Council of the Canceled with Eric Weinstein, Jay Bhattacharya and Mike Benz (X Content): Difference between revisions

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[[File:20240807-Nicole-Shanahan-Council-of-the-Canceled.jpg]]

|host=[https://x.com/NicoleShanahan Nicole Shanahan]

|length=01:32:40

|releasedate=7 August 2024

|next=Eric Weinstein - Why Can No One Agree On The Truth Anymore? - Modern Wisdom 676 (YouTube Content)

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* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund International Monetary Fund (IMF)]

* [[Jessupization]]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite Kryptonite]

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology Marxist Liberation Theology]

00:03:13:13 - 00:03:30:26

I mean, what I want, Nicole, is that there should never have to ever be another Council of the Canceled. We can have society run in a way so that our institutions welcome the kinds of dissident voices that have been shunned aside during the pandemic.

00:06:00:14 - 00:06:01:24

No, no, please.

00:10:13:11 - 00:10:39:16

00:10:39:18 - 00:10:40:07

00:10:40:13 - 00:10:45:03

And in fact, I have to tell you, I myself was fooled about this point when we when I wrote it.

00:10:45:29 - 00:10:46:03

Like.

00:10:47:03 - 00:10:48:06

Wait, am I fringe?

00:10:51:09 - 00:11:05:21

Yeah, exactly. So so like I, you know, I wrote this thinking, okay, I'm not I'm not really representing the, the majority opinion, but a really respectable minority opinion at the time. and now when I look back, I'm not so. Sure that that's true

00:12:02:21 - 00:13:07:08

Kind of pick up on. One thing you said, I think is. So super important. the, the experts that we're talking about, what, what's really what we're talking about is making sure that the people are represented in these institutions. These dissenting voices often represent regular people, regular, you know, that are hurt by the majority decisions. And so receiving these institutions with experts, really what it means is it's it's it's putting the representation, the people, the representatives of the people in the halls of power when the discussions are being made. I mean, that's partly my thinking with the Great Barrington, that all these people were being hurt by these lockdowns, by the school closures at scale and their voices were nowhere near the centers of power they deserve to be. And to me, I was I was a representation of that group rather than just myself. That's why it was, you know, I despite thinking, okay, maybe I'm in the minority, I thought, nope, no, there's these people. Regular people have a right to be heard in these when these decisions are made. And so that's why I was I was you know, quite, quite still quite proud of it.

'''Eric Weinstein:'''

00:16:28:06 - 00:16:31:06

00:29:01:24 - 00:29:47:25

You know what I've seen firsthand? The mechanisms, at least within science, how this works. Right. So, the NIH, is responsive for funding, a huge amount of biomedical research in the United States and around the world. But it's not even the money that they confer. What they confer is social status. All right. So I have a I'm a professor with full tenure Stanford University in the School of Medicine. One of the main reasons I was able to get that position is because I was successful getting NIH grants. Right. It's a social marker. And the, the what they do is they send out the heads of these institutes, Tony Fauci will send out request for proposals with like essentially telling you what they want from you. that's, that's the normal way.

00:29:49:27 - 00:30:26:25

I mean, they won't explicitly say what they want, but but you said up the set of ideas that you're allowed to like to say in order to, like, get, have any chance of getting, getting funding. And then the signal goes out wide and clear. Right. So, so, and it's very directed. It's, it's, it's, it's, and it didn't I don't think it always used to be like this, but like the very top of the institution says, here's the kind of science we want you to here's the kind of inquiries we want. We want, and, and so and then that essentially constrains the set of things that scientists are allowed to ask, because I don't want to not get tenure. I mean, I don't want to be on the outside.

00:31:13:27 - 00:31:33:27

It's that's exactly what the what happens. And it has real consequences for the health of the American people. Yeah. But the American people have invested millions and millions, tens of hundreds of millions of dollars. For instance, on prevention of Alzheimer's disease. And for decades, the NIH only permitted, hypotheses were from a very narrow range of thinking.

00:31:34:27 - 00:31:43:29

Amyloid plaque, and it turns out very likely that's not the most like it's got. It's not the proximate cause of, of of Alzheimer's disease that we need. We need other kinds of thinking.

00:31:49:22 - 00:31:55:23

But for for a decade or more, if you were in this field, you could not get an NIH grant unless you took that as the main hypothesis.

00:32:04:16 - 00:32:21:16

nerd humor, I mean, but that's the that's the problem, right? So science needs to have people you can't put a scarlet F for fringe on every single scientist had a different idea. it makes no sense. it just kills science, and it hurts the health of the American people.

00:34:13:28 - 00:35:54:17

I think that the two major principles are we need to decentralize the powers of the power of the institution so that it allows other voices that are on the now are on the outside in, you know, voices that have some expertise. But for whatever reason, it's expertise that's a challenge in the center of power. And then we need radical transparency. Right. And so free speech is of a piece of that of a, of a, of a part of like a fundamental part of that. Right. So what happened to me was that the government decided that what I was saying was so, so wrong or dangerous or whatever inconvenient, that it sent messages to social media companies saying, if if you have people saying the kinds of things Jay says, label them, throw them off, makes them make them into fringe figures. Don't let them. Don't let them have a voice. And don't tell them, by the way, that that they've been you just so they'll think that they're just they're seeing things when they're not. the idea that the government can tell social media companies who and what to censor, that was the heart of that case. And unfortunately, Nicole, we, we had some really good rulings in the lower courts and in the Supreme Court. Supreme court ruled it was a very interesting ruling. It said that I lacked standing to sue. For this case. which meant that because I couldn't show an email directly from the government to the social media kind of things and censor Jay. Therefore, it was okay that they went to the from the social media government told social media companies censor the the kinds of ideas. Jay says, so you're running me Bobby Kennedy. He's he also has a case, a very similar case. And he very certainly has that he meets that standard for for stand it like he.

00:35:57:14 - 00:36:19:23

and in that case which is fantastic news, which but but what it does is it says the government can't tell social media companies who to censor, but the government can now still, under current law, under the current rule, a sort of ruling Supreme Court can tell social media companies what ideas to censor. And there's no one will have stand it because there won't be a that.

00:36:23:15 - 00:36:25:23

Yes.

00:36:32:23 - 00:36:37:22

I think this is one for this. We need Congress to act. We I mean, because of some.

00:36:37:24 - 00:36:38:24

I've sort of lost a little.

00:51:16:20 - 00:52:28:03

Sorry, Nicole, can I can I give you an example of this? Because what you said is so important that it's the people's interests need to be represented in these decisions, right? So let me just get a very concrete example. Right. It's very likely that this pandemic was caused by, a kind of research that essentially turned viruses that were they went out into the wild places, got viruses that would never have seen the light of day, brought them into labs. And the civilian excuse was, well, we need to study these viruses to see if they might make the leap and then develop countermeasures vaccines, before they make the leap. Right. and so they're doing these dangerous experiments. And a very small number of people signed off on them. Tony Fauci signed off on these experiments; in 2012 he wrote a paper where he explicitly wrote that even if these experiments result in a worldwide pandemic, it'll be worth it because of the the knowledge gained. Right? Well, who is he to make that decision of such a risky activity that impacts every single person on the face of the earth, by himself or with it, with a small group of people? The expertise, that would have represented those people needed to be at the table when those decisions were made.

00:52:28:23 - 00:52:45:18

And it shouldn't have just been that small group of people making it, making decisions that very likely caused the pandemic. This kind of like true democratization, the representation of the people via expertise, dissenting expertise. I think that's the that's the path forward.

00:53:26:09 - 00:53:36:00

It's funny because that that that phrase was, coined by, this group, actually, I think I thought had like, actually good intentions in mind. It does make sense to understand how animals—

00:53:36:27 - 00:53:56:13

But it was it was essentially stole like grabbed by people who just essentially used it to like, put this nice aura of like, let's understand how the world works into this very, very dangerous set of experiments that very likely cause the harm to the health and well-being of every single person on the face of the earth.

00:56:05:01 - 00:56:12:26

Even. This certainly is. Yeah. That's the 100% certainty. The American, the U.S. NIH publicly funded American Labs to do some of this work.

00:56:15:21 - 00:57:05:18

I don't know, I think it's now shut down. But like with, you know, like 22, I think it was 2011, there was the H1n1 virus that was essentially weaponized by in the, in the Netherlands, and funded by U.S taxpayers, the Rocky Mountain Lab, too, in Montana and has a lot of. So I just I mean, again, these the work being done at these places may or may not be worthwhile, may or may not be scientifically interesting. So on. But I think we should have at the table representatives of the people to say, look you you think you scientists think that this is worth the risk to the entire world? Well, you know, I don't I don't I don't think that's true. Like, maybe we shouldn't we shouldn't invest in you, right? Instead, what we have is the scientists themselves regulating whether those risks take

00:57:06:23 - 00:57:19:00

Yes, a very few scientists themselves who stand to gain in this in the ladder of scientific respectability or whatever from doing this work, taking risks that may impact the health of every single human being.

01:05:16:02 - 01:06:32:28

Yeah, I mean, not for me. I, I wandered into this in 2020. Right? I was a professor for two decades at Stanford. I've been at Stanford now almost 40 years as a student and as professor. The world I thought I inhabited was a world that, there are ideas that people fight over, with with the kinds of, weapons the, you know, the I say what I believe, you say what you believe, Mike comes up with data, and you turn out to be right. And then, you know, I take you to dinner and say, okay, next time, right? That's the that's the world I thought we fought, and that's what I inhabited. The world that I've seen since 2020 is just it's very it's so, it's so unlike that world because it's instead of that spirit of dissent and open mindedness, reliance on data, real logic, a desire to, like, make sure that people, like regular people's lives are not harmed by what we do. Instead, what we have is this, world of power, power and control, where people tell themselves stories that if they let people have their say, if they let dissent in, that all hell will break loose. But in fact, all hell has and broken loose.

'''Eric Weinstein:'''

01:08:39:17 - 01:10:51:11

01:10:51:14 - 01:12:02:16

I mean, I, okay, so I've, said to tell you, look, I've gone from despondent to, like, hopeful in many ways. And I think—part of it is like, I was at one point in my life and even in 2020, I was convinced that we didn't need politics to solve this. We could just do this. If we just had people, good people, talking to each other. And I think actually there's a, there does actually need to be a political movement around this, but it's because it's people's interests that are not represented. That's why I'm so glad to see you and Bobby running, because you're putting injecting into the conversation things that the American people need to talk about and think about. It's absolutely vital. and I think that, that really that political angle actually is, I don't mean vote for person A or person B, I mean the political angle of telling the people, here's what's happening. What do you really want? What do you want from these institutions? They they have their legitimacy base be cut based on the people. Mike you were talking about this earlier. I thought that was really powerful. If they're not representing the people then what are they for? Who are they representing?

01:16:10:29 - 01:16:42:08

There's a practical thing that everyone, every person listening to this can do. Every single person you can ask your Congress, congressional candidates, where do you stand on free speech? Where do you stand on the censorship complex? What do you stand on regulation of science. What do you stand on corporate ownership of the of these kinds of, these these decisions about health, like, where do you—what is your position? Why are you not taking a position? Like every single person, Democrat or Republican, it doesn't matter, should be asked these questions before. They before they adopt, accept power.

01:23:17:19 - 01:23:22:10

Yeah. So, actually, it was it was Erica that brought this up. And it's such a really important story.

01:23:34:22 - 01:24:51:20

Can I say one point about her? She's an absolute hero to me, right? So she worked for the FDA and she wasn't like the top of it, but she was just an honest scientist inside the FDA bureaucracy. And she just, she looked at the data and said, “look, there's not enough information here to guarantee the safety of this drug, show me more”. And in the meantime, the FDA equivalent in Europe had already signed off on it. And all these moms took this drug with the assurance it was safe, based on what their version of the FDA was telling them. And it wasn't safe. It led to their babies, many of their babies being born with no limbs. It was it was just absolutely heartbreaking. A huge—and so for her to stand up as a as a scientist in favor of the truth, and then to have the institution so that that it would listen to this dissenting voice. That protected all these moms and dads and babies in the United States, when in Europe, they'd failed, they let thalidomide into the public with a promise it would stop you from getting morning sickness. But it just makes your baby have no limbs, or have these major birth defects. That's a model for how our institutions need to be. It's not that we don't need institutions. We need people inside the institutions that speak for the people.

01:27:14:03 - 01:28:14:23

Well, I mean, and there was a law passed in 1962 actually giving the FDA the power to regulate the efficacy of drugs. Right. And it revamped the FDA. As I recall, it was a major accomplishment of the of the Kennedy Administration. And I think, you know, the kinds of institutions that have at their heart the good of the people that have the people represented automatically will have these kinds of dissenting ideas allowed, permitted, even sometimes honored as part of them, it will never have the structures you're talking about, Mike, where like, the goal is to silence. The goal is to suppress. The goal is to get to, like, hammer down and label with, you know, with the Scarlet Letter, anyone that disagrees, that's so fundamentally un-American. I think to me then the solution is, let's empower the people to speak up again and ask for those institutions back.

01:31:24:13 - 01:31:25:16

Absolutely, great.