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

“Terrible business model under the current system. What you want is to build the system in which it is a great business model.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, a layer in which those things could be defended so you could hear what a good argument sounded like rather than just hear a caricatured argument.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is evidence for plate tectonics. As crazy as it sounds that the continents are floating around on liquid, actually that's not so implausible. You know, we've got these subduction zones, we've got geology that is compatible, we've got puzzle piece continents that seem to fit together. Wow, that's a surprising amount of evidence for that position. So I'm going to file some Bayesian probability with it that's updated for the fact that actually the steel man argument's better than I was expecting, right? So I could imagine something like that where A, I would love the search to be indifferent to who's searching, right? The solopsistic thing is too dangerous. So the search could be general, so we would all get a sense for whatever else was seeing too. And then some layer that didn't have anything to do with what YouTube points you to or not, but allowed you to see, you know, the general pattern of adherence to searching for information.”
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 know that a vaccine is a mind control device, and you could have a steel man, this argument, competition effectively, and the better answers that steel man it as well as possible would rise to the top. And so you could read the top three or four explanations about why this really credibly is a mind control product. And you can say, well, that doesn't really add up. I can check these three things myself and they can't possibly be right, and you could dismiss it. And then as an argument that was credible, let's say plate tectonics before that was an accepted concept, you'd say, wait a minute.”
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 evidence that Ivermectin works. I find all of these discussions and people talk about various protocols and this and that. And then I could say, all right, what is the other side? And I could see who is searching as individuals, but what demographics are searching alternatives. And maybe you could even combine it with something Reddit-like where effectively let's say that there was a position that”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has the problem that I suggest. But one thing you could do is you could give us the tools to understand what we're looking at. You could give us, so first of all, there's something I think myopic, solipsistic, narcissistic about an algorithm that serves shareholders by showing you what you want to see rather than what you need to know, right? That's the distinction is flattering you, you know, playing to your blind spot is something that algorithm will figure out, but it's not healthy for us all to have Google playing to our blind spot. It's very, very dangerous. So what I really want is analytics that allow me, or maybe options and analytics. The options should allow me to see what alternative perspectives are being explored, right? So here's the thing I'm searching and it leads me down this road, right? Let's say it's Ivermectin. I find all of that.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some sense you're suggesting something that's close kin to what I was saying about freedom of expression ultimately provides an advantage to better ideas. So I'm in agreement, broadly speaking. But I would also say there's probably some sort of, you know, let's imagine the world that you propose where YouTube shows you the alternative point of view.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creates a problem of its own, which is that it means that the way to get exposure is to generate something fringy. If you're the only thing on some fringe, then suddenly YouTube would be recommending those things. And that's obviously a gamable system at best.”
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 an evidentiary question and there is essentially no evidence that the vaccine is a mind control agent and there's plenty of evidence that the vaccine is safe, then well you look for this video, we're going to give you this one, puts it on a par, right? So for the mind that's tracking how much thought is there behind it's safe versus how much thought is there behind it's a mind control agent will result in artificially elevating this. Now in the current case, what we've seen is not this at all. We have seen evidence obscured in order to create a false story about safety. And we saw the inverse with Ivermectin. We saw a campaign to portray the drug as more dangerous and less effective than the evidence clearly suggested it was. So we're not talking about a comparable thing, but I guess my point is the algorithmic solution that you point 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
“When, in fact, the vaccine is very safe, whatever that means. If that were the actual configuration of the puzzle, then YouTube would be doing active harm pointing you to this other video potentially. Now, yes, I would love to live in a world where people are up to the challenge of sorting that out. But my basic point would be.”
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's come up with a hypothetical. Okay, let's come up with a very deadly disease for which there's a vaccine that is very safe, though not perfectly safe. And we are then faced with YouTube trying to figure out what to do for somebody searching on vaccine safety. Suppose it is necessary in order to drive the pathogen to extinction, something like smallpox, that people get on board with the vaccine But there's a tiny fringe of people who think that the vaccine is a mind control agent. So, should YouTube direct people to the only claims against this vaccine, which is that it's a mind control agent?”
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 mean, what you're describing is unthinkable. It is unthinkable that in the face of a campaign to vaccinate people in order to reach herd immunity that YouTube would give you videos on hazards of vaccines when this is, you know, how hazardous the vaccines are is an unsettled 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
“Well, there's a lot there, I would say. We have to keep in mind that we're talking about a publicly held company with shareholders and obligations to them and that that may make it impossible. And I remember many years ago, back in the early days of Google, I remember a sense of terror at the loss of general search. It used to be that Google, if you searched, came up with the same thing for everyone. And then it got personalized. And for a while it was possible to turn off the personalization, which was still not great because if everybody else is looking at a personalized search and you can tune into one that isn't personalized, that doesn't tell you why the world is sounding the way it is. But nonetheless, it was at least an option. And then that vanished. And the problem is I think this is literally deranging us. That in effect”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Placing humanity in danger of a permanent relationship with this pathogen. I cannot emphasize enough how expensive that is. It's effectively incalculable if the relationship becomes permanent the number of people who will ultimately suffer and die from it is indefinitely large.”
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, at the moment it's going to be pretty hard to compel me that these people should be trusted with any sort of curation or comment on matters of evidence because they have demonstrated that they are incapable of doing it well. You could make such an argument, and I guess I'm open to the idea of institutions that would look something like YouTube that would be capable of offering something valuable. I mean, and even just the fact of them literally curating things and putting some videos next to others implies something. So, yeah, there's a question to be answered. But at the moment, no. At the moment, what it is doing is quite literally putting not only individual humans in tremendous jeopardy by censoring discussion of useful tools and making tools that are more hazardous than has been acknowledged seem safe, right? But it is also...”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should fix that, okay? I believe that that is the basic principle. Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between ideas and personal attacks, doxing these other things. So I agree. There's no value in allowing people to destroy each other's lives, even if there's a technical legal defense for it. Now, how you draw that line, I don't know. What I'm talking about is, yes, people should be free to traffic in bad ideas and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad. And hopefully that process results in better ideas winning out.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Automatic, but the heterodoxy at the fringe, which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas, is the key to progress. So if you decide, hey, the fringe is ninety nine percent garbage, let's just get rid of it, right? Hey, that's a strong win. We're getting rid of 99% garbage for 1%, something or other. And the point is, yeah, but that 1%, something or other is the key. You're throwing out the key. And so that's what YouTube is doing. Frankly, I think at the point that it started censoring my channel in the immediate aftermath of this major reversal of Verlab Leak, it should have looked at itself and said, well, what the hell are we doing? Who are we? We're censoring somebody who was just right, right, in a conflict with the very same people on whose behalf we are now censoring, right? That should have caused them to wake up.”
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 know how strongly I believe that it will work, but I will say I haven't heard a better idea. I would also point out that there's something very significant in this question of the hubris involved in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion by censoring, which is the majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread on the short term does not say that over the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. So there is a high tendency for novelty to be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct. And you have to keep that in mind. It's not like the genome, right? Everything is happening at a much higher rate. Things are being created. They're being destroyed. And I can't say that, you know, I mean, obviously we've seen totalitarianism arise many times and it's very destructive each time it does. So it's not like, hey, freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage. But the question is over time, does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies? And I believe that it does. I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the pattern.”
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 layer is prone to make errors, right? And anybody who's watched a child grow up knows that children make absurd errors all the time, right? That's part of the process we were discussing earlier. It is also true that as you look across a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense. It's garbage.”
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, yes, it's all worrying in time of emergency, to be sure. But I want you to notice that what you've happened on is actually an analog for a much deeper and older problem. Human beings are the Are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised. And there's a reason for that, right? It's where our flexibility comes from. We have effectively our robots in which a large fraction of the cognitive capacity has been or of the behavioral capacity has been offloaded to the software layer, which gets written and rewritten over evolutionary time. That means effectively, that much of what we are, in fact, the important part of what we are, is housed in the cultural layer and the conscious layer and not in the hardware hard coding layer.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook may be more powerful in this moment than the federal government of their worst nightmares could have been. The power that these entities have to control thought and to shift civilization is so great that we need to have those same protections. It doesn't mean that harmful things won't be said, but it means that nothing has changed about the cost-benefit analysis of building the right to censor. So if I were running YouTube, the limit of what should be allowed is the limit of the law, right? If what you are doing is legal, then it should not be YouTube's place to limit what gets said or who gets to hear it. That is between speakers and audience will harm come from that, of course it will, but will net harm come from it? No, I don't believe it will. I believe that allowing everything to be said does allow a process in which better ideas do come to the fore.”
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 impact, the centrality of platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. If they had, they would not have limited the First Amendment as they did. They clearly understood that the power of the federal government was so great that it needed to be limited by granting explicitly the right of citizens to say anything.”
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, unfortunately, or fortunately, this is actually quite simple The founders, the American founders, settled on a counterintuitive formulation that people should be free to say anything, they should be free from the government blocking them from doing so. They did not imagine that in formulating that right that most of what was said would be of high quality, nor did they imagine it would be free of harmful things. What they correctly reasoned was that the benefit of leaving everything so it can be said exceeds the cost, which everyone understands to be substantial. I would say, is they could not have anticipated”
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 corrupt wisdom of the Who and the CDC, but the Who and the CDC have been wrong again and again in this pandemic. And the irony here is that with YouTube coming after me, well, my channel has been right where the Who and CDC have been wrong consistently over the whole pandemic. So how is it that YouTube is censoring us because the Who and CDC disagree with us when in fact in past disagreements we've been right and they've been wrong?”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With that said, once that right to lie exists, then it finds out it turns out to serve the interests of, for example, pharmaceutical companies, which have emergency use authorizations that require that there not be a safe and effective treatment and have immunity from liability for harms caused by their product. So that's a recipe for disaster, right? You don't need to be a sophisticated thinker about complex systems to see the hazard of immunizing a company from the harm of its own product at the same time that that product can only exist in the market if some other product that works better somehow fails to be noticed. So somehow YouTube is doing the bidding of Merck and others, whether it knows that that's what it's doing, I have no idea. I think this may be another case of an autopilot that thinks it's doing the right thing because it's parasitic.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even at their best, the Who and CDC are not scientific entities, they are entities that are about public health. And public health has this, whether it's right or not, and I believe I disagree with it, but it has this self-assigned right to lie that comes from the fact that there is game theory that works against, for example, a successful vaccination campaign. Everybody else takes a vaccine and therefore the herd becomes immune through vaccination and you decide not to take a vaccine, then you benefit from the immunity of the herd without having taken the risk. So people who do best are the people who opt out. That's a hazard. And the who and CDC as public health entities effectively oversimplify stories in order that that game Theory does not cause a predictable tragedy of the commons.”
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, there's a question about why they say they did it, and there's a question about why they actually did it. Now it is worth mentioning that YouTube is part of a consortium of Is partnered with Twitter, Facebook, Reuters, AP Financial Times, Washington Post, some other notable organizations, and that this group has appointed itself to the The arbiter of truth. In effect, they have decided to control discussion ostensibly to prevent the distribution of misinformation. How have they chosen to do that? In this case, they have chosen to simply utilize the recommendations of the who and the CDC and apply them as if they are synonymous with scientific truth”
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 apparent that if the amount of drug in your system is sufficient to be protective at the end of the week, then it was probably far too high at the beginning of the week. So there's a question about whether or not you could flatten out the intake so that the amount of ivermectin goes down, but the protection remains. I have little doubt that that would be discovered if we looked for it. But that said, it does seem to be quite safe, highly effective at preventing COVID. The 86% number is plenty high enough for us to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction in light of its R0 number of slightly more than two. And so why we are not using it as a bit of a mystery”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is perfectly safe. And I do worry about the long term implications of taking it. I also think it's very likely because the drug is administered in a dose something like, let's say, 15 milligrams for somebody my size once a week after you've gone through the initial double dose that you take 48 hours apart.”
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 let me just say I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a biologist. I am on Ivermectin in lieu of vaccination. In terms of dosage, there is one reason for concern, which is that the most effective dose for prophylaxis involves something like weekly administration, and that is because that is not a historical pattern of use for the drug, it is possible that there is some long-term implication of being on it for being on it weekly for a long period of time. There's not a strong indication of that. The safety signal that we have over people using the drug over many years and using it in high doses, in fact, Dr. Corey told me yesterday that there are cases in which people have made calculation errors and taken a massive overdose of the drug and had no ill effect. So anyway, there's lots of reasons to think the drug is comparatively safe.”
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 really cool, and they've got some really nice graphics that allow you to understand what is the evidence that's concentrated around this level of effectiveness. Etc. So, anyway, it's a great site, well worth paying attention to. No, this was a meta-analysis. I don't know any of the authors, but one. Second author is Tess Laurie of the Bird Group, Bird being a group of analysts and doctors in Britain that is playing a role similar to the FLCC here in the US. So anyway, this is a meta-analysis that Tesla and others did of all of the available evidence. And it's quite compelling. People can look for it on my Twitter. I will put it up and people can find 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
“No, this is not that meta-analysis. So that is, as you say, a living meta-analysis where you can watch Evidence, which is super”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them early, and it showed an 86% effectiveness as a prophylactic to prevent people from contracting COVID. And that number, eighty six percent, is high enough to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction if we wished to deploy 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
“Molecule. It was discovered some time ago, apparently, that it has antiviral properties, and so it was tested early in the COVID-19 pandemic to see if it might work to treat humans with COVID. It turned out to have very promising evidence that it did treat humans. It was tested in tissues. It was tested at a very high dosage, which confuses people. They think that those of us who believe that Ivermectin might be useful in confronting this disease are advocating those high doses, which is not the case. But in any case, there have been quite a number of studies, a wonderful meta-analysis was finally released. We had seen it in pre-print version, but it was finally peer-reviewed and published this last week. It reveals that the drug, as clinicians have been telling us, those who have been using it, it's highly effective at treating people with a disease, especially if you get”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the discovery of the Ivermectin molecule in 2015, its initial use was in treating parasitic infections. It's very effective in treating the worm that causes river blindness, the pathogen that causes elephantitis, scabies, the very effective anti-parasite drug. It's extremely safe. It's on the who's list of essential medications. It's safe for children. It has been administered something like 4 billion times in the last four decades. It has been given away in the millions of doses by Merck in Africa. People have been on it for long periods of time. And in fact, one of the reasons that Africa may have had less severe impacts from COVID-19 is that Ivermectin is widely used there to prevent parasites, and the drug appears to have a long-lasting impact. So it's an interesting...”
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 Ivermectin is an interesting drug. It was discovered in the 70s by a Japanese scientist named Satoshi Omura, and he found it in soil near a Japanese golf course. So I would just point out in passing that if we were to stop self-silencing over the possibility that Asians will be demonized over the possible lab leak in Wuhan and to recognize that actually the natural course of the story has a likely lab leak in China, it has an unlikely hero in Japan. The story is naturally not a simple one. But in any case, Amura discovered this molecule. He sent it to a friend who was at Merck, a scientist named Campbell. They won a Nobel Prize.”
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 doctors or scientists, but they are advocating for it in the sense that there is this pressure not to talk about its effectiveness for reasons that we can go into.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much enjoyed talking to Joe, and I'm Undescribably grateful that he would take the risk of such a discussion, that he would, as he described it, do an emergency podcast on the subject, which I think that was not an exaggeration. This needed to happen for various reasons, that he took us down the road of talking about the censorship campaign against Ivermectin, which I find utterly shocking, and talking about the drug itself. And I should say we talked, we had Pierre Corey available. He came on the podcast as well. He is, of course, the face of the FLCC, the frontline COVID-19 critical care alliance. These are doctors who have innovated ways of treating COVID patients, and they happened on Ivermectin and have been using it. And I hesitate to use the word advocating for it because that's not really the role.”
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 that's extremely dangerous. The way out of it is to cultivate security to the extent that somebody is in a position to go against the grain and have it not be a catastrophe for their family and their ability to earn, you will see that behavior a lot more. So I would argue that some of what you're talking about is just a simple predictable consequence of the concentration of the sources of well-being and that this is a solvable problem.”
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, years ago, I came up with a concept called cultivated insecurity. And the idea is, let's just take the example of the average Joe. The average Joe has a job somewhere, and their mortgage, their medical insurance, their retirement, their connection with the economy is to one degree or another dependent on their relationship with the employer. That means that there is a strong incentive, especially in any industry where it's not easy to move from one employer to the next. There's a strong incentive to stay in your employer's good graces, right? So it creates a very top-down dynamic, not only in terms of who gets to tell other people what to do, but it really comes down to who gets to tell other people how to think.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have these institutions, they are behaving towards a kind of somatic obligation. They have lost sight of what they were built to accomplish. And on the inside, the way they avoid going back to their original mission is to say things to themselves, like, the public can't have this discussion, it can't be trusted with it. Yes, we need to be able to talk about this, but it has to be private. Whatever it is they say to themselves, that is what capture sounds like on the inside. It's a institutional rationalization mechanism, and it's very, very deadly. And at the point you go from Lab Leak to repurposed drugs, you can see that it's very deadly in a very direct way.”
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 you're describing about what people said, and a great many people understood that the Laublek hypothesis could not be taken off the table, but they didn't say so publicly, and I think that their discussions with each other about why they did not say what they understood, that's what capture sounds like on the inside. I don't know exactly what force captured the institutions. I don't think anybody knows for sure out here in public. I don't even know that it wasn't just simply a process, but”
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, it is. I also think that we have to look at it and understand it for what it is. For one thing, it's kind of a cryptic totalitarianism. Somehow people's sense of what they're allowed to think about, talk about, discuss is causing them to self-censor. And I can tell you it's causing many of them to rationalize, which is even worse. They are blinding themselves to what they can see. But it is also the case, I believe,”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Demonizing people like me, like Josh Rogan, like Yuri Dagan, the entire drastic group on Twitter by demonizing us, for simply following the evidence, is to set a terrible precedent you're demonizing people from using the scientific method to evaluate evidence that is available to us in the world. What a terrible crime it is to teach that lesson, right? Thou shalt not use scientific tools? No, I'm sorry. Whatever your license to lie is, it doesn't extend to that.”
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 you point out, one thing that rests on this question is whether we continue to do this kind of research going forward. And the scientists in question, all of them, American, Chinese, all of them, were pushing the idea that the risk of a zonotic spillover event causing a major and highly destructive pandemic was so great that we had to risk this. Now, if they themselves have caused it, and if they are wrong, as I believe they are, about the likelihood of a major world pandemic spilling out of nature in the way that they wrote into their grant applications, then the danger is, you know, the call is coming from inside the house. And we have to look at that. And yes, whatever we have to do to protect scientists from retribution, we should do. But we cannot Protecting them by lying to the world, and even worse by”
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, okay. You know, there are obviously places where complete transparency is not a good idea, right? To the extent that you broadcast a technology that allows one individual to hold the world hostage, right? Obviously, you've got something to be navigated. In general, I don't believe that the scientific system should be lying to us in the case of this particular lie The idea that the well-being of Chinese scientists outweighs the well-being of the world is preposterous.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Matter what happened, we have a right to know. And I frankly do not take the institutional layer at its word that its motivations are honorable and that it was protecting good-hearted scientists at the expense of the world. explanation does not add up.”
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 point would be, I don't want to see the targeting of anyone. I don't want to see racism of any kind. On the other hand, once you create license to lie in order to protect individuals when the world has a stake in knowing what happened, then it is inevitable that that process, that license to lie, will be used by the thing that captures institutions for its own purposes. So my sense is It may be very unfortunate if the story of what happened here can be used against Chinese people. That would be very unfortunate. And as I think I mentioned, Heather and I have taken great pains to point out that this doesn't look like a Chinese failure. It looks like a failure of the international scientific community. So I think it is important to broadcast that message along with the analysis of the evidence.”
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 feel that there's anything to steal man. And I also think that immediately at the point that the world suddenly, with no new evidence on the table, switched gears with respect to the lab leak, you know, at the point that Nicholas Wade had published his article and suddenly the world was going to admit that this was at least a possibility, if not a likelihood. We got to see something of the rationalization process that had taken place inside the institutional world, and it very definitely involved the claim that what was being avoided was the targeting of Chinese scientists.”
2021-06-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source