The Joe Rogan Experience - #1919 - Bret Weinstein

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

Dr. Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, podcaster, and author. He is the author, along with his wife, fellow biologist Dr. Heather Heying, of "A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life." Together, they are the co-hosts of "The DarkHorse Podcast." www.bretweinstein.net

the Joe Rogan experience do you get weirded out when you do podcasts now? no was there a time in the beginning when you did? where you're like okay here we go yeah I suppose at the beginning it was nerve-wracking. But I also think I have a really weird relationship with fear, I guess. And so I think I have reason to think that in places where I'm particularly anxious, some part of me feels it.

But my conscious mind is not allowed in on it, so I can do what I have to do. Did this come after Evergreen or before? Definitely before, although right as Evergreen erupted into the public consciousness, there's this one incident, actually the incident that brought me to public attention, where I was standing in the hallway and I was being confronted by these 50 students who I had literally never met. And they were accusing me of racism and demanding that I resign or be fired. We should explain to people that don't know, because we were starting off this way, the backstory of the evergreen. So it started off where there was an appreciation day for people of color where they did not have to show up for work, right?

Yeah, that's true. That's how it started. That's not exactly the story, but there is this event called Day of Absence, which was a longstanding event at the college where basically at first black people and then later on more generally people of color did not come to work and they held discussions separately. And then in 2017, they changed this to a request that white people not come to campus. And I responded to this and I said that was unacceptable. This was a public college. I wasn't going to be told I couldn't teach my class. And that did cause a bit of a firestorm, but that firestorm was embedded in a much longer battle that had begun to simmer when

the new president of the college, George Bridges, showed up and impaneled a committee effectively to suggest mechanisms for restructuring the college. And the mechanisms were insane. They were a recipe for destroying the place. And it was my obligation as a faculty member to point out that it would be a terrible idea for us to adopt these policies. And so the day of absence controversy became the explanation that the public got for why things erupted when they did. But it really it was one example among many of things that were afoot at the college. What were the other policies that he was trying to implement? Heather and I were most troubled by was a proposal that every faculty hire needed to be justified on the basis of it in some way addressing inequity. And so you can imagine an environment where you need to hire a mathematician or a chemist, And the answer is, well, you can't really hire

anybody whose background doesn't include some strong evidence of their being an activist. And so anyway, that would have been debilitating to the college. That was one thing. Another thing was the suggestion that the college would only be functional at the point that every single graduate was equally capable. And there is exactly one way to do that, which is to hobble all the people who are highly capable. So these were things that didn't make any sense. Equally capable by what metric? By every metric. So to the extent that there was going to be some level of skill that was going to be shown by people graduating with respect to math or whatever else, everybody needed to attain it, which of course, even if that's plausible, if you had access to everybody from birth and you could

give them a really high quality math education, by the time students come to college, many have lost the ability to do many of these things. And it will never be regained, certainly at the level of the top-performing students. So the only way to get them equal at graduation would be to hobble those who were unusually capable. But what about people of color that are truly exceptional geniuses, like outliers? Like what do they do to the other people that don't meet up to those expectations? Well, that's one of the terrible things about these diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives is that the right way out of the problem is to herald those people and to provide them the opportunities that will allow them to flourish.

provide them the opportunities that will allow them to flourish. Instead, they get dragged into a group based on something like skin color, and their exceptional capabilities aren't allowed to shine through. It's basically, it's considered counterproductive or race trading, really. So the idea was that they wanted to make everyone equally capable in some way, but the only mechanism to do that would be that you had to lower the performance of the people that were at the highest levels of achievement? Well, they never said that. That is, as a biologist, that is me telling you that when you have a group of organisms that have different capabilities, the idea you're going to bring every individual of low capability up to the top performer, the only way to do that is to lower where the top performers are. So they never finished the sentence. They basically described a utopia in which we looked at the top performing student and then suddenly brought

everybody up to their level. But that's impossible. This was like the very beginning of the public being aware of some of the madness that was going on in some universities. Well, I think there are a number of things that are true about it. One is the protesters at Evergreen were foolish enough to film everything they did. And they uploaded it first to Facebook and then an account called Not My Fault One, I believe, transported it over to YouTube. And when people saw how absurd it was, it made it much harder to deny that something had gone very wrong. Now, of course, the response at that point was, well, that's evergreen. And I, at this point, now famously said, no, evergreen is maybe more dramatic in this way.

It's earlier, but this is going to spill out into everything. It's already riddled throughout the other universities, and now that's just undeniable. It's already riddled throughout the other universities and now that's just undeniable. Yeah, I remember the early days when this was happening when I would do podcasts about it. And I think this is back when I was still reading comments. And one of the comments was, why would you care about what's happening in these universities? Like this has literally no bearing on you. And my thought was, I don't think that's true because the people from universities are eventually going to go into the workplace. And if this ideology is so radically

different than anything I experienced when I was in my early 20s, like there's a shift in the culture that seemed to be a groupthink shift that was forcing people to accept these crazy ideas. And that this is going to have some spillover. And now we know that that's 100% true. Jordan was ringing the alarm for this a long time ago. And I'm sure you're aware of what's happening to him now. I am aware that something new is happening to him in the last couple of days, but I have not caught up to it. I don't know if he wants me to discuss this publicly. So I'm going to hold off and wait until he does, because I believe he's addressing it publicly. Has he addressed this on his, see if he went to, go to his Twitter page, see if he said anything.

But the Wi-Fi issue at the moment. Okay. He's getting in trouble for retweeting some person who was critical of Justin Trudeau and the some whatever board of psychologists that they have in Ontario is bringing him in for disciplinary discussions. discussions and I think they're having some sort of, they want him to be involved in some sort of a class or some sort of a thing. Oh, I should just read it. And if I don't get, I'll contact him. If I don't get his permission, I'll delete this aspect of it. So here's what it says. It says, the College of Psychologists of Ontario, the government-mandated professional college of psychologists, has disciplined me and is threatening my clinical psychology license for retweeting the Conservative Party leader, Pierre Polivier. How do you say his name?

Not sure. Not sure. Levere, how do you say his name? Not sure. Not sure. Criticizing Justin Trudeau, the chief of staff, Gerald Butts, someone named Jacinda Arden, and an Ottawa city councilor. He is required to participate in mandatory social media communication retraining to modify, it says, to modify my objectionable behavior, which I absolutely refuse to do. So they'll go to the next step, which would be an in-person disciplinary hearing

with my license on the line. I'm going to make all this public this week. If you're interested, take a look. Canada has given over to the commissars, something I thought I'd never see in my lifetime. Happy New Year. Well, I can't say I'm terribly surprised. Ultimately, anybody who remains inside an institution is going to be up against disciplinary hearings if they insist on seeing reality and discussing it. But the term retraining, like I'll read it again because it sounds so bonkers that someone would think that this is a good idea. This term is so crazy that he is going to participate, have to participate in mandatory social media communication retraining.

Social media communication retraining. Social media communication retraining. Like, you have to do it the way I do it. You have to do it the way other people, that we have decided the way you communicate is not proper. We don't agree. You're retweeting people who are critical or criticizing the government, and we don't agree with that. So we're going to retrain you how to communicate on social media, and this is mandatory.

You have to do it, and then you're going to have to adhere, right? Because if you do it, if you go through the retraining and then you don't adhere, well, then it doesn't count. You have to be a different person. Yeah. I mean, I am simultaneously shocked. Myself from 10 years ago is absolutely shocked. Myself that has lived up to this point through the last five years is not shocked. At all? No. The disciplinary hearings are part of the structure that keeps the last holdouts from doing their thing. And in this case,

you and I both know that Jordan is not going to bow to this. There's nothing that they can say that is going to cause him to do that. Well, fortunately, he doesn't have to. This is the most important part about it is that Jordan has achieved escape velocity. And he doesn't have, he doesn't need them anymore. And so this is an empty threat. So this removing his license, you're not going to take away his education, his degrees. If you say you're removing his license, well, I don't think he's seeing clients anymore. He's not really acting as a clinical psychologist anymore, is he? I don't think so. I don't believe so. And I agree with you. I think what we have to discuss is this.

There's a question about where each of us are with respect to what you're calling escape velocity. In fact, you and I sitting here is an interesting test case because I haven't – I've come close to escaping escape velocity, but not quite. velocity, but not quite. Well, you've been hobbled by the demonetization on YouTube for things that are now being printed in the Washington Post, which is wild. Because one of the things that you got in trouble for was, how do you say his name? Geert van der Bosch? Geert van den Bosch. Van den Bosch. He was talking early on, on your podcast, about how these vaccines are in some way going to aid in variants. Yeah. Right. And he made a video today.

Did I send it to you yet, Jamie? I don't think so. I'll send it to you now because he made a new video that's quite chilling because he's been very accurate about what he said up until now, and he made a new one yesterday. You're going to have to airdrop it. I'm not going to get it. Oh, okay. Oh, really?

I'm literally having, like, I'm trying to talk to the IT guys now. Something's wrong with our network. Oh, no. Can I text it to you? It won't work? Yeah, I need my internet on my computer to get that. Oh. You could text it to me, and I could airdrop it to myself yeah try that okay i'll try that hang on please copy link um yeah it's uh i mean fucking we are living in the strangest of times the strangest of times. The strangest of times. Because when you're ignoring,

like if you talk about the Barrington, Great Barrington Declaration, you're ignoring virologists and epidemiologists and their expert opinion on things. Top flight. Yeah, and then actively talking through emails, openly talking about publicly discrediting these people. Well, there are a number of topics we need to talk about here.

But one of them is this clear pattern where those of us who have achieved some kind of immunity to their control speak about these things. We pay some terrible price. We get slandered on our Wikipedia pages and elsewhere, but we persist. And eventually it forces an acknowledgement of what we were saying that's years late, that has tremendous consequences for what we're actually doing. But I'm convinced that what they're up to is they're fixing the historical record, But I'm convinced that what they're up to is they're fixing the historical record, right? When we stand up to their nonsense and we make it clear what's actually taking place and they are begrudgingly acknowledging this in the end, what it will look like in their own writing of the record, and they will, of course, write the record, is that, you know, government's a bit slow and they were a little late to acknowledge this. But, of course, that was because they were being very scientifically careful, which is nonsense.

They never would have acknowledged it if they hadn't been forced to it. Yeah, that's what's being revealed with the Twitter files. And this whole thing where there's this massive pushback against Elon Musk. And there's all these celebrities that are virtue signaling and removing themselves from Twitter publicly. And they're doing this to try to let everybody know that they're on the right side. And without real examination of what's actually going on, you know, and they're concentrating on Donald Trump, you know, him bringing back Donald Trump and a host of other unmentionables on Twitter. But Donald Trump is not posting on Twitter.

I believe he has some sort of an exclusive deal with his truth. I don't know that this is true, so let me just say that right now. There's been speculation, I should say. Let's put it that way, that he has some sort of exclusive deal with Truth Social, which would be the only thing that would make sense to me why he wouldn't want to post all that stuff that he says on Twitter as well. I mean, he has, what is his account? He must have like 100 million followers.

Like, what does he have? Do you know what, Donald? You're going to have to go on your phone, huh? We have Wi-Fi issues, ladies and gentlemen. Been hampered. Yeah. Did you get that text? I got the text, but it's a tweet, so I can't pull up the tweet on my phone. I thought it was a video.

So we will have no internet access during this podcast. There will be no fact-checking. Until further notice. Wild and reckless we will go. Working without a net. Well, Jamie can tweet things. I mean, he can Google things on his phone at least. 87.8 million on his real Donald Trump account. That's a lot of people that he has access to that he's ignoring.

And I would imagine that's probably because he has, and this is, again, speculation, pure speculation, that he has some sort of exclusive deal. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I'm more interested really in this phenomenon of people leaving Twitter. So on Dark Horse, we've talked about a concept that I call zero is a special number. And the idea of zero is a special number is that this narrative control would not work if there was even one newspaper that was dedicated to the job of reporting the news. It wouldn't work if there was even one university that was dedicated to finding what the truth might be, right? It doesn't work if there's one social media platform in a primary position in which free speech reigns because in any of these cases, if you had the university that was still interested in truth-seeking in an era where everybody else was doing their diversity, equity, and inclusion thing, every reasonable person would want to send their kid there, right? So it would win in competition almost immediately. And the result would be every other institution would have to change their policy to compete. So if you get even one exception, that's enough to break this pattern. So what Elon Musk is doing is actually

fighting to make Twitter into that single exception. And the structure that is controlling the narrative understands that it cannot endure that. And so far, it has failed to shut down Elon. So their next move is actually to get people on one side of this debate to leave so that they can't prevent Twitter from being a space where people can speak freely, but they can take it out of the position of being a primary social media environment. In so doing, they will take the number of meaningful exceptions to the free speech control back to zero. That's what they're up to.

Anyway, I'm... Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I don't think that's... Oh, we got internet now? Yay, we're back. Okay, so let's play Geert van den Bosch's newest video, and then we'll get back to this whole idea of escape velocity. Because this is one of the reasons why I want to bring this up in particular, because this was a particularly egregious example of YouTube censoring a real expert who has said something that has been publicly declared. You would speak to this better than me. You're not supposed to vaccinate during a pandemic because what it encourages variants or it opens up the possibility of variants. What is the reason for that?

You are essentially in a battle with a pathogen and the pathogen is primed to be able to evolve. And so if you vaccinate ahead of a pandemic, then when the pathogen attempts to infect people, it runs into a lot of immune systems that see it coming. If you vaccinate into an active pandemic, you're doing a number of different things. For one thing, maybe the worst thing, is you're guaranteeing that the pathogen is going to encounter a lot of people who are in the process of developing immunity. So what you're giving them is like an environment that's set up to train them to escape the immunity that the vaccine produces. Now, with the vaccines that we have used, this problem is even worse because these vaccines, or I should say so-called vaccines, they aren't vaccines. And I was convinced that that was not an important issue. Lots of people

were upset by the redefinition of the term vaccine. I wasn't convinced it was an important issue. I have switched sides on this. I now think the definition is vitally important, and we're beginning to see why. But in any case... But we should clarify that. Why do you think it is not a vaccine? Well, it's not a vaccine for a number of different reasons. The primary reason is that it does not create immunity to the pathogen, right? So... Okay, but then is a flu vaccine a vaccine? It depends. I would like to know more about how well flu vaccines actually work, right? Now that we've seen all of this theater around safe and effective, I am now in a very cautious position

with respect to what I thought I knew about the effectiveness of other so-called vaccines. But in the case of the COVID vaccines, there are really two issues. One, it doesn't produce immunity to catching the disease or transmitting it. So it's not a vaccine by that metric. It just produces antibodies. Well, I wouldn't say it just produces antibodies. I would say we don't really know. The public discussion has focused on antibodies, but I think that's because the public knows what an antibody is, right? So the deeper discussion is, well, what is the interplay between antibodies and T cells, which don't make antibodies? And we don't know the answer to that. But fundamentally, these so-called vaccines, they enter your cells and they turn your cells into a vaccine factory at best.

That's what they do. That's a very different technology. reason that I now think that the question of whether or not it is or is not a vaccine is important is that effectively, all of us normal folk had a belief that vaccines, yeah, it's a complicated thing, but it's a pretty elegant medical intervention. And in general, they're pretty safe. They have very low levels of side effects. And they're basically worth it. It's a good deal, right? You just get a little injection and you have an immunity to some disease that you have never seen before. Isn't that marvelous?

And I still feel this way about the fundamental technology. But the fact is this is actually, A, far less certain than we understood. It's a more radical intervention than we commonly understand. And in this case, what they've done is they've smuggled in a really, truly radically new technology and they caused us all not to worry about it very much by using the term vaccine, right? If they had said, all right, we've got this pandemic. And in order to prevent it from spreading, we're going to have everybody take gene therapy. Everybody would have said, what? Gene therapy? Is that safe? Right? So the point is, we had a category and it was called vaccine. And we all thought, you know, there are some crazy folks who are worried about vaccines, but in general, it's safe. So if something carries that label, it's probably safe too. And this is actually what activated Heather and me when the pandemic began. And then, you know, we started trying to unpack what we were hearing about it just to translate the biology into English for people.

And then we, you know, the vaccines were on the horizon and we were initially very hopeful. We thought, oh, well, maybe that's an answer. But then they said the vaccines, you know, the testing tells us that these things are highly effective and very safe. And we didn't know anything about effectiveness at that point. In fact, I'm a little embarrassed to have taken them at their word. But the claim that they were safe didn't make a whit of sense. They couldn't possibly know, right? And the reason that they couldn't possibly know is that the word safe, if you say that something is safe, you are not saying that it's harmless. You

are saying, you know, it doesn't carry any risk, right? If you get in your car drunk one day and you drive home, right? Well, there was no harm. It was harmless, but it wasn't safe, right? So when they said these things are safe, the answer is, well, how would you know that? You've only been injecting them into people for months. You don't know what happens five years down the road. It can't be safe, right? You can tell us you don't know any harms of any harms yet, but you can't say it's safe. And so that alarmed us because we were immediately being told, here's a new technology. Heather and I looked at the new technology and it's like, oh, that's not a minor change. That's a radical departure from the way of vaccine. And this is you as a biologist examining this?

Yep. Heather and me as a biologist, and I have a little background in immunology. And Heather is a biologist as well. Absolutely. We're evolutionary biologists. So anyway, we looked at these technologies and thought, wow, you are intervening in a nested series of complex systems in a way that you can't possibly predict the outcome. You just couldn't know at that point. And so that caused us to dig deeper, which got us in more and more trouble and actually landed us at Gerrit van den Bosch's work pretty quickly, right, which introduced a whole new set of questions, you know, beyond the question of how safe is this for the individual. The

question is, well, what does this vaccination program mean for the pandemic itself, right? And what he said, which there was no evidence that it was taking place at the time, but what he said is, look, if you vaccinate into a pandemic and you do so broadly across the population, you're going to drive the evolution of variants, right? You are going to create an evolutionary arms race, and you are going to cause the number of variants to proliferate. And, you know, at the time, I couldn't say for sure that he was right. But what I could say was that he was making evolutionary sense. There was nothing terribly complex about his argument, and it was robust. And I think now we are seeing,

not only have we seen that proliferation of variants, but we are now seeing the grudging acceptance that that's what's happened in places like the Washington Post. Seeing it in the front of the Washington Post was wild. Just to see that admission and have the discussion open up, are the vaccines causing variants? Because that was the, what was the exact title? See if we can find the Washington Post title. I read it and I was like, whoa.

First, lean a win. Discussing openly the superior immunity that comes from natural immunity from catching the virus and recovering and how much better it is in so many different ways. And to have her turn the course and have her say masks don't work, cloth masks don't work, you need an N95, otherwise it's just theater, and it's just facial decorations. And then to go from that to her describing how natural immunity has to be recognized and that it is actually better and then showing that people have been vaccinated and then boosted. The more vaccines you get, it seems like there's more prevalence of people catching COVID, which is wild. more prevalence of people catching COVID, which is wild. Yes. And if you think carefully about what I told you the definition of a vaccine was before it was altered, that means, and we can get into this question of the IgG4 result that recently emerged.

What is that? result that recently emerged. What is that? This was a result that showed surprisingly and in contrast to the other true vaccines that they looked at, the mRNA vaccines, and this is not true for the DNA version, but for the mRNA vaccines like the Pfizer and the Moderna, Pfizer and the Moderna, that after three doses, they saw a radical elevation in the percentage of the antibodies that are part of this class called IgG4. Ig is just, it means immunoglobulin. It's a synonym for antibody. IgGG is a class of antibody, and it fights pathogens. But IgG4 is a special subclass, and it has, you know, all things in biology are complex, and so it has multiple implications. But IgG4 is actually part of a system in which the body attenuates its own response to an antigen. So the mind-blowing, and it's an early result, maybe it doesn't get replicated, but it was published in Science

Immunology, Top Flight Journal. The implication is that the evolutionary path we have traveled is causing the pathogen now to be able to trigger a response that will cause the immune system not to fight. Nobody knows what happens next. It's a very dangerous discovery. How does that work? Well, think about it this way. Well, think about it this way. The way we develop the amazing immune system that we have that allows us to fight off pathogens for our entire life, including pathogens with which we have no experience, is that we have a system. It's one of the two fundamental properties of our immune system that allows it to fend off anything we might encounter. and it's called the self-non-self-recognition system. And the way the self-non-self-recognition system happens is that before you're born, in utero, you have a huge diversity of immune cells that are all a little different, and they react to antigens that are electromagnetically distinct from each other. And basically, in principle, they can react to almost anything, the electromagnetic signature on the surface of almost anything biological.

But while you're in utero, you're exposed to almost nothing from the outside, right? You're insulated by your mother. And so that means that any cell in that library that is reacting when you're in utero is reacting to you. And so all of the cells that react when you're in utero are eliminated, leaving only the cells that don't react to you, right? That is basically the definition of non-self, right? Anything that wasn't eliminated is potentially an enemy. Now that can result in a lot of weirdness, like you breathe in some pollen. That's not self. And so the body can react to it and it can overreact and it can make a problem Now that can result in a lot of weirdness, like you breathe in some pollen. That's not self, and so the body can react to it, and it can overreact, and it can make a problem for you that it shouldn't.

But in general, this system just sits there dormant, and any time it runs into an antigen that it hasn't seen, it treats it like an invader, and it fights. But what happens if something about the system, let's say that your physiology changes in some way so that your own tissues are now triggering the system, right? Well, there are ways in which the system can attenuate that response. When you go to an immunologist to deal with an allergy, and the immunologist will give you allergens, right, which sounds like a recipe for an allergy attack. But the point is, if you do this in a particular way, you can trigger this attenuation signal, and you can cause the body to stop reacting to something that you were allergic to. So the idea that a pathogen, and mind you, not a normal pathogen, a pathogen that we can now be pretty darn certain was engineered by humans, at least in part.

That pathogen is now triggering that signal that causes the immune system not to react anymore, means we're in a whole new landscape. fact, because there was a recent article that I saw someone quoting on a podcast as evidence that this is a natural spillover, and that there is new discussion that points to COVID-19 being a natural spillover. And I saw that wildly and widely dismissed by many people that were furious, saying that ignored the science that points to the fact that this was engineered. What is your perspective on this? Well, I've believed from the very beginning that, well, almost the very beginning, actually one hour into my awareness, I changed my mind. I tweeted at first.

So as you know, I'm a bat biologist. I studied bats in grad school. And when Heather and I were in the Amazon writing the first draft or finishing the first draft of our book, we emerged to the news that this, what was then called novel coronavirus, was circulating. And so it just sort of dawned on us, what is this? And we were trying to figure it out. And I looked at the initial materials. I looked at the explanation of how it likely had come through bats. I was familiar with the family of bats in question. And I just decided to tweet to my followers that, you know, more or less the story added up as far as I could tell. And I did that, and I immediately got back a response somewhat annoyed by a longtime follower of mine who said, so it's just a coincidence that there's a biosafety level 4 lab in the exact place that this virus emerged?

And I said, what the hell? I don't know anything about this. I don't know what a biosafety level four lab is. And I started to look into it because, you know, if those labs were everywhere, then maybe it doesn't mean anything that there happened to be one in the very place that the virus seems to have emerged. But they aren't everywhere. And the idea that the bats in question aren't in the place where the virus emerged and the lab was and that the lab had been searching for exactly this sort of virus in the wild, it all pointed in a particular direction. And so I immediately followed up my tweet and said, don't listen to that. There's more here to be understood. And the deeper I dug, the more convincing I found

it that this had actually emerged from the lab and not as a simple matter of having passed through the lab. You know, that's possible that you could bring a virus into the lab and not do anything to it and then it could escape. Just a coincidence. Right. But that's not what this was. What we're talking about here is a highly unusual pathogen with unusual, in fact, unprecedented genetic alteration, given the subfamily that it's in. And all the circumstantial evidence points to this laboratory, the behavior that it is known to have been involved in. So, you know. Could you explain what is unusual about the pathogen? Well, many things are unusual about the pathogen. Part of it, it's very unusual for a pathogen to behave in the way that this one behaves, right?

This is seeming to hit many different tissues in the body. And so, you know, I will say I have been accused by some of being part of the group that thinks COVID isn't serious and that the vaccines are dangerous. I do think the vaccines are dangerous, but I also think COVID is dangerous. I think the hazard of it is not captured in the case fatality rate, that this thing is obviously having impacts that we don't understand. So that's one set of things. And I would just point out, there's a reason that a normal pathogen doesn't do the wide scale damage that COVID seems to. And that reason is that in general, pathogens don't have an interest in harming you. They harm you incidentally, right? In fact,

they do best when you are healthy enough to walk around and spread them. And so they tend to spare tissues that do not help them to be transmitted. Well, that's not the case with this pathogen. This pathogen seems to invade all kinds of tissues that don't help it to spread. And that is- How so? Well, it seems to invade using the ACE2 receptor, and it shows all kinds of pathologies. I mean, from, you know, damaged toes and weird circulation issues, it seems to get into the brain. It's a very strange pathogen. You would expect it to self-limit to tissues that help it spread. And the fact that it doesn't is actually what you would predict if you enhanced a virus in a laboratory environment where it was freed from the constraint of having to keep its host healthy enough to

spread it. So let's take, I don't know whether this is right or not, but logically, at least, it serves the purpose of explaining it. If you think about the loss of taste and smell that so many people seem to experience with COVID, well, now imagine a wild animal that had that effect, lost its taste and smell, right? Well, for most mammals, that would be a devastating loss from the point of view of them even just feeding themselves, right? So it would be a hazard if COVID was spreading in wild animals and it was robbing them of this essential tool for finding food, then it would cause its host to start starving. That's not a good thing. On the other hand, if you caged a bunch of animals together and you allowed them to spread the pathogen and you fed them, let's say it's ferrets, which is a likely experimental organism. If you were feeding them ferret chow and they were falling all over each other infecting other ferrets, then that constraint is lifted.

Then the point is it's not bad to lose your sense of taste and smell from the point of view of passing on the pathogen. And that would fit very well for the human population too, right? You lose your taste and smell. It's annoying, but it doesn't get in the way of you getting fed. And so anyway, there are many different ways in which this pathogen behaves in a bizarre fashion. The fern cleavage site, which allows it to invade tissue so effectively. A, that's something that we knew would take a Sbrocco coronavirus and cause it to be highly infective in humans. We knew that before SARS-CoV-2 ever emerged. So to find it on this virus, even though no other member of the subfamily has it, is conspicuous. So I guess what I'm telling you is I rapidly moved in the direction of believing

that the most likely explanation was laboratory enhancement and escape. Everything I have seen only moves me farther in that direction, including the repeated efforts to shut down that explanation, right? I mean, every month we go and we don't find the intermediate host is evidence that there is no intermediate host. The intermediate host is the lab, right? So we are continuing to add evidence upon evidence. And every time that we are, you know, caused to wonder, you know, every time we see headlines that say, no, it turns out it was the wet market. There's nothing there. So what was this that has been recently cited? This article?

You're talking about the wet market article? Yes. Well, it's now been, I think, a couple months since then. I would have to go back and look at it exactly. But basically, they did an analysis where they showed basically the pattern of early infections having some claimed epicenter in the wet market. But this isn't really evidence of anything. I mean, for example, imagine that there was a coffee shop in the bottom floor of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And then imagine that you did this analysis and you found, oh, goodness, there's an epicenter of disease in the coffee shop of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That doesn't mean that the coffee shop has anything to do with it.

It just means that people from the lab go to the coffee shop. And the fact is the wet market is close to the lab. So people from the lab undoubtedly went to the wet market. And we still haven't found anything like a creature in the wet market that has evidence of having carried or transmitted this disease. So anyway, it's smoke and mirrors. And smoke and mirrors doesn't mean that there couldn't be the discovery tomorrow of some intermediate host in the wild and some story that would account for all of the evidence, but it gets less likely every day. And why do you think, do you have a speculation to why they would publish that?

Oh, I mean, let's put it this way. What I said on the DeSantis committee to look into our COVID response, what I said in our public meeting a few weeks back, was that COVID is the largest blunder in human history. I believe that's unambiguous. And I'm not talking about the largest blunder in public health. It's clearly that too. But I'm talking about the largest blunder in human history, starting with the decision to circumvent the ban on gain-of-function research that the U.S. Congress wisely imposed, to offshore the work to Wuhan, where they then found presumably the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, likely as a result of the interaction of the three miners who became sick in the guano-filled cave, brought the ancestor back into the lab, put it through gain-of-function experiments,

enhanced it with a fern cleavage site, and then lost control of it. Can you please explain the fern cleavage site? Well, the fern cleavage site is just a sequence. It's a small sequence of amino acids that alters the spike protein so that it is especially effective at entering human tissues. So the point is, there was no natural member of the subfamily that has this feature. And it was well known amongst people who study these viruses that were a virus of this type to acquire that feature, that that would radically enhance its capacity to get into human tissues. So I don't

really know whether, I mean, I guess I assume that the virologists who are constantly bombarding us with the story that a pandemic is going to leap out of nature at any time, it's going to be devastating, and we're going to have to study these dangerous viruses in order to be prepared, right? That's the story that caused all of this work to get funded. Now, I don't really believe this story. I think it's wrong. But it may be that the people who are spreading it do believe it. And that having believed it, that crazy as this sounds, what they did was they found a virus that had many characteristics that would make it a dangerous human pandemic-causing pathogen, but it didn't have all of them. And so in order to figure

out what it would be like if it did have all of them, they gave it the ones it didn't have. And they did a certain amount of genetic engineering and a certain amount of gain of function work using probably ferrets, using humanized mice, using human airway tissue. And they just gave it a bunch of puzzles and they taught it. And then it escaped, right? That's the assumption. How much evidence do we have of that specific type of research being done at Wuhan? Well, that's a good question. We have circumstantial evidence. And in fact, a lot of this work was done stateside before the ban on gain-of-function research. So we have a fair amount of circumstantial evidence of what sorts

of enhancements the Wuhan Institute was interested in and that they had the capacity to do them. We've seen a lot of these experiments done piecemeal prior to the ban. As to exactly what they did, this is something that we, the people of planet Earth, are entitled to know. And this is one of the reasons why I'm so troubled by the perspective that so many people have that, well, wherever it came from, now we've got SARS-CoV-2, so let's just deal with it. And the answer is no. There's an awful lot contained in knowing what exactly they did that might help us to fight it, what they knew about what they were doing, what protocols were used, what animals were used. That is vital information. And the fact that many people see it as sort of beside the point is quite wrong. And in fact, you know, the IgG4 result that I was just

telling you about is actually, it is another one of these indications. One of the things that I said very early in the pandemic was that because this is not a normal virus, all of the rules that we usually assume will be true, right? Like the thing is going to evolve into a lower state of virulence. All of those assumptions are now invalid because we don't even know what we're dealing with, right? We're not dealing with a normal spillover event. We're dealing with a synthetic spillover event and with a virus that has experienced an environment that is very much unlike nature. So anyway, I still believe that it is in our vital interest to figure out exactly what happened and when. I will point out that is also a big question that leads in a number of very disturbing directions.

But leaving these questions aside is not in our interest. So back to your question, though. Why are they continually trying to reanimate the explanation that this is a natural spillover event? Because if it isn't, then we know who did it, right? Anthony Fauci was key to circumventing the ban on gain-of-function research that resulted in the Wuhan lab being funded by us to do this work. So if this was a natural spillover event from a wet And so part of what you and I have experienced, right, the incredible pushback that we have gotten for just noticing obvious patterns, right, patterns of dishonesty, patterns of evidence that aren't being discussed. That is about the fact that those who are responsible cannot allow a full investigation. I don't know what will happen if the truth were to fully emerge about not only what was the explanation for how this virus came into the world, when it came into the world, right? Those are really important questions.

But also what we failed to do, what responses we failed to deploy. And then ultimately, we get back to the questions of Gerrit Vandenbosch, right? Because we didn't deal with the pathogen properly at the beginning, because we didn't deploy the drugs that we had at our disposal that did work, we ran out the clock on the brief period of time when we might have driven it extinct or at least controlled it. And in lieu of that, what we got is a proliferation of variants. And this is utterly out of our control now. This is now a pathogen that is learning tricks that look like they allow it to shut down our own immunity. And what's more, the fact of these IgG4 antibodies that likely have an attenuating effect on immunity, right? Which would explain

why vaccinated and especially heavily vaccinated people do seem to be so vulnerable to this disease now. But that offers an opportunity to other pathogens that can figure out that small sequence, that motif that will allow them to trigger the same stand down, right? So we are now dealing with, yes, one pandemic, but also a mechanism that will allow other pathogens to evolve and escape of their own using our so-called vaccine response and its impact on the immune system. So this could potentially, so as people are vaccinated and boosted and then boosted again, this would accentuate this mechanism. Yes, the more, so again, it appears to be, and there's a whole world of things we might discuss with respect to the distinction between the DNA versions of the so-called vaccine and

the mRNA version. There is a radical distinction in the implications of these things, both for personal health and apparently for the pandemic. The DNA version does not appear to trigger this. But yes, for people who got the mRNA shots, the more of them they got, the more pronounced this effect. So that raises all kinds of possibilities. And one of the things that I'm still struggling to understand is what are the implications for those of us who didn't get the mRNA shot or those who got one or two but not three or those who got the DNA shot instead, right? Is this going to create two very different levels of vulnerability, right, where only the people who were heavily vaccinated with the mRNA are going to have this vulnerability.

Or is this going to create such a large number of infected people that that is going to allow these pathogens to experiment and find those of us who didn't get this primary vulnerability? I'm hoping, well, frankly, I'm hoping that we wise up and we confront what I think is maybe the most important question of the whole pandemic, which is what would the world look like if we hadn't done anything unusual? What would it look like if we stopped doing the unusual stuff now and started behaving reasonably? Right. stopped doing the unusual stuff now and started behaving reasonably, right? And my sense is the sooner we start behaving reasonably and let normal medical practice figure out how to treat the disease rather than this top-down stuff, the better off we're going to be. But, you know, Gerrit Vandenbosch has been right about a lot. And part of the troubling thing is that he was, we now know that he was right or effectively know that he was right about the proliferation of variants that were going to be driven by our absurdly narrow vaccine program. thing about these vaccines is that because they have this basically just spike protein and they all work the same way, whether they're DNA or RNA, they're producing the same protein. The point is that gives the pathogen a very clear, narrow signal, right, about how to evolve to evade

this immunity. It's not like normal immunity. If you get sick with COVID, you and I have both had it, right? Our immune systems will have reacted to multiple different molecular motifs on the surface of that pathogen. What as yours did, but I might be particularly immune or vice versa. But when you have everybody, when you have literally billions of people who've all been given the same very narrow instruction about how to fight this pathogen, I mean, I don't know. There's got to be an easy MMA analogy here, right? If every fighter in the world adopted one trick and tried to perfect it, right, that trick would become a vulnerability. Am I wrong? No, you were right. You're right. Unless you're really good at that trick. This brings in the question, what about people that were vaccinated and then got COVID and recovered? Do they gain the same sort of natural

immunity that people who were unvaccinated who got COVID and recovered? Well, another one of our, I hesitate to say catchphrases. I think that trivializes it. But another one of the things that Heather and I often say on Dark Horse is welcome to complex systems. And that's what we say when somebody, you know, thinks they understand enough about biology to get ahead of it, and then, of course, you know, it doesn't work, right? And so the answer is there are many different ways that intervening in the nested series of complex systems that are in play here can go wrong, right?

One of them that we have been talking about for quite a long time is something called original antigenic sin. It's a strange name, but what it basically means is when you tell the immune system how to react to a particular pathogen, right, the immune system gets used to that being the right answer. And it gets harder and harder for the immune system to find its way to a new and better answer, right? So the point is the immune system becomes habitual, and that habitual nature can be counterproductive, right? That's one way that things can go wrong. We also have something called antibody-dependent enhancement, where if you think about the battle between a pathogen and immunity, well, pathogens can pretty well count on immunity, right?

I mean, if you've got a pathogen that attacks mammals, every mammal it's going to encounter has an immune system. All of those immune systems are going to produce antibodies. So the point is, well, what can you do with antibodies is a question that these pathogens are constantly facing. And one of the things that they can do is they can use antibodies to gain access to cells in a way that they couldn't do without the antibody response. So these are just multiple ways that our intervention can make things worse and not better. And we are now discovering that there's a whole other layer, right? The IgG4 result that I was talking about isn't antibody-dependent enhancement, right? It seems related to original antigenic sin, but in a whole different way with a new mechanism.

with a new mechanism and how this works in a population where what you are now doing is you are creating an incubator for new variants, not only of COVID, but of other diseases. That's a recipe for disaster. And I don't, you know, I mean, you're an outdoorsman. If you're doing something and it's just making things worse, right, step one is stop doing it. I mean, in fact, I should ask you about this. I've always wondered if this is the reason that people do get knocked out in a fight. It's an interesting reaction that the body has to just suddenly shut down in the face of battle. But the way it looks to me, okay, so you're out there in nature and you're engaged in some battle with something and you keep getting hit in the head. Well, it's not obvious that collapsing

is a good idea, but it might be, right? If you collapse in front of a grizzly bear, it might leave you alone. I don't know. I don't think that's what happens. You don't? No. What it is is the human body and all bodies are vulnerable in terms of the structure of the brain, the way the brain is encased in the skull. And if that gets disrupted, it just shuts the

system. It's just mass trauma. Now, the problem happens when people encounter mass trauma over and over and over again, and they become particularly vulnerable to it. Now, there's a lot of theories as to why that happens. And therein lies the theory that the body recognizes that this is happening again. And the best way to avoid it is to just shut off. And so what happens is fighters become what they call chinny. And what chinny means, it's a slang term for someone who gets knocked out very easily. And it's because they've had so many concussions and they've had so much trauma to the brain the brain recognizes this pattern and just says I know where this is going this guy's gonna he's a really tough guy he's gonna just take a beating and we're not gonna allow that so we're just gonna

shut off but this is all theoretical well I think that second explanation is exactly what I'm yeah but. But it'd be the initial concussion though, initially getting knocked out because everyone is vulnerable to it initially. And I don't think that that's an evolutionary advantage. I think it's just, we're not designed to get hit. And it's just a vulnerability of these incredibly complex systems that we have that use neurons and nerves and your bones and tissue interact with these nerves. And upon trauma, nerves get compressed, the brain gets rattled inside the head, and there's massive trauma that goes on, including bleeding. And there's a lot going on that would cause auous in the sense that, you know, there are a lot of levels of dysfunction and you go from fully functional to, you know,

effectively asleep. Um, that the idea that the disruptions wouldn't result in certain, uh, circuits going offline while others remain online is the thing that surprises me about it. Okay. Let's watch the Geert van den Bosch thing. Sure. Let's play that, Jamie. So this is, what is his background? He's actually a vaccinologist. So he has a broad evolutionary and immunological background. And he also, I believe he has a veterinary background. So what I'm saying is that now we are in a situation where vaccinees are

sitting, because of Omicron, on non-neutralizing antibodies that enhance the infectiousness at the upper respiratory tract. That's why they become more susceptible to infection, but that at the same time is still suppressing severe disease at the lower respiratory tract because these antibodies, these very same antibodies can prevent, can inhibit the process of trans-infection. So in other words, what I'm saying here is that now the virus is put under immune pressure from the non-neutralizing antibodies that prevent it from becoming more virulent, from causing severe disease. And provided we sustain this immune pressure, it is very clear that the virus will overcome this. Because don't forget the pressure is tremendous. Omicron is circulating. People have been primed by way of the vaccination.

And even if this, sorry to say, even if these idiots don't decide to come with an Omicron vaccine, come with an Omicron vaccine, everyone in the population is now boosted with Omicron because it is circulating. The vaccinees who are having non-neutralizing antibodies are highly susceptible. So they are highly susceptible to priming. So these non-neutralizing antibodies will very soon reach elevated titers in the vaccinees. And the more people we vaccinate, the higher the prevalence of these elevated titers of non-neutralizing antibodies. You can imagine all this stuff

is putting tremendous pressure no longer on the infectiousness of the virus. That has been done, that has been taken care of, but now on the virulence. in that paper i have even predicted what molecular changes could enable the virus to stay very infectious but at the same time to increase its virulence yeah holy moly. Yeah. So – And what kind of pushback did he experience? Because in the beginning of the pandemic, he was one of the few people that was an expert in vaccinations that was sounding this alarm.

So he's sounding multiple alarms. Maybe I should just translate a little bit about what he was saying there. About what he was saying there. What he's getting at is the way I've been putting this piece of the puzzle is that we are running the largest gain of function experiment in the history of the world. And we are doing that by pushing this virus around, first allowing it to escape into the public and then pushing it around with these cartoonishly narrow vaccines. And his point is that you actually, you've got two parameters that are distinct. You have the infectiousness, how good is it from getting from one person to another, and the virulence, how sick does it make you? And his point is, the thing has learned the infectiousness trick very, very well, right? But we are putting a pressure on it where it is good at getting into the upper airway and not so good at getting into the lower airway where it

make you much sicker. And the point is, his point here, if I read it correctly, is that each person constitutes an opportunity for these viruses in light of the antibodies that are being induced to learn the trick of infecting more tissue, right? So what he's saying is that he expects, and he has predicted two things, one of which, and he's been on my podcast twice, and I talked to him about this the last time he was on when we were at the conference in Bath, England together. The one thing he's predicted is a proliferation of variants in response to the so-called vaccines. That we've seen, and you're now seeing it acknowledged in the press. The other thing he has predicted is an increase in the virulence, the severity of the disease as a result of this program.

And he admits that this has been much slower to emerge than he expected. The question is, will it happen? And he's describing here in this clip the way in which he expects it to happen, that it will begin to pursue tissues farther down and succeed in infecting tissues farther down in the respiratory tract. So we'll see. But, you know, the thing that I really appreciate about Garrett, he's very broad-minded. He's very honest about what he's gotten right, what he's not gotten right, what's still up for grabs. And he is sounding an alarm that I think privately has been acknowledged by far more people than have been willing to publicly say, yeah, unfortunately, Gerard Vandenbosch is making sense. So I think if I understand him correctly,

there is an awareness inside vaccinology about the absurdity of what we are doing. But because of the pressure, the same pressure that you and I have felt not to talk about certain things, pressure that you and I have ignored often at our peril, but that other people have reacted to that by becoming quiet about what they know, even when what they know is professional and scientific. Well, you had a doctor from the UK on your podcast recently. Who are we talking about? Didn't you? Oh, you're talking about...

The cardiologist? Yeah, Asim Malhotra, I believe is how you pronounce it. Yep. He is a cardiologist who was initially very favorable on the vaccine program, and he lost his father. And because he's a cardiologist and a very smart, decent fellow, he dug and concluded that very likely he had lost his father to a vaccine adverse event. And it caused him to dig deeply and to reverse his position on the wisdom of these so-called vaccines. But what was interesting was that these similar conclusions had been reached by these other academics who had decided to not publish this. That was one of the things that he discussed, because they were worried about funding being withdrawn and public ostracization. Well, this is true across the board. I mean,

this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where ultimately, if you don't respond to any of the threats along the way, ultimately, you're going to face disciplinary action, or you will face a drying up of your funding, the very stuff that allows an academic to continue to do what they do. And at some point, maybe this is the way to think of it. Sometimes I will go to somebody's Twitter feed or some other page and I will look at And they are suddenly, they're reacting to a world in which, you know, these so-called vaccines were terrifically successful at controlling COVID. Really? How could you even, how could you even get there, right? It just doesn't make any sense. So is that the narrative that it saved millions of lives? And you keep hearing that narrative

repeated over and over and over again. I don't know how they do. Do you think the vaccines have saved lives? We actually know more about this than you would think. First of all, I should point out that this number, which everyone, including Anthony Fauci, has been repeating in the most recent version of it was 3 million American lives have been saved by vaccines is utter nonsense. It is based on a model. So that should initially that should cause you a good deal of alarm in and of itself. It's very easy to create a model that will tell you anything you want to hear. And in this case, they've got a model and they fed it garbage, including they fed it completely unrealistic numbers with respect to how many people would have died if we had done nothing, right? So,

for example, they gave it a number of daily deaths that's higher than any day that we ever saw with respect to COVID. They didn't calculate any rate of death from vaccine adverse events. And they projected basically what they did is they took a model and they fed it an absurd estimate of how good the vaccines were. And then they asked the model how many people were saved. And it's nonsense. Now, what we know from the work of Christine Stable-Benn, who is another member of Governor DeSantis' committee on COVID response, her work says that the mRNA vaccinations have cost more lives than they have saved. And for the DNA vaccines, it is slightly the reverse. There is a slight benefit in terms of all-cause mortality, but it does not appear to come through resistance to COVID. It appears to come through some sort of general resistance that we don't understand.

Now, I would guess that latter result will reverse if you measure over a long period of time. In other words, these shots have only been out for a brief period. And so to the extent that there are ongoing impacts, a slight benefit at year one of a treatment will reverse if there are downstream negative consequences that happen five years out and 10 years out. But anyway, put that aside. The basic answer is most people in the U.S. got the mRNA shots, and those shots appear to increase your risk of death, not decrease it. So I find that extremely alarming. And even more alarming is the fact that there does not seem to be a response to it

in the public health apparatus. There was a very disturbing moment in time where there was something that was published that said that more unvaccinated people are getting COVID and a higher percentage of unvaccinated people or excuse me, more vaccinated people were getting COVID and a higher percentage of vaccinated people were dying from COVID. people were getting COVID and a higher percentage of vaccinated people were dying from COVID. And then I was thinking, okay, but most people have been vaccinated. Like when they're saying that you're dealing with a much larger number to draw from. So if you have three quarters of the population gets vaccinated and one quarter doesn't, and you have a certain number of deaths per capita, and it's standard, it seems to apply universally, then you're, of course, going to get more people who are vaccinated that die from COVID. And all that says is that the vaccines weren't as effective as we hoped, or that COVID

got more dangerous because of variants. But it doesn't mean that it's preventing people from recovering from COVID better than people that were unvaccinated. Well, I agree. These things are hard to interpret. And the way to see your point clearly is if you had a population where 100% of the people were vaccinated, then everybody who died of COVID would be vaccinated and it wouldn't tell you anything. So that's certainly a danger. But I will say, you know, the most difficult job during the pandemic has been figuring out which evidence is actually real and should be included in the model and which evidence should be excluded. And, you know, that should be the job of academic fields and universities

and journals. They should be doing that job. And almost none of them are. So that leaves those of us in the public with a toolkit to even understand what these papers say to figure it out. But it does appear that the mRNA vaccines specifically are creating a level of vulnerability. And in particular, I would say one conspicuous feature of the landscape is that we do not see the rates of contracting COVID dropping radically, which you would expect them to. And you should expect people dying from COVID to drop radically. Why? Because the disease is going to cull those who are most vulnerable to it just automatically. And so that leaves a population

that is more and more capable of enduring the pathogen. And so again, this is one more place where we don't see a familiar landscape. We see an unusual pathogen behaving in ways that are counterintuitive. And now we are beginning to look into processes inside the immunity, which as far as we know, don't accompany other pathogens. All of that suggests a very ominous picture. And I would say, well, let's compare two worlds. Let's compare the world where when COVID emerged, we did nothing official. We recognized that it existed to the extent that we could do that. And we just let doctors figure out how to treat it, right? If that had happened, then doctors would have, I don't mean this in a negative way, they would inevitably have killed a certain number of people following hunches, deploying

techniques that didn't work, but they would have discovered that and they would have gotten rapidly better at treating this disease. And they would have discovered all of the compounds that work and they would have talked to each other about in what way to deploy those compounds, at what dosage. They would have discovered all of that stuff. And we can see that in the implementation of respirators. Of ventilators. Ventilators, excuse me. Absolutely.

Because that was the narrative at the beginning of the pandemic. We need more ventilators. We need more ventilators. And I must say that there is a part of me that is increasingly revisiting that chapter and I you can hear me hesitating to say this but one of the effects of the deployment of these ventilators and the fact that it killed people was that it elevated our collective sense of how dangerous the pathogen was. And that fear was a big part of how we were sold on the rest of it. So you have a lot of vulnerable people in a population.

They're concentrated amongst the elderly and the infirm. Nobody is okay. Nobody decent is okay with the fact that if you have a new pathogen circulating, it is liable to kill those people disproportionately. However, it's not unexpected and it should not trigger you to expose the rest of your population to risks that they don't need to face. And we experience that with the flu. Right. All the time. Yeah. Because the flu does severely impact people who are compromised, people who are obese, people who are old. Right. And, you know, it also is it teaches us another lesson that's really well understood in biology, right? If you see that

somebody has died at 85 of the flu, right? Okay, did the flu kill them? Partly, but a lot of what happened is that they have expended all of the capacity to fight over a lifetime, and then the flu pushed them over the edge the last bit, right? Did it rob them of life? Yeah, it robbed them of some life. It robbed them of a life that was probably a greatly diminished quality and wasn't going to last very long. So when the death certificate says the person died of flu, it's not telling us a complete story. And COVID did the same thing, right? It did it in a way that a sober response would have allowed us to remain calm and not overreact. Something was very interested in using our fear to get us to be compliant. What it did is it took the evidence of people who had died of COVID who were very close to death anyway for one reason or another.

And famously now took people who didn't really die of COVID but died with COVID. And it used those numbers to cause us to think the pathogen was something other than it was. And again, I'm not telling you COVID isn't a dangerous pathogen. SARS-CoV-2 is a dangerous pathogen. I'm very worried about where it goes. But the case fatality rate is not one that should have caused us to vaccinate literally billions of people. Including people that were not vulnerable, like children. Right. And this is the thing that is now so alarming to me. You can imagine a public health authority that was arrogant and that thought it understood things way better than it did. And it thought it had a plan. And maybe it dreamt that by deploying these novel vaccines that would surely be the basis for many future successful vaccine campaigns against other then discover that it didn't work and it hurt people. But at the point that we're seeing an undeniable pattern of damage, and we know that that damage is disproportionately experienced by younger people, and that the risk of COVID is disproportionately to the old,

the idea that it doesn't stop, the idea that it doesn't turn around and say, well, the vaccines are good. Let's give them to people over 65. If you're over 40 and you want one, you can have one, but we're not going to vaccinate anybody young because the risk benefit ratio doesn't make sense. The fact that it doesn't do that means, I think, that somehow whatever is driving this policy is absolutely comfortable with the death of other people. How could it not be? I mean, how could you recommend these mRNA vaccines for children who are not, at least at the moment, vulnerable to COVID? How could you do it? And do you think this is because of financial pressure? Because this is the only thing that

makes sense to me, because there's a vast financial interest in vaccinating as many people as possible. You know, I see that as the shallow end of the pool, right? And I try very hard not to get ahead of the evidence. I would say at the very least, the floor of plausible explanations, something is interested in making money, is comfortable from decades of corrupting the public health apparatus with making decisions that result in... Acceptable amounts of losses. Yeah. And acceptable amounts would leave a normal person with their jaw on the floor. But something has become very comfortable with this. And so it may be that.

But I also have an uneasy sense about what the larger picture may be here. So there was a concept that I was reluctant to talk about for months. It wouldn't let me go, but I was reluctant to talk about it publicly. And I finally did release it on Dark Horse. Admittedly, it needs a better name. I call it the time-traveling money printer. And to make a long story reasonably short, you presumably have thought a little bit about black budgets.

So I guess for your audience, let me just briefly say that a black budget, you know, in a democracy, the power of the purse allows something like the Congress to control, you know, the intelligence community, for example. The intelligence community has to go to the Congress in order to get funding to do the things that it wants to do, but the intelligence community also has the capacity to do things that normal folks can't. And they can generate money that isn't on the books by using some of the advantages that come to them by virtue of their position. So you can imagine, for example, the DEA, it has to be involved in a certain number of drug deals in order to catch the bad guys, right? So it has some license to play in drug dealing and you could imagine, I don't, this is not about the DEA. I'm just using it as an example. But the DEA, if it decided it needed a black budget that wasn't under

the control of Congress, could use the leeway that it has in interacting with, you know, drug cartels to generate money that it could then use without anybody being able to say no. So that's a black budget. Now, black budgets are one way of doing this. But anything else that can generate money that isn't accounted for in a normal federal budget has the same potential. And what I want to do is just point out something that seems to have happened here that raises a financial question that I have not heard widely asked. So we've all gone through the thought exercise of if you had a time machine, what would you do with it? All right. And one answer is almost no matter who you are, even if you're a super good person who's interested in doing good things, money allows you to do good things. So your time machine, if it can go backwards in time, can allow you to buy Tesla or Apple or Amazon stock and turn a small amount of money into a huge amount of money.

And if it can go forward in time, you have similar opportunities, right? You can see what's going to go up or down and you can buy some or short. So anyway, a time machine would give you the opportunity to generate money. Now, as far as we know, time travel doesn't exist. I'm pretty compelled by Stephen Hawking's proof that it probably doesn't exist. You know about this? No. Stephen Hawking threw a party which he advertised for time travelers. He welcomed all time travelers

to come and none of them showed up. And he said, well, I guess it doesn't exist, right? Because if it did, they'd come. So anyway, let's assume time travel doesn't exist. There's another way of doing the same thing without an actual time machine, right? Printing money. And it requires an awful lot of power to either shape history or slow regular folks down in how much they realize and how quickly they realize it, right? If you're in a position to do that, then you can print money, right? If you know what's coming, if you know what history is going to do. It's a kind of insider information that is hard to prosecute. It's not like knowing something about a stock price from being an insider. And anyway, so my point is this.

There is substantial evidence that COVID began circulating such that it was an important component of what unfolded at the military games in Wuhan in September of 2019. And there's been lots of talk in various publications at this point about the possibility that COVID was circulating earlier than we knew. possibility that COVID was circulating earlier than we knew. But if folks knew that it was circulating earlier than we knew, or than the public knew, they had the opportunity to warn us and to help prepare us. But there's another opportunity, which is to actually take some time to position themselves financially so that when the pandemic finally did emerge, it would print money for them, right? If you know that a pandemic is coming and that it is going to spread around the globe and it is going to cause all kinds of alterations, you can, you know, short stocks for cruise ships or, you know, airplanes, hotels, right? You can invest in pharmaceutical companies that have useful technologies, whatever. If you had that advanced

information, you could position yourself and it would result in a cryptic massive transfer of wealth. And so the question is, how much of the story here involves something having understood what was coming and having revealed it at a point that it was positioned rather than it having emerged naturally and the world suddenly all became aware at the dawning of 2020, that's the question is, was there something about this that goes beyond what you were suggesting, which is, well, there's an opportunity to make money if you're in a pharmaceutical company, there's going to be lots of opportunities to sell treatments and vaccines and things like that. That's all true, but there's a much bigger opportunity if somebody is willing to effectively slow down the public awareness of a historical event. And I guess the last thing I would say on that is the environment that we live in, the environment that actually results in you and me doing what we get to do in podcast space is an environment that exists primarily because people are absolutely starved for reliable sources.

Right. Every paper is broken. Every university is broken. And that means that people are left to find voices that for whatever reason are credible, because they're honest, because they correct their mistakes, whatever. And I guess the point I would make is that the question of zero being a special number interfaces the question of the time-traveling money printer in the sense that keeping people from having mechanisms that tell them what's true is an excellent way of detaining them so that this sort of financial gamesmanship can unfold, right? It has to be true that there aren't newspapers out there seriously pursuing Pulitzer Prizes for deep investigations that, you know, treat nothing as sacred. It doesn't seem to happen anymore. And the question is why? And I can, of course, be certain of nothing.

I'm as much an outsider to this as anybody. But I will say there's a version of the story in which our being kept in the dark is a perpetual source of wealth. And that means that people like you and I have to be specially punished for trying to get out of the dark. Right? It's what we do. We talk to interesting people who seem to have a beat on something. You know, I talked to Gerrit Vandenbosch and I'm in a position to know that what he's saying is at least sensible, right? Neither of us know it's going to come true, but I can certainly say there's nothing in that that isn't plausible. And that's very dangerous, right? The easiest thing, what they want to do is they want to dismiss Garrett

Vandenbosch. They want to say he's got a financial conflict of interest. That's why he's saying these things. Well, I don't see it. What I see is a small number of people who have two characteristics. The two characteristics are they've got a toolkit that allows them to see with some clarity. And the other characteristic is that they have the courage to speak about it when they're being threatened, right? And those people are actually making their way in the world and people are gravitating to us. And then I'm sure some people are faking it, But it has resulted in a very noisy sense-making environment. And I don't think it's naturally noisy. I think somebody has denied us the tools with which we would normally make sense and forced us into this realm of podcasts in which we have to struggle against ungodly levels

of propaganda, for example. You know, it's this thing that people do, the other people. I mean, we love to do it when there's a complex problem. One of the best ways to not look at people as being human is to categorize them as an enemy in some way. I mean, it is like historically, those are the bad people. Let's go kill them. We're the good people. We don't kill each other.

You punish people for killing each other. You reward them for killing the bad people. This is like tribal. It's gone on forever. You're seeing echoes of that in that woman's tweet. Well, but you're seeing something downstream of what's being called mass formation, and the mass formation appears to be downstream

of an industrial strength propaganda campaign, a very expensive one, designed to create these unsolvable puzzles for people so that they would end up in this mindset. And I think one of the things that people like you and I have to do is figure out, you know, where you draw the line. I mean, for me, I have nothing but forgiveness for people who got it wrong and who did what they thought was the right thing on the basis of bad information that they couldn't figure out was bad. I have the same perspective.

On the other hand, if you went after people who were so-called vaccine hesitant, if you went after them, if you demonized them, if you said they weren't entitled to medical services, if you said it wasn't a tragedy if they died, if you said that kind of stuff, and now you're one of the huge majority of people who has not gotten their bivalent booster and you're not getting it because there's something nagging at you because you're now vaccine hesitant, right? And the answer is own up to it. You don't get to keep pretending that you were right to demonize us. You have switched sides. You've done so on the basis that the evidence has persuaded you that something is not right.

And the answer is, look, you're not going to get punished by us if you come out now and you say, by us if you come out now and you say, actually, I had it wrong. But don't you dare keep coming after us and then hide this fact that you've become hesitant and you don't know how to file that in your own mind. So that's kind of where I draw the line. We have to get along with each other. We have to figure out how to do that again. And most people didn't do anything wrong. I'm not drawing that line. And the reason why I'm not drawing that line is because I feel like we have to be charitable and forgiving. And that's the only way we come to unity after this. And I don't want to demonize people who demonized me. I don't want to be angry at people that called me an anti-vaxxer or listen, man had dr peter hotez on early i had michael osterholm on early and i had him on again i mean i had all these people on early and i the osterholm podcast

freaked so many people out i did it the very early days of the pandemic before there was a vaccine and osterholm was painting a picture that was absolutely fucking terrifying and it terrified me and it made me want to get vaccinated it made a lot of people like looking forward to that vaccine and when you have this narrative in your mind and then you see people that are somehow or another the enemy of that narrative in your mind or a problem in that they're going to cause more problems for you and for other people and for vulnerable people. Even logically, it didn't make sense because the vaccine did stop the virus in its tracks. Why would you be angry at people that don't take it? Because they're just going to be

vulnerable. Why would you be angry? You should be sad. You should be trying to convince them. The only way to convince them that works is with love and understanding and to communicate with them in a way that's going to reach them. If you call people an idiot and a fool or a monster or demonize them and say, laugh when they die. I mean, there was this woman who's a famous food writer who demonized people. And she did it in a way where she was saying that the only good side was that the people that were dying were all these anti-vaxxers. And that somehow or another, that was good that these people that didn't trust the pharmaceutical companies, the companies that have had more criminal punishments,

companies that have had more criminal punishments, more fines for criminal behavior than virtually any industry that's ever existed, more lying about the adverse effects and the adverse reactions that people possibly could have or were going to have about these drugs that they pushed, where we have internal memos where they describe, like in terms of Vioxx, they describe these potential bad side effects that are going to happen, but also say, but we will do well with these. We have those. We have that evidence. So these people that got duped, I have nothing but love for them.

And I think the only way we're going to get out of this is if we forgive them. And people are so hesitant to do that. And they're like, fuck them. Fuck this. Fuck that. You can't have a society with fuck them. Because we are them. They are the...

I could have been one of them if I wasn't doing this fucking podcast. Okay? I could have been one of them if I wasn't doing this fucking podcast. OK, if I was just a regular comedian and I that's what I did for a living and I didn't pay much attention to alternative media and podcasts that were discussing this and people like Peter McCullough or Robert Malone or all these people that were sounding the alarm. If I was one of those people that didn't have the access to these kind of conversations, I would not have a nuanced perspective. And if I had gotten vaccinated and other people didn't, I would be like, fuck those people. I would be just like people I know who I used to be friends with who now hate me and are angry at me and talk shit about me online. And I forgive them because I would have been like them if I didn't have the access to the kind of conversations that I've had. If I didn't have the kind of mindset that I have,

that my personality that is just immune to bullshit, when bullshit hits me, I'm go, oh, I know what this is. I grew up without a dad. Okay. I don't trust people. I think there's a lot of bullshit in the world. You know, I've had people try to do things to me. I've been in dangerous situations. I know people can be sketchy. There's sketchy fucking people out there in the world. And the people that haven't experienced that and don't have that, that perspective, I can understand why they formed the conclusions that they did, because I could have been them. I 100% could have been them. The only way that we can help each other is for people like you and people like me and other people that have had these other perspectives, the Aaron

Rogers of the world, these people that have been demonized, to forgive people. And if we don't do that, we just continue these ideological tribes that battle each other and move the goalposts. Because we saw the goalposts get moved when it turned out that, well, COVID doesn't, or the vaccines don't stop transmission. They don't stop infection. They don't stop you from getting sick. We saw that happen. And then we saw the narrative change. We knew that. We knew that it was just going to prevent you from getting sick. We saw that happen, and then we saw the narrative change. We knew that, and we knew that it was just going to prevent you from serious illness. Well, why were you mad at me when I didn't get seriously ill? Why were people mad at me? Because I didn't do what they did, and they thought they did the right thing, and I didn't do the right thing,

and I'm some crazy kook who believes in the flat earth and fucking chemtrails or whatever the fuck you want to attribute to it. And that's the reason why. And I'm promoting dangerous misinformation. That actually turns out to be true. That's what's so crazy about all this. I totally agree. Now, let's sort this out. I'm arguing that we should be forgiving of people who made this error naturally, which is almost everybody.

What I'm arguing is beyond that line for me, where I'm not ready to forgive, is if they are continuing to do it. The only way they're going to stop is if we don't fight it. I feel like you have to present the information that seems to be true and valid. you have to present the information that seems to be true and valid. And I understand why people came to incorrect conclusions, why they have uncharitable perspectives about people that did not get vaccinated. I understand them, but I can't hate them because I could have been them. Oh, I'm not, I'm not arguing to hate anybody, but even if they're doing it right now, like that lady just tweeted that right now, Sean Penn recently said that he thinks that unvaccinated people should have been jailed I mean I don't hate him he shouldn't be this speaking on this right he says he's just famous

because he's famous his words carry weight he could have been a guy at a bar that you know works for some fucking trucking company or something he has this perspective we should fucking jail him but or something. And he has this perspective. We should fucking jail him. But it doesn't mean he's informed, right? It just means he's talking. And because he's talking and he says something that turns out to be incorrect and he happens to be famous,

then it becomes broadcast everywhere. I forgive him too. I forgive all these people with these wrong perspectives because that's the only way we get out of this. And if we don't do that, then we head into further and further polarization. And this is what I'm scared of. What I'm scared of is that people dig their fucking heels in and just decide that all these people that didn't get vaccinated are all a bunch

of MAGA support and racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic assholes. And we hate assholes. They did it out of hate. And that's what that lady's saying. She's like hook, line and sinker. They did it out of hate, which is crazy to say, especially if you might have known someone who had an adverse effect early on, which I did. I knew a few people that got really wrecked early on. Friends of mine, comedians. I know people that are in their 30s that have pacemakers now. I know people that have had adverse effects. There was a recent poll that suggested that 28% of Americans know someone who died from the vaccine. That's purely anecdotal. Now, do we know that that person actually died of the vaccine? We don't. There's some evidence that people have absolutely had an

adverse event that happened because of the vaccine, particularly young children who all of a sudden got myocarditis or heart attacks and strokes and died. There's a very reasonable connection that you can make to this young, very healthy athlete who gets a COVID vaccine and then immediately has a heart attack and dies. Hey, this might be the cause. Is there a mechanism that shows that the vaccine under rare conditions can cause that in people? Turns out, yes. Right? So I understand where all these people came from. And I really feel this very strongly. The only way we get out of this is all the people that were demonized and all the people that were called kooks and just continue to be kind and generous and charitable and say, I get it.

I get why you formed those opinions. I get why you were mad. I get why you followed this narrative. And I get why you dug your heels in. And I clearly get why you use social media to project this to comfort yourself that you're on the right side of history. You're in the right group of people. yourself that you're on the right side of history, you're in the right group of people, and to also punish those people who didn't do what you did to reinforce your opinion in yourself that you did the right thing. Well, I agree with you. I'm 90% of the way there. I'm not arguing that

the people who are still doing this are unforgivable. What I'm arguing is that the vast majority of people who have woken up to some degree to what has happened, that those people are ready to be forgiven, and that those people who are still doing this need to discover that they are being left behind by all of those who have woken up and recognized something wrong happened, and we need to figure out what it is. And I do want to talk a little bit about that mechanism that you hint at, where these mRNA vaccines seem to be causing myocarditis. Yeah, please do. Because this is also something that I've gotten in trouble for discussing, particularly on the Josh Zeps podcast. Because I pointed out that there was a study previous that showed that young boys in particular

were many times more likely to get myocarditis because of the vaccine. And then he said something to the effect of more people are getting myocarditis from COVID itself than from the vaccine. But now as more and more data is being understood and analyzed, that turns out to not be the case. Absolutely. And you were right at the time. That was visible to those of us who were following the evidence. But let's talk about- But I didn't know it. See, I'm not an expert. So me talking out of school like that, I took my medicine. I was like, look, this is what I had been told. This is what thought I love Josh Zeps I understand that Josh Zeps has a very different perspective on this than me he also comes from Australia which

was fucking hook line and sinker and he also works for a large corporation he was working on a radio show there and I get his perspective I fucking love the guy like I'm not mad at the guy I did look stupid at the time when we pulled up the wrong thing. But I had so many people who had told me who were experts who had told me that that is not the case. And then there was a bunch of people that defended me online that were scientists and doctors and said, no, this is actually particularly with the Moderna vaccine, which is a more potent version of the mRNA vaccine than the Pfizer. It's hotter. Yeah. So what is the mechanism and what is the data in terms of myocarditis? All right. So let's talk about, A, first of all, myocarditis is a bit of a problematic term because what it really means is just inflammation, right? And inflammation is not a pathology in and of itself. It's just a symptom, right? So the question is, what's causing the inflammation? Now, I need to talk about a little bit of immunological

function here in order for this to make sense. The mRNA vaccines, right, they were supposed to inject them into your arm, and they told us that the vaccine was supposed to stay more or less in the deltoid. Maybe it leaks into the lymphatic system, ends up presenting or creating antigen and then presenting it inside the lymph nodes. Well, that turns out not to have been the case. The stuff leaks out and it gets into the body, it gets into the bloodstream. Now, the problem with that is that if we then, from the point that we go from assuming that it's going to stay in your deltoid to, oh, it's going to circulate around the body in your blood, right? Now we have an immediate

problem. Can I pause you right there? Sure. When someone gets injected into the deltoid, are there times where it does stay in the deltoid? And is this because of where it's injected in the deltoid? Is it possible that it gets injected and punctures a vein or an artery and that's how it gets into the entire body and that that's why it only happens in some cases? There are several schools of thought and several things that probably contribute here. Okay. So you're no doubt aware of John Campbell. Yes.

So John Campbell. He's wonderful. Fantastic. And he's so level-headed and so careful. He's teaching the rest of us a lesson on how to convey the message without straying into the crosshairs. I really, I love the guy both at the level of his comprehension, his dedication to teaching things in such a way that people understand it anyway. And his expertise. I think so highly of him. Yes, me too. And he's been for a long time pointing out that there's an obvious thing known from medicine, which is that when you inject somebody,

that you pull back on the plunger and the syringe. And if you see blood, you go further in before you inject. And the reason for that is because you don't want to inject anything into a blood vessel. And we haven't seen that aspiration even when Biden got injected on television. Not only have we not seen it, it's been recommended that you don't do it. And the argument was, as I understand it, as crazy as this sounds, that the fact that it leaves the needle in a little longer and it might cause a little extra pain is going to result in more vaccine hesitancy, right? As if injecting things that are supposed to go into the muscle, but then end up in the bloodstream and then cause adverse

events isn't going to cause vaccine hesitancy. So is that possibly why some people got vaccinated and had no issue with it whatsoever? That is one possibility is that you've got two classes of people, those who got unlucky and the thing hit partially or completely inside of a blood vessel, and those who got lucky and it stayed more or less in the deltoid. Now, I don't think that that's the sum total of it, but no doubt you were unluckier if it hit a blood vessel. It's an important factor. And I will point out that it is not only John Campbell on this, but there's another guy who I've recently started reading, a guy named, I think it's Mark Girardot. And he's been advancing something that he calls bolus theory. I would call it hypothesis. But in any case, his point is that a lot of adverse

events having nothing to do with this particular vaccine, but in general have to do with those that fraction of cases in which somebody gets a huge dose, a bolus that flows through their circulatory system for something that was designed to leak out slowly through the lymph. So anyway, I would encourage people to look him up and check out his take on the COVID vaccines. people to look him up and check out his take on the COVID vaccines. But, oh, and then there's a third contributing, I guess there's a second contributing factor here potentially. And this is something that Peter McCullough has talked about. Peter McCullough has talked about it. You should also check out Chris Martinson. Do you know Chris Martinson? No. Chris Martinson. Oh, yes, I do. No, I do. Yes.

Peak Prosperity. Anyway, he's a lovely guy. He has a totally cool specialty for talking about the pandemic. He's a toxicologist. And so anyway, he's very excellent at what he does, and he's very clear-headed. He's also a very good teacher. And he has been talking about the manufacturing process of these vaccines. And the fact is, on top of everything else, on top of the bad design, and on top of the design failures, and on top of the poor choice of antigen, and all of the other things, there's the fact that the batches were incredibly uneven, right? So there are certain batches that have been hugely associated with adverse events and other batches that don't show up in the reports, right? So what Peter McCullough has said, I hope I'm getting this right, but what I think Peter McCullough has said is that it may be that people who experience none of the harms from these things have effectively gotten blanks,

right? So I don't know how common that is. I would say that one of the harms from these things have effectively gotten blanks, right? So I don't know how common that is. I would say that one of the overarching messages that I hope people will get from our discussion is that a lot of these questions are not hard to know the answer to, right? Is there or is there not a pattern of athletes collapsing on the field that is different from history. That's not a hard question to study. Is there or is there not a new phenomenon that is being seen in mortuaries where there are these large fibrous clot-like things? Is that new? Is that not new? Does it exist? Does it not exist? None of these things are hard to study. And what we're finding is that, in fact, you just have this absolute dedication to not studying these questions so that it remains ambiguous. The answer is, well, what does that tell us?

That nobody's looking. Because people, there's a real consequence to examining these things. There's a real consequence to speaking out, particularly a year ago. Well, that's true. A year ago, it was much more dangerous than it is today. And I believe that if you look at what's going on with the Washington Post now, where they're talking about these vaccines actually encouraging these variants to proliferate, and then also the lab leak theory being discussed on the front cover of Newsweek magazine, all these different things that are now happening that weren't happening before.

Lena Wen talking about natural immunity being superior to the immunity that's imparted by the vaccine, talking about how exercise is prevented, and not a lot of exercise, just 10 minutes a day, a few times a week, turns out to be 400% more effective at preventing you from death or serious illness. That we knew this about vitamin D. We knew this about a lot of things, obesity. We knew this. And that as time went on, even with new evidence, that evidence was not only not promoted, but if you discussed it, you were encouraging vaccine hesitancy. not promoted, but if you discussed it, you were encouraging vaccine hesitancy. This crazy way of looking at positive outcomes through things that people can control, like diet and exercise

and overall metabolic health, which you absolutely can improve if you're alive. You can do this. And we could have encouraged people to do these things. And we could have said and changed a lot of people's lives and said, hey, there's something you can do that will help you. And there's a lot of people that did follow that advice and follow that instruction because they did find out about it. And they did change their life. And they are infinitely better off than they were three years ago physically because of the decisions that they made. We could have encouraged millions of people. I don't know how many people would have done that because it's very difficult to make a horse drink. You can lead a horse to water, but getting them to drink, you know, that's the old expression. It's very difficult to get people to take steps that require discipline

and focus and commitment and also overcoming procrastination and this resistance that people have to change. But you could have at least encouraged it and it would have made some people react to it. Well, there's that. And, you know, the lowest bar of all was the vitamin D. Yeah. Right. So the point is how, you know, how dedicated does somebody have to be to recognize, A, that they're probably deficient in vitamin D, B, maybe spend a little time in the sun while it's high enough in the sky for you to make it, and at the very worst, C, supplement. Did you ever see the discussion that I had with Peter Hotez where Pierre Corey put on his – pull that up. It's Pierre Corey's Twitter page. And Dr. Pierre Corey, who was in the very beginning, he's a part of the frontline critical care COVID response, where they were trying to figure out what ways and methods could be effective to stop the transmission or to help people that were ill. And coming up with off-label medications and obviously massive amounts of pushback and massive amounts of demonization.

I experienced that in the biggest way possible on CNN in a way that I was fucking baffled by the response. We can get to that in a minute, but let's play this because this is really, this is the very beginning of, of, uh, the, the, the COVID pandemic. And this is when I had him on, um, and you know, I had no misgivings or no hesitation whatsoever about getting vaccinated. It wasn't, it wasn't even available to me. This might be my favorite all-time favorite Joe Rogan. Are you cautious about your diet? I'm not as cautious about my diet as I should be.

I'm a junk foodaholic, actually. Well, that seems like a terrible thing for your health. It is a terrible thing for my health and something my wife is working on. But that seems ridiculous for someone who works with health. Yeah. Yeah. What's going on with you, man? Sometimes, man.

I just don't get it right. How often? What. How often? What? How often? How often do I steal a bag of chips or something like that? How often do you eat garbage? Every day? I don't know.

No, no. Hopefully not every day. Hopefully not every day. Maybe a couple of times a week. Oh. That's what it's with Rachel, my daughter with autism. That's like our thing is to go to the it's called the burger joint or to shake shack to get a to get a cheeseburger we'll sneak some fries so so you live in large we call

it like that mouth pleasure so much you're willing to sacrifice a little bit i am yeah i you know i you know i i can i have to concede that's the case. Well, there's, I mean, I don't have to tell you, but there's a large body of data that connects poor diet to a host of diseases. That seems like a crazy decision for a guy in your line of work. There you go. Sometimes the, sometimes the, it's not all brain. It's something else. But, I mean, if you ate healthy food, I mean, the thing is your body starts craving healthy food. You start feeling positive results.

Yeah, no question. No question about it. Do you take vitamins? I don't take vitamins. Really? Yeah. Wow. I don't think they do.

I don't think they're needed. What? What? Hold up. Hold up. Hold up. You don't think they're needed while you're eating junk food? Well, hopefully I'm not only eating junk food.

You know there's a large body of clinical research on the efficacy of vitamins, especially vitamins D, vitamins B. I have taken vitamin D for periods, a recommendation of my internist. What about essential fatty acids, which are great for your brain, fish oil, all these different things that are fantastic for inflammation. I'm not going to argue with you. What is going on with you, doctor? You got it over me.

Listen, but you would have a much better argument. You're making my wife stay here. If you're taking care of yourself 100% instead of just concentrating. But you still need your vaccines. I'm sure you do, but vaccines aren't going to prevent cancer. No, that's true. Right. And there's a lot of diseases.

Or diabetes or cardiovascular disease. A lot of these diseases are connected directly to diet. Yeah. Come on. And other lifestyle changes. Yeah. Sedentary life. I try to go on the treadmill for 30 minutes every morning.

I do. Actually, I'm pretty good about that. Yeah? 30 minutes every morning. Why don't you just go for an actual walk? It's more interesting. I do that, too. Do you have a dog?

No, but I do 30 minutes on the treadmill in the morning, and then I take a long walk with my wife in the evening. Oh, that's good. But the thing that knocks the crap out of you is the travel. Yes. I find that very frustrating, because you don don't exercise and then you don't eat well and you don't control the diet as well. So that's...

Well, I have a solution to that and eat well and exercise. Those are solutions to that. Just do it. I treat it like I'm brushing my teeth. I brush my teeth every day. I exercise every day too. So when I travel, I don't have an option. When I land, I go to the gym.

This is how it goes. I land, I get in my hotel room, I put my shorts on. Yeah, I do that too. It's the only way. If you have to do it, if you say this is just what gets done, this is how you do it. Yeah, I try to be really compulsive about that. Yeah, I have it written out. I know what I'm going to do.

Especially if it's great if the hotel is a good gym the whole you know if they have weights and a bunch of different or i'll run outside if we don't have it you run yeah do you not very well but no but you do okay yeah we're gonna get you healthy buddy yeah can't be pushing only chemicals and injectable forms to facilitate health fair enough yeah not chemicals or vaccines oh i'm sorry what's in them what it's not i mean and injectable forms to facilitate health. Fair enough. Yeah. Not chemicals. They're vaccines. Oh, I'm sorry. What's in them?

What? I mean, it's some sort of chemical now. No, they're antigens, right? What's the fluid? Macromolecules. What's the liquid stuff? Typically, it would be saline or salt water. Right.

Very telling. Right? Yeah, absolutely. Especially now that we know about evidence that points to having good health being one of the best ways to fight off all kinds of diseases. Yeah, it's like the substrate on which these diseases do or don't function. Tia has talked about this in depth about just having a healthy body, reducing all-cause mortality by an enormous factor, reducing cardiac events, cancer. And that if there was a drug that did what exercise does in terms of promoting overall health and metabolic health, that would be one of the most important drugs that's ever been introduced to human populations. Yeah, absolutely. But the fact that this unfortunate conversation for him, you know, the way it aged now, what we know now about Peter, and I think Peter's a great guy.

I've known Peter for a long time. And the reason why I had him on the podcast is I talked to him about diseases when I was doing Joe Rogan questions everything for sci-fi. And he was explaining to me how many people were infected by parasites in third world countries and in tropical climates. This is one of his areas of expertise. And I found it very stunning that he was like the majority of the people in these places have parasites. I'm like, oh, my God, it's great. It's crazy to think of. And he was talking about how dangerous this is and how important it is to try to treat these things and help these people. But then when someone is a person who is publicly telling people that they have to do one very specific thing that turns out to

actually not prevent COVID, not prevent transmission, and continues to say it, but doesn't do the things that we know can help, that you can do without that, like good diet, vitamin D supplementation, exercise, losing weight, all those things. I mean, this is a very unfortunate sort of narrative that got pushed, that there's only one way. It's a very binary way out of this. You got to inject your way out of this. Yeah, it's a kind of medical faith. Yeah. And it's completely unsubstantiated. And what's more, I mean, when medicine works, it's because it leverages true things about biology and it leverages them elegantly. It's not these giant interventions that, you know, save the day.

Right. It's elegant, minimal interventions. And these particular so-called vaccines are nothing of the sort. And yet for people, I mean, it's almost like a kind of transhumanism where these people have put their faith in what their doctor can do for them rather than in preventive practices that would actually make them much less vulnerable in the first place. We should go back to the myocarditis mechanism. Oh, yeah. Okay. So when the vaccine, the so-called vaccine, the mRNA vaccine, enters your body,

you have lipid nanoparticles coding this mRNA message. coding this mRNA message. The lipid nanoparticles have no targeting mechanism in them. They're just dumb, fatty interfaces. And that means that they will interface with any cell they encounter. Now, different cells may have different affinities, but there's nothing that tells that lipid nanoparticle coat which cells to go into. And so when this leaks out of your deltoid or when it travels out of your deltoid in a blood vessel, you now have these pseudoviruses effectively, a fatty coat with a gene message inside written in the language of mRNA. And it is going to be taken up by cells that it encounters haphazardly around the body. Okay? It gets into the cell. The cell translates, well, actually this is RNA, so it transcribes the message into protein. That protein, the spike protein, is then exported to the surface

of the cell. It's supposed to stick there. Surely some of it does. We now know some of it does not. Some of that spike circulates around. But the problem is, you've now got a cell that is displaying the spike protein. That's according to the design of this inoculation, right? The cell is displaying this protein. The body, the immune system, looking at a cell in your body that is displaying your own proteins and foreign proteins, thinks it knows exactly what it's looking at. The only thing that can be is a virally infected cell. And there's only one thing to do with a virally infected cell, and that's to destroy it. And there's only one thing to do with a virally infected cell, and that's to destroy it.

So we are programmed, our immune systems, every day of the year are circulating, looking for cells that are showing the signature of having been invaded by a virus, and then it destroys them. Not because losing cells is okay. It's not. It's bad for you. But because it's better than leaving a cell that has been captured by a virus producing more virus. Now, if this happens, if you get injected and these things are circulating in your blood and they get taken up in your liver, right,

a certain number of cells in your liver will then be destroyed by your immune system. It's probably not a big deal because liver can replace itself at a very high rate. If it happens in your heart, it's an absolute disaster. And the reason it's an absolute disaster is that your heart, for reasons we can get into if you want, is not an organ that repairs itself, right? What it does instead is it scars. So you've got this mechanism where the failure of the vaccine, either because nobody aspirated the syringe or because it was leaking out of the deltoid anyway, is circulating in the body. It gets taken up by cells. In some unlucky people, those cells will be in

the heart. When those cells in the heart do their job and transcribe this new message, they will be attacked by the immune system and destroyed, creating a wound in your heart. Right? Now, if you wait long enough, that wound will hopefully scar over. It will diminish the capacity of the heart to do its job. And for people interested... Permanently? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Right. That's the thing about the heart, is the heart, I mean, it is actually downstream of something, as you know, I studied a long time ago, which is the tradeoff between tissue repair and senescence. And so the heart, one of its most amazing characteristics is that it doesn't get cancer, right?

But the cost of not getting cancer is that it doesn't repair, right? It scars and that reduces the capacity of the heart to do the job that it does. And it also is going to create a vulnerability, right? Now, again, the question of whether or not people are dropping dead at a high rate during athletic events is a readily studyable question, right? It's possible that this happens with some regularity, that we don't know it because it doesn't generally get reported, and that during COVID people are super sensitive to these things, and they're now

circulating the clips. It's also possible that it's happening at a much, much higher rate, and that the reason has to do with this very flaw. Is there data on this? That's the question. Why isn't there? Why, given how easy a question this is to answer, why isn't there data? Now, I will say there's data on related matters. You should check out the substack of an excellent biologist named Jumi Kim, who has delved

into a number of the issues surrounding COVID and vaccines and the like. And she has put together an excellent analysis on the effect on athletic performance of these vaccines. And it's pretty surprising, right? There is in some large fraction of people who get the mRNA vaccines, a substantial decrease that I think she says is akin to something like the loss of 10 years of vitality. That's not a small loss. So there is evidence that there is a harm. There is an obvious mechanism. In fact, I think it is incumbent on those who designed these so-called vaccines to explain why this wouldn't happen.

As soon as we knew that these things were going to circulate in the body, one has to make the assumption that they will be taken up haphazardly, and that having been taken up haphazardly, the immune system will target the cells that have taken it up and destroy them. Once you know that, the question is, well, what protects the heart? What protects the major blood vessels? Those are places you can't afford to have a wound. And yet, there's no explanation of why, how this could possibly be safe in this regard. And what's worse is, you know, at the beginning of this so-called vaccination campaign, they led us to believe, they very directly led us to believe that the mRNA transcripts were very short-lived, which leaves the idea that whatever, however bad these things might be, at least it's a very temporary kind of harm, right? The harm will be done and then it will be over. But it turns out that they actually did something. And you can, you know, if we steel man the position of the designers, they're trying to get a vaccine that works at all, right? They're going to use every trick they can to just try to

get these transcripts into enough cells that they can get enough of an effect that it has some positive impact on the disease. Well, one of the things they did was they took the mRNAs, which are spelled, it's a four-letter code, and they substituted all the uracils they use with a different version of the chemical that renders these things incredibly stable. Now, this is a trick that nature apparently does itself, but it substitutes a very rare U with one of these pseudouridines. In the case of these manufacturers, they substituted every single one. And what that means is that these mRNA fragments are not vulnerable to being taken apart by the enzymes that we all carry that break apart mRNAs that they find floating around the body.

So at the point that the immune system has targeted these cells that have taken up these transcripts, these transcripts presumably become flowing out and they get gobbled up by a macrophage or something like that, which then may get transfected itself. So they've created a nightmare scenario. in this unfolding nightmare is we said, look, there's no way that any of these so-called vaccines could be safe. They can't be safe because nobody knows what they do long-term. But the DNA version is likely to be a lot safer than the mRNA version. And there are various different reasons for that. But this has turned out to be true. And the paper I pointed to earlier, the Christine Stable-Benn paper, that showed a decrease, a slight decrease in all-cause mortality for the DNA version and an increase in all-cause mortality for the mRNA version reflects this. But one of the hidden characteristics is in the DNA version,

what they've done is they've borrowed an adenovirus. They borrowed a virus that exists, a virus that has an evolutionary history infecting creatures. And at the beginning of the podcast, I was talking about the fact that a virus does not have an interest in hurting you, right? A virus has an interest in leaving you on your feet. Well, by borrowing this adenovirus, they've borrowed something that presumably has some of that characteristic built into it. In other words, it's not infecting every cell in the body. It's not looking to get into your heart because why would it do that? It doesn't help it to transmit itself. So it's not a good thing to do. So you've got the fact that the adenovirus is superior than the lipid nanoparticles. You've got the fact that

DNA does not have pseudouridines. So it does not have this ultra permanent nature that they imbued the mRNA transcripts with. And this creates an environment in which these two things, which then go on both to produce spike protein, which was not a good choice. Spike protein is a dangerous thing for your body to be producing. But what it means is that we actually have a controlled experiment where the hazards that come from the spike protein apply to both versions. But the hazards that come from the lipid nanoparticles, the lack of targeting, and the stabilized mRNAs only apply to those vaccines. And we are seeing a radical difference in the level of harm. One of the things that people said to dismiss the concerns about myocarditis is they said that it's very temporary and that you take medication and that you get over it quickly. I saw that narrative over and over again when people were discussing

myocarditis. They're saying the myocarditis that's imparted by the vaccine is unfortunate, but it's temporary for most people. This is nonsense. Now, there is a technical way in which this could be true. But if you talk to cardiologists, they don't believe that this is the case, at least not good cardiologists. And the loophole here is that, as I said at the top of the podcast, myocarditis just means inflammation of the heart. And so there's different levels of myocarditis and different levels of inflammation. So is this the discussion when you're talking about myocarditis that's imparted by COVID, which is obviously very bad for you, but by catching the disease, some people do get myocarditis from the disease?

Well, this is one of these pieces of evidence that I want to see explored by an actually independent body. This has been looked at by some folks. And my sense, having looked at the various kinds of data, is that the myocarditis that is seen as a result of COVID vaccination is serious and it is downstream of tissue destruction. And that's the point. It's not the myocarditis itself. It's the tissue destruction that is causing the problem. It is causing weaknesses in the heart. It is causing arrhythmias in the heart. And all of these things are vulnerabilities. So that's the thing to be tracking. The inflammation itself is like an indicator that something has happened to the heart. But the question is, was there damage? How much damage was there? Your heart isn't innervated in the

same way as your surface. So you don't necessarily have evidence that you've got a weakness in your aorta, for example. But if you do, then that creates a hazard for you. And it creates a hazard that's particularly acute before it heals or before it scars and remains a vulnerability after it has scarred. So the idea that, you know, you've got inflammation in your heart, we give you some drugs, it gets better. It may be that the inflammation gets better, but the question is, were you damaged, right? That's the key issue. Were you damaged and what implication does it have for your capacity to function?

And what implication does it have for your capacity to function? What implication does it have for the threshold at which your heart is no longer capable of doing what it needs to do? Right? That's the question with the possibility that athletes are collapsing on the field due to heart attack with an irregular frequency at this point. As you can imagine, somebody, an athlete who has a very strong heart, it then becomes damaged, still functions, it's still a strong heart, but there's some point at which it gets pushed past a threshold that it hasn't seen in a month, a year, who knows, some particularly intense moment of play, and then that could cause an incident. And so I'm not telling you we know that this is happening, but I am telling you it's not a hard question to study. And the fact that we are not obsessed with finding out the answer is conspicuous. Now, if someone does have myocarditis and they do

get scarring of the heart, you can improve the function of your heart through exercise. Can you improve the function of your heart once it has myocarditis to the point where it's no longer a factor? You should ask a cardiologist, but my understanding as a biologist is you can't restore it fully, but you can get back to a place where it is stabilized in a somewhat diminished capacity. Wow. And the reason is because the heart is not good at healing. It's not what it does.

And I would argue that the reason that it's not good at healing is that it's so good at preventing cancer. If they knew that this damage had taken place to someone's heart, is there a way to repair it? I will tell you, my biological model says you may be able to improve it. You cannot erase damage to the heart. Is it possible that a medical intervention, a future medical intervention, could do that? Well, I mean, if we're really going to go sci-fi on it. It would be sci-fi?

It's sci-fi for a couple reasons. There's no reason in principle, if we knew enough, that we couldn't grow you a heart from your own cells so that it would share your genome, which would neutralize any immunological issues. And we know more or less how to install a heart. Heart transplants are real. But an installed heart is a compromised heart in the sense that it does not regulate. So my understanding, again, this is as a biologist looking at this system, this is not as a medical doctor, but my understanding is that the regulation of the beating of the heart is something we have not mastered, right? That we basically set the heart at a rate when it gets installed. And having set the heart at a rate, it's not as good as a heart that is dynamically changing with the circumstances. So it just can't be the equal.

And I would also argue, you know, the installing of a heart in a patient is bound to have issues with scarring and the reduction in the reproductive capacity of the cells at any place where it was sewn in. So in the vasculature, there are going to be places where you have to take the vessels of the heart and connect them to the vessels of the body. Those are going to be vulnerabilities. But I'd be very interested to hear a cardiologist evaluate what I've just said. This is horrible. It is. This is horrible.

It is. It's a very difficult subject to segue from. Are we going to talk about this young man who collapsed yesterday during the— Well, we don't know much, right? We don't know much, right? We do know that Dr. Sanjay Gupta was on CNN, and he gave a reason why this young man had this incident. I don't believe that he's something that happens if someone gets hit at the exact right time, and if they get hit on the heart at the exact right time, that it can stop the heart? I think we can do better than that. I think we can say cardiologists,

including Peter McCullough, have looked at the footage and they believe that this is exactly what happened, right? That there is this moment in the heart's rhythm in which, in my mind, it's like if you had an explosion in the cylinder of an internal combustion engine, as the piston was coming up to the top, it would stop it dead rather than exploding at the right moment and driving it back down, right? So there's some moment of vulnerability and a hard enough hit can stop the heart. And so anyway, Peter McCullough and others have looked at this tape and said that appears to be what happened. But as with the, so I'm sorry, I looked, I'm not a football fan, so I didn't know this young man's name before, before this incident. Yes. Jamie, do you know his name? Damar Hamlin. Damar Hamlin. So I don't know how well you know him. I looked at him and I would just say in having this discussion, I think it's really important. My impression in looking at what

evidence there was about him online is that this was an unusually good kid, not only extremely talented as an athlete, but also just super decent. And the fact that we are talking about it, I don't want to detract from the fact that he's fighting for his life. And that's true. And we should be rooting for him irrespective of what has happened here. This is somebody who deserves to have a long life ahead of him. We don't know. So it is possible that someone could get hit in that regard and it could cause that thing to happen. And it has happened before, particularly with people getting hit in the chest with fast balls, right? Right. But what needs to be done is a proper differential diagnosis in which all of the contributing factors are found. The other thing we can say, in a brief look this morning,

I found that nobody has died on a football field in the NFL in 50 years. Now, maybe that's wrong, but that's certainly the evidence I found in a couple of places. This is a very rare event. Now, obviously, he's still alive. Have people had heart attacks in football games previously? I know they've had heart attacks playing soccer before. People have had that. Yeah, I can't. Soccer is

particularly a difficult sport in terms of your cardiovascular function, right? Because those guys are in fucking insane shape because you have to be the amount of strain they're sprinting. I went to see, um, the Austin, Austin has a, uh, soccer league and I went to see it live and I was really impressed. I was first of all impressed, but these guys have fucking thoroughbred legs. I mean, they are in insane shape and just the demand as a person who works out, watching the demand that's required to the body to be able to perform that way, sprinting constantly. And soccer, my friend Eddie who uh is one of the owners of the local soccer team he was explaining to me that one of the reasons why it's not good for television in america

is because they don't take breaks right they don't it's not like you know you have a stop we'll be right back with you know first down and we'll be back with commercials and you can you know pizza hut and all that shit you play your commercials and you can, you know, Pizza Hut and all that shit. You play your commercials and then you come back. I mean, that's how you fund television. You need commercials. But soccer just goes on and on and on. I mean. Yeah. No, it's in some ways, you know, I'm not an expert in this, but it seems like it's the worst case scenario because, you know, basketball is full of motion in a way that football isn't, but it's a smaller court. Yes. Right?

Yes, much smaller. So there's a lot less distance to rest. And there's timeouts. There's just like things that happen where you get little breaks. Right. Soccer players have to be in incredible shape. Yeah. And that means that the range of conditions over which their hearts have to be tolerant is very high.

And so, you know, again, it's crazy that we are having to deal at the level of anecdote with this pattern or lack of a pattern. Maybe it's not a pattern, but it certainly does seem that we see footage of people collapsing on what they would call the football pitch in Europe. What is that, right? a heart attack in particular or stroke or something like this, that there seems to be some desire not to even open the possibility of what may have caused it. And presumably that's because people are being told it is vitally important that we not fuel vaccine hesitancy because it's essential to protecting the vulnerable and ending the pandemic. And at this point, hopefully we're over that.

Hopefully the point is actually, you know what? We need to know what the risk benefit analysis is for a person taking this, right? It's essential that we find out. Yeah. It's crazy that this is where you have this discussion. Right. You know? Absolutely. This is the wrong way to do it. But the problem is, you know what you really need? A university, you know, and preferably dozens of them studying questions like this. They know how to do it. From the jump. Right.

From the jump, being on it objectively from the jump, analyzing all the data, and analyzing it without bias at all. Right. Because, of course, we have an interest in finding out what it is that's in the data, what the patterns mean. And then we ought to have a vital press corps looking out for corruption that would prevent universities from pursuing these things properly. Yeah. Right? And it's amazing to me that it's now 2023 and we have none of this, right?

Yeah. I mean, again, it's a hard thing to segue out of, but I want to talk about chat GPT. Fascinating question. Yeah. Have you experimented with it at all? I have not, but someone, the gentleman who runs the JRE companion page, made a rap with chat GPT. Like, was it if Kanye West wrote a rap for chat GPT?

They put it on Instagram? But it's, like, it seems like a person saying it. You want to try it? No. We can try it. I mean, it takes a long time. His thing took, like, 48 minutes to do. Well, whatever you want to look up right now, we can do it.

Yeah, the problem is you have to cajole it. It'll get something wrong and you have to say no, not that way. But let's just say, it can be awful, but it is often surprisingly good at answering questions you might have about how to do things. One of the great triumphs of it is that coders are now asking it to solve coding problems, and it will actually write code that is functional. It's pretty amazing. And it also, there's an implementation of it that if you

feed it up to three tweets, it will write a New York Times story in one of five genres, you know, optimistic, pessimistic, neutral. And, you know, you don't really need the New York Times anymore because it's pretty good at this job, right? So on the one hand, it's all very interesting that we're living in an era in which there is at least, I mean, you know, and this is a prototype, right? This is a prototype that was specifically trained and then placed on the Internet so people could play with it. And I've seen lots of interesting uses. It's going to get better, right? We're dealing with ChatGPT 3.

There's going to be a ChatGPT 4, which is going to be that much better because it will be built with the improvements that have been gained through turning this one loose on the world. But I have to say, I am quite alarmed. I am quite alarmed, not only that this thing exists, but I don't think we're ready for it. And I don't think we're ready for it in a couple different ways. I mean, if you want to comfort yourself and say, well, this isn't that serious that we have this AI that can do these really shocking things. The comforting thing is that the way it's programmed, it doesn't know what it's saying. It doesn't matter that it convinces you that it's saying something and it means it and, you know, that it seems like a creative entity. What it's doing is it is basically using a predictive model that has been trained on a huge data set of written language, right? So the answer is if, you know, you take three words in a row, can you predict what the next word is going to be?

And they've allowed it. They've exposed it to a large data set, and it's gotten really good at predicting basically these sequences to the point that it can now, if you prompt it correctly, it can spit out these very long explanations. Some of them are dead wrong. Sometimes they're right on target. But I have two concerns about it. One, if actual insight that much harder to spot, right? In other words, if you become expert at operating this thing, at querying it, and it becomes better at understanding a wider range of topics because they turn it loose on everything that's written on the internet, for example, right? Then the point is the ability to fake expertise is going to go through the roof. I don't think we know how we're

going to police a world in which, I mean, this problem is already bad enough. Most academics are fakers. They don't know that, right? They trained in something, they wrote a dissertation, they think they're experts, but you can see when something unexpected happens like the pandemic, you get just broad scale failure across entire disciplines where nobody seems to get it right, right? So in that world, this is going to be even worse because now you have some, an artificial intelligence able to generate things in plain English that are often full of true information. But you don't know whether what generated it is some brain-dead model or something else. That's one concern.

That's one concern. And then the other concern is when we say, well, chat GPT don't know how it develops in a child, right? A child is exposed to a world of adults talking around them, and the child experiments first with phonemes and then words and then clusters of words and then sentences. And by doing something that isn't all that far from what chat GPT is doing. It ends up becoming a conscious individual. And so I think it's clear that chat GPT isn't conscious. It couldn't be, but it isn't clear to me at least that we are not suddenly stepping on to a process that produces that very quickly without us even necessarily knowing it. And what steps, if any, can be done to mitigate that at this point? Well, it's interesting. I wrote a paper, which I never published anywhere in 2016,

about this very issue. In fact, I used basically the argument that you could attain artificial general intelligence by imbuing computers with a childlike play environment for language and then exposing them to a huge data set, which is not exactly what's happened here, but it's in the ballpark. And I would argue, and I did argue, that one needs to build an architecture in which this can't get away from you, right? And so the architecture that I advocate for is actually a metamorphosis architecture where metamorphosis is not allowed. It is an affirmative choice of humans. So in other words, if you think about, let's say that we developed some artificial frogs to do some job to clear some waterway of something. And we imbued them with an intelligence so that they could learn to clear the waterway of something. And we imbued them with an intelligence so that they could

learn to clear the waterway better, but we worried that they might learn to do something that we don't want them to do and that we would have no way of arresting it once these frogs were released in the wild and capable of producing more of themselves. But if what you say is, well, at the point at which you go from a tadpole to a frog, you have to ask us if you can go, right? There's no automatic transition from a tadpole to a frog. There are still dangers, right? In the case of GPT-CHAT, you know, I think some of the artificial intelligence existential risk folks would tell you that one of the dangers is that the chat AI could convince you to do its bidding, right? As you said, when you were looking at this, it felt like a person, right? And the point is something that

feels like a person can play on your emotions, right? Can that be used to cause a failsafe to be removed, maybe. But in any case, this only deals with one of the two issues I'm raising, the question of actual artificial general intelligence arriving, us not knowing necessarily that it has, right? That's a frightening prospect. And in fact, I have a little thought experiment that might reveal why. But the other issue is the issue of competence. everybody is using this thing behind the scenes in order to say things that are beyond their own capacity to articulate, right, then the world becomes some new kind of hall of mirrors. We've had a hard enough time dealing with algorithms on, you know, on search and feed. This is a whole next level of difficulty in knowing where you are and who you're talking to and what it means and what their motives are.

And I think we ought to be on high alert. When you extrapolate, when you look at what this does and what it's capable of. I think what scares people is something that seems to be a person but doesn't have any emotion, doesn't have any soul. It's not us, but it behaves exactly as us. And then you can put it in a physical entity. So if you have this chat GPT and then you extrapolate to version 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and then there's a physical thing that has this ability inside of it to communicate with you like ex machina, where it's exhibiting all of the behavior characteristics of a person. Like one of the most terrifying – that's one of my favorite movies of all time.

I love that movie. One of my favorite movies of all time was when that guy who was brought in to sort of run some tests on these artificial intelligence creations and determine whether or not they pass as human. What is that test called again? Turing test. Turing test. Yeah. And he is in love with this woman. She's manipulated him to the point where he's aided her in her escape,

and then she leaves him in that room with the bulletproof glass, and he's pounding on the glass, and she walks away with not a thought at all about him. on the glass and she walks away with not a thought at all about him. It is the ultimate example of the worst-case scenario of where this can go where you have something that behaves exactly like a human being and knows how to play upon your sexual urges, your emotional desires, all of those different things that she plays upon. And then she just walks away from him and leaves him to starve to death in this fucking bulletproof room.

Yeah. And, you know, I'm now recalling the film and it's done very well because it manipulates you passively in your seat. Yes. Right? As it manipulates this character on the screen. And so you are betrayed too. Yes.

In this. You want to believe that it's emotional and it has none of that. You feel bad for this woman, what you think is a woman, who is contained. And, you know, when she's saying to him, when the power goes out, don't trust him. And then, you know, the power comes back on. She normally again you're like oh my god like she's trapped right like this poor creature they've made an a person essentially and she has these thoughts and hopes and dreams just like a regular person but now she's trapped and he falls in love with her and even though he's seen her in her robot form when she puts skin on and when she puts clothes on and she's in front of him he's in love with her right and it you know again it plays very well because uh there's a manipulable

circuit in straight men. Yeah. Right. That's going to react to this. I'm sure straight women as well. I'm sure gay women. Gay women. No doubt. No doubt. Well, yes. But in this particular narrative, you'd have to be a gay woman or a straight man for it to trigger you.

But but a part of this is actually inevitable in the chat GPT story, because. Especially to the extent that this is a mindless entity that doesn't know what it's doing, it's just striving to do it better. The tactics that work will register as, oh, you did it right. So to the extent that you have those vulnerabilities in you and it finds them and that works, then the point is reinforcement. It scares us because it's not us, but it is us. Because it's behaving exactly like us, but it doesn't have all the things that make a person a person. It doesn't have the biological vulnerabilities. It doesn't have the ability to actually sexually reproduce.

It doesn't have emotions. It doesn't have all these different things that we like to think of. The soul, you know, whatever that means, whatever that term actually means. Yeah. But I'm worried about what could be generated. And I know that that sounds, it will sound to a lot of people, especially technological people, like a biologist out of his depth. But I don't think so. This is a biologist trying to say something about the biology and what it applies about this analogous system. So let's just do a reducto ad absurdum example to reveal the problem. If I build the simplest possible circuit,

I put a circuit on the desk and it's got a button and it's got a light. You press the button, the light goes on. Now I say, I'm going to label that circuit suffering. When the light's on, the circuit is suffering. Is it a problem that I press the button? No. It's the same circuit it was before I labeled it. But now start extrapolating up. You have a circuit in you for suffering. It's not different fundamentally from the button and the light, right? That circuit

in you is evolution building a circuit to detect when something is harming you. So you'll recoil and cause it to stop harming you or fight it off or whatever it is that you're supposed to do when you're suffering, right? The point is, this is evolution building a button and a light. And there's some point at which there's enough of it and at which you have a subjective experience that causes us to honor the fact that you're suffering. And in fact, if we look at something like a spider that you've put in a jar, a spider that you put in a jar will very often behave as if it is panicked, right? It will look, you will have a hard time not feeling that it is panicked.

But there's no reason to think that the spider actually has a subjective experience, But there's no reason to think that the spider actually has a subjective experience. The spider is reacting to being trapped in a way that has freed trapped ancestor spiders before. But there's no reason to think that it's feeling anything. Could be. We can't prove it's not. But it's hard to see what it adds to our understanding of a spider to say that it has a consciousness, right? Probably it doesn't. say that it has a consciousness, right? Probably it doesn't. And so what I'm getting at is that there's a continuum from the button and the light that we just label suffering, and it doesn't mean a damn thing, to the spider, which can do something like suffering and it can do something like panic,

but it probably doesn't have, it doesn't feel anything about it. It just reacts in a way that has been useful. To us, where we suffer. And where if you tell me that you're suffering, I know what you mean. And maybe I feel it too on your behalf, right? My point is there's no discontinuity in there. It goes from nothing worth paying any attention to, paying any attention to, to the most important thing. And the question is, if you take a learning AI and you expose it to all of the stuff of human experience to the extent that human beings can report it, and it gets better and better and better at delivering the right thing at the right moment in the right way. It's not obvious to me that it doesn't become conscious and that we won't recognize it because we'll say, well, we didn't program it to be conscious. And the answer is, well, okay,

but you didn't program an octopus to be conscious. And it might be, right? You didn't program a chimp and you can infer that it has your consciousness, even though it's a mysterious endpoint of a process that does involve children playing with language, looking at other people, seeing how they react, feeling good when they react in a way that makes sense, right? That isn't so far from what this thing is doing. And the question is, can we get a discussion in which we actually figure out whether we're just comforting ourselves that it's not conscious today? That means it's not on the road there, right? Or maybe it is on the road there and we better prepare ourselves for what it will be like to share a world with some other kind of consciousness that overlaps us in language space.

Is that inevitable? I think it, well, let's put it this way. There's a school of thought that unfortunately afflicts many of my favorite thinkers. I think they're just dead wrong about it. But I'm sure you will have encountered it. It's called panpsychism. And it means that actually consciousness is more fundamental than biology, that consciousness is somehow in the particles of the universe. It's written into the software. I think this is nonsense. I don't think – I think I understand why smart people end up there. I think it solves a certain problem.

And the fact is solving that problem is the key to accessing a bunch of other problems. So it's sort of worth cheating on that puzzle in order to do other stuff that's productive. So I don't see any reason to believe it. If I'm wrong and it's true, then it is not inevitable that these AIs will tap into consciousness because it's, you know, they could. I'm not saying they couldn't, but I'm saying it's not inevitable. On the other hand, if panpsychism is wrong or substantially wrong, then I do think it is inevitable that this little game we're playing with AI lands on consciousness sooner rather than later. What's terrifying to me is that we become obsolete, but isn't that inevitable? Like if you went back and look at single-celled organisms and you say, hey, listen, buddy,

one day you're going to be flying a plane. One day you're going to be using an iPhone. They would go, what? What are you saying? You know, I'm going to be using an iPhone. They would go, what? What are you saying? You know, I'm going to be obsolete. Isn't that true with all organisms? I mean, and isn't there, if there's an inevitable push because of natural selection, evolution, progress, innovation, if there's an inevitable push that things just consistently and constantly get better, inevitable push that things just consistently and constantly get better. Isn't there a biological

roadblock to that, that we just can't improve biologically as quickly as technology? Yes and no. First, I would just point out that we are already cyborgs. Right. Right. Not only, I mean, our phone is the most obvious way that this is true, but even books, even the ability to just store information in a way that allows us to transport it across space and time without constraint, even that is technology. It's a kind of transhuman technology. So it's not new that we are here. It is new that we are accelerating at the rate that we are and that we are going to cross event horizons in rapid succession. I mean, we are already, I feel like the confusion that one feels in the face of the era of COVID and Trump and Biden and all of this, that confusion is in

part because we've crossed over an event horizon. And the point is none of this was predictable and we're floating in a chaotic set of events. But look, you're a deep thinking guy who reads eclectically, talks to all kinds of people with different perspectives. And I know from many things that you've said to me and many things that I've heard you say to others on your podcast, that there's a part of you that is struggling with wanting humans to be decent to each other, to find each other. And I think this is that question, right? Because what you're saying is right. We're about to be obsolete. That is certainly true for almost everybody, right? What happens when we're obsolete? Does some set of people with power decide to get rid of the obsolete ones?

I think that's what's going to happen if we don't get ahead of this. On the other hand, we have another opportunity, which is we could look at this puzzle and we could say, hey, all hands on deck, we are about to have a huge problem where all of these people who have done nothing wrong are about to find themselves obsolete in a world that has nothing, no way to sustain them in an obsolete form. And we could say, this does not have to descend into a dystopian hell. We could figure out what the implications of that are, and we could take up arms against it. We could figure out how we are going to live in the next phase without our ability to deliver our labor being the key question as to whether or not we are entitled to education, entitled to have a place on the planet.

And, you know, I really, I don't even see it as a choice between those two things because if we decide to just allow the chips to fall where they may, this is not going to be a long ride. This is going to become, you know, even more of a disaster much more rapidly, and it's going to accelerate. So this is really maybe last call for figuring out how human beings can move into the next phase of being human. I mean, you and I aren't farmers. can move into the next phase of being human. I mean, you and I aren't farmers. We exited a phase where you had to produce your own food, and we moved into a phase where these things are delivered economically,

and it worked okay. I mean, it certainly has its faults and downsides, but it worked okay. It sustained a lot of people and created a lot of high-quality living opportunities. But it's time to do that again. And if we let nature do it for us, it's not going to work out well. What if we integrate? Are you concerned at all about things like Neuralink? And there's some other competitive technologies, people that initially started with Neuralink that are working now to, they're starting with EyeSight to develop artificial eyes for people that are blind

and do so implementing a similar type of technology where you're using some sort of computer interface, something that interacts with human biology, but permanently embedded? Well, I will say that in principle, I'm very concerned about things like Neuralink. In practice, I'm less concerned because I think the job is harder than we've understood. because I think the job is harder than we've understood. That said, I'd be very interested in talking to Elon about this. My understanding from others I have spoken to is that part of the motivation is so that AI can't get ahead of us. Right. Right? The idea is this is really our only mechanism for staying ahead of the AI escalator by being on it. Right?

Yeah. So as it gets smarter, we get smarter. Now, I don't know how good a plan that is. It does not sound very plausible to me. And the devil is in the details. There's a lot of tricks you can play linking machines to neurons, right? You can, for example, learn to control a computer mouse, you know, with your mind, but you're not really, it's not like the computer mouse is integrated

with you. What you're effectively doing is learning to think something hard enough that you can cause a detector to know that you want it to go this way or that way. So it's a learnable skill and it's real. It's important. But it's not the same thing as being able to plug a mouse into you and have it understand what you're doing, right? But is that just for now? Yes. Because if you think about, in my lifetime we've gone from pong which is a thing that you played on your television and it was so wild that you could move a dial on this little console and then you could move the paddle up and down. I can remember playing with my sister and we were like, wow, this is crazy.

And then that went, you know, and then of course you went from that to what we have now, things like, you know, like these video games that are incredibly realistic like we've we've played these um uh examples from uh the unreal engine there's a new unreal engine that does real-time shading and light in this spectacular way and you have this uh character this video character running in these hills and it creates dirt and you see the sunrise and all the lights are interacting with the ground and creating these realistic shadows. And it's so crazy to see. imagine that this brain mouse interface would improve in a similar way to the point where, or even crazier, you're dealing with like some incredibly realistic virtual reality that's indiscernible from reality itself. Well, look, all of that stuff is happening already in a form that isn't so terrifying.

And maybe that's the problem with it. Right. The fact is you can now interact with a keyboard with this chat engine and it can respond more or less like a human being if you stay on the right kinds of topics. Right. So how different is it? How importantly different is it that you're interacting through a keyboard than if you could plug it into yourself? So I'm dubious about the plug it into yourself part of the story, but I'm not at all dubious that there's some very important

thing already happening where you're interacting through a controller or some other thing like that. And I would also just finally say the matrix, which we kind of are living in and kind of aren't living in, is a virtual reality. And when you and I have the experience of going and looking at somebody's Twitter page, and it's like they literally live on a different planet where up is down, that's because they're experiencing a kind of virtual reality that is not the same one that we're plugged into. And I think, you know, you and I are struggling to not be plugged into virtual reality. We're trying to retain a grip on actual reality, which is hard as hell in this era.

We're trying to retain a grip on actual reality, which is hard as hell in this era. But there are those who have, you know, surrendered to the Matrix the way Cypher does in the film, right? They would just rather, you know, not struggle against it because what are they going to do? Well, I think they're also ideologically captured to the point where they don't consider any of these other perspectives. ideologically captured to the point where they don't consider any of these other perspectives. And they only think within their echo chamber that this is the correct way to do it and everybody outside of that is the enemy. So they've been captured in this way that is just sort of inherent to the human condition to think tribally. Well, I would say the way to think about it is that for almost all of human history, one's well-being within one's social group, which is very often a lineage, is the vital parameter that dictates how well off you are in evolutionary meaning terms, meaningful terms. And so to the extent that that's the case, people become very easily manipulated as you threaten them with expulsion from polite society. And we've seen our friends succumb to this. You've lost friends.

I've lost friends. It's very disturbing. lost friends, I've lost friends. It's very disturbing, but it's also, we have to remember, it's not surprising that a human being faced with being ostracized reacts like a drowning person, right? They become a lethal hazard because they will do anything not to, not to drown, not to be, not to be expelled. And I guess, there's so much we haven't talked about here, but the lesson of the last several years, we've watched people go crazy. We've watched people go after us. That seems to have lifted somewhat. There's a dawning consciousness of what actually took place. It certainly hasn't reached everybody,

but it's reached a lot more people than it had before. And I would say, I would encourage us all to treat this as a learning exercise, that we have seen what people are capable of, and we are now returned to a slightly calmer state for who knows how long. But we damn well better figure out what happened so it can't happen again. And we also have a much better understanding of what happens to people under extreme duress with an incredibly persuasive sort of narrative to comply. Yes, and as Matthias Desmet points out,

social isolation is a precondition for the kind of insanity that we saw overtake people. And in light of that, I think we need to be very concerned about the degree to which young people seem to have, in their own minds, gotten over the need to have a life partner, the degree to which we are now interacting through mediums that are moderated by forces we don't understand, to the extent that you may have very good friendships on Facebook or Twitter or wherever, but the fact that Twitter or Facebook may have an opinion on the nature of your friendship, whether it is a sanctioned kind of friendship that will be tolerated or the kind of friendship that will be terminated by kicking somebody off the platform

because they speak what has strangely been called malinformation or whatever. That is a very insecure kind of connection, even if your friendship is very real. That's the only beautiful thing about, it's one of the beautiful things about Elon taking over Twitter, is that we do have this new sort of ideological battleground. We have this new town hall form of discussion that a lot of people are very upset about. They're very upset that these, you know, unmentionable people are allowed to communicate on this platform very upset about they're very upset that these you know unmentionable people are allowed to communicate on this platform now and they're very upset that he has sort of you

know it's so easy for people to demonize him because he's a multi-billionaire the one of the richest people on earth and that he can just buy this and run it any way he wants. And there's so many attack vectors, you know, in terms of like people pointing out flaws in his application, the way he's doing this, the implementation of his own rules and guidelines and what's allowed and not allowed. But at least we have a place where people can actually talk freely. And you've seen a gigantic change in the kind of responses that people have to bullshit. Like when the Biden administration gets fact checked and it's proven that they're lying about certain things that they tweet and then they delete the tweet. That is wild. That

is wild to see and very encouraging to me. Yeah, I am slightly cautious, but a huge fan of what I think Elon is doing. I really, you know, he's an unusual guy. He's strangely a little hard to read, even though I think the best interpretation that is, is that he's fairly straightforward about what he's trying to accomplish. And he obviously likes to play games. He likes to win. But the A, the change on Twitter is remarkable. It is not all positive, but I would say it is net wildly positive. Right? The difference one feels, I mean, one literally does not feel the weight of Big Brother watching every interaction there anymore. Now, whether Elon can stabilize it, I don't know. He's got a monumental challenge figuring out how to moderate it. And it does

need to be moderated at some level, but how you can moderate it without killing off the right to free expression that he, I think, clearly values. It's quite a puzzle. It's a tough puzzle. But I would say I'm rooting for him for two reasons. puzzle. But I would say I'm rooting for him for two reasons. One of them, great, and one of them, terrible, and I know it, right? The great one is, I think he's headed in the right direction. I've watched him make mistakes. I've watched him correct himself. And I have the sense of a guy who likes to act and is not afraid to realize, oh, that didn't work and take a different tack. act and is not afraid to realize, oh, that didn't work and take a different tack. That's a very positive thing. And so, you know, he has skills most don't. And I think he's more up to the

challenge than anybody else that I've seen. The other reason that I'm strongly rooting for him is that there's nothing else out there. There is nothing else out there. I mean, the other alternatives are ideologically captured by the right. I mean, if you go to some of these other social media platforms and you try to talk sense about January 6th, you get attacked. They talk about the dangers of invading the Capitol and that it is a real issue. People try to dismiss it. Right. No, it's crazy.

I mean it's crazy on both sides. It's crazy on both sides. It's crazy on both sides. And isn't that just inherent to the human condition, what you're talking about, like tribal isolation, that like if you're isolated or ostracized from the group, it's very damaging. It's very scary for people. So they do get captured by whatever group they're in. And we have to stop thinking about it in terms of good people or bad people and think about it rather in terms of just inherent to the human condition to adhere to a group of preordained opinions. Like you're adopting a conglomeration of opinions and ideas that the tribe has accepted. And this is – we're seeing this with woke politics. We're seeing this with crazy QAnon people. We're seeing this

across the board with everything. Yeah. And you can see on social media that the potential to make things vastly worse and more polarized and tribal is absolutely ever-present. And the potential to make it better is also there. Yeah. If you watch, for example, how people react over, you know, videos of animals doing surprising things, you know, especially pets that do things that we relate to. It's amazing how it will bring out the shared humanity in people who just, because they're looking at a video of a dog doing something remarkable, don't get around to wondering whether the person that they're bonding with over it is

of their political stripe or of the other stripe. And, you know, it's a lesson. I mean, I know because I was more or less violently ejected out of my home tribe, right, the left, and then was embraced by many people who call themselves on the right, and I found a tremendous amount of goodness over there, people who share values that I recognize from home, right? But what I admire is that you still are the same person. You haven't, there's a few of us that have been ideologically captured by the other tribe and they embrace it and then change their opinion on so many things and done a complete 180 and it's audience capture, right? They're captured

by these new people that have sort of embraced them and they've completely changed their political philosophies and their social philosophies. And they've sort of abandoned a lot of the things that they grew up with and that they identified themselves, whether they're progressives or leftists or whatever it is. Like when they've experienced this ostracization from the group, they said, well, this other group will take me. I'm fucking dyeing my skin blue and I'm wearing a mohawk like everybody else. You know, they're going to just do whatever the other group does. Yeah, it's true.

You can only do that once, by the way. Right. Yeah, exactly. People catch on. You can't go back. You can't say, no, by the way. Right. Yeah, exactly. People catch on. You can't go back. You can't say, no, no, no, I'm progressive now. You know, I do believe in a woman's right to choose. Now I've changed my position on gay marriage.

I'm all for it again. Right. I was against it at one point in time, and now I'm back. Like, you can't do that. Like, you can only do that once. You can only, like, in a lifetime, especially a public lifetime, if you're I mean, you can vary your opinions, most certainly. But if you make a complete radical shift in your philosophy in life, like you really can't bounce back and forth with that one. True. And, you know, for a couple of years, there was a like incessant

challenge to Heather and me that we were now conservatives and we just needed to admit it. Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah. We kept saying, look, no, this is not a social question for us. This is a question of what we are to do. And as much as we recognize the danger in progressivism, I don't think we can continue to live this way.

So we have to be progressives. Now, the danger I see. So the chorus that said we were conservatives actually died down. People got used to us saying, no, we're liberals and we know why. And it doesn't mean that we don't like you conservatives. It just means that we have a different perspective. And that's actually a good thing. Yeah.

The conservatives need progressives to talk to because it's the tension between the instinct to conserve what you've got and the instinct to improve upon it that actually makes the system work. It's also there's a real problem with identifying yourself as one or the other. Like most people just have ideas that they believe in and have things that they agree with and disagree with. And they have concepts that they have sort of interfaced with. They say, this makes sense to me.

And to just wholesale go one way or the other way, it's just you're trapped. Yeah, it's nuts. I mean, for one thing, the slates of different positions that are gathered under these banners aren't coherent. Yeah, no, they're not. They're really not. But the thing I worry about now, maybe a little less after the recent election, it's died down slightly. election, there was a chorus on the right, even people I quite like on the right, who were thinking that there was going to be a red wave ready to just dispense with liberals. And they're like, your time is done, right? Yes, you did an important job in history, but it's over. This is the time that we now wake up to the glory of conservatism. And, you know, I hear the error that they're making.

They're just not understanding, you know, conservatives have a vital role. But it only works if there's a tension pulling in the other way. Right. I mean, you know, it's like. It only works if people are allowed to debate ideas where you can listen to both sides and find out what resonates with you and what makes sense. Hell, yeah. you can listen to both sides and find out what resonates with you and what makes sense. Hell yeah. And it also, it strengthens the arguments on both sides because you have to shore up

your defense. If everybody sucks at chess, you know, and you're a master, like it's not good for your game. No, it's not. No, you need it. So anyway, I mean, I guess I'm appreciative of the number of people who've been welcoming on the right and I'm appreciative of the number of people who've been welcoming on the right and I'm appreciative of the number of people. And we're now seeing a fair grouping of people who come from the left who are now homeless because our party is insane, but are nonetheless proudly proclaiming their perspective and interacting well with conservatives.

And really, this is all going to come down to whether the people with ears to hear on both sides are going to be ready to gather and talk about how we're to govern ourselves. I think the more we discuss this, the more that idea gets into the zeitgeist and people realize how preposterous it is to be so rigidly one way or the other. And that, you know, to only look at conservatives as the good people and only look at liberals as the good people, like this is a nonsense perspective. It's the same way that woman was talking about the anti-vaxxers. They all did it out of hate. Like that's just a simplistic perspective that's not good for anybody. And

it's inherently a weak way of looking at the world. Yeah. There's a single error. It's very easy to see what it is, but boy, is it a doozy. It's a doozy. I know what I did and it wasn't wrong. Therefore, everything that the people who disagreed with me did was motivated by the wrong stuff and it was built of illogic and bad facts and all of that. And boy. And most people have so much stress and so many obligations, they don't have the time to really look at things from other people's perspectives. And to try to put yourself in their thought process and put yourself in their shoes and put yourself.

And they probably don't even know people like that in their real world. The problem is like real interactions. You know, one of the nice things about living in Texas is I regularly interact with conservative people. I regularly interact with progressive and liberal people. And in Austin in particular, which is a fantastic city, those people intermingle and get along in a way that I've never experienced before. And, you know, when I lived in California, the only place I talked to conservative people was in jujitsu and the gun range. That's when I interacted with them or when I went on the road. And comics that go on the road, you know, you're traveling to Arkansas, you're traveling to Oklahoma, you're traveling to the places where there's a lot of people that are conservative.

to Arkansas, you're traveling to Oklahoma, you're traveling to the places where there's a lot of people that are conservative. And you get accustomed to, you know, just realizing like, yeah, you can have a drink with that guy with the cowboy hat. He's cool. You know, like people are different. And it's okay. It's okay to be different. It's actually great. I like talking to people that, you know, grew up in different ways and lived in different ways. And you can find the strength and the interesting aspects of their character and the way like where their way of life sort of resonates with you and you're like, oh, I get it. I get why you're this way.

I get why you're, you know, why what you think is cool and why you have that American flag tattoo and like it makes sense to me. It's okay. But there's an enormous group of people that live in these ideological bubbles, both physically and cyberly. And in that cyber world, my God, those ideological bubbles are so constricting. And if that's the only way you interact with people, and if you are a person who works from home or is kind of shut in and is just engaging with people in this very limited manner on social media in these echo chambers and thought bubbles, it's like it's not good for you. It's not good for you.

It doesn't encourage nuance. It's also a really sad missed opportunity in my opinion. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Products of evolution that are even capable of letting some other person in on what we see and experience and think and how it came to be. That is such an odd thing to be. And to miss the opportunity, you know, you sit down with somebody and you have the opportunity to do that little experiment even for five minutes. And, you know, I almost never have the experience that it isn't worth it. Right. Yeah. Because some people, when they talk, it's just competitive. You know,

when they talk to people, it's just like, I'm right. And you're wrong. And I'm going to tell you why you're wrong. And I'm going to win. And I'm going to tell you to shut up. And it's just a profound lack of understanding of human nature. Like you realize that even with your kids, like if I tell my kids, Hey, shut up. Like they're like, I don't want to fucking shut up.

Like, and you're like, Oh, you're right. I shouldn't tell you to shut up. I should tell you why what you're saying is annoying and wrong or why you shouldn't yell at your sister or why like, you gotta like,

let's talk this through. You gotta talk it through. And you know, you learn that when you have children, like you learn how to like, look, we're going to talk this through and I've got to talk it through. And you learn that when you have children. You learn how to like, look, we've got to talk this through, and I'm going to explain to you. And it's going to take a long time for everybody to calm down. But then eventually we're going to get to this place where we realize, look, we just love each other. And sometimes people make mistakes.

And sometimes you do the wrong thing, and I have to teach you the right thing. And sometimes I learn that I did the wrong thing, and I have to tell you I did the wrong thing so you learn from me. thing and I have to tell you I did the wrong thing so you learn from me actually that's the most important lesson in parenting is when you screw up with your kids but you have to tell them you did it wrong you tell them it's one of the first things I do if I screw up I definitely do that but I also tell them whenever I'm correcting them I'm like listen I did that I did everything you're smarter than me guaranteed you have more access to information You have a giant advantage that you have parents that talk to you in this way And I've fucked up in more ways than you're ever gonna fuck up, so I'm not better than you. I'm just older

I just have more life experiences that have accumulated But like whenever I correct my kids. I'm like I fucking did all that I did that I lied I stole liquor from the cabinet. I that. I did that. I lied. I stole liquor from the cabinet. I did this. I did that. I did all those things that you're doing. And, you know, that's a very, like, I have a friend of mine who, he's a yoga instructor. And one of the things that he said to me that I never forgot, he said, having children was, like, one of the most important parts of my education as a human being

and that I've become so much wiser through having children and watching them experiencing life it's been a huge learning process to me and I remember thinking oh that's a really interesting way to look at it like he's looking at it not just I have to raise these kids but I'm enriching myself my own understanding of human beings through this process. And it's very educational to me. Yeah. It's like, it's actually the human metamorphosis at the point that you have kids because suddenly the program that you've been improving, the purpose of it becomes evident. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes when I'm Yeah. And, you know, sometimes when I'm yelling at my kids, hopefully I'm not yelling, but it does happen. But I will find myself saying to them, I'm not yelling at you for me. I'm yelling at you for future you.

Yeah. Which, you know, I mean, it works. They can hear that, right? Right. They don't always act on it, but they do know what I'm trying to tell them. Yeah. It's complicated, but so is everything. Brett, we just did fucking three and a half hours at least. Wow. It was a long-ass time, but it was very interesting.

I really appreciate you, man. And I appreciate your courage and your steadfast desire to get to the bottom of things and the truth, regardless of all the consequences. And I know you faced a lot of them. So I'm a fan, man. Well, I appreciate that. And let me, before we sign off here, just say one of the things I want to talk about today was I think you saved my channel at the point that we got demonetized. You brought me on here in June of 2021. You called it an emergency podcast. And I think it got in the way of they were planning to throw us off. And I think you stopped it.

And so anyway, I'm deeply grateful to you. I feel like we've been in some ways at war together and there's now an outbreak of peace. A brief one maybe, but we'll see. I'm hopeful that this conversation will somehow or another facilitate more of that. Hell yeah. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you. Thank you. Bye, everybody.