Dr. Fauci, Expert Collusion & the Failure of Governance

0:01 the question why expertise has failed requires us to consider the possibility that it didn't fail organically if you think about the market and the way it works the fact that um to a high degree making money in the market provides you power political and otherwise what makes money in the market Superior information how do you get Superior information well you do it in part by

0:33 not supporting A system that makes information public in other words we're seeing the failure of all of our public truth seeking apparatuses we're seeing it in journalism we're seeing it in universities increasingly we're seeing it in the courts and you don't need to imagine that people got together in a conference room and decided to destroy Truth uh seek what you need to imagine is that there are a lot of people in some sector who

1:06 have an interest in being ahead of their competitors and therefore just have an instinctive revulsion at the idea that truth is going to be sought in a university it's going to be published in journals that everybody can read and we're all going to then make hay out of it that sounds rough if on the other hand you can privatize the truth seeking and the public is left to flail with inferior tools well then you're ahead and so so people who tend to think that

1:31 way do tend to be ahead and they have more control over whether our system uh finds sanity then would be ideal for us so this is actually an example of the model that I think you need to have in your mind in order to understand how to deal with the question of the very real fact of collusion and the obvious fact that those who think in term of is conspiracy taking place can easily have

2:03 that explanation run away with them because it's so hard to falsify so I would argue in my mind I call the force that opposes meaningful change the force that prevents us from moving in the direction that we should obviously go Goliath right I use that because it reminds me of what sort of power we're up against and who we are collectively but Goliath is a being composed of two parts there

2:36 is conscious collusion we all know it anytime a uh a corporation gets together and decides on a strategy that it doesn't share publicly it's involved in a kind of collusion albeit legal in many cases but there is secret agreement to move in a direction that is in the interests of some party at our expense and then there are also emerg properties that is to say a bunch of firms that are not in conversation with each other may have a United interest in

3:08 freezing the public out of its ability to know what's going on and they may find common cause they may support the same pseudo journalistic institutions that manage to misinform us so we don't see what's coming so in my mind we have some ratio what percentage of what we are up against is actually conscious tion and what percent of it is emergent and I don't know the answer so I know that I don't know the answer and I know

3:36 that it's a slider it could be that most of what we are seeing is emergent it could be that most of it is the result of collusion and uh I don't think it's wholly either one but it can range from zero to one and that's the way to think about it the way to maintain it in the mind so that you can always adjust the slider with the evidence if if I can add um we were just talking earlier this

3:58 week actually about um sort of where where people seem to be ahead or where corporations seem to be ahead there are and perhaps these aren't enough categories but there are at least two broad categories of ways that they could have gotten ahead it could be some kind of Insider information you know collusion uh conversations with people that you that aren't public Etc or could be insight and you know we tend to imagine that those who are ahead those

4:29 who are doing well in the market those who are bringing something that appears to be new are doing so through Insight because that's that's the classic way that's the honorable way that's what we all think about when we imagine um when we imagine Market Innovation uh but Innovation sometimes isn't Innovation at all so you know if we if we if we split that into these these two categories and within that one category is both the categories that Brett is talking about

4:55 but we have insight and we have Insider information we have something rent seeking yeah um something that propels you forward uh based on who you know as opposed to what Innovative new analytical creative things you have thought and it's harder to do Insight that it is to do rent seeking I um I would also point out that it's not if we take a recent example where we now know enough to say what took place at least

5:27 at some level it's not wholly one or the other the case of the MRNA platform that was sold to us as vaccines there is a very real Innovation there not a safe one not one that you could rationally deploy into humans given what we knew as of 2021 but a combination strategy that took this highly Innovative technology and fused it with lies frankly that kept

5:58 the public in the dark about their own well-being medically speaking that combination turned out to be very profitable so it's not right to say there's no innovation there there is and it's not right to say that this was you know it wasn't entirely smoke and mirrors but the smoke and mirrors made the Innovation that wasn't ready for Prime Time viable in a way that it wouldn't have been on its own you know one of the things I'm hearing is that we

6:23 have the baby and the bath water and it's not always clear what's the baby and what's the bathat at any given time like what is legitimate progress Innovation and what is some corrupt rent seeking Shenanigans that's basically taking from one to keep for to give to the other or to keep for myself is that fair is that like one way to think about it when we look at like what's happening in our world it's like what's worth that's the hard part right

6:52 what's worth saving of our institutions and of our leadership and like what is like no you need to go you're you're not a contributor anymore the problem is that the answer to that question is simultaneously absolutely apocalyptic and better than you think this job isn't as hard as it looks right good governance is never going to be perfect but it's doable we know how to do it and the key ingredient is really the

7:24 independence of the evaluators of policy from the profit if you mix those two things it becomes hopeless because the people who profit by you know if they make their slice of the pie bigger at the expense by shrinking the entire pie for the rest of us then they get ahead and they get more control over policy so if you if you don't have a firewall between governance and uh profit made in the market then this is the inevitable outcome right you

7:53 will eventually get Loop holers enlarging the loopholes until that's all you've got on the other hand if you can figure your way to just simply firewalling these things so that the people who end up with more power in governance are the people who have actually blocked the activities that were really bad for us and fostered the activities that were good for us right not 100% but just so that we you know beat the odds if you make that the key

8:21 to success in governance then the system fixes itself never perfect but it's going to work and really that's the question is which side of the divider are we on are the rent Seekers going to come out ahead of the rest of us in which case I can tell you how this ends or are the people who seek rent rather than innovating going to actually suffer because they've wasted their time on rent seeking which is expensive right if

8:44 that's the world we live in then the world will fix itself we don't have to micromanage it and um the the problem is we've let this go for so long that it now seems Preposterous that we would have good governance many people don't even believe it's possible and that's a pretty hopeless situation but it's really this is the result of letting it go we should have dealt with this when it was obvious 25 years ago rather than

9:09 waiting until it's an absolute crisis of governance so it's funny because I think we probably agree on a lot of things but we might be at the ful Crim of where um I find what you're saying challenging so I want to like dig into that in a couple places you know one is you've set up a dichotomy that I want to challenge and which is that there's that there's a actually there's really just one thing you're referring to the public and to us

9:35 and to we like there's a unified singular public us and we right like there's a there's this like rent seeking cohort or set and then there is the public help me understand that because uh I'm not sure that's true is that just Linguistics is that just a shorthand like help me understand what you mean by that yeah it's a shorthand you know there's a Wei in this room right this is not a natural Wei it doesn't go on you

10:05 know indefinitely but is it a fiction to refer to it no there are purposes for which the wi you know if there's a fire in this building the wi in this room is a real thing that has to figure out what to do next right three weeks from now there's no this we isn't here and so the question well who is we now right is we you know are you going to redefine it for every context and the answer is yeah

10:27 I'm going to and it's the same thing for they sometimes there's a they that engages in collusion against us but the they that engages in collusion against us then suffers from some of the the dysfunction that it creates so you know are they victims or are they perpetrators they're both who is Us in any given context that's kind of my question because I feel like a lot of these forces and battles we're we're confronting are differences in values

10:56 that are expressed by multiple we there's there's a group there's large groups of people that believe the world would be better with one set of values and they're different and disagree with this other large group of people and and multiple I have an example of what I think you're talking about um and correct me if if you think I've got any of these details wrong uh NIH National Institutes for health uh which is one of the main funders of all science uh and I

11:25 think the primary funer of medical research in the United States uh has of course many subd directorates and that's the language of the NSF with which I'm more familiar but Sub sub institutions within it and of course during Co we all became aware of niid which is I believe national uh National Institutes for allergies and infectious diseases uh which since the mid 80s has been run by fouchi and uh that was that was public knowledge but um not widely

11:53 known uh before covid and one of the major things that fouchi turns out to have done early in his tenure as head of the niid uh was to welcome in you know with this this is a public granting agency which means that taxpayer dollars are going to fund research uh that the people um who are hired by the niad and who are brought in as peer reviewers of Grant proposals understand to be in the public interest for that research to be

12:24 done one of the things one of the main things that fouchi did was to be effectively begin to privatize niid by uh formalizing relationships with corporations specifically pharmaceutical companies and what that changed was who's who interest is this research in now when the money is coming from fizer how can we be sure that the not

12:55 and not just you know it seems obvious that you like you don't want fiser involved in dictating what the answers are to a question as to whether or not the drug that they've spent a billion dollars on R&D is is safe that's obvious but how about if they get to decide much more cryptically to everyone who's not in Academia or or medicine what if they get um you know a person on the panel that decides okay of these 100 Grant

13:20 applications which eight shall we fund or 18 or 20 or whatever the whatever the percentage is but it's it's less than half right so it's not going going to be obvious these are going to be subtle pressures that once you have someone representing a a force that is not that is inherently not interested in the public good it is inherently interested in private profits making decisions that are masquerading as in the public good that I think is is one example of what

13:51 Brett means when he says we you know we is we we want research to be done that brings to bear to to reach first all Americans and then hopefully all of humanity drugs that are actually safe and effective an understanding of cancer that doesn't only look at half the equation but looks at all of the equation and understands what the trade-offs are and when you have entities that are being allowed to fund these institutions which still claim to

14:17 be public which actually have an interest in only one kind of answer or one set of answers depending on what it is that they've spent their R&D on then you're no longer actually serving the public if you like this clip we've got more where that came from be sure to watch the full video and don't forget to subscribe to the channel so you won't miss our new videos as they come out each week