#2101 - Bret Weinstein
2024-02-13 03:26:56
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Very funny text you sent me the other day. And you said, I hope we have something to talk about.
Well, you know, the fact is the world's gotten kind of calm, so... I was hoping, I looked out the window of the hotel this morning, thinking the weather might help us. Nope, boring as can be.
It's beautiful, birds chirping, well, who knows what lies on the horizon. I did not watch the Super Bowl, but I got a ton of messages from people that watched it. They're like, what the fuck is going on? Like, the Super Bowl was some gigantic propaganda campaign. And there's Pfizer ads, and weird woke commercials, and...
It was bizarre. I did watch it, you know, I had nothing else to do, and I probably wouldn't have watched it otherwise. But I did watch it, and it was like some running inside joke. You had to know who these people were in order to even just be with the flow. I mean, obviously the game is what it is, but all of the stuff surrounding it was like, you're either embedded in this culture, or it's kind of a head-scratcher.
I did not see any of it, so I wasn't watching the Super Bowl last night, I was busy. So I don't know what happened.
Well, let's put it this way, I'm not a football aficionado by any stretch, but it was a pretty exciting game. I mean, it came down to the last seconds of overtime, and, you know, it was a hell of a comeback.
There are a ton of conspiracies about the way it was officiated, and that the fix was in, with Travis Kelsey being sponsored by Pfizer, and Taylor Swift, and Taylor Swift's music catalog being owned by some megacorporation that has shady ties.
Well, I have to say, I was watching it, and I didn't have a dog in the fight, I wasn't really rooting for either team, I was just trying to get the sense of what the game was like. But I did find myself, in the end, rooting against Taylor Swift.
This is the Biden thing that they posted?
After his bedtime.
Just like we drew it up, and it's Biden with these, you know, red robot eyes. Why would they do that? Why would they make that, like that, just that alone? Like, what are you saying? Like, what are you doing?
Like, imagine that's the President of the United States. Just, I want you to imagine Ronald Reagan, if social media was alive, posting a photograph like that. Or Bill Clinton.
Well, I mean, I do know what they're doing, right? They have a very weak meme game, but they do have moments when they show some kind of spark in this regard. And I detest it. I think they have an obligation to be above this stuff, and to not troll. But, you know, in a world where Trump is a political force, they're trying to, you know, they're trying to build a game in the same arena, and they're going to get crushed, but that's why they did it.
You know, and obviously it's the machine that did it.
It's kind of amazing that the left can't meme.
Because they're really bad at it. Because they're denying so many truths. Like, in order to adhere to the ideology, you have to be so rigid in what you accept as truth. And there's so many things that just don't jive with that, that you can't really meme. well, when you're doing that.
Like, what memes are, is pointing things out and exaggerating them in a way where people kind of know that this is the case. And then you make a preposterous image, and everybody laughs. But the left can't really do that, because a lot of those memes are very offensive and funny.
Well, I think it's actually a window into not really the left. I mean, as you know, I feel myself of the left, but I don't relate to these people at all.
Nor do I. Something weird happened, and we got kicked out.
Yeah, it got taken over by something diabolical. And, you know, what you're pointing to, it's the same thing. It has no sense of humor, right? Right. They laugh, but they have no sense of humor.
They have no ability to juxtapose things so that you suddenly see something in the way, something, you know, a funny joke works. They can't meme because they're not really, you know, this is some corrupt cabal behind the scenes that arranges a set of, you know, policies that aren't coherent together because they're about something that's never been discussed with us. And so it's not a natural, for, you know, you can't really build a culture around it because it's incoherent to begin with. So they just, they have. no, they're bad at humor.
Memes is a special kind of humor that has, you know, arisen online. And the rules of it, actually, I wanted to talk to you about this. The rules of it are different from normal humor. I was trying to phrase something on Twitter today to make it funny. And I was realizing the difference between a tweet and, you know, what I've seen you do in your club, right?
Where in your club, you can actually structure a joke that isn't funny until four lines in. Right. Because your audience isn't going anywhere. Right. On Twitter, you need to keep them on board with the tweet so they don't scroll to the next one.
Right. So there has to be some juice in the beginning in order to get to the punchline. But, you know, anyway, I'd be curious what you think about what the different rules are for humor in the different contexts. But even just the structural differences is profound online.
Well, one of the best examples of how the tide has changed is the Babylon Bee out onions, the onion. The onion is essentially dormant. The onion was like the dominant force of satire forever. And they were so good. They were so good.
And then something happened. where there's like places they can't go. It's like a runner being limited to like a certain amount of miles per hour, when that the speed that you're limited to cannot compete with the best runners.
Well, I think it's actually a manifestation of some of a larger pattern that you can see very clearly when it's about humor and satire, and you don't see it as clearly elsewhere. But when the onion was funny, it was a political force. And so it had to be targeted by things that it would have opposed. Right. By things that it would have mocked and revealed.
And so the fact that it's been neutered makes perfect sense. If you imagine whoever it is that was galled by being revealed by the onion, it doesn't make sense. If you imagine that the onion is in some competitive environment where it's trying to win market share by being hilarious. Right. Why would you take a hot property like the onion and ruin it?
Well, the question is, are you trying to accomplish something political by getting rid of a powerful force, a force of ridicule, or are you trying to compete economically? And we see this in lots of places. Why would social media platforms embrace censorship? Right. Everybody wants to be in a social media environment that's lively.
It doesn't want one that's heavily constrained. And yet these would-be competitors are behaving, they're colluding effectively to shut out messages that lots of people want to hear.
Do you think that that's because they're worried about government intervention and some sort of repercussions for not adhering to whatever guidelines the government wants you to do? I mean, this clearly seems to be the case when you look at, like, the Twitter files. The Twitter files, which has gotten almost no press in the mainstream media, or I should say the corporate controlled media, but has been extensively covered by independent journalists. because it's so shocking. Because you're seeing the government actively campaign to get factual information removed from Twitter because it's inconvenient.
And most of the social media campaigns, most of the social media programs, whether it's the companies, whether it's Facebook or Instagram, or most of them, have complied to a certain extent, at least limited the reach of certain things. Like, there was one that Tucker did famously on COVID and whatever government organization that was contacting them, I think it was the FBI, was trying to get them to take it down. And they wouldn't take it down, but they limited the reach substantially by like 50%. But they had ruled that they cannot take it down because it's factual. And so there was.
no, it's not like. this was misinformation. So then it falls into this weird category that we've just recently heard, recently entered the Zeitgeist, which is malinformation.
Malinformation is factual information that could be used in a damaging way.
I know, Heather, and I have been screaming about this one since the day that memo emerged. What the hell, you're actually going to put that on paper? Yeah, it's wild. But I think the answer to your question is we in the public are under the misapprehension that the game is about money. And the reason that we're under that misapprehension is that traditionally, money has been a pretty good proxy for power.
And what's happened is the game is still very much about power and control, but money doesn't mean what we thought it did.
In what way?
Well, A, I think we're being set up that, you know, your ability to store wealth in money is dependent on rational policy, right? If somebody is going to print money in order to get themselves out of a crisis, then they're robbing you without ever gaining access to your bank account. So the value of what you've stored is under somebody else's control. Now, if you imagine that the power players understand this game, that they know that, the way I would put it is this. Money has two values.
One is as a means of exchange. Can you buy stuff with it? And money still works the way it always did from that perspective. The other is can you store your wealth there? And, at least with respect to dollars, it used to be the case that you could store your wealth in dollars.
But the power players are aware that dollars aren't going to continue to mean what they have traditionally meant. And presumably they have other strategies for storing wealth in ways that they're going to be able to recover it after whatever happens. I would recommend people – I hope I have the title right. There's a book called The Great Taking, written by an elite Wall Street insider, who reveals certain changes that have been introduced into the law that most of us are unaware of. So, for example, there's a change in which you think you own a stock in the way that people used to own stocks.
But stocks used to actually have a physical manifestation. You had a sheet of paper that you would put in your safe. And what has happened is you now own a stock and you can cash out anytime you like, the way you always could. But if the entity, the underlying entity, goes bankrupt, then you don't actually own the stock. You actually own an IOU, which can be valueless.
And we don't know this in the public. We think we're trading stocks the way we always did. But what has happened is something that had a physical manifestation in which you could have a battle in a court about who owns this piece of paper is now not about the piece of paper. It's about a right. And that right has an arcane structure that most of us are unaware of.
So the question is, at some point, do things that you think you own, do rules get revealed to you that tells you that you don't actually own those things anymore and that your financial position is therefore not the one that you thought you were in?
So what do you think this strategy is about? What do you think?
Power and control.
But do you think that this is the devaluation of money? What's the end purpose of the devaluation of money?
Is it central bank, digital currency?
That is a mechanism for the ultimate purpose, which is power and control. And I should point out that in the way I think about things, I take that as an assumption. I'm not arguing that as a conclusion, although I do think you can discover that that is the pattern by looking at all of the evidence about what the rent-seeking elites care about and don't care about. But I would say it is a comparatively safe assumption that it is about control and power, because it's always been about that. In fact, evolutionarily, that's really why creatures look the way they do.
Even if you take a human being, for example, you're composed of something like 30 trillion cells of 200 different kinds. All of those cells contain the same information, but they all agree to act differently because it's in their interest to not go rogue. They could all independently try to reproduce like single-celled organisms. But if they agree to collaborate, they surrender a lot of capability to reproduce. 30 trillion cells can produce a lot of offspring cells.
What they get is an increased amount of control over their environment. So that's what evolution is doing by organizing things in the way it is. Its purpose is to put your genes as far into the future as it can lodge them. But power and control is the game, the evolutionary game that is being played. Humans play it differently.
We go from being a highly adaptable, somewhat technological creature. Our Stone Age ancestors were technological in the sense that they could flint-nap a weapon or a tool, but not highly technological. But nonetheless, the game has persisted as we have become organized into larger and larger social entities, into societies. And it hasn't fundamentally changed now. So what these elites are doing is they are attempting to gain control, to consolidate it, and to arrange to protect it into a future which they see as increasingly chaotic and dangerous.
As the people of Earth become aware that they have no plan for the future, that most of us have nothing meaningful to do with our lives, that even the systems that feed us and sustain us energetically are built on rickety premises, they know that there's a reckoning coming, and so they're preparing for it. And, you know, what you saw at the Super Bowl, or didn't see but might have, is the distraction, right? The stuff that we are fed, so that we'll think about things other than our long-term prospects in light of elites who, frankly, don't give a shit about us.
Have you seen what happened in Europe with the farmers?
I've been watching that, yes.
Yeah, it seems like they at least temporarily have won.
They have won, but let's explain what we're talking about. All right. Well, maybe you should explain what you've seen. I've watched massive protests of farmers who are increasingly angry and organized about regulations that make farming increasingly difficult, unproductive, and unprofitable.
If I was a conspiratorially-minded person, what I would say is what they're trying to do is take over these farms. And the best way to do that is to enact legislation and rules that limit their profitable... Well, first of all, farms are always very difficult to run. They're very difficult to maintain profitability. They struggle.
And it's a terrible shame that the people that provide us the thing that we need to survive, ultimately food, that we've done something to these people to make it more difficult for them to do it. while it's already insanely difficult. It requires incredible hours, incredibly difficult, highly stressful. There's so many moving pieces just to provide food for all these people. And they started enacting legislation to limit the amount of fertilizer they're allowed to use, to limit the amount of animals they have.
I know in Ireland they proposed something where they want to kill a certain amount of the cows because they're saying that the cows produce methane. It's fucking insane. It's not scientific. It's not something voted on. It's not something agreed upon by scientists, biologists, certainly not debated.
when you're talking about regenerative farming practices. Like people that have provided significant options for farming, whatever the issues that they have, where they can actually sequester carbon in the soil and make these farms carbon neutral. It's been demonstrated. It's not theory. It's been done in America.
Polyphase Farms, White Oaks Pastures are two great examples of that. But there's many regenerative farms. It can be done. And for whatever reason, they have decided to enact these harsh limitations on these farmers' abilities to provide food for people. Cynically, when I look at something like that, I'm like, I think what they would do is do that, cripple the farmers' ability to make money.
The farms go under. They take over. They control the food supply.
And I hear you working overtime not to see what's in front of you. And I agree.
Well, I'm just being fair. I'm just making it as I'm trying to steel man it as much as possible.
Right. But if you take the objective of the game as profit, it's not exactly clear what the end game is. If you take the objective of the game as power and control, then it's pretty clear.
That's the best way to control the food supply. You just put the farmers out of business.
Who's going to challenge you if their ability to eat requires them to embrace whatever nonsense you're feeding them?
And all you would have to do is start some sort of famine and just make it very difficult for people to get food and people panic. And when people panic, especially people with limited resources and limited financial ability, they concede. They do. And that's what we saw during the pandemic. I mean, it was, it was a great test run to see how much control you can really have over people as soon as you have some sort of major issue that everyone globally has to deal with.
Of course, simultaneously, they make it difficult for those of us who recognize what is unfolding to make ourselves self-sufficient. So you see weird regulations against, you know, ancient things like unpasteurized dairy, as if that was some major threat to people or something that you should override their ability to judge for themselves. But the pattern of seeking power and control, if you imagine an antagonist, rent-seeking elites, for lack of a better term, and you imagine that they are, however, they get there, completely amoral with respect to us normies. I don't know that they hate us, but they don't care if we live or die. If you imagine that, then you begin to see that major patterns point in the same direction.
This attempt to control agriculture, which suggests some later chapter in which hunger is going to be used to to keep people in line, is consistent with vaccine mandates that were issued in the military, which drove out all of the people who would naturally resist immoral orders, creating a more compliant force. Now, you could imagine that that was an accident. You could imagine that public health officials let their fears get away from them, and they mandated these things out of a misunderstanding of the protection of that force. But I think the most parsimonious explanation is that actually a force built of people who take whatever orders you give them is desired for some scenario we have yet to see.
So what happened in Europe was these farmers started fighting back, they started dumping manure everywhere, and they started blockading and doing all these things to protest, and apparently, at least temporarily, they've won. Now, what kind of repercussions they're going to face because of this is what's going to get. really weird, and that'll be very telling to see what they do to attack these farmers. But it seems like part of the problem was the public was unanimously in favor of the farmers. No one thought any of this stuff made sense.
No one thought that killing all these cows made any sense. No one thought that limiting the amount of fertilizer these guys could use or the way these guys can produce food made any sense. And I think most people fundamentally recognize that farming is not just difficult, but it's fragile. They don't have a lot of wiggle room. And so for these people to rise up the way they did, that's very courageous.
It's very courageous, and it reveals that we are in territory that was just simply not anticipated by the U.S. founders, by any of the important founders of the Western nations. Nobody envisioned some sort of an attack from within, in which the ability to generate enough food for the population would be targeted. That seems an insane thing that one doesn't need to create rules against, because it would be, if we view through a couple century old lens, it would be a suicidal move. But that's not the case anymore.
You're dealing with a global elite, and that global elite has options that were unthinkable in the 18th century. So that said,
I don't think these people, whoever they are and whatever it is they are doing, I do not believe that they understand the world nearly as well as they think they do.
Do you think that's just because they're removed? I mean, if you're one of the billionaires that's involved in the World Economic Forum, how much contact do you have with regular people? What are your perceptions of regular human beings? And if you've been living like that for a long time, I liken it to celebrities who just have no concept of how other people think or behave or feel because they've been famous and wealthy for so long and adored for so long. They don't understand the plight of the average human being.
It's a rare elite that, even if they came from humble beginnings, it's a rare elite that maintains that mindset in any significant way, because it becomes an obstacle. It becomes a limiter of what strategies you can deploy.
Yeah, and encourages empathy, which is bad for business.
Very well said, Joe. But the problem is they also, the elites, especially ones who have, to some degree or other, arranged their ascent, right? They've done something that makes them feel like they must be very well informed, they must be very clever, right? There's some component of their power that is the result of some moment of cleverness in their past, or maybe more than one. But it makes it difficult for them to remember how much of what they accomplished actually had nothing to do with them.
It had to do with systems built by other people that they know nothing about. And the tendency for them to see the part of the puzzle that they're comfortable with, right? Maybe it's the strategy of power and control, but to not appreciate the parts of the puzzle that nobody's expert at, right? They're dealing with complex systems layered upon each other. The ability to disrupt that stuff in a way that it stops functioning, such that even the elites who make this happen are not going to like the world that they're going to create.
They may not even be able to live in it, right? That's the biggest concern I have, right? If I thought that they were diabolical, but knew what they were doing, then my sense is, well, all right, we're in for a bad hundred years, and that's terrible, but that's not extinction, right? I think we're actually headed for extinction, because I think these people have no idea what they're playing with. They do not understand what needs to be preserved in order to keep the world functional enough for them to live in.
How is that conversation not taking place? That's what doesn't make sense to me. Is it coming from a place where they never feel like they're ever going to go back to poverty or to any sort of chaotic world that we could envision? if everything falls apart? They think they'll be protected ultimately, because resources influence power.
Think about it this way. Let's say that you're really good at the game of power and control, and you manage to take what would ordinarily be a profit-making entity, a social media platform, and you get it to sign up for rules of censorship that are bad for business, but good for keeping dangerous ideas from spreading. Well, then, you're also likely to utilize that mechanism to shut down the very discussions that you need to hear.
If you think about the question, and I don't know how accurate it is that monarchs had court gestures, I don't know how regular that was, whether it was an exception, but if you think about the position of a monarch, who needs to know what's actually going on, but nobody around them is going to tell them, because it's too dangerous to tell the king that the people think he's an asshole. So you empower a gesture. Maybe you put a ridiculous hat on him, and he speaks in a weird way, so that anything he says is dismissible. But the point is that guy is actually in a position to tell you what you need to know. He can make jokes that are funny in the street that you're not going to hear because you're the king.
So these new power elites, they don't have a mechanism that overcomes the control, that keeps people from telling them exactly what they need to know. Look, if you're one of these people, you're going to screw up the world that you cannot escape, and nobody can tell you that, because you've managed to create a very pleasant world of people who tell you what you want to hear. So that's the danger you're putting us in, and we're mad about it for two reasons. We're mad about it because you're plotting against our ability to guide our own ship. That's natural, and you expect that part.
But we're also mad at you because you're screwing up the world, and it's not yours to destroy. You're not going to leave a planet for my children. You're okay with that. I get it. But you're not going to leave a planet for your children either.
So wake the fuck up.
I think they think their children will be protected.
It's the old phrase, rules for thee, but not for me. We see that with the World Economic Forum serving beef short rib. It's like, what do you really believe, and why are you saying what you're saying? And do you think that because you're so protected now, because you go from limousine to private jet, to major hotels surrounded by armed security back and forth, your interaction with a person who's trying to deal with their bills, trying to deal with their bullshit, trying to deal with mortgage payments, and whether or not they can afford to pay their taxes. That kind of shit.
You're completely removed from any financial strife. Once you get into that category, I'm nowhere near those people, and I don't worry about it, so they must not worry about it. They can't ever think that it's going to be an issue, because it's not an issue. It's just like human beings have this inability to recognize anything that they don't immediately interact with. Everything else becomes abstract, like even the whole climate emergency.
It's a great thing to talk about. It's a great talking point for people that need something to wave a flag for and scream and protest and block the highway for. It's a great mechanism in that regard. But are you really worried about it every day? I'm not worried about it.
every day. Every day I wake up, it's pretty much just like yesterday. It's not that much different.
No, I'm worried about it, less and less, in fact.
I'm worried about it less and less as well, and also because of the way China's taking it on, which is not at all. China's building power plants left and right. They've got 100 coal plants being built right now, plus. More than 100, right? What was it, Jamie?
I think it was close to 200.. They're the number one, them and India. They're the people that are dumping shit into the air. Killing cows isn't going to put one half of 1% of a fucking dent in the amount of greenhouse gases that get emitted. It's not a lot.
No, let's put it this way. I think we have to have one caution, which is just because they're using it to manipulate us doesn't mean that there's not some underlying truth there. But if I look at where the waterline was when I was a kid versus now, it hasn't budged. That alerts me to something. I do think I've seen a little bit of glacial retreat in places that I knew, but it's not a lot.
Well, also, regardless of whether or not people are polluting the world, and I think they 100% are, and I'm 100% on board. Look, if you go to Los Angeles from the 1960s and 1970s and look at the air, and then you look at the emission standards that were enacted, catalytic converters, the way they changed, how cars work, it is much better now.
So much better.
Clear indication that these regulations that were smart and intentional, they worked. They did something good. It's better. It still sucks. But if you go to Mexico City, you realize there's a giant difference.
I took photos when I flew into Mexico City for the UFC, and it looks like there's a fire. It's like there's a fire on the ground. There's so much smoke, and it's just an everyday part of their life. If they had the same regulations that they enacted in Los Angeles, that would lead to cleaner air and better health outcomes for pretty much all of their citizens. We both agree to that.
100%. I mean, in fact, when I travel to places like this and I think, oh, wouldn't it be cool to live here? I always think, yep. And how much does your life expectancy go down because of the amount of pollutant you're breathing every day? So yeah, good regulations are...
Critical. Critical. And in fact, we just moved recently from...
Don't tell anybody where you live.
I'm not gonna tell them where I live, but I did move from Oregon to Washington, and Oregon and Washington deal very differently.
You moved from the frying pan right into the fire, sir. You're a glutton for punishment. What's wrong with you? I need to get you a gun. Bring you out here to God's country.
Get yourself a ranch. We've got guns. Get yourself a well.
Yeah, a well, some guns, some solar.
Get yourself some longhorns that you can slaughter once a year.
But the point is, Oregon actually has regulations that you can't register your car if it puts out significant pollution, and Washington doesn't. Otherwise, they're almost identical states. Politically. The difference between driving in Oregon, where you're not behind the truck that belches out that huge bunch of smoke and you're struggling to find the thing to turn off the vent, right? In Oregon, it was a night and day difference even between those two states.
Because of those rules.
Because of the regulations. I'm a big fan of elegant, light touch regulation that creates a big benefit for a small cost.
Also, we realize there's, listen, I am a car enthusiast. I love automobiles. The automobiles today that have the best emissions output are by far faster, handle better, safer. Everything they do outperforms the stinky ones that were ruining the world. The benefit in terms of the air has no negative net effect on the ability to make awesome cars.
It just doesn't.
Right. The cars are absolutely rad. The electric ones.
Not just electric ones. The electric one's problematic. Here's why the electric one's problematic. At the fucking heart of every electronic device that uses batteries, you've got conflict minerals. And if you've ever seen my podcast with Siddharth Kaura and you've read his book and you've seen the investigative journalism that that guy did, where he risked his life to go into the Congo and show how these artesian mines, that mine cobalt, how it's actually being extracted from the ground.
And your cell phone is likely conflict minerals that have come from the poorest of poor people on planet Earth, literally farming with no protection, like hammering this stuff out, mining with babies on their back. Young girls who have infants on their back are mining this toxic shit that we need for our phones so we can tweet about global warming. That is wild. And as of right now, these things don't exist. In terms of the way our batteries work, they don't exist without those kind of minerals.
And whether or not they can be harvested ethically, seems like we can probably do it. It doesn't seem like it would be impossible, but China's not interested in it at all. And the people that run those mines are not interested in it at all. They want to make the most amount of money right now. And the best way is to keep people poor as fuck so that those people have to do that because there are no options.
You get that from them. You extract enormous profits. The people that risk their lives and have terrible outcomes have no benefit from it. And you continue business as usual because you've been allowed to. Now, if that was in Ohio, if we found out that that was going down in Ohio, people would freak the fuck out.
They would boycott those companies. They'd figure out how to buy things that didn't rely on that. And we would have to change politically. It would be so untenable politically to support slave labor and to support people living in the most abject poverty. you can imagine, the worst poverty on earth, but yet are extracting some of the most valuable resources the earth has.
That's insane.
Yeah, it's crazy. Now, of course, the right answer to it is good governance, where we look at these questions in the long term and we say, here's where we are. This isn't sustainable. What is it? What is the objective?
How can we do the maximum amount with the minimum amount of damage? And we figure out how to move in a coordinated fashion in that direction, because it's in all of our interest to do so. But we can't do that while rent-seeking elites are conspiring to control us, arguably, out of existence.
I mean, not just that, but trying to control discourse, because discourse is what starts the European farmers getting together and overturning these regulations. Discourse is what starts people recognizing how unfair the structure of some of these systems are and who's profiting and why, and whether or not we want to support that, or whether or not this is a normal pattern of behavior for human beings when they have ultimate power. It has existed forever. Every king, every emperor, every person who ran giant groups of people did so ruthlessly, with no regard for the people. Ultimately.
No one ever said, like, I've got so much money and I'm the king. I'm going to make sure that my money is distributed to everybody. There's no hungry people. Everybody has food. Everybody has a place to sleep.
No one's ever done that. They all do the exact same thing. When they have power, the ultimate power, they develop this idea that they deserve it and that it's theirs, and then they ruthlessly wield it and they keep the people down, because if the people are down just enough, you don't want them down to the point where they're going to fight back and kill everybody. You want just under coup levels.
Well, I mean, I think there's a little more richness to that story. I agree that, almost without exception, leaders rule in their own enlightened self-interest, but there's a question about how enlightened they are. You can have a monarch who understands that long term, their ability to rule is better served by protecting the people's interest, more than some other leader who realizes, you know, I mean...
But isn't that rare to have a leader like that? Can you name any of them?
It would have a hard time...
Are these utopian leaders?
No, I think there's a spectrum. You know, you have people, you know, on the other end of the spectrum, like Pol Pot, right? And the idea is you only need one tool and the tool is if I don't like you, you're dead. Yeah. Right?
So that's one way to do it, but it's not really a long term strategy. And then we have everybody, you know...
But isn't it a long term strategy? in some places? Like Kim Jong Un seems to be doing a pretty good job at that.
I don't see any relinquishing of that power.
No, I don't see it either.
It's not like they have massive resources. It's not like they're doing great.
I agree with you. I have to say it is a more effective strategy than I would like to imagine, but it doesn't look like a strategy that is going to effectively spread over time. Whereas if you look at our system and really our system, you know, as much as you can say one monarch is better than another, really the point is the West has the alternative. that is the best plan going and probably the best plan possible. The consent of the governed, in which we put aside our lineage level differences and we collaborate with other people, irrespective of what they look like, because they're good collaborators.
That system is like wildfire with respect to creating... I hate to use the term growth, but growth is a good proxy for what it creates. It creates capacity, right? And the reason that so much of the world looked at the American experiment and decided that it wanted a piece of it was because America was an extremely dynamic place. Once it discovered that this was the way to do it, that putting aside monarchs altogether, giving people the right to consent or not over those who would rule them, and putting aside the many differences that existed at a genetic level between the populations that were here, that that is it's lightning in a bottle.
And I believe that what's going on with these rent-seeking elites is that they have not really understood that story and they have decided that they're going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and they're not going to be happy with the world that follows.
But isn't that what the founding fathers were trying to prevent by structuring our government in the way that they did?
Yeah, my sense is they accidentally solved the most important puzzle because they needed to do it in order to get the colonies to agree to confederate. And that so by taking a bunch of different mini nation like things and saying, well, what are the rules that will allow these people to trust a confederation is not going to leave them with a short straw. They built a system that actually does allow people from different races to do the same trick. And the idea that the thing that really makes the West special is that we agree not to care about the shape of your nose or the slant of your eyes or the color of your skin. And the question is, well, all right, I've got some piece of the puzzle.
Who's got a compatible piece that we can put together and create wealth? That's magic. If you're limited to your own racial group in order to make wealth, then the amount of wealth you can make is a lot tinier. So this is just simply a better way of existing. And, as you well know, we were nowhere.
It was not perfected. It was really just a prototype 10 years ago, 20 years ago. But what we've started to do is wreck it in favor of utopian notions that will never work or a retreat to some kind of cryptic oligarchic power. And none of these things are in a position to compete with that system from the point of view of discovering what's possible and bringing the value of it to the population of planet Earth.
And art, innovation, everything. Everything. Technology, everything.
Everything good that we should be trying to achieve is achieved better with that mechanism.
But what's fascinating is that they're using this is like you're saying to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. They're using all of these utopian social ideas and using them in this very weird, authoritarian way. And the people that are most promoting it are the people that are in control of all these systems. These are the people that are in control of the military industrial complex, the people in control of the pharmaceutical companies. They're the ones that they want this struggle to be going on between people.
They want this false sense that white supremacy is the number one problem that we face in America right now.
In a country where we elected a black man twice.
Well, it's just nonsense. Yeah. And I think it promotes racism because it makes people that are like on the fence racist, angry, and they go the other way. They go hard. And there's a bunch of people that feel like they have to be racist because they're being discriminated against and no one cares.
And for people that aren't thoughtful and people that don't spend a lot of time and really consider their position on things. I think they they tend to react in a way that is, you know, you're, you're reacting in an impulsive way because you feel threatened, and it's not logical. It's not. it doesn't reflect your actual real values of how you really would think about people if everybody would just treat it. Everybody is normal.
Everybody is in, is the same thing, you know, and that the idea that even the the goal of that itself to aspire to a colorblind society is somehow racist was that doesn't make any sense.
I think it's a pretty good. This is exactly why I'm concerned that these people just don't know what they're doing. Yeah. Right. They tried to create racial strife to distract from their their bankruptcy, their moral bankruptcy.
Right. They were staving off the French Revolution by getting us to turn on each other. Well, that worked a little bit for a while, but it also created a lot of interest in talking about what they were up to. And it created an entire alternative media space in which people who didn't want any part of that nonsense actually gained credibility in the public's eyes. People who might never have been heard of in in wider circles, if not for this.
So they didn't anticipate that they were going to create an alternative to the media that they controlled. That's how little they understand. They didn't realize that at some point, if they tried to push the idea that, you know, fat is beautiful, that you're somehow morally defective if you're not attracted to trans people. By pushing that nonsense, they created a rebellion. They forced people to actually consider these things, which made a lot of us reject them.
And by rejecting them, there's now a a very influential, if not powerful, group of people across a wide spectrum discussing what those elites are up to. We even, I think, have elites of our own. I can't be certain, but Musk doesn't look like he's on their team to me.
He's not on their team.
That's what I think.
Well, he's insanely wealthy and independent and an actual legitimate genius in a world of fools.
Right. And I think...
Not flawless.
Not flawless.
He gets out of line every now and then. He gets a little wacky. He does. But he's fun.
He's restless.
He's a fun guy to have at the helm.
And I think he looks at what is being plotted against us and sees it as a fun challenge to confront it.
And he has the resources to do it, unlike most people, and has the courage to do something like completely overpay for Twitter and then have the advertisers lock him out. And literally, in a discussion with the guy from the New York Times, he goes, go, fuck yourself. Go fuck. Let me be clear. Go, fuck yourself.
Yep.
I don't care. You're trying to blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself.
Right.
Nobody does that.
Well, on the one hand, nobody does it. On the other hand, I wonder why more people don't. Because the fact is, he's demonstrating that not only does it work short-term, it has costs, but long-term, he's not exactly losing.
No, but he's also... He's a child of the Internet, in the sense that, like, he makes memes. He posts memes. Like, when you post that meme of Bill Clinton, excuse me, of Bill Gates next to the emoji of a pregnant man and said, when you want to lose a boner real quick, that's wild. Because you can't even say, oh, fuck that guy.
He's a dumbass. It's literally one of the smartest human beings alive and the wealthiest man alive. Right. And he's dunking on you on a platform that he owns now.
Right. There's that. I also, as much as it's juvenile... I love it. I am juvenile.
No, it's the one where he was asked for comment by one of these legacy media outlets. I don't know if it was the New York Times, but it might as well have been. And he sent back a poop emoji. And it's like, look, that's a wise move, because the rules of the game say, you know, he refused to comment. Right.
But you can't say that if he did comment and it was a poop emoji. You have to report that. So that was extremely clever.
Yeah. Listen, regardless of how nonsensical some of the stuff that they print is, I still have faith in journalists. I think we're going through a very weird trend right now where they're not behaving like journalists. They're behaving like propagandists. And I think that the business is imploding because of that and the rise of independent journalists.
And I know there was an attempt at a correction at CNN. There was an attempt at it, but they had so many fucking holes in that ship that just try to patch them up a little. You're not going to get people's trust in that way. And I don't think it was effective. So it wasn't effective in terms of the amount of people that were watching.
And there's no dynamic personalities that people appreciate and respect and really, really trust that are on the air. It's simply talking heads that you're familiar with. But I think that ultimately, they're going to have to either adjust or die. Either one of them is okay, because if they die, then you have independent journalists that do have the respect and the admiration of people, because they put their neck out there. And they've said things that are controversial and difficult.
And they've made these points from a well-articulated place of an actual understanding of the issues and not ideological. So when you're seeing something like the New York Times, post things that are clearly ideological, Rolling Stones lost the plot. I mean, just what are they doing? They're propaganda nonsense. That shit that they did during the pandemic about the people dying from ivermectin while gunshot wounds.
How many people are getting shot? The fuck are you talking about? You've got a line of gunshot wounds? Is that what you're showing me? And then you're showing me a photograph, which is a stock photo, of a completely different time of the year, where people are wearing winter jackets.
You fuckheads. This is crazy. You're talking about, what? is it, Oklahoma that we're saying? Oklahoma in the summer?
And people are wearing parkas? Like, fuck you. How are you real? How are you real? How are you real?
while the Dark Horse podcast exists? How are you real? It's because people, they're not quite ready to jump ship yet. But they're fucking close. And so you've seen the New York Times and the LA Times just fired a shitload of people.
Sports Illustrated. There's all these organizations that are just fucked now. Because the media, corporate media, you don't want to call it mainstream anymore, because it's not as big. It's really not. The real mainstream is online.
And corporate media is fucking imploding. But the people that want those jobs, the people that go to school, the people that really grow up respecting and appreciating and admiring actual journalists, the people that uncovered Watergate, the people that report about the pipeline being blown up and who's actually doing it. When you get real kids that are growing up right now, that are listening to this, people that are in college right now, that recognize the true value of journalism, they're going to get out into the world. And some of them are going to make it. And they're going to show the way.
And it's the only way for those businesses to survive. You can't survive as a propagandist while X exists. You cannot. Because you're going to be exposed. You might work for the boomers, but guess what?
They're going to die. They don't have much time left, especially if they take your fucking medical advice.
Exactly. So let me introduce a concept here that we talk about on Dark Horse regularly, which is zero is a special number. And this is about a little piece of game theory that the rent-seeking elites did not understand. The idea is if you have control, if you have censorship control over all of the social media platforms, then the world looks a particular way, because certain stories that should be discussed can't be discussed. If a single platform escapes that control, then it becomes the platform that everybody wants to be on, because nobody wants to be treated like a child.
We all want to be in the places where we can discuss whatever needs to be discussed. So by buying Twitter and keeping it afloat through the initial attacks, Musk created an environment where we are now much freer than we were to speak even just two or three years ago.
And it seems to have alleviated pressure.
That's my point. Once you have one entity that succeeds in stabilizing itself outside of the control, every other social media platform has to follow or die. But do they? They are. They are, and they will.
I mean it's possible that they will find some way to defang X. There's still a lot of bad architecture inside of X. But if X remains freer, then it forces the hand of everybody else who wishes to compete, because nobody wants to be playing mini-golf when there's real golf.
Can you expand on the structure of the architecture that you think is—?
Well, let's just say I will use in my defense. I met with Elon and he talked to me about something that I think he's also talked to and he's talked publicly about, which is the fact that before he owned X, he could detect that the behavior with respect to his own account was not organic. There was lots of structure inside that decided what to elevate and what to suppress. I feel this in my account. I've in fact seen very strange stuff up until last week.
It's very hard to convey that to anybody, because they don't know how good you are at sorting actual shenanigans from just feeling like a tweet should have done better than it did, and it was just luck of the draw. But I think it is possible to demonstrate. Let me just tell you about one example. I was tweeting about—well, it was about—after my interview, I had two recent interviews with Tucker Carlson. The second one was about the border crisis, and it contained some really explosive stuff.
And it was not trending, which is weird for a Tucker interview, especially one that got as many views as it did. And there has been some—I used to be able to do something I would call climbing a trend. If there was a trend on Twitter, I could very often tweet about it and then my tweet would climb up the trend. And that became impossible. It was like forbidden somehow in the architecture of Twitter.
In the aftermath of this Tucker interview, I expected to see that interview and my participation in it trend, because so many people saw it. It was like six million views in two days. So it was obviously something that was being seen and discussed. And it didn't start trending. And then a weird thing happened.
My name trended, but it was only my first name. And it trended under the category sports. And if you went to the tweets in the trend, they were actually about the Tucker interview. So the Brett— Right. So what it turned out, somebody posted on me, they said, oh, it's Brett Favre.
That's why it says Brett. Favre. Favre.
Communist. Wow.
I'm not going to live that down, am I? But Favre.
He's a legend. You've got to get his name right.
I am going to from now on.
Would you say, Jamie? That's going to be a meme.
All right. Well, I'll take my lumps on that. But nonetheless.
It's an odd spelling in your defense. if you don't, you know.
Well, yeah. So here's what happened.
BRET trended. The category was sports. It wasn't Brett Weinstein trending. And when you went to the tweets, they weren't about sports or Brett Favre. Okay.
They were actually about me. Right.
So you were prevented from trending in some way.
I think that what happened, to put it in the proper computer science language, is that the intersection of Brett Weinstein and Brett Favre is B-R-E-T. He spells his name with two T's, and obviously we have different last names. But the idea was that whatever the architecture in the back of Twitter is, was preventing me from trending, but he was allowed to trend. And because our names had this intersection, I could trend under his category.
But most of the category was about you.
None of it was about him. It was all about me, as far as I could tell. So anyway, I think that implies the structure that I've been detecting, but haven't been able to establish. And anyway, that stuff is still inside Twitter. Do I think Musk has put a block on me trending?
No, I don't think so at all. But I think there's something in there that he doesn't know about.
Well, you've got to think, who's working there? First of all, Twitter's in San Francisco. The idea that you're going to get 4,000 rebels,
or international dark web members that are working in Twitter is nonsense. You're going to get those kids that are subject to the same social pressures that all the other kids that are getting out of universities and they're moving into social media space are getting. Those are the people. Now, they might have mandates that they're told to use, but these are computer geniuses. These are people that know how to fuck with things.
These are people that are coders. And if they can get away with it, especially if your boss is busy running SpaceX and Tesla, I mean, how the fuck can that guy do? Oh, and the boring company, sorry. And having 150 kids. How?
How does that guy have time? I have three kids, and I can't fucking pay attention to half the shit that's going on in the world. I have issues sometimes at my club where I have to put out social fires, and I'm like, what is actually happening? I have to, kind of like forensically, analyze each and every conflict, measure personalities, like what is this person susceptible to doing something? Maybe they don't seem to be honest, like something's going on here.
What's the actual truth? Do I get these two people together? Fuck, man. And that's a simple thing, like a comedy club with 100 employees. It's not that big a deal.
This motherfucker is running Twitter, SpaceX, Tesla, and the boring company, and he's providing Starlink satellites to Ukraine and all other parts of the world, and you could put one on your fucking camper and get 5G in the middle of the desert. Like what?
Right, at the same time that he's like memeing people into submission. How?
Every time I text him, I'm like, how are you responding to me? How do you have the fucking time?
How do you do that?
I can't keep up. I have like 89 text messages that I have to get to at the end of this podcast.
Yeah, it's amazing what he's able to do. It's insane. He has a taste for it.
So how could he possibly be paying attention to how people are trending and what's allowed and what's not allowed?
Oh, I don't think he can do that. He can't. All he can do is put people in charge and he can give them marching orders and say, I don't want this thing to have its thumb on it.
Is he aware of this dilemma? You should alert him to this.
Here's the problem. Okay. And I don't know what this means. I was not going to mention this, but this is the very thing. So I went to see Musk, as I mentioned.
We had a very good discussion. I spent about a half an hour with him. At the end of it, he said that he thought it was a good discussion and he wanted to meet again. And I said, anytime.
Of course.
On my trip back home, literally from that meeting, my Twitter account got hijacked for the first time ever. I've never had an account hijacked, but my Twitter account got hijacked and it started putting out some crazy spam stuff. And I was concerned about it because not only is it alarming to have your account captured, but I had been DMing with Musk, including encrypted DMs. Now, there wasn't anything sensitive in there, but you can imagine in my shoes, the last thing you want is somebody captures your account and they start exposing communications with Musk that maybe he doesn't want public. So I contacted him, right, in alarm.
And I said, my account's been captured, not sure what to do about it. And we were in a discussion and we were talking about the fact that the account itself has weird behavior on Twitter, which I didn't know if that was relevant or not. And he asked me for more information and I started to tell him about this trend stuff. He blocked me. Now, I don't know what that means.
I don't think he's on the other team. He blocked you. Yes, he blocked me and I'm blocked to this day, which seems strange. It could be that he's forgotten that he's done it, but I don't think so.
Why would he block you?
I have no idea. It makes no sense. Now, it's possible that he, you know, he's very busy. It's possible that he took what I was telling him about the behavior of my account as if I thought it was his obligation to pay attention to me personally, which I never thought. But maybe he interpreted it that way.
The last thing he said was, stop spamming me, which was very strange for a guy who said he wanted to have another meeting.
How many messages were you sending him?
Three or four.
Stop spamming me.
It was very strange. But look, I don't hold it against him. The guy is obviously, I think it's obvious that he is trying to save the world, and he's one of very few people who has the kind of power and insight to actually make an important difference in that. So I'm very much a supporter of what he's doing, even if I found that whole chapter strange.
But nonetheless, it happened. I don't know what it means, and it is interesting that it happened as I was trying to explain to him the weirdness in my account, which was a mirror for what he told me he had experienced with his account before he bought Twitter.
Yeah. You know, you could, if you wanted to be charitable, you could chalk that up to a guy that's just fucking, insanely stressed out and busy and dealing with a thousand fires.
I'm already there. My feeling is I'm still a supporter of his. I don't like that. he blocked me, but the guy's got more important stuff to do, and I'm supportive of what he's doing.
Well, hopefully he'll hear this and unblock you.
That would be lovely.
Stop spamming him, bro.
Well, let's put it this way. If that was the issue, all he needed to say is, Hey, Brett.
Yeah, I'm very busy.
I'm very busy.
Yeah, which he clearly is. Yep. Yeah, you can't fake that. I don't know how he does it in the first place. So even responding by stop spamming me, right?
Even that. I didn't have time for that. How expensive was that that he actually typed that out?
I'm just thankful that there is a guy like him that's doing what he's doing, because if it wasn't for him, I think we were moving in a very wild direction, a really crazy direction of adherence and compliance, regardless of whether or not it's logical, and things are moving more and more into this crazy ideological place that seems very much like a cult. And it was in control of all of our mass means of communication, other than whether it's Rumble or Gab or these sites that are committed to free speech, and some of them have been kind of fucked and take over. And I think that's something that people need to take into consideration, too. When you hear about a right-wing platform that gets infiltrated by racists and Nazis, and I'm sure that's true, too. I'm sure there are some.
But I would imagine, and I would like you to consider, that we know that government interference in social media discourse, whether it is our government or whether it's foreign governments that want us to stay at each other's throats, is a real thing. And one of the ways they would do that is to make any sort of, any time there's a discussion, have the most problematic take on it elevated, and have massive amounts of people that are saying egregious, horrible things over and over again. And to me, my reaction when I see that is I stop using that platform. And that's me. That's someone who's really aware of this game and knows how it's going.
I don't go to these other platforms. I just get the fuck out of here. It's too nuts. Some of them. And then some of them.
I go, okay, like on X, like when some hot take comes out, I love to go into the accounts and see what the most ridiculous people, like, what they're saying, and then go to their page. And it's usually like a name with a bunch of numbers, and they have like 43 followers, and then you look at their tweets, and it's all either responding to these social issues in this very egregious way, or retweeting preposterous things and retweeting gaslighting things, retweeting things that, just like you, just go, who the fuck thinks like this? Well, they're not real people, man. These are agents of chaos, and they're injected into social media. If you have beer, and it's a really good beer, and you inject 20% piss into that beer, people are going to drink that beer.
What the fuck is wrong with this beer? It's not the beer. It's what's being injected into the beer. You're not allowing the real citizens to have an honest take on how everybody else thinks, because the way we figure out what's right, no one exactly knows that their take is 100%. the only way to look at things.
You've got to be able to interact with people. That's why discourse is so important, and that's the most fascinating aspect about the free internet is to be able to see the actual opinions of real people that think very differently than you. And some of them you might think are ridiculous, and some of them might change your mind. You might listen to what their take is on something and go, I never considered that. Maybe I am looking at things ideologically.
Maybe I do have a preconceived notion of what's right and what's wrong, and it's not based on facts. I'm not being objective. And that's the only way to find that out. But when you're dealing with swarms of people, whether it's Russian troll farms or Chinese or American, and they're jumping into the fray and fucking up all the conversations, you're like, ooh, what's really going on here? What is really going on?
And I think most people don't know what's really going on. The reason why I got to this recently, there was some article. I forget what the article was about, but it was some social take. But then I saw that they were posting tweets in the article, which is a new thing that lazy journalists would do, and this was the take online of this. And so I go, okay, that's the take online.
Let me go to that person, see if it's a real person. Nope, not a real person. Let me go to this other tweet. Nope, not a real person. I mean, it might be a real person, but my instincts are that the fucking name and three numbers behind it and the way they're tweeting about stuff, bullshit.
Bullshit. So did they do that? How did they not do that before they posted those tweets? They don't give a fuck. They're just getting clicks.
They just want to see that people are arguing about things, and they want to see the support for whatever preposterous notion they're trying to push out, whether it's trans athletes or people being able to use women's rooms with penises, all that stuff. When you see the takes on that and you go, like, how much of this is real humans and how much of it is actually affecting real humans, to their whole barometer, their idea of, like, what's okay and what's not okay shifts. And the way I've described it, and I heard someone talk about this one in terms of – I think it was Tony Robbins, actually – talk about it in terms of beneficial behavior, that if you are on a certain path, there's two boats on a certain path, and one of them deviates slightly in a better direction, over time. the distance is great from where you would be to where you are now because you've done the right things. Well, that's also true.
if you get people to believe nonsense and you get people to believe weird social things, and you get people to believe that if you are not willing to have sex with a biological male who identifies as a woman, somehow or another, you're a Nazi. And as that gets further and further, then we find ourselves in these – like, how did I get here? Like, how are we here? And a lot of it is just discourse. And if you can control discourse and if you can manipulate discourse, which is clearly being done, you can change what's acceptable.
Well, on the one hand, I think it's even worse than you're portraying it. And, on the other hand, I find a kind of hope in this. And the way it's worse is if you think about who we're up against and what properties they control,
they presumably have the intelligence services on their side. They've banked all of our communications. And, I mean, if you give me their cards, I know how to win, right? You know who suspects whom of what. You know who resents whom.
You know how to seed anger and disrespect. It's not hard to take a group of people and get them to tangle themselves if you have that kind of information. And they just simply do, and they don't even have to collect it in real time. They just have to bank it so that they can go back and figure out what the map of these things is and they can tangle us.
And I think they're doing it. And I think we are seeing, I know that in the COVID dissident community, there's all kinds of infighting. that's going on that...
About what?
Well, there's a faction that has emerged, for example, that is convinced that there was no novel pathogen circulating during the COVID pandemic.
Now, do you think those people are real?
Some of them are. I know some of them.
Right. So these people think that it was just all bullshit and that all those people getting sick was what, the flu?
Well, there's a second faction that says it wasn't SARS-CoV-2, it was flu.
Now, let's just say, I think the people who say that there was no novel pathogen, they actually have a point that they're failing to make, which they should be making. The point is, the propaganda was so effective. It was so industrial strength that a pathogen was not required. Much of this could have been accomplished with no pathogen.
Right.
Now, that doesn't mean there wasn't a pathogen. And I think there was because I think I've had it. And my sense that I have had that pathogen is based on observations of the pattern with my family. So let's just take the question of, well, was this flu? And are you leaping to the conclusion that flu was something special because people had put the idea of SARS-CoV-2 in your mind?
I don't think so. And here's why I don't think so. I've had flu maybe three or four times in my life. I've had something three times in the last four years. Something severe and flu-like.
Is it still severe? Well, The most recent versions have been severe for you?
Let's put it this way, severe as in, debilitated. Really? I treated it aggressively. I got over it quickly.
But the results, the impact initially.
The impact was profound. Right. It was flu, or worse severity. Now, am I saying that was SARS-CoV-2?. How would I know?
How would I know?
You didn't get tested the last two times?
The last time I got tested, it did not test positive for COVID, but it was out of season. So the basic pattern is this. I believe that pathogens exist. I believe that I have contracted a pathogen three times in four years. Does it have to be one pathogen?
No, I'm open to the possibility. It was a couple of different things. But mostly we're talking about not in the traditional season for flu.
Did you get tested for RSV?
I didn't, but I did talk to Pierre Corey about it, and there was no reason to think it was going to be RSV.
So, anyway, my point is I don't believe there was no pathogen, because I believe that something that followed the pattern of a pathogen is in the world.
Also, the pathogen is clearly documented.
Well, I agree with you. it's clearly documented, but it's not that the people who are arguing there's no pathogen don't have responses. And so we saw a lot of shenanigans with cycle thresholds on PCR. So there are ways to create the impression of a pandemic that do not require there to be an actual pathogen.
Well, it was also one of the rare times where, being asymptomatic, you were still considered sick.
Yeah, and that was likely nonsense or largely nonsense.
Well, it was like some wild number. Like 65% of the people who were diagnosed with SARS-CoV-2 were asymptomatic, and this was also during the PCR cycle days of 40 cycles.
Right. So the point is, all right, we know that there are various tricks you can play, and we know that they were played, that people who died of things that had nothing to do with any infectious disease were categorized as dying with COVID or of COVID.
And that they were financially incentivized to do so.
We know all of those games were played. And so, from my perspective, I believe that most of what happened could have been arranged without a pathogen. That said, I believe there was one. Now, but the larger point, you asked me, what is the infighting in the COVID community? The fact is, those who believe that there was a pathogen are viewed as shills or limited hangouts by those who believe that there wasn't one.
Can I ask you this? There's this thing that they say, that the conspiracy theorists, never biologists say, is that COVID has never been isolated.
Yeah, I don't think this is true. I think what you want is somebody who is skilled in the molecular side of this story to talk you through what is and isn't correct.
Can you just expand on that? This idea that keeps getting propagated, that COVID has never been isolated.
So I can't really explore that evidence because I'm not well-versed in it. I can tell you who I trust on this topic. And I would say, talk to Kevin McKernan. He can tell you what's been seen and what hasn't. The problem is, I mean, you read Bobby Kennedy's book about Fauci, right?
And you remember in that book that there is an exploration of what happened with HIV. Now, the portrayal in that book, which I must say is, I think, shockingly compelling, is that HIV exists, but it is not explanatory of acquired immune deficiency syndrome as we think it is.
And this is Peter Duesberg's assertion too, who was demonized heavily during the AIDS crisis. Right. He's a professor of biology, University of California, Berkeley.
So we're dealing with a question. There are those who believe that pathogens don't exist, that viruses don't exist. I think these people are completely nuts. OK, we know, viruses exist. For one thing, you know, there are certain viruses you can see, right?
Like a bacteriophage, is something that you can actually see with an electron microscope. So viruses definitely exist. Whether they are responsible for this, that or the other syndrome is something that we can get wrong.
Can I stop you there? Sure. So if you could see viruses in an electron microscope, you cannot see COVID in an electron microscope?
You can see something, right? You can see a particle with structure, but there are, so again, we're in an area that is not my area of expertise. You've got a couple of different kinds of electron micrographs. You've got scanning and transmission. And then you have various tricks to increase the ability of them to see into ranges that are actually beyond the ability of electrons to reveal them directly.
And anyway, it is a highly technical realm, and it's not something I can explain. But we can see something. But the fact, you know, if you say this person has a syndrome, right? And then you go looking for a particle, and that particle is present reliably, right? You have to then figure out if that particle is absent from people who don't have the symptoms.
And if it's not absent, which it sometimes won't be, you have to figure out what it means, right? So there's a postulate about establishing the connection between a virus and a disease. that is seemingly logical. In other words, people who have the particle present ought to show symptoms of the disease, and people who have symptoms of the disease ought to have the particle and those. So that postulate, Cox postulate, does not actually work.
And the reason it doesn't work is because you have, let's take the case of AIDS, for example. AIDS involves a inability of people to fend off various pathogens that they would otherwise be able to fend off. You can say, well, that's the result of HIV. The problem is that the inability to fend off some set of pathogens may be the result of the disruption of a subclass of cells, CD4 cells, let's say. So, if CD4 cells are attacked by HIV and that disrupts the ability of a patient to fend off a particular disease, then anything that disrupts the formation of CD4 cells will produce the same pathology.
So, according to this postulate, which is too narrow, you can falsify the idea that HIV is causing AIDS because there are patients who have AIDS, who don't have HIV, right? So that's the problem. You need a richer toolkit in order to be able to establish a causal relationship. And in the case of HIV, the argument is that it is effectively a minor fellow traveler, right? That whatever it is that is causing AIDS actually is accompanied by HIV, but that HIV isn't actually inducing that syndrome, right?
So AIDS is a syndrome, which just means a collection of symptoms that occur together. But the nature of biology is that you have pathways. Anything that disrupts a particular pathway will create all the same symptoms downstream. And so, in any case, that complexity makes it very difficult to establish with certainty that X particle creates Y disease.
There's also ignoring a very important factor in AIDS, which is party drugs.
That is the competing hypothesis. And for those who think that this is a preposterous allegation, you should look at this evidence. The evidence is surprisingly compelling. And if your mind resists that, realize that Luc Montagnier, who got a Nobel Prize for the discovery of HIV, later in life, became convinced that the thing for which he got the Nobel Prize was not nearly as important as he had imagined. He believed that HIV was not the causal element.
So to me, that's very powerful. Somebody as smart as Luc Montagnier looked at the evidence and said he had gotten it wrong, where that actually decreased his own historical importance.
And then we have to take into consideration the initial treatment, which was AZT.
Right. AZT.
Now, AZT kills people dead. And they stopped using it as chemotherapy medication because it was killing people quicker than cancer. And chemotherapy medication has never been prescribed to people that you constantly stay on it. That's just not something they do. You go on it for very short periods of time because it's very damaging, but it kills the cancer.
And then your body recovers and survives. With AZT, with AIDS, it was killing people. So now you have people dying from AIDS. And you have this medication, which Fauci in the 1980s was famously quoted as saying, is the only reason why we use only one medications, because the only medication that's been proven to be both safe and effective. Right.
Where have you heard that before? Right. It was a total, it was, COVID, was a rerun of the AIDS chapter. with AZT. You're taking someone who has a compromised immune system.
And your response to that was give him something that's going to kill him quicker and then say there's a giant crisis. And this is what Duesberg was demonized for.
Yeah, I agree. And, you know, for many years, I resisted the interpretation. I was more familiar with Carey Mullis's objections. Carey Mullis was the inventor of PCR technology who died tragically and some would say strangely, at the very beginning of the COVID crisis.
Why? strangely? Just because of the timing?
Have you ever seen this piece of video where he talks about Anthony Fauci?
Yeah.
Let's put it this way. Carey Mullis was a outspoken, vigorous, highly intelligent person who was not corralled by fashion. And in fact, his objection to the idea that HIV was causing AIDS was an early testament to his maverick nature.
For people who haven't heard it, let's find that. Find that clip of Carey Mullis talking about Anthony Fauci. He's essentially just saying he's a bureaucrat and he doesn't know what he's talking about, and that his technology should never be used.
Yeah, the second one there.
The second one. That one, yeah.
What is it about humanity that wants to go through all the details and stuff? You know, guys like Fauci get up there and start talking. He doesn't know anything really about anything. And I'd say that to his face. Nothing.
The man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it's got a virus in there, you'll know it. He doesn't understand electron microscopy. He doesn't understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he's in. Most of those guys up there on the top are just total administrative people and they don't know anything about what's going on at the bottom.
Those guys have got an agenda, which is not what we would like them to have, being that we pay for them to take care of our health. They've got a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go. They change them when they want to. And they smugly, like Tony Fauci, does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.
You can't expect the sheep to really respect the best and the brightest. They don't know the difference, really. I mean, I like humans. Don't get me wrong. But basically, the vast majority of them do not possess the ability to judge who is and who isn't a really good scientist.
I mean, that's the problem. That's the main problem I hear with science, I'd say, in this century, because science is being judged by people. Funding is being done by people who don't understand it. And who do we trust? Fauci.
Fauci doesn't know enough to know. If Fauci wants to get on television with somebody who knows a little bit about this stuff and debate him, he could easily do it, because he's been asked. And I've had a lot of people, president of the University of South Carolina, ask Fauci if he'd come down there and debate me on the stage in front of the student body, because I wanted somebody who was from the other side to come down there and balance my feelings, because I felt like, well, these guys can listen to me, but I need to have somebody else down here that's going to tell me what science is. But Fauci didn't want to do it.
Yeah. That's not it.
Yeah, so that's a pretty wild piece.
And how did he die?
I've forgotten what the pathology was, but some spontaneous thing. But the thing is, he was a, you know, people die, but he was a healthy, healthy guy.
That was from 2000,. what, that video?
Jamie, do you know?
Well, I'll say it's like 16, 18..
See if you can find it, just so we know.
So.
So we can judge based on what he looked like there. He looked pretty healthy, but obviously people have things that come up even when they look healthy.
Sure. You know, and that's the problem with all of these things, is, you know, people do die spontaneously.
But if you're looking for someone who would be someone, who would be a brilliant, well-respected scientist, that would be at the head of the resistance or something like this, and would be vocal about it. Right. That's your Huckleberry.
Yeah. You would have had him on your podcast and he would have said this cycle threshold stuff is nonsense. And, you know, frankly, it would have been a mirror of what happened with Robert Malone. Right. The whole covid crisis unfolded differently because the inventor of the mRNA technology at the heart of those so-called vaccines.
Didn't think this made any sense, had been injured himself by getting one of these inoculations that changed the dynamic of the argument to have the inventor of PCR technology saying you're using that in a way that is unforgivably wrong. Right. That would have changed the whole dynamic as well. And yet he was gone. So probably natural causes.
What was his cause of death? I'm looking both things up at the same time. Okay. We'll find out both things shortly.
I should point out, Luke Montagnier also died late in the covid crisis. Now, he was as old as the hills. So one has to imagine that that was probably just bad luck.
But I've never even heard of him before.
You've never heard of him? No.
What does it say? Heart respiratory failure brought on by pneumonia.
2019?.
Yeah, August of 2019.. Look at that.
Right before it popped up. Boy, that's convenient. He's 74.. But 74 is, you know, around the time when people do die. That video was from, do we know what year?
I was trying to make it at once. No worries. I found multiple issues or uploads of that video, but I'm trying to figure out how to find out. When the discussion was? Who the person was talking to him.
Okay.
So anyway, the reason I raised him was that the first place I became aware that anybody significant doubted the story about HIV leading to AIDS, it was Kerry Mullis. And my sense at the time, which I now regard as wrong, was this is a chemist. He's a brilliant guy, but he doesn't understand the biology. And he's overusing the postulate. And he's not understanding why a virus that does cause a disease wouldn't match the postulate.
96.. So that was when that conversation was, wow, that's crazy. Yeah. 96..
But what I came to understand later, after I looked at what Luke Montagnier had said, and I read Bobby Kennedy's book on Fauci, was that actually the argument against HIV being causal was a lot higher quality than I had understood. That it being a real virus, a fellow traveler of a disease that was chemically triggered, that is at least a highly plausible hypothesis. And with Anthony Fauci playing his role, that was inconvenient for what he was trying to accomplish.
And we have to really take into consideration the time in which we're talking about. We're talking about the 1980s, and the media was completely controlled. And it was very small. There wasn't a lot of outlets. There was no independent journalism.
It didn't exist. There was no people that were standing, no rebels that were standing outside the fray saying, that's not true. This is what's actually going on.
And actually, this brings me back to an earlier point. So you were saying that journalism would survive. And the story here is an interesting one. I don't trust any, almost any, journalist who's still in the mainstream system, right? There's maybe a couple of holdouts.
Cy Hirsch still puts out important stuff every now and again. But the interesting thing that's happened is whatever force it is that has made it essentially impossible to do good journalism inside the official system, has driven out and surfaced really good people, right? We've got Matt Taibbi. We've got Schellenberger. We've got Greenwald.
We have, of all things, Tucker Carlson is now, you know, he's gone from being an anchor person, albeit a very articulate and insightful one, but an anchor person. He's now traveling around the world and doing a job that looks like something like what a newsroom used to be. And this was, of course, the Achilles heel of the journalists that had surfaced previously was that they could do the job of journalism well outside of the New York Times and CNN and all of that. But they couldn't reproduce the power of a newsroom that could send people all over the world and actually report the story. So anyway, I do see the emergence of, you know, and part of it is what we're doing here right now, right?
The inability of the system to tolerate open discussion of important topics has produced the phenomenon that you so heavily innovated, that so many of us have picked up, which is now fueling the ability of these independent journalists to bring their discoveries to the public. And the public, of course, is absolutely fascinated and completely uninterested in reading the New York Times because there's nothing in it. So, anyway, that's a very hopeful thing. And the degree to which that is also riding on, you know, the purchase of Twitter and...
And people like Tucker.
Right. It's...
And also Fox fucking up and removing him.
Well, but think about it. All of these things are the same, right? You've got social media platforms that refuse to provide people a venue in which they can talk about whatever they want. That's business-wise, stupid, but in terms of maintaining power and control, very important, right? You've got Fox firing its most important asset and thereby accidentally freeing him to basically dwarf their influence.
So all of these things represent something that should... And the onion, right? The onion was funny, right? Funny is a moneymaker. So why do all of these properties make dumb decisions that sabotage, that cannibalize their own business?
Well, it's all pointing in the same direction. All of these things are involved in some battle over control. that confuses us, because we think of them as normal businesses.
Well, it's clearly pressured by advertisers. It has to be. And it also has to be pressured by some intelligence agencies. If you've got a guy like Tucker saying the CIA killed JFK, the FBI had 200 people at least on the Capitol, on the lawn, that were instigating. He's saying this on Fox.
And if you have a corporation like Fox, which is this long standing conservative news organization that has deep ties to the military and to conservative groups, and then certainly to beholden to advertisers, you've got a real problem on your hands. How much is this guy worth? How many views does he get? What does Jesse Waters get?
Right.
Is it close? What about Sean Hannity? Is it close? Can we fucking just move him in and take a small hit, but not have any propaganda hit?
It's not. And so, I mean, I think that actually describes the game, right? We've got to stop looking at businesses in simple terms, right? Victoria's Secret does not embrace fat because it thinks anybody actually is persuaded by this stuff, right? It does it because there's some higher order principle being deployed in which it has to play its role.
That is driving the fact that there is some influence, a pernicious influence, causing everything that should behave normally to behave weirdly and against the public's interest, is driving everything that insists on continuing to function out. And if we were all driven out, but we had no mechanism to reach an audience, then it would be game over. But the fact is, there is a mechanism. The internet provides it. So then the question is, well, what are the bottlenecks, right?
And now we're going to fight over the bottlenecks. And social media platforms all marching in lockstep, that was a bottleneck, okay? One of them gets broken out by Musk, right? Now, the whole sector can't behave in the same way, because there is a place you can go if you don't want to exist under that control.
And when Musk buys it out, Tucker goes to X, which is a double wild.
It gives Tucker a place to go. And so the point is, he doesn't miss a beat, right?
Not only that, he gets bigger, far bigger.
And, you know, it's interesting to see how you can infer the control that Fox had, even over Tucker, by the difference in the way he is playing the game outside of that structure, right? And it's to our benefit. So I would say, as a committed patriot and somebody who thinks the West is in great jeopardy, the way we should look at the chessboard is the most important thing is maintaining that ability for us to discuss what needs to be talked about in a place where it can be found by people who want to hear it.
Absolutely. Well said. It's the only way we get through this. And then, you know, I always bring this up, that throughout all human interactions, throughout all history, there's been good and evil. There's been pro and con.
There's been negative and positive. And they battle. And it's one of the reasons why positive influences and great things rise, because they're in competition with evil. They have to innovate. They have to grow stronger.
They have to expand, because that's the only way to survive. And when people do have this moral imperative and do have these ethical considerations that don't allow them to give in and sell out, they can push this thing and get through, and we all benefit from it. And if this battle didn't exist, maybe we wouldn't get as far as we're going to get. Maybe this is just a natural part of the way humans interact and the way ideas battle it out to find out what's the good one and what's the bad one. And even these people that are these fake accounts that are on Twitter, they're participating in it, whether they realize it or not, because they're allowing people to understand, like, oh, there are factors at play that are not actual human beings in the sense of like individuals with objective ideas.
They're a part of a group that's trying to push a narrative in a very specific direction. And now, because I'm aware of that, now I see things a little bit more clearly. I stand outside a little bit more and analyze things with less emotion and try to figure out what is really going on here and how complex is it. And also, how much time am I going to have to invest in this before I really understand what's going on? Because most people don't have any fucking time.
They don't. Most people's lives are filled with things that they have to do. Obligations, family, finances, all sorts of stuff they have to pay attention to where they don't have enough rabbit hole time to really dive into this kind of stuff and figure out what the fuck is going on. And why are things moving? What is DEI?
Why are things moving in this direction? Are people being paid to do this? Who's paying them? Why? Why is there a financial incentive to push this kind of bizarre behavior and thinking?
Like, what is it? What is it?
Yeah, I think you're pointing to exactly the right thing. And I have the same. Unfortunately, you told me many years ago, don't read the comment. Now, I was a comment reader, and I still do to an extent, but I think what's happened is whatever the number of people who pay attention to me has gone up, the certainty with which I'm going to have to embrace your approach to this grows as well. And the reason is because it doesn't take very much seeding of bad behavior to create a wave, even amongst the real people.
So when I talk about the COVID dissidents and the infighting, some of these people are real. I know it because I've met them. I've spent time talking to them. What is inspiring them to do. that can well be sock puppets or bots that are loaded with information that is surprisingly good about what these people, where their blind spots are, what their suspicions are.
And so they can be induced to play this role and to accuse them of not being real is incorrect. But the amount of influence it has over the public discussion is huge. And actually, I would deploy, I don't, you know, it's just a hypothesis. But I think one of the reasons that programs like yours are playing the role that they are, and, you know, my show is an outgrowth of yours, you literally told me to start one, and I did.
The reason that that makes a difference to people is because the ability to mislead is really dependent on the ability to know exactly where the audience is going to be seated, so that you can construct something in front of them that looks a particular way and leads them to a particular conclusion. Conversations like this can't do that, right? The point is too many topics. We don't know ahead of time what we're going to talk about. So the point is, you really do get a sense for how comfortable a person is with their perspective, whether it requires them to stay exactly on message, because as soon as they're off message, it's not going to work.
So if you were looking for authenticity, the way you would find it is in, you know, a conversation, the confines of which were not spelled out in advance. There was no script, there was no, we're going to spend four minutes here, then there's going to be a commercial, all of that. So I wonder if that's part of what's driving people into podcast world is just the simple fact that it can't really be faked.
Yeah. I think people definitely have a real hunger for authenticity.
And that's a part of it, like the least produced, the less there's some involvement, the less you feel like there's an agenda and a script, the more you're willing to listen.
Yeah. And I hate to use the term low production values, because that sounds like an insult, but at some level it's the low production values, which, you know, that part you can fake. You can make something look like it was put together in a garage.
People smell it. They smell the bullshit. Like this really is a low production value show. I mean, it really is, but it's on purpose. And it's because I think that's the only way to do it.
And it's also with a skeleton crew, which I also think is the only way to do it. I have friends that have podcasts, that have enormous staffs of people running around doing the job of one young Jamie. I don't think that's the way to do it.
Nope. And it's amazing that, you know, there are a lot of strikes against us in this battle, but one of the things that's working very much for us is the fact that, in terms of the equipment, you need to do it. And as long as they don't bar you from accessing the internet, the ability to distribute it is available to pretty much anybody. So the question is, can you load something into that that's actually worth people's time enough that they're going to tune in?
Well, that's when it gets real sketchy, right? Because they are taking steps. And one of the things that has been discussed recently was Google's new guidelines in terms of what they're going to do in the future if there's any sort of large event. And they use this really blanket description of what this event would be, anything of social consequence, anything involving a pandemic. And so they're essentially expanding their ability to censor.
Now, you could imagine where you could justify that if they weren't horribly wrong just a couple of years ago. If just a couple of years ago, if you had discussed things on your podcast that are undeniably true and now accepted as fact, you would be banned. You would be kicked off. That's a fact. We know that to be a fact.
And we know that there was pressure, at least on Twitter, documented pressure by these groups that have a vested interest in pushing a very specific narrative to deny people access to the truth. And the best way to do that, in their eyes, was ban people, suppress information, kick people off the platform, demonetize them, so you incentivize them to self-censor. There was all these tactics being put in place.
In Google, they're openly stating that they'd like to do more of this after they were horribly unsuccessful and incorrect doing this during the first pandemic.
Well, that is a perfect mirror for what's going on in the World Health Organization as well, where I don't know how much you've been following it, but there is a pandemic preparedness, treaty modification and international health regulations that are hurtling towards approval in May of this year. And what they are is the exact rules that would have allowed the CDC and the WHO and all of those over in Fauci land to win during COVID if they had been in place. So it looks to me like the World Health Organization is setting us up for a rematch in which we cannot do what we succeeded in doing, which is upend their narrative and get higher quality information into discussion. And they're doing this at every level.
And how do they want to do it? What's their plan?
Well, so, first of all, the plan keeps morphing. Our ability to even see it is not maintained. They keep changing its name, so it's hard to search on. But the overarching picture is the World Health Organization would like the ability to declare a pandemic for any reason whatsoever, including climate change, that in the event of such a pandemic, they want the ability to mandate behavior, including lockdowns. They specifically call out the ability to mandate vaccines.
They specifically call out the ability to mandate gene therapy, which is frightening. And, what's more, they want the ability to censor in order to make the campaign work, in addition to being able to redistribute medications. So, for example, let's say that they decided that people like you and me were out of hand with ivermectin and they wanted to just mandate that it be sent to some far flung corner of the globe. so it would be a completely academic issue. All of these things are spelled out in detail in this document.
And it is written in such a way that you, you know, it's just boring.
Who's voting on this?
All of the member nations, of the UN. Or of the WHO. So this is a absolutely diabolical plan. that, I mean, if you sat down and you said, well, what rules would have allowed them to win during COVID rather than be embarrassed by podcasters? This is the set of rules and it is a complete surrender of national sovereignty.
Tedros, in addressing that concern, which tells us that we are beginning to make headway, raising people's concern about this, what he said is it's not a compromise of sovereignty. And then his explanation for why it's not is that, effectively, this is going to be voted on by your elected governments. So his point is you've already, you've elected governments that should block this if it's a breach of your sovereignty, and they're not going to do it. So your sovereignty is intact, but that does mean that he's going to have the ability to declare an emergency and then implement all of these draconian measures. It's absolutely terrifying.
Have they suffered any worldwide decrease in respect or whether or not people value their opinion, or whether or not people value their competency? Or is it, I mean, am I in a bubble where I hear the World Health Organization and go, these people are out of their fucking minds? But does the rest of the world think like that? Like, what is the general perception? What's the temperature in the world when it comes to these things?
I think there are a great many...
Oh,
great. So they're saying it's a bad thing that you don't give up sovereignty. The pandemic treaty politically fucks. The pandemic treaty currently being negotiated through the World Health Organization aims to prepare for the next global health emergency and prevent a repeat of what South Africa called vaccine apartheid, where countries had vastly unequal access to COVID vaccines. Wow.
But wasn't the problem also in Africa that people weren't dying because they weren't getting vaccinated and it wasn't having the same effects? And also the way they report things is very different than us, because they don't have a financial incentive to label everything as a COVID death. And also, you have less people that have all of our comorbidities, which is really ironic, considering they're much poorer than us. But when you don't have a lot of food, you don't get obesity. And obesity seems to be one of the major causes of people's health declining to the point where something like COVID is fatal.
Yeah, you have all kinds of differences. You have regular use of ivermectin as an antiparasitic. You have a differential exposure to the sun and the ability to create vitamin D. There are all kinds of reasons that Africa was in a different boat. And, yes, it did fare very differently, much better than the rest of the world.
How confident are you that ivermectin was effective?
I will say highly confident that it was effective. And there are multiple different routes into that. For one thing, the evidence that it was not effective was drawn from randomized, controlled trials that were designed to fail and yet did not.
Can you explain how they were designed to fail?
Yeah, there are a bunch of different ways. you can design a study to fail. You can underdose, you can dose late, you can administer the study in a place where ivermectin was already in use. So the control group is actually cryptically on ivermectin at some higher level. There are numerous different routes to do it.
And the irony of those studies, if you dig deeply enough, is that actually, although the studies claimed that there was no effect, that actually the effect is in the data. It's just not reported.
How so?
If you look at an analysis that, you know, if you look at what they wrote about what they discovered, it doesn't work. If you look at what they actually found, right, if you read past their abstract, and you look at what they actually found, there is an effect, even though the studies were designed to fail. So what that tells you is that the effect is powerful enough that, even with the choosing of arbitrarily high end conditions, with all of these effects, you can still see that it was functioning in the treatment group. So even the studies that say it didn't work, show that it does. And then there's a huge range of other evidence that did not come from.
these massive randomized controlled trials, or supposedly randomized, supposedly controlled trials, we should call them, that suggests it works. In addition to the clinical experience of numerous doctors who discovered that it worked, in addition to the fact that it was already known to work with SARS-1, along with a bunch of other RNA viruses. So there was reason to expect that it would work. There was lots of clinical evidence that it worked. And even the randomized controlled trials that supposedly suggested it didn't work, show that it does work if you know how to read them.
And that it halts viral replication in vitro.
Yes.
We know that.
Yes. And it was not even its only mechanism of action. It also apparently binds spike protein. It is an inflammation reducer, in addition to being among the safest drugs that have ever been discovered.
And the most important part about this, for people that are unaware, is that it's generic.
Cheap as can be, right? It had been administered billions of times. So we knew a lot about its safety profile, its interactions with other drugs. So...
So there'd be no reason, if you were acting in the greater interest of mankind, no reason to not encourage its use. And definitely no reason to demonize it the way it was done, and to call it horse dewormer on CNN.
It was obscene. Right? This was... Let's put it this way.
The... COVID was not a major emergency, or it would not have been, if medicine had been allowed to function normally, so that doctors could discover that things like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were highly effective, and they could be used early to treat people who were actually in jeopardy, because they had comorbidities. Right? Now, I still think this COVID was a major tragedy for the world, assuming that what we understand from the evidence is correct, that there was the release of SARS-CoV-2 from the Wuhan lab, where it had been engineered to increase its ability to infect human beings. If that is true, it adds a pathogen to the list of things that afflict human beings, and we will never be rid of it now.
So that is a major cost to humans. But in terms of the threat of an individual case of COVID, it's minor if you allow doctors to treat it, as doctors would quickly have discovered was readily possible, even in cases where people are full of comorbidities.
And we should also explain that not only is it because it's generic and cheap, but because of the emergency use authorization. If you're going to have an emergency use authorization of a medication, there has to be no available treatments that are effective. So not only is it cheap, but it could potentially cost them untold billions of dollars if they don't achieve emergency use authorization. So without the kind of long-term testing that we've become accustomed to when they do approve certain medications.
Now, that is true. And I used to think that was the reason that they demonized ivermectin. I have changed my sense of why they did it, because there's something about that explanation that, you know, and I learned about that from Heather, who found it in the regulations and described it on our podcast.
And for a long time, I thought that was the explanation. that had ivermectin been understood to be an effective treatment and preventative for SARS-CoV-2, that they could not have gotten the emergency use authorization for the so-called vaccines. The problem is, these people have so much power over the regulatory apparatus. And that explanation requires that they would not have been able to overcome that obstacle, which I think they could have.
Yeah, but you're definitely squashing dissent, because you're not allowing its distribution and the ability to demonstrate its effectiveness. So if people just can't get it, you know, there's a doctor that I know, and this doctor had to go to court over this, because they were prescribing ivermectin early, and they were in jeopardy of losing their license.
Yeah, in fact, there is a mind-blowing section of Pierre Khoury's book, The War on Ivermectin, in which he describes an accidental experiment, in which a lawyer goes into the job of confronting places where hospitals forbid the use of ivermectin.
I don't want to misdescribe it, but if I'm recalling correctly, it was something like there were 12 cases, and he lost something like half of them and won the others. And the people on whose behalf he won, who were administered ivermectin survived, and the ones where he lost and the hospital didn't administer it died. Maybe I'm describing that slightly cleaner than it was, but it's very close. And to think that, you know, that this drug is powerful enough that your fate in a court, whether the court mandates that you be given it or not, you know, tells you whether you're going to live or get a death sentence, right?
Which we've never experienced before.
It's unreal. I mean, that's the thing about this drug is it was a very powerful treatment for this disease, enough that even a study designed to hide that fact didn't effectively hide it. And where, you know, a court case, I mean, and think about how much time it takes to get a court to mandate this stuff. That means that if you win your case, you're getting it late, and yet it's still the difference between life and death. So that's amazing.
But what I've come to understand about the bizarre campaign against ivermectin, what I've come to think is the most likely explanation is not that it really would have blocked the emergency use authorization, though technically it should have. The real problem was if ivermectin was available widely, it rendered SARS-CoV-2 a minor fact, right? It was not something that induced fear if people had access to proper drugs. So from the point of view of the public and its acceptance of the mRNA shots, most of us in the public would have said no. You know, given how highly novel that shot is, and the fact that there are drugs in the pharmacy that apparently mean that this disease is not something I have to worry about, why would I take that risk?
That's what I think was driving.
Which is all the same factor. It limits the amount of money that they're going to make from the compliance. The amount of people that got administered the COVID shot. in America, it's a bananas number. There's never been a novel medication that's ever had such compliance.
I agree, but I think what was actually in play is much bigger than that. Because the mRNA platform, as I may have described here before, I don't remember what we talked about the last time, but the mRNA platform has a number of different design defects that are, in my opinion, insurmountable with respect to its safety. It can't be rendered safe. And I would describe the most important of these as the fact that the lipid nanoparticle, which gets the mRNA into your cells, has no way of, it has no targeting mechanism that would lead it to be taken up by certain cells, but not other cells. It will literally be taken up haphazardly around the body.
And what it does, according to the manufacturer, is the mRNA gets into your cells, it is translated into protein by ribosomes, and those proteins then are displayed on the surfaces of cells. Your immune system automatically, because of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, your immune system regards a cell that produces your own proteins and proteins. it's never seen before as virally infected, and it kills those cells. That's what it does. That's its automatic response.
Because once a cell is infected with a virus, there's no curing it. So the immune system is better off to kill it, even though it's a cell of yours, and it's potentially useful. An infected cell is better off removed. If that happens in your heart, it creates a wound and a vulnerability.
So these shots were going to cause that effect. wherever these lipid nanoparticles introduced the mRNA into cells of yours. That was inevitable. If that was somehow limited to your, deltoid, wasn't going to be a big deal from the point of view of your longevity. If it's in your heart, it's a disaster.
What is the difference in the people that did have heart issues and the people that experienced nothing adverse?
But there are a couple of factors that impact whether or not a particular person is going to have this effect. One of them is that the manufacturer of the vaccines was highly variable. The quality control was crap. So the amount of the active ingredient, these mRNAs coated in lipid nanoparticle, that a particular shot contained, varied tremendously. So that's one thing.
People who had no effect may have gotten something like a blank. Second thing is, you will remember during the pandemic that there was a battle over the aspiration of the syringes that were used to administer this stuff. And the official line was they did not want the people giving the shots to aspirate the needle. That means pull back on the plunger when the needle is in your arm. And the reason that you should do that is because it is possible to land the needle just by accident in a vein.
And if you do that and you inject it, then the stuff goes into your circulation directly, which is bad. It's not supposed to circulate around the body. Now, what the officials said is don't do that. Don't pull back on the plunger. The idea is, if you pull back on the plunger and you see blood, you've got to push the needle in farther so that you can get out of that vein.
They said don't do that. And the reason that they said don't do that is because the amount of time that the needle is in your arm and the amount of pain that the person experiences were thought to be a risk. I don't even think they thought it was a risk. They argued that it was a risk and that they didn't want to create vaccine hesitancy. So the idea was inject you as quick as possible.
Well, that is insane. Because what it means is that a small fraction of people for each dose, a small fraction of people got a bolus that circulated immediately because it went into a circulatory vessel. It's not supposed to go into a circulatory vessel and they could have eliminated that. So some of the people who got hurt got hurt because they had an accidental intravenous injection and a big glob of this stuff is circulating around them and lands in their heart and they get a big wound. That's one of the factors.
There could be genetic distinctions. I think that's actually pretty unlikely. But between the variation between the doses, the variation in the intravenous versus the interstitial injections, and the fact of just simple dumb luck. There's a question about where the material goes and which cells it bumps into. So that's just luck of the draw.
Although I will point out that, as the vaccine campaign was in full swing, Heather and I wondered about these issues and the myocarditis consequence was being discussed. And our point was, look, has this ever been studied? Given that this is a risk, has anybody ever looked at whether or not you're better off having it injected in your left arm or your right arm or your butt cheek? Which of these things produces this effect least often? As far as I know, it was never studied, which is also crazy, because it's possible, even if you were going to inject this stupid stuff into people, that you could have done it in a way that was less harmful.
You could have aspirated the needle. You could have injected it wherever it was least likely to damage the heart. You could have stopped giving it to young people who didn't need it in the first place. There were lots of ways to make it safer, and they did none of them.
Because any discouraging would have limited the amount of use that people have. Right? I mean, if there's anything like that, it would have, in some way, I mean, if you've got people that are on the fence, and then they start hearing this kind of talk, oh, they have to aspirate. If they don't aspirate, it could be a real problem. It could get to your heart.
What, what, what, what? It can get to my heart. And if it damages your heart, it's permanent. What? Hold on a second.
Why am I taking this chance?
Well, that's what people should have done. And you're right that, you know, if we give them the benefit of the doubt, if we imagine that we had a bunch of, I don't know, health morons, who are well intended, but clumsy beyond any natural level, then yeah, maybe they were doing everything in their power to get the maximum number of people to take the shots, because they thought those shots were actually going to be effective. But, you know, as I think I've said to you before, there's a limit to how bad advice can get as a result of stupidity. And what happened during COVID exceeds that limit, because virtually everything you were told was the inverse of what you should have done.
Isn't there also a possibility, though, that they have this initial statement, this initial protocol, and they do not want to course correct, because then they have to admit that they fucked up in the beginning?
Many things are possible. To me, the degree to which they told you the inverse of what you should do, and, you know, let's take your argument and play it through. Wouldn't they, at this point, be at least taking their foot off the gas with respect to the COVID mRNA shot?
But the profitability of it has been so incredible.
Well, okay. The profitability is incredible. It is a tiny fraction of what I think was actually in play. And I have come to think that the story of COVID,
let's assume that COVID starts accidentally, right? A virus escapes as a result of inadequate security measures and move on, begins to circulate. It is then utilized as an emergency. It is turned into an emergency in order to normalize the mRNA platform. To get people to accept that platform without proper safety testing, to get them to allow it into their systems, and to get used to the idea that it is perfectly normal to inject you with a genetic message in mRNA form wrapped in lipid nanoparticle.
Right? The public has now accepted that, which it never should have. And the profit that they saw over the course of COVID is a tiny fraction of the profit that will ultimately be realized from that platform if we allow it to continue.
Hold that thought because I have to pee so bad. All right. But we'll be right back, because there's so many things I want to talk to you about. We'll be right back. All right.
We're back. Here we go.
So we were at this idea of using this mRNA platform in the future. Yeah. And that they want to be able to use this in the future. Now, here's my question. If so many people got it, so many people got the shot, and there's 330, whatever million people in this country.
And it's estimated that somewhere between 70-something to 80-something percent of the people got at least one shot. Why are there not more people with all these problems? How come so many people, I know, got it and didn't have really any issues? Do you think that a lot of those people have underlying issues that they're not yet aware of because of it? Or do you think that some people's bodies were able to process it?
Or do you think it's a combination of that and duds? And we do know that there's been some studies that have been done that show that a disproportionate amount of adverse effects occurred with specific batches.
Yep.
So there was batches that were tainted or batches that there was some sort of a problem.
Yeah, the batches varied tremendously. The quality control was really quite lousy. So, A, we're not going to know what the full consequence was unless we actually get serious about tracking people's longevity, and we figure out who didn't get it, who did get it, and we properly study that question, which at the moment, it's not looking like we will.
I think there was a lot of variability. People presumably got damage to organs that will not limit their lifespan, right? If you got the damage in your liver and not your heart, that probably does not have an implication for how long you're going to live, because most of us don't die from the failure of our livers. Failure of the heart is special, which is why we saw that effect.
Can you explain that to people, why that's the case?
Sure. Let me explain why it is the case and then why. I think there's an explanation beyond that. Your liver has a tremendous capacity to replace damaged tissue. In fact, you can transplant a small fraction of a liver into someone and it can grow into a fully capable liver in the recipient.
In like six to eight weeks.
Yeah, it's amazing. My guess, evolutionarily, is that that's true because our ancestors did not have such an excellent ability to keep toxins out of their diet. You have excess capacity in your liver because your ancestors needed it and we don't need it. Right. So we have livers that unless you're a super heavy drinker, you probably go a whole lifetime.
A super heavy drinker or a very uncareful eater of mushrooms, you probably go your whole life and your liver remains with excess capacity even as you die. The heart, you damage it. Obviously, if you damage it critically, it'll take you out. And if you damage it in some way that it scars over, it will actually limit your athletic capacity for the rest of your life. It will put you at greater risk of heart failure.
But anyway, it's a much more central to your functioning. Yeah, I think a lot of people who have not had an important pathology have something subclinical. A lot of others got away with it because the shots they got were duds or close to it.
Many people did not have intravenous injection, and so they might have gotten a small amount of damage, but not a large enough amount of damage to limit their lifespans.
There's also a problem with people being reluctant to talk about injuries they've gotten from the vaccine, particularly if they're of a particular political persuasion. There's a lot of people that don't want to discuss it. They don't want to admit that this is what happened.
I get it completely. They don't want the blowback. Well, there's the blowback, but there's also the terror. Yeah, that's it, right. You and I are not built this way, I think.
We'd be talking about it like Robert Malone took the shot, got injured, and is talking about it, or Elon Musk, similarly. But for a lot of people, the way they manage, the fear that they were induced to do something that could have implications for their long-term health and lifespan is to lie to themselves. I would point out to those people, as sympathetic as I am, I know how strong that coercion was and how many people who were smart and under other circumstances would have avoided this, succumbed to it. But if you lie to yourself about what happened, your ability to protect yourself from further harm is greatly reduced. We have to understand what we did to ourselves in order to fend this off.
But here's the other part of that question. The people that were promoting the vaccine, did they take it?
I don't think so.
You don't think anyone did?
Lots of people who were promoting it took it.
Of course, clearly. But I'm talking about the people at the front of the line, the people at the wheel. Look- Wasn't there an instance where Albert Borlaug couldn't go to Israel because he didn't have the right booster?
There was something-.
He wasn't up to date?
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