Feb. 12, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I'm Dave Rubin and it's Friday, so we've got another big panel show for you guys. | ||
| Today we'll be focusing on big tech censorship, specifically in the medical and legal worlds, and joining me today is addiction medicine specialist and host of the Dr. Drew Podcast, the one and only Dr. Drew. | ||
| Stanford-trained internist and host of the ZDoggMD Show, Dr. Zubin Damania, and commercial litigation lawyer turned YouTuber, we're all YouTubers now, Viva Frye. | ||
| Welcome to the show, guys. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So I'm looking forward to this because I think we're gonna touch on pretty much everything that everybody's talking about, basically at every level of society these days related to lockdowns and censorship and free speech and everything else. | ||
| You guys have all dealt with some level of censorship yourselves in the last couple of weeks. | ||
| Drew, I'll start with you. | ||
| Is your YouTube channel still demonetized? | ||
| I know you were demonetized for a while, which people think. | ||
| is just about money, but actually when you get demonetized, that hurts you in the algorithm, | ||
| and then you get less views and everything else. | ||
| Where are you at with that? | ||
| And why did it happen? | ||
| I was in some sort of one week deplatforming. | ||
| I was actually, and threatening with permanent deplatforming for absolutely reasons I cannot determine. | ||
| I was sent a list of policies that are not to be violated, and they were nowhere near anything I was talking about. | ||
| The only thing that came close that I could imagine is I had COVID and I was discussing the status | ||
| as measured of my immunity. | ||
| And somehow discussing immunity is touchy for them. | ||
| I was talking to an anesthesiologist who's doing research on long haulers, and we were just discussing the controversies of the kinds of treatments that can be used to deal with cytokine activation, deal with active viral illness, deal with brain inflammation, things like fluvoxamine. | ||
| That's all we were talking about. | ||
| Then we get a notification that we're in the doghouse for a week, and I still don't know why. | ||
| Right, so you're in the doghouse for a week. | ||
| I guess the strike, from what I understand, the strike I guess has been taken away, but you know once that thing kicks in once, you're that much closer to being gone altogether. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Zubin, you had problems. | ||
| Let's put YouTube aside for a moment. | ||
| You had some problems with Facebook in the last couple weeks, right? | ||
| Yeah, and we're on all these platforms as well. | ||
| And on Facebook, I suddenly got a message on the backend in my creator side that said, oh, this page is at risk for being de-published because of violations of community standards. | ||
| And I got no such notifications, had no clue. | ||
| And when you click appeal, it's grayed out. | ||
| So you have no recourse. | ||
| And on top of that, the concern was the entire page. | ||
| So that's a, you know, 2.2 million person following thing that we've built over 10 years. | ||
| They were basically saying, oh, tomorrow it could be gone with no explanation. | ||
| And that was a little frustrating because it had been led into with some of my videos that were sort of talking about the science of vaccines in a pro-vaccine way, being labeled as potential misinformation by independent fact checkers. | ||
| So the whole thing was kind of a mess. | ||
| This is the thing that kills me. | ||
| Independent fact checkers. | ||
| Go ahead, Drew. | ||
| I gotta tell you, this is what exercises me, and my son is a law student, got very worked up about this, that we are board certified in internal medicine, I have 35 years of practice in medicine, I'm having a conversation with a colleague, and non-medical professionals are determining what is appropriate for a physician conversation in the public sphere, which is Anathema, it's bizarre. | ||
| And there's so many things wrong with that, I can't even begin to talk about. | ||
| Wait, Drew, are you telling me that anonymous, non-expert people that work for giant big tech companies | ||
| might have some sort of bias and should not be in charge of what medical professionals | ||
| say? - Right, just non-medicals, You're having non-medical personnel determining what a physician should say. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| Viva, on the legal side of this, well, have you been outright censored just because of your legal positions? | ||
| And then we'll dive into a little bit more on the legal side of what people like these two gentlemen can do. | ||
| So I have not been, I have not gotten a strike. | ||
| I've gotten a warning which I thought tooth and nail to have removed and it was more of a misunderstanding than anything else. | ||
| But I did at one point when I broke down and explained the deposition of Alex Jones. | ||
| That video, after a couple hundred thousand views, was suddenly demonetized and confirmed on appeal without any appeal being lodged on my side. | ||
| Then subsequently, it was actually removed from the platform for violating the terms of service as relates to hate speech. | ||
| And bear in mind, this was nothing more than an analysis of a deposition of Alex Jones in his defamation lawsuit, and I didn't even include any of the incendiary parts. | ||
| So I thought that tooth and nail as well and then magically one day it comes back on the platform fully monetized as though the search terms in the algorithm had been modified or tinkered with and what was taboo two weeks ago is now green-lighted once again and this happens vice versa all the time. | ||
| Yeah, and just to be clear, you know, all of you guys have locals communities, you have other ways that you make money, you have subscriptions and all that, but the demonetization thing, I mean, people don't realize it. | ||
| They think, oh, you're just complaining over some ad dollars that you get, but it really is not that. | ||
| It hurts the video's ability to get out. | ||
| To other people, but it's interesting because you're talking about how basically non-legal experts are shutting you down for talking about a legal case, and what the two doctors here are saying are that, in essence, non-medical experts have this kind of power. | ||
| Drew, since you've been in the media game the longest out of us, does any of this surprise you? | ||
| I mean, you've had to deal with network censors and all of that, but that this has now leaked into so much of new media as well. | ||
| Yeah, this has gotten... Well, I never expected anything like this. | ||
| This is absolutely bizarre for me. | ||
| And where it gets even more bizarre is how much it has... Physicians, we are easily frightened, right? | ||
| We're frightened of liability. | ||
| We're frightened of our reputation being damaged in some way. | ||
| And now I'm seeing doctors out in the world, not only afraid to talk about what we normally do, which is Discuss medicine, discuss controversies, discuss what's in the literature, discuss how we've improvised to try to help patients. | ||
| We'll not discuss it and certainly will not try anything. | ||
| And people are literally dying. | ||
| Some of this, I think, is because medicine has become so corporatized. | ||
| I really looked into this rather carefully. | ||
| And so many physicians, particularly on the general medicine side and ER, are hired by large corporations or large hospital groups. | ||
| And if they step out of any alignment with the specified clinical pathways, they are in danger. | ||
| So they just shut up. | ||
| You don't need doctors anymore. | ||
| Why have doctors if we're not using our judgment and not sharing and growing and building medical knowledge? | ||
| Are you telling me we're not all doctors just by signing on to WebMD and figuring out what's wrong with ourselves? | ||
| I'm just saying you could have nurse practitioners follow clinical pathways. | ||
| Maybe that's what they intend. | ||
| It'll save money. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| But people are dying now in a pandemic because this is an illness that needs to be hit early and hard and everyone's afraid to do it. | ||
| You know, so I think one of the things that Drew pointed out is the corporatization of medicine, but the other thing is we're so polarized now, and I think these algorithms, these very algorithms that we're complaining about artificially censoring us, you know, for reasons unclear, are the same ones that provoke this division in the first place, because they're preying on our belief-based sort of human algorithms to divide us, and that's why misinformation spreads so fast and all of that. | ||
| It's one thing to have a nameless algorithm cancel you or somebody that isn't a doctor, but what you see now, Drew, and you guys, is that this has bled into the discourse in general. | ||
| So on Twitter, I recently had Dr. Vinay Prasad on the show, UCSF hematologist, oncologist, very smart guy, very rational guy, avowed progressive. | ||
| His own tribe wants him deplatformed. | ||
| If he shows up on my show and talks about, maybe we don't have to wear a mask forever after we get vaccinated with mutual consent. | ||
| They will ask me on Twitter, fellow doctors, to never give him a platform. | ||
| And I think it's almost like the algorithm is beginning real censorship now by humans who can't tolerate ideas that challenge their existing dogma. | ||
| Yes, you're right. | ||
| Orthodoxy or nothing. | ||
| Orthodoxy, tribal orthodoxy or nothing. | ||
| And that is wild and scary. | ||
| I've never seen anything like it. | ||
| I actually want to get back to that because this idea of follow the science and they seem to be telling us that science never changes or that we never seem to learn anymore and we just have to accept it. | ||
| But Viva, what would you say to all of the people watching who are saying, oh, but all of you are free people. | ||
| You don't have to be on these platforms. | ||
| There's no reason to complain about anything. | ||
| You're all doing fine. | ||
| What do you say to those people? | ||
| That may be true, but the issue is, and people don't appreciate this like you've mentioned, when something gets demonetized, you don't just lose a few bucks on the video. | ||
| I've had videos that have had hundreds of thousands of views get demonetized for no good reason and the views go to zero, so it stops spreading the message. | ||
| And it is sort of algorithmic in that whatever the taboo words of the day are, now if you make a video, even if it's an objective breaking down of Dominion defamation lawsuits, those words trigger Demonetization. | ||
| And it's soft censorship. | ||
| You're gonna say, if I'm gonna work five or seven hours in a day to do something, if I'm not gonna be able to make money doing it, why do it? | ||
| And that's how they deter people from discussing certain subjects. | ||
| But when it comes to science and law, people have these ideas that, you know, there's settled science, there's settled law. | ||
| On certain issues, there is. | ||
| And you're not going to have lawyers seriously debating certain issues | ||
| any more than you're going to have doctors and scientists seriously debating other issues. | ||
| But there's a lot of stuff that is not settled, and there's a lot of stuff that you get to a higher plane | ||
| through discussion and through challenging of ideas. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But there is a dogma out there. | ||
| There is a, what's almost a religious belief that you can't challenge the ideas, | ||
| and now it's big tech playing the overlord, saying this is what you can and cannot discuss, | ||
| and it doesn't just stifle discussion, it stifles growth, it stifles innovation, | ||
| and it divides people. | ||
| Yeah, so that's exactly what I wanted to get to. | ||
| So when you guys hear the phrase, follow the science, or when people, average people, see the videos of Fauci saying masks don't work, then saying two masks, then saying, you know, next he'll say three masks, or, you know, let's not forget, guys, it's less than a year ago they told us two weeks to flatten the curve, and now they're telling us, oh, maybe things won't get right till 2022 and 100-day federal mask mandates and everything else. | ||
| That makes people very skeptical of science in the first place and the medical field in the | ||
| first place, doesn't it Drew? | ||
| It's, listen, it's the same complaint that you hear whenever the press creates a headline in | ||
| science, it's a disaster. What are... | ||
| I'm supposed to not eat eggs? | ||
| I can't eat eggs? | ||
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What? | |
| You guys can't decide. | ||
| That's how science works. | ||
| It moves forward. | ||
| When Fauci said we don't want to use masks, at that moment, he was correct. | ||
| We were worried that it was transmitted on the hands, hands at the face messing with the mask, | ||
| like influenza would transmit that way. | ||
| And we need the PPE saved for the first line providers. | ||
| Then he adjusted his priors, his Bayesian reasoning. | ||
| He found new information. | ||
| He wasn't lying before. | ||
| People want to make that lying. | ||
| No, that is science moving forward. | ||
| And he may have a different opinion in six months as we learn more. | ||
| But if we don't have discourse about the data, about our experiences, it's certainly not gonna move | ||
| forward. | ||
| So Zubin, is that sort of key to this, that everyone hears the phrase, follow the science, and then when Fauci says something, like Drew just laid out, that is sensible at the time, but then you change as things happen, that people are just like, ah, you know what, they're all liars, they're all frauds, and then of course we see all the politicians, you know, breaking all the laws and their own edicts anyway. | ||
| Yeah, you're at the French Laundry, you know, talking about wearing 12 masks. | ||
| And this is the thing, I think Drew is spot on, that it really is about communicating that science is not a dogma. | ||
| It's nothing settled about science. | ||
| Science is an approach to solving problems. | ||
| And I think one of our problems in this country is we haven't taught people how to think freely. | ||
| We haven't taught people how to do critical thinking and how to evaluate. | ||
| evidence and discussions in a rational, civil way, because our platforms and our media don't | ||
| allow us to do that. | ||
| When you have such polarization in media, such polarization on social media, then that's | ||
| the teaching is, well, there's good people and bad people. | ||
| There's right and wrong, and that's it. | ||
| And so when, if you're on team Fauci because of whatever underlying belief, then no matter | ||
| what contravailing evidence or discussion is had, that's evil. | ||
| It's not even just that it's wrong. | ||
| You're bad to even bring it up. | ||
| And I think that is very poisonous to the very scientific basis that we're trying to espouse. | ||
| I had Jay Bhattacharya on the show, and he's been canceled a million times for having a different intuition on the same data. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And listen, two things that occur to me. | ||
| One is that There's no such thing as really fact in science. | ||
| We just go from hypothesis to theory, and then we test the theory over and over again to really check its veracity. | ||
| But we go from hypothesis to theory. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's science. | ||
| That's as good, that's as close as we get to the truth. | ||
| And we try to keep, you know, refining that till we get closer to the truth. | ||
| The other thing I've noticed is that math is dead. | ||
| We're not only not teaching critical reasoning, we're not teaching math. | ||
| I had a very strange set of questions when I got sick with COVID. | ||
| Almost everybody asked me, were you scared? | ||
| Were you scared? | ||
| And I thought, It didn't even occur to me to be scared. | ||
| I have a 99% probability of survival. | ||
| Why would I be scared? | ||
| A 1% fatality? | ||
| When I had my prostate removed for prostate cancer, the surgeon sat down and said, you have a 90% chance of cure. | ||
| That's a surgeon telling me I'm cured. | ||
| When it's 99%, they're telling you don't worry about it. | ||
| I mean, it happens, but we'll tell you if you need to worry. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| So it didn't even occur to me to worry. | ||
| 99% is a good number. | ||
| We don't talk about the morbidity of this illness enough, which is fascinating to me, because that is affecting a lot of people, and I'm suffering long hauler stuff right now, but that's something for another day. | ||
| Well, I mean, we could do it real quick, like, we know that, and clean up the numbers, the two docs here can clean up the numbers for me, but isn't it something like 95, or it's 99% recovery rate unless you have two other comorbidities, usually diabetes and overweight, and that includes usually people that are over 80? | ||
| Did I ballpark that right? | ||
| Age is the big thing. | ||
| Age is the big thing. | ||
| You can think of it. | ||
| Think of it this way, Dave. | ||
| You're 36 more times likely to die in a car accident if you're 24 and below than you are of COVID. | ||
| But if you're over 65, you're twice as likely to die of COVID than you are in a car accident. | ||
| And people don't understand risk, like Drew was saying. | ||
| It really is something that we need to teach better. | ||
| the math of risk and the intuition of risk, which we've evolved to misunderstand. | ||
| It's almost like we have to overestimate risks that we can see in our proximal | ||
| or on the news all the time, which is why the news has such a negativity bias | ||
| because they prey on that and underestimate risks that are actually much more dangerous, | ||
| like driving your car. | ||
| Right, so Viva, these guys are having trouble just talking to other doctors. | ||
| That's one thing, right? | ||
| But in terms of, like, lockdowns and, you know, Drew and I are crazy enough to still live in LA, where I'm still not even sure if I can walk outside of my house without being assassinated, although that might have more to do with my general state of being than COVID, but... | ||
| But in terms of lockdowns and that it's become increasingly obvious that they did not follow science to do lockdowns. | ||
| We know that as LA is opening up right now, we have more cases of COVID now than when they did the outdoor lockdown in December. | ||
| But they're finally realizing it's politically expedient to do it. | ||
| What do you think the legal answers are? | ||
| Because I'm a firm believer that one of the ways we get out of this thing is we are gonna have to sue the hell out of an awful lot of politicians. | ||
| That's good for you, maybe not great for the country. | ||
| Well, it's not good for me. | ||
| I'm not taking these cases now because I think I have enough of a public persona that I would actually be a detriment or a liability to a client in court. | ||
| But just to go back to the follow the science issue, and it's an interesting discussion I've been having with other people. | ||
| Follow the Science has turned into a political trope, for lack of a better word, where it doesn't mean follow the science now. | ||
| People are using it as in follow the leader, and if you question it, you will be shunned, you'll be cancelled, you'll be brushed aside as right-wing Trumpism or whatever. | ||
| They've associated politics with critical thinking and questioning of the narrative | ||
| and the directions being told. | ||
| So follow the science has turned into a euphemism for follow the leader, do as you're told | ||
| and don't question it. | ||
| And especially in Quebec, our health director has recently publicly stated | ||
| that there is no concrete science to support the effectiveness of curfews | ||
| to fight the spread of a virus. | ||
| He says, you know, the things that you implement in wartime to prevent nighttime riots, not to prevent the spread of the virus. | ||
| And if they can't go to night, it'll spread during the day. | ||
| So they say this at the same time they're implementing certain measures, which they admit are not backed by science. | ||
| So the question is really, What do they mean by follow the science and my impression now is it has been used to divide people as to who's going to follow the rules and be a good citizen, good citizen, and who is going to question the rules and be a defiant citizen. | ||
| But as far as as far as how to remedy this, It takes a lot of people suing the courts with legitimate lawsuits, not frivolous lawsuits, in the hopes that you get a judge who sets a precedent. | ||
| In Quebec, we've been somewhat lucky and somewhat unlucky. | ||
| In the States, you guys are far more litigious and far more loving of your rights, seemingly, and far less willing to give them up without a judicial fight. | ||
| Canada seems to be a little more docile, so we have not been to the courts as much as Americans have. | ||
| Drew, this is a slight sidebar, but are we gonna get rid of Newsom? | ||
| Do you think the recall is gonna happen? | ||
| I think the recall is gonna happen, I just don't know if they're gonna put somebody in his place. | ||
| I mean, this state just doesn't seem to learn anything. | ||
| I mean, just again, I've been fighting the homeless thing for two years and I can't even believe what I'm seeing there. | ||
| Didn't you say something on HLN like maybe two years ago about the homeless, or was it about Clinton? | ||
| No, I'm sorry, it was about Clinton's health, right? | ||
| That guy, Hillary Clinton's health. | ||
| It's a long story, but the show had already been canceled. | ||
| And I said something about the care she was getting, not her health, the choices the doctors were making. | ||
| And Drudge reported that as me saying, "Hillary's unfit for office," which was not true. | ||
| My show had already been planned to be canceled. | ||
| But, and I told CNN, "Let me go out and straighten it all out. | ||
| "Shut up, just move along." | ||
| That was it. | ||
| Zubin, can you talk a little bit about, since you're in it with a lot of other doctors, | ||
| just the level of fear that people have? | ||
| Because every now and again, I'll see a doctor that I usually haven't heard of, and suddenly they'll start getting a little traction on Twitter, and I'm like, oh, maybe I should talk to that person. | ||
| But then I have to do some real due diligence on, oh, are they just trying to go for fame? | ||
| Are they just trying to have their moment? | ||
| Are they legit? | ||
| What makes them even want to get in the game at this point, because the risk is so high and everything else? | ||
| I think that this has been a huge opportunity for people with a marginal interest in being famous or having attention on them to get a platform. | ||
| Because for the first time, the average American actually cares about the crap that we care about, which is all this medical stuff. | ||
| Suddenly it's like the it thing to be in medicine and be a pundit and talk about it anywhere you can. | ||
| And what I've found is a lot of these online docs fall into the same exact tropes. | ||
| Instead of being in what I call the alt-middle, where it's this rational way where you can look at all the sides and just try to process through it using critical thinking, they, again, take a tribal identifier, whether it's follow the science or whether it's stay home or whether their Twitter avatar has 14 masks on. | ||
| It's like, hi, I'm Dr. Bobby, mask your ass up, Jones. | ||
| Whatever it is, that's much more rewarding in terms of social media juice than saying, you know, the thing about lockdowns is we actually don't know if they work because we can't define what a lockdown is. | ||
| It's different in every country. | ||
| We haven't measured it. | ||
| We haven't studied it. | ||
| So we have no idea whether this very obtrusive mechanism with a lot of economic downside is working. | ||
| Can we talk about that? | ||
| That will get you no clicks, no love, no social juice at all. | ||
| And that's why I think a lot of docs online, like the most successful Twitter docs are the ones that are like, you know, Trump is a little bitch. | ||
| And it's like, well, you nailed it. | ||
| Now you're going to get 30,000 retweets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you guys know the history of lockdowns in the United States? | ||
| There's actually a history. | ||
| Do you know this? | ||
| No, go ahead. | ||
| It was invented by a 14 year old high school student in, I believe it was 2000. | ||
| No, this is factually true. | ||
| The New York Times ran this history. | ||
| A high school student in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who built a model, a computer model, to reduce the spread of influenza. | ||
| She determined that you could close locally, schools down, because influenza is transmitted by children very different than this virus. | ||
| You can close down local schools and reduce the spread. | ||
| Her father, who is a computer programmer at Los Alamos, said, that's a great idea. | ||
| I bet I could build a computer model for regional lockdowns in a pandemic. | ||
| The Bush administration adopted it as policy. | ||
| No one had ever, you'll not find it in a epidemiology textbook, an infectious disease textbook. | ||
| It wasn't until the Chinese Communist Party did it that it was something that anyone thought they would ever do. | ||
| And it's not something that's ever been tested. | ||
| It's not something that is in the lexicon. | ||
| The CDC never recommended it. | ||
| It's really just something that has come out of nowhere without any science behind it. | ||
| Well, this is great. | ||
| A 14-year-old from Albuquerque basically figured out our whole national plan for COVID. | ||
| Well, we definitely got demonetized on this episode. | ||
| I have no doubt about that. | ||
| Viva, what about just sort of the way that all of this has sort of mixed into one thing? | ||
| So we covered on my show this week the Time Magazine article that I'm sure you guys at least ancillarily saw wherein, oh, you did a nice piece on it actually. | ||
| Yeah, I broke that one down thoroughly. | ||
| Yeah, so in essence, though, what they said was, this is Time Magazine, said that a secret cabal of activists and other industries worked together to, quote, you know, secure the election, not steal the election, secure the election. | ||
| Now, I talked about it. | ||
| Fortify the election. | ||
| Yeah, to fortify the election, exactly. | ||
| I talked about it on my show, except the entire time I had to keep saying, this is what Time is saying, not me, because YouTube has given us warnings that if we even address any of this, we'll be taken out. | ||
| What do you make of that whole situation? | ||
| Because it's connected to all of this. | ||
| Well, that article, if it illustrates nothing else, it illustrates that big tech has become a partisan player and not anything, not even a neutral platform, not even a platform. | ||
| They have become activist players in the industry with their monopolies over the free exchange and communication of ideas. | ||
| And to say it's dangerous is an understatement. | ||
| People are going to read that article and say, well, everything they did was legal. | ||
| When big tech becomes the arbiter of truth and information, first of all, I don't think that that should be legal in the first place, but that is just dangerous even if you think it's legal. | ||
| But, you know, going back to the idea that doctors don't feel comfortable talking about this for fear of cancellation, and Drew, I saw what happened to you, you know, in the early stages of this It's a vicious world in that if you don't toe the narrative, the line, what big tech and what politicians working in tandem want you to believe and want you to say, you're going to get raked over the coals. | ||
| They're going to come after your sponsors. | ||
| They're going to come after You know, you personally, they're going to go after your license, and we see it on medical issues, and we're seeing it on legal issues. | ||
| As in, you know, lawyers, by virtue of the fact of who they represent, if it's an unpopular opinion, not only do they want you to lose the lawsuit, they then want to come after your law license for having dared to file an election lawsuit, or dared to represent Trump. | ||
| It's tribalism in law, it's tribalism in medicine, and it's fundamentally destructive to both. | ||
| Yeah, so to that point, Drew, when you came out and you were one of the first people very early on that was at least skeptical of lockdowns, obviously you see the Twitter outrage on that and everything else, but what kind of response did you get just from medical community and people that are in the media world that know you? | ||
| At the beginning? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At the beginning, I was just trying to reduce the panic. | ||
| I was constantly telling people, which is, again, when they go after you, they leave out what you actually say, of course. | ||
| What I kept saying is, listen to the CDC, listen to Fauci. | ||
| Don't point at China. | ||
| Don't point at Italy. | ||
| Shut up. | ||
| The media shouldn't have an opinion about this. | ||
| This should be the physicians and the CDC deciding what to do. | ||
| And I made a mistake of comparing it with H1N1 because I was saying, look, we just had a pandemic 10 years ago. | ||
| You don't, you're not even aware it happened. | ||
| And it killed 300,000 people worldwide. | ||
| You don't even know it happened. | ||
| This is going to be worse, but let's just, you know, let's listen to our CDC and let's do what we're supposed to do. | ||
| Most physicians agreed with me at that point, but then hit pieces came out, leaving out everything I was actually saying, decontextualizing things. | ||
| And I did miss how infectious this was and this sort of non-flu-like quality, this so-called cytokine storm that we learned about very quickly. | ||
| And I apologize for that. | ||
| That was wrong. | ||
| I missed that. | ||
| I updated my beliefs in March of last year. | ||
| And when Fauci said it's not the flu, I adjusted my course and have been studying it ever since and apologize. | ||
| I got it wrong. | ||
| I did get it wrong. | ||
| But I did not get wrong this panic that they were whipping up and the fact that there seemed to be a demand that we follow the policies set by China, which to me was bizarre. | ||
| It was just nothing that made sense to me. | ||
| And to this day, we're seeing, I mean, one of the great misadventures of this entire pandemic is probably going to be school lockdowns, the massive damage that will have done, not to mention the overdose deaths, the mental health consequences. | ||
| Pushing people into poverty. | ||
| I mean, this will have profound consequences for a long time to come. | ||
| Yeah, Zubin, do you see a sense that, to me, every system that we once knew, literally a year ago today, before all the lockdown started, every single system is either going to crumble or be basically completely unrecognizable at this point. | ||
| A thousand percent, and Drew, you know, when you were saying all that stuff, you have a major media platform, and I have this weird gorilla thing with a lot of healthcare professionals, and I was saying the same shit loudly about the panic, the fear porn that was everywhere, and the fact that we were going to hurt kids, we were going to hurt the economy, we were going to cause depression, alcoholism, suicide, substance abuse. | ||
| And what's interesting is I could say that without cancellation in the early days because it hadn't tribalized enough yet and what was happening is I was getting this feedback from physicians Who were saying, you know, you're saying all the stuff that we think right now, because we've seen, we've been through H1N1, we know this isn't flu, but this is also not the plague. | ||
| It's not something with a 90% fatality that's aerosolized and all of this. | ||
| And the school piece was big. | ||
| So Dave, to your question, the idea that our systems have completely flubbed this, I think this is the first time we've had a pandemic in the age of social media and cable news, in the age of such political tribalization, and now we're seeing what happens. | ||
| Hopefully that'll wake us up to understand that this is not how you have dialogue, do science, move forward, and actually prevent the most harm for the most people, which should be our goal in the first place. | ||
| Diva, as a guy that cares about the law a little bit, are you shocked to see how quickly we all just kind of rolled over? | ||
| I'm going to Florida in a couple days, and I'm looking forward to a little freedom. | ||
| I have been accused, the doctors will know what this is, I've been accused of having ODD, oppositional defiance disorder. | ||
| I was stubborn as a kid, I'm still stubborn now. | ||
| I have it too. | ||
| Perfect attorney. | ||
| The degree and the rapidity with which people have just said, okay, I'll accept a curfew. | ||
| I will accept the violation of our most fundamental civil rights and liberties in the absence of, you know, the most compelling needs to infringe on them and in the presence of the most minimalist infringement to begin with. | ||
| I am shocked. | ||
| I'm surprised. | ||
| I'm a little disheartened because it took people's lives and decades to fight for those freedoms. | ||
| And now the government knows that it can get away with imposing a curfew, notwithstanding its own admitted | ||
| absence of scientific basis to do it. | ||
| I don't know how it comes back and I don't know how long it takes to come back if it ever does come back. | ||
| But I've been shocked. | ||
| But one thing I've been sort of encouraged about is I have a lot of discussions with people privately | ||
| and I suspect Dr. Drew and Dr. ZDogg, you have the same thing. | ||
| A lot of people privately agree. | ||
| It's just that they don't want to say it publicly because of the power of social media, the power of big tech to shun and destroy anybody who publicly voices what a lot of people believe quietly and will omit amongst themselves. | ||
| Yeah, so my audience knows that. | ||
| Dave, I'm hoping that Locals is our quiet home where we can stream and communicate and meet with people and have control over the content and the platform. | ||
| I mean, that's literally why we built the thing. | ||
| And what you do, I mean, I know this sounds so crazy, but Drew, what you do in your Locals community, it's up to you. | ||
| It has nothing to do with me. | ||
| Isn't that bananas? | ||
| I believe that you can create a community. | ||
| What? | ||
| You're not going to tell me what to do? | ||
| Will I have to shelter in place while I do it? | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| Well, that's why I'm thrilled that you guys are all on there, right? | ||
| Because you're all masters at your own craft and you wanna have a place to communicate | ||
| with your own people that is not beholden to a bunch of non-experts to tell the experts what to do. | ||
| Zubin, go ahead, I can tell you got something. | ||
| So for the locals thing, it's the first social media, it's not even social media, | ||
| the first community platform that I found where I set the tone, like I say, listen, | ||
| we're gonna be all middle, we're gonna be rational, we're gonna be respectful of all dialogue | ||
| and nothing is off limits, but you'll see if it's not resonating with people. | ||
| And it actually happens, because the tribe that's built there, Actually takes that seriously, whereas on Facebook, on YouTube, they're incentivized to hurt each other. | ||
| It's all sport and theater, and it's really great to have that. | ||
| I like the idea of a radical middle. | ||
| Because the both ends look crazy when you stand in the radical middle. | ||
| The radical middle meaning that you're okay with some people disagreeing with you every now and again. | ||
| How radical we have all become. | ||
| Go ahead, Viva. | ||
| I was going to say, we have a local page as well with Robert Barnes, where we have our, call it radical middle for lack of a better word. | ||
| And I don't want to make anybody nervous, but it is only going to be a matter of time. | ||
| This was something I warned or I discussed with the CEO of Rumble during our live stream. | ||
| And it's something that we now saw with Parler. | ||
| And I think Dan Bongino also talked about it, you know, having a dual economy. | ||
| It's going to get so bad, or it could get so bad, where big tech is going to go after not just the platforms, but the ISPs, not just the payment processing, but the banks themselves. | ||
| And so you say something, I am concerned that it's going to come to the point where even on your own private communities, the war will be waged in ways that are just going to go one level up. | ||
| But as far as it goes, yeah, you know, the ability to post posts and express your ideas Without having to play with your words so that it doesn't get flagged and it doesn't damage a channel that you've been building for five years. | ||
| It's a great thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by the way, I'm not going to sit here and lie to you. | ||
| We have not solved all of the technological stuff yet. | ||
| We have some redundancies with servers and there's some other things because we, as you guys know, we have paid communities that keeps out 99.9% of the bad actors. | ||
| And we have, I think, a very solid terms of service. | ||
| But yes, can they do all of the horrible things that we can think of and some things we can't think of? | ||
| There's just no doubt the answer is yes. | ||
| But before we wrap, guys, I try to always end these shows with some kind of silver lining, because I just know so many people, Drew, you hit on this a little bit, and you did too as well, Zubin, this idea that people really are depressed right now. | ||
| I think especially young people, they don't see a future. | ||
| I can only imagine if I was 20, Yeah, I don't have any great enthusiasm. | ||
| I do think the economy is going to recover. | ||
| There's a real nihilist feeling and everything else right now. | ||
| Can you guys paint something that feels kind of all right? | ||
| Drew, you've been doing this forever to try to get people out of these dark places. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't have any great enthusiasm. | ||
| I do think the economy is gonna recover. | ||
| I do think there will be jobs. | ||
| I think it could get overheated, but that's gonna be an issue | ||
| that we'll have to deal with down the line. | ||
| I think people with opinions fundamentally should hold their head up. | ||
| They should understand if they're just trying to do good and share ideas and help other people, hold your head up, put one foot in front of the other and keep talking. | ||
| There are always people that are there, increasingly people that want to try to struggle with the truth. | ||
| I think one of the silver linings is an awareness that things are tribal, an awareness that things are so siloed that you can't trust anything. | ||
| I've particularly seen this in sort of under 18, where they're trying to figure out how they assess news. | ||
| How do they determine what is good sources and what aren't? | ||
| Be a good source and just keep moving forward. | ||
| And hopefully, I have tremendous faith in the American system, things will right itself. | ||
| Yeah, Zubin. | ||
| I think human evolution is beautiful, it's inevitable, and it's inevitably messy. | ||
| So we're going through this phase where we're getting better, but in the process we're seeing the shadow of some of this stuff that we're pulling along, this sort of human baggage that we have that gets weaponized through new technology that we don't fully understand yet, and these algorithms and the business incentives that go with it. | ||
| And I think once this pandemic's gonna shine a light on it, it's gonna transform medicine because already telehealth, non-in-person encounters, and the way we pay for medicine will be transformed. | ||
| I'm actually as optimistic as I've ever been that as we get to the end of this, with what Drew said, that meta-awareness of how we think and how we think critically, that will transform and emerge the next sort of stage in our development. | ||
| So I'm excited. | ||
| Viva Dr. Free. | ||
| Dr. Z just gave me, I just called you a doctor, Dr. Z just gave us some positive vibes to go out on. | ||
| Can you top that? | ||
| I'm not sure I can top it. | ||
| All I can do is repeat something that Robert Barnes often says when I ask him to motivate our crowd. | ||
| He says, you can't control what happens to you. | ||
| You can only control the way you react to it. | ||
| We live in a world of tribalism now where the powers that be, and I will call them social media, big tech, incentivizes radicalizing of people. | ||
| They, I believe, specifically go out of their way to try to further radicalize people through deplatforming, through alienating, through ostracizing. | ||
| My only word of advice and my only optimism is do not let the system radicalize you because when they do radicalize you then the system has won. | ||
| So stay sane and stay open and stay open to having dialogue and avoid demonizing people who have ideological differences because that is what Twitter, YouTube, Facebook wants everyone to react like and that is the force that we have to resist. | ||
| I'm trying, man, and I know you guys are too. | ||
| It ain't easy sometimes, especially these days and the way the algorithms are tricking us. | ||
| Well, listen, you know, as all of the big things sort of crumble around us, I do think that the bottom-up internet is the right way. | ||
| So I'm thrilled that the three of you guys are on Locals doing your own thing. | ||
| We're going to link to your Locals communities down below. | ||
| And, you know, the other part of this, Thank you Dave. | ||
| networks in a traditional sense, you know, Drew, you came from the network side of this, | ||
| those things with the giant overhead and the huge studios and all that stuff, it is not necessary anymore. | ||
| I got two guys in my room, that's it. | ||
| And we're building new networks and I think this is part of it. | ||
| So I'm thrilled to be in the game with you guys. | ||
| So I thank you very much for joining me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Dave. - Thank you much, Dave. | |
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| All right, thanks to Dr. Z, Dr. Drew, and I almost called him Dr. Viva or Dr. F. | ||
| Oh, he's not a doctor, he's a lawyer. | ||
| Guys, these people are all on Locals. | ||
| It has nothing to do with me other than I started this thing, so I would encourage you to check out what we built, and of course, you can check out the Rubin Report community at rubinreport.locals.com. | ||
| We've gotta figure out some stuff, and I think we have a small window to do it. | ||
| Like, the longer that we don't, Solve these problems, whether it's talking about lockdowns, honestly, talking about COVID, honestly, talking about our political polarization, honestly, like the longer we don't solve these things, and of course, the big tech censorship part of it, it's like these things will only get worse. | ||
| And then one day we're gonna wake up and we won't even be able to sign on to these things. | ||
| I mean, imagine if big tech tomorrow just said, hey, we're just taking half of you guys out. | ||
| You know, we're shutting down the droid army now that we won the war. | ||
| You thought I could do a whole show without a Star Wars reference? | ||
| I think it could all happen, so fight back however you can. | ||
| I actually thought that all of their advice at the end was quite right, that we will be okay one way or another, but it's on us. | ||
| Anyway, thanks for watching, guys. | ||
| Get offline for the weekend, how about that? |
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