In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with CNN's Chief Health and Human Rights Correspondent, Dr. Alex Blumberg, to talk about his experience living in Austin, Texas, and his thoughts on the growing problem of homelessness in America's largest cities. We also talk about the legalization of marijuana, and why he doesn't think it's a good idea at all. And of course, we talk about why he thinks it should be legalized and why it might not be a bad idea. It's a fun episode, and I hope you enjoy listening to it! Thanks for tuning in, Joe! -Jon Sorrentino and Sarah Abdurrahman The Joe Rogans Experience is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. Produced in Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY. Hosted by Jonny LoQuasto and Matt Knost, and produced in Atlanta, GA, Georgia. The show is brought to you by Native Creative and produced by John Rocha, AKA the Chief Health & Human Rights Counselor at the Center for Public Health and Public Policy at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, MD, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Johns Hopkins University, located across the street from Columbia Medical Center. from the National Museum of American Indian Arts and Cultural History and Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., and adjacent to the Medical Center of St. Martin's Medical Center, we are located in the ground floor of Union Station, just a few blocks away from Union Station. , we are just a short distance from downtown Atlanta, Maryland. and across the river from Union St. Patrick's Yard, we have a great view of downtown, across the park, across from Union Park. We hope you find this episode interesting, informative, funny, entertaining, and entertaining, informative and entertaining. . Thank you for listening to this episode, Jonny and Sarah, Sarah, thank you for being here, and we appreciate you, Sarah and Sarah for being kind enough to share this with us. - Thank you so much, Sarah & Sarah, we really appreciate it, we appreciate your support, we love you, we can't wait to have you, and thank you, bye, bye bye! -Jonny, bye! --Jonny & Sarah - Jonny, Sarah, Caitlyn, and Sarah -
00:00:24.000I hadn't been to Austin in some time, and it's changed in a really good way.
00:00:30.000I was staying at a hotel downtown, walking around, tons of cool restaurants, and I guess Austin City Limits has their little stage that's downtown.
00:00:44.000A few months ago, it was pretty rough with the tents and all the homelessness stuff, but they moved those folks into hotels, and they've purchased some hotels.
00:01:02.000All over the country, anywhere you go, any big city, you have this fairly unique situation in terms of modern times of people camping on the street.
00:03:32.000But there's obviously a lot of people who think, who aren't watching CNN, who, like, if I wanted to reach them in some way, I mean, you reach them.
00:03:42.000And I thought to myself, if there's one person, really...
00:03:45.000That I would have a conversation and say, hey man, just listen to how I think about these things.
00:03:49.000I want to hear how you think about it.
00:03:50.000Listen to how I think about these things.
00:03:52.000Who would that one person be in the United States?
00:04:03.000I wanted to have you on, first of all, because I really respected that you made this change of opinion publicly.
00:04:11.000When you were first talking about marijuana, you were talking about it as if it had no medical benefit, and it was really just a recreational drug that was possibly or probably harmful.
00:04:22.000Is that an assessment that you agree with?
00:04:25.000Yeah, I think it certainly didn't seem to have any medicinal benefit.
00:04:29.000But then, upon further examination, you publicly changed your position.
00:04:35.000And in doing so, you actually examined all the scientific evidence that pointed to, for many people with diseases, many people that are on chemotherapy, many people with some serious ailments,
00:05:03.000You know, use confirmation bias and whatever, you know, echo chamber news sources they can get to sort of confirm their initial position, and you didn't do that.
00:05:13.000And I thought that's a real thinking person who is trying to honestly figure out what's going on instead of just working on being right.
00:05:27.000Well, look, I appreciate that, and it was very illuminating for me, because I think the way that we become a more knowledgeable society, I think, sometimes surprises people.
00:05:41.000I do think, and maybe this will dovetail even to a little bit of what's going on now, but the thing is that...
00:05:47.000When you looked at the, so if you were just to look at the bulk of evidence around cannabis at that, and I'm talking, I wrote this Time Magazine article back, you know, this is probably 12, 13 years ago, and I looked at the bulk of evidence and you say, okay, I'm going to just look at the 400 most recent papers.
00:06:25.000Now, if you're just looking at papers, you're like, well, this one potential lung harm, this one possible addiction, this one gateway, you know, you're seeing all those individual studies.
00:06:31.000But at a broader level, one step upstream, you realize that most of the studies that are getting funded are designed to look for harm, right?
00:06:38.000So when I saw that, that was the first time I thought, well, why are the studies that are getting out there, why are they all designed to look for harm?
00:06:46.000Then I started looking at other countries and some really good research out of places like Israel in particular.
00:06:52.000A guy named Raf Mashulam, who's 91 years old now.
00:06:55.000He was the first guy to ever isolate THC and then synthesize it.
00:07:32.000A little child who's having 300 seizures a week and is now not having seizures is a much more specific sort of metric.
00:07:39.000And it seemed to work really well in kids who did not respond to existing seizure drugs, which was kind of amazing to me.
00:07:52.000To me, in some ways, that wasn't just a medical issue at that point.
00:07:56.000It was a moral issue because nothing worked for these kids.
00:08:00.000And they were thinking about even compounding veterinary medications for them.
00:08:04.000And these parents are like, you know, in their kitchen sinks, stirring up, you know, cannabis, trying to get the formulation right to turn it into an oil or a tincture they could put underneath the kid's tongue.
00:08:21.000And that's when I said, you know, there's something here.
00:08:23.000But I got to tell you, when I wrote the article saying I changed my mind on this, you know, you hit send at night and then you wake up in the morning and I work at a university.
00:10:46.000One thing I tried to stay away from whenever I wrote about this was I felt like it was a little bit of a trap to get into the moral equivalency of things.
00:12:53.000Before that, they had used slavery to process hemp back in the day.
00:12:58.000And then with the invention of the cotton gin, cotton became a preferred source of textiles.
00:13:05.000But then when the decorticator came around, it was the cover of Popular Science magazine.
00:13:10.000It said, hemp the new billion-dollar crop, because of the fact they figured out this new machine.
00:13:15.000And then William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger, because William Randolph Hearst didn't just own Hearst Publications and Hearst the newspapers.
00:13:27.000Also, he owned paper mills, and he owned forests filled with trees they were going to chop down to make paper, and it would have cost him millions of dollars to convert all that to hemp.
00:13:38.000So this evil fuck, when he decided to demonize this particular plant because of the textile, because of the commodity of hemp, and he blamed it all on the psychoactive plant And then named it after a Mexican slang for wild tobacco.
00:14:20.000That propaganda, the echoes of that propaganda are what is bothering people even today.
00:14:27.000It's really frightening to think about it that way.
00:14:30.000I mean, you see it, and then when you see it, it's sort of unraveled like that.
00:14:33.000I knew the William Randolph Hearst connection.
00:14:36.000I didn't know it to that level of detail.
00:14:38.000But there was some, you know, this idea that people had a lot to gain from this substance being sort of really suppressed, I thought was scary.
00:14:47.000But fascinating to see, because, you know, then you look for it, you say, like, this is happening.
00:14:52.000Well, it shows you how dangerous it is when the press is lying, when they're inaccurate, when they're allowed to print things and publish things that aren't true, that the echoes of that, as I said, could last for, you know, 90, 100 years.
00:16:19.000But I think the uncomfortable feeling that you get from the paranoia, when it goes away, you're left with an understanding of maybe what are these things that you have issues with.
00:16:32.000And maybe if you could shore up those aspects of your life, you wouldn't have maybe these underlying feelings that you're suppressing and ignoring for the most part until you get high.
00:16:45.000I think you'd like to get your life to a place where when you get really high, you don't feel bad.
00:16:51.000That's a really interesting way of looking at it.
00:16:53.000If I've dealt with some of these things in my own life, then if I were to get high, I would be not as overwhelmed by the paranoia.
00:17:02.000I fully accept that I have issues that I've got to deal with.
00:17:17.000I read his book, How to Heal Your Mind, and I've talked to him about this stuff, and I interviewed even the guys who are doing some of these psilocybin trials now and stuff, and it's really interesting to me, you know?
00:17:42.000Well, it's also a dose issue, you know, when you don't have any experience with THC and then you smoke marijuana, you know, it's hard to regulate.
00:18:00.000And then you get this, I was told, you get sort of a biphasic.
00:18:03.000You get the first sort of hit, and then it goes through your liver, and then you get a second hit, which can be very hard to manage, is what I was told.
00:18:10.000Well, the liver part, your body produces 11-hydroxymetabolite.
00:18:13.000It's a far more potent version of a psychoactive that you don't really get when you smoke it.
00:18:20.000It's not really active in smoking it, but when you eat it, it's called a one-pass.
00:18:26.000As it goes through your liver, it's four to five times more psychoactive than THC. Is that right?
00:18:31.000Yeah, that's why people get confused and they think maybe it was laced, like you'll have a pot cookie or something.
00:18:36.000Have you ever watched the video of the cops who took the marijuana from the kids and then called 911?
00:19:18.000You certainly can when you close your eyes.
00:19:20.000If you eat it, I used to enjoy eating it and then going into the sensory deprivation tank because you'd close your eyes and you have these wild visions.
00:19:32.000So you're not hallucinating with your eyes open, but when you close your eyes, you're seeing some wild visuals that I don't know what is responsible for those.
00:19:42.000You and Elon doing that, everyone has talked about that, but I'm curious for you, I mean, obviously you feel different, but do you feel more creative?
00:19:52.000Do you feel more unleashed in some ways?
00:19:56.000I mean, you think about that with alcohol, right?
00:19:58.000It's a disinhibiting sort of substance.
00:20:01.000I'm sure it's just a different sort of feel in terms of the conversation you have with somebody.
00:20:07.000Yeah, I definitely think it opens up some aspect of your mind that tends to favor creativity.
00:20:16.000Carl Sagan had a really fascinating quote about marijuana.
00:20:20.000Carl Sagan was a huge marijuana enthusiast, and his quote was essentially something to the lines of, he believes that there are thoughts that are available to you when you are smoking cannabis that aren't available otherwise.
00:20:35.000I, you know, when I was only semi-joking about the fact that I wrote some stuff down that I thought was brilliant, what I kind of realized in retrospect is that it's there, but I'm inhibiting it.
00:20:48.000I'm worried about putting it down on paper.
00:20:49.000I don't think it's going to be very good, or I don't think it's going to sound very smart, or whatever it might be, and it never gets out there.
00:20:55.000And then all of a sudden, I don't care, and I'm putting it out, and then I read it in retrospect, and I'm like...
00:21:05.000You're on this major television news network talking about science and medicine.
00:21:11.000And you're a practicing physician that works for a hospital.
00:21:16.000You have affiliation with the university.
00:21:17.000There's a lot going on with you where you're scrutinized and you're a public person.
00:21:21.000So there's these constant eyeballs on you and you have to be very aware of saying something that'll be preposterous or people are going to diminish your viewpoint because, oh, but he said this and look at that.
00:21:35.000You can look at you in an unfavorable light very easily.
00:21:56.000It's not that I'm trying to not disclose something, but I think sometimes when I'm having conversations, people behave a certain way around me, they say certain things around me, around whatever the issue may be.
00:22:07.000They feel like they have to act a certain way around me.
00:22:34.000I found that jarring because, you know, some people are arrogant, obviously, but I think as a general rule, if you say, hey, look, this group of people is arrogant, and they're also the group of people, like with this pandemic, that we want to listen to,
00:22:50.000but if we see them as arrogant and we don't want to be taking instructions or feel like it's too didactic or too top-down, there's not enough of a conversation going on, that's a problem.
00:23:02.000Not that I'm strategically trying not to be that way, but I think that that's just not who I am.
00:23:08.000I'm not trying to lecture people on this stuff.
00:23:12.000I think when you are a person that is discussing something that It's affecting millions if not billions of people.
00:23:23.000You have millions if not billions of opinions that are coming your way.
00:23:28.000And when you have spent an enormous amount of time studying an issue and you're discussing this issue with people that have spent almost no time studying it, maybe read a few things online or watched a YouTube video, I think it's very easy to get arrogant.
00:23:43.000It's also very easy to appear arrogant to try to stifle or to dismiss or diminish the opinions of people that don't agree with you.
00:23:54.000And it is a very common thing when someone is constantly being questioned or constantly being pressured, and you can see it unfold.
00:24:04.000I don't mean to pick on her, but the White House secretary, that Jen Psaki lady, she has, over time, adopted an increasingly more combative tone with people that are questioning her in the press.
00:24:17.000And, you know, she comes off a lot of times as arrogant.
00:24:20.000I think that arrogance comes from this constant pressure of being questioned, constant pressure of being scrutinized and criticized, and she's standing up on that podium and she wants to stop it!
00:24:33.000And so that sort of tone comes out of that and unfortunately it does the opposite of what it's intended.
00:24:42.000It's intended to sort of silence critics, but it just emboldens them and it makes them more enthusiastic about asking more grading questions and more questions that are going to be more irritable or irritating and get under her skin more and try to get more of a reaction like that from them.
00:24:57.000I think people do that with scientists.
00:24:59.000I think they do that with journalists.
00:25:05.000So the people who are asking Jen Psaki questions, I guess the question is, are these legitimate questions or are they just doing it to get under her skin?
00:25:44.000And then she's also responding to these people As a representative of the president, but she's not the president.
00:25:52.000So she's not elected, she's hired, she's a press secretary, and we know from previous experiences, those people don't last.
00:25:58.000Like, Trump went through a gang of them, right?
00:26:00.000It was pretty funny watching these poor people just having to deal with answering the press that were freaking out about the shit that Trump would say.
00:26:09.000They stopped doing press conferences for a while.
00:26:12.000I guess they thought there was no value in them anymore.
00:26:16.000I think they just get tired of being just criticized and scrutinized.
00:26:20.000It's a fascinating position because it's a very unnatural position.
00:26:31.000It's not conducive to good conversations.
00:26:33.000I think that, like, going back to, you know, just you and I having this conversation, I mean, I think that there can be real conversations about these important topics, right?
00:26:51.000Everyone says it's so polarized now, and you can't disentangle anything from politics, and I think that's true.
00:26:57.000And it's not just this pandemic, you know?
00:27:00.000I mean, even prior to this pandemic, science and politics were not neatly cordoned off from one another.
00:27:06.000There's always been these sort of things.
00:27:08.000But I've never seen it quite like this.
00:27:11.000Nor have I. I think the question is, when people raise these issues, are they trying to start shit, or are they actually having a legitimate question?
00:27:21.000I had this guy, Joe, the other day who our air conditioning broke at the house.
00:27:27.000This guy comes over to the house to fix it.
00:28:05.000But here's the thing, you know, your risk of clotting is, as it turns out, 80 times higher from the disease COVID rather than from the vaccine.
00:28:15.000Really, you know, the clotting risk was primarily among postmenopausal women, and it was primarily the adenoviral, the Johnson& Johnson type vaccines.
00:28:23.000You didn't really see it in the mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna.
00:28:29.000But clotting is a real concern with this disease, which is weird, to the point where some people say we shouldn't even call this a respiratory disease as much as a vascular disease.
00:31:13.000And we've got to communicate that to people.
00:31:16.000If we're going to ask the country to do something, if you're going to ask the country to get vaccinated, if you're going to ask the country to get boosters, which is the most recent thing, you've got to explain it well.
00:31:25.000If you're going to ask kids to get vaccinated, why?
00:32:22.000But I think, you know, like in any given year, I think what, some 500 children have died of COVID. In any given year, you know, you may have similar numbers of flu.
00:32:41.000And that is a good conversation to have.
00:32:44.000But I mean, the conversation about children, let's just stay on this one for a bit.
00:32:48.000What studies are there about children and the dangers of being vaccinated?
00:32:53.000Because there was a study that came out recently about Young boys, in particular, that young boys face a higher risk of myocarditis from the vaccine than they do from getting COVID. I'm not sure that's right.
00:33:08.000So, 16 to 24-year-olds, I think that may be the study you're talking about.
00:33:54.000But this is immediately afterwards, which is almost, I mean, not entirely 100% correlated, but most likely.
00:34:04.000I think you could make a strong case that it's correlated, you know, I mean, given that it happens.
00:34:08.000And then what they found was that So after the first shot, it was about 0.8 per million rate of myocarditis.
00:34:14.000But after the second shot, it went closer to 6, 5.8 per million myocarditis rates.
00:34:20.000So still very low, but definitely like if you see a number like that jump, especially between the first and second shot, you've got to pay attention to that.
00:34:29.000But then you've also got to look at what is, as you point out, the risk of getting myocarditis with the disease COVID as opposed to the vaccine.
00:34:44.000Now keep in mind, 16 times higher sounds like a lot, but we're still talking about 5 out of a million versus now maybe just under 100 out of a million.
00:35:40.000And I think the only way we can know long-term things To be perfectly honest, of any of these aspects of the vaccine, the only way we can know long-term stuff is with the passage of time, you know, for certain.
00:35:55.000The idea that your son could get vaccinated, and most likely he would have been fine if he got COVID, and that your son could catch myocarditis and have permanent heart problems.
00:36:05.000Well, I don't know that we can say the person will be fine if they get COVID, Joe.
00:36:50.000That's the way the numbers get presented.
00:36:52.000And frankly, that's our fault as well in the media to just say, this is how many people have died.
00:36:57.000When that study from Scripps came out, and I think Brett or somebody on your show mentioned it even the other day, and they said, hey, look, we should probably start thinking of this thing as a vascular disease, not a respiratory disease, because, you know, I'm a neurosurgeon.
00:37:11.000When I first heard that this respiratory pathogen could cause isolated loss of smell, I thought to myself, like, the fact that they can't smell, that's not the end of the world.
00:37:53.000What do you think those things are, though?
00:37:54.000When you say long-term symptoms, what do you think is going on there?
00:37:57.000Is this a result of overall poor health in general, lack of vitamin supplementation and exercise, and just a robust...
00:38:07.000Immune system and just a person who's eating poorly sedentary lifestyle like what is causing their body to have this sort of reaction where some people get through it quite easily Young people in particular my children my children got through it.
00:38:23.000It was like the worst was like it was like a day and my other one had a headache for a day and And, you know, thankfully, I think most people are that way, right?
00:38:33.000When I say most, I mean, you know, even among adults, 80%.
00:38:36.000So should we be making decisions based on the small amount of people that have these long-term symptoms and not instead addressing why do these individuals have these long-term symptoms?
00:38:49.000That's inherent to their own biology, their own lifestyle choices.
00:38:52.000Is that what the consequences are coming from?
00:38:54.000Or is it coming from this very serious disease?
00:38:57.000Like, shouldn't we look at it in terms of what does this do to healthy people?
00:39:00.000And if these people are not healthy, what can we do to make them healthy so that they could have a more robust immune system and a more, you know, a more favorable outcome?
00:39:10.000Instead of just thinking we should vaccinate kids, all kids.
00:39:16.000Because I'm worried because I know one of my friends, his good friend that he grew up with, his daughter was 14 years old, got vaccinated and had to be admitted to the ICU because she had some sort of a cardiorespiratory issue from the vaccine.
00:39:50.000But if you're going to bring up anecdotal evidence about people that have long-term fatigue and consequences, you also have to bring up these anecdotal tales of people that have lost friends and loved ones to being vaccinated.
00:40:19.000It's a young lady who apparently followed all the rules, was wearing a mask all the time, was very disciplined, was going to college, was one of the first people to...
00:40:28.000You know, at her college, get vaccinated, and she had a terrible reaction.
00:40:32.000Now, obviously, if you vaccinate millions and millions of people, you're going to have a certain percentage of them that have a bad reaction, just like if you give peanuts to millions and millions of people, some people are going to die.
00:40:44.000No, I mean, the long haulers thing, when I was mentioning the COVID naps, that was just an example.
00:40:50.000I mean, there is data, you know, when you look at across the board, not just young people, but adults as well.
00:40:56.000They're saying about a third of people will have symptoms that last longer than a couple months.
00:41:00.000I have a friend who was a long hauler and what his issue was, I'm most sure, was that he was training while he was sick and didn't know and he's a fighter and just kept going and kept training while he was sick and didn't allow himself to rest and it just got worse and worse and he would take a little time off and then push it again and he wound up having symptoms that lasted for months.
00:41:23.000I mean, that part of it, I think, is an important part of the discussion as well, just because, you know, we often do just define things in terms of life and death.
00:41:45.000But I do think that when you think about something that's causing such a change in your vascular system...
00:41:51.000I mean, the way that so many different organs are affected in the body is through the blood, you know, and the idea that the blood is somehow affected by this virus or your vascular system is, I think is, you know, we're going to learn a lot about that.
00:42:04.000I mean, the risk reward proposition on the vaccines for young people, if that's the question.
00:42:13.000You know, I think that the FDA and these other organizations will look at this data and make some recommendations.
00:42:18.000And there's probably going to be people who say, look, in the end, I just don't think it's worth it for my kids.
00:42:24.000What I would say is that, you know, if you're concerned about a specific issue like myocarditis, look at the data and just sort of say, hey, what's the risk-reward proposition for vaccine versus risk-reward proposition for the disease?
00:42:41.000We are getting better at actually having data because more time has passed now.
00:42:45.000And then also keep in mind, as you've talked about on the podcast, that you could still be someone who's perpetuating the pandemic because you could potentially still be spreading this virus.
00:42:58.000I think we're going to get to the point where we can actually have this pandemic under control.
00:43:02.000Well, you know, obviously you're aware that you can spread it when you're vaccinated.
00:43:07.000In fact, this most recent outbreak that we had at the Comedy Store was spread by a vaccinated person and put a bunch of people, you know, out of business, very sick, and two of them in the hospital, who I think they were both vaccinated.
00:43:22.000Obviously, vaccinated people can catch it and vaccinated people can spread it.
00:43:27.000So if that's the case, the argument of getting vaccinated to stop spreading it doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
00:43:33.000But what if you were far less likely to get infected if you were vaccinated?
00:43:37.000Wouldn't you be far less likely to get infected also if you're healthy?
00:43:40.000And wouldn't we promote people getting healthy?
00:43:44.000I totally agree with that, and I want to talk to you about that because I wrote a lot about this, but just on this point of the vaccination, again, I don't think that it's either or with this.
00:43:54.000I think that, so you're eight times, according to this new data that's coming out, eight times less likely to get infected if you have been vaccinated.
00:44:03.000Then just someone who's just plain unvaccinated, never infected from COVID. Someone who does not have immunity.
00:44:08.000Someone who does not have immunity, which we'll talk about that as well, I'm sure.
00:44:11.000But just in general, someone who doesn't have immunity versus someone who does, if you have it, you're eight times less likely to get infected.
00:44:17.000Now, if you do get infected, You're right.
00:44:20.000You can still carry the virus in your nose and your mouth and you could still transmit it.
00:44:24.000A study out of Singapore says your viral load comes down much faster.
00:44:28.000So there's a period of time where you're probably just as likely to transmit it as an unvaccinated person or a person without immunity.
00:44:34.000This is within what time period of the vaccine, right?
00:44:38.000Because the vaccine immunity supposedly wanes over time, which is the argument for the boosters.
00:44:49.000Do they have eight times the ability to fight it off?
00:44:52.000So, now they're saying that, you know, six to eight months after the vaccine, there's some evidence that against mild infection, the vaccine's effectiveness wanes, which probably means you're more likely to get infected.
00:45:12.000Because the FDA just declined the recommendation of boosters and the two top people resigned because they didn't think that the science was there to recommend boosters, right?
00:45:22.000They recommend it for people over 65, people who are vulnerable because of pre-existing conditions, things like people who they think will get quite sick if they were to get a breakthrough infection.
00:45:48.000And, I mean, there was a study that was out of England, and then there was another one out of Israel where a large percentage of it was a great population.
00:46:00.000But you've got to remember something, though, Joe, is that once you start getting the vast majority of people vaccinated in a society, then the total number of people who show up in the hospital with COVID are likely to be vaccinated.
00:46:12.000Right, because the greater percentage of the people are vaccinated.
00:46:16.000But if you have a lot of people who are showing up in the hospital, over 100,000 at one point in this country that are in the hospital with COVID, 90% plus were unvaccinated.
00:46:26.000Now, once we get to a higher vaccination level or a higher immunity level, the ratio will flip just because more people will be vaccinated.
00:46:34.000Right, because we have a greater percentage.
00:46:36.000But I think the question they were asking as part of this booster discussion is, who are the 5% that are vaccinated and still get sick enough to end up in the hospital?
00:46:45.000And what they found was that they tended to be older.
00:46:47.000They tended to be people with certain pre-existing conditions.
00:46:50.000They had already made a determination that people who were immune compromised We should get a booster shot.
00:46:56.000So there was all these various things.
00:46:58.000They did not do, you're right, across the board recommendation for everyone to get boosters.
00:47:04.000They don't think the data is there to sort of support that yet.
00:47:07.000They think the vaccines do work pretty well for people who aren't vulnerable for these reasons.
00:47:42.000We should be hearing about these things first from FDA or CDC. Yeah, scientists.
00:47:47.000And I think that there was this concern that the White House was sort of getting out ahead of things and making it seem like this was preordained.
00:48:04.000They came back and they said, hey, look, what we really meant was that we think boosters are going to be necessary because we're seeing what's happening in Israel.
00:48:11.000We're seeing what's happening in the UK. We want to be ready.
00:48:14.000We want to make sure pharmacies have boosters and we don't go through the whole thing when vaccines first rolled out where people couldn't get them.
00:48:55.000Because in the middle of a pandemic, you would think that the people that have already worked on this and have been working on it for quite some time are extremely valuable, for whatever reason that's forcing them to step down like that.
00:49:06.000It concerned me a lot, and I, you know, look, I spoke up about it even at the time, and I said there was two problems here.
00:49:13.000One is that clearly the FDA and the CDC were not even part of some of these discussions, at least not some of the career scientists over there.
00:49:20.000They weren't even part of the discussion because they were surprised when suddenly the White House Coronavirus Task Force was saying boosters.
00:49:29.000And so some of these folks who are the actual scientists who are looking at this data trying to make these determinations were obviously blindsided by that.
00:50:33.000That feeling of saying that I feel like if I got infected, I would be okay.
00:50:41.000Why is that okay to have that feeling if you've been vaccinated and not have that feeling if you're unvaccinated?
00:50:48.000If you are not concerned about a breakthrough infection because you feel like your immune system is strong enough to handle it, why is that not okay for someone who is especially a young person Let's think of a young male who's 18, 19 years old who is in this risk of myocarditis versus COVID,
00:51:10.000Why wouldn't it be okay for that person to make that choice?
00:51:13.000And what is the argument against just vaccinating vulnerable people like your parents and my parents who have also been vaccinated?
00:51:22.000And taking care of them and protecting them and not having this entire across-the-board population vaccination strategy.
00:51:31.000Well, I think when you say unvaccinated, you mean somebody without any immunity or somebody who's had COVID and now may have natural immunity?
00:51:49.000It could happen to me, but it's less likely because I am less likely to...
00:51:54.000I'm eight times less likely to get infected in the first place.
00:51:57.000If I do get infected, my viral load, which could go up and I could carry a virus in my nose and my mouth, it will come down much faster, too.
00:52:05.000So I can spread, but it's a narrower window, and I'm less likely to get infected in the first place.
00:52:11.000It's a narrow window within a certain period of time after your vaccination.
00:52:30.000I mean, if you look at vaccines overall, leave aside the flu shot for a second, just say vaccines.
00:52:35.000Most vaccines do require a prime, maybe sometimes a couple shots that sort of prime your immune system, and then eventually you get a boost, and it sort of boosts it so that you get long-lasting protection.
00:52:47.000You see that with a lot of childhood vaccines and other vaccines as well, even some that we take as adults.
00:52:55.000I think what the question really is, is when does everyone need a boost, like me, for example, and younger people, and is there a right interval for that?
00:54:14.000You remember in the fall of last year, they wanted to authorize these vaccines really fast.
00:54:19.000Just get them out there, put them out there.
00:54:21.000And they pushed back and said, no, we're going to wait for two months at least of safety data because the vast majority of side effects occur within the first 42 days.
00:54:29.000Again, I don't know about this 19-year-old woman, and I'm sure that there are some stories like that.
00:54:34.000But I think that that data has held up.
00:54:37.000I mean, there's been some 6 billion shots now given around the world of this vaccine.
00:54:41.000So in addition to the clinical trials, which were tens of thousands of people, you have a lot of real-world data now over the last 8 to 10 months.
00:54:50.000You could make the case that these are some of the most studied therapeutics anywhere on the planet, which is not surprising because everyone on the planet will ultimately need these or take these, you know, so you get billions of pieces of data.
00:55:02.000You really think everyone on the planet is going to have to get a COVID shot?
00:55:05.000What about people that have had the infection and recovered?
00:55:31.000It was just at this celebration a couple of weeks ago.
00:55:35.000I don't know if he got COVID there or whatever, but this maskless celebration has a breakthrough, dies from COVID. The odds of that happening to a healthy child are very, very low.
00:57:36.000There's also adults like you that are vaccinated that die.
00:57:39.000Yes, but I think people in their 50s, if you look at the data of people who get hospitalized with these breakthrough infections, they do fall into very specific categories.
00:58:10.000What I'm saying is your attitude about not being concerned because you have antibodies and you think you would get through it even if you had a breakthrough infection, that is the exact same attitude that a lot of young people have where they don't want to get a shot because they're worried about the consequences,
00:59:21.000They can happen, but they're not, despite this particular story, the person who died of it, in my age group, they're not very common.
00:59:28.000At some point, if there's more evidence that the vaccine's effectiveness is waning even more, you're seeing people my age getting it, that's like a more common thing, then I would consider that.
00:59:40.000Some would suggest I get a booster shot because I work in a hospital, right?
00:59:44.000I'm a healthcare worker, and I don't take care of COVID patients specifically, but there can be COVID in the hospital, obviously.
00:59:50.000My patients are neurosurgery patients, so it's a little different.
00:59:53.000But yeah, I think it's a fair point, but I certainly wouldn't look at that and say this is a reason for children not to get vaccinated.
01:00:02.000But if there is a study that shows that young boys in particular are more likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine than they are to catching COVID, Is there a study that shows that?
01:00:18.000Find that study where it says young boys more likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine than to COVID. We were just talking about it.
01:00:26.000I mean, the myocarditis data, I know, which is what a lot of people have focused on, It was about 16 times higher with the disease than with the vaccine.
01:00:38.000But my point is, the same attitude that you have about not being worried if you catch it because you're vaccinated, a lot of people have that, not being worried if they catch it because they're young and healthy.
01:00:51.000Boys more at risk from Pfizer jab side effect than COVID studies suggested.
01:00:56.000U.S. researchers say teenagers more likely to get vaccine-related myocarditis than end up in the hospital with COVID. So if you have a child and you read this, don't you think that you would be hesitant to vaccinate a child that would most likely cruise through COVID with no issues,
01:01:36.000The children with boys age 12 to 15 with no underlying medical conditions are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in the hospital with COVID over a four-month period.
01:02:06.000I think when you raise that point, that's always going to be a fair point because until we have it four to six times.
01:02:12.000The absolute risk versus the relative risk, it's a real thing.
01:02:17.000But I think if the question you're saying is, look, I'm worried about myocarditis, period.
01:02:22.000How likely is my child to get myocarditis from the vaccine versus from COVID? Okay, not just, hey, how likely are they end up in the hospital period from COVID, but just how likely are they to end up with myocarditis?
01:02:35.000I think, you know, like if you were to ask the question, how likely you'd end up in the hospital after a vaccine versus how likely you end up in the hospital after COVID? That would be a fair comparison.
01:02:44.000What do you think is wrong with this comparison that they're making?
01:02:47.000Let's put it up again so you can specifically read it and tell me what's wrong because I feel like you're kind of cherry picking here.
01:02:53.000Because it says the data suggests that boys 12 to 15 with no underlying medical conditions are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis.
01:03:03.000Then ending up in the hospital with COVID. Ending up in the hospital with COVID for anything, right?
01:03:07.000I mean, there are two different groups of patients here.
01:04:36.000What is the likelihood I'm going to have myocarditis from the vaccine versus myocarditis from the disease?
01:04:42.000It seems like the likelihood, according to that study, for young boys age 12 to 15 is far more likely to get myocarditis from the vaccine than you are from COVID. There's not a lot of kids who go to the hospital for COVID. You're right about that.
01:05:42.000And we looked a lot at the myocarditis data overall.
01:05:46.000But that is saying that you're four to six more likely to get myocarditis than you are to be hospitalized for COVID for any reason at all.
01:05:54.000Yeah, so here's the myocarditis data specifically, which showed that it was a 16 times higher risk of myocarditis among patients with COVID-19 as compared to the vaccine itself.
01:06:11.000We're specifically talking about 12 to 15-year-old boys.
01:06:14.000What I was saying to you is your confidence in not worrying about catching COVID because you're a healthy guy and because you've been vaccinated.
01:06:23.000So you catching an infection of a highly novel virus, which is a real thing, you're less worried about that because of your circumstances.
01:06:32.000What I'm saying is- Because I have immunity.
01:06:35.000These young boys will breeze through this thing for the most part.
01:06:50.000You can spread it if you get sick, but you're not worried about it because you'll be okay.
01:06:55.000Look, it's not a perfect vaccine, I'm not suggesting that, but if I tell you I'm eight times less likely to get infected...
01:07:01.000Right, but you could get infected and thousands and thousands of people have and are still spreading it, right?
01:07:06.000My point was that your attitude, which is a totally reasonable attitude of not being concerned about a breakthrough infection, is exactly the same way a lot of people feel about their children.
01:07:23.000And I appreciate the conversation around this, but I think that, you know, we have to apply the same degree of certainty and confidence across the board, right?
01:07:33.000When I tell you that I am not concerned about getting a significant breakthrough infection, I mean that because I know that the people who do get these significant breakthrough infections Are people who are more vulnerable and elderly, right?
01:07:55.000That's what I'm talking about with the certainty, Joe.
01:07:59.000I'm not saying 100%, but if you look at the vast majority of people who have breakthrough infections that end up in the hospital, You can start to see who is most vulnerable here.
01:08:12.000I understand, but don't you see that the same logic can be applied to young people?
01:08:15.000The same logic can be applied to young, healthy people.
01:08:28.000So, in that circumstance, why would you want to vaccinate young people if the risk of being vaccine injured is four to six times more likely than being hospitalized for COVID under, for any circumstance, according to that?
01:08:42.000Okay, well, if you just leave aside that study for a second, and I get you.
01:08:49.000Okay, but let me say, what is another reason for young people to get vaccinated?
01:08:55.000Besides that, is there any other benefit to it?
01:08:58.000I mean, we're in the middle of this pandemic.
01:09:00.000If we know that people who don't have immunity, even if they don't get sick, can still catch this and spread it, and that the majority of spread was coming through people who did not even have much in the way of symptoms.
01:09:39.000You take care of yourself, and you got sick still, right?
01:09:44.000I mean, like you say, you're more aware of your own body.
01:09:47.000But I think whatever it was, either because people weren't getting tested or they didn't feel they had symptoms, unlike with a lot of respiratory pathogens, you're usually transmitting it when you're sick.
01:09:58.000You're coughing and you're sneezing and that sort of stuff.
01:10:01.000A lot of this spread happened through asymptomatic people.
01:10:45.000We know you can still potentially be a carrier and spreader even if you've been vaccinated, but it's a lot less likely.
01:10:52.000So if we're serious about bringing this pandemic to an end and giving as many people immunity as possible, is there benefit to vaccinating young people?
01:12:01.000You're right, that was across the board, but this was really up to 24 years old because you weren't seeing a lot of myocarditis in people who were older.
01:14:20.000Because that study on the spike protein that they did at the Salk Institute, I'm sure you're aware of that, that showed the spike protein is responsible for the deterioration of blood vessels.
01:14:31.000I mean, the Salk, and they were the same ones who then classify this potentially as a vascular disease as opposed to a respiratory disease for that very reason.
01:14:41.000They think that there's these receptors that are really, you know, predominantly in your blood vessels that do get, you know, that the spike protein is binding to.
01:14:52.000And obviously your blood is going everywhere in the body, which is why so many organ systems are affected.
01:14:57.000So do you think that the injection, if it does inadvertently hit a blood vessel or some sort of a vein, and then it goes straight into that, that It's possible that could be what's going on with people.
01:15:10.000I mean, what you're injecting into the body is a signal, a messenger RNA signal that is then telling your muscle cells to make some of the spike protein.
01:15:23.000And then your body reacts to the spike protein it just made by creating antibodies, these proteins that So you're essentially, the body is the vaccine-making factory here.
01:15:33.000If you inject it into the bloodstream, does the muscle even get to make the spike protein?
01:16:14.000What are your thoughts about therapeutics?
01:16:15.000Like specifically the new Merck has a new therapeutic that's coming out and Pfizer has a new therapeutic that's coming out and monoclonal antibodies which have been observed to be very effective.
01:16:29.000I think the therapeutics are potentially really good.
01:16:34.000I mean, the Merck one, I have not seen any data from besides the company yet.
01:16:54.000But when healthcare companies, when companies like pharmaceutical companies have a direct vested interest in ignoring certain aspects of studies because it might somehow or another inhibit their profit or scare people off of their drug,
01:17:56.000And Bextra is an anti-inflammatory drug.
01:17:58.000So this is back in 2000. Yeah, look, I mean, even when the first vaccine data came out before it was reviewed, I think we had to be skeptical.
01:18:08.000And I was, you know, I mean, when they first said 95% protective, I mean, that's huge.
01:18:14.000You don't typically hear about vaccines being that protective.
01:18:16.000And by the way, it was supposed to take four years and they did it so fast, you know, so...
01:18:20.000Yeah, you have to do a lot of homework.
01:18:22.000I had to dig deep on some of that stuff.
01:18:24.000And I think it's the same thing with the Merck.
01:18:27.000If this medication holds up, and the data is, you know, they review it and it's true, I think it's pretty significant.
01:18:35.000You know, it reminds you a little bit of like Tamiflu, that we talk about the flu, but this would even be potentially more effective than Tamiflu is for the flu.
01:18:42.000Would you change your perspective on vaccines if that turned out to be very effective?
01:20:01.000If you're a frontline worker, if you have to work in a hospital like I do, then all of a sudden maybe you're thinking 99.5% is not so bad.
01:20:09.000I'd love to talk to you about that, too, because one of the things that saddens me deeply is these hospital workers who risked their lives during the pandemic to treat people with COVID, most of them were exposed.
01:20:25.000A lot of them got COVID and they have the antibodies and now they're being forced to either get vaccinated or they get fired.
01:21:29.000I think what has surprised me a bit about it is that we still don't do enough testing to really know for sure if people actually have the immunity.
01:21:39.000People say they've had COVID, so they should have antibodies.
01:21:41.000Some of these antibody tests are pretty good, some are not.
01:21:44.000So it's weird that two years into this that we still don't have good vision on just how much immunity we have.
01:21:51.000Well, you took a nice little antibody test today.
01:22:38.000Those are good tests, but I talked to Mercy, your nurse, and those tests she got from the hospital, you go and get the over-the-counter tests, and she'll be the first to tell you.
01:22:46.000She doesn't use those because they sometimes don't work, or they'll give different results.
01:22:50.000The over-the-counter tests are not blood tests, correct?
01:22:53.000You can buy over-the-counter antibody tests.
01:23:48.000You could do it at your house when you're brushing your teeth and you know that day if you're contagious or not and we don't do that and I've asked Joe and there's there's not a good answer but one of the answers that I keep getting if I can explain this well is Is that if you think about the purpose of an antigen test,
01:24:05.000like me taking an antigen test benefits who exactly?
01:24:08.000It benefits the people around me, right?
01:24:10.000Well, I'm healthy, so I'm not sick, so now I just want to know, am I spreading this to other people, right?
01:24:20.000Well, going back to what I said earlier, I think there's a lot of people that are just not aware of how their body's functioning because they're eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew and sitting around doing nothing.
01:24:29.000So their body's always in a state of discomfort.
01:24:35.000The antigen test, the way that they regulate that is as a public health tool because they're saying this is good for the public health, whereas the PCR, you know, the specific gold standard test, they say that's an individual test because that tells you they have presence of virus.
01:25:03.000A guy named Michael Minna, who has done a lot of writing on this, He was saying early days that we should just have antigen tests available for everybody every day.
01:25:13.000They could do this, at least till we get through the worst of the pandemic, until we get it under control.
01:25:20.000If you're contagious, you don't be around people that day.
01:25:23.000It seems like that would be a good solution.
01:25:26.000The only thing I would say when it comes to Merck, the therapeutics, and when it comes to testing, and I know how you feel about this, I'm getting an idea of how you think about this, is that the testing is obviously testing you to see if you have the virus.
01:25:42.000The therapeutic is to treat you because you have the virus.
01:25:46.000I still think it'd be better not to get the virus.
01:25:48.000I think you'd be better to get the virus and recover and have amazing immunity to it.
01:26:01.000The vaccine protects you from a bad infection.
01:26:05.000And then you get COVID, so then you get the robust immunity that's imparted from having the actual disease itself, which is far more complex and comprehensive than you're getting from the vaccine that targets one specific protein, right?
01:26:17.000You could make that argument, I think.
01:26:55.000Don't I? I think your immunity is really good.
01:26:57.000So why, if I've already gotten through COVID and I was really only sick for a day, and then five days later I was negative, and I do have the natural antibodies now, why would I take a chance in getting vaccinated on top of that?
01:27:53.000They said, you are not a horse, you are not a cow, stop taking this stuff, or something like that.
01:27:56.000Why would you say that when you're talking about a drug that's been given out to billions and billions of people?
01:28:02.000A drug that was responsible for one of the inventors of it making the Nobel Prize in 2015. A drug that has been shown to stop viral replication in vitro.
01:30:06.000Rogan telling his 13 million Instagram followers that he was treated with several drugs, and he included ivermectin on the list, a drug used for livestock the FDA and the CDC warned against using to treat COVID. Turns out I got COVID. Look,
01:32:43.000What they were finding in some of these trials was that to get the plasma, you know, the blood concentrations high enough, you had to take very high doses that were more in line with...
01:32:52.000That has nothing to do with me taking horse medication.
01:32:53.000They shouldn't have called it a horse to warmer.
01:34:22.000The 230 million people, and they've knocked it down to an insanely small amount.
01:34:27.000You know what happens, Joe, I think, is that that virus really burned through that population.
01:34:33.000My uncle died during that spring surge of COVID. So when you get a significant spread, going back to the natural immunity thing, you do get a fair amount of natural immunity out there.
01:34:49.000Where 230 million people have knocked it down almost nothing?
01:34:51.000Well, that's a huge number, but I think even if you looked at what happened in the UK, and you saw that significant spike a few months ago, and then it came down really rapidly...
01:36:10.000But I think what they were showing, and again, I feel badly about this whole horse to warmer thing, but that's not a good way to have portrayed that to you.
01:37:12.000I would love to have you talk to Dr. Pierre Corey because he disagrees strongly that they haven't shown.
01:37:17.000There was one study that he talks about, and I listened to him on your podcast, and I don't know if this is a study that he showed you, but the one that he was referring to on your podcast was one that did look promising.
01:37:29.000The only problem with the study was that people were also getting dexamethasone, which is a steroid.
01:37:36.000And we know dexamethasone can be effective for people who have COVID in terms of preventing them from getting really sick.
01:40:28.000I think what happens is that, again, people expect a certain level of certainty in saying how effective they are, or they're going to be a panacea for things, and nothing is.
01:40:41.000Have you ever seen the doctor online who vapes through a mask?
01:40:45.000There's a doctor that he thinks that masks are silly and they're really only for surgery and that really they're just to stop spittle and particles from falling out.
01:40:54.000He's like, these cloth masks that people are using, his argument is essentially like, watch this.
01:41:34.000So if all that is going out into the air just like your breath is, How is that protecting you from COVID? Is some of it being caught in that thing?
01:42:31.000And I have made the case many times that if you're going to wear a mask, you probably should wear a high-quality mask, like a KN95. That's what I carry around with me, is a KN95. Can you see the difference between that?
01:42:43.000I came in an Uber when I came over here.
01:42:45.000This is bullshit compared to my masks, bro.
01:44:03.000When you're supposed to wear a mask or a mask is suggested, I wear a mask just so people feel at ease.
01:44:11.000Because I see certain people, particularly people that are anxiety ridden, that see someone without a mask and they get upset and they tense up.
01:44:18.000This has been a strain on a lot of folks that were barely hanging on during normal times.
01:44:24.000Two years ago, there was people that were filled with anxiety, freaking the fuck out about regular life.
01:49:59.000If we're going to do that, we should first of all encourage them to get healthy because getting healthy will prevent a lot of things, like heart disease, which kills way more people than any disease.
01:50:09.000I mean, what we're dealing with with COVID is 95% of the people have four comorbidities that die, right?
01:50:16.000When you're dealing with heart disease, you're just getting heart disease, right?
01:50:20.000Some of it is obviously you're born with it.
01:50:23.000You're born with certain predetermined conditions that you have no control over.
01:50:29.000But there's a lot of people that are making poor life choices.
01:50:43.000It is a band-aid on one problem, but the overall metabolic health Is poor, and that's one of the reasons why their body's in decline.
01:50:54.000When you're dealing with people that have four comorbidities, outside of genetic conditions, we're dealing with so many lifestyle choices in this country.
01:51:02.000There's people that are just not exercising, are not drinking enough water, are not taking vitamins, are not being healthy, are not making healthy choices.
01:51:10.000These things should be encouraged above and beyond, because this is the...
01:51:15.000Those are the things that can get your body to a place where it can be better.
01:53:02.000There's been thousands of discussions and almost no discussion of the fact that 78% of the people that wind up in the hospital for COVID are obese, right?
01:53:10.000Yeah, I think, right, and 113% in the ICU and whatever.
01:53:16.000It's a much more likely to end up versus those.
01:53:26.000Joe, we spend $4 trillion a year on healthcare in this country.
01:53:29.00070% of the diseases are probably totally preventable, and most of that is lifestyle.
01:53:34.000And most of that even more specifically is diet.
01:53:37.000So I think there's always been, again, going back to the nuance of these discussions, people say, hey, look...
01:53:43.000You know, you can't shame people who are obese.
01:53:45.000And no, nobody's saying shame people who are obese.
01:53:48.000They're saying there's a real problem in this country.
01:53:50.000If we spent 1% of our healthcare budget on actually helping people get fit and making sure they had healthy food and whatever it may be, it would go a long way.
01:54:01.000The problem with this expression, you can't shame people, is that it's been distorted down to the point where even bringing up the fact that someone is obese is shaming them.
01:54:27.000Even the microbiome, like what you've eaten in the morning, could probably have some impact on how you might fare if you were to get the disease later on that night.
01:54:36.000I mean, 80% of our immunity is in our gut.
01:55:05.000And there's certain, you know, the demographics, you know, whatever.
01:55:09.000But if you just compare country to country, wealthier countries, you think of malaria, tuberculosis, you think of poorer countries with fewer resources.
01:55:16.000With COVID, it was wealthier countries.
01:55:18.000And there's a few reasons why, but we're not healthy.
01:55:24.000Overeating and poor diet is a huge issue.
01:55:26.000And it's really stunning when you go back and you look at what people looked like in the 1920s and the 1930s and you compare it to what people look like today.
01:57:26.000He was sick for weeks, because he wouldn't give his body a break, because he's a fucking maniac.
01:57:33.000Well, I mean, that's like any other illness.
01:57:36.000But my point is, that's a very different thing, calling him a long hauler, Because I think that if he just sat around and did nothing, he would have bounced back from it very quickly.
01:57:44.000Whereas an obese person, they just have a hard time with all diseases.
01:57:49.000This is going to serve as a significant wake-up call, I think, for the overall health of the country.
01:59:32.000It's a very important function, and it's to tell people what's going on, to inform people.
01:59:37.000When they lie about things like that, it's so pointless to me.
01:59:41.000Because it's not like I don't have a platform to tell people that you lied, and it's not that people don't figure out very quickly that it's a lie, but we already have Probably the highest level of distrust in mainstream media than we've ever had ever in our lives.
01:59:57.000I don't know if that's because of Trump calling everything fake news.
02:00:01.000I don't know if it's because of people exposing things that some parts of the news that weren't accurately displayed or depicted.
02:00:11.000I don't know what it is, but I have a great deal of respect for journalism.
02:00:17.000I think real journalism is incredibly important.
02:00:20.000But I think there's an issue today where too much emphasis is put on ratings.
02:00:27.000Too much emphasis is put on sensationalism, exaggeration, hyperbole, changing the headlines in order to get people to pay attention.
02:00:58.000Yeah, I mean, I think for the most part, that's what CNN does.
02:01:02.000I think that for the most part, that's what Fox News does.
02:01:04.000But when we get ideologically conflicted and distort these narratives in order to sell clicks, in order to get people to tune in, like that to me is...
02:01:48.000It's become much more opinion-based, especially some shows.
02:01:51.000You know, there's a lot of editorializing, even the way that things will be presented with modifiers.
02:01:56.000You know, it was just this, or, you know, can you believe X? So you've kind of given a way to think about this.
02:02:03.000I think, not that I want to bring this up again, you know, the whole ivermectin thing, but I think that the reason the FDA put that out there saying, you know, this is...
02:02:13.000I think someone at CNN told them, let's make some money.
02:05:31.000Whenever you have an open forum like that, you're going to get a lot of bullshit, right?
02:05:35.000So who knows how much of it is true and how much of it is not.
02:05:38.000So then I started researching therapeutics and talking to people about therapeutics and the conversation with Dr. Pierre Corey and Brett Weinstein and there's many schools of thoughts on this.
02:05:51.000Some people think everyone should get vaccinated.
02:05:53.000Some people think we should only vaccinate the very vulnerable and what we should do is concentrate on improving the metabolic health of the general population and having therapeutics in place.
02:06:05.000I think we should improve the general health of the population.
02:06:24.000Well, Joe, I mean, isn't so if that's the case, then what doesn't that make a stronger case for the vaccine?
02:06:29.000Then if you're if you're basically saying, hey, we can't do that.
02:06:33.000People are just going to be sick and vulnerable.
02:06:35.000And by the way, that's half the country, probably more when you talk about obesity and diabetes and other comorbidities that are associated with this.
02:06:42.000You're talking about hundreds of millions of people.
02:08:09.000I think a lot of people should get vaccinated.
02:08:11.000You're talking a lot of vulnerable people.
02:08:13.000If you just said vulnerable people, maybe a lot of people...
02:08:16.000Yeah, older people, fat people, I think a lot of those folks.
02:08:19.000My real concern is this urge to vaccinate children, and I don't know what kind of data we have on the long-term effects of this, and I don't know what kind of data we have.
02:08:30.000When you look at this study that shows that the 12 to 15-year-old boys are four to six times more likely, or is that the number?
02:08:37.000Whatever the number was, much more likely.
02:08:45.000So again, I don't know that we've settled this whole myocarditis thing, maybe we won't today, but I worried about this, okay, because I have kids.
02:08:54.000So, you know, the thing about a pandemic, it's not just me reporting like I go to Haiti and I report on an earthquake.
02:09:01.000And I... Joe, I did deep dives into this, and the myocarditis thing specifically came up.
02:09:08.000And what I found was that there's a certain background rate of myocarditis, there's a certain rate that people would get from the vaccines, and there's a certain rate that they would get from the disease itself.
02:10:21.000Part of getting there is to really bring down the amount of transmission.
02:10:25.000If you could see the virus, you would see it being sort of a viral storm.
02:10:30.000You know, you'd actually see that we're being showered in virus, kind of like your vaping guy over here.
02:10:34.000You know, it's just a lot of virus out there.
02:10:36.000So if you have more and more people who have immunity and the virus runs out of places to go, not perfect, again, eight times less likely to get infected, not perfect, But eventually it starts to really wither down.
02:10:48.000And I think having more and more people immunized helps that.
02:10:52.000What do you think about the discussion about leaky viruses, excuse me, leaky vaccines?
02:11:13.000So this idea that somehow, you know, kind of like antibiotic resistance, you could be developing resistance to the vaccines because the types of viruses that are then allowed to...
02:11:25.000Because the vaccines target a very specific protein, that some of these variants that are more aggressive, like particularly the Delta or whatever one they are, that the virus will then propagate through selection of more aggressive variants.
02:11:41.000Yeah, I think that the idea that the more the virus spreads, the more variants come out is real.
02:11:48.000If the idea is that more people having immunity, I use the term generally...
02:11:55.000Immunity to the very specific original variant.
02:12:06.000But I think ultimately, if you just slow down the spread, that's what's won in the past, or at least brought these things under control in the past.
02:12:14.000Traditionally, when viruses do mutate and change, they tend to change towards...
02:13:17.000There was two days where I was working out and I was like, something's going on.
02:13:22.000During normal activities, I felt fine, but then under exertion, I felt a diminished capacity for work.
02:13:30.000Like when I was doing workouts, I was like, God, I feel draggy.
02:13:34.000I knew something was going on, so I've done that before, and I've gotten myself sick by being a meathead.
02:13:40.000That was years past, but now when that happens, what I do is I just basically go through the motions very lightly, and I break a sweat, stretch out, and get out of there.
02:13:49.000The benefits of exercise, you know, with the endorphins and you get your circulatory system pumps and your respiratory system pumps and you get a good little, you know, you get some activity, but no stress, no strain.
02:14:05.000And I did that for two days and I was good.
02:14:07.000But the second day was the same thing.
02:14:17.000Yeah, my older kid didn't get it, but she knew that we had it, and so she didn't come by, but we're good.
02:14:22.000But I knew that I had encountered it, and that my immune system had fought it off.
02:14:28.000And I think I probably, I mean, I like to think that I probably would have fought it off in Florida, too, if it wasn't for getting hammered and staying out at 3 in the morning playing pool.
02:14:36.000I feel like that part of your life's not going to change, huh?
02:15:32.000Hey, you know, you texted me when I asked about the natural immunity thing, and I think you're raising a really good point about natural immunity.
02:15:39.000I think the issue a little bit, Joe, and this is more just because I care about you, is that we don't have good data on how long the natural immunity lasts.
02:15:52.000We don't have good data on how long the vaccine immunity lasts either.
02:15:54.000We get in some, which is showing that there's some waning against mild disease.
02:17:10.000I'll be pussyfooting around with this.
02:17:12.000So if I said, and then you're going to ask me how I know, which I get, but if I said you're likely to have longer-term immunity, there was a study that came out of Kentucky.
02:18:00.000You know, it strikes me that so many people are moving towards these really abbreviated things, like there was Quibi, you know, like, we'll do this in two minutes.
02:18:06.000Yeah, that didn't work out so good, did it?
02:19:27.000And even that 21-year-old thing that made all the 21-year-old guests you had on the show, or no, it was a friend of yours, I think, that you were, he asked you, should he get vaxed?
02:19:36.000I was talking about young people, like a 21-year-old healthy person, should you get vaccinated?
02:19:41.000And I didn't think you should, because I think you could beat it fairly easily.
02:19:45.000But then afterwards you said, hey, look, what hasn't been explained well is exactly why he should get vax, beyond the fact that he's likely to recover well, but could he be potentially someone who is a source of spread?
02:20:00.000And that sounded like, from what you said, that was of concern to you, right?
02:20:03.000Well, that was one of the things that Fauci had said.
02:20:06.000Like, you know, he responded to me saying that if you only are concerned about yourself, But that if you're talking about spreading it to other people, that's, you know, your responsibility to the community is different.
02:20:22.000I go, okay, well that's a different argument.
02:21:00.000I've had quite a few friends that were sick and weren't sure if they got COVID, and then we brought them in here four or five months later and gave them an antibody test, and it turns out they had had it.
02:21:10.000You know, when you talk about your, like, the friends, by the way, was that 19-year-old?
02:21:14.000I'm really curious about the story of the 19-year-old who needed a heart transplant, if you have that, Jamie.
02:21:19.000Yeah, I found one place that said it was claiming it was due to that, and then I found other places that said that the doctors didn't know exactly why she had died.
02:21:27.000Yeah, the family says that it's 100% from the vaccine, that she got vaccinated right afterwards, and they didn't want to submit it to the VAERS. You know, there's a lot of hesitancy amongst hospitals and doctors in submitting things to the VAERS because they don't want to contribute to vaccine hesitancy.
02:22:01.000She's 19. She had a heart transplant one month after developing what her doctors believe is myocarditis following her second dose of Moderna.
02:22:11.000So what's really sad is she gets the heart transplant and then the immunosuppressant drugs caused her to succumb to pneumonia and then she dies of pneumonia.
02:22:22.000You know, I... I mean, how do you just...
02:22:25.000There's no chance she would have died from COVID. I mean, a fucking infinitesimally small chance.
02:22:32.000I think when you put it all together, just again, in terms of how you think, you're not anti-vax.
02:24:02.000Profound respect to have for the athletes and my job is very different there It's just to give life and to put words to their performances.
02:24:11.000That's that's the difference That's the only job I have I feel like when I listen to you and even this conversation now is a very authentic conversation And I think it's that's all I have you don't have we don't have enough of that overall in society So if I'm authentic I can tell people don't take my advice Take the advice of people who are professionals.
02:24:29.000Listen to you and then also listen to other professionals like Dr. Pierre Corey and decide for yourself.
02:24:35.000Listen to evolutionary biologists like Brett Weinstein.
02:25:43.000How do I know if they're telling the truth about all these other very important things when this insignificant thing of a dumb comedian taking a medication?
02:25:53.000Can I just tell you, I'm sorry that I brought this up again.
02:26:50.000I'd like to see what's going on there.
02:26:52.000Yeah, no, I looked at that, and I think these things are definitely worth looking at.
02:26:58.000I really do spend a lot of time reading these studies and trying to make decisions and judgments on my own, in part for my own family and myself, my parents.
02:27:07.000I mean, when you say the thing about people getting really sick and having strokes after a vaccine, For my parents, who are probably listening right now, they're in their late 70s, that's going to scare the shit out of them.
02:27:19.000But ironically, those are the people that are less likely to have adverse side effects.
02:28:25.000But there are trials that are still happening.
02:28:28.000And whereas with the vaccine, there's a lot of data.
02:28:31.000And then, you know, you bring up the long-term effects.
02:28:33.000We're going to need to know at that dosing, which is probably going to be higher dosing than treating, you know, river blindness and things like that.
02:28:40.000What is the dose of treating river blindness?
02:28:43.000But the blood concentrations you needed in those studies that they, you know, that Pierre talks about as well, were much higher doses in order to get the antiviral effect, at least in the lab.
02:28:53.000So if you're trying to replicate that in the body, you're probably going to need higher doses.
02:29:10.000So, I just like, in terms of how you think about this, like, the vaccine has a lot of data behind it.
02:29:17.000There's obviously some terrible stories, which I'm going to look at here.
02:29:19.000I had not heard about, for example, this 19-year-old.
02:29:22.000But for the most part, it has a lot of data behind it that shows that it is safe and that it's effective in terms of keeping people from getting super sick.
02:29:30.000Can I say one thing that's really important too?
02:29:32.000Because I know that people are going to bring this up.
02:29:34.000I am very aware that these rare anecdotal stories, like this woman who's 19 years old, you can't take that as the Absolute, this is what's going to happen to people.
02:29:51.000These rare stories of this poor young lady.
02:29:54.000I'm very aware that these are unusual.
02:29:57.000But that gives no comfort to the family that lost that daughter.
02:30:05.000My chest hurts a little bit when I read stories like that.
02:30:08.000And what bothers me is at 19 years old, when it bothers me at 19 years old, especially when you look at her and she's very fit and young, Highly unlikely she would have had a problem with COVID. Yeah, I agree.
02:32:40.000Well, the term vaccine is weird because it's really a therapeutic because it's only got a certain amount of lifespan.
02:32:46.000If you need a booster after a year or whatever it is...
02:32:50.000But that is not unusual for all vaccines to get a booster.
02:32:53.000But it's only the flu vaccine that's similar, right?
02:32:54.000The flu vaccine is a yearly sort of thing, but if you look at things like hepatitis or you look at other vaccines, you get boosters of some of these things.
02:33:25.000We're not sure that we're going to need to get boosters every year.
02:33:28.000I mean, if people get boost, like I'm saying, and this gets back to even with me, I got a prime and then I got a second shot three weeks later.
02:33:35.000I think we should have centers where people can go to catch COVID after they've been vaccinated.
02:33:40.000So you have like the ultimate control.
02:33:43.000I feel like this conversation, somehow you're trying to convince me of something and I'm trying to convince you of something.
02:33:48.000I'm telling you to get COVID and you're telling me to get vaccinated.
02:33:52.000So, look, if I get COVID, and I call you up and I say, Joe.
02:34:17.000These places are recommending that natural immunity, they say, as you said, and I asked the question about natural immunity, it can be very protective.
02:34:25.000We don't know how long those antibodies last.
02:34:28.000In other cases like SARS, you know, immunity lasted a long time.
02:34:32.000There was a study out of Kentucky showing people who had had natural immunity, their reinfection rates versus people who had natural immunity plus the vaccine.
02:34:43.000And they found that the reinfection rates were twice as high in those who just had the natural immunity.
02:34:48.000The natural immunity people, where they have been reinfected, what is the mortality rate?
02:36:20.000I started kickboxing after I did Taekwondo or during and then after.
02:36:25.000The last three fights that I had were kickboxing fights and I was Aware that, first of all, I was suffering some issues, like really bad headaches, but also I was aware that people around me that I had known had been fighting for years were starting to slur their words and were starting to exhibit diminished behavior,
02:36:52.000And then, you know, that term punch drunk has always been around, but we really didn't understand CTE until, you know, the early 2000s.
02:37:00.000And then the concussion movie, and then, you know, people started doing examinations and all these different studies of people post-mortem.
02:37:08.000We have an understanding about brain damage now that we didn't have when I was a child.
02:38:14.000Because the APOE-4, whatever the issue that some people have versus some people don't, where it leads you to be more susceptible to CTE and various issues that people have from repeated head trauma.
02:39:08.000Listen, we know about monoclonal antibodies, and I really firmly believe that if you were sick and you got monoclonal antibodies, you'd be fine.
02:39:15.000Yeah, I think the monoclonal antibodies work really well.
02:39:45.000It is my main moral dilemma about being involved in martial arts and commentating.
02:39:53.000And it's not that I don't respect the decision of the athletes to pursue a dangerous but ultimately insanely rewarding lifestyle choice and career choice.
02:40:06.000And I understand that the glory that these people receive, the highs that they achieve are impossible for mere mortals like myself to comprehend.
02:40:18.000When you're dealing with Israel Adesanya, when you're dealing with Conor McGregor, when you're dealing with Dustin Poirier, when you're dealing with the elite of the elite, like what they experience upon victory is probably Most of us will probably never understand it.
02:40:47.000I mean, some people have likened some of these sports, like football, you know, where you're taking a lot of blows to the head, like, you know, the Coliseum days where people were fighting.
02:41:10.000You know, there's a very big difference between locked in a cage and then given a sword like fucking Russell Crowe and being forced out into the...
02:41:17.000I mean, I don't think they're valid comparisons.
02:41:21.000Not a valid comparison in terms of that, like the servitude part of it, but the idea that you're putting yourself at real risk in order to entertain others.
02:41:30.000You can choose not to, but this is why I draw the distinction.
02:41:33.000I feel like there's a great danger in a lot of things that we celebrate, whether it's BMX riding, people who do skateboarding and do a lot of fucking jumps and flips and fall and hit their head.
02:41:49.000There's a lot of things that people do where there are long-term consequences for short-term gains.
02:41:56.000So for a lot of fighters, they have to figure out how to navigate those waters with just mitigating the amount of damage that they get.
02:42:06.000I think when I look at fighters overall in general, one of my favorite examples Of someone who's done a fantastic job of mitigating risk is Floyd Mayweather.
02:42:16.000And the reason why he's been so good at it is because, first of all, he's very intelligent and he recognized early on that defense is of primary concern.
02:43:18.000So you're entering into the same sort of sport.
02:43:21.000Some people, their approach is to just go, ah!
02:43:24.000Full blast and clash into each other and hope that they survive and that the other person falls.
02:43:29.000Floyd Mayweather's approach is like some four-dimensional chess game with like, you know, he's just got far more comprehensive understanding of movement and boxing and like what happens when you do this and then I do that and then what's your natural response after that?
02:43:48.000He's two, three, four, five, six steps ahead of the average boxer.
02:43:56.000It's because of having his, you know, his uncle was Roger Mayweather and his father was Floyd Mayweather, the guy who fought Sugar Ray Leonard back when Leonard was in his prime.
02:44:05.000Yeah, his father was an amazing boxer.
02:44:07.000So because of that, he's got this lineage and he's got this, you know, he's a part of like an incredible boxing lineage.
02:45:36.000World War C, COVID-19 pandemic and how to prepare for the next one.
02:45:40.000But honestly, why would you think that I should get vaccinated on top of having natural immunity from overcoming COVID? I think your protection is really good right now.
02:45:53.000How good is my protection right now without it?
02:45:58.000Yeah, I think, you know, it's like you said.
02:45:59.000I mean, if you look at the Israel data, you know, it's maybe 6 to 16. There was one study that said even up to 23 times better in terms of neutralizing antibodies.
02:46:09.000I think we don't know how long it lasts.
02:47:30.000Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if you start to look at the, like, specific numbers, you know, the Kentucky study just showed you had a higher rate of reinfection if you were not, if you just had the natural immunity and you didn't get vaccinated.
02:47:43.000So if you wanted to say, hey, look, I want to be done with this, there's a good chance between a prime Which was your COVID infection, in this case, and then a boost, which would be the vaccine, that you'd probably have really long-lasting protection.
02:47:58.000But I'm basing that on just the data from other vaccines and looking at what's happening with these antibodies overall.
02:48:10.000Five friends who got COVID and then got vaccinated after they got COVID. One of them had a severe reaction to the first Moderna shot and did not get a second.
02:48:21.000That's the one that I was talking about, about fluid built up in his body.
02:48:25.000And he's an elite athlete, by the way.
02:51:54.000And they were buying PPE, including from the United States, in the fall of 2019. There was a study that just came out that said they were likely buying reagents for PCR testing.
02:52:05.000In the summer of 2019, maybe that was for something else.
02:52:11.000And China has not been very transparent, even going back to the days of SARS. They waited a long time before they actually alerted the world on this.
02:52:22.000Did you read the e-mail leaks, the e-mails from Peter Batsik and all the different discussions that they had about their concerns, that they were responsible for this through gain-of-function research?
02:52:34.000They applied for a grant to specifically insert a furin cleavage site, which is that particular part of the virus that raised so much concern.
02:52:45.000I mean, look, the thing is, this gets back to the same thing I think we're dancing around a little bit, which is I don't know sometimes what to do with this.
02:52:55.000I think of this sometimes the way I think about my teenage kids.
02:52:58.000They're not telling me everything here.
02:53:00.000Now, do I automatically assume they're totally guilty of everything I think they're guilty of, or is there something else going on here, you know?
02:53:11.000Part of being prepared in my World War C book is that we have to have a world health organization that's actually empowered to be able to do things.
02:53:26.000And there was a letter that came out from Peter Daszak in February of last year that he wrote in The Lancet, along with a bunch of other people, saying, This thing, you know, this is ridiculous to suggest that this had somehow been bioengineered at a lab.
02:53:39.000Meanwhile, the internal email suggested that he had very different concerns.
02:55:05.000When you see Fauci being grilled by Rand Paul and he denies that they were doing gain-of-function research, what are your thoughts on that?
02:55:14.000Because by any definition, that was gain-of-function research.
02:55:18.000Gain-of-function research is Taking a virus, we should probably Google the exact definition, but what my impression is that gain-of-function means you're imparting new ability to this virus to infect humans,
02:55:39.000And that type of research has been done, and in fact, I think it was in 2015, I think, in the Netherlands somewhere.
02:55:46.000But if the NIH was giving funding to EcoHealth Alliance, and EcoHealth Alliance was funding that kind of research, and then Fauci is not being honest about that.
02:55:59.000I think the NIH is clearly funding EcoHealth Alliance, and EcoHealth Alliance is clearly giving grants to Wuhan Institute of Virology.
02:56:05.000Here's how they answer the question when I ask them, including Francis Collins, who's the head of the NIH. They define gain-of-function research as this.
02:56:14.000You have a known bad contagious pathogen, and you're going to essentially use the backbone of another known bad pathogen, and you're going to splice them together, essentially.
02:56:27.000You're taking one thing that you know to be bad and contagious and splicing it with something else that you know to be bad.
02:56:33.000That is, you're expecting this to be worse than what you started with.
02:56:37.000If you're taking a novel virus and you don't know how contagious this is, and you're basically saying, look, I want to isolate the spike protein on this new virus.
02:56:46.000I'm going to put it on the backbone of something I do know.
02:57:15.000If we instead abandon any sort of nomenclature that might be problematic and say, were they doing experiments to make viruses more contagious to people?
02:57:37.000That is research that is done to try and figure out, I mean, a lot of these pathogens they examine, they're not contagious.
02:57:43.000They put the spike protein and they put some component of the virus onto the backbone of a known thing and it doesn't do much.
02:57:49.000So they say, we don't have to worry about this.
02:57:51.000But it could turn into a situation where you take a component of a new virus, you put it on the backbone of a known virus, and it does lead to something much more contagious.
02:58:00.000And that's what a lot of people are concerned about here.
02:58:03.000I mean, you know, there was the part of those emails, as you know, Joe, were emails that were sent to Fauci in January of last year, where Christian Andersen He subsequently wrote a paper saying, hey, those changes that we saw, I thought that was clear evidence of bioengineering,
02:58:20.000but now I've seen evidence of those same abnormalities in existing naturally occurring viruses.
02:58:25.000So now I don't think that's the problem.
02:58:28.000But it's going back and forth, and frankly, we may never know for sure.
02:58:32.000It's really complicated, and the problem is for someone like myself, who doesn't have any education in the matter, I'm reading these analysis back and forth and back and forth and trying to figure out what's what.
02:58:43.000I don't like the way Fauci responded when he was asked by Rand Paul.
02:59:05.000Well, yeah, and that kind of conversation, I feel like doing it from a far distance, they're both at these tables, Fauci's over here, Rand Paul's over here.
02:59:16.000What I would like to see is Fauci and Rand Paul on a podcast.
03:01:29.000I get labeled that way because of my position on guns and some other things, but I'm very pro-choice.
03:01:35.000I'm very women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, trans rights.
03:01:40.000I'm even universal healthcare, universal basic income.
03:01:44.000I think we're going to come to a point in time where I think Andrew Yang has some really good points about automation and elimination of jobs.
03:01:52.000And I also think that we should take into consideration, like, where do our tax dollars go?
03:01:56.000And if people just had their basic needs met.
03:01:59.000Would that give them more of an opportunity to pursue innovation and creativity and other goals?
03:02:07.000Or would that, you know, with a negative perspective, would that encourage people to be lazy?
03:02:12.000I mean, I think it's something to be considered, like, whether or not people who are ambitious would always be ambitious.
03:02:54.000And that's why I've never voted for a Republican, ever.
03:03:00.000One of the things that gets lost on the left is law and order and then the importance of discipline and encouraging discipline and encouraging hard work and rewarding hard work and commending people for that.
03:03:15.000And this victim mentality drives me fucking crazy.
03:03:18.000That's what drives me crazy about the left.
03:03:20.000This idea of like weaponizing victimhood and making it so that people are excited about the fact that they have Certain things that are holding them back.
03:03:30.000I just think that's not empowering in any way, shape, or form.
03:03:35.000And that's one of the main issues I have with the left.
03:03:39.000Yeah, I mean, we live in a very capitalistic country.
03:03:43.000And we obviously have these divisions within the country.
03:03:45.000But still, you know, for a country that's 4% of the world's population.
03:03:48.000It is generally what you're describing, aren't you?
03:03:51.000I mean, in terms of there's a capitalist country.
03:03:55.000We do have federal entitlements and social programs, and it sounds like you agree with those things.
03:04:10.000I think the idea that children should be saddled down with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt right out of high school is crazy.
03:05:53.000With COVID-19, it went to just people who had the disease, it added about 200 more cases per million, okay?
03:06:01.000And then if you talk about the vaccine for the first shot, it added about another case per million, and the second shot added around 5.8, around six cases per million.
03:06:14.000So really, the comparison is the disease versus the vaccine.
03:06:20.000And this is what has been reported to the VAERS. This was CDC data.
03:06:48.000Listen, this is one of the things that I like about this podcast.
03:06:50.000You and I came into this podcast not totally knowing each other, not knowing exactly what to expect and wondering how much adversity and how much antagonistic conversation would take place, and very little.
03:07:32.000Let's do it again, and if there's any concerns that you have that you feel like things are being misrepresented or misinformation is being distributed, I am very open to discussing things.
03:07:45.000I have my questions, and I'm willing to push back against things, but I'm open to being wrong, and I'm very open to talking to people, especially...
03:07:54.000A person like yourself that is very knowledgeable and a really nice guy.