Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and author of Tell Your Children, critiques COVID-19 responses, arguing lockdowns harmed children (school closures, outdoor activity bans) while death counts were inflated by PCR overtesting—e.g., false positives linked to comorbidities like heart attacks. He dismisses mask efficacy (except N95s), citing studies like Denmark’s, and warns of vaccine side effects (17% severe reactions for Moderna), questioning why trials underrepresented high-risk groups (e.g., 40K participants with only 5% over 75). Both Rogan and Berenson blame media groupthink—suppressing lab-leak theories, racializing vaccine prioritization (e.g., Harold Schmidt’s "leveling the playing field" logic), and conflating dissent with conspiracy theories—while noting tech platforms amplified fear. Ultimately, they argue institutional bias and profit motives (e.g., Pfizer/Moderna stock gains) have distorted public health decisions, prioritizing ideological narratives over evidence-based risks. [Automatically generated summary]
I think maybe more people expected it to be hostile because you were not...
I want to say you're anti-cannabis, but I do think that you had a realistic perspective on cannabis.
And we've talked about this before outside that I think a lot of people that are pro-cannabis, like myself, They don't want to look at the negative aspects of it because they think it'll harm the chances of it being legalized.
And I think that's irresponsible and I think it's not honest.
And now that it does look, let's be honest, like it's going to be legal.
You know, certainly, you know, every state or, you know, there are major states that voted to legalize like New Jersey and Arizona in the last election.
And nationally, it looks like it's going to be legal.
It's time for people in the industry, I think, to start being more honest about who this product is for and, you know, and some of the downsides.
And I think that in particular, one of the things that disturbs me the most is that there has been no accounting for the damage that has been done by forcing people to shut down their businesses.
And the only thought has been making sure that the ICU beds are open and that somehow or another people are able to get treatment for this.
There's been...
Openly criticize the fact there's been no discussion whatsoever about getting healthy.
No one's encouraging you because they're worried about being called a fat shamer or some other nonsensical term.
I think we had an idea of what COVID was going to be.
I certainly did for the first few weeks.
I was like, this is going to kill everybody.
I thought I was going to kill 10% of the population.
I was really worried about it.
I remember being in the supermarket stocking up and thinking, Jesus Christ, this feels so crazy.
But I also remember thinking it was going to last two weeks.
And now here we are, still reacting this way.
We're now deep into December, almost into January.
of my friends were caught including young jamie over here jamie beat it in a day uh tony hinchcliffe has it now he was sick yesterday and today feels good and this is the case with so many people whereas if they got the flu i knew i know a lot of the same people that have got the flu they were knocked down into the dirt for three or four days maybe a week maybe two weeks um it's different than we thought it was going to be but we're still reacting like it was the same thing and
And then there's this fear porn that everybody likes to peddle.
It's this weird thing where everybody wants to think that if you catch it, you have a 10% chance of dying or the sky is falling.
It's just...
It's weird how people want to pretend that it's still what it used to be.
And they want to say, you know, you should think about this because 300,000 Americans have died.
Here's the most fundamental fact about COVID that the media doesn't report accurately.
How stratified the risk is by age.
So you mentioned people who might be overweight or have diabetes.
All that stuff does add to your risk.
What really adds to your risk is age.
And people don't really, I think this is true of almost everybody, People don't really have a good idea of what What risk is, right?
So if I say, you know, like it's riskier to be old and have COVID than to be young, you might think, okay, it's like two to one or three to one or five to one.
It's kind of like normal risks.
Like what are the odds that the Jets are going to beat the Rams?
Like one in 10, you know, last week.
And that happened.
The Jets beat the Rams.
This risk is not like that.
It's like somewhere between 100 and 10,000 times the risk.
First of all, that happens to people with the flu.
I can point you to stories from 2018, you know, young, healthy teacher dies of the flu.
It just was never reported nationally this way.
That's A. B is, if you look at those cases, oftentimes there's weird idiosyncratic stuff happening, of which the number one thing is a lot of those people were put on ventilators very early.
They were put on ventilators and they never came off.
We're not having that as much anymore.
And if you look, the average age of death is actually creeping up now, it looks like.
So what happened was, in March especially, back when everybody was terrified, there's something called a nebulizing procedure.
So there are procedures where you're inserting tubes into people and it releases a lot of aerosols from them.
And the fear was, this is going to get aerosolized and the nurses and the doctors are all going to get sick and die and we're going to have no medical staff.
Ventilator avoids that problem.
So the feeling was, let's ventilate very early.
This is a really serious disease.
Let's get everybody we can on ventilators.
Remember when we needed 100,000 ventilators, 200,000 ventilators?
That was the idea.
We're going to ventilate really early.
Turns out that was a terrible idea.
It turns out that, as Elon Musk likes to say, your lungs, if you ventilate too early, it's just like a meat bellows, and you can blow out people's lungs if you overventilate.
And it looks like that happened.
I will tell you, not that we don't use ventilators for COVID, but right now in the United States, I believe there are about 8,000 people on ventilators.
So again, we're not saying this disease isn't real, and we're not saying that some people, unfortunately, aren't going to have these bad reactions to it.
But back in March, maybe he gets put on a ventilator, and maybe he dies.
Okay, so that's one issue with the death counting, is that so many of the people—so let's say you're—and I urge people—one of the things that I've done a couple times on Twitter that always gets an interesting response is you can go look at coroner's reports, especially in Milwaukee where they put them all online, of people who've died.
So you can actually see the people who have died of COVID and you'll see how sick they are for the most part.
I'm talking about people in their 80s and 90s who have multiple severe comorbidities.
So in that case, it's really hard to tell.
Did this person die with COVID or from COVID? You know, if my heart is failing and my kidneys are failing and I get this thing and I die the next day...
Okay, I died.
Did I die?
Did I die with COVID? Or did I die two weeks before I would have died anyway?
unidentified
And we're counting that as from COVID. Or maybe even a year before you would have died anyway.
When we count deaths, the states have a procedure, most states.
They look at positive tests and they match them with death certificates.
So let's say you had a positive test tomorrow.
And let's say it was 38 cycles.
They're not going to tell you that, but it was 38 cycles.
You are not very sick at all with COVID. But you're in a registry somewhere.
Your name's in a registry.
A month and a half later, you die.
Let's say you get hit by a car.
That will still initially come up as a positive COVID death because you had a positive test and you died within a specific amount of time after having that test.
So you're saying that if you have this tiny amount of COVID in your system, you never wind up getting sick, but yet you have a heart attack a couple weeks later, three, four weeks later, they will still call that a COVID death, even though you never got sick from COVID. 100%.
Is it because they don't have the resources to differentiate between the people that have died from heart attacks where it's clear, oh, we looked at the person, they had a very small amount of the virus in their system.
Four weeks later, there's no way they were sick from that.
It's a function of decisions that have been made along the way.
So they could have set the PCR threshold at lower.
They could have set it at 30. They were aware from almost the beginning of this issue that you can find a comment from Fauci in July talking about this.
And certainly they knew well before this.
The idea was we want to know So as broadly as possible, how many people have this?
And then secondarily, we wanted to find deaths from COVID as broadly as possible.
Different states have different levels, but in most places it's 37 to 40 cycles.
Which again, means that a lot of those people at the high end are not sick, and they certainly had COVID at some point, but they probably don't have it anymore.
Here's the other reason to do this show.
If you set it really high, you're going to capture people on the way in, just as they're getting sick.
So if you're truly afraid of, we want to quarantine everybody really early, then you have to set the threshold really high.
So that, to the extent there's a logic behind it, that's the logic behind it.
But it has all these negative side effects.
So there was one other point I wanted to make, but I'll remember it in a second.
So the negative side effects would be that they're inflating the number of people that not just have it but die from it because of the fact that they're making sure that these deaths that get linked within a certain time period.
Oh, here's, okay, so there's a negative for the person who's tested positive, because you then have to isolate yourself, you can't work, you know, you're scared.
And then there's this negative for society with the death counts later.
Right, but isn't that negative, that you have to isolate yourself and you can't work?
That seems very rational.
Because if you do test, like let's say you're on the way in, you catch it, you have a little tiny bit of it in your system, and they're like, you have to isolate, you have COVID.
What if that person just went out and started drinking, got run down, the COVID multiplies, and then they have a full-blown case, and then they start spreading?
Back in March and April, people said, COVID deaths are being undercounted.
We're not doing enough testing.
There's all these people dying.
They're being called pneumonia deaths.
It's probably COVID. That was probably true at the time, especially in New York and New Jersey.
You can look and you can see the number of what are called excess deaths, more people dying than you would expect in a normal year, was higher than the number of COVID deaths.
And a lot of those deaths were in people who had pneumonia.
Okay, so that looks like, hey, we didn't even, you know, this is even worse than we thought.
We're capturing, we're not even capturing everybody who died.
Okay, but that was March and April.
Let's talk about what's happening now.
We know the PCR tests are going to capture a lot of people who aren't sick anymore and who maybe never were sick.
We know that some of those people are going to be classified as COVID deaths.
Again, I'm 88. I somehow was asymptomatic a month ago, but I got a positive PCR test.
Now I die because I'm 88. That's a COVID death, okay?
What we're seeing now in the United States and certainly in Europe, we don't have data as good in the U.S. from the last couple weeks, but we have some pretty good data from Europe and the U.K., is that the number of COVID deaths, when you add it to the number of non-COVID deaths, is not as high as the overall number of deaths you would expect. is not as high as the overall number of deaths So what does that tell you?
That tells you that some non-COVID deaths are probably being classified as COVID deaths these days.
So back in March and April, there were more people dying than you would have thought based on the number of COVID deaths.
Now there are fewer people overall dying than you would think based on the number of COVID deaths.
And I've got to add one more thing.
I know this gets complicated, but it's worth thinking about.
We also know that a significant number of people are dying from lockdown.
And the number one way you can look at that is overdose.
Overdose deaths in this country have been terrible for years.
This year it looks like they're off the charts.
So if 20 or 30,000 people, and that's probably a reasonable estimate, 20 or 30,000 extra people are dying this year from overdose alone, That should push up the number of overall deaths.
And then if you'd add the COVID deaths, it should be even higher.
When you put these three things together, right now you're getting fewer deaths than you would expect.
Again, what I'm trying to say is, I know this math can sort of seem complicated and the stacking can seem complicated, but right now it looks like a significant number of deaths that are being classified as COVID would have occurred anyway.
And are just sort of being shifted into the COVID pile.
And that was not so true a few months ago.
So when you see 3000 people died today of COVID, Until we get the true mortality figures for this year, for November and December, we're not going to know if that's really true.
I understand that people want to be cautious, right?
And that's one of the reasons why they've classified things the way they have.
But is there a financial incentive for hospitals to classify deaths as COVID? I have a friend, people love to make fun of me because I say these things, like I have a friend and this is what happened,
but I have a friend, his grandfather died and they never tested his grandfather, but they listed his death as COVID and he was very old and he was in a nursing home, but they never tested him for COVID. So the short answer to that is it doesn't seem, and I've done a fair bit of work on this, it doesn't seem like there's a financial incentive to classify deaths as COVID or non-COVID. There's a financial incentive for hospitals to classify cases as COVID. Okay.
Because you get, and this is known, this is not a secret, you get a 20% bump in your reimbursements if you classify cases COVID. Now, they're not going to lie, okay?
That doesn't mean they're going to say, you know, Joe went in for, you know, whatever, surgery on his hand and he has COVID. What it means is they're going to test you for COVID. Where are they getting this bump from?
But is it also possible that wearing the masks and this practice of socially distancing and that people being paranoid and washing their hands and all that stuff has reduced the number of flu cases?
When you hear the word droplet, you know, you're not a scientist.
You think, oh, that's like a spit globule or something, right?
No.
All of this stuff is happening at sizes that are far, far too small for people to see, okay?
The virus itself is about 60 nanometers, okay?
A nanometer is one one billionth of a meter, okay?
Too small for you to even imagine seeing, okay?
Most of the virus, when you exhale, it looks like, is in droplets that are smaller than 5 microns.
A micron is one millionth of a meter.
5 microns is one five thousandth of an inch.
If you're wearing a bandana, or you're wearing a cloth mask, or you're wearing a standard surgical mask, Even if it's fitted right and people don't wear them right, okay, they wear them off their noses, they wear them around, it's not stopping enough of the virus to matter.
If you're wearing an N95, okay, if you're actually a doctor or you care enough to put on an N95 and wear it even though it's uncomfortable and it's fitted properly, you might actually have a chance to stop some of the virus on both the way out and the way in.
If you're wearing one of these regular masks, it does nothing for you to protect you.
And the best you can say about this idea of my mask protects you is that there is marginal evidence, marginal evidence, that maybe it reduces some of the viral load on the way out.
If you can reduce the viral load on the way out, you would reduce the amount of people that you infect.
Or you would reduce the amount of viral load that the people that you infect take in.
And that does seem to have a significant impact on whether or not you get sick, right?
Like people that work in ICU wards or they're around people that have COVID. They're wearing M95s.
But if they don't, they're taking in more viral load, right?
Rather than someone who just comes in close proximity to someone who has COVID. Well, you might get the tiniest amount of it, and your immune system can fight it off.
But don't you think that one of the things that's happening with California is that people are living in close proximity to each other and they're forced to go to work.
Like, a lot of the people that are getting it are in poor neighborhoods.
A lot of them live with multiple family members in the household and they're all on top of each other.
And The fact that they're stuck inside would actually kind of accentuate the spread of this disease.
But they're catching it because they have to go to work.
The kind of study you're talking about, where you would do a cluster trial where you'd give sort of two cities and have one of them wear masks everybody and one of them not wear masks, has never been done, is basically impossible.
Ideally, you'd try to find two cities that were basically at the same place on the curve, and you'd say, hey, City A, Des Moines versus Omaha, or whatever.
First of all, you'd have to make everybody in the one city wear a mess and make everybody in the other city not wear a mess, and that would be unethical.
People have to agree to do this.
And second of all, it's just impractical.
So what we're left with, what the pro-mask people are left with when they talk about papers is there's really three kinds of papers.
One is the kind that talk about the theory that you've had, which is, yay, it looks like this might reduce the viral load.
Wouldn't that be a good thing?
Okay, that's one kind.
The second kind is what are essentially lab trials where you put a mask on a mannequin or you put it on a human volunteer and you see how many particles come in and out.
The third kind is we're going to look at how things changed after a mask mandate was imposed.
And so there are papers in all of those categories that show that masks seem to work.
But they're not very good science.
The good science would be the kind that I'm telling you about, and we've never done that.
And the only time we've done it with trying to see if masks protect the wearer, in general, those papers, including the most recent one, this big Danish mask study, show that masks don't protect the wearer.
And I'd say that most serious people don't disagree with that.
The only argument is, does my mask protect you?
And what I'm telling you is, yes, you can build a case for that.
And it can even sound kinda plausible, but when you look at the evidence, it's not really there.
I kind of hate having to talk about masks because masks are the thing that make me sound sort of the most like conspiracy and kind of out there because I know most people support mask wearing.
I'd rather talk about things like school closing and lockdowns.
Because they didn't exist 10 months ago because this virus is not particularly dangerous to me or you or my kids or my wife.
And I'd rather just get it and be done with it than take a vaccine that's shown to have 17% serious side effects after the second dose in people who take it.
One in 1,000 people who got the Moderna vaccine after the second dose had a fever of 104 degrees or higher.
And most of those people were taking Tylenol or Advil or other stuff to bring down the fever.
Let me tell you, if you call your doctor and tell him you have 104, he's going to tell you if it doesn't go down pretty soon, you should go to the ER. So one in how many again?
There's some evidence that for the Moderna vaccine specifically, so everybody develops antibodies, but T-cell immunity is more lasting, and it's not clear that the Moderna vaccine produces complete T-cell immunity.
Then you have, then your T cells are, you know, if this thing comes back in your body, they're going to recognize it and they're going to ramp up your immune response.
This is different to me for a couple of reasons, okay?
This technology is very new.
These have not been in humans before, okay?
This is not, you know, this is not something that we've been working on for 50 years.
And the virus itself, unfortunately, what it looks like is, you know, the virus itself is quite dangerous to people, again, in their 80s, their 70s, you know, 75 and over, you could say is the breakpoint.
The adverse responses go the other way.
It looks like the younger you are, the more serious they are.
So what I tell my mom, if she says to me, you know what, I think I should get this.
So bacteria, I mean, there are other kinds of viruses that can also cause the common cold.
Rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, but the coronaviruses cause the common cold too.
What you're talking about with penicillin is those are bacteria.
So those are generally more susceptible to treatment.
These viruses were just not that good at treating.
Oh, I wanted to say one last thing about the particles, and you mentioned how many particles, possibly it's more particles, is more likely to get you sick.
The size of the particles might also matter.
So with anthrax, famously, If an anthrax spore gets into your lungs, it's terrible.
I mean, you have about an 80% lethality rate of anthrax getting into your lungs.
If it gets into just your nose, it doesn't do that.
It has to get all the way down.
So it is possible, and I'm not saying this is true, it is possible that by filtering out larger particles, as masks do, what you're left with is more dangerous particles that are more likely to get into your lungs.
But it would protect you if we're talking about a distribution of the viral load, then it's got to be protecting you in the same fashion that it's protecting other people from you.
There's a virtue signaling thing going on as well that is unfortunately just a general part of communication through social media today.
That if you're not in compliance, if you're a rebel, if you go outside the lines and you say something, hey, I don't think this is the right way to do it, people get very angry.
People were very angry at people saying that maybe these lockdowns were a bad idea eight months ago.
That now it's the general consensus that the lockdowns are terrible.
The only people that seem to like the lockdowns are people that are independently wealthy or really crazy progressive people that think the government should pay for everything and that we should siphon off the money from the wealthy people to pay people's mortgages and rents.
And there's a lot of that discussion, which is...
There's some logic to it.
Like, why should corporations be getting bailed out?
And why shouldn't people that need their rent and their mortgage pay get bailed out?
Like, this doesn't make any sense.
And if you look at the bill that was passed, I mean, I went over it last night, and it's There's a lot of weird shit in there.
Why are we giving all this aid to foreign countries in this bill?
Why is there a part of this aid bill that makes it a felony to illegally stream?
They sneak things into these fucking bills.
These people are monsters.
They really are.
This should have been a real clear-cut thing.
Aid to people that have lost all their income because of this and they need a stimulus.
The fact that they added in a felony provision for people who stream movies and profit from them.
Well, what happens is the idea is this thing's going to pass anyway, so you help out your favorite lobbyist, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you sneak something in.
This is why Tell Your Children actually matters in this debate.
I wrote this book and you can say...
That's the pot book for folks.
You can say this guy, he doesn't understand.
A lot of people just like to get high and they can handle it.
It shouldn't be criminal.
Minorities bear the burden here.
It's wrong.
Let's legalize.
Okay, totally reasonable.
And by the way, alcohol kills a whole lot of people.
It's legal.
It's advertised on TV. It's legal.
The rules should be the same.
I totally get that, okay?
If you read the book, it's about something else.
It's about this is psychiatrically harmful to a lot of people and we're not talking about it.
And by the way, there's a downstream violence that comes from that sometimes that we're not talking about either.
To me, those things, if you read the book with an open mind, are pretty factual and inarguable.
It doesn't mean, by the way, that you can't then say cannabis should still be legal.
You can read the book and agree with it and say, but you know what?
It should still be legal for those other reasons.
Fine.
That is not the way the book was treated last year.
Okay?
It was, you hate black people, you don't understand science, you're cherry picking, go to hell.
Okay?
So when I saw this happening this year with COVID, and I saw the New York Times where I used to work, and you know what?
People can yell at me for saying I used to work there, but I worked there for 10 years and I was a really good reporter there, and I'm not going to back down from my credentials because I am a good reporter.
You can say...
You can say, you know what?
Like, lockdowns are necessary, and we need to protect these old people, and you know what?
We can't let the hospitals get overrun.
But if I present evidence to you that's contrary, don't just shout at me that I'm an idiot and don't know what I'm talking about, okay?
It's not going to work.
It didn't work with Tell Your Children, and it's not going to work this time, okay?
And what I recognized was that, unfortunately, And in sort of the elite levels of the media, you know, The Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, the groupthink is overwhelming.
It's overwhelming on cannabis and it's overwhelming on all these woke progressive issues and it's gotten much, much worse since I left The Times 10 years ago.
And I don't know what's going to turn it around, okay?
And it has terrible effects.
Let me give you one example, okay?
We should all want to know where this virus came from.
I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, liberal, conservative.
I don't care what country you live in.
You should want to know if this is the result of a Chinese lab accident.
And there's some evidence of that.
We can talk about that later, okay?
And you should at least want to know that there's been a complete independent investigation into this, okay?
This thing has messed up the world in a mammoth way this year.
And at the least, we should want to know where it came from if it did come from some kind of accident.
I'm not saying the Chinese released it intentionally.
I'm saying there might be evidence that there was an accident.
Because if that happened, we better make sure it never, ever, ever happens again.
What happened in March was the progressive media...
First of all, they were terrified because of what was happening in New York, what seemed to be happening in New York, and they all thought they were going to die.
And then once they realized they weren't all gonna die, they realized that they could beat Donald Trump over the head with this, and he would lose the election.
And they did, and he did.
And look, I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat.
Well, we were criticized on the podcast because I had Brett Weinstein, who's an evolutionary biologist, who discussed all the reasons, scientific reasons, why there's evidence that indicates that this is not a virus that naturally occurred.
You would think that people would want to put those two together, but It was something from the beginning that this groupthink was established that you are not to question that.
And there was a whole article written about promoting this dangerous conspiracy theory that this came from a lab that's been disproven.
Near the most important part of it, the part of it that binds to this receptor on your cells that enables it to get in, it's called the receptor binding domain, is pangolin.
Okay?
So it just happens that it's a perfect cut of mostly this virus that we know was in this lab, this bat virus, with a pangolin virus, with a tiny addition that enables the spike to attach more efficiently. with a tiny addition that enables the spike to attach Okay?
It's called the fur and cleavage.
And again, we're at sort of the limits of my knowledge.
I don't want to talk too specifically about it.
But somehow this virus just happens to be mostly bat, a little bit pangolin, and we can't find any evidence of a virus that's like that to a 99 percentile in the wild.
And believe me, don't you think the Chinese have looked in the last year?
Or wouldn't they have looked if they thought they could find something?
When SARS came, the original SARS, not SARS-CoV-2, they had found the viral host within a matter of months.
I mean, the zoonotic one, the animal viral host, in a matter of months.
And they published a paper on it.
There's been nothing like that.
Now, you can choose to believe that's because, you know what, it's just in some cave in China that they haven't found the real thing yet.
Or you can choose to question, as you said, there's this level 4 BSL lab in Wuhan where this thing happens to seemingly have emerged from.
Yeah, if you talk about it, you're a Trump supporter.
Yeah, the group thing is, it's so strange with social media because the consequences of being attacked are so real.
People do get emotionally devastated by these gang attacks, and they are very bullying.
I mean, they really are bullying.
And people don't think of it as bullying because you're not physically in front of someone and you're not intimidating them and scaring them, but you know what you're doing.
And I've learned that there was one thing in May where I really got dogpiled.
And the only thing to do is not to respond, to turn the computer off for a few hours and just let it go.
Because the one thing about the mob is when they realize they can't touch you, when they realize that they can't get you fired, that you have some independence, they will generally move on.
But if they can touch you, they will.
So I got my one last book here.
The reason that I am able to write about this stuff in the way that I've been is because after I left The Times in 2010, I wrote spy novels for a number of years.
And I was paid pretty well.
I was fortunate.
This novel, believe it or not, I wrote in 2019. It's called The Power Couple.
It's these concentrated attacks and this distortion of who you are.
I don't mind if you're upset at who I actually am, but when you distort who I am and what my positions are on things, just because you want people to attack me...
Well, then people are not going to trust you now.
And that's one of the things that's happened to the people that know me from this podcast.
They know me from 1,500-plus episodes that are more than three hours long.
Often, they know who I am.
So if you say that I'm this hateful person who just wants to attack trans people, no, I'm not.
Awesome human being and one of my favorite guests ever.
My position was about an MMA fighter that wasn't telling people that they were male for 30 years, were only female for two, and then were fighting unbeknownst females, you know, and beating the fuck up.
And I was like, this is crazy.
And the only reason why...
I jumped in.
It's because you've entered into my world now.
Now you're into the world of fighting.
Like, I'm a martial arts expert.
You can't tell me there's no difference between male and female frames.
Male and female power.
There's a lot of variables.
And you can't deny those variables just because you want to be woke.
And then people...
The response to that is disturbing, but...
Ultimately, it will do them in, because people know what it is, and the reaction to it has been less and less effective.
People realize it's more and more thought of as being hysterical and not based in reality.
But it's a dangerous time, Joe, because, you know, so Trump, look, Trump lost, there's lots to dislike about Donald Trump, and You know, who I voted for doesn't matter, but it's disturbing that in anonymous polls before the election, basically one in ten Trump supporters wouldn't tell pollsters that they were going to vote for him, right?
I mean, the fact that they're that afraid of, you know, that people believe that the consequences of them may be so severe that they're not even allowed to talk anonymously about who they're going to vote for, that is not a healthy sign for our democracy or anything else.
Yeah, it's not a healthy sign for communication, but it's also like he's such a polarizing guy.
It's just he's the wrong guy for that.
I think he's the right guy for people to understand that It is possible for someone who's outside of the system, who understands the system, to win and become president.
Then there could be someone who's maybe not nearly as offensive, but not the person they want into office, and they might use the same strategy and tactics because they've already been sanctioned.
And that is what's happened with COVID. Our response to COVID is dangerous in and of itself, but it is even more dangerous as a signal of both legacy and tech censorship of ideas that don't fit the sort of Silicon Valley, D.C., New York norm.
And I also think there's a thing that's going on where people had locked into a mindset that they had at the beginning of the pandemic where this is going to devastate the population and kill a bunch of people, or a large percentage, I should say, of the people, 10% or whatever the fuck that get it.
Why is it okay to go to Walmart, but not to go to a church, right?
But yet it's still happening.
You know, in my state in New York, they're talking about a complete lockdown again.
It's as if we've learned nothing in the last few months.
And as you and I were sort of starting to say a few minutes ago...
There's actually evidence that lockdowns are counterproductive because they force people into their homes and most transmission happens inside, not outside.
There's not that much you can do once this becomes endemic.
So if you're not New Zealand, if you can't sort of close your borders and quarantine everybody for 14 days and be some island in the Pacific with 5 million people, Basically, there's a few things you have to do, right?
You have to stand up the hospitals and make sure they have adequate equipment and that if there's a regional real crisis that you get some extra nurses and doctors in there.
You need to encourage people who are sick to stay home.
I mean, that's been good advice forever.
If you're sick, stay home.
If you have to go out, wear a mask if you're sick, okay?
There's not actually great evidence that hand washing does anything, but we should all be washing our hands.
It's a good idea.
And, you know...
In moments when there's a big surge, would it make sense to sort of shut down, let's say, arenas?
I mean, those are all shut down already, but I'm talking about if we had a more normal response to this.
So you say, we'll postpone a concert.
Maybe we'll close bars.
That's about it, Joe.
The problem is, that doesn't get Tony Fauci on TV every day.
That doesn't get Governor Cuomo a book deal and on TV. When you say to people, you know what, we're going to get through this...
We're going to function as a society.
Oh, and look, if there's a way to protect nursing homes, because half the people, almost half the people who are dying from this are dying in nursing homes or congregate care settings.
So those people are the people who are vulnerable.
Maybe, you know, is there a way to sort of like try to install better ventilation in those nursing homes?
Is there a way where staff should be tested every day?
And if you have a positive case in a nursing home, that person gets moved.
Yes, maybe there are things we could do.
Unfortunately, the idea of closing off nursing homes is not a great idea, and here's why.
Look, those are not great jobs.
Those are tough jobs for people.
And one of the ways that you can be sort of sure that people are actually being taken care of, the residents in the homes, and they're not being neglected, is having family members come in, right?
So the person who is demented and is shitting themselves is getting cleaned up and not getting bed sores.
Having family members keep an eye on nursing homes is unfortunately kind of necessary.
And by the way, even if that's not happening, these people with Alzheimer's or dementia, when they don't have families, they just sail off into space if people are not visiting them and talking to them and trying to keep them there.
And it's pretty clear that deaths of people with Alzheimer's and dementia are up this year, independent of COVID, again.
And that's because they're being neglected in these nursing homes.
So shutting off nursing homes from society, even though it sounds like a good idea, we've got to protect these people, isn't necessarily a great idea.
In general, the idea should have been, we're going to do the minimum to sort of make things work, and we're going to manage through this.
Once we realized it wasn't the plague, once we realized that 10% of people weren't going to die, that somewhere between 997 and 999 out of 1,000 people who get this will survive, It still means that people are going to die, and it still means, you know, it's a big country, it's a big world.
The numbers can look kind of ugly.
We should have said, the idea is going to be not to screw up society.
And by the way, here's the one thing, Joe, and I will go to my grave being furious about this.
The schools should have stayed open, and to the extent they closed, they should have reopened within weeks, okay?
That's what they did in Europe, and they continue to leave them open, even now, even when they had this second wave.
If all the schools are shut down, and you're saying that there's no factor with the children getting it in school and transmitting it to their parents or their grandparents...
Well, once it was established that the risk for the actual children themselves is extremely low, my question when they were like, we've got to protect these children, this was the talk of my kids old school.
I was like, well, what do you do when it's the flu?
And once they did that, once the government stopped sort of, you know, lying about who was most at risk by far, Behavior did start to change and eventually things got better.
So that's sort of happening with this in a hundredfold.
We're not being honest.
So a lot of people who are very low risk are terrified, right?
A lot of these middle-aged people and young people, young millennials, they're scared to death of this thing for no reason.
Yes, I know, but I'm not saying that it's not logical.
It's clearly logical, right?
but I'm saying these things that you think are going to be the end of the world and aren't, we never seem to...
No one wants to bring any of that up.
You might be bringing it up now because you're kind of a guy that's not afraid to talk about controversial subjects like that, but that's not something that you're going to see Fauci discuss, who was at the forefront of the fear campaign.
Well, he said the only reason why he did it was because he didn't want people to go out and buy masks and then healthcare workers and first responders weren't able to get them.
Okay, so naturally generated immunity in general, and again, I don't want to talk like a virologist.
I'm not a virologist.
My understanding of this is that naturally generated immunity, in other words, you get the actual illness and you beat it, is stronger in general than vaccine-generated immunity.
So why are we encouraging people who have naturally generated immunity to bother with the vaccine, which at best will give them the antibodies they already have, and at worst, they'll have some kind of, you know, anaphylaxis.
I think that the reason that it's being pushed is the same reason that you're seeing lockdowns again right now, which is it's part of the societal slash public health slash political pressure to get everyone vaccinated.
So, if the incentive is to get people vaccinated, and this is the reason why they're locking down, where is the directive coming from?
Like, who is benefiting from this?
Or who, I should say, who is pushing this idea that the way to move forward is to vaccinate everybody, and one of the ways we're going to be able to vaccinate everybody is to force a lockdown?
I've got to say, if you wanted to go deep, Alex Jones, you would say the reason why they're doing the lockdown is because they want people to take the vaccine, and this is why they're setting this up.
You think the best way to beat COVID is to get everybody vaccinated.
And yeah, there's going to be some adverse events, but you know what?
Most people who get it, the vaccine will be fine.
Nearly everybody, okay?
And maybe they'll have a couple days of fever, and maybe that fever will be bad, but they'll be fine, okay?
COVID kills people.
And you sort of ignore the fact that mainly, you know, 90% of the people it kills are over 70, or, you know, whatever the numbers exactly are, but it kills people.
You want that to stop.
Okay.
You know the vaccine is controversial and unpleasant to a lot of people, and we've never really forced adults to take a vaccine before.
Okay.
Lockdowns are also unpleasant, and you think they're useful.
You think they're going to slow the spread.
What is the disincentive for you to recommend lockdowns to Gavin Newsom or anybody else?
Okay?
You think they're good in and of themselves because they slow the spread.
And you're aware that they are going to, you know, make people more willing to take a vaccine.
That doesn't mean it's not a grand conspiracy.
It's not like Bill Gates is calling, you know, Rachel, what's her name in Los Angeles County or whoever, you know, whoever the equivalent is in Texas.
It's the incentives are lined up the same for everybody.
When you look at the fact that Los Angeles said the longest lockdown and some of the most stringent lockdowns, but yet has the highest number of cases.
What has been the explanation for that?
Cuomo had the worst reaction.
He was like, you know, you didn't want to get fat.
You shouldn't eat the cheesecake.
You didn't wear your mask.
He had the dumbest fucking down-home, dumbest Dopey logic for why people were sick.
He was literally blaming the people who were sick and blaming the imminent lockdown on people being assholes.
We told you to not see your family for Thanksgiving or Christmas, even though it's been the worst year of your lives and half of you are semi-suicidally depressed.
Too bad.
This is going to go on and on and on.
To me, that is completely inhumane, and it ignores the fact that lockdowns don't work!
Okay, if you lock down for a really long time, not weeks, months, okay, and you're in a place where the spread is not endemic, So Australia, you know, it's not New Zealand, okay?
It's a lot bigger than New Zealand, but it's still its own continent.
They locked down Melbourne in an incredibly strict way.
I mean, and they were serious about it.
They had drones patrolling, and they were tracking license plates, and they were arresting people, and they were literally breaking into people's homes who were, you know, pushing back against the lockdown.
The police weren't making arrests.
There's videos of this stuff you can see.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
You can see it.
Eventually, you are able to burn the virus out after a matter of months in that region.
It looks like.
It also helps if the weather helps.
Remember, it's the Southern Hemisphere.
They were going into the summer, okay?
The virus doesn't do as well in the summer in temperate areas.
L-O-L. There was a time, though, that I felt bad for her when she was sitting next to Trump and Trump was talking about, we could just inject them with disinfectants.
Hey, the guy that wrote the 1994 crime bill that put more people of color in jail for the rest of their fucking lives for nonviolent drug offenses than anybody ever.
Yeah, that guy?
Oh yeah, he's going to fix it all.
Yeah.
It's crazy how we look to these people like daddy.
Like daddy's going to come swoop in and fix everything.
They're career politicians.
They've been corrupted from the jump, from the moment they got into office.
I'm a cage-fighting commentator and a stand-up comedian.
I have no desire to run anything or have any power over anybody.
Definitely no run for office.
But I do have an interest in someone who's smart, who does not like the way things go and has that calling, is not a part of this system.
The problem is this system is so entrenched in And its own corruption, its own influence, and all of the lobbyists and special interests are so much that's like tangled in so many vines and the people that rise to these positions of senators and congressmen and mayors and they're so deeply infected by this fucked up system that we need someone that's outside of it or someone who is just of superior character.
Well, let me pivot to the vaccine again for a second, because you got me thinking about the vaccine when we were talking about this.
Here's what we've forgotten or not thinking about about the vaccine.
Vaccines are commercial products.
They're made by for-profit companies that have done exceptionally well this year.
The top executive at both BioNTech, which is the German company that makes the Pfizer vaccine, And Moderna have made billions of dollars in stock gains this year.
Billions.
Okay?
Generational wealth.
Now, I covered the drug industry for The Times for a number of years.
When they are moving towards commercialization, when they have put significant money into a product that they believe is effective or that looks to be effective, what's the biggest problem with these products usually?
It's not lack of effectiveness, although it can be.
It's side effects.
So they, in general, will not be honest about side effects.
And that is what's happening.
And I saw with drugs from major companies that I covered for The Times, the leading companies in the industry, including Merck, which everyone said was the best one, okay, in the whole industry.
And that's a very serious problem because if you're Pfizer or whatever, the last check on you is, are we betting the company here if something goes wrong?
In this case, if it all goes tits up with the vaccine, I'm not saying it will, it probably won't, they're going to say...
I think it basically exists because the company said, look, you know what?
If there's a one in a million chance that a healthy kid dies after our vaccine, or even one in 10 million, we're going to pay a billion dollars for that.
A trial lawyer is going to kill us for that, so you have to protect us.
The anti-vax community, there's a whole community of people that attribute a series of ailments, including autism, obviously that, to vaccines.
That is like the most maligned and marginalized of all the conspiracy groups.
Because the thought is that you're not just pushing flat earth theories, you're actually harming people because kids are getting measles now that weren't getting it before and there's a consequence.
Of like a real direct transmission of these diseases that we were protected against just a decade or so ago.
And honestly, I've never looked into sort of the anti-vaccine arguments.
I've always thought of them as being generally...
Flat earther, I would say, and conspiratorial.
With this vaccine, I know it's different because the technology is new, because they want every healthy adult to take it.
It feels different to me.
It feels more like a pharmaceutical product, and that's something that I know about.
But just to go back, okay, so you asked me, where do we know about this stuff?
Well, the companies, they will...
Look, there was a phenomenon for a long time.
It was called the file drawer clinical trial.
So you'd run a trial, and if the results were negative, you never published it.
Okay?
Or if it showed a lot of side effects, you never published it.
The FDA got the data.
But, you know, the FDA has a lot to do, and if the drug was already approved, they might never do anything with it.
So the companies, like, accumulated bad data from time to time that no one ever saw, except people in the FDA who often didn't do anything about it.
And it only came out during lawsuits.
Okay.
But the bigger problem is this.
It's that, yes, the companies will disclose the data, you know, sort of the pre-approval data, but And then they'll do what they can to downplay.
So if you're the CEO of Moderna or the CEO of Pfizer and you have a commercial product that you're getting paid for that's going into people's arms right now, do you want a discussion that says, hey, maybe only people over 75 should really take this right now?
By the way, the market size on that is 1 20th Of the adult population, and we should make sure everybody else who's taking it is well aware of these potentially, you know, painful side effects?
Or do you want the conversation around this to be, screw you, we're all getting it, and you're a real jerk if you even argue about it?
I mean, well, at this point, they don't have a legal obligation, although they might face criminal liability, I guess.
But I'm not saying that they haven't published it.
What I said to you is I got the data from their publishing it.
What I'm saying is the conversation is we're not having an honest conversation about it, and the companies have every financial incentive to keep the conversation dishonest.
Keeping the conversation dishonest, though, but not – But there's a difference between keeping the conversation dishonest and not publishing the results.
But you could keep the conversation dishonest, but yet still have that information available.
So if they had no concern whatsoever about profit, and they were just interested in transparency, and they came out and said...
Folks, this is the virus.
It's killing X amount of people.
This is the vaccine.
The vaccine is going to affect people in different ways, and a certain number of people are going to have a severe reaction that could potentially cause them to be hospitalized.
And they, because they have so much momentum and they sort of have the entire public health community on their side, they don't actually have to say that much right now.
I mean, there's been sort of positive stories written about Pfizer and Moderna.
They don't have to market this as much because everyone's marketing for them.
But let me give you another sort of on-point example of this.
So the Pfizer vaccine, there were 40,000 people in that clinical trial.
They enrolled 40,000.
They gave 18,000 or 19,000 the drug and 18,000 or 19,000 placebo.
A guy named Harold Schmidt, who's a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said openly that it was not fair to give this to older people.
By the way, there's a lot of older people who are black and Hispanic too, but that you should give it to essential workers first because so many of those people are black and Hispanic and older people are white.
I believe the state of Minnesota, someone sent me this, and I have to be honest, I didn't check it, I should have checked it before I came on with you, actually overtly followed this, essentially this pattern in their first recommendation round.
Study reveals impact of socioeconomic factors and the racial gap in life expectancy.
Right, but he's still advocating for balancing it out.
Harold Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults given the risks and that they are disproportionately minorities.
I get the risks part, but the disproportionately minorities part is like strange.
He says it explicitly.
Explicitly.
Older populations are whiter, Dr. Schmidt said.
Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer.
Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.
You know, I think there's been some really interesting cultural...
Moments with this.
And, I mean, you know, it's interesting that the people who are most afraid seem to be, or at least who are the loudest about being afraid, are women, oftentimes in 20s, 30s, and 40s, middle class, upper middle class, you know, the stereotypical Karen, right?
Although they're not all white, but a lot of white.
I had friends that have never thought about having guns.
They were telling me they want to get a gun.
How do I get a gun?
Can I borrow one of your guns?
They were saying a bunch of crazy shit.
And the gun ownership, you know, skyrocketed.
That, to me, shows the paranoia.
When liberals start waiting in line for hours to get a fucking rifle.
This is what we saw.
So these women who are particularly vulnerable in that group, right?
Because they're physically vulnerable.
And maybe their husbands are pussies.
And then they're there and they're stuck.
And they're like, no one's going to protect me.
No one's going to protect my children.
I'm scared.
And then they're addicted to social media.
And they're on Twitter all day because they don't have a job anymore because they lost their job and now they're economically terrified.
So they're online just hanging out with Alyssa Milano and tweeting up a fucking storm and they're all scared.
So I've answered it for you.
I think that's what it is.
They're physically vulnerable and then on top of that, they might not have the ability to objectively go into this stuff with an open mind and look at the variables and say, what is actually happening versus what is the media saying and why is the media saying it this way?
Well, one of the reasons why, unfortunately, is fear sells.
If it bleeds, it leads.
All this clickbait shit that people are diving into.
It's like very valuable.
It's a commodity to get people to click on things and to get people to pay attention to your videos.
The best way to do it has always traditionally been in terms of like mainstream media.
Scare the fuck out of people.
And they scared the fuck out of people.
It's something that's guaranteed to kill 20% of the people.
We're all going to die.
There was all these numbers that were being thrown around in the beginning of the pandemic.
No, I mean, you know, a couple interesting things.
You could see, even into June and July, I don't think you see it as much anymore, people talking about how they hadn't left their apartments, you know, in New York.
And these are people who are in shitty, small apartments.
Sometimes they have kids, and they're like, day 106, I'm beating this thing.
I'm like, the only thing you're beating is your own fucking sanity.
And it's also a short-term gain for long-term disastrous results.
The short-term gain of getting these ratings and getting all these people to pay attention and getting people locked into this concept of fear.
And then also it's supported by a lot of these people in the community.
But a lot of these people in these media communities, they're not robust folks.
I hate to say that, but they're not.
There's an issue with people that don't exercise, don't take care of themselves, aren't eating well, aren't taking vitamins, and don't do a deep dive into how to optimize your immune system and your health.
And these are the people that are telling you about what you're doing and who you're putting at risk when you want to have a birthday party for your kid.
Well, so there were a handful of case reports, okay?
It turned out this is really manageable.
You give kids steroids.
First of all, it can happen with the flu, too, right?
It's like myocarditis, right?
This idea, sometimes you can have an inflammation or an infection of the heart muscle with COVID. That's true of the flu, too.
A lot of this stuff is true with a lot of, you know, sort of standard viruses.
So there were case reports, but instead of saying...
And there's something called Kawasaki Syndrome, which affects kids, which is known.
This predates COVID, okay?
And occasionally kids can get really sick.
So this fit in these paradigms.
This was just a very rare condition that unfortunately a very few kids were going to get sick from after COVID, okay?
The media went crazy with it.
And that's one reason why the schools have stayed closed for so long.
And basically, by July, I mean, to a lot of people, it was pretty clear it was bullshit from the beginning.
But by July, even the people who had initially talked about it were essentially acknowledging it was bullshit.
The Times, they never went back.
They never said, hey, this doesn't look very serious.
Kids are not just not at risk from COVID. They're really not at risk from this pediatric syndrome we've been trying to scare you about.
They go chicken little over and over and over again.
And when it turns out they're wrong, and the hospitals don't collapse, and we don't need 100,000 ventilators, and a million people don't die, and the death rate is not 10%, and people are not dropping dead in the streets.
Well, what about people that have had COVID? Like, here's an example.
There's a guy named Cody Garbrandt.
He's a former UFC Bantamweight champion, stud athlete, got COVID, and it significantly affected him for a long period of time, and it kept him from fighting in a title fight.
He was supposed to fight for the flyweight title just last month and wasn't able to do it, or earlier this month, rather.
In those cases, though, it's going to take you some time to recover, right?
If you get sick with this, really sick with it, it's like anything else.
It's going to take you some time, right?
The question about long haul isn't those people, right?
It's whether or not...
Some 40-year-old who doesn't even know when she got it, and in some cases doesn't have either a PCR or an antibody test to show that she got it, is now complaining, I have fatigue, and I have pain, and I have brain fog, and I can't get out of bed.
So you can have blood clots if you essentially are immobile.
So was he in bed for weeks or months?
So we don't know.
So we're kind of speculating.
What I'm talking about is this much greater population of people who never really got very sick and now say they have long COVID. And that...
That seems to have a lot more in common with sort of fibromyalgia or restless leg syndrome or a lot of these quasi-somatic illnesses that unfortunately a lot of the population or gluten intolerance.
So what I'm saying is, with long COVID, it fits into this group of illnesses that are not well defined, that sufferers are pretty organized and loud about their symptoms.
And again, I'm not talking about your friends.
I'm talking about what you see online.
And unfortunately, Where there appears to be a significant, not always, but a significant somatic component.
But when you get a guy who's in his 30s, who's a stud athlete like Cody Garbrandt and is suffering from blood clots quite a while after the infection, I don't remember the exact time period, but that's unusual for any other kind of disease, right?
And in fact, they tried to treat it with anticoagulants and anti-inflammatories that prevent clotting, and I think the response was not actually that strong, for whatever reason.
But this is sort of like, again, we talk about things that I don't like to talk about because it's a level of medical precision that I don't want to pretend to, and that sort of...
Do you think, though, that the people—hasn't there been evidence, though, that the people that even didn't suffer from severe symptoms had some lung scarring?
So, there have been, like—this is sort of like the myocarditis issue.
This is about the, like, heart function issues.
There have been these small, open-label studies where, essentially, the researchers know that the people had COVID— And they've said, yeah, we see abnormalities here on scans, okay?
There's a couple things about that.
They're uncontrolled again, so you're not looking.
The right way to do this would be to take 100 people, 50 of whom had had COVID and 50 of whom had not.
The researchers don't know who's who.
Scan them all and see if you can find anything different.
When you're looking at people you know are sick and you're looking for abnormalities, sometimes you're more predisposed to find them.
That's why clinical trials are run the way they are.
The second thing is when these findings are announced, the media jumps them.
So you may remember in the summer, there was this issue of myocarditis.
It was healthy young people are getting, you know, inflammation of the heart and infections in the heart.
And we can't have football because of it because they're all going to drop dead.
The Big Ten got scared.
And it was based on this one German study.
Okay.
So first of all, the flu can cause myocarditis.
It's a common reaction to respiratory viruses.
Second of all, when you actually looked at this study—and again, this is something that I have to read about because I'm not qualified to judge the data myself— The data was much weaker than it appeared to be on first glance.
And in fact, the researchers basically walked back their conclusions.
None of that stopped the media from panicking.
So that's what happens.
And with long haul, it's an even bigger problem.
And here's why.
There's money at stake, again.
There's money at stake for people who want disability, and there's even more money at stake for doctors.
Okay?
Who want to treat these people and who want insurers to cover it.
My joke about this, which is not really a joke, is wait till you see ketamine for long-haul COVID. Okay?
There are going to be very expensive treatments that are offered for this that are going to have nothing to do with it.
I think two really big things have happened in the last, one in the last 10 years, one in the last 40 years.
And they mean that this is more likely to happen again in the future, unfortunately.
In a way, we're lucky with COVID because COVID is so non-threatening to most, you know, sort of healthy adults that this one's been a trial run, okay?
Because imagine if COVID actually did kill 1%, much less 5% of the people who got it, we'd be in lockdown forever.
So here's the two things that have clearly happened.
First of all, the medical, what I call the medical industrial complex is bigger than it's ever been, both worldwide and in the U.S. In 1960, the U.S. spent about $27 billion on health care.
Now, adjusted for inflation, that was about $250 billion.
This year, or last year, let's say pre-COVID, we spent $4 trillion.
One in $5 we spend is on health care.
It's practically the biggest sector.
Look, I'm not saying doctors aren't good people.
I'm not saying nurses aren't good people.
Even in the drug companies, there are good people.
They care about human health.
But you need inputs.
Patients are inputs.
And this disease created a lot of inputs.
There's a lot of incentive to push.
And that, unfortunately, is not going away.
Healthcare is only becoming more powerful.
And not just in the US, but worldwide, but especially in the US. But the second factor is even more important.
The second factor is tech.
We couldn't have done this 10 years ago.
We certainly couldn't have done it 20 years ago because we couldn't have shut all the offices in the country.
All the nice white-collar people who are in charge had to go in.
They don't have to go in anymore.
If you work at Walmart, you got to go in.
But if you're a lawyer, you can do it all on Zoom.
Okay?
You don't even have to wear pants.
And if you're Jeffrey Toobin, apparently you can jerk off while you're doing it.
We have the bandwidth for a lot of the country to work virtually.
And guess what?
A lot of the country, especially adults who don't remember what it's like to be 12 years old and want to be outside and seeing your friends, kind of like working virtually.
Do you really think that the reason why they're doing that is because they want people to not be aware of all the things you're saying?
Or do you think that they're worried that what you're doing is you're spreading some conspiracy theories or some untruths that are going to cause real problems and cause people to make mistakes and spread the disease?
So because of all these documentaries, these plandemics and all these different things that have already been suppressed, there seems to be like an inclination to the first move is to suppress.
First of all, in general, the antidote to speech is more speech.
So they shouldn't...
Second of all, okay, second of all, suppressing people like me drives people, drives readers and ordinary people looking for information to crazier theories, right?
If Berenson is being suppressed, then it must...
You know what?
Maybe the pandemic thing is true, okay?
And the third thing is...
What I said to you about the companies having a financial incentive for this to go on, unfortunately, is true.
And I'm not saying that's driving their decision making.
It's confluence again.
Not conspiracy, confluence.
If you're Amazon or YouTube, you should be bending over backwards to allow dissent because of your financial incentives.
You should show people that that's not driving your decision making.
Because you've been attacked and you've got to imagine that the same people who attacked you will probably attack the people that are willing to distribute your work even harder than they've attacked you because they can't really do anything to you.
But they can do something to Amazon.
They can do something to someone who's distributing what you're producing.
You've given this guy a platform you should be boycotting to.
Yeah, I guess there's...
But...
Look...
So big tech, though, these forces that are making tech even more and more central in our lives and making it possible for us to live virtually more and more, and making tech more important and profitable, those forces are not going away.
So the medicalization of society not going away.
And the techization of society not going away.
We would not have responded to this kind of shitty, dismal little virus this way 20 years ago.
They're worried about the blowback like, you know, we're talking about that I had from the Abigail Schreier podcast or any of the other podcasts that are controversial.
Well, they still think of themselves as the mainstream, and it's not really the case anymore.
You're one of the mainstream.
When there's other people that you don't consider mainstream, and they have hundreds of millions of views, you say that's not mainstream.
Well, what the fuck is mainstream then?
What do you consider?
Does it have to be sanctioned by a corporation that has a...
Not just a clear mandate, but that you get direction as to what you can and can't say and who you can and can't have on.
These gatekeepers of information and the idea that these gatekeepers should be influenced and also not just influenced but directed by financial decisions.
Whether it's financially viable, whether or not corporate interests are being served, whether or not advertisers are going to support this particular subject matter.
But there's also a legitimate worry that some of these people...
When you don't have any gatekeepers, right?
And it's open information.
There's some people that are going to say things that aren't accurate.
And those things are going to become spread and retweeted.
And then these conspiracies are going to become something that people actually believe in when they're not accurate.
What they would like is there to be some sort of...
Some sort of gatekeeper or some sort of fil- but the problem is they've been so fucking shitty at it that no one trusts them anymore.
You guys lie about so much and you distort so much and you have this obvious political ideology that you're relying on and you filter everything through.
That's right.
There's not a real, clear, objective news source that will say, we're wrong about this, or we've been wrong about that.
Like you were talking about with the various things, especially with the child disease, that they never pushed back against.
They never went back and corrected it.
They should have an equal response to the fact that they found out that they were in error.
I think we're in this sort of transitionary period between these media giants that have failed their audience in many respects.
Because if you ask people, do you believe the story, it was on CNN, and you said that 10 years ago, I think most people would say yes.
Most people.
If you ask that to most intelligent people today post this whole Trump madness, Trump derangement syndrome and all the other shit that's been going on at the Russiagate, all that stuff, I think a lot of people are like, what is it about?
Is there an incentive for them?
Are they motivated to not be honest?
Is this a political thing?
Have they made a decision to not be honest because they think it best serves the interests of the United States if they're not honest?
All these considerations were never a factor before, and they are now.
So when I worked at the Times, people would accuse the Times of being biased and liberal, and I would tell them what I thought was the truth, which I really think was the truth at the time.
Look, there is some bias in terms of story selection.
And if I were in that camp, I'd really be saying to myself, Why the hell is it that Donald Trump won more African-American and other minority votes than Mitt Romney?
I've seen Latino people get angry at that distinction.
It's strange to me, and I wonder what saves journalism, because I wish there was a place that I could go to that I knew there was not going to be any bias whatsoever, that I knew these are the facts as we know them, as it stands now, and it used to be The Times.
I used to think The Times was that place.
I still think The Times is better than most, but the problem is with these kids coming out of these universities, they feel like they have this There's an obligation to push some sort of social justice along with the news.
And that just wasn't the case before.
They might have had their own political leanings, but the news...
it is was most important but it also then you would get it from the times the most articulate and intelligent way they were the best writers like you would read it and you're like this is yeah and some of it is still i mean they're still very very good but you know yeah like we're not even gonna just go all the way back to what we were talking at the beginning we're not even gonna ask this question of where the virus came from because it might you know give comfort to donald trump right you have lost your way as a journalist if that's your point of view
well there was a thought that covering any of the hillary clinton email scandals was one of the reasons why donald trump got elected And so that they had fucked up and they had failed.
It's going to have to come from a place like that, where it starts from the beginning with that in mind, and with that as the core tenets of objective reality.
And the obligation is to disseminate this objective reality.
And not social justice, not right-wing ideology, no biases.
And that's not really what we expect from mainstream television news.
But I do need some protection from what I think is the overreach of tech censorship.
And I've had a great time with YouTube.
They really haven't done...
They've really been very good, and I know they take a lot of shit, but in terms of how bad it could have gone, and I know that there's been a lot of censorship that does exist with YouTube and some other places, I have no problems with them.
But I don't trust that it's going to stay that way.
I don't.
I just see too much.
I see, you know, Brett Weinstein's organization.
He had this Unity 2020 Twitter account where the idea was to take people from the left and people from the right that are reasonable, educated, intelligent people and great leaders and create a third sort of option for people.
There's violated terms of service or whatever the fuck it is.
It made no sense.
Crazy.
Just absolute fucking lunacy that just discussing the option of a third party by a public intellectual who's a scholar was thought to be so dangerous that they had to shut it down.
The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.
And if being afraid of catching a disease that 99-point-whatever people survive from is the worst thing that happened to you, it's still the worst thing that happened to you.
You haven't gone through World War I. You haven't seen your grandparents starve.
You haven't had these horrific, violent encounters on a daily basis.
This thing still is the worst thing you've encountered because so many people, they inflate their adversity.
They make it seem like this unbelievable barrier that they've had such great difficulty overcoming because there's social value, there's social cred, and there's social currency.
In suffering and in being a victim.
And so there's so many people that love to talk about it, you know, and make this big horrific deal about it.
I mean, this is part of the problem with human beings is that we have this understanding of what real struggle is based on our own personal experience.
And I think a lot of these people that are freaking out, they've really, they've had soft lives.
It's part of the problem.
You talk to people that are tough, that have had hard lives, that have like, you know, fucking struggled and come here from other countries and like really, really, really seen some horrific shit, really seen crime and violence on a high level.
No, and I mean, I'll never forget being in Baghdad in the summer of 2004 and walking through the central morgue and I mean, you know, there were a lot of dead bodies in that morgue.
Whatever happened to her, wherever she is right now, even if she doesn't know it and she doesn't know it because she's on Twitter and she's arguing with people, she needs to be left alone and she needs some help.
There's an update today from the Los Angeles Times here at the end of the thing.
It says that when they found, or of course that pops up now, when he found out that wasn't going to be published, he cut off all communication and previously was referred to, or by his lawyers, referred to her as his fiancée.
And if we're not willing to allow people to make mistakes, it's just like the tone of people's communication should be shunned.
This nasty, shitty, sniping tone should be really shunned.
Because it's one of the most detrimental things to our society and our culture in terms of establishing community and friendships and And just spreading love.
He is pretty smart, but it was also the way he was attacking them.
It was an uncomfortable debate because it was about some very sensitive subjects, like about minorities and bank accounts and stuff like that.
But it was just sometimes people, even though they might have a functional mind, they might be intelligent, If they're running for office or if they are holding an office, they're locked into a way of communicating where they can't stray outside the lines.
So even if they're intelligent, they can't concede points.
and they're trying to win a conversation.
They're not just trying to discuss things.
I think one of the benefits of podcasts above any other kind of discourse, generally speaking, is that you don't have to be right.
You just have to talk.
And if someone else is right, you should be willing to go, oh, yeah, that's true.
That makes sense.
You should.
And if you don't, people aren't going to trust you.
And politicians don't do that.
They just fucking don't do that.
And if they know they're wrong, they try to weasel their way around it or worm their way.
And pundits do it, too.
And a lot of journalists do it, unfortunately, too.
And what people want to know is that they can trust you with basic reality.
And I don't think most people trust politicians with basic reality.
So we're left with the people that make the most critical decisions in terms of how our society is going to move forward, what our response is going to be to disasters like this pandemic.
And we're leaving it with people that don't tell the truth.
Because they're not allowed to.
They're not allowed to be honest about things that do stray outside the lines.
They have to stick.
Inside this pre-arranged or pre-organized pattern of thinking.
Unfortunately, and this is just a function of science and its own complexity, with something like the mRNA vaccine, okay?
How many people are there in the world who truly understand it?
And how many of those people are not working for one of the companies?
So to some extent...
I'm not saying who can't kind of understand it.
You know, you can be a smart person and read, but I'm saying like who've spent their lives actually looking at this and can tell you the real risks in a meaningful way.
The number is very small, okay?
Think of it the same as quantum computing.
How many people understand that?
Very few, and most of them are working on it.
And once you start working on something, no matter who you are and how honest you are, you have an incentive to want it.
To want it to work, to want it to succeed, in general.
That's just human nature.
So to some extent, we are dependent on these scientists, on these engineers, on these highly trained people who spent their lives on one particular question.
But what we shouldn't do, and this is where journalists have failed so completely, When you're dependent on them, the answer is not, I'm going to take what you say as gospel because I'm afraid to ask.
It's, I'm going to keep asking you until you can explain this to me and to the world in a way that I can understand.
And I want you to help me understand the risks, okay?
We didn't let Oppenheimer decide whether to drop the bomb.
Truman decided, okay?
Ultimately, the public health people, they are technicians.
Their job is to lay out different courses of action with pros and cons.
And it is the job of the politician, the lawmaker, the person who's been elected to make the decision, to make the decision.
And that was Trump's ultimate failing, okay?
That he failed to say, I'm in charge here.
I'm making it.
Whatever it is, right or wrong, it's my decision.
I'm not going to be afraid of you.
Because he is a germaphobe, and he isn't that smart, and he is afraid of scientists, okay?
But journalists, whose job it is to question all authority, And to make sure that people's statements line up.
Over time, if you have one job as a journalist, it's to make sure that what people are saying, you don't let them change their facts two days later, okay?
Or change their facts with what's published somewhere else.
That you question them on that discrepancy.
There are many jobs as journalists, but that's the most basic one.
That maybe it's wise to support the distribution of the vaccine because the potential downsides of the vaccine are less than the potential downsides of catching the disease and getting really sick from it.
And it's a double lie now because, again, I keep repeating it, not only are the risks higher if you're older from COVID, but the vaccine side effects are lower.
So those people got to take it or should be encouraged to take it.
Well, forced compliance seems to be like, it's just people want to tell other people to comply because they want to comply and they want to know that everyone else is complying as well.
They want to know that we're all involved in groupthink.