Joe and Alex are joined by a guest who is pro-cannabis. They talk about the recent legalization of recreational marijuana in the United States, the dangers of medical marijuana use, and whether or not medical marijuana should be legalized in the first place. They also discuss the tragic death of a young girl who overdosed on marijuana, and how the government should have done more to prevent it from happening. Joe and Alex also discuss why medical marijuana is a problem, and why it should be treated as a public health crisis, not a medical crisis, and what we should do about it. Joe is a comedian, and Alex is a writer, and they're both in the business of writing about the cannabis industry and the problems it's created. They also talk about how we need to be more honest about who cannabis is for and what it's for, and the downsides of it, and some of the risks it poses to our health and well-being. Finally, they talk about why we should be worried about the future of the medical marijuana industry, and if it's time to get serious about getting serious about the problem. If you're a fan of the show, please consider becoming a patron. Thanks for listening and share it on your socials! if you like the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. I'll be looking out for more episodes in the future episodes. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What's the worst thing you've heard about pot? 3:30 - What are you worried about? 4: What do you think about it? 5:00 6:40 - Is it's going to kill you? 7:00- What would you like to see more? 8:15 - How do you feel about it now? 9:00s - Is there a better solution? 11:30s - What should we be doing more realistic? 12:40s - How does it be better? 15:00 Is it better than that? 16:20s - I think it's better than it's not? 17: Is it more dangerous than it s better than you should be? 19: What are we going to get healthy? 21:00 | How do we know it s going to be better than this? 22:20 - Can we be more realistic about it ?
00:00:19.000I don't think the last one was hostile.
00:00:21.000I think maybe more people expected it to be hostile because you were not...
00:00:26.000I want to say you're anti-cannabis, but I do think that you had a realistic perspective on cannabis.
00:00:33.000And we've talked about this before outside that I think a lot of people that are pro-cannabis, like myself, They don't want to look at the negative aspects of it because they think it'll harm the chances of it being legalized.
00:00:45.000And I think that's irresponsible and I think it's not honest.
00:00:49.000And now that it does look, let's be honest, like it's going to be legal.
00:00:53.000You know, certainly, you know, every state or, you know, there are major states that voted to legalize like New Jersey and Arizona in the last election.
00:01:00.000And nationally, it looks like it's going to be legal.
00:01:01.000It's time for people in the industry, I think, to start being more honest about who this product is for and, you know, and some of the downsides.
00:02:37.000And I think that in particular, one of the things that disturbs me the most is that there has been no accounting for the damage that has been done by forcing people to shut down their businesses.
00:02:48.000And the only thought has been making sure that the ICU beds are open and that somehow or another people are able to get treatment for this.
00:05:34.000Here's the thing, and I don't know if you...
00:05:38.000As I said, I've got all this stuff for you, but...
00:05:42.000The booklets, especially the first one, which is about death counting, how we count a COVID death, I go into this in detail.
00:05:50.000Okay, well let's talk about that right away.
00:05:54.000Here's the most fundamental fact about COVID that the media doesn't report accurately.
00:06:15.000I think this is true of almost everybody.
00:06:16.000People don't really have a good idea of what What risk is, right?
00:06:20.000So if I say, you know, like it's riskier to be old and have COVID than to be young, you might think, okay, it's like two to one or three to one or five to one.
00:07:15.000Is over 82 or 83. Now what about people like, there was that guy who was a Broadway actor, who was a young, healthy-looking guy who got sick and wound up dying from it.
00:07:28.000First of all, that happens to people with the flu.
00:07:29.000I can point you to stories from 2018, you know, young, healthy teacher dies of the flu.
00:07:34.000It just was never reported nationally this way.
00:07:36.000That's A. B is, if you look at those cases, oftentimes there's weird idiosyncratic stuff happening, of which the number one thing is a lot of those people were put on ventilators very early.
00:07:47.000They were put on ventilators and they never came off.
00:07:49.000We're not having that as much anymore.
00:07:51.000And if you look, the average age of death is actually creeping up now, it looks like.
00:08:02.000So what happened was, in March especially, back when everybody was terrified, there's something called a nebulizing procedure.
00:08:09.000So there are procedures where you're inserting tubes into people and it releases a lot of aerosols from them.
00:08:17.000And the fear was, this is going to get aerosolized and the nurses and the doctors are all going to get sick and die and we're going to have no medical staff.
00:08:45.000It turns out that, as Elon Musk likes to say, your lungs, if you ventilate too early, it's just like a meat bellows, and you can blow out people's lungs if you overventilate.
00:08:57.000I will tell you, not that we don't use ventilators for COVID, but right now in the United States, I believe there are about 8,000 people on ventilators.
00:10:21.000His doctor didn't put him on a ventilator, because he said, if I put you on a ventilator, your lung's going to stop working, and you're going to die.
00:10:40.000So again, we're not saying this disease isn't real, and we're not saying that some people, unfortunately, aren't going to have these bad reactions to it.
00:10:47.000But back in March, maybe he gets put on a ventilator, and maybe he dies.
00:10:57.000Okay, so that's one issue with the death counting, is that so many of the people—so let's say you're—and I urge people—one of the things that I've done a couple times on Twitter that always gets an interesting response is you can go look at coroner's reports, especially in Milwaukee where they put them all online, of people who've died.
00:11:12.000So you can actually see the people who have died of COVID and you'll see how sick they are for the most part.
00:11:19.000I'm talking about people in their 80s and 90s who have multiple severe comorbidities.
00:11:23.000So in that case, it's really hard to tell.
00:11:26.000Did this person die with COVID or from COVID? You know, if my heart is failing and my kidneys are failing and I get this thing and I die the next day...
00:13:36.000It's clear, by the way, when people have a low threshold, let's say 20 times, let's say it only takes 20 cycles, that's a million multiplications.
00:13:43.000If you're positive at 20 cycles, you're pretty sick.
00:13:46.000If you're positive at 25 cycles, you're probably pretty sick.
00:13:50.000If you're positive at 30 cycles, maybe not.
00:13:53.00040 cycles, it doesn't really mean anything.
00:14:54.000That will still initially come up as a positive COVID death because you had a positive test and you died within a specific amount of time after having that test.
00:15:04.000But they don't distinguish from a violent accident?
00:15:07.000Now, some of the states are trying to clear this up.
00:15:09.000But let's say you died of a heart attack, Joe.
00:15:11.000Okay, a heart attack is a potential, you know, outcome of COVID. You're always going to be on there if you died of a heart attack.
00:15:18.000So you're saying that if you have this tiny amount of COVID in your system, you never wind up getting sick, but yet you have a heart attack a couple weeks later, three, four weeks later, they will still call that a COVID death, even though you never got sick from COVID. 100%.
00:15:34.000The idea is to capture deaths as broadly as possible.
00:15:38.000The idea is this is a serious illness, and we want to know every possible person who's died from it.
00:15:43.000We don't do this with any other illness.
00:15:45.000Is it because they don't have the resources to differentiate between the people that have died from heart attacks where it's clear, oh, we looked at the person, they had a very small amount of the virus in their system.
00:15:54.000Four weeks later, there's no way they were sick from that.
00:15:58.000It's a function of decisions that have been made along the way.
00:16:02.000So they could have set the PCR threshold at lower.
00:16:05.000They could have set it at 30. They were aware from almost the beginning of this issue that you can find a comment from Fauci in July talking about this.
00:16:14.000And certainly they knew well before this.
00:16:18.000The idea was we want to know So as broadly as possible, how many people have this?
00:16:24.000And then secondarily, we wanted to find deaths from COVID as broadly as possible.
00:16:28.000And what is the level set at currently?
00:16:31.000Different states have different levels, but in most places it's 37 to 40 cycles.
00:16:36.000Which again, means that a lot of those people at the high end are not sick, and they certainly had COVID at some point, but they probably don't have it anymore.
00:16:48.000Here's the other reason to do this show.
00:16:52.000If you set it really high, you're going to capture people on the way in, just as they're getting sick.
00:16:58.000So if you're truly afraid of, we want to quarantine everybody really early, then you have to set the threshold really high.
00:17:05.000So that, to the extent there's a logic behind it, that's the logic behind it.
00:17:09.000But it has all these negative side effects.
00:17:12.000So there was one other point I wanted to make, but I'll remember it in a second.
00:17:17.000So the negative side effects would be that they're inflating the number of people that not just have it but die from it because of the fact that they're making sure that these deaths that get linked within a certain time period.
00:17:36.000I don't know if it's more than 60 anywhere.
00:17:38.000But the states are sort of allowed to define it.
00:17:40.000Oh, here's, okay, so there's a negative for the person who's tested positive, because you then have to isolate yourself, you can't work, you know, you're scared.
00:17:48.000And then there's this negative for society with the death counts later.
00:17:51.000Right, but isn't that negative, that you have to isolate yourself and you can't work?
00:19:01.000They're being called pneumonia deaths.
00:19:02.000It's probably COVID. That was probably true at the time, especially in New York and New Jersey.
00:19:07.000You can look and you can see the number of what are called excess deaths, more people dying than you would expect in a normal year, was higher than the number of COVID deaths.
00:19:16.000And a lot of those deaths were in people who had pneumonia.
00:19:20.000Okay, so that looks like, hey, we didn't even, you know, this is even worse than we thought.
00:19:25.000We're capturing, we're not even capturing everybody who died.
00:19:30.000Let's talk about what's happening now.
00:19:32.000We know the PCR tests are going to capture a lot of people who aren't sick anymore and who maybe never were sick.
00:19:40.000We know that some of those people are going to be classified as COVID deaths.
00:19:45.000Again, I'm 88. I somehow was asymptomatic a month ago, but I got a positive PCR test.
00:19:52.000Now I die because I'm 88. That's a COVID death, okay?
00:19:58.000What we're seeing now in the United States, and certainly in Europe, we don't have data as good in the U.S. from the last couple weeks, but we have some pretty good data from Europe and the U.K., is that the number of COVID deaths We're good to go.
00:20:25.000There were more people dying than you would have thought based on the number of COVID deaths.
00:20:29.000Now there are fewer people overall dying than you would think based on the number of COVID deaths.
00:20:35.000I know this gets complicated, but it's worth thinking about.
00:20:39.000We also know that a significant number of people are dying from lockdown.
00:20:43.000And the number one way you can look at that is overdose.
00:20:48.000Overdose deaths in this country have been terrible for years.
00:20:51.000This year it looks like they're off the charts.
00:20:54.000So if 20 or 30,000 people, and that's probably a reasonable estimate, 20 or 30,000 extra people are dying this year from overdose alone, That should push up the number of overall deaths.
00:21:09.000And then if you'd add the COVID deaths, it should be even higher.
00:21:13.000When you put these three things together, right now you're getting fewer deaths than you would expect.
00:21:18.000Again, what I'm trying to say is, I know this math can sort of seem complicated and the stacking can seem complicated, but right now it looks like a significant number of deaths that are being classified as COVID would have occurred anyway.
00:21:31.000And are just sort of being shifted into the COVID pile.
00:21:34.000And that was not so true a few months ago.
00:21:36.000So when you see 3000 people died today of COVID, Until we get the true mortality figures for this year, for November and December, we're not going to know if that's really true.
00:21:47.000I understand that people want to be cautious, right?
00:21:50.000And that's one of the reasons why they've classified things the way they have.
00:21:54.000But is there a financial incentive for hospitals to classify deaths as COVID? I have a friend, people love to make fun of me because I say these things, like I have a friend and this is what happened,
00:22:11.000but I have a friend, his grandfather died and they never tested his grandfather, but they listed his death as COVID and he was very old and he was in a nursing home, but they never tested him for COVID. So the short answer to that is it doesn't seem, and I've done a fair bit of work on this,
00:22:26.000it doesn't seem like there's a financial incentive to classify deaths as COVID or non-COVID. There's a financial incentive for hospitals to classify cases as COVID. Okay.
00:22:34.000Because you get, and this is known, this is not a secret, you get a 20% bump in your reimbursements if you classify cases COVID. Now, they're not going to lie, okay?
00:22:43.000That doesn't mean they're going to say, you know, Joe went in for, you know, whatever, surgery on his hand and he has COVID. What it means is they're going to test you for COVID. Where are they getting this bump from?
00:23:29.000So if someone dies, are they incentivized to say that that was a COVID death, even if it wasn't a COVID death?
00:23:38.000No, but because they know you're COVID positive, if you then die in the hospital, it's going to be classified as a COVID. It has to be, right.
00:23:56.000So again, if you look back in March and April, pneumonia deaths were higher.
00:24:00.000And that's a good reason to think that we were actually undercounting COVID back then.
00:24:04.000Now, it looks like, first of all, there doesn't seem to be any flu right now, which is very weird.
00:24:10.000Either COVID has sort of pushed it aside because COVID is more effective, or we're just not testing for it.
00:24:16.000But is it also possible that wearing the masks and this practice of socially distancing and that people being paranoid and washing their hands and all that stuff has reduced the number of flu cases?
00:29:20.0005 microns is one five thousandth of an inch.
00:29:23.000If you're wearing a bandana, or you're wearing a cloth mask, or you're wearing a standard surgical mask, Even if it's fitted right and people don't wear them right, okay, they wear them off their noses, they wear them around, it's not stopping enough of the virus to matter.
00:29:36.000If you're wearing an N95, okay, if you're actually a doctor or you care enough to put on an N95 and wear it even though it's uncomfortable and it's fitted properly, you might actually have a chance to stop some of the virus on both the way out and the way in.
00:29:50.000If you're wearing one of these regular masks, it does nothing for you to protect you.
00:29:54.000And the best you can say about this idea of my mask protects you is that there is marginal evidence, marginal evidence, that maybe it reduces some of the viral load on the way out.
00:30:08.000No proof that that makes a difference.
00:30:12.000It seems like that would make a difference.
00:30:14.000If you can reduce the viral load on the way out, you would reduce the amount of people that you infect.
00:30:20.000Or you would reduce the amount of viral load that the people that you infect take in.
00:30:25.000And that does seem to have a significant impact on whether or not you get sick, right?
00:30:29.000Like people that work in ICU wards or they're around people that have COVID. They're wearing M95s.
00:30:34.000But if they don't, they're taking in more viral load, right?
00:30:37.000Rather than someone who just comes in close proximity to someone who has COVID. Well, you might get the tiniest amount of it, and your immune system can fight it off.
00:30:45.000Doesn't it impact you, how much you take in?
00:30:48.000What you're saying seems plausible, but it's theoretical.
00:30:52.000There's no real evidence that you're reducing viral load enough to matter.
00:30:57.000And here's the real-world proof of this, okay?
00:31:08.000In the real world, whether or not you wear masks seems to make no difference to the spread of this virus.
00:31:14.000But don't you think that one of the things that's happening with California is that people are living in close proximity to each other and they're forced to go to work.
00:31:23.000Like, a lot of the people that are getting it are in poor neighborhoods.
00:31:26.000A lot of them live with multiple family members in the household and they're all on top of each other.
00:31:33.000And The fact that they're stuck inside would actually kind of accentuate the spread of this disease.
00:31:40.000But they're catching it because they have to go to work.
00:32:57.000Open the windows and let fresh air in.
00:33:00.000It doesn't spread outside at all, basically.
00:33:03.000When the Chinese, months ago, looked at transmission, all the cases they could find, I think they found two cases where there was outdoor spread.
00:33:12.000But I was reading something that was talking about the impact of the protests and that there was an uptick in the virus from the protests.
00:35:32.000It showed masks did not protect the wear.
00:35:34.000The kind of study you're talking about, where you would do a cluster trial where you'd give sort of two cities and have one of them wear masks everybody and one of them not wear masks, has never been done, is basically impossible.
00:35:46.000Also, just because there's two cities, Austin has way less cases than another city.
00:35:54.000Ideally, you'd try to find two cities that were basically at the same place on the curve, and you'd say, hey, City A, Des Moines versus Omaha, or whatever.
00:36:03.000And you could surmise from the results.
00:36:07.000First of all, you'd have to make everybody in the one city wear a mess and make everybody in the other city not wear a mess, and that would be unethical.
00:36:35.000The second kind is what are essentially lab trials where you put a mask on a mannequin or you put it on a human volunteer and you see how many particles come in and out.
00:36:46.000The third kind is we're going to look at how things changed after a mask mandate was imposed.
00:36:53.000And so there are papers in all of those categories that show that masks seem to work.
00:37:04.000The good science would be the kind that I'm telling you about, and we've never done that.
00:37:08.000And the only time we've done it with trying to see if masks protect the wearer, in general, those papers, including the most recent one, this big Danish mask study, show that masks don't protect the wearer.
00:37:19.000And I'd say that most serious people don't disagree with that.
00:37:23.000The only argument is, does my mask protect you?
00:37:27.000And what I'm telling you is, yes, you can build a case for that.
00:37:30.000And it can even sound kinda plausible, but when you look at the evidence, it's not really there.
00:37:38.000But we do agree that the larger the viral load you take in, the more likely you are to catch the disease.
00:39:33.000I kind of hate having to talk about masks because masks are the thing that make me sound sort of the most like conspiracy and kind of out there because I know most people support mask wearing.
00:39:42.000I'd rather talk about things like school closing and lockdowns.
00:39:45.000We could definitely talk about that, but I'm talking about masks because it's such a polarizing aspect of this pandemic.
00:39:52.000And the reason I feel I have to talk about it is because the people who are pro-mask are relying on pseudoscience.
00:39:59.000And pseudoscience has driven so much of our response to this pandemic, and so I feel I have to push back on this.
00:40:05.000Okay, well, whether they're relying on pseudoscience or not, there's a bunch of things that they're signaling.
00:40:11.000One, they're signaling that they're compliant and that they're polite.
00:40:15.000So they're being polite to the people around them.
00:40:17.000They don't want other people to panic because people are panicking if you don't have a mask on.
00:40:21.000Unfortunately, that's just how it is now.
00:40:23.000It's weird that a year ago that was not an issue at all, ever.
00:40:27.000And now it's a giant issue one year later.
00:40:29.000There's never been a thing like that in our society where you're having almost universal compliance amongst everybody in the entire country.
00:40:57.000Because they didn't exist 10 months ago because this virus is not particularly dangerous to me or you or my kids or my wife.
00:41:06.000And I'd rather just get it and be done with it than take a vaccine that's shown to have 17% serious side effects after the second dose in people who take it.
00:41:59.000One in 1,000 people who got the Moderna vaccine after the second dose had a fever of 104 degrees or higher.
00:42:05.000And most of those people were taking Tylenol or Advil or other stuff to bring down the fever.
00:42:10.000Let me tell you, if you call your doctor and tell him you have 104, he's going to tell you if it doesn't go down pretty soon, you should go to the ER. So one in how many again?
00:43:05.000There's some evidence that for the Moderna vaccine specifically, so everybody develops antibodies, but T-cell immunity is more lasting, and it's not clear that the Moderna vaccine produces complete T-cell immunity.
00:43:17.000So T-cell immunity is produced by people that have had the disease and beat it, like young Jamie.
00:43:23.000Then you have, then your T cells are, you know, if this thing comes back in your body, they're going to recognize it and they're going to ramp up your immune response.
00:43:46.000These have not been in humans before, okay?
00:43:48.000This is not, you know, this is not something that we've been working on for 50 years.
00:43:53.000And the virus itself, unfortunately, what it looks like is, you know, the virus itself is quite dangerous to people, again, in their 80s, their 70s, you know, 75 and over, you could say is the breakpoint.
00:44:06.000The adverse responses go the other way.
00:44:09.000It looks like the younger you are, the more serious they are.
00:44:12.000So what I tell my mom, if she says to me, you know what, I think I should get this.
00:46:18.000So bacteria, I mean, there are other kinds of viruses that can also cause the common cold.
00:46:23.000Rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, but the coronaviruses cause the common cold too.
00:46:27.000What you're talking about with penicillin is those are bacteria.
00:46:30.000So those are generally more susceptible to treatment.
00:46:35.000These viruses were just not that good at treating.
00:46:37.000Oh, I wanted to say one last thing about the particles, and you mentioned how many particles, possibly it's more particles, is more likely to get you sick.
00:46:47.000The size of the particles might also matter.
00:46:49.000So with anthrax, famously, If an anthrax spore gets into your lungs, it's terrible.
00:46:57.000I mean, you have about an 80% lethality rate of anthrax getting into your lungs.
00:47:01.000If it gets into just your nose, it doesn't do that.
00:47:06.000So it is possible, and I'm not saying this is true, it is possible that by filtering out larger particles, as masks do, what you're left with is more dangerous particles that are more likely to get into your lungs.
00:48:45.000Yeah, I mean, not to, you know, back to the fart thing, not to kiss your ass, but it's the one that you make.
00:48:50.000It's that this could lower the viral load and possibly lead to some, maybe some people who would have been infected don't get infected.
00:48:58.000Maybe some people who would have been seriously infected don't get as seriously infected.
00:49:01.000I don't think the logic is particularly strong, but I think that's a case you can make.
00:49:05.000The idea that my mask protects me, you just can't make a case for it.
00:49:10.000But it would protect you if we're talking about a distribution of the viral load, then it's got to be protecting you in the same fashion that it's protecting other people from you.
00:50:12.000That doesn't care if people get sick and die and doesn't understand the science and lies.
00:50:18.000One of them called me a liar a bunch and then I said I might sue her, which anything's possible.
00:50:23.000And she sort of stopped calling me a liar.
00:50:26.000She also later admitted basically that masks don't work to protect the wearer, which was really interesting after she'd been criticizing me.
00:50:45.000There's a virtue signaling thing going on as well that is unfortunately just a general part of communication through social media today.
00:50:53.000That if you're not in compliance, if you're a rebel, if you go outside the lines and you say something, hey, I don't think this is the right way to do it, people get very angry.
00:51:02.000People were very angry at people saying that maybe these lockdowns were a bad idea eight months ago.
00:51:09.000That now it's the general consensus that the lockdowns are terrible.
00:51:14.000The only people that seem to like the lockdowns are people that are independently wealthy or really crazy progressive people that think the government should pay for everything and that we should siphon off the money from the wealthy people to pay people's mortgages and rents.
00:51:29.000And there's a lot of that discussion, which is...
00:52:34.000I don't understand the logic behind it.
00:52:36.000I don't understand how this got agreed to.
00:52:38.000Well, what happens is the idea is this thing's going to pass anyway, so you help out your favorite lobbyist, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you sneak something in.
00:54:02.000So when I saw this happening this year with COVID, and I saw the New York Times where I used to work, and you know what?
00:54:10.000People can yell at me for saying I used to work there, but I worked there for 10 years and I was a really good reporter there, and I'm not going to back down from my credentials because I am a good reporter.
00:54:40.000It didn't work with Tell Your Children, and it's not going to work this time, okay?
00:54:45.000And what I recognized was that, unfortunately, And in sort of the elite levels of the media, you know, The Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, the groupthink is overwhelming.
00:54:57.000It's overwhelming on cannabis and it's overwhelming on all these woke progressive issues and it's gotten much, much worse since I left The Times 10 years ago.
00:55:04.000And I don't know what's going to turn it around, okay?
00:56:07.000What happened in March was the progressive media...
00:56:10.000First of all, they were terrified because of what was happening in New York, what seemed to be happening in New York, and they all thought they were going to die.
00:56:16.000And then once they realized they weren't all gonna die, they realized that they could beat Donald Trump over the head with this, and he would lose the election.
00:56:41.000OK, but so why is it that the New York Times won't even write stories about the fact that there's real questions about where this virus came from?
00:56:49.000Forget the ventilators, forget the U.S. response, forget, you know, Donald Trump.
00:56:55.000The group think is so serious that basic questions don't get asked right now.
00:56:59.000Well, we were criticized on the podcast because I had Brett Weinstein, who's an evolutionary biologist, who discussed all the reasons, scientific reasons, why there's evidence that indicates that this is not a virus that naturally occurred.
00:57:20.000You would think that people would want to put those two together, but It was something from the beginning that this groupthink was established that you are not to question that.
00:57:29.000And there was a whole article written about promoting this dangerous conspiracy theory that this came from a lab that's been disproven.
00:58:30.000Near the most important part of it, the part of it that binds to this receptor on your cells that enables it to get in, it's called the receptor binding domain, is pangolin.
00:58:41.000So it just happens that it's a perfect cut We're good to go.
00:59:08.000Somehow, this virus just happens to be mostly bat, a little bit pangolin, and we can't find any evidence of a virus that's like that to a 99 percentile in the wild.
00:59:21.000And believe me, don't you think the Chinese have looked in the last year?
00:59:26.000Or wouldn't they have looked if they thought they could find something?
00:59:29.000When SARS came, the original SARS, not SARS-CoV-2, they had found the viral host within a matter of months.
00:59:36.000I mean, the zoonotic one, the animal viral host, in a matter of months.
01:00:24.000And people don't think of it as bullying because you're not physically in front of someone and you're not intimidating them and scaring them, but you know what you're doing.
01:00:40.000And I've learned that there was one thing in May where I really got dogpiled.
01:00:45.000And the only thing to do is not to respond, to turn the computer off for a few hours and just let it go.
01:00:50.000Because the one thing about the mob is when they realize they can't touch you, when they realize that they can't get you fired, that you have some independence, they will generally move on.
01:01:06.000The reason that I am able to write about this stuff in the way that I've been is because after I left The Times in 2010, I wrote spy novels for a number of years.
01:01:47.000I wrote these John Wells novels for a number of years, and I wrote this book, which I finished, again, fortunately, before all this happened.
01:01:56.000As long as people are willing to buy my fiction...
01:01:58.000I can tell the truth in my nonfiction.
01:02:01.000I'm not owned by The Times or anybody else.
01:02:55.000It's these concentrated attacks and this distortion of who you are.
01:03:01.000I don't mind if you're upset at who I actually am, but when you distort who I am and what my positions are on things, just because you want people to attack me...
01:03:13.000Well, then people are not going to trust you now.
01:03:15.000And that's one of the things that's happened to the people that know me from this podcast.
01:03:19.000They know me from 1,500-plus episodes that are more than three hours long.
01:03:53.000I remember an off-Broadway thing with, I guess I should say her, maybe 20 years ago.
01:03:58.000It was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen.
01:04:01.000Awesome human being and one of my favorite guests ever.
01:04:03.000My position was about an MMA fighter that wasn't telling people that they were male for 30 years, were only female for two, and then were fighting unbeknownst females, you know, and beating the fuck up.
01:04:40.000The response to that is disturbing, but...
01:04:44.000Ultimately, it will do them in, because people know what it is, and the reaction to it has been less and less effective.
01:04:53.000People realize it's more and more thought of as being hysterical and not based in reality.
01:05:02.000But it's a dangerous time, Joe, because, you know, so Trump, look, Trump lost, there's lots to dislike about Donald Trump, and You know, who I voted for doesn't matter, but it's disturbing that in anonymous polls before the election,
01:05:19.000basically one in ten Trump supporters wouldn't tell pollsters that they were going to vote for him, right?
01:05:25.000I mean, the fact that they're that afraid of, you know, that people believe that the consequences of them may be so severe that they're not even allowed to talk anonymously about who they're going to vote for, that is not a healthy sign for our democracy or anything else.
01:05:40.000Yeah, it's not a healthy sign for communication, but it's also like he's such a polarizing guy.
01:05:46.000It's just he's the wrong guy for that.
01:05:48.000I think he's the right guy for people to understand that It is possible for someone who's outside of the system, who understands the system, to win and become president.
01:07:42.000Then there could be someone who's maybe not nearly as offensive, but not the person they want into office, and they might use the same strategy and tactics because they've already been sanctioned.
01:07:54.000And that is what's happened with COVID. Our response to COVID is dangerous in and of itself, but it is even more dangerous as a signal of both legacy and tech censorship of ideas that don't fit the sort of Silicon Valley,
01:08:20.000And I also think there's a thing that's going on where people had locked into a mindset that they had at the beginning of the pandemic where this is going to devastate the population and kill a bunch of people, or a large percentage, I should say, of the people, 10% or whatever the fuck that get it.
01:08:35.000And that didn't turn out to be the case.
01:08:37.000But we're still locked into that same mindset.
01:08:45.000You may think everyone agrees on that, but look at what's happening.
01:08:48.000I think there's a lot more people that are not in support of lockdowns, particularly people that are in danger or have already lost their business.
01:09:10.000You know, in my state in New York, they're talking about a complete lockdown again.
01:09:14.000It's as if we've learned nothing in the last few months.
01:09:17.000And as you and I were sort of starting to say a few minutes ago...
01:09:23.000There's actually evidence that lockdowns are counterproductive because they force people into their homes and most transmission happens inside, not outside.
01:09:31.000So what do you think would be the best strategy to try to mitigate the amount of people that get sick if it's not lockdowns?
01:09:38.000The truth is people don't like hearing this.
01:09:41.000There's not that much you can do once this becomes endemic.
01:09:45.000So if you're not New Zealand, if you can't sort of close your borders and quarantine everybody for 14 days and be some island in the Pacific with 5 million people, Basically, there's a few things you have to do, right?
01:09:58.000You have to stand up the hospitals and make sure they have adequate equipment and that if there's a regional real crisis that you get some extra nurses and doctors in there.
01:10:09.000You need to encourage people who are sick to stay home.
01:10:13.000I mean, that's been good advice forever.
01:11:31.000Oh, and look, if there's a way to protect nursing homes, because half the people, almost half the people who are dying from this are dying in nursing homes or congregate care settings.
01:11:41.000So those people are the people who are vulnerable.
01:11:44.000Maybe, you know, is there a way to sort of like try to install better ventilation in those nursing homes?
01:11:49.000Is there a way where staff should be tested every day?
01:11:52.000And if you have a positive case in a nursing home, that person gets moved.
01:11:57.000Yes, maybe there are things we could do.
01:11:59.000Unfortunately, the idea of closing off nursing homes is not a great idea, and here's why.
01:12:09.000And one of the ways that you can be sort of sure that people are actually being taken care of, the residents in the homes, and they're not being neglected, is having family members come in, right?
01:12:19.000So the person who is demented and is shitting themselves is getting cleaned up and not getting bed sores.
01:12:28.000Having family members keep an eye on nursing homes is unfortunately kind of necessary.
01:12:34.000And by the way, even if that's not happening, these people with Alzheimer's or dementia, when they don't have families, they just sail off into space if people are not visiting them and talking to them and trying to keep them there.
01:12:47.000And it's pretty clear that deaths of people with Alzheimer's and dementia are up this year, independent of COVID, again.
01:12:54.000And that's because they're being neglected in these nursing homes.
01:12:57.000So shutting off nursing homes from society, even though it sounds like a good idea, we've got to protect these people, isn't necessarily a great idea.
01:13:04.000In general, the idea should have been, we're going to do the minimum to sort of make things work, and we're going to manage through this.
01:13:14.000Once we realized it wasn't the plague, once we realized that 10% of people weren't going to die, that somewhere between 997 and 999 out of 1,000 people who get this will survive, It still means that people are going to die, and it still means, you know, it's a big country, it's a big world.
01:14:30.000If all the schools are shut down, and you're saying that there's no factor with the children getting it in school and transmitting it to their parents or their grandparents...
01:14:40.000How do we know if the schools are shut down?
01:14:42.000Because they've contact traced in places where the schools are open.
01:14:45.000And they found that they don't usually...
01:16:58.000Well, once it was established that the risk for the actual children themselves is extremely low, my question when they were like, we've got to protect these children, this was the talk of my kids old school.
01:17:11.000I was like, well, what do you do when it's the flu?
01:18:28.000So under 15, there's been fewer than 100 children.
01:18:32.000There's about 60 million people in that age range, and fewer than 100 have died this year of COVID. And a lot of those deaths are overcounted.
01:18:38.000It is interesting when you look, when it gets 15 to 24, it goes way up.
01:21:24.000And once they did that, once the government stopped sort of, you know, lying about who was most at risk by far, Behavior did start to change and eventually things got better.
01:21:36.000So that's sort of happening with this in a hundredfold.
01:21:54.000And our societal response has been completely screwed up.
01:21:57.000The AIDS one is so strange because I was, I mean, I remember being convinced that we were going to lose a giant percentage of the population.
01:22:06.000And it wasn't just going to be gay people.
01:23:21.000But he did say, I believe it was in 1983, that he thought casual household transmission was a possibility with HIV. There's a paper that he wrote.
01:23:37.000That was when they were telling the truth about masks, Joe.
01:23:39.000They stopped telling the truth about masks.
01:23:41.000Well, he said the only reason why he did it was because he didn't want people to go out and buy masks and then healthcare workers and first responders weren't able to get them.
01:29:07.000My understanding of this is that naturally generated immunity, in other words, you get the actual illness and you beat it, is stronger in general than vaccine-generated immunity.
01:29:17.000So why are we encouraging people who have naturally generated immunity to bother with the vaccine, which at best will give them the antibodies they already have, and at worst, they'll have some kind of, you know, anaphylaxis.
01:29:33.000They'll have some kind of shock reaction to it.
01:29:35.000I think the reason being is that we can't prove that a person has had it and beat it.
01:33:33.000Or who, I should say, who is pushing this idea that the way to move forward is to vaccinate everybody, and one of the ways we're going to be able to vaccinate everybody is to force a lockdown?
01:33:46.000It seems like a grand conspiracy theory.
01:33:50.000I've got to say, if you wanted to go deep, Alex Jones, you would say the reason why they're doing the lockdown is because they want people to take the vaccine, and this is why they're setting this up.
01:34:05.000I'm pushing the limits of what I think.
01:34:51.000And you sort of ignore the fact that mainly, you know, 90% of the people it kills are over 70, or, you know, whatever the numbers exactly are, but it kills people.
01:35:55.000When you look at the fact that Los Angeles has had the longest lockdown and some of the most stringent lockdowns, but yet has the highest number of cases, what has been the explanation for that?
01:36:45.000We told you to not see your family for Thanksgiving or Christmas, even though it's been the worst year of your lives and half of you are semi-suicidally depressed.
01:37:15.000Okay, if you lock down for a really long time, not weeks, months, okay, and you're in a place where the spread is not endemic, So Australia, you know, it's not New Zealand, okay?
01:37:26.000It's a lot bigger than New Zealand, but it's still its own continent.
01:37:30.000It's still less than the people in California, and it's the contiguous size of the contiguous United States.
01:37:35.000And they can control entry and exit completely.
01:37:42.000They locked down Melbourne in an incredibly strict way.
01:37:46.000I mean, and they were serious about it.
01:37:47.000They had drones patrolling, and they were tracking license plates, and they were arresting people, and they were literally breaking into people's homes who were, you know, pushing back against the lockdown.
01:41:11.000By the way, I'd like to be a fly on the wall at her next family reunion because I think it was her daughter's sister-in-law who narked on her.
01:42:01.000My joke was she slipped and fell and landed on Thanksgiving's dick.
01:42:04.000L-O-L. There was a time, though, that I felt bad for her when she was sitting next to Trump and Trump was talking about, we could just inject them with disinfectants.
01:43:16.000Hey, the guy that wrote the 1994 crime bill that put more people of color in jail for the rest of their fucking lives for nonviolent drug offenses than anybody ever.
01:44:20.000But I do have an interest in someone who's smart, who does not like the way things go and has that calling, is not a part of this system.
01:44:27.000The problem is this system is so entrenched in And its own corruption, its own influence, and all of the lobbyists and special interests are so much that's like tangled in so many vines and the people that rise to these positions of senators and congressmen and mayors and they're so deeply infected by this fucked up system that we need someone that's outside of it or someone who is just of superior character.
01:44:56.000Well, let me pivot to the vaccine again for a second, because you got me thinking about the vaccine when we were talking about this.
01:45:03.000Here's what we've forgotten or not thinking about about the vaccine.
01:45:09.000They're made by for-profit companies that have done exceptionally well this year.
01:45:14.000The top executive at both BioNTech, which is the German company that makes the Pfizer vaccine, And Moderna have made billions of dollars in stock gains this year.
01:45:50.000When they are moving towards commercialization, when they have put significant money into a product that they believe is effective or that looks to be effective, what's the biggest problem with these products usually?
01:46:01.000It's not lack of effectiveness, although it can be.
01:46:13.000And I saw with drugs from major companies that I covered for The Times, the leading companies in the industry, including Merck, which everyone said was the best one, okay, in the whole industry.
01:46:26.000They won't tell the truth about side effects.
01:46:46.000And that's a very serious problem because if you're Pfizer or whatever, the last check on you is, are we betting the company here if something goes wrong?
01:46:54.000In this case, if it all goes tits up with the vaccine, I'm not saying it will, it probably won't, they're going to say...
01:47:02.000Hey guys, we did what the FDA told us to do.
01:47:05.000You wanted this fast and the White House.
01:47:35.000Does that exist because of the biological variabilities of people that some people, for whatever reason, have adverse reactions?
01:47:44.000I think it basically exists because the company said, look, you know what?
01:47:47.000If there's a one in a million chance that a healthy kid dies after our vaccine, or even one in 10 million, we're going to pay a billion dollars for that.
01:47:55.000A trial lawyer is going to kill us for that, so you have to protect us.
01:47:58.000The anti-vax community, there's a whole community of people that attribute a series of ailments, including autism, obviously that, to vaccines.
01:48:07.000That is like the most maligned and marginalized of all the conspiracy groups.
01:48:15.000Because the thought is that you're not just pushing flat earth theories, you're actually harming people because kids are getting measles now that weren't getting it before and there's a consequence.
01:48:25.000Of like a real direct transmission of these diseases that we were protected against just a decade or so ago.
01:49:20.000But, you know, the FDA has a lot to do, and if the drug was already approved, they might never do anything with it.
01:49:25.000So the companies, like, accumulated bad data from time to time that no one ever saw, except people in the FDA who often didn't do anything about it.
01:49:40.000It's that, yes, the companies will disclose the data, you know, sort of the pre-approval data, but And then they'll do what they can to downplay.
01:49:50.000So if you're the CEO of Moderna or the CEO of Pfizer and you have a commercial product that you're getting paid for that's going into people's arms right now, do you want a discussion that says, hey, maybe only people over 75 should really take this right now?
01:50:05.000By the way, the market size on that is 1 20th Of the adult population, and we should make sure everybody else who's taking it is well aware of these potentially, you know, painful side effects?
01:50:16.000Or do you want the conversation around this to be, screw you, we're all getting it, and you're a real jerk if you even argue about it?
01:50:24.000Well, so, do they have any obligation to publish the potential side effects?
01:50:33.000I mean, well, at this point, they don't have a legal obligation, although they might face criminal liability, I guess.
01:50:39.000But I'm not saying that they haven't published it.
01:50:41.000What I said to you is I got the data from their publishing it.
01:50:45.000What I'm saying is the conversation is we're not having an honest conversation about it, and the companies have every financial incentive to keep the conversation dishonest.
01:50:56.000Keeping the conversation dishonest, though, but not – But there's a difference between keeping the conversation dishonest and not publishing the results.
01:51:04.000But you could keep the conversation dishonest, but yet still have that information available.
01:51:28.000The vaccine is going to affect people in different ways, and a certain number of people are going to have a severe reaction that could potentially cause them to be hospitalized.
01:51:49.000You've got to kind of dig for it, right?
01:51:51.000And they, because they have so much momentum and they sort of have the entire public health community on their side, they don't actually have to say that much right now.
01:51:58.000I mean, there's been sort of positive stories written about Pfizer and Moderna.
01:52:03.000They don't have to market this as much because everyone's marketing for them.
01:52:07.000But let me give you another sort of on-point example of this.
01:52:11.000So the Pfizer vaccine, there were 40,000 people in that clinical trial.
01:54:02.000A guy named Harold Schmidt, who's a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said openly that it was not fair to give this to older people.
01:54:12.000By the way, there's a lot of older people who are black and Hispanic too, but that you should give it to essential workers first because so many of those people are black and Hispanic and older people are white.
01:54:22.000But isn't there an argument to give it to essential workers first because it slows the curve?
01:55:19.000Harold Schmidt, H-A-R-A-L-D, you could definitely find it.
01:55:24.000It seems strange that you would openly advocate for singling out people based entirely on the fact that they're of a particular ethnicity or race.
01:56:00.000I don't think he's, like, on any committees.
01:56:01.000I believe the state of Minnesota, someone sent me this, and I have to be honest, I didn't check it, I should have checked it before I came on with you, actually overtly followed this, essentially this pattern in their first recommendation round.
01:56:14.000But there have been people, including...
01:56:16.000Didn't Nicholas Christakis recommend that it would be given to first responders?
01:56:23.000Jamie, didn't he say that during the podcast?
01:56:25.000I believe that was something that he said about slowing the spread, because there are people that are most likely in contact with it.
01:56:31.000He didn't look at it from a racial perspective at all.
01:56:33.000I mean, I think that's a bad idea, because I think, again, when you look at who's really at risk, it should be people over 75 who get it first.
01:56:59.000Study reveals impact of socioeconomic factors and the racial gap in life expectancy.
01:57:03.000Right, but he's still advocating for balancing it out.
01:57:09.000Harold Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given the risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities.
01:59:04.000And, I mean, you know, it's interesting that the people who are most afraid seem to be, or at least who are the loudest about being afraid, are women, oftentimes in 20s, 30s, and 40s, middle class, upper middle class, you know, the stereotypical Karen, right?
01:59:19.000Although they're not all white, but a lot of white.
02:01:50.000They're physically vulnerable and then on top of that, they might not have the ability to objectively go into this stuff with an open mind and look at the variables and say, what is actually happening versus what is the media saying and why is the media saying it this way?
02:02:09.000Well, one of the reasons why, unfortunately, is fear sells.
02:03:05.000I have a friend who was saying that he thought that Donald Trump still had a possibility of dying when he was on a steroid-fueled tweet storm.
02:03:13.000He was screaming, you know, make America great again.
02:03:25.000No, I mean, you know, a couple interesting things.
02:03:27.000You could see, even into June and July, I don't think you see it as much anymore, people talking about how they hadn't left their apartments, you know, in New York.
02:03:34.000And these are people who are in shitty, small apartments.
02:03:38.000Sometimes they have kids, and they're like, day 106, I'm beating this thing.
02:03:43.000I'm like, the only thing you're beating is your own fucking sanity.
02:03:46.000And your immune system, too, by the way.
02:05:59.000It's led to horrible public policy decisions.
02:06:02.000And it's also a short-term gain for long-term disastrous results.
02:06:07.000The short-term gain of getting these ratings and getting all these people to pay attention and getting people locked into this concept of fear.
02:06:14.000And then also it's supported by a lot of these people in the community.
02:06:17.000But a lot of these people in these media communities, they're not robust folks.
02:06:25.000There's an issue with people that don't exercise, don't take care of themselves, aren't eating well, aren't taking vitamins, and don't do a deep dive into how to optimize your immune system and your health.
02:06:38.000And these are the people that are telling you about what you're doing and who you're putting at risk when you want to have a birthday party for your kid.
02:08:54.000They never said, hey, this doesn't look very serious.
02:08:58.000Kids are not just not at risk from COVID. They're really not at risk from this pediatric syndrome we've been trying to scare you about.
02:09:04.000They go chicken little over and over and over again.
02:09:09.000And when it turns out they're wrong, and the hospitals don't collapse, and we don't need 100,000 ventilators, and a million people don't die, and the death rate is not 10%, and people are not dropping dead in the streets.
02:09:43.000He's a former UFC Bantamweight champion, stud athlete, got COVID, and it significantly affected him for a long period of time, and it kept him from fighting in a title fight.
02:09:54.000He was supposed to fight for the flyweight title just last month and wasn't able to do it, or earlier this month, rather.
02:10:23.000Some 40-year-old who doesn't even know when she got it, and in some cases doesn't have either a PCR or an antibody test to show that she got it, is now complaining, I have fatigue, and I have pain, and I have brain fog,
02:11:19.000There's more evidence that that's a real thing, and that's something that we should look at and researchers should look at.
02:11:26.000But remember, most people who get sick with COVID who are under 70 don't get particularly sick.
02:11:31.000So people like your friend are not It's worth looking at them.
02:11:36.000Cody Garbrandt was suffering from blood clots.
02:11:39.000He'd gone to the doctor and he found out that quite a bit after the initial infection, he was still fatigued and he was suffering from blood clots.
02:11:47.000So you can have blood clots if you essentially are immobile.
02:11:54.000What I'm talking about is this much greater population of people who never really got very sick and now say they have long COVID. And that...
02:12:02.000That seems to have a lot more in common with sort of fibromyalgia or restless leg syndrome or a lot of these quasi-somatic illnesses that unfortunately a lot of the population or gluten intolerance.
02:12:15.000I'm not talking about celiac disease, okay?
02:12:34.000So what I'm saying is, with long COVID, it fits into this group of illnesses that are not well defined, that sufferers are pretty organized and loud about their symptoms.
02:12:45.000And again, I'm not talking about your friends.
02:12:47.000I'm talking about what you see online.
02:12:48.000And unfortunately, Where there appears to be a significant, not always, but a significant somatic component.
02:12:56.000See, the thing about the blood clots, though, I think this has been pretty established in people that have died from COVID. Yes, that's correct.
02:13:17.000But when you get a guy who's in his 30s, who's a stud athlete like Cody Garbrandt and is suffering from blood clots quite a while after the infection, I don't remember the exact time period, but that's unusual for any other kind of disease, right?
02:13:31.000I don't know if it's unusual for any other kind of disease.
02:13:35.000I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing this.
02:13:39.000But I've never heard that attributed to the flu.
02:15:46.000And in fact, they tried to treat it with anticoagulants and anti-inflammatories that prevent clotting, and I think the response was not actually that strong, for whatever reason.
02:15:58.000But this is sort of like, again, we talk about things that I don't like to talk about because it's a level of medical precision that I don't want to pretend to, and that sort of...
02:16:08.000Do you think, though, that the people—hasn't there been evidence, though, that the people that even didn't suffer from severe symptoms had some lung scarring?
02:16:20.000So, there have been, like—this is sort of like the myocarditis issue.
02:16:26.000This is about the, like, heart function issues.
02:16:28.000There have been these small, open-label studies where, essentially, the researchers know that the people had COVID— And they've said, yeah, we see abnormalities here on scans, okay?
02:17:30.000So first of all, the flu can cause myocarditis.
02:17:33.000It's a common reaction to respiratory viruses.
02:17:37.000Second of all, when you actually looked at this study—and again, this is something that I have to read about because I'm not qualified to judge the data myself— The data was much weaker than it appeared to be on first glance.
02:17:52.000And in fact, the researchers basically walked back their conclusions.
02:17:55.000None of that stopped the media from panicking.
02:19:17.000I think two really big things have happened in the last, one in the last 10 years, one in the last 40 years.
02:19:22.000And they mean that this is more likely to happen again in the future, unfortunately.
02:19:27.000In a way, we're lucky with COVID because COVID is so non-threatening to most, you know, sort of healthy adults that this one's been a trial run, okay?
02:19:36.000Because imagine if COVID actually did kill 1%, much less 5% of the people who got it, we'd be in lockdown forever.
02:19:42.000So here's the two things that have clearly happened.
02:19:45.000First of all, the medical, what I call the medical industrial complex is bigger than it's ever been, both worldwide and in the U.S. In 1960, the U.S. spent about $27 billion on health care.
02:20:01.000Now, adjusted for inflation, that was about $250 billion.
02:20:04.000This year, or last year, let's say pre-COVID, we spent $4 trillion.
02:21:44.000A lot of the country, especially adults who don't remember what it's like to be 12 years old and want to be outside and seeing your friends, kind of like working virtually.
02:25:32.000There's 330 million people or whatever it is in the country.
02:25:36.000Most people are not going to listen to this.
02:25:39.000And when Amazon gets a wind of the fact that you have a booklet like this, I don't think they're hiring a bunch of people to fact check with them.
02:25:48.000So because of all these documentaries, these plandemics and all these different things that have already been suppressed, there seems to be like an inclination to the first move is to suppress.
02:26:09.000Second of all, okay, second of all, suppressing people like me drives people, drives readers and ordinary people looking for information to crazier theories, right?
02:26:20.000If Berenson is being suppressed, then it must...
02:27:09.000Because you've been attacked and you've got to imagine that the same people who attacked you will probably attack the people that are willing to distribute your work even harder than they've attacked you because they can't really do anything to you.
02:27:35.000So big tech, though, these forces that are making tech even more and more central in our lives and making it possible for us to live virtually more and more, and making tech more important and profitable, those forces are not going away.
02:27:51.000So the medicalization of society not going away.
02:27:55.000And the techization of society not going away.
02:28:02.000We would not have responded to this kind of shitty, dismal little virus this way 20 years ago.
02:28:09.000And the same number of people would have died.
02:28:13.000And of course, someone would jump in and go, it's not a shitty, dismal little virus that's killed almost 300,000 people.
02:32:50.000As long as it's live so you don't get to edit, you know, make me look like an asshole.
02:32:53.000Well, they're worried about the blowback.
02:32:54.000They're worried about the blowback like, you know, we're talking about that I had from the Abigail Schreier podcast or any of the other podcasts that are controversial.
02:33:37.000Does it have to be sanctioned by a corporation that has a...
02:33:40.000Not just a clear mandate, but that you get direction as to what you can and can't say and who you can and can't have on.
02:33:50.000These gatekeepers of information and the idea that these gatekeepers should be influenced and also not just influenced but directed by financial decisions.
02:34:31.000There's some people that are going to say things that aren't accurate.
02:34:35.000And those things are going to become spread and retweeted.
02:34:40.000And then these conspiracies are going to become something that people actually believe in when they're not accurate.
02:34:45.000What they would like is there to be some sort of...
02:34:50.000Some sort of gatekeeper or some sort of fil- but the problem is they've been so fucking shitty at it that no one trusts them anymore.
02:34:58.000You guys lie about so much and you distort so much and you have this obvious political ideology that you're relying on and you filter everything through.
02:36:56.000So when I worked at the Times, people would accuse the Times of being biased and liberal, and I would tell them what I thought was the truth, which I really think was the truth at the time.
02:37:06.000Look, there is some bias in terms of story selection.
02:37:12.000Yeah, like, obviously, it was easier to write stories about, you know, police brutality than how great the police were or something like that, right?
02:37:21.000But once you got past that idea, okay...
02:37:25.000You were supposed to report the facts.
02:37:27.000You were supposed to give people who you were, let's say it was a negative story, a chance to comment and report their answers honestly, not snarkily.
02:37:36.000Give them the space that they deserved because they have a point of view too.
02:37:41.000And you weren't supposed to lie in a meaningful way.
02:37:45.000In other words, what the story was was supposed to be an accurate representation of reality.
02:37:51.000And I don't think you can say those things about the New York Times anymore.
02:37:56.000Well, it shifted with Trump, and it shifted with this sort of new generation of journalists they hired, some of whom were not really journalists.
02:38:04.000They were sort of like new media people who were camera, they were videographers, or they were web designers.
02:38:12.000They didn't come out of the idea that We're journalists first, and our first goal is to try to reflect reality as well as any human being can.
02:38:38.000A bunch of racist morons, and we're going to show them the way, the truth, and the light.
02:38:43.000And that has been the last five years.
02:38:45.000And it's been devastating to journalism.
02:38:47.000It's the indoctrination, too, from the universities.
02:38:49.000This woke ideology is thought to be the way.
02:38:52.000And in many ways, it's a new religion.
02:38:55.000It's like the religion of woke is more important than the objective dissemination of reality.
02:39:02.000And if I were in that camp, I'd really be saying to myself, Why the hell is it that Donald Trump won more African-American and other minority votes than Mitt Romney?
02:39:37.000I've seen Latino people get angry at that distinction.
02:39:43.000It's strange to me, and I wonder what saves journalism, because I wish there was a place that I could go to that I knew there was not going to be any bias whatsoever, that I knew these are the facts as we know them, as it stands now, and it used to be The Times.
02:39:58.000I used to think The Times was that place.
02:39:59.000I still think The Times is better than most, but the problem is with these kids coming out of these universities, they feel like they have this There's an obligation to push some sort of social justice along with the news.
02:41:36.000It's going to have to come from a place like that, where it starts from the beginning with that in mind, and with that as the core tenets of objective reality.
02:41:49.000And the obligation is to disseminate this objective reality.
02:41:53.000And not social justice, not right-wing ideology, no biases.
02:42:00.000And that's not really what we expect from mainstream television news.
02:42:08.000But in the interim, something is happening.
02:42:11.000And you're actually, again, I don't want to sound like I'm kissing your ass, but look at the size of your audience.
02:43:29.000They've really been very good, and I know they take a lot of shit, but in terms of how bad it could have gone, and I know that there's been a lot of censorship that does exist with YouTube and some other places, I have no problems with them.
02:43:56.000I see, you know, Brett Weinstein's organization.
02:44:01.000He had this Unity 2020 Twitter account where the idea was to take people from the left and people from the right that are reasonable, educated, intelligent people and great leaders and create a third sort of option for people.
02:44:27.000Just absolute fucking lunacy that just discussing the option of a third party by a public intellectual who's a scholar was thought to be so dangerous that they had to shut it down.
02:46:03.000The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.
02:46:08.000And if being afraid of catching a disease that 99-point-whatever people survive from is the worst thing that happened to you, it's still the worst thing that happened to you.
02:46:18.000You haven't gone through World War I. You haven't seen your grandparents starve.
02:46:23.000You haven't had these horrific, violent encounters on a daily basis.
02:46:28.000How do you argue with someone out of fear?
02:46:30.000This thing still is the worst thing you've encountered because so many people, they inflate their adversity.
02:46:39.000They make it seem like this unbelievable barrier that they've had such great difficulty overcoming because there's social value, there's social cred, and there's social currency.
02:47:04.000I mean, this is part of the problem with human beings is that we have this understanding of what real struggle is based on our own personal experience.
02:47:12.000And I think a lot of these people that are freaking out, they've really, they've had soft lives.
02:47:20.000You talk to people that are tough, that have had hard lives, that have like, you know, fucking struggled and come here from other countries and like really, really, really seen some horrific shit, really seen crime and violence on a high level.
02:47:34.000They're not nearly as scared of this stuff.
02:47:36.000No, and I mean, I'll never forget being in Baghdad in the summer of 2004 and walking through the central morgue and I mean, you know, there were a lot of dead bodies in that morgue.
02:52:56.000Whatever happened to her, wherever she is right now, even if she doesn't know it and she doesn't know it because she's on Twitter and she's arguing with people, she needs to be left alone and she needs some help.
02:54:17.000You know, and sometimes people have these romantic ideas about a person, particularly a person that's very vulnerable and dependent upon them, right?
02:54:24.000Like, maybe her husband wasn't really that into her, and maybe she looked at this guy who was locked up.
02:54:31.000Like, women fall in love with fucking serial killers.
02:56:07.000You've got to be willing to make mistakes.
02:56:09.000And if we're not willing to allow people to make mistakes, it's just like the tone of people's communication should be shunned.
02:56:17.000This nasty, shitty, sniping tone should be really shunned.
02:56:23.000Because it's one of the most detrimental things to our society and our culture in terms of establishing community and friendships and And just spreading love.
02:57:33.000He is pretty smart, but it was also the way he was attacking them.
02:57:37.000It was an uncomfortable debate because it was about some very sensitive subjects, like about minorities and bank accounts and stuff like that.
02:57:47.000But it was just sometimes people, even though they might have a functional mind, they might be intelligent, If they're running for office or if they are holding an office, they're locked into a way of communicating where they can't stray outside the lines.
02:58:03.000So even if they're intelligent, they can't concede points.
02:58:57.000And I don't think most people trust politicians with basic reality.
02:59:02.000So we're left with the people that make the most critical decisions in terms of how our society is going to move forward, what our response is going to be to disasters like this pandemic.
02:59:12.000And we're leaving it with people that don't tell the truth.
03:00:30.000I'm not saying who can't kind of understand it.
03:00:33.000You know, you can be a smart person and read, but I'm saying like who've spent their lives actually looking at this and can tell you the real risks in a meaningful way.
03:01:04.000So to some extent, we are dependent on these scientists, on these engineers, on these highly trained people who spent their lives on one particular question.
03:01:16.000But what we shouldn't do, and this is where journalists have failed so completely, When you're dependent on them, the answer is not, I'm going to take what you say as gospel because I'm afraid to ask.
03:01:28.000It's, I'm going to keep asking you until you can explain this to me and to the world in a way that I can understand.
03:01:37.000And I want you to help me understand the risks, okay?
03:01:40.000We didn't let Oppenheimer decide whether to drop the bomb.
03:02:12.000Because he is a germaphobe, and he isn't that smart, and he is afraid of scientists, okay?
03:02:17.000But journalists, whose job it is to question all authority, And to make sure that people's statements line up.
03:02:24.000Over time, if you have one job as a journalist, it's to make sure that what people are saying, you don't let them change their facts two days later, okay?
03:02:33.000Or change their facts with what's published somewhere else.
03:02:36.000That you question them on that discrepancy.
03:02:38.000There are many jobs as journalists, but that's the most basic one.
03:02:53.000That maybe it's wise to support the distribution of the vaccine because the potential downsides of the vaccine are less than the potential downsides of catching the disease and getting really sick from it.
03:03:21.000And it's a double lie now because, again, I keep repeating it, not only are the risks higher if you're older from COVID, but the vaccine side effects are lower.
03:03:29.000So those people got to take it or should be encouraged to take it.
03:03:33.000But if you are under 50 and you do get the vaccine and then you are immune to the disease, you could potentially spread it less.
03:03:40.000You know how else you get immune to the disease?
03:04:22.000I think that is the best way to sell it to people.
03:04:25.000That's not the way it's being sold to people.
03:04:27.000It's get the damn vaccine or you're not going to be able to go anywhere.
03:04:29.000Well, forced compliance seems to be like, it's just people want to tell other people to comply because they want to comply and they want to know that everyone else is complying as well.
03:04:39.000They want to know that we're all involved in groupthink.