YouSaid · the spoken record

Bret Weinstein

lines on the record: 202
first: 2021-06-25
most recent: 2021-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And what's the harm in publishing them so that your peers have to review them in public where they actually, if they're going to disagree with you, they actually have to take the risk of saying, I don't think this is right and here's why, right, with their name on it. I'd much rather that. It's not that I don't want my work reviewed by peers, but I want it done in the open, you know, for the same reason you don't meet with dangerous people in private. You meet at the cafe. I want the work reviewed out in public.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is reviewed by peers which is not synonymous with peer review. And that's the thing people don't understand that the two things aren't the same Peer review is an anonymous process that happens before publication in a place where there is a power dynamic. I mean, the joke, of course, is that peer review is actually peer preview, right? Your biggest competitors get to see your work before it sees the light of day and decide whether or not it gets published. And again, when your formative experience with the publication apparatus is the one I had with the telomere paper. There's no way that that seems like the right way to advance important ideas.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And illustrate that one can make contributions to the field without using journals as the primary mechanism for distributing what you've come to understand, then it's obviously a valid mechanism. And it's a far better one from the point of view of accomplishing what I want to accomplish.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work generally takes evidence accumulated by others and places it together in order to generate hypotheses that explain sets of phenomena that are otherwise intractable. And I am not sure that that is best done with narrow publications that are read by few. And in fact, I would point to the very conspicuous example of Richard Dawkins, who I must say I have learned a tremendous amount from and I greatly admire. Hawkins has almost no publication record in the sense of peer reviewed papers and journals. What he's done instead is done synthetic work and he's published it in books which are not peer reviewed in the same sense and frankly I think there's no doubting his contribution to the field. So my sense is if Richard Dawkins”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Confusion about who had done what because he was a great mentor. And the idea was actually A great mentor is not stealing ideas and you don't want people thinking that they are. So anyway, my point would be. I wasn't up for being Parisatized. I don't like the idea that if you are very good, you get parasitized until it's your turn to parasitize others. That doesn't make sense to me. Crossing over from evolution into cellular biology may have exposed me to that. That may have been par for the course, but it doesn't make it acceptable. And I would also point out that my work falls in the realm of synthesis.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It did not, it was not a very good sales pitch for trying to make a difference through publication. And I would point out part of what I ran into, and I think frankly part of what explains Carroll's behavior, is that in some parts of science there is this dynamic where PIs parasitize their underlings. And if you're very, very good, you rise to the level where one day instead of being parasitized, you get to parasitize others. Now I find that scientifically despicable. And it wasn't the culture of the lab I grew up in at all, my lab. In fact, the PI, Dick Alexander, who's now gone, but who was an incredible mind and a great human being, he didn't want his graduate students working on the same topics he was on, not because it wouldn't have been useful and exciting, but because in effect he did not want any”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I considered it, but I must say the experience of having my first encounter with the process of peer review be this story, which was frankly a debacle from one end to the other with respect to the process of publishing.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As for the need to pursue it further, I think it's kind of absurd, and you're not the first person to say maybe that was the way to go about it. But the basic point is, look, the work was good. It turned out to be highly predictive. Frankly, the model of senescence that I presented is now widely accepted. And I don't feel any misgivings at all about having spent a year on it said my piece and moved on to other things, which frankly I think are bigger. I think there's a lot of good to be done, and it would be a waste to get overly narrowly focused.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did I have a couple things to say about it? One, this work was not central for me. I took a year on the Telamir project because something fascinating occurred to me and I pursued it and the more I pursued it, the clearer it was there was something there. But it wasn't the focus of my graduate work and I didn't want to become a telomere researcher. What I want to do is to be an evolutionary biologist who upgrades the toolkit of evolutionary concepts so that we can see more clearly how organisms function and why. And Delomeres was a proof of concept, right? That paper was a proof of concept that the toolkit in question works.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Believe I even center tissues at some point in part not related to this project, but as a favor she was doing another project that involved telomeres and she needed samples that I could get a hold of because of the Museum of Zoology that I was in. So this was not a one-off conversation. I certainly know that those sorts of things can happen, but that's not what happened here. This was a relationship that existed and then was suddenly cut short at the point that she published her paper by surprise without saying where the hypothesis had come from and began to be a opposing force to my work.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not a mix of both. I know that because we corresponded. She put a graduate student on this work. He emailed me excitedly when the results came in. So there was no ambiguity about what had happened. What's more, when I went to publish my work, I actually sent it to Carol in order to get her feedback because I wanted to be a good collaborator to her. And she absolutely panned it made many critiques that were not valid, but it was clear at that point that she became an antagonist. And none of this adds that she couldn't possibly have forgotten the conversation.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very troubled by the fact that as a father, for example, I am in no position to protect my family from the hazard that I believe lurks in our medicine cabinets. Even though I'm aware of where the hazard comes from, it doesn't tell me anything useful about which of these drugs will turn out to do damage if it is ultimately tested. And that's a very frustrating position to be in. On the other hand, there's a part of me that's even still grateful to Carol for taking my call. She didn't have to take my call and talk to some young graduate student who had some evolutionary idea that wasn't, you know, in her wheelhouse specifically, and yet she did. And, you know, for a while she was a good collaborator.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'm really troubled by in this story is the fact that as far as I know, the flaw with the mice has not been addressed. Actually, Eric did some looking into this. He tried to establish by calling the Jacks Lab and trying to ascertain what had happened with the colonies, whether any change in protocol had occurred. And he couldn't get anywhere. There was seemingly no awareness that it was even an issue.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had one of the most bizarre emotional experiences of my life because she presented the work that resulted from my hypothesis. She presented it as she had in her paper with no acknowledgement of where it had come from, and she had in fact portrayed the distortion of the telomeres as if it were a lucky fact because it allowed testing hypotheses that would otherwise not be testable. Have to understand as a young scientist to watch work that you have done presented in what's surely the most important lecture of her career, right? It's thrilling. It was thrilling to see her figures projected on the screen there, right? To have been part of work that was important enough for that felt great. And of course, to be erased from the story felt absolutely terrible. So anyway, that's sort of where I am with it. My sense is...”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think of it in those terms, probably partly because it's not productive. But I have a complex relationship with this story. On the one hand, I'm livid with Carol Grider for what she did, right? She absolutely pretended that I didn't exist in this story, and I don't think I was a threat to her. My interest was as an evolutionary biologist. I had made an evolutionary contribution. She had tested a hypothesis, and frankly, I think it would have been better for her if she had acknowledged what I had done, I think it would have enhanced her work. And, you know, I was... Put it this way when I watched her Nobel lecture, and I should say there's been a lot of confusion about this Nobel stuff, I've never said that I should have gotten a Nobel Prize. People have misportrayed that. In listening to her lecture.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it is that motivated her, I don't know. But I don't think it can possibly be that this result is unimportant. The fact is, the reason I called her in the first place, an established contact that generated our collaboration was that she was a leading light in the field of telomeric studies. And because of that, this question about whether the model organisms are distorting the understanding of the functioning of telomeres is central.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my paper was motivated by interest in the evolutionary dynamics around senescence. I wasn't, you know, pursuing grants or anything like that. I was just working on a puzzle I thought was interesting. Carol has, of course, gone on to win a Nobel Prize for her co-discovery with Elizabeth Grider of telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres. But anyway, she's a heavy hitter in the academic world. I don't know exactly what her purpose was. I do know that she told me she wasn't planning to publish, and I do know that I discovered that she was in the process of publishing very late. And when I asked her to send me the paper to see whether or not she had put evidence in it that the hypothesis had come from me, she grudgingly sent it to me and my name was nowhere mentioned. And she has She broke contact at that point.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't believe so. And in fact, at the point that I went to publish my paper, Carol published her result. She did so in a way that did not make a huge splash.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question If somebody is motivated cynically, and what they want to do is appear to have deeper insight into biology because they predict things better than others do, knowing where the flaw is so that your predictions come out true is advantageous. At the same time, I can't help but imagine that the pharmaceutical industry, when it figured out that the mice were predisposed to suggest that drugs were safe, didn't leap to fix the problem because in some sense it was the perfect cover for the difficult job of Bringing drugs to market and then discovering their actual toxicity profile, right? This made things look safer than they were, and I believe a lot of profits have likely been generated downstream.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My collaborator, Carol Grider, said something to me that rings in my ears to this day. She initially, after she showed that laboratory mice have anomalously long telomeres and that wild mice don't have long telomeres, I asked her where she was going to publish that result so that I could cite it in my paper. And she said that she was going to keep the result in house rather than publish it. And at the time I was a young graduate student. I didn't really understand what she was saying. But in some sense, the knowledge that a model organism is broken in a way that creates the likelihood that certain results will be reliably generatable, you can publish a paper and make a big splash with such a thing, or you can exploit the fact that you know how those models will misbehave and other people don't. So there's a question.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down its tumors faster than you harm its other tissues, and so you'll get a paradoxical result that actually some drug that's toxic seems to benefit the mouse. Now, I don't think that that was understood before I published my paper. Now I'm pretty sure it has to be. And the problem is that this actually is a system that serves pharmaceutical companies that have the difficult job of bringing compounds to market, many of which will be toxic, maybe all of them will be toxic. And these mice predispose our system to declare these toxic compounds safe. And in fact, I believe we've seen the errors that result from using these mice a number of times, most famously with Viox, which turned out to do conspicuous heart damage.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What this implied though, as you read, is that our reading protocols generate lengthening of telomeres, and the implication of that is that the animals that have these very long telomeres will be hyperprone to create tumors. They will be extremely resistant to toxins because they have effectively an infinite capacity to replace any damaged tissue. And so, ironically, if you give one of these ultra long telomere lab mice a toxin, if the toxin doesn't outright kill it, it may actually increase its lifespan because it functions as a kind of chemotherapy. So the reason that chemotherapy works is the dividing cells are more vulnerable than cells that are not dividing. And so if this mouse has effectively had its cancer protection turned off and it has cells dividing too rapidly and you give it a toxin, you will slowly”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not, and Carol Grider, who agreed to collaborate with me, tested that hypothesis and showed that it was indeed true that Wilde derived mice or at least mice that had been in captivity for a much shorter period of time, did not have ultra-locked telomeres.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The result was that mice have very long telomeres, but they do not have very long lives. Now we can talk about what the actual meaning of don't have very long lives is, but in the end, I was confronted with a hypothesis that would explain a great many features of the way mammals and indeed vertebrates age, but it was inconsistent with one result. And at first I thought maybe there's something wrong with the result. Maybe this is one of these cases where the result was achieved once through some bad protocol and everybody else was repeating it. Didn't turn out to be the case. Many laboratories had established that mice had ultra-long telomeres. And so I began to wonder whether or not there was something about the breeding protocols that generated these mice. And what that would predict is that the mice that have long telomeres would be laboratory mice and that wild mice wouldn't”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let's put it this way. I think there was a reason that the world of scientists who was working on telomeres did not spot the pleiotropic relationship that was the key argument in my paper. Reason they didn't spot it was that there was a result that everybody knew which seemed inconsistent.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who argued that senescence would have to be caused by pleiotropic genes that cause early life benefits at unavoidable late life costs, and although this isn't the exact nature of the system he predicted, it matches what he was expecting in many regards to a shocking degree.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bringing about a halt to the lengthening of telomeres in order to counteract cancer. And the folks who were studying the senescence process were interested in lengthening telomeres in order to generate greater repair capacity. And my point was evolutionarily speaking, this looks like a pleiotropic effect that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves are providing a benefit in youth, which is that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient and eventually die. And that matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams, one of the great 20th century evolutionists.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Counteracting the aging process, and it was being studied in exactly the opposite fashion by people who were interested in tumorogenesis and cancer, the thought being because it was true that when one looked into tumors they always had telomerase active, that's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres, so those folks were interested”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question was why would that be, especially in light of the fact that the mechanism that seems to limit the ability of cells to reproduce is something called a telomere? Telomere, it's not a gene, but it's a DNA sequence at the ends of our chromosomes that is just simply repetitive. And the number of repeats functions like a counter. So there's a number of repeats that you have after development is finished. And then each time the cell divides a little bit of telomere is lost. And at the point that the telomere becomes critically short, the cell stops dividing even though it still has the capacity to do so. Stops dividing and it starts transcribing different genes than it did when it had more telomere. So what my work did was it looked at the fact that the telomeric shortening was being studied by two different groups. It was being studied by people who were interested in”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easier to explain the conclusion of the paper. There's a question about why a creature that can replace itself with new cells grows feeble and inefficient with age. We call that process, which is otherwise called aging. We call it senescence. And senescence in this paper, it is hypothesized, is the unavoidable downside of a cancer prevention feature of our bodies, that each cell has a limit on the number of times it can divide. There are a few cells in the body that are exceptional, but most of our cells can only divide a limited number of times. That's called the Hayflick limit. And the Hayflick limit reduces the ability of the organism to replace tissues. It therefore results in a failure over time of maintenance and repair. And that explains why we become decrepit as we grow old.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me just say I am also completely shocked that we did not get on high quality testing early and that we are still suffering from this even now because just the simple ability to track where the virus moves between people would tell us a lot about its mode of transmission, which would allow us to protect ourselves better. Instead, that information was hard won and for no good reason. So I also find this mysterious.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's something about the way we are going about vaccinating, who we are vaccinating, what dangers we are pretending don't exist that suggests that to some set of people, vaccinating people is a good in and of itself, that that is the objective of the exercise, not herd immunity. And the last thing, and I'm sorry, I don't want to prevent you from jumping in here. But the second reason, in addition to the fact that we're exposing people to danger that we should not be exposing them to.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only argument for doing this is that they may cryptically be carrying more COVID than we think, and therefore they may be integral to the way the virus spreads to the population. But if that's the reason that we are inoculating children, and there has been some revision in the last day or two about the recommendation on this because of the adverse events that have shown up in children, but to the extent that we were vaccinating children, we were doing it to protect old infirm people who are the most likely to succumb to COVID-19. What society puts children in danger, robs children of life to save old infirm people? That's upside down.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who had had COVID-19, which is a large population. There is no reason to expose those people to danger. Their risk of adverse events in the case that they have them is greater. So there's no reason that we would be allowing those people to face a risk of death if this was really about an acceptable number of deaths arising out of the set of vaccines. I would also point out there's something incredibly bizarre, and I would struggle to find language that is strong enough for the horror of vaccinating children in this case, because children suffer a greater risk of long-term effects because they are going to live longer and because this is earlier in their development, therefore it impacts systems that are still forming. They tolerate COVID well, and so the benefit to them is very small.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fair system is the. In the US, we have above 5,000 unexpected deaths that seem in time to be associated with vaccination. That is an undercount almost certainly. And by a large factor, we don't know how large. I've seen estimates, 25,000 dead in the US alone. Now, you can make the argument that, okay, that's a large number, but the necessity of immunizing the population to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction is such that it's an acceptable number. But I would point out that that actually does not make any sense. And the reason it doesn't make any sense is actually there several reasons. One, if that was really your point, that yes, many, many people are going to die, but many more will die if we don't do this. Were that your approach, you would not be inoculating people.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to pick up on your rant. Estimates of the degree of underreporting in Vares are that it is 10% of the real to 100% or 1%.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I don't believe that the probability of creating a worse pandemic is low enough to discount. I think the probability is fairly high, and frankly, we are seeing a wave of variance that Will have to do it carefully analysis to figure out what exactly that has to do with campaigns of vaccination where they have been, where they haven't been, where the variants emerged from. But I believe that what we are seeing is a disturbing pattern that reflects that those who were advising caution may well have been right.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course. The argument that everybody should get vaccinated is that nothing is perfectly safe. Phase three trials showed good safety for the vaccines. Now, that may or may not be actually true, but what we saw suggested high degree of efficacy and a high degree of safety for the vaccines that inoculating people quickly and therefore dropping the landscape of available victims for the pathogen to a very low number so that herd immunity drives it to extinction requires us all to take our share of the risk. And that because driving it to extinction should be our highest priority, that really people shouldn't think too much about the various nuances because overwhelmingly fewer people will die if the population is vaccinated from the vaccine, then will die from COVID if they're not vaccinated.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now in a traditional vaccine, you would typically not have one antigen, right? You would have basically a virus full of antigens and the immune system would therefore produce a broader response. So that is the case for people who have had COVID, right? They have an immunity that is broader because it wasn't so focused on one part of the spike protein. So anyway, there is something unique here. So these platforms create that special hazard. They also have components that we haven't used before in people. So for example, the lipid nanoparticles that coat the RNAs are distributing themselves around the body in a way that will have unknown consequences. So anyway, there's reason for concern.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not even just the mRNA vaccines. The mRNA vaccines and the adenovector DNA vaccine all share the same vulnerability, which is they are very narrowly focused on one subunit of the spike protein. So that is a very concentrated evolutionary signal. We are also deploying it in mid-pandemic, and it takes time for immunity to develop. So part of the problem here, if you inoculated a population before encounter with a pathogen, then there might be substantially enough immunity to prevent this phenomenon from happening. But in this case, we are inoculating people as they are encountering those who are sick with the disease. And what that means is the disease is now faced with a lot of opportunities to effectively evolutionarily practice escape strategies. So one thing is the timing. The other thing is the narrow focus.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To attack the body in ways that it is incapable of doing before exposure. So, this is apparently, this pattern has apparently blocked past efforts to make vaccines against coronaviruses, whether it will happen here or not, it is still too early to say. But before we even get to the question of harm done to individuals by these vaccines, we have to ask about what the overall impact is going to be. And it's not clear in the way people think it is that if we vaccinate enough people, the pandemic will end. It could be that we vaccinate people and make the pandemic worse. And while nobody can say for sure that that's where we're headed, it is at least something to be aware of. So don't vaccines use”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a hazard. It is a particular hazard in light of the fact that these vaccines have a substantial number of breakthrough cases. So one danger is that a person who has been vaccinated will shed viruses that are specifically less visible or invisible to the immunity created by the vaccines. So we may be creating the next pandemic by applying the pressure of vaccines at a point that it doesn't make sense to. The other danger has to do with something called antibody-dependent enhancement, which is something that we see in certain diseases like dengue fever. You may know that dengue one gets a case, and then their second case is much more devastating. So break bone fever is when you get your second case of dengue, and dengue effectively utilizes the immune response that is produced by prior exposure.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, that's a good question. I would say, first of all, there are some hazards with the vaccine that people need to be aware of. There are some things that we cannot rule out and for which there is some evidence. The two that I think people should be tracking is the possibility, some would say, a likelihood, that a vaccine of this nature, that is to say very narrowly focused on a single antigen. Is an evolutionary pressure that will drive the emergence of variance that will escape the protection that comes from the vaccine.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That emerges would naturally be enhancing human well-being. Perfectly so? No, but overwhelmingly so, but at the moment, markets are finding our every defect of character and exploiting them and making huge profits and making us worse to each other in the process.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you just let technology evolve, it's going to be our undoing, right? One of the things that I fault my libertarian friends for is this faith that the market is going to find solutions without destroying us. And my sense is I'm a very strong believer in markets. I believe in their power even above some market fundamentalists. But what I don't believe is that they should be allowed to plot our course. Markets are very good at figuring out how to do things. They are not good at all about figuring out what we should do, right? What we should want. We have to tell markets what we want, and then they can tell us how to do it best. And if we adopted that kind of pro-market, but in a context where it's not steering, where human well-being is actually the driver, we can do remarkable things and the technology”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Valley that was unexplored by people, their population would grow until it had carrying capacity. So there would be this great feeling of there's abundance until you hit carrying capacity, which is inevitable, and then zero-sum dynamics would set in. So in order for human beings to flourish long term, the way to get there is to satisfy the desire for growth without hooking it to actual growth, which only moves and fits and starts. And this is actually, I believe, the key to avoiding these spasms of human tragedy when in the absence of growth people do something that causes their population to experience growth, which is they go and make war on or commit genocide against some other population, which is something we obviously have to stop.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't kidding about build the system in which your idea is a great business plan. So in our upcoming book, Heather and I in our last chapter explore something called The Fourth Frontier. And Fourth Frontier has to do with sort of a 2.0 version of civilization, which we freely admit we can't tell you very much about. It's something that would have to be, we would have to prototype our way there. We would have to effectively navigate our way there. But the result would be very much like what you're describing. It would be something that effectively liberates humans meaningfully. And most importantly, it has to feel like growth without depending on growth. In other words, human beings are creatures that like every other creature is effectively looking for growth. We are looking for underexploited or unexploited opportunities. And when we find them, our ancestors, for example, if they happen into a new”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not what I'm saying. There's obviously great ideas that remain unexplored because nobody has gotten to the foothill that would allow you to explore them. That's true. But an internet that was non-predatory is an obvious idea. And many of us know that we want it. And many of us have seen prototypes of it. And we don't move because there's no audience there. So the network effects cause you to stay with the predatory internet. Let me just.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but what we have is a market that doesn't favor this. I mean, for one thing, we had an alternative to Facebook that looked, you owned your own data, it wasn't exploitative, and Facebook bought a huge interest in it and it died. I mean, who do you know who's on diaspora?”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you got to ask yourself the question though if this is such a great business model, why isn't it evolving? Don't we see it?”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source