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April 19, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:36:29

Sidebar with Bret Weinstein! Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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	What are you going to be looking out for as this trial gets underway?
	Well, this is all about the dangerous distortion of truth because those rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6th, that didn't happen in a vacuum.
	They were fed lies.
	They were fed disinformation.
	So the disinformation about Dominion is what is on trial right now.
	Fox is being held accountable in a way it never has been before.
	And what I'm watching are the dollar figures, the dollar totals here.
	What are you going to be looking out for as this trial gets underway?
	Can we appreciate the irony of Brian Stetler lecturing on Fox News disinformation?
	We're not going to get into that in the details of that tonight.
	I'll talk about that tomorrow.
	The details of the $787.5 million settlement between Fox and Dominion.
	It's just an apropos intro to today's stream because today we have Brett Weinstein.
	And I've checked.
	It's Weinstein, not Weinstein, although I suspect he gets both.
	Brett Weinstein, who, if you go read his Wikipedia page, you'd think he is a nobody who was just coming up with some ideas off the street and shouting them into the air with no credentials, no nothing.
	Wikipedia has the audacity to accuse Brett Weinstein of COVID disinformation.
	It's an amazing world that the people who don't know, the people who actually are probably the ones who should stay in their lane if anyone is to stay in their lane, although I don't like that idea, that concept whatsoever, but the ones telling the Brent Weinsteins of the world, you're just an evolutionary biologist.
	What do you know?
	Stay in your lane.
	You're not a, what's the word for the thing, the people who study diseases?
	I forgot the word now.
	I'm an idiot.
	You know the word I'm thinking about.
	You're not one of those.
	And if you happen to be one of those, Oh, well, you're a quack if you don't tow the official narrative.
	Disinformation, misinformation, and the abuse of those terms has been something that Brett Weinstein has been the victim of in real time in a way that I suspect he could never have foreseen.
	Epidemiologist, thank you very much, Nathan Danner.
	So we've got Brett Weinstein on tonight.
	For obvious reasons, we're not staying very long on YouTube because I'd actually like to have a discussion.
	I'd like to ask some of the neurotic questions that have been lingering in the back of my mind for the last two years.
	And we can't have those questions on YouTube.
	I was listening to some podcasts with Brett on Spotify and I happened to see a number of his Dark Horse podcast just graffitied with, this might contain COVID, find the latest on COVID information.
	We live in a world where unlicensed social media tech people are telling licensed doctors how to practice.
	They're telling evolutionary biologists what to think and what's the truth and what's not the truth of the day, which happens to change from one year to the next.
	It's a wild, wild world.
	Okay.
	All that to say, we've got Brett.
	I'm going to bring him in now because I said I'd do three minutes to let everyone trickle in.
	We're going to head over to Rumble much sooner than later, but we're going to do the standard 30,000-foot overview.
	Get to know Brett.
	How he got to be where he is.
	And then his rude entry.
	Is it the rude entry or rough entry into the world of identity politics and social media?
	Smearing campaigns.
	Brett, I see you.
	I'm bringing you in in 3, 2, 1. Brett, sir, how goes the battle?
	Not bad.
	I have my go bag packed for when we leave YouTube and head on over to Rumble.
	So I'm ready for that.
	You just tell me when we're moving.
	Yeah, it's going pretty well.
	How are you?
	I'm, you know, other than the witnessing a world go crazy and my standard neuroses, you know, I've been better, but I've been worse.
	And we have no choice but to keep plugging along.
	Brett, for anybody who's watching who doesn't know who you are, the 30,000 foot overview as to who you are now, but then I'll have my standard intro questions as to like childhood.
	I know a lot of these answers because we've already met in person, and it's not going to be my first time hearing the answers, but I'm going to look surprised when you answer them anyhow.
	Who are you, for those who don't know?
	I am an evolutionary biologist.
	I studied evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor under Dick Alexander, who's one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century.
	I did my undergraduate.
	At UCSC under Robert Trivers, another one of the greats.
	So in any case, I have been in the thick of it from the point of view of evolutionary science.
	I taught for 14 years at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
	That came to an abrupt and rather spectacular end when at 9.30 in the morning on May 23, 2017, 50 students that I'd never met before streamed into my classroom and accused me of racism and demanded my firing or resignation.
	They foolishly filmed everything they did as the college descended into riots and anarchy, that is literal anarchy.
	They uploaded it to Facebook.
	Somebody moved it over to YouTube.
	The incident became quite famous.
	Of course, nobody ever found any evidence of racism because I'm not a racist.
	And in any case, that's how I came to public attention.
	Since then, I have been doing the Dark Horse podcast.
	Every Saturday, my wife, Heather Hying, another evolutionary biologist, and I do a live stream.
	Those live streams have focused quite a bit on COVID, which has gotten us into quite a bit of hot water, as I think you know.
	We wrote a book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which became a New York Times bestseller almost instantly.
	So anyway, that's the short version.
	We're going to get into some of that stuff in much greater detail, specifically the Evergreen incident.
	Back at all the way up to the beginning, I like to ask these questions just to get the context.
	How many generations American are you?
	Where were you born, raised?
	What was your childhood like in the States?
	I'm going to bring in Robert right now just so we can get this hold on like this.
	There we go.
	My grandparents on my father's side were immigrants and my great-grandparents on my mother's side were immigrants.
	I grew up in Los Angeles, California.
	I am not, however, crazy.
	But nonetheless, I did spend time there.
	I've actually come to appreciate the place a great deal more since leaving.
	I didn't much like it when I was there as a young person.
	For one thing, it made it very hard to learn what order the seasons came in.
	But I got that wired now.
	What else did you ask me?
	What did your parents do?
	How many siblings?
	And were you raised in California?
	So I grew up not far from the tar pits in Los Angeles.
	About a mile from the tar pits.
	My father is a lawyer.
	He actually did antitrust law under Bobby Kennedy Sr. in the Justice Department many decades ago.
	My mother is a psychologist, now retired.
	I am having trouble keeping track of all of the questions you've asked.
	And your brother, also famous, Eric.
	Are there other siblings that we may be less familiar with?
	There are no other siblings that I'm aware of.
	So only Eric.
	Yes, Eric is well known.
	He is the originator of the idea of the intellectual dark web.
	He coined that term.
	And anyway, people will be familiar with him.
	He is a...
	He would say a mathematician.
	I think people would probably understand him better as a mathematical physicist.
	He's interested in theories of everything, etc.
	Yeah, that's it.
	No other siblings.
	What was it like watching you and your brother talk?
	Sometimes it reminds me of, when I'm talking to my brother, he does metaphysics and philosophy, and he'll be describing something to me, and he assumes I know what he's talking about, and sometimes I have absolutely no clue.
	And it seems like you guys at times have your own language when you're talking to each other.
	Was it that way when you were growing up, or is that something that became more of a phenomenon as adults?
	Well, I'm on both sides of that, because on the one hand, we do have...
	A language that makes it very efficient for us to communicate about technical matters.
	I also have a language with Heather, and there's a lot of overlap between my language with Heather and my language with Eric.
	There are just certain terms of art that, for example, if we talk about the trade-off between hill climbing and valley crossing, that may sound bizarre and mysterious to most people, but it's a very efficient way of describing an evolutionary process.
	So anyway, it was like that.
	On the other hand, there is a place in Eric's area of specialty where he crosses out of that which I understand and I become a spectator like everybody else.
	And maybe I have a little bit of insight because, you know, sciences work the same way and math, if it isn't exactly a science, is certainly an adjacent style of thought.
	But there is definitely an area that Eric...
	Brett understands well that I really don't.
	Brett, I mean, we're going to get into the discussion of COVID on Rumble, but so people can like, I don't know, place you in terms of credentials and in terms of your expertise.
	What goes into getting, I mean, I presume, I don't know what level of degree, but evolutionary biology, it's a science, it's not an art.
	I mean, what goes into that study and how many years did you do it for?
	Well, we should probably come back to the question of art and science, because really this is one of these things that scientists misportray, I think, out of a kind of insecurity.
	And so, yes, evolutionary biology is definitely a science, but there is an aspect of it that if you're going to be any good, it's an art.
	So we can come back to that.
	But in any case, I studied my fieldwork.
	involved bats of all things.
	I was studying tent making bats in Costa Rica and Panama.
	These are animals that modify understory leaves into roost structures and I did a number of things with them.
	I radio tracked them to test a hypothesis about why this behavior had evolved multiple times.
	I also innovated some technology that allowed me I believe I am the only person who has ever watched about Make a Tent, which I was able to do by using infrared LEDs that I bought.
	These are the kind of LEDs that are used in television remote controls.
	And I rigged up basically a light block that I put under a tent that I knew was about to be modified because I could see the initial signs.
	And I sat there for several nights in the dark using...
	A bank surveillance camera and this infrared illuminator to watch this animal construct a tent.
	Anyway, it solved a problem that hadn't been solved before.
	Now, of course, that technology is readily available.
	You buy a camera, it may well have night shot on it, but that wasn't the case back then.
	I had to rig the system to do it.
	My dissertation ended up focusing on evolutionary trade-offs.
	So what I argued in my dissertation was that there is actually a set of rules that governs the trade-offs between different desirable characteristics that biological organisms have and that all of the major problems that we can't solve in evolutionary biology can be solved if you understand the way trade-offs function.
	And so anyway, I laid out that argument and I...
	I wrote several chapters giving examples of difficult problems that were solvable if you took this particular approach.
	As a general matter, what inspires, like, are you eight years old and you think, I'd like to go study bats, especially the bats that make tents?
	What leads you to that path?
	Well, you know, the answer is kind of funny.
	I don't know if this is correct or not, but it's pretty close.
	My grandmother...
	He used to read to me from a book called Animals Do the Strangest Things.
	And I only remember one of the animals in that book.
	In fact, I haven't seen it since I was probably five years old.
	But the pangolin was described in this book, and I thought that is so fascinating.
	And in any case, there's a kind of a game that I started playing.
	I didn't even realize I was doing it when I was very young.
	But looking at organisms and trying to understand why they were structured in the way that they were.
	And, you know, that was fun for me.
	And then when I got to high school and then college and I realized that there was actually a field of study that took this question and made it into a rigorous exploration where you could not only...
	I hypothesize an answer to why a creature was structured in a particular way or why it was behaving in a particular way, but you could test those answers against each other and you could figure out which ones had merit and which ones didn't, and that was tantalizing.
	Now, when I went to graduate school, I vowed to myself that I wasn't going to study evolutionary biology because I thought, you know, this was something I had already explored quite a bit, and I thought it would be better for me if I I approached what I thought was a harder biological field, something like neurobiology or cellular biology.
	And when I went into those labs in my first year of graduate school in order to figure out whether I wanted to study one field or another, I found the thinking that I saw there kind of feeble.
	It was surprising to me because I had assumed...
	That it would be even more hard-headed and rigorous.
	And what it was was more technical, but it was not more rigorous.
	And so I ended up finding the evolutionary biologists who turned out to be the strongest thinkers in the department at Michigan.
	And from there, it was just a question of what particular organisms I wanted to study and in what way.
	You mentioned earlier you didn't know what level of degree.
	I do have a doctorate.
	In biology.
	My specialty was evolution.
	Heather, my wife, also has a doctorate.
	She studied poison frogs in Madagascar.
	So anyway, that's sort of the gist.
	That's amazing.
	And all of this is going to loop back in when we start talking about COVID itself.
	But this will be the last subject that we talk about on YouTube.
	But I want everyone to hear about this before we go over to Rumble.
	I say this non-judgmentally, but up until the Evergreen incident, you had had a pretty routine professor life at university?
	You were not on the map of the interwebs, or you hadn't had any controversies up until the Evergreen incident?
	That is not the case.
	This is why you asked the question, is that it doesn't have a straightforward answer.
	The fact is, I...
	Polarized my department in graduate school, and I had also had an incident in college that few are aware of, but definitely foreshadowed what happened to me at Evergreen.
	So in college, as a freshman, I was not rushing a...
	A fraternity.
	It wasn't my style.
	I was at the University of Pennsylvania.
	But my next-door neighbor in the dorm and a good friend of mine was rushing a fraternity.
	And one day he talked me into going to a rush event, which I was reluctant to go to, but he correctly pointed out that I didn't have anything to do and I was probably not going to get around to doing the reading that I was supposed to be doing, so why not?
	I went.
	There was an incident.
	Brought the incident to the attention of the paper, thinking that it was important, and there was a scandal that broke out after this, and it polarized the campus.
	So there's an argument to be made that one of the things I do is polarize places, and my feeling is that's not a bad thing if they polarize correctly.
	In other words, if the people who are actually honorable end up respecting you, then it doesn't matter that you create a whole lot of enemies.
	That's more or less it means that you're having an effect.
	What was the nature of the incident?
	I don't, not to get into details, just an idea.
	The ZBT fraternity had hired, so Penn is in a depressed black neighborhood in Philadelphia.
	And the fraternity in question was a, Wealthy Jewish fraternity that had hired black prostitutes from the neighborhood.
	And it had done so through a guy who appeared to be their pimp, who they brought on stage to introduce these women.
	And then they enacted a mock rape of these women in which the rushes of the fraternity...
	It was a hazing event from the point of view of the rushes, but it was also a pretty despicable display and pretty insensitive to the neighborhood in which the college existed.
	And I thought that the fact that these organizations were privileged, had their own judicial system, for example, on the campus, had the nicest real estate that was available on the campus and were behaving in this way that was...
	Reflected badly on the rest of the school would be significant to people.
	When I went to the paper, again, this foreshadowed a lot of what I saw after the Evergreen incident and a lot of what happened over COVID, but the press botched it.
	The story they published ultimately because the fraternity members were unwilling to comment and they told many different stories about what had happened that night, including that there was a chess tournament and other lies.
	But the paper reported that several fraternities had hired strippers.
	And then they used quotes from me that were not about stripping at all.
	They were about...
	And so in the context of a story about fraternities hiring women to take off their clothes, my comments seemed overheated, and it caused me to be mocked.
	And so I insisted that they let me write an editorial in which I explained what I was actually commenting on.
	And then at that point, I became...
	I guess public enemy number one for the first time in my life because I was revealing a deep, dark secret of the fraternity system, which ultimately got that fraternity banned from campus for a year.
	But in any case, so that is a story in my past.
	No, it is not the case that my life was uneventful until Evergreen.
	It was eventful, but yes, the events have changed scale.
	Now, in terms of the grad school, my recollection is that this concerns what you found about the efficacy of certain lab testing techniques and whatnot.
	I found that actually even more disturbing in many respects than some of the other things that you've exposed.
	Can you explain that for folks?
	Yeah, there's a question about how deep we should go, because we could obviously spend hours fully exploring the topic, but I'll give you the view from 30,000 feet.
	So I wasn't really looking to find anything about drug safety testing.
	In fact, when I started the project, I didn't have any intent to go anywhere medical at all.
	I was really just trying to answer an evolutionary question that I found interesting and about which I had a sudden flash of insight.
	The question was, why do creatures like us grow feeble and inefficient with age?
	The technical term for it is senescence.
	The common parlance term would be aging.
	But I was interested in why we senesce.
	And that is a question that has had a proper theoretical answer since 1947, when George Williams wrote a paper explaining the basic underlying trade-off, but had never had a practical example found.
	And one day I was sitting in a seminar.
	And a student who didn't really know anything about evolution, a guy who decided to try out the seminar in some spare time he had from the cancer lab he was working in, gave a talk about cancer.
	And I realized that there were two different groups of people.
	One studying aging or senescence, the other studying cancer, who had become focused on the exact same mechanism, but they saw it in exactly inverse terms.
	So the people who were studying aging looked at something called telomeres, and they thought that the fact that telomeres, which are repetitive gene sequences at the ends of chromosomes, the fact that those sequences were limited, and therefore limited the number of times cells could reproduce, That that was probably a curable cause for senescence.
	In other words, they wanted to remove the limits on the telomeres.
	And the other group was studying cancer, and they had discovered that those limits had been lost every time they looked into a cancer.
	And so they wanted to institute better limits.
	And each group thought that they were about to extend human longevity by messing with telomeres, but they clearly weren't spotting the other half of the puzzle, which suggested...
	That actually the answer I mentioned from 1947, George Williams, was correct, that there was a trade-off, and that in fact the reason that we don't unlimit our telomeres and have infinite cellular replacement is that we would be almost immediately overrun by tumors, right?
	So we have an elegant system that causes almost all of the tumors that we would otherwise get to arrest themselves, and you're never aware of them, but the cost is you can't repair your tissues indefinitely.
	Throughout life.
	So that's the question I was studying.
	But as clean a story as that is, there was one huge obstacle, which was that mice were understood to have extremely long telomeres, much longer than human telomeres, and yet they had very short lives, which was presumed to falsify any such model.
	And I looked at this and I thought, there are too many places where this model That places tissue repair and tumor suppression as opposing forces in a trade-off.
	There are too many questions that would be solved if it were true.
	And there was only one piece of evidence that suggested it was false.
	Maybe there's something wrong with that piece of evidence.
	And it's when I went looking for what might be wrong with the idea that mice have very long telomeres and short lives.
	That's where I tripped over it.
	And by it...
	I mean, I went from an area that was more or less just of academic interest or scientific interest, and I moved accidentally into an area where there was a huge amount of money at stake.
	That's the point at which science went insane around me, and I grew up.
	I learned the lesson about what happens to science in the context of money, and it ain't pretty.
	So to your question, Robert, the...
	It turned out that the problem that I had identified was solved if you hypothesized that mice do not in fact have long telomeres, that wild mice have short telomeres, and that it is laboratory mice that have long telomeres, telomeres that have been elongated as a result of the breeding protocols that we use to produce laboratory mice.
	Now the reason that the literature concluded that Mice have long telomeres is that there were many tests that showed that, in fact, the telomeres were always long.
	But what was unclear was that they had all gotten their mice from the same place.
	And so the protocol that had changed, that had caused the evolution of long telomeres in mice, then became a pseudo-replication, meaning that many laboratories were sourcing their mice and coming up with the same answer, but not because it was representative of nature.
	Instead, it was representative of the Particular source of mice.
	So to make a long story short, I put that hypothesis on the table.
	I shared it with somebody who had been studying telomeres, and she tested the hypothesis.
	She put a graduate student on the work.
	That graduate student tested the hypothesis that wild mice had short telomeres.
	And I got a very excited email reporting that, in fact, the hypothesis was true.
	Mice actually have short telomeres.
	So that's the good news.
	That meant, oh, my hypothesis about telomeres, senescence, and cancer is likely right because the one obstacle was now gone.
	But the problem is that had dire implications for medicine and, in particular, pharmacology because...
	When an animal, like a mouse, has very long telomeres, what that means is that it is extremely prone to cancer, which is true.
	Laboratory mice all die of cancer if you give them time.
	But they are also extremely resistant to tissue damage in a way that humans aren't because they effectively have an infinite capacity to replace cells.
	So if a poison doesn't outright kill a mouse, the mouse will show far fewer pathologies than a human because it can replace its tissues in a way that a human cannot.
	Now, that piece of news should have caused a change in the way we studied drug safety.
	It should have caused us to reinvestigate every drug that had been tested on these broken mice, again, using mice that were not broken, to see if the drugs that we had released were in fact safe for humans in the way that we thought they were.
	Instead, this caused what appears to me as an outsider to be a massive cover-up in which we pretended that the mouse telomere issue was not a problem.
	We didn't go back and recheck any drugs.
	We never connected the dots with respect to Vioxx, Fenfen, Seldane, Erythromycin, all of the drugs that had done heart damage when they were released into people, which we did not expect based on animal testing.
	So what I saw was a scientific system.
	That stared down a major error that it had produced.
	Initially, I assume that error was accidental.
	But instead of curing it, I believe what happened is the pharmaceutical industry realized that they had a mechanism for getting through safety testing with drugs that were poisonous and that that was good for business.
	And so they preserved it.
	And as far as I know, this problem persists to this day.
	Well, we started off with a black pill, Brett.
	Sorry about that.
	And now I understand, because you talked about that with Joe Rogan, and now I understand in even greater detail that it wasn't just the oversight to begin with.
	It was perpetuating, basically approving drugs which might not otherwise get approval if you test them on the proper mice which have a natural telomere length, whatever that gene thing.
	As bad as it is to have a system that is biased in the direction of making compounds look safe even when they're not, it is even worse that we have mice that are not representative of normal mammalian physiology.
	What that means is that as we do science on these animals, we are generating answers that are incorrect.
	And they just lodge themselves in the literature and they become foundational.
	And really, there should have been a massive investigation.
	That investigation should have caused a change in the way we sourced and bred these animals.
	And then we should have gone back and figured out all of the conclusions that would be rendered insecure as a result of these broken models.
	And we never did it.
	So we are...
	We're figuratively blinding ourselves by using non-representative model animals.
	And when you say that to a scientist who uses these animals, you always get the same reply.
	We know the mice are broken.
	But it's very frustrating to me to hear that because there is no reason the mice have to be broken in this way.
	There are ways that they will always be not...
	Terribly representative.
	But they are systematically misleading us here in a way that pollutes science.
	And so the upshot of this personally is once you have seen science stare down an insight like this, you know that everything you were told about the way science is supposed to work is at least no longer true.
	Nobody's really interested in the truth.
	They're much more interested in knowing where the science is going to go so that they are well positioned for it.
	It's effectively like watching insider information used in trading.
	That is not the market correctly adjusting the price of things.
	That's people cheating.
	Speaking of people who have sort of seen the collapse of science in the pharmacological industry and that kind of...
	Well, I have two thoughts.
	I'm definitely a fan, and I know that will cause many people to clutch their pearls and...
	You know, we reach for feigning couches or whatever it is that people do these days because he is supposed to be some kind of a whack job.
	But I actually know the man and he's not a whack job.
	He's actually incredibly insightful and decent.
	And the idea that many of us have been lured into believing that he's something else is really evidence of the strength of the propaganda machine that has taken over mainstream media.
	So on the one hand...
	I'm very much in favor of this candidacy.
	Basically, I would like to see anybody who has integrity and intelligence and courage throw their hat in the ring so that we actually have some decent choices come Election Day.
	On the other hand, there is a part of me that's a little troubled that he's running inside of the Democratic Party because I have, though I've been a Democrat since the first day that I could vote.
	I have completely lost any trust in this party.
	I basically look at it as like the family dog that has contracted rabies, right?
	That's not the family dog anymore.
	Whatever that thing is, is a lethal hazard and should be treated that way.
	That's what I see in the Democratic Party.
	So I'm glad he's running.
	I think he is an excellent candidate for the job, certainly.
	Far better than either of the mainstream offerings in the last election.
	But I'm concerned about the Democratic Party and anything that is pretending it's a legitimate entity at this point, it isn't.
	I just interviewed Roger Stone on Monday and he said, you know, the idea of a unity ticket after RFK Jr. gets screwed the way...
	Bernie Sanders got screwed.
	He won't turn around and endorse whoever screws him.
	He goes independent and maybe joins his VP ticket with Trump.
	Barnes, I don't know what you think about that.
	Oh, I think that's extremely unlikely.
	Kennedy is at heart a Democrat.
	Father was a Democrat.
	Grandfather was a Democrat.
	It's too deeply in his blood and in his DNA.
	But I think his candidacy is very welcome.
	I mean, probably the best...
	What I would call the populist left candidate since his father in 1968.
	And the big question is, can he salvage a Democratic Party that is in institutional disarray and has been hijacked by an agenda that's often oppositional, its own working class voting base?
	Can he break through with African-American and Latino voters?
	His father ultimately did in 1968.
	The assumption was his dad would not be able to do that, and his dad ultimately did in California.
	I mean, I did love speaking of a bridge topic on that.
	One of the things he said today was maybe if they hadn't censored him for 18 years, he wouldn't feel the need to talk for the next 18 months on a campaign slogan.
	You've experienced the insanity and inanity of the censorship regime.
	Were you surprised by it when it came about?
	I mean, both in terms of what happened in the craziness at Evergreen, which ended up being a precursor and a foreshadowing of what was going to happen across university and academic and mainstream culture writ large, but also then experiencing it in the Twitter space, experiencing it on social media, experiencing it from previous allies, who you just break a little bit from the institutional or gatekeeper narrative to steal from your brother.
	Then all of a sudden, But, Brett, before you answer, we're going to end on YouTube right now.
	For everyone watching on YouTube, come over to Rumble for the answer.
	The link is there.
	Come in 3, 2, 1, and we're on it.
	Yeah, Brett, what's it like?
	I mean, you're used to adversity, at least from a few of the anecdotes of your life, but, I mean, this is on a whole new scale.
	Yeah, you know, in one way, every time it happens, the lessons are the same, but there is no question there is something jaw-dropping about seeing the scale and ferocity of it.
	I mean, what happened during COVID was mind-blowing if you were at the epicenter of it, right?
	It was like nothing I've ever experienced because there was clearly...
	Tens of millions of dollars being used to steer a narrative, and that might have been less than obvious if you were just watching from afar.
	But when suddenly, you know, every screen is suddenly barking horse dewormer on the same day, right?
	It's like, what on earth is happening?
	How many organizations are involved here, and how do they have their tentacles in so many places?
	And then, of course, you begin to see, you know, later in the story, you see things like the Twitter files and it becomes obvious that, in fact, there was collusion at an incredible scale and collusion that one struggles to avoid calling it fascist because of the way that it clearly fused corporate and governmental interests in the violation of the rights of citizens.
	So anyway, you know.
	Look, there are certain lessons that are universal and have been true every time.
	You will lose friends when you are at the epicenter of one of these things.
	People will disappoint you.
	They will abandon you.
	You will gain new friends.
	They will be higher quality as a result of the fact that the people who you will meet in such a circumstance are actually battle-tested and they are ready in a certain way.
	So I call it a painful...
	Upgrade of your social circle is you lose people who don't know how to stand up properly and you meet people who have that built in at some deep level.
	But, you know, it's true every time.
	People surprise you in both directions and you should be ready for it.
	And the one thing you mustn't do is pretend it's not happening, right?
	When somebody shows you that they are incapable of standing up in the face of pressure.
	That's who they're going to be.
	And in some ways, the circumstance is doing you a favor because you're learning it now rather than in whatever even more desperate circumstance might happen later, right?
	The earlier you know, the better.
	And if you live under comfortable circumstances, you'll never know.
	You know, actually, just to end the evergreen saga, because the one question I had is, when you and Heather resigned, what was your plan after resigning from the university that you had been teaching at for Over a decade and a half.
	But just summarily, tell us what happened with that Evergreen incident and what you did after that and what your plan was after that.
	Well, you know, I've done, of course, a lot of reflecting in the six years since it happened.
	The fact is, Heather was literally the college's most popular professor.
	It was unambiguous.
	I wasn't terribly far behind.
	I was quite popular, too.
	And we had a community of students who were very loyal.
	In fact, we didn't lose any of them during the meltdown.
	And they were thrilled to be learning about evolution from professors that actually cared about them right down to the individual level.
	And this is something, you know, we were embraced by many people on the right after this happened.
	Even though we very clearly came from the left and remain there.
	And I can defend that to you later because it always raises a question in people's minds.
	But for the moment, just realize that we had a very unique teaching situation at Evergreen.
	It gave us, because the founders of the college were radicals, they had...
	Eliminated every normal structure that existed in a regular university, right?
	There weren't any departments.
	There was no administrator who could tell you what you had to teach in any given year.
	The only requirement was that you taught your share of freshmen.
	But aside from that, you could name the topic, you could design the course.
	It was all up to you.
	Complete freedom.
	Now, we also taught one class full-time.
	Students took one class full-time.
	Those classes could be taught individually.
	They could be taught by teams of faculty from different disciplines.
	And they could go on for one, two, or three terms.
	They could go on for a full year.
	So all of those things together, if you are dedicated to teaching, if you're really interested in upgrading people's capacity to think, That's a description of paradise, right?
	There is no end to the ways you can innovate to reach people, and there is no limit to the satisfaction that comes from knowing somebody well personally and watching them intellectually grow as a result of something that you have architected.
	So it's a great environment for that.
	It is also a great environment for freeloaders who don't know what to do with all of that freedom, and it became very hard.
	At Evergreen, for us to get rid of faculty who weren't either good at their job or interested in doing it.
	So there was a lot of dead wood on the faculty.
	And so in any case, it is a tragedy that the college failed.
	It was a great place for students who were not well built for a normal college environment.
	If they could find the professors who cared deeply about their learning, then it was the right place for them.
	On the other hand, if you didn't know how to find the good faculty, you could waste years at a time in classrooms of people who didn't care.
	So the place doesn't tell a simple story about the failure of liberal ideas on a radical campus or the success.
	It was some of each, and it could have been fixed.
	The real tragedy of the place is that the founder's vision was half crazy and half brilliant, and we could have fixed the part that was half crazy, but we just didn't have the courage to do it.
	But in any case, having taught in that environment and then having it melt down as a result of the activities of a new president of the college who had no allegiance to the place, some faculty who wanted to use race as a mechanism to gain power,
	and students who in part were interested in making themselves Important in some cases or in other cases were taken advantage of by unscrupulous people.
	That confluence caused the place to melt down, but it did not suggest that there was some other place for Heather and me to go teach because we had existed in an environment where we could do something that was just simply impossible in any normal college.
	And, you know, standing at the front of the room and lecturing, To a room full of people taking four credits at a time just wasn't appealing.
	So when it melted down and we decided we had to leave because it was literally an unsafe working environment where the president of the college had told the police to stay out of the riots that had broken out, told the police not to stop the students who were literally hunting me, stopping traffic, searching car to car.
	That was not a safe working environment, so we had to leave.
	And it meant that although we had to walk away from jobs that were about as secure as any job on earth ever is, that we got to start anew.
	We got to figure out what else we wanted to do with our lives.
	And we did it.
	We built a YouTube channel that became two channels.
	And, you know, resurrected an income from that, quite a good income.
	Wrote a book that became very popular.
	So, you know, the ability to reinvent yourself and succeed in a second area was pretty cool.
	I can't be unhappy about that.
	I can be quite annoyed that YouTube, during the height of the COVID madness, decided To go after us economically.
	And it demonetized both of our channels, knocking out half our family income, actually more than half our family income in the space of an hour.
	And that's a pretty remarkable feeling to be targeted by something as powerful as Google, which I'm quite certain would have thrown us off.
	Had Joe Rogan not stepped in with his emergency podcast and called attention to what they were doing.
	But in any case, it forced us to, for a third time, figure out how to make a living in the world.
	In any case, there's a lot there.
	Maybe you have questions that will help clarify it.
	I'm curious in general, it's a question I ask everybody, but I'm always curious what leads someone to be independent of thought.
	In other words, that you face, why do some people take the road less traveled by?
	The common sense thing to do for many people, the self-advancement thing to do is don't cause a stir on college campus.
	Don't cause a stir on grad school.
	Don't cause a stir as a professor.
	Don't cause a stir against YouTube.
	Don't jeopardize your professional future.
	Jeopardize your financial future.
	But at each time, you do.
	So I'm always curious.
	What leads you to have that independence of thought, do you think?
	Something in your life experience, in your acculturation or education?
	What do you attribute it to?
	Because your brother shows similar signs of it, too.
	Yeah, it's a great question.
	And I know some things about the answer, but I'm not convinced I know the answer.
	What I will say is that once you have done it...
	Once you have taken a stand that others say you shouldn't take because it's too dangerous and bad things will happen, and you find out that it's not as fatal as you've been told, then the question is, well, maybe, you know, it's like if you looked at a wave, if you didn't know how to swim and you looked at a wave and you thought it would be insane for me to go out there, I'm going to drown, well, that might be true in that case.
	But if you played around in the waves, And then you faced some big waves that people told you were going to drown you, and then it turned out actually there were things you could do that allowed you to, I don't know, body surf them or whatever.
	Then the point is, once you find the foothill of that thing that others can't do, especially in light of the fact that although, yes, it is true that our income keeps evaporating and we have to figure out new ways to make one, A, that turns out to be possible.
	B, It turns out to be possible in part because there are a whole lot of people out there rooting for someone to stand up and say reasonable things.
	And, you know, we never recovered the income that we lost from YouTube, right?
	When they took away our monetization, they struck a substantial blow.
	What we did was we managed to produce enough of an independent income that we didn't have to kowtow to them.
	What can I say?
	It gives you a sense of, well, my integrity resulted in there being a cost, but it was survivable.
	I don't think anybody should feel bad for Heather and me.
	We live very well.
	We sleep well at night.
	Fight ourselves in the mirror and feel good about what we're doing.
	And, you know, I wish more people would find the foothill to do that thing because, frankly, there's an epidemic of cowardice that is being exploited by unscrupulous people to steer civilization into grave danger.
	So if more people can figure out how to stand up, say the right thing, and live to fight another day...
	Then we'll be in a much better position.
	But if everybody looks at what they stand to lose and says, well, I can't possibly stand up because look what might happen if I do, we're sunk.
	Brett, I got to bring this article up.
	You were demonetized relatively early on into the pandemic, I think, in 2021?
	Yep.
	Listen to this.
	Brett Weinstein's COVID agenda.
	Brett sees himself in a heroic struggle against demonetization and demonization.
	But what he's actually doing is building a powerful quote, just asking questions, brand of conspiratorial musings.
	How dare you, Brett?
	Yeah.
	How dare I?
	Let's go to the first question that you asked.
	When did the first question in your head go off with COVID that this doesn't make sense?
	I know at the beginning...
	You initially said, or dismissed the lab leak theory, but quickly revised that dismissal.
	Yes, it actually took exactly one hour for me to come around.
	And it wasn't that I came around to, oh, this looks like a lab leak, but I came around to, what the heck don't I know?
	And I'll tell you, it's an interesting story that is etched in my mind, in part because of the way it happened.
	Heather and I were deep in the Amazon finishing the first draft of our book.
	We decided to spend a couple of weeks at a field station that we knew well, one of our favorite places on Earth, in Tiputini.
	Actually, it's in Yasuni, which is the most diverse habitat on Earth, as far as anyone knows.
	It's a beautiful place, and it was a great place for us to go to finish our book, but it meant we were completely cut off from contact for two weeks.
	As we came out of the jungle, we had to take a series of boat trips from the Tiputini River to the Napo and then to a town colloquially called Coca.
	And in that transition, there's a place where you get to a military checkpoint where the military x-rays your bags and controls who passes through.
	It's the first place that we had signal.
	From anywhere.
	And so our phones kind of woke up after two weeks of being dead to the world.
	And we started to see news of things that we'd heard not at all about.
	And one of the things that we saw, of course, our phones had defaulted to Ecuador mode.
	And so we were seeing sort of local stories.
	And there was a person who had what was called novel coronavirus in Ecuador, right?
	The first person in Latin America, maybe in the new world, to show signs of this disease.
	And we'd never heard of it.
	And so anyway, you know, I kind of elbowed Heather and I was like, what's novel coronavirus?
	Do you know anything about this story?
	Nope, I don't know.
	So we started looking into it and, you know, I followed the trail a little bit.
	Okay, there's a virus.
	It has escaped from bats.
	I knew the family of bats in question reasonably well.
	It's a family of bats I had seen in the field.
	And I felt as a bat biologist that it was Sort of an obligation that I say something to my Twitter followers about this story and that it more or less checked out, right?
	You have a lineage of viruses that does circulate in this particular family of bats that exists in China, and it looks like somehow this virus has escaped from bats into people, probably at the wet market, etc.
	So I tweeted that.
	And I got back an angry tweet from a follower that I had had since the Evergreen debacle.
	And that follower said, oh, so it's just a coincidence that there happens to be a biosafety level four laboratory studying those exact viruses in Wuhan where the virus suddenly escaped into people?
	Of course.
	Get this tweet, and I thought, what the hell don't I know?
	And at the time, I didn't know what a biosafety level four laboratory was, and I thought, well, If biosafety level four laboratories studying coronaviruses are, you know, if there are thousands of them on Earth, then it probably means nothing that there happens to be one in Wuhan.
	But if there aren't thousands of them, or they don't study these viruses, then that's an awfully strange coincidence.
	And so I tweeted, and it just by happenstance turned out to be exactly an hour later.
	I don't know what I don't know about this story.
	But there may be more to it than I thought.
	That was the point at which I began to wake up to nonsense surrounding COVID.
	The deeper I dug, the more bizarre the story was.
	Not only was there a lab studying these viruses in Wuhan, but what wasn't in Wuhan?
	The bats in question.
	So as I dug, it became obvious that there were things about the story that made no sense.
	And that, of course, has continued to this day.
	The story of COVID, its origin, the best ways to treat it, the vaccines, their supposed safety and effectiveness, the fact that they're supposedly vaccines at all.
	All of these things are narratives that are more propaganda than truth.
	I mean, I was shocked.
	By the scale of what took place in terms of the lockdowns at the very beginning, in the sense that this was not a common public health response to do it on this basically mass house arrest, the evisceration of pretty much every constitutional liberty known to man.
	You couldn't go to church unless you were allowed to, couldn't leave your home unless you were allowed to, couldn't go to work unless you were allowed to, couldn't operate your own business unless you were allowed to.
	The state took away basically every core right.
	A lot of the country and about 90% of politicians on both sides were okay with it.
	And I found it terrifying.
	What was your reaction at the time to witnessing this in live time?
	All right.
	Prepare for nuance.
	There was, let's put it this way, now having seen who was in charge and how they dealt with that responsibility.
	My feeling is I don't want those people empowered in any way.
	There is nothing good about what they advised or mandated.
	So at some level, I have the sense that we are looking at a malignant public health apparatus, and if they want it, I suspect it's not good.
	I suspect that there's a hidden agenda.
	That's how I feel now.
	At the time, I thought, And still believe that the virus is actually more dangerous than the case fatality rate would have you think.
	It's not a particularly fatal virus, but it is a very destructive and strange virus.
	And I believe we had a short period of time in which we might have driven it extinct and that we squandered that time on half-hearted measures and symbolism.
	So that's what I now think.
	Let me stop you there.
	If you're in power, what would have been your method of driving it extinct?
	I'm under the impression it's a futile attempt of humans to try to drive a virus extinct.
	It is now.
	It wasn't necessarily then.
	For one thing, the original SARS is extinct, as far as we know.
	So you're dealing with a pathogen that gets better and better at escaping countermeasures.
	What I think we didn't contemplate correctly, and I'm not, you know, what I wanted or what I would have wanted is a hundred of the best independent minds in a position to evaluate the countermeasures, to sit down and look at them with a strict cost-benefit analysis.
	What I wonder is the idea of long-term lockdowns was insane.
	That was never going to work.
	If there was an argument for lockdowns, it would have been for more intense, very short-duration lockdowns.
	And the logic behind that is that we know, and it became increasingly obvious, that the place where people were picking this thing up was largely at home.
	So if you had had good tests, which we never did, but if you had had good tests available, if we had...
	Set our sights on producing good tests, and there's no reason we shouldn't have been able to do that.
	And you locked people down for, let's say, a month or six weeks.
	That is enough time for the virus to move between people within households where somebody has it and to burn itself out.
	So everybody walks away from that house with natural immunity.
	And then at the point that you release people to go back about their normal business, then the few places where the virus has persisted through that six weeks and is still actively being transmitted would show up as hotspots and we could deal with those things locally.
	That's one possible set of responses.
	I am now suspicious that that wouldn't have worked on the basis that I see how lockdowns were utilized to do things that had nothing to do with controlling a virus.
	They had a lot to do with the transfer of wealth in a very predictable direction.
	So I'm not saying that, you know, I believe that a six-week intense lockdown would have worked, but I do believe it is a countermeasure that should have been on the table in a circumstance where public health authorities who had not been corrupted by pharma money, for example, should have entertained that possibility.
	How you deal with that In light of the civil liberties questions that it obviously raises, I don't know.
	Those two things are liable to be in contact or in conflict, and it's a difficult question.
	Is there a conceivable virus that we might see for which a temporary suspension of certain civil liberties would be warranted because What would hang in the balance is the possibility of driving a pathogen extinct in a short time versus having it become a permanent endemic virus that would cause indefinitely large amounts of harm through time, as COVID now is.
	I mean, I think I've always had the argument similar to my theory on the draft, which is that if it is in fact true, it's something that we should publicly, popularly persuade people of.
	And you'll get mass compliance and don't need to go that route.
	That's my argument about the draft.
	People say, well, we have to have a draft for this war or that war.
	And I'm like, if it's an actual good war, you don't need a draft.
	You only need a draft when it's not a good war, when it's some politician who wants to fight something for some other reason, is my takeaway from it.
	And if you fail in public persuasion, then that's the source of failure, if you will.
	But in that same sense, as you point out, like your experience was in grad school, everything related to the pandemic in terms of public health policy, Yeah, you know.
	I don't know exactly how to describe the two simultaneous reactions that go in opposite directions.
	On the one hand, I was absolutely shocked.
	And on the other hand, I wasn't the least bit surprised.
	Once you've seen the way economic forces overwhelm science and governance, then you can't really be surprised at anything.
	On the other hand, the point that this thing...
	Is interested in denying useful drugs to patients who could benefit, drugs that not only treated people who had COVID, but prevented people from contracting COVID, at the point that it denied those things, at the point that it failed to recommend vitamin D, which even if vitamin D didn't turn out to be highly effective against COVID, which it is.
	Even if it had turned out to be useless against COVID, recommending it to people would have had collateral benefits against other diseases.
	That was well known.
	And to the extent that having two diseases at once makes your COVID worse, it would have had at least that much benefit.
	So at the point that public health authorities are not recommending vitamin D, they're actually unable to persuade doctors not to prescribe hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, so they go after the pharmacists.
	Why, if their case is so rock solid, can't they convince doctors not to prescribe this stuff?
	It wasn't over-the-counter.
	All they needed to do was convince doctors that their case was solid, and yet they had to go after it at the pharmacy?
	That was bonkers.
	And then, on top of that, they deploy these vaccines, these so-called vaccines.
	This is a brand new, novel platform, an utterly radical mechanism for inducing immunity.
	That much was obvious from day one.
	A radical mechanism for inducing immunity that has all sorts of unanswered questions that nobody could possibly know the answers to because they hadn't existed long enough for the test to be done, right?
	You'd want to follow these things for decades in order to know what the consequences were.
	But instead of deploying them and saying, hey, we think this is a good idea, but we don't know what the long-term consequences are, they said they were safe, right?
	That's nuts.
	And then they decided that your kids should have them.
	Healthy kids don't die from COVID.
	In fact, they don't get especially sick.
	So why would a public health authority be recommending this radical treatment for children?
	So anyway, my point is I could go on with all of the things that just simply didn't add up even at a basic level.
	And at the point you start seeing that and you realize that actually if you wanted to generate a list of the things you should do in light of COVID, You should do the opposite of everything you were told.
	At the point you realize that, it's game over.
	Stay inside.
	Basically, avoid the sunlight.
	No vitamin D. With ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, whether or not it was effective, at the very least, it had 50 years of pretty much assured safety.
	Brett, I mean, I got a few questions, one of which is going to get into what is fundamentally dangerous about this jab stuff.
	But before then, The evidence that it was derived through gain-of-function research in a lab revolves around something.
	I forget what it's called.
	The cleavage site?
	The cleavage site, yeah.
	I've listened to many people explain it, and I still can't get my head around it.
	What is that as evidence to show that it was tinkered with by men?
	Well, I mean, the most important thing is that it was understood before the pandemic that the thing that the particular subfamily of coronaviruses lacked A highly infective virus for humans was a foreign cleavage site.
	So we have publications in which the absence of this thing is discussed as an important obstacle to the virus jumping into people, right?
	That was understood.
	And so then the follow-on to that is, well, maybe what we should do is we should introduce this foreign cleavage site, which simply...
	affects the way the spike protein interacts with a receptor on human cells, right?
	All of these things are molecular machines, right?
	The fern cleavage site alters a molecular machine so that it is well built to invade a class of human cells that has a particular receptor on them, right?
	It can gain entry.
	From there, it can simply cause the cell to do its bidding.
	I think the way to understand this is you had a group of people.
	Let's take them at their word.
	This group of people was obsessed with the idea.
	I believe it is a wrong idea, but they were obsessed with the idea that we are constantly faced with viruses that are about to jump into humans and that, in some sense, the argument that they would make in their grant applications was This problem is actually growing worse because the growth in the human population is putting people into contact with wildlife more and more frequently.
	So you never know when one of these things is going to leap out of nature and become a human pandemic, and we damn well better figure out how these things behave before that happens so that we can respond quickly when it does.
	That was their argument.
	Now, if you're familiar with the way things work inside of science, you know that people have a kind of...
	Stepping stone approach to getting their grants funded, right?
	There's a standard argument.
	If you've chosen a particular field of inquiry, maybe that field of inquiry has no known implication for humans, but you'll come up with an argument, you know, six points that will cause your...
	Grant application to stand out as potentially having disproportionate value.
	And everybody who's getting grants is doing this.
	And so the argument amongst the people who were studying these viruses was these viruses are a strong candidate for jumping into people.
	And when they do, they are likely to cause a pandemic.
	And so it is very important that governments give us funding to figure out what that will look like in a safe environment before it happens so we don't get caught off guard.
	That was their argument.
	And this is a nonsense argument for a couple of different reasons.
	The jumping from nature to people is actually evolutionarily much more difficult than these folks who were trying to get grant money would have you believe.
	It is not impossible for a virus to jump from an animal to a person, but it has to make two jumps before it can do anything like cause a pandemic.
	It has to learn how to jump into people.
	And there is evidence that viruses related to SARS-CoV-2, related to its ancestor, did jump into three miners who had been working in a cave filled with bat guano in Yunnan province.
	That that was what called the attention of the researchers to go collect viruses there, was that they found these three sick people, none of whom transmitted it to anybody.
	They didn't transmit it to each other.
	They got it from basically having their lungs filled with guano dust in which these viruses presumably were present.
	But having jumped into people is a far cry from doing the evolutionary work necessary to jump between people.
	So in almost any case where a virus jumps from nature into a person for the first time, it's going to go extinct in that person, even if it kills them.
	It's not going to become a human pandemic because it has to learn the second evolutionary trick before it can do any of the work necessary to get good at infecting people.
	It has to at least learn to jump between them, which is why we have cases where we have seen viruses jump and they cause people to get sick, news reports, and then they burn out.
	It's a natural course of events.
	In any case, you had a...
	Research program built around the idea that turbocharging viruses so they were better at infecting people was a good idea so that we could get ahead of them.
	Now, that's insane because in any such circumstance, a virus is likely to infect one of the people doing this work, no matter how careful they are.
	And if they're at all not careful, then it's effectively certain.
	So the number one way that a virus is going to learn to jump the gap from nature to people is if people go looking for those viruses, they start culturing them, they start genetically engineering them by splicing in things like a fern cleavage site, or if they start serially passaging them through animals that are similar to humans like ferrets.
	Where they start serially passaging them through human airway tissue or humanized mice, which are mice that have been molecularly altered to look more human so that viruses can work on transmission against that background.
	That's the number one way they're going to jump.
	Can you describe for people the sense of, like, you were one of the first people to point out the problems with the promotional material related to the COVID vaccines.
	That there was something inherent to the very nature of what they were propounding.
	Aside from the fact we never really had a great track record of success of vaccines against coronaviruses because of something else you're mentioning, the nature of virus evolution.
	In order for it to survive, it has to become more infectious, less lethal, and to some degree it has to be able to circumvent the various mechanisms.
	That's why the flu shot works only once every two years.
	It's not like your everyday smallpox vaccine, for example.
	This is a very different virus, very different vaccine, or so-called vaccine.
	Could you describe what the scientific issues are there?
	Sure.
	I will do my best.
	This is a complex topic and, you know, it'd be great to have slides and a chalkboard and all that.
	But let's start with the basics.
	Your immune system is elegantly built to recognize molecular structures that you yourself do not make.
	I won't go into the details about how that happens.
	It's among the most fascinating.
	Set of facts in biology that I'm aware of.
	But nonetheless, you, after you go through a certain amount of development, have what's called a self-non-self-recognition system.
	You do not react to molecules that you yourself make, and you react to almost any biological molecule that is not produced by you yourself on the presumption that those things are probably hostile.
	So that's the basics of the immune system, or at least the adaptive immune system.
	That system can be educated to react to a pathogen you have not yet seen by introducing antigens from that pathogen in one way or another.
	Antigens are molecular signatures that The immune system can learn to recognize.
	It literally evolves to recognize them better and better.
	So there are two general ways that that is done with what we classically call a vaccine.
	One way is to take a pathogen and to attenuate it so that it is not virulent.
	It does not make you sick, right?
	If we can give you a little infection that's closely related to some infection that Is a threat to you.
	And we give you a mild version that doesn't make you especially sick and, most importantly, doesn't transmit from one person to the next, then we can give your immune system a trial run with something molecularly very similar to the dangerous disease.
	And then when you encounter the dangerous disease, your immune system is already educated.
	It has natural immunity.
	Because of cross-reactivity between the attenuated virus that we gave you and the wild virus that's a threat.
	Now, there are a number of reasons that vaccinologists don't prefer that method.
	For one thing, it's difficult to do.
	You want to get something that's good enough to give you enough of an infection to be capable of generating natural immunity, but you don't want it to get out of control.
	You don't want it to jump from person to person.
	So the point is you're threading a needle with this mechanism.
	The best vaccines have this profile, but it's not an easy thing to arrange, and it takes a long time to figure out whether you've done it right.
	So from the point of view of the business of pharma, it's not a winner.
	We have figured out a way to cheat.
	That is more economically effective while being much less useful as a technique.
	And it basically involves dead viruses or fragments thereof, which have the molecular signature that your immune system has to learn.
	But the problem is, the things that trigger your immune system to do the learning are the infection that is caused by the pathogen.
	If we inject some pieces of a virus into you, your body doesn't have the right reaction because you're not sick.
	And so the right alarms don't go off to set in motion the learning process that a good vaccine would trigger.
	So what we do is we avail ourselves of some cheats.
	And the cheats are what are called adjuvants.
	Adjuvants are basically...
	Irritants for the immune system.
	So if we give you a bunch of antigen that looks like a pathogen, right, let's say it's killed virus, and we give you an irritant that causes your immune system to wake up and look around, then it can find those antigens and it can learn the formula, right?
	So this is, in my opinion, not a very good way to make a vaccine, in part, and, you know, this is largely Something I became aware of as I started digging deeper on vaccines during COVID, that the adjuvant mechanism, it may work to trigger a natural immunity, but it may also cause you to become allergic to things, right?
	We're irritating your immune system, and it may find the antigen that we've injected you with, but it may also find the peanuts in your gut.
	Or the honey or the gluten or whatever, and it may become sensitive to that.
	And so there's a question about how many of these new allergic effects that we have where people become allergic to their food and things are actually the result of adjuvanted vaccines.
	I don't know the answer to that question, but I certainly think it's an important one.
	All right, so that's the basics of how normal vaccines against a virus would work.
	When they announced these COVID vaccines, They came in two forms, both of which were totally novel.
	One of them are the mRNA-based vaccines.
	And I cannot emphasize enough how simultaneously brilliant and diabolical this mechanism is.
	What it does is it takes an mRNA message, the little m in front of the It stands for messenger.
	Now, messenger RNA is the language that the genes in your nucleus of all of your cells use to get proteins produced, which are what does the work of the cells.
	Proteins are the working molecules.
	DNA is the information molecule.
	mRNA is the intermediary.
	So a gene is translated into mRNA.
	Or it is transcribed into mRNA and then translated into protein in the cytoplasm of the cell.
	So what the mRNAs that we injected people with do is they find their way into cells through a mechanism I'll tell you about in a second.
	And then the natural process inside the cells translates them into proteins, in the case of the vaccines that people were given, into spike protein.
	That spike protein is supposed to get exported to the surface of the cell where the immune system is supposed to see it and learn the code.
	Now, on the one hand, that is a very clever way, not really of vaccinating you, but of turning your own cells into vaccine factories.
	It's a totally novel mechanism.
	It's not an adjuvanted vaccine.
	It's not an attenuated vaccine.
	It's a whole new way of doing this.
	And on the one hand, it solves a problem that accompanies any gene therapy, and there is a strong argument to be made that these are gene therapy.
	Vaccine is the wrong term.
	Gene therapy is arguably the right one.
	But when you introduce these mRNAs into cells, there are two things you need to know.
	One of them took a long time to find out.
	And the other one was obvious from the get-go, or should have been.
	The one that's obvious is when your cells start producing a foreign protein, like the spike protein, the immune system cannot help but regard those cells as virally infected.
	That's the only thing in nature that looks like a cell that has been hijacked by an mRNA vaccine.
	Right?
	Brett, if I may just stop you there for one second, just make sure I understand.
	So the mRNA goes into the nucleus, or what does it go into?
	It goes into the cytoplasm of the cell.
	Okay.
	And that triggers the production of the protein.
	Is that what we're calling the spike protein?
	Yes.
	So there's an ancient machine in all of your cells called a ribosome, right?
	It actually looks like...
	An enzyme or a series of enzymes, but it's made out of RNA, a different kind of RNA.
	It's not an mRNA.
	But anyway, it's a big machine that sits around, you know, billions, trillions of these things exist in your body.
	So anytime an mRNA message finds its way to a ribosome, the ribosome just automatically translates it into protein.
	In this case, so the question really is, you could effectively put any protein into the body by...
	Putting it in an mRNA message and then letting the ribosomes produce the protein, right?
	That's brilliant.
	There's a lot of stuff that could be usefully done with this mechanism because it allows you to just effectively produce proteins inside of cells, right?
	But the problem, there are two problems, one of which I was explaining a second ago, which is as soon as your cell starts expressing a foreign protein, your immune system has to think that's a virally infected cell.
	And there's only one right thing to do with a virally infected cell, and that is destroy it.
	Okay?
	If that cell is in your deltoid because they injected this vaccine into your arm and the vaccine stayed where it was supposed to be, then the destruction of that cell in your arm isn't a particularly terrible thing, right?
	It may give you some weakness, but it's not critical.
	If, on the other hand, That mRNA has circulated around your body because either they didn't aspirate the syringe when they injected you and they hit a vein, or it has leaked out of the deltoid and found its way into lymph and /or the blood circulation system, then it could in principle show up anywhere.
	And that means it could be absorbed by any cell in your body that will have it, which presumably is almost any cell because the mechanism that gets the mRNA into the cells is a chemical affinity between the lipid nanoparticles that they coated it in and the lipids on the surface of cells.
	All of your cells are coated in lipid.
	So here's the upshot of this half of the problem.
	Your cells that take up this message and translate it into protein.
	Are going to be targeted by your immune system.
	When they are targeted, they will be destroyed.
	If that happens in your arm, it's not a big deal.
	If it happens in your liver, it's probably not a big deal.
	If it happens in your heart, it's a huge fucking deal.
	And they didn't put any targeting mechanism on it.
	There's nothing about this lipid nanoparticle that says, don't invade heart cells, stick to liver and arm or something like that.
	There is nothing.
	So they were depending on...
	These things staying local to the injection site, which they should have known they weren't going to do, and as soon as they found out they weren't doing it, they should have halted the program right then and there because there's no reasonable way that this wasn't going to cause damage to vital organs that you can't afford to have damaged, like, for example, your heart.
	That was obvious or should have been.
	But that's only half the story.
	The other half of the story is they told us, and you may even remember, that At the early stage of the vaccination campaign, they said that the mRNAs were short-lived so that all of us folks who were upset or concerned by what we were being told about the novelty of this mechanism were overreacting because the mRNAs were so short-lived that whatever was going to happen, it wasn't going to be much of it.
	Well, it turned out that they used a trick to stabilize the mRNAs.
	And the trick is one that they borrowed from nature.
	It's something called a pseudouridine, which is, so mRNAs are written in a four-letter code, just like DNA.
	One of the four letters is U for uracil.
	That's the chemical that is, when we describe it on paper, we write a U. But uracil is one of the four chemicals in the alphabet of mRNA.
	And if you substitute pseudouridine in for a uracil, it makes the mRNA much more stable.
	Nature does that occasionally.
	We do not really understand why, where it happens, but there are times when nature wishes to stabilize an mRNA so it is not quickly degraded, and it will do this trick.
	But the people who made these vaccines stabilized the entire message.
	They substituted every Every uracil with a pseudouridine.
	And they made an incredibly stable molecule.
	So now you've got two problems.
	One is that you've got an mRNA with no targeting mechanism being taken up by whatever cells it encounters.
	It's circulating around the body.
	Some of those cells will be heart in the worst case.
	It gets into those heart cells.
	Those heart cells will translate a protein that will cause the immune system to attack.
	Those cells will be destroyed.
	Now you've got a problem that you're not supposed to have, right?
	Dead tissue in your heart.
	That's bad because the heart has an extremely low capacity for repair.
	Mostly what it does is scar.
	It does not repair.
	So, okay, now that cell has been destroyed.
	The mRNA has been hyperstabilized, and it now spills out of that cell, and it presumably gets picked up by another cell.
	Maybe that cell is a macrophage, another immune cell.
	That cell picks it up.
	It's hyperstabilized.
	Maybe that immune cell now starts translating this protein and it gets targeted by the immune system.
	So there are two problems.
	One, it's not targeted.
	And two, the hyperstabilizing of the mRNA means that this can continue to cascade into pathologies in cells downstream of the initial transfection event in a way that the architects Presumably did not intend.
	Brett, some people, we've been rewriting the history of the science in terms of natural infection not being the strongest form of vaccination.
	When it comes to aspirating the needle, I'm old enough to remember that they always said to aspirate the needle to make sure that you're injecting into muscle tissue what is supposed to be injected into muscle tissue.
	The CDC, in the context of this thing, Comes up with this substance and specifically says, don't aspirate.
	Is there any argument for the safety of not aspirating what is supposed to be a vaccine that is supposed to stay in muscle tissue?
	I certainly don't think so.
	And certainly the argument that they deployed was beyond ridiculous.
	The idea was they didn't want to cause vaccine hesitancy.
	People are squeamish about needles.
	And it would leave the needle in place longer and potentially cause extra discomfort.
	That is as garbagey an argument as I've ever heard.
	It really makes no sense, especially in light of the fact that these so-called vaccines were barely tested.
	So nobody knew what their long-term consequences were.
	We should have been extra careful in every regard.
	We shouldn't have given them to anybody who didn't need them.
	We certainly should have aspirated the needles to make sure that they didn't find their way to parts of the body where they would have unintended consequences.
	No, that was nonsense.
	And it's one of a hundred places where the inverse of the advice they gave would have been good advice.
	Speaking of viral infections, a particular kind of viral infection is incurred where, I don't know if you're still living there, Portland, Oregon, in terms of ideas.
	I remember when Portland was a place where I couldn't distinguish the millionaire hipster from the homeless guy in terms of style of dress, but I liked its sort of wild weirdness in the same way Austin used to be weird in a cool way.
	And then it kind of just got crazy in an uncool way.
	And you've lived that.
	You've seen it not only at Evergreen, but in the city.
	Well, we've left Portland, and we did leave because it did not look like a place that was stable over the long term.
	We watched it even in the few years that we lived there go precipitously downhill.
	Clearly as a result of very bad governance, governance that was driven by the fashionable social conclusions of the moment and not driven by hard-headed, dispassionate analysis, which would have served the population of Portland far better.
	That's unfortunately a pattern that isn't.
	Limited to any one city, it seems to afflict San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, you know, cities up and down the West Coast.
	I'm not sure what to think about it.
	The problem is so obvious, and the solution is so obvious, that it's hard to imagine that having watched the degradation, that there is not just simply a circuit in people's minds that says, this isn't working, let's reverse course.
	But there isn't.
	The commitment to these oversimplified wrong ideas is so thorough that the only move is to double down.
	And yes, you could save Portland, but you're not going to be able to save Portland if you keep electing the people who have the most extreme and absurd views.
	Brett, this is actually right on point with a rumble rant here.
	The $100 rumble rant from Almanac.
	Sorry, but any leftist who remains a leftist after the last three years shouldn't receive support from the right.
	Those lost souls on the right who support said leftists are just that lost souls.
	I think it's a question of semantics in terms of what people think makes them left.
	Jimmy Dore, Brett, you say you're still lefty leftist, and I think it's more of a conservative liberalism and not a degenerate progressivism.
	But setting that aside, thank you I don't know if you've been blackpilled in all of this.
	I don't know how anybody can have faith in science or the so-called experts.
	In Canada, they're trying to do something called the National Citizens' Inquiry, which is sort of like a citizen's initiative at some form of reconciliation or at the very least of having our grievances heard.
	What has to happen and can it happen in order for the general population to regain, restore, or ever have any faith ever again in the so-called experts and medical system?
	Well, the answer is not a very nice one.
	Unfortunately, what has been revealed by COVID is that the fraction of all of these systems that is composed of adults Who, given the right tools, could govern them properly is pretty small.
	The number of doctors who went along with injecting patients with reckless, novel transfection agents was huge for a disease that didn't threaten most of those patients in the absence of any evidence that these things controlled the spread of the virus.
	So the degree to which corruption has broken our system Is spectacular.
	I do think it is very easy to learn the wrong lesson.
	And I think, in some sense, the answer to all of the things you connected in your last statement there is the same one, right?
	Why am I still on the left, given what I've seen?
	Well, that question is born of a misunderstanding of what it means to be left, in my opinion.
	Left, to me, is not a social designation.
	It does not mean I like other people on the left.
	It means that I believe we cannot preserve our current system in its current state, that what happened during COVID is as much a piece of evidence that we need radical change as anything.
	And so it is my sense that change is necessary.
	I am frightened by change.
	As I repeatedly say to people, I am a liberal who wants to live in a world so good I get to be a conservative.
	But we don't live in that world.
	We live in a world that we will have to change in order to have something that we can just simply conserve.
	So that's the answer to the riddle.
	It's the same riddle with science.
	How could I still believe in science after all of this?
	Because that wasn't science.
	What happened was that was something that dressed up like science and it locked up science in the basement and tried to make sure it didn't happen.
	So the cure for what we saw is actual science.
	And actual science is not a club.
	It's not a group of people with degrees.
	It's not people who use the right jargon.
	Science is a method.
	It is a method based on a deep and not widely understood It's a philosophical set of parameters.
	If you do it right, it works.
	And it doesn't matter if you're the janitor or you're the professor.
	You do science right, it works.
	You do it wrong, your degree isn't going to help you, right?
	It doesn't work if you don't do it correctly.
	So what we need is good governance.
	We need rational change that is managed by people who understand what needs to be accomplished and have a...
	Healthy respect for unintended consequences, because that's the flaw of liberal thinking, I think, every time.
	You do something because you're trying to solve a problem, and you don't understand that you may actually make things worse in attempting to solve it.
	That's the mistake that liberals typically make.
	So we need to have a healthy respect for unintended consequences before we engage in problem solving, or we're just going to keep upending ourselves.
	Anyway, I hope that brings some clarity to the person who asked that question.
	It's not a social club.
	In general, the only people on the left I like are people that the left has thrown out.
	I like Glenn Greenwald.
	I like Tulsi Gabbard.
	These are good people.
	I like Matt Taibbi.
	These are people that the left does not recognize as their own because they actually still believe in those left principles.
	No doubt.
	As a final question, just twofold.
	One is where people can find you now, but also what is the future of, I think I finally figured out how to pronounce your name correctly.
	I mispronounce people all the time.
	So it's like Weinstein.
	So it's like a big stein of good wine.
	So if I got that right, let me know.
	But where can people find you and where's your own personal, where do you see yourself going in the near and distant future?
	Well, you know, my sense is that in the AGI era, and either we're living in the AGI era now or we will be shortly, either way, anybody who predicts where they're going to be more than five minutes out in the AGI era is making an error of their own.
	So I don't know where I'm going.
	Hopefully, we're all going to fight shoulder to shoulder and we're going to beat back the things that threaten us together.
	At the 11th hour, because we're not going to make it to the 12th hour.
	Where can they find me?
	They can find me on the Dark Horse podcast.
	I do a live stream with my wife almost every Saturday.
	I do discussions with interesting people periodically.
	They can find me on Twitter, at Brett Weinstein.
	Brett has one T, and yes, Robert, you pronounced it correctly.
	It is pronounced like The Bagel Brothers, except with a W. And where else?
	Oh, and I don't know.
	You might buy a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide.
	No, that's a different book.
	A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
	That's a good place to get a deeper dive into some of these issues.
	Excellent.
	And everybody with the tips in Locals, maybe we're going to set up a chat, but I'll get to all of them tomorrow because we had Brett for 90 minutes and we've already exceeded that.
	Brett, thank you very much.
	If people have any more questions, because it's impossible to get to all of the questions about COVID and all this stuff, find you on Twitter, find you on your podcast.
	It's very mesmerizing and relaxing to listen to as well, which is good for me.
	Brett, stick around.
	Robert, we'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everybody out there, thank you for being here.
	And we'll see you tomorrow or the day after.
	I don't know what my dog is barking at, but he's barking at something.

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