#2037 - Alex Berenson
2023-09-20 02:47:38
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Strain by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night! All day!
Hello. Good to see you.
It's a pleasure.
How you feeling out there, you truth, warrior?
I keep waiting to be done with this shit. Yeah. To be done with COVID.
It'd be nice to be done, right?
They will not let it go.
Yeah, it's strange. It's strange now. Because it's also strange what bothers me. And I try to emphasize this as much as possible. And I even had to do this recently with some close family friends.
You've got to take care of your health. You have to take vitamins. You have to eat right. You have to. If you don't do that, your body doesn't function well.
That includes your immune system. Includes everything. Includes, you know, inflammation. It causes a host of diseases in your body. You've got to take care of yourself.
And that should be the most important message that everyone's putting out. Not just podcasters, but the government. Health officials. Everyone should be saying that. You should really supplement with vitamins.
You should really, you know, get your nutrient levels checked. If you can.
Even if you can't do those things, you can eat decently.
You can eat decently.
You can try to exercise moderately. Look, I know a lot of people have, you know, complicated lives. They have kids. They have work. You know, they don't have much time.
I get it. But, like, even if you can work out, like, a half hour a day, three days a week, and not eat too much, you're in better shape. Much better shape.
Yeah. There's been some studies done recently that something really crazy, like 20 minutes of exercise, like twice a week, improves your overall, like, all-cause mortality score. Yes. Just a little bit. Moderate stuff.
Nothing crazy. Like, do some push-ups and sit-ups and some jumping jacks, and you're good to go. Just you have to do something that gets your body moving, or it doesn't think that it has to, and it atrophies. It's just an unfortunate aspect of our biology that we are not like other animals. You know, like, and other animals get stronger, too, is the exercise, but we've all seen animals that are, like, super muscular, that don't do anything.
It's just that they're different, you know, and they only live 13 years, right?
Yes.
The whole thing's different.
Yes.
With us, we're this long-term species, with intelligence and ego and justifications and all sorts of weird ways that we will procrastinate and justify bad behavior and unhealthy choices, and it's just a constant battle. just being a human being. No one wins that battle. You just win battles. Yes.
You win, like, daily battles. No one wins the war.
Everyone dies in the end.
Everyone dies in the end.
But I do, you know, and I wrote about this. on the subject. We were just talking before we started, about when I didn't see you, but when you were in Vegas in July and I was in Vegas in July for I was playing poker, that, like, you know, gambling is, and I like to gamble. I don't have a moral problem with it, but gambling destroys people, too. Overeating destroys people.
Gambling destroys people.
Gambling destroys people.
Drugs destroy people. We, as human beings, we've set up all these, like, modern things, to take advantage of our dopamine, and we're not really built for it.
We're not, and we're certainly not built for phones. You know, so many people are getting destroyed by social media. Like, their lives have become wrapped up in arguing with people, and I just think that's super unhealthy. Yes. There's some aspect of it that's very beneficial and positive.
I think you get a lot of information that you wouldn't have gotten. I think you get to see people's perspectives that occasionally are very inspiring and very unique and interesting. I love listening or reading things from other people that I think have very good perspectives and interesting perspectives. It's a rare opportunity to talk to people that you wouldn't be able to run into. If we lived in the 1970s, you'd have to cultivate these interesting people, like, in the physical person, which is probably better for you, right, but not available for most people.
That's right. And we tend to imitate our atmospheres, and you see that in thought bubbles, and I think that's another problem that we have with social media, and there's these thought bubbles, and people just, you know, you sort of gravitate towards them. You stay in them, and if you're busy, you just sort of get affirmation from that thought bubble, and you never think outside the box.
Yes. Look, I don't know what we do about social media. I mean, obviously my career, I wouldn't, well, I guess I was on with you one time before, COVID, you know, talking about cannabis, but...
Before you got kicked off.
Before you got kicked off Twitter. That's right. And then got put back.
Well, let's talk about that, because you came on for your book that I've referenced many times, and it's called Tell Your Children, and I think it's important. I think, when we talk about these things that some people like to use recreationally, like even gambling, as you talked about, we have to be aware that there's consequences to these things too. It's not an even ride. It's not like every person is going to handle every situation well. We had a podcast yesterday with Kurt Angle, an Olympic gold medalist in wrestling, and he was a WWE champion, amazing guy, and he had a real pill problem.
And he had a pill problem because he broke his neck like five times. Like crazy. He wrestled in the Olympics with a broken neck. Wow. Broken vertebrae in his neck and won.
Wow. I mean, just the freak of freaks.
So he can do that, but...
But he got hooked. He got hooked. I mean, this is like a man whose mind is as strong as any fucking human has ever walked the face of the earth. You can win the gold medal in the Olympics in wrestling? Wrestling is one of the most competitive, grueling, insane, physical contests that are in the Olympics.
It's like boxing and wrestling are two of the craziest. Judo. Judo is pretty crazy. But God, those guys are strong mentally. And for that guy to get hooked on pills.
A guy like that, imagine. Right.
Because it's not about how strong you are. It's just if they click with you in some way, you're going to have a problem.
And I also had Peter Berg on the podcast, who's brilliant. And Peter, who did that film for Netflix, the series that's out now, Painkiller. He said he tried an OxyContin once, recreationally. And he was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. I can never do this again.
I'll never do this again. But he's got a mindset that can see that and go, oh, I see where this is going. Right.
Right. So look, there's always been this stuff. And the legalizers, whether it's drug legalizers or people who want more gambling, they always say the same thing. Well, you can't really stop people from doing it. And so you've got to make it safe for them.
Here's the problem with that. Here's the flip side of that. When you legalize it or normalize it, you wind up opening it to people who otherwise wouldn't do it. And let me go back to gambling, because I think it's a little bit less emotionally charged for people. Once upon a time, if you wanted to gamble legally, you had to go to Las Vegas, basically.
Or maybe Atlantic City after 1978.. But basically, you had to go out to the desert and find that gambling.
And deal with the mob.
Deal with the mob. That's right. Or, if you wanted to bet football, you could probably find a bookie. You could call a friend who called a friend. But it was going to be some guy who might break your arm if you didn't pay.
Okay. So you could do it. But it was discouraged and not that easy. Right. Now, we have gambling in 23 states.
We have lotteries on every corner. And just in the last five years, we have sports betting on your phone in many states. So it couldn't be easier. So what does that mean? It means it's going to wreck people who it would never have been available to before.
And that's just a function of freedom, right?
Well, okay. Freedom would be go to Vegas and do it. And we're not going to really judge you for it. But you've got to go get it.
So make it less accessible.
That's right. This is more, we're going to promote this because both private interest and the state, state governments, make money from it.
Right. Well, you could see it from their perspective, too. They're like, why should we give the revenue to Vegas? We can handle it here. Right.
Our residents should be able to gamble here. And there's a percentage, whatever that percentage is. And I don't know if it's genetic or if it's based on personal experience in gambling. Like, maybe it's like OxyContin. Like Peter Berg took one.
But if he took like as many as Kurt Engel did, he would be physically hooked, too. That's right. Maybe there could be just you chasing bad money a couple of times. And next thing, you know, you're doing it all the time.
I mean, you see it. Okay. You see the people who can't stop. Right. Who know they don't have this money, who know they're going to the credit card advance machine for the fifth time, you know, that weekend.
They can't stop.
So how do we balance that with the freedom to be able to do it? Like, how do we say that it has to be regional? Like, how do we say that you can go to Vegas, it's totally legal, but you can't gamble in Michigan?
That's a fair question. I don't have a good answer to that.
So is the solution that we just have to have more people available for counseling and more rehabilitation centers? Is that the solution?
I don't really think that stuff works very well to me. Here's what I do think. I think putting it on people's phones is a mistake. I think putting it in every—.
You don't think gambling rehabilitation works or any rehabilitation?
I don't think rehabilitation works as a rule. I think when people want to stop, they stop.
But you don't think that support from other human beings that have also gone through it could be beneficial in making good decisions in the future?
I think, for people who want to stop, that can be helpful to them. I don't think anybody who goes to rehab unwillingly, or even selling willingly, is going to get much out of it. And I know this is a controversial perspective. One of the things that—so before COVID, just before COVID, I was working on sort of a big book about—bigger than the cannabis book, sort of growing out of the cannabis book—about drug legalization and sort of addiction in general. And the most disappointing thing that I found when I was doing this research is that when you try to do randomized trials, where you say that—you take 100 people and you say 50 of them, you're going to get—you're going to go to AA.
The other 50 are not. And you look at their outcomes. a year or five years later, there's no benefit to even going to AA, which I really thought worked. The reason AA seems to work is that people go to it and stick with it, like you say, get something out of it. But there are going to be a bunch of people who don't get anything out of it, who are like, I don't need—I don't need to give my volition to God.
This is a problem I'm going to fix. I don't like the AA model. And, by the way, why is—why do I have to sit in this room three hours a week? So for every person who gets something out of it, there's somebody who doesn't get anything out of it. The truth is, people stop using drugs or stop gambling when they personally realize that it's become a crisis for them.
Sometimes, though, people are motivated by other people's feedback. So is there a point of no return, or is it—it's got to be variable for different people. Like? I think, for some people, rehab is probably very beneficial, especially because they get a chance to talk to someone who made it out of it. Who was telling us about this rehab guy that came in, cracked out of his mind?
Oh, it was Brian Simpson. The guy, he was like a counselor or something like that, and then, one night, he just went off the wagon and came back to work in the morning. And everyone's like, hey, are we supposed to pretend that you're not cracked out of your mind right now?
No, but let me give you—you laugh, but the most dangerous time for an addict is the first two weeks after they come out of rehab. Because they've stopped using, their tolerance is down, and if they start again, that's when people OD and die the most.
Oh, Jesus.
It's not easy. But then the argument against legalization—here's the problem. And, you know, I've talked about this ad nauseum. If you heard this, I'm sorry. When I was a kid, if someone was on heroin, that was fucking super rare.
It was super rare. You would know that guy's off the deep end. Like, Johnny's, out there in the woods, doing heroin. Like, whoa. Like, that guy's gone.
But now to hear, oh, my uncle got hooked on pills is super normal. Right. It's super normal. Right. And now, because of these documentaries, we know what was the root cause of that.
But now, once it's kind of been established that this is a recreational thing for people, so what do you do? Do you outlaw it? And then what does that do? That empowers the cartels, because there's the demand already.
So, okay. So the roots of the opioid crisis are exactly, you know, Peter Burke. I mean, you know, that series is completely correct. It came out of Purdue Pharma. It came out of, unfortunately, some doctors, some of whom, I think, thought they were doing the right thing, some of whom were motivated by money.
They pushed prescriptions of opioids in the U.S. in an absolutely insane way. And we've now tried to push back, but we're still dealing with the fruits of that poison tree.
Wasn't that done before in other countries to kind of ruin countries, like introduce heroin?
Yeah. I mean, the classic example. And, you know, when people talk about how the Chinese export fentanyl to the United States, I guarantee you there are people in China who have not forgot the opium wars in the 19th century, the U.S. and Britain. And this is something we should be ashamed of forever.
We basically forced opium on the Chinese and we destroyed that society.
Well, you and I weren't alive. That's true. So I don't think we should be ashamed. But I think human beings in general have done some really fucking heinous things. We just want to pretend that they don't do them anymore.
Oh, no, they do.
But isn't it interesting? It's part of the pushback of all this stuff from people that have no stake in the game other than they're a human being, is that you're saying something that shatters their narrative. They have a narrative they've established about what's good in the world, what's the right thing to do and the direction we have to go. And these people are looking out for us, and these people are Nazis. And when you have that and something comes along and says, hey, there might be something afoot here, you should pay attention.
Like there's some data you should look at. We have a long history of people lying about all kinds of things. You know, whether it's the opium war, fucking everything throughout human history. But for whatever it is like now, we don't. Hey, that's not, that's.
Oh, this conspiracy theories. Oh, this guy is this wacky guy with his fringe ideas. He's an alt-right hero. And like, oh, OK, I get it. I get it.
I wish the world was perfect, too. I really do. I wish there was a guy in the White House that was this amazing human being and a shining example of what's possible from just a person, a loving person wants to take care of a nation because they really believe in them. But this is like you've got me laughing, but it's what we want and we never get it. We never get it.
It's like fucking. it's it's Charlie Brown and Lucy. That football just gets yanked away every time.
And we're like, shit, shit.
I thought this was going to be. the adults were in the room. Shit.
You know, I mean, beware. the person who, you know, tells you what to do, because they know what's best for you.
Yeah, that's. that's a normal thing of human nature, too. It's a weird thing about human nature. We're always led by someone. It's very strange because it seems to be a part of just our programming that we have.
We've kept since we were primates in, like, the jungles, like there was always a leader. There's like, if you ever watch that Chimp Nation show, an amazing show on Netflix. These scientists were embedded in this chimpanzee group for 30 years. And so the chimpanzees had become totally comfortable with human beings as long as they were 20 yards away. So they never moved any closer than 20 yards.
The chimp moves close to them. They back away. You never have food. It's a bunch of rules about what to do and what not to do. But if you follow those rules, these chimps behave as if they're just chimps in the jungle.
So it's this incredible opportunity to watch their social hierarchy.
It's just like people.
There's a leader. There's always a leader. There's always a leader. And there's young people that are challenging the leader. And the leader has to beat them down.
And it gets to a certain point in time where the leader can't do that anymore. And he has to relinquish. And it's all about the relationships they develop while they're leaders. And those are the ones that can go on the longest. That's the same thing with human beings.
It's like, goddammit, it's literally our programming. And we've surpassed it in our ability to communicate, in our ability to understand the variables and the amount of variables. But we still operate on this chimp hierarchy. It's really crazy. Because if you watch that Chimp Empire show and you think of us, like, oh, my god, this is what our problem is.
We always want to have a leader. We always want to run things. We always want to tell other people. We get power out of telling other people what to do. Some people just get their jollies.
Like. you know that if you have a bad boss and the boss, like, yells at all, the people in the warehouse, like, fuck.
Just wants to humiliate and be in charge.
Yes, they want to beat their chest and run through the fucking trees and shake them.
It does sometimes feel like anybody who wants power should not be allowed to have it.
Yeah, right? Like, and the only people who should be president are people who don't want that job. You know, it's like John Dutton in Yellowstone. He has to become governor. You know, it's like, it's really like fucking, it's kind of similar.
Yes. Jesus Christ.
Meanwhile, the old chimps now will not leave the stage.
Bro, not just the old, I mean all of them. All of them. These people are hanging in. It's amazing. With like hormone replacement and Adderall and whatever else they have to take.
These folks can keep going deep into their 80s. Except that Mitch McConnell guy.
No, no.
He's having some real ones.
He's just going to fall over.
He's having some real moments. Like that, in any other job. Like imagine if you're a train conductor and you just freeze up. Charlie, Charlie, the crossroads is coming.
Charlie!
And Charlie's just locked up, like Windows 98..
Like blue screen of death, bro.
You got to control all delete Charlie before this fucking train crashes. But you can do it if, you know, you're a high-ranking politician in the greatest country the world's ever known. It's very strange. You know? Like Dianne Feinstein doesn't want to relinquish her throne.
But what I understand is it's also all the people that work for her too. And they all have like a whole system. It's probably not even her that's getting things done. It's a giant staff. And if she stays in office, then the giant staff keeps doing what they're doing.
I don't even know if it's a giant staff. But a competent staff. It's not about...
No, their jobs depend on her. As much as Hollywood, right? Like your job depends on your relationship with the big guy, big woman.
Right. Well, you know that lady's not making the big decisions. At this point. Nope. At this stage.
That's when she started?
Oh, my God. Jesus. She was kind of pretty.
She was hot. The thing is, man, when you get stuck... That job is like any other job. If that's what you do. If you play football, you're used to colliding with people and scrambling for the ball.
That's what you do. What they do is govern. That's right. Why are you going to tell Mick Jagger he can't tour anymore? That's right.
Come on, man. He looks awesome out there. What are you going to do? They're fucking politicians. What do we expect?
That should be like fucking... There should be some sort of a cognitive test or something. At some point in time, it should be like, look, we really need... Can we give you another job? That's right.
Like a second job?
You have to be 35 to be president. Why shouldn't there be a top limit? Why shouldn't it be 80 or something? I mean, it's some reasonable number.
Why don't we move the elder statesman into a different bracket? Like advisors. Have them be advisors to discuss policy. Wouldn't that be great? Yeah.
If the senators could go and meet with the advisors who are still around. Back in the 2000s, there was an issue with 4G.
There's got to be a way to do it where you have more vibrant people representing, whatever they're representing.
Yes.
But it's also, they don't want to relinquish power. And they've got a really good grip on it. now. If you want to run a country within the rules and kind of dominate it, they've done an amazing job because they've done it all within the rules. It's pretty clever.
It's like when Donald Trump was talking about not paying taxes. Yes. It's like, yeah, you guys set it up like that, so I don't have to pay taxes.
I'm going to take advantage of it. Yes.
It makes sense.
Well, I mean, so this is a good segue into a lot of things, but it's also a good segue into sort of COVID and pharma and those guys, because they are masters at going to the edge of the line, going to the gray area. They don't necessarily lie, although sometimes I think when they're forced to, they will lie, but they shade the truth. They run studies in a way that determines, you know, that gets them to the outcome they want. They use friendly doctors to promote. With pharma, with Purdue Pharma, with Oxy and with the opioids, you saw this in spades, and we're seeing it again right now with the mRNA vaccine.
So these companies, they know, they're very legally wise, and they play games.
And they're allowed to.
And they're allowed to.
And that's their job, right? That's what's interesting.
Well, you would hope it's not their job.
Well, there's one guy's job, and that guy's job is to invent medicine. I mean, not one guy. One group of humans. And then the other people, their job is to sell it. Their job is to get it out there.
And they're very different kinds of thought processes, I would imagine. And that's part of the problem with, like, business and medicine, when they're together. It's like either we're looking out for each other or we're trying to make insane amounts of wealth from each other. That's right. Both of those things are, like, that's two ways of looking at the health care for a country.
Either we say the whole reason the system is in place is to make sure that everybody is healthy, and if you get injured, we can help you. If you could do it that way, that would be wonderful. The other way to do it is saying we got to fucking get you on as much shit as possible, because the more stuff we sell to you, the more money we make. And if there's a reason to recommend it, we're going to recommend it, because you want to make our reps happy, want to make the hospital happy. And unfortunately, that seems to be real, too.
It's very real. So that's real, too. So that's a real possibility in today's modern age. And I'm sure there are people that fall into the former. I'm sure there's – I mean I know doctors that are great human beings and they really enjoy being able to help people.
Yes.
It's not – it's just, like, it's just – that's how a system works. When a system has the opportunity to make more money by doing certain things, it's like – it's not the scientists that are trying to – it's like there's a whole system.
So with the drug companies – and I think this is true of doctors, too – it's not that they – they want people to get better. I do believe that, okay? But once you've invested a billion or $2 billion in a drug and you've brought it to market and it's got an FDA approval, you're going to do whatever you can to protect it. And that means generally exaggerating its benefits and, if there are problems with it, doing everything you can to hide those problems.
And that's almost like a fiscal responsibility if you're a publicly traded company.
To your shareholders. That's right. That's right.
Which is really crazy. That's what's really crazy. What's really crazy about it is that money and medicine are all combined. And it's not saying that doctors don't deserve money or the people that develop medicines don't deserve money. They certainly do.
They work really hard. What I am saying is, when you have anything that gets wrapped up in a lot of money, people want to make more. They want to make more. How do I make more? I don't like making X amount.
I want to make Y. How do I get to Y? What do I have to do? I've got to sell this. I've got to do that.
I've got to make some unnecessary these or those and do a few things to people that maybe they didn't need.
Yes. And it's okay, because maybe it benefits them. It probably doesn't hurt them that much. You justify it.
And then there's real things that people thought were conspiracies. Real things like incentives. And that showed up during the pandemic as well. There was – they got paid per case for people that had COVID. And they got paid per COVID deaths.
And they got – the whole thing was weird. It's like if you financially incentivize the treatment of a pandemic disease, that seems – I understand that hospitals have to make money. But isn't there a fear that you label something COVID death, you get more money. That people would use that on things that weren't necessarily COVID, especially if there's no oversight. Oh, yeah.
Of course. They're not combing through your fucking books.
And if the worst thing that happens if they do comb through your books is you have to pay some of it back. Whoopsies. That's right. Sorry. Exactly.
Exactly. We up-coded a little bit here. We cheated a little bit there. We'll give you a check.
Elon talked about it on the podcast. And people said he was making it up. Nope.
He was not making it up.
He was saying if you got bit by a shark and you had COVID, they would call it a COVID death. Yes. It's just like, what?
And this is still going on, Joe. This is going on until 2025.. If you're a family member and you can get a family member who died to be classified as a COVID death, you get up to $9,000 for their funeral expenses. You submit it to FEMA. They cut you a check.
And so, of course, those families want $9,000.. Who wouldn't?
Yeah. It's free $9,000.. Your loved one's already gone. Yes. The whole thing is just so slippery.
because, yeah, if everything was perfect, you would say maybe it would be good to help these people at the funeral. Maybe it would be good if you….
But why is COVID different than anything else? Good question. Why do you get $9,000 for COVID and nothing else?
What do you think it would be like if people started promoting that for obese folks? If you're obese and you die, we'll give you….
It would bankrupt the federal government.
Grandma was obese. You know, like you, just like….
People respond to incentives. When there's money, companies respond.
Doctors respond.
Unfortunately, right? Everybody. Yeah, I mean, I guess, unfortunately. I mean, look, it's why we have this, you know, all these great things in this country, too. But….
Yeah.
I will give you…. So, an ophthalmologist called me a few weeks ago. There's a drug, and the drug works, okay? It's good for people. if you….
It's something called wet macular degeneration, okay? It's something older people get, and it can blind you. So, there's a drug…. There's a couple drugs that actually work for it. They block the flow of….
They block blood vessel formation at the back of the eye. They help you. So, these are administered…. Ophthalmologists administer them in their offices. So, a drug like that, the ophthalmologist actually buys and charges Medicare or the private insurer for.
Okay. What's happening…. And I saw this with a different drug when I worked in the New York Times 15 years ago. So, nothing ever changes. These companies all play the same games.
Is that the companies that make this drug are giving doctors a rebate on the purchase price. And the more you use, the bigger the rebate. And this is a drug that costs thousands of dollars per person per year, okay? It's dosed multiple times a year for a lot of these people. So, what all this adds up to is if you're an ophthalmologist who's using a lot of this, the company is cutting you a check for five or sometimes six figures, sometimes multiple times a year.
Okay. Don't tell me that's not a bribe. Okay. Because that's a bribe. It may be legal.
They may have found a way to do this. And he showed me…. He showed me the check that his company or that his ophthalmology practice had received. And it was huge. Okay.
And, by the way, these doctors make a lot of money on their own just doing the procedure. They don't need this. But it's a way for the drug company to get them to use this more. There is corruption all over our medical system.
And how does that get resolved? Is there a way at this point, or is it the system itself? Is it just a function of that's how human beings behave, when they have enough regulation where they can get away with some stuff and they just want to make more and more money and it just becomes? that's what they're trying to do? I mean, I don't know.
It's just human beings?
I mean, if you're that ophthalmologist in Florida, do you need another Ferrari?
Maybe you don't think that way. You don't think that way. You just think, I can get it. Right. And I'm in this system and the system is fucked already.
That's right. And I'm using this drug because I know it works and it's good for patients. The problem is you're then having incentives to ignore the problem if there is one later. And so in this case, the guy actually said to me, he's like, this is a good drug. It does work.
He said, but sometimes if we dose it too many times, there can be sort of a paradoxical effect where it stops working. If you're one of those doctors who's on the tit and getting that check every quarter or every six months, or however frequently you get it, it's going to be harder for you to see the problem because all of a sudden you have a financial incentive not to see it. Right.
I don't know what we do about any of this.
Except talk about it and make sure people know.
Talk about it and make sure people know. You need senators to call this stuff out. And we need people that run these companies to just have their ethical boundaries, because they make great stuff. The thing about pharmaceutical drug companies is I would never say we don't need them. That's crazy.
How many people they've helped. You know how many drugs? the pharmaceutical companies that we currently demonize because of this thing, this for profit aspect of it. But how many of them have brought drugs to the market that have fixed all sorts of problems that people have been suffering for forever?
Yes.
They just can't go ham. You can't go crazy and force people to take your stuff. That's a bad relationship. A good relationship is a consumer and a provider. And the provider develops these drugs that are very beneficial to people.
And most of them are. A lot of them are. Some of them are. They do have drugs that they've developed that are really beneficial for people. They really do.
They're real. And we can't fucking throw out the baby with the bathwater. I just think that it just happens. The problem is also the process, right? Because to bring a drug to market costs so much fucking money.
It costs a crazy. It's so prohibitive for most. If you were like some pharmacologist or some biologist and you guys were working together and you developed something. You had this idea about a pathway and you figured out something, and maybe this could fix it. And you really figured it out.
Good fucking luck.
Right.
Good luck. Right. Getting that thing approved.
I mean, one of the great disappointments for me in the last 10 years is realizing that if you had to choose between a sewer system and a medical system, you'd choose a sewer system.
What's more efficient?
What actually helps human health more? The great gains for human longevity in the last 200 years have been really simple things. Clean water. Try to get the air clean. Don't have meat packing plants in the middle of cities.
Don't have giant graveyards in the middle of cities. That stuff.
Have you read Dissolving Illusions?
I have not.
It's a fantastic book about just that. And the beginning of it is they talk about the conditions that people lived in, because you never really think about it. What would it be like to live in a city before there were cars? Well, guess what? Horseshit.
But nothing gets to you. That's right. You're not getting fresh vegetables in the winter. You're not getting vitamins. That's right.
Massive malnutrition, starvation, extreme poverty, people living in squalor, terrible sanitation. I mean, open outhouses for entire blocks of people. Yep. And just crazy diseases. Yep.
And they all lived on top of each other. And, again, malnutrition, no vitamin D, no sunlight exposure in the winter, et cetera, et cetera. And a lot of those people got horrible diseases because of that, just like they did in the olden times, like we know about. Yes. When people dump shit in the streets.
The plague came.
The first few decades of the Industrial Revolution were terrible for human health. People got crammed together. They got sicker. And then, about 1850, they started to figure this stuff out. For 100 years, we did great.
But it wasn't really medicine. It was really more basic than that. And so the last 50, 60, 70 years, we've spent more and more and more money on medicine, trying to continue that growth in life expectancy. And it turns out there are limits to it. There are just limits.
And we seem to be reaching them. And the problem is, in the U.S., anyway, we're now spending so much money and having so many unnecessary medical procedures of marginal value. I'm not even talking about the cost. I'm talking about value to people that we seem to have topped out. And this is a really depressing thing to realize, that ultimately, once people get to be about 80, there's just not that much you can do for them.
Unless you're, Vince McMahon.
You ever see what he looks like? No. He's 78 years old. Is he looking good?
He's jacked.
He goes to the gym at 3 o'clock in the morning, sleeps two hours a night. So, there's that canary in the coal mine.
That's right. Let's see him at 82..
Well, that's only four years from now. But the reality is, you're right.
But also, there's a lot of complicated factors in being healthy. They don't all involve medicine. No. And it's not just... Are you joking?
No, no, that's legit. I think he was 74 there. So, it's four years ago. He's still jacked up.
That's ridiculous. Wow.
Modern science. Right there, baby. Look at that.
Look at him. Jacked. 76, 78-year-old man.
Jacked.
He keeps it rolling.
The train kept rolling with him. Yeah, man. There's a lot going on with people's health.
The reality is, we rightly should attribute a lot of it to medicine. It's great. They did a lot of great stuff. But also, there's a lot of other factors. And the factor with plagues is the sanitation systems that we had in this country at the beginning of the 19th century.
They were horrible. Horrible. Horrible. Yes.
Horrible. Cholera.
Everything. Typhus. Terrible disease. It's all gangs in New York. People forget.
You think of New York, you think of Fifth Avenue. What an amazing place to visit. Back then, it was horrific.
Little Johnny came home with a cold, and the next day, it was dead.
Horrific. People were just dying left and right. One thing that I also found out that was fascinating was about the Spanish flu. The Spanish flu killed so many people. It killed a shit ton of people.
But they said that what it killed people from is not actually the flu itself, but the side diseases that come with it. And that you could have cured those with antibiotics.
Bacterial pneumonia. Yep. That's true.
Bacterial pneumonia. And what was the other one? There was another one? Meningitis? Meningitis.
That may be. Was it that?
But they said they could have cured those with antibiotics. Yes, that's true. So if that happened, the fear was always that the Spanish flu happened today. But because medical science has progressed, if that same flu came around today, they would actually be able to save most of them.
The mortality rate would probably be much lower. Now, if there's a bad flu or bad, you know, another coronavirus, I can just about guarantee you that will come out of a lab. Just like this one did.
This is a conspiracy theory, and this is getting you kicked off YouTube.
It's not a conspiracy theory to say it came out of a lab.
Isn't it funny that it used to be? Yes. You used to be racist to say it. That's true. There used to be something wrong with you.
They did an amazing job of gaslighting people.
I didn't say it was made in a lab. I said it came out of a lab.
Yes.
And it did, okay?
Well, it seems like the people in the lab were patients zero, right?
They were fucking around with the coronavirus. They were trying to make it more dangerous or trying to make a vaccine, a pan-coronavirus vaccine, and they didn't. You know, somebody slipped or somebody accidentally injected a ferret when they were supposed to inject a mouse, and it all started there.
Most likely.
Yes, most likely.
Yeah. It's just, that's weird. how little outrage there is about that.
Yes. By the way, if it came out of a cave, it came out of a cave when some idiot who shouldn't have been in the cave was poking around, swabbing a bat's asshole to try to, like, find a virus. So, either way, it's the fault of our effort. We did this, okay?
Is there any benefit from that kind of research? No.
It should all be stopped.
Period. Do they just do it because that's what they do? Yes. Just like we do research, and I want to do research on coronaviruses and how to make them more infectious.
Yes. It should all be stopped. It's useless, okay? You want the proof that it's useless? Did you hear anybody predict this was going to happen before it happened?
They spent 10 years trying to figure out what was going to happen.
But is there any benefit in understanding those things so that they can develop drugs to combat them?
Eh, broadly, no.
And also, there's a problem with that, because if you literally have a thing where you have a cure for a thing, and if that thing gets out, then you can sell that cure. If you're Dr. Evil, you're going to fucking open the hatch.
That's right.
You would hope. nobody would ever do that.
You would hope.
But there's been people in the world that have done some horrible—like, we know Hitler was a real guy. We know that was a—like, that never happened again. Are you fucking sure?
Right. Are you totally sure? There's been genocide since then.
It seems like the only way to—boy.
I mean, we have to figure out a way to, like, catch up to our abilities. Like, catch up as a species.
I don't know how. I mean, so the last—.
We have the ability to, like, affect so many people in negative ways, with, like, with whatever it is, drugs and all sorts of things that we do.
You know, so did you see Oppenheimer, the movie?
I haven't seen it yet.
It's pretty great, okay? It's amazing. And so I read the book it's based on, which is also pretty amazing, okay? That was a case. You know, those guys, unbelievable.
They, just, like, they, looked inside the atom with their minds, right? It's unbelievable. they figured out how this works. And then they took metal and they made the sun, okay? They made an explosion like the sun.
They figured it out in a matter of years. It was so scary to people, the threat that nuclear weapons pose, that we actually kind of got it under control. We never used them again after 1945..
Which is really astonishing.
It's pretty amazing. Pretty astonishing. So, when the threat is obvious enough that, like, you can eliminate a city in seconds, our little lizard brains, we figure something out. The problem is with these viruses, it's a little more marginal. It's not as obvious.
And so we have these people just continuing to mess around with them.
I hate to take you off track, but when the nuclear bombs were first detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I think with some of the tests too, right after that, is when people started seeing a lot of UFOs. Huh. That's like the folklore behind UFOs. They all started coming after 47.. Huh.
Yeah.
I did not know that.
Yeah. So I would ask you, what the fuck is going on? What the fuck is going on? When you see all this UAP stuff, and all these people that are whistleblowers, and they're talking about crashed retrieval programs where they could recover crashed UFOs and back engineer them, like, what's going on?
So I'm not a believer in this. And let me tell you why.
Please tell me.
You are an alien, okay? You have super hyper advanced technology. You can go faster than the speed of light. You can get to Earth. You can figure out that this one little planet has other human beings, or has other life forms on it that you want to go see, okay?
Right. You do that. Then you crash your stupid UFO into the desert? Yeah.
I have a problem with that.
One more point on this, okay? What happened with the Titan Submersible? Okay. That thing went down, and basically they knew, okay, within hours, that it was blown up, okay? Right.
They still, we're human beings. We try to rescue other human beings, okay? The aliens aren't going to try to rescue other aliens. if there's been a crash? They're not going to try to come get them?
So you tell me. You tell me why it's always in the desert in Arizona. They never show up at the White House. They never show up in Times Square. Why?
There have been places where large groups of people have seen it. And there was a place in Brazil, Varginha, Brazil, and there's a very interesting documentary about it called Moment of Contact. And there was a crash. There was a crazy lightning storm, and there was a crash, and they claimed that there was actual live beings. And one of these guys took one of these beings to a hospital.
They refused it, brought it to another hospital. I think they wanted to bring it to a third hospital. The guy who was carrying this alien, supposedly, but this is a fact, this guy died of some incurable bacterial disease that they had no hope of fixing. It just overcame his body, and he was dead very quickly. He was a young guy.
I think he was dead in less than two weeks. And they were attributing that to him carrying this fucking alien.
So what happened to the body, the alien body?
I don't know. They say that the United States Air Force flew a jet, and this is in the documentary, they said they flew a jet to Varginha, Brazil, to recover whatever this thing was. Because they have a recovery retrieval program. Who the fuck knows, man? Every time I even say it, I sound so dumb.
I listen to myself like, do you believe this? Do you believe this? But I do think we just crashed an F-35.. That's true. There's a guy who had to fucking eject out of his jet.
And they're like, hey, if anybody sees one of our $800 million jets, call this hotline.
This is what I'm saying.
But that's us. And that's the pinnacle of modern technology. Maybe, if you just have their saucers over Washington, D.C. What year was that, James? 1952..
1952.. Yeah. It was a newspaper article where they had – apparently they photographed – yeah, someone tried to shoot at one. But what does that mean? What does that mean?
And when someone tells a story like that, maybe they did see something. I mean, how much of it do they remember? How much of the embellished –?
How high were they at the time?
But there are fighter jets. Fighter jets that have encountered them. I believe those guys. Sober, like American heroes. Yes, like David Fravor.
Yes. That story is insane. But I tend to think more than ever that it's a drone and that there's some sort of a drone program that they've kept secret. that is insanely powerful. That I'll believe.
And if I had a drone program that can do wild shit, like, go hypersonic speeds and hover dead still in midair and operate it without any visible method of propulsion, I would start talking about aliens too. I'd be like, dude, they're here. We don't even know what they are. They're off-road vehicles – or, excuse me, off-world vehicles. And then people would go, oh, yeah, aliens are here.
But meanwhile, what it is is we have super sophisticated tech that your tax dollars have paid for without you having any idea it exists for your own protection.
So you don't believe in aliens?
I do and I don't. Well, I do in –. of course, there's the Fermi paradox. Like, if they're out there, where are they? How can we not see them?
But how much can we look? That's like a guy poking his head out of a tent going, I don't see any bears. How fucking much do you look at? That's true. How much are you really paying attention?
There's 100 billion stars in this galaxy alone. There's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe. Like, what are you talking about? Like, where have we looked?
I'm not saying they're not out there. I'm just saying they're not interested in us.
Well, I most certainly think they would be interested in us.
Who are these fucking idiots? Right.
Well, the same way we go to the Congo and film for Chimp Empire. It's really not that much different. The same way we go to butterfly habitats and study. butterflies. Like human beings, are fascinated by some of the most primitive of creatures.
A long-thought instinct. fox becomes a major news story amongst academics. When people can go and travel to exotic places, and especially biologists, and study these animals, you ever read Sapolsky's work with the baboons? Fascinating stuff. Sapolsky, he's from Stanford, right?
You know Stanford? Just a brilliant guy who's done all this crazy work about toxoplasmosis. Are you aware of that? Toxoplasmosis is nuts. It's one of the reasons why they tell women to not handle kitty litter.
Toxoplasmosis is a cat parasite that grows in a cat's gut. And when it gets on rats, it rewires the rat's sexual reward system and makes the rats sexually attracted to cat urine. And it removes their fear of cats. So that the cats devour the rats, because the only way that that parasite can reproduce is inside a cat's gut. So the parasite reproduces inside the cat's gut, comes out and cat shit.
And then people get it. And people get it from cat shit. You might get it from an open wound. You might get it from handling it. But when people get it, it makes them more reckless.
He said there's a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims, crash victims that are toxoplasmosis infected. At one point in time, France was like 50% of the people had toxoplasmosis. Isn't that wild?
That is wild.
And it changes behavior. It affects behavior.
Okay. I did not know any of this.
And it's a fucking parasite that, like half a population of a country, had. Because feral cats. Because you have feral cats everywhere.
So point is, we study all kinds of shit.
Weird parasites and fucking monkeys and giraffes and everything. There it is. Toxoplasmosis is considered to be a leading cause of death attributed to foodborne illness in the United States. More than 40 million men, women and children in the U.S. carry the toxoplasma parasite.
But very few have symptoms because the immune system usually keeps the parasite from causing illness.
So this is like if you have HIV late stage or something, you wind up killing. Interesting.
Interesting, right? It's a very bizarre parasite. But we study fucking penguins, man. They all look the same. Of course.
The March of the Penguins. People study them. They love to watch organisms. You don't think they'd want to watch us?
Yeah, but ultimately we mess around with those penguins. The aliens would mess around with us.
I think they might be. I think they might have made us. They might have made us. We might really be a biology project. That's not a joke.
If you think about it, there's a weird thing with primates and us.
We're so far past them.
Yes. We are so in another dimension of reality.
Yes.
With communication, with our ability to create technology and alter the world, we're in a weird place. How did we get here so quick? How did that happen? How did the doubling of the human brain size, the biggest mystery in the entire biological record, how did that happen? Over two million years, human brain size doubles.
People start walking upright and talking to each other. What happened? And if I was an asshole from another planet and I came down here, I'd be like, you know. It's like when people take a wolf and they breed it with a chihuahua because they're a dick. You want to see what it looks like?
I wonder if they would do that to us. I wonder if they'd come and they'd say, you know what we could do? I'd just add a little of this to these things, these crazy, shit-throwing wild primates. Yeah, just give them a taste of alien DNA. Alter some stuff here and there.
You know, just see how it works. Do a couple different versions of it.
Do you know what I'm getting from this conversation, Joe Rogan? What? That COVID is definitely over.
Yeah, I'm kidding. I mean, it's here. Take care of yourself, and it's a cold. Nobody wants to say that. It's like this foreboding thing.
Come on, kids. Let's be real about it. Let's be real about it now.
Yes.
You know, and that Kathy Hoechl thing when she was on TV saying, you know, you have to get, this is a new vaccine. The old one's not going to work for it.
She's always saying what the CDC just said. It's crazy. Okay, so COVID is over. Okay. But here's what I'm telling you.
And like, I guess I'm going to be stuck beating this drum for I don't know how long. We do not know what the long-term effects of the mRNA vaccines are. And it is, I would go beyond borderline. I would say it is immoral and unethical to keep using those right now. Okay.
If you're going to insist on giving people COVID vaccines, there are simpler, cheaper ones that don't have this question about what they do long-term. The mRNAs, at this point. to me, they're a failed product and they basically should be withdrawn. It will never happen. There's far, far too much at stake for both the pharmaceutical industry and public health and the Democratic Party and the media to even consider allowing that to happen.
But the promise, Joe, the promise two and a half years ago, was these vaccines are new. They're going to revolutionize the treatment of respiratory viruses. They're going to eliminate COVID. Don't let them tell you that's not what they said, because it is what they said. Okay.
Not, there may be some symptom reduction. It may reduce cases of serious illness. No, it was. these are so effective. We're going to get the herd immunity with them and COVID is not going to be a problem ever again.
That was total horseshit and we can't let them forget it.
Yeah.
And I know, I know this is boring. I know there's only like a few people who care, but it's so important.
No, I think a lot of people care. I don't think it's a few people. It's just uncomfortable. All these things are so uncomfortable.
You know? Yes. This is a reality that people would sell things that don't work just to make money and they could put you at risk. But it's like, if they can, they will. And if they have it for sale, it's like we got to get this stuff off the shelves.
Come on. We've been developing this. We developed this thing for the variants.
So this is a number.
Didn't they just test it on 10 mice? Yes.
Pfizer, literally 10 mice. Yes. Not a joke. There were 5 billion doses so far of the mRNAs made. Okay.
About $100 billion sold by Pfizer. No, a little bit more. $110, $120 billion sold by Pfizer and Moderna combined. Okay. My best estimate, and I haven't been able to lock it down because the numbers are really hard to find.
2 billion of those 5 billion doses were thrown away, unused. The companies made somewhere between $40, $50 billion on vaccine. that just got tossed. It was a pure gift to the companies. $40 billion.
Wow. Now, that even by American pharmaceutical standards, that's a lot of money. It's a lot of money to waste.
Yeah. Geez.
Because nobody wanted them.
Pfizer made $75 billion in 2021 and 2022.. Moderna made close to $40 billion. They made some more this year, not as much. It's a lot of money.
Yeah. It's hard to turn that spigot off.
I get it. It's hard to tell the truth when there's that much money.
Can you, though, if you put something out and, again, we're bringing this back to the obligation to your shareholders and how to run a corporation versus what's the right thing to do, right? If you have something and you haven't been called out for it, and there seems to be like enough gaslighting going on in the media that it sort of obscures the reality of it, you're supposed to keep selling it. I mean, if that's what your company does, right?
I'm not saying it's good, but I'm saying, like, if you don't know there's a problem, then you don't know there's a problem. And if you don't look to find the problem, then you don't know. So you don't look.
So you don't look.
That's the game.
Boy, I wish that wasn't the game. I wish the game was we want to make medicine to make you feel better. And if that medicine doesn't work, we try to come up with a new one. Sorry.
That's right. No, that's not the game.
Isn't it sort of just the amount of money involved in developing one of those things, the incentives to pass it through, regardless of whether or not it's effective, are so strong? Yes. Because you're so in the fucking red before you get out of the gate. Yeah. Before you get out of the gate, you're into this thing a billion dollars or whatever.
That's right. And the flip side of that is it's so profitable on a per unit basis because it takes a few cents to make, and then you could sell it for $5 or $50 or $500.. So the per unit profit, once you earn your nut back, is phenomenal.
Phenomenal.
I'm suing the government, right? I'm suing the president.
How many people say that to you all casual? I'm suing the government.
I'm suing the government.
Oh, that's cool.
But I'm also suing the chief executive of Pfizer and one of the board members of Pfizer, all in the same suit. So they've responded, and it's called a motion to dismiss. They want the lawsuit gone. One of the things they say in the lawsuit is that I have been fundraising, and I have a sub stack, and I've been merchandising, which I haven't been merchandising. This shirt is my own printed.
Borla is the CEO of Pfizer, Fauci we all know. Gottlieb is on the Pfizer board, and Slavitt is somebody else. I'm suing.
You have a T-shirt on, like you're a YouTube streamer.
I do.
A bunch of people's names on it for clicks.
But so Pfizer's lawyers have said, or Borla's lawyers, Albert Borla, the CEO of Pfizer, as I like to call him the world's favorite veterinarian, because he's not a doctor. He's a doctor of veterinary medicine, which is fine. We need those. Yeah, absolutely. But you know what?
He sort of treated the world like livestock.
But Borla is trying to get this lawsuit dismissed, and he's saying Berenson's making all this money. Listen, buddy, your company made $70 billion selling the vaccines, and you personally had your salary double, from $18 million to $33 million, almost double, from 2020 to 2022.. So don't call me the grifter, my friend, when you're the one who's made more money than anyone can imagine on these vaccines.
Well, he's calling you a grifter because you're making money from what, sub stack?
Because I have a sub stack and because I've raised money to sue.
You write about other things. in sub stack. You write about many things.
I do. But no, no. I mean, you would say I read a lot about it. Or I would, you know, I read a lot about COVID and the vaccine, sure.
Yeah.
But, you know, the whole thing is that having that as an argument seems kind of crazy. Like, it should be based on whether or not he's right.
That's right.
And also, like, why did you guys get him kicked off Twitter? Like, who did that? And who talked to who? And how did that go down?
Well, that's a, you know, so that's what the lawsuit's about. But I know, I know that this guy, Scott Gottlieb, who's...get this, Joe. Scott Gottlieb, between 2017 and 2019, was the commissioner of the FDA. He quit the FDA and three months later, exactly three months, the minimum amount of time later, he joined the Pfizer board, where he's a senior board member, where they pay him about $400,000 a year.
That sounds like a sweet gig.
It is a nice gig for a couple of meetings. So...
It's a good move. It's a good move.
So Scott Gottlieb has earned his paycheck with Pfizer, though, because he, in August of 2021, made a call to a senior lobbyist at Twitter. And within a few hours, I had gotten my fifth strike and I was kicked off Twitter.
That happened. And what were you kicked off for, specifically?
I mean, we can find the tweet.
Well, you could just tell me.
But the exact words were, it doesn't stop infection or transmission. Think of it at best as a therapeutic that needs to be diagnosed in advance of infection and has bad side effects. And we want to mandate it? Insanity. That was the entire tweet.
Every word of that is true. Let me tell you what was really happening. Okay. We can talk about the vaccines and the approval process and the hype around them and the hope around them in early 2021. And you can make a good case that, hey, there were people just trying to get out of the pandemic.
Right. All right? By the summer of 2021, everything changed. Everybody who knew where to look, which was really Israel, could see that the vaccines were not working for very long.
Why was the Israel data was important? Because, first of all, they were more accurate.
They were first to vaccinate a small country. They vaccinated almost everybody by the end of January.
And were they very open about their data as well?
They were. And you can read stories from the spring of 2021 talking about the miracle, how COVID went to zero in Israel, basically. Because there is this short period of time after those first two doses when you do actually prevent infection. Okay. I don't think anybody who looks at the data can dispute that.
I know there are some people who do, but I don't think there's anybody who can really dispute that. Okay. Then what happens is your antibodies go away and it comes roaring back. And you also often provoke a new variant, which is what happened in the summer of 2021.. The Delta variant sort of came roaring along.
So, by July of 2021...
Can you explain to people who don't understand how that could be possible? Sure. How does a vaccine promote a variant?
So, these vaccines, specifically, these mRNAs, cause a very focused immune response. And what they do is they make your body make a specific version of the spike protein, which is the part of the coronavirus that attaches to your cells and gets the virus into your cells. So, the idea is your body makes a spike. Your body recognizes the spike as an invader. It makes antibodies against the spike.
And then, if you actually are hit with the coronavirus, if you're infected with it, you've got this great head start where your body's antibodies can attack the coronavirus and keep it from infecting any of your cells. You don't get infected. You beat it. Okay. I mean, that's the basic theory of the vaccine.
Okay? The problem is the virus, quote, unquote, knows what's happening. The virus is going to mutate. There are just going to be errors in its genome over time. These RNA viruses are notorious for this.
When they replicate, they make mistakes. And some of those mistakes in the genome lead the virus to look a little bit differently, the spike to look a little bit different. And then the antibodies can't attach as well. If you're a virus that's mutated and you have these different antibodies, you have an advantage. The advantage is suddenly you can infect people again.
Guess what? That version of the virus is going to take off and accelerate. So, that's a very natural process. Here's one thing nobody sort of thinks about, which is we really stopped mass vaccinating people in late 2021, early 2022.. The rate of variants slowed way down last year and into this year.
Omicron came, but since then there hasn't been another major variant class.
Is there any dispute in this? Because there was a conversation that I got in with a friend of mine at the very beginning of the pandemic. And he was trying to tell me that his doctor was telling him that it was the unvaccinated people that were causing the variants.
No.
And I sent him some YouTube videos. I'm like, this is what I've read. And what is his name? Geert van der Bosch? Yes.
He's an expert. And what is he? He's an epidemiologist, or I forget what he is. It's something to do with vaccines. Yes.
But he understands the whole pathway. It's like you never mass vaccinate during a pandemic.
Yes.
Especially with something that doesn't offer.
That's leaky. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Complete.
So, I mean, that's why you give people the flu vaccine before flu season. Ideally, you do not mass vaccinate during a pandemic. But so, in the summer of 2021, everything went to shit from the point of view of the Biden administration and, to a lesser extent, the vaccine companies. Okay. The vaccine companies were more aware that this was going to happen.
But remember, the Bidenites, and you can find, I can find you a clip of Fauci in May 2021, saying this is over. Like, I think we can eliminate this. He said that on the record. They were caught with their pants down. And their response was twofold.
One, we're going to try to get everyone boosted. We're going to try to scare people into getting boosted, or encourage people to get boosted, which they knew, or should have known was only going to buy them a matter of months. But they didn't care. They just wanted to do something. The other part, though, was even worse.
And that was the mandates. Okay. The mandates were unforgivable. Unforgivable constitutionally. Unforgivable medically.
And here, this is, unfortunately, what I've concluded about the mandates. You know what else was happening in August 2021? Afghanistan collapsed. Okay. And I don't know if you remember, but I'm sure you can find it.
There's a picture of Joe Biden sitting alone in the Situation Room looking at TVs, and he looks like he looks completely lost. Okay. We left Afghanistan in July. By August, there were, the Taliban was in Kabul and we were, you know, Marines were getting killed. And Afghans were trying to get on airplanes.
It was terrible. Okay. Here's the thing about the mandates. Let's let's just pretend the vaccines actually work for a long period of time. Okay.
And let's pretend that 90% of older people hadn't been vaccinated, which they had been. Okay. So let's pretend that there was an actual justification for these mandates. What were they, Joe? They were workplace mandates.
The government couldn't directly make old people get vaccinated. So they said, we're going to have workplace mandates. Who is in the workforce? Healthy adults under 65.. So there was no possibility that the mandates could actually affect the population most at risk from COVID and get them vaccinated.
They were designed not to work, but to be something that the president could say he was doing at a time when he looked completely incompetent because of what had happened in Afghanistan. That is my true belief about this. That's it. That's it. You need something.
that is not that picture. That was August.
I don't know if that's the case, but I do know that.
I mean, if you have a vaccine that protects the people that take it.
What is? why are you mandating it? for the people that won't be protected? That's right. If it does work.
That's right.
You should probably encourage people to take it if it works. But the people that don't take it. Hey, let those people get sick. If that's what they want to do.
That's right. And they'll figure it out.
Because who are they going to get sick? Just other people that haven't been vaccinated. if it really works.
That's right. That's right.
And then people would eventually catch on. Right. And then they would figure it out. You don't have to mandate it.
Right. So there was this theory that there was this young people for whom the vaccine hadn't been approved yet. But that was, of course, a complete lie, because young people are not at high risk from COVID. The only exception to that is there's a small number of people who are seriously immunocompromised. I'm talking about people who have chemotherapy, people who are really sick.
And those people don't necessarily have a strong immune response to the vaccine. So you say, OK, our theory is we're going to make everybody get vaccinated to protect those people. Here's the problem with that. That's not how we practice medicine. Right.
You don't practice medicine on a group basis.
I was talking with my friends the other day about it. I was like, imagine if, for some reason, we were actually talking about fluoride in the water. But it's a similar analogy. Imagine if some people are more susceptible to skin cancer. So we put sunscreen in apples.
That's right. People would go, no, I want a fucking, just a regular apple. No, no, no. You need this. It's for everyone.
We have to protect the other people that are vulnerable. So this is how apples come now, because people love apples.
What kind of craziness is this? You guys put medicine in the apples?
That's right. I mean, the thing about fluoride in the drinking water is it's very, very, very—I don't know that there's any risk to it at all. But that's what the standard has to be.
Did you know that there's associated lower IQs at places that have higher fluoride ratios?
That I did not know.
Yeah, we found it out the other day. We were trying to figure it out. We're like, why is fluoride in the water? Like, I've heard wacky conspiracy theories. Like, the wackiest ones is like it's to make people dumber and more docile.
But what I'm telling you is you're mandating this not for the people who are at risk, but for adults in the workplace who are not at risk. What is the logic there? Right. It is just to make that man look like he's doing something.
Do you really think that's it?
I do because I can't imagine—.
I think people were so in the throes of that thing. I think people—when COVID was in its just full phase and there was a heightened—it's hard for us to remember, because I think it was very traumatic. It's a—you know, because when you have—like, you know, it's like people after 9-11.. Their memory's very foggy, right? Yep.
COVID is very traumatic in a way. that, like, was a long, slow drip of trauma in a weird way, where it gave people horrible anxiety. There's an invisible thing that's going to kill us all and you've got to stay in your house. You've got to take the medicine and get boosted. I don't think people got off that ride, man.
No, they didn't. And maybe you're right. And maybe I'm giving the White House too much credit. Maybe they were just afraid and stupid. But you go—.
It was the mindset of the country to do something. And if you got vaccinated, you were a good person. Yes. And if you didn't, you—you remember, like, people saying, like, you're pointing a loaded gun at someone's head if you're not vaccinated?
Joe, I'm not vaccinated. I mean, not against this. I have no mRNA, no COVID vaccine. I—believe me, I remember. Find the statement that Biden made.
It's either September 8th or September 9th, 2021, where he said—it was the White House. It was when he announced the mandates. He said, we have lost patience with the unvaccinated. And there's one from a—.
So you think that was him taking control?
I do. But it's also what you're saying. There was real fear. But, I mean, imagine that. The wildest one.
Imagine trying to divide the country like that.
The wildest one was the White House statement that said, the unvaccinated will experience a death of severe illness. Yeah. A winter of severe illness and death. What?
Our patience is wearing thin.
Yeah, I remember that. We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. That's so crazy. If it already was proven that it didn't work. You know, people—didn't one person get COVID while they were in the test?
I mean, more than one. But they're definitely—what happened was, during the clinical trials, which only lasted a couple of months, that's that period when the vaccines really worked. There's this short period when you have a tremendous number of antibodies and you don't really get sick. And that's what the data showed. But it didn't show anything else.
And that's why they have to have long-term studies.
Long-term studies, yes.
But we didn't have the luxury of long-term studies.
So they seemed to have a belief that it worked. We chose not to.
It's just—the weird thing was the ignoring of natural immunity. That was very strange.
That's another weird one.
Not just ignoring, but I had intelligent people that I respect trying to convince me that I should get vaccinated right after I recovered from COVID. And I was like, well, I don't think that's scientific. I think if you read the data, it shows you that you have a much higher level of immunity from recovering from it. naturally. That's the data.
I'm not—it's not encouraging people to go get COVID. But I'm saying that that was what the data said. So, like, whoa, you get even more protected if you get vaccinated. I'm like, okay, but is that more risks? Like, what is the risk factor now?
Like, is it—because that's what I've heard. There's, like, an elevated risk factor for adverse side effects if you've just recovered from COVID. Is that true?
Yes, that is true. There's no reason to be vaccinated if you got COVID recovered.
But here's what it really was. They wanted me to join the club. That's right. That's what it was. That's right.
I'm in the club. I took the vaccine. Did you take the vaccine? I got the new iPhone. Do you got the new iPhone?
That's right. You know? That's right.
Team Pfizer, Team Moderna. Team Electric Car. Yeah. No, no, Jim. Team Apple.
Team Apple. No, man. It's sick. It's sick what they did. Yeah.
They got us. They got us. They played us against ourselves. And people, they literally enjoyed, like, chastising people for not following the rules.
That's right.
And when those rules turned out to not—neither be accurate, scientific, or even beneficial, when those rules turned out to be bullshit and actually detrimental, nobody apologized. Nobody cared.
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