PBD Podcast - Bret Weinstein's Reaction To Neil deGrasse Tyson's Covid Argument | PBD Podcast | Ep. 229 | Part 2

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

On this episode, Patrick Bet-David and Bret Weinstein will discuss: How Gen Z is controlling the world  New York Times' bizarre comment about short people  Bret Weinstein's reaction to Neil deGrasse Tyson's covid argument  Whether guns are good or bad for society  The Dangers of AI Protect and secure your retirement savings now with this complimentary precious metals guide. Go to http://goldco.com/pbd FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on https://minnect.com/ Want to get clear on your next 5 business moves? https://valuetainment.com/academy/ Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pbdpodcast/support

30 seconds. Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm so close, I could take sweetest theory. I know this life meant for me. Yeah, why would you plan on galiah when we got bett David? Value payment, giving values, contagious, this world, I want your panors, we can't no value that haters. Howdy run homie, look what I've become.

I'm the one. Can I ask just a very simple question? You know back in the day was maybe people your age are a little bit older the boomers Are you a baby boomer? I am not a boomer. Okay, you're Gen X. Yes. How dare you man? We won 44 to 65 He looks great that I get I'll revisit this had a hair you and your brother have it I don't know. Not only are you the client, you're the player president of the hair club.

But anyway, the boomers were kind of responsible for Woodstock changing the system. And then you can go back a generation before that, whether it's a silent generation traditionalist. These days, here's my question. When you, the face of wokeness and the face of, you know, all this super progressiveness, at the end of the day, our college campus liberals, 20-something-year-olds Gen Z. Is this sort of just every generation the young people are going to have their causes

they identify with? And it is what it is. And they're the future, sorry, 68-year-olds, 72-year-olds, 80-year-olds. It's not your time is coming gone and move on. It's now Gen Z time, the woke time. How much of that is just on them? And this is their philosophy and they're the future. And it's like it is what it is, buddy. How much of that is on them? I wish. Unfortunately, it's on us. And you know, this actually is a perfect way to get back to your question about education. The problem, or at least I would argue, one of the most major problems is that we have broken the mechanism by which young people come to understand how the world functions. Now that has happened in a number of different ways, but it has accelerated very rapidly

in the last decade or two. Because of the iPhone, the MISO-ME and the internet? It could have been a lot of things. It happened to be those two and a few more, you know, porn, lots of stuff. But the problem, if you think back into what human beings fundamentally are, human beings are a creature in which you have the hardware package, the body, and you have a software package that is loaded in after the child is born primarily. That software package is capable of turning you into anything.

You can be an in-uit hunting large sea mammals by kayak, right? Or you can be a mosae herdsman, or you can be a collector of swallow nests in a cave in China, right? A human being can be a lot of different things based on what software package it gets, right? It can be an Aztec. But what it cannot do is live in a world where by the time an individual becomes an adult, the software program that it picked up in childhood

is already obsolete. There is no mechanism to deal with that world, where it is changing so rapidly that the world you're born into is gone before you become an adult. And that's the world that we're living in. In our case, it happens to surround technologies like iPhones, like the internet, like pornography. These things are radically altering the realities. And this then brings us back to the question of what should we do to fix education? And the answer, at least a big part of it,

is actually staring us in the face. What is so distorting about the technologies that come to us through screens is that they are not obligated to adhere to rules. On the internet, if you say that you're a woman, then I guess you are, because it's going to say differently. In reality, if you're a man and you say that you're a woman, there's something to talk about, right? That doesn't appear, that doesn't match

the person I see standing in front of me. So the way to take a generation and educate it so that it does not grow up to be a world full of suckers is to force education to include things that are obligated to rules, especially physical rules. So when Heather and I were teaching among the things that we did was we would assign students to teach themselves any skill. We had an assignment we called Learn a Skill. The idea was, it didn't matter what skill it was, but it had one requirement.

The skill had to be one where you didn't need some person to tell you whether you had succeeded or failed. It had to be obvious. If you were going to build tables, they had to stand up. They had to be level. You don't need someone to tell you, or you didn't build a table. Or you didn't fix an engine.

You did, or you didn't play a song that sounded musical. Those are all physical realities. And the reason that that is so important is that in a world where everything that you learn is learned socially, right, you can be persuaded of things that are absolutely false. Right. If the professor at the front of the room is a fool, but they're in charge of your grade and they say lots of foolish things and you do tofully write them down in your notebook and then you spit them back out on the test, you are being anti-educated, right? That's never going to happen in the context of an engine or a garden or anything where it's physics that dictates whether or not you succeeded or it's biology that dictates whether or not you've succeeded.

So my point would be somebody who gets really good at operating in the physical world is not going to be a fool, right? They may, you know, lack some skills, they may not be able to do calculus, they may not be articulate, but they won't be a fool. And so we have to include these mechanisms that are not socially conveyed in our education at a high level. And frankly, most people can go through school and never encounter these things. They're no longer a part of the regular curriculum. Would you do us a favor and go maybe slightly deeper and take a sort of an abstract idea and be very specific? Like what are you doing with your 16 and 18 year old kids

to educate them so they don't become fools and victims of modern society? You know, we do all kinds of things. We troubleshoot our vehicles when they fail. We build additions onto our house. We fix the plumbing when it's not working. And you know, these things, they're not only incredibly useful, but they're also rewarding.

There's nothing quite like taking something that isn't working for reasons that are mysterious, going through the process, which by the way, ends up being a scientific process where you determine what it is that must be going wrong with it. And then you discover, hey, I must have that right because there it is working now. That's a very rewarding process. It's very interesting because you, I must have had that right because there it is working now, right? That's a very rewarding process.

It's very interesting because you, I would say, you know, obviously you get paid to use your brain and your mouth, but you're making your kids use their hands to accomplish things. That must be very intentional. Well, it is and it is, you know, I sort of grew up as a tinkerer, I was always, you know, when people would come to do work on the house I grew up

and I would follow them around like a puppy dog watching everything they did, understanding how the house worked and all of those things. And so, you know, it's not like I have to go out of my way to teach this lesson. It's intuitive, but it also, it works like gang busters. Some may say you're just getting free labor out of your kids. I don't know. That is definitely also the case. Let's talk about, let's transition to a couple

of different topics. This has been great. We got 45 minutes left and we got a few topics to go through. So, Chad GBT is passing the tests required for medical licenses and business degrees. I don't know if you saw this or not. Pull up a little bit so we can kind of cover this. So, the viral chatbot that has raised concerns

from teachers and academics over its ability to cheat on essays and exam has now passed a Wharton MBA final exam, the United States Medical Licensing exam, and components of the bar exam. And this thing's only been around since November, by the way. The Wharton professor conducted a study in which he used OpenAI GP3, GPT3, the language model on which it is built on,

to take a final example of a core MBA course. It concluded that GPT3 would have received a B-2B minutes on the exam. The professor Christian Terri-Teroish founded that GPT3, performed the best at basic operations, management, and processing analysis questions. For these, the chatbot provided both correct answers and excellent explanation as to why an answer was selected. In the paper summary, teaching knowledge that GPT-3 is by no means perfect at times the bot made mistakes

and simple mathematical calculations and wasn't able to handle more advanced process analysis questions. The study further fueled the conversation that economics are now having as a result of GPT-3, GPT-A advanced writing skills regarding exam policies, etc. So some professors are extremely concerned, some are worried, some are saying this good question to existing business model teaching model universities how concerned are you how excited are you how little do you care about this I don't think anybody is worried enough I think the hazard of what we're facing is almost beyond what we can imagine and that is I'm saying that even though I know I know what you have to focus on if you want to comfort yourself

that this isn't so terrible, you can focus on the fact that this model has no capacity to be conscious, right? It's simulating meaning without knowing what it's saying. But I don't know how long that lasts. I do know that this is a pretty good spot check of where we are in the trajectory that results in general artificial intelligence. And I don't think we are remotely ready for what's coming. And I will point to the most obvious of these problems is already critical

and you're hinting at it in what you're reading here. But the fact that it is going to become extremely difficult to assess actual competence should alarm us at the highest level, right? To have a the possibility you could have a conference of people all consulting whatever descendants of a chat GPT happens to be available at the time and talking to each other as if they know what they're talking about. You know we've already got a problem with our experts who don't mostly seem they know what they're talking about. We've already got a problem with our experts who don't mostly seem to know what they're talking about. This is going to be a hundred times as bad in a world

where they can be consulting something that sounds very knowledgeable and may in fact be completely on the wrong track, which I would point out is another argument and maybe even a much stronger argument for including real world physical interactions in which you do not have to assess whether or not somebody knows what they're doing. They either fixed your engine or they didn't, right?

It either runs or it doesn't. Those kinds of things are not going to be easily fit, though even they, right, a mechanic who does not know what he's doing, but is able to consult this device in order to figure out what is likely causing a problem is going to become less and less capable. So I don't know what we're supposed to do about it, but I do know we're not ready. We're not ready and the rate at which this is going to get better is clear, right? Exposing it to larger and larger data sets is going to make it better and better at simulating this kind of interaction.

And that's, you know, that's if it stays unconscious. The question of what happens if this doesn't stay unconscious or this stays unconscious, but its descendent picks up consciousness is even more troubling. But go to ugly place. Good bad ugly. Worst case, what happens? Is it the fear that I actually want you to go there before I tell you what I think is the fear for some people? Okay. First of all, we don't need chat GPT to take us to the worst case scenario. We are already losing our capacity to understand the world we live in to manage the tools that

we are creating to live in harmony with each other. We are losing those things in the present prior to chat GPT. All of those problems get worse. This is like an accelerant, right? This is like you had a house fire and then you just threw gasoline on it, right? Now we have a raging house fire. So I don't know that this is or isn't the the thing, but I do know it's not going to help. At this moment, we can't deal with this. And this is not the last time that's going to happen, by the way.

Right, we had a world, we had an internet, and then we dumped smartphones into it. And it was like an accelerant. It took the derangement that was arising out of natural algorithmic processes within the internet, and they got vastly worse when people were constantly confronted with their phone and the ability to interact in this way all the time. So we've seen that. We're going to see it again with fusion power. Fusion power, which I believe is the one technology

that potentially bootstraps us out of the system we're in and into one that is sustainable. But if you just added it to the system tomorrow, if you read the paper tomorrow and turned out we'd accomplished scalable fusion, it would likely make things worse and not better because we're not ready for the world that it creates. So I don't know what the name of that problem is, but the we're not ready for that problem is a very serious one.

And we can swap in one technology after another. And you know, we will create different disasters. What's the most dangerous invention we ever had? The most dangerous invention ever. The most dangerous invention we ever had. Most dangerous invention ever. The most dangerous invention we ever had. Or innovation, invention, innovation. Most of the most dangerous invention where we invented it, we're like, oh shit,

this is not good. You know, it's an almost impossible question to answer because, you know, if I do the job right, it'll probably be something like paper or the mirror. Those things kick loose processes that may drive our extinction in the end. They won't, you know, there's not going to be a mirror the day the president hits the nuclear button and it all goes up and smoke, right? But the point is it may be the kind of self-awareness

that comes when you see a photorealistic impression of yourself two feet away, right? It may be that the thought processes that follow from that are the reason that we will ultimately destroy ourselves. More approximately, of course, we do have to talk about things like nuclear weapons. Boy, do I think we just got a wake-up call on the biology front with COVID? I mean, yeah, this was a lot better than it might have been, but this was the first round.

And we did not do very well with this test. Let's put it that way. Okay, so we're going to get to that here in a minute. Let's stay on this topic of the most dangerous invention. You said it could be the mirror or paper, but probably nuclear is where we're going to go or, you know, other things, right? When I say paper, I'm really hinting at written language. Of course, I go, of course, also, you know, incredibly marvelous. I'm not arguinging at written language, of course, I call it like this. Of course, also incredibly marvelous. I'm not arguing, it's not fantastic. So, guns, when guns were first invented, they called them the Great Equalizer.

Who were they good for? Who were they bad for? Well, this is one of these places where I have changed my perspective. I long believed the second amendment was the greatest error in our constitution. I no longer believe that. And it doesn't mean that I look past all of the terrible unnecessary carnage that arises because guns are easily available. But I'm watching tyranny erupt in places that I never would have expected it. And I am wondering if the founders did not very wisely understand that this day would come and that it will be very hard for and that it will be very hard for tyrants to succeed in America if the populace is armed. So, again, I don't, I know people will hear something in that that I'm not saying.

The cost of having these weapons commonly available is huge and frankly completely unacceptable to me. Really? So the cost. So so you went from prosek in amendment to now saying it would be better if we didn't have guns. No, no. The other way. I'll say, God, now the benefit of having it is good versus not having it. Even though I appreciate the tremendous unnecessary cost of these weapons being common. Right? Even though I see that cost, I believe nothing will be more destructive than if tyranny, I mean, we've already seen lots of hints of tyranny in recent times in the US, but if tyranny takes over our nation and the West, we are in even more serious trouble. So I believe the harms that do come from these weapons being common will be dwarfed by the

harms of things like what we saw in the 20th century in the Soviet Union, for example. So let's go back to the question. Yeah, so let's go back to the question. So who the invention of gun, the great equalizer? Who did it hurt? Who did it benefit? I think I don't want to pretend to be an expert on that question. It would take me a lot of thought to get to an answer.

I believe. This is what happens when you ask a former professor of evolutionary biology. Very rarely do I have an answer more than a evolutionary biology, scientist, okay. But who did it hurt and who did it benefit? I think who it hurt the most were bullies, right? People that could just strong-arm you physically

or in any capacity and who did it help, it helped weaker people. Sometimes you might say the weaker sex helped women. I think at the end of the day, if there's two very strong people, man and a woman or a weaker man and a very strong man, and all of a sudden the weaker person has a gun, essentially that's the great equalizer. So I think it hurt bullies the most.

And if you extrapolate that to governments and you take a look at, you know, bully governments, whether it's Iran today, with the mullahs, whether it's in Venezuela, where you don't, it can't have a gun, or any place where the, you know, society or the civilization, or the people don't have a weapon to defend themselves, you're gonna be at the whim of tyrannical governments, and bullies.

So to answer your question, I think it helped weaker people defend themselves. All right, but I wanna push back slightly. No, no, I'm way smarter than you,, I think it helped weaker people defend themselves. All right, but I want to I want to push back slightly. No, no, I'm way smarter than you and I believe. Please. Here's I believe your argument is correct as far as it goes. And the question is, is it correct in the end? Right.

You can take that same argument and you could apply it to nuclear weapons. And you could say actually what we want to do is have every country be armed with nuclear weapons because then big countries won't bully small countries. If you did that, the nuclear war that we will ultimately face will be that much sooner, right? Because you have that many itch-tryger fingers that could initiate the thing. And so I'm not convinced that even, I mean, look, we saw that nuclear weapons did produce peace. It worked. But in the end is that they're not effect, we can't measure that because we're not at

the end. So I don't know what the not effect of guns is. I do believe the effect you're describing is real and important. The only caveat that I would say, I can't believe I'm pushing back on you right now, is that the capacity for these nuclear weapons in the wrong hands could literally end earth as we know it. Whereas a gun or an M16, yes, there could be some carnage, but you're not Literally blowing up the world. So nuclear weapons to a certain extent is You know that threshold where it's like don't cross that line bread. You can't let a playboy argue with you His resume. It's just it's not

You're a former professor of evolutionary biology. He's a he's a form of an evolutionary biology There is biology there, but it's different. It's called the Mime Night Life scene. It's a different education. Let's go through that. Let's go through that. It's okay. So guns, specific guns, not nuclear.

Guns benefited the average person's like, listen, that guy's been bullying the city. This time he comes around, hey, you can't do this anymore. You gotta get out of my house. Okay, shit, I'm not messing with that family. I'm out because I got a gun. Fantastic, right? It's like when you got the sign in a backyard,. Okay, shit, I'm not messing with that family, I'm out because I got a gun. Fantastic, right? It's like when you got to sign in a backyard, beware.

There's a pit where a German Shepherd and beware, and there's no dog, but that sign itself gets some people to say, I don't want to mess with that place. And there's a study shown that there's a percentage of people that don't mess with a house that just has that sign whether there's a real dog or not, it still helps you to create some safety.

Nuclear, fine, internet, you internet, a lot of people were worried about internet at the beginning, you have radio, you have TV, you have all this stuff, right? Who did YouTube scare? Who did anchor or Spotify benefit and hurt? If we think about who YouTube and Spotify and these places hurt, it hurt mainstream media. It's scared to crap out of the bullies that have been telling everybody one side of the

story. Now you got to sit there and listen to the number one podcast in the world, Joe Rogan, telling you a different way because he's got a guest that got you thinking. Now we're going out there doing research, going to Google, which at one point we were concerned. So does chat GBT, chat GPT scare intellectuals? Is it where intellectuals are sitting there saying, and professors are sitting there saying, uh-oh, if this happens like in the insurance industry, I'm in the life of a short space. The moment they started doing predictive analytics

without needing underwriters and saying, Brett, you don't need to do blood and urine anymore. We don't need to do that anymore. We don't need underwriters and saying, Brett, you don't need to do blood and urine anymore. We don't need to do that anymore. We don't need underwriters anymore. Here's the test we're going to be taking on you. We're going to get your social media score. We're going to get this. We're going to get this.

We're going to get this. Based on that, your preferred elite underwriting, your healthy, you're going to lift to 85. Mom lift to 89. Dad lift to this. You're going to be fine, right? We don't need underwriters. Underwriters sat down there like,

no, you can't stop this. I make quarter million a year. There's no way I'm going to get rid of my job. This is scary, right? But guess what? That's innovation. Getting rid of underwriters. Could this model get rid of some educational system

that will replace professors and they're sitting, they're worried saying, hey, I've been bragging about how smart I am. Now, I can't do that anymore. This is not cool. Yes, and you know, we have just watched the entire expert class fail a real-world test. We watched all the universities, every science department, they have all just failed a major test. So, and, you know, if you were inside that system and you kept your wits about you,

you knew that there was a problem with competence. You knew that a lot of that was fakery and nonsense. It sounds, it looks like science, but it doesn't function like science. If you actually understand the magic that makes science work, you knew it wasn't taking place in these departments, that it wasn't taking place in the major journals. And so on the one hand, it is possible that something like chat GPT helps us discover the level of incompetence that is putting us in jeopardy, which would be great. But my concern is that it actually arms the next wave of incompetence so that it sounds competent.

And so it's harder to detect. And my guess is that latter problem outweighs the benefit of the format. Well, I mean, you took me to a whole different place. We've already been having that. I mean, we have a president that is giving speeches of people that gave the speech 10 or 20 years prior to him and sounding very presidential and getting caught plagiarizing John of Kennedy speech or Ted Kennedy speech

or all these other people's speech. So plagiarisms not going away. People sound very, very intellectual. I think what is gonna be interesting is, we can right now produce a robot. If we don't already have it, that would be the UFC champion for every weight, okay. We can probably produce a robot.

I don't know if you've seen that one robot that shoots three pointers and how accurate it is. Have you seen that one or no? Step career robot? No, no, it's not even step career. It's better than step is 43%, 42%. This guy is like just hitting him left and right, okay? Perfect accuracy and he's shooting the ball.

So, the robot James? The robot Jordan. But so, you know, we're already going in that direction, but do you really want to see robots playing? No. You know, if we can create a robot to go into UFC and fight them, am I really intimidated by that? Probably not.

Now, the future of robots that are military, that's a different story. That's concerning. But intellectuals debating. Like, if you were to have a debate with Chad GBT, you're probably going to lose the debate, not in a sense of who's right or who's wrong, who can recite more information and remember and memorize. Well, the ability to memorize as an individual, it was very valuable skill set 20 years ago

today, you know, you can just go somewhere do it. But I think we're still going to want to see a hand to hand combat with people debating and going out of versus just debating a machine. Right, the question is, will you be able to know what you're seeing? So I used to tell students that you are here in this classroom to enhance the capacity of your mind. You are not here to learn things, right? Things are now freely available on the internet.

You don't need to go to school to access them. What you need to do here is practice how well your mind functions. And so, yeah, you know, today, I would beat the pants off chat GPT because I wouldn't let it come down to volumes of information. On a volumes of information question, then if chat GPT3 can't do it, chat GPT4 will. But at the level of the ability to reason, and I'm not arguing that there's no ability because we've actually seen it,

the fact that this thing can write code and fix code is incredible, and that is a kind of thinking, even if it's not doing it in a way that we recognize as a valid cognition, but we do have to worry about what the future is going to look like. And I already don't think that we know exactly what we see when somebody's giving, especially somebody very powerful is giving a speech on television. But we're going to be in a world of confusion once you plug this thing into our

mechanisms for sense-making. It's going to be all I know is it's going to be interesting to see what happens next. This thing is not going to be slowing down by the way, it keeps getting smarter and smarter. Let's talk about COVID. We had Neil deGrasse Tyson here. Did you watch the clip where it was specifically to COVID clip him and I talking about it and he was given his point of view. When you heard him, okay, I'm sure you were saying to yourself, Patrick say this, you know, he needs to know this and what about this and what about that?

What was your take when you heard Neil de Graz Tyson give his views on the vaccine. I had a number of responses. First, let's give him his due though. He was way out of his depth, but the point, his underlying point isn't incorrect. It's just not applicable. So, his underlying point was that there is a game theoretic problem that surrounds issues of public health and that we are in a position to do ourselves great harm if we don't recognize that issue and address it. And to give you

a trivial example that everyone will agree on. The fact is that washing your hands after you use the toilet is not about protecting yourself, it's about protecting other people. And we formally and informally enforce a rule where people have to wash their hands because the benefit to all of us of having people who prepare our food, for example, wash their hands or anybody who's going to touch a doorknob, is so great compared to the cost that we each pay for washing our own hands, that it's a slam-dunk winner. So that kind of game theory exists potentially

in the space of things like vaccination. And I will just describe it this way. If you had a good vaccine, one that really provided sterilizing immunity to a serious disease, then and it had some risk, right? There's a what we call a free rider problem, which is if you imagine that you start vaccinating people for this disease and that the benefit comes from having more and more people vaccinated

so the disease can't find vulnerable individuals to use as vectors. Then the closer you get to vaccinating everybody, the less value there is in vaccinating the next person because you've already got a population that has herd immunity. So, if you want to not experience, not face your share of the risk of that program, then you don't get vaccinated, and everybody else is taking the risk on your behalf gives you the benefit too. So, the free rider comes out ahead because they get the benefit of the vaccination program and they don't pay the cost of it, right? That's a real problem in the context of an actually good vaccine that carries some risk with it. And what it will do is it may drive the number or the fraction of the population that gets the vaccine down to a point where we don't

have herd immunity and the disease continues to circulate, right? So that's the problem that he wants to solve. The issue comes that we have a completely polluted set of information available to the public about the nature of the so-called vaccines that were deployed for COVID about the nature of the so-called vaccines that were deployed for COVID, about the effectiveness of those vaccines, that's those so-called vaccines at preventing disease, serious or otherwise, and the safety of those inoculations. So what you heard in your exchange with him was a guy who effectively believed the public health apparatus in what it told him and couldn't imagine how anybody would reach a different conclusion.

Now many of us, including me, did reach a different conclusion. And you know, for all of us, it started somewhere. For Heather and me, it started when we were hearing about these so-called vaccines for the first time. And we were told, like everybody else, that these things were highly effective against COVID and safe. And when we heard the claim that they were safe, we knew something was wrong. Because there is no conceivable way, there is literally no way they could be safe. They could have been harmless. They didn't turn out to be harmless, but they could have been harmless.

But safe implies that you know, at the point that claim is made, that they are harmless, that they don't have any long-term impacts that are worth knowing about. And they hadn't been around long enough. There was no prior example of such an anoculation used in another creature that would have allowed us to determine that. So if these people were telling the truth, what they would have said was, well, I don't want to say because I think we now know that this wasn't the truth even then. But if they had said, we don't know of any harms and we don't believe they are likely, but we cannot promise you they don't exist, right?

Then it would have been a very different story. But at the point they said, oh, these things are safe, the point is, ah, that's a lie. I don't know why it's a lie. I don't know if they're solving a game theory problem and they actually believe that or they're solving a business problem and I'm the mark, I don't know if they're solving a game theory problem and they actually believe that or they're solving a business problem and

I'm the mark. I don't know, but I do know something's wrong with the claim and at the point that we realized something was wrong with that claim, we started to dig. The further we dug, the worse it got. And you know, that sort of led us to a second line of inquiry, which was, well, what is the likelihood that a inoculation based on this technology would be safe? And the answer was very, very low. And the reason I say that is because the technology in question, especially the mRNA inoculation or transfectant, was so radically different from anything that had been successfully deployed before, that the chances it was going to have some impact on the immune system, on the circulatory system,

on neurological systems, the likelihood that there was going to be something in there that it disrupted was extremely high because complex systems are that way. There are so many interrelated parts that there's no way to predict what the impacts will be and the likelihood of improving a functional organism with such a thing is low. So I have two questions for you.

One, did you watch the Pfizer CEO at Davos being chased down and asked and all the questions and didn't have a response from, did you see that? By the way, that clip is not on YouTube, so we're not going to be playing it. It can be on Twitter, you can go find it, we'll put a link for it if people want to see it. But it's a very interesting back and forth for two or three minutes and the guy walked for a long time. The question I got for you is the part,

and this is where a lot of people message me. The interview got nearly 100,000 comments, is what it got, not in the span of six years. In the span of two weeks, got 100,000 comments. First, six hours that already had 40,000 comments. Newly across the world. Yeah, there's a part where he says, there's a public health contract

that you have signed implicitly as a citizen of a country where in part we depend on each other for health, our wealth, our security and the like. And that contract is in the best scientific evidence available at the time. If you do not get vaccinated, you will put other people in this organization at risk. That organization does not want to take that risk. So you do not have this job anymore if you decline it. So in, in with any public health decision,

there has to be a consequence to you not participating in this social contract. Which social contract is he talking about? Public health contract is he talking about? Well, this is exactly what I was getting at when I said we should give him his due. In principle, he's not wrong. The problem is that the person or the entity into which you have entered this contract,

without your choice, by the way, but which you have been forced to enter this contract, is in breach of that exact contract. That is why this is a non-question. That is why there is exactly no right to mandate these things, is because in order to have any legitimacy to such a policy, you would have to take every precaution to protect the public from the perverse incentives inside of science, inside of pharma, inside of public health, and no precautions were taken. In fact, what appears to have happened

is the complete capture of the system that should be protecting us. So, in the case that you had a truly dangerous disease, you had, let's say that we had a true vaccine, something based on a reliable technology, something like an attenuated virus-based vaccine, in which proper testing had been done by an independent authority, which had evaluated the level of adverse events to be low, had looked at past examples of similar vaccines and said the likelihood that there is something hiding here that we don't know is low.

Here are the all-cause mortality statistics on previous vaccines that have been out for many decades. Right. Then there would have been at least the basis for a discussion about a mandate. But we are so far from having a structure that is capable of managing that responsibility, that it is inconceivable that those mandates would have been justified. And of course, the fact that they did not instantly get removed at the point we discovered these things did not block transmission of the disease tells you this wasn't about public health in the first place. This was about something else.

I don't know that we know what that something else was, but it wasn't good. It wasn't about us in the public. It was about something. Perhaps it was business. That's the best case scenarios that this was greed driving us, but it certainly wasn't keeping people safe.

Money. That's the floor. The explanation could be worse, but at least this was runaway greed and a complete indifference to the suffering and death of other people's children. Can I just ask a simple question? This is not my wheelhouse. I would like the audience to maybe get some very specific clear answers.

Every country had a different approach. Every state. America had a different approach. We saw what happened in California lockdown lockdowns, New York versus Florida, DeSantis, all that. If you could give a grade to America's response as a country, and then what countries out there would you give an A to in the response to everything that happened in 2020. I don't think an A was possible. If we're grading on a curve, Sweden did better. He let the old educational system what he wants to know whether he got an A or B. Right. Planet Earth got an F- on this one. Planet Earth got an F-

that's not even harsh enough. Let's just be clear about this. No matter what ended up being true about these so-called vaccines, about early treatment, about the proliferation of variants that comes from the vaccination campaign, no matter what we conclude on all of those topics. At the very least, we have a virus that appears to have been the product of a circumvention of a law that was created by Congress to protect us from gain of function research that resulted in Anthony Fauci using a proxy to offshore that work to the lab in Wuhan, China, where they appear to have enhanced this virus's capacity to infect human beings. Every single bad thing that happened to us, including the trillions of dollars of wealth that got evaporated, all of the people who have been killed by the virus, or some consequence

of lockdowns, or some consequence of lockdowns or some consequence of these innoculents, right? All of those costs come from that error. So you know, this is a self-inflicted wound from one end to the other. This is the greatest blunder in human history. And for the same people who are responsible for that blunder, to have been put in charge of protecting us when they clearly had perverse incentives, was insane. Any country to get an A on this exam would have had to call that out and say, actually, this can't be managed by

the same people who created it. We need to find the best minds, the most independent minds, and we need to start with a fresh sheet of paper that doesn't involve those people and figure out what the right thing to do is. And if we had done that, even after the virus had gotten loose and spread around the globe, we would have done vastly better. Would there have been deaths? Yes, many. But we would have done vastly better. Would there have been deaths? Yes, many. But we would have done vastly better. So the fact that at best, provinces ignored the global response and did their own

thing and saved their own populations, right? Utar Pradesh, used Ivermectin, right? Do we know what the consequence of that was? Not exactly. But we don't know because there is an obsession with not finding out. Much as there is an obsession with not finding out what adverse events are actually happening at what rate, right, from the mRNA vaccines. So we simply have to escape the people who have control over what questions we are allowed to ask, what we are allowed to study, and we need to figure out what happens so that this can never happen again. So let me ask you this question. This is my challenge, and this is kind of where I was

going with it. What things are the left certain about, and what things are the left certain about and what things are the right certain about what things are Liberals certain about what things are conservative certain about That they're not correct. No, no either way look listen. Here's the Republicans are wrong The Democrats are wrong on this 100% they're wrong on this or we the Democrats are right on this we the Republicans are right on this what things On both sides are they certain they're right or wrong You know what i'm asking not exactly so for example i give you an idea uh We make the right the right thing to do is to get the vaccine or else you know

The the world's gonna die the right thing to do is to get the vaccine or else, you know, the world's gonna die. The right thing to do is climate change. We have to make that a priority because in 12 years, we may cease to exist, you know, the right thing to do is we are 100% right. Climate change is real. You know, what things would you say? The left is 100% certain the right and the other side is wrong and vice versa. Well, I mean, I think this is just a different puzzle than the one you're asking about. We have teams, right? We have a blue team and a red team. These things amount to jerseys.

And the fact is you have good soldiers on both sides, right, who wear the jersey and believe all of the stuff that the other people who wear that same jersey and go to the same parties believe. So it's just like a really insane slate of things that have been incoherently put together. It's really the hallmark of low quality thinking that people sign up for the full slate. Right? It would be normal if you, you know, the people that you were aligned with politically had a set of beliefs and you thought, well, I'm with them on this, this, and this. I'm halfway there on this one and I disagree with them on these two, right? That would be normal. But the idea that, oh, yeah, I'm, you know, the New York Times that it speaks for me. Wow, you got to be some amazing level of confused. If you think,

I got a story for you, I'm going to show here in a minute, not right now, but keep going. Well, it has to give credit to New York Times. Maybe it's not credit, but you'll see here in a minute. Well, I look forward to hearing about that. It's been some time since the New York Times deserved any credit. Well, you'll see what it is here in a second. But anyway, so, you know, we could go through those, you know, the slates of disagreements on both sides, and the problem is that all of these things require adult-level nuance that isn't found in either of these, you know, simple sets of prescriptions. And either of these simple sets of prescriptions. So let me maybe set up why I'm asking the question. Okay.

For me, I come from the school of thought of, man, we don't know. It's a test. We're testing. And we could be wrong. Meaning, Sweden took a test, took a risk. Hey, worked off for them. The scientists took a risk. Could, worked out for them. The scientists took a risk. Could have worked out against them,

worked against them, but it worked in his benefit. Cuomo took a risk, got him fired, maybe for other reasons, but he got fired, Newsom took a risk, not a good look for California, you know, Illinois took a risk, Texas took a risk, South Dakota took a risk, a lot of people took a risk. Every leader took a risk. The risk to me that was annoying was when people were 100% right, that they are 100% right, rather than saying, look, this is the strategy we're using to beat the enemy. None of us know 100% whether we're going to be right or wrong.

Nobody knows 100%. But this is the choices that we have. Our encouragement is if you're afraid, you have an option, go take the vaccine. But, you know, we feel confident about the amount of research that we've gotten so far. Obviously, if we had five or ten years, we would be more certain because we've done more testing But if you're still comfortable taking it in a military they came up to us remember back in the day's anthrax shot Oh, so they came in the army. This is how it was for the army by the way just so you know now It's gonna make sense because I'm going back and realizing when my you know kind of like

They came and they said you guys are taking an anthrax shot I'm like what are you talking about while your government property? And so the sergeants are talking to us at the Sergeant Braxton. Artis, guys, tell them the truth. You signed that contract, man. In that situation, you did sign a contract. You are government property. You are theirs for eight years, right?

So guess what shot we have to take? We have to take the shot. Now, we would say, so how much do we know about what's going on? Not, you know, typically first line of defense, first testing goes through military and you're a part of it, right? Do you know how many people took it where like do this? Am I gonna grow, you know, fourth arm?

Am I gonna be a two headed Assyrian, you know, what's gonna happen here, right? But people were scared and a lot of debate was going on, but they told you, this could and a lot of debate was going on. But they told you, this could cause a lot of side effects. You have to sign this waiver that the military can never be held liable for XYZ. And we had already signed it anyway, so we didn't have a choice. But at least it's to say, this comes with side effects. You take the medication, what does the medication say? You know, they made Philip Morris put what on the cigarette. This could call cancer, bro.

If you want to smoke it, smoke it, but you could die from cancer. Guess what? I'm okay with that because you're telling me what my risks are. My concern was they were too confident that their way was 100% the right way in the opposition had no opportunity to question them. That was my biggest chance.

So when I'm asking a question about, which side things, they're more certain than different areas, the left was very, very certain. Their way was the right way, or hit the road, if you can take a different approach. Well, two responses. One, I noticed as my kids were growing up that I would ask them what they thought was going on in some case and they would tell me and

I would say how certain are you and they would say a hundred percent and I would say wrong And so anyway, I started to Force them to put a number on the likelihood that they were oh you're right're right, I would get along. And it could be a very tiny number, right? But the point is you need to have what? Yeah, you go. Right. It can be a fraction of 1%, but it can't be zero, right? And I would also say that in the context of COVID and most significantly the vaccination campaign, there was a nightmare scenario for

Heather and me. And unfortunately, we had to root for it. Right? This was torture. Because on the one hand, we were confident that we could not be confident of the safety of these things. Nobody could. There was no way you could have certainty about their safety because they had not been around long enough to know what their consequence would be a year down the

road or two years down the road. And that's a reasonable level of skepticism. It was, should have been uncontroversial. But the problem is, what could have happened is we could have said, hey, wait a minute, these things can't be safe. That has to be a lie because nobody knows what happens three years down the road. And there could have been no consequences, which would have been the best outcome by far. And it would have ruined our credibility because most people don't understand that to say, that is not safe, is different than saying that does harm. So we left the door open to any possibility and just said, look, the only thing to be certain of is that we can't be certain

of something like safety in this case. And so we had to root for our own destruction. We had to root that the vaccines would be harmless. And it was a very uncomfortable spot to be in because on the one hand, you want them to be harmless, of course. And on the other hand, I don't know what we do for a living after that. So that's the predicament of adult level nuance. It's not a safe business.

And how confident are you that now that McCarthy and, you know, some of the guys pushed, they went 15 rounds until he finally was announced, you know, Speaker to House, because there was a lot of deals being made where they're going to go investigate Fauci and, you know, all of the vaccine stuff. How confident are you that Rand Paul and his camp, they're going to get to the bottom of this. And we're going to find that exactly how this thing got out, how much, you know, like just the same thing that we learned about Twitter files, or we're going to learn new things about it, controversy about it.

Or we eventually going to get to the truth. I doubt it. Really. I don't, I think we will get to more truth than we've got. But the system has a way of protecting itself. And what it's going to do is reveal no more than it has to. And so from our perspective in the public, if we don't want this to happen to us again, we have to push so that the amount that it has to cough up is a greater fraction of the whole. But no, I strongly doubt we will fully get

to the bottom of what happened here. Quick point about this, this 100% level of certainty in general. We've all been around those people. It's like, how confident you are? You 100% bro, I'm telling you, it's 100%. You know how like in polling, we've seen the pollsters get it wrong for decades now.

Why can't they implement this margin of error? You's usually what 3% give or take? Why can't we take that and put that into people's opinions or even something as essential as COVID or anything like that. It's like, all right, you can no longer say a hundred percent. Sick question. We got two minutes. So this is what I want percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. But the level of stuff they write, I mean, you think this is a joke, okay, here's New York Times. There has never been a better time to be short, okay? So this article goes down, keep going down, and it says how it is bad, get out of something I'm saying, from where I stand at 5 feet 7, being tall is widely held fan as you superior to others on it. It made sense of fun over high twin facility ages ago when necessary and it was defending yourself that others are, if you go all the way to the bottom and read this article, you know what it's really saying? How tall people should stop having kids, okay?

How short, it's shorter people are better for society. Why we should go back to being shorter, not being taller. Why it's not fair. I mean, the average person who has logical reads this says, who even approved this opinion to be written with the brand New York Times, unless if you're just trying to get a lot of eyeballs for people to talk about it, okay. What do you see with the level of credibility

New York Times has today? I know you're a big fan of this. I know you're like a big spokesperson for them going around always trying to get people to subscribe. I mean, I'm just endlessly shocked and disappointed by the New York Times, you know, the Washington Post too, and really all of the mainstream media. But the question is why is this, you know, project mockingbird just simply one, or is this the breakdown in competence having produced a newspaper that you know wouldn't know news if it hit it in the face? Or would you secretly

fantasize about owning them? The New York Times? I never fantasize about owning the New York Times. No, you wouldn't want to be like the editor-in-chief or... I think they've done too much damage to the brand for it to be anything other than funny. But once your level of certainty though, 100% 90% where you at on that that it would be good to on the New York Times I'm at three percent. Leave a margin of error to call back to my. Oh you got like it. Okay, by the way I wish we had more time truly enjoyed it. I just looked at I'm like oh shoot I need another two hours with this guy. I really enjoyed being, I'm looking forward to bringing you back and hopefully next time,

Rob, next time we do a, let's do it at a time that's not on a dream team call, so we can go more than two hours because two hours with Brett is not enough time. We're just getting started. But for folks who enjoy today's podcasts and you'd like to find more information on Brett, Brett has a podcast

Called the dark horse if I'm saying it correctly dark horse podcast dark horse podcast You can find it all over the place. What's the main place you'd like us to push it to if you were to go to one spot spotify Let's put the Spotify link to the podcast so people can go Find it bread. Appreciate you for coming out. This was great. Can I wait to do it again? Thanks me too. Take care everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye Find it, Brett, appreciate you for coming out. This was great. Can I wait to do it again? Thanks me too.

Take care everybody, bye bye bye bye.