EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,070 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- NANarrator
(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music plays)
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you get weirded out when you do podcasts now?
- BWBret Weinstein
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is it, was, was there a time in the beginning when you did? Where you were like, "Okay, here we go."
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, I suppose at the beginning it was, uh, n- nerve-wracking, but I also think I have a really weird relationship with, um, fear, I guess. And so, I think ... I have reason to think that in places where I'm partici- particularly anxious, some part of me feels it, but my conscious mind is not allowed in on it, so I can do what I have to do.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. Did this come after Evergreen or before?
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh, definitely before, although right as Evergreen erupted into the, the public consciousness, there's this one incident, actually the incident that, that brought me to public attention, where I was standing in the hallway and I was being confronted by these 50 students who I had literally never met. And they were accusing me of racism and demanding that I resign or be fired.
- JRJoe Rogan
We should explain to people that don't know, 'cause we, we're starting off this way, the backstory of the Evergreen, um, th- um, so it started off where there was a, uh, an appreciation day for people of color, where they did not have to show up for work, right?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, that's true. Uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's how it started.
- BWBret Weinstein
... uh, that's not exactly the story, but th- there is this event called Day of Absence, which was a longstanding event at the college, where, uh, basically at first Black people and then later on, more generally, people of color, did not come to work and they held, uh, discussions separately. And then in 2017, they changed this to a request that white people not come to campus, and I responded to this and I said that was unacceptable. This was a public college. I wasn't going to be told I couldn't, uh, teach my class. And that did cause a bit of a firestorm, but that firestorm was embedded in a much longer battle that had, um, begun to simmer when the new president of the college, George Bridges, showed up and empaneled a committee effectively to suggest mechanisms for restructuring the college. And the mechanisms were insane. They were, they were a recipe for destroying the place, and it was my obligation as a faculty member to point out that it would be a terrible idea for us to adopt these policies. And so the Day of Absence controversy became the explanation that the public got for why things erupted when they did, but it really, it was one example among many of things that were afoot at the college that-
- JRJoe Rogan
What were the other policies that he was trying to implement?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, let's take for example the one that, uh, Heather and I were most troubled by was m- a proposal that every faculty hire needed to be justified on the basis of it, uh, in some way addressing ine- inequity. And so you can imagine an environment where you need to hire a mathematician or a chemist, and the answer is, well, you can't really hire anybody whose background doesn't include some strong evidence of their being an activist. And so anyway, that would've been debilitating to the college. That was one thing. Another thing was the suggestion that the college would only be functional at the point that every single graduate was equally capable, and there is exactly one way to do that, which is to hobble all the people who are highly capable. So these were things that didn't make any sense at a college-
- JRJoe Rogan
Equally capable by what metric?
- BWBret Weinstein
By every metric. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
(sighs)
- BWBret Weinstein
... to the extent that there was going to be some level of skill that was going to be shown by people graduating with respect to math or whatever else, everybody needed to attain it, which of course even if that's plausible, if you had access to everybody from birth and you could give them a really high quality math education, by the time students come to college, many have lost the ability to do many of these things and it will never be regained certainly at the level of the top performing students. So the only way to get them equal at graduation would be to hobble those who were, uh, unusually capable.
- JRJoe Rogan
But what about people of color that are truly exceptional geniuses, like outliers? Like, what do they do to the other people that don't meet up to those expectations?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, that's one of the terrible things about these diversity, equity, and inclusion, uh, initiatives is that the right way out of the problem is to herald those people and to provide them the opportunities that will allow them to flourish. Instead, they get dragged into a group based on something like skin color and they, their exceptional capabilities aren't allowed to shine through. It's basically, uh, it's considered counterproductive or race trading, really.
- JRJoe Rogan
So the, the idea was that they wanted to make everyone equally capable in some way, but the only mechanism to do that would be that you had to lower the performance of the people that were at the highest levels of, of achievement?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, they never said that. That is, uh, as a biologist, that is me telling you-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
... that when, uh, you have a group of-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, I understand.
- BWBret Weinstein
... organisms that have different capabilities-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... the idea you're gonna bring every individual, uh, of low capability up to the top performer-... the only way to do that is to lower where the top performers are. So, they never finished the sentence. They basically described a utopia-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... in which we looked at the top-performing student, and then suddenly brought everybody up to their level. But that's impossible.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, this- this was, like, the very beginning of the public being aware of some of the madness that was going on in- in some universities.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Hmm. …
- BWBret Weinstein
I'm convinced that what they're up to is they're fixing the historical record, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
When we, when we stand up to their nonsense, and we make it clear what's actually taking place, and they are begrudgingly acknowledging this in the end, what it will look like in their own writing of the record, and they will, of course, write the record, is that, you know, government's a bit slow, and they were a little, a little late to acknowledge this. But, of course, that was because they were being very scientifically careful, which is nonsense. They never would have acknowledged it if they hadn't been forced to it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. That's, uh, what's being revealed, um, with the Twitter files, and, um, this, this whole, uh, thing where there's this massive pushback against Elon Musk, and there's all these celebrities that are virtue signaling and removing themselves from Twitter publicly. And they're doing this to try to s- let everybody know that they're on the right side and without real examination of what's actually going on, you know? And they're, they're concentrating on Donald Trump, you know, him, him r- bringing back Donald Trump and, uh, a host of other, uh, unmentionables on Twitter. But, but Donald Trump is not posting on Twitter. He actually... I believe he has some sort of an exclusive deal with his, uh, Truth... I don't know that this is true, so let me just say that right now. Um, uh, there's been speculation, I should say. Let's put it that way, that he's some... he has some sort of, um, exclusive deal with Truth Social, which was, would be the only thing that would make sense to me why he wouldn't want to post all that stuff that he says on Twitter as well. I mean, he has... What is his account? He must have like a hundred million followers. Like, what does he have? Do you know what, Donald? You're gonna have to go on your phone, huh? We have, uh, wifi issues, ladies and gentlemen. It's been hampered. Yeah. Did you get that text that I sent? I got the text, but it's a tweet, so I can't pull up the tweet- Oh. ... on my phone. Okay. I thought it was a video I could see. So, we will have no internet access during this podcast. There will be no fact-checking. Until further notice. Wild and reckless we will go. I could connect to the-
- BWBret Weinstein
Working without a net.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, we'll... Jamie can tweet things. I mean, he can, uh, Google things on his phone at least. Uh, 87.8 million on his real Donald Trump account. That's a lot of people that he has access to that he's ignoring. And I, I, I would imagine that's probably because he has, and this is again speculation, pure speculation, that he has some sort of exclusive deal.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. I think that makes sense. I'm more interested, really, in this phenomenon of people leaving Twitter.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
So, um, on, on Dark Horse, we've talked about a concept that I call zero is a special number, and the idea of zero is a special number is that this narrative control would not work if there was even one newspaper that was dedicated to the job of reporting the news. It wouldn't work if there was even one university that was dedicated to finding what the truth might be, right? It doesn't work if there's one social media platform in a primary, uh, position in which free speech reigns, because in any of these cases...If you had the university that was still interested in truth-seeking, in an era where everybody else was doing their, uh, diversity, equity, and inclusion thing, every reasonable person would want to send their kid there, right? So it would win in competition almost immediately, and the result would be every other institution would have to change their policy to compete. So, if you get even one exception, that's enough to break this pattern. So what Elon Musk is doing is actually fighting to make Twitter into that single exception. And the structure that is controlling the narrative understands that it cannot endure that, and so far, it has failed to shut down Elon. So, their next move is actually to get people on one side of this debate to leave, so that they can't prevent Twitter from being a space where people can speak freely, but they can take it out of the position of being a primary, uh, social media environment. And in so doing, they will take the number of meaningful exceptions to the free speech control to, back to zero. That's what they're up to.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
So, anyway I'm-
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't think that's a c- oh, we got internet now?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yay, we're back. Okay, so let's play Geert Vanden Bossche's, um, his, uh, his newest video, and then we'll get back to this whole idea of escape velocity. Because this is one of the ... The reason why I wanted to bring this up in particular is because this was a particularly, uh, egregious example of, um, YouTube censoring a real expert who has said something that has been publicly declared. It's, it's ... You, you would speak to this better than me. That you're not supposed to vaccinate during a pandemic, because what? It, it encourages variants or it, it opens the possibility of variants? Like, what is the reason for that?
- BWBret Weinstein
You are essentially in a battle with a pathogen, and the pathogen is primed to be able to evolve, and so if you vaccinate ahead of a pandemic, then when the pathogen attempts to infect people, it runs into a lot of immune systems that see it coming. If you vaccinate into an active pandemic, you're doing a number of different things. For one thing, maybe the worst thing, is you're guaranteeing that the pathogen is going to encounter a lot of people who are in the process of developing immunity. So what you're giving them is like a, an environment that's set up to train them to escape the immunity that the vaccine produces. Now, with the vaccines that we have used, this problem is even worse, because these vac- vaccines, or I should say so-called vaccines, they aren't vaccines, and I was convinced that that was not an important issue. Lots of people were upset by the redefinition of the term vaccine. I wasn't convinced it was an important issue. I have switched sides on this. I now think the definition is vitally important, and we're beginning to see why. But in any case, these-
- JRJoe Rogan
But we should b- clarify that. Why do you think it is not a vaccine?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, it's not a vaccine for a number of different reasons. The primary reason is that it does not create immunity to the pathogen, right? So-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay, but so then is a flu vaccine a flu, a vaccine?
- BWBret Weinstein
I- it depends. I would like to know more about how well flu vaccines actually work, all right? Now that we've seen all of this theater around safe and effective, I am now in a very cautious position with respect to what I thought I knew about the effectiveness of other so-called vaccines. But in the case of the, the COVID vaccines, there, there are really, um, two issues. One, it doesn't produce immunity to catching the disease or transmitting it, so it's not a vaccine by that metric.
- JRJoe Rogan
It just produces antibodies?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I wouldn't say it just produces antibodies. I would say we don't really know. The, the public discussion has focused on antibodies, but I think that's because the public knows what an antibody is, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
So the, the deeper discussion is, well, what is the interplay between antibodies and T cells, which don't make antibodies? And we don't know the answer to that, but fundamentally, these so-called vaccines, they enter your cells and they turn your cells into a vaccine factory, at best. That's what they do. That's a very different technology. And so th- the reason that I now think that the question of whether or not it is or is not a vaccine, uh, is important, is that effectively, all of us normal folk had a belief that vaccines, yeah, it's a complicated thing, but it's a pretty elegant, uh, medical intervention, and in general, they're pretty safe. They have very low levels of side effects, and they're basically worth it. It's a good deal, right? You just get a little injection and you have an immunity to some disease that you have never seen before. Isn't that marvelous? And I still feel this way about the fundamental technology. But the fact is, this is actually, um, A, far less certain than we understood. It's a more radical intervention than we commonly understand, and in this case, what they've done is they've smuggled in a really, truly, radically new technology, and they caused us all not to worry about it very much by using the term vaccine, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
If they had said, uh, "All right. We've got this pandemic, and uh, in order to, uh, prevent it from spreading, we're going to have everybody take gene therapy." Everybody would have said, "What? Gene therapy? Is that safe?" Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, so the point is by... We had a category, and it was called vaccine, and we all thought, you know, there are some crazy folks who are worried about vaccines, but in general, it's safe. So if something carries that label, it's probably safe too. And this is actually what activated Heather and me when the pandemic began, and then...... you know, we started trying to unpack what we were hearing about it, just to translate the biology into English for people. And then we, you know, the vaccines were, uh, on the horizon and we were initially very hopeful. We thought, "Oh. Well, maybe, maybe that's an answer." Um, but then they said, "The vaccines, you know, the testing tells us that these things are highly effective and very safe." And we didn't know anything about effectiveness at that point. In fact, I'm a little embarrassed to have taken them at their word. Um, but the claim that they were safe didn't make a wit of sense. They couldn't possibly know, right? And the reason that they couldn't possibly know is that the word safe, if you say that something is safe, you are not saying, um, that it's harmless. You are saying you know it doesn't carry any risk. Right? If you, if you get in your car drunk one day and you drive home, right, well, there was no harm. It was harmless. But it wasn't safe.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? So, when they said these things are safe, the answer's, "Well, how would you know that? You've only been injecting them into people for months. You don't know what happens five years down the road. It can't be safe." Right? You can tell us you don't know any harms, of any harms yet, but you can't say it's safe. And so that alarmed us, because we were immediately being told here's a new technology. Heather and I looked at the new technology and it's like, oh, that's not a minor change. That's a radical departure from the way a vaccine worked.
- JRJoe Rogan
And this is you as a biologist examining this.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Whoa. …
- BWBret Weinstein
the evolutionary path we have traveled is causing the pathogen now to be able to trigger a response that will cause the immune system not to fight. Nobody knows what happens next.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- BWBret Weinstein
It's a very dangerous discovery.
- JRJoe Rogan
The- how does that- uh, how does that work? What-
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, think about it this way, um...The way we develop the amazing immune system that we have, that allows us to fight off pathogens for our entire life, including pathogens with which we have no experience, is that we have a system, it's one of the two fundamental properties of our immune system that allows it to fend off anything we might encounter, and it's called the self/non-self recognition system. And the way the self/non-self recognition system happens is that before you're born, in utero, you have a huge diversity of immune cells that are all a little different, and they react to antigens that are electromagnetically distinct from each other. And basically, in principle, they can react to almost anything. Uh, the electromagnetic signature on the surface of almost anything biological. But while you're in utero, you're exposed to almost nothing from the outside, right? You're insulated by your mother. And so that means that any cell in that library that is reacting when you're in utero, is reacting to you. And so all of the cells that react when you're in utero are eliminated, leaving only the cells that don't react to you, right? That is basically the definition of non-self, right? Anything that wasn't eliminated is potentially an enemy. Now, that can result in a lot of weirdness, like you breathe in some pollen, that's not self. And so the body can react to it, and it can overreact, and it can make a problem for you that it shouldn't. But in general, this system just sits there dormant, and anytime it runs into an antigen that it hasn't seen, it treats it like an invader, and it fights. But what happens if something about the system... let's say that your physiology changes in some way, so that your own tissues are now triggering the system, right? Well, there are ways in which the system can attenuate that response. When you go to an immunologist to deal with an allergy, and the immunologist will give you allergens, right? Which sounds like a recipe for an allergy attack, but the point is, if you do this in a particular way, you can trigger this attenuation signal, and you can cause the body to stop reacting to something that you were allergic to. So, the idea that a pathogen, and mind you, not a normal pathogen, a pathogen that we can now be pretty darn certain was engineered by humans, at least in part, that pathogen is now triggering that signal that causes the immune system not to react anymore means we're in a, in a whole new landscape.
- JRJoe Rogan
I want to bring up that fact because there was a recent article that I saw someone quoting on a podcast as evidence that it, it, this is a natural spillover, and that there is new discussion that points to COVID-19 being a natural spillover. And I saw that wildly and widely dismissed by many people that were furious, saying that ignored the science that points to the fact that this was engineered. What is your persp- perspective on this?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I've believed from the very beginning that, uh... well, almost the very beginning, actually one hour into my awareness, uh, I changed my mind. I tweeted, at first, uh, so as you know, I'm a, I'm a bat biologist. I studied bats in grad school. And when Heather and I were in the Amazon writing the first draft or finishing the first draft of our book, we emerged to the news that this, what was then called novel coronavirus, was circulating. And so it just sort of dawned on us, what is this? And we were trying to figure it out, and I looked at the, the initial materials. I looked at the, the explanation of how it likely had come through bats. I was familiar with the family of bats in question, and I just decided to tweet to my, uh, my followers that, you know, more or less, the story added up as far as I could tell. And I did that, and I immediately got back, uh, a response somewhat, uh, annoyed by a longtime follower of mine, who said, "So it's just a coincidence that there's a, a biosafety level 4 lab in the exact place that this virus emerged?" And I said, "What the hell? I don't know anything about this. I don't know what a biosafety lev- level 4 lab is." And I started to look into it, because, you know, if those labs were everywhere, then maybe it doesn't mean anything that there happened to be one in the very place that the virus seems to have emerged. But they aren't everywhere. And the idea that the bats in question aren't in the place where the virus emerged and the lab was, and that the lab had been searching for exactly this sort of virus in the wild, it all, uh, pointed in a particular direction. And so I immediately, uh, followed up my tweet and said, "Don't listen to that. There's more here to be understood." And the deeper I dug, the more convincing I found it, that this had actually emerged from the lab and not, not as a simple matter of having passed through the lab, you know? That's possible, that you could bring a virus into the lab and not do anything to it, and then it could escape.
- JRJoe Rogan
Just a coincidence.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. But that's not what this was. What we're talking about here is a highly unusual pathogen with unusual, uh, in fact, unprecedented genetic alteration given the subfamily that it's in, and all the circumstantial evidence points to this laboratory, the behavior that it, it was, it is known to have been involved in. So I, I, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
But could you explain what is unusual about the pathogen?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, many things are unusual about the pathogen. Part of it, uh, it's very unusual for a pathogen to behave in the way that this one behaves, right? This is seeming to hit many different tissues in the body, and so, you know-I will say, I have been accused by some of being part of the group that thinks COVID isn't serious and that the vaccines are, are dangerous. I do think the vaccines are dangerous, but I also think COVID is dangerous. I think we, uh, it, the, the hazard of it is not captured in the case fatality rate, um, that this thing is obviously having impacts that we don't understand. So, that's, that's one set of things. And, and I would, I would just point out, there's a reason that a normal pathogen doesn't do the wide-scale damage that COVID seems to. And that reason is that, in general, pathogens don't have an interest in harming you. They harm you incidentally, right? In fact, they do best when you are healthy enough to walk around and spread them. And so, they tend to spare tissues that do not help them to be transmitted. Well, that's not the case with this pathogen. This pathogen seems to invade all kinds of tissues that don't help it to spread. And that is-
- JRJoe Rogan
H- how so?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, it seems to invade, um, y- using, uh, the ACE2 receptor and it shows all kinds of pathologies. I mean, from, you know, damaged toes and, and weird circulation issues. It seems to get into the brain. It, it's a very strange pathogen. You would expect it to self-limit to tissues that help it spread. And the fact that it doesn't is actually what you would predict if you, uh, enhanced a virus in a laboratory environment where it was freed from the constraint of having to keep its host healthy enough to spread it, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
So, let's take ... Uh, I don't know whether this is right or not, but logically, at, at least it, it serves the, the purpose of, of explaining it. If you think about, um, the loss of taste and smell that so many people seem to experience with COVID, well, now imagine a wild animal that had that effect, lost its taste and smell, right? Well, for m- for most mammals, that would be a devastating loss from the point of view of them even just feeding themselves, right? So, it would be a hazard if COVID was spreading in wild animals and it was robbing them of this essential tool for finding food. Then it would cause its host to start starving. That's not a good thing. On the other hand, if you caged a bunch of animals together and you allowed them to spread the pathogen and you fed them, let's say it's ferrets, which is a likely, a likely, uh, experimental organism, um, if you were feeding them ferret chow and they were falling all over each other infecting other ferrets, then that constraint is lifted. Then the point is, it's not bad to lose your sense of taste and smell from the point of view of passing on the pathogen, and that would fit very well for the human population too, right? You lose your taste and, and smell, it's annoying, but it doesn't get in the way of you getting fed. And so, anyway, there are, there are many different ways in which this pathogen behaves in a bizarre fashion. Um, the furin cleavage site, which allows it to invade tissue so effectively, A, that's something that we knew would take a, a sarbeco-, uh, coronavirus and cause it to be highly infective in humans. We knew that before SARS-CoV-2 ever emerged. So, to find it on this virus, even though it, no other member of the subfamily has it, is conspicuous. So, I guess what I'm telling you is, I rapidly moved in the direction of believing that the most likely explanation was laboratory enhancement and escape. Everything I have seen only moves me farther in that direction, including the repeated efforts to shut down that explanation, right? I mean, every month we go and we don't find the intermediate host is evidence that there is no intermediate host, that the intermediate host is the lab, right? So, we are continuing to add evidence upon evidence, and every time that we are, you know, caused to wonder, you know, every time we see headlines that say, no, it turns out it was the, the wet market, there's nothing there.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, what was this th- th- that has been recently cited? This, uh, article-
- BWBret Weinstein
You, you're-
- JRJoe Rogan
... like, what, and w-
- BWBret Weinstein
... talking about the, the wet market article?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, it's now been, I think, a couple months since then. I would have to go back and look at it exactly, but basically they did an analysis where they showed the, basically the pattern of early infections having some claimed epicenter in the wet market. But this isn't really evidence of anything. I mean, for example, imagine that there was a coffee shop in the bottom floor of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and then imagine that you did this analysis and you found, oh, goodness, there's a, uh, an epicenter of disease in the coffee shop of the, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Well, it doesn't mean that the coffee shop has anything to do with it. It just means that people from the lab go to the coffee shop.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
And the fact is, the wet market is close to the lab, so people from the lab undoubtedly went to the wet market. And we still haven't found anything like a creature in the wet market that has evidence of having carried or transmitted this disease. So, anyway, it's smoke and mirrors, and smoke and mirrors doesn't mean that there couldn't be the discovery tomorrow of some intermediate host in the wild and some story that would account for all of the evidence, but it gets less likely every day.
- JRJoe Rogan
And w- why do you think ... Do you have a speculation to why they would publish that?
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh. I mean ... Let's put it this way-What I said on the DeSantis committee to look into our COVID response, what I said in our public meeting, uh, a few weeks back, was that COVID is the largest blunder in human history. I believe that's unambiguous. And I'm not talking about the largest blunder in public health. It's clearly that too, but I'm talking about the largest blunder in human history, starting with the decision to, uh, circumvent the ban on gain-of-function research that the US Congress wi- uh, wisely imposed, to offshore the work to Wuhan, where they then found, presumably, the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, uh, likely as a result of the interaction of the three miners who became sick in the guano-filled cave, brought the ancestor back into the lab, put it through gain-of-function experiments, enhanced it, uh, with a furin cleavage site, and then lost control of it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can you please explain the furin cleavage site?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, the furin cleavage site is just a sequence. It's a small sequence of amino acids that alters the spike protein so that i- it is especially effective at entering human tissues. So the point is, there was no natural, um, member of the subfamily that has this feature, and it was well-known amongst people who study these viruses, that were a, uh, a virus of this type to acquire that feature, that that would radically enhance its capacity to get into human tissues. So I don't really know whether, I mean, I guess I assume that the virologists who are constantly bombarding us with the story that a pandemic is going to leap out of nature at any time, it's going to be devastating, and we're going to have to study these dangerous viruses in order to be prepared, right? That's the story that caused all of this work to get funded. Now, I don't really believe the story. I think it's wrong, but it may be that the people who are spreading it do believe it, and that having believed it, that, crazy as this sounds, what they did was they found a virus that had many characteristics that would make it a dangerous human, uh, pandemic-causing pathogen, but it didn't have all of them. And so in order to figure out what it
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
How much evidence do…
- BWBret Weinstein
would be like if it did have all of them, they gave it the ones it didn't have, and they did a certain amount of genetic engineering and a certain amount of gain-of-function work using probably ferrets, using human, uh, humanized mice, using airway, human airway tissue, and they just gave it a bunch of puzzles, and they taught it, and then it escaped, right? That's the assumption.
- JRJoe Rogan
How much evidence do we have of that specific type of research being done at Wuhan?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, that's a good question. We have circumstantial evidence, and in fact, a lot of this work was done stateside before the ban on gain-of-function research. Um, so we have a fair amount of circumstantial evidence of what sorts of enhancements the Wuhan Institute was interested in and that they had the capacity to do them. We've seen a lot of these experiments done piecemeal prior to the ban. As to exactly what they did, this is something that w- we, the people of planet Earth, are entitled to know, and this is one of the reasons why I'm so troubled by the perspective that so many people have that, "Well, wherever it came from, now we've got SARS-CoV-2, so let's just deal with it," and the answer is no. There's an awful lot contained in knowing what exactly they did that might help us to fight it, what they knew about what they were doing, what protocols were used, what animals were used. That is vital information, and the fact that many people see it as s- sort of, uh, beside the point is quite wrong. And in fact, you know, the, uh, the IgG4 result that I was just telling you about is actually, it is another one of these indications. One of the things that I said very early in the pandemic was that because this is not a normal virus, all of the rules that we usually assume will be true, right, like the thing is going to evolve into a lower state of virulence, all of those assumptions are now invalid because we don't even need, know what we're dealing with, right? We're not dealing with a normal spillover event. We're dealing with a, a synthetic spillover event and with a virus that has experienced an environment that is very much unlike nature. So anyway, I still, I still believe that it is in our vital interest to figure out exactly what happened and when. I will point out that is also a big question that leads, um, in a number of very disturbing directions. But, uh, leaving these questions aside, is, um, i- is not in our interest. So back to your question, though, w- why are they continually trying to, uh, reanimate the explanation that this is a natural spillover event? Because if it isn't, then we know who did it, right? Anthony Fauci was key to circumventing the ban on gain-of-function research that resulted in the Wuhan lab being funded by us to do this work. So if this was a natural spillover event from a wet market, then Anthony Fauci is in the clear, right? If this is the result of ill-conceived gain-of-function research taking place in Wuhan, partially at our direction, that's a whole different ballgame. And so part of what you and I have experienced, right, the incredible pushback that we have gotten for just noticing...... obvious patterns, right? Patterns of dishonesty, patterns of evidence that aren't being discussed. That is about the, um, the fact that those who are responsible cannot allow a full investigation. I don't know what will happen if the truth were to fully emerge about, not only what was the explanation for how this virus came into the world, when it came into the world. Right? Those are really important questions. But also, what we failed to do, what, what, uh, responses we failed to deploy, and then ultimately, we get back to the questions of Geert Vanden Bossche, right? Because we didn't deal with the, the pathogen properly at the beginning, because we didn't deploy the drugs that we had at our disposal that did work, we ran out the clock on the brief period of time when we might have driven it extinct, or at least controlled it. And in lieu of that, what we got is a proliferation of variants, and this is utterly out of our control now. This is now a pathogen that is learning tricks that look like they allow it to shut down our own immunity. And what's more, the fact of these IgG4 antibodies that likely have an attenuating effect on immunity, right, which would explain why vaccinated, and especially heavily vaccinated people, do seem to be so vulnerable to this disease now. But that offers an opportunity to other pathogens that can figure out that small sequence, that motif, that will allow them to trigger the same stand down, right? So, we are now dealing with, yes, one pandemic, but also a mechanism that will allow other pathogens to evolve an escape of their own using our so-called vaccine response and its impact on the immune system.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, this could potentially ... So, the, as people are vaccinated and boosted and then boosted again, this would accentuate this mechanism?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yes. The more ... So, again, it appears to be, and there's a whole world of things we might discuss with respect to the distinction between the DNA versions of the so-called vaccine and the mRNA version. There is a radical distinction in the implications of these things, both for personal health, and apparently for the pandemic. The DNA version does not appear to trigger this. But yes, for people who got the mRNA shots, the more of them they got, the more, uh, pronounced this effect. So, that raises all kinds of possibilities, and I'd ... You know, one of the things that I'm still struggling to understand is, what are the implications for those of us who didn't get the mRNA shot? Or those who got one or two but not three, or those who got the DNA shot instead, right? Is this going to create two very different levels of vulnerability, right? Where only the people who were heavily vaccinated with the mRNA are gonna have this vulnerability? Or is this gonna create such a large number of infected people that that is going to allow these pathogens to experiment and find those of us who didn't get this primary vulnerability? And I don't know. I'm, I'm hoping ... Well, frankly, I'm hoping that we wise up and we confront what I think is maybe the most important question of the whole pandemic, which is, what would the world look like if we hadn't done anything unusual? What would it look like if we stopped doing the unusual stuff now and started behaving reasonably, right? And my sense is, the sooner we start behaving reasonably and let normal medical practice figure out how to treat the disease rather than this top-down stuff, um, the better off we're gonna be. But, you know, Geert Vanden Bossche has been right about a lot, and part of the troubling thing is that he was, we now know that he was right, or effectively know that he was right about the proliferation of variants that were going to be driven by our absurdly narrow, um, vaccine program. Right? Uh, the thing about these vaccines is that because they have this basically just spike protein, and they all work the same way, whether they're DNA or RNA, they're producing the same protein, the point is that gives the pathogen a very clear, narrow signal, right? About how to evolve to evade this immunity. It's not like normal immunity. If you get sick with COVID, you and I have both had it, right? Our immune systems will have reacted to multiple different, uh, molecular motifs on the surface of that pathogen. What's more, you and I will have reacted to different motifs, and so that diversity means that, all right, you might get unlucky, and the next variant might be particularly bad for people who, uh, you know, whose immune systems reacted as yours did, but I might be particularly immune, or vice versa. But when you have everybody, when you have literally billions of people who've all been given the same very narrow instruction about how to fight this pathogen, I mean, I don't know. Uh, th- there's gotta be an easy MMA analogy here, right? If every fighter in the world had adopted one trick and tried to per- perfect it, right, that trick would become a vulnerability.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Am I wrong?
- JRJoe Rogan
No, you were right. You're right, unless you're really good at that trick. Um, this brings in the question, what about people that were vaccinated and then got COVID and recovered? Do they gain the same sort of natural immunity that people who were unvaccinated who got COVID and recovered?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, another one of our...... uh, I, I he-hesitate to say catchphrases, I think that trivializes it, but another one of the things that Heather and I often say on Dark Horse is, "Welcome to complex systems." And that's what we say when somebody, you know, thinks they understand enough about biology to get ahead of it, and then, of course, you know, it doesn't work.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? And so, the, the answer is, there are many different ways that intervening in the nested series of complex systems that are in play here can go wrong. Right? One of them that we have been talking about for quite a long time is something called original antigenic sin. It's a strange name, but what it basically means is when you tell the immune system how to react to a particular pathogen, right, the immune system gets used to that being the right answer, and it gets harder and harder for the immune system to find its way to a new and better answer, right? So the point is, the immune system becomes habitual, and that habitual nature can be counterproductive, right? That's one way that things can go wrong. We also have something called antibody-dependent enhancement, where if you think about the battle between a pathogen and immunity, well, pathogens can pretty well count on immunity, right? I mean, if you've got a pathogen that attacks mammals, every mammal it's going to encounter has an immune system, all of those immune systems are going to produce antibodies. So the point is, well, "What can you do with antibodies?" is a question that these pathogens are constantly facing. And one of the things that they can do is they can use antibodies to gain access to cells in a way that they couldn't do without the antibody response. So, these are just multiple ways that our intervention can make things worse and not better. And we are now discovering that there's a whole other layer, right? The, the IgG4 result that I was talking about isn't antibody-dependent enhancement, right? It seems related to original antigenic sin, but in a whole different way, with a new mechanism. And how this works in a population, where what you are now doing is you are creating a, an incubator for new variants, not only of COVID, but of other diseases, that is a, that's a recipe for disaster. And I, I don't, you know, I mean, you're an outdoorsman. If you're doing something and it's just making things worse, right, step one is stop doing it. Right? I mean, in fact, uh, I, I should ask you about this. I've always wondered if this is the reason that, um, people do get n- knocked out in a fight.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? It's an interesting reaction that the body has, to just certainly- suddenly shut down in the face of battle. But the way it looks to me, okay, so you're out there in nature, and you're engaged in some battle with something, and you keep getting hit in the head. Well, it's not obvious that collapsing is a good idea, but it might be. Right? If you collapse in front of a grizzly bear, it might leave you alone, I don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't think that's what happens.
- BWBret Weinstein
You don't?
- JRJoe Rogan
No. Um, what it is, is the human body, and all bodies, are, are vulnerable, um, in terms of the structure of the brain, the way the, the brain is encased in the skull, and if that gets disrupted, it, it, it just shuts the system off. It's just mass trauma. Now, the problem happens when people encounter mass trauma over and over and over again, and they become particularly vulnerable to it. Now, there's a lot of theories as to why that happens, and there is- therein lies the theory that the body recognizes th- that this is happening again, and the best way to avoid it is to just shut off. And so what happens is, fighters become what they, what they call chinny. And what chinny means, uh, it's, it's a, it's a slang term for someone who gets knocked out very easily, and get, and, and it's because they've had so many concussions, and they've had so much, uh, trauma to the brain, the brain recognizes this pattern and just says, "I know where this is going. This guy's gonna- he's a really tough guy, he's gonna just take a beating, and we're not gonna allow that, so we're just gonna shut off." But this is all theoretical...
- BWBret Weinstein
Well...
- JRJoe Rogan
I think.
- BWBret Weinstein
... but that, that second explanation is exactly what I'm...
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... hypothesizing.
- JRJoe Rogan
But it'd be at the initial concussion, though.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well...
- JRJoe Rogan
Initially getting knocked out, 'cause everyone is vulnerable to it initially. And I, and I don't think that that's an evolutionary advantage. I think it's just, we're not designed to get hit.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And it's just a vulnerability of these incredibly complex systems that we have that use neurons, and n- nerves, and your, your bones and tissue interact with these nerves, and upon trauma, nerves get compressed, the brain gets rattled inside the head, and there's massive trauma that goes on,
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Well, I... …
- JRJoe Rogan
including bleeding, and there's a lot going on that would in- that would cause a person to shut off.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I...
- JRJoe Rogan
Initially. From like first, first concussion you've ever had, first traumatic knockout you've ever experienced.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I, I agree with your point about all of the things that are going on. What surprises me about being knocked out is that it seems discontinuous, in the sense that, you know, there are a lot of levels of dysfunction, and you go from fully functional to, you know, effectively asleep.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, that, the idea that the disruptions wouldn't result in certain, uh, circuits going offline while others remain online is the thing that surprises me about it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm. Okay, um, let's, let's watch the Geert Vanden Bossche then.
- BWBret Weinstein
Sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
Let's play that, Jamie.So, this is, uh... What is his background?
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh, he's actually a vaccinologist, um, so he has a broad evolutionary, uh, and immunological background and he also... I believe he has a veterinary background.
So, what I'm saying is that now, we are in a situation where, uh, vaccinees are sitting, because of Omicron, on non-neutralizing antibodies that enhance the infectiousness at the upper respiratority- uh, respiratory tract. That's why they become more susceptible to infection, but at- at the same time, it's still suppressing severe disease at the lower respiratory tract because these antibodies, these very same antibodies, can prevent, can inhibit the process of transinfection. So, in other words, what I'm saying here is that now, the virus is put under immune pressure from the non-neutralizing antibodies that prevent it from be- becoming more virulent, from causing severe disease. And provided we sustain this immune pressure, it is very clear that the virus will overcome this, because don't forget, the pressure is tremendous. Omicron is circulating, people have been primed by way of the vaccination, and even if these, sorry to say, even if these idiots don't decide to come with an Omicron vaccine, everyone in the population is now boosted with Omicron because it is circulating. The vaccinees who are having non-neutralizing antibodies are highly susceptible, so they are highly susceptible to priming. So, these non-neutralizing antibodies will very soon reach elevated titers in the vaccinees, and the more people we vaccinate, the higher the prevalence of these elevated titers of non-neutralizing antibodies. You can imagine, all this stuff is putting tremendous pressure no longer on infectiousness of the virus... That has been done. That has been taken care of. But now, on the virulence. And in that paper, I have even predicted what molecular changes could enable the virus to stay very infectious, but at the same time, to increase its virulence.
Yeah, holy moly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
So-
- JRJoe Rogan
And what kind of pushback did he experience? Because in the beginning of the pandemic, he was one of the few people that was an expert in vaccinations that was sounding this alarm.
- BWBret Weinstein
So, he's sounding multiple alarms. Um, maybe I should just translate-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes, please.
- BWBret Weinstein
... a little bit about what he was saying there. What he's getting at is... The way I've been putting this piece of the puzzle is that we are running the largest gain-of-function experiment in the history of the world, and we are doing that by pushing this virus around. First, allowing it to escape into the public, and then pushing it around with these cartoonishly narrow vaccines. And his point is that you actually... You've got, um, two parameters that are distinct. You have the infectiousness, how good is it from getting- getting from one person to another? And, uh, the virulence. How sick does it make you? And his point is, the thing has learned the infectiousness trick very, very well, right? But we are putting a pressure on it where it is good at getting into the upper airway and not so good at getting into the lower airway, where it would make you much sicker. And the point is... His point here, if I read it correctly, is that each person constitutes an opportunity for these viruses, in light of the antibodies that are being induced, to learn the trick of infecting more tissue, right? So, what he's saying is that he expects... And, you know, he has predicted two things, one of which... And he's been on my podcast twice, and I talked to him about this the last time he was on, uh, when we were at the conference in, uh, in Bath, England, together. The one thing he's predicted is a proliferation of variants in response to the so-called vaccines. That, we've seen, and you're now seeing it acknowledged in the press. The other thing he has predicted is an increase in the virulence, the severity of the disease as a result of this program, and he admits that this has been much slower to emerge than he expected. Um, the question is, will it happen? And he's describing here in this clip the way in which he expects it to happen, that it will begin to pursue tissues farther down and succeed in infecting tissues farther down in- in the respiratory tract. So, we'll see, but, um, you know, the thing that I really appreciate about Geert, he's very broad-minded. He's very honest about what he's gotten right, what he's not gotten right, what's still, uh, up for grabs. And he is sounding an alarm that I think, privately, has been acknowledged by far more people than have been willing to publicly say, "Yeah, unfortunately, Geert Vanden Bossche is making sense." So, um, I think if- if I understand him correctly, there is an awareness inside vaccinology about the absurdity of what we are doing, but because of the pressure, the same pressure that you and I have felt not to talk about certain things, pressure that you and I have ignored, often at our peril. But that other people have reacted to that by becoming quiet about what they know, even when what they know is professional and scientific.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, you had, um, uh, a doctor from the UK on your podcast recently.
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh, who are we talking about?
- JRJoe Rogan
D- didn't you-
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, you're talking about, uh...
- JRJoe Rogan
The cardiologist?
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh, yeah. Aseem, um...... Malhotra, I believe is how you pronounce it. Yep, he is a cardiologist who was initially very favorable on the, the vaccine program. And he lost his father, and because he's a cardiologist and, uh, a very smart, decent fella, he dug and, um, concluded that very likely, he had lost his father to, uh, a vaccine-adverse event, and it caused him to, to dig deeply and to reverse his position on the wisdom of, of these, uh, so-called vaccines.
- JRJoe Rogan
But what was interesting was that th- these similar conclusions had been reached by these other academics who had decided to not publish this, that was one of the things that he discussed, because they were worried about funding being withdrawn and public ostracization.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, this is true across the board is that the con- I mean, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where ultimately, if you don't respond to any of the threats along the way, ultimately, you're gonna face disciplinary action, or you will face, uh, a drying up of your funding, the very stuff that allows an academic to, uh, to continue to do what they do. Um, and I mean, at some point, you know, maybe this is the way to think of it. Sometimes I will go to somebody's Twitter feed or some other page, and I will look at what they are saying in the present about where we are, and I will think, "It's like they live on a different planet," right? It's like everything I know to be right is inverse, right? And they're sudden- they're reacting to a world in which, you know, these so-called vaccines were terrifically successful at controlling COVID. Really? How could you even, how could you even get there, right? It just doesn't make any sense. Um, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
There's that, the narrative that it saved millions of lives, and you, you keep hearing that narrative repeated over and over and over again. I don't know how they... Do, do you think the vaccines have saved lives?
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, we actually know more about this than you would think. First of all, I should point out that this number, which everyone, including Anthony Fauci, has been repeating, uh, and the most recent version of it was three million American lives have been saved-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... by vaccines, is utter nonsense. Um, it is based on a model, so that should initially, that should cause you, uh, a good deal of alarm in and of itself. It's very easy to create a model that will tell you anything you want to hear. And in this case, they've got a model and they fed it garbage, including, um, they fed it (clears throat) completely unrealistic numbers with respect to how many people, uh, would have died if we had done nothing, right? So for example, they gave it a number of daily deaths that's higher than any day that we ever saw with respect to COVID. They didn't calculate, uh, any rate of death from vaccine-adverse events, and they projected... Basically, what they did is they took a model, and they fed it an absurd estimate of how good the vaccines were, and then they asked the model how many people were saved, and it's nonsense. Now, what we know from the work of Christine Stabile Benn, who is another member of, uh, Governor DeSantis' committee on, on COVID response, her work says that the mRNA vaccinations have cost more lives than they have saved, and for the DNA vaccines, it is slightly the reverse. There is a slight benefit in terms of all-cause mortality, but it does not appear to come through resistance to COVID. It appears to come through some sort of general resistance that we don't understand. Now, I would guess that latter result will reverse if you measure over a long period of time. In other words, these shots have only been out for a brief period, and so to the extent that there are ongoing impacts, a slight benefit at year one, um, of a, of a treatment, um, will reverse if there are downstream negative consequences that happen five years out and 10 years out. But anyway, put that aside. The basic answer is most people in the US got the mRNA shots, and those shots appear to increase your risk of death, not decrease it. So, I find that extremely alarming, and even more alarming is the fact that there does not seem to be a response to it in the public health apparatus.
- 1:15:00 – 1:30:00
And we can see…
- BWBret Weinstein
I don't mean this in a negative way, they would inevitably have killed a certain number of people following hunches, deploying techniques that didn't work. But they would've discovered that, and they would've gotten rapidly better at treating this disease, and they would've discovered all of the compounds that work, and they would've talked to each other about in what way to deploy those compounds, at what dosage. They would've discovered all of that stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
And we can see that in the implementation of respirators.
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh, of, um, yeah, of ventilators.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ventilators, excuse me.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, absolutely. And...
- JRJoe Rogan
Because that was the narrative at the beginning of the pandemic, "We need more ventilators."
- BWBret Weinstein
We need more ventilators, and I must say that there is a part of me that is increasingly revisiting that chapter, and I, I... You can hear me hesitating to say this. But one of the effects of the deployment of these ventilators, and the fact that it killed people, was that it elevated our collective sense of how dangerous the pathogen was.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BWBret Weinstein
And that fear was a big part of how we were sold on the rest of it, right? So, you have a lot of vulnerable people in a population, right? They're concentrated amongst the elderly and the infirm. Nobody is okay, nobody decent is okay with the fact that if you have a new pathogen circulating, it is liable to kill those people disproportionately. However, it's unexpected, it's- it's not unexpected, and it should not trigger you to expose the rest of your population to risks that they don't need to face.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, and we experienced that with the flu.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right, all the time.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, 'cause the flu does severely impact people who are compromised, people who are obese, people who are old.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right, and, you know, it also is, it- it teaches us another lesson that's really well-understood, uh, in biology, right? If you see that somebody has died at 85 of the flu, right? Okay, did the flu kill them? Partly, but a lot of what happened is that they have expended all of the capacity to fight over a lifetime, and then the flu pushed them over the edge, the last bit, right? Did it rob them of life? Yeah, it robbed them of some life. It robbed them of a life that was probably at greatly diminished quality and wasn't going to last very long. So when the- when the death certificate says the person died of flu, it's not telling us a complete story, and COVID did the same thing, right? It did it in a way that, um, a sober response would've allowed us to, to remain calm and not overreact. But when something was very interested in using our fear to get us to be compliant, what it did is it took the evidence of people who had died of COVID who were very close to death anyway for one reason or another, and famously now, took people who didn't really die of, of COVID, but died with COVID, and it used those numbers to cause us to think the pathogen was something other than it was. And again, I'm not telling you COVID isn't a dangerous pathogen. SARS-CoV-2 is a dangerous pathogen. I'm very worried about where it goes. But the case fatality rate is not one that should've caused us to vaccinate literally billions of people.
- JRJoe Rogan
Including people that were not vulnerable, like children.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right, and this is the thing that is now so alarming to me. You can imagine a public health authority that was arrogant, and that thought it understood things way better than it did, and it thought it had a plan, and it, maybe it dreamt that, you know, by deploying these novel vaccines that would surely be the-... basis for many future successful vaccine campaigns against other pathogens, that they would be heralded as heroes. Right? You could imagine hubris causing people to deploy this and then discover that it didn't work, and it hurt people. But at the point that we're seeing an undeniable pattern of damage, and we know that that damage is disproportionately experienced by younger people, and that the risk of COVID is disproportionately to the old, the idea that it doesn't stop, the idea that it doesn't turn around and say, "Well, the vaccines are good. Let's give them to people over 65. If you're over 40 and you want one, you can have one. But we're not going to vaccinate anybody young because the, the risk-benefit ratio doesn't make sense." The fact that it doesn't do that means, I think, that somehow whatever is driving this policy is absolutely comfortable with the death of other people. How could it not be? I mean, how could you recommend these mRNA vaccines for children who are not, at least at the moment, vulnerable to COVID? How could you do it?
- JRJoe Rogan
And do you think this is because of financial pressure? 'Cause this is the only thing that makes sense to me, because there's a vast financial interest in vaccinating as many people as possible.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, you know, I see that as the shallow end of the pool. Right? And I try very hard not to get ahead of the evidence. I would say at the very least, the floor of plausible explanations, something is interested in making money, is comfortable from decades of corrupting the public health apparatus with making decisions that result in w- an amount o-
- JRJoe Rogan
Acceptable amounts of losses.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, and acceptable amounts would leave a normal person with their jaw on the floor. But something has become very comfortable with this. And so it may be, it may be that. But I also have, I have an uneasy sense about what the larger picture may be here. Um, so there was a, a concept that I was reluctant to talk about for months. Right? It wouldn't let me go, but I was reluctant to talk about it publicly, and I finally did, uh, release it on Dark Horse. Uh, admittedly, it needs a better name. Um, I call it the time-traveling money printer. And to make a long story reasonably short, um, you presumably have thought a little bit about black budgets.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, so I guess for your audience, let me just briefly say that a black budget, you know, in a, in a, in a democracy, uh, the power of the purse allows something like the Congress to control, uh, you know, the intelligence community, for example. Right? The intelligence community has to go to the Congress in order to get funding to do the things that it wants to do. But the intelligence community also has the capacity to do things that normal folks can't. And, um, they can generate money that isn't on the books by using some of the advantages that come to, uh, to them by virtue of their position. So you can imagine, for example, the DEA, uh, you know, it has to be involved in a certain number of drug deals in order to catch the bad guys. Right? So it has some license to play in drug dealing and you could imagine... I'm not, I don't, this is not about the DEA. I'm just using that as an example.
- JRJoe Rogan
I understand what you're saying.
- BWBret Weinstein
But the DEA, if it decided it needed a black budget that wasn't under the control of Congress, could use the leeway that it has in, uh, interacting with, uh, you know, drug cartels to generate money that it could then use without anybody being able to say no. So that's a black budget. Now, black budgets are one way of doing this. But anything else that can generate money that isn't accounted for, uh, in a normal, you know, federal budget has the same potential. And w- what I want to do is just point out something that seems to have happened here that raises a financial question that I have not heard widely asked. So we've all gone through the thought exercise of, if you had a time machine, what would you do with it? Right? And one answer is, almost no matter who you are, even if you're a super good person who's interested in doing good things, money allows you to do good things. So your time machine, if it can go backwards in time, can allow you to buy Tesla or Apple or Amazon stock and turn a small amount of money into a huge amount of money. And if it can go forward in time, you have, uh, similar opportunities. Right? You can see what's going to go up or down and you can buy some or short. So anyway, a time machine would give you the opportunity, um, to generate money. Now, as far as we know, time travel doesn't exist. I'm pretty compelled by Stephen Hawking's proof that it probably doesn't exist. You know about this?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- BWBret Weinstein
Uh, Stephen Hawking threw a party which he advertised for time travelers. He welcomed-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
... all time travelers to come and none of them showed up and he said, "Well, I guess it doesn't exist." Right? 'Cause if it did, they'd come. Um, so anyway, let's assume time travel doesn't exist. There's another way of doing the same thing without an actual time machine. Right? Printing money. And it requires an awful lot of power to either shape history or slow regular folks down in how, how much they realize and how quickly they realize it. All right? If you're in a position to do that-... then you can print money, right? If you know what's coming, if you know what history is going to do. It's a kind of insider information that, uh, is hard to prosecute. It's not like knowing something about a stock price, um, from being an insider. And anyway, so m- my point is, my point is this: There is substantial evidence that COVID began circulating such that it was, uh, an important component of what unfolded at the military games in Wuhan in September of 2019. And there's been lots of talk in various publications at this point about the possibility that COVID was circulating earlier than we knew. But if folks knew that it was circulating earlier than we knew, or than the public knew, they had the opportunity to warn us and to help prepare us. But there's another opportunity, which is to actually take some time to position themselves financially so that when the pandemic finally did emerge, it would print money for them, right? If you know that a pandemic is coming and that it is going to spread around the globe, and it is going to cause all kinds of alterations, you can, uh, you know, short stocks for, uh, cruise ships or, you know, airplanes, hotels, right? You can invest in pharmaceutical companies that have useful technologies, whatever. If you had that advanced information, you could position yourself, and it would result in a cryptic massive transfer of wealth. And so the question is, how much of the story here involves something having understood what was coming, and having revealed it at a point that it was positioned rather than it having emerged naturally, and, you know, the world suddenly all became aware at the dawning of 2020, right? That's the question, is, was there something about this that goes beyond what you were suggesting, which is, well, there's an opportunity to make money if you're in a pharmaceutical, uh, if you're in a pharmaceutical company, there's gonna be lots of opportunities to sell treatments and vaccines, and things like that. That's all true, but there's a much bigger opportunity if somebody is willing to effectively slow down the public awareness of a historical event. And I guess the last thing I would say on that is, the environment that we live in, the environment that actually results in you and me doing what we get to do in podcast space, is an environment that exists primarily because people are absolutely starved for reliable sources, right? Every paper is broken. Every university is broken. And that means that people are left to find voices that, for whatever reason, are credible because they're honest, because they correct their mistakes, whatever. And the, I guess, the point I would make is that the question of zero being a special number interfaces the question of the time-traveling money printer in the sense that keeping people from having mechanisms that tell them what's true is an excellent way of detaining them so that this sort of, um, financial gamesmanship can unfold, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
It has to be true that there, there aren't newspapers out there seriously pursuing Pulitzer Prizes for deep investigations that, you know, treat nothing as sacred. That doesn't seem to happen anymore.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- 1:30:00 – 1:33:10
Y- you know, it's…
- BWBret Weinstein
true, but I can certainly say there's nothing in that that isn't, isn't plausible, and that's very dangerous, right? The easiest th- What they want to do is they want to dismiss Gerrit Van den Bosche. They want to say, "He's got a financial conflict of interest. That's why he's saying these things." Well, I don't see it. Uh, what I see is a small number of people who have two characteristics. The two characteristics are, they've got a toolkit that allows them to see with some clarity, and the other characteristic is that they have the courage to speak about it when they are being threatened, right? And those people are actually making their way in the world, and people are gravitating to us, and then I'm sure some people are faking it. But, um, it has resulted in a very noisy sense-making environment, and I don't think it's naturally noisy. I think somebody has denied us the tools with which we would normally make sense and forced us into this realm of podcasts in which we have to struggle against, you know, ungodly levels of propaganda, for example.
- JRJoe Rogan
Y- you know, it's this thing that people do. They "other" people. I mean, we love to do it when there's a complex problem. One of the best ways to not look at people as being human is to categorize them as an enemy in some way. I mean, it is like, historically, those are the bad people. Let's go kill them. We're the good people. We don't kill each other.... you punish people for killing each other, you reward them for killing the bad people. This is, like, tribal.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's gone on forever. You're seeing echoes of that in that woman's tweet.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, but you're seeing something downstream of what's being called mass formation. And the mass formation appears to be downstream of an industrial strength propaganda campaign, a very expensive one, designed to create these unsolvable puzzles for people so that they would end up in this mindset.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
And I think one of the things that, um, people like you and I have to do is figure out, you know, w- where you draw the line. I mean, for me, I have nothing but forgiveness for people who got it wrong and who did what they thought was the right thing on the basis of bad information that they couldn't figure out was bad.
- JRJoe Rogan
I have the same perspective.
- BWBret Weinstein
On the other hand, if you went after people who were so-called vaccine hesitant, if you went after them, if you demonized them, if you said they weren't entitled to medical services, if you said it wasn't a tragedy if they died, if you said that kind of stuff, and now you're one of the huge majority of people who has not gotten their bivalent booster, and you're not getting it because there's something nagging at you, because you're now vaccine hesitant, right? Then the answer is own up to it. You don't get to keep pretending that you were right to demonize us.
Episode duration: 3:18:56
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