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Oct. 12, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:22:49

A History of Death: Spanish Flu and #Covid19

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	- - You, Stefan.
	And we are asking your opinion about this coronavirus crisis and what normal people should do.
	Now I'm turning the computer you could see We are, and there we are.
	Hello, hello. On people coming from Canada,
	I think it's the US that you have concerns about, which I can certainly understand.
	How has it been for you guys out there?
	I mean, I've read a little bit about it, but what's the on-the-ground view of the pandemic?
	I mean, actually, we are now in the second phase.
	The first phase was really, it was very weak.
	There is a few deaths and so on.
	But the government has ordered a complete lockdown of the country for a few weeks, which was detrimental for the economy.
	And we have a big GDP collapse, like 13% of the GDP has disappeared.
	And now we are beginning the second phase, which is in Europe very strong.
	And Hungary is one of the strongest in Europe in terms of a number of deaths.
	But this time The government learned the lesson at least and now they say that we don't close down the country.
	So we don't have any more lockdown and we just have to survive and that's it.
	But we had a wonderful lecture just in the morning with one of my friends gave a lecture which is probably said that actually the cost of closing down of the economy is much bigger in terms of of expected life years than the virus could cause.
	Wait, are you saying that a government program had the opposite of its intended effect?
	Let me just write this down.
	This is This is shocking!
	Appalling! I've never heard of...
	Actually, that's the entire foundation, right, of Austrian economics to some degree, is that the law of unintended consequences completely overwhelms the good intentions, even if they are there, from the bureaucrats.
	So, yes, I think that's good.
	So, I... Of course, I'm not a doctor or anything like that.
	I'm not an expert in any kind of healthcare.
	I have been tracking... The coronavirus, well, it's funny, you know, it's a strange coincidence in life.
	Last year, I flew out to Hong Kong to cover the protests and I was there in late September and then left, obviously.
	It was quite a wild trip.
	I mean, I marched with the protesters.
	I took several rather exhilarating facefuls of tear gas, which, you know, the power of the state often makes me cry, but usually not quite as vividly or directly as that.
	And then I left, of course, and produced a documentary in November talking about how dangerous China was.
	Little did I know that, you know, I was leaving Hong Kong and behind me was this tidal wave of coronavirus bacteria or viruses that were sort of flowing after me.
	So it was an odd coincidence that that happened to play out that way.
	I did call the pandemic in January.
	It was pretty clear to me that, you know, the endless accusations of xenophobia and racism, the corruption of the World Health Organization that is led by a Marxist ex-terrorist, that this was going to cripple any rational response To the world.
	I mean, we've got, Canada has sort of, the eastern part has had almost no coronavirus because they closed their internal borders very easily.
	Whereas, of course, the World Health Organization said that countries should leave their borders open, that to close their borders would be racist, anti-Chinese, xenophobic, bad for the economy, oddly enough.
	And of course, it's easy to talk about what's good or bad for the economy When it's other people paying the price.
	It's again a fundamental issue with the government.
	And they have actually recently now admitted, the World Health Organization, that the recommendation to leave borders open during a pandemic, which is truly insane.
	It's something...
	It's like having a submarine go underwater but leave the portholes open.
	It obviously makes no sense at all.
	But it was driven by politics.
	It was driven by...
	A fear of harming the economy.
	It was driven by, obviously, the influence of China upon the World Health Organization is overwhelming.
	And they did, of course, exactly what you would expect a government agency to do, which is to act for its own petty political and economic self-interest.
	Of course, if there's a pandemic, everyone says, well, World Health Organization clearly needs a lot more money because don't you know there's a pandemic?
	In other words, you pay them To spread the virus.
	You've got this World Health Organization that has a direct financial incentive to spread the virus because that gives them more funding, more authority, more interviews.
	They get to jet off to cool places and have a gaggle of microphones in front of them.
	So it's all the entirely wrong incentives.
	And it is really one of the greatest incentives.
	Crimes against humanity that has happened outside of war or direct internal genocide.
	Because it's not just, of course, the, what is it, million plus people who have supposedly died.
	It's not the tens of millions who've been infected.
	It is the fact that in many places, 10 times the number of people have died from the effects of the lockdowns.
	The effects of not having access to health care.
	Because, of course, they shut down, as you know.
	It's like, oh, we just need two weeks to shut down so that we can slow the rise and everybody get ready.
	Now, of course, everybody who understands the nature of the state knows that it never gets ready for anything.
	Anything, anything, anything.
	Now, here in Canada, it's been, what, nine months, nine and a half months?
	And they still don't have...
	Testing set up. They still, and they say, well, you know, we're not ready for the second wave.
	It's like, excuse me, you had eight, nine months?
	But no, of course, nothing like that.
	So they said, just, you know, two weeks for a lockdown, and now it's 10 months later, and everybody's wearing diapers on their heads, and nobody has a face, right?
	So it is really terrible, the amount of drug addiction, suicides, depression, anxiety, and all of the, you know, it's funny because they say, well, we're canceling non-essential surgeries.
	So non-essential surgeries, everyone thinks that's like me waltzing in to get a hair transplant for my armpit or something like that, or breast implants or something.
	But no, no. Non-essential surgeries are just, you don't happen to have an ambulance full of people coming in from some horrible bus accident.
	Non-essential surgeries are, yeah, you need a tumor removed.
	Yeah, that's pretty important. And so people aren't getting preventive care.
	They're not getting regular checkups.
	They're not getting surgeries that they need.
	And as we know, the seen versus the unseen, like this is the big problem.
	And the fact that governments have not educated people on the seen versus the unseen is really the great catastrophe.
	And I talked about this many, many months ago, saying that The government, if there's a coronavirus death, the media is like, coronavirus death!
	And it's all over the place.
	Whereas if someone dies six months from now because they didn't get a lump removed, it doesn't even show up on the radar.
	And the fact that we're trained to look at, you know, it's like the old thing with the job...
	Government's creating jobs.
	You know, we just spent five million dollars and created a hundred jobs.
	And everyone's like, wow, a hundred jobs.
	That's a net positive to the economy.
	And nobody talks about and nobody sees.
	The jobs that would have been created if they hadn't vampired that money out of the economy.
	And, of course, everyone who gets a job is like, yay, I've got a job.
	It's the greatest thing ever. But the guy who's still unemployed who would have had a job if the government hadn't taken the money, he doesn't even know what he's missing.
	So we've got this terrible educational system and this terrible media that, of course, you know, it's funny how badly coronavirus strikes people.
	Conservative, right-wing, Christian environments and how it magically leaps over.
	Democrat gatherings, Black Lives Matter protests, anarchist gatherings.
	It's just amazing. It's like this very, very selective ideological virus that just happens to land very hard on people who oppose communism and vaults over everyone who's enacting a takeover in communism.
	I did want to sort of talk about just a general intro like that.
	I have put together some truly gripping information.
	I guess I'll say gripping because it feels that way.
	It was certainly fascinating for me to read it.
	Some gripping information about the worst flu.
	Everybody knows, right? The 1918.
	What's called the Spanish flu, which is entirely unfair to the Spaniards where it did not originate.
	But I wanted to talk a little bit about...
	What happened in the Spanish flu?
	How unbelievably terrible the government was, as we can imagine, at handling the Spanish flu.
	Then I'll do a couple of minutes on how a free society would actually handle the flu or handle a pandemic, and then a Q&A. How does that sound?
	I booked a fair amount of time, so I hope that we have that.
	Do we have for a little while? Yeah, sure, we have some time.
	So, go on. All right.
	That's a dangerous thing to give me, is a microphone, people's attention, and a fair amount of unlimited time.
	So, I hope everyone went to the washroom already, and you're all well, carbohydrate.
	All right. So, Spanish flu.
	Actually started off pretty mild.
	Spring of 1918, first wave was pretty mild.
	And it was considered to be a typical flu.
	You got your chills, your fever, your fatigue, and after several days, People got better and the number of reported deaths was very, very low.
	And then over the summer, and of course I'm hoping this is not the case with COVID and it doesn't seem to be, there was a second wave that had, you know, the two things you don't want in a coronavirus, right?
	You don't want it to be highly contagious and you don't want it to be extremely dangerous.
	Actually, that's two. The third one you don't want it to be, which unfortunately is the case with COVID, is you don't want your coronavirus, To have a week or two of asymptomatic potential transmission.
	Because, you know, the one thing that was the mild saving grace with SARS, like the sudden acute respiratory syndrome that came out of China and Hong Kong in 2003, I think it was, is that at least when you got SARS, you just face-planted into your bed and coughed up blood until you either lived or died.
	Like, you weren't out there wandering around grilling food.
	Meat on the barbecue and spreading your germs everywhere.
	So what happened in the fall of 1918 is the flu hit and it was absolutely...
	Like it had not been seen.
	This kind of ailment had not been seen, I would really guess.
	I mean, smallpox was kind of continuous until the vaccine was developed, but it probably was the first truly deadly disease to emerge in Europe since the Black Death of...
	13th, 14th, 15th, 16th centuries.
	So, like, this is truly astounding.
	The flu in the fall of 1918 hit so hard that if you got it, you could die within hours.
	Hours! Or days of developing symptoms.
	Your skin turned blue, your lungs fill up with fluid, and you basically drown in your own goop.
	And in just one year, right?
	So remember, the spring of 1918 is pretty mild, but by the fall...
	It's so vicious that the average life expectancy in America plummeted by, ooh, audience participation time.
	Let's throw out a couple of guesses.
	The average life expectancy in America dropped by how many years in the fall?
	I mean, there is, I think, like 10 or 20 million people has died, so it had to be fairly big.
	That is. 10 years, 20 years, like this?
	See, that's what's so beautiful about dealing with a group that's so good at math.
	It's beautiful. So, yeah, 12 years.
	The average life expectancy declined By 12 years.
	And of course, they had no vaccine because there's never been a successful vaccine against the coronavirus.
	I mean, there's the flu every year, but that's a bit of hit and miss.
	Of course, they had no antibiotics to treat the secondary bacterial infections.
	And basically, they had only non-pharmaceutical interventions.
	So isolation, quarantine, hand washing and so on, disinfectants, limitations of public gatherings.
	But It was all applied incredibly unevenly, which made things quite a bit worse.
	Now, so, of course, does anybody know where the Spanish Flu is now considered to have emerged?
	Hint! Spoiler!
	Not Spain! Yeah, it's in the US. This was the American soldiers who developed the Spanish Flu first.
	Well, that's where it showed up for the first in America.
	But there is now, and I'll get into this in a little bit, there is considerable evidence now.
	It hasn't been confirmed by a thorough genetic analysis of the progress, because it's hard to find the Spanish flu virus now.
	They did find one, which was actually kind of a cool story I'll get to.
	China. Interestingly enough, like the Black Death, like a wide variety of other things that came out of China, at least that's the latest, and I'll get into that, right?
	So, does anyone know the story as to why it's called the Spanish Flu?
	Yes, because the military authorities have suppressed the news, and on its page came the news about the infection, and this is why it became the Spanish Flu.
	Yeah, that's right. So, Spain was a neutral country with a relatively free media and they covered the outbreak from the start.
	They reported on it in Madrid as early as late May of 1918.
	But of course, the allied countries, the central powers had wartime censors and they covered up all of the news of the flu.
	Why? To keep morale high.
	Don't be sad everyone.
	And because the Spanish news sources were the only ones that were actually reporting On the flu, many thought, oh, it came from Spain.
	Now, of course, in Spain, they thought it came from France and they referred to it as the French flu, but of course, the name didn't take.
	The French flu now is socialism and ennui, but that's about it.
	Now, strange thing about 1918 flu is that it's very different from COVID. Does anybody remember or know who was most affected by the 1918 flu?
	I don't know. Babies, children and young people and, of course, very old people, middle-aged people were pretty fine.
	So it also hit previously healthy young people really, really hard.
	And, of course, that's people who normally take these kind of bullets and kind of stroll away.
	A huge number of World War I servicemen were affected.
	But of course, I think you would think of the stress of wartime and how stress and the cortisol levels associated with it tend to depress your immune system.
	I think that did not help.
	So, quick question again. Did more soldiers die from the flu or from war?
	I think from flu.
	I heard that there's a more...
	Yeah, so more U.S. soldiers died from the 18th flu than were killed in battle during the war.
	40% of the U.S. Navy got it, 36% of the Army, and of course the troops are moving all over the place.
	So you can't think of the Spanish flu outside of its connection to World War I because of course the troops were often decommissioning, they were coming home, they were traveling around.
	And of course, the supply chain had to be kept up, you know, an army marches on its stomach.
	So they really had the government program called war and motion, just as we have a government program called migration, mass migration, mass immigration, and mass work visas.
	That's another government program that had a similar effect earlier this year in helping to spread war.
	The virus, and so that was, and of course they were in crowded ships, they were in trains, of course there was very little passenger, although no passenger planes at that point, but they were all kind of jammed in because the government is not very interested in social distancing when it comes to moving troops around, they're in there like sardines.
	Alright, who knows the death count?
	How many tens, or millions, or billions, I guess not billions.
	Anybody remember the death count of the 18 flu?
	Like 55 million or like this?
	40 million, 55, 40, like this.
	Alright, so that's pretty good.
	That's pretty good.
	What about number of infections?
	No, that I don't know.
	So the number of infections is really quite amazing.
	One third of the entire world's population was infected.
	500 million out of 1.5 billion, so one-third.
	Now, of course, it was really loosey-goosey as far as record-keeping went, so it's 20 to 50 million is an often estimate, but some estimates run as high as 100 million victims, which is about 3% of the world's Population.
	So, yeah, that was pretty bad.
	So, I'll just make a real brief case for the origin story of COVID. Because, you know, they say history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure as hell rhymes.
	Although it's hard to come up with a rhyme for China.
	But... So the argument is this first appeared in China, and there's an author of a book, his name is Humphreys.
	And I'll send you guys the links to all of this stuff, but a mysterious respiratory disease broke out in northern China in November of 1917.
	November! It's like even the same month as 2019, right?
	Broke out in northern China in November, and they suffered many of the same symptoms of the Spanish flu.
	Doctors were reporting that patients turned blue from a lack of oxygen.
	They coughed up blood and suffered from fever, headaches, pneumonia, and shortness of breath.
	And this flu in China was unusual and highly contagious because it killed otherwise healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 40.
	Seemingly by turning their strong immune systems against them, right?
	So you guys have probably heard of what's called the cytokine storm, which is, you know, COVID has these ACE2 receptors which can plug into just about every human cell and when it spreads through the body, the immune system really freaks out and just starts attacking everything because it can't figure out You know, it's like when there's a submarine around and you don't know where it is, you'll just launch your depth charges everywhere hoping to catch it.
	Or, you know, flack in the night if you can't find the planes.
	And this happened.
	So the stronger you were and the stronger your immune system, the more this disease would turn it against you.
	And so local Chinese health officials called it the winter sickness.
	And they chose not to quarantine citizens or enact travel restrictions.
	Once more, the repetition is grim and sad, right?
	It came out in November. They knew it was highly contagious.
	They knew it was very dangerous, but they chose not to quarantine citizens or enact travel restrictions.
	And as you all know, in China, I've got a whole video called The Case Against China, so I won't go over it in detail here, obviously.
	Yeah, they enacted internal travel restrictions while letting everyone travel internationally, which is about as sure a way of making sure that everyone else gets the disease as you can imagine, right?
	So then the question is, back then there wasn't the same international travel between China and the West as is now, so how did this influenza get from China to North America and to Europe?
	Ah, very, very interesting.
	A historical footnote is pointed out by the author from World War I. The shipment of 94,000 laborers from northern China to southern England and France to free up able-bodied British and French citizens to fight on the front lines of the Western Front.
	Right? So, again, we've got a government program called WAR and they need laborers and they decide to get their laborers From China.
	So during the winter of 1917, remember the virus emerged, of course, in the spring, or at least that's when it got on people's radar.
	Up to 20,000 workers a month from the plague-infected area of China arrived at the British East port of...
	Oh, sorry. This is a squinty-vision glasses word here.
	Something like that.
	To become part of the Chinese labor corps, they were packed into these crowded barracks.
	Of course, that's breeding ground for influenza.
	Although the British were aware of the outbreaks at their barracks, they still shipped out the Chinese workers.
	Government program, government program, government program, everywhere, all over the place here, right?
	So this is how it began to spread.
	And they were originally transported these labor corps around Africa by way of the Suez Canal.
	But all the resources were diverted to the troop transports and the British had to find another way to Europe.
	So what happened?
	Canada.
	So Canada gave its agreement or allowed the Chinese laborers to land in Vancouver.
	And then those Chinese laborers traveled across the country by train.
	And then they left for Europe from Halifax, which is an Atlantic port on the eastern end of Canada.
	And so Canada, nativist, patriotic, whatever you want to call them, you could call them racist feelings, were pretty high.
	And there were fears that the Chinese laborers would try to escape within Canada.
	So what happened? Well, the Canadian authorities kept this whole mass transfer of infected people across Canada.
	They kept it secret. They banned coverage of it in the press.
	And they put special army guards inside these sealed train cars with the Chinese workers.
	And stationed them at camps encased in barbed wire, right?
	So this is modern surf stuff that's going on.
	So the guy looked at these medical records, and of the 25,000 Chinese labor corps workers that came across Canada, 3,000 of them ended up in medical quarantine, most, of course, with flu-like symptoms.
	The influenza then ripped through all the Canadian guards and then took root in North America.
	This is what he wrote. Ethnocentric fears, both official and popular, facilitated its spread along military pathways that have been carved out across the globe to sustain the war effort on the Western Front.
	So hundreds of these Chinese workers that, of course, landed in Vancouver, went all the way across.
	It's like probably a five or six day train journey or more.
	To Halifax and then they shipped out hundreds of these workers who continued on to Europe.
	There were thousands and thousands, but hundreds of them died in Europe of respiratory illnesses.
	And the influence that they brought with them, according to the author, mutated and then exploded along the sinews of war.
	Actually kind of a cool phrase.
	Oh, that's according to a journal article.
	So the flu outbreak that came from China boomeranged back to North America and then across the Pacific Ocean.
	And it's really pretty wild.
	So there does seem to be a...
	And the other thing too, so this wave was less lethal in China than the mysterious illness that broke out in 1917.
	And the author says, well, that's kind of proof that China started the virus because by the time that the virus came back to China...
	It was not very lethal because they had already developed immunities based upon China starting the virus.
	So that's kind of the argument.
	And the 1918 flu went just about everywhere.
	It even went to, like, remote Alaskan communities, Inuit communities.
	Even President Woodrow Wilson was reportedly hit by the flu in early 1919 while negotiating the Treaty of Versailles.
	So I guess it's not the first president who got hit hard with the COVID situation.
	And in March 1918, so there's a spring, right, 84,000 American soldiers were headed across the Atlantic And were followed by 118,000 more the following month.
	So it was...
	And of course, when the flu hit, World War I, again, government program had left parts of America with a shortage of physicians, other health workers.
	And of course, a lot of them got sick with the virus itself.
	Hospitals were so overloaded.
	That schools and private homes, other buildings, gymnasiums and so on had to be converted into these makeshift MASH hospitals and sometimes all they could find were medical students to deal with this stuff.
	Now, just as it's happening now, some places there were quarantines, there was ordering to wear masks and shutdown of public places, schools, churches and theaters and so on.
	People were told, don't shake hands, stay indoors.
	Libraries put a halt on lending books and there was a very common habit of spitting in the streets and regulations were passed banning that and of course those changes in behavior have lasted down to the current.
	Day. Now there's another...
	I mean, it's just unbelievable how much government is responsible for flus in the past and in the present.
	So they didn't have any cure.
	They didn't have any antibiotics.
	And they didn't have any antivirals, of course.
	So what did they do? They said, um...
	What you want to do is jam your face into a giant bucket of aspirin and inhale as many as you possibly can, right?
	So aspirin had been trademarked by Bayer in 1899.
	The patent had expired in 1917.
	So it was, you know, free to produce, relatively free to produce for this.
	And before the spikes in deaths of the Spanish flu in the fall of 18, the U.S. Surgeon General, Navy, and the Journal of the American Medical Association all said, aspirin, aspirin, aspirin.
	So doctors were advised by the government, by the government regulatory agencies to To advise their patients to take up to 30 grams a day.
	Does anybody know? I guess you guys probably take a little aspirin from time to time.
	Does anyone know they got 30 grams a day?
	They say take 30 grams a day.
	At what dose or how many grams is now considered to be toxic?
	Very obscure question.
	All right. Look at that.
	A super healthy group. Love it.
	All right. So, take up to 30 grams a day, and anything above 4 grams now is considered to be unsafe.
	Now, if you get aspirin poisoning, which you probably would if you're taking 30 grams a day, what does it look like?
	Well, you get hyperventilation and pulmonary edema, the buildup of fluid in the lungs, and now what they're saying is that many of the deaths that particularly peaked in October of 1918 were actually caused or accelerated by government-mandated aspirin poisoning.
	So if the flu doesn't get you, well, your doctor will.
	And again, these come hugely out of government situations.
	And I mean, it really was staggering what happened.
	I mean, entire families would get wiped out.
	And of course, you've got the problem of widows and orphans.
	Because men are more out of the house.
	And you know, men, we're smart slash ridiculously stupid when it comes to, I will run out and save.
	Somebody's ill. Somebody's unwell.
	I'm going to go and help them. And you know, it hit men particularly hard, which again is the case with COVID-19.
	It hits men a lot harder than women.
	And of course, this drives government programs as well.
	War always drives government programs, as we know, for obvious reasons, but also because there are widows and orphans that the government needs to support.
	And this was the same situation here as well.
	So the government facilitated and to some degree mandated deaths that arose either from the aspirin or the flu leaves a lot of widows and orphans.
	Funeral parlors, way overwhelmed, bodies were piling up, and a lot of people had to dig graves for their own family members.
	It was unbelievable. The economy, the economy, the economy, the economy, the great, invisible, wounded, necessary ghost of these pandemics.
	And particularly, it was harder then because the government couldn't just print all the money, borrow all the money, raise all the funds that it wanted through selling off the unborn to foreign banksters.
	So, you know, businesses were forced to shut down, employees got sick, mail delivery, garbage collection, all of that was hindered, which, you know, if you don't collect the garbage, it attracts rats, the rats can spread disease and all that.
	There weren't enough places, there weren't enough farm workers in some place to harvest crops, there were food Shortages and all of that.
	And it really is...
	And there was no central understanding.
	Very little science. And people just kind of made stuff up.
	So I'll give you the tale of two cities, right?
	Philadelphia. Now...
	Oh, that's a really obscure question.
	I tried to look it up.
	I'm pretty sure Philadelphia was on the left or on the Democrat side back in the day because it was highly corrupt.
	And whether I'm right or wrong, I associate those two things.
	So Philadelphia... I had a guy named Dr.
	Wilmer Krusen. He was director of public health and charities.
	And he said that, yeah, okay, there are a lot of people dying, it's true, but it's not this Spanish flu.
	And I'm pretty sure he used air quotes, although there's no video.
	It's Spanish flu. It's just the normal flu.
	It's just, it's a bad flu.
	It's not the Spanish flu.
	And there was a liberty loan parade that was supposed to be attended by tens of thousands of Philadelphians.
	Now, liberty loans were the loans that you would give the government to wage war on the promise that it would pay you back later as if it had any money.
	And this guy was like, oh, this should totally go on.
	It's just the flu. It's just the flu.
	And he was warned to cancel the parade, but he assured the public that the recent military deaths were from an old-fashioned influenza or grip.
	And, yeah, that's not good.
	And what happened was, in just 10 days after this parade, over 1,000 Philadelphians were dead.
	Another 200,000 were sick.
	And then, finally, like locking the barn door after the horses left, the city closed saloons and theaters.
	By March of 1919, over 15,000 citizens of Philadelphia had lost their lives.
	Again, government mandate, government mandate.
	Well, it's a government-sanctioned, on-public-property parade to allow citizens or encourage them to buy government bonds.
	It's approved of by the government agency and bureaucracy and so on.
	And that's crazy.
	Now, if you look at St. Louis, Missouri, that's very different.
	They started off real early.
	Schools and movie theaters closed.
	Public gatherings banned.
	And the peak mortality rate in St.
	Louis was only one eighth of Philadelphia's death rate during the peak of the pandemic.
	In San Francisco, you were fined five dollars.
	I mean, that's when five dollars really meant something.
	If you were caught in public without masks and they were charged with disturbing the peace.
	And eventually just people died.
	And what ended up happening was you either got immunity or you died.
	And then eventually they managed to sort of get it back.
	The story, and they actually have been able to resurrect the virus to study and figure out what made it so dangerous.
	It's a long story and I won't go into it in detail here, but A researcher went out to the far north, to an Inuit community that had buried people who had died of the 1918 flu, but their bodies had been encased in permafrost, which I guess had preserved, obviously, everything.
	He tried it when he was 25, and it didn't take...
	He tried flying it back home, but he didn't have a good enough fridge, and he would take the samples when they would stop the refuel, and he would get some CO2 from fire extinguishers and...
	Spray it on the samples to try and keep the virus preserved but it didn't work.
	He tried injecting it into chicken eggs but it never took.
	Like 50 years later he was able to kind of do it again and this time they figured it out.
	And they did finally figure out what had made it so difficult and it did have something to do with How badly it hijacked your immune system to turn you against yourself.
	So, yeah, it is nasty.
	Now, of course, since then, since then, there have been other influenza epidemics, pandemics, really, but none quite as bad.
	A flu pandemic from 1957 to 1958 killed about 2 million people worldwide, 70,000 people in the U.S., And 1968 to 1969 was pretty bad as well.
	About a million people got killed around the world, 34,000 Americans.
	I guess the American website, sorry, I don't have the figures for Ukraine.
	And 2009 to 2010, 12,000 Americans died from H1N1, the sea of swine flu and so on.
	So I just wanted to just touch on a couple of things and get you guys thoughts about this.
	So why was this pandemic so bad?
	Well, the war, obviously.
	There was this travel, like, oh, we need 98,000 workers because of the war.
	Let's get them from China. And it seems so weird to go that far.
	The only thing I can generally assume is some politicians, some bureaucrats, some business people doubtless got bribes or paybacks for supplying this kind of stuff.
	So when there's a shortage of labor, the government generally gets bribed by the big...
	Corporations to allow for labor to come in from other countries, right?
	So you constantly hear in America and other places, oh, we don't have enough STEM. You know, your science, technology, engineering, medicine?
	I always forget the last one.
	But we don't have enough of these skilled workers, so we need to bring them in from other countries.
	Now, we all know being free market 101 people that if there's a demand, then that will raise the price and that will increase the supply and it all sorts out.
	But, of course, companies don't want to wait for any of that kind of stuff.
	They just want stuff in the here and now.
	And so, for computer programming, if there wasn't a constant influx of cheap programmers, then all that would happen is people would invest money to figure out how programs could write programs.
	You know, in the same way that when you had slavery...
	Throughout most of the world, throughout most of human history, the incentive to create labor-saving devices was just not there.
	I mean, the ancient world in Romans, they knew all about the steam engine and other cool things, but they just never transferred it into labor-saving devices, because if you're investing all of your money in slaves, you don't want to render them less valuable by inventing labor-saving devices.
	Travel for these weird, unproductive, short-term gain economic reasons also did it.
	Censorship was huge.
	Censorship was huge in allowing for the spread of this.
	Good information was suppressed. Bad information was spread.
	And this was what was so terrible about The World Health Organization, because the social media companies, as you know, said, well, if you quote the World Health Organization, you're pretty much okay, but if you go against what the World Health Organization says, that's really, really bad.
	And what that meant, of course, is that the World Health Organization dictated The terms in which people could speak about the virus.
	In other words, if you said, as I did, and many people said, you gotta close borders.
	Close your borders. It's not complicated.
	There's a pandemic. You close your borders.
	But of course, when the World Health Organization came out and said, don't close your borders, people like me and others who were saying close the borders could be suppressed.
	We could have our posts removed.
	We could be suppressed. We could be kicked off social media because we were saying close the borders.
	And the World Health Organization was saying open the borders.
	Now, normally that would be, or keep the borders open, normally that would be a back and forth, right?
	Like people would discount me because I'm not a doctor.
	It's like, yeah, that doesn't mean I can't think.
	Doesn't mean I can't figure out how viruses travel.
	And so normally there'd be a robust debate about borders open versus borders closed, but because a lot of social media companies adopted the, if you go against the World Health Organization, you're spreading misinformation and you're a bad guy and you can't be allowed to have an audience, that destroyed the capacity to debate the value of open versus closed borders during a pandemic, which I mean, it's just crazy, the idea that this would even be debatable.
	But the debate was kind of shut down, and this happened in 1918, with everything being suppressed for the sake of morale.
	Morale. You've got to keep people's morale high so we can't tell them about this dangerous virus or teach them how to take precautions until it's too late.
	Although, I've got to tell you, I mean...
	Of the two situations, number one, I'm told about a dangerous disease, or number two, I have to go out into my backyard with a shovel and bury my entire family.
	I think the morale is probably hit a little bit harder by throwing dirt on your children's faces because they turned blue and their lungs exploded.
	I'll take that over some bad news.
	And, of course, politicians are concerned about looking good or looking bad.
	One of the reasons World Health Organization...
	said to keep your borders open was because they'd made a mistake as they believed in the past when a disease hit in India.
	They suggest close borders and it cost the Indian economy like three billion dollars.
	It turned out not to be too dangerous.
	So, of course, they swing from one side to another without any rhyme or reason because it's a government agency, a quasi-government agency.
	Now, the seen versus the unseen as well.
	It's truly an alternate universe looking at America and the coverage of this.
	I mean, I put on my mental hazmat suit and I dive into the mainstream media from time to time to see what they're talking about.
	And it's always the same. You know, it's always framed to be anti-Trump.
	Trump is Christian. Trump is a nationalist.
	Trump's mentor was anti-communist, so he's got to be wrecked.
	And so they always say, Trump says, hey, don't be so afraid of the virus.
	It's not that bad. And then the media always says, Trump downplays danger of virus as U.S. dead past 200,000, right?
	It's 200,000. Now, the issue of the number of dead...
	Is really debatable, which sounds terrible, because if you question this number, it sounds like you don't care about the dead.
	It's like, well, we really do care about the dead.
	We just care about more than just the COVID deaths, but the deaths, as mentioned earlier, related to overdoses, related to suicides, related to not getting regular health care or preventive care or regular surgeries and so on.
	But the 200,000 number You know, 94% of those died with comorbidities, right?
	With comorbidities, and often two or more.
	Comorbidities, as you know, being obese, significant smoking, heart disease, being male, African Americans are hit particularly hard and so on.
	Though that's not, of course, a comorbidity, but...
	There is, and of course, at age 80 plus and so on, you know, how many of the people who died with coronavirus would have been dead in a couple of months anyway?
	Hard to tell, right? But what they do is they say, well, 200,000 dead, forgetting completely that America was warned to expect 2 million dead, right?
	So what they do is they don't sit there and say, wow, Trump saved 1.8 million lives or Pence was in charge of the coronavirus response.
	They don't sit there and say, wow, we were expecting 2 million dead.
	We only got 200,000.
	That's great. What they do is they create an imaginary baseline of no one dying.
	And then every death is directly attributable to Trump.
	And therefore, you should get Biden in followed very quickly by Kamala Harris, right?
	So the seen versus the unseen.
	People aren't looking there and saying, well, according to estimates, 1.8 million people are alive who wouldn't otherwise have been alive.
	That's really good. What they do is they say, well, somehow there's a magic universe where nobody dies from coronavirus and the 200,000 deaths were unnecessary and Trump is responsible.
	So that's how things play out.
	And it's because the population has been dumbed down by bad education, bad media, bad movies, bad thinking or no thinking and all that.
	So, let's just, I'll end up really briefly here, and then I want to get you guys' thoughts on this.
	What would a free society look like in its handling of a pandemic?
	And I know this is kind of like a hole with no bottom.
	How would the roads run if there was no government, blah, blah.
	I get all of that, right? But I think it's worth talking about, because there are precedents, and, you know, we do have to have answers from time to time about what happens in a free society.
	So, the first thing I want, and it's consumer-driven, like I'm talking a truly stateless society, so for all of these small-g government libertarians, just hold your nose and pretending I'm talking about really, really small government.
	It's really, really small like an atom is small.
	You know it's there, but you just can't see it in any reasonable way, right?
	So, what I want is, first of all, I want organizations that make money off people being healthy rather than people being sick.
	Because that's kind of the terrible situation that is occurring at the moment.
	The big fight in American politics right now is pre-existing conditions.
	Will people with pre-existing conditions be covered?
	Now of course, the only reason that pre-existing conditions is such an issue It's because in World War II, as you probably know, the government said to the corporations, the business concerns, you can't give anyone a raise.
	But they still wanted to get the best talent.
	So what they did was they said, okay, we'll just pay for your health insurance, which is probably one of your big ticket items.
	So we can't give you a raise.
	We're not allowed to. But what we will do is we'll pay for your health insurance.
	That's actually why Health insurance and employment got so intertwined in America and of course in other places as well.
	And so corporations loved it because if you were healthy, you get very cheap insurance, then you get sick.
	Maybe you have cancer or you get diabetes or something like that.
	Well, diabetes, of course, often is a continual pre-existing condition, but even cancer, people are concerned about recurrence.
	And so now, if you leave your job, you lose your health insurance, which is beautiful for a manager because they can start to treat you like crap knowing that you can't leave if you have something that's going to make health insurance more expensive, as generally happens when you age as a whole, right?
	So, pre-existing conditions is if you go for health insurance and you are diabetic, they'll say no or they'll be really expensive or whatever.
	And, you know, it is kind of like wanting fire insurance while your house is currently burning down.
	You're not going to get a lot of responses to that.
	People aren't going to say yes to that a lot.
	Insurance companies in America, what's left of them in the remainder of the free market, I think it's much less than 50% of American healthcare is still in the free market.
	But I want them to make money when you're healthy because they're very keen for preventive care.
	Like here in Canada, and I'm not sure how the healthcare works there, perhaps someone can let me know in the Q&A, but here in Canada, my doctor makes money if I get sick.
	Doesn't make any money if I'm healthy.
	And there used to be an old, like back in pre-communist days in China, there used to be a deal where you would pay your doctor every month until you got sick.
	And then you wouldn't pay your doctor, and so your doctor would have every incentive to, and you would still have to provide health care, but your doctor had every incentive to keep you healthy.
	So, obviously a pandemic costs a huge amount of money.
	And the question is, are the people responsible for keeping the population healthy the same people who are going to lose money If the population gets sick, that's the most fundamental question of incentives, because, you know, we can all talk about good intentions until we're blue in the face, but to rely on the weird, individualistic, genetic freaks of people who have high motivation in the absence of incentives, well, that's just a strange thing.
	You know, there were, I'm sure, scattered throughout the Soviet Empire and Ukraine back in the day.
	I'm sure there were really great workers.
	In the communist system.
	I'm sure that there were occasional, you know, you guys are the breadbasket of Europe.
	I'm sure there were excellent farmers, even in the horrors of the Holodomor and even in the collectivized farm horrors.
	I'm sure there were just people who just woke up and they're just weirdly motivated to just do a great job regardless.
	But those people are extraordinarily rare, right?
	It's like saying, well, you know, we can only have productivity from people who are over seven feet tall.
	It's like, well, they're there, but there just ain't many of them, right?
	So... The people who are responsible for keeping the population healthy should be the people who lose money.
	And I don't just mean lose money in the corporate sense, because I hate corporations as a concept, because it's a government-created legal fiction that allows people to suck profits out of a business concern without ever being liable for losses or damages.
	And so I want people...
	To lose their houses, to live under bridges and cardboard boxes, to be sued into atoms if they allow the population to get sick.
	Now, the World Health Organization, as I mentioned earlier, they say keep your borders open and let's say half a million people die as a result and a trillion dollars worth of economic damage is done in various places around the world.
	Well, they don't lose their houses.
	They don't lose their jobs.
	They don't lose their incomes. In fact, their funding often goes up.
	And it's the same thing. The governments, as they open or close the borders, they don't lose money if a pandemic gets.
	In fact, governments, as you know, war being the health of the state and pandemic being the unhealth of our liberties, a lot of governments are like, woohoo!
	Especially in America, like, oh yeah, pandemic, that'd be great.
	Because we can use that as a cudgel to beat Trump out of the White House.
	So they have an incentive, a positive incentive.
	If they're, you know, the Karen-based control freaks who love ordering everyone around, oh, now I get to order everyone around.
	I get to tell everyone what to do.
	I've got the dopamine rush of base monkey brain power.
	And it's a great plus.
	In a free society, though, the people who are responsible for keeping you healthy will lose weight.
	Hundreds of billions of dollars.
	If You get sick.
	So what are they going to do? Well, they're going to have a deal, right?
	They're going to have a deal with the airlines and they're going to say to the airlines, you know, hey, you got to make sure that no sick people get in.
	And if sick people get in, then through the airlines or through ships or wherever, then you sue those people for not checking for, right?
	And then the people who run those companies I'm happy that you get rich if I stay healthy.
	But if I get sick because of negligence on your part, I want you to lose your home.
	Now, of course, there will be in a free society, there'll be insurance companies or other companies that will say, yeah, you know, you should come with me because, you know, hey, if you get sick through my negligence, I get a raise or I don't lose anything or I just retire gracefully with a big golden parachute of 10 million dollars.
	But nobody will want to do business with those people because everybody understands how incentives work.
	Of course, it would be far cheaper in a pandemic to pay everyone who might have the illness to quarantine.
	To pay them. Put them up in, I dare say, a five-star, Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump-style resort.
	And, hey, what's your favorite food?
	You can eat that for two weeks straight.
	You can have desserts.
	You can have lap dancers.
	Like, I don't care what it is that you need.
	Foot rubs from people in biohazard suits.
	I don't know. Whatever it is you need.
	And if you complete this program, your kids get to go to Disney World and your wife gets a facelift, I don't know, whatever is needed, right?
	You can have liposuction to get rid of your dad bod, all for free.
	All you have to do is stay in a room for two weeks.
	We'll pay you to do it. It's a beautiful room.
	You get great meals and foot rubs and whatever, right?
	Because it's way cheaper. Way, way, way cheaper.
	I don't even know. Have you guys heard?
	Or does anybody here know?
	What is the estimate of the economic damage?
	I mean, I know it's very hard to calculate.
	Anybody have a clue of the estimate of economic damage worldwide from this stuff?
	It's like between 5 and 10% of world GDP? Maybe.
	I would say probably closer to 10 and maybe higher if you count all of the stuff which you can't see, like people getting sick and dying six months from now because they couldn't get a tumor scan or whatever, right?
	Okay, so 10% of the U.S. GDP, I don't know what it is now, like 17 trillion or something like that, so I just did this in my head.
	$1.7 trillion, I know, you throw a bunch of matchsticks down and be able to count them before they hit the floor, but it's at $1.7 trillion, at least.
	At least an ongoing economic damage.
	You know, there are pluses. People are getting less indoctrinated in government schools and homeschooling is up and there are some pluses.
	But, you know, $1.7 trillion, that's quite a lot of money.
	And so you could spend up to $1.7 trillion and still be ahead.
	And are you telling me that you can't find a way to get people to quarantine for 1.7 trillion?
	Of course you can. In fact, you know, the danger would be if you make it so pleasant, people would be out there licking coronavirus patients just trying to get into this fabulous resort of hope you don't die called Quarantine Central.
	So, in a free market environment, The quarantine, which is the key, you know, you shut the borders for sure because you fear losing your house because you're going to ship people in who've got disease, right?
	And the quarantine, which is the key, that's how you do it.
	Everybody who, and of course, you know, when it comes to these contact tracing apps, you know, a lot of people are concerned, right?
	Hey, I'm sure it's totally anonymous.
	Yeah, absolutely. Of course it's anonymous.
	It's the government telling me it's anonymous, just like the government said open borders was the way to go.
	But if you just pay people, say, I will deduct from your premiums $200 a month if you do this contact tracing app.
	Okay, now we've got some incentives, right?
	And there's a sweet spot, right, where you figure out where the cost benefit is.
	But when you have people who are going to lose their homes if they mess up, well, it concentrates their mind extraordinarily well.
	And contact tracing and paying people for quarantine, all of that, I'm guessing, would cost about one-tenth of one percent of the damage.
	That is occurring.
	And without those incentives, of course, when people say, well, we want to do this or we want to do that, it's like, to me, it's all nonsense.
	Because they don't have any stake.
	They don't have any risk.
	There's no moral hazard, as they say.
	So now you have the situation, and I'll just end on this point.
	You have the situation which is completely ridiculous.
	Which is... So think of a plane, right?
	Now, you've got a plane...
	And, of course, what you need to do, you've got an airplane, a little Cessna, whatever, right?
	You've got it on the runway. What do you need to do?
	Well, you need to hit the gas. You need to open up the throttle.
	You need to hit the gas. You've got to get enough speed that you're going to be able to lift off, right?
	And let's say you've got, I don't know, a half a kilometer runway, some big-ass runway.
	You've got a half a kilometer runway, and you've got to just take off, right?
	And you've really got to do it before the end of the runway, right?
	Now, what's happening right now is...
	Things aren't so bad, let's open up.
	Oh dear, things got bad from opening up, let's close down.
	Oh good, things are better because we closed down, so let's open up again.
	Oh no, things are better.
	You understand, and what this is, at some point the runway runs out.
	In other words, your economy collapses.
	And what's happening right now is the plane is going...
	Oh, let's take off.
	Oh, no, no. Coronavirus deaths are up.
	We've got to go down. Okay, we'll go down.
	Okay. But the runway is still going down the runway.
	The runway is going to end.
	You're going to run out of money. Seriously, like Weimar Republic style, French Revolution style, you're going to run out of money and you can't wallpaper it up with type whatever you want into your own bank account craziness.
	From the central bank. So right now, there's this start-stop.
	There's this rise and fall.
	There's this, we're going to fly?
	No, we're going to land. And they're not doing anything other than running out of runway.
	And that's because nobody has any stakes, and that's also because nobody knows how to think.
	And we've lost the capacity to sacrifice because we have all this free money that comes through the central banking, quote, free money, right?
	And so people don't want to hear the truth.
	The truth is, yeah, China probably grew, probably released, and certainly facilitated the release of this virus around the world.
	It's bad.
	Why is it bad? Because it's evil, it's destructive, it's communism.
	I mean, I don't have to tell you guys anything about all of that, right?
	You guys know it infinitely better than I do.
	So... But you see, there's a big PR problem, because if everybody starts blaming China, which is not blaming the Chinese people, of course, they're victims, but they are blaming the Chinese government, which is communist, well, that's going to be a bad PR rap for communism.
	Communist is going to look pretty bad. So what they've got to do is pretend, well, you know, we're just dealing with this virus, kind of came out of nowhere, no one's to blame, blaming China is racist, like, whatever, communism is a race now.
	And we just got to find some way to manage it and we can't allow too much bad news to accumulate in society because if you get too much bad news, people get angry.
	And when they get angry, they start looking at who's to blame.
	And it won't be that hard to figure out who's to blame.
	And all is protect the reputation of communism these days.
	Protect the reputation of communist China.
	Blame Russia. Blame young people.
	Blame Trump. Blame whoever, right?
	Blame conspiracy theorists.
	Blame conservatives.
	Blame whoever, right? But if they can keep the death count from getting too high...
	Then they can keep people from getting too angry.
	If they can keep people from getting too angry, they can continue to redirect the blame at people who are trying to manage the problem caused by communism rather than people following those breadcrumbs to the foot, well, of two countries, right?
	Because if it's true, and the evidence seems to be piling in that it is, if it's true that COVID-19 was lab manufactured, Well, it started in America, and then it shifted to China.
	It started in America, Obama was in charge of it for a long time, and then it switched to China, when it was perceived to be too risky in America.
	So you have two holy relics in the collectivist cult that can't be touched.
	And communism. So the redirection of people's anger towards Trump, towards people having parties, towards whoever, right, is really, really essential.
	Follow those breadcrumbs back and you'll see, as I've talked about here, yeah, it's the government.
	It's government programs, it's government bureaucracy, it's government misdirection, it's bad incentives, all of this.
	The reason why your grandmother is on a ventilator is largely because of the state.
	Entirely because of the state, if it turns out, as many Chinese academics are talking about, that it was created in the Wuhan lab.
	I mean, the fact that it emerged a stone's throw from the only level 4 bioweapons facility in all of China.
	Anybody who believes that level of coincidence is a little tough to reason with, but...
	Yeah, the state is really the cause and facilitator of pandemics, and I really don't see how we're going to solve the problems of pandemics as long as the government is controlling all of these things.
	When you get backwards incentives, you get not progress, but regress.
	And I'm concerned that we have a state that's becoming so similar to the medieval overreach of government power that we are back in Black Death territory, which also was facilitated by the state to a large degree.
	That's my sort of major thoughts about this.
	I'm certainly happy to questions, objections, additions, subtractions, whatever you guys want to chat about.
	Okay, thanks very much.
	Is there any question? Yes, we already have one.
	Just a small round of applause.
	Thank you. It was a long talk, very good.
	I'm sorry, one guy left.
	And should we just wait until you can release the jackals to bring him back?
	No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. Go ahead.
	So, hello, Adrian here.
	Thank you for the talk.
	I was wondering about the...
	No, no, wait. First, Adrian, I'm wondering about your accent.
	What the hell is going on with that?
	I'm from London. There we go.
	It seemed familiar. It seemed like a familiar accent that I've drifted a little from, but all right, okay.
	So, there's talk of herd immunity and that's kind of suppressed.
	Obviously, the Spanish flu disappeared for whatever reason.
	Well, it was herd immunity.
	That must have something to do with herd immunity, right?
	That phrase you can't say.
	And I was wondering if you knew anything about the mechanism of how that disappeared and how that was reported and how governments responded to the sudden disappearance, or the slow disappearance, I don't know the details.
	Oh, do you mean of 1918?
	In 1918, we don't know about the Black Death, but that also killed a large proportion of the population and then disappeared.
	So the argument that herd immunity, there's no such thing when we've had far worse pandemics seems strange to me, or absolute nonsense.
	And why that would be suppressed is a mystery to me.
	And I wonder what you thought about that.
	Well, so, yeah, again, this is all just my amateur reading and I've talked with a lot of experts, so, you know, but don't blame them for anything I'm going to say because, you know, it's my mouth and all that.
	Self-ownership is the key. So, yeah, herd immunity, of course, is a very real thing and it has a lot to do with why diseases emerge and then fade out, right?
	So, as you know, people, when they get...
	The viral load is pretty important, right?
	And this is the question about what just happened with Donald Trump.
	Like, why did the 74-year-old Technically obese guy shrug off COVID in a couple of days and come out charging like some bull through paper tissue.
	Well, it probably has a lot to do with the viral load, which is the more of it you get, the worse it's going to be.
	So if you just get a small amount, it may not affect you at all.
	If you get a medium amount, you'll get what would appear to be a bad flu.
	If you get a lot, then you could end up in hospital.
	The viral load is pretty key.
	So obviously people who die, well, they're out of the equation, right?
	So whatever susceptibility they had is out of the population.
	I mean, obviously it's transferred to their kids to some degree, but the direct susceptibility is out of the population.
	The people who get a little viral load, develop antibodies, may have some immunity.
	The people who get it and recover, we know, have some immunity, although that immunity may not last more than a couple of months.
	There are a number of different variations of COVID floating around the world and various levels of danger.
	And of course, one of the issues Is mutation, right?
	That's why the flu, right?
	And why the cold? There are like a hundred colds in the world and you're just getting a new cold, right?
	It's like you already have immunity to the old cold, but there's some new cold that's circulating around, right?
	So coronaviruses mutate at rates hundreds of times more because it's RNA, right?
	They mutate at rates hundreds of times more than DNA. And so the mutation is kind of the issue.
	Like the Black Death came in waves.
	It wasn't just one singular event.
	Like it came in waves over centuries.
	And that's because there would be, you know, a quarter of the population could get wiped out and people who survived had some sort of immunities to it or at least resistance to it.
	Then it would mutate and it would come back again.
	And so herd immunity is a thing.
	It actually does occur.
	Because coronavirus is so, COVID is so new, nobody knows exactly what percentage you would So the basic thing is the R0. I refer to it as R0 in one of my presentations.
	And people are like, no, no, no, it's R0. Like it was some Latin phrase.
	It's like, no, 0 is just the British word for zero.
	And so the R0. The replication number is the key, right?
	So if you've got a replication number of R2, then it means two people are getting infected by one person.
	And it's weird because with Trump and all of his cohorts, there was an R number of seven or eight, which is really kind of unprecedented for COVID and has led to all kinds of wild theories about the virus being planted and so on, because no Democrats got hit and tons of Republican leadership did.
	But anyway, topic for another time.
	So once you get the replication number down below, One, then the virus is fading out.
	It's kind of dying out, right? That's sort of the idea.
	So if enough people get herd immunity, then the replication rate of the illness goes down to the point where it just kind of diminishes and fades away.
	From what I've read about the 1918 Spanish flu, it was very quick.
	And because the more brutal it is, The quicker it tends to end because it's so decisive.
	I mean, this is one of the reasons why SARS was relatively easy to contain because it was so brutal that it took people right out of circulation.
	They couldn't even get out of bed when they got it.
	And so it had, like the more brutal it is, the more self-limiting it tends to be.
	And eliminating these, I think there's only, there is in fact only one major disease that has ever been completely eliminated from the world and that's smallpox.
	Does anyone know how long that took?
	Anyone?
	Again, I'm like Mr. Obscure questions today, but... - Did this be the... - You mean the... - ...this was '80.
	- I'm sorry? - I think it was in the 1970s when it disappeared.
	It took 15 years.
	And it took 15 years of intensely coordinated international efforts, the kind of coordination which doesn't seem to be quite as intense these days.
	So that's the best they could do with that.
	But no, herd immunity is absolutely a thing as far as I understand it.
	But of course, herd immunity comes with a big cost.
	And it's one of these really unfortunate visible costs.
	So herd immunity means that a lot of older people A lot of obese people, a lot of people with heart disease, a lot of people with diabetes, a lot of people who have compromised immune systems, a lot of people who've got pulmonary issues, a lot of people who are smokers, blah, blah, I don't give you a whole list.
	A lot of them are going to get sick and a lot of them are going to die.
	That's the price of herd immunity.
	Now, if you don't want herd immunity, then you have this airplane runway thing that I was talking about before, where you basically run out of the economy, which is much worse.
	And in fact, the lockdown now, there are tens of millions of people who are facing food insecurity.
	Because the supply chain is breaking down, because agriculture is breaking down.
	I did a whole show recently with a guy who's an expert in the shipping industry, just how unbelievably wretched conditions are for sailors trapped on ships who can't get home.
	The whole shipping industry is falling apart, and that's kind of important, because we've got this whole economy that's geared towards international shipments, and you can't fly this stuff all over because it's ridiculously expensive, because, you know, shipping...
	The water does most of the work, right?
	You're just putting along on the top, right?
	And so, yeah, you can do herd immunity.
	And that's a strategy that, you know, you could argue that's a strategy that Sweden has employed.
	And there are certain boroughs in New York where a significant portion, a third, maybe 40% of people are testing positive for COVID antibodies.
	So you can get that.
	But selling that to a population that is trained that the government can spend its way out of every problem and has never really been asked to make a difficult public choice, that's really tough.
	Because everybody's got this fantasy.
	This stuff started in the 60s, right?
	Well, you had the welfare warfare state.
	Let's wage war and build the great society at the same time.
	Now, in any sane universe, neither of those would be impossible.
	But even in a status universe, you kind of have to choose what used to be called when I was a kid, you know, guns or butter.
	You want guns, you want butter. You can't have both, right?
	If you're going to take all the money away from the farmers to pay for the war, you get guns.
	But you don't have any butter. If you're going to not wage war, maybe you'll get some butter.
	Guns are butter. In the 60s, and this is, you know, the birthplace of the boomers and so on, you had this magic wand.
	You could just, you could have everything.
	There are no difficult choices to be made.
	And now we have entire generations...
	Of people in the West who have grown up never once having to make a difficult public choice.
	Never once saying, oh, if you want Obamacare, oh, that's going to be hugely expensive.
	If you want socialized men, very...
	So what do you want to cut to pay for it?
	You never hear that. I mean, all of the debates that you hear all around the Western world, nobody ever says, well, we've got this giant debt, we've got this giant deficit, we've got in America close to $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities.
	What are we going to do? What are we going to cut?
	You never hear that. And, of course, we all know that there's no solutions, there's only trade-offs, right?
	Outside of sort of base morality.
	And so you would have to go to the population and you'd have to say, hey, I know you've had probably 60 straight years Of complete unreality.
	Of living in this weird, money-printing, socialist, amniotic sack of pre-birth, gooey, easy-feed nonsense.
	But I'm going to have to ask you to grow up really quickly now, people.
	You've got to grow up really, really quickly.
	Because those days of easy, money-printing answers are deep in the rear view.
	And now, we're going to have to weigh the options.
	And we're going to have to... It's a big chart.
	And unfortunately, this chart has a lot of coffins in it.
	But what is the very best we can do?
	If you let herd immunity rip through, you're going to lose X number of people.
	Nobody really knows, but it's going to be pretty bad.
	If we don't let herd immunity rip through, well, of course, the goal is to wait and hope for the magic solution called a vaccine, which May come, may not.
	May actually come from the Russians, oddly enough.
	But everybody's hoping to just kind of tread water until the vaccine comes along.
	But the vaccine, you know, even if only 1% of people have adverse reactions to a vaccine, which is actually pretty low even for a traditional vaccine that took 10 plus years to develop, let alone one that took less than a year or about a year.
	Okay, so 1%, that's a lot of people.
	That's a huge number of people.
	That's probably hundreds of millions around the world have pretty severe adverse reactions, including deaths.
	So even the vaccine is a difficult and unpleasant solution for a lot of people.
	So, you know, we've got a toddler population.
	A toddler population, you know, it's like the old thing that Socrates used to say about democracy.
	It's a problem with democracy.
	It's like one politician is standing in front of a group of five-year-olds saying, you can have candy or you can have broccoli.
	And of course, all the five-year-olds are like, candy, candy, candy, and the broccoli guy gets nothing.
	So you've got one politician standing in front of you saying, oh yeah, there was a magic wand that could have prevented everyone from dying, and therefore all 200,000 deaths are directly on the feet of Trump.
	And we don't need to make any difficult decisions.
	We can just do magic and everything can be great.
	There's no compromises needed.
	There's no, on the other hand, losses that could possibly accrue.
	And then you've got other people coming up and saying, you know, it might be absolutely necessary in order to develop herd immunity that X number of people are going to die.
	And people just recoil.
	This is like you're just running at someone with a sword called reality.
	And so the problem is that, and you know, I've had messages from old people who were like, I wish they'd asked me because I don't want my grandkids to have no life and no freedoms and no economic opportunities.
	I've had a pretty good run.
	I'm 78 years old.
	Let's say that I'm at a double risk for dying.
	It's like, I don't want my grandkids, you know, the idea of sacrifice has just gone completely by the way.
	And people have said, I don't want my grandkids to have no life, no future, no freedoms, no economic opportunities.
	Because you want to keep me alive for another year.
	You know, I'll take my chances.
	I'll take my chances. But you can't, any politician that stands up and asks for sacrifice now or says we've got tough choices to make, nobody's going to listen.
	Alright, any other questions from here?
	Now that's what I call a great hairdo.
	Hello Stefan, I'm Martin.
	I'd just like to make the point that we just had a conversation about Hungary, because actually we are in Hungary now, so close to Budapest, so we are not in Ukraine.
	Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm so sorry.
	I did this the other day with Taiwan and I'm so sorry.
	My apologies. Go ahead. Comparing the European responses for the coronavirus and of course discussing the Swedish model, we knew the Hungarian data that Most of the people who died from corona, they are between the age of 70 and 80.
	And we had 900 cases which ended up with death, and we have probably less than 10% who were below 40 years old.
	So that's really, I think, a shocking number.
	And the other thing that we were talking about, We have, like, a new aristocracy in our society.
	Like, we are really giving a privilege for older adults.
	And that's why it's really a new thing and never happened, basically, during history.
	And so we are really far in this age, probably, from, like, the heroism of the Spartans who were ready to sacrifice their lives when a big threat was coming.
	And basically, this is a war, again, a different kind of war.
	But nobody is ready to sacrifice their lives.
	Okay, so there are three topics.
	I'm just curious about your thoughts about it.
	Now, you did kind of mix those three topics in, so can you just break them out and make sure I've got them in sequence?
	I'm going to type something here, make sure I get it.
	Okay. Yes, so what is the data, for example, in North America, the average year or age of the coronavirus deaths?
	Yeah, well, it's pretty old.
	Obviously, there are certain places, even in North America, where the average age of coronavirus deaths is higher than the average age of the general population.
	In other words, these are the people who already won the lottery, and then just ended it later than the average.
	It is pretty now that partly is, of course, because of the susceptibility of the old and also partly because, as you know, in certain places in America and other places, the Democrat, largely Democrat mayors would order old age nursing homes to take COVID patients and thus bringing, like again, the government program, government program and tens of thousands of people directly killed by these government mandates, which of course drives the numbers up.
	And what was your opinion about the Swedish model?
	What they applied? Again, it's hard to know.
	So, as you know, the Swedes didn't really lock down at all.
	But you have a very sort of high IQ population, very socially conscious, very socially responsible population.
	So, it's a little different.
	If you try to do that in Haiti, it might be a whole different kind of situation, right?
	So, they had, of course, a big spike and they're very high in deaths.
	And then it seemed to be working really, really well.
	Numbers went down. But now it's starting to come back up again.
	So, I certainly...
	I think that solutions that arrive organically from within a population tend to be much, much better than solutions that are imposed in a hierarchy, like from an authoritarian source.
	They either tend to be too much or too little.
	They're not nimble. They don't respond to changing circumstances.
	Sweden has basically said to their population, it's up to you to sort out how you're going to manage this illness.
	And of course, a lot of Swedes are socially distancing, although the arguments for the six-foot thing are pretty specious and arise from one paper from 1930, which there's no corroboration for.
	So the six-week thing is kind of...
	Sorry, the six-foot thing is kind of largely...
	It's pulled from someplace that normally only a proctologist goes to visit.
	So... But...
	But they're doing a lot of sensible things in Sweden.
	The general population is doing it because, of course, it's the old thing.
	People think, oh, well, if the government doesn't do it, it's not going to get done.
	If the government doesn't educate the children, no children will get educated.
	If the government doesn't force you to do stuff, it doesn't mean that the population is going to just say, oh, I'm going to pretend there's no virus.
	What's going to happen is you're going to get local experiments occurring.
	Some people are going to be more keen on social gatherings.
	Some people are going to be more keen on wearing masks.
	And you're going to have a lot of data that you can use to check out what's working and what's not.
	And when the government imposes some big mandate, then you don't get that data and you have no idea what's working or what doesn't or when things should go down.
	So... I like the Swedish model of allowing local and individual control, socially enforced, peaceful control over how they respond to it.
	I don't think it's a magic bullet that they're going to get great herd immunity and everything's going to be fine because, again, there are more resurgences, but...
	Yeah, a lot of, and it's not just Sweden too, because a lot of the Scandinavian countries are doing pretty well.
	Again, tight social cohesion, high IQ population, and so on.
	And so the less government mandates, I think, the better, the more data we're going to get as quickly as possible, rather than just this big blanket quote solution that hides what could be working better.
	All right, thank you very much.
	Wait, that was two. Didn't you have three?
	Yes, actually, the third topic.
	You are really, really punctual.
	So the third topic, I was thinking that probably we are giving a privileged position for older adults and senior adults in our societies.
	And that's why we are really far from a heroic society.
	And we are not able to Make the same sacrifices our ancestors were able to do when the threat was approaching.
	Yeah, so here's my big prediction is that we're going to see a lot of vampire movies over the next couple of days, a couple of years, right?
	And the reason being is what are vampires?
	Vampires are ancient creatures that feed on the young.
	And in the same way that when schools got dumbed down, we saw these endless zombie movies, like the culture kind of picks up, the zeitgeist kind of picks up these sort of hidden vibrations of what's going on in society.
	And yeah, we're going to see a lot of stories of ancient creatures feasting on the young because this is kind of what's happening, right?
	And to, I'm a big one for like complete maximum responsibility for everyone, right?
	So older people, you know, you're a young man, right?
	I was at one point a young man and I spent a lot of my youth fighting with the boomers about communism.
	I fought on the seas, on the oceans.
	I fought in school.
	I fought at parties.
	I was a big, you know, wake up, guys.
	Joseph McCarthy was right. It's really dangerous.
	Communism is really bad.
	China's dangerous. And I did this whole documentary, which got wildly suppressed on you.
	Like, you could type the title out of my documentary.
	You couldn't find it anywhere, right?
	And it turns out only white supremacists make anti-communist documentaries.
	It's a kind of funny coincidence that way.
	But, so I spent a huge amount of time and effort, and it cost me a lot.
	It cost me in university, it cost me in theater school, it cost me in graduate school, it cost me a lot to wage these kinds of battles, just as it's cost me a lot in many ways on social media, deplatforming and so on, to fight these battles.
	So what's really weird, and you'd kind of write this if you wanted to write some Greek myth, you'd write it this way and you'd say, well, the people who ignored communism the most and the longest are the ones most susceptible to a virus released by communists.
	Like, it's almost like it's a manufactured plot device to give people some sense of, well, the people most responsible For inattention to the dangers of communism and now the ones being most harmed by communism.
	And so the young people who've, you know, really heavily indoctrinated in a way that the boomers weren't, right?
	Because the boomers grew up when there was still a strong, they grew up in the shadow of McCarthy and they grew up when there was a very strong anti-communist movement throughout the West.
	The younger people have much more sympathy for because the boomers let that light kind of go out.
	But it is a kind of funny thing.
	That the old, like if you were to say, we have to sacrifice some portion of population to a communist virus, surely it would be the oldest just because that's sadly the way things go in society, right?
	I mean, there's a reason why the Inuit would put their old people on, give them a nice song and a little meal and they put their old people on an iceberg because we haven't got enough to eat and we should give the food to the young rather than to the ancient.
	Yeah. But if you were to say, okay, we're going to have to sacrifice some portion of society, both for reasons of you had a good life and also for reasons of you shut down and attacked people who were warning you about communism for 60 years, you know, you could make worse arguments, I suppose. Thank you very much.
	Now, let me ask our friends who joined via Skype whether they have any questions, comments, perhaps.
	So... I don't know.
	It's not common in Hungary to have a nap after your meal, right?
	So you're not going to be waking them up or anything?
	If we were in Mexico and it was lunch, everybody would be face-planted in their sombreros.
	I don't know. Peter or Georgi, do you have any questions, comments perhaps?
	Our noise, they can hear me, or you can hear me?
	No, no, I've clearly answered every conceivable question in the known universe, so...
	Yeah. I've been saving it all up for this.
	Well, thank you very much.
	Thank you guys very much.
	A really, really great pleasure to chat.
	I hope when this begins to wane that I can come and visit your nice country whose name I completely now remember.
	So, thank you so much for the invitation.
	It was a great pleasure to chat and I hope to speak to you guys at some point again.
	Okay. Thanks very much.
	Take care. Bye-bye.
	Bye-bye. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
	And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement and your resources.
	Please like, subscribe and share and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
	And also, equally importantly, go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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	So thank you so much for your support, my friends.

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