April 26, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
38:48
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
[MUSIC] | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and we've got a special Thursday roundtable extravaganza for you. | ||
| It's just like the Friday Roundtable Extravaganza, except it's on Thursday. | ||
| And joining me today are the co-hosts of the upcoming brand new Illusion of Consensus podcast, former Rubin Report guest Rav Arora and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. | ||
| Rav, Jay, good to see you guys. | ||
| Thanks for having us, Dave. | ||
| Yeah, it's great to be here. | ||
| So if all goes well, the podcast will debut next week, and I wanted to give you guys a chance to do a little bit of what you're going to be doing on the podcast, which is a lot of debunking of nonsense and the expert class. | ||
| So that's what we're gonna be diving into today. | ||
| I thought real quick before we do it, and I've got one ad, maybe if each of you could just take 30 seconds or so, just kind of give me the genesis of why you guys wanted to do this together. | ||
| And then we'll go from there. | ||
| Dr. Jay, why don't you go first? | ||
| Well, for me, it's really fun to be able to talk with a bright young journalist. | ||
| And because one of the key things I think that's been, that's gone on during the pandemic is you had experts on high Yeah, no, it's a thrill to collaborate with Jay on this. | ||
| when often it wasn't, often misleading people, creating this illusion. | ||
| And it's actually young journalists like Rob and podcasters and others, | ||
| citizen scientists who pushed back effectively. | ||
| So to me, like to cooperate with Rob is really quite an honor. | ||
| Rob. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no, it's a thrill to collaborate with Jay on this. | ||
| I think throughout the pandemic, one thing that has become really clear | ||
| is that there is this kind of illusion of consensus, hence our title, on a number of issues | ||
| and how the nuances and the complexities of various issues, whether it's masking, vaccines, mandates, | ||
| lockdowns, et cetera, there's far more nuance | ||
| and far more diversity of opinion on those issues than one would seem to believe | ||
| by just judging the mainstream media where. | ||
| They select certain experts instead of others, and so it becomes sort of unquestionable, or it becomes this sort of monolith that you can't question when, you know, given set of experts support lockdowns or vaccine mandates or mask mandates. | ||
| But in reality, there's far more debate on those issues. | ||
| And, you know, Jay and I first met, I think, in September of 2021, when I first interviewed him for an article. | ||
| Before that point, I was trusting the mainstream experts. | ||
| I didn't know much about what I was talking about. | ||
| And then I talked to Jay and I'm like, wait, hold on. | ||
| I thought these things were just universally true. | ||
| I thought all scientists believe that, you know, 1% of people are going to die from COVID, that masks work, that vaccine mandates are a good idea. | ||
| But whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. | ||
| I've been hypnotized. | ||
| So I very quickly kind of course corrected and shifted my perspective on this. | ||
| And so JJ and I are going to examine the sort of illusion of consensus in the pandemic, but also in other areas, potentially psychiatry, psychology, etc. | ||
| So we look forward to collaborating on this. | ||
| All right, well, we're going to hit a couple of the type of topics you guys are going to be talking about with a little bit of that nuance and diversity of ideas. | ||
| Let me talk to you guys about Cozy Earth real quick, and then we'll get to it. | ||
| Do you want your mom bragging about your incredibly thoughtful Mother's Day gift? | ||
| Well, I've got two words for you. | ||
| Cozy Earth. | ||
| The softest, most luxurious and responsibly sourced bedding and loungewear on the planet. | ||
| Cozy Earth crafts luxury goods that transform your lifestyle. | ||
| Their luxuriously cozy loungewear is made from temperature regulating viscous from bamboo and is made to fit every body type. | ||
| From soft crew socks to stretch knit tees, Cozy Earth has your leisure wear covered. | ||
| Transform your bathroom into a spa with Cozy Earth's plush towels as well as their new premium waffle towel Collection. | ||
| After a long day of fighting for freedom and curbing Joe Biden's radical woke agenda, there's nothing that I love more than resting on my Cozy Earth bedsheets. | ||
| I seriously love these sheets. | ||
| Cozy Earth is having a huge Mother's Day sale going on right now. | ||
| Save up to 35% with promo code Dave at CozyEarth.com. | ||
| Just enter code Dave at checkout. | ||
| for 35% off your order. | ||
| And now back to me. | ||
| All right, let's dive right into it, because it seems to me that many of the people, regardless of what country you are in, the people who, quote unquote, lead us, have led us in really, really awful ways. | ||
| I'd put Justin Trudeau just about at the top of that list. | ||
| And this week, he's basically saying he never forced anyone to get vaccinated. | ||
| Misinformation and disinformation is carrying people to believe things that are untrue. | ||
| And vaccinations is a perfect example of it. | ||
| Like any modern bit of medical advancements, there are potential side effects in vaccinations. | ||
| And there are people who've probably gotten very sick from vaccinations, on the billions of people who've been vaccinated against COVID over the past few years. | ||
| And the idea that people can fly in the face of science, well, individuals are allowed to make their own choices. | ||
| There may be all sorts of different reasons why someone is hesitant to get vaccinated. | ||
| But I make a distinction, and I always have, between someone choosing for personal reasons To choose not to get vaccinated? | ||
| And someone deliberately using misinformation to mislead and scare other people with so-called facts that aren't facts at all, and all of the scientists and the medical experts and the researchers, not just in Canada but around the world, Understood that vaccination was going to be the way through this. | ||
| And therefore, while not forcing anyone to get vaccinated, I chose to make sure that all the incentives and all the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated. | ||
| And that's exactly what they did. | ||
| Jay, let me start with you on this one. | ||
| I mean, he's rewriting history in real time. | ||
| It is a complete lie that he was not forcing people to get vaccinated. | ||
| Ask any of the Canadian truckers and the people whose bank accounts got frozen and the litany of other things that happen in Canada. | ||
| But there's also a certain condescension with him and smugness that I think gets to the point that you mentioned up top about this elite class that thinks that they should not be questioned. | ||
| Now he somehow thinks Oh, you know, people should make choices for themselves. | ||
| Just not the misinformation specialists. | ||
| But it's completely the reverse of what he pushed on Canadians for three years. | ||
| I mean, even in that clip, the one substantive point he tried to make, which is that side effects are rare. | ||
| Well, I mean, rare according to who? | ||
| There was a re-analysis of the Pfizer and Moderna trials, a very careful one, done by Joe Fryman, Peter Doshi, and some of their colleagues, that found that the serious adverse event rate from the | ||
| vaccines in the randomized trials themselves during that first two months of that trial was | ||
| one in 800. That's a pretty high serious adverse event rate for a vaccine that is deployed en masse. | ||
| I mean, I agree with that. It's normally something like one in a million. Is that correct? I mean, | ||
| that would be a pretty safe vaccine. | ||
| One in a million would be a pretty safe vaccine. | ||
| I mean, the thing about it is, Dave, it's like, you know, it should have been a nuanced thing where you talk with your doctor about it, right? | ||
| So like, if you're an older person, you put up with some of the higher risk because you get this enormous benefit of reductions in mortality risk from COVID, right? | ||
| So that's why I advocate for vaccines for older people, because I thought it would be a good idea on net, not that it would be forced to do it, but like, because on net, it would save the lives of older people. | ||
| for younger people is a very different calculus, right? A lot of young men got myocarditis for | ||
| taking this vaccine, and what benefit do they get from the vaccine itself when COVID, | ||
| the death rate from COVID in young men is very, very, very low. So I just, I think it's one of | ||
| these things where like he's just, he's obviously gaslighting people, and what I find really | ||
| offensive is this implication that he didn't coerce people, he didn't force people to | ||
| Just because he didn't hold people down and jab them with a needle by himself doesn't mean he didn't coerce people. | ||
| He violated the civil rights of a tremendous number of Canadians. | ||
| They couldn't even travel within their own country if they were unvaccinated. | ||
| Quite literally, you could not get on trains. | ||
| Rav, you're unvaccinated. | ||
| You are a Canadian. | ||
| And I say that with all due irony because Dr. Bhattacharya is in California, which is the Canada of America. | ||
| I'm here in free Florida. | ||
| But when you see your prime minister gaslighting the country like that, I mean, how do you feel about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it's potentially misleading what he's saying because in that clip, he sounds fairly reasonable. | ||
| Like if those things were followed, Right. | ||
| You know, we didn't force people. | ||
| There are lots of vaccine adverse events. | ||
| Lots of people have gotten sick. | ||
| And I make this distinction between people who don't want to get it and other people who are down the conspiratorial anti-vax cult, etc. | ||
| All of that is reasonable. | ||
| But his policies were not reasonable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Me and here in Canada. | ||
| I mean, I remember then I think this was around the first time I spoke to Jay in September of 2021. | ||
| Vaccine mandates were brought into effect and I couldn't exercise at a gym, couldn't go to a wedding, couldn't go to large restaurants, large gatherings, couldn't leave the country. | ||
| My family's from India. | ||
| They wanted to go visit relatives. | ||
| They couldn't go to India. | ||
| I couldn't go to India. | ||
| We couldn't do so many different things that we wanted to do simply because we chose not to get this experimental vaccine. | ||
| And so for Trudeau now to To say in this clip that, you know, he took all these reasonable measures and how he allowed people choice. | ||
| Well, again, similar to what Jay said, obviously, you know, cops weren't at our door shoving needles in our arms. | ||
| But if you work in a federally regulated industry, you couldn't go to your job. | ||
| I mean, I know people who were working online and they couldn't even resume their job because the way the mandates were federally forced down, it was really strict and really draconian. | ||
| People even working virtually couldn't return to their jobs. | ||
| And so all of this has been a great awakening for me because I really underestimated how much the government can clamp down on a society and enforce these draconian measures. | ||
| And it's really shocked me how many people still go along with it when Trudeau is using this kind of illusory veil of love and compassion and inclusivity, yet We had some of the most draconian COVID measures in the world. | ||
| And as you guys know, I mean, at least from an American perspective, most of the blue state governors who did all of this stuff got reelected in some cases by landslides. | ||
| Jay, do you see a sort of silver lining in that his rhetoric at least did shift? | ||
| So he sort of has given up on most of the draconian stuff. | ||
| And even if he's lying and rewriting history now, at least we got there. | ||
| I mean, I know that's not a great comfort, but it's, I suppose, something. | ||
| There's a French philosopher who has this dictum, Lavro Choucault, he says that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. | ||
| That's it right there. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean he has to pretend, right? | ||
| The problem is, like, what they did is just indefensible, Dave. | ||
| And you look back and you say, boy, those were crazy times. | ||
| Well, those were crazy times because people like Trudeau imposed crazy policies that didn't protect people from COVID. | ||
| I mean, Sweden has among the lowest all-cause excess death rates in the world, lower than Canada. | ||
| And they didn't follow all of these crazy mandate policies, these lockdown policies, they didn't close schools. | ||
| It's a real problem for a political leader like Trudeau who adopted these, I mean, you know, there's this story of a pizza shop owner in Toronto, I think, whose pizza shop got shut down because he allowed an unvaccinated person to come in and eat. | ||
| I mean, you have policies like that where it's completely unnecessary to actually protect the populace when you look at the Swedish example. | ||
| He has to do something. | ||
| I guess what he chose to do is lie. | ||
| If I were his advisor, I would tell him, just fess up, be honest. | ||
| Say, look, I made tremendous mistakes, I've learned from them, and here's what I want to do going forward. | ||
| You at least have the decency to honor the people you've harmed when you did that. | ||
| I don't know who it convinces. | ||
| You know, Jordan Peterson's line on Trudeau is that he simply cannot utter one single statement that is true, that he's basically so deep in the nonsense that that's where he's at. | ||
| Rav, finish us up on Justin Trudeau from a Canadian perspective. | ||
| Is this guy, I mean, has he lost any cred with the people? | ||
| Or I know he only got 30 some odd percent of the vote, but he is still in power, whether we like it or not. | ||
| Yeah, I was gonna mention one other thing that some people might miss. | ||
| You know, in the clip he says, well, yes, you know, there have been vaccine adverse events, and some people have gotten very, very sick. | ||
| I don't think that was the line he used a year ago or two years ago, right? | ||
| This is kind of a newer admission, and, you know, it's cloaked in this, well, we gave it to billions of people, obviously some people are going to get it. | ||
| Now, that's true with every medicine and every medical intervention, but as Jay mentioned, this vaccine seems to have Um, the highest adverse event rate we've seen in the history of vaccines in terms of a vaccine that's been broadly used, um, and, you know, pushed by the government and whatnot. | ||
| And on my own sub stack, one of the stories that I wrote in, I think this was late, uh, late last year was a 38 year old law enforcement officer, um, also of South Asian background like me. | ||
| And he was forced to get vaccinated in order to maintain his job in law enforcement because of the federal mandates pushed by Trudeau. | ||
| And after his second Pfizer dose, shortly after, a few days, like in the middle of the night, he was, you know, panting, having shortness of breath, had horrible chest pain. | ||
| He thought he was fine. | ||
| He was just going to brush it off. | ||
| And this guy's really fit. | ||
| He's working out all the time. | ||
| He's incredibly healthy. | ||
| Calls the ambulance and they just, you know, take a brush into the hospital and the cardiologist said that he was lucky to have been alive because he got vaccine myocarditis, which could have resulted in an immediate heart attack. | ||
| And as this person told me, this was just one hospital in Victoria, BC, British Columbia. | ||
| And he said something like he was the third or fourth myocarditis, the vaccine myocarditis patient within the last like 30 to 60 days in this one hospital alone. | ||
| For Trudeau to say now that lots of people have gotten sick from the vaccine, of course, this is what happens when you indiscriminately push one medical intervention on everybody and sort of a one-size-fits-all policy without being honest, like, hey, for young men, there is this risk. | ||
| For kids, there's a far lower risk of COVID. | ||
| And so we should prioritize elderly people and let anyone under 40, 50, or 60, whatever you want, let them choose what they want to do. | ||
| and not force this medical intervention that is known to produce serious cardiac outcomes | ||
| in a minority of young males who get it, right? | ||
| None of that was considered. | ||
| It was just as many vaccines as possible and as many arms as possible | ||
| without any kind of nuance or personal choice. | ||
| For the record, I would be for not mandating any vaccine for anyone under a hundred years old. | ||
| That's my own personal libertarian utopia. | ||
| But let's move on to the sort of rewriting of history, because it's not just that it's happening in Canada. | ||
| It's happening right here in the United States. | ||
| I want to read a tweet. | ||
| That Jay, you sent out a couple days ago. | ||
| Apparently, President Trump is attacking Governor Ron DeSantis as a lockdown governor. | ||
| It is a ridiculous charge. | ||
| I spoke with Governor DeSantis in July 21 about his thinking on COVID, lockdowns, open schools, etc. | ||
| on my otherwise neglected YouTube channel. | ||
| And I want to show you a little clip of you talking to DeSantis about just that. | ||
| in the population from being exposed to the disease. | ||
| So, can you talk about antibody? | ||
| In Florida, we've been, we hit probably 25% on our testing. | ||
| Now, those aren't scientifically representative. | ||
| It's people that want to go in. | ||
| It now has kind of gone down just because, you know, we have less prevalence. | ||
| The protection is still there, but the antibodies may not be popping in these tests. | ||
| And so, that's one thing to look at, but then there may be other things. | ||
| Can you just summarize what the state of play is on that? | ||
| So the news is actually very, very good. | ||
| It looks like the disease is not as lethal as we thought. | ||
| It's for young people really much less lethal even than the flu. | ||
| A substantial fraction of the population seems to have been infected and not died from it. | ||
| And that's providing some protection in the population from being exposed to the disease. | ||
| All right, I just wanna clean something up real quick. | ||
| So you had a conversation with him in 21 on your YouTube channel. | ||
| That is from a year before, so September of 2020. | ||
| That's why I wanted to run that clip because even back then, you were really one of the leading voices on everybody calm down, let's see what's going on here. | ||
| And Trump seems to be rewriting that in real time. | ||
| I don't really understand. | ||
| I mean, I guess politics just frustrates me. | ||
| I'm not sure how people put up with it. | ||
| I mean, what Trump is trying to do, paint the governor as a lockdown governor, is just deeply an unfair charge. | ||
| I mean, I think the state did lock down in March of 2020, mainly because Trump and Pence sent around Debbie Birx all around the country, scaring the living daylights out of almost every single governor. | ||
| And so the state did lock down, but I think that DeSantis was among the earliest to open up, starting in May of 2020. | ||
| He called me in September of 2020, Before that clip, he just called me up out of the blue. | ||
| We talked for two hours, Dave. | ||
| And it was remarkable. | ||
| He'd read a whole bunch of papers. | ||
| He knew the footnotes of papers. | ||
| And we had that roundtable where he led the discussion, and right shortly after that roundtable, which included press, it was put up on YouTube, he opened the state. | ||
| He opened the rest of the state. | ||
| And I've seen him also personally apologize. | ||
| There's this one clip, which I remember, of him at some press conference where he's talking about having closed down sort of isolating older people so that they couldn't even | ||
| visit with family members and he told a story about somebody who | ||
| Who told who didn't get to see their parents before mom before they died. He broke down crying | ||
| An apology for that He said, I can't believe that I did this. | ||
| You know, and I'm sorry. | ||
| I mean, it's remarkable politician that would do something like that, just admit that kind of error. | ||
| And he never did it again. | ||
| And by the way, by the way, he subsequently has passed into law that that type of thing can never happen again, that you would have rights, whether it's your spouse or parent or child, to get into the hospital room. | ||
| So everyone makes mistakes and it's about the people that kind of correct it. | ||
| Rob, on the sort of political side of this, is it just like one of those things, like, all right, guys are running for president and it's just going to get nasty? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I think so. | ||
| I mean, we know what Trump's been putting out recently, you know, a lot of crazy allegations, you know, I mean, the way he talks about Ron DeSantis, you know, Ron DeSanctimonious or Meatball Ron or whatever, all these things. | ||
| I mean, I think he's just using whatever dirt he can and just throwing it, you know, DeSantis' way. | ||
| I'm not sure what the prospects are for Trump or DeSantis, but I think DeSantis has a lot of promise in the future given how he's handled COVID. | ||
| Him and Dr. Joseph Latipo, the head surgeon general of Florida, I've written a few times how they're leading with the best example that I've seen across the world. | ||
| Dr. Latipo, he's always promoting holistic health, fitness, supplements, these kind of things. | ||
| Recommending against mRNA vaccination, I believe, for men under 40, I think, was their recent advisory guideline. | ||
| So, you know, they've been at the forefront of examining the mRNA vaccine safety and being honest about the risks and benefits. | ||
| So, you know, my hats are off to Dr. Latipo and DeSantis for how they've handled this. | ||
| And by the way, when Dr. Latipo posted the study on men under 40 with myocarditis, Twitter, the old regime of Twitter, censored it. | ||
| It went back up a couple days later, and obviously things are different with Elon. | ||
| I want to show you one response by DeSantis in the last couple days about some of the stuff that Trump's been saying about his response. | ||
| Leaders take the bull by the horns and make the decisions for themselves. | ||
| They don't subcontract out their leadership to health bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci. | ||
| There are some that want to open up almost now. | ||
| If we disagree with it, we're not going to let them open. | ||
| But I didn't like to see spas at this early stage, nor did the doctors. | ||
| Going ahead and leapfrogging into phases where you should not be, I would advise him, as a health official and as a physician, not to do that. | ||
| Jay, I know you don't want to get bogged down too much in the political part of this, but if Trump had been president at the time and you were advising him instead of Fauci, do you think there are moments that you would have really gone in the other direction? | ||
| Or do you think that it just, Fauci listens to his own experts too, and that really gets to the thesis, again, of why you guys are doing this podcast. | ||
| I mean, we don't have to like play hypotheticals. | ||
| We can actually see what happened, right? | ||
| So we, in July of 2020, We had President Trump who I think his instincts were look that this is too excessive around July 2020 was already too excessive Why are we locking down? | ||
| He brought in Scott Atlas to advise him Scott and I were in close contact when he when Scott was in the White House We were sharing papers. | ||
| We were discussing, you know, new new papers are coming out nearly every day and And Scott routinely expresses frustration to me about his inability to get across to Tony Fauci and Debbie Birx basic scientific facts that were becoming clearer and clearer about immunity, about the high risk for older people, the low risk for younger people, the necessity of focus protection, the necessity of opening schools. | ||
| You know, all of that he was unable to get across. | ||
| And the question I had in my mind is, why did President Trump Who actually, I think, had the right instincts in the middle of 2020, when he hired Scott Atlas, leave in place people like Tony Fauci and Debbie Birx to undermine his own strategy. | ||
| He's the President of the United States, he has to take responsibility for the policies that he put in place, for the leaders he enabled to make those decisions. | ||
| And I just, it's one of these things, I don't, and our politics, I don't really, | ||
| I mean, I think in public health, we have to reach everybody, | ||
| no matter what their politics are. | ||
| But I mean, when I look at that, I just, I just imagine, | ||
| imagine on that wonder, what if, what if he had really enabled Scott Atlas | ||
| to be the leader that he wanted to be, rather than allowing Tony Fauci | ||
| to take the center stage over and over again. | ||
| You know, one of the themes, obviously, that we've all been talking about over the last couple | ||
| years is how do you find people to trust? | ||
| So I want to shift a little bit here because, Rav, I know one guy that you and I, I would say, trusted fairly intimately over the last couple of years on most things was Sam Harris. | ||
| And Sam Harris has had, I think, just a series of big, I would say, political blunders, something to that effect. | ||
| And he was on a podcast recently talking about how we should really only listen to experts And I thought it was rather enlightening. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| We're swimming in a sea of misinformation where you've got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others who should not have an opinion on these topics. | ||
| There is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety or climate change or The war in Ukraine, or anything else that we might want to talk about from Candace Owens, right? | ||
| It's just like she's not a relevant expert on any of those topics. | ||
| And what's more, she doesn't seem to care, right? | ||
| And she's living in a culture that has amplified that not caring into a business model, an effective business model, right? | ||
| So it's just, it's something very Trumpian about it. | ||
| Rav, it's kind of bizarre because I think we're all in agreement here. | ||
| The experts, whether they're the political experts or the science experts or the culture, whatever experts, have gotten almost everything wrong lately. | ||
| So there are reasons that people turn to other normal people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| First of all, I just want to say I still, you know, really like Sam and he has a fantastic meditation app that I use every day. | ||
| I think he's done incredible work. | ||
| in extracting the greatest kind of spiritual wisdom from the East, you know, in his time when he was in India and bringing that to the West, bringing traditional, you know, Buddhist and Hindu practices and kind of in a universal message on his waking up app. | ||
| But all of that aside, Covid, he just miserably failed, in my opinion. | ||
| And I've told him that and we've privately corresponded at great length about these things and to some success, but to some failure, although I do have I honestly do have hope for him because as more and more information comes out, it's going to be very hard to defend his positions that he's taken in the past. | ||
| But Sam says that we shouldn't be listening to people like Candace Owens or others on vaccine safety and vaccine efficacy, but at the height of of 2021 in the summer when vaccines were rolled out on his podcast, he was saying the case for getting vaccinated is absolutely clear cut. | ||
| Everybody should be getting this thing right away as soon as possible. | ||
| You know, there's so many different stories that he told. | ||
| There was one incident where he was at a restaurant and there were unvaccinated waiters around him. | ||
| And he basically said that these people are nothing but hosts of deranged right wing conspiracy theory. | ||
| When in retrospect, you know, those young men might have been smart not to get vaccinated, depending on their health | ||
| status and whatnot. | ||
| But, you know, the way in which he spoke about vaccines and the sources that he used, like he had he had on Eric Topol | ||
| in that podcast and he's had on Nicholas Bristakis. | ||
| You know, both those figures, especially Eric Topol, have continually gotten so many things wrong. | ||
| I mean, people can go look this up on Dr. Vinay Prashad, you know, great guy, on his Substack. | ||
| He recently just put out an article on Eric Topol and pointed out, like, ten different, like, basic errors that he's made in interpreting studies on long COVID, on vaccines, on COVID causing strokes and heart attacks, right? | ||
| Eric Topol has proven to be completely unreliable and erroneous in many of his positions, yet | ||
| he was kind of the chosen guru by Sam and used as sort of justification for things that | ||
| Sam pushed. | ||
| Well, in retrospect, and continuing to this day, you know, Sam refuses to listen to people | ||
| like Jay and others who have dissented on this topic and have instead attacked him. | ||
| And I think Jay and I, we spoke about this in our recent podcast episode. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I actually, I want to get, I want to get to a clip of that, but actually Jay, you're a Stanford guy. | ||
| I know so much of sort of the intellectual elite comes out of Stanford. | ||
| How, how did you not fall into this trap? | ||
| Well, I mean, I think one thing in listening to that clip that I think is a mistake that Sam makes, and a lot of people make, There's on one side there are facts that are Difficult to know like the way you learn about those facts is by debate scientific debate among people who have some expertise sometimes even people who don't look to have the relevant expertise have Important things to say about facts on the other side you have values about what to do with those facts Like someone like Sam Harris has his values and he has his knowledge his view of facts. | ||
| He's entitled to them someone like Candace Owens has her her knowledge and about the facts and also her values, which I think are quite at odds with someone like Sam Harris. | ||
| You combine those together and you may have a very different opinion about what to do about X, Y, or Z. That's not misinformation. | ||
| That's just how humans make action, make decisions, is by combining facts with their values and then making recommendations. | ||
| It's kind of, to me, it's like the height of hubris to say, well, okay, I don't think that you should listen to this other person. | ||
| Really, most of it is not about facts. | ||
| Most of it's about differences in values that I think Candace and Sam have. | ||
| I mean, I think it's one thing if Sam is going to say, well, let's look at the scientific evidence and here's what this says and that says. | ||
| And here's what this expert says, and it's one thing to try to do a balanced assessment | ||
| of the scientific evidence. In a lot of areas of science, there's a range of ideas, | ||
| hypotheses that are possible given the data. It's not right for him to say, "Oh, I know the truth | ||
| so much that I can just condemn this other individual as being completely unqualified." | ||
| I mean, it's not the qualifications, it's whether the facts are right or wrong. | ||
| How does that combine with values? | ||
| How do you connect with your audience? | ||
| Do you persuade people based on the connections? | ||
| I mean, all of that is, like, very complicated. | ||
| And I just, I find myself, you know, I just can't do this. | ||
| I can't look at Sam Harris looking down on people. | ||
| That's just bad public health, I think. | ||
| Yeah, it's really disappointing. | ||
| And I just want to say again, because I've said it a few times when I've referenced him on my podcast, I'm not trying to do this gratuitously or to attack him. | ||
| It's really just if you're part of the public discourse, then people are going to push back on on some of the other stuff. | ||
| You might say his feelings about this have been sort of religious or cult-like, which I guess would be a bit ironic. | ||
| But let's shift for a second, because he left Sam, this gives me a perfect segue, actually, Sam left Twitter because of Elon Musk. | ||
| He had thanked Jack Dorsey for banning Trump way back when, which was a bit of an odd move, but then he left Twitter once Elon Musk took over. | ||
| Got a little video of Elon and what he's doing at Twitter these days. | ||
| I think the same standard should apply to me as it applies to everyone on Twitter, just as it does on positive or negative. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what do you do? | |
| Same for everyone. | ||
| Now the thing that a lot of traditional journalists don't like is they don't like being put on the same platform as the average citizen. | ||
| They don't like their voice being the same. | ||
| They're pretty mad about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, there are several news organizations who don't like your push for democratization and what they believe is the devaluing of the badges because they were differentiated. | |
| So is that just a moment in time? | ||
| No, that's deliberate. | ||
| I think it's very important for To elevate citizen journalism, I think it's very important to hear the voice of the people, the actual voice of the people, not the filtered voice of the people. | ||
| And let the people choose the narrative, and let the people determine the truth, and not five editors-in-chiefs of major publications. | ||
| Do you want to know what's really going on, or do you want their opinion? | ||
| You know, it's a handful of people. | ||
| I think we want to know the voice of the people, the true voice of the people. | ||
| This does get us to that starting point of the elites versus the people. | ||
| And Rav, there's an awful lot of elites and formerly blue check journalists who are very upset and not willing to pay $8 to still have that blue check and, you know, get some of the benefits thereof. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Dave, you know, we should, we should really hold our thoughts and prayers for the blue check mark genocide. | ||
| All these people who can't afford $8, A month. | ||
| I mean, how many Spotify or Netflix or Crave or HBO, whatever subscriptions do these people have? | ||
| And how much time are they spending on these things? | ||
| I mean, $8 a month is, I mean, it's, I think you said it's the price of a coffee or whatever, like the meltdown over these little things on Twitter. | ||
| This is the point where I get where, like, I'm looking at all these people melting down and I'm like, I need to get off Twitter because this is a fake reality. | ||
| This is like a hallucination. | ||
| This is not real. | ||
| This is like, this is like, The most trivial of trivial problems. | ||
| And I need to go outside and like touch the dirt or something and do something in my real hands because people are whining about $8 a month. | ||
| But other than that, like what Elon Musk just says in this clip is absolutely right. | ||
| I mean, this explains the rise of Substack, how leading publications throughout the pandemic, especially and in other issues, have gotten things completely wrong. | ||
| I mean, The Atlantic, The New York Times on lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccines, etc. | ||
| They have gotten these issues so wrong and they have failed to hold big pharma accountable for what they've done, you know, Pfizer and Moderna and the CDC and the FDA and misleading the public. | ||
| And so that, you know, that explains why so many people are now subscribing to Substax where, you know, independent journalists like myself can freely write about vaccines and write about mandates without any fear of an editor, you know, editorializing or changing things. | ||
| And I'll just quickly say, too, in my experience, even writing for a couple of major conservative-leaning publications, I couldn't write about vaccine mandates even. | ||
| I mean, I had some editors who, despite being kind of right-leaning or libertarian, they were still like, no, no, we're not going to publish anything negative about vaccines. | ||
| And I'm like, this is the data, myocarditis or whatever. | ||
| And they're like, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. | ||
| And I'm like, really? | ||
| OK, if that was the New York Times, I would expect that. | ||
| Some of these other publications have kind of sold out on this issue too, so that pushed this sort of migration to Substack on my part and to launching this podcast as well with Jay. | ||
| Jay, I assume that Elon's words are music to your ears because obviously you were shadow banned and then suspended and then ultimately banned banned from Twitter by the old regime, reinstated by Elon. | ||
| Do you have confidence that that this thing's gonna work out properly and that he can, you know, keep it in defense of free speech and the rest of it? | ||
| Well, we'll see. | ||
| It's difficult. | ||
| I mean, I think a lot of what you have to understand is a lot of the censorship by social media, a lot of the sort of like narrative enforcement by the press, a lot of that actually is actually at the behest of the government. | ||
| I've been involved in this lawsuit, Missouri versus Biden, brought by the Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General's offices. | ||
| I'm represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance. | ||
| And what we found is that there was a vast censorship ...apparatus set up by the federal government, including the Surgeon General's office, including the NIH, including the White House itself, sending messages threatening social media about what to ban and who to ban. | ||
| It's almost inconceivable that it wasn't also... Newspapers like the New York Times essentially reinforcing the narrative that Tony Fauci wants. | ||
| A lot of what we saw, this sort of univocal support for lockdowns and all that, and then censorship and delegitimization of people who opposed, was at the behest of the government. | ||
| It wasn't just simply social media doing it by itself. | ||
| What Elon Musk has done on Twitter is actually quite brave. | ||
| He's essentially telling the government to go take a flying hike, a flying leap, whereas you look at Facebook, you still have this censorship regime going on. | ||
| You know, when I was at Twitter, I sat down with all these engineers and they opened up everything for me. | ||
| You know, there were certain tabs they couldn't click with personal emails, that sort of thing. | ||
| But they showed me everything and it's incredible because Jack Dorsey testified under oath that Twitter didn't shadow ban. | ||
| The entire system was built on shadow banning and tags and all of those other things. | ||
| Jay, can you just bring us home on one last thing here and then we got to run? | ||
| You were, last time I saw you was a few months ago at a COVID panel that Governor DeSantis put together. | ||
| Brett Weinstein was there, a few other people. | ||
| What's happening with that? | ||
| And I guess, do you think anything will actually come of it? | ||
| Well, we're about to meet, I think, in early May. | ||
| You know, it's one of these things where, like, Science works frustratingly slowly, so we're just working through various issues related to vaccination, health policy going forward, and you know, it's a robust discussion, so stay tuned. | ||
| I mean, we'll eventually have some reports and various things, but it's a slow process, Dave. | ||
| I thought you could do science just like that. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Rav J, great seeing you guys. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And guys, no post-game show today because I'm actually across the world in the other holy land, not Florida. | ||
| I'm in Israel right now and we'll have more videos for you in the next couple of days. |
Export Selection