Del Bigtree interviews Bret Weinstein

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[Del Bigtree]

Introduction

Every once in a while, I do an interview that I have been trying to get, I think, for probably over three years. This next person is someone that I really admire. We've had moments, I really think this guy's a game changer. He has been speaking out where no one else has. But we've also had our moments of conflict, there's, you know, a lot that I, I'm sitting here looking at all the questions that I have right now. So I'm going to say this, I think, I think this is going to be a long shot. I think this is going to be one of those. So I'd almost like say, pause it for a second, go get some popcorn, take a moment, because I want to walk Brett Weinstein, not just through where he's at right now, and you've seen some of the podcasts. I want to talk about this journey, both he and I have walked through together over these last several years, and why he is so, so, you know, emphatic now about our need to try and save this republic. How did he get here? I want to take this journey with you. So just to get us started, if for some reason you don't know who Brett Weinstein is, from the Dark Horse podcast, this is the guy.

[00:01:04]

[Tucker Carlson]

Brett Weinstein's Background

I am delighted to be here with Brett Weinstein. Dr. Brett Weinstein. Professor Brett Weinstein joins us. Great Brett Weinstein in the house.

[Unknown]

The Dark Horse podcast and co-author, the forthcoming book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. Brett Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, author, co-host of the Dark Horse podcast, and, as he says, reluctant radical.

[Brett Weinstein]

Heather and I began discussing the conflict over COVID policy, and at some point we realized that we were dealing with the exact same thing that we had seen over questions of patriarchy and white supremacy in Evergreen. And we started referring to it as a question of medical wokeness. If a person opposes an equity proposal, those advancing the proposal are secure in asserting that the person is motivated by opposition to racial equity itself. In other words, they are racist.

[00:02:00]

It's not the case. We all, I believe, are agreed that something very serious is afoot, and the public is largely unaware that they have been placed into a kind of danger. And we also know that there's a great deal of stigma directed at those who would explore these dangers, that I believe in my heart of hearts that a great many lives are at stake. There's just simply no question that come hell or high water, this must be discussed. I think in June, the chances that it came from the lab looked to me to be about 90 percent. Okay, so this was never a conspiracy theory. In fact, that term is simply used to make it go away. It was maintained by people who privately in their emails acknowledged that they had grave doubts about the natural origin of this virus. There's a problem built into the question of vaccines, which is that there's a difference between the public health analysis and the private decisions that people have to make about their own vaccinations. There is a tendency to underrate the risks of vaccines in order to get everybody on board with getting them, and then people who raise questions get demonized.

[00:03:06]

[Unknown]

Do you think in the future we'll look back on this and there'll be some sort of a shift in the way we discuss it?

[Brett Weinstein]

I worry a lot that not only are we headed into chaos, but that we are going to be denied the ability to have a proper historical account of the present, that we're never going to understand what these stories were doing, why they played out the way they did. And that's extremely dangerous.

[Del Bigtree]

The Dark Horse Podcast

All right. Well, most of you probably know him as one of the hosts of the Dark Horse podcast, also the author of A Hunter Gathers Guide to the 21st Century. Brett Weinstein joins me now. It is great to be here, Dal. It's really, this is sort of a bucket list moment. I've been wanting to get you on this stage for some time. But before we sort of get into, you know, where our paths have come together or run into each other a few times, for my audience and really also from my understanding, like sort of just back it up a notch.

[00:04:13]

First of all, when did you start the Dark Horse podcast?

[Brett Weinstein]

I started the Dark Horse podcast in 2019 or early 2020. And initially, the idea was different from what it became. But because the so-called pandemic dawned in 2020, it first of all forced us to take all of the studio materials that we had built into a studio in downtown Portland and go in the middle of the night and take them and build them into our house, into the set that became familiar to people. And Heather, at one point, we were at the beginning of the so-called pandemic. Heather and I were having conversations every night.

[00:05:00]

We're both biologists. We were talking about what the meaning of this pathogen was, what the advice we were being given meant. And Heather said, you know, other people would benefit greatly from hearing these discussions. Maybe we should just sit down live and do it. And it turned out that that was rocket fuel for the podcast. People were starved for high-quality information.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah. So what was the original idea? So it wasn't that, because that's how we all know your show to be. What was the original plan?

[Brett Weinstein]

Well, the original plan stemmed from something that I had been doing as a professor. So I taught at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. And Evergreen was a very unusual place in which professors had absolute freedom to teach whatever they wanted in whatever way they wanted. And I was never a very good student. But because of Evergreen's, the freedom it provided for professors, I was able to teach in a way that would have worked for me.

[00:06:01]

And a lot of students who also weren't great at school showed up in my classroom and flourished. And so I became... You were teaching? Evolutionary biology. Okay. And I became fascinated by what made people with high capacity, but an unusual profile, how they ended up there. So I wanted to talk to people who had done something remarkable from some starting point that you wouldn't have imagined it. Dark horses. That's what I wanted to do. And so anyway, that morphed into a show that increasingly focused on COVID as a pathogen and the remedies and measures that we were being told to deploy. And now the show, we do still cover that topic. We cover a lot of other things too. Heather and I are still dyed in the wool evolutionary biologists who are fascinated by nature and love talking about things that have emerged or things that we've seen.

[00:07:06]

We love talking about humans and human behavior, which is definitely a core element of our book. But anyway, yes, that's the evolution. It was forced to change by COVID.

[Del Bigtree]

Corruption in Science Research

Now what's interesting about your background is even though when I started talking to you during COVID, you explained to me, we weren't seeing eye to eye, I wouldn't say in the beginning. There were some things we agreed on, some we didn't. We'll get into that. But really your background was you had seen malfeasance, shall we say, or corruption or issues inside of science research and things and had already gotten yourself in a little trouble in that space. Remind me exactly what happened there.

[Brett Weinstein]

So I had, so I've always been interested in corruption as a problem, as an obstacle to having a reasonable society.

[00:08:09]

And as a graduate student, I was pursuing a project just out of pure interest. I was pursuing a project having to do with senescence. That's the process of aging cancer and the repetitive sequences at the ends of our chromosomes called telomeres. And what I didn't realize was that I was crossing an invisible boundary. My field, evolutionary biology, is one in which there isn't a lot of money at stake, right? There's prestige, but that's it. And so the level of corruption is sort of human scale. As you get closer to medicine, things go absolutely insane. And I didn't know I was crossing that boundary. In fact, nobody had ever mentioned it to me. And so as I got close to the question of why human beings age in the way that we do, suddenly it was a threat to all sorts of people who were selling a fiction that they were on the verge of curing aging, which they were not.

[00:09:12]

Another group was selling the fiction that they were on the verge of curing cancer, which they were not. And if you understood these two things together, you realized that the obstacle that was going to prevent the one group from accomplishing its goal was the other group, right? If you tried to cure aging, you'd run into cancer. If you cure cancer, you'll run into aging. You'll make the problem worse. So anyway, there's a very elegant evolutionary story to tell. But as I got into that quadrant, nothing made sense. And all of the rules that I had been told governed the functioning of science just simply did not apply. They'd just been thrown out the door. Yes, at an absurd level. I don't know how deep you want to go.

[Del Bigtree]

The Mouse Study

Well, I mean, tell me about the sort of the mouse study and how they were pulling this off.

[00:10:01]

[Brett Weinstein]

There was a very elegant evolutionary theory by a biologist named George C. Williams, who's now gone, somebody I knew. And he had described in 1957 the reason that evolution should create creatures that grow feeble and inefficient with age, as we all do. And his point was the genome, which we didn't know a lot about in 1957, but the genome contains a very limited number of genes. We have a huge complexity. I mean, a human, an adult human, is 30 trillion cells, right? Somehow that 30 trillion cell system is being built and managed by a genome that has 20,000 active genes. Maybe the average one has five different edits. So 100,000 genetic units are governing a self-assembling, self-repairing system of 30 trillion cells that lives 80 years.

[00:11:02]

I mean, that's an incredible thing. And his point was that means that all of those genes have to be doing more than one thing. That's called pleiotropy. Okay. And he said, look, there's an asymmetry in the way evolution works. Evolution sees early life much more clearly than it sees late life. Because if something happens to you late, then the chances that you've already done your reproduction are high. And so the cost is small. Something negative happens. Right. So he said, look, anytime there's a gene that produces a benefit to you early in life at a cost that is realized later, selection will tend to favor it because lots of people won't be around to suffer the late life cost. Right. So he called that theory antagonistic pleiotropy. We know it's true because there's lots of predictions that come from it that we can see. If we go out into a population in nature and, you know, we compare, you know, guppies from the bottom of the watershed to ones at the top of the watershed, we see the pattern that he described.

[00:12:05]

So we know it's right. But at the point I started studying this in the late 90s, nobody had ever found one of these genes. And so I found that odd. Right. Why? He says the genome...

[Del Bigtree]

But you're seeing a world where this gene must exist, but no one has found the gene that's creating the tapestry that we're staring at. And it should have been everywhere.

[Brett Weinstein]

So that... I thought, you know, I kind of have a taste for the equivalent of big game, right? I see a question like that and I think, huh, there is bound to be a great answer there and I wonder if I can find it. Right. And so I went looking and I happened to be in the right seminar on the right day and somebody from a cancer lab was talking about the relationship between cancers, tumorigenesis, and this enzyme telomerase, which adds these repetitive sequences to the ends of our chromosomes. And I knew about telomeres from a whole different place, from the study of senescence, where it was thought that the shrinking of these telomeres, every time a cell divides, it loses some of the sequence, that that was resulting in our failure to be able to maintain the body.

[00:13:13]

I've heard that in a lot of anti-aging seminars and things I speak at. Right. And so my thought was, huh, you put these two things together. It's George Williams' antagonistic pleiotropy right there. It's not exactly as he described it. A telomere is not a gene, right? A telomere is a genetic sequence, but it doesn't make a protein. It's not a gene. But if it is true that the shortening of telomeres causes the body to grow feeble with age, and if it is true that tumors have the unique characteristic of the enzyme that lengthens telomeres being turned on, where it's turned off across the body, then this makes perfect sense. What's going on is that we have a built-in cancer prevention mechanism that involves the shortening of our telomeres with cell divisions, that that keeps us cancer-free for decade after decade of life.

[00:14:06]

But what's the cost? You can't repair yourself forever, right? It's so elegant, and it explains senescence across the body.

[Del Bigtree]

Right. So I thought, this is so... So what keeps you alive and healthy early on is this sort of shrinking of telomeres, but if you were to expand them, cancer becomes... So you have this... So you're really healthy, but it's causing, essentially, an earlier end of life because you're losing the ability to repair yourself.

[Brett Weinstein]

100%.

[Del Bigtree]

Okay.

[Brett Weinstein]

So it's such a simple and elegant idea that so perfectly fits from what we already understood to be true from evolutionary theory. Eventually, I thought, well, now all I've got to do is to find the evidence that will support this. And as I went on what I thought would be a short adventure into the literature looking for the evidence, I ran into a problem, and the problem was that when I got to the studies on mice, the primary mammalian model organism, they didn't fit.

[00:15:08]

In fact, they were perfectly inconsistent with that idea, right? Because mice, the literature said, have ultra-long telomeres, much longer than humans. So why would that be? You've got a tiny little animal that lives a short life. Why would it have telomeres that allow it to reproduce its tissues just indefinitely? That doesn't fit because a mouse should age for the same reason we do. It's a mammal. We're not so distantly related. Right. And as long telomeres, they should be living to be 250 years old. Right. What gives? Right. So I couldn't figure it out. And my first thought was, okay, I've seen screw-ups in the literature before. Something will happen where one person reports something. It's not right. They did the experiment incorrectly, right? They weren't looking at the cells they thought they were looking at. They report it. And then all the science just builds.

[00:16:01]

Everybody cites it. And so you think it's this widely tested idea. No, that didn't happen. Turned out a dozen labs had looked at the telomeres of mice. They all came out with the same answer. Mouse telomeres are ultra-long and hyper-variable. And so I was like, look, this answer is so simple and clearly fits everything we think we know. Something's wrong in the literature. And when I spent a couple weeks trying to figure out what it was, and finally, as preposterous as this sounds, I realized what was probably going on. Had to be something wrong with the mice they were looking at. But how could that be, right? These are mice. So anyway, I called up one of the leading lights in my field, somebody who didn't know me. She wasn't really in my field. She was in biology. And I said, this is Carol Greider, who now has a Nobel Prize. She did not at the time, but she was an odds-on favorite to get one. I called her up and I said, Carol, you don't know me. I'm a graduate student in Michigan.

[00:17:00]

I'm looking at the literature. And I'm wondering, it says that mice have ultra-long telomeres. Is it possible that's just lab mice? And she said, I don't think so. I think all mice have long telomeres. But it's interesting, if you order mice from Europe and you get mus spredus instead of mus musculus, then the telomeres come in various different lengths. So maybe there's something to this. She put a graduate student on it, a guy named Mike Heeman, and they tested it. They tested my hypothesis by looking at various different strains of what they called wild, but were really just more recently captive mice. And I got an excited email, Eureka, the hypothesis is true. Mice don't have long telomeres. It's lab mice that have long telomeres.

[Del Bigtree]

The Impact of the Mouse Study

Now, there's a whole rabbit hole. I was amazed, because you hear these stories that you're just a student at this point, but you have a hypothesis that intrigues a professor level scientist.

[00:18:11]

[Brett Weinstein]

Well, and it was a pretty profound moment. I mean, it changed me because for a number of reasons. One, it is very enabling and empowering to figure something out in the abstract and then to have it predict something, especially something surprising, in a laboratory setting. Like, whoa, we just looked into the genomes of mice that nobody had looked before, and they don't look like the mice we've been looking at for some reason that I think I know. So anyway, that's very empowering.

[Del Bigtree]

I don't think that's lost on anyone. I don't think anyone would not understand as a scientist, a student, whether you're geeking out or not, hey, I ever thought that maybe all of science is looking at something the wrong way. Can you just check these mice real quick? Right. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

[00:19:00]

[Brett Weinstein]

You're right. So that led to two things. One, there's a question of what is it about the laboratory environment that is lengthening these telomeres? Yeah. And I had a hypothesis. It is now the only hypothesis standing as far as I know. So we have to take it as presumptively the explanation, and it's a doozy. That's one thing. And the other thing is the implications. What does it mean that we are studying biology using an organism broken in this way? So first thing is, what the hell's going on with the mice? Well, think about the story we were talking about earlier, where selection is delicately balancing the threat to you from cancer with the threat to you from aging. And it has optimized you so you can live a long life, reducing the threat of cancer, reducing the degree to which your aging process interferes with your fitness. Okay? That's what selection is doing. Well, we take mice from the wild who have the same problem, and we bring them into a breeding colony. Turns out all of the mice in all of the experiments that were being measured, the reason that all of those papers said the same thing about mice having ultra-long telomeres is they all came from the same place, the Jack's Lab.

[00:20:10]

Okay? Jack's Lab in Bar Harbor, Maine. Jack's Lab in Bar Harbor, Maine was supplying these mice, and the Jack's Lab was doing what you would expect a laboratory that sells mice to do, which is trying to increase the number of mice it produces per dollar invested.

[Del Bigtree]

Right. Now the way you do that... Selecting for the healthiest, what it means, some form of selection so that you have a product that lasts, produces many of them.

[Brett Weinstein]

And in fact, the error that they made, this is again a hypothesis, but I think it's the presumptively correct one, is that the decision to breed only young animals, because young animals breed faster, so per unit of mouse chow you get the most mouse babies. Got it. You breed only young animals, and that has a tremendous selective effect on the colony.

[00:21:03]

What it does is it says cancer doesn't really matter anymore, because that's not... The eight-month breeding cutoff is not enough time for a mouse to die of cancer. So you take that trade-off that selection is balancing between cancer and senescence, and you say, all right, take cancer out of the equation. Now the selective effect in the colony is whatever mouse breeds fastest in that time is the winner. It takes over the colony genetically. And so you throw out cancer, you put a priority on not senescing, and what you get are mice that don't senesce in the same way that we do. They remain young, and they all die early of cancer. That's what we've got, right? Wow. We've got mice that all die early of cancer, and when we look at their tissues, they don't get disorganized as they age the way our tissues do. So it's a terrible model organism, right? Right. Desperately misleading. Now here's the punchline, which you're going to love.

[00:22:01]

The punchline is we also use the same animals for drug safety testing. And those animals have a built-in bias, which I couldn't say for sure, I'm not an insider, but I don't think pharma knew that the mice were biased in their direction before my work came out. Okay. But now, what we can say is if you've got mice that are highly cancer-prone and have these incredibly long telomeres, which mean that they can replace their tissues indefinitely, well, if you give them a very toxic drug, not only will they survive it when a human might not, because they have a capacity to repair their tissues in a way that we don't, and just repair the damage. But because the mice are in effect all condemned to die of cancer, if you give them a toxin, it may actually lengthen their lives because it functions as chemotherapy, right? Chemotherapy works on the basis that you're going to give something very toxic to a person, and that person's cancers are more sensitive to the toxin than the rest of them because cancers are constantly dividing, and that means that the DNA is separated.

[00:23:14]

It's not double-stranded. It's often single-stranded, which means it's more vulnerable to toxins. So that's why chemotherapy works. You kill the cancer faster than you kill the patient, is what chemotherapy doctors say. So in the case of a mouse that's got tumors starting because it's condemned to die of something... They're extending their life. Right. And in fact, that...

[Del Bigtree]

So by poisoning the heck out of this super mouse, you are actually extending its life and saying, hey, look, the product's safe. Not only is it safe, maybe it's good for you. Maybe it's good for you.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. Now, and then what happens? Well, then you get the Vioxx effect. You've got a drug. You think it's safe. It's released into the public. It turns out it's really not safe, and it does, quote-unquote, heart damage, which I don't think is really heart damage.

[00:24:02]

I think it's body-wide damage, and because the heart is special, we see the damage there. We notice it. But you've got Vioxx. You've got Fen-Phen. You've got Seldane. You've got erythromycin. You've got all the NSAIDs. Right? You see heart damage, right? What I think this is is a biased model organism causing us to regard drugs as safe and to put them into the market, and then only if the harm is serious enough that, you know, people drop dead on the basketball court or something like that, do you start to notice it. Right. And I will say that in the aftermath of the Vioxx scandal, the federal government commissioned an investigation into what had gone wrong, and there was a 300-page book on the future of drug safety published. Doesn't mention mice. It doesn't mention the genus Muss. It doesn't mention telomeres. It misses this entirely.

[Del Bigtree]

And I remember Vioxx was sort of famous because they, at a certain point, got emails, internal emails, once it was in court, showing that they knew that this was going to have a high...

[00:25:08]

They literally had done mathematical equations saying how many will die of heart attacks versus how much will we sell, and they made this... It's a cost of doing business. Cost of doing business.

The Vioxx Scandal

And so you brought the attention to these mice. Like it should be an earth-shattering moment in all of science, oh my God, the mice we're using are manipulating our studies and giving us, perhaps, not just a bad answer, but the exact wrong answer, that the things that are toxic this mouse loves, things that maybe aren't toxic, it's going to show that it's dying early just because of how the mouse is designed.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep. Well, I didn't raise the awareness. I tried to, desperately. I tried to ring that bell for decades, and it just didn't work. And I would have the same kind of experience again and again.

[00:26:02]

A journalist would be interested in the story, and they'd be like, that's fascinating.

[Del Bigtree]

If I had met you when I was on the Doctor's television show, I would have been like, this is it, I'm going to blow this up. By the way, I think I would have gotten away with it, too. Until I ran into the whistleblower at the CDC, I was getting really good. They'd be like, I don't understand, and it's like, trust me, this is going to be a mind blower. And I had a bunch of television execs that had never been around science or medicine, so they would just be like, all right. And then I would do a show like that, and people would be like, blown away. So we could have maybe, you just missed me, I could have done something there.

[Brett Weinstein]

Well, let's put it this way. The people I ran into were all, I think they were cowards. I think they were also not scientifically sophisticated enough to smell a rat, as it were. Because what would happen is, they would talk to me, they'd be fascinated by the story, I'd think they had it. And then they would call somebody, just to confirm that this wasn't insane.

[00:27:06]

And what they would be told wouldn't make any sense, but it would cause them to think, I don't know what this story is, and they would back off and disappear, and I wouldn't hear from them again. So it hasn't gone anywhere, really. As far as I know, we're still using mice with this very defect. And it's crazy, because not only is it the drug safety thing, but these are just bad model organisms for the study of wound repair, for the study of aging, for the study of cancer, for a wide range of things. And so we are blinding ourselves, we're building a literature on a model that's misleading. And the irony is, it doesn't have to be. You could get every advantage that comes from the mice. You can keep the uniform genetic background that comes from the inbreeding. You don't have to give that up in order to breed these animals in a way that doesn't produce this effect. It's very easy to solve. But because we don't admit that it's a problem, it won't be solved. And who knows? I mean, I look at my medicine cabinet and I think, you know, maybe the aspirin is safe.

[00:28:04]

Evergreen State College

Maybe that's been around long enough and we've got the dosage, you know?

[Del Bigtree]

So let's jump into part of your career that then, I mean, obviously you're a person that's willing to challenge the established concept. You're not hung up on trying to make a difference. Then you find yourself at your university. You got a little, I mean, you basically got run off of the university. How did that happen?

[Brett Weinstein]

Well, it's a crazy story. Heather and I, Heather is my wife, co-host of the Dark Horse podcast, co-author of Honor Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. We were, let's just say very popular professors at Evergreen. Evergreen was a very strange school. It was set up in the very early seventies by radicals who literally threw out every normal structure and rule that would exist in a college or university. And they replaced it with something that they thought was better.

[00:29:03]

Approximately half of the things they did were insane. Half of them were brilliant. It never got fixed. So it was always that mixture, right? No departments, no grades, right? Professors had total freedom, much more freedom than you would have as a tenured professor at Harvard. We could teach anything we wanted in any way we wanted. Classes, you took, you taught one class full time. Students took one class full time. They could go on for a full year. So we knew our students really well. So if you if you're the kind of professor who really wants to figure out what can be done in a classroom, in what way could you teach that nobody's ever done it before? That's the place.

[Del Bigtree]

If you're a student looking, you're going to be getting somewhere between a lunatic that has no structure whatsoever to a genius that's found their way. It's a bit like it's like building a house here in Texas. No regulations whatsoever. So you can build the most beautiful house there is, but move into a house and your walls and windows can start falling out because no one made sure that everyone was doing it right.

[00:30:02]

Right. Yeah, that's a beautiful house.

[Brett Weinstein]

So we used to tell our students, we used to tell them, look, the way to go through college here is to figure out, ignore the course description, figure out who the professors are who know something and are really compelled to figure out how to convey it. That'll be a good course no matter what it's on. Yeah. Right. And if you take something because the course description sounds good, but it's from somebody who's trying to minimize their workload, you're not going to learn anything. But anyway, Heather and I loved teaching there. It was so great. And we had this community of students who became fascinated with evolution, who would move from my programs to her programs. Sometimes we team taught and, you know, it would come together. Anyway, we were, we were popular for a reason because we were dedicated to the work, right? Um, and the college hired a new president, a guy named George Bridges. Um, and for whatever reason, George Bridges wanted to totally remake the college into something much more standard.

[00:31:05]

So it was going to rob the students who needed a place like Evergreen in order to thrive. And anyway, so he wanted to revolutionize or de-revolutionize the college really. But he couldn't do it because the founders of the college had set it up in a way that the faculty had the ability to just shut him down. It was the inverse of a normal college and the faculty were reflexively anti-administrator. So they were suspicious of a president, especially a new one who hadn't been there. So what he did was he impaneled a diversity, equity and inclusion committee, a large committee hand selected. He actually mapped the faculty. He figured out where the tensions were. He figured out who was going to be a useful bully. He constructed a weapon and he used that thing to effectively seed a race riot.

[00:32:00]

Now Heather was on sabbatical the year that this went down, but I saw this thing coming. I had the equivalent of tenure as did Heather. Heather was literally the college's most popular professor. And so I saw this diversity, equity and inclusion committee basically, you know, with the college in its crosshairs. And it was both my job to stand up and say, actually, you're going to destroy this college. It's not going to function after you do what you're planning. It was my job to object.

[Del Bigtree]

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee

Was the goal to take you had a sort of a teacher, faculty led establishment. But if you could somehow turn the teachers against each other, you could.

[Brett Weinstein]

Was that what the idea was to use this or how is this going to the race war that President Bridges started was, I think this is conjecture, but I did know the man reasonably well. It was designed to get the faculty so that they were at each other's throats and could not shut down his program to make the college why he wanted to remake the college.

[00:33:05]

Right. I don't know.

[Del Bigtree]

The divide and conquer. Right. Would they have strength? I need them to fight each other so that they lose their strength and power of collective thought and not bargaining necessarily, but to sort of stand their ground. I'm going to get them divided.

[Brett Weinstein]

Absolutely. OK, so anyway, he sets this thing in motion. I start attending every faculty meeting because there are bombshells being dropped all the time and faculty meetings have been restructured so we can't ask questions. And so I'm like collecting information on what's being done and I'm distributing it by email. And anyway, so I become an obstacle to what he's doing and. Something behind the scenes happens and I start I become the focus of ire of the diversity, equity and inclusion committee, and in fact, I have one. A.

[00:34:00]

Antagonist who is rather dedicated to undoing what I'm trying to accomplish and to make a long story short, there's a faculty meeting in which I stand up publicly. The faculty is in the process of deliberating about a requirement that we would inflict on ourselves that every member of the faculty every year would write a document reflecting on their progress at addressing their own racism, which was simply assumed to exist. This was as liberal a college as exists. Yeah. It did not have a racism problem. Right. Right. But we were supposed to do this. And the idea was once you get people in an official document reflecting on their own racism, then you can use those things. These would be public documents that would be available when somebody was up for promotion or whatever.

[00:35:00]

You could use it for firing purposes. So anyway, I stood up in this faculty meeting and I said, this is a terrible idea. And I explained why the vote was something like 70 to two. Right. Everybody embraced this thing. And then immediately at the end of the faculty meeting, a bunch of tenured faculty came up to me and they said, you know, you were right, but I had to vote for it anyway. Right. Wow. So it was that kind of environment. But anyway, one year to the day after that faculty meeting, 50 students that I had never met streamed into my classroom accusing me of racism, demanding that I apologize, resign or be fired. Now, it took me a month or two to figure out what they were expecting to happen. I think they were expecting this was 2017, May 23rd, nine thirty in the morning. I think they were expecting that any time some colorful group of students storms into the classroom of a straight white professor in 2017, that professor's students are going to abandon the professor and join the protest, because no doubt they all have complaints about feeling that they didn't get the right grade on something or, you know, yeah, they would have grievances.

[00:36:22]

Not one of my students defected. In fact, they did the opposite. They spoke up on my behalf, including students of color. What are you talking about? Racist. This is insane. In fact, we had been studying like evolutionarily, what is race and why does it cause this problem in civilizations and all of that? So they got the opposite effect that they wanted. But what unfolded over the next week was remarkable. So the protesters who were accusing me of racism, again, people I'd never met, filmed everything they did. They were very proud of it and they uploaded it to the Internet.

[00:37:01]

The Internet scratched its head over, I stood up and I said, no, I'm not I'm not racist. I refuse to admit any such thing. I tried to reason with them, you know, I did my best to do you know, I was a college professor confronted with confused college students. It felt like my professional responsibility to help them see the world more clearly. Right. Right. And when the public saw this, it was like, wait a minute. Why? Why are they going after him? He seems all right. Right. And so that sort of began to open people's eyes. It was this important event because it broke the DEI narrative.

Campus Riots and Tucker Carlson

But what happened on the college campus was that the protest in my classroom very quickly descended into campus wide riots. The president of the college, George Bridges, literally ordered the campus police. This was a real police force, but they were under his his command.

[00:38:00]

He ordered them to stay out of it. In fact, he ordered them to lock themselves in their police station, which they did. And the campus descended into literal anarchy and then chaos. Students were roaming the campus, taking over for the police. They actually battered students. They were the police told me the police alerted me that I needed to stay away from campus because the rioters were looking for me. There was a public road that came through campus. They were stopping traffic and they were searching cars looking for me. This is blocks from my house. I'm literally being hunted by students who are enraged at racism that is not present. And the police have been ordered to stay out of it. And they've told me I need to stay away because nobody's going to protect me. So this is madness.

[00:39:02]

And anyway, to make a long story short, of course, the press didn't show up with one exception. The one exception being Tucker Carlson reached out and he said, well, you want to tell that story? And at the time, I thought Tucker Carlson was quite the villain, but I knew that the story needed to reach a wider audience. If the story was kept on campus, it was not going to get understood and adjudicated correctly. So I took up Carlson on his offer, which I'm very glad I did. I no longer think ill of him. He is a great guy and a real patriot and not an ounce of racism to him either. And he treated me very compassionately, which caught my attention right away where he could have basically taken up the idea, well, you know, you're a liberal, you got what you deserve.

[00:40:01]

Right. He he was compassionate and, you know, clearly disturbed at what had happened to me. I'm troubled by what this implies about the current state of the left.

[Tucker Carlson]

Well, you think you said people shouldn't be allowed to speak or not on the basis of their skin color, which seems like a foundational belief of the left and one that I agree with strongly. And for that, they physically threatened you and are trying to get you fired.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yes, they're they are absolutely trying to get me fired. And they believe that my words in my email are transparently racist. And I think we're caught quite off guard when people who were not at Evergreen read my letter and couldn't find any racism in it. Well, yeah, just just the opposite. So this became an iconic event. It, of course, got me portrayed as far right, which, of course, is the opposite of the truth. But but anyway, that's that's the short version.

[00:41:01]

Wow. And so I assume you left the job. Heather and I resigned our positions. It had become, you know, at the point that your boss orders the police to stay out of riots that are built around a phony accusation of you and people are hunting you on campus. It's not a place you can teach. Right. So we left. We got a settlement from the college enough to give us a couple of years to figure out what to do next. And what we ended up doing is writing a book, starting a podcast, speaking around the country in the world. And there it is.

[Del Bigtree]

Well, we're going to swing back around to all of this because it really helps me understand why you're going where you are now.

The COVID-19 Pandemic

But let's get to the place where I would say sort of you and I end up meeting up, which is around this covid pandemic.

The Malone, Kirsch, and Weinstein Interview

And, you know, the first time I ever heard of you was the interview that you did with Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch.

[00:42:01]

Yep. Let's just look at a clip really quick.

[Brett Weinstein]

Robert Malone is an MD, PhD, no masters, masters and MD. He is also and most significantly here, the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology from back as a graduate student. Am I correct?

[Robert Malone]

Yeah. And I'm also a licensed physician in Maryland.

[Brett Weinstein]

This is your area of expertise, is that what the what these vaccines do is they encode spike protein alone so that the immune system will learn to recognize spike protein and will catch it quickly when one is confronted with covid. But the spike protein itself, we now know, is very dangerous. It's cytotoxic. Is that a fair description?

[Robert Malone]

More than fair. And I alerted the FDA about this risk months and months and months ago. So we had a discussion.

[Brett Weinstein]

So if it was very dangerous, but it did what the brochure on these vaccines says it should do, which is lodged in the membrane of the cells that are doing the transcribing, it would be a lot less destructive.

[00:43:02]

Right.

[Robert Malone]

I think that's fair. And you're right. It's not just the literature that that the documentation about the vaccine, it's the prior literature that was put out by the people that developed it, that developed these clones. So they were they were aware that there was a risk of a spike being biologically active and having adverse events if it did not stay stuck to the cells that were transfected that got the RNA and made it. OK. And and they used a genetic engineering method of putting a transmembrane domain on it to ensure that it stayed anchored and stayed put. And there they did limited non-clinical studies to say, looks like it stays stuck. We engineered it to stay stuck. They did. And and they published that. Here's the thing. Special engineered.

[00:44:00]

OK. Is that that's generally not good enough in non-clinical data package. So before we get a product released to use in humans in the normal situation where we're not in a rush, we have some really rigorous tests that have to be done in animals. And revealing that spike gets cleaved off of expressed cells and becomes free is something that absolutely should have been known and understood well before this ever gotten put into humans. I'll just leave it at that.

[Steve Kirsch]

This particular vaccine, because of the spike protein and because it breaks, it cleaves off the cell and it goes throughout your body and your brain, your heart, anywhere that you can have these symptoms that are so varied, whether it's a 16 year old who can't talk or see 48 hours after injection or someone who's, you know, handshakes the victims of this of this vaccine.

[00:45:03]

They're not being able to tell their story.

[Del Bigtree]

So that interview, I mean, for us, just a little bit, you know, and you probably know by now what we were up to at that time. But, you know, we had been on an investigation to vaccination just on the testing on is this being properly tested for safety? Forget efficacy. Is it being tested for safety? We have done that work from the beginning, like the end of 2016, been bringing lawsuits against Health and Human Services, CDC, FDA, NIH, saying you're not you're not doing proper safety tests. You're not long enough. You're not using a placebo group. None of this is being done right. And, of course, we were being called anti-vaxxers in the whole bit. So when Covid hit, you know, all of a sudden for us, I mean, we had been at this for three, you know, years or so, really had seen how the playbook worked for how they rush vaccines through the market.

[00:46:01]

Then this mRNA technology pops up. We're investigating and has a terrible track record in animal models, like awful. And now Donald Trump's going to warp speed this this process. We're fighting to like if you're going to do trials on this, you better have a placebo. But we actually won that battle. They were going to use a meningococcal vaccine as the placebo group in the giant trials. And we told them we will shout to the entire world, which we've been winning lawsuits against you. We will prove that you didn't have a proper safety trial this time and in real time. But for us, we felt like they rushed right into our battle zone, which was you're about to do what we know you've been doing the whole time and the whole world is going to watch it. But even so, we were under attack, being suppressed. And what is your evidence? Suddenly we saw this interview and I just said, oh, my God, this is the moment we have always been waiting for, because prior to this moment, all you ever had was Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

[00:47:05]

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Del Bigtree]

Up until this moment and this show that you did, there's just one lunatic doctor that said that this is, you know, causes all these other, you know, autism, whatever it is. He's a whack and no one else in science believes that the vaccines have a problem. I feel like when we saw this, I said, this guy, Dr. Robert Malone, claiming to be one of the inventors of this technology is saying, dude, we have messed up and we've messed up in a big way. And you were able to have this conversation, as we just saw, getting so deep in the science. So not only is there Robert Malone, who you could say is nuts, you've got this Brett Weinstein character that clearly understands biology to a level and he's agreeing with him. And then you had Steve Kirsch coming from, you know, a background in Silicon Valley and understanding, you know, technical sciences and things. It was absolutely, for us, like the clouds had finally parted, a sunbeam came down and here comes the cavalry.

[00:48:07]

Here comes real scientists to finally join us and understand what we've been talking about. That's what happened over here.

The Significance of the Interview

What happened? How did this interview happen?

[Brett Weinstein]

How did you find Dr. Robert Malone? So first of all, let me just say, I didn't know that. I didn't know that that had been important to you, you didn't know, you didn't have no idea that that interview, which stayed up for a very short period of time. I mean, I must say, I'm sure there are some very expensive podcasts out there, high production values stuff. Yeah. But for normal podcasts, that's got to have been one of the most expensive podcasts ever. That podcast, along with the one that I did with Pierre Corey, resulted in YouTube demonetizing the two channels that Dark Horse had and setting us up to be removed from YouTube altogether.

[00:49:11]

We are still demonetized. They have never, they now run ads on our stuff. They're still demonetized. That podcast has been removed from YouTube, has not been put back up, even though it has been vindicated. And I think the powers that be also had a reaction to that podcast, which was, oh, this cannot be right. Because if we're going to have people actually making the science accessible, talking about why it is that these so-called vaccines cannot be safe, if we're going to have that conversation, then, you know, you just you're pulling back the curtain on, you know, on the man running the machines. So in any case, the system had an allergic reaction to that podcast.

[00:50:02]

You had a here comes the cavalry reaction. Now, the story of that podcast, I wish it was more fitting for how apparently important it was. What happened was I had run into Steve Kirsch. And what he had done with the data that had accumulated on adverse events, even at that early point, was impressive to me. And I wanted to talk to him about it. But I was nervous about it. He wasn't positioned. You know, he was a tech guy. He's the inventor of the optical mouse. Right. This is not his area.

[Del Bigtree]

And so I was nervous about he had just been injured by the product. I understand. Right. Was pissed off. Pretty decent research, just started doing his own research. Smart guy. Had a hold of you or how did how did that connection happen?

[Brett Weinstein]

How did that connection happen? I don't remember. OK, I don't know. But I think maybe he reached out. But in any case, I was talking to him in advance and like, can we really do this?

[00:51:02]

Are you the guy who can bring this evidence forward? And he said, well, maybe we should bring in my friend Robert. And I said, who's Robert? And he said, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology. And I was like, run that by me again. He's the inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology. Wait, and he's on our side like what what is going on? So I said, by all means, let's let's bring in Robert. So, you know, that that podcast that you saw, that's the day I met him. He came to my house. He was, of course, you know, everything you could want and more. You know, a lovely human being who loves the science. He and I have to be careful because, you know, the love of the biology underlying the thing is going to take us over. Yeah. To lose all entertainment value altogether or just.

[Audience]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

Exactly. So anyway, I mean, I I do remember it's now it's kind of a bittersweet memory.

[00:52:07]

But I did say to him, I said, you know, Robert, you're you're the inventor of this technology. You and I both know how much potential this technology has. It solves one of the tremendously important problems in gene therapy. But you're going to lose any chance at the Nobel Prize that is eventually going to be awarded for this if you go on this podcast. And he was aware of the issue and decided to do it anyway. And of course, that has now happened. The Nobel Prize, amazingly enough, was given to the folks who pseudo Eurodene and messed up. Yeah, the worst design flaw. Yeah. Right. So anyway, I do think people need to realize that as much as Robert Malone has, of course, become a hero of the medical freedom movement, that that story has a depth to it.

[00:53:03]

This is somebody who took the course of righteousness instead of the course of fame and fortune. And anyway, I think I think we all owe him a major debt of gratitude because the obvious dangers of these inoculations would have been much harder to establish if their literal inventor had not been ready to to acknowledge them on camera.

[Del Bigtree]

Robert Malone's Role in mRNA Technology

You there are there's questions at times whether he can be considered an inventor of this technology. I know that you do your research for those that may be questioning. Why do you believe he should be credited with that?

[Brett Weinstein]

Well, because he's got the receipts. I mean, the fact is, unfortunately, for those who want to play these games in narrative space, we have a legal system that is designed to adjudicate exactly who is and who isn't the inventor of what. Right. It's the patent system.

[00:54:00]

And so he's got the receipts. He's got the laboratory evidence. It's very clear. Now, can you make the argument that there are other co inventors? Yeah, there are a couple of people who can be co credited. But is he does he is he is not one of the people who was simply in some large collection of folks, not like some P.A. in the background that's making credit for.

[Del Bigtree]

I was like in the room watching. I've seen that happen. Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

No, this is this is the inventor of the technology. And if you actually sit down and talk to him about what the history of laboratory experiments is, I mean, this this is a genius who did solve all of the problems necessary to make this work. Now, that didn't make it safe. Right. Right. We have not solved the safety problem here. And so this is not a technology that should be used on human beings under any circumstances.

[Del Bigtree]

And it's just it's a marvelous thing that that Robert when you were doing the interview, I mean, how long was the conversation before you did the interview? I mean, did you have a really good sense of where he's at?

[00:55:01]

Or was there some level of discovery happening in real time as we're watching that?

[Brett Weinstein]

It's almost all in real time. We probably had. Ten minutes of conversation before we turned on the cameras and went.

[Del Bigtree]

So I mean, so while it was happening, because it was mind blowing watching it, it's hard sometimes as an interviewer to step out. You're in the middle of it. Are you thinking this is this is monumental? What's happening here?

[Brett Weinstein]

Oh, yeah.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. I mean, clearly, clearly, because so I have skills remembering the dates and the order of things is not one of them. Yes. But Heather and I, our entree into the, you know, the rabbit hole of the so-called vaccine safety and effectiveness was a simple observation.

[00:56:00]

We were being told that these vaccines were safe. That literally could not possibly be true.

[Audience]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

Like I can say with 100 percent certainty, there is no way that this could have turned out to be an accurate claim. And the reason for that is because safety doesn't mean what people think it means. We think it means without harm. That's not what it means. It means without risk. There's no way you can inject a brand new vaccine into people that hasn't existed long enough for you to find out what happens to them five years later and tell me that it's safe. It's not without risk. Yeah. You can tell me we have not seen any harm, which would have been a lie. But you could say we have not seen any harm. Right. Right. Is it safe? We don't know. It's safe as far as we know. But we don't know that it is safe. And so at the point that they're telling me it is safe. Alarm bells are going off. I know that that's a lie. I don't know what kind of lie, but I know it's a lie.

[00:57:01]

[Audience]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

And so at the point you're lying to me about something that is as profound an intervention as a shot that, you know, because I'm a biologist, I know what it means that you're going to put mRNA into me and you're going to get my cells to translate it into a protein. Right. I didn't know the full depth of it. I didn't know that they had stabilized the mRNA so that it didn't dissipate quickly. I get rid of it. I didn't know that it was going to circulate around the body and that it could inoculate any cell at any tissue. I didn't know any of that yet. But the point was, all right, you just told me something that tells me you're not honest. Right. What else don't I know? And that is that's the label on that rabbit hole. What else don't I know? And of course, in this area, there's no shortage of things down that hole. Right. There's a whole lot they didn't tell us. And it just gets worse and worse, the more, you know, I mean, right through, you know, IgG four. Yeah.

[00:58:00]

Right. It took a long time to get to that revelation that these inoculations, if you've had two or more of them, actually turned down your immune system anytime it sees the spike protein.

[Del Bigtree]

Right. So now you're now you're more likely to get infected more. I mean, I keep seeing headlines as though it's like a brand new headline in a bigger and bigger paper. More the more vaccines you get, more COVID vaccines you get, the more infections you're going to have, the less I mean, it's like when we were saying this, of course, a couple of years ago. Now it's getting to be bigger and bigger science.

Censorship on YouTube

Did you did you were you nervous at all that what was being said could get you canceled on YouTube? Because that that was that was also sort of the beginning of that. Censorship was just I mean, I mean, maybe you may have even triggered it at the level that that started happening.

[Brett Weinstein]

Um, I definitely knew it was a possibility. OK, in fact, the way that history will have recorded that is in general, our guest appearances are recorded and we release them later.

[00:59:06]

They're not edited, but we don't do them live because it's just technically. Yeah, difficult. We did the Corey podcast and the Malone Kirsch podcast live. And the reason that we did them live was because it would not give YouTube warning of what was coming. Got it. We wanted them to have to take it in real time. So we were aware of the danger. You know, I have a little saying, which is no matter how cynical you get, you're still being naive. So, you know, I look back on my mindset from that era and I think, yeah, it's going to be a problem.

[Del Bigtree]

It's no, it was right. But we're going to deal with this. No, we just under the we released a crack.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, we we we we tapped Goliath on the shoulder. And in fact, I now know from insiders at YouTube that the decision to demonetize and not remonetize Dark Horse was made in the C-suite at YouTube.

[01:00:05]

Right. This was top level style. Now, there is a part of me that is I mean, you must have the same thing, but just structured in a way where it's like, look, you're telling me you're going to put human lives in jeopardy and lie about it. Yeah. And you're going to tell me as an American that I don't get to talk about what you're doing. I'm sorry.

[Audience]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

Come hell or high water, I'm going to talk about what you're doing.

[Audience]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

And you know, like I said, that was an expensive podcast. They knocked out half our family income in the space of an hour. Well, you know, one channel than the second channel demonetized permanently. It was like, boom, you know, this is and frankly, it's torturous interference, right? That's the idea as well. If you're going to talk about it, then you're going to have to figure out what else you do for a living.

[01:01:00]

Yeah. I don't regret it, though our lives would look very different if we hadn't done that. The podcast was absolutely taking off in terms of viewership. And even though YouTube pays terribly with their ads, it was making money in a way we frankly never expected. We saw that for one month and then it was demonetized and we have not gotten a penny from them since. On the other hand, look at where we are in twenty, twenty four. You know, the fact is the narrative that they were selling. Broke, it shattered, and there are still parts of it that people believe.

[Del Bigtree]

People still are confused about what happened with the report, really coming down to who you're where you're getting your news and information from that we are literally living in two different worlds. Yes. So incredibly different.

Living in Different Worlds

My father used to contemplate this with me. He's like, I think that we there may be a point where we see the world so differently.

[01:02:04]

This is actually years ago that you may not be able to see the person you're crossing the street. He would talk about Martian Chronicles and remember like that film series. But like there's like two passages of time. The aliens aren't seeing the people. We are so far apart now in perspectives that it's we are almost quite literally living in different worlds now with people like right down the street from us.

[Brett Weinstein]

Well, I would say there are three groups, though. There are two groups that just literally have world views that can't be reconciled. Yeah. And then there's a vast group in the middle that can't quite admit where they are. Right.

[Del Bigtree]

That's why that's why I talk. That's what I think I do this show for.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Del Bigtree]

Is to and I say to people, don't waste any of your energy on the people that have already poured the cement around their feet and are jumping into the ocean. There is a lot of people sitting on the railing right now that are just trying to figure out why am I not feeling comfortable with what I'm seeing?

[01:03:01]

Right. What's going on? Let's get to a place where you and I sort of found some discomfort.

The Better Way Conference

This was at I don't know if this is the first time we met in person. It might have been. But we were in England at the Better Way Conference. Yeah. And I sort of locked horns with Geert van den Bosch. Take a look at this. I think there's a conversation that needs to happen right here and now if we're truly going to discuss a better way forward that is been set off. And some of it's a bit of a firestorm that Geert van den Bosch has created online. For those of you that have been asking those questions, it really comes down to vaccinations. I think that many in this audience and out there in the viewing world right now would think that after this covid pandemic and the problems that we've seen with this vaccine, that an event like this would come to the conclusion that there isn't a place for vaccines moving forward. So I want to ask a few questions of this panel. I'm going to put you on the spot. I haven't done it on my show.

[01:04:00]

Maybe you'll never come on again. But we are truly, truly going to have a scientific conversation. We can't be afraid to have this one. Geert, you have talked about how dangerous it is vaccinating the youth, the children in this pandemic because of their natural and powerful innate immunity. What is the difference? Why is it that you came here today and said we must continue vaccinating children with all of the other vaccinations and not trusting innate immunity and that that natural immune system when it comes to childhood illness?

[Geert Vanden Bossche]

The problem is that we are facing two completely different situations when we are again vaccinating the children during a pandemic. Very clearly, very clearly, we are not contributing. So the children are not contributing to herd immunity. We prevent this reservoir. This is way more complex than you are discussing.

[01:05:01]

If you are discussing about the safety issues, for example, I mean, you are not considering the impact of losing herd immunity. If you have diseases like flu, like Corona, like even measles that can spread asymptomatically. How do you think that without vaccination you are going to maintain your herd immunity? Please tell me. OK, it's by having the next the next epidemic, of course. Do you want to have this? Can you calculate what the damage will be of that? Of that? You cannot. You know, this is simply based on on, you know, knowledge of immunology, herd immunity. You cannot compare like, you know, monkey pox, for example, where you have a really protective immune response to cytolytic T-cells, for example, I would say this with other things. So I'm having a huge problem with with with taking this the shortcuts. Right. And we're saying no injections.

[01:06:01]

OK, guys, then we are not going to vaccinate these diseases that we have kept under control for many years. I have two points immunity. Lose that herd immunity and have your epidemics to reestablish it every single time.

[Brett Weinstein]

I hate to be this guy, but the problem is really that we all feel entitled to have a simple solution and we waited far too long for there to be one. Right. The problem is like two layers up. Right. Vaccination is too important to be in the hands of a private corporation. Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to hand it to government? Our governments, have you seen how they behave? That wouldn't be safe now, would it? So at some level, this is not an indictment of vaccination. It's an indictment of the system in which it is embedded. We're going to have to solve that problem. And if you think that's going to be simple, then you haven't been paying attention. We have a serious problem in Western civilization. Every institution has been captured. We have to solve that problem. Then we can talk about vaccination.

[01:07:01]

[Del Bigtree]

I know that's its own conversation that happened on the stage, and certainly I had laid out all of the safety side, like all of the drops in child, you know, the fact that we had a rise in, you know, all sorts of neurological and autoimmune disease. You didn't want to talk about any of that. It's not his focus. I don't really care to talk about that right now. What I'm more interested in is we went to dinner that night and I don't know if it's purposeful. Somehow you and I got down to the same table and I have some recollection of that conversation, though it may not be fully accurate, but we've never actually had the moment to reflect on that actual conversation. And my memory of it was something to the effect that you believe that, you know, there was that because I was being so radical in my messaging, that all vaccines are a problem, just like covid, that I was undermining what was happening in this movement around the covid vaccine, that it was it was not helping, that I was distracting the conversation.

[01:08:09]

And and you made a point, which I did really take home, which is this battle you've been fighting. You know, you are you seem to be unaware of what you have just achieved, which is and you said rightfully so. Look around this room right now. We're at dinner. It was Robert Malone and Geert van den Bosch and other like great scientists that had joined this cause, as we discussed during sort of a spark by your interview of Robert Malone. I did. I did leave, you know, thinking, you know, Bretton may be right. I'm fighting a battle the same way as though I'm all alone, which I've been for, you know, four or five years. And I'm not recalibrating to the fact that there is a a real support group that is now here and I'm kind of freaking them out.

[01:09:02]

Is that your recollection of that conversation?

[Brett Weinstein]

Reflections on the Dinner Conversation

Yeah, almost exactly. Not only freaking them out, but potentially putting them in jeopardy. Now, that conversation meant something to me, too. I was very impressed with the way you were able to hear the critique in real time. You didn't become defensive. You heard it for what it was. And it was an observation about, you know, a couple of things. One is just strategically speaking, this isn't the battle you were in two years ago. It's a different battle because there are a lot of people who are awake to something.

[Audience]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

And then there's a question about, well, what is the discovery? What is the implication? And at that point, you and I were somewhere quite different. And I must say my position has moved because this has forced me to learn. About the reality of how these products are produced. Which I'm now embarrassed to say, I had simply assumed that they were produced in a reasonable fashion, that the level of corruption was sort of human scale, that, you know, that there would be embarrassing things in it.

[01:10:14]

There would be dangers that hadn't been confessed. But I was shocked to discover the level at which the safety work simply had not been done, which has now been acknowledged by, you know, one of the leading proponents. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, my position has moved because it was predicated on bad assumptions about what these inoculations were.

[Del Bigtree]

Vaccines as a Great Achievement

I mean, to the point in some people, I'm sure you get accused, oh, he's a shill. He's working for the other side. I mean, the book you published lists in the sort of top three great achievements in science vaccines.

[Brett Weinstein]

One of the three great. So the point that we make in the book is that medicine is a very mixed bag.

[01:11:01]

There's a lot of harm to be done. That there are three great achievements and the three great achievements that Heather and I list are surgery, vaccination and antibiotics. And that was a book that we completed in 2019, right before the pandemic. Yeah. What? And, you know, I want to walk up a careful line here in principle. So I should say I'm an evolutionary biologist, but as an undergraduate, I took a course in immunobiology in the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. I had a habit of taking courses that weren't in my particular trajectory just because I thought that subject matter was interesting. Turns out to have been one of the greatest things I ever did for myself as a human being and as a biologist, just the understanding of how the immune system works is it pays dividends all the time.

[01:12:01]

But it had left me with a correct understanding of the way vaccines are supposed to work, which I still think in principle is a hugely important contributor to public health. I am now not compelled that the system that has the current batch of vaccines and certainly the vaccines that are being designed, designed basically a a refresh based on the mRNA platform that cannot possibly be safe enough to contemplate. So my sense is, and I used to say this about television, I say it's not the box, it's the business model. There's nothing inherently dangerous about a television. You can have a documentary about nature. You can have science programming. There's lots of good stuff that can come through your TV. It becomes dangerous when the business model causes it to parasitize you.

[01:13:00]

Same can be said for social media. And what I'm now coming to understand is that the the mechanisms that are employed by vaccine manufacturers and the methods used to test or really to obscure safety signals make the products invalid from the get go.

[Audience]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

The Dangers of Adjuvants

You know, when I at the beginning of the pandemic, I did not really know what an adjuvant was. At the moment, I discovered that we were using a trick to hyperactivate the immune system in order to make the vaccine work. My thought was, how could that possibly be safe? Right. And what does it have to do with all of the allergies that we scratch our heads over? Right.

[Del Bigtree]

It doesn't make sense that I'm citing the immune system, the body of toxins, you know, into inflammation. I mean, in a world where inflammation is the bad guy, this product's designed to cause inflammation in order to work in a totally nonspecific way.

[01:14:03]

[Brett Weinstein]

And what's more, if so, let's take the aluminum that is currently the favorite adjuvant. If you're going to inject somebody with aluminum to hyperactivate their immune system in order to get it to respond to an antigen that you've put in a shot that it won't respond to under ordinary circumstances. There should be a long list of instructions that come with that. Here are the things that you should avoid eating for the next two weeks or a month. Here are the seasons in which we are not going to give you this shot because ragweed is blooming. I don't know what the instructions would be exactly, but there would be instructions about how to minimize the likelihood of triggering the immune system to react to something that is not a pathogen where you will suffer for the rest of your life for its reactivity. And I've never heard of this.

[Del Bigtree]

And this is what I love about what you do. Like and for me, you have given me new ways of getting an idea across or even understanding something that I've been saying in a deeper way.

[01:15:05]

But essentially what you're saying so that people understand this is that the vaccine is almost like it opens it like if there's a lock on your your your your the coding of your computer, it opens it up. So at this point, anything's allowed to come in and rewrite onto your software. You're creating this opening so that if you're breathing in ragweed right now while your body's going through the several days of like, oh, I'm supposed to be told that's an enemy, you know, right now, I've just triggered the system, say you're under attack, create antibodies to this. But if I'm eating cheese at that moment, if I'm eating eggs at that moment, if I'm breathing ragweed at that moment, my body's going, oh, my enemy, my enemy. And starts creating all sorts of unnecessary immune responses to things that could be just environmental, not a part of the vaccine. Is that sort of?

[Brett Weinstein]

The Problem with the mRNA Platform

Yes. So I actually learned some of this from Bobby.

[01:16:02]

There is a and the oldest vaccine technology involves using an attenuated pathogen, that is to say, a relative of the thing that actually threatens your health and giving you an infection. Your body responds to infections. It's one of the things it does very well. So if it has an infection, it can learn the antigen that it is supposed to be targeting. Now, vaccine manufacturers do not like this technology, and there are reasons they don't like it. One, it's cumbersome, right? You have to actually cultivate these organisms. And because you're cultivating them, they can evolve. They can evolve once the patient has the infection. So it's a little bit scary that that technology. But what they've replaced it with is an inferior technology where they separate the antigens, where you're getting, you know, something inert and dead. And the body does not respond to it like an infection and therefore does not develop the immunity.

[01:17:02]

Right. They're weak is what they are. And as a trick to trigger the immune system to react as if it has an infection, they're basically giving you a chemical sickness, right? They're tricking your body into thinking it's sick so that the body then is in surveillance mode, trying to figure out which of the particles that are present are actually hostile with no mechanism for telling it how to distinguish between ragweed and, you know, some antigen of a virus. So, of course, this would cause autoimmune disorders, allergies. It will cause dysregulation of that entire extremely elegant system. Yeah. So I guess what I'm realizing and, you know, I'm still somewhere in this trajectory. Yeah. Is that much of what. Allows us to protect our own health. Are based on assumptions that.

[01:18:00]

Simply are not met by the mechanisms that are being employed, right? You think that there is a system that tests vaccines carefully to make sure that nothing is injected into you for which the benefit does not exceed the cost. That is simply. Not true. These things are being created because they're profitable. They are being created in ways that are economically efficient at arbitrary cost to human health. The ways in which they can disrupt the body. Here's one. This is a significant change in my understanding. I used to think that inoculations were an elegant, minimal intervention that gave a large benefit. Right. Because that's more or less how it's described in the textbook. You know, a very tiny gauge needle injects a small amount of a liquid and suddenly your immune system is simply informed of something it didn't know. I now regard anything that is delivered.

[01:19:02]

Into the tissue with a hypodermic needle as a radical intervention, right? You will often hear people who are defending, you know, shots that have mercury in them by saying, well, yes, there's mercury in it, but, you know, it's less than there is in a tuna fish sandwich. Well, that is a a game of smoke and mirrors, because one, there shouldn't be any mercury in a tuna fish sandwich. That is the result of humans polluting the environment. Two, the amount of mercury in a tuna fish sandwich is not trivial, which is why pregnant women are advised to avoid them. Yeah. Three, there is a huge difference between ingesting something into your gut where your gut is wired not to transport things into your interior, your actual interior. So most of that mercury will pass through you if you eat it. Whereas injecting it into you, this is not something you would normally be encountering.

[01:20:04]

Your body doesn't have the mechanisms to deal with it. So its consequences are arbitrary. So in any case, when we inoculate, it seems like a minimal intervention. It is a radical intervention. And I still believe that vaccination in the sense meant the original sense is potentially an extremely valuable intervention. But I absolutely do not trust the mechanisms that generate these products or that test them either for how effective they are or how safe they are.

[Del Bigtree]

While we're on the subject, because you're so good at describing these things, you said something about the platform, the mRNA technology. To me, when we were just in Switzerland that I didn't fully understand. You know, I've been really caught up with the spike. I've been saying the spike protein was the worst decision. Why would you make the bioweapon like the weapon itself?

[01:21:02]

What your body is recreating? Usually a vaccine wants me to focus on, you know, the weaker part of the bar, the wheels of the tank, if you will, so that I still take out the tank. But I'm not at risk for taking, you know, having the bioweapon wreak havoc through my body. And so that's what I feel like was one of the catastrophic mistakes, which even Malone and you kind of touch on in that first interview. And so the myocarditis, pericarditis, the fact that there's spike protein being found there, we're all really sort of obsessed with that. But you said it really doesn't matter if it's spike protein. That's not actually the problem is that it's the technology itself.

The Dangers of the mRNA Platform

Explain that. Sure.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's a problem. It's not the problem. Right. And I agree with you that the problem with spike protein is that because this is the molecule that binds to the ACE2 receptor, if you produce a bunch of it, we've got ACE2 receptors all over many tissues. So you don't want to produce something that's the exact. You know, you don't want to distribute keys at random that are opening locks.

[01:22:00]

Right. That's not a biologically wise thing to do. So the spike protein was a bad choice. It is not the core problem with the mRNA platform. And the reason I think we are being led to understand that even to the extent that the system that produces these things is beginning to acknowledge the hazards, it wants us to focus on spike protein and it wants to rescue the platform as if the unfortunate thing.

[Del Bigtree]

And and there's tons of it being made like they're like canceling, going after mRNA is the future. Right. Technology.

[Brett Weinstein]

So let me explain in simple terms why this technology in this form is dead on arrival. Yeah. The mRNA platform takes a message, a transcript of a gene and it imports it. It imports it into the body in lipid nanoparticle. Lipid just means fat and fats are absorbed by other fats.

[01:23:02]

Your cells are all covered in fat. So we were initially told that the vaccines stayed in the site of injection. Right. Obviously, that wasn't going to be right here. And it turned out to be true. Yeah. Which means that they're going to circulate around the body and the blood and the lymph. Where will they get taken up? They will get taken up arbitrarily around the body, wherever the lipid nanoparticle bumps into a cell and the fats merge. And this transcript is injected into the cytoplasm of the cell. When the cell takes that transcript and it translates it into protein, the ribosome picks up the mRNA and it reads it. Now, there's a lot of flaws there. The way we've stabilized these molecules makes the ribosome prone to produce garbage on the other end, which is dangerous. Even if it worked flawlessly, if it does, if it's a perfect copy and really like just delivers exactly what the recipe said to make, if it did exactly what the brochure said, it would still be deadly dangerous.

[01:24:02]

And the reason is that the immune system, one of the things I learned in that in that immunobiology course all those years ago was that the immune system has an incredibly elegant mechanism for distinguishing self from non-self. Your immune system is composed of a huge number of cells. They can react in principle to any biological molecule that they encounter. But early in life, in utero, in fact, there is a sorting process where all of the cells, you have this huge array of cells that react to different things. All of the cells that are triggered in utero must be reacting to you because you're the only thing present, right? You're insulated from the world. So the immune system turns off all those lineages that are reactive.

[Del Bigtree]

Everything I'm seeing right now is me is me.

[Brett Weinstein]

Don't attack it. Those things are those are on the white list, right? Everything else is foreign.

[01:25:02]

So when you're born, the point is all of the cells that would react to you are already turned off. And anything that your immune system sees is now foreign, which doesn't make everything a pathogen. But it means those things are not self. So a self non-self recognition system is the core of a properly functioning immune system. When you get sick with a virus. A virus gets into your body, it invades a cell and it hijacks it. That cell now starts producing virus and that cell will burst open. It will spill over to the next adjacent cell and eventually some tissue will start leaking virus. You'll cough it onto somebody. They'll start producing virus themselves. So the immune system looks for a hallmark of viral infection in order to cure this. The hallmark is a cell that is making self antigens and a cell that is making foreign antigens.

[01:26:03]

Any time the immune system sees a cell making both self and foreign, that is a virally infected cell. And the one and only right thing to do is to destroy it, kill it. Yeah. So if that happens in your arm, in your liver, the surface of your lungs. It's not positive. It's a loss of tissue, but it's a manageable loss. Right. If that happens in your heart, it's a disaster, especially if it's a bunch of cells, because your heart, for reasons that actually go back to that telomere story that we talked about up top, your heart has almost no capacity to repair. What it does instead is it scars over and scar tissue is not the equivalent of the tissue that was replaced, especially not something that's got to be flexible and moving. Right. It can't you know, it can't fail for 80 years of continuous pumping. So these shots, by their very nature, if they work exactly as the manufacturer suggests, cause your own tissues to be attacked by your own immune system.

[01:27:09]

[Del Bigtree]

It makes your cells make self and foreign proteins at the same time. Yep. Therefore, relaying the immune system attack and kill this. It's doing that. If it lands in your heart, your heart cells start doing that. We are attacking and killing that part of the body does not regenerate cells, causes scarring. Right. Thus, we have this issue of myocarditis, pericarditis.

[Brett Weinstein]

And this is very rarely your immune system attacking your own heart cells is very rarely necessary. And the reason is the heart is not a good place for a virus to land and try to spread to anybody else. So it's not a target. It's well insulated. So in the case that your immune system detects a virus in your heart, that's a very serious situation. And destroying heart cells is not something that selection would program us to do haphazardly.

[01:28:01]

It's a dire choice to have to make. So my point is, I don't care what antigen you load into this thing. You're going to get. The cells of the body taking it up arbitrarily, you're going to get cytotoxic T cells attacking the locations of translation of these proteins, and that is going to cause wounds, which in the case of the heart will then become scars. You have an absolutely acute pathology. If you get a bunch of heart tissue damage simultaneously, like if, you know, as John Campbell pointed out in one of his early videos, the failure to aspirate the needle means that you potentially might, you know, hit a vein and get a whole glob of this stuff floating around the body. If that lands in your heart, gets absorbed, you get a bunch of heart tissue. It's producing this foreign antigen. Immune system comes in, kills that tissue. Now you've got a wound in your heart.

[01:29:00]

And I must say I'm concerned when we say myocarditis. Myocarditis means inflammation of the heart tissue. It's not a pathology. It's a symptom. OK, what is it a symptom of? Heart damage, destruction of heart tissue. That destruction of heart tissue is a critical problem. If you've got a significant number of cells that have been destroyed, you've got a wound in your heart. Let's say you're a soccer player. You don't know that there's some portion of your heart wall. You know, the aorta has a weak spot in it now that wasn't there two weeks before. And, you know, you're running for the goal and your heart, your blood pressure goes up beyond what it's done. And boom, suddenly it blows a hole in the wall, right? Yeah. You don't know that that's there. But even after it heals over time, it becomes a scar. You're compromised for life. Yes.

[01:30:00]

So there's no way that we should be risking triggering our own immune systems to attack our own tissues arbitrarily, which is what these shots will do, irrespective of what the antigen in them is.

[Audience]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

So the attempt to blame the spike protein, of course, suggests, yes, we made a tragic error. The spike focus on that. Right.

[Del Bigtree]

Folks, I won't do the spike, but we love this mRNA technology.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right. We're moving forward. And of course, they love the mRNA technology because a it's cheap to produce. I mean, basically, you can produce a new vaccine by typing a sequence into a computer. Yeah. Right. B, it allows them to take a bunch of shots that, you know, are arduous to produce and streamline their production. So it's economically tremendously efficient. See, you can produce shots for a whole bunch of new things without having to come up with some new protocol for producing them because it's all the same. D, you can tell the FDA, well, this is the same shot you've already authorized.

[01:31:04]

So we're just going to sorry.

[Del Bigtree]

It's already been proven to be the same technology. Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

We'll just test the antigen this time, see if the antigen causes any special problems. So your, you know, control group and your treatment group are both going to have the pathologies of the mRNA platform. They're going to disappear because you get the same amount of pathology in both groups. So anyway, it's a dream come true for the ruthless bastards in pharma. Right. It's a nightmare from the point of view of patients. Yes. Absolute nightmare.

[Del Bigtree]

The Motivation Behind the mRNA Push

Amazing. So clearly stated. I'm really glad, you know, my audience got to hear that. So sort of reflecting back then, this moment where we were sitting there and you did make good points about my assessing where this battle is at. And one of the things that I've said to in similar meetings with Malone's and people like that is, you know, there was this question. We're losing this battle. We're losing this battle. I was like, you are looking at this through the Overton window that you're involved in, which is this big.

[01:32:03]

There are some of us that have been at this this long. We're actually in an accelerated position right now. You're just feeling the wave come down in the little space that you just jumped into. And then there's people have been at this longer than I have. One of the things that, you know, we sort of said there was a real push to to change the labeling of the mRNA technology, to not call it a vaccine is a huge part of like our movement was fairly divided over it. You know, it's a it's a gene therapy. And I said, do not do that. Do not change this. They called it a vaccine because this is the only way I'm going to draw attention from people that are now recognizing this is problematic, that you have similar problems, though the technologies may be a little bit different. But if I let you change the name, though, are bad, we mislabeled it. Then you leave all of these vaccines that have never been through proper safety trials that are really having issues that we need people to look at. I don't want to lose that focus. So they called it a vaccine. I'm sticking with it's a vaccine. So I've made decisions like that along the way because I'm involved in a battle that matters to me.

[01:33:04]

I also want to say, because we're going to get into really the more important reason why you're here, which is really, you know, we're going to talk about Rescue the Republic and why that's the case. But I just want to say that I grew up with parents that said question authority. They marched in the 60s. You know, I wasn't vaccinated, but I ate, you know, macrobiotic food. Like there was just everything. My parents said, do not trust the news. Do not trust what you're looking at. You've got to stick with your own instincts, you know, and make sure that you always have the freedom of speech. So all of those things, it felt like to me, there are a lot of issues in our society, whether it's the Federal Reserve banking, fractional, you know, all of that. I can look at many different things. People are in the chemtrails. We're looking at some of that. But it seemed to me this vaccine issue, if I need my country to wake up, to the fact that your government is actually not looking out for you and you're actually not in control of it somewhere way back, somewhere back, probably before I started looking, certainly before I started looking this, we lost this for and by the people.

[01:34:12]

The reason this vaccine issue really seemed important to me and why I sort of dropped everything I was doing to go into this was as I looked at it, which you've now been on this journey. This has been done to everyone in this country. This isn't just if I get into banking, there's people that banking could that they don't make enough money for it ever, Matt. If I need everyone in this country to recognize that your country, your government's lying to you, it's not looking out for you. I need something that's happened to all of us. That's been a lie we've all been a part of. And this is what I saw in the vaccine program. If I can convince and show it, not just convince, if I can show you through science that they have known they didn't properly test this, that they have skipped all of the things that they are pushing a product, that they see injury, it is at their doors.

[01:35:03]

They're being sued from it. They're not letting any press see it. They're using, you know, propaganda to hide the fact that there seems to be a real problem here, that if enough people really saw that this would be the tip of a spear to recognizing, oh, my God, my government is not what I think it is. So just as we sit here now, back in that room, that's what I was a part of. And you were saying you're, you know what I mean? You're undermining what's happening here. I'd say most of the people in that room now see this the way that that me and Bobby Kennedy and a few other scientists and doctors that have been really on this for some time. So as we sit here now, you came up to me and I'm not. And honestly, this isn't in any sort of gloating. I haven't since we had this. You did come up about a year or so ago at an event. And you said, you know, I wanted to tell you, I, you know, I apologize.

[01:36:02]

I don't remember there being something to apologize for, by the way. But I just said to you, Brett, I know you're going to look into this and you're going to see that, you know, that it's not what you think it is. And I'll never forget when you came up to me about a year ago, you said something that has really rocked me to the core. You said, I knew. Look, I you told me about the mouse study. Like, I know that science is manipulated, especially where there's money to be made. I knew there was going to be problems. I know some people are being injured. That's obvious. Every product injures people. What I was shocked to find is that there is no science at all. That is an absolutely chilling. Statement.

The Lack of Science in Vaccine Safety

Just quickly, what do you mean by that?

[Brett Weinstein]

Well, a couple of things. One, I remember it as as you do.

[01:37:01]

And, you know, I look back on my assumptions and. Of course, they were reasonable assumptions. But the system itself is not reasonable. I sometimes say certain stories diagnose the system. What you're talking about is if you actually have the courage to follow the evidence and figure out what is known and how is it known. In this case, you cannot help but discover that it's a Potemkin village. Right. This is nonsense. There are no people living in that village, though. That's a movie set. And the implications of that are dire, both from the point of view of what we are doing to people's health in the guise of trying to improve it. But also. Just personally, I mean. I didn't understand. That I appear to have a vaccine injury. Right. I have a profound allergy to wheat.

[01:38:00]

There's no reason I should have an allergy to wheat. I'm an Ashkenazi Jew. My people have been eating wheat for thousands of years. What happened? Well, an adjuvant happened. Well, I happen to have wheat in my gut because, of course, everything contains wheat. Right. My children have allergies to things that they shouldn't be alerted to. Right. I'm let's put it this way. I never thought vaccines were safe. I thought they were safe enough. I thought the cost benefit analysis was positive for them. When my children were born, Heather and I looked at each other and we said, what are we going to do about this? These things are not safe. And we said, OK, the rational thing to do is to postpone the injections in each case as long as possible. And the reasoning for that was very sound. The older you are when you get them, the more of your development is behind you already, the less disruptive they will be if something goes wrong. So we did that.

[01:39:00]

So what that tells you, my children are now 18 and 20. Tells you two decades ago, we were already on alert that these things had potentially serious negative implications and we were trying to minimize them. That level of caution wasn't nearly strong enough for me to protect my own children. I fell down on the job as a father because I didn't actually check all the assumptions then. Now, of course, you can't check every assumption in your life. Right. You'd be paralyzed. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, I should have. I should have known that that one needed special scrutiny and I didn't didn't do it. But what this also tells us is, you know, when you hear Bobby talk about his road in to this murky landscape. Yeah. He was dragged in. He didn't want to go looking here. He had plenty of corporate malfeasance to look into in the environment.

[Del Bigtree]

And aren't I doing enough trying to get this mercury out of water?

[01:40:03]

Right. You water or fish or food supply or air like kind of busy here.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right. And it just sort of seems like, oh, my goodness. Right. You know, why take up a new topic where there's at least safety testing is being done in some regard. Right. Right. And so he got dragged in because somehow somebody with an injured child, I think, caused him to feel that he had to just look a little bit and once you look a little bit, you discover you have to look a little bit farther and just, you know, the degree to which this is a fiction is. Shocking. Yeah. And then you face the thing from the other side of the looking glass where everybody, you know, as you start to talk about, you know, the hazards of these things, you just you watch the openness of people to listen to you just shut down reflexively like a rat.

[Del Bigtree]

I mean, just you just just draw a giant scarlet letter right on your chest.

[01:41:01]

Right. Exactly. You decide to start talking about it.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter if you have a background in immunobiology. It doesn't matter that you can describe very reasonably why an adjuvant is suspect, you know, on its face or why the MRNA platform should be expected to cause heart wounds. Yeah. People people are social creatures. People are interested in what's true, but only to a point. And this is one of the the lessons that Heather and I address in our book. We are built to be able to figure out what's true, but it's it's a means to an end. All right. It's a means to an evolutionary objective. It is not the objective. And therefore, when people detect the social consequences that will befall them, if they conclude something awkward, they find reasons not to conclude that.

[01:42:04]

And it has made this conversation impossible. But. The I think the road in. Is to recognize we are not talking about looking back at decisions you've made and worrying that they may have shortened your lives or injured your kids or something like that. That is, of course, part of it. But they're not done with you. Right, right. They are currently revising these injections to put them on the MRNA platform. If what I'm saying is true. Then that is going to result in large numbers of people dying from heart pathologies that are going to be covered up because they can be right. So if they're not done with you, then it is a matter of, you know, it is a matter of urgency that you look into this, not for social reasons, but for physiological reasons, you do not want to be damaged in this way.

[01:43:08]

Yeah. And you need to be able to say no. And the fact that they are not only gearing up to have these injections and to strong arm you into taking them, but they are gearing up to shut down discussion of the hazards. They are gearing up to tie your compliance to your finances. Right. They're setting up a dystopian landscape where you're going to have no choice but to accept something that puts you at risk of heart damage. You, your children, your grandchildren. So. The instinct not to look at it is. Let me give you some advice. Future you would like you to pay attention now because it only gets worse.

The Urgency of the Situation

Right.

[Del Bigtree]

Let me ask you this. How do they tell themselves? I have a theory that I'll put, but I get you believe in this technology.

[01:44:04]

You're probably thinking we're sweeping some of the injuries under the rug on all the childhood vaccines. Yeah, maybe autism, maybe some of them are, you know, triggered by vaccines for those that are like on top, up above, like doctors, not questioning at all. Like they think these things are just perfectly as safe as water. They've been brainwashed in school, but everyone at the top making these things, putting them all, I have to assume there's some knowledge that we have a little bit of a problem here. But to have an arrogance. Or a disconnect to the level of we are going to take a brand new technology like mRNA. And give it to if we can, if we can get away with it, we're going to rush it on the market and give it to every single person in the world so that if this thing has some sort of fatal flaw, we will be responsible for wiping out the species.

[01:45:01]

How do intelligent people like yourself that could have found you could have taken a trajectory in your life that found yourself making this very exciting product? How the hell did they tell themselves that that there wasn't like that? How do they convince themselves they could do that without the greatest risk of all times?

[Brett Weinstein]

The Darkness of the Situation

Well, unfortunately, this gets very dark because, you know, I think once you start to see how dangerous this stuff is, you really want this to be some inhuman level of actual error. But that story just does not fly.

[Del Bigtree]

Meaning nefarious, meaning purposeful or?

[Brett Weinstein]

No, no, no. You want this to be an error because the idea that it is more than an error is. It's so ghastly.

[01:46:00]

That it's just the mind. You don't want to know that you are living amongst monsters, but. I don't know how else to interpret this, because I can see, you know, what actually happened at the beginning of COVID. I don't know. But I can tell you the following thing. There are new mRNA booster shots being recommended now for children.

[Audience]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

There is no defense of that. You don't have to know very much to understand why that's insane. If you really made a mistake and you really thought COVID was a serious disease, it requires a vaccine to protect people from it. You would limit this to the people who actually are threatened by COVID, which is very few people. You certainly wouldn't be giving it to children, because among other things, not only is the cost benefit analysis almost certainly negative. But the the fact that we are now stuck with a new human pathogen.

[01:47:06]

Means that children face a lifetime of multiple confrontations with this thing. We have no idea what the long term implications are, not only from the point of compromising their health with the shots themselves, but people may need to reach some equilibrium with this new pathogen. We don't know that we are not preventing that from happening. And in fact, there's good reason to think that we are preventing it from happening by inoculating them, you know, early in life.

[Del Bigtree]

A vaccine that cannot allow their immune system cannot kill this thing. Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's just absolutely intolerably stupid. What's more? And, you know, it's rabbit hole after rabbit hole. But the result that is now replicated that says two or more mRNA shots for COVID and you trigger the production of IgG4.

[01:48:03]

Now, that's going to be a lot of steps for most people. Yeah. But I mean, make it simple. IgG means immunoglobulin. It means antibody. IgG is one of the regular classes of antibody. IgG4 is a very special subtype of IgG. IgG4's purpose, its biological purpose, the reason it evolved is to turn down immune responses when they are causing harm. Right. When your allergist is trying to cure an allergy by injecting stuff into you, you're trying to trigger this attenuation signal to turn your immune response down. Yeah. Calm it down. Right. Right. So we are now giving people multiple shots when we know very well that multiple shots trigger the production of IgG4. Now, one, if you're in the business of trying to create immunity to COVID and the mechanism you've chosen, if this was a surprise to you, and you suddenly discover you're producing an attenuation signal, the answer is, oh, what don't we know?

[01:49:13]

OK, this did not work. It may be working in reverse.

[Del Bigtree]

You're sending a tank and saying, you know what? If we keep, we're literally tearing the armor off of the tank now. And so it's not protect, like you are doing the opposite of what your goal was.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right. And so, you know, Heather and I have a catchphrase, which is welcome to complex systems, right? You make an intervention that seems like a reasonable thing. And some consequence you did not see coming has popped up. Welcome to complex systems. You didn't expect that to happen. Yeah. Well, in this case, it did happen. IgG4 shows up. That should have caused a total rethink of this if this was an honest effort to improve human health and immunity to COVID. Didn't cause a hiccup at all. So what are we doing now? I will also. There is a hypothesis.

[01:50:00]

That I don't know what to do with. We know that. Well, we almost know that COVID SARS-CoV-2 emerged from dual use research. That means bioweapons research. Right. Now, bioweapons people, Anthony Fauci, for example, have a couple of different problems. They need to figure out if you're if you. I would never produce bioweapons. I think it's immoral. But if you, for some reason, thought bioweapons needed to be produced. The question is always, how are you going to produce a bioweapon that injures the people who are targeted and leaves the people that you're trying to protect safe? One obvious way to do it would be to vaccinate the population you're trying to protect so that they are not vulnerable.

[01:51:00]

The enemy is vulnerable. But in this case, this bioweapons research that seems to have produced this virus and the vaccine, which is a downstream product of the same bioweapons research. Therefore, the spike protein is borrowed from the virus and it is loaded into these vaccines in transcript form. Triggers an attenuation signal of immunity. That means that people who got these shots, more than one of them, at least. Can now have an attenuation signal triggered in them by anything bearing the spike protein. Do we think our enemies haven't noticed that if they have a bioweapons program, that spike protein is now a mechanism to trigger attenuation in American? Wow.

[Del Bigtree]

The Potential for Exploitation

You've just created a massive susceptibility to.

[01:52:01]

Yes.

[Brett Weinstein]

Your enemy's attack. And if it's an accident. Then it says, well, what is the consequence of bioweapons research? Well, you've just made the population that you supposedly the population who paid for it, who you were supposed to be making safer, you just made them vulnerable.

[Del Bigtree]

This IgG4, if there's a weakness, as you're saying, that an enemy could utilize it, but they all they all took the vaccine, too. So clearly, if that's a vulnerability, any enemy is going to say they can't like create a weapon to attack the vulnerability because they're vulnerable to.

[Brett Weinstein]

I don't think so. In fact, I believe it is correct to say the Chinese did not inoculate their population with anything mRNA based or spike based. So this would be the separation between populations that weapons makers are seeking just in a direction that is extremely unfortunate for for the West.

[01:53:00]

[Del Bigtree]

So essentially, I'm assuming you're not saying that this was done on purpose by China. Are you just saying that there is a group of people that could utilize this this vulnerability now if they wanted to?

[Brett Weinstein]

I can't make heads or tails of it. Is this our having accidentally created a vulnerability that could be exploited? Is there something I don't know about what the real teams are? All I can say is that the more I look at it, the more it seems we have created, we have invited a horrifying confrontation and that not only did we do it, but we are continuing to make it worse by inoculating people with ever more boosters.

[Del Bigtree]

And I still think back to that moment when we called China and said, what's the code we're supposed to be injecting into all of our citizens?

[Audience]

Mm hmm.

[Del Bigtree]

Which is how this whole thing starts. Right.

[01:54:00]

I mean, I'm not I'm not into like, you know. Creating boogeymen, but it is at the very least. It is shocking to know that. There's, you know, there's a group that has armor and a group that does not.

[Brett Weinstein]

Well, you know, we see there are a lot of animals that when confronted with an insurmountable obstacle. Play dead. It's also true that a boxer who keeps getting hit in the head. We'll find himself on the mat, not getting up. And I've always wondered, I have a hypothesis that this is a contingency program, that at the point that whatever you're doing is resulting in you getting hit over and over and over again. Doing nothing isn't a safe option, but it may well be better than continuing to do that same program. So. We've hurt ourselves.

[01:55:01]

Stopping any further harm would be the absolute minimum and the first go to move and why we don't do it, I cannot imagine. Summer cold is a famous thing that happens every now and again. It's notable because it's rare. Right. People are sick this summer.

[Del Bigtree]

That's not supposed to and everyone's saying, I cannot kick it. I can't get rid of it. No one feels like a cold is the same anymore.

[Brett Weinstein]

Like, right. You know. Right. So, OK, we've just engaged in this massive program that at best was the result of hubris that said that we know what to do to make you safer. And we've got a population that is now a lot more vulnerable to disease. And the likely connection is not hard to see. So we ought to be obsessed with figuring out whether that connection is, in fact, what is causing this increased level of sickness. But of course, we are not. We also ought to recognize, you know, if the net effect of bioweapons research is that you screw up and you make your own population vulnerable to a foreign bioweapon, maybe bioweapons research isn't such a good idea.

[01:56:04]

The Failure of Gain-of-Function Research

Right. At the same in the same way, we were told that the research that was going on, the gain of function research on these viruses. What was the purpose? We were told we were told that it was so that we could create these viruses so that we could know what to do if a pandemic ever happened. Well, no benefit came from that research. We didn't manage to do any better with covid based on something we learned. The story isn't plausible in the first place. Right. If you turbocharge a pathogen, the only thing you're going to learn is how to deal with that pathogen. Right. Right. So the story was nonsense to begin with. Right.

[Del Bigtree]

At best, this is a we've learned how to handle a very specific enemy that we created. Right. As though somehow we've learned something. This this particular coronavirus could mutate myriad different ways. And all this knowledge would be useless to us.

[01:57:00]

Right. Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

And it and it proved to be useless. Right. Correct. In fact, you know, among the many things that I have learned here, you know, I obviously took a lot of crap for pointing out that ivermectin appeared to be efficacious against SARS-CoV-2. I came to the conclusion late that hydroxychloroquine also was efficacious. But what I now understand is that actually ivermectin is broadly useful against RNA viruses in general. Right. It would be weird if it wasn't effective against SARS-CoV-2. It was effective against SARS-1. Right. Right. It's effective against other RNA viruses. So at some level, if the idea was we were supposed to become smarter about how to deal with viruses that are something like this, the go to for the the public health effort should have been ivermectin. It's very likely to work.

[01:58:00]

It will be anomalous if it doesn't.

[Del Bigtree]

Whereas, in fact, what we got was a propaganda campaign that obscured how effective it was and blocked, had pharmacies blocking it from people like people were dying because they couldn't get it. Right. So to your point, and let's get to the, you know, the reason we're really here to try and do something about this. But we where you have a nation that says, I mean, we're looking out for you. We're well, obviously you've hired us. We, the people, we're working for you. It should have said ivermectin in every cabinet in America right now, immediately for any other attack that may be. We have learned something here. This is a great product. Didn't do the opposite. But still, still genuinely fighting to, you know, on late night talk shows to make everyone a buffoon that still thinks ivermectin and Pierre Corey's fighting for his license. And I mean, over what should is so such settled science at this point, if science works the way you think it does, you have Peter Marks and these people still promoting a product that, as you've pointed out, clearly causes more harm for children than it does.

[01:59:06]

It's causing IgG4 in everybody, which is making us weaker and weaker and weaker and terrifyingly so. No one's considering the fact that we won't get into it, that if this is a manmade virus, we gave it an ability it never had, which is to truly infect human beings. And so and we've stopped our ability immune systems to kill it, which is what Garrett was screaming about. If you too many people get this vaccine, no one's going to be able to stop the evolution of this. And so now we took a virus, maybe gave it a hundred year evolutional bump, you know, and now it's there and it's it's evolving from there. We have no idea what this thing is going to turn into now. And we have a society that cannot stop and is even lowering its ability to to fight it. Everyone that I mean, we must assume that there's enough intelligence to people with enough intelligence in our government that should know this. So then we are under attack.

[02:00:04]

Are We Under Attack?

And I guess what we all grapple with is, is it true? Like from what? From what?

[Brett Weinstein]

No, we we are under attack and, you know, best case scenario, this is market forces that have created monsters that are willing to silence truth tellers and injure people to make a buck. That's the best case scenario. They get much darker from there, and I honestly don't know what it is.

[Del Bigtree]

But they've created something. Here's what I don't understand. They came to protect themselves from it. Can they? I mean, is there it would make sense if the Illuminati ruling class that wants to own the world has somehow got a vaccine for themselves that works as these things are out there? I don't think I saw that that happened.

[Brett Weinstein]

No. Well, let's separate that into two pieces. OK, again, we are in the realm of conjecture and hypothesis.

[Del Bigtree]

We have no idea. We do not know. We're trying to search for motivation.

[02:01:00]

What might be that is so I'll say this. People say, are there aliens on the planet? I will say there are people that are acting so far away from what it means to be human that you call it whatever you want. What we're watching is not. And I've said this. I have studied human beings. Why am I? I'm a journalist. I've been asking people questions since I was four. You know, more than I read. I wanted to know what made everyone tick. It's my fascination. I'm really good at it. This whole thing has gotten outside of any dimension I understand about human motivation. It goes beyond greed in. You know, I can explain a lot of it, but it just greed falls short. Power, because they're not protecting themselves. There's just things that I can't make it add up inside of what I understand a human being makes a human being tick.

[Brett Weinstein]

Well, I mean, unfortunately. If you zoom out to a longer timescale, maybe there's a game that we're not aware of because we play in human lifetime timescales.

[02:02:02]

Yeah. Maybe somebody is looking at a longer time horizon and, you know, it's just that we have become unimportant because, you know, we're a blip. But the the number of places, I mean, let's take let's take the disease itself. The disease itself appears to have emerged in gain of function research in which a very difficult jump for a pathogen to leap from nature into people and then leap from one person to the next was facilitated by a laboratory, which took the place of an intermediate host where that evolution might have happened. Let's say that the average case of covid is half as bad as the flu. That's still a disaster. Right. We have flu. And now we're going to have a similar level of sickness that we didn't have to have at all.

[02:03:03]

Right. It didn't exist, didn't exist. But it's worse than that, because I don't know how many times I've had the flu in my life. Maybe. Four. Covid appears to be something you can get on a yearly basis. So even if it's half as bad, but you're getting it five times as often, ten times as often, the cost to humanity of having helped this thing leap the gap into people is absolutely ghastly. It's it's extraordinary that we would have played that game and now pretend that we didn't. Right. That's that's that should be an obsession of of people. But then the. The. Number of interventions that we have made that have compounded that harm is spectacular, which brings me back to your your earlier point. Certain stories diagnose the system.

[02:04:01]

You see the vaccine story, the older story as such a story because it reveals all of the places where the science wasn't done, where the doctors were complicit, where the journalists won't look at it. All of that. I agree. It diagnoses the system. The reason that Heather and I became focused on covid was that the covid story also diagnosed the system. Right. The covid story reveals the corruption of science. It reveals the corruption of journalism. It reveals the corruption of the university structure. And the consequences are tangible, right? We know people who were injured. It's amazing that we can identify people in our own lives who are actually injured by this. Yeah. Right. This is an amazing level of harm. So in any case, either one of those is good enough to realize that the entire system has been corrupted and it needs a reboot.

[02:05:00]

Right.

[Del Bigtree]

The Need for a Reboot

An absolute reboot. And it's not stopping. It doesn't learn. It has no stability to learn. It refuses to learn, refuses to learn.

[Brett Weinstein]

It has educated us. Right. A number of us, you know, the number of doctors I know who were vaccine advocates five years ago and have now become skeptics because they've looked into adjuvants, they've looked into the mRNA platform and they know that. The world that they thought they lived in isn't a real place is shocking.

[Del Bigtree]

It is. It's it's it's a movement and it's happening. The question is, is it happening fast enough? And I think that that's what we really get down to is this ticking clock. Because as we pointed out, a system that's refusing to learn, but is also supposed to be for and by the people, which means we're supposed to be able to say, you're not learning. I don't know why I elected you or why I've put you in this position. We are now removing you from that position.

[02:06:02]

And that's where probably the scariest thing that could possibly happen is the attack on the First Amendment that's taking place right now. The fact that your podcast, a podcast that should have been seen by everyone in the world, was demonetized, shut down. Robert Malone's LinkedIn is taken down. We lost our YouTube channel. We lost our Facebook channel. Zuckerberg is now saying, yeah, I did that. Sorry. Sorry, everyone. I mean, on the laptop, I covered that up, too, for the for a corrupt government of CIA and FBI agents that all work for the president to hide a personal problem, which to me, I mean, we could go for days makes Nixon and Watergate look like like this compared to the Empire State Building of using your power in government to manipulate and mislead. But we are so dangerously close right now. They are arresting people in England and Europe and Ireland for sharing tweets.

[02:07:01]

I'm claiming that they're going to come for those of us that are spreading misinformation in America. And I don't see anyone in my government saying back off. That will never happen here. I mean, there's there's no one really seems to be defending our Constitution. Instead, I see a globalist, this global idea that that's the way we should all be, that the government, the global government is going to decide what misinformation, malinformation, all of it is. And look, I talk to family that are like, tell I get it. They don't understand your issue. They just don't understand your issue. And that's unfortunate. But it's really it's oh, you know, it's not that bad. As soon as you're after the First Amendment, I don't care if it's on an issue I don't care about. Once the government starts thinking we're deciding what is correct and incorrect information, our founding fathers were right. That will be the end. That will spell the end. You are now moving into some form of collectivism, some form of authoritarianism.

[02:08:02]

You are going to be screwed. I feel like, you know, whether it's about politics now, can we vote our way out of this? Who knows? But we certainly need the last. You know, remaining republic, if you will, with a constitution that defends the rights of human beings is endowed by God and not by the government themselves. And, you know, we're we're dangerously close to the end of the American experiment. And am I overstating it?

[Brett Weinstein]

Rescue the Republic

You're understating this is potentially the end of the West. It's now or never. This is, in my opinion, absolutely urgent. People's fancy rationales for staying on the couch and not voting because they don't think their vote counts. This is no time for that. This is no time for what I have done in past elections, which is, you know, to vote my conscience and vote for people that I knew would not be elected.

[02:09:07]

There is a time and a place for that. I do not believe this is the time and the place. This is the moment at which we have to defeat whatever that force is that has taken over our system and targeted all of our rights. We are in a better position than Europeans are because our constitution is. Better thought out. We are kind of last on the list from the point of view of the degradation of our rights.

[Del Bigtree]

I think, yeah, I think we are hanging up the global. Takeover like it's there's one this pesky little country fairly large country with a really difficult constitution to get around is messing up our flow right now.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep. With the First Amendment backed up by a second amendment. Yeah. And so. We are holding a.

[02:10:03]

I don't even know what to call it, because, yes, technically it's a rally, it's an event in the same way that I think Woodstock was a music festival. Yeah. Right. We are holding an event on the Capitol Mall, September 29th. It's called Rescue the Republic. And the website is join the resistance dot org. This needs to be massive. We have an incredible list of speakers and not all of the people who we believe are coming are yet listed, but people should go and they should they should look at at who's coming. It's an incredible group of people. And this is our moment. You know, this is the moment for a little loathe to use the word unity, even though, you know, in 2020, I put together a unity 2020 initiative. I believe unity is the right thing.

[02:11:00]

And then that word has been co-opted. But I think we need to take it back. Yeah, this is the moment to realize that whatever our ideological differences may be. Yes, are completely unimportant if we lose the republic. Right. If we are to fight about the differences between what conservatives and liberals see, it has to be after the republic has been put back on a course with a future to it. Absolutely. So in any case, this event is important. Yes, it's not convenient to have to travel to Washington. But I think people will want to have been there because this is where we declare our we draw a line in the sand. We have to found a movement.

[Del Bigtree]

I keep saying, you know, I played a lot of sports growing up and I've been on the team where everyone was yelling and screaming at each other. I've also been on the team across the field, watching the other team yelling and screaming at each other.

[02:12:03]

And that team never wins.

[Audience]

Yeah.

[Del Bigtree]

And if we look at Team America right now, if we look at the pressures that are coming from so many different directions, but global pressures, you know, whether or not, you know, I'm all about relating and getting along with the world. But I am not about giving up my sovereignty to some even larger government. I cannot control. I would definitely say I've probably moved in sort of that libertarian direction where, you know, I, too, grew up a Democrat, but where I just I want the government as close to me as I can get it. I want it. I want the biggest decisions made by the guy right down the street, not the one in Washington, D.C., where, you know, I got to get too many millions of people to understand what the problem is. Imagine taking that to a global size. We're seeing this with the European Union. It's terrifying for people that live in the Netherlands and Germany and just they have no power, no matter what they are electing inside of their borders. It just seems like this larger system of nations they can't talk to and neighbors they can't connect with are like it's they've got no power.

[02:13:09]

We're on the verge of a global power that just wipes out anything that America stood for. So it seems to me no matter what your ideology, as you've said, even really what party affiliation you think you have, what you've got to ask yourself is who is going to how do we unite this country around the concept that a victory here is necessary and that, you know, that we can only, you know, when we're in sports, we're not arguing with each other about what church you went to. We're we're we we know what we're up against here. We're you know, we're fighting the Broncos today. That's that's what we're dealing with. The rest of this. Let's deal with this another time. We have to be focused. And I really think this this, you know, rescue the republic. There have been time, I mean, really, if anyone's listening right now and saying, I think this is that moment, I'm really worried that there may never be another free election.

[02:14:07]

I'm really worried that I'm not sure how this election is going to go. I'm really concerned that is going to take away all our jobs. I'm really concerned that, you know, we're giving away resources and not reaping any benefit from it. I'm really concerned that large global, you know, companies are buying up the homes and I'm just going to be renting from some global power. I mean, if those things are on your mind, then this will be the trip you want to say you made. You want to be able to say to your children, I was there. I was there the moment that it actually mattered when the dream of the United States of America was hanging in the balance.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. When it was hanging in the balance and we rescued it, we rescued it. I will just say. A lot of people that we have spoken to. Some of whom you will see on the website and some of whom will be there soon. You have an all star lineup, but a lot of people have said the same thing, which is, you know, this isn't really the sort of thing that I do.

[02:15:06]

But in this case, I'm going to do it. Right. Because it is that moment. Right. A lot of people are not comfortable with the idea of a rally or a march or or something like that. And, you know, I feel this this way, too. It's a moment for us to work against our instincts because everything depends on it.

[Audience]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

And if you're concerned about, you know, well, what am I really signing up for? Right. Rescue the Republic sounds good, but what does that really mean? We have done our best to articulate what it is that we are fighting. And you can see in that a reflection of what it is that we want. And these are things that will be broadly resonant for all patriotic Americans. I will see if I can remember off the top of my head. So we've defined a number of we have it on the screen, right?

[02:16:00]

[Del Bigtree]

The Goals of Rescue the Republic

Military and war is always the last resort versus military industrial complex. Yep. Sanctify, recodify, informed consent versus medical industrial complex banish state media control, surveillance and propaganda versus censorship, industrial complex enact a rational border policy versus immigration, industrial complex and lawfare and abuse of the judicial system versus injustice. Industrial complex, secure monetary freedom versus financial industrial complex, restore family sovereignty versus developmental industrial complex, return to truth seeking and open dialogue versus academic industrial complex.

[Brett Weinstein]

So we are against these industrial complexes that have taken over these essential processes and distorted them. And what we really want to do is return to the founders vision of a country that, you know, consent of the governed is the sole basis for the legitimacy of governance.

[02:17:05]

The moment we don't have consent of the governed, we have a system that is rigged. Yes. And this, you know, the republic is both the starting place for the modern West and its central structural element. If the republic falls, we can see Europe is already ahead of us in terms of being lost. But I do want to say the republic is a part of the West. The West is not a geographic description. The countries that we would typically name as members of the traditional West do not always live up to the ideals of the West. But ultimately, the West is about a system in which we agree not to rig the world on behalf of our people. Right. It is an agreement on a level playing field, which is good for all of us. Right. Yeah. Everyone has access to the market. And if you compete and produce something that's valuable, if you create wealth for the world, then you get rewarded for it.

[02:18:05]

Right. That doesn't work if the system is rigged against you.

[Del Bigtree]

Well, I mean, this is maybe my favorite interview of all times. It's one I knew would be spectacular because I've watched how you are watched your journey. And I love how you articulate your experiences as you've gone along. I'm sure you have been just as dynamic in the years before we saw you come to this place. But it is. There's something powerful about just seeing you, you know, you look like a great professor like that would be. Why are you getting so involved with trying to rally humanity to a cause? You're a big part behind this, you know, rescue the republic. And I agree with you.

[02:19:01]

I mean, I'm just so happy that we're able to sit in a room together. I know we've come from different places, but this was always why I was shouting what I understood from the mountaintops. They're lying to us. They're poisoning us. They're defiant against learning. And now they're taking away our voice to oppose what is taking place. I'm empowered, I want to say this, it can be very debilitating for a lot of people to just feel like it's just so big and so insurmountable. I keep saying to my audience, you should be thankful that you live at this moment because you're needed. There have been generations that really didn't need to be here. Kind of go unnoticed. Whether we win or lose, we will be remembered for this moment that's taking place right now.

[Brett Weinstein]

A Call to Action

Well, I've been saying for quite some time, and I heard Elon say something similar recently.

[02:20:01]

We all know this point in the movie. We all know who we're rooting for. We know what music is supposed to be playing. And the question is, do you recognize that it is that moment and will you be motivated if you're hoping that the heroes in the movie do the thing that must be done and you find yourself in that movie and the thing must be done? Are you ready to do it? That is the question. So, you know, let's do this, because we don't have a choice, right? We only have this republic. And if you have seen how the world functions in the absence of a flawed but wonderful system like ours, then you know this cannot be allowed to fail.

[Del Bigtree]

That's it. Do it. Do what's necessary. Get out there. Let's make this happen.

[Audience]

Thank you.

[Del Bigtree]

Thank you.