Joe Rogan Experience #1919 - Bret Weinstein

1. 0:00 – 1:15

   Evergreen fallout and learning to speak under pressure

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (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)

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:12

      Do you get weirded out when you do podcasts now?

   3. BWBret Weinstein0:15

      No.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:17

      Is it, was, was there a time in the beginning when you did? Where you were like, "Okay, here we go."

   5. BWBret Weinstein0:23

      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.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:46

      Mm. Did this come after Evergreen or before?

   7. BWBret Weinstein0:49

      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.

2. 1:15 – 2:54

   What actually sparked Evergreen: Day of Absence and the policy fight behind it

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:15

      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?

   2. BWBret Weinstein1:31

      Yeah, that's true. Uh-

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:33

      That's how it started.

   4. BWBret Weinstein1:33

      ... 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-

3. 2:54 – 6:08

   DEI-driven hiring and ‘equal outcomes’ as institutional self-sabotage

   1. JRJoe Rogan2:54

      What were the other policies that he was trying to implement?

   2. BWBret Weinstein2:57

      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-

   3. JRJoe Rogan3:57

      Equally capable by what metric?

   4. BWBret Weinstein4:00

      By every metric. So-

   5. JRJoe Rogan4:01

      (sighs)

   6. BWBret Weinstein4:01

      ... 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.

   7. JRJoe Rogan4:37

      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?

   8. BWBret Weinstein4:48

      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.

   9. JRJoe Rogan5:21

      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?

   10. BWBret Weinstein5:37

       Well, they never said that. That is, uh, as a biologist, that is me telling you-

   11. JRJoe Rogan5:42

       Mm-hmm.

   12. BWBret Weinstein5:42

       ... that when, uh, you have a group of-

   13. JRJoe Rogan5:44

       Right, I understand.

   14. BWBret Weinstein5:45

       ... organisms that have different capabilities-

   15. JRJoe Rogan5:47

       Right.

   16. BWBret Weinstein5:47

       ... 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-

   17. JRJoe Rogan6:02

       Right.

   18. BWBret Weinstein6:02

       ... in which we looked at the top-performing student, and then suddenly brought everybody up to their level. But that's impossible.

4. 6:08 – 7:58

   Evergreen as a preview: filmed protests, institutional spread, and cultural spillover

   1. JRJoe Rogan6:08

      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.

   2. BWBret Weinstein6:18

      Well, I think there are a number of things that are true about it. One is the protestors at Evergreen were foolish enough to film everything they did, and they uploaded it, first to Facebook, and then an account called, uh, Not My Fault 1, I believe, uh, transported it over to YouTube. And when people saw how absurd it was, it- it made it much harder to deny that something had gone very wrong. Now, of course, the- the response at that point was, "Well, that's Evergreen." And I, at this point now famously said, "No. Evergreen is maybe more dramatic in this way. It's earlier, but this is going to spill out into everything."

   3. JRJoe Rogan7:00

      Yeah.

   4. BWBret Weinstein7:00

      It's already riddled throughout the other universities, and now that's just undeniable.

   5. JRJoe Rogan7:05

      Yeah. I remember the early days when this was happening, when I would do podcasts about it. And I think this is back when I was still reading comments, and one of the comments was, "Why would you care about what's happening these, in these universities? Like, this has literally no bearing on you." And my thought was, "I don't think that's true because the people from universities are eventually going to go into the workplace." And if this ideology is so radically different than anything I experienced when I was in my early 20s, like, this- there's a shift in the culture that seemed to be a groupthink shift that was forcing people to accept these crazy ideas, and that this is- this is gonna have some spillover. And now we know that that's 100% true. Like, Jordan was ringing the alarm for this a long time ago, and I'm sure you're aware of what's happening to him now.

5. 7:58 – 17:23

   Jordan Peterson ‘retraining’ and the idea of institutional escape velocity

   1. BWBret Weinstein7:58

      Uh, I am aware that something new is happening to him in the last couple of days, but I have not caught up to it.

   2. JRJoe Rogan8:03

      I don't know if, uh, he wants me to discuss this publicly. So I'm going to hold off and wait until, uh, he does, 'cause I believe he's addressing it publicly. Has he addressed this on his, uh... See if he went to his- go to his Twitter page. See if he said anything. But-

   3. BWBret Weinstein8:19

      Hm. Having a Wi-Fi issue at the moment.

   4. JRJoe Rogan8:21

      Oh, okay. He's getting in trouble for retweeting some, uh, person who was critical of Justin Trudeau.

   5. BWBret Weinstein8:29

      Mm.

   6. JRJoe Rogan8:30

      And the- the- the- some- the- whatever board of psychologists that they have in, uh, Ontario is bringing him in for disciplinary discussions, and I think they're- they're having some sort of- th- they want him to be involved in some sort of a class or some sort of a thi- Here, I'll- I should just- just read it, and if I don't get... I'll- I'll contact him. If I don't get his permission, I'll- I'll delete this, this aspect of it. But- so here's- here's what it says. Um, it says, "The College of Psychologists of Ontario, the government-mandated professional college of psychologists, has disciplined me and is threatening my clinical psychology license for retweeting the Conservative Party leader, Pierre Poilievre." How do you say his name?

   7. BWBret Weinstein9:21

      Not sure.

   8. JRJoe Rogan9:21

      Not sure. Um, "Criticizing Justin Trudeau, the chief of, uh, staff Gerald Butts, uh, someone named Jacinda Ardern, and, uh, an Ottawa city councilor. He is required to participate in mandatory social media communication retraining."

   9. BWBret Weinstein9:42

      (laughs)

   10. JRJoe Rogan9:44

       "To modify..." It says, "To modify my objectionable behavior, which I absolutely refuse to do, so they'll go to the next step, which will be an in-person disciplinary healing- hearing," excuse me, "with my license on the line. I'm going to make all this public this week. If you're interested, take a look. Canada has given over to the com- commissars, something I thought I'd never see in my lifetime. Happy New Year."

   11. BWBret Weinstein10:08

       Well, I can't say I'm terribly surprised. You know, ultimately, w- anybody who re- remains inside an institution is going to be up against disciplinary hearings if they insist on seeing reality and discussing it.

   12. JRJoe Rogan10:24

       But the- the- the term retraining, like- like, I'm- I'll read it again 'cause it sounds so bonkers, th- that- that someone would think that this is a good idea. Th- this- this term is so crazy, that he is going to participate, have to participate in mandatory social media communication retraining.

   13. BWBret Weinstein10:44

       (laughs)

   14. JRJoe Rogan10:46

       Social media communication retraining. Retraining. Like, "You have to do it the way I do it. You have to do it the way other people, um, that we- we have decided the way you communicate is not proper. We don't agree. You're- you're retweeting people who are critical or criticizing the government, and we don't agree with that, so we're going to retrain you how to communicate on social media, and this is mandatory. You have to do it, and then you're going to have to adhere, right? 'Cause if you do it, uh, if you go through the retraining and then you don't adhere, well, then it doesn't count. Like, you have to be a different person."

   15. BWBret Weinstein11:22

       Yeah. I- I mean, I am simultaneously shocked. M- my- myself from 10 years ago is absolutely shocked.

   16. JRJoe Rogan11:30

       Yeah.

   17. BWBret Weinstein11:31

       Myself that has lived up to this point through the last five years is not shocked.

   18. JRJoe Rogan11:36

       At all?

   19. BWBret Weinstein11:37

       You know? No, the- the disciplinary hearings are part of the structure that keeps the last holdouts from doing their thing. And in this case, you and I both know that Jordan is not going to bow to this. There's- there's nothing that they can say that is going to cause him to do that.

   20. JRJoe Rogan11:54

       Well, fortunately, he doesn't have to.

   21. BWBret Weinstein11:56

       Right.

   22. JRJoe Rogan11:56

       This is the most important part about it, is that Jordan has achieved, uh, escape velocity.... and he doesn't have t-... He doesn't need them anymore, and so this is an empty threat. So, this removing his license, you're gonna, not gonna take away his education, his degrees. You can't, you, you... If you say you're removing his license, well, I don't think he's seeing clients anymore. He's not really acting as a clinical psychologist anymore, is he?

   23. BWBret Weinstein12:20

       I don't think so.

   24. JRJoe Rogan12:20

       I don't believe so.

   25. BWBret Weinstein12:21

       And I agree with you. Uh, uh, I think what we have to discuss is this. There's a question about where each of us are with respect to what you're calling escape velocity.

   26. JRJoe Rogan12:32

       Yeah.

   27. BWBret Weinstein12:32

       And, in fact, you and I sitting here is an interesting test case because I haven't... I've come close to escaping achieve, uh, escape velocity, but not quite.

   28. JRJoe Rogan12:42

       Well, you've been hobbled by the demonetization on YouTube for things that are now being printed in The Washington Post, which is wild. Because one of the things that you got in trouble for was, uh... How do you say his name? Geert Vanderbosch? Am I saying it correct-

   29. BWBret Weinstein12:58

       Geert Vanden Bossche.

   30. JRJoe Rogan12:58

       Vanden Bossche. Um, he was talking early on, on your podcast, about how these vaccines are, in some way, going to aid in variants.
6. 17:23 – 19:50

   Narrative control, Twitter under Musk, and ‘zero is a special number’

   1. BWBret Weinstein17:23

      Yeah. I think that makes sense. I'm more interested, really, in this phenomenon of people leaving Twitter.

   2. JRJoe Rogan17:31

      Yeah.

   3. BWBret Weinstein17:32

      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.

   4. JRJoe Rogan19:15

      Mm-hmm.

   5. BWBret Weinstein19:16

      So, anyway I'm-

   6. JRJoe Rogan19:17

      I don't think that's a c- oh, we got internet now?

   7. BWBret Weinstein19:20

      Yes.

   8. JRJoe Rogan19:20

      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

7. 19:50 – 28:24

   Vaccinating into a pandemic: variant pressure and redefining ‘vaccine’

   1. JRJoe Rogan19:50

      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?

   2. BWBret Weinstein20:01

      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-

   3. JRJoe Rogan21:10

      But we should b- clarify that. Why do you think it is not a vaccine?

   4. BWBret Weinstein21:15

      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-

   5. JRJoe Rogan21:24

      Okay, but so then is a flu vaccine a flu, a vaccine?

   6. BWBret Weinstein21:28

      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.

   7. JRJoe Rogan21:59

      It just produces antibodies?

   8. BWBret Weinstein22:01

      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?

   9. JRJoe Rogan22:12

      Mm-hmm.

   10. BWBret Weinstein22:12

       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?

   11. JRJoe Rogan23:43

       Mm-hmm.

   12. BWBret Weinstein23:43

       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?

   13. JRJoe Rogan23:58

       Mm-hmm.

   14. BWBret Weinstein23:59

       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.

   15. JRJoe Rogan25:18

       Mm.

   16. BWBret Weinstein25:18

       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.

   17. JRJoe Rogan25:43

       And this is you as a biologist examining this.

   18. BWBret Weinstein25:47

       Yep. Heather and me, as a biologist, and I have a little background in, uh, immunology, so-

   19. JRJoe Rogan25:52

       And Heather is a biologist as well.

   20. BWBret Weinstein25:53

       Absolutely.

   21. JRJoe Rogan25:54

       Yeah.

   22. BWBret Weinstein25:54

       Or evolutionary biologist.

   23. JRJoe Rogan25:55

       Yeah.

   24. BWBret Weinstein25:56

       So, anyway, we looked at these technologies and thought, wow, you are intervening in a nested series of complex systems in a way that you can't possibly predict the outcome. You just couldn't know at that point. And so that caused us to dig deeper, which got us in more and more trouble, and actually landed us, uh, at Geert Vanden Bossche's work pretty quickly. Right? Which introduced a whole new, uh, set of questions, you know, beyond the question of how safe is this for the individual, the question is, well, what does this vaccination program mean for the pandemic itself? Right? And what he said, which there was no evidence that it was taking place at the time, but what he said is, "Look, if you vaccinate into a pandemic, and you do so broadly across the population, you're going to drive the evolution of variants." Right? You are gonna create an evolutionary arms race, and you are gonna cause the number of variants to proliferate. And, you know, at the time, I couldn't say for sure that he was right. But what I could say was that he was making evolutionary sense. There was nothing terribly complex about his argument and it was robust. And I think now we are seeing not only have we seen that proliferation of variants, but we are now seeing the grudging acceptance that that's what's happened in places like, uh, The Washington Post.

   25. JRJoe Rogan27:17

       Seeing it in the front of The Washington Post was wild. Just to- to- to see that admission-

   26. BWBret Weinstein27:24

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan27:24

       ... you know, and- and have the discussion open up, are the vaccines causing variants, 'cause that was- what was the exact title? See if you can find The Washington Post title. I read it and I was like, whoa. The first Leana Wen, um, discussing openly this superior immunity that comes from natural, uh, natural immunity from catching the virus and recovering, and how much better it is in so many different ways. And to f- to have her turn the course and have her say masks don't work, cloth masks don't work, you know, you need an N95, otherwise it's just theater, and that it's just facial decorations, and then to go from that to her describing how natural immunity has to be recognized, and that it is actually better, and then showing that people have been vaccinated and then boosted, the more vaccines you get, it seems like there's more prevalence of people catching COVID, which is wild.

8. 28:24 – 32:58

   IgG4 antibodies and the possibility of immune ‘stand-down’ after repeated mRNA doses

   1. BWBret Weinstein28:24

      Yes. And if you think carefully about what I told you the definition of a vaccine was before it was altered, that means, and, you know, we can get into this, uh, question of the IgG4 result that recently emerged-

   2. JRJoe Rogan28:42

      What is that?

   3. BWBret Weinstein28:44

      Um, this was a result that showed surprisingly, and in contrast to the other true vaccines that they looked at, the mRNA vaccines, and this is not true for the DNA version, but for the mRNA vaccines like the Pfizer and the Moderna, that after three doses they saw a radical elevation in the percentage of the antibodies that are part of this class called IgG4. Ig is just, it means immunoglobulin, it's a synonym for antibody. IgGG is a s- class of antibody and it fights pathogens, but IgG4 is a special subclass, and it has, you know, all things in biology are complex and so it has multiple implications, but IgG4 is actually part of a system in which the body attenuates its own response to an antigen. So, the mind-blowing and, you know, it's an early result, it- maybe it doesn't get replicated, but it was published in Science Immunology, top flight journal. The implication is that the evolutionary path we have traveled is causing the pathogen now to be able to trigger a response that will cause the immune system not to fight. Nobody knows what happens next.

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:14

      Whoa.

   5. BWBret Weinstein30:14

      It's a very dangerous discovery.

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:18

      The- how does that- uh, how does that work? What-

   7. BWBret Weinstein30:20

      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.

9. 32:58 – 1:00:46

   Lab leak case: bats, Wuhan, furin cleavage site, and why the question still matters

   1. JRJoe Rogan32:58

      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?

   2. BWBret Weinstein33:29

      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.

   3. JRJoe Rogan35:39

      Just a coincidence.

   4. BWBret Weinstein35:41

      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-

   5. JRJoe Rogan36:09

      But could you explain what is unusual about the pathogen?

   6. BWBret Weinstein36:13

      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-

   7. JRJoe Rogan37:36

      H- how so?

   8. BWBret Weinstein37:37

      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?

   9. JRJoe Rogan38:13

      Mm-hmm.

   10. BWBret Weinstein38:14

       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.

   11. JRJoe Rogan40:50

       So, what was this th- th- that has been recently cited? This, uh, article-

   12. BWBret Weinstein40:56

       You, you're-

   13. JRJoe Rogan40:56

       ... like, what, and w-

   14. BWBret Weinstein40:56

       ... talking about the, the wet market article?

   15. JRJoe Rogan40:59

       Yes.

   16. BWBret Weinstein40:59

       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.

   17. JRJoe Rogan41:47

       Mm-hmm.

   18. BWBret Weinstein41:47

       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.

   19. JRJoe Rogan42:20

       And w- why do you think ... Do you have a speculation to why they would publish that?

   20. BWBret Weinstein42:27

       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.

   21. JRJoe Rogan43:37

       Can you please explain the furin cleavage site?

   22. BWBret Weinstein43:39

       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 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.

   23. JRJoe Rogan45:23

       How much evidence do we have of that specific type of research being done at Wuhan?

   24. BWBret Weinstein45:29

       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.

   25. JRJoe Rogan50:48

       So, this could potentially ... So, the, as people are vaccinated and boosted and then boosted again, this would accentuate this mechanism?

   26. BWBret Weinstein51:02

       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.

   27. JRJoe Rogan54:31

       Mm.

   28. BWBret Weinstein54:31

       Am I wrong?

   29. JRJoe Rogan54:32

       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?

   30. BWBret Weinstein54:52

       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.
10. 1:00:46 – 1:08:58

    Geert Vanden Bossche clip: infectiousness vs virulence and the ‘largest gain-of-function experiment’ claim

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:46

       Hmm. Okay, um, let's, let's watch the Geert Vanden Bossche then.

    2. BWBret Weinstein1:00:51

       Sure.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:00:52

       Let's play that, Jamie.So, this is, uh... What is his background?

    4. BWBret Weinstein1:00:57

       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.

    5. 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.

    6. Yeah, holy moly.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:03:23

       Yeah.

    8. BWBret Weinstein1:03:24

       So-

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:03:25

       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.

    10. BWBret Weinstein1:03:35

        So, he's sounding multiple alarms. Um, maybe I should just translate-

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:03:39

        Yes, please.

    12. BWBret Weinstein1:03:39

        ... 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.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:06:44

        Well, you had, um, uh, a doctor from the UK on your podcast recently.

    14. BWBret Weinstein1:06:50

        Uh, who are we talking about?

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:06:52

        D- didn't you-

    16. BWBret Weinstein1:06:52

        Oh, you're talking about, uh...

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:06:54

        The cardiologist?

    18. BWBret Weinstein1:06:56

        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.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:07:31

        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.

    20. BWBret Weinstein1:07:49

        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-

11. 1:08:58 – 1:45:31

    Did vaccines save lives? Modeling claims, all-cause mortality, and why public health didn’t pivot

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:08:58

       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?

    2. BWBret Weinstein1:09:11

       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-

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:09:24

       Right.

    4. BWBret Weinstein1:09:24

       ... 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.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:11:47

       There was a very disturbing moment in time where, um, there was something that was published that said that more unvaccinated people are getting COVID, and a higher percentage of unvaccinated people, or excuse me, more vaccinated people were getting COVID, and a higher percentage of vaccinated people were dying from COVID. And then I was thinking, "Okay, but most people have been vaccinated." Like, when they're saying that you're dealing with a much larger number to draw from, so if you have the, three quarters of the population gets vaccinated and one-quarter doesn't, and you have a certain number of deaths per capita, and it's standard. It's, it's, it's, it seems to apply universally. Then you're, of course, gonna get more people who are vaccinated that die from COVID, and all that says is that the vaccines weren't as effective as we hoped or that COVID got more dangerous because of variants, but it doesn't mean that it's preventing people from recovering from COVID better than people that were unvaccinated.

    6. BWBret Weinstein1:12:46

       Well, I agree. These things are hard to interpret, and, and the way to see, uh, your point clearly is if you had a population where 100% of the people were vaccinated, then everybody who died of COVID would be vaccinated, and it wouldn't tell you anything.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:12:58

       Right.

    8. BWBret Weinstein1:12:59

       Um, so that's certainly a danger, but I will say...You know, the most difficult job during the pandemic has been figuring out which evidence is actually real and should be included in the model, and which evidence should be excluded. And, you know, that should be the job of academic fields and universities and journals. They should be doing that job, and almost none of them are. So that leaves those of us in the public with a toolkit to even understand what these papers say to figure it out. But, uh, it does appear that the mRNA vaccines specifically are creating a level of vulnerability. And in particular, uh, I would say one conspicuous feature of the landscape is that we do not see the rates of contracting COVID dropping radically, which you would expect them to. And you should expect people dying from COVID to drop radically. Why? Because the disease is going to cull those who are most vulnerable to it, just automatically. And so, that leaves a population that is more and more capable of enduring, um, the pathogen. And so again, this is one more place where we don't see a familiar landscape. We see an unusual pathogen behaving in ways that are counterintuitive, and now we are beginning to look into processes inside the immunity, which as far as we know, don't accompany other pathogens. All of that suggests a very ominous picture, and I would say, well, l- let's compare two worlds. Let's compare the world where when COVID emerged, we did nothing official. We recognized that it existed to the extent that we could do that, and we just let doctors figure out how to treat it, right? If that had happened, then doctors would have, I don't mean this in a negative way, they would inevitably have killed a certain number of people following hunches, deploying techniques that didn't work. But they would'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.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:15:23

       And we can see that in the implementation of respirators.

    10. BWBret Weinstein1:15:27

        Uh, of, um, yeah, of ventilators.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:15:30

        Ventilators, excuse me.

    12. BWBret Weinstein1:15:31

        Um, absolutely. And...

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:15:34

        Because that was the narrative at the beginning of the pandemic, "We need more ventilators."

    14. BWBret Weinstein1:15:39

        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.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:16:09

        Mm.

    16. BWBret Weinstein1:16:10

        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.

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:16:46

        Uh, and we experienced that with the flu.

    18. BWBret Weinstein1:16:48

        Right, all the time.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:16:49

        Yeah, 'cause the flu does severely impact people who are compromised, people who are obese, people who are old.

    20. BWBret Weinstein1:16:57

        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.

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:18:43

        Including people that were not vulnerable, like children.

    22. BWBret Weinstein1:18:47

        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?

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:20:36

        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.

    24. BWBret Weinstein1:20:49

        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-

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:21:17

        Acceptable amounts of losses.

    26. BWBret Weinstein1:21:20

        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.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:22:09

        Mm-hmm.

    28. BWBret Weinstein1:22:10

        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.

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:23:07

        I understand what you're saying.

    30. BWBret Weinstein1:23:08

        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?

Episode duration: 3:18:56