The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 334. Covid 19 Mandates： Silencing the Opposition ｜ Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I have the privilege today of talking to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's been a very effective spokesman on the pandemic front during the COVID-19 crisis.

00:01:20.620 Both imaginary and real, Dr. Bhattacharya has fought in the public domain to bring accurate information about the pandemic and the potential negative consequences of lockdowns and other COVID-19 interventions to widespread public attention.

00:01:39.260 He is a professor and researcher specializing in the economics of health care.

00:01:44.720 Bhattacharya received all four of his degrees, an MA, an MD, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University.

00:01:54.280 He is currently the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

00:02:00.880 Bhattacharya came under severe fire during the COVID-19 pandemic, believing, as he did, and publicly communicating that fact,

00:02:10.120 that mask mandates and forced lockdowns were a detriment, instead advocating for the development of herd immunity.

00:02:19.200 He argued to allow the healthy and low-risk individuals, the majority of people, to continue on with everyday life and work while providing protection for those most at risk.

00:02:29.820 Only recently, it was revealed through the Twitter files that, among others, Dr. Bhattacharya was being purposefully silenced on mainstream media platforms.

00:02:43.640 Hello, Dr. Bhattacharya. I'm looking very much forward to this conversation today.

00:02:49.100 We met recently at Stanford Conference on Academic Freedom, and that was the first time we'd met in public.

00:02:56.520 I'd been following what you'd been doing for a long time, but it was good to see you there, and it's good to have this opportunity to talk through what's happened over the last three years.

00:03:07.240 Especially, I would say, in light of the recent Cochrane review, for example, that indicated there was no evidence whatsoever that masks were effective in preventing or even delaying the transmission of COVID-19.

00:03:21.580 And I've watched the usual apologists try to wend their way around that review, but the Cochrane reviews are pretty damn reliable, and they're conservative, too, in their claims and are known for that, right?

00:03:35.220 I mean, the Cochrane reviews aren't going to come out and say that masks don't work if the people who wrote the reviews aren't pretty damn convinced that masks don't work.

00:03:43.740 And so, the fact that that's the case, and that there was evidence about that beforehand, because in the epidemic planning that predated the outbreak of COVID-19, there weren't credible people, as far as I could tell, that really thought that masks worked even back then.

00:04:02.260 So, anyways, the tide seems to be turning on the COVID narrative front, and that's not a small measure attributable to you, so why don't we go into that?

00:04:14.700 Sure, well, it's a great honour to talk with you, Jordan. It was really a delight to meet you at the conference.

00:04:19.100 I've obviously been following you for a very long time. I admire your courage.

00:04:22.720 You know, it's interesting, because the science on COVID, on the lockdowns, on the mitigation measures, on a whole host of topics, if the public was listening, they would hear this idea that there was this univocal conclusion that you had to do lockdowns,

00:04:46.760 you had to wear masks, you had to socially distance, you had to put plastic barriers up, you had to close schools, you had to do all of these things,

00:04:54.700 that the vaccines would stop transmission of the disease, that therefore was warranted to force people to lose their jobs over them.

00:05:01.620 All of these ideas were sold as if there was a scientific consensus in favour of them.

00:05:07.900 That was a lie. There was never a scientific consensus on almost any of the topics.

00:05:12.980 And as you say, en masse, in fact, the pre-existing narrative, the pre-existing idea among most scientists before the pandemic was quite the opposite direction.

00:05:23.040 What happened was a relatively small group, a cartel almost, of very powerful scientific bureaucrats took over the whole apparatus of science,

00:05:35.200 at least as far as the public eye was concerned, dominated the media, dominated the message to politicians,

00:05:41.020 and as a result, we had a catastrophic response to COVID and, you know, we're going to be paying the cost of that for a very long time.

00:05:50.200 So let's dig into that because it's so easy in the current political climate for discussion to become conspiratorial, right?

00:06:01.240 And the idea of a cartel, well, that sounds conspiratorial.

00:06:04.660 Now, I've been trying to think that through.

00:06:07.040 And so a system of ideas can act like a conspiracy, even if it doesn't make itself manifest as a direct conspiracy,

00:06:15.600 because a system of ideas has an internal intrinsic ethos and view and implications for actions that unfold across time.

00:06:24.600 If you read the Gulag Archipelago, for example, Solzhenitsyn does a masterful job of indicating how the consequences,

00:06:34.900 the brutal, tyrannical actions of Lenin and Stalin were necessary concomitants to the, 0.68

00:06:44.760 or necessary outcomes of the axioms that were embedded in the communist worldview.

00:06:49.140 They weren't deviations from some properly utopian norm.

00:06:54.280 They were exactly what you'd expect if you put those principles into operation.

00:06:58.460 And I see similar things going on around us now.

00:07:03.460 Let's say on the politically correct front,

00:07:05.940 I don't really believe there's a conspiracy of politically correct people who are meeting in secret to direct the world,

00:07:11.560 although if there was, the WEF would probably qualify.

00:07:14.880 But I do think that systems of ideas can act as conspiratorial agents.

00:07:22.100 Now, in this case, it's more complex, though.

00:07:24.800 So there's a cartel who's pushing forward this narrative.

00:07:29.600 And the question is, well, or a system of ideas that's generating it.

00:07:34.400 And the question is, well, to what end?

00:07:37.360 That's one question.

00:07:38.380 And the other question is, who benefits?

00:07:39.960 Now, and then the further question is, why would the media, for example,

00:07:47.180 fall into lockstep, shoulder-to-shoulder cooperation with those who benefit?

00:07:53.240 Now, we know perfectly well that the biggest punitive civil lawsuits ever levied in the United States

00:08:02.120 were levied successfully against pharmaceutical companies.

00:08:05.100 And the left has every reason to be entirely skeptical about pharmaceutical companies,

00:08:10.820 like they have been for the last five decades.

00:08:13.580 But all of a sudden, we saw this massive spin around

00:08:16.700 where everything the pharmaceutical companies said was taken as gospel.

00:08:20.960 And it's very hard to suppress the suspicions that something like massive lobbying

00:08:26.660 and very narrow profit-seeking were driving this.

00:08:30.300 What's your sense of the underlying motivation?

00:08:35.920 So I completely agree with you that this, what I described as a small cartel,

00:08:41.400 was operating in the context of a very complex environment.

00:08:45.940 And in that environment, many people took advantage of the opportunities provided to them

00:08:50.620 by the set of events that unfolded.

00:08:55.020 But let me just defend the characterization of this as at least initiated.

00:09:00.540 I personally blame public health, public health authorities,

00:09:04.600 the top public health authorities in the world

00:09:06.280 and the top public health authorities in the United States and elsewhere

00:09:09.000 for the set of events that transpired in response.

00:09:15.020 And let's name some names on that front.

00:09:18.540 Yeah.

00:09:19.120 So like in the United States,

00:09:20.360 a primary architect of the lockdown strategy was Tony Fauci.

00:09:25.820 Now, let me just describe why I think this wasn't,

00:09:29.260 it's not a conspiracy in a sense that, you know,

00:09:32.380 there's this like small group that has nefarious ideas.

00:09:35.660 If you look at the decades before the pandemic happened,

00:09:40.520 there was a concerted effort in the United States and elsewhere

00:09:44.840 to prepare for the next pandemic.

00:09:47.560 That preparation involved putting into actuality a whole range of powers

00:09:56.480 that previously we would have said were not consistent with liberal democracy.

00:10:01.600 Powers to close you into your home, to close your business, to close your schools.

00:10:07.700 Powers to basically force you to test and isolate if you're found positive.

00:10:12.740 A whole range of almost, you know, dictatorial powers that would have been previously unimaginable.

00:10:22.660 The idea was that we are biohazards to each other.

00:10:27.900 And the whole goal is if we can keep each other apart during a time of severe infectious disease threat,

00:10:35.540 it will actually save lives.

00:10:36.760 That was the premise of this.

00:10:39.920 And that there was coming another, a new respiratory virus pandemic threat.

00:10:46.960 Now, that is actually, was certain to be true.

00:10:50.100 We've had respiratory virus pandemics time after time, you know,

00:10:54.280 decade after decade in the 20th century, we had respiratory virus pandemics.

00:10:58.120 1918, of course, now is the most famous.

00:10:59.720 But we had them in, you know, 1957, 1968, 1976.

00:11:05.140 You could just keep going on and on.

00:11:06.460 Most recently, maybe 2009 and the swine flu pandemic.

00:11:11.000 So there was this infrastructure set up and this sort of ideology among the top scientific bureaucrats in this country and elsewhere

00:11:19.320 that because a respiratory virus pandemic was coming,

00:11:22.760 we needed better tools than we previously had to address it.

00:11:26.040 And for them, the better tools meant essentially the dictatorial powers,

00:11:31.060 the authoritarian powers that constitute a lockdown.

00:11:35.660 And they, now, when COVID arrived, and we can talk about what the, you know, exactly how it arrived,

00:11:42.940 but let's just take that as a given that it arrived.

00:11:46.700 That entire infrastructure sort of powered into existence.

00:11:51.040 And part of that infrastructure involves making sure that the people take the measures that are being proposed seriously,

00:12:02.360 that the threat seriously.

00:12:04.120 And the way they did that is by spreading panic and fear about the disease.

00:12:09.340 In that environment, what happened was that a small group of people at the head,

00:12:17.140 like Tony, let's say, let's just name names, Tony Fauci.

00:12:21.100 He donned on himself the mantle of science itself, right?

00:12:27.160 We're all looking for a guru.

00:12:29.420 Yes, he took the name of science in vain.

00:12:32.720 He actually did.

00:12:34.040 I mean, he talks about it as if it's some sort of religious system.

00:12:37.360 So, he took, and what he did is he designed a set of policies, an ethos that said,

00:12:48.280 if you do these things, then I will rescue you from the threat that is going all around you,

00:12:54.700 that's in the air everywhere, where even your children are a biohazard to you, a threat to you.

00:13:00.380 And in that, so, when that set of events unfolds, like, you have someone who essentially takes over what truth is in the minds of everybody.

00:13:14.520 Then all these other actors could come in and start to say, you know, you mentioned the pharmaceutical companies.

00:13:20.460 They jumped in, not, I don't think they're in a nefarious plot.

00:13:24.340 I think that they jumped in legitimately saying, okay, let's help figure out how to address this threat.

00:13:29.340 Now, then they took advantage of the power they had in very abusive ways, but that's a later development rather than the driving force, I think.

00:13:38.700 And so, how do you understand the practicalities of the relationship between the top public health bureaucrats and the pharmaceutical companies?

00:13:48.160 Because there's obviously moral hazard there.

00:13:50.200 One of the things that struck me is really beyond comprehension in some fundamental sense is that the Biden White House, for example,

00:13:58.060 is essentially a shill, is acting as a shill for Pfizer constantly.

00:14:02.640 The Biden White House tweets out around Christmas, for example, this became particularly egregious.

00:14:07.820 These constant reminders that if you loved your children, you'd go have them both vaccinated and boosted.

00:14:13.020 And by that time, it was absolutely clear to me, and I'd be more than happy to be corrected on this front,

00:14:18.140 that the evidence that vaccinating children was a good idea was not only lacking, it was the best evidence was counter-evidence,

00:14:26.180 is that children were basically at zero risk for serious consequences, serious side effects from COVID.

00:14:34.160 And the vaccines, in all likelihood, posed a greater threat to them than did the virus.

00:14:39.500 And so, I couldn't understand at all why the White House would be supporting the marketing efforts of the pharmaceutical companies.

00:14:47.460 Now, there are tens of billions of dollars at stake here, and there is a revolving door.

00:14:53.060 And people who are listening and watching, my understanding is that there's something of a revolving door in Washington

00:14:59.380 between powerful companies and the regulators who regulate them.

00:15:03.700 Those regulatory bureaucratic positions aren't necessarily particularly well paid,

00:15:08.160 and they don't last forever, and a lot of the people who occupy those positions are ambitious,

00:15:12.700 and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.

00:15:14.880 But it's pretty damn useful to hire someone to work for you who was once involved in the regulation of your company, let's say.

00:15:22.580 So, there's plenty of moral hazard on that front.

00:15:25.000 How do you understand the interplay, like the dynamic interplay between the public health officials, quote,

00:15:31.540 who are there to protect us and these entities operating behind the scenes who, you know,

00:15:38.280 do make products that are useful but also have an iron in the fire that isn't necessarily completely aligned with everyone's best interests?

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00:17:23.660 Yeah, so I think the idea is that in war, a lot is possible and ethically permitted that would not be permitted outside of war, right?

00:17:36.000 So the same kind of principle applies here.

00:17:39.600 So what you have, for instance, again in the U.S., that a former head of the FDA was actually on the board of Pfizer.

00:17:46.440 He then is on national TV all the time, essentially pushing a line that benefited Pfizer and the sale of its products.

00:17:59.800 Sometimes and often, in fact, without disclosing the fact that he has this conflict.

00:18:06.300 So they're definitely, but that's longstanding, right?

00:18:09.620 You understand that, that those kinds of conflicts exist.

00:18:13.320 And you're absolutely right, like the regulatory agencies, there is this like sort of people, people work for the regulatory agencies and then they go work for the drug companies and come back, right?

00:18:22.660 That's like the FDA, that's a major problem the FDA in the U.S. faces.

00:18:27.200 So that's completely understandable.

00:18:29.880 What has to happen is policymakers, top policymakers, understand that dynamic and act against it.

00:18:37.260 Instead, what happened was that the top policymakers said, maybe to themselves, assuming they acted this way, that that kind of dynamic actually helps the public.

00:18:50.080 Because what they're doing is putting forward a product that's going to rescue us from the pandemic.

00:18:54.940 Yeah, right.

00:18:55.320 You have a product, this vaccine, and so it's okay.

00:18:58.680 I mean, it's implicit, at least that's my interpretation of how people acted.

00:19:01.760 Because otherwise you would have had top policymakers and top public health officials decrying these conflicts of interest, this sort of revolving door, as you say.

00:19:11.240 Well, the problem is, is that in the face of an unspecified threat, it's easy to make the argument that the end justifies the means.

00:19:18.080 And you can understand how we would fall into that, especially given, and this is something else that's very interesting to contemplate, the exaggeration of the severity of the threat.

00:19:27.100 Now, I've been thinking about this biologically, you know, I did a lot of work on the extended immune system, the behavioral immune system.

00:19:35.360 And so we have an immune system that operates within us to protect us from disease, but we have a behavioral immune system too.

00:19:42.500 And both disgust and fear are part of that behavioral immune system.

00:19:47.840 And what I mean by that is, well, we tend to be disgusted by such things as, let's say, rotting food.

00:19:53.740 And the reason we're disgusted by it is because the rotting food is full of bacteria that produces toxins to keep us from eating the bacteria's food.

00:20:02.600 And we're sensitive to that, so we stay the hell away from it.

00:20:05.560 And so that's part of what protects us against pathogens.

00:20:11.440 And disgust is one of the main mechanisms whereby that operates.

00:20:17.360 And so what we saw happening was the use of fear, definitely, but also the use of disgust, which, by the way, is much more dangerous.

00:20:25.920 Because if you're afraid of something, you avoid it.

00:20:28.840 But if you're disgusted by something, you burn it and destroy it.

00:20:33.020 So if you start to leverage disgust in the political landscape, you're playing with fire.

00:20:37.460 Certainly what the Nazi propagandists were very, very good at using disgust.

00:20:43.280 And Hitler's anti-Semitic language, for example, is absolutely permeated with disgust metaphors.

00:20:48.980 You know, purity of the blood, purity of the race, the cockroaches and insects that were conspiring against Germany. 0.96

00:20:56.260 It's all purity language.

00:20:58.080 And so I kind of think that what happened from a biological perspective might be construed as an overreaction of the behavioral immune system, right?

00:21:08.800 So, you know, if you get COVID, you can have a cytokine storm, which is an immune system overreaction.

00:21:14.680 And that can kill you, not the virus, but the immune response.

00:21:17.940 And in this situation, what happened was we faced an uncertain threat.

00:21:23.020 And then we had, as you pointed out, a pre-prepared response to it that turned out to be far worse on virtually every front than the threat that it was purported to reduce.

00:21:34.780 But that metaphor of, you know, of an extended immune system overreaction depoliticizes it to some degree.

00:21:43.600 You know, we can think about that as more something like an existential threat, which is how do we regulate our responses to unknown threats so that the response itself doesn't become more pathological than the threat?

00:21:56.140 I think we're facing the same thing on the climate catastrophe front at the moment, by the way.

00:22:01.280 And, you know, people can differ in their opinions about that.

00:22:04.480 But certainly systemic overreaction is a constant potential catastrophe.

00:22:10.760 And then we rushed to imitate a totalitarian state, too, which was extraordinarily interesting.

00:22:15.920 All across the West in a mad, panicked, herd-like response to, well, to what?

00:22:23.200 But that's now what we're learning.

00:22:25.900 Yeah.

00:22:27.140 I mean, I completely agree.

00:22:28.800 I think you're—it's actually quite insightful to point to disgust as a central driving factor in this pandemic.

00:22:37.040 Right?

00:22:37.260 So, for instance, if anyone were to get COVID, the first thing you'd ask is, who gave it to you?

00:22:42.780 Yeah.

00:22:43.160 Right?

00:22:43.480 As if it's some sort of sin.

00:22:45.280 Yeah.

00:22:45.560 It's treated not as a disease to be managed and a person who gets it to be cared for.

00:22:50.760 Instead, it's a sin that you've committed that you—and as a result, and once you have it, everyone around you needs to be so far away from you that there's no chance of the contagion spreading to them.

00:23:04.140 I mean, now, it is true there are diseases that are quite deadly.

00:23:08.080 You want to have quarantining—I mean, those are like—those are legitimate tools.

00:23:11.720 But deployed at a society-wide level for extended periods of time essentially destroys the underpinnings of civil society.

00:23:22.680 Yeah.

00:23:22.720 When we are in community with each other, we implicitly accept that there's some risk of your spreading some diseases to me.

00:23:34.220 That's just normal part of how civilization works.

00:23:38.740 It's a deal we've made with each other.

00:23:40.460 Civilization tempers the inclination that we humans have toward disgust and transforms it into something where it's much more constructive.

00:23:52.920 And, you know, you can absolutely have pathologies of societies where that disgust is allowed to spread and marginalize people.

00:24:00.980 Like, so, like, you know, I come from Indian culture.

00:24:03.480 The Indian society has struggled forever with this distinction of clean and unclean with certain castes of people being—I mean, so, I mean, I think that is a normal feature of societies. 1.00

00:24:14.940 Yeah, well, there's good work, too, on the political front showing that societies where infectious disease prevalence is higher, like genuinely higher, are also substantially more likely to have authoritarian political structures.

00:24:28.320 And that there seems—and the correlation is like 0.7.

00:24:31.960 This is not a trivial effect.

00:24:33.860 It's a walloping effect.

00:24:35.220 And some of that has to do with, well, exactly what you're describing, which is the distinction, the ritual and even sacred distinction between what's clean and unclean.

00:24:45.980 And that does tie into bodily and physical purity and then into a kind of metaphysical purity.

00:24:52.520 And it's very difficult to keep those levels of analysis separate.

00:24:55.320 I mean, the goal of public health has always worked to counteract that.

00:25:01.540 Right.

00:25:01.720 We tell people it's not—you shouldn't moralize a disease.

00:25:05.360 You shouldn't treat a disease as if it's something that's, like, morally wrong about the person that has the disease.

00:25:12.100 With HIV, we learned that lesson, I thought. 0.68

00:25:14.620 Yet during the pandemic, public health authorities leaned into this.

00:25:18.680 They leaned into the idea that someone who gets COVID has committed a sin.

00:25:23.380 And, you know, they didn't say it out loud, but they acted that way.

00:25:28.120 It's—now, I said that there was a pandemic template.

00:25:34.340 But, you know, that pandemic template is at odds with every other pandemic that we managed in the respiratory virus pandemic we managed in the last century.

00:25:42.140 Right.

00:25:43.160 In that whole of the last century, what we did is we identified who was most at risk, developed therapeutics, vaccines, and other methods to try to protect those people as best we could while the pandemic was spreading.

00:25:58.300 And—but minimized the fear in society at large, minimized the disruption to society at large.

00:26:07.120 And the reasoning was so compelling.

00:26:09.700 The idea is that if you—if you disrupt society at large, you will do more harm to people than you would save them from the—whatever marginal risk from the—from the respiratory virus pandemic that spread it.

00:26:22.660 Right. Yeah, well, that's a basically conservative, so to speak, a classic conservative concern, right, which is twofold.

00:26:31.240 One is to stress the law of unintended consequences.

00:26:34.640 This is something I really learned as a social scientist and—well, and as a biological scientist, for that matter. 0.99

00:26:41.020 Don't be so sure that your stupid intervention will only do what you think it will do, only the good things. 1.00

00:26:48.980 Don't even be sure that it won't be positively counterproductive. 1.00

00:26:52.460 Be certain that it will produce unintended consequences, because it will.

00:26:57.240 You know, one of the most famous studies, for example, ever done on the prevention of antisocial behavior among kids—this was the Somerville study done back in the 1930s—one of the first large-scale public health interventions on the psychological front.

00:27:09.980 They grouped kids who were prone to conduct disorder and then criminal behavior, let's say, later in their life, randomly into a treatment group and a control group.

00:27:21.160 And they hit the treatment group with every positive psychological and sociological intervention you could manage—literacy training, parent training, communication training for the kids.

00:27:32.580 They paired them with mentors, they paired them with mentors, and they took the kids out of the inner cities and out to camp, summer camp, for two weeks every year while the program ran.

00:27:43.800 And when they released the results, it showed very clearly that the kids in the treatment group, who would be the subject of all this positive attention—which, by the way, the kids loved, the parents loved, the teachers loved, the implementers loved—they did worse on virtually every measure.

00:28:00.500 And the conclusion was that it was a really bad idea to take antisocial kids out of their environment for two weeks in the summer and group them together, because they were basically camps for criminals.

00:28:12.780 And that was such a powerful effect that it overwhelmed all the other interventions.

00:28:17.780 Somerville study—very, very famous cautionary tale—and Joan McCord, who was one of the authors of that study, and one of the first female PhDs in criminology, basically spent the rest of her life traveling around to academic conferences telling people,

00:28:32.780 do not assume your idiot intervention is going to work, build in careful outcome analysis to any social program that has a behavioral change mandate, and have some humility in the face of the complexity of the problem you're trying to solve.

00:28:52.060 And certainly, well, we just let all that go by the wayside in this—now, you said that we had a different strategy in place for pandemics in the past, and that this new strategy emerged—like, emerged where, and why did it dominate? 0.98

00:29:06.360 I mean, I think, in the West, it emerged out of the war on terror, you know, if you can go back to the anthrax threat from, I think it was 2001 or 2002, and people reacted to that by saying, we need a way to deal with biosecurity threats, a new way to deal with biosecurity threats that's much more serious, that takes the threat more seriously.

00:29:31.020 The whole series of war games and, you know, sort of planning exercises around biosecurity threats, that's not normally what you think of how you deal with respiratory virus pandemics, right?

00:29:43.140 You would normally deal with them the old way, which was focused protection of vulnerable people, development of therapeutics, reduce—making sure that people don't panic, right?

00:29:53.100 You know, so society can go on as best it can.

00:29:56.800 I think that—so when the pandemic hit in 2020 in the U.S. and the world, what happened was that the World Health Organization organized, in the early days of the pandemic, a junket, if you will, to China.

00:30:16.580 The Chinese authorities in January 2020 had declared finally a pandemic, had locked down their, you know, this major city, Wuhan.

00:30:26.260 Yeah.

00:30:26.760 And the World Health Organization sent a junket that included, you know, a deputy of Tony Fauci, prominent officials within, you know, public health officials in the World Health Organization.

00:30:39.500 They came back from that junket saying that what China had done had worked. 0.61

00:30:43.000 These authoritarian measures that China had taken, shutting people into their apartment and locking the door, you know, essentially, like, had worked. 0.55

00:30:52.120 The disease was gone.

00:30:53.860 Yeah, well, you know, lots of dim-witted Western intellectuals go to communist countries and conclude that it works. 0.84

00:31:01.320 Yeah, that— 0.71

00:31:01.940 I mean, we do have a long history of that, don't we?

00:31:03.540 We certainly do.

00:31:03.900 We certainly do.

00:31:05.380 We certainly do.

00:31:06.260 And anybody dim enough to go to China under the control of the CCP and assume that their top-down authoritarian policies are working really needs to think along and hard about how they view the long arc of history, let's say.

00:31:19.500 I mean, your default presumption when dealing with the CCP is 100% of everything you see is a lie until proven otherwise.

00:31:27.540 I mean, there's an email from Cliff Lane, who's a deputy of Tony Fauci.

00:31:34.680 He comes back from this World Health Organization junket to China.

00:31:40.120 And in the email, he writes that we have a—what China did worked, in fact, we have a very difficult decision to make.

00:31:51.120 It will take more than just the people in this room to make that decision.

00:31:54.960 And he writes, what China did worked, albeit at great cost.

00:31:58.140 Oh, yeah, that.

00:31:58.960 That pesky little, what would you say, consequence.

00:32:01.980 But, you know, you mentioned this classic social science study.

00:32:09.560 The expertise of social scientists was denigrated early in the pandemic.

00:32:14.680 The question was, are you an epidemiologist?

00:32:17.300 Are you a virologist?

00:32:18.520 Are you an infectious disease specialist?

00:32:21.360 Yeah.

00:32:21.620 And anyone else with any other expertise was not relevant to decision-making.

00:32:26.780 Only the science itself had a say.

00:32:29.880 Right.

00:32:30.080 Oh, and as you said, like, the science, follow the science.

00:32:35.580 It's like, well, okay, what do you mean here exactly?

00:32:38.000 Because there's always a balance of risks if you're a sophisticated thinker.

00:32:41.180 It's like, even if there's a pandemic, well, first of all, we better make sure that there is and that we know the scope.

00:32:47.720 But there's a hundred other considerations of risk that need to be simultaneously evaluated.

00:32:53.680 And the way to protect yourself from that cognitive complexity if you're a narcissistic leader and you want to forge the moral pathway forward is just to demonize anybody who adds any complexity into the argument.

00:33:07.460 So, we saw plenty of that.

00:33:10.220 That's exactly what happened.

00:33:10.760 Yeah.

00:33:11.460 That's exactly what happened.

00:33:12.820 And anyone who has the notion of the law of unintended consequences, of tradeoffs, of risk management in their soul, or in their training at least, they were excluded from the conversation.

00:33:25.260 Right?

00:33:25.360 So, you could say, look, this is going to really hurt the economy.

00:33:30.300 And then what the response you'd get was, well, you care more about money than lives.

00:33:35.080 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:33:35.880 And therefore, you shouldn't do that.

00:33:37.100 But, you know, the irony is that the economic harm from the lockdowns with 100% certainty killed more people and is still killing more people.

00:33:48.840 Oh, yeah.

00:33:49.400 Than the lives saved by the lockdowns, which I think are very few.

00:33:53.580 Yeah, well, we're not done with that yet.

00:33:55.700 We have no idea how many people the lockdown and the associated panic killed.

00:34:01.480 That'll unfold over probably decades.

00:34:05.260 Yeah, well, especially when you factor in things like the decrement and educational attainment that emerged as a consequence of the suppression of schooling.

00:34:13.820 Because that's a whole lifetime of decreased economic productivity.

00:34:18.100 I cannot tell you how frustrated I was about this.

00:34:20.660 So, my training is, I have an MD and a PhD in economics.

00:34:25.420 I do health economics for a living.

00:34:26.840 I've been following, for the last two decades, this literature obsessively documenting the returns to education on the health of children during their entire lives.

00:34:37.180 And, you know, it's pretty convincing.

00:34:40.440 It's a great investment we make when we educate our children in terms of, you know, they live longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives.

00:34:48.820 And even, like, small interruptions to education is what the literature documented have long lifetime consequences.

00:34:55.860 Someone, this guy named Dimitri Kostakis, who's an editor of JAMA Pediatrics, did this really interesting paper.

00:35:02.300 We just extrapolated that existing social science literature and said, well, we closed schools for a short time in spring 2020.

00:35:09.420 What consequences will that have on the lifespans of children?

00:35:13.100 And he estimated that we had essentially robbed children in the United States of five and a half million life years just from the short interruption in spring of 2020.

00:35:25.080 Well, you know, schools closed on the basis of public health, this cartel of public health people all around the world.

00:35:31.660 Yeah.

00:35:31.820 In Uganda, in India, the school's closed for two years.

00:35:37.340 Many people don't have access to internet or electricity or whatever.

00:35:41.700 That meant no school and millions of kids.

00:35:45.520 It also meant no social interactions.

00:35:47.740 It meant way more time online.

00:35:49.440 It meant way more time frustrated.

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00:36:58.280 Depression, one in four young adults seriously considered suicide in the U.S., according to a CDC survey in June of 2020.

00:37:11.920 I mean, the consequences are just, the knock-on consequences were devastating.

00:37:17.100 The U.N. World Food Program was yelling as loud as it could that there were going to be millions, tens of millions of people on the brink of starvation as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by the lockdown.

00:37:31.400 Supply chain disruptions, absolutely.

00:37:33.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:37:35.280 And the pointy end of the supply chain disruption is some guy who makes $5 a day or $10 a day of income selling coconuts to rich Mumbai laptop class people.

00:37:46.100 And then he loses his job.

00:37:49.160 He now earns less than $2 a day of income.

00:37:51.180 His family starves.

00:37:52.940 That is the, so it wasn't, it was never lives versus money.

00:37:57.560 Never, no.

00:37:57.860 It was always lives versus lives.

00:38:00.720 And if you talk to any competent social scientist, that's exactly what they would have told you in that early days of the pandemic.

00:38:08.100 It was entirely predictable.

00:38:09.740 When, okay, when did you start to become concerned about the, the overreach of the pandemic mandates?

00:38:19.020 And, and tell me that story.

00:38:20.600 And how did that unfold?

00:38:22.020 So the, the, the day I heard about the lockdowns, I mean, I just, I was, I was absolutely floored.

00:38:30.400 I couldn't believe that, that in medicine and public health, we were recommending this approach that I knew with certainty was going to harm the lives of poor and vulnerable people literally everywhere in the world.

00:38:44.100 I thought, I thought that we had made commitments to, to protect, you know, almost these Rawlsian commitments to, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you structure public policy so that you don't harm the least, the least capable among us to suffer from that.

00:39:00.580 Right.

00:39:00.900 An extension of the Hippocratic Oath, right?

00:39:03.580 And, that's what I thought, exactly.

00:39:06.380 And I thought, okay, well, that's, that's, that's, that's the, that's the profession I thought I was in.

00:39:10.380 Yeah.

00:39:10.700 And then, when, when the lockdowns were announced, I mean, actually, I had an argument with my, with my, my boss, who's like, it was in, in, in, in Stanford Medicine, almost that very day, because his, his wife is the head of Santa Clara County Public Health.

00:39:25.620 And we had this argument about whether lockdowns were a good idea on the eve of the lockdown.

00:39:30.600 I just came away stunned.

00:39:32.060 Like, I, this can't, and I actually gave an interview to a Reuters reporter who was doing a story on what lockdowns would do to kids, to, to domestic assault rates.

00:39:41.860 Right, right.

00:39:42.360 To alcoholism.

00:39:43.360 To depression.

00:39:44.100 Opiate misuse.

00:39:45.060 Alcoholism.

00:39:45.780 Yeah.

00:39:46.720 In, in, so I gave it, I gave an interview in, in, like, April of 2020, and I emphasized these knock-on effects.

00:39:54.100 I thought they were certain to come.

00:39:55.480 And I actually said in that interview that the lockdowns were very likely the, the biggest public health mistake we ever made.

00:40:00.980 Oh yeah, you think it's a bigger public health mistake than, than the inverted food pyramid and the, and the injunction to everyone to do nothing but eat carbohydrates until they weigh 350 pounds?

00:40:11.980 Or, I mean, no, you got to admit, those at least compete for, for.

00:40:16.920 There, there, there, there are a lot of sins to, to, to, to weigh, but this is certainly, it's certainly up there.

00:40:22.580 Yeah.

00:40:22.820 I mean, you know, just in terms of the catastrophic harm to poor people.

00:40:26.820 Yeah, and that's not, we're not done with that.

00:40:28.760 So everyone listening and watching needs to know that.

00:40:31.240 The catastrophic consequences of harm done to poor people are still unfolding.

00:40:36.120 And God only knows what the end result of that's going to be because food is more expensive than it should have been.

00:40:42.980 And energy is more expensive than it should have been.

00:40:44.920 And there are multiple reasons for that, but the bloody supply chain disruptions were one of them.

00:40:50.080 And we really toyed with bringing our supply chains to the brink of bloody disaster.

00:40:55.040 It's still hard to buy a car in North America.

00:40:57.280 And, you know, it's really difficult to screw something up like that because we're pretty damn good at making cars and so, and distributing them.

00:41:05.000 And to see that there are shortages on all fronts for rich people.

00:41:09.440 You just imagine what the shortages are like for poor people.

00:41:12.860 So, yeah, you know, the other thought I had early, early, early on was that we didn't actually know how deadly the disease was.

00:41:19.080 Right.

00:41:19.280 So during the swine flu epidemic, there had been the early estimates by the World Health Organization was that the case fatality rate was 4% or 5%.

00:41:27.500 Yeah.

00:41:27.780 Just like they said with COVID.

00:41:29.720 Yeah.

00:41:30.080 But what happened in the swine flu epidemic in 2009 was a whole bunch of scholars ran studies called seroprevalence studies.

00:41:38.180 Studies of measuring antibodies in the blood of populations.

00:41:43.260 Antibodies specific to the, you know, the flu virus that was floating around.

00:41:47.700 And what they found was there were 100 times more infections or more than cases because the virus had produced a mild reaction in some people, generating an antibody.

00:41:59.140 And they didn't go into the doctor.

00:42:00.920 No one knew that they had had the flu or had the swine flu.

00:42:05.260 And so the infection fatality rate turned out to be 0.01% for the swine flu.

00:42:12.460 Right, right, right.

00:42:13.600 Okay, so that had already been established as a scientific precedent.

00:42:16.460 What do you think the case fatality rate was for COVID?

00:42:21.320 So I ran a study in April of 2020, a seroprevalence study in Santa Clara County, California.

00:42:27.200 Now, we didn't include nursing homes where the really high case infection fatality rate actually is.

00:42:35.120 But if you include in the community, it turned out to be about 0.2%, 99.8% survival.

00:42:41.320 And we ran another separate study in L.A. County the week after and found almost the same identical infection fatality rate.

00:42:50.720 And how does that compare to a standard flu?

00:42:52.880 Well, you know, that's funny.

00:42:56.360 Can you ask that?

00:42:56.900 Because I don't know.

00:42:58.460 I look at the people say that the flu has a 0.1% infection fatality rate.

00:43:03.820 But I don't know that's true.

00:43:05.140 It's not backed by careful seroprevalence studies.

00:43:08.180 So, for instance, the swine flu, which was thought to be particularly deadly, turned out to be 0.01%.

00:43:12.300 Right, right.

00:43:12.820 So, I do think that there's more deadly than the flu.

00:43:17.100 There's no question in my mind, in fact, about that.

00:43:18.980 And that was no question in my mind from the very moment I heard about this.

00:43:21.660 This was something to take seriously.

00:43:23.640 Absolutely.

00:43:24.820 That 0.2%, while much less than the 3% or 4% that the World Health Organization is panicking people with, was still a very high number.

00:43:33.640 And it's especially high for older people.

00:43:36.180 Right, right.

00:43:37.060 If you can think about it, it's like the risk doubles by every seven years of age.

00:43:41.620 So, you know, I was 51 at the time.

00:43:46.540 My mom, who was 81 at the time, like what is that, like one, two, three, four doublings, my infection fatality rate was 0.2%.

00:43:56.520 Hers was, you know, 0.4, 0.8, 0.1, 0.6, 3.2%.

00:44:00.820 Right, right.

00:44:01.760 So the proper response would have been to identify the genuine risk factors for serious risk of hospitalization, let's say.

00:44:12.140 And as far as I can tell, these are what they are.

00:44:14.620 And I would also appreciate being corrected.

00:44:16.520 So age is a major one.

00:44:18.360 Obesity is a huge contributor.

00:44:21.920 Comorbidity, that hardly counts because, of course, the more comorbidities you have, the more likely you're to die of anything.

00:44:27.500 But that still has to be taken into account.

00:44:30.140 And then I've also concluded that the evidence for increased severity among people who have vitamin D deficiencies also seems to be quite robust.

00:44:39.880 And so what we should have done was note this is particularly dangerous to obese, old people who already have multiple illnesses and who are additionally suffering from vitamin D deficiencies.

00:44:51.560 And they probably had, well, who knows what their case fatality rate was, but they were the ones that were particularly at risk.

00:44:57.580 Whereas for anybody under 40 who was fundamentally healthy and reasonably well-nourished, it was clearly not worse than the typical run-of-the-mill flu.

00:45:07.600 Does that seem about right?

00:45:09.720 Yeah, I mean, I think I might modify the statement about the relative risk of the flu because I just don't know what that is.

00:45:15.380 Right, right, fair enough.

00:45:15.980 I think it's a very, very, it's a very low risk for relative, for healthy young people.

00:45:20.940 And I think, and I agree with you about the risk factors, but the key risk factor is age.

00:45:26.020 So, for instance, obese versus non-obese, that roughly doubles your infection fatality rate.

00:45:31.940 Every seven years of age doubles it.

00:45:34.280 Oh, yeah.

00:45:34.580 Which compounds, right?

00:45:35.460 So, like, so what you have is a disease, you know, like 80% of the deaths are people over the age of 65, still.

00:45:42.540 So, what you have is a disease that is a very high risk to an identifiable population.

00:45:47.380 And for the rest of the population, and the vitamin D I agree with, actually, although that's a little bit controversial.

00:45:51.400 I don't know why it's controversial.

00:45:53.020 It just seems to me that the evidence is pretty clear on this.

00:45:55.760 In any case, there's no harm in recommending.

00:45:57.300 Cheap, easily accessible and harmless.

00:45:59.020 How about that?

00:46:00.420 Impossible to monetize.

00:46:01.500 That's another problem.

00:46:02.660 So, you just tell people to go out and have exercise.

00:46:07.100 Like, what?

00:46:07.660 Yeah, in the sun.

00:46:08.380 Like, you know, go out in the sun.

00:46:08.820 I mean, instead of being locked at home and not being able to go to a park, for example.

00:46:13.060 Exactly.

00:46:13.840 So, like, having that as a modifiable risk factor would have been healthier, would have produced health in other ways as well.

00:46:21.900 Right.

00:46:22.520 So, instead, we in public health adopted this mantra that we were all equally vulnerable.

00:46:31.500 Yeah.

00:46:31.740 So, if I remember watching this press conference by this Rudy Gobert, who's a National Basketball Association player, NBA basketball player in the United States.

00:46:43.240 And he'd contracted COVID early in the pandemic.

00:46:46.480 And, you know, he's a young man, very healthy, didn't appear to be particularly sick.

00:46:51.660 But he gave this press conference where he, like, just was joking around.

00:46:55.120 He licked the microphone.

00:46:56.600 He was making fun of the clean and unclean trope that was starting to, like, spread.

00:47:00.180 And the whole world came down on this poor man, forced him to apologize, you know, and you have to take the virus seriously.

00:47:09.140 So, even young, healthy NBA players who are at basically zero risk from dying from this disease have to grovel and apologize because they're acting like young, healthy people.

00:47:22.400 It looks like disgust demonization, eh?

00:47:24.720 That particular response.

00:47:26.140 It absolutely is.

00:47:27.220 And the idea was, the ideology was very simple.

00:47:29.920 If we don't force everyone to take the virus as seriously as an 83-year-old person living in, you know, with multiple comorbidities does, then they won't comply with the lockdown orders.

00:47:42.660 What we asked young people to do was immoral. 0.87

00:47:46.580 We essentially said, stop, sacrifice your life, yes, in order to save grandma.

00:47:53.000 We weaponized the empathy that young people have against themselves.

00:47:56.940 No, in order to produce a small decrement in risk to grandma.

00:48:01.280 But, you know, that's the funny thing.

00:48:02.720 It didn't really even protect grandma.

00:48:04.300 Right, right.

00:48:04.820 80% of the deaths are still over the age of 65.

00:48:07.000 You have a disease that spreads very, very easily.

00:48:11.200 And the lockdown measures, people can't really comply with them for extended periods of time, except unless you happen to be very well off and have a job that can be replaced with a laptop.

00:48:22.760 Right, right, right.

00:48:23.920 Then, okay, maybe.

00:48:25.700 But that's a very small fraction of the world population.

00:48:29.100 Yeah.

00:48:29.480 Maybe 20%, 30% of even rich countries.

00:48:32.860 Right, right.

00:48:33.460 Okay, so you started to become aware of this back in March of 2020, right away, essentially, as soon as the lockdowns occurred.

00:48:40.040 And so, and you talked about the first conversation you had with one of your colleagues who was involved in local public health.

00:48:46.120 And you could see this miasma of paranoia and force spreading.

00:48:51.420 And it was very concerning to you because of your epidemiological and economics training.

00:48:57.380 And economists, at least, are trained to consider, well, multiple trade-offs in terms of value, if they're good economists, obviously.

00:49:06.560 They seem to be more reliable public policy formulators, by and large, I would say, than biologists, who take a much more unidimensional view of the world.

00:49:15.400 And epidemiologists, as well, who specialize in a given illness.

00:49:18.500 So, so then, as this marched forward, what did you find yourself doing?

00:49:24.620 Well, I mean, there was a lot of, I published these studies or wrote these studies on seroprevalence, published them, and there was a tremendous blowback.

00:49:33.900 My colleagues didn't want to believe the result.

00:49:36.200 They thought it was a much more deadly disease than we were finding with our scientific studies.

00:49:40.480 And actually, where we met was the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference.

00:49:47.320 I told a little bit about the story about how Stanford treated me, which is, I think, abysmally.

00:49:53.140 Yeah, well, let's delve into that a little bit because that's par for the course at modern universities as well at the moment.

00:49:59.020 So, what happened?

00:50:00.160 You published these studies.

00:50:01.720 Now, we should point out to everyone who's watching and listening that Jay is not exactly your fringe researcher, right?

00:50:07.980 Stanford's a major university.

00:50:09.960 He has a PhD in economics and an MD.

00:50:12.620 He's a very, very well-respected researcher and certainly not someone who's prone to grinding political axes.

00:50:18.900 And that's generally the case for epidemiologists and real scientists is they're not politically minded.

00:50:23.620 They're trying to, as much as it's possible, to follow the trail of the data.

00:50:29.020 And I certainly believe that you're in that category.

00:50:31.320 So, you published these papers showing what was good news, essentially.

00:50:34.900 This isn't as deadly as we thought.

00:50:37.060 And you produced a counterimmune response from your colleagues.

00:50:41.420 And so, what did that consist of?

00:50:44.300 I mean, I got accused of not knowing how to divide, essentially not knowing how to divide, doing the math wrong,

00:50:50.860 that there was still a possibility that every single positive result we found on these antibody tests were all false positives.

00:50:57.500 And then I started getting hit pieces against me, against my wife, against my colleagues.

00:51:05.020 I mean, it was very stressful.

00:51:07.280 Stanford reacted to those hit pieces in the press by giving them credence even when they knew for a fact they were false.

00:51:14.240 So, for instance, there was an allegation that the head of an airline company had given $5,000 to me and somehow it changed the result of the study.

00:51:25.660 But it was ridiculous.

00:51:27.480 The $5,000 went to Stanford in a gift account we used to offset study expenses.

00:51:32.820 We ran this study in two weeks or three weeks.

00:51:36.460 We organized it and ran it.

00:51:38.160 It was really quite a feat.

00:51:41.460 Right.

00:51:41.920 And we ran it very inexpensively.

00:51:44.960 I would never alter the result of a study based on what funders say. 0.94

00:51:50.940 It's ridiculous.

00:51:51.440 Well, and what benefit would that be to you anyways? 0.55

00:51:54.220 Like, if you're going to convict someone, accuse someone of a crime, you should at least have a motive in mind.

00:51:59.320 And $5,000 is a pretty cheap price for your soul, by the way, Jay.

00:52:05.000 And then, like, what's in it for you exactly?

00:52:07.740 What was the accusation?

00:52:09.660 You were falsifying the data for what reason?

00:52:12.160 Yeah, so, I mean, so Stanford, rather than just dismissing the allegations out of hand, they conducted, well, first they started to call it an investigation, but then they realized they couldn't call it an investigation because it was so ridiculous.

00:52:24.280 They called it a fact-finding mission.

00:52:25.820 Oh, one of those.

00:52:26.840 Yeah.

00:52:28.040 Yeah, and, like, I spent that summer just incredibly stressed.

00:52:33.080 Yeah, I bet.

00:52:33.520 Like, I'd never felt anxiety before.

00:52:36.280 I mean, I'd never written an op-ed before.

00:52:38.100 I just was a scientist, Jordan.

00:52:39.740 I wrote, I published papers for a living in peer-reviewed journals.

00:52:43.280 I was really happy with that life.

00:52:44.800 Yeah, yeah.

00:52:45.340 Hey, join the club, man.

00:52:47.660 Yeah, I know.

00:52:48.500 I thought about you a lot, actually, in those days, Jordan.

00:52:53.060 And I had to make a decision, you know, after Stanford cleared me.

00:52:59.020 They'd sent this very strong signal.

00:53:00.380 If I just went back to their whole life, you know, just quietly doing science, they would just let me go.

00:53:05.820 They would continue to be a good, you know, good faculty member and good standing.

00:53:10.940 Right, so despite the fact that you were innocent, you should shut the hell up and go back to invisibility, and then we'll let you, what will, we'll.

00:53:18.000 So what did the powers that be decide?

00:53:19.940 That as long as you were compliant and quiet, like a good faculty member should be, then all the sins you didn't commit would be forgiven?

00:53:28.220 Yes, exactly.

00:53:29.120 Yeah, how lovely of them.

00:53:30.280 That's so impressive.

00:53:31.440 And it was so stressful, Jordan.

00:53:34.060 I mean, like I said, I thought about you a lot in those days because I know what you went through.

00:53:38.200 But, you know, I lost, I generally am very good at dealing with anxiety.

00:53:41.760 I never in my life have felt anxiety.

00:53:44.260 I felt it in a deep way.

00:53:45.740 I lost 30 pounds of weight.

00:53:49.480 At one point, I was losing weight so quickly, I couldn't, I thought I was actually afraid for my life.

00:53:54.260 Yeah.

00:53:54.500 I was, I couldn't sleep.

00:53:56.980 I didn't eat.

00:53:57.940 I just obsessively worked trying to, like, address the damage.

00:54:01.660 And then at some point, at some point in, like, summer of 2020, I decided that, you know, what is my career for?

00:54:10.520 It's not, if it's just to, like, have a, you know, another CV line or a stamp.

00:54:15.300 It's just, I've wasted my life.

00:54:16.880 Yeah.

00:54:17.040 And I would speak no matter what the consequences.

00:54:21.000 And actually, then the anxiety went away.

00:54:22.660 Like, at that point, that decision, I think, was the right one.

00:54:27.660 People have two big classes of fear.

00:54:30.620 And they're archetypal.

00:54:32.820 And one is fear of nature and the other is fear of culture.

00:54:35.440 Those are good ways of thinking about it.

00:54:36.940 And you're afraid of nature because you could die.

00:54:39.800 You could go insane.

00:54:40.900 You could lose your mind. 1.00

00:54:41.840 You could die. 1.00

00:54:42.520 You could die while you're suffering.

00:54:44.360 That's worth being afraid of.

00:54:45.900 Second category.

00:54:47.560 You'll get mobbed, excluded, and alienated. 0.95

00:54:50.760 And then you'll die.

00:54:52.380 And so, when, and I've watched this with, like, 200 people now who've been mobbed and betrayed by the, by the, well, by the powers that be, let's say.

00:55:01.620 And every single one of them, with tiny exceptions, responds exactly the way you did, which is, it's as if something traumatic in an unprecedented manner has occurred.

00:55:13.800 And I've seen colleagues of mine who were, well, you said, for example, yourself, you weren't particularly prone to anxiety.

00:55:20.300 You know, fairly emotionally stable person.

00:55:22.400 I've seen people, colleagues of mine, who were the most solid people you could possibly imagine, like, literally hounded into the asylum by the, by the, by the forces of the mob. 0.96

00:55:33.200 It's appalling, this, this, this, this, this demonizing cancel culture driven by narcissistic psychopaths. 0.66

00:55:41.980 It's like, it could be the death of us all. 1.00

00:55:43.900 It's really bad.

00:55:45.100 And so, your response is absolutely typical.

00:55:48.280 It's interesting, though, A, when you, you make that decision to flip the, what would you say, to flip the, the, to invert the reality, to go on the offensive rather than to be defensive and guilty.

00:56:02.460 Then, well, that, especially if you are basing that on a genuine apprehension of your own innocence, that does change the playing landscape substantially.

00:56:13.360 And so, that happened to you when, that was in the summer of 2020?

00:56:16.900 Yeah, sometime in some, I talked to my colleague, a friend of mine, who I've written with many times, who said, I told him explicitly, I'm crossing the Rubicon.

00:56:25.740 I don't, I don't care about my reputation anymore, what I, you know, my whatever academic reputation.

00:56:30.740 I'm going to use what knowledge and, and, you know, sort of resources I have to say what I believe.

00:56:38.420 Yep.

00:56:38.660 Because I think that were there many, many lives at stake in the mistake, mistaken policies we've adopted.

00:56:45.840 And I have the, had the background and the, and the, you know, sort of the, the, the, the life story where I could actually try to make some difference on that.

00:56:55.640 Right, right.

00:56:56.380 After that, it was, it was just transformative.

00:56:58.200 I mean, I, you know, I, I also am religious and, you know, praying actually helped a lot.

00:57:02.020 But that's.

00:57:02.680 What were you praying for?

00:57:03.800 The summer of 2020.

00:57:04.240 What were you praying for?

00:57:05.480 Just out of curiosity at that time.

00:57:06.920 Just, just, just for, just, just for clarity for what, relief from the, the, the anxiety.

00:57:12.620 And then clarity for what I should do with my life.

00:57:15.460 Yeah, well, you know, one of the things that's worth knowing, and obviously you discovered this, is that there is nothing that will save you in a complex situation except the truth.

00:57:24.860 Now, it might not save you as well, but there is nothing else that you have.

00:57:30.440 And so when you're backed into a corner, well, first of all, you better scour your soul.

00:57:34.500 But second, what you've got to defend you, if you have anything, is definitely words of truth.

00:57:41.260 Words that you believe to be the case.

00:57:43.800 And so, and it's useful to notice that that can be on your side.

00:57:47.560 And, you know, you have to, I don't know, the other thing I realized is if I'm living my life just for myself, it's hollow.

00:57:53.680 If I, if I, if the, the purpose of my work before, I mean, if you look back on my work, I, what I wrote when I applied for tenure was that I was, I studied vulnerable populations.

00:58:04.060 The health and well-being of vulnerable populations and how government policies and economic, economic realities affect the health and well-being.

00:58:12.980 I mean, and if that, if that's true, that means that what I studied was for other people.

00:58:17.360 Yeah.

00:58:17.620 That my actions and my, and my, was not inwardly focused, but focused on, on, on the, the, the people that I studied.

00:58:26.080 Right. Well, so that means the crisis also forced you to really prioritize your values, you know, because, and it's tricky as a scientist, you know, and you see this when you're training graduate students is that, well, you have to follow the science properly and you have to be skeptical of your own results.

00:58:42.680 And you have to be sure you're not publishing merely so that you publish and merely to burnish your reputation.

00:58:49.380 And the same thing with attending conferences.

00:58:51.380 On the other hand, you do have to publish and you have to market and communicate.

00:58:54.740 There is a, there is a career development element to every enterprise.

00:58:59.680 Now, the question then becomes, well, what do you do when those are set at odds with one another?

00:59:04.240 And the answer is, well, if you're tilting towards pathological narcissism, you sacrifice the mission for the message.

00:59:13.420 And there's plenty of corruption in science that's merely a consequence of that.

00:59:17.680 But when you're backed into a corner the way you were, then you have to really start to understand what that means.

00:59:23.620 It's like, are you in this to do the good that hypothetically motivates the science?

00:59:28.120 Or are you going to sacrifice that, apologize, kowtow, and hypothetically protect your reputation?

00:59:35.500 And that's, you're done as a scientist if you do that.

00:59:39.060 I think you're done as an ethical actor.

00:59:40.720 I think you're done as a human being.

00:59:42.560 You are.

00:59:42.960 And you don't protect yourself against the mob because all that's happened is they've fundamentally emasculated you and you've been eliminated as a credible threat.

00:59:52.140 It's a very bad strategy.

00:59:54.600 So, well, so it's a relief to hear that you, you know, were able to see your pathway forward in the summer.

01:00:00.960 I'm sure that was utterly brutal.

01:00:02.420 It's hard to communicate to people just exactly what it's like to be a respected scientific practitioner and then to have all of that inverted and to see your colleagues fail to support you or participate in the inversion.

01:00:20.060 It's quite the illuminating experience.

01:00:24.220 Let's put it that way.

01:00:25.620 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:26.140 I guess I understood how excommunication worked.

01:00:29.680 Right, exactly.

01:00:30.220 That's what it felt like.

01:00:31.020 Yeah, you bet, because that's, that betrayal and excommunication, that's exactly what it is.

01:00:35.460 So then, okay, so you decided to, that you were, the devil take the hindmost and that you were going to say what you needed, what you believed to be true.

01:00:43.800 And so what occurred then?

01:00:46.480 So fast forward a few months, I, there was some, my colleague, Scott Atlas was advising the president of the United States.

01:00:52.760 And so I actually got to meet with the president.

01:00:54.380 But that never went anywhere.

01:00:56.500 The American president at the time, President Trump, he was, I think his instincts were against the lockdowns, but his, his, he basically thought that if he, if he lifted, if he let Tony Fauci not have the reins, that he would lose the election.

01:01:12.440 And so that was quite frustrating.

01:01:16.580 Fast forward a few months to October, 2020.

01:01:18.520 And a colleague of mine from Harvard, Martin Kulldorff, who's a fantastic biostatistician, he helped design the vaccine safety surveillance systems that, statistical systems that the FDA and the CDC use in the U.S. with the statistical work.

01:01:33.960 Invited me and Sunetra Gupta, who's a great epidemiologist at Oxford University, to a small conference in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

01:01:43.700 Yep.

01:01:44.500 We arrived basically just to compare notes.

01:01:47.320 Like we weren't thinking about issuing a statement or anything, but we realized that we'd arrived at the same place regarding the strategy of how to manage the pandemic.

01:01:56.540 The summer had seen a decline in cases.

01:01:59.580 There's some, some spread in like Arizona and the South and some other, some countries, but the threat of March seemed to have subsided.

01:02:06.660 But it was really clear from the data that the disease was coming back in the fall, that there was going to be spread of the disease again.

01:02:13.440 And, and it was also clear to me as a social scientist, looking at the pattern of political action, that the lockdowns were also going to come back because the fear was not gone.

01:02:23.600 The disgust was not gone.

01:02:24.820 All of that was still in place.

01:02:26.160 All the infrastructure for the lockdowns were there.

01:02:27.880 And so what we, we, we wrote this very short document, one page long, called the Great Barrington Declaration.

01:02:36.080 We wrote it in very simple language because we wanted to reach regular people.

01:02:41.840 Because I, I, I thought to myself and we thought to ourselves that it was really regular people that needed to know that there wasn't a consensus in favor of the lockdown.

01:02:51.360 That people were being misled, that the idea that all scientists agreed that there was a consensus, that the science said, let's lock down, was not true.

01:03:01.040 In fact, many, many reputable scientists disagreed with that.

01:03:04.900 And yet they stayed silent because of the fear of, of social ostracism, fear of, you know, Tony Fauci controls billions of dollars of, of federal money on, for research.

01:03:15.780 That, what's not just the money so that you can do your experiments, they, it controls the social status of scientists.

01:03:21.160 You know, you don't get tenure at a top university, medical university, unless you get NIH funding in the United States.

01:03:30.000 So it's the social status as well as even more than the money itself.

01:03:33.720 Well, it's not just the social status either.

01:03:36.160 We should be clear about that.

01:03:37.360 It's also your livelihood itself, right?

01:03:40.340 Because, so it isn't merely the fact that you want to elevate yourself up the status hierarchy.

01:03:45.100 It's that you want to keep your job.

01:03:48.200 And so this is, this is, this is nuts and bolts, this is, this is nuts and bolts material here.

01:03:53.980 Yeah, you know, I was very ill when the Great Barrington Declaration came out.

01:03:57.680 So I wasn't as, what would you say, aware of everything that was going on as I might have been under different conditions.

01:04:05.620 But one of the things I do remember, and I've been struck by this continually, is that, well, it was demonized and put off to the side as the work of essentially like scientific outsiders and extremists.

01:04:18.360 And what's so interesting about that, I found this repeatedly because I've talked to a lot of reprehensible people over the last few years, such as yourself.

01:04:26.160 And I found that even though I know as well as anyone how easy it is for people to be demonized for their views and how often that's purely an invention of psychopathic narcissists, very often, trying to score points at the expense of someone's reputation.

01:04:45.820 It's still the case that even the smallest slur in relationship to someone's professional reputation is enough to make, to make even me skeptical about who I'm talking to.

01:04:59.920 Because you think, it's very hard to think, well, if there's enough smoke, there's probably some fire, right?

01:05:06.620 And that's actually a pretty intelligent rule of thumb decision because there's 7 billion people out there.

01:05:12.260 You're not going to listen to all of them.

01:05:13.440 And so one way you cut through the complexity of figuring out who to listen to is you don't listen to people whose reputations have been savaged.

01:05:22.400 And you don't have time to sort that out like a legal trial, you know, but what it does mean is that reputation savaging can be weaponized.

01:05:29.980 And there are people who are absolutely stellar at that.

01:05:34.900 And the Great Barrington Declaration was definitely savage, ignored and savaged both.

01:05:39.940 And so, okay, so it launched when?

01:05:43.360 And this was in 2020?

01:05:45.060 Yeah, October 4, 2020.

01:05:47.180 I mean, the people that signed, like tens of thousands of doctors and epidemiologists signed it.

01:05:53.120 Nobel Prize winners signed it.

01:05:55.200 Almost a million people have signed it to date.

01:05:58.740 It went viral very rapidly.

01:06:01.420 Like we just put it on a web page and people just found it.

01:06:05.140 And I started getting messages from people saying, you know, thanking me for like saying common sense.

01:06:09.440 Protect vulnerable people.

01:06:11.200 Protect vulnerable people.

01:06:12.900 Lift the lockdowns.

01:06:13.760 Those are the two ideas of the Great Barrington.

01:06:15.560 It's the old pandemic plan.

01:06:17.060 It's the least original thing I've ever written in my entire life.

01:06:20.440 I mean, there's nothing new actually in it.

01:06:23.320 And certainly nothing radical.

01:06:24.580 I didn't think so.

01:06:28.260 But four days after we wrote it, the head of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling the three of us that were the primary co-authors of the declaration fringe epidemiologists.

01:06:42.860 Right, right.

01:06:43.440 And then he called for a devastating published takedown of the premises.

01:06:48.700 I started getting hit pieces written against me in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, a whole bunch of other.

01:06:54.840 I mean, the CBC hosted a panel of scientists who savaged us as wanting to let the virus rip and kill grandma.

01:07:03.880 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:07:04.580 Thank God for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

01:07:07.580 That $1.4 billion of government subsidy a year and a 1.9% market share.

01:07:15.540 They're quite the stellar bunch, boy.

01:07:19.760 The level of propaganda is remarkable.

01:07:22.620 I was calling for focused protection of vulnerable people.

01:07:25.860 I was calling for a conversation among public health people, how better to protect old people who are dying in droves as a consequence of not being protected by the lockdowns.

01:07:33.580 I wanted, you know, how you protect old people is complicated, right?

01:07:38.580 So it depends on the local living circumstances of each person, of the old people in the community.

01:07:43.640 The answer in, you know, Alberta, Canada is going to be very different than the answer in, you know, in, like, highly, in, like, you know, Southern California or something.

01:07:54.980 It's just going to be very different.

01:07:55.880 All those pesky complexities.

01:07:58.900 Yeah.

01:07:59.420 Well, you need local public health who know the living circumstances to participate in that discussion.

01:08:04.660 Think creatively about how to protect older people when you have this highly infectious respiratory virus pandemic going on.

01:08:13.020 Instead, we were demonized.

01:08:15.120 We were told that it was impossible to protect older people without a lockdown.

01:08:18.440 The lockdown didn't protect older people.

01:08:23.220 It hadn't in the spring, and it didn't protect them in the fall, and it continued to not protect them.

01:08:29.880 So, essentially, they closed their, the top of the federal public health bureaucracy closed the minds of public health against the possibility of focused protection.

01:08:42.220 Yeah.

01:08:42.620 By demonizing us.

01:08:43.780 And the purpose of the demonization was so that they could tell the public that every reputable scientist, the consensus of scientists, agreed with their plan.

01:08:54.340 Yeah.

01:08:54.740 Their plan to lock down.

01:08:56.320 Yeah.

01:08:56.520 Well, that, and I suppose the motivation for that was the ability to publicly trumpet the staggering effectiveness and decisiveness of their simple and potent plan to protect, right?

01:09:11.400 And so, for me, again, that's a kind of unbelievably narcissistic virtue signaling is you want all the credit that would go along with actually dealing with the problem while doing none of the effort whatsoever necessary to actually understand the problem and to implement the complex multidimensional solutions that would be demanded.

01:09:31.480 Yeah.

01:09:31.960 I mean, actually, I remember seeing a podcast with you and your daughter, I think, during that time.

01:09:37.660 I was quite moved, actually, by it, both by the devotion your daughter has to you and also the illness you were going through.

01:09:44.020 So, I don't think you have anything to, I mean, what you went through is tremendous.

01:09:50.440 Anyway, so, we wrote this, started getting, I mean, but the thing is, I was emotionally better prepared to deal with the blowback from that.

01:09:58.900 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:09:59.440 And it became this, like, this thing where it was clear that the purpose was to limit the reach of the declaration.

01:10:08.300 Many people still have not heard of it.

01:10:09.660 Yeah.

01:10:10.040 They probably should have heard of it.

01:10:11.860 And that partly succeeded.

01:10:14.240 Yeah.

01:10:14.380 But it didn't entirely succeed.

01:10:16.400 The nucleus of this anti-lockdown movement was put in place.

01:10:20.440 And then as time has gone on, what's happened is that that anti-lockdown movement, as people have seen the reality of what the lockdowns really have meant.

01:10:29.480 Well, lockdowns is not just, you know, you're forced quarantining at home.

01:10:33.340 Lockdown is the ideology that we must keep people apart from each other.

01:10:38.040 The ideology that we have to treat each other as biohackers.

01:10:40.440 And that the state has the right to impose that from the top down, right, which is a major part of the ideology, for everyone's good.

01:10:49.060 You know, one of the things I also knew, and I don't know how much you know about this, and maybe you know a lot about it.

01:10:54.700 You know, the Nazi eradication campaign started out as public health initiatives.

01:10:59.600 Like, the causal pathway is clear.

01:11:03.420 And so, and that disgust demonization was part of that process.

01:11:08.540 But it was all put forward initially under the guise of protecting the public and doing the best even for the suffering.

01:11:15.240 So, the Nazis were extremely good at leveraging a false compassion on the narcissistic front to produce unbelievably pathological outcomes. 0.57

01:11:23.160 And that went along also with the notion, the implicit notion that, well, the state has the right to do whatever's necessary if public health is at risk.

01:11:32.260 And it's whatever's necessary, that's the, it's like, really, whatever's necessary, eh?

01:11:37.800 Yeah, well, maybe you're, well, here's my new theory, political theory, or part of it.

01:11:43.840 But if your response to an emergency makes you terrified and tyrannical, and one of the consequences of that is your claim that the emergency justifies the granting of all due power to you, you are not the right leader.

01:12:04.000 And there's three levels of evidence.

01:12:05.940 Number one, you're frightened into paralysis by the emergency.

01:12:10.700 So, you're too small.

01:12:11.780 Second, you're willing to extend the use of tyrannical power to justify response to your fear.

01:12:20.520 That's also an indication that you're not just frightened, you're a frightened tyrant.

01:12:24.700 And third, the claim that you're making that the situation is so dire that you and the people who think like you must be given all the power is a moral hazard of the first order.

01:12:36.900 And so, there's three identifying features so that everyone listening and watching can understand who not to trust in the leadership position.

01:12:45.640 Is the emergency terrifies them, they become tyrants, and it's so convenient that they also get all the power.

01:12:53.460 It's like, no, those are not the leaders you want.

01:12:55.660 Not even if the emergency is real, let alone when it's manufactured, you know, for the benefit of people who want all the power and all the unearned credit.

01:13:05.260 Yeah, I mean, I agree with that.

01:13:07.640 I think that the people who draw power to themselves, you absolutely need to be skeptical.

01:13:15.400 At the very least, you want checks and balances, right?

01:13:18.500 So, like, imagine if we'd had an honest and open debate about pandemic policy, like, without this demonization, without this cancel culture kind of overlay.

01:13:29.340 We would have won that debate, Jordan.

01:13:31.400 Because it was already clear in October 2020, first, that the lockdowns had done tremendous harm or continue to do tremendous harm to the poor, the vulnerable, to working class people.

01:13:43.380 It was already clear that they'd failed to stop the disease from spreading.

01:13:47.000 Like, what success was there?

01:13:49.980 And then, third, it was already clear who the vulnerable people really were, like, the highest risk people.

01:13:56.900 Like, so, at that point, if there'd been an open debate without this demonization, the authoritarians would have lost the scientific consent.

01:14:07.480 I mean, at the time when I wrote the declaration, I thought we actually were in the minority among scientists.

01:14:12.640 Yeah.

01:14:13.520 I'm not sure that's true, actually.

01:14:14.960 Yeah, no, I suspect it's probably not true.

01:14:19.940 But it's also almost impossible to overestimate the probability that people will be silenced by intimidation.

01:14:29.600 And we should take this very seriously.

01:14:31.520 Like, look, you said—and this is borne out by the experience of literally the hundreds of people I've talked to to whom this has happened—you experienced the exclusion and mobbing as something akin to a life-threatening illness.

01:14:47.340 Yeah, so it's no joke.

01:14:48.560 It's no bloody wonder that people are afraid to speak out.

01:14:50.940 And could it be the majority?

01:14:52.220 It's like, yes, absolutely it could be the majority, because it's a minority of power-mad narcissists who twist the narrative to their liking and their—or to their advantage.

01:15:05.780 And they're perfectly willing to take out anybody who stands in their way.

01:15:09.220 And so it's certainly probable, I would think, that the more sensible scientists knew that something was amiss on the COVID lockdown front and were very hesitant to step forward and speak.

01:15:22.860 And you can say, well, aren't they cowardly?

01:15:24.680 It's like, yeah, maybe. 0.88

01:15:26.580 Wait till you find yourself in that position and see how bloody brave you are.

01:15:30.220 Because my experience has been that that kind of bravery is vanishingly rare.

01:15:36.160 Maybe 1% of people can manage it.

01:15:39.780 You know, and they often have additional resources that aren't available to everybody.

01:15:43.080 Like me, to the degree that I was brave, I suppose, I at least wouldn't shut my mouth.

01:15:49.400 You know, I had three sources of income.

01:15:53.460 Right?

01:15:53.860 So, and I lost two of them, but I didn't lose the third one.

01:15:58.240 And most people aren't in a position where they have established three independent sources of income.

01:16:03.640 So, like, I lost my professorship and I lost my clinical practice, but I didn't lose my business.

01:16:09.020 And so, and then I also had the support of my family, like full support of my family and extended family and of a very large network of friends.

01:16:17.560 And so, many, many people who are put in a corner have, some of them have none of those, what would you say, forces in their corner and on their side.

01:16:30.040 I mean, I have tenure at Stanford.

01:16:34.140 I wasn't sure that that tenure would hold.

01:16:37.520 Yeah.

01:16:37.720 I mean, it was not clear to me.

01:16:40.460 I don't have, I had that one source of income.

01:16:43.660 But, you know, Jordan, I just don't believe that my life should be lived simply for that tenure or the money.

01:16:50.720 I think, and I lost a major source of support in many of my friends that I previously called friends I wrote with, broke with me.

01:17:00.720 Yep.

01:17:02.760 So, I lost that, but I didn't lose my family.

01:17:05.740 I didn't lose my faith.

01:17:08.180 And what I found in compensation was this tremendous community of people that saw what was happening and that found what I was saying meaningful to them.

01:17:21.180 I mean, I just, it's hard to convey to people how much that meant.

01:17:25.320 Yeah, right.

01:17:25.800 It really, it made me feel like my, that what I was doing was worthwhile, probably really for the first time.

01:17:33.160 I mean, it's fine to get CV lines with, like, you know, published papers and fancy journals.

01:17:38.200 But to actually have that move people to action, to give them the ability to speak up when an injustice is being done, that's, there's something, just you can't replace it.

01:17:53.760 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:54.460 Well, I guess that's the reward, that's the reward you accrue for having undergone the trials of exclusion and mobbing, right?

01:18:03.000 And that ability to ally yourself to the degree that you're extraordinarily careful and fortunate with what you believe to be true.

01:18:13.760 Yes, and that's definitely something worth, well, there isn't anything that's more worth discovering than that, some fundamental sense.

01:18:19.500 Now, let's talk for a moment about, you said that, you know, the Barrington Declaration was marginalized and demonized, both of those, with some success on both fronts.

01:18:29.460 And I would say, yes, with some success, but not with entire success.

01:18:32.600 But let's also talk about how your communication on the public front was thwarted.

01:18:40.080 So I've been watching the Twitter trust and safety, the former trust and safety executive, Yoel Roth, being roasted over a slow fire, or maybe a quick fire, in Congress with a certain degree of satisfaction.

01:18:53.660 And it's clearly the case that social media enterprises and Twitter, the most egregious among them, perhaps, although we don't know what happened at Facebook, etc.

01:19:03.120 You were definitely persona non grata on the social media communication front.

01:19:09.220 And so what do you make of that?

01:19:10.780 And how did that unfold?

01:19:12.460 Yeah, so I joined Twitter in August 2021.

01:19:14.740 I mean, I never had a Twitter presence.

01:19:16.460 In fact, I told my assistant professors and graduate students, don't join Twitter, just write scientific papers for a decade.

01:19:22.760 Yep, yep, yep.

01:19:23.720 So there was some irony in my joining Twitter.

01:19:26.900 What I found was that I felt like it gave me a voice, right?

01:19:32.060 I joined and almost immediately got 100,000 followers.

01:19:36.280 It was actually kind of, you know, it felt like I could have a platform.

01:19:40.940 Yeah.

01:19:41.580 But, you know, I would write messages and it would get attention of my followers, but it never went outside of my followers.

01:19:49.040 And I wondered about that.

01:19:51.580 When Barry Weiss wrote her Twitter files expose, what she found was that the day I joined Twitter,

01:19:59.180 I was put on a trends blacklist that guaranteed that my tweets, and I joined Twitter for one purpose,

01:20:06.660 essentially to communicate to the public the ideas of the Great Barrington Declaration,

01:20:10.740 to criticize public health when it was warranted to criticize public health,

01:20:14.500 to propose alternate strategies for managing the pandemic,

01:20:17.240 and to help create a community of people who, of scientists and regular people,

01:20:23.020 who would then have some tools to oppose authoritarianism where they were.

01:20:27.640 Yep.

01:20:28.800 You know, public health authoritarianism where they were.

01:20:31.020 That was the purpose of joining Twitter.

01:20:32.800 And then also to convince people that didn't necessarily agree with me,

01:20:36.380 or just didn't know my message,

01:20:38.160 that I had something reasonable to say about these topics.

01:20:41.500 So, to be on a trends blacklist, essentially what it meant was that I could not actually,

01:20:48.220 even though it looked to me like I was accomplishing something with Twitter,

01:20:51.200 and I was, I was with my followers,

01:20:53.040 but I wasn't accomplishing the broader purpose for which I had joined Twitter.

01:20:57.180 Yeah.

01:20:57.440 The purpose for which Twitter exists, actually, I think,

01:21:00.100 is to allow that kind of communication to happen at scale.

01:21:04.340 Yeah.

01:21:05.080 I have mixed emotions about Twitter.

01:21:08.840 It is an incredibly powerful tool, Jordan, as you know.

01:21:12.220 You reach political leaders, you reach journalists, you reach other scientists,

01:21:18.540 and you reach regular people in a way that's not possible with any other platform.

01:21:23.820 And I think in the right hands, it is a force, great force for good in society.

01:21:31.480 Yeah, but it's also a place where, like, what would you call it,

01:21:35.400 penny-ante petty tyrants can run roughshod invisibly behind the scenes.

01:21:43.460 And we've certainly seen no shortage of that on Twitter, 0.99

01:21:46.360 despite the fact that the legacy media, you know, damn their calloused souls, 0.92

01:21:52.480 seem to have no interest whatsoever on sharing the revelations that Musk has made public 0.96

01:21:57.400 about the unbelievably backbiting maneuvering that went on underground continually on the Twitter landscape.

01:22:06.120 So it's really pernicious, eh, when you're subject to the authoritarian constraint of your communication

01:22:12.840 in a manner that's actually invisible as well as lied about.

01:22:16.960 It's really something pathological.

01:22:19.340 And so what's your understanding of how your communication was restricted on Twitter?

01:22:25.140 So I actually got to go visit Elon Musk and see Twitter headquarters,

01:22:31.380 and they showed me their, they have a system called Jira,

01:22:34.660 where, you know, you have your own account.

01:22:37.040 I had my account, and they would have, you know, sort of marks on my account

01:22:41.100 for, like, what the restrictions were.

01:22:43.820 Literally, it said the words, trends blacklist.

01:22:47.480 That trends blacklist, I don't believe Twitter put in place on its own.

01:22:51.940 So I believe that that was the result of the American federal government

01:22:57.320 essentially asking Twitter executives to suppress.

01:23:02.120 Now, why do I believe...

01:23:03.020 Did you say trends, T-R-E-N-D-S, or trans? 1.00

01:23:07.920 Trends, T-R-E-N-D-S. 1.00

01:23:09.580 Okay, trends, yeah, okay.

01:23:11.080 Trends blacklist, got it, yeah.

01:23:12.720 So did that mean you couldn't trend?

01:23:14.240 Yeah, to prevent my tweets from trending.

01:23:15.460 Right, got it, got it.

01:23:16.880 So that meant you couldn't go viral, essentially, anything that you did.

01:23:20.240 Yeah, that's right.

01:23:22.680 How sneaky.

01:23:23.520 And you think that there was collusion between Twitter and the federal government,

01:23:28.420 and this would be the public health bureaucracy, essentially,

01:23:31.600 designed to stop you from being able to communicate your expertise.

01:23:36.580 Let's be clear about that.

01:23:37.740 Yeah.

01:23:38.140 Your expertise.

01:23:39.100 So I think a lot of governments did this,

01:23:41.360 but certainly the American government did this.

01:23:42.900 They adopted this strategy of limiting misinformation in social media settings.

01:23:50.120 Misinformation, yeah.

01:23:52.300 And the way they did that is they garnered the cooperation of social media companies

01:23:58.400 essentially by threat, right?

01:24:01.720 If you don't do this, we're going to regulate you out of existence.

01:24:06.180 That started with this, like, national security issues around election issues and national security issues,

01:24:13.560 but I think it bled over into this pandemic management.

01:24:17.160 Russia collusion, conspiracy, fraud.

01:24:19.360 Yeah, and so, like, it bled over into this, into, like, communication about health risks and COVID, right?

01:24:26.840 And so, like, the Surgeon General of the United States had an initiative where he wanted to root out information.

01:24:32.420 Tony Fauci has an email with Mark Zuckerberg from the very beginning of the pandemic,

01:24:37.000 where Zuckerberg essentially offers him, it's redacted, but from the context, it's pretty clear,

01:24:42.520 some capacity to limit what Facebook actually, what you can post, people can post on Facebook,

01:24:47.300 to limit misinformation.

01:24:49.700 The social media companies were in regular contact with the federal government,

01:24:55.200 receiving instructions about what to suppress and, in many cases, who to suppress,

01:25:00.000 regarding specifically, you know, information about COVID.

01:25:05.180 And I know this because I'm part of a lawsuit that the Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General's offices

01:25:10.340 have brought against the Biden administration.

01:25:13.740 Yeah, right.

01:25:15.060 And that lawsuit isn't covered.

01:25:16.480 We deposed Tony Fauci.

01:25:17.900 We deposed, I think Jen Psaki is going to be deposed. 1.00

01:25:20.900 A whole bunch of, like, very prominent figures in the department.

01:25:23.940 When is this going to unfold?

01:25:25.480 It's been going on for, like, nine months now.

01:25:28.500 I mean, hopefully we'll get some decision in this coming year.

01:25:32.560 I'm actually quite hopeful about this because what we've uncovered is—

01:25:35.220 Have they testified?

01:25:35.820 Have Fauci and Psaki testified yet?

01:25:38.040 Fauci has. 0.65

01:25:38.740 I don't know yet if you've had Psaki in yet, but there was—

01:25:42.700 The judges granted us the ability to depose 10 major figures inside the Biden administration,

01:25:51.140 including the FBI agents and others.

01:25:54.620 It's revealed a vast censorship enterprise.

01:25:58.040 Well, we should also define for everybody who's listening and watching

01:26:01.520 what fascism means, technically.

01:26:04.780 So fascist means to bind together.

01:26:08.060 And the fascist ethos is something like unity of corporation, government, and media at the

01:26:14.420 highest levels of function.

01:26:17.780 And so the idea is essentially that the triumvirate acting as a unity at those high levels can be

01:26:27.120 extraordinarily efficient, and if it's benevolent, and if it's benevolent, there's the rub, then it can march forward, you know, with unparalleled success.

01:26:35.520 And you get people like our appalling prime minister admiring the CCP, for example, for its ability to move forward on the environmental front without, you know, paying attention to such niceties as, let's say, parliament and public opinion.

01:26:50.080 And that's that delusion of fascist deficiency.

01:26:52.760 And the thing about United Systems is they can move very, very quickly when they need to, and that's well and good if they're moving in the right direction.

01:27:01.220 But the right direction is hard to determine, and if they're moving in the wrong direction, then God help us all.

01:27:06.980 And this collusion between the social media companies and the security apparatus and the broader media world, which is still occurring because they won't cover the Twitter files, is fascist in the highest order.

01:27:21.280 And it's definitely a threat to the integrity of, well, I would say, proper governance worldwide, but certainly proper governance within the United States.

01:27:29.660 It's appalling beyond belief.

01:27:32.060 I think part of the reason the public hasn't woken up to it, this is certainly true in Canada, Canadians would rather believe, for example, that the trucker convoy was run by mega-inspired American Republicans who wanted to destabilize Canadian democracy, which is what our bloody prime minister told them.

01:27:49.820 They would actually—

01:27:50.700 Jordan, they had bouncy houses.

01:27:52.380 They had bouncy houses for kids.

01:27:54.280 I mean, they had, like, Sikh music and—I mean, it was like—

01:27:58.380 Well, there's a huge coterie of Sikh truckers in Canada. 1.00

01:28:01.260 Yeah, well, Canadians would rather believe that, though, that this was a conspiratorial enterprise motivated, really, by—and funded by mega-Americans.

01:28:10.160 This is the Canadian narrative.

01:28:11.420 Most Canadians still believe that, 51%.

01:28:13.980 And the reason they still believe that is because it's easier to believe that than it is to believe that you can't—that your leaders, Chrystia Freeland, Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, are compromised entirely by their globalist utopian agenda and lying about absolutely everything, and that you can't trust the legacy media anymore.

01:28:35.160 And Canadians just—they're not capable of swallowing that bitter pill. 0.99

01:28:40.320 And, like, I can understand why, you know, in our country, and in yours, too, to a large degree, the fundamental institutions have been reasonably trustworthy for a long time.

01:28:50.940 And then to understand that, no, you have to now go out and—you have to go and ferret out the truth, and that there are conspiracy-like actions proceeding on all sorts of domains.

01:29:03.780 It's like, well, it's no wonder people don't—can't go there with ease.

01:29:08.320 Yeah, I mean, I don't want to believe it either.

01:29:11.320 Well, right.

01:29:11.740 Until I see it, I'm going to assume the best of people, but when you see the federal government acting in this way, in direct violation of fundamental commitments to civil rights, like free speech, and, you know, it's just there in emails in black and white, where—and, you know, and the way that they convey it, it's as if they—it's so obvious that they're doing the right thing.

01:29:41.900 Oh, yeah, we just suppressed this because we didn't want people to be harmed by this bad information.

01:29:46.620 Well, how do you know this information is bad?

01:29:48.100 Well, that—this is the question.

01:29:50.480 Like, I now virtually instantly distrust anyone who uses the word misinformation or the word disinformation.

01:29:58.900 It's like, I see, you think there's some gold standard by which factual information can be revealed, that its validity can be revealed.

01:30:09.800 That's just self-evident.

01:30:10.760 You can set up some fact-finding committee that can just differentiate between the true facts and the false facts.

01:30:16.920 It's like, why do we need the scientific enterprise, then, if it's so bloody obvious?

01:30:20.880 And why is there political discussion?

01:30:23.240 Well, no, no, there's misinformation, and we need committees to deal with it and to suppress it, which they certainly did at Twitter.

01:30:29.460 Jordan, it's a new dark age, right?

01:30:32.540 That was the feature of the old dark age, was that there was a high clerisy that could inerringly distinguish truth from falsity and suppress falsities for the benefit of the public at large.

01:30:46.140 That is the age we are currently living in.

01:30:48.940 Yeah, well, it's a degenerate, it's a degenerate theocracy, right?

01:30:52.860 But the, what, running itself under the guise of a kind of rampant secularism.

01:30:59.140 It's really something to see, and it's so interesting.

01:31:02.160 Maybe we could touch on this in a minute.

01:31:04.040 I knew 10 years ago that the woke types in the universities would go after the STEM fields, and everyone thought at that point that I was being conspiratorial and paranoid, and I thought, no, no, I know how scientists work.

01:31:20.380 Most of them are obsessively focused on their narrow specialization.

01:31:24.300 That's not an insult.

01:31:25.860 That's their job.

01:31:26.960 That's their job, is to be 80 hours a week focused on that specific issue to understand it deeply and communicate that to the rest of us.

01:31:36.340 More power to them.

01:31:37.420 But it means that they don't have a political bone in their body, especially the real scientists, especially in STEM.

01:31:44.300 And so when the woke political mob of narcissists comes for them, they won't have a hope of resisting.

01:31:52.660 And, well, obviously, that's exactly what's happening.

01:31:55.540 In the California system now, UCAL system, 80% of applicants to STEM positions are rejected on the basis of inadequate diversity, inclusivity, and equity statements.

01:32:07.620 You see that Texas yesterday, the University of Texas, revoked its commitment to requiring DIE statements as a precondition for employment.

01:32:18.780 And then, of course, denied that they ever had such a policy in place to begin with.

01:32:22.200 I mean, those are just the de facto loyalty oaths.

01:32:26.180 I mean, that's essentially what they are.

01:32:27.440 Like, you're, I mean, it's a statement of faith that you belong to this particular, you know, faith tradition.

01:32:35.100 Yeah.

01:32:35.540 You know, documented by the DEI statements.

01:32:38.140 I mean, I just, I think it's one of these things where, like, I never imagined that the free countries of the West would come to a situation where, you know, like, the basic civil rights, checks and balances of power, all these, like, norms of liberal civilization that I thought everyone agreed with were actually in question.

01:33:02.340 I mean, you saw it earlier than most.

01:33:04.000 I certainly, you know, before the pandemic, I would have thought of them as annoying, but I wouldn't have thought of them as an existential threat.

01:33:10.920 And now I've really come to around.

01:33:12.840 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:13.480 Well, it's, yeah.

01:33:15.400 Well, the, well, you know, the other thing we can think about, too, here is that we don't want to underestimate the pervasive attractiveness of this set of ideas.

01:33:25.260 I mean, it devastated Eastern Europe, Russia, and China, and that's still going on in China. 0.97

01:33:31.440 It's still going on in North Korea.

01:33:33.260 These are attractive ideas.

01:33:34.940 They promise universal brotherhood.

01:33:36.620 They promise an egalitarianism that is not only impossible to produce but would be horrible in its realization but that looks on the surface extraordinarily attractive.

01:33:49.140 They appeal to a kind of domestic ethos, too.

01:33:51.840 You know, Ben Shapiro said to me one time, he said, well, at home, I'm a communist.

01:33:57.080 And what he meant by that was that in his family, he has children, it's to each according to his need and from each according to his ability.

01:34:04.480 And that might work perfectly well in the domestic environment, you know, in a limited manner, but as a scalable political enterprise, it's a complete bloody disaster.

01:34:14.520 It's not obvious why.

01:34:16.240 It's just obvious that that's the case.

01:34:17.960 And, you know, when I grew up, we had the Soviet Union as evil example of this woke pseudo-communist ideology, and that kept everybody in check. 0.97

01:34:29.320 But that threat diminished substantially in 1989, and it allowed these ideas to hold sway once again in the West, you know, aided and abetted by idiot intellectuals, especially on the literary criticism front. 0.96

01:34:42.340 But that's just pervaded the institutions of higher education like mad. 0.97

01:34:47.940 But we need to give the devil his due.

01:34:49.720 I mean, these ideas hold sway over the minds of hundreds of millions of people because they offer attractiveness on the utopian front that's not easy for conservatives or classical liberals or scientists to mitigate against with their insistence on individual autonomy and responsibility.

01:35:10.600 And the importance of tradition and the necessity of rational inquiry.

01:35:14.780 Even communities.

01:35:16.020 Like, I'm a big—I mean, I think communities are incredibly important.

01:35:20.040 Like, thick communities where people are embedded and they draw support.

01:35:26.020 Like, even people who think like that should be opposed to these ideas because these ideas destroy communities.

01:35:32.820 We need to have checks—I mean, just—let's go back to our discussion about lockdowns.

01:35:36.820 What do lockdowns do other than destroy communities?

01:35:39.360 It's not an individual thing to say—individualistic to say that lockdowns are a bad idea.

01:35:47.240 They destroy the communities that provide support for the poor.

01:35:50.800 And the poorest communities, most—well, the other thing, too, is that, look, for all you leftists who are listening, all 15 of you—and this is why I like people like Russell Brand and to some degree Joe Rogan.

01:36:03.500 It's like, why do you believe, if you're on the left, that fascist collusion at the highest levels of power is going to serve the communities that you might even rightly be attempting to serve?

01:36:17.300 You know, the genuine leftists, and I've known many in my life, say, labor leader types, you know, who are trying to give a real voice to the working class, and that's a necessary thing to do.

01:36:26.620 And to push back against the gigantism and excess of the corporate world, that's a valid thing to do.

01:36:33.240 Why in the world would you think that this top-down collusion between government, state, and media is in the interests of the people that you purport to serve?

01:36:42.220 It's a preposterous notion.

01:36:43.760 I mean, I've encountered many people on the left, like the honest left, who joined the anti-lockdown movement.

01:36:49.820 Sunetra Gupta, who wrote the Great Banjo Declaration with me, for instance, is famously on the left.

01:36:56.380 So I think that there is a tradition within the left that is solidly devoted to basic liberal ideas, just as there is on the right.

01:37:05.360 And I think that's the coalition that will win.

01:37:09.660 And the lockdowns, the whole strategy we followed to drive the pandemic, at least for me, has just brought me to a realization about how unimportant other kinds of political designations are.

01:37:25.820 You know, Democrat, liberal, Democrat, Republican.

01:37:28.420 I mean, really the key thing, the key unifying thing is this, you know, this devotion, this commitment to checks and balances, a commitment to sort of enlightenment ideals, a commitment to religious tolerance, to freedom of speech.

01:37:46.160 And freedom of speech and conscience probably foremost among those.

01:37:50.220 And I think foremost because, as far as I can tell, all the other processes that keep systems of good governance in place are dependent, how could it be otherwise, on freedom of conscience, thought, and speech.

01:38:04.840 Because that's the mechanism by which complex problems are solved.

01:38:08.900 And so if you give up that mechanism, that's the mechanism of thought itself.

01:38:13.000 And I mean, what we're doing today, well, both of us are trying to update our views of the world to some degree, as well as to communicate with other people.

01:38:20.740 But that's all part of the process of analysis, diagnosis, and repair of systems that have gone astray.

01:38:27.860 And unless you can engage in that freely, then they just go more astray.

01:38:32.400 And the consequences of that, as we saw with the lockdown and are continuing to see with the lockdown, the consequences of that are, well, we'll see how cataclysmic they are.

01:38:42.380 You know, I thought, for example, that part of the reason we're in a war with Russia is probably, perhaps, and maybe this is only 10% of the problem or less, world leaders weren't getting together and talking because of the lockdowns.

01:38:56.740 It's like, I don't know how often the president of the United States and the leader of Russia should get together and talk, but never is definitely the wrong answer.

01:39:06.900 And if you think you can do that electronically and do it successfully, you're naive and careless beyond, what would you call it, beyond forgiveness, beyond the requirement for forgiveness.

01:39:20.060 And I think it extends not just to, like, top leaders of countries, but also just to regular interactions with people.

01:39:28.220 Like, a lot of the fracture of communities, you know, like, just take my own example of the friendships that have been broken.

01:39:37.940 If we'd actually been meeting with other faculty members regularly just because we ran into them in the office building, I just find it hard to, like, it would have been much more difficult to demonize me.

01:39:49.680 If Francis Collins or Tony Fauci had just called me and spoke and said, here's what we were thinking, here's why we're concerned, let's change it.

01:39:57.880 Could you change it, do it this way?

01:39:59.300 Like, I mean, you know, I might have gone along to, like, try to, like, figure out how to accommodate their concerns.

01:40:04.660 Like, rather than demonizing me, we would have found a better way to, like, manage it.

01:40:08.380 I mean, science works by those kinds of personal communications.

01:40:12.780 It's, you know, yeah, you write papers, but then you go talk to people.

01:40:15.980 Those conferences are actually worthwhile because now you get to know really who they are, how they think.

01:40:22.160 Yeah.

01:40:22.380 It's a human endeavor.

01:40:23.580 Yeah.

01:40:23.740 Just as, you know, and to, like, to have this ideology where you have to be a part or replace everything just by Zoom just doesn't work.

01:40:32.000 Yeah, well, the other thing that's lurking underneath all of this that we're going to have to contend with is that I think virtualization breeds mistrust.

01:40:41.200 And so what I've noticed when I've conducted virtualized enterprises is that they go fine when everyone agrees, but they go very badly as soon as disagreement emerges.

01:40:54.340 And I think it's because if I disagree with you, it's easy for that to produce a halo and for me to think, well, we disagree on everything.

01:41:01.340 If we were getting together and having a coffee and bumping into each other in the hallway, we'd see that it's one minor disagreement in a host of agreements.

01:41:10.620 But that requires personal contact.

01:41:13.440 And so that's foregone in the virtual world.

01:41:16.480 And then I also think that this is worse, and I don't know how dangerous a threat it is, but I think it's a paramount threat.

01:41:23.600 I also think that virtualization enables psychopathy because psychopaths are actually held at bay by the perils of face-to-face communication.

01:41:34.160 And if they can operate behind the scenes, which they can certainly do online, there's an immense amount of online criminal activity and exploitation.

01:41:43.360 I mean, the whole pornography industry is nothing but that.

01:41:45.760 And then immense, like, swaths of criminals operating online, and then all the troll behavior as well. 0.97

01:41:52.800 Like, we may be setting up a world in the virtual space where the psychopaths and the predators and the predatory parasites, because that's what a psychopath is, they can just run roughshod. 0.94

01:42:07.040 I mean, there's a counterbalancing. 0.80

01:42:09.120 So I know people that speak anonymously where they legitimately fear their job, and they wouldn't speak otherwise.

01:42:18.000 So there's a temporary—so I don't know how you manage that.

01:42:21.080 I don't either.

01:42:21.660 Maybe you authorize.

01:42:23.220 It's a complicated problem, but I hear you.

01:42:26.260 I mean, it is—one of the costs of going online, going on Twitter—

01:42:29.880 Oh, yeah.

01:42:30.220 You're subject to tremendous calumny from, like, random people.

01:42:34.540 Oh, it's unreal.

01:42:35.080 I mean, I don't know.

01:42:35.600 You know, I think that was happening before I went on Twitter, though.

01:42:39.840 I mean, just in the minds of some people or the reputation-destroying mechanisms of some people.

01:42:45.980 It's just—so you just—I view it as, like, at least I'm in a position where I can speak and get my message out.

01:42:53.240 And if they're going to, you know, sort of attack me in these vile ways, I just—at the very least, I can have my own say.

01:43:01.860 Yeah, yeah.

01:43:02.380 Rather than staying silent.

01:43:03.600 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:43:04.580 Yeah, no, no, people will say things on Twitter that would instantly get them punched in real life.

01:43:09.860 And so—and they do it all the time.

01:43:11.980 And there are people who do that just for entertainment.

01:43:15.060 And, I mean, the clinical literature on that is becoming extraordinarily clear.

01:43:18.280 So the particularly pathological venom-spewing trolls, you know, a small percentage of the anonymous accounts are genuine whistleblowers. 0.98

01:43:28.180 Most of them are Machiavellian, psychopathic, narcissistic sadists. 0.98

01:43:32.660 And that's what the clinical literature shows. 0.97

01:43:34.660 And they have full sway on Twitter and disproportionate effect.

01:43:39.300 And that's warping the entire political landscape.

01:43:42.340 Anyways, that's grounds for another conversation.

01:43:44.640 We should actually wrap this up.

01:43:46.220 I guess there's lots of other things we could talk about, but we covered a fair bit of territory today.

01:43:50.980 And so it's a pleasure to get to sit down and talk with you at some length.

01:43:55.800 We didn't manage that at Stanford, although we got to know each other at least a trifle there.

01:43:59.760 So, what's next as far as you're concerned?

01:44:03.400 What are you attempting to do right now?

01:44:05.400 Maybe we can close with that.

01:44:07.440 Sure.

01:44:08.100 So the main thing is the public health authorities made tremendous mistakes.

01:44:12.900 We can just see at least that, at least mistakes during the pandemic.

01:44:16.880 The public deserves a full accounting of what decisions were made, who made them, and why.

01:44:25.080 There needs to be an honest COVID commission on the order of like the 9-11 commission that honestly looks at these and answers these questions.

01:44:36.160 So I've been working on a document called the Norfolk Group document.

01:44:39.780 You can go to norfolkgroup.org and find it with a bunch of my colleagues where we've set an agenda.

01:44:46.620 It's just questions that an honest COVID commission would ask.

01:44:50.800 And so I want to help set that agenda.

01:44:52.340 Well, maybe we should do a podcast with like two or three members of that group.

01:44:56.300 When you guys are far enough along to feel that that would be useful, why don't we do that?

01:45:03.620 And you could suggest to me who these people should be.

01:45:06.460 Okay, let's do that.

01:45:07.560 And so any sense about when that might be?

01:45:11.380 So the document is actually done.

01:45:13.240 We've been working on it for the last eight months.

01:45:15.160 And now I want to spend time educating, you know, willing legislators and others who are going to be conducting these inquiries.

01:45:23.800 Okay.

01:45:24.420 So basically in every country.

01:45:26.700 So right now the next step I think is we're going to try to translate it, get it translated into multiple languages.

01:45:31.660 And try to contact commissions that are already starting to form, you know, parliamentary inquiries or commissions that are already starting to form.

01:45:41.660 So that they have these set of questions in front of them that they can ask.

01:45:45.040 These are reasonable questions.

01:45:46.300 Like, you know, what was the basis for deciding that children should have the vaccine?

01:45:53.420 Yeah, yeah.

01:45:53.960 I'd like to know the answer to that question for sure.

01:45:56.640 Because I just can't figure that out at all.

01:45:58.180 We just lay out the evidence.

01:45:59.120 Yeah.

01:45:59.680 We just lay out the evidence.

01:46:01.260 But, you know, why wasn't a—why didn't the randomized trials for children for this vaccine have as a clinical endpoint the prevention of hospitalization or death?

01:46:10.600 Why did it only have antibody production as the clinical endpoint?

01:46:13.200 Yeah, there's a good one.

01:46:14.060 I mean, like things like this.

01:46:15.080 Yeah.

01:46:15.260 Why weren't the trials required to produce all-cause mortality as one of the outcomes?

01:46:22.200 An excellent question.

01:46:23.360 Yeah.

01:46:23.460 Because that would have helped us understand what better to do with the vaccine.

01:46:27.280 Yes.

01:46:27.600 So I think—I mean, like, anyway, so we have, like, we have, like, a just—it's, you know, on 10 different—why were the schools closed?

01:46:33.320 What was done to mitigate the harms of school closure?

01:46:36.120 Things like this.

01:46:36.740 Yeah, yeah.

01:46:37.340 So questions that need to get answered.

01:46:39.180 The public deserves an answer.

01:46:41.600 And the goal is—at least my goal is not necessarily indict anybody or anything in terms of, like, criminally or whatever.

01:46:49.780 My goal is so that we, in public health, understand the right lessons, reform, repent even.

01:46:57.680 Yeah.

01:46:58.120 And then so we don't ever do this again.

01:47:00.520 Yeah.

01:47:00.660 But we respect civil liberties next time.

01:47:02.980 I think the outcome of any honest process will be that lockdown will be a dirty word, that we will shudder and whore whenever we hear it, and anyone that proposes it will be seen as a charlatan.

01:47:12.400 And I think that is the ultimate outcome of any honest inquiry.

01:47:19.580 And I'm going to—I'm working toward, like, making sure those honest inquiries happen.

01:47:22.660 Yeah, well, amen to that.

01:47:23.900 Okay, so for everyone watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Jay for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:47:30.580 I usually walk people through a bit of a biographical discussion about how their career unfolded and how their interests, their meaningful interests, made themselves manifest in their life.

01:47:41.060 So that's on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:47:43.240 For all of those of you who are watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

01:47:47.440 And Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, thank you very much for talking to me today.

01:47:52.540 It was a pleasure to walk through all this, I suppose, a strange sort of pleasure to walk through all this dismal material with you.

01:48:00.700 But to see it laid clear in the manner you managed it, that's extraordinarily helpful.

01:48:07.080 And so—and thanks to the crew here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for helping me out today to make this happen.

01:48:14.820 So, good to see you, Jay, and, well, we'll talk again when the Norfolk Group project is ready to accrue some additional public communication.

01:48:27.340 Thank you. Thank you, Jordan. A great honor to talk with you.

01:48:29.800 Good to see you.

01:48:31.660 Hello, everyone.

01:48:32.480 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 23, 2023

334. Covid 19 Mandates： Silencing the Opposition ｜ Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya

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