	I think that what came out from this whole adventure that was good for me is I learned the importance of things like vitamin D, having adequate levels of zinc, selenium, the use of quercetin in a pinch, things like that.
	I have an armamentarium now that I didn't have two years ago.
	I think that was absolute genius, fantastic stuff, but I think it actually legit scares some companies out there.
	Because people can now, if they have access to this information, can actually be a lot healthier than they used to be.
	And that blows up some CFO spreadsheets.
	Chris, I want to push back on this, not to try to get in good graces or anything.
	People say ivermectin, you know, they're safe in that it's billions of people have taken it.
	You know, it's tested.
	My wife, who incidentally also is a neuroscientist, a PhD as well, who I think she's going to appreciate.
	What you mentioned at minute 23, she might email you.
	But she'll say like, okay, antibiotics, also safe.
	But you don't want to go around willy-nilly prescribing antibiotics because even though it's safe and effective and proven in relatively low toxicity, you don't want to routinely over-prescribe because it can have longer-term problems regardless.
	So is that same argument not applicable nonetheless to, despite the safety, to over-prescribing or uselessly prescribing something?
	Which long-term might have some incidental negative effects?
	Well, so this is now the answer.
	So this is a two-part answer.
	The answer today is yes.
	I don't think there's...
	So COVID's now, SARS-CoV-2, it's endemic.
	And I'm not really clear that Omicron to be...
	It's so different from the other earlier versions.
	I'm not really clear that we aren't facing two separate things, but luckily Omicron is providing antigenic response to the earlier variants.
	Good news.
	Longer story there, but now that it's endemic, I don't think there really is a role for saying, hey, we should just prophylax people forever on ivermectin or all of that.
	I think it still has a role in treatment when people get symptoms, but in terms of just sort of chowing it, no, because...
	Nature's really smart this way.
	Eventually, it'll find a workaround.
	That's the argument against overprescribing antibiotics.
	And by the way, we do anyway.
	We're way overusing them.
	We give antibiotics to cows so they grow faster, right?
	That's just one of the dumbest things you can do from a drug preservation standpoint.
	So I don't think we should be using it that way.
	But what's slightly different in this story is that ivermectin has lots of different mechanisms of action, whereas a lot of antibiotics are single point of action.
	Those you can evade fairly simply.
	All you usually require is one or two genetic mutations to begin to override that.
	But with ivermectin hitting four, five, or six different things at once, that's much harder.
	But eventually, the virus would figure out a way around that.
	So yes, I'm with you on that.
	Where I really took exception was that if you can take any virus and you can drive its R0, that's its reproductive drive potential.
	From one, where one person gives it to one other person, that thing will persist.
	But if you can drive that below one, if you can get to 0.9 or 0.8 or 0.6, eventually that thing dies out.
	All the studies I saw early on with ivermectin, when you gave it prophylactically and you gave it at a certain level, like 90% of the population in a given area, you could drive the R0 of COVID below one.
	If we had done that...
	Early and aggressively, we could have driven this thing out so that it's not an endemic.
	We could have actually gotten rid of it.
	We didn't do that.
	So that would have been a really highly sanctioned, awesome use for that at that point in time.
	Now it's a little bit more of a complicated story for a variety of reasons.
	But I think it still has a strong role, and it's going to be in my personal medicine kit.
	Anyway, because an anecdote, I know we all hate anecdotes, but it was...
	April of 2020, I was under a lot of stress, and I thought I had COVID, but I wasn't sure.
	But I ended up getting shingles.
	Just never had them before.
	And so I Google it, and I'm like, oh no, the worst thing ever.
	Like, this is going to suck.
	And so I just took a bite.
	That was my first time taking ivermectin.
	And anecdote, shingles went away in five days.
	Not a problem.
	And so that was my first time thinking, hey, there might be a...
	There might be forces arrayed against this molecule because of just how magic it is.
	I mean, if it took care of that, that's a multi-billion dollar industry.
	And again, it's just an anecdote, not medical advice, all the usual disclaimers.
	And I'll tell you one thing.
	I got shingles literally the month before the outbreak, the month before COVID, I think.
	And I went...
	Because you don't know what it is.
	You just feel pain on your body and you don't see anything.
	And then someone says, you might have shingles.
	So I went and got the antiviral, but I got shingles so bad.
	The only thing I was grateful for was that I didn't get it lower than my belt or higher than my shoulder, but my entire torso.
	And I still have post-herpatic neuralgia.
	I still have numbness and tingling and stabbing pains all over my torso, which I've lived with.
	But even the antiviral drugs, anecdotal?
	Maybe it would have been worse, but they didn't do jack squat.
	So you say these things, and you come out and you say, okay, this is my opinion, but people say, what do you know?
	You're just a pathologist.
	And what I've noticed in the context of this entire debate, if you agree with the mainstream, you could be a pediatrician, and they'll say, good for you, you understand the science.
	But if you disagree, and unless you have a hyper-specialty in the specific field, they'll say, you're not a, what's the word I'm looking for?
	What's the word for the people dealing with diseases?
	You're not a epidemiologist or infectious disease specialist.
	You're not an epidemiologist.
	You're just a low PhD.
	You can even be the vaccine maker or the creator of the vaccine technology being utilized in these vaccines, and even then you'll be discredited as someone who doesn't count.
	Unless you have, you know, four more experts on your side that are the same thing.
	And even when that happens, then they discount those and they say, well, we have 40 more, you know, that kind of routine.
	But yeah, sorry to cut you off, Eva, what was your question?
	No, that's my point.
	It's like, okay, so you come in and you have your expertise, but the second you go against the grain, people just, they don't just write you off, they literally delete you.
	I mean, what's your response to someone who says, what do you know?
	You're just a PhD in pathology.
	You know nothing about epidemiology or infectious diseases.
	Hey, how do you think the Red Sox are going to do this year?
	I just changed the topic.
	I've grown such a thick skin around this.
	I've learned very early on that here's my rule in life.
	Here's a rule in life.
	I got many.
	One of them is that if I'm talking with somebody and they counter with other data and stuff like that, or we're having a conversation, We both are holding opinions.
	That's awesome.
	If somebody comes at me with any emotional charge whatsoever, anger, hostility, sadness, whatever it is, it means that we're not in opinion territory.
	We're at belief territory now.
	And beliefs are not just resistant to data, but they're subject to backfire effect, which means the more data you throw at them, the more entrenched they become.
	So I've gotten very good when I detect somebody comes at me with a belief-oriented position.
	I just disengage because it's...
	Again, quick learner eventually.
	It took me a long time to realize you cannot have a conversation with somebody who's entrenched in a belief system and have fun doing it.
	Unless you're on the same side of that belief system.
	So there's a lot of belief stuff going on here.
	And what's been amazing watching this whole, you know, I did this interview with Matthias Desmet.
	He's of the Mass Formation Psychosis fame.
	And it really helped snap some things in place.
	But one of the things I'd been struggling with was that the more highly educated, the more intelligent a person seemed, actually, the more likely they were to be holding an intractable belief system that was provably, demonstrably wrong.
	And the first default of somebody who's holding a belief system they have to defend is ad hominem, appeal to authority, all the usual logical fallacies.
	So you get very good at spotting those quickly.
	But I don't know why that was surprising to me.
	I would have thought people who are more classically trained, who use their minds ostensibly in their daily practice, would have been more immune to this process.
	I think they're less immune.
	That's been my experience so far.
	Yeah, it's like where the Milgram experiment worked the best in certain categories was the higher up the person's already position of authority or they were more likely to defer to authority.
	Even though, I mean, Milgram, for those people who don't know, brilliant experiment, brings people in.
	There's just a guy in a white lab coat.
	They're not told anything else.
	And they're told that it's for their own good to shock this person across from them.
	And they don't know they're not actually shocking them.
	And it's an actor on the other side.
	They believe they are shocking them.
	Keep turning it up.
	And the test was to see how many people would just obey a person in a white lab coat to the point of killing somebody, killing a stranger, just because a person in a white lab coat told them.
	Unfortunately, more than half the country did.
	But the more they had a position of authority, the more likely they were to do it.
	Whereas the more blue-collar they were, the less authoritative position they held, the less likely they were to go along with whatever.
	Because they remember the white lab coat crowd.
	You know, ancestrally, you know, told grandpa to put leeches on them to solve their problems.
	So, you know, there's some of us that have had historical ancestral skepticism towards the political and legal and medical establishments, even if we're part of them now.
	But in that, so have you been, like, one of the things that people like Robert Kennedy and some others have been talking about for more than a decade, and I paid attention to it a little bit, but I didn't fully absorb it until this.
	Which is that there's so many disincentives in our system that there's always been the philosophical debate about what happens when your economic interest is against somebody else, the common goods interest, which is kind of the case with pharmacological profits in general, depending on the circumstance.
	But often they need a disease in order for their cure to make money.
	So that often creates an incentive, perversely, to see the disease develop and expand.
	In other contexts, as you note, they definitely have an incentive in people not using alternative remedies, whether that's natural health, whether that's ones that don't have a patent on them anymore, whether that's some other competitor, and that creates distorted disincentives.
	And then the big one is the degree to which our medical health authorities, public health authorities, have been compromised by politicized agendas and big pharma over the past several decades, which people like Bobby Kennedy have been screaming about, but it's really become...
	It's glaringly clear in the COVID context.
	I mean, when you could predict, well, this group's going to make money, so that's who's going to get approval for this.
	This group won't make money, so that ain't going to get approval.
	And we've seen it with one after the next, after the next, after the next, after the next.
	Have you been surprised?
	Was that something you're already familiar with, or was it seeing this institutionalized corruption?
	Which is at the core of the bad medicine and bad science and bad public policy we've been on the receiving end now for two years.
	How much of that was a surprise to you and how much of it was confirmation of what you had long suspected?
	You know, probably about half and half.
	Again, this really...
	So I've been talking about this in a theoretical construct for 14 years now.
	Now I have the...
	The reality of it, right?
	And so I never thought I was going to actually survive to be old enough to live through a moment like we're living through right now.
	And I can't believe the speed of it.
	It's been shocking to me.
	So, you know, I've seen people characterize it pretty well, which is like, if you ever wondered how you personally would have behaved in Germany in 1933, now you know.
	Right?
	Because what we're seeing here is the exact same dynamic, that othering of people, that, you know, I watch people gleefully say, I hope unvaccinated people die, you know, in the hospital.
	They shouldn't be treated like, whoa, Nellie, slow that ship down.
	You know, I watched that happen, and I realized...
	Because I pay very close attention to both what is and what is not being said within the media construct.
	I've studied psychology and propaganda enough to know when they're using emotionally evocative words and terms.
	I look at the pacing and organization of phraseology.
	And I realize there are people out there who are very skilled pushing and pulling levers and buttons, right?
	And now we understand because Laura wrote this book in the UK and they've admitted they're nudge units, you know, psychologists who help the government.
	Instill a greater degree of fear and panic in the populace so they have easier time getting these programs through that they want to do.
	And they justify it by saying, well, we think these are the right programs, so whatever.
	The means justify the end.
	So let's scare people.
	We'll get more of them to take shots and wear masks.
	But once they get on that train, it's very hard to control what happens next because police know there's a big difference between a group of individuals and a mob.
	Might be the same number of individuals, but a mob is a whole different beast, right?
	So they're trained how to not let that group of individuals become a mob, because this is uncontrollable, right?
	So as I watch this unfolding, you know, this is why I do what I do, Viva and Robert.
	I'm very interested in helping people avoid what I think is going to be a relatively painful period.
	I see policy failures everywhere that are really...
	Either rooted in dogma or hubris or over-concentration of specialization.
	But make no mistake, as bad as COVID was for people's average lives, what the Federal Reserve is doing in driving money supply aggregates to levels has no easy way out.
	It's going to be painful, right?
	The fact that our Department of Energy has no plan for what we're going to do, when, not if, but when.
	Our domestic oil supplies wind down and we have to compete on the open market for what we want is just recklessly negligent at this point in time.
	And there's so many things we could be doing, you know, so it would have been relatively easy to have, you know, studied and promoted ivermectin early on and used that to drive the R0 below zero.
	It would have been relatively easy back at the time Carter put his cardigan on, put some solar panels on the White House to say, you know what, why don't we build houses with slightly thicker walls and roofs?
	We didn't.
	Do you see what happened in Texas last year, right?
	They get a little cold snap and next thing you know, like there's pipes bursting and the whole place practically, you know, froze to death.
	That was all completely avoidable.
	So I see these things are avoidable.
	That's my frustration.
	And yet it's happening and it's happening everywhere.
	And I kind of have a model, which is Neil Howe's fourth turning, which is just, you know what?
	Empire's late stage.
	They just get a little overcomplicated.
	They lose the plot line.
	They start passing really crazy rules.
	They just don't understand what got them to that greatness in the first place.
	And they fritter away their energies on kind of useless stuff.
	That's where I see we're at right now.
	And so I think people ought to be ready for that mentally, physically, financially, emotionally.
	And so that's really my work is to provide enough context for people to go, you're right, maybe I ought to have an insurance policy here.
	Interesting question.
	The insurance policy.
	People are sitting here saying, and I've been sitting here saying for the last year, I'm getting fed up.
	This is nuts.
	The question is, where do you go?
	Once upon a time, there were safe harbors.
	There were safe havens.
	And now everybody's saying Florida, Texas.
	But Florida, for example, is just one election away from replacing DeSantis with replacing him with a Whitmer, a Whitmer, or another Cuomo.
	World has gone mad.
	Where is the insurance policy to protect against this collective universal madness?
	What do you possibly do?
	Well, there are multiple levels to this.
	The first thing, you know, when I asked Matthias Desmond, how do you break the mass formation, the mass psychosis event?
	And it's when good people stand up and you don't forcefully resist ever.
	You just ask the question that just can't be answered.
	You know, why are we burning those women, you know, for the Salem Witch Trials?
	Like, it's just a...
	Hard to answer question.
	And eventually it rattles around in people's minds and it breaks the spell.
	So we have to break the spell that we're in.
	I think it's important for people who aren't in the spell to gather together.
	You know, there is a, finally, I've heard about an organized march in the United States coming up on January 23rd in D.C. It's going to go from the mall to the Lincoln Memorial and up the mall.
	And that's defeat the mandates D.C. They're organizing that.
	Love what they're saying.
	They're saying, hey, it doesn't make sense to put these vaccines into these healthy children.
	We don't agree with coercive mandates.
	We don't agree with the idea that a government can be allowed to coerce people while absolving themselves and the manufacturers both of liability.
	Hey, here you go.
	I'm going to converse you to do something.
	But if anything goes bad, all the risks on you.
	These things are distinctly un-American.
	They're distinctly unethical.
	And so people are gathering.
	That's an important step.
	But ultimately, Viva, you have to be personally resilient because the times that are coming, you know, if...
	Remember 2008, October?
	World's looking pretty dicey, right?
	It wasn't until like three years later.
	We're reading Hank Paulson's diary and he talks about how he's at this meeting two in the morning.
	In October of 2008, and a bank executive, a CEO, was late coming up, and he knew he was in the lobby, and he asked this guy, he's like, why did it take you so long to just make it up to the meeting?
	And this bank CEO said, because I stopped at the ATM to take some cash out.
	This is the CEO of a major bank.
	We were within a whisker of a complete banking meltdown, right?
	And that's how close that got.
	I truly think that we live in a system that's both very robust and has a lot of inertia and it's amazingly efficient and it's got some weak points in it as well.
	And so I truly think everybody ought to get as resilient as possible.
	You know, this is my home studio.
	Right outside the door over there is three cows and some chickens in the garden space.
	And I've got my most prized asset is I have a spring, no moving parts.
	I have 110 PSI water.
	At 20 gallons a minute down here.
	And so that's how I'm measuring resilience at this point in time.
	But honestly, the most important thing is that emotional resilience.
	And that's where it's literally learning how to come back together again in ways I don't think my great-grandfather would be confused by, but I think are some skills some people here may need to relearn, including myself.
	Have you been surprised at all about the scale and scope of censorship that's taken place in the sense that even people like Dr. Robert Malone, who has been pretty much a conventional doctor most of his life, a conventional scientist, not exactly political.
	You wouldn't find him at a rally or something 10 years ago.
	I think he recently said he's had enough red pills to last a couple of lifetimes in just the last couple of months.
	But here's someone who just wants to make sure his invention isn't misused and abused.
	And this is someone who helped invent mRNA technology as a vaccine delivery mechanism.
	And it doesn't oppose the use of the vaccine for certain groups.
	He thinks we should stick with traditional medicine and science, which recognizes the limitations of vaccines, recognizes the limitations of experimental vaccines, and recognizes that there isn't a one-size-fits-all.
	And yet we are constantly having public health officials and politicians try to superimpose a one-size-fits-all system.
	It's like, even I talk to my friends who believe in some of these things, I'm like, okay, but you do recognize that just because it might be good for a 65-year-old asthmatic to wear a mask, it might not be good for a two-year-old to be stuck with it running around outside.
	We used to have individual doctor-patient relationships for a reason.
	If it really was one size fits all, why do we even need doctors?
	Just put up a computer screen and everybody will get the same treatment.
	Everybody will get the same thing.
	We don't do that because we recognize that's bad medicine and yet bad medicine is being publicly mandated.
	Not to quote an old rock song from the 1980s.
	I mean, in particular, the treatment of Dr. Malone, and you're working with him on the Unity Project, which you can also talk about, too.
	I think that's good for people to know about all the collective efforts that are revealing what you're talking about, resiliency of ordinary people, even against censorship of people who are well-regarded, well-respected scientists in their field.
	That censorship is highly disturbing because it came on really quick.
	Three years ago, I could say anything I wanted on YouTube.
	And then YouTube came out with their famous community guidelines and they said, "Well, we're just trying to protect people." Obviously, they have billions and billions and billions of dollars.
	I look at their quarterly earnings reports.
	They could afford to understand the difference between bad information and good information or where there's legitimate disagreement, but they've chosen not to.
	Again, 50 coin flips all come up heads always on one side, which is they censor in support of the current policies.
	And as we've just determined, the policies weren't based on science.
	They were based on other considerations.
	So that's a real foul.
	In my mind, It's a sin that's unpardonable.
	I actually think that the big tech giants ought to be broken up.
	And I think they ought to be spanked and spanked pretty hard for the behavior that they put out here.
	Because to censor somebody like Robert Malone, you know, I know him.
	You talk with a guy.
	He's very measured.
	He's very careful.
	He's always saying, hey, you know, let me point you to where you could find this data for yourself.
	Here's how I interpret it, but I may or may not be right.
	I mean, he's as careful a guy as I know.
	And it's just how he's built, right?
	It's not a strategy.
	It's just...
	How his mind works.
	So for him to get censored off of Twitter just is a symptom of just how bad this situation is.
	And I'm really worried about it because I honestly think the people doing the censoring on some level, they have to go to sleep at night.
	They think they're doing the right things, right?
	These are the people who think, hey, let's put some activists on the board of Exxon.
	This will all work out great.
	Or we need 13 different types of bathrooms.
	That's the most important thing.
	These are very earnest people.
	They really believe this stuff.
	And it's absolutely the wrong things at the wrong time.
	And my concern is that if we can't even manage the nuance, and it really isn't hard, about the distinction between a 65-year-old asthmatic and a two-year-old when it comes to masking, how are we going to manage the fact that the Colorado River can't service 40 million people with water anymore?
	That seems a little bit more complicated.
	If we've devolved to the point where we can't manage basic conversations at what I consider to be almost...
	All due respect, these are elementary sort of conversations to have.
	What's the science?
	Should we use it on two-year-olds?
	It's like masks should have been simple, and we couldn't manage it.
	So that makes me concerned about the other larger conversations we have to manage.
	They're going to be harder.
	So I think there's, you know, that old saying, it's in that book, I forget who wrote it, but hard times create good men, and good men create easy times, and easy times create soft men.
	And soft men create hard times.
	When you go around that loop, I have that sense that we have a lot of soft people in positions of power right now.
	And I think that's sort of the model that says, well, what comes next is probably not more easy times.
	Well, I'll bring this one up for a second.
	At six years old, this looks like control demolition to me.
	I recommend everyone have a plan B. I can tell you from my limited knowledge.
	A 12-gauge shotgun that can shoot both pheasants and has a changeable choke that can shoot slugs for larger gain and go live in the woods?
	That's a good plan B if you want to plan for that type of plan B. Some might just say plan B would be vote these nincompoops out of office if you can never have free and fair elections again.
	But this is a question.
	Dr. Chris.
	One thing I was shocked about, you mentioned the anecdote about one of the three hospitals where you are still suggesting very intrusive and very destructive remedies.
	Where we are in Canada, the recommendation is go home and come back when you are so morbidly sick, we have nothing to do in terms of helping you.
	Where is the middle ground?
	In your expertise as a lowly PhD in pathology and not as a disease specialist, where's the middle ground?
	How did you get to this point where it's either the wrong, most invasive procedure, or go home and come back only when you're so sick we have nothing left to do for you?
	It's inexcusable to have that policy still at this point in time.
	The data is very clear at this point in time.
	I can mention to you four doctors who I know personally.
	Who've all treated collectively around 30,000 patients, who among them, as long as they get you within five days of symptom onset and give you a variety of early treatments, some of them we've mentioned, and there are many others beside, there's a long list of things we know about now, a long list, right?
	Including...
	Nigella sativa and different steroids now and different inhalers.
	We've got fluvoxamine.
	There's all these things that could be tried, right?
	And many of them are effective and many of them have effective ratios of 70, 75, 80, 85, like really high, good, like you have 85% better chance of outcome.
	And we know that.
	And we've known that for a long time.
	So for those policies to still be in place, we're beyond sort of...
	Willful ignorance.
	We're into some sort of negligence at this point in time.
	So anybody who finds themselves in that system, you got to educate yourself.
	The data's all there.
	You go to c19early.com.
	You go to the FLCCC website.
	These are places where they have all these protocols sort of mapped out.
	Melatonin's in there.
	Of course, you want to make sure you have adequate vitamin D levels.
	And these are all things that can be done at this point in time.
	And so of those doctors I mentioned with their 30,000 people, When they get them within five days, zero of them have died.
	All different ages.
	And these are in places where they're drawing from, if you looked at the other people in their surrounding, in the counties they came from, there are plenty of deaths.
	So to me, again, it's just really straightforward.
	This isn't hard.
	What we should be doing, if we were all healthy, Canada, U.S., we'd be saying...
	Uttar Pradesh, you seem to have 277 million people and none of them are dying right now from COVID.
	What are you doing?
	That would be an important question.
	Maybe we should find out, right?
	On and on and on.
	So the data's all there.
	Here's the thing for anybody listening.
	The data is all there to suggest that there are known effective ways to remedy this, both at the public health level, the non-pharmaceutical interventions, early treatments.
	Some of them are on patent and prescription only.
	Some of them are off patent, very commonly available.
	That's what should be happening.
	But the most effort I've seen governments, and this includes Canada, this includes now the Attorney General of the State of New York, this includes customs for both countries, is they're working very hard to block ivermectin from getting to people.
	That's where they're spending far more effort than just...
	They could just call me up like, Chris, what are those six doctors?
	I'm like, here are their numbers.
	Talk to them.
	Here are their papers.
	It's very simple.
	But they're not doing that, are they?
	I mean, Canada...
	I've got to be honest, you know, with Trudeau and some of the things I've seen coming out of both Brunswick and BC, it's actually kind of horrifying to me, what I'm seeing.
	Canada's next level, and the one thing that I've noticed is that some of these treatments you can't get in Canada because the doctors will get, they'll have their licenses stripped, which brings me into, like, one of the paradoxes is that some people who are reluctant to take the jab are open to taking these very alternative treatments There may be a paradox there, but that's someone's individual choice.
	I just want to say this.
	Japan is doing a good job.
	Unless you know what is going on in Japan and what is required.
	If you want to travel to Japan, enjoy your two weeks in solitary in a quarantine hotel where you're fed under a door.
	And from what I've been told, there's actually no natural light.
	But even if there is, Japan might be doing good.
	At what expense, though?
	At what cost?
	When you literally travel into the country, you're two weeks in a government hotel in the same way you were in Canada a year ago.
	So I don't know how well they're doing, and if they're doing that well, still the question is at what expense.
	But some people say criminal negligence, Dr. Chris.
	Other people are going to say part of the plan, part of the broader plan, without hypothesizing, just to transition.
	I mean...
	How do you see this ending in terms of the practice of medicine and whether or not the practice of medicine can ever regain their stature and their respect that I think they have lost over the last year?
	I feel pretty bad for a lot of the doctors, nurses, frontline people in this story because I know a lot of them want to be in a different system, want to be doing better.
	Some of them are just co-opted by the whole system and they'll just turn the cranks and follow the orders.
	I think what's happened...
	My larger organizing framework, the way we get out of this, is money has become too important in our culture.
	The quote isn't, money is the root of all evil.
	The full quote is, for the love of money is the root of all evil.
	Money itself is neutral.
	For the love of describes what's your relationship to money.
	Money is so important in our culture now that my wiki gets taken down because I'm not a qualified expert.
	Gates is on TV.
	This guy, oh, what do you think about vaccines, Bill?
	Last I checked, he didn't even graduate college.
	He doesn't have a science degree, right?
	But somehow, because he has money, he's revered, and we have to listen to him, right?
	And no fault of Ray Dalio.
	He's very wealthy, but if he speaks, people listen, right?
	So we have this culture that's really dominated by this idea of money.
	And so I think the opportunity here, the way we get through this is...
	We need to blow a few things up, metaphorically speaking here, which in one of them is our whole so-called healthcare system in the United States.
	We spend 20% of our GDP, $4.5 trillion, on medical care, have some of the worst outcomes compared to countries that spend half that.
	And so there's a lot of opportunities to fix this right now.
	And it's not the doctors being bad doctors.
	It's that, you know, if you go into a hospital system right now, even a small, smaller sort of regional one.
	Odds are the CEO's earning around three mil.
	There's a whole C-suite of people.
	Who even knows what they do, right?
	You've got predatory billing systems that we've all come to know and hate, right?
	Which is like, I don't know why, but my three hours in the ER cost $42,795.58, right?
	Some weird number, right?
	And so we know that it's a predatory system.
	We know that it has non-transparent pricing.
	And you just know that that money went somewhere.
	But it really didn't go to the nurses.
	It really didn't go to the doctors as much as it used to.
	It's going somewhere else.
	And it's going to private equity more and more.
	It's going to the financialized aspect of our country.
	And so I just, I honestly think the hope here is I've heard of a lot of doctors who self-ejected from the system and they're offering now concierge doctoring, which is a good start, right?
	That's a wonderful response to this.
	A doctor hangs out their shingle, not affiliated with some system where you've got an administrator and a chief risk officer and a compliance officer and a liability crew telling him what he can and can't do, and they just doctor, right?
	So that's good, but honestly, our system is really broken at this point in time, and it needs an overhaul.
	No doubt.
	I mean, I've told people you can get at sophisticated levels.
	Of Plan B kind of individual restructuring in case the system fails itself from, you know, second passports, dual citizenships, property and land, gold and silver, diamonds, things that are transportable, things that have been universally of value over a long period of time.
	You know, the more sophisticated version of a burner phone and, you know, computers and laptops that don't necessarily have traceable, trackable IPs to you.
	It can get more creative as you go along, representing various people.
	Who've needed that for various reasons over time.
	But as I always tell people, it's like the movie Heat.
	If you feel the heat around the corner, you can get out in 15 seconds flat.
	Everybody should have their own born identity plan because governments just fail, and when they fail, they tend to fail quickly.
	Like, you know, people that were Jewish diamond brokers, say, in Berlin in 1929 or art dealers didn't see the world falling apart within a year and all of their property stripped and half their family murdered.
	And so that's where if you're smart, you know, you're one step ahead of that.
	And that's part of what self-education leads to is self-empowerment and a different kind of self-enrichment like you're talking about.
	In that general context...
	Do you think that part of the core of the problem is we've elevated the wrong people into positions of power and we've created distorted...
	Incentive structures, disincentive structures almost, whether it's how hospitals do care, how a doctor practices medicine, how a court responds to an emergency, how governments issue public health mandates.
	Whatever it is, at a systemic level, we look like those end-stage empires that make decisions that, in retrospect, you wonder, what in the world were they thinking?
	But down deep, it was that underlying structural flaw that was leading to the bad outcome.
	Yeah, I agree a lot.
	And I'll add one other thing to that list, which is just consequences, right?
	I have real consequences in my life.
	Liability is a real concept for me, right?
	If I do something and somebody decides they don't like it, I could get in real trouble, including stuff that, I mean, I just own property.
	Somebody could decide to wander onto my property and break their leg on it.
	And I have issues on my hand, but I've watched over and over again in my adult life that the people who are high, once you're above a certain level.
	The consequences never really seem to land.
	And it's been shocking of late.
	And I don't know what you do without consequences.
	I mean, again, three years ago, Robert and Viva, if you said to me, Chris, there's going to be a ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee caught sleeping with a Chinese spy.
	Not only is nothing going to happen to them, they're going to be tapped to run the second impeachment process.
	I would have said, you got to take that plot back to writing because that'll never get out of script writing.
	That's a terrible plot line.
	Nobody will believe it, right?
	But here we are, like even things that are completely obvious, like, you know, watching what's happened with the way that the FBI has gone out and flagrantly broken the laws over and over again.
	And this is what I'm reading about in the New York Times.
	I mean, they just say they broke the laws.
	And I'm like, did anybody get fired or demoted even?
	No, nothing happens, right?
	Just in case nobody knows who you're talking about, you're talking about Swalwell and his Chinese girlfriend.
	I think her nickname was Fang Fang.
	And it's not just that all that happened.
	In the meantime, Swalwell has the audacity, the moral hypocrisy to go out and lecture the Let's Go Brandon dad about the nerve that it takes to the indecency to go and do the Let's Go Brandon on Biden who doesn't even know he's saying Let's Go Brandon.
	Yeah, that's Swalwell.
	The guy who said, you know, we have nukes, so don't fight with the government, just in case anybody didn't know.
	But yeah, well, consequence-free, and almost you fail upwards, like you've seen it in Canada.
	You fail upwards, and you get to an echelon where there is no such thing as failing.
	It's screw-up, and you get a seat on the World Economic Forum.
	I think Christia Freeland, who's a member of our government here...
	It's on the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum.
	It's an amazing thing how these things happen.
	But yes, consequences are good when the consequences are proportionate and and reasonable and justified.
	Yep.
	What where where do you.
	Let's just see.
	Predict the future, Dr. Chris.
	Where do you see things going and how do you see them unfolding?
	COVID's over.
	All that's left is for the cleanup operations.
	Omicron, unless, here's my caveat, unless it mutates into something new.
	And by the way, I'm a little concerned that...
	They're putting the Merck drug out there, Molnupiravir, which is a mutagen.
	And it doesn't stop the virus from replicating for a full three days, but it's mutating.
	So we're putting a mutagenic hyperdrive onto people.
	And I can't even believe, I can't believe for the life of me that they proved it.
	I've never seen a drug with such a low putative efficacy, which, you know, they rig the trials the best they possibly can in their favor.
	I think it had like a 30% efficacy.
	Should never have made a past FDA, sailed right through, right?
	And so unless Omicron does something new and awful, it's over.
	You know, the way we might think about Omicron is that it's an airborne vaccine.
	It spreads like wildfire.
	It's in 90% of the world at this point in time.
	It's just unbelievable.
	Its ability to spread looks like as good as measles in a naive population.
	It's everywhere.
	And it confers immunity.
	If you have Omicron antibodies, they work against Delta for sure.
	We're pretty sure it looks like they work against Alpha, Beta, Gamma, the earlier version.
	So it provides immunity and it's much milder.
	So that's the best we could have hoped for in this story.
	With that done, all that's left is, well, you know how it is.
	Remember, it's like 40 years after World War II is over, they found the last Japanese soldier out of some South Pacific island wandering out.
	30 years, they'll find somebody in Brooklyn with three masks on, still disinfecting their DoorDash deliveries.
	But beyond those few people, it's over.
	And so we have to see how the governments respond and will they give up that power and there'll be some fights there.
	Part two of this story is that the Federal Reserve is still throwing $120 billion a month into the markets.
	The ECB is doing even more than that.
	So we're going to watch all that stimulus come washing in, and I see the potential for exceedingly high rates of inflation.
	We had weird things happen where Russia isn't exporting any fertilizer.
	China's not exporting any fertilizer.
	The United States isn't making enough for itself.
	So we're going to have a real fertilizer shortage, which is going to ding harvests next year, guaranteed.
	I don't see any way around that at this point.
	And that's without any weather sort of issues.
	And as well, we have a massive energy crisis, which is astonishing.
	Indonesia just stopped exporting coal.
	There isn't enough coal for China.
	And, you know, we got natural gas issues in Europe.
	So those sorts of issues, I think those come to the fore in this next part of the year.
	And so that could be fairly disruptive.
	Energy riots for the first time I was in Kazakhstan.
	We just happened where people rose up because their energy bills spiked so badly.
	And I think the government just took a knee on that one.
	So that would be the prediction.
	We'll see more of that because our authorities have been just doing everything possible to keep the stock and the bond markets elevated at the exclusion of everything else.
	Every other consideration was irrelevant.
	And so that...
	There's some price to pay for that.
	I think 2022 is when we see that coming up.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, if Omicron, if spring comes and it's gone, you're going to have a lot of pent-up energy from people saying, woo-hoo!
	And wanting to party again and travel and do things that they've really held off and get elective surgeries and see their grandkids and all kinds of stuff.
	So I actually think the economic explosion off of this...
	Could be fairly dramatic.
	So that's what I'm looking forward to here.
	How much do you think some of the kind of alternatives that have emerged during the COVID era in the sense of we kind of have like a pirate radio of independent media content creators that more and more people have turned to, that has led to the censorship efforts because of the success of those independent content creators, yourself and others, that how much do you think that continues, that people have learned they can't trust institutional sources of information all the time and they need to get independent sources of information?
	And how much, and things like underground railroads of medical care treatment, right?
	You've had these doctor's clinics set up sort of independently.
	I mean, I was just waiting for the day when your local corner drug dealer would be, okay, heroin, cocaine, or ivermectin?
	Which would you like?
	The, you know, we're going to give the cartel, the Mexican cartel, something else to deal with.
	But, you know, like, I mean, a friend of mine got COVID.
	He went to this underground railroad of people who told him which hospital was the good one to go to.
	He's like, no, go to this one.
	They give you certain steroid treatments.
	They'll take care of it quickly.
	It all worked well.
	And it was only because he was connected to this underground railroad of connected parties that knew which place to go to that was good and which one was dangerous.
	How much do you think all of that also continues into the new year?
	Enormously.
	This actually very, very...
	Just sort of selfishly, even.
	I'm in the alternative media business.
	I've never seen a more target-rich business environment in my entire life.
	It's amazing.
	The big media can't begin to figure out how not to do it wrong.
	I don't know what's going wrong with them, but I'm like, thank you, because it creates more opportunities for people to come out.
	I mean, you would think eventually.
	I thought self-interest for the big media companies, they would catch on and they would go, Why does Joe Rogan have larger numbers than all of us combined?
	What's he doing?
	Listening to people and having context-rich conversations in long form.
	We're pretty sure people want bullshit fed in small nuggets, right?
	Eventually they would catch on and they haven't.
	So I think that, yes, for at least until something really significantly changes, we're going to see more and more and more of that.
	And by the way, the...
	Those big media places, they're really shot through with the woke crowd.
	And I think those people fundamentally don't understand that people don't think like them.
	They don't value it.
	And they're more interested in shaming people into compliance.
	And it's really weird.
	People don't like being shamed into doing stuff.
	Who knew, right?
	But that creates extraordinary opportunities.
	And I'm excited because I get to hang out with all these people like yourselves, these high integrity people who just want to do good, get the truth out.
	Have a good time.
	Engage with other thoughtful people.
	And so we got to find each other, and that's been just fab.
	I'm really happy about that.
	Chris, I've got to ask you something.
	I've heard it said time and time again, and you might be able to field it.
	The Federal Reserve is neither federal nor a reserve.
	Talk amongst yourselves.
	Can you explain what that meme or that trope means to me?
	Because I don't understand this.
	Well, sure.
	So the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, it's very short.
	It's only six pages.
	It set up a non-governmental operation, a government-sponsored enterprise, a GSE.
	And that GSE is the Federal Reserve.
	Now, the Federal Reserve is actually a corporation, and it has capital stock.
	That capital stock is held by various other participants, none of whom happen to be the federal government.
	The other holders of the capital stock, which is the controlling interest in the Federal Reserve, Are member banks within that ecosystem.
	So JP Morgan owns an undetermined amount of capital stock in the Federal Reserve because they don't release who owns or how much, but you can tell by their position within the ecosystem that they are owners.
	So we know that.
	So that's all that that means.
	The Federal Reserve is really a private consortium.
	It's a cartel and it's structured that way, but it's really not a lot different from saying Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.
	Government?
	Yes, sort of.
	It has some government guarantees.
	We assume the Treasury Department would write in if there was a big capital call that couldn't be met within the Federal Reserve system, but it's a private institution.
	Nobody on this call has ever voted for anybody to be on the Federal Reserve, ever.
	Yeah, and our mutual friend George Gammon, we're bringing suit to try to finally audit the Fed by FOIAing the Fed because they are subject to Freedom of Information Act requirements due to the breadth and expanse of that law.
	And we'll see, they're still delaying the production, but they're supposed to be doing it any day now.
	They're supposed to be getting to us back a lot of the documents and information we requested.
	So we'll see if they do.
	The other interesting thing here is, as I'm watching this...
	Because sometimes, you know, if you were arguing, I call it hush-hush on our VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com little platform.
	But these alternative theories, and like George was exploring one with, you know, why might the IMF...
	Be interested in the Fed raising interest rates even when that will endanger aspects of the stock market, housing market in the United States.
	Well, the IMF might look at as a broader perspective that you look at all the debt held by so many small countries around the world and that they might not be able to be able to repay that debt and that would all of a sudden give the IMF the power to go in and basically dictate their Financial policy, which ultimately means their governmental policy.
	And all of a sudden, the de facto president of Small Country X is actually some assistant banker at the IMF.
	And then, as you mentioned, the oil and energy policies.
	Why are we trying to squeeze certain fertilizer producers and natural gas producers and the whole Ukrainian-Russia conflict?
	But then you see revolt in Kazakhstan, where there's been an interest in certain Western European capitals and certain three-letter agencies in the United States who would like to see the current Kazakhstan regime fall apart.
	They're part of the loose security arrangement with Russia.
	And so they might have a different long play in the kind of...
	How much do you think...
	Concern over China is important, and having also just this long-term institutional approach in terms of dealing with some of the risks that we face in the coming decade or two.
	It's everything to me.
	It's just everything.
	So once you understand the true role of energy in maintaining complexity, and our economic system is a complex model, right?
	Like, I don't know how many SKUs, like if you're in the business of making phones, right?
	I don't know how many SKUs are involved in this, right?
	There's a chip, there's a camera, there's a microphone, there's a screen, there's a button.
	There's probably 400 separate components in there.
	Well, if you looked at those and you gave every one of those a stock keeping unit, a SKU, a little barcode, last count, there were something like 20 billion SKUs in the world economic system, right?
	It's just like this massive number of things.
	It's highly complicated.
	To maintain that complexity requires energy flows.
	So everything is about energy.
	And, you know, we've been doing a huge disservice in this country by allowing greenwash after greenwash after greenwash article to just float out there, right?
	And eventually people take it as axiomatic truth.
	Oh, wind towers are cheaper than oil.
	Like, well, it's actually not fungible.
	They make electrons and oil we turn into like fertilizer and plastics and we use it in giant ships, right?
	They're not...
	We're not interchangeable even slightly yet.
	And so people believe that we can just make this easy transition, and we can't.
	And China's very clear-eyed about that.
	China looked at our overall situation and said, we want to compete with these guys on the blue water.
	And they came up with the Belt and Road Initiative, right?
	Which is like, now they have land routes to everything they need.
	Oh, by the way, with Afghanistan, leaving behind 85 billion of fresh U.S. hardware gives a land route to China over...
	To the last largest known gas reserves in the world.
	And so there's like maybe 10% of the world's known gas reserves right across Afghanistan and they're building a pipeline.
	So that's the story.
	The next decades are all about that.
	Who has the resources?
	Who has access to them?
	And how's that going to shake out?
	Europe's in a tough place here.
	They have three major gas fields all in decline at this point in time.
	They don't have any new identified ones.
	It's not like they've been not drilling stuff.
	The coal reserves in Germany is just down to the brown coal, the lignite at this point in time.
	So they have real energy issues.
	They are highly dependent on Russia, who they've been busy pissing off.
	Russia's like, well, I don't know.
	Maybe we'll sell this stuff to China.
	They seem friendly.
	They treat us well.
	I don't know.
	And so I'm really concerned for...
	How the geopolitics is mapping out in this particular arc, because we're not setting ourselves up for success.
	And there's a lot of things we should be doing that we're really not at this stage as a country, strategically.
	And so I'm hopeful that, you know, we could get somebody in the office who might get that.
	But Obama didn't get it.
	Trump didn't get it.
	Biden, not a chance.
	He might not be capable of getting it.
	But actually, Chris, just going back to one thing you said earlier, but China.
	Russia not selling fertilizer to America.
	To the world.
	First of all, I mean, why do other countries not produce their own fertilizer?
	What type of fertilizer and what prediction?
	What is your conclusion from that phenomenon?
	Yeah, these are all basically nitrogen fertilizers.
	So there's three big components, usually N, P, and K. P is the phosphorus, K is the potassium.
	Those are still being exported and mined in a variety of places, but it's the nitrogen fertilizer.
	It's a very energy-intensive process.
	The typical way you make it is from natural gas, and you use that natural gas to strip the hydrogen off and take the nitrogen out of the atmosphere, and you combine those two and you make ammonia.
	And then you sell that ammonia fertilizer out to the rest of the world.
	That's a very energy-intensive process.
	For whatever sets of reasons, various supply chains broke down.
	I don't quite have my hands around it because it's really weird, but for sure in Europe, we saw two fertilizer plants in the UK, one in Germany, just stop.
	Just stop because they couldn't do it economically.
	China claimed that they couldn't export it for other reasons, and Russia didn't have enough besides to export.
	They needed it for their own purposes.
	So for whatever reasons...
	There is just like nobody selling it and the price spike is extraordinary.
	It's up by a factor of 4 to 10, depending on the market we're talking about.
	It's just, it's really, it's big, but that's even if you can get it.
	So we're going to see a lot of farmers not plant with it.
	And is that actual legit shortages or are these strategic shortages?
	I'm not clear about that at this point in time.
	I can't chase the story down well enough to be certain.
	And nothing to do with being used as a component in explosives.
	This is strictly for fertilizer, not for potassium nitrate bomb, whatever, gunpowder, whatever.
	Yeah, no.
	Fertilizer, not weaponry.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Yeah, that's how I see it at this point in time.
	But, you know, these are all, again, the complexity of this system requires that we would have people who would understand that you have to be a little bit, you have to have some humility in these things, right?
	And so...
	If I was running the ship, what we would be doing is we'd be saying, listen, I understand just-in-time inventory is nice and lean, you know, but actually, we ought to have reserves, right?
	We ought to have deep, deep pantries in our own households, but if you're a company, you ought to be running a deeper inventory.
	I know it's not super cost-effective, but it is important.
	Like we saw, we saw whole automotive lines get shut down because they didn't buy the chips, but not all of them.
	Subaru bought the chips.
	They're doing fine, right?
	But Ford didn't seem...
	See fit to buy the chips they needed.
	And they had to shut down whole lines because they were missing a little control chip, you know, for their main units.
	So those are the kinds of shortages that can rear their heads relatively quickly.
	And to harken back to something Robert said earlier, it's like that definition of how did Hemingway go broke, you know, slowly, then all at once.
	I actually think that that's the thing I'm concerned about is that, you know, our government and our system can seem like it's going along for a while.
	And it's slowly devolving, but I worry about that chance that things could devolve more quickly.
	So there's something in the story I can't resolve and I hate it.
	I have pretty good intuition about these things and there's just something in there going, I don't get it.
	And I don't like that because the shortages I'm seeing don't make sense at this point.
	I can't chase them all down.
	How do you get your sources of information in general?
	Because you're able to stay on top of a wide range of topics across a wide range of subjects and be ahead of the curve consistently.
	So how did you acquire the skill set to get to those independent sources?
	And how do you do it on a day-to-day basis?
	I have a whole wide variety of chat boards that I belong to.
	I trust the edges of the information.
	I know there's a lot of noise out there, but there's signal, too.
	And that signal is often a very valuable several months to more in front of.
	By the time you read about it in a New York Times Wall Street Journal, it's pretty well curated by that point in time, and there's not a lot of data left in that.
	So I like to sift at the edges, and you find really cool things there.
	So I'll tell you, here was one of these moments for me.
	I was on a chat board for...
	I follow energy really closely.
	There was a chat board for utility people, and they were talking about this event that had just gone down in San Jose, where some people, some snipers, had shot into the base of the cooling fins of these giant transformers and shot perfectly.
	And these cooling fins have mineral oil, and the mineral oil all drained out.
	Now, no big deal.
	These things have alarm systems on them.
	But whoever this was, it also crawled into two separate manhole covers and clipped three separate fiber optic lines.
	That shut down the 911 system and also the emergency warning system for these things.
	So it was a highly inside job, right?
	So I'm reading about that, and I'm waiting to hear about this in the newspaper because this took out one-third of San Jose's electrical production capabilities or transforming capabilities.
	It was a really big deal, and it was weeks before it came out in the newspapers.
	And even then, they kind of like soft-pedaled it.
	So then a number of years later, I was sitting next to James Wolsey, who was former CIA director, and I said, hey, Do you ever notice this thing about what happened in San Jose?
	And he immediately just locked on.
	He's like, how did you know about that?
	What do you know?
	He's like, not a lot of people know about that.
	And so that's how I find out about these things.
	I'm just hanging out in the boards where the people who are most in the know are likely to share their information.
	And it's amazing what people share.
	So, you know, Twitter is sort of like my early sort of very high noise to signal, sort of like if something's breaking in.
	I'll find out there first, possibly.
	I go to Reddit boards.
	I go to various chat boards that belong to different specialties and things like that.
	And then I have a large network of people I trust.
	Yeah, ultimately, or like these days, I find the same thing in that the people at the Viva Barnes Law...
	.locals.com board provide me with about 90% of the information.
	Where I used to have to go out and find it in different places, they're feeding it on a constant basis, so it ends up being very useful and helpful.
	Also, my favorite James Woolsey story was when he was director of the CIA, I was there with some young students who he gave a tour to and did a little lunch presentation at which he explained.
	I knew certain things were coming down with the Clinton administration because he explained, I asked about, you know, What about the ban on killing foreign leaders?
	And he looked at me and said, well, define leader.
	And this would be an example of when you probably shouldn't have a lawyer in control of the intelligence agency.
	Yeah, well, yeah, define is.
	I mean, yeah, you know what's going on.
	Oh, yeah.
	He was a fun guy to talk to, actually.
	He was very concerned even back then, years ago, about...
	The CRISPR technology and that somebody with two years of training and 100 grand could start manufacturing organisms.
	Various people have been worried about this biological outbreak for a long time.
	I'm sure you've talked about the event 201.
	There's a lot of weird coincidences around these things.
	I'm a coincidence theorist.
	I don't like them.
	You get too many coincidences in a row and I start to think bad thoughts.
	The expression earlier, I've heard it before, it's first time is an accident, second time is a coincidence, third time is enemy action.
	Yeah, it's an old military saying, yeah.
	It's beautiful.
	And a question someone had asked, I forget where it was now.
	You're feeling, I think, I know where Robert's going to go on this, but you're feeling, Chris, about the governments of the world having learned their lesson, we may or may not be an endemic.
	How we move on, but the governments are going to employ the very same tactics they use for this pandemic health crisis for environmental crises going forward, and they will never give the power back.
	Yeah.
	Your thoughts?
	Yeah, and here's the reason why.
	Again, I'm this guy.
	I'm going to have to constantly back out to some other sort of angle on this, but there was a graph that Bridgewater Associates put out, I don't know, five, six years ago, and it just showed the total debt of the United States.
	So debts.
	Easy to understand, right?
	You got your auto loans, mortgage loans, student loans, there's municipal debt, federal debt.
	That's just this little smear at the bottom.
	And then they added the IOUs on top of that, which would be underfunded pensions, underfunded Medicare, Social Security entitlements.
	And you add all that up, and the conclusion a number of years ago was that the United States owed about 1,100% of GDP to the future.
	Then you study a little history and you find out there was one country once that dug out from a position of 260% to GDP, and that was England from 1815 to 1900.
	1815, the Napoleonic Wars had ended, and they had this little thing called the Industrial Revolution as a tailwind.
	That's the world record holder for actively paying back what had been borrowed.
	So I look at this and I just come to the conclusion, there's really only one question to resolve when you look at this chart, and that is, who's going to eat the losses?
	That's it.
	It's really, it boils down to that.
	We can't pay it back.
	To pay it back would require us to do two things.
	Grow the economy at a rate it's never been growing in history ever, including a time when we had abundant natural resources.
	And two, that we don't continue to overspend and overpromise and we actively tighten our belts at that same time.
	So that's never going to happen in this environment.
	So that question of who's going to eat the losses, you can't resolve that.
	With honesty in our political system.
	Somebody would have to come forward and say, look, you might not have overspent, but somebody before you did, and now we're all going to have to tighten our belts and really go into austerity as a consequence of this.
	It's not going to happen.
	So if you can't do that and you can't be honest with people, you have to be dishonest.
	And a form of dishonesty would be...
	Hey, we're very sorry, Viva, but you can't take any trips anymore that waste too much carbon, and you're going to have to live in a smaller house, and you can't eat meat anymore, crickets for you, and on and on and on.
	But all of those are articulations of saying it's austerity, but now we've imposed the austerity by telling you it's about this existential thing, and here's the best part.
	It's your fault.
	You're the one who has to suffer because you're the one exuding carbon and eating meat, or whatever they're saying.
	That's how I see this now.
	Not that I don't believe there's legit issues with environmental issues, but the way I see it being reflected is the same thing I see with COVID.
	There are reasons to convince us that we have to do things that we wouldn't otherwise want to do.
	And I wish we could just be honest.
	I trust people more than the powers that be seem to.
	I'd like to sit everybody down and say, listen, I wish they hadn't overspent, but they did, and here we are.
	How do we want to get past this?
	And here are our options.
	And I think if you give people...
	Have you ever been to a Mudder Challenge?
	I mean, I've watched them.
	I've never participated.
	But these are people like in Vermont.
	It's like October.
	It's 40 degrees out.
	They're crawling over stuff, obstacles, and they're all wet, and they're freezing cold and shivering.
	And they're doing it because they have a goal.
	You know, I think if you give people an appropriate vision and goal, they will literally crawl through mud.
	I have great faith in humans, but I do believe that our leaders are just lying to us and fibbing and they know it and we know it.
	We're down to that Russian saying, right?
	We knew they're lying.
	They know we know they're lying and on and on, right?
	With the Solzhenitsyn statement, right?
	So that's where we're at.
	And unfortunately, that system breaks at some point because the social corrosion, that cohesion we had, it just breaks.
	Just don't buy it anymore.
	And I think we're already seeing that in lots of different ways.
	And so that's the process we're in.
	So my prediction, it gets more and more turbulent for a while until we resolve these sort of really fundamental issues at hand.
	Now, you're part of a range of projects that are trying to bring a means of addressing and redressing a lot of these problems.
	Could you describe what some of those are and the ones you're most hopeful for?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So working with the Unity Project, which is organized around the K through, well, 5 through 11 mandates for children, the mandates for vaccination, is a prerequisite for going to school.
	So people have organized around that, really wonderful people.
	They've got an extraordinary...
	Board and advisory council and really earnest, wonderful people.
	So they're working very hard around that issue right there.
	So I help with that.
	I serve on the board with the FLCCC, who are working very hard to get early treatments promoted and just wonderful people there.
	Unbelievably good people.
	And then I'm working with a...
	Ben Swan is working to create a new platform called Sovereign, which I'm just really a fan of and helping to get that going because he's just been very thoughtful about it.
	He's thought through the risks that I care about most.
	One, the App Store risk.
	Can they just put a bullet in you by...
	Kicking out of the app store, so he's taking care of that risk.
	Second, are you on AWS servers?
	Can you get Parlered?
	So he's figured out that, so that won't be a risk.
	And then the overall governance model, he's pulling forward, very creative and thoughtful.
	So anytime I see somebody really, really trying to do good and do right and evade the censorship and help organize people, I'm just a big fan of that.
	PeakProsperity.com is my own website.
	That's been my own effort for the past 14 years, and we've got a great community.
	I should shout out to them, too.
	I get a lot of my information from these people.
	Super tapped in, very smart and thoughtful.
	And then to put it all together, we have a seminar we do once a year virtually.
	It's January 29th and 30th this year, Saturday, Sunday.
	It's virtual, so it'll be recorded.
	But what we are doing this year that's fun is we're opening up a set of chat rooms for a whole week before this thing.
	And then the context of this is Surviving the Great Reset.
	So we're going to talk about the framing of what's happening.
	We've got Brett Weinstein coming.
	Ben Swan is coming to that.
	Pierre Corey and a number of other people to talk about what's happening and what you can do about it.
	But the biggest part is I want to just use that as a tent to assemble people so they can find each other.
	That's the best part.
	That's what I feel best about.
	I feel best when people tell me, "Oh my God, I found this person and we're doing this together now." That's my favorite moment.
	Chris?
	I'm going to put all of these links.
	I'm going to get them if you could email them to me.
	And I'll put them in the pinned comment so people can find you.
	People can follow you everywhere you go.
	Are you, dare I ask the question, are you on Locals, Chris?
	Not yet.
	Okay.
	We'll talk after the stream is over, but I'm going to pin all of your links in the pinned comment so people can find you.
	This has been fantastic and it's been phenomenal.
	I hope it's been enlightening, not too depressing for some people.
	They might have to go deeper into your content to actually get what a plan B looks like, the logistics and how to hedge accordingly.
	But this has been phenomenal.
	Chris, Robert, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes afterwards.
	Okay, one more time though, Chris.
	Where can people find you?
	It's peak...
	I lost the word already.
	Peak Prosperity.
	Peak prosperity.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And your channel is peak prosperity as well.
	A lot of red pill realities in a black pill world with a white pill solution.
	PeakProsperity.com.
	We're optimistic realists.
	That's how we parse that.
	Excellent.
	Okay, we're going to wind it up.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much for the comments.
	Share away.
	Clip away.
	There were some great moments here.
	I'm going to have to go back and re-watch and re-clip.
	Chris, thank you very much for coming on.
	Next time, I'll be in my studio, and the audio will be better, but content over form, whatever it is.
	You know how it goes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	Enjoy the week, and we'll see you soon.

▲