TRIGGERnometry - Did COVID Come From a Lab? - Bret Weinstein

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

Recorded live on 15 June 2021 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we begin, we'd like to say that in our opinion it is not suitable for children or for those of you who may have a nervous disposition. Hello and welcome to a very special live episode of Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kitten. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Doesn't get any more fascinating than the returning guest for you today. He's an evolutionary biologist who's been covering. the lab leak hypothesis and a lot more. Please welcome. It's Brett Weinstein. Brett, welcome back to the show.

Gentlemen, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to have you on. Before we get started, Francis and I have something to say to the guards of YouTube. We hear at Trigonometry believe that anyone has any wrong thoughts about anything to do with COVID is inherently evil. We will not be talking about anything. We're not allowed to by YouTube because obviously they should decide what everyone thinks and what anyone says. That's how we approach it. Censorship is brilliant.

We also love Xi Jinping. He's a great guy as well. And the World Health Organization are wonderful. We're totally on board with all their restrictions as well. And, yeah, we definitely won't be having any problematic conversations. Please don't cancel us. Exactly. And once we've got that out of the way.

That was all humor, of course. But the one thing we do know is you have been covering some potential alternative treatments for COVID. And you've had things taken down from your channel for doing so. So I think it's best that we stay away from that. And if people want to talk about that or listen to things about that, they can go and check it out on your channel on other platforms, which we know how to find. But they better hurry because as of yesterday,

YouTube has moved even farther in the direction of hurling dark horse off the platform. We had another video taken down a strike against our clips channel. So it looks like YouTube is about sick of open discussion. And anyway, it's a good moment to get yourself up to speed before there's no place left to do that. Well, absolutely, Brett. And the conversations you have been having are very, very interesting. I do recommend people check them out and make up their own mind. Obviously, we're not endorsing any particular view because we're not medical experts.

and people can go and check it out for themselves. That's what we always recommend. But listen, we wanted to talk to you about the censorship which you're experiencing. But before we do that, I do think it's helpful to, first of all, having a conversation about the lab leak situation about the oranges of COVID. And the reason I say this is not only because that in and of itself matters, but it's a crucial example of what happens when social media companies, a big tech companies are deciding what can and can't be talked about.

and then later suddenly find that actually that should have been talked about a year ago. So can we, first of all, before we get into lab leak and the idea that COVID may have come from a lab, why doesn't matter where COVID came from, Brett? Well, there are really two general reasons. One of them is widely agreed by people who've thought about the issue. And the other one, I seem to be one of the lone voices, maybe the only voice making this point. But the first reason is because if this came from a lab, and it was indeed a leak, then it is the result of predictable error.

And that is to say that in choosing to do this work, and in fact what we now understand, in choosing to circumvent the ban on this work by offshoring it to China, we effectively put the world in jeopardy of a very serious pandemic. And the fact is even if this somehow did come from nature, which is still a possibility, though the likelihood of it grows smaller with each week. But even if this did come from nature, the fact is the work in question was taking place, and it does place the world in danger of a pandemic because laboratory leaks are not rare. In fact, they happen all the time.

So the first reason that matters is because if COVID-19 is the result of a lab leak, then we can potentially correct our behavior going forward and eliminate that hazard. if we pretend that there's no chance it came from the laboratory, then we will presumably not only continue that work, but COVID-19 will be used as a demonstration that that work needs to be at a much larger scale because it was not fast enough to prevent this pandemic. So it matters a great deal, I would say, because what we do downstream of it would be potentially the opposite of what we would do

if this was a natural spillover event. And how does it reflect on the Chinese, spread, and particularly, I say the Chinese, but really the CCP, if it's found out that it was a leak from a laboratory that started the virus? Well, I think, frankly, this is a little bit of a dead end in terms of the analysis, because at some level, the sense that this took place in China in a Chinese lab, and that the leak may have emerged from there. By this, I mean, the research that might have led to such a pathogen and the possible leak looks most likely to have come from the Wuhan lab, because of course,

Wuhan is the origin point of the pandemic. On the other hand, the work in question was clearly the result of a quadrant of the international scientific community deciding that this work needed to be done and innovating the techniques with which to do it. And so certainly the Chinese have a tremendous, and by the Chinese, I don't really mean the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese government. The Chinese government bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for its lack of candor and for what to all appearances is a massive cover-up. You know, that is the responsibility of the Chinese government. On the other hand, the work in

question is a much bigger failure than that, right? It certainly appears to involve Tony Fauci. it involves eco-health alliance, whatever that is, whether that is actually a research organization or a laundering operation that allows money to circumvent a U.S. ban on gain of function research. I don't think it's entirely clear. But what is clear is that there is a small cabal of people who have been pushing this work forward over the objection of scientific colleagues who were clearly right to attempt to raise the alarm and to generate a ban on gain of function research. So I think it is a mistake to focus on China because the failure is much bigger than that and the implications are much more profound.

All right. Well, let's not focus on China. Then I think you make a good point. I think let's focus on the science of this. Wait. Can we go back though? I realize I failed to fully answer your question, which actually probably goes to where you're headed next. You said let's stick to the science. The place in which I believe there is a lot to be gained from knowing where SARS-CoV-2 came from that I seem to be alone on is the belief that were we to understand, let's say that this was a lab leak, which seems highly probable. If this was a lab leak, what are the protocols that were used to take the ancestor virus from nature, which by all appearances would not have been highly infectious of humans and almost certainly would not have been transmissible between humans? what are the protocols of the experiments that produced a highly infectious agent in humans like SARS-CoV-2? If we were to find out, for example, that ferrets were used in this process, we would understand a lot about why the virus behaves the way that it does, right? Ferrets are used in the laboratory environment because they have an ACE2 receptor that looks very much like the human one.

So if you were trying to produce a coronavirus that was infectious in humans, you might serially pass it. the virus through ferrets. If that happened, then we know, then we would know that ferrets are an organism in which we could study the progress of this disease and understand a great deal more about it, because the disease is not normal. The number of tissues that it impacts is incredible, the number of symptoms. And so, in essence, my point more broadly than ferrets is knowing the protocols that generated the virus, if it was generated in the laboratory, potentially gives us a tremendous leg up on fighting COVID. It would allow us to narrow our search in understanding what the virus is and understanding what its vulnerabilities might be, predicting what it might do both

epidemiologically and evolutionarily going forward. And so my sense is at the very least, we have the right to that information in order to see whether or not there are useful tools buried within it. And by playing this game where we pretend that the majority of the evidence still points toward a natural origin, which is absolutely false. By playing that game, what we are effectively doing is running out the clock when, in fact, time is of the essence. That makes perfect sense, Brett. So let's get into the science of it from the beginning, because there will be a lot of people who are tuning into this who have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. And I'll be honest with you, to some extent, both Francis and I are two

of those people, right? What are you talking about? I understand everything, Mike. The day you start doing biology maze, the day we're all screwed. But, look, Brett, seriously, though, from the very beginning, just take us through at a sort of normal person's level of understanding. What are you talking about? What do you mean lab leak? What do you mean it was made in a lab? Like, what on earth are you talking about?

So, first of all, there's been a game played, right? It is implausible that human beings could have designed a virus like this. that is true. And so by pretending that lab leak is synonymous with a designed virus, there were for many months a sort of false sense that people were alleging something, you know, at the remote end of science fiction. When in fact those of us who were pointing out that the evidence did in fact point towards a laboratory leak were not making that claim at all. Our point was there are things that we accomplish in the lab that we cannot say how they will look in advance. What we do is we use evolution. We harness evolution in the laboratory to design things

that we would not know beforehand we're going to work. So for example, the spike protein of SARS COVID-2 is spectacularly well designed to infect human tissue. But if you took the sort of state-of-the-art knowledge before SARS-CoV-2 was known in the world, we would not have predicted if you showed somebody the sequence that it would have been a highly effective pathogen. So we learned that from SARS-CoV-2. And the question is, did scientists train an ancestral virus to infect humans in the laboratory by effectively forcing it to jump from one creature to the next, possibly ferrets, possibly humanized mice, or possibly the cells of human airway? All of these things are laboratory platforms that can be used to teach a virus evolutionarily how to accomplish jumping from one cell to the next or one individual to the next.

And so the question is we know that these experiments were being done. They were being done primarily in North Carolina in the Ralph Barrett lab and in Wuhan in the Ji Zhang Li lab. Those two labs are connected. They are effectively Ralph Barak trained Zhigeng Li in these techniques. and these are the two primary places in the world where this work is done. So when the virus emerged in Wuhan, it immediately raised red flags for some of us. And in my case, I didn't know that there was a BSL4 lab in Wuhan. And when I first looked, the story is this.

Heather and I were in the Amazon working on the first draft of our upcoming book. And so we were completely out of contact with the world. I mean, literally no contact for a couple weeks. And when we came out, we were in Ecuador and we emerged from the Amazon and we're on the river at the first place where one's phone can pick up just wisps of signal. And there was a story that stuck out from all the rest. The story was that the first case of what was then called novel coronavirus was in Ecuador already. And we'd never heard of this. And so I started to look into it.

And initially I thought, and I had, as a graduate student, I studied bats. And so I looked at the story that was being distributed, and it said that a virus appears to have jumped from horseshoe bats, probably through the bushmeat trade at the Wuhan seafood market and is now spreading in a concerning way, even outside of China. And I looked at that, and I looked at the papers in question, and it all made sense to me. And then I tweeted that it did. I explained that I had been a bat biologist and that the story made sense and that the Bushmeat trade is indeed incredibly dangerous.

It's probably the source of HIV, for example, and that it should be shut down. And I immediately got pushback from some of my followers who said, so you think it's a coincidence that there's a BSL4 lab studying these viruses in Wuhan? And I thought, what the hell? That's an amazing coincidence. and then I thought, well, maybe there are a lot more of these labs than I think. No, there aren't. There are only a few labs studying these viruses, and one of them happens to be in Wuhan.

And then I looked into the distribution of the bats. They're not in Wuhan. And so it was this curiouser and curiouser phenomenon. The deeper you dug, the more it looked anomalous that this virus had emerged in Wuhan at the location where such viruses were under manipulation. All right. So that, of course, was a message that some of us tried to put into the world, that there was a question to be answered. Is this a simple coincidence? And if so, how do we reconcile it? And the more you look for a way to reconcile it, the less sense it makes. And then Uri Dagan did the first deep investigation into the genomics of SARS-CoV-2.

And in fact, Yuri, much like many of us who ended up pushing the lab leak hypothesis into the public view, Yuri was essentially trying to reassure himself that this was not a laboratory leak and that those people who were saying it was were, you know, off the deep end. And the deeper he dug, the more he found that actually the genome sure looks like it might have been the product of laboratory. experiments. And we now know from Tony Fauci's emails that a lot of the experts in the field when they first looked at the genome, that was their first thought too, including Christian Anderson, who has been one of the lead proponents of the idea that LabLeak is pure conspiracy theory and that those who are advancing it are out of their depth and that the genome could only have come from nature. He turns out privately to have thought that the genome that he was looking at was

completely inconsistent with evolutionary theory. So anyway, there are multiple different kinds of evidence that point towards the lab. It is not a completely closed case. In other words, there are things that we could see that would alert us that a story had unfolded that we didn't know anything about that would explain how it got from nature to people, but the likelihood at this point is very, very low that it came from nature. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein. The new Elixir collection featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord, paired with vanilla, each with its own distinct attitude, each with its own universe, bold elixir, sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic elixir, sweet and romantic like a lingering touch, solar elixir, a radiant

expression of joy, ultra-concentrated for amplified impact and lasting power. Find your euphoria. Discover the Euphoria Elixir Collection by Calvin Klein. And does that mean that the virus is more dangerous because it leaks from, because it leaked from a lab, because in my head as a layman, I think, have they genetically altered this virus? Does it make it more deadly, et cetera, et cetera? Do we know the long-term effects of it? Those are good questions. Let me try to put it in context. Most, so there are innumerable viruses in nature that could in principle infect humans. The problem is, in order for a virus, to become pandemic in humans.

It has to learn two tricks, a virus that jumps from a bat to a person, for example, needs to move from cell to cell in order to be able to create enough offspring viruses to be viable in the world. And those offspring viruses need to be produced in a way that causes them to be passed on. So it has to learn to infect a person and it has to learn to spread between people. both of those are evolutionarily very difficult jobs. It's not that it doesn't happen, but the point is the likelihood of it happening. If you were to contact an animal in the wild and it was sick with a virus and that virus managed to get into your airway, the chances of it infecting a cell successfully and then infecting neighboring cells enough that there was a substantial population of viruses, and then those viruses being capable of infecting someone else,

are almost zero. So again, it can happen, but it requires some very rare things to all go the same direction. So what we know in this case is that this virus is spectacularly well adapted to humans and actually very poorly adapted to bats, right? So it has done a lot of learning somewhere.

And the thing that is most conspicuous about the evidence is that there is no hint that this virus learned to do what it does, in the human population. At the point we first know about it in Wuhan, it is already a spectacularly capable virus. Right. May I interrupt you there?

Just again, from a layman's point of view, is it possible for a virus to be a crappy virus and bats and a hugely effective virus in humans just by chance or accident or however you might describe it? Well, it depends what you mean. At a technical level, first of all, the virus had if we're right about what the ancestor is and i have never heard anyone challenge that right the ancestor appears to have been a virus of horseshoe bats and there's a small uh subfamily of bats that

essentially specializes there's a diversity of these these viruses um those viruses have to be good at infecting bats in order to stick around from one year to the next so we know that the ancestor was good at infecting bats and we know that saris covey too is good at infecting humans. And we have zero explanation for how it got from A to B other than the possibility of the lab, or there's some natural population of some creature that we have yet to find in which it's circulated for a while, or there's some population of humans that had an epidemic that so far has not been connected. The dots have not been connected in spite of a huge amount of search effort. What about the pangolin? We keep being told about the pangolin. The pangolin was nonsense.

These viruses do not inhabit panglins. It is inconsistent with the data. In fact, everybody now admits that the pangolin was a dead end. And I think, frankly, dead end isn't even the right description. It looks like it was a cover story, right? It doesn't make sense ecologically. It doesn't make sense genomically. It does not fit with the affinities of the viruses in question.

So that was a dead end. There could be probably more likely it would be a carnivorine, you know, so a relative of, things like weasels, which in fact would explain, you know, there's one of two explanations for why this virus, which does occasionally spread to other creatures, but does not spread between members of those other species, with two exceptions. Ferrets and minks, right? So those ferrets and minks are very closely related. They're both weasels. So there's a question about why this virus seems to be good in people and weasels. But in any case, the...

Most people are like weasels. Sorry, I had to say that. You did. I know that you did. So let me try to remember. Oh, the question that you asked, Francis, was, is it possible for the virus to just simply have accidentally been good at infecting humans? And the point is, is it possible to take a bucket of mechanical parts, throw them out the window, and have them assemble into a robot? And the answer is, a philosopher could make a technical argument that it is possible, right? But it is not a meaningful probability. Their likelihood is so very low. Now, this might be slightly higher than that. But what you would get in every case that we've seen is a virus that had maybe unusually good ability to jump between species. It would initially have a very poor ability to jump between individuals of the new species. But it would have enough that selection could fix it, right?

That's what you would expect in a natural spillover event. But that period in which natural selection, fixed the virus and made it very good at jumping between individuals of a species that it did not initially inhabit, that would leave a signature. That signature would be in the world, and we would find it, and we have no evidence of it. What we have is a virus that was so incredibly well adapted at the point it first shows up in humans that it does very little evolve. It just simply takes off across the globe. That's a very anomalous fact, right? It could be explained by a natural spillover event and a mystery population of either people or some other creatures somewhere, but we have not found them.

There's no hint of them. That's why the Wuhan lab looks to be such a likely explanation. And you say it's a likely explanation, Brett. To me, this sounds like something out of the realms of science fiction. You know, a manipulated virus is leaked out into the world, creates a pandemic. if it's, as you say, it's been manipulated and, you know, created in a lab, as it were, I'm using layman's language and I realize these might be technically incoherent, et cetera, et cetera. But does that mean that it somehow, it could be more deadly?

It could be more, it's far more infectious. We don't know what the long-time implications of this virus are. Surely that's terrifying, isn't it? Absolutely terrifying. And this is part of the problem is that, let's assume that everybody is on the up and up with respect to why they were working on these viruses. I think we had a group of scientists who really were terrified that a spillover event was going to cause a tremendous human pandemic that would be devastating and they were racing against the clock to prevent it, right? I think they were wrong about how likely that is to happen from nature and we can talk about why.

But let's imagine that that was just simply what they were thinking. and let's imagine that maybe they took humanized mice, ferrets, airway tissue, and they passaged a virus through these things in order to enhance its infectivity of humans. Part of the problem is they are making a puzzle for the virus to evolutionarily solve that is not exactly like nature, right? So imagine for a second that this virus, you know, got into a wild population. population of weasels. Well, in order to spread from one weasel to the next, it has to leave those weasels healthy enough to go about and encounter each other, right? It's not going to get

very far if it infects a weasel and knocks it flat and no other weasel will come near it because it looks sickly. And even if it infects other weasels in its burrow, if it doesn't get to the next burrow, it's going extinct. So a virus typically has to leave a creature healthy enough to spread it. Now, there are some diseases that don't work like this, right? So, for example, denge, yellow fever, malaria, which are spread by a mosquito, they can knock you flat. And in fact, it might be a good thing to knock you flat, because if you're knocked flat and you can't even swat a mosquito away, you might be more likely to transmit them. But for something like a coronavirus, it does not want to debilitate its host, because debilitating its host reduces the chances it will spread.

that's very different if you've got a cage full of ferrets, right? A cage full of ferrets that can't get away from each other, right? So one of the things that I think is likely to have happened here is that we made a much worse virus from the point of view of the damage it does to the body because the damage that it did in the lab, if that's where it came from, wasn't critical in the story of how it spread from one creature to the next, right? So I do think the chances are I have regarded COVID-19 as a very dangerous disease from the beginning. And many people, I think, have been misled by the low case fatality rate.

It's not an especially fatal disease, but it is an extremely destructive disease and an extremely transmissible disease. And my feeling from very early on was we have a limited amount of time to drive this virus extinct. And that if we don't, it's going to become a permanent fellow traveler of humans. And that will be an unmeasurable tragedy, which I think we still don't know whether we're stuck with it. But because of the way we've mishandled the treatment and prevention of COVID, it's a strong possibility that we won't be able to rid ourselves of it. So what you're talking about essentially is every winter we have, like with the flu, we have a wave of this virus. But unlike flu, it leaves lasting damage in many of the people. that it infect. Well, I also think we underrate the seriousness of flu, and I've been bothered for many years

by the fact that I think we have a model in our heads that if you get better from a disease, that you got away with it, right? And it may have robbed you of a couple weeks, but, you know, whatever. That's the cost. And what we don't realize is that these things all have costs. They destroy tissue, and, you know, they rob you of future life, and they cause you to age faster. So anyway, I regard the flu as serious, but this is much more serious. Some of the kinds of damage, the number of tissues involved is particularly troubling. And yes, it could become permanent. It could, you know, it will probably have some seasonality to it on the basis that our behavior is so seasonal that, you know, it will likely, even if it didn't have any seasonality built into it, the simple fact that we are outdoors more.

when it's warm in the tempered zones and that it doesn't seem to transmit outdoors will give it a seasonal signature. But yeah, it could become a permanent pathogen of people and that will be a spectacular tragedy all the greater if it has come from a laboratory and is a self-inflicted wound. Brett, let me try and summarize very quickly some of the things you've said and do correct me at any point if I've got it wrong. And before I do, our producer just reminded us that we've got a lot of questions flowing already.

There's some links in the bottom for PayPal and super chats, which you're free to use, send in questions. There will be that one thing that shall not be named that we won't be asking Brett about. But apart from that.

And that, of course, is Voldemort. Waldemort, exactly. We can't talk about it in euphemistic terms. Apparently not. But we actually, We want to talk about the censorship of it a little bit later on, but just sticking to the virus for now. Sure. You're saying the initial idea was like it's a bioweapon.

You're saying it was not designed for that sort of purpose. Well, if it was designed at all. So let me point us to yesterday's New York Times. So the New York Times has been screwing the pooch on this story from the beginning. There are occasional glimmers of hope like Brett Stevens' recent column. But yesterday, the New York Times ran an extraordinary piece on an interview with Xi Zhang Li, where the reporter almost preposterously claims she just phoned up Xi and the phone was answered. And anyway, it's a remarkable piece.

and it doesn't really hold together as plausible, but it does participate in this very broad-scale attempt to regain control of the narrative in the aftermath of Nicholas Wade's piece, which seemed to cause the world to wake up to what was going on in the Lab League story. But the piece basically says that Xi Zhengli is very upset that the world is looking at her with suspicion and that she can't produce the evidence because there is no evidence of something that didn't happen,

which is something she has been saying for a long time, but of course she is a citizen of China. The interview is mostly over email. So there's a question about what this even is other than just a sort of formal statement. Yes, this didn't come from the Wuhan lab, which we've heard many, many, many times and does not square with the evidence.

But here's the point I want to make. The New York Times has not put together that their attempt to resurrect the idea that this did not come from the Wuhan lab leads you to an even worse possibility, which has to remain on the table. Right. But the evidence that this came from a lab is substantial, and it comes in numerous different forms. That does not go away if it didn't come from the Wuhan lab. Let's say that the Wuhan lab threw open its doors. Let us look in its freezers. Let us look at its lab notebooks.

Let's say that they've preserved the evidence instead of disappearing it. We looked at all that. And there was really no evidence that this had happened in the Wuhan lab. Then the question is, okay, then what lab did it happen? Right? Because the next most likely hypothesis, and I want your listeners to understand this, I am not saying that I think this happened. I am saying there is no evidence for this.

if we discover that the Wuhan lab is in fact innocent and the virus still appears to have been the product of laboratory activity, then the question is, who released it in Wuhan and why? And the obvious answer would be so that people would assume it came from the Wuhan lab, right? I don't think this happened. There's no evidence for it. But if the New York Times and others are so sure that Xi Zhang Li is innocent because she says she is, and we can get an investigation that can establish that in one way or another, the next most likely thing becomes it was some other lab in Wuhan was the cover story. Brett, the reason I'm asking is if I temporarily put my tinfall hat on and take a puff on my imaginary spliff here is, I mean, it's a virus that's killing primarily old people in a world that feels

very overpopulated to a lot of people. Well, it's not deadly enough to, you know, certainly one can imagine. I mean, one can imagine that some diabolical force might have decided that it wanted fewer people on planet Earth. But this is not a especially good virus from that perspective. It doesn't kill enough people and the people it kills are more often towards the end of their lives. So it doesn't look like an effective weapon in and of itself. Now, if you put on the tinfoil hat and pass the spills, belief there thanks very much it could be useful as a disruptive agent or it could be useful if

others did not have a remedy for it but you knew of one right there are ways in which it could be used as a weapon but in and of itself it does not look especially weapon like fair enough so it wasn't you're saying there's a possibility but you don't believe that that's what happened so it was it was a failed experiment or a leak, an experiment was happening and somehow it probably got out of that lab into the wild, so to speak. Is that a correct summation of your point of view? Yeah. So back in, I guess it would have been May of 2020, I put together a flow chart of all of the real possibilities for where this thing came from, the various natural stories. It came directly from bats. It came through an intermediate species. It came through the lab as a result of weapons

research. It came through the lab as the result of pandemic prevention research. All of the things were on the table. And I went through and I gave probabilities for each of these things based on whether there was any evidence for them, based on how many different facts that are not an evidence would have to be true in order for it to be right. And basically the point is you can't knock the idea of it came from some other lab and was released in Wuhan so that Wuhan would be blamed for it. You can't knock that off completely because the whole point of such a thing would be to leave a false impression. On the other hand, the thing that really sticks out to me is the appearance of a massive cover up of what was going on in the Wuhan lab, which would not have occurred if the

Wuhan lab was innocent. In other words, why go around and behave like a very guilty lab if you are in fact an innocent lab? Because the whole key at that point would be, look, you know, I know how this looks. It didn't come from here. Here's how we know. And we're on board with figuring out where it did come from, right? That would have been the right approach. And of course, there are things about the government of China that might be inconsistent with that kind of openness, but nonetheless, if they are an innocent lab, they have behaved in exactly the opposite way, including renaming samples in a way that is against scientific protocol, deleting databases that might have contained exculpatory evidence. The whole thing looks like the

behavior of guilty people who know what happened and wish to evade blame. So I think, you know, could it be that this was dual purpose research inside the Wuhan lab, that it was partly about weapons and it was partly about pandemics? That's possible. We don't know. There are slight hints of such a thing. But I think even if this was partially weapons research, the release was still accidental. That's the most likely thing. And the most likely lab for it to have been released from was the lab in Wuhan.

There's a question that I really want to ask. it's a Tim Foll hack question in a way, but it just feels more and more, how can I put this pertinent as we go on? I see governments becoming ever more stringent with lockdown, particularly in the UK. Yeah, at the same time, we get told that, you know, it's a virus that is, you know,

not particularly dangerous to young people, it's dangerous to old people. It feels at times that we're not being told the truth about this virus and the impact it's having on the body. Is that Tim Foil Hat question or am I asking something particularly valid? Well, first of all, I don't know how we all should be dealing with the question of tinfoil hat questions. At some level, we've been frightened off of talking about collusion, even though every human being should be aware that collusion is a very common feature of civilization.

That doesn't, you know, most hypotheses of collusion are definitely going to be false. However, there's an awful lot of collusion in the world. And the idea that we should be timid at all about asking the question about collusion when there is anomalous behavior and obvious lying, we shouldn't be embarrassed about it at all. And in fact, the right tools to use when collusion is to question are scientific tools. So what I would say is there's a reason, and I was nearly alone in this, there's a reason that I was quite inflexible about the idea that the only right way to refer to this was the lab leak hypothesis and that the word theory was in and of itself a problem because, you know, if you think about evolutionary theory, we call evolutionary theory because it is the presumed right answer based on a tremendous amount of, work. Right? So to call this a lab leak theory is an error. To call it a hypothesis tells you exactly what the rules of engagement are, what the legitimate tools are, what the standards of evidence are.

And so my feeling is we should address all of these questions of collusion with that same toolkit. That's the right way to do it. And it doesn't involve putting on a tinfoil hat. So are we being lied to at a level that is almost impossible to fathom? And that's one of the things, about the entire story of COVID really, right? And this starts. I see the lab leak hypothesis as one leg of a three-legged stool of places where the very same people are trying to control what it is we are allowed to discuss. They are trying to shape a narrative that a small amount of investigation reveals is nonsense. And we have to figure out how, give that all of our institutions seem to be participants in this lie, whether they know that they're

lying or not, we have to figure out how to make sense of what we are facing and plan for how we are going to escape it with the minimal amount of damage. We're going to have to figure out how to do that at the moment going around the institutions. The institutions are simply an obstacle to civilization's well-being and even knowing what's taking place. I mean, that's not exactly the question that I wanted. I'm going to be honest with you. Why is it? No, carry on and then I'll ask you.

I was going to suggest if, you know, if you wanted a happier answer, I mean, you could have got a different guest for one thing. But, yeah, go on. No, so that being the case, why is it that big tech all? of these particular, you know, institutions have decided what is and what isn't acceptable. At one point, we, I mean, we could still get kicked off, but we could still have a strike against our channel for this particular interview. Why is it all of a sudden that big tech has deemed it acceptable that we can have this conversation now, whereas two months down the line, it was deemed that it was unacceptable, two months ago?

Well, I think the way to understand this is to keep multiple conversations in mind simultaneously. So it is now perfectly acceptable anywhere you want to have a proper conversation about the LabLic hypothesis. As you point out, that was not true several months back. And what changed was not the evidence. It is not that some piece of evidence emerged that. caused people to wake up. It was somehow a social decision. And for those of us who have been demonized as conspiracy theorists for saying what most people now regard as self-evident, the whole thing is rather strange.

It's like we against the odds, managed to turn the heat up high enough on the garbage story that this obviously came from nature and anybody who thinks otherwise is crazy. we turned the heat on it. There were enough people with enough different skill sets to surface the evidence that eventually that story just wasn't tenable. And you know, you remember the, what is it, Colin Ray's song, that's my story and I'm sticking to it, right? Where the dude comes home and his wife asks him where he's been and he said he fell asleep in the hammock in the yard and she tells him, actually I threw the hammock in the attic a week ago. and he says, well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. This is that, right?

This is for months, there has been clear nonsense being distributed as if it were scientific consensus and fact based on scientific work. And then eventually the contradiction became so glaring that whoever was trying to maintain it decided to back off, not all the way. It's not like they've come clean. It's not like they've admitted that a laboratory. leak is the most likely explanation, which it clearly is, that what they've done is they've decided to adjust the story so that the contradictions are less obvious and then to staunch

the bleeding by establishing a new false story, which we are now battling over. But that is taking place. We are now allowed to talk about the lab leak. Facebook says it's no longer going to take down posts on this topic. Well, thanks Facebook, right? But we've got other topics that have the exact same profile, right? The exact same profile where those who talk about them are morally defective. They are getting in the way of our, you know, collective human campaign to fight off COVID. It's the same battle. The sensors are the same people. And the answer is, if you watched the lab leak thing happen, why are you not saying to yourself, gee, I wonder if the people who got the LabLeague right, we're revealing something about what the censorship is really for, right?

And whether or not where I see that censorship still taking place, there might be something that I desperately need to know about. And there is. Brett, do you think this is really the level of sophistication of the thinking about this? And this is a question that I really want to talk to you about. And we've been talking for nearly now, and we haven't even got to the censorship part of it properly. the idea that we live in a world now where essentially four people in hoodies in Silicon Valley

control the entirety of the mass communication that occurs and they are making decisions about what we can and can't talk about and it just seems inconceivable to me that YouTube has a scientifically sufficiently educated team to even make this decision on a scientific basis It seems far more likely to me that the big tech company simply get a note from the presidential administration or from whoever, which says this is evil lying propaganda that's undermining our efforts to tackle a deadly pandemic. It must be suppressed. And the hoodie billionaire in Silicon Valley goes, well, the government is telling me this. So I don't have a clue. So I'm not a biologist.

I'm not epidemiologist. I'm not a virologist. you know, so I'm going to do what the government tell me because I don't want to kill people. Well, but I mean, think about what you're saying. I mean, I don't agree. I rarely do. I don't think it's for people in hoodies. In fact, one of the strong possibilities here is that we have a, I don't want to call it artificially intelligent.

It's more like artificially stupid set of algorithms that are on autopilot and that the folks in Silicon Valley who feel that they are in control actually would discover that they weren't if they tried to change course, right? That this is a process. You've got people staffing a process that is out of control. And yes, it does seem to be taking direction from the CDC and the who and we don't know who else. But, you know, in the U.S., to have the government telling tech companies to silence individuals is a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment, I would say. The defense of censorship has been, these are private concerns, and they have a right to have on their platform who they want and to not have others.

Now, that's a very shaky defense, but it falls apart completely if what they are doing is taking directives from a government that is absolutely forbidden in our top amendment, not to silence its citizens. So there's a big question here. We don't know how it works, but anybody who does even a little bit of looking into this will discover something absolutely ghastly. And even if you disagree on the content, maybe you think natural origin is the most likely explanation for the virus. Maybe, well, I guess I got to skip the other topic so we don't put your channel in jeopardy. But maybe you think I'm just wrong on the evidence on these other things.

You still have to ask yourself, if I'm wrong, why is it so necessary to silence me? Can't we just have this out in public and find out that I'm wrong because the evidence will go against me? And what does that say about our society, Brett, that we silence people who disagree with the narrative? It says that something that has its own incentives has taken over and that we are effectively passengers on a ship headed to a destination we do not know. And Brett, I want to come back to the point about these decisions not being made scientifically because I come from a family of scientists. Both my parents were biochemists in the Soviet Union. My dad actually worked on viruses and vaccines for the Soviet Union at the time.

And yet in our family, conversations about alternative hypotheses about various explanations for various events were not only regular, they were actively encouraged because I understood, and I think my parents understood, were very kind of classically educated in science. That is the scientific method, right? It's a discussion and a debate and a series of investigations and experiments about what the truth may be, which produces a working theory that is the best theory available until the next one comes along by a process of other people coming up with other quote-unquote conspiracy theories about why that established theory is now wrong. So how have we got to a place where the more science advances and moves forward,

we're now almost unable to discuss the next potential hypothesis that can explain something that is, as you say, currently unexplained. There are two important answers here, I think. One is we are confused as a society about what science is. Those of us who have dedicated our life to it and who are very serious about it in its detail, understand that science is a process. It is not a collection of answers that we have arrived at through that process. It is not a social system of people and their beliefs. It is a process by which you find out where your perceptual biases have misled you and you find out what is true in spite of those biases. That's the purpose of science. And the only way it can work is in a system that is open to entertaining all possibilities and then engaging in very serious falsification. So to have this kind of mind-numbing follow the science, you know, hashtag mentality,

where people think that following the science is, you know, rebroadcasting the bullet points in the, you know, the press release is to invert science. This is anti-scientific. That said, people, I think, especially in an emergency, are prone to just want to know what they're supposed to do. And so anybody who wants to give false certainty about what the virus is, how it transmits, what one should do to protect themselves, anybody who wants to tell the right kind of story has a huge and willing audience. And those people, you know, people want to feel, for example, all right, we've just got to get ourselves to a vaccine. Okay, vaccine showed up earlier than anybody was expecting. That's kind of great. Maybe the answer is I've just simply got to go get myself vaccinated. I can relax for the first time in more than a year, right?

I get that. I understand why that's comforting. Such a person, though, does not want to hear the nuances. They don't want to hear what we don't know about the implication of those vaccines, right? They don't want to hear about the fact that you have multiple novel phenomena being deployed at once in a process that has been shortened in order to bring it to the public more quickly and that that, that, means we know even less than we would know ordinarily, right? They don't want to know these things because, frankly, it makes it hard to sleep. So, you know, lots of people are lying to themselves because what they want is a comforting story and they'd like to just cross their fingers and hope

it's right. And the problem is those of us who don't sleep very well until we've actually looked into these things are not comforted by the story. And we're not comforted by the official powers that be handing down what's absolute nonsense, right? I mean, this has been clear from the beginning. Heather and I have been shouting for much more than a year about the fact that this virus does not appear to transmit outdoors, that it does appear that people who have more vitamin D are better off than people who have less vitamin D, that you should go outdoors, you should not wear a mask except in maybe very unusual circumstances outdoors, and that for the powers

it be to tell us effectively you need a mask at all times because the entire world is suddenly dangerous is wrong. More than 99% of the world is not dangerous because it's not inside a building or a car or an airplane. All of that space is safe. And for the last year and a half, we should have been using that fact to take a break from COVID and go talk about what's really going on outside in comparative safety. Right. But we haven't been doing it because something is very interested in us listening to its dictates about what we should do. And that is a very alarming fact. Do you think the governments have been using this as a power grab in a very cynical sense? The problem is, so we have a composite of two things that are almost certain both to be present.

On the one hand, there is collusion behind the scenes of people who have objectives that we don't know about. right there are meetings in which people decide what to do and the reasons that they decide what we should do are not necessarily about our well-being you know that britt we we also have no i'm serious how do you know that those meetings are happening well for one thing you can detect the way that the lab leak hypothesis suddenly became mainstream involved a series of acknowledgments over the course of days. In other words, some email chain or Zoom call or meeting resulted in a conclusion, which is, okay, that story is not going to work. The new story is going to look like this. And so the people who were in on it started repositioning themselves. And in the course of two weeks,

everything was different. And you had a whole new set of people championing the Lablich hypothesis who had been mum or had been demonizing it up until right before. And so the point is you can detect that something unnatural has caused a shift in the narrative. And there are many such things. But anyway, my point about this is you have collusion and you have emergence, right? There's also a certain organic phenomenon that happens. The who and the CDC are not scientific organizations. They're about public health.

And public health involves stories that are simple enough to get people to do what we need them to do. Right. And the problem is that's in conflict with knowing what's actually happening. And it's especially dangerous to allow the thing that licenses itself to lie in order to get the public to do what it needs to do. To allow those lies to start interfering with scientific inquiry is especially dangerous. It's like, you know, putting on blinders before you run down the stairs. So you've got emergence, right? Natural processes that are set in motion for one reason and then evolve into something else. And you've We've got collusion, people actually having meetings and deciding to shut down some line of inquiry or whatever. We never know the admixture, right? So it could be that this is 99% emergence and 1% collusion, or it could be reversed, or it could be somewhere in the middle. And if you're going to think about these issues, it's very important, I believe, to enter into them with the sense of, in a complex story like this, both things are going to be there. and the question is, what's the ratio, right? Is this mostly a story of collusion,

or is this mostly a story of emergence, or is it divided between them in some, you know, haphazard fashion? The thing that I find, you know, we talk about this, the thing that I find very worrying is that when I speak to most people, they want an end to this. They want this to end. They want to return to normal. I don't think we're ever going to return to normal as it was.

I think this is for the long term. Do you share my pessimism? Well, it's two questions, really. I said back in probably it would have been February of 2020, we're never going back to normal. I don't think we're ever going back to normal. It doesn't mean I don't think we could drive COVID extinct. In fact, what I have come to understand recently is that probably we could have driven COVID extinct months ago and that we are not doing it for reasons that are mysterious, right? You would imagine that everybody, given the opportunity to drive COVID to extinction, would be interested in doing that. And that were there a question about whether that was really possible? And I believe honest brokers who have looked at all

the information, reasonable people could disagree over whether or not it is possible to drive COVID to extinction with the tools we presently have in short order. But if you even think that that's possible and the tools are the right ones to bring to bear whether or not we're stuck with COVID, then you should certainly bring them to bear. And our failure to do that is utterly alarming. I really cannot emphasize enough how strange our behavior is in light of the tools at our disposal. And Brett, I take it that if I ask you what those tools are, you're going to give me an answer that will get us banned from YouTube. Is that correct? Well, how about we, I mean, you know, personally, my feeling is, you know, how can I say this?

It'd be great. It'd be great if you guys just grew a pair. It doesn't have to be two-care. We're getting called out live on air. One care between you is enough, I think, right? And the fact is, look, I'm probably going to lose my channel over this. But from what I've seen, if it takes losing my channel in order to make the point about what we're doing wrong, then so be it, even though my channel is the bulk of my family's income. So I understand that not everybody's in that position. No, Brett, I'll tell you what the difficulty is for us. And I actually think it's important for us to discuss this. The difficulty for us is that we are not scientists.

And so the stuff that – and the reason we wanted to have this conversation with you is we know you, we've met you, we both can. consider you a friend and we trust that you wouldn't be doing what you're doing if there wasn't a good reason for it. But nonetheless, we don't have the ability to independently verify the stuff that you're talking about. So we're delighted that you've joined us. And you know, you're right to call us out to some extent. I don't want to be sitting here going, bro, you can't talk about this where you can do. I don't. No, no. I don't even. I don't even. I know you don't. I know. The concern for us is that we are not able to independently verify it. So we want to bring the conversation to people's attention.

Right. And we want to make people aware that you've talked about some of this other stuff elsewhere and they're welcome to seek it out. Okay. So I'm not going to put you guys in danger. I understand what you're protecting. And I agree with you that my responsibility here is far greater than yours because I am in a position to look at the evidence and evaluate it with at least some of the right

tools. And I'm in contact with people who have the other tools and the picture is quite clear to me. In a way, I wouldn't expect it to be clear to you. But I would point out that there are two questions on the table. There are a series of topics that are scientific and technical in nature, and there's the censorship issue, which is not. And the point is the technical ones require the censorship one to be solved. And so my concern is that a legitimate fear that you're not in a position to evaluate the scientific questions is going to result in too much timidity on too many channels with respect to the censorship. censorship issue, which is clearly out of control, right? For them to come after me when I've had,

you know, clinicians on who are, who have saved many people from COVID, people who have actually innovated the current standard of care, people who are important players in the story of how we have medically addressed COVID, are saying there's something that we're not doing, and there's no good reason for it. I've had them on my channel, right? So, anyway, the question is, is there perhaps some way, you know, you mentioned that we could refer to some of these forbidden topics as Voldemort? The problem with that is that I think, you know, and I, you know, I'm a scientist, I'm not a literature guy, but in reading the Harry Potter series, my feeling was that Voldemort is pretty unambiguously bad.

You have to be pretty postmodern to not see him as sort of a negative character. So my sense is if we use that euphemism, that it gives the wrong impression about the things that we are not saying. And so I was going to suggest that maybe we could do something, we could refer to the things that we can't talk about in a more simple. pathetic and appealing way. Like, you know, could we refer to the central tool that we are not using in the fight against COVID as Jody Foster in the movie Contact or something like that? Could we refer to some of the other tools as maybe Sigourney Weaver in Alien? And for people who don't swing that way, could we refer to the other tools that we're not using as Matt Damon in the Born Under a Bad Sign? Is there some way that, that we could make these things approachable so that we could discuss them. I think the best thing to do is maybe before we go to the Q&A is for you to tell people who you've had the conversations with, and they can go and find that information. Sure.

So the conversations that I think are most salient are I had a conversation that has now been removed by YouTube with Pierre Corey, Pierre Corey of the frontline COVID-19 critical care alliance, which are a group of doctors that got together when COVID began in order to figure out how you treat these patients who had this brand new disease. And they worked very hard to figure out what worked, what didn't work. They followed the evidence. And they have settled on some alarmingly good treatments that are now being hidden for reasons that are unfortunately becoming quite apparent, right? There are financial reasons. that we are not using our best tools.

Are there other reasons? I don't know, but the financial ones are clear enough. They can be demonstrated pretty easily. So I had Pierre on, and it was a great conversation. YouTube removed it. I should point out they also, and I think as shocking as it is, that they removed a conversation between a biologist and a doctor about a pandemic and its potential treatment.

They also removed Pierre Corrie's congressional testimony. He testified in front of the Senate on the very same topic and YouTube removed it. What? This is absolutely factual. He testified on this topic and YouTube removed it. Okay, just think about that. That's insane. This is a highly decorated doctor.

This is somebody who saves lives for a living. This is an ICU doc, right? He goes to, we go and do whatever we do on YouTube. He goes to work and saves people. And he testified to Congress and it was extremely popular and it was widely circulating and YouTube took it down. Now, my claim is even if he had been a crank, a crank testifying in front of Congress is something the public needs to be able to see. There is no explanation for why YouTube would deem itself in a patent. position to remove such a thing.

Agreed. And I can tell you, I've looked at the evidence, and the evidence is high quality. There are meta-analyses that have been done that make it clear that even if you have complaints about the size of the various studies, when you compile the evidence, the signal is unambiguous. And so, anyway, that's one of the conversations. The other conversation was one I had more recently with Steve Kirsch. Steve Kirsch is the inventor of the optical mouse, and he has.

done research on the impacts of the COVID vaccines. He is fully vaccinated. He has done research on the impact, the medical impact of the COVID-19 vaccines. And in that conversation, we were with Robert Malone, who is literally the inventor of the MRNA vaccine technology that is at the core of most of these vaccines. So we had a conversation, a three-way conversation. It is still up about the nature of these vaccines. And I only wish I could give you a summary of it,

but people should look for that conversation on the Dark Horse podcast channel. If they want to see the conversation that YouTube removed between Pierre Corey and me, the FLCCC, that's the frontline COVID-critical care alliance website. has the podcast still up on BitShoot, and it is also available as audio on all of the usual podcast apps. And so one thing I would say, if you're interested in the censorship issue, then whether or not you are inclined to entertain these descriptions of heterodox thinking surrounding vaccination and other COVID treatments, you should say, certainly take the following to heart. If the sensors are going to lose, their censorship has to

fail. When somebody censors something that appears to be important, whether it's congressional testimony of a frontline COVID doctor, whether it's an evolutionary biologist talking to the inventor of a vaccine technology, when something is censored, you should probably take extra interest in it, right? What is it I am not supposed to hear? And you may find that the censors are right that certain content isn't any good. Now, I wouldn't advise that they censor it, but it may be that what you find when you scratch the surface is, yes, there's something compromised about this discussion. It is not informative.

Or you may find that it's very informative and that some force does not want you to know the content because it has interests that run in some other direction. And I would just invite people to look at these conversations and judge for themselves. And it occurs to me that our lack of a pair, as you generally, put to Brett is also a bit of a test case because we have deliberately stayed away from the one thing your video with Pierre was banned for. And so it would be interesting whether they feel the need to censor a reference to a conversation that's now been deleted and to see how far they're willing to go in that process. Well, my sense having looked at this is that you're probably

safe from YouTube's hammer if you're... speaking obliquely and not making claims, but simply referring to the fact that claims have been made somewhere else and inviting people to look at those things. I, of course, don't know. But the important thing is that when somebody makes a decision like this, the important thing is that it actually amplifies rather than tamps down the investigation into the question, right? The fact that something is being censored shouldn't convince you that it's true. But the fact that something is being censored should convince you that somebody doesn't want you to hear this. And then you can quickly check and figure out whether they're acting in your interest. And in this case, I believe it is utterly unambiguous. They are acting in someone else's interest. And on that, rather upbeat and hope, we are going to cut to a commercial break

and we'll be back in around three to four minutes. and we'll be facing your questions to Brett. So see you in three to four minutes, guys. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Well, if you do, then EasyDNS are the company for you. Easy DNS is the perfect domain name, registrar provider and web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients,

whether it be council culture, de-platform attacks, or overzealous government agencies. Eno's a bit about that. So will you in a second. Easy DNS have rock solid network infrastructure and incredible customer support. They're in your corner no matter what the world throws at you, unless it's your ex-girlfriend, in which case you're on your own. You'd know about that.

Move your domains and websites over to EasyDNS right now. All you've got to do is head over to EasyDNS.com forward slash triggered and use our promo code, which is, of course, triggered as well. and you will get 50% off with the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, access of easy that tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. Hey, Constantine, do you love trigonometry? Of course, incredible interviews, hilarious live streams, hard-hitting satire,

plus my handsome jawline. Whatever takes away from your hairline. But if you do love trigonometry and you want to support us, There's only one place to do that, and that's on Locals. Yes, Locals is a brilliant platform that has been incredibly supportive to our show and other problematic creators. The great thing about locals is that it's a community for people who love trigonometry. That's right. It's a place for you to hang out with like-minded people, share thoughts, memes and discuss the show. You can enjoy it for free, but it also gives you the option of supporting us for as little as $7 a month.

And if you want to give more, you can. have incredible rewards for our higher tier supporters as well. We've got everything for mugs, monthly group calls and one on two chats with me and KK. Get in. Join our community by hitting the link in the description and the pin comment below. See you there guys. Do you want to promote your business to an intelligent audience who don't need to know your pronouns to buy your product? Here at Trigonometry, we have over 250,000 subscribers across the different platforms and we frequently get over 3 million views a month. That's a lot of new customers for your business. We speak with some of the biggest guests from the worlds of politics, economics, journalism,

arts and entertainment. All of them has spent at least one month in the gulag so you don't have to. And we'll match your product to the perfect guest for you. American sponsors will be matched with American guests and so on. That way, you know your advert has the best possible chance of getting to the right people. Or as we call them, the Ronald. people. Advertise with us and we'll get your business cancelled or your money back. Contact us by email at marketing at triggerpod.com.com. Dot UK and we'll make your nightmares come true. All right. Hello everybody and welcome back. Anton, let's get Brett back in here so we can ask

the questions. Brett, questions are flowing in already. Iron shirt says how likely is it that the zoonotic origin would produce a virus that didn't know how to infect people out of doors? Well, this is a great question. I've made this point several places. There's something conspicuous about it not transmitting at all outdoors, it seems, or almost never. And there are really two interpretations. I think it is highly likely that that is the result that this virus adapted to a laboratory environment, which is obviously the sort of indoor of indoors, and that that is a signature of something. The question is, as a

bat virus, how would it have normally transmitted? And my guess is that in general, the bats in question, these horseshoe bats are forest dwelling bats that would not be collected in large numbers in the foraging environment. So the place where the virus would have been most likely to transmit between them would have been inside a roost like a cave. Is a cave more like an indoor environment or an outdoor environment? It's not entirely clear. But I would say my guess is when this is all over and we know the answer, it will probably

turn out that the inability of the virus to transmit itself almost ever in the outdoor environment has something to do with laboratory origin. But it is possible that it is the result of the nature of the bat-roosting environment where the virus would transmit under normal. Just as a follow up from me, Brad, do we have any scientific idea of why the virus is so in effect of transmitting itself? outside. Yeah, this is a beautiful question. The answer is it's going to be two things, right? We know that it is highly sensitive to UV light. UV light destroys it. But if it were just UV light,

then it would be transmissible at night outdoors and not during the day. And that's not what we see. So the other factor is what I would call effective volume. This virus is very sensitive because of the way it transmits by effectively saturating the air with particles that float, some of them for a very long time. The virus is very sensitive to how much air there is, that is to say, how long it takes to saturate, how much flow there is, and therefore how quickly it is distributed, and basically things like aridity. So my point would be, if you're in a room, if you're in a car, with an Uber driver who has COVID, that's a very tiny effective volume and it will saturate very quickly. And the likelihood that you will get it in spite of the fact that you're wearing a mask is quite high, right?

If you open the windows of that car, its effective volume jumps. If it's standing at a stoplight, it jumps a lot. If it's moving down the highway, it jumps astronomically. So the effective volume is the question. And basically, effective volume goes to infinity as you go outside. So it is these two things that seem to be working in tandem that make the virus so difficult to transmit in an outdoor environment. That's a great answer. Thank you very much, Brett. And we have a wonderful question from James Hogg. He said, Brett, do you think science's actions were affected by the politics of COVID-19? These are not Trump supporters and the league theory became Trump's. Has it affected our objectivity? and how do we learn from this?

That's a good question. There's clearly something about, you know, I hate to use these terms, and it's in fact gotten me in trouble before, but there is something about Trump derangement syndrome that actually turns out not just to be, you know, a funny punchline. Trump derangement syndrome has made it impossible

for us to think analytically. That is to say, I am stunned by the degree to which journalists have settled on the story that they could not possibly have been expected to see through the natural origin story because Trump had said some things that suggested he thought the origin wasn't natural. In what universe do you give anyone the power to get you not to look into something by them embracing it, right? If you hand your enemy that capacity, the ability to dissuade you from investigating something by simply embracing it, they own you. So I don't know what it is that happened to people. I don't, you know, if Trump lied every time he opened his mouth, that would not mean that whatever came out of his mouth was the opposite of true.

It would mean there was no information in it, right? That's the answer. If you decide that Trump is simply a non source of information because everything is a lie, you don't embrace the opposite of what he thinks. You just take it as non-information and you move on from there. And if people had done that, they would have found that the lab leak hypothesis was the most probable from very early in 2020. And Britain, doesn't that also mean that you can't trust the mainstream media in that case? Because if they're not being objective about what Trump is saying, then ultimately what are they not being objective about? And this is really my point is this, I think, is the best chance.

we're ever going to get to see this because you don't usually win these battles. We have, in a sense, a very limited sense, won the battle on the Lab League hypothesis. We have taken it from being demonized and stigmatized as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory and gotten it to the mainstream so that we are actually now at least beginning to have a conversation about what the evidence really does suggest. At the same time, we have not jumped that gap with several other stories related to COVID. And that gives us the opportunity to just simply take what we learned or should have learned in the Lab Leak case and apply it to these other stories. And what that says is, wow, the sources that you would just love to trust cannot be trusted. You have to look past them.

You have to figure out who is having conversations that actually make analytical sense because the other thing is just like a distribution point for propaganda, right? We got propagandized on LabLeak. the people who told us for sure that we were crazy to worry about it coming from a lab, behind the scenes looked at it and said to each other over email, you know what? This looks like it came from a lap, right? They're telling you something. You shouldn't have to wait for the emails to come spilling out

in order to get the sense that you need to look deeper. And then the ultimate question for people is, if I can't trust the mainstream media to be objective, if I can't trust these traditional people who I get my information from, then who can I trust? Well, yeah, and you know, you can't trust anybody at the level of just tell me what to think. That's the bitter pill here, right? You never could.

What you can do is you can trust people to navigate the issue as an honest broker and to show their work, right? That's the most you can hope for. And when you get people who show their work and attempt to navigate the issue honestly, then you can check their track record over time, right? still doesn't mean that they're right. But it's a process that allows you to figure out, you know, on balance, where should you put your trust and where shouldn't you? And, you know, the thing is it would be wonderful if we had things like newspapers that accumulated people who were trustworthy to sort these things out for us so that we could go to them and find out, you know, what somebody with resources would discover if they went down some rabbit hole. Unfortunately, somehow, in 2021, there are no such papers. That's an amazing fact. There are no such universities. How is that possible? None of the places that you would like to go to just figure out what smart people who are in a good position to see the evidence conclude. There's no institution that can do that job

at this moment. And really, that's the biggest emergency we have. Brett, Matt is asking a question that actually I care about as well. And I think it's an important question to ask. One of the narratives here in the UK, I don't know what the situation is in America, is that everyone must take the vaccine because even if you as an individual, let's say a child or a young, healthy person who seems to have a lot less to fear from this virus, by not being vaccinated, you're creating the environment, which is likely to cause more variants to come about. And he says, wouldn't a vaccinated environment produce greater selection and more mutation? And by the way, let me add a question on my own, is actually mutation bad?

Because one of the narratives we had at the beginning of this virus emerging was that we needed to mutate more and more so that it can become less lethal. Well, the question of it evolving to become less lethal, effectively assumes a natural origin. And once you discover that this is not a natural origin, the natural rules don't apply. So how it will evolve is an open question. So I would say yes, for the moment, variants are bad because to the extent that people who have had COVID or have had the vaccine are immune to something, it's to the initial variant. And that will decay over time. And I think one of the vulnerabilities of these vaccines, even if these vaccines worked exactly as we had hoped, which they do not. But if the vaccines worked exactly as we had hoped, then they are still very narrowly focused on the spike.

protein. And that means that that is an intense evolutionary pressure for the spike protein to evolve so as to become invisible to the immune system. So that's a hazard here. And I would say variants are bad. As for the question about shouldn't we vaccinate people who are young and therefore not very vulnerable to COVID? I find this the most maddening feature of this entire situation. Young people do not need to be vaccinated to protect them. I understand the argument that we want to have as many people immune as possible to protect others. But what society liquidates the health of young people in order to preserve the health of old people, right? Now, if the vaccines were in fact safe, that would be a different question, right? if there were no cost that we could detect in young people of having the vaccines, then we could raise the question of whether or not the risk that there was something we didn't know downstream was worth exposing them to in order to protect older, infirm people.

That's not the case. We have very strong signals now. We have unexplained deaths in the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands, even just here in the U.S. We have clotting disorders. We have heart failures. We've got strokes. These things, one cannot establish on the basis of a very noisy system of reporting exactly where they are from. But the point is anybody should be able to look at what is taking place and know that we don't know enough about the consequences of vaccinating people with these vaccines to expose children to it.

It makes no sense, right? And if you say to yourself, well, I differ, you know, COVID is serious enough and, you know, a human life is precious no matter what age it is and we should, we should, you know, the risk of the vaccines is small compared to the risk of COVID. If that's what you think, then you got to ask yourself this question. Why on earth are we vaccinating people who had COVID? They will get the very same immunity. There's no evidence their immunity gets better for vaccinating them.

We are exposing those people to the risks of these vaccines for no benefit. It doesn't make anybody else immune. It doesn't get us any closer to herd immunity. So there is something in the environment that is hell bent on vaccinating people, whether or not it makes sense to do so. And the proof of that is in the fact that we are vaccinating people who have already had COVID and therefore are already effectively vaccinated. I mean, yeah. Just ask a nice question. The YouTube channel is gone.

Comedy podcast, I forgot. Yeah. You just crack on, man. Yeah, this is what I used to call in teaching a sweaty back moment. Anyway, this is from M.B. And he says, Brett, did your experiences at Evergreen help prime your skepticism on current issues, or have you been aware of underlying issues with public health? Well, I mean, let's put it this way.

my development as a kid and as a young adult set me in motion to look behind the scenes. And what happens when you do that is you do discover that there's an awful lot of cover story and an awful lot of ugly process behind the veil. Now, on the public health front, I would say the most important developmental experience was my experience as a graduate student when I started, looking into the evolution of telomeres, senescence, and cancer. And what I found was that there is a flaw in our model mice that results in them being terrifically prone to cancer and terrifically resistant to toxins.

And that was alarming to me because we used those animals in drug safety testing. And so I tried to raise the alarm. and the bell wouldn't ring. I was unable to call the attention of the professional public to this giant hazard that our mice were predisposed to tell us that toxic drugs were safe and that this would explain things like the Vioxx phenomenon, the Selden phenomenon, Fenn-Fen, Glevec. A whole range of drugs have shown themselves to be very dangerous when we thought they were comparative. safe, and all of this is easily explained by the fact that the mice that we use to detect toxicity are actually prone to resist it. But in any case, once you've seen the system refuse to engage such a hazard, it wakes you up and one loses their naivete rather quickly.

Brett, first of all, Oksana's messaged in with a PayPal just saying how much she appreciates everything you're doing and thanking you for it. But also, we had a lot of questions about the role of the World Health Organization in all of this. So what do you make of? Because some of the stuff that has come out from that particular institution over the last year and a bit has just been mind-boggling, starting from no human to human transmission all the way through to all sorts of other stuff.

At one point, they were saying lockdowns are essential. and I think at another point they were saying lockdowns are a temporary measure that shouldn't be used to, you know, just completely contradictory stuff over a long period of time. What do you make of the role of the World Health Organization and all of this? And how should we see that institution in the light of everything that's been happening? I would say the central issue of our day is capture. And unfortunately, capture has become synonymous with a. narrow version called regulatory capture. So regulatory capture involves a corporation or an industry gaining control over the regulators that are supposed to dictate the limits of what it can do.

But that is a small version of something that has a much larger form. And I would say the signal is very strong that things like the WHO, the CDC, the major tech platforms, the university, the journals, the newspapers, these things have been captured and their capture renders them unreliable. Now, that's a very frightening fact to have all of those things captured. And the way in which they were captured, I think, is not understood by anyone. I think there are many different mechanisms afoot. And frankly, we may be up against evolution itself. It may be that capture evolves and has taken over each of these things in course.

and that has resulted in an environment in which they're all untrustworthy. But yeah, I've looked at the Who over the course of the COVID pandemic, and I am constantly shocked by how it distributes utter nonsense as if it were a fact beyond criticism. And anybody who looks at the series of pronouncements that have come out of the Who can tell something's wrong. Absolutely. I actually want to pick up on something you said there, And we alluded to before the Q&A, but I want to get into and maybe push back on something that you're talking about. Because you'll remember in our conversation with Jordan and Heather only last week, we talked about the fact that technological change has been so rapid that many of the societal shifts that we now see

and many of the other problems that we're now experiencing seem to be a product primarily of that more than anything else. Do you not think that given the fact that basically in the last 10, 15 years, we've invented an Uber mega nuclear printing press, which is what social media big tech really is, that there is some responsibility on these institutions to acknowledge the huge power that they've given to ordinary people who, some of whom like you, are, acting in good faith, but there's also others. You know, we had the example of David Ike making comments about the link between COVID and 5G, and then bang, the next day people are burning down 5G Mars. That's a terrible thing to be happening, in my opinion. So, look, I'm putting this as a sort of devil's advocate argument, but I do think it needs to be put.

Do you not think there has to be some regulation of what is published, particularly in a heightened situation like this? The analogy might be made with a wartime in wartime broadcasting, wartime publication, et cetera, where there is some restriction for the greater good, if you like. With very few exceptions, I would say no. And the reason is not that I don't understand the hazard you're pointing to or I don't think it's serious. I think it's very serious. But I think this is a simple question of net effect, right?

Unfortunately, the novelty of the tech platforms and the way that they have created a new pattern of collective cognition, that is a very frightening and dangerous fact. We are now linked together in not only a global industrial system, but a global proto mind of some kind. I'm not saying that's safe. What I am saying is that a mind in which something has the power to regulate what can be considered by whom and in what way, that mind is much more dangerous than one in which anything can be considered. And ultimately, one hopes that the truth has power over the nonsense, right? The danger of creating the limitation is greater than the danger of the admittedly dangerous fictions that will circulate in that environment. We have to hope that that's true because the other route involves a very predictable collapse of sense making that in the context of our industrial capacity, I think would certainly be fatal in short order. What are you talking about, Brett?

I'm talking about the ability to prevent processes from happening, right? We have many different existential threats that have not yet grown to a scale of being existential independently, but they are linked together in a way that puts us in great jeopardy. The problem is the profits to be made in each of these realms from generating these things is sufficient that there is an evolutionary pressure for those who want to engage in these processes because it enriches them to do so. they have a pressure to capture the entities that might raise the alarm about the hazard of what they're doing, right? We have to be able to raise the hazard. But if every industry is able to frustrate discussion of the danger that flows out of the new process it has just invented, then one of those processes is going to get us soon. And we've seen how many of these things now, right? We've seen the financial collapse of 2008.

We've seen the Deepwater Horizon blowout. We've seen the Fukushima triple meltdown. we've seen the Aliso Canyon leak. We've seen the COVID-19, which it appears probably came from the lab in Wuhan. All of these things have the same signature. Some industry is doing something that the public only finds out about once the accident has happened, right? Now, so far, all of these things, including COVID-19, have been much better than they might have been. One of these days, we're going to get unlucky.

and the magnitude of the accident is going to be so great, there won't be any recovering. So it is of the utmost importance that humanity figures out how to have the discussions about which processes are safe enough for us to engage in, what is the way in which we will engage in them so that when something goes wrong, we can reverse course. We have to have that conversation. And it's never going to happen if there's a mechanism there that is allowed to regulate what we can talk about and it is available to be captured by those with a financial incentive to do so. What you're saying, if I can rephrase it, is we essentially now have an established system of anti-transparency.

We have a system of anti-transparency where any conversation, there's a price point for shutting down a conversation. And if you just go industry by industry, right, each of the industries that is engaged in some process with the potential for a catastrophe where the costs will be borne by humanity, not by the corporation, In each of those cases, there is an incentive to use the levers that may have been erected nobly to prevent dangerous conversations to prevent people from burning down 5G towers or whatever it is. There's going to be an incentive to capture those mechanisms and make sure that they do not talk about the hazards and the public's interest. We've seen it too many times already, and we have to get away from the idea that we are going to solve the problem by increasing the quality of speech, by purging the stuff that we all. agree is wrong. You can't do that because the problem, nobody on earth has ever figured out how you sort the vast array of quackery and fringe nonsense from the heterodoxy that travels in the same layer. Every great idea starts as a minority of one. And the problem is if you had a

magic formula for spotting which idea over in the fringe layer, was actually the next great idea, and so you could throw out all of the nonsense ideas that are over there, you'd be king, right? But it can't be done. You can't, there's no mechanism for sorting the really important heterodoxy that nobody believes yet, but we'll all believe down the road from the nonsense that nobody reasonable is ever going to believe because it really is garbage, right? You have to wait for heterodoxy to either demonstrate its power or go away. And so we can't improve the quality of the conversation unless what you want to do is say, well, we've got enough progress already. So heterodoxy is done.

And if you do that, we're finished as a species. We have to, we can't stay here. Our processes are not sustainable. We have to get out of this by innovating our way to a sustainable existence on planet Earth. So you can't freeze progress here. And if you can't freeze progress here, you can't shut down heterodoxy by shutting down every idea that isn't, you know, certified by the CDC. Brett, isn't this a symptom of late-stage capitalism in which you have four companies that have a stranglehold on the market, and therefore, because they have no competitors, they can do pretty much as they please?

No, not really, because what it is, you know, what we call late-stage capitalism, and of course I'm not entirely sure what we mean by that, but it's effectively a instantiation of, of a natural process, right? It's an evolutionary environment in which there are niches, and we discover them with the evolution of strategies. And so those corporations, as angry as I am at them, for attempting for the hubris involved in thinking that they can regulate the conversation into a better place, they are responding to evolutionary pressures.

They are like a liquid filling a, volume, right? They are creatures filling a niche. And if we want better corporations, if we want them to stand down and stop attempting to regulate discussion, we need to create the environment where the niches are such that that process doesn't evolve. It'll happen each and every time. So late stage capitalism is another way of saying, you know, a political and economic version of nature's experiment. And yeah, it's red in tooth and claw. And if we don't want it to be, we have to create an environment where something better evolves. Fantastic. Did you have a question? Or do you want to, shall I go to another question? You go to another question. It's a question from Jay, who's one of our

regular views. He says, Brett, can you please comment on Dr. Keyes? I think it's Dr. Keyes article in the Wall Street Journal. He talked about the insertion of a double CGG sequence found in COVID-19 in the exact same places the furin cleavage site is as well it's a two tell-tale signs of artificial manipulation in the lab according to dr kea are you are you familiar with this i think that was my question mate to be i am familiar what's a cg mate mate i don't want to steal brett sundar brett you carry on please mate i think it is what i want people to do in this case is to actually simplify the genomic questions They are tremendously complex. To some of us, they are very interesting.

But in effect, when Ralph Barrett came out in Science Magazine as co-author on an article saying that the lab leak hypothesis needed to be investigated, here you have the world's unambiguous leader, the person who has innovated more of the techniques in question, a person who knows more about what is possible and what is, it would look like than anyone else on earth telling you, I have looked at this genome. I've seen everything you've seen up to the point this paper is published. There is nothing in the sequence that is incompatible with the idea of a laboratory origin. And in fact, a laboratory origin is likely enough that it must be investigated, right? You couldn't ask for a clearer signal that what is in the genome is, at the very least, consistent with a laboratory origin and taken in conjunction with the emails that we've now seen exchanged by Christian Anderson and Anthony Fauci. This is, it is quite clear. Many have looked at this and they have seen the signature of a laboratory

origin, that there are different techniques involved. We're talking about in some cases like the fern cleavage site, potentially, in fact, very likely to be an insert that was placed in the genome. and then we see evidence of serial passage. So I don't want to engage the argument specifically, but I don't think there's any reason for people to be focused on it because what we have finally, after a year and a half of fighting over this, is a at least clear acknowledgement that what is in that genome is consistent with laboratory origin

and that those who know the most believe we have to look in that direction. Brett. Well, we've got one more question. Okay. Another couple of minutes, Brett. And this is probably a good one to finish on, actually, because Casey says, are there reliable people at entities that are archiving your Dark Coast videos somewhere so YouTube isn't the only place that they can be found so that there's a place to find

them if they're not on YouTube anymore? Yes, we certainly have them all, and we are going to make sure that they are available. But I want the public who is interested in this to think very, carefully. There is a huge chorus of people that have been signaling at me and saying, you know, change platforms, go somewhere else where they can't do this to you. And the problem is, the audience is on YouTube. And the fact that I might be able to solve a problem for my channel, the fact that I might be able to solve a problem for my family and our income stream by taking the content and putting it somewhere else, or the fact that I might be able to solve a problem for an interested person who

wants to know where they can go find it is not the real question. The question is, how can the material live in some place where it reaches enough people to wake them and to change what's going on? Because what's going on is killing people, right? That's a very serious claim. I'm aware of how serious it is, but it effectively leaves me with very little choice. I have to do what I'm doing. The personal costs are terrible, but I do. don't, I just don't see that there is morally any room not to point out what it is I'm seeing and help people try to understand it.

That makes a lot of sense. Brett, thank you so much for coming on the show. If, uh, where is the best place to follow? I mean, we've addressed it, but follow you, uh, on Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, follow me on Twitter at Brett Weinstein. Check out the dark horse podcast, which for the moment at least is still on YouTube. It is still available on all of the major podcast apps. That's Apple, Spotify, all of those.

You can come to my Patreon and support my work. We are generating a way that people who prefer to pay in cryptocurrency can do that. Maybe that's about it. Brett, thank you so much. I should just say before we let you go, that there's a tremendous number of people who are sending messages thanking you for everything you're doing. And we really appreciate it coming on. I know that you would have wanted to have a more frank conversation about this. And I feel very guilty. I feel like I'm a disappointing

son to a very good dad. No, no, no, no. Can I say I feel a little bad about what I said and that had this conversation taken place in a room full of good-natured people, that would have gotten a tremendous laugh and the tension over it would have been dissipated immediately. And anyway, please don't take it personally. No, you're very kind. And look, I would love to live in the world that we don't have to do things this way. And I feel like with people like you in the world, that will eventually happen. So please keep fighting the good fight and we'll do our best as well. To you guys as well. All right. Be well. Thanks, Brett. And thanks everybody for watching. Take care. Thank you very much for watching, guys.

And if you want to follow us, please do. All our shows and live streams go out 7pm, UK time, Tuesday, Thursday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and Wednesday for our episodes. Take care. See you soon. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so that you never miss another fantastic episode. And if you believe that the work we do here at trigonometry is important, support us by joining our locals community using the link below.