SIO291: Bret Weinstein Spreads Dangerous Anti-vax Nonsense

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 291. I'm Thomas and with me as always, I want to say with me is always as Lindsey, but then sometimes I just go off the rails and do some solo episodes. But anyway, Lindsey, how are you doing?

0:00:42 Lindsey: Yeah, those are fun. Oh, man, I am incredibly full of rage. I have my mint tea. I'm ready to yell. Very angry.

0:00:48 Thomas: Ooh, maybe this is your problem. You're using mint tea as your rage tea. You like, I've got my chamomile tea and my sedative and I'm ready to be mad. Like maybe that's your problem? I need you to do a line of Coke. Joke.

0:00:54 Lindsey: To soothe my voice. Yeah, I mean, you know, but I don't know. There's an idea. Yeah. Try that out next time.

0:01:07 Thomas: New Patreon goal. We'll talk about it later. Which substances can get Lindsay to actually sound mad? We'll find out. No, but I'm also really just off a high of our first Q&A together that we did on Patreon and we released to everybody. That was a ton of fun. I I bring up because I've got the question thread for it's going to be May. It's going to be May Patreon because I had the bright idea to put that up like early in the month. And so as the episodes come out, if you've got questions for us for our end of the month Q&A thread, go to patreon.com/seriouspod and pop the questions in there all month, you know, and then at the end ofthe month, we'll have stuff from each of episodes. Seems like a good way to do it. And I can imagine this episode could raise some questions. We'll see.

0:01:10 Lindsey: Oh yeah, that was so fun.

0:01:56 Lindsey: I bet so.

0:01:57 Thomas: So I wanted to to set up a little bit, little bit of the context. And then I'm hoping that Lindsay is going to just science us good, you know, good and hard. I cannot wait. So you where do we start? Joe Rogan is like the most popular podcast in maybe the world, which is the most depressing thing in the world. I, I, it Might be, it may be, I've seen various metrics, you now, it's certainly with a, with a certain crowd I think with obviously with like white men it's the most popular podcast by far, um, but it's got an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, which If You're, if you know anything about podcasting, that that means he has a a very large audience that has at least listened to him from time to time, you know, like if 11 million people listen to each episode, that that means there's probably a crowd of like, I don't know, 50 million people that check in here and there, just because most people don't listen to, especially with a podcast like his, that's four or five hours long every single day.

I don't know who would listen to all of that, but anyway, it's got a massive reach. We'll just say it's good. It says, uh, I've got a Washington Post article open that says Rogan reaches nearly four times as many people as primetime cable hosts such as Sean Hannity of Fox News and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

So if we're talking about who we should be worried about and misinformation and where people are getting their information, so much rage for Tucker Carlson, for example, and I'm just in disbelief at how bad he is and all that stuff.

0:02:11 Lindsey: Joe Rogan, yeah. Is he really?

0:02:36 Lindsey: Jesus Christ. Hying,

0:03:35 Thomas: But we're taking someone here with four times the the reach who might be honestly just as bad in some ways. So it's worth prioritizing, I think, what we're looking at in terms of misinformation. And Joe Rogan is a massive source of misinformation for a lot of people. And he made a comment the other day, I'm sure you've heard of by now, it's been a few weeks now, April 23rd. And somebody asked him about vaccines and he said, said, if you're like 21 years old, this is a quote, if you're, like, 21 years and you say to me, should I get vaccinated, I'll go, no. And, you know, he kind of did this this sort of apology thing and said, quote, I'm not an anti-vax person. I'm a moron. Cautioning listeners that his show is not meant to entertain and not to provide medical advice.

0:04:25 Thomas: And, look, I think we need to stop pretending. Everybody, like Joe Rogan and others who have an audience, need to stop pretending that people will only listen to them on certain things. And back in the day when Jon Jon Stewart. Jon he used to do the thing where he's like, Hey man, I'm just the dick jokes guy, but like whenever he would be interacting with a politician. And he was making a joke. He was making a point that like, how is it that I have this information right? And you don't, and you're a politician, whatever. I'm just the dick jokes guy. People shouldn't listen to me, blah, blah, blah. And I make the same point there. Like if you have the audience, people like you, people will listen to you. And I think we've discovered, you know, 30 years later, 20 years later in this experiment of cable news and now online, all this stuff, if people like, you can listen to, you, they don't care what you actually have expertise in, and they're not good at being like, oh, Mr.

0:05:17 Thomas: Rogan commented, he was talking about Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and I listened to him there, but he's talking about vaccines here, so I'm not going to listen to him. Like, you don't get to just do that, this is important, and then what I saw that, um, Brett Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, who, who have been on Joe Rogan. And I know during the evergreen thing that some of you listeners may remember, I covered a lot on this podcast back when it happened. Um, and was completely proven right about that. Uh, that they, they were, they, I think I got like an, either an ad for it or like a recommended video for it, you know, which was, uh, sort of piggybacking on the Joe Rogan episode. And it was saying like, Hey, yeah, we're, we're two evolutionary biologists. And, you know, we're here to tell you that the science sort of backs up Joe Rogan.

0:06:04 Thomas: And like, he's actually, he shouldn't have backed down on this claim, um, that if you're 21 years old and they had some sort of caveat language, like, oh, we're going to explore it more. There may, may be more of a scientific basis than people are letting on and are essentially trying to capitalize on the Joe Rogan audience and to good effect. Weinstein's channel has nearly 300,000 subscribers, which, which, you know, that's a lot. And this video in particular, as of now, has about 75,000 views and counting. So, that is a lot of people that this is reaching.

0:06:39 Lindsey: It was posted Four days ago. Um, that's That's a lot.

0:06:40 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. It is a lot. And they, they have, they've got an audience. And so I thought it was important for us to specifically debunk. It's one thing to be like, yeah Joe Rogans an idiot. He said a dumb thing and he's not a doctor. Doctor. But these people are people who have credentials and are going to do massive amounts of harm and, you know, probably get people killed. We'll never be able to like prove the body count, but like, yeah, if you're going on and telling or more people, we'll see how many it gets that, you Know, vaccines are unsafe or an unwise choice for you. That will lead to people getting the virus, more people than wouldn't have otherwise. And so I was hoping Lindsay could kind of break down the science for us and tell us why these two scientists, people with PhDs, people who should know better, why they're so wrong on this issue.

0:06:43 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:07:33 Lindsey: And there's probably multiple answers to that, so I, I have not watched, uh, or listened to a ton of their podcasts, but this is, they've apparently expressed like vaccine skepticism for a long time and, and I think skepticism about other COVID stuff that we're going to talk about, um, but, but two, two things to say before we really get into it, um, they are PhDs in evolutionary biology, but they, they don't have specific expertise in the things that I think are really relevant to evaluating like research about virology And the effectiveness of vaccines, they're not experts in that, you know, they, they, I was trying to look up like what their PhDs are actually in and I had trouble finding that, but like based on the publications and things that they have, they, they do research on like animal ecology and stuff which is great, right, but it's not the same kind of of expertise that you need in order to evaluate research on vaccines, so I, so they are not the authorities on This topic that I think that they're presenting themselves to be.

0:08:01 Thomas: Interesting.

0:08:30 Thomas: Right. Well, and someone might push back and say, well, neither are you, Lindsay. You don't have those.

0:08:36 Lindsey: Well, That's Exactly what I Was going to say next, actually. And so, like, this, this discussion that we're going to have right now, like, neither one of us are coming to this with special expertise in the Relevant field, um, but that doesn't matter and I'm going to try to make the case that it doesn't matter, because the problem with their position is that they are taking a position that is a minority scientific position. They are going against the scientific consensus with any credentials.

0:09:05 Lindsey: It Is night and day, right? In order to go against the scientific consensus in an actually scientific way, an actually skeptical way, you do actually need to be credentialed. You need to have expertise in the specific thing that you are talking about. For all the rest of us who don't have expertise in these questions about vaccine, the vaccines, the absolute best thing that we can do, the best heuristic we could use to figure out what's true is to have confidence in the scientific consensus. And the entire argument that they make in this podcast is that people shouldn't, and that is incredibly dangerous and incredibly irresponsible, and they should know better because they are, they are familiar with the scientific process, process, right? So they should, they should recognize that what they're doing isn't truly skeptical. Did

0:08:36 Thomas: Yep. Right, right. Very different thing.

0:09:50 Thomas: Absolutely. We should get into the specifics. There's so much rage. We may save it for a later date. We made you another episode of Thomas and Lindsay yell at or something. We'll see. Um, because there, there are some claims in this whole, I watched the whole thing and we're not going to cover the whole things, but wow, there are some, there's some claims later on. What?

0:10:08 Lindsey: You Even Did You ever watch the the part at the end where they're talking about nature?

0:10:12 Thomas: I did actually. Cause I just left it on and was like, okay, nature. Cool. This is the thing you guys know about. You should talk. This should be your show. No one would watch it, but, you know, at least I'd be like, oh, these poor people, no one will watch their nice nature show instead of, oh these anti-vax clowns that are getting people killed and then also have a cute nature segment at the end.

0:10:14 Lindsey: Oh. Yeah.

0:10:33 Thomas: It's frustrating, yeah.

0:10:33 Lindsey: Seems Strategic. Yeah.

0:10:35 Thomas: There's a conspiratorial thinking to their mindset that I think has pushed them astray on this. So why don't we, you know, get into their, to what they're claiming.

0:10:46 Lindsey: Right, so so like overall the narrative that they're telling is that they're defending Joe Rogan sort of on two fronts, right, on his, his, the fact that he should be able to speak about things beyond his expertise because he's not trying to claim, you know, medical knowledge or whatever, but then they spent the rest of the episode essentially defending the position that it is actually very reasonable and in fact maybe, um, wise to be very skeptical about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. And they, as you said, they, they do this with a bunch of different things, there's no way we're going to get through all of it, um, so what, what, what I think I'd like to do is kind of, I want to show some of the techniques that they are using to undermine confidence in the scientific consensus, and we can sort of bring in examples of the claims along the way. Oh

0:11:28 Thomas: Yeah. Step one, I wanted to stipulate that they do several times at least acknowledge that COVID-19 is a dangerous, you now, virus, and they, so, so they're not full-on like COVID-19 deniers per se, um, just, and it's it's important because it's hard to know which, you know, if people aren't familiar you never know what what level of anti-science we're talking about, what level conspiracy theory, um, so not, not that level of it, at least.

0:11:59 Lindsey: I mean, yeah, they make sure to qualify at lots of points that yes, this is a dangerous disease, but effects of what they're claiming is to get people to take that threat less seriously. So I, you know, I think that they, I would like to see them reconcile that contradiction, right? But anyway, yeah, so when I watched this, right, and so synthesizing my thoughts about all this, what I noticed, right is that they are they are justifying their minority position on COVID vaccines, using these techniques that like you see among science deniers all the time, like people that are peddling woo and you know, propagating pseudoscience and All this stuff. So one way that they do this, one technique that they use is they're trying to undermine confidence in the scientific consensus in general by pointing toward how the consensus changes over time.

0:12:09 Thomas: Right. Right, ugh.

0:12:47 Lindsey: There was a point when Brett did this, and I think it's worth reading the quote here because there's some things to unpack. So he says, quote, "The entire idea of taking science and marshalling against those who would challenge it is the height of unscientific. Everything we now believe started out as heterodoxy," which means by challenging the quote-unquote orthodoxy or the consensus position. "It comes to be orthodox because it withstands tests and we find out how it works. Do you really think we're in a position, or do you really think we are in a place where you can freeze that process now?" And he's referring to where we are with vaccine testing. The scientific perspective is that we don't know what of the things that we believe today we will come to discover is false tomorrow.

0:13:32 Thomas: I have had to deal with this exact word-for-word argument with my religious family about global warming, about quantum physics, believe it or not. Religious people aren't Huge fans of quantum physics. Yeah, because they, you know, I'm painting with a broad brush, but there's a segment of religious people who are really, really uncomfortable with the fact that it's like a particle can't both be there and not there, that, you know, cause then that, that means that like Socrates couldn't have figured everything out by thinking about it. You know, essentially that like it violates the basic logic stuff that they take to be like the fundamental fabric of God's universe, you know? Like very, it's, it's interesting. It's an interesting topic for another time. But anyway, definitely those two topics. I think there's another one. I mean, I've argued a little bit evolution back in the day. I think they accept evolution. But anyway, this is basically word for word, like the same exact science denying arguments that I've argued against them. And it's

0:13:34 Lindsey: Wow.

0:13:44 Lindsey: Let

0:14:30 Thomas: Not that it's completely untrue, but why don't you explain to us why it's not a good way to argue here?

0:14:36 Lindsey: So this quote, everything he's sort of shoving into this quote is all like half true, right? So first of all, there is plenty of scientific progress that has happened without having to challenge the establishment view, right? So like when you embark on a new line of questioning, right, you have ideas that start out sort of very broad and descriptive, and there's a lot of open questions, and then people investigate those open questions. And over time, you get this picture of whatever the question is, right. So there's that.

0:14:41 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Good point.

0:15:01 Thomas: Yeah, I think I made that point on the quantum physics things when I was arguing with my family. It was like, okay, sure. Quantum physics captures, it says that, you know, the theory of gravity doesn't work at certain, I don't know, your other podcast partner could tell us better, but, you know, at certain tiny scales or like really relativistic scales or whatever, it breaks down a little bit. You know, I might be combining two different things there, but it doesn't mean that Newton's ball bearings actually didn't roll down the ramp at a certain speed. You know, like it doesn'T mean that those observations were invalid. Like if you're standing there at the bottom of a ramp and there's a giant ball bearing coming and you're like, well, actually the science says this isn't exactly how it works. It's like, no, you're going to get crushed by a ball bearing. That's still going to happen if you are in this weird construction I've invented.

0:15:03 Lindsey: Yeah, nope.

0:15:37 Lindsey: Yeah, No, no. And actually, so that's perfect segue into the second thing that I think is wrong with this quote, is because in cases where there really has been a major challenge to the status quo, and some paradigm has actually been then overturned, there's this big leap forward, right? It is not the case, as you just said, that we just throw out all the other evidence.

It's that that new thing, that new paradigm that they came up with, accounted for all that evidence and then it did some stuff on top of that, right? So like, his, when people bring this up in this kind of pseudoscientific context to get people to be like, oh, that's true, scientific paradigms change all the time, I guess I shouldn't believe what scientists to say, they're doing that because they want people to have the sense that like, actually, right, the scientists don't really know what's going on any more than you do. And so if, if we want to put forward this claim that challenges the the orthodoxy, as they would call it, right, the consensus position, right, our our claims are essentially on equal footing? And it's super dangerous, right, to present progress this way, to talk about challenging the status quo in the way that they are is super dangerous because, because, and this is an important point, the right way that paradigms get overturned in science is not by people with very little expertise in the topic that they're questioning.

0:16:32 Thomas: Right.

0:17:01 Thomas: Wait, it is not on a YouTube channel?

0:17:04 Lindsey: It's actually not, right? It's not by Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying coming in. And again, they do not have expertise in the claims that they are trying to debunk. Those shifts in paradigmas, they don't happen from people like that just sort of being like, actually, I don't know. I don't if I accept the consensus.

0:17:04 Thomas: Yeah.

0:17:21 Thomas: It is not like Einstein was not a physicist. He was like a biologist, you you know, or something.

0:17:23 Lindsey: I was going to use the same example, right?

0:17:29 Thomas: Oh, sorry.

0:17:30 Lindsey: No, we're so in sync, right? Yeah, no, the way that these paradigms do get overturned is by experts with massive amounts of expertise finding even better ways of accounting for existing evidence. So yeah, if you want to be Einstein, you need to go be a physicist, right, that's not what Brett and and Heather are doing right, they are approaching these questions with very uninformed unsophisticated kinds of views about these things

0:17:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, and the selective skepticism, you know? The idea that, like, you turn it on when it's a something, and I just, honestly, it really jibes with what I learned about Brett Weinstein when I covered the Evergreen stuff now four years ago, I think, just about three or four years go. Know, because I remember back then thinking he must Must have been some sort of conservative, but he said he was like, well, to the left of Bernie and, you know, he voted for Bernie, but not Hillary. And it fits in with this sort of anti-authority, which can be, you know, nothing wrong with that, but also toward the, a bit of the conspiracy mindset left, you know, that we have that doesn't trust like the anti-vax left, basically. It's, it's, they, they don't sound like full-on anti-vaxxers, but honestly, a lot of anti vaxxers try not to sound like fall on anti- vaxers. Like I've had these debates where, well, I'm not against vaccines.

0:17:56 Lindsey: Yes absolutely

0:18:44 Thomas: I just think it may be unsafe for my child to have so many of them at a time. And they find these little ways to, you know, we call it like vaccine hesitancy or whatever. But, you Know, this is what, this Is what this Is, you Know, it's, it'S, there's a lot of qualifying language to make it sound like it's not just out and out anti-vax stuff, but it, you Know, that's what anti-vaxxers do because they know that they sound kind of dumb when when they're very conspiratorial about vaccines. All that is to say, this seems to be his pattern back through then. And I'm just adding him to the list of, you know, half a dozen people I've been proven right about, including Dave Rubin and David Smalley and this guy.

0:19:16 Lindsey: Yeah

0:19:25 Thomas: It's just, yep, just if I ever complain about someone, just listen to me is all I'm saying. And it doesn't mean I'm right every time. It's juste that I've never been wrong. But no.

0:19:25 Lindsey: Keep track I'd say you've developed some deep expertise in spotting these folks so yeah I I pay attention to you um

0:19:37 Thomas: Yeah, this is my expertise. People who are going to turn into reactionary right-wing podcasters slash YouTubers. I have a good track record on that specific topic. Okay.

0:19:46 Lindsey: Yeah and so one other thing to pick out of this quote, so the, where he says, do you really think that we're in a place where you can freeze that process now with regard to where we are with knowledge about vaccine development.

0:19:55 Thomas: Yeah. As though that's what we want to do. Like we want stop, stop all the science.

0:20:00 Lindsey: Yeah, of course not.

0:20:02 Thomas: We're right, right now.

0:20:02 Lindsey: Of course not, right? But also, and this comes back later in the episodes in several points, right, I think that the point that he's trying to make there, or the way that he is trying to undermine the consensus there, is he's like, okay, so COVID is a new disease, and so these vaccines are new, and so we're all just starting at zero in terms of our priors about whether there would be, you know, long-term consequences of these vaccines, all this stuff. That is totally denying, or it's ignoring the fact that the development of these vaccines, right, is based on a ton of research, right? The technology behind these vaccines is not new. I have

0:20:21 Thomas: Hmm.

0:20:39 Thomas: So this is, can you, so this is the new technique. What is it? The messenger RNA thing. I want to make sure you answered this because it does. This is another thing that I think is appealing to people like me who don't have any expertise in this. It's like, okay, so their argument is this new vaccine is using a new technique, a messenger RNA thingy. And we don't, you know, this is the first one, according to them, that's been widely used, I guess. And that it's a new technology with young people, and this is how they try to justify the Joe Rogan point of view. They're saying because young people have longer lives to live, that means that you You have to weight the potential downsides of a vaccine more, whereas, you know, so they're saying, yep, if you're old, by all means, get the vaccine.

0:21:25 Thomas: But if you're younger, maybe not worth it because we don't even know. We know nothing. Apparently, we're starting at zero with this messenger RNA technique. It does seem to to be true that this is the first mRNA vaccine, at least approved for a disease, is what I'm seeing on the internet.

0:21:45 Lindsey: Like in order, in order for these vaccines to have gotten to the state, okay, so it may be new in the sense that like they're, they're this technology is being used in this way for the first time, right? But that doesn't mean that like we don't know anything about this technology, right, which I think is like, that's that's the only, that's only sense in which, uh, Brett and Heather's arguments here would make any sense.

0:22:08 Lindsey: Right. They're essentially like, we don't, this is brand new, there's no, we don't know anything about this, scientists don't know about it, it's brand, how could we know? COVID's new. Vaccine's new.

0:22:01 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And like you said earlier, they think we start at zero now with this. And if you start at 0, they say other things like there can't have been any testing on long term effects because it's a brand new thing. So literally, there couldn't have have been tests to understand the long-term consequences of this technology.

0:22:17 Lindsey: Yes. Uh.

0:22:37 Lindsey: From the reading that I have done on, you, the medical consensus websites that are answering these FAQs about these vaccines, is like, is like, yeah, it's new, right, but we do have evidence on which we are basing the claim that that there is no significant risk, there being long-term consequences, right? I take that seriously, they can't just say that. Yes.

0:22:54 Thomas: Right. Yeah, they've been developing this for like 30 years. You know, like the technology may have, you know, now may be the breakthrough, but it doesn't mean we knew nothing about it. They weren't like, oh, new technique right now in 2020, and then made a vaccine with it.

0:23:00 Lindsey: Precisely.

0:23:12 Lindsey: So, so yeah, I wanted to underline that particular point. Do you really think that we can freeze that process now? No, of course not. But like, also, it's not like we're on the ground floor with this stuff, right? There's a huge body of evidence that researchers are working on in the development of these vaccines, right? There's a reason that they're making the recommendations that they are.

0:23:30 Thomas: But one time Fauci was wrong about masks. Is it time to talk about Fauci? Yeah. Yeah.

0:23:33 Lindsey: Oh, that's where we're going next. It is time to talk about Fauci.

0:23:36 Thomas: So you you may think, oh, they just made the Fauci masks argument. That's already bad enough that, yeah, they were wrong. They had the wrong position on on masks for, you know, what, a few weeks, I think, you know, and then they corrected it. And that's exactly talk about should the science have stopped? No, like they didn't stop there. They corrected that. And then, you know, um, but it's worse than that listener. Let me tell you the Fauci, the anti-Fauciness of this episode is something you would find on like Alex Jones. Uh, it's that bad.

0:23:49 Lindsey: Yep. Yeah. Yeah, so Nuts, right. So I want to take the mask thing first just in case anybody forgot what the context around that was because they, because the quote here from Brett was, uh, there's the mask fiasco where he, Fauci, lied about whether or not masks were valuable and later acknowledged that that's what he had done, right. That's a strong claim, right.

0:24:31 Lindsey: Um, yeah, so we were all there when the CC reversed its guidance, for anybody who doesn't remember the context around this out of context quote. That Brett's claim about Fauci is based on this like selectively edited clip from a 60 Minutes interview with Fauce early in the pandemic. So the, the interview was on March 8th, that was right around the time that the country was shutting down, right. Um, depending on the location, it was a little bit before. And at that time, we knew a lot less about how the virus was being spread, and, most importantly, we didn't know at that point at what, what a huge risk asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic

0:24:13 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Well, Yeah.

0:25:05 Lindsey: Spread were, right.

0:25:06 Thomas: We were all focused on washing hands and cleaning groceries and stuff like stuff that now doesn't actually really matter. I mean, washing hands is still good, but like surfaces.

0:25:07 Lindsey: Yeah. Clorox. And your bananas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, that's

0:25:18 Thomas: Yeah, all that stuff.

0:25:20 Lindsey: Right, yeah, and so the CDC didn't reverse its guidance on masks until April 3rd, so that's almost a month after this interview, when the significant risk of asymptomatic spread became clear, right? So in the selectively edited clip, and I've got clips to the shorter one, the only thing that's excerpted is Fauci saying, like, yeah, people don't need to wear masks when they're going around in public. Again, in the context of a world where we didn't know the asymptomatic spread was a problem.

0:25:25 Thomas: Okay. A month. Yeah well,

0:25:45 Lindsey: One. Now, if you watch the stuff that's around that clip, he starts off that clip by saying it's very important for an infected person to wear a mask. He starts off, but yes, he starts off by saying that. Then he says people don't need to wear masks in public. And then he. He says the reason that we don't want people going out and like panic buying all the masks so they can wear them all the time in public, like, is because then we're not going to have enough PPE for healthcare workers who actually need them because masks are effective in reducing spreading the spread of this disease.

0:25:45 Thomas: Mm hmm. Oh, really? Yeah.

0:26:17 Thomas: Hmm. Does that sound like Fauci lied about masks? Does that sounds like Fauchi knew that masks were good, but then was like, they're not good. Masks are bad. Is that because that's what a lie would have to be about it. You'd have to know that they were good. And then he told the people don't don't wear masks because they're bad at do they don't you don't need them. And that's not what I'm hearing. What I'm hearing is infected people definitely wear masks. So, yeah, already that contradicts it. But non infected people as of that time, they thought they didn't have to wear them, plus balancing the fact that doctors needed masks. And

0:26:21 Lindsey: That's a really hard question.

0:26:53 Lindsey: Exactly.

0:26:53 Thomas: So it was a better use of the PPE to save the basically the front line people at that time. And then they were wrong. And that is the one thing that the entire higher right wing points at is like, why, oh, well, guess we can't listen to anything he ever said because of this one thing that he got a little bit wrong. Yeah.

0:27:16 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. Right. And by the way, they're presenting this and the next thing that we're going to talk about, which is even more fun, they'RE presenting this to undermine the credibility of Fauci as a person that you should listen to about the scientific consensus, right? They're saying, you know, Fauci criticized Joe Rogan, but like, why should we listen to Fauci? He lied about masks.

0:27:22 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. But the problem is Rogan was still lying about masks. Now it's

0:27:39 Lindsey: He Yeah. But that's their whole point here. Like, and they do it with Fauci, they do it with a couple other people in the course of the right, but they're using using this technique of like, of like, yeah, you know, they say to trust the scientific consensus, but all these mouthpieces for the scientific insistence are actually untrustworthy and you shouldn't listen to them, right? And that's another, that's other thing that science denialists like to do is these essentially like ad hominems, um, not

0:28:03 Thomas: And they also do with Bill Gates, as though I'm listening to Bill, I haven't listened to anything Bill Gates has said about this. I'm sure he's probably right about some stuff, and maybe he'd also be wrong about some stuff, but he's not critical to my worldview. It way worse. Wow.

0:28:18 Lindsey: Not so much, right? Okay, so yeah, so that's, that was the the first thing they did. The second thing that they did, um, yeah right, is that they, they bring up this this like lab leak hypothesis. So I'm going to read Brett's quote here. Uh, quote, the irony of ironies is that Fauci is the one telling us what our duty to society is because Fauchi, uh, played a role in restarting gain of function research, which, which it is ever clearer, may have played a decisive role in creating the pandemic.

0:28:47 Lindsey: Yeah, Fauci used to believe that gain-of-function research was safe enough that we could engage in it and not put the world at risk of a major pandemic. It's becoming clear that that wasn't the case. Whether or not this pandemic is the result of a laboratory escape, it is clear that things escape laboratories routinely and the gain-of-function research is perfectly capable of creating a nightmare virus. And so, did it happen here? We have yet to find out. Close quote.

0:28:46 Thomas: We Have Yet to find out, everybody, but That's a pretty strong statement, which may, so like, they're blaming him for the pandemic. They're saying he okayed this gain of function research, but I didn't know what that was. I wasn't sure if, was that like, oh, we're researching, getting um, a pangolin and a bat and a human into a room and having them like make out. Like I wasn't sure if like that was in specifically in Wuhan, like that Was the gain of function research.

0:29:14 Lindsey: Indeed.

0:29:32 Lindsey: That's most of it. That's the most fun gain-of-function research, yeah. Yeah.

0:29:36 Thomas: Um, I'd never heard of that type of research, but if that's what it was, then yeah, that sounds real bad. Um, but no, that's not what it is. This is the lab escape theory that really sounds, I mean, sure, again he put in a little caveat language, we, you know, we don't know, but like he's has, uh, the anger and ire toward Fauci as though he caused the pandemic, but then he's like, well, I guess we're not sure he did, but like we can still be mad at him as though we did, fucking

0:30:08 Lindsey: Right. Yeah, and apparently Brett and Heather have gone on, Bill Maher, and talked about the lab leak hypothesis and why it's reasonable.

0:30:14 Thomas: Bill Maher as experts in virology that they aren't, oh.

0:30:18 Lindsey: Yes, indeed. They actually, you know, they would be experts in the kind of research that you just described with having people make out with bats. That seems like the kind I think they'd be good at.

0:30:26 Thomas: Yeah. Well When We get That started. Yeah. Yeah.

0:30:28 Lindsey: Yeah. But yeah, so I, you know, I looked up some stuff about the lab leak theory to see if there's, you know, is this still an active question? Because there has been sort of investigation into it after people brought it up, Right? And, you know, I found a news article from Nature that was summarizing the World Health Organization's report on their investigation of the pandemic origins, and, like, no, the results of this investigation indicate that no, it's, there, it seems as though, uh, COVID was being spread from these wet markets, right? Indeed.

0:30:59 Thomas: But that's exactly what China would want you to think. And they, you know, again, you have to get into a global conspiracy level thinking.

0:31:09 Thomas: You know, it's it's hard. I'm not trying to poison the well by saying these are tinfoil hat assholes, but like they have a little bit of tinfoils on their heads, at least. And and exactly

0:31:16 Lindsey: If The Tinfoil hat fits, I, that's

0:31:22 Thomas: If you are going to sit here and and totally deny the fact that none of the evidence shows, and in fact, the World Health Organization and other people who've looked at it have said like, no, there's no evidence of this, then you're effectively, you have to be saying, by not accepting that, you're not be saying there's some sort of global conspiracy involving, at the very least, the WHO and some other people.

0:31:47 Lindsey: Exactly what I was going to say. I mean, this came up when we were talking about Deborah, so, as well, right? Like the, you know, there Just Can, exactly.

0:31:50 Thomas: Yeah. It's all the same things without saying it. Like you, you I guess it's equivocating language where it's like, I'm not saying there's a big global conspiracy, but the thing I'm saying can only be true if there is a big global conspiracy. And Then the people who want to defend them and say that we're being unfair, like, but they said there was no global conspiracy. But it's, like, yeah, but the thing they're arguing is only possible under a global conspiracy. So, like, it's both ways, and then we, you and I know what they're saying, but then they have the plausible deniability. It's very frustrating.

0:32:06 Lindsey: Precisely.

0:32:23 Lindsey: Yep. It's pretty cool. And by the way, so I don't know if we define the gain of function thing, but this is, this is the research where, you know, there is essentially research to find out about like how different pressures affect pathogens, right? It's super, super important applications for understanding how viruses are transmitted and how they replicate and the threat of mutations that make viruses more dangerous. And so I, you know, we were looking looking some of this stuff up, and it looks like, you know, there is a non-zero risk of their, uh, some of these things escaping from labs, but it, it seemed from the cases we were looking at that like those were like failures of protocols, and So I don't Know that

0:32:53 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I Was Doing a Little research into this because I, I was wondering, and I, I'm willing to admit I was wrong. I was thinking like, hey, how often has anything ever escaped a lab? And then I looked up and like, yeah, it, you know, it happens, people are incompetent, and slash you know, government can often be either underfunded or you can have weird reasons why, like, oh, a lab is moving, or it lost its funding, and so they just left like a box of viruses, you know, there's... there's weird stuff that can happen. But to blame, to turn that into blaming Fauci is a, is a weird process.

You know, it might be one thing to say this gain of function research has such a risk, you know, you could take the position that it has such risk, we shouldn't do it. Um, I think you'd probably be wrong, cause I think you'd want to look at, okay, if we set up just insanely safe protocol around it, and we make sure that, you know, and, and slash, there's benefits to the research, like you're not doing it for no reason, again, with, it's the same with a mask thing, Voucher wasn't saying don't wear a mask for no region, it was a risk calculation, or it was a risk reward calculation, and for gain of function it sounds like there's a very real reward of scientific breakthrough that could help in treating the next pandemic, or, or, whatever, you know, fighting

0:33:02 Lindsey: Yeah Yeah Right.

0:34:11 Thomas: The next pandemic.

0:34:11 Lindsey: Or Or Or predicting them, or I mean, like, how do we think that, uh, that, you know, scientists were able to sound alarm bells as early as they were in the pandemic, right? It's on the basis of research like this. Um, so yeah, so that's cool. I

0:34:13 Thomas: Yeah. Right. And imagine if people had listened to scientists, we could have avoided the whole damn thing.

0:34:30 Lindsey: Encourage everyone to listen to scientists.

0:34:32 Thomas: Yeah, Long story short on the lab thing like it does, it does happen. The answer is, well, there let's ban labs. No more labs. You know, the answer should be, hey, maybe we fund science in this country, for example, and like actually make sure they have the resources and the oversight and all that, that, you know, it's, it's the answer is more science, not get rid of science, essentially.

0:34:32 Lindsey: Yeah. Totally.

0:34:54 Lindsey: Agree, I okay, so that's the second technique that they kind of use throughout, right? Let's just undermine the credibility of the people who are the mouthpieces, and then that will instill uncertainty in people about whether they should trust the consensus about vaccines, right? This last one is related, and I think it's an important one. So another technique that they use throughout is that they suggest that trusting experts is bad, and it's not skeptical. It's not a scientific mindset to trust experts because they're essentially claiming that it's method of authority, that's

0:35:25 Thomas: Yeah, because after all, scientists are, um, they inherit their, so if you're born in a scientist family you get authority, you're just, it's birthright. And so, yeah, so listening to that, to the, to scientists just because they were born scientists, yeah, you're right, that's totally illogical, that's how it works, right? Is that how, is that a, science works, Lindsay?

0:35:45 Thomas: You, you're Like like a Duke of science. You're like the, you're the Lord of virology over the right.

0:35:44 Lindsey: How I get it. But Yeah, so let's make some clear definitions here. So if you're using method of authority to determine whether something is true, you're saying, I believe that this claim is true because this person with a PhD said it. So put a pin in that. So we'll come back to that in a second on sort of the flip side. But they're essentially saying that if you, if you trust experts in these scientific questions in their area of expertise, that you're being uncritical because you're just trusting their expertise. Okay, so here's, um, there was kind of an interesting example of this that Heather got into, she read a lot of Washington Post articles in preparation for this podcast episode. Episode. Uh-huh.

0:36:32 Thomas: Yeah. And she did a thing that I can't stand, which is not differentiating between, was this what an opinion writer in the Washington post wrote? Or was it like from the news section? But side note, that makes a big difference. She said like, Oh, the Washington Post thinks. And you're like, well, do they think that? I don't know who wrote the article. What section of the paper was it in? But anyway, set that aside.

0:36:42 Lindsey: Yeah. I So, in this piece that she's quoting from, um, the title of it is, Joe Rogan is using his wildly popular podcast to question vaccines, experts are fighting back. And so she, she quotes with just audible disdain from this one section toward the end of the article. So she says, this is quoting from Heather, quoting from the article, so, quote, "Misinformation coming from someone like Rogan continues to perpetuate doubt," said Kolina Koltai, a vaccine misinformation researcher at the University of Washington. Quote, "A lot of young adults follow him, and he's encouraging people to have hesitation." The article goes on to say Koltai pointed out that, quote, "No one is getting all of their information from Joe Rogan, but when his comments clash with what experts tell us, it helps muddy the waters."

0:37:44 Lindsey: Quote, hearing these conflicting messages from someone you might trust and someone you may agree with typically, it can potentially cause you to be concerned, she said. Oftentimes, it just ends up confusing people and making them sure not what what to do. So Heather has a lot of disdain for this quote. She says that the language struck her as super anti-scientific, antithetical to skepticism. She looked up who this person Koltai was, and it's a postdoc who has a PhD in information studies, and she makes sure to say, she was like, so she's not a scientist. And it's like, well, actually she is because information information studies as a branch of data science.

0:38:15 Thomas: Oh, yeah. She made fun of that. Yeah. Yeah, oh, this was so this was outrageous. Like, honestly, she so this article quotes somebody who talks about misinformation and people believing bullshit, right? Or like, you know, and then her Heather Hying to try to debunk this is like, well, let's see what her you credentials are. And it's like information science. She's like, see, not a not a scientist. She is not a virologist. You're like, but that's not what she she she's taking for granted.

0:38:26 Lindsey: Yeah. Yep. And

0:38:52 Thomas: The person in the article. What's her name again?

0:38:55 Lindsey: Kalina Koltay.

0:38:55 Thomas: Yeah. Kalina Koltai is taking for granite the expert consensus in virology and she's analyzing how how people, you know, the information part of it, the part that is her expertise, like, okay, taking that for granted, because I'm not a virologist, I'm going to analyze how people are understanding or misunderstanding the science. And then Heather Hines over here saying like, she's a virologist. How could she be talking about this at all? It's unbelievable. I thought that was so egregious.

0:39:02 Lindsey: That's correct. Yeah, it was, it Was awful, right? And she goes on, I think it's worth reading a little bit more of what Heather has to say about this, because it's gross. And I agree completely with that analysis. I had the same point. It's like, yeah, she's not speaking beyond her expertise. She's speaking directly within her expertise, yeah.

0:39:34 Thomas: Yeah, it was unreal. Like, what are you talking about, Heather Hine?

0:39:40 Lindsey: It was, it was awful, but again, like, it's just, you know, she's just being like, "Well, you know, this is not a person that you should trust," but um, but it, but it goes beyond that, right? So she's not just saying that this isn't a person you should trustworthy, she's making a specific argument about her being anti-scientific and and not skeptical, right? So he says, uh, Heather says, quote, "um, that has nothing to do with science, she's talking about her expertise, and that may exactly be training that she has that allows her to speak as if expert here that runs exactly opposed to what the scientific method is." This is a direct quote.

0:40:14 Thomas: What?

0:40:14 Lindsey: By the way, I'm not trying to make her sound

0:40:15 Thomas: I'm not sure I even understood that. I may have to translate.

0:40:15 Lindsey: Yeah She's just, she's just saying she's not using the scientific methods, she's essentially accusing her of using method of authority in order to evaluate her truth claim, right? Um, so she, Heather continues, uh, "She may well know what information is and what it looks like when people start to believe things that most, most people believe" to be true. Yep. But that does not mean that those people are themselves wrong. I see nothing indicating that she actually understands what the scientific method is." And then she's, yeah, and then she says a little bit later, Heather does, she says, Joe is using a skeptical approach to understanding the world and by implication is not using the method of authority. She continues, "The authorities are demonstrating over and over and over again that they don't even know what science is." That's right and

0:40:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:46 Thomas: Understands what the scientific method is. Oh my God. They don't know what science is. Fauci doesn't know it's science is this information scientist quoted about information doesn't know it science is apparently. Imagine if you wanted to study information misinformation. You know, I don't, I Don't know much about this field, but imagine if you also had to to be an expert in everything you discussed, you know, you're like, well, yeah, I want to research people who think the moon landing was fake, but that means I have to go into space. Like I actually have to be Neil Armstrong. Otherwise I can't do it. Like, yeah. How would I, I'm not an expert. Yeah. No, you take the scientific consensus and you know for the sake of research, assume that's the true thing. Or at least you don't even have to assume it's true. You're just researching how people are believing or not believing it, right?

0:41:15 Lindsey: Everything was misinformation about yeah, yep that would be a bummer, you know yeah Right, and I want to drill down on on this one piece of it, so she says, um, Heather again, she said she, Kultai, may well know what information is and what it looks like when people start to believe things, start to disbelieve things that most people believe to be true, and I bolded that part, "that most people believe to to be true," because the, the issue here is about people's disbelief, not in like the general consensus, not in what, you know, is popular to believe out in general public, the issue is like when people start to disbelieve the people who know the most about a given topic the experts, right?

0:42:26 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:42:29 Lindsey: So she's doing a little pivot here that I don't appreciate, right? And and she's dealing it, she's again, she's giving it toward the toward the idea, right, to to set up that like, "Nope, you you shouldn't trust the consensus of experts because that's not scientific, that's just, you know, method of authority," right? And then that, it's right after that discussion that Brett goes into his thing about all scientific knowledge starts out as heterodoxy. And, you knows, scientific paradigms and all that stuff.

0:42:52 Thomas: Yeah, where does she think Joe Rogan is getting his opinions? All he's doing is trusting people who come and tell him stuff. They're just the wrong people. We're going to get into it, I guess, in part eight of this series because we're already out of time and we haven't even gotten through stuff because there's so much. But like there's... there's A delightful Atlantic article called "The Pandemic's Wrongest Man" that I just love that we're going to talk about if we get to it. But anyway, he's been on Joe Rogan's show. So it's not as though Joe Rogin is, this is such a shameless just appeal for Joe Rogon listeners, basically their viewers, you know, like trying to piggyback on that audience. It's not as though what he's doing. She's trying to make the point that he's acting more scientifically because what, because he just says shit rather than because he says stuff that's wrong, so that means he's not trusting authority, that if so, fat, so he's more scientific. I don't get it.

0:43:02 Lindsey: Somebody, sorry, if there's a more charitable read on their position on this, then I would love to hear it, right, but it really does seem like they're saying, like, nope, it is, it is evidence of your skepticism for you to disbelieve scientific consensus, or at least to have like a lot of skepticism. I don't want to call it skepticism, right? It's like, if you have to question without any expertise yourself, you have to question experts in order to give your creds as a real skeptic. And that is the exact opposite of what is true.

Trusting the consensus of experts is trust in the scientific process itself. It's not trust in a person because they're an expert, it is recognition of the fact that scientific consensus forms on the basis of careful, systematic observation by the people who know the most about that topic in the world. And so, as a non-expert, right, your best bet, your best heuristic, I think it is, I think it is a um, a pro-science position is to trust the conclusion of people who know the best about it and offer you their conclusions, right? It's just, it's so, don't, it is, it's the opposite of what they're saying. It is not good skepticism to, to be like critical of the scientific consensus on the basis of no information. Did I, did I sound mad?

0:43:53 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:45:04 Thomas: You Do, that's the most mad, new record, ding ding ding, madness record.

0:45:07 Lindsey: I did it.

0:45:08 Thomas: Record. Yeah.

0:45:08 Lindsey: I did it.

0:45:09 Thomas: Mildly perturbed is rating the on the scale. Everybody vote in with your scale of what you think.

0:45:10 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, and you know what, you know, what is method of authority? It's people believing Brett and Heather because their PhDs in biology. That's method of Authority.

0:45:21 Thomas: Yeah, mm-hmm. And there's so much more too, because they talk about individual risk versus group risk. I to get into that, because it's another thing that I think will will appeal to some people, you know, it's, so their theory is, and I would, I would love it if you could do some science for us here or represent the expert consensus on these things. Their, their part of this is if you were to, the reason why Joe Rogan is correct is sure on a, um, again, it gets a little conspiratorial, the globalists, no, the, uh, the liberal, and he actually says this.

Brett Brett Weinsteiner says this, He says the left tends to be like group rights and the right tends to be like individual rights. And the answer, you know, is you have to balance those things, which fair enough, you know? Like I'll go with that. And so, but he sets up this thing of like, the problem is Fauci and the liberals want you all to get vaccinated because it's what's best for everybody. But if you're a 21, a healthy 21 year old, as you know Joe Rogan used as an example, it is like inappropriate for them to enforce the group rights on you and not look at your individual risk reward calculation.

But, and so I think that's going to appeal to somebody, but drives me nuts on that is I don't know that there's any evidence of any actual risk beyond, you know, that we've had a couple instances of the blood clotting. I don'T if you want to talk about that, but like, is there actual risk that's individual level worse for the vaccine than the virus?

0:45:30 Lindsey: Yeah sure, Sure.

0:46:58 Thomas: I thought the virus risk was massively more risky, like even for 20 healthy 21 year olds.

0:47:03 Lindsey: That is precisely my understanding. And again, like all I'm doing is being a mouthpiece for the consensus here. I don't have expertise in these things, but from the reading that I did about the consensus position around this is that no, there is no significant risk to these vaccines just for the vast majority of people, right? I'm sure that there are like known risks that might interact, right. We know that people that are immunocompromised might not be able to take These vaccines, there's... there's things like that, that's all fine, right, and those are the kinds of things that would go into that calculus of whether somebody should get a vaccine. Uh, but no, they're, they are sowing doubt about the safety of these vaccines based on nothing, as far as I can tell.

0:47:30 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:45 Thomas: Yeah, and the Alex Berenson article references a study that, you know, that was like, here's some data out of what is Sweden or something, and all these people died after getting the vaccine. Then turned out it's because they vaccinated like the oldest, least healthy people first who lived In, you, nursing homes, essentially. And the death rate in the nursing home was exactly what you would have expected on a normal, like, hundreds of people die in nursing homes because they're at the end of their lives. That's where people die. And so there was nothing to it. But they were using a lot of, I'm not sure if this is explicitly what Weinstein and Hying are referencing, but that is in that information ecosystem. Ecosystem is that kind of study.

That's like, yeah, look, these people died after taking the vaccine. And with this, Lindsay, we've realized that there's so much bad science, bad skepticism, frankly, dangerous, harmful bullshit coming out of Weinstein and Hying that we need to do a Part 2 on this. So we're going to, so we are going to cut it off here for part one and do a whole nother episode on, there's even, there are even more bad claims being made.

0:48:00 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:48:52 Thomas: And it's, it's really dangerous stuff. And it's so frustrating because I, the New York Times just came out with that article the other day that was like, looks like the U.S. is not going to reach herd immunity. So maybe we can also, we could also talk about that maybe in the part two to to drive home why this is so dangerous. So, oh, Lindsay, as always, thanks so much for the analysis, the science, the being the consensus mouthpiece here.

0:49:17 Lindsey: Yeah, and I apologize for losing my temper.

0:49:19 Thomas: Yeah, it was very unprofessional. All right. Thanks so much, listeners. We love you. Jump on the Patreon for that Q&A thread and look forward to part two on this very depressing topic.

0:49:41 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com slash SeriousPod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.