00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, Alex Berenson, author of a very important new book, All the COVID Thought Crimes You Can Fit into One Episode, Vaccines, Lockdowns, Testing, All of It.
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00:02:40.000Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:42.000I have been wanting to do this interview since March of 2020, but good things come to those who wait, I suppose.
00:02:48.000Alex Berenson is with us, who I am a huge admirer of.
00:02:51.000He is an honest, courageous, fact-first individual who is the author of a phenomenal new book called Pandemia, How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights and Lives.
00:03:02.000Alex Berenson, in a prior life, was a reporter for the New York Times, a financial fraud reporter, and author of Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.
00:03:15.000But we are here to talk about pandemia.
00:03:17.000Alex, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:03:19.000Well, thank you so much for having me.
00:03:21.000And so, Alex, let's just start with the whole kind of theme of the book and your journey with this topic.
00:03:29.000It's interesting because you mentioned that I wrote about financial fraud for the Times, and I did, but for a number of years, I covered the drug industry.
00:03:38.000And I think that that actually really informed a lot of pandemia and certainly my coverage of the vaccines in the last year.
00:03:47.000Because it really taught me about the complexities of what drug companies do and the way they can manipulate clinical trial data and science without lying, but manipulate it in ways that really work to their advantage and to the disadvantage of the public.
00:04:02.000But even going back before that, because I was a reporter who focused on finance, very sort of numbers heavy, I was not a political reporter.
00:04:10.000I was not really a personalities reporter.
00:04:14.000When I started to see stuff that didn't add up in terms of what the government was reporting, and not so much, it's not like I'm saying the government made up data.
00:04:23.000What I'm saying is the way the data was presented was fundamentally untrue.
00:04:29.000And so I had the confidence to speak out about that on Twitter from sort of very early on, from late March 2020.
00:04:36.000And it made me, I guess, a prominent voice in the anti-lockdown community.
00:04:42.000And it also made me hated by the people who I had worked with at the New York Times because, I mean, honestly, I think they viewed me as a class traitor.
00:04:49.000I had these opinions that people who, you know, who they worked with weren't supposed to have.
00:04:56.000I mean, February 2020, you were like investigating marijuana and other things.
00:05:02.000And then the virus comes and you just decided, I'm going to start looking into this.
00:05:06.000And I started to come across your stuff on Substack where, you know, Aaron Ginn, who you might know, is another guy that was really into it in the early days.
00:05:15.000And I was so outspoken about the lockdowns.
00:05:18.000And I was, we were really into it because I really had nothing else to do.
00:05:21.000And I'm by no means an expert, but just my common sense instincts that something's wrong.
00:05:25.000And you were so informative and so courageous early on.
00:05:28.000Walk us through that because you probably never planned to be center stage of one of the most important medical issues that humanity's ever faced.
00:05:40.000And, you know, I was working on a book about really about U.S. drug policy that would have been, and I hope to write one day still, a follow-up to tell your children sort of broadly about this, you know, the epidemic of legalization, the sort of very broad campaign to legalize drugs that we've seen, and not just cannabis, but really all drugs that we've seen in the last 10 or 15 years.
00:06:06.000And then, of course, like everybody else, I saw the videos coming out of China.
00:06:09.000I think we were all pretty nervous back in January and February.
00:06:13.000And then, you know, in March 2020, and I do, I talk about this in pandemia, I've read that Neil Ferguson report, the Imperial College London report that said, oh, if we don't do anything, 2 million Americans will die.
00:06:24.000But even worse, if we do mitigate a million Americans will die and we need to really lock down on society.
00:06:32.000And within days, that started to happen in New York and California and everywhere else.
00:06:37.000And then amazingly to me, Neil Ferguson totally changed his prediction.
00:06:43.00010 days after releasing this report that really shocked the world and pushed the United States and Europe into lockdowns.
00:06:57.000So look, the science or the data was evolving very fast around the coronavirus back at that time.
00:07:04.000And everybody's got the right to look at new data and change their views.
00:07:09.000But what was shocking to me was that the media was not willing to acknowledge what Ferguson had done.
00:07:15.000And so I tweeted this out and Elon Musk, you know, who was a coronavirus skeptic from the very first, retweeted it.
00:07:21.000And then Donald Trump Jr. retweeted it.
00:07:23.000And all of a sudden, I'd started with 7,000 followers.
00:07:27.000I think by the end of within a month, I had 100,000.
00:07:30.000And it just sort of took off from there.
00:07:32.000And, you know, people I knew, you know, at first they were like, look, you got to just, you know, understand what's happening in New York City.
00:08:36.000So I go into this in the book and I think that, you know, there are a couple of legitimate explanations.
00:08:41.000One is that New York is obviously the home of a tremendous amount of the media, tremendous concentration of media.
00:08:48.000And New York was hit hardest and first in the United States.
00:08:51.000And so, and so I think it was pretty scary in New York in late March into early April.
00:08:57.000And it was, and it was hard for people to see, you know, that it wasn't as bad as it looked, and that some of the wounds were self-inflicted with what was happening in the nursing homes.
00:09:07.000And that, you know, New York has a pretty terrible public hospital system anyway that's bad at the best of times.
00:09:12.000And so, so I think, I think that was hard.
00:09:16.000And then the more cynical explanation is these people knew it was terrible for Donald Trump.
00:09:20.000It was clear from the beginning that if the epidemic continued, it was going to be very hard for him to be reelected.
00:09:27.000You know, he, first of all, it crashed the economy.
00:09:29.000And second of all, it doesn't play to his strengths, right?
00:09:55.000That doesn't explain what happened in other countries.
00:09:58.000And that doesn't explain why the sort of hyped crisis continued after Joe Biden won and took office.
00:10:06.000And I think we don't fully understand that.
00:10:08.000We don't really understand the dynamics at play and why the media has not just given up its watchdog role, but become a propaganda arm of the government and the WHO.
00:10:18.000And we see it now with vaccines where they won't ask really basic questions about vaccine safety and efficacy.
00:10:24.000And why that is, I mean, I don't know, Charlie, your guess is as good as mine.
00:10:28.000I don't want to be conspiratorial, but it becomes hard not to ask that question or not to wonder.
00:10:34.000Yeah, I'm just processing all this because it's these people have a lot of power and they have a responsibility to tell people the truth.
00:10:46.000As we celebrate the Christmas season, we often pause to consider our many blessings.
00:10:50.000Hillsdale College wishes to thank you for standing with them as they celebrate over 177 years of blessings.
00:10:56.000Since 1844, the Beacon of the North, the last college, Hillsdale College, has held fast to its mission to provide the kind of education essential to preserving free government.
00:11:05.000And for decades, the college has extended its educational mission on behalf of liberty through a variety of outreach programs.
00:11:10.000Perhaps you receive in Primus for every month, or have taken one of Hillsdale's excellent online courses or attended one of Hillsdale's free regional events.
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00:11:28.000And no time in our nation's history has there been a greater need for this kind of classical liberal arts education that Hillsdale offers on its campuses and nationwide.
00:11:35.000So during the season of blessings, Hillsdale thanks you for partnership in extending its mission to the country.
00:11:40.000To learn more about Hillsdale College and take their online courses, the Aristotle course, the Winston Churchill course, the Dying Citizen course, which I'm about to wrap up with Victor Davis Hansen.
00:11:54.000For parents out there, require your children to take at least one Hillsdale course before they get any Christmas gifts.
00:12:00.000You see, I'm a very big fan of parents withholding good things unless kids do the necessary things.
00:12:08.000Kids shouldn't just get Christmas gifts because they exist.
00:12:11.000They should get Christmas gifts because they've earned them.
00:12:14.000And by earning them, they need to take Hillsdale online courses to learn about Western civilization, learn about God, learn about Genesis, the book of Genesis, the Constitution, and more.
00:12:23.000Charlie4Hillsdale.com, Charlie F-O-Rhillsdale.com.
00:12:30.000So I want to just reiterate the book title, Pandemia, How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government Rights and Lives.
00:12:38.000So let me ask you a broad question and we can kind of navigate it.
00:12:42.000Has there been any evidence to show that the death count?
00:12:47.000Is there a difference of dying with COVID or because of COVID?
00:12:50.000Is there truth to that line of questioning?
00:12:56.000And this is one where, you know, I think like because I'm not, you know, sort of a conspirator, conspiracy theorist, my view on this is quite a bit more nuanced than, you know, than it's made out to be.
00:13:06.000And you, and you may have read or you may have heard, oh, only 6% of people who, you know, died from COVID actually died from COVID, you know, the CDC says.
00:13:23.000COVID definitely killed a lot of Americans and people around the world last year and this year.
00:13:27.000We know that because, and I go into this in the book, overall deaths were up quite a bit last year in the United States and Europe and in other parts of the world.
00:13:36.000I mean, they weren't up nearly as much as the, you know, as you would think if you'd watched CNN and MSNBC all the time, but they were still up.
00:13:42.000A couple million people died from COVID last year.
00:13:46.000And, you know, 60 million people die worldwide, a couple million from COVID.
00:13:49.000So it's a real killer, but it isn't, you know, it isn't a top five killer.
00:13:54.000And this is the most important lie about COVID that was told from the very beginning.
00:13:59.000Most of those people were very old and very sick.
00:14:04.000And many of them who weren't very old or very sick were morbidly obese, meaning their life expectancies, in many cases, they might be three months, six months, a year, two years.
00:14:14.000The idea that COVID strikes down people, not just in the prime of their lives, but sort of healthy 60-year-olds, is just not true.
00:14:25.000But so when people say, oh, you know, there were all these people who had car accidents and they, you know, they're listed as COVID deaths because they happened to have COVID at the time they died.
00:14:37.000But what people are trying to get at is this idea that most of the people who died from COVID were very sick and would have died soon anyway.
00:14:46.000And let me give you a personal example of this because my dad last year, he died of leukemia and he was in New York City.
00:15:39.000Because if all of a sudden the legitimate death total is 80% lower, then that doesn't justify the type of reaction.
00:15:49.000Or if once you understand who's dying, you have to ask yourself, why are we sacrificing children and their schooling and young adults and forcing them to stay home so they get depressed?
00:16:02.000And, you know, and business owners who've put their lives into, you know, whatever.
00:16:06.000It could be a small little business that's, but it's theirs, dry cleaning or whatever.
00:16:22.000We should do what we can to protect those older people, but we need to understand the choices that we're making and that the trade-off is real.
00:16:30.000And we were never having a mature conversation about this, right?
00:16:37.000We know everything in life is a choice.
00:16:39.000We know that when you get an automobile, it's a choice.
00:16:41.000We know if you buy a home with a pool, it's a choice.
00:16:43.000And those choices are that if you have an infant, that infant might go into the pool and die.
00:16:48.000That's a real thing that happens a lot in this country, more than people are comfortable with, right?
00:16:53.000Life is a series of cost-benefit analysis.
00:16:57.000But the whole conversation, Alex, that frustrated people like me, not a scientist, whatever that means anymore, is that we were never being honest about the risks that are just embedded with daily existence.
00:17:24.000And the analogy that I've used about this, and I don't use it in the book, but I kind of wish I had is, you know, Oppenheimer and those scientist and those brilliant scientists during World War II created, you know, the atomic bomb, but they didn't choose to drop it.
00:18:23.000I mean, remember how crazy it got in, you know, sort of March through June.
00:18:29.000There was a moment when they even tried to sideline Fauci a little bit and the media went crazy.
00:18:34.000No, I know, but I think I agree with that.
00:18:36.000All things being equal, outside of, I don't think he should have fired him, just to be clear.
00:18:40.000I think he could have put him among, make him one among 20, right?
00:18:46.000That, oh, we now have a whole committee because I think firing Fauci would have turned him into a public relations martyr that would have been on television every day.
00:18:55.000I told you, I told you, I told you, I told you, right?
00:18:59.000And so there could have been a strategy there.
00:19:00.000So I want to ask you another part of this, which is one of the things that I think Trump deserves credit for was his original instincts.
00:19:08.000His original instincts was about treatments, not vaccines and not lockdowns.
00:19:14.000And I remember being on the phone with Mark Meadows issuing, you know, a word I'd never heard before.
00:19:20.000It was called hydroxychloroquine, never heard of it before, right?
00:19:23.000That it was working other parts of the world.
00:19:32.000If there is an anti-malarial that could potentially help, why don't we tell people about it?
00:19:38.000Alex, talk about how we had one of the most, I would say, nearly diabolical campaigns against the conversation when it came to treatments.
00:19:49.000So I mean, it's interesting because hydroxychloroquine, unfortunately, probably does not work very well against COVID.
00:19:55.000But that doesn't mean that there wasn't good evidence to support testing it, you know, and testing it thoroughly.
00:20:02.000And it's the same thing now with ivermectin.
00:20:04.000Ivermectin may or may not work against COVID, but it should have been tested by the NIH and by sort of American scientists in a way it has not been.
00:20:13.000And there's three or four other drugs that I could mention that fall in that category that are older, that are cheap and off-patent and widely available.
00:20:22.000And there's really no reason that they shouldn't have been tested except that, you know, Fauci seems to be totally in love with vaccines and expensive new therapeutics.
00:20:30.000And so, and so Donald Trump, it's interesting you say it because, look, Trump, I think actually in some ways, Trump's scientific instincts actually were not bad here, but his political instincts were terrible.
00:20:41.000So he'd say things like, you know, I don't want to let those people on the cruise ship off because it'll make the numbers look worse.
00:20:47.000And, you know, he got beaten over the head with that.
00:20:50.000But at the same time, he was saying, I think that the, you know, the death rate is actually lower than we realize because so many people who get this don't get really sick and aren't counted in the case counts.
00:21:28.000Once Trump said hydroxychloroquine, it became, there was a campaign, a coordinated campaign, not just in the media, but in some of the best scientific journals in the world to prove that it didn't work.
00:21:40.000And in fact, they embarrassed themselves.
00:21:42.000They published data based on a fake data set, the Lancet, which is again a tough journal 2020, just in an effort to prove that Donald Trump was wrong.
00:21:53.000So I mean, let me pull back even further again.
00:21:58.000People on the left say, well, you know, how did this get politicized?
00:22:02.000Everyone's entitled to, you know, views about masks or everyone's entitled to, you know, we shouldn't politicize a discussion of the vaccines.
00:22:12.000Like people are entitled to their own opinion about masks and people are entitled to look at the data about vaccines and try to make a decision.
00:22:20.000Hey, maybe this isn't good for my kids.
00:22:22.000Maybe it's good for my, you know, my elderly mother.
00:22:27.000It's not the right that is saying don't have that conversation.
00:22:31.000The left is saying, we are going to make you do this.
00:22:36.000They are turning a medical discussion and a scientific discussion into a political discussion.
00:22:41.000It is the left and not the right that has politicized this.
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00:22:54.000It was a nice thought, but unfortunately, it's just not possible.
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00:24:51.000Talk just broadly about the vaccine, because this right now is considered to be like the most forbidden topic to discuss in America right now.
00:25:03.000And frankly, I've been disappointed in the right on this.
00:25:06.000And I've been disappointed in sort of, you know, the people I called Team Reality who, you know, who are very willing to look and question lockdowns and question masks and question school closures.
00:25:15.000And when the vaccine came out, it was as if they just, everybody just wanted this to be over.
00:25:20.000I totally agree with you on this, by the way, 100%.
00:25:23.000You know, if we have to get a couple shots, so be it.
00:25:26.000And people, you know, if people are afraid to question science sort of broadly, they're really afraid to question drug development and discovery.
00:25:33.000And so, and so here's, here's where my being a reporter for the Times and having covered these companies really mattered.
00:25:42.000One of the most important aspects, and this was very early on, this was before any of the more recent questions about the vaccine.
00:25:49.000One of the most important things you do as a drug company is design your clinical trials.
00:25:53.000And if you have a new product, whether it's, you know, it could be a new antidepressant or a heart medicine or whatever it is, they spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to figure out how to design clinical trials that will make their drug look the best and give it the best chance of approval.
00:26:29.000But in these 40,000 person clinical trials, 30,000 in the case of Moderna, there were a literal handful of people who were at high risk of death from COVID.
00:26:40.000In other words, most of the people in the trials were under 65 and a few were between 65 and 75 and a tiny number were 75 and over.
00:26:50.000If you want to know whether these vaccines actually protect people from severe disease and death, you have got to give it to these older people who are at high risk of severe disease and death.
00:27:02.000And by the way, that's why we know the monoclonal antibodies work because we tested those in older people.
00:27:07.000They went to nursing homes and they enrolled people who could actually die from COVID.
00:27:19.000Well, you can't go back because Twitter has now banished me.
00:27:21.000And this is something else in the book about how new media and old media have colluded to suppress dissension, not just around vaccines, but especially around vaccines.
00:27:30.000But you can go back, or I can go back and look at my tweets from November 2020 and see tweets that are positive about the vaccines.
00:27:43.000And it was only when I realized that there was this fundamental flaw intentionally in the clinical trial design that I started to become suspicious of the vaccine.
00:27:54.000And unfortunately, my suspicions grew over time as I looked at sort of the preclinical work that had been done, as I looked at the FDA and EMA, the European Medicines Agency briefing books, as I looked at some of the papers that had been written.
00:28:09.000And then as we saw that congruent with the rollout in Israel, and Israel and the UK were the first two big countries, the first two Western countries to roll out the vaccines, they saw huge spikes in infections and deaths in that first couple of weeks after the first dose, which the media would not talk about.
00:28:28.000And I thought to myself, look, these things, the overall benefit may still be great for people.
00:28:34.000Although, even by then, I was really questioning whether or not mandates made sense.
00:28:39.000But why can't we talk about what's actually happening here and what some of the risks are?
00:28:43.000And that's where I've really been ever since.
00:28:46.000And unfortunately, after a brief period of time, which I, you know, on my sub stack, I call the Substack, we haven't really talked about, but it's this platform that I went to following my banishment from Twitter.
00:28:58.000And I have a newsletter there called Unreported Truths that people can go see.
00:29:02.000But on my sub stack, I started to call this the happy vaccine valley, that there's this period where after the second dose, where you do have a lot of antibodies and you can see cases and infections go down, you know, basically everywhere.
00:29:16.000Unfortunately, that period does not last.
00:29:18.000Within a couple of months, the vaccines start to fail, their efficacy fails.
00:29:23.000And so that's why there's this desperate push for boosters to sort of temporarily amp up antibodies again, which unfortunately, and the good news is that actually does work to amp up your antibodies.
00:29:35.000The bad news is nobody, not even the companies, has any idea what the long-term effects of repeated dosing is going to be.
00:29:43.000So my view has gotten more negative over time, but it really began in December 2020 when I realized that the clinical trials didn't say what they seem to say.
00:29:53.000And there's so many different components that I'd like to unpack with you.
00:29:56.000We could go to the adverse events, which are legitimate, that people are experiencing adverse events to these vaccines, and we're not allowed to talk about it.
00:30:42.000And I ask the room, I say, raise your hand if you or someone you know personally has had an adverse event, a serious adverse event to the vaccine.
00:30:58.000And so talk a little bit about that, Alex.
00:31:00.000What's going on with the adverse events to the vaccine?
00:31:02.000Is it overblown or is there something really here?
00:31:05.000No, I don't think it's overblown at all.
00:31:07.000I mean, you know, it's the vaccine fanatics, as I like to call them, will say, oh, well, VARES, which is the vaccine adverse events reporting system, which is the U.S. database of adverse events.
00:31:21.000Anybody can submit, maybe people are making fake reports.
00:31:24.000There's actually very, very little evidence of any substantial number of fake reports.
00:31:29.000And in fact, it appears to be the other way around: that this routine adverse events simply are not reported to bears because at this point, there are so many of them.
00:31:37.000And then, even if you look at really severe adverse events, and this was very interesting because you know, there's this, the Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines can cause this very rare, but sometimes deadly, very unusual clotting, especially in young women who get vaccinated.
00:31:55.000And when the UK, so the UK picked up on this and they had a few cases and they said to doctors, you need, we're going to require, legally require you to report all the cases you see.
00:32:07.000And within a few weeks, they've gone from, and I, and I don't want to quote the numbers exactly, but it was something like 15 cases to 100 or more cases.
00:32:16.000And so, what that said to me was, even for this very unusual event that was very serious, that doctors would be inclined to report, there was substantial under-reporting of cases.
00:32:30.000You're supposed to report these events, but it's voluntary.
00:32:33.000So, you have a system that's a little bit clunky to use, and you have a system that's voluntary for providers and certainly for patients to use.
00:32:41.000It's not going to pick up on a lot of events.
00:32:43.000And the truth, Charlie, is we have better systems, okay?
00:32:46.000We have what you know, the U.S. is not as good at this as countries that have sort of national health care and national identifiers.
00:32:54.000You know, there's lots of problems with those things, but one thing they do let you do is track hospitalizations post-vaccination better.
00:33:01.000But we do have electronical medical, I'm sorry, electronic medical records, and we have big databases.
00:33:06.000And if we wanted to, we could search those databases and really look for what, you know, whether within, let's say, a month of vaccination, there were an excess in heart attacks.
00:33:19.000And we could look at a population of 10 million people.
00:33:22.000You said, so what you do is you say you look at those 10 million people the month before vaccination, you look at them the month after vaccination.
00:33:29.000Do you see any excess in heart attacks in the month after compared to the month before?
00:33:34.000And if so, that doesn't prove the vaccination caused the heart attacks.
00:33:37.000There could be other explanations, but that's a signal.
00:33:40.000And that work basically is not being done in the United States.
00:33:45.000And again, it looks, and that's, you know, that's why stories like yours, that's why people I think are increasingly scared.
00:33:53.000They, they, all they have is these anecdotes, and the media is telling them that what they're seeing with their own eyes is not real.
00:34:00.000And if we, you know, if we weren't so terrified of doing a real cost-benefit analysis of the vaccines, we could.
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00:35:02.000Yeah, and that would, again, require challenging this incredible monolith that is these vaccine companies that pay a lot of bills for a lot of important people.
00:35:15.000They have, they have an incredible, I mean, when you're, when you're able to mandate something for every human being in the Western world, you're going to have a lot, you know, that you could distribute.
00:35:25.000And so, of course, it's a money incentive, obviously.
00:36:06.000And I've never been on either side of it.
00:36:08.000I think that anyone could act corrupt.
00:36:10.000I obviously think generally markets are good, but I just, I would appreciate like a little bit of, you know, like table pounding by the, you know, that whole, you know, anti-capitalist wing of the party.
00:36:21.000I think it would actually be interesting, but they're totally silent on this.
00:36:25.000So, Alex, I want to be respectful of your time.
00:36:26.000It's pandemia, how coronavirus hysteria took over our government rights and lives.
00:36:31.000I want to get to this five minutes remaining because we have so many parents and kids that are misled on the weed issue, right?
00:36:55.000And let me, before even you ask a question about this, I want to say something about tell your children because I think it's actually very important.
00:37:00.000And I talk about this a little bit in pandemia.
00:37:03.000What I saw with the response to tell your children helped me understand what was happening with the media's response to the pandemic, which is to say, look, you can read Tell Your Children and think, you know what?
00:37:16.000Yeah, there are going to be some people who have bad reactions to cannabis.
00:37:34.000And you can think, you know what, there's too many black people who get their lives ruined because they got arrested smoking a joint on the street.
00:37:40.000Again, it's that that's somewhat exaggerated, but it does happen.
00:38:06.000The Times where I had worked didn't review the book.
00:38:09.000Other places, you know, didn't review the book.
00:38:12.000And so what that told me was: if you step out of line on an issue that is important to sort of the, you know, the propaganda instincts of the media, the a politically important issue on which there's a lot of groupthink, you are going to have an impossible time breaking through, no matter how good the science.
00:39:37.000Well, no, it's this like weird social currency.
00:39:40.000Like, I'm going to be allowed into the party because I think all the kids should be able to do psychedelic laced weed at age seven or whatever.
00:41:08.000Now, it's not physically harmful the way alcohol is, although some people get this very weird syndrome called scrommeting, where they wind up with uncontrolled vomiting after using it for long periods of time.
00:41:22.000But it is certainly harmful to the brain and it can cause psychotic episodes.
00:41:35.000And if you wind up using a lot, especially if you start when you're young and you have a, you know, you might have a family history of mental illness, you are substantially increasing your chances for real permanent mental illness.
00:41:51.000I say this and tell your children, it would be much better to get lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking than get schizophrenia after five years of using pot because schizophrenia is a terrible disease.
00:42:15.000We should talk to him about it because he, although he likes, you know, he likes using cannabis, he's well aware that can have this effect.