Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Everything You Need To Know About Joe Rogan

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Everything You Need To Know About Joe Rogan · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
The world has never been more connected and never more divided.
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Most of the media panders to what you believe and distorts what you don't.
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Reinforces, biases and exaggerates divisions.
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We live inside echo chambers.
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But change doesn't happen inside an echo chamber.
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It's time to stick your head above the parapet to step out of the bunker,
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to stretch your legs and step on some landmines, friends.
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It's time to have uncomfortable conversations.
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I thought I would speak to you one-on-one today about the past week getting back to Australia,
0:47
the Twitter fallout of going on Joe Rogan, follow-up research about myocarditis,
0:55
Jockovich being deported from Australia.
0:58
Lots happened.
0:59
A lot has happened.
1:00
I hope you've had a lovely week.
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If you're just joining the show as a result of having seen me on Joe Rogan, then welcome.
1:08
We won't always just have me ranting.
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We'll sometimes talk to other interesting people as well.
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But hey, I'm interesting too.
1:15
It's just me and you.
1:16
Let's sit down.
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Let's have a cup of tea, cup of coffee, if you'd prefer.
1:20
Maybe some ayahuasca, we could do a ceremony, take a fantastic trip.
1:24
Whatever you want to, I'm not pushing any kind of substance on you.
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This is your moment to sit down with old Uncle Josh.
1:33
It's been quite the week.
1:35
I would say a small majority of the tens of thousands of messages that I've got on social media have been broadly supportive,
1:46
saying thanks for putting forth an alternative point of view,
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and the one that we often hear in alternate media, especially in the States about Australia and vaccines,
1:58
and a large minority making the very good point that I am an authoritarian Nazi bootlicker,
2:05
apologist for a fascist totalitarian dictatorship in Australia,
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and I should go back to wherever Australia is, which many of these people don't know.
2:15
But both good points, both excellent points for me to digest.
2:20
I've sort of just skated over the surface of it.
2:24
As one does with Twitter storms, they run hot, but they run fast.
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And now I'm back happily insconced at ABC radio in Sydney broadcasting about sane things.
2:35
I must say I was a bit surprised by the whole, if you're not aware of this whole brew,
2:40
I don't know where the hell have you been? Am I right people?
2:43
If you're not aware of it, where have you been?
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But if you're not, then after I spoke to Joe Rogan,
2:49
what I thought was a fairly amicable exchange about the relative risk of getting heart inflammation
2:59
after getting an mRNA vaccine versus getting coronavirus itself.
3:04
And simply because we disagreed about the data there,
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it became this, obviously, the headline hack writers end up turning it into Australian journalist in fiery exchange with Rogan.
3:18
Like I only imagined people clicking on it and going,
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hmm, it didn't seem very fiery.
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I mean, we went on to talk for two and a half hours about all kinds of other things
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and subsequently have been texting each other back and forth.
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You know, we all seem fine with each other.
3:34
Anyway, that's just what the media does, isn't it?
3:36
One thing I would say in the wake of it,
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because there's been a lot of, a lot of dude bros hitting me up with,
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you know, read this article or read this piece of research about myocarditis.
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And there actually is an elevated risk among specifically 15-year-old males
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who live in Jersey, who have blue hair.
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They, if you just analyze it and if you squint really hard
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and you turn the paper upside down,
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the graph clearly shows that they are at higher risk of myocarditis,
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but not pericarditis, but look,
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in order to resolve all this,
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I actually on my radio show yesterday,
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we asked the heart institute,
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the cardiology institute of Australia,
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who know the most more than anyone about heart issues,
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to put forward someone who was across all of the latest research
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about myocarditis and vaccines.
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And they gave us a consultant cardiologist
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at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney,
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who's also a board member and clinical practice advisor
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with the cardiac society of Australia and New Zealand
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who's across all the data.
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So in other words, I didn't go to,
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like a pro-vaccine person or a public health expert
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or an epidemiologist who was going to potentially be biased
5:00
towards the benefits of vaccination.
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I went specifically to someone who concerns themselves,
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only with heart health.
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And I spoke to them for half an hour in a new segment
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I've got called Do Your Own Research,
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where on the radio, each week or every other week,
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I'm going to take something that people online are saying,
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do your own research about.
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You know how people say that to you?
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Well, I don't know.
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Have you heard about the 5G waves?
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Have you heard about, you know, I mean,
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QAnon might be a little bit crazy,
5:29
but there's a lot of QAnon said that,
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have you heard about the child sex trafficking ring
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that Donald Trump is getting rid of?
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Have you heard about, well, climate change
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that you know, a lot of climate scientists
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are dissenting about.
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They usually need to do your own research.
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You need to do your own.
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Don't be a sheeple, sheeple.
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You know, don't just trust what you're being spoon-fed.
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Do your own research.
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No, you don't.
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No.
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The world's too complicated.
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Things are too complicated.
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How are you going to do your own research?
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How would you even know what peer-reviewed papers
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to look up?
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How many of them to read?
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Who to trust?
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How to read the graphs and the data?
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It's way too much.
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How could you possibly do your own research
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about all this stuff?
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That's why we outsource our expertise to experts.
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And then at some point,
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yeah, maybe some of the experts are full of shit.
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But at some point,
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you've got to sort of make a judgment call
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about how many of them would have to be full of shit
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in order to be pulling the wool over your eyes.
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And unless you're a conspiracy-minded maniac,
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there's going to be a point at which you go,
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all right, look, lots of you smart people
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know more about this than I do.
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So I'm not going to listen to this one individual
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who happens to be on a podcast,
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who happens to be dissenting just because he's got good credentials
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if he is regarded by his own peers as being a crank.
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So anyway,
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this bloke who I had on my radio show,
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Professor Raj Puranik,
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he was quite clear that the reason why
6:54
you see myocarditis in young males
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is because the spike protein in the vaccine
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very occasionally can cause hard information.
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He said it's almost never serious
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and it's always always treatable and it's very rare.
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But his point was that the reason why
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you're getting that from the vaccine
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is because of the spike protein.
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In other words, the people who are getting
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that adverse reaction from the vaccine
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would have gotten an even worse adverse reaction
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from the virus itself because it's the spike protein
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that's causing the myocarditis.
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So the same mechanism by which anyone is getting
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a side effect from the vaccine
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would be the mechanism by which they would get that same condition
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from the virus itself only worse
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because they also wouldn't have the protection
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that the vaccine provides.
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And I asked him about the Oxford study
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which Marjord Nawaz and others on Twitter
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have cited as being definitive
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and have claimed that I brought out of date information
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to Joe Rogan when in actual fact
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it was just that Jamie Joe's producer
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pulled up a new scientist article
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which vindicated my position
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and which I have subsequently gone down the rabbit hole
8:07
and checked is the overwhelming representation
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of what most experts believe on this.
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But there's some recent Oxford study
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which suggests otherwise,
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suggests that there might actually be high risks
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of myocarditis among young males
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and there is from the vaccine
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and there is from coronavirus.
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But this expert who I spoke to said
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that's one study if you look at the aggregate
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of all the studies
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and in particular if you look at Israel
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which is probably the best place to look
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because they're more mRNA vaccine based,
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whereas the UK is AstraZeneca predominantly
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which is not an mRNA vaccine.
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Then out of Israel it shows the reverse.
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So and then he added the point that like
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if the mechanism that's causing the myocarditis
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from the vaccine is despite protein
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and that's the same thing that they'd be getting
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from coronavirus then it just doesn't make sense
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that the vaccine would be worse for you
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in this particular respect than the virus itself.
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Then you've got to add to that of course
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that there are all kinds of other things
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that catching COVID does that's bad for you.
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I mean it's not just myocarditis,
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it also gives you all kinds of weird other things potentially.
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I mean if you get a bad case of it
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and admittedly young people don't get bad cases
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of it very often at all.
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But if you infect tens or hundreds of millions of people
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of people with it which will happen
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if you don't have high vaccination rates,
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then some of those very rare things like long COVID
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fatigue and muscle aches and brain fog
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and all those correlated things
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that you can get from getting COVID.
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You have to add that to the ledger
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when you're thinking about the risk of catching COVID.
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So my general takeaway from this whole thing
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has been as a sort of meta way of thinking about it.
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My rule of thumb is don't be suspicious of facts
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or of authority only in one direction.
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There is a certain credulity in being a hyperskeptic.
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I understand the instinct of a lot of the people
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who've been hitting me up on social media
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who are in the kind of alt media space
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to be skeptical of mainstream narratives,
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to do their own thinking, to want to do your own research.
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I don't know if I've finished that thought
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about the do your own research segment
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that I'm going to be doing on ABC radio Sydney.
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But basically we're going to take a different thing
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from do your own research sort of meme online.
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And we will do the research for you.
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So you don't have to do your own research
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because you shouldn't have to do your own research
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because you can't do your own research and nor can I.
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But we will talk to experts on the here
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and we'll ask them to resolve for us the questions,
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the kinds of things that people at a barbecue
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or at a bar will sometimes say to you,
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oh, do your own research into UFOs or something.
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Well, we will do the research.
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So anyway, those types of people will tend to have a lot of,
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you know, suspicion about mainstream narratives,
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about what governments and institutions are telling them.
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And I am skeptical of that as well.
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I mean, I think you'd have to be an idiot
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not to take with a grain of salt things
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that people in positions of power tell you.
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And there are, there is a lot of bullshit, frankly,
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that comes from big business and big industry
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and big government.
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I mean, we've seen the lies of tobacco companies,
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the lies of big oil companies, the lies of big drug companies,
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the lies of governments.
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And I think it's totally appropriate and laudable
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that many people are suspicious of the official line
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on coronavirus, on vaccines, on whatever, up to a point,
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up to a point because there is obviously
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a financial incentive for drug companies
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to be pushing vaccines.
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And so if it was only drug companies
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that were telling me that vaccines worked,
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I would buy two would be very suspicious.
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So I don't, I don't trust vaccines
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because the drug companies tell me not in a million years.
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I trust it because we've had almost 10 billion doses
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for billion in four billion individuals
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and we haven't seen bad side effects
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in so many different countries.
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So I just trust the sort of common sense
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that there being hundreds of different jurisdictions
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that have been doing this with hundreds of thousands
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of unaffiliated doctors and nurses
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and public health officials
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all looking at the results.
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And the level of kind of subterfuge
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and conspiratorial collaboration
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that would have to be going on behind the scenes
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to be systematically covering this up everywhere
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from South Korea to New Zealand to America
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to Bulgaria is just not plausible.
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So what I would say to sort of sceptically minded people
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is there were two kinds of bullshit.
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There's the bullshit that comes out of big tobacco,
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big drug companies, big oil, big government.
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But then there's also the kind of bullshit
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that floats around in superstitious circles
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and can be quite tempting to believe precisely
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because it is anti-authoritarian and anti-allet.
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There's the suspicion of genetically modified foods
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which far exceeds any risks of genetically modified foods,
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which have been being used for decades now
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and don't seem to have any health side effects.
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I'm not saying that there aren't corporate side effects,
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that there are side effects for farmers,
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there are no health problems
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with consuming genetically modified products.
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Yet, you'll see anti-GMO labeling all over the place
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and there's still a huge amount of suspicion about it.
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The same thing applies to the latest nuclear energy facilities.
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I mean, nuclear power now, the new technology is incredibly safe
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and is carbon-free
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and the idea that it's still taboo to talk about it
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in some circles has part of our response to climate change
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is a sort of a superstition.
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And there's, you know, in the lowest vaccinated parts of Europe,
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largely German-speaking parts and Eastern Europe,
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there's a huge reverence for things like homeopathy,
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which is complete nonsense.
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Homeopathy, tablets and medicines are just water.
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The belief is that if you dilute the water
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with a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of some compound
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and then dilute it so much that there is none of the compound left
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in that water chemically so that it's just water chemically
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that the water remembers the compound
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and exerts some extraordinary psychedelic biological effect
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on your cells that gets them into some spiritual state
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that helps them to understand the illness.
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I mean, the whole thing is absolute nonsense.
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But you understand what I'm saying here.
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Don't just direct your skepticism in one way.
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Don't just direct your skepticism towards big, nasty,
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nefarious conspirators, also direct your skepticism
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towards the peddlers of nonsense on social media
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or towards people who claim that they have the latest graph
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and the latest study and the latest data that shows you this
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and so really actually Joe was right and Josh was wrong
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and bloody, bloody, look, who cares?
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Who cares? At some point, take the word of people you trust.
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At some point, you're going to have to outsource a certain amount
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of your skepticism and your understanding of the world.
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To people in positions who are better trained
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at understanding things than you are.
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Not everything can come from a podcast.
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Not everything can come from a blog.
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Sometimes, unfortunately, we sort of do have to trust
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the hierarchical systems that have created civilization
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and that continue to promote public health.
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However, clumsily, they might do that.
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The other thing that I just want to say is that, you know,
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some Aussies have hit me up saying,
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I can't believe that they can't believe that I was so sang
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on about what's going on in Australia.
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I must say the vast, vast majority of Aussies over 95%
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have said, thank God you went and disabused Americans
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of this idea that we're living in a totalitarian dictatorship
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since things have gone so much better here
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than they have in so many other countries throughout the pandemic.
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By the way, on that point, I should also just flesh out
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some numbers here, which are just in case you're not in Australia
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and you're not aware of them.
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Australia has basically had 96 to 97% fewer deaths
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from all causes than the United States per capita.
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I believe that's correct.
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Yes.
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Florida has had 63,000 deaths, Texas,
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almost 77,000.
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This is just from COVID.
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Australia's population is between Florida's and Texas's
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and our deaths were 2,500.
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Last time I checked last week, it's probably up to a little bit
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above that now.
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So 2,500 versus about 70,000 for the same population
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in Florida and Texas.
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And we've done that largely through border closures
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and lockdowns.
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Now, to the people who have hit me up from particularly Victoria,
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saying that I was sort of callous in characterizing life
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as normal.
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I feel your pain.
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I was, I said at the beginning of the, of the Rogan episode
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that I was talking about the majority of Australians
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by which I meant people in the most populous state of New South Wales
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and then add to that some of the other states like WA
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and Queensland, which have been largely COVID-free.
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Melbourne is its own, own unique story.
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And over the course of the next few years,
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we will be looking at the things that the Victorian government
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did in terms of nighttime curfews and the duration
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of the lockdowns and the severity of the lockdowns.
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And we'll be trying to figure out whether or not there was a
18:02
justification for those.
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And it's probably too soon to tell, but I absolutely grant
18:10
that the duration of those lockdowns was absolutely grueling
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for so many people who were there.
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What I do think is misleading about the way that
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it's perceived abroad is the occasional viral video of police
18:27
brutalising somebody for not, I don't know, wearing a mask
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or at least that's what's claimed in the viral video
18:33
becomes a proxy for the way that things are in all of Australia.
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So what I was trying to say was that the places that have
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successfully had border closures and had limited lockdowns
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in order to suppress temporary outbreaks actually have enjoyed
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life basically like a pre-pandemic period.
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I mean, for most of last year, for the first half of last year,
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Sydney was completely open and completely COVID-free.
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And that was that basically ran from, yeah,
19:02
from the middle of 2020 to the middle of 2021.
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Western Australia was able to sustain that essentially
19:10
in perpetuity.
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They've never had a significant outbreak or lockdown.
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And yeah, so most other states are part from Victoria.
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Now that doesn't excuse police overreach,
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but it's just worth remembering that anytime you try to enforce
19:28
rules, there are going to be fringe cases that are unpleasant.
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I mean, is the United States a country that is untouched
19:34
by police brutality, by viral videos of police doing
19:39
bad things?
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I mean, I know, you know, if you're listening to this in America
19:44
and you're thinking, well, I've seen a lot of bad stuff out of Australia,
19:48
trust me.
19:49
Everyone outside of America, I hear from people all the time who say,
19:53
wow, I can't imagine being not like a black person in America.
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I mean, it just must be so dangerous walking down the street.
20:00
I mean, you know, you must just be at risk,
20:02
constant risk of getting shot by police.
20:05
Now, it is not incredibly dangerous to walk down the street as an
20:09
African American in the United States.
20:12
In spite of the number of viral videos that we see of unarmed
20:16
black men being killed by police.
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You know, the reality of America is not that as non-Americans
20:23
might think on the basis of videos that they see on social
20:26
media that crowds of fat Walmart shoppers on Black Friday stamp
20:31
each other to death and that that's what shopping in America is like.
20:34
You know, non-Americans also see videos of gun rights protesters
20:40
carrying AR-15s into Chick-fil-A, you know, fast food restaurants and
20:45
think that that's what it's like to live in America.
20:47
Well, I lived in America for 12 years.
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I never saw someone carrying an AR-15 into a fast food joint.
20:52
Like, you know, of course, I mean, if something goes viral on social media
20:56
then almost by definition, it is highly unusual.
20:59
That's why it's going viral.
21:01
If it was the norm, you know, people wouldn't need to share it and
21:05
talk about how extraordinary it is.
21:08
There are some people who are listening to all of this who are only
21:13
interested in like rejecting everything that I say that doesn't align
21:16
with your preconceived ideas.
21:18
And that's fine.
21:19
The world's always going to have closed-minded people.
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But, you know, my message out of all of this would be that if you're
21:26
genuinely curious, and if you're a listener to Joe Rogan, then you probably
21:29
are, then consider that social media is selective and also consider
21:34
that what might feel like defiance in sticking up for causes that you believe
21:39
in can also veer into pig-headedness, it can veer into parochialism.
21:44
Like, it's a lot more fun to feel like an uncompromising fighter in the
21:49
battle against Australian tyranny than to feel like a wishy-washy
21:53
both sides are who sort of tries to rationalize why public health
21:58
initiatives in Australia have looked the way they have.
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But just remember that you might feel like an uncompromising fighter
22:04
against Australian tyranny, but rigid, uninformed ideologues
22:08
and reactionaries also feel like uncompromising fighters.
22:11
Assholes also feel like uncompromising fighters.
22:14
Dicts also feel like uncompromising fighters.
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So, my basic point is, can we all just put our weapons down
22:23
for a second and actually listen from a place of conversation?
22:26
The other point about myocarditis, vaccines, vaccination,
22:31
vaccine mandates, whether or not I'm an authoritarian Nazi boot liquor
22:35
for thinking that the actions of Australian, Australia,
22:40
broadly as a country and yourself while specifically as a state have been
22:44
well within the bounds of democratic processes during an emergency
22:49
and do not represent a slide into totalitarianism,
22:53
is that like public health is the sort of missing thing here
22:57
and I sort of wish I brought this up on Rogan's show.
23:00
Yes, getting vaccinated is your individual right,
23:05
and it's your right not to.
23:07
And I don't think that we should be destroying people's lives
23:10
for not doing it.
23:11
I don't support universal vaccine mandates like they have in Victoria
23:15
where you're not even allowed to leave your house to go to work
23:19
regardless of what your job is unless you've vaccinated.
23:21
I mean, this is silly, like allow people some individual autonomy.
23:25
But I don't object to specific industries,
23:28
specific government departments and things requiring that, you know,
23:32
if you're going to be a nurse or a doctor or a cop,
23:34
if you're going to be interfacing with the public,
23:36
then you basically have to do everything that you can to reduce your risk of infectiousness
23:40
and being vaccinated doesn't eliminate the risk that you're going to get
23:44
infected or pass on the bug, but it dramatically reduces it somewhere
23:50
in the sort of two to three to 10 at the upper extent time range.
23:56
And when you think about public health things,
23:59
like it's not always helpful to think about,
24:01
well, what is my individual risk and what is my individual,
24:04
the likelihood that I as an individual, you know,
24:07
I'm going to catch it and I'm going to pass it on,
24:09
I'm going to get sick from it.
24:11
The point is there are people who are either very old or very fat
24:16
or a very immune compromised who are at risk and who will always be at risk
24:20
regardless of their vaccination status at serious risk.
24:23
These people are going to end up clogging hospitals
24:26
and taking up intensive care beds and losing families
24:30
and creating individual disasters and tragedies all over the joint.
24:34
And the way to minimize that is to make sure that as many people have vaccinated as possible.
24:40
So for me, it's a little bit like having, you know, clean drinking water
24:44
or requiring that people who work in the kitchens of our restaurants
24:49
wash their hands after going to the toilet.
24:51
Well, like, you know, like, think about the actual likelihood
24:54
that you're going to get sick from eating food
24:57
as a result of someone who works in the kitchen not washing their hands.
25:01
Like, it's pretty low. It's pretty low.
25:04
I mean, someone can, frankly, a cook can do a piss
25:08
and then not wash their hands and then prepare your steak
25:12
and you're probably going to be fine.
25:14
But if you multiply that across all the cooks in America
25:19
and all the meals they serve,
25:21
it's much better as a general policy for us all to agree
25:24
that when cooks go to the toilet, they wash their hands afterwards.
25:28
Like, that's a public health thing. It's not an individual choice thing.
25:32
It's the same with something like fencing, putting fences around swimming pools.
25:36
Like, I hate fences around swimming pools.
25:38
I love being able to walk from a balcony down into a garden
25:42
and then go straight in the pool.
25:44
It's annoying to have fences around swimming pools.
25:46
In an individual case, it's almost certain to be useless.
25:49
Like, it's very unlikely that a particular fence around a particular pool
25:52
is actually going to save a particular child's life.
25:55
But across the whole country, when every pool has a child-proof fence around it,
26:00
then you save a significant number of children's lives every year.
26:04
If you like guns, for example,
26:08
think about rules about whether or not guns should be loaded or unloaded
26:12
and whether they should be kept, where they should be kept,
26:14
and how they should be stored.
26:16
Like, in any individual case, if I am a gun owner,
26:19
it's not actually very high risk for me to keep a loaded gun in a safe place
26:23
as long as it's put it on top of a shelf or something where a kid can't get it
26:28
or if I don't live with kids, what's the harm in just having it in my bedside drawer?
26:32
It's unlikely that a loaded gun is actually going to kill anybody in my house.
26:37
But multiply that across 330 million people in America
26:41
have the rule of thumb be that loaded guns are around,
26:44
and you have a lot of casualties.
26:46
So it's better just as a rule for us all to agree,
26:48
you take your unload your gun and you keep your gun in a safe
26:51
and you keep it separate from the ammunition,
26:53
and that's what we're all going to do.
26:54
And as a result, we all get a public health payoff of that.
26:58
That's the way I think about vaccines.
27:00
I don't think about it as like, what is, how am I going to, you know,
27:03
sort of try to splice and dice the specific data that Marge at know us has sent me
27:08
and that Tim Pool is like disputing online and who am I going to trust
27:11
and how, what about what Brett Weinstein said and what about the guest that Joe had
27:15
who said this or who had that look?
27:17
Billions of people have gotten vaccinated.
27:20
Billions of people are fine.
27:22
We know that the vaccines are effective at reducing, not eliminating,
27:25
but reducing the spread of the virus and at almost eliminating
27:29
your risk of death or severe disease.
27:32
Now, it's not perfect.
27:34
You know, I just saw that Tim Pool, genius, you know,
27:37
Nobel laureate in waiting, tweeted on the 19th of January today,
27:42
someone I know who is triple Vax just got COVID.
27:45
WTF is the point of the vaccine.
27:49
I mean, do I even need to dignify that with a response?
27:53
Is this just trolling everybody at this point?
27:55
Like, is anyone so stupid that that I don't understand?
27:58
The just because a cure isn't 100% effective.
28:01
If it's 99% effective, that isn't a good thing.
28:04
Like, is 99% effective the same as 0% effective.
28:07
If you are triple Vax, you can get COVID.
28:10
Absolutely.
28:11
If you are triple Vax, you are much, much less likely to get severe COVID.
28:16
So, you're less likely to be infectious.
28:18
You're less likely to get infected.
28:20
And most of all, you're somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 times,
28:24
less likely to get seriously ill.
28:27
So, that's the point.
28:29
Timothy.
28:32
Another interesting thing about Australia's infectious rate,
28:36
it was surreal coming off the plane and entering Australia
28:40
and realizing that I was coming from jurisdictions
28:42
with less infection than Australia.
28:44
Australia, it's funny.
28:47
It's like, you know, we've spent two years just being like,
28:52
oh, we're this little paradise where we're all just trotting around
28:56
doing nothing.
28:57
We're going about our normal lives.
28:59
Occasionally, we have to stay inside for six weeks or eight weeks
29:02
from the worst case in Sydney.
29:03
Anything was about 14 weeks or something inside.
29:06
That was an absolute pain in the ass.
29:07
But we were still allowed to go outside.
29:09
We were still allowed to exercise.
29:10
We were still allowed to go for jobs.
29:12
And, you know, at some point have picnics in the parks.
29:15
Once enough of us were vaccinated.
29:17
So, we got on with that.
29:18
And part of the sort of national identity
29:22
was that we were doing well at suppressing COVID.
29:25
We had vanishingly low numbers of infection
29:28
and vanishingly low numbers of death.
29:30
And vanishingly low numbers have all caused mortality as well,
29:33
which, as an aside, is something that I thought I might get to on Rogan's show,
29:36
which I didn't get to, unfortunately,
29:38
which is you sometimes hear people saying,
29:40
oh, you know, what if we'd all just done what Sweden did?
29:43
Because Sweden was effective at not having lockdowns,
29:47
but also not having huge amounts of mortality.
29:51
But if you compare Sweden to its neighbours,
29:54
to other Scandinavian and Nordic countries,
29:57
I was looking at these graphs.
29:59
So, you can actually just go to World Ometer,
30:01
that website that aggregates all of the information
30:03
or our world in data is another good one.
30:05
And they'll superimpose those graphs.
30:07
You can just pick all cause mortality.
30:10
So, because I know a lot of people are skeptical
30:12
about the COVID numbers and think they might be inflated,
30:14
and they say, oh, well, you know, how do we know that,
30:17
you know, the hospitals that get it,
30:19
I heard this, I heard the doctor on Joe Rogan's show say
30:22
this a few weeks ago, if hospitals and doctors
30:24
are getting paid for COVID patients,
30:26
then there's an incentive for them to overreport
30:28
the COVID patients.
30:29
So, someone comes in with a gunshot wound
30:31
who also happens to test positive to COVID.
30:33
They list it as a COVID death.
30:35
Well, that's ridiculous.
30:36
That would be absolutely absurd.
30:39
Occasionally, that happens.
30:41
I've looked into that.
30:42
And yes, it is listed.
30:44
There is no systematic way of counting COVID
30:46
in the United States,
30:47
like so many parts of the American health system.
30:49
It's just a hodgepodge to patchwork.
30:51
There's no authority.
30:52
So, you know, it will sometimes be listed on the death certificate
30:55
that the patient was died with COVID,
30:57
and that might go into a state database
31:00
where it's listed as a COVID patient.
31:03
However, most experts think that the incidence of that
31:05
is much less than the incidence of people
31:07
who are in, for example, nursing homes
31:10
or low-income communities
31:11
or public housing projects who die of COVID
31:13
and they never get counted as COVID
31:15
because there's no systematic way of counting those numbers either.
31:18
So, most of the world's experts think
31:20
that the COVID numbers are undercounted in America,
31:22
not overcounted because although there's a little bit
31:24
of overcounting in hospitals,
31:25
there's a lot of undercounting
31:26
outside of hospital settings.
31:27
Anyway, that's all on the side.
31:29
So, I had these graphs that I was going to take to Rogan,
31:32
in case we got into an argument about Scandinavia, Sweden,
31:36
and so on.
31:37
And they show all cause mortality,
31:39
not just coronavirus, not just COVID deaths,
31:42
because even if the people who are skeptical
31:46
of official COVID statistics were right,
31:50
and even if it were true that there were far fewer COVID deaths
31:55
in America than officials claim,
31:58
what you wouldn't be able to hide is overall mortality,
32:01
just the total number of people dying from all causes.
32:04
That's the simplest way to determine how successful or unsuccessful
32:07
countries have been at managing the public health aspect
32:10
of the pandemic.
32:11
Don't worry about COVID numbers,
32:13
just worry about how many corpses you've got.
32:15
And when you look at that,
32:17
Australia is just this low...
32:20
You look at Australia, South Korea, New Zealand,
32:22
all these other zero COVID countries,
32:23
and they're basically fairly flat lines.
32:26
In fact, some of them are under.
32:28
I think Australia is under what you would expect it to be
32:31
on the basis of previous years.
32:33
And then you're superimposed, Sweden,
32:36
when you've got this massive spike,
32:38
and you're superimposed in America,
32:39
and then you want to have a more massive spike.
32:41
This is per capita, right, per million,
32:43
so it doesn't matter how popular the country is.
32:46
You just take a million people and see how many of them
32:49
end up in body bags.
32:51
Then the UK, and you've got an even bigger spike.
32:53
So all of that is just to say that,
32:56
you know, there's a huge amount of death
33:00
abroad that was avoided in Australia.
33:04
So here we were thinking that we were uniquely free
33:08
of coronavirus in comparison to other countries.
33:10
And now, since November 1st,
33:13
New South Wales opened up to the rest of the world,
33:16
meaning that essentially Australia did as well,
33:18
with the exception of the states that have remained closed,
33:21
like Western Australia.
33:23
Lockdowns were lifted,
33:25
mandatory restrictions were basically ended,
33:27
and what happened was,
33:29
whatever epidemiologist and health expert
33:31
and politician knew was going to happen,
33:33
which is cases exploded,
33:36
which is fine.
33:38
It's inconvenient.
33:40
It's tragic for the people who are losing their lives
33:42
and getting sick.
33:44
It's enormously stressful for people trying to figure out,
33:47
you know, the risk profile of going to various barbies
33:51
or parks or picnics or bars or movies or whatever.
33:55
But this was always going to happen.
33:57
And the fears of sort of the people who were claiming
34:03
that authoritarianism was knocking on Australia's door
34:06
or that Australia would never reopen
34:08
and would sort of remain in lockdown forever,
34:11
have been proven false in the sense that
34:14
it was always only a short-term strategy.
34:16
I'm not sure what the strategy for China or New Zealand
34:19
or, you know, some of these other zero-COVID countries
34:22
are in the long term,
34:23
because I don't know what point they're going to want to introduce
34:26
the pathogen into their communities.
34:29
But in the case of New South Wales,
34:31
we're over this, we've given up trying to suppress it
34:34
for too long now that Omicron is here
34:36
and we're as vaccinated as we can be
34:38
and we've got the hospital capacity that we can have.
34:41
We're basically ready to brace it.
34:43
So the past two years have not been Australians largely
34:46
shying away from the fight of addressing coronavirus.
34:50
But rather, if you can choose to get your ducks in a row
34:54
and to corral your army before the enemy invades,
34:57
why not?
34:58
Just press pause.
34:59
Let leave the enemy off shore for a little bit.
35:01
Get vaccinated.
35:02
Get yourself ready.
35:03
And then let her in.
35:04
So since November 1st, we've been letting her in.
35:07
And it's been, it was weird, you know, getting off the plane
35:10
and coming into an Australia where the infection,
35:13
the ambient infection rate is so much higher than the places
35:16
that I was coming from, even though I was coming from places
35:18
that we normally think I was being really infectious
35:20
like the United States.
35:21
And there has been some stupendously idiotic takes
35:25
on social media here.
35:27
I've got a tweet from someone who tagged me
35:30
and Claire Lehman, the editor of Quillette,
35:33
who's also Australian.
35:34
And the person just said,
35:36
your country is a giant steaming turd.
35:39
I thought, oh, that's an interesting point of view.
35:41
I wonder what informs this particular perspective.
35:44
And I looked up, and it's a response to a tweet
35:50
from the 10th of January,
35:52
from a critic of Australia, saying Australia
35:55
just reported nearly 112,000 cases,
35:58
the equivalent of 1.5 million in the US.
36:00
And cases are up a mind-boggling 808,000%
36:04
since the Washington Post said Australia
36:07
had almost eliminated COVID with science.
36:10
I wonder if we'll ever find out why the science,
36:13
trademark, stopped working with a graph
36:17
showing daily new cases in Australia
36:21
throughout the whole course of the pandemic.
36:24
And all of the list of lockdowns,
36:27
lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, lockdown,
36:30
Australia almost eliminated the coronavirus
36:33
by putting faith in science is one of the lockdowns.
36:36
That's a Washington Post article,
36:38
which is listed as coming from November of 2020.
36:42
Then you've got all of these different lockdowns
36:44
leading up to the final lockdown.
36:50
And the graph is going low, low, low, low, low, low.
36:53
It's creeping along.
36:54
And then after the lockdown,
36:55
it's got this massive spike in cases
36:57
that goes almost vertical,
36:59
starting in November and December.
37:02
And this person thinks that this graph
37:05
shows that Australian lockdowns didn't work,
37:08
and that the science, quite unquote, stopped working.
37:14
Let me remind you,
37:16
the graph shows an almost horizontal line of zero cases
37:20
while all of these lockdowns are taking place.
37:25
Then the lockdown ends, the last lockdown,
37:28
and then several months go by,
37:32
and then the zero, the near zero cases go vertical.
37:38
That's not the science not working.
37:40
That's the science working.
37:42
That's the predictions of the epidemiologists
37:44
and the public health officials
37:45
all doing exactly what we thought it would,
37:47
which is when the lockdowns are used sparingly and judiciously
37:50
and in a targeted fashion at outbreaks,
37:52
they do suppress the spread.
37:55
Then a conscious decision was made,
37:58
a policy decision that the time was ripe
38:01
to end the lockdowns and to open the border
38:04
and to let Australians come back into the country,
38:07
vaccinated Australians to come back into the country for now.
38:10
And we knew that the graph was going to go vertical.
38:14
We knew that cases would explode
38:16
because we're choosing to let them in.
38:18
That's the science.
38:19
I honestly have a hard time understanding how people
38:23
could be that stupid to go like,
38:26
Australia's got lots of cases,
38:28
but they didn't have lots of cases,
38:30
but now they have lots of cases
38:32
now that they're not locked down.
38:33
So obviously the lockdown didn't work for two years
38:35
when they had no cases.
38:36
We've been locked down,
38:37
it didn't look down anymore,
38:38
and it went vertical, where's your science?
38:41
Now that's the science, dumb dumb.
38:43
That's the science.
38:45
So anyway, lots and lots of cases here in Australia.
38:49
And lastly,
38:50
a few of you have been quibbling
38:52
with my use of the word alt-right
38:54
to characterize some people
38:56
on this side of the spectrum,
38:59
which I did on Joe Rogan's show.
39:03
All I mean is,
39:06
alt-right for me is just any sort of fake news
39:10
obsessed anti-establishment internet warrior
39:13
who thinks that they're God's gift to civilization
39:16
because they're more angry about tyranny than everybody else is.
39:19
And they're more obsessed about the lies
39:21
that the lame stream media
39:23
is pumping out to cover up the elite's plans for domination.
39:27
I don't really care whether you call yourself left or call yourself right.
39:30
That's the worldview that I'm talking about.
39:33
And the main difference between the worldview of those people
39:36
who've been parachuting
39:37
into try to save Australia from itself
39:39
and Australians ourselves
39:42
is that we all in Australia are already keenly aware
39:46
of all the problems that they're citing.
39:48
Like we're fully aware that it sucks
39:51
to have to follow rules.
39:53
It's not like we're going,
39:54
oh, thanks.
39:56
Thank you, like alt-right internet warrior,
39:58
for pointing out that it is not nice to have to wear a mask
40:03
and be vaccinated
40:05
and to abide by public health restrictions
40:08
and to isolate yourself
40:10
if you've been a close contact,
40:12
if you're in the context of an unvaccinated Indigenous community
40:16
and we get it,
40:18
we're the ones living through it.
40:20
We're fully aware.
40:22
I mean, in order to believe the narrative of the Australia
40:24
has fallen crowd,
40:26
you would have to believe that the vast majority of Australians
40:29
are so stupid they can't even see what's going on around them.
40:33
Maybe many people do think that.
40:35
I also get a lot of people on Twitter saying
40:37
realize what was happening until it was too late
40:39
and a Reichstag fire had burned.
40:43
I think a lot of them knew.
40:45
I think a lot of them knew what was going on.
40:47
I think they could see the writing on the wall.
40:49
Anyway, we'll find out, weren't we?
40:51
I mean, let's, you know, maybe Tim Pool and I can tour.
40:53
By the way, for people who are saying that we should talk,
40:55
my offer for him to come on my podcast still stands,
40:58
he's invited me on his podcast,
41:01
which is fine, whatever.
41:04
So my producer has reached out to his producer
41:06
and we're just waiting for that to happen.
41:08
So if he, if it doesn't happen, then it's completely on him.
41:10
I'm absolutely 100% eager to clarify any misconceptions
41:15
that might exist in a convivial and friendly way.
41:19
I'm not a person who bears grudges
41:20
and I don't not talk to people just because they disagree with me.
41:25
Yeah, and the last question is the one that some people have said
41:28
about concentration camps,
41:30
about like, you know, a lot of people on social have been like,
41:33
they might not like the word concentration camps,
41:35
but like a quarantine facility is a sort of a concentration camp,
41:40
even if they're not killing people.
41:43
To me, that's just sophistry.
41:45
That's just semantics.
41:47
I mean, like to give you an example,
41:49
if I think it depends on how bad the pathogen
41:52
that you're trying to protect people from is,
41:54
if Ebola arrived in, say, a remote part of the United States,
42:00
let's say Alaska.
42:02
And Ebola is starting to spread in a small Alaska community
42:06
and there are like, intimate Native American communities
42:09
around who would be completely ravaged,
42:11
bleeding out their eyes, wiped out, and so on.
42:14
Would it be acceptable if there was an old mining compound
42:18
up there to, with the consent of community leaders,
42:23
forcibly take the people who are in the next town
42:26
over who are about to catch Ebola
42:28
and put them in the military, in the mining area
42:34
in order to protect them,
42:36
or to take people who'd been infected
42:38
and put them there until they were no longer infectious,
42:41
so that it doesn't spread to the rest of Alaska
42:43
and the rest of North America.
42:46
And you don't have an Ebola outbreak in the United States.
42:49
If your answer to that is yes,
42:51
that sort of thing would probably be acceptable.
42:53
Then we agree that concentration camps, quote unquote,
42:57
the way that that term is being used by these figures,
43:03
these social justice Australia has fallen,
43:07
fallen, ultra-right, not-or-right figures,
43:10
are using the term.
43:12
If it's ever okay to have a public health emergency justification
43:18
for creating a court on sanitaire or a quarantine area
43:22
for infected people or to protect people,
43:26
then we agree that concentration camps are okay.
43:28
So if you're going to go at me for using that term,
43:31
whatever, I don't care what you call it,
43:33
I think it's a bit mischievous to call it a concentration camp
43:37
and I think the people who use that term know
43:39
that it's mischievous, which is exactly why they use it.
43:42
But if you really push the boundaries and sort of test the edge cases
43:45
by thinking about hypotheticals in which it might be acceptable
43:48
for people to be separated from each other
43:51
during a public health emergency,
43:53
then it doesn't really matter what word you use.
43:55
I think we would all agree that at some point,
43:57
that becomes acceptable.
43:58
So now we're just squabbling over whether or not
44:01
it was justified at particular moments
44:03
of this particular pandemic in response to this particular virus.
44:07
I think that'll do for now.
44:10
I hope you're doing well.
44:12
I hope this has sort of given some sort of context to all of this.
44:15
As I say, I think the brew aha with Joe was a storm in a teacup
44:19
and I still mates and he thought the conversation was fantastic.
44:23
He loved the fact that it went all over the place.
44:26
And really, we only spoke about coronavirus and vaccines
44:30
for about half an hour.
44:31
If you haven't listened to the whole thing,
44:32
listen to the whole thing.
44:33
We talk about aliens.
44:34
We talk about consciousness.
44:35
We talk about artificial intelligence.
44:37
We talk about virtual reality.
44:38
We talk about augmented reality.
44:39
We talk about so much.
44:41
I love talking to that guy.
44:42
I love it.
44:43
It's just like talking to someone who has such a wide and curious outlook
44:49
on the world.
44:51
That's why I paid sort of no heed to the pot shots
44:55
that conventional media were taking when they just sort of get to jump on a bandwagon
44:58
and go.
44:59
Yeah, I will be back to normal program.
45:03
We've got some great, great guests coming up.
45:05
I won't even spoil it.
45:06
But make sure that you actually subscribe to the podcast.
45:08
By the way, I know it's a pain in the ass.
45:10
And every podcast asks you to do it.
45:12
But the whole like rating and reviewing on iTunes thing
45:16
actually does help people find the shit.
45:18
Why don't you just now, like right now, right now, right now,
45:21
pull your phone out of your pocket.
45:23
Pull your phone out of your pocket.
45:25
Just go to your podcast app, whether you're on Android or you're on all your
45:30
on iPhone.
45:31
And just rate it and leave a little review.
45:33
I know it's stupid.
45:35
I don't know why it's set up that way.
45:37
But it's not that it gets, gives us good reviews.
45:39
It's that even if you give me one star, it just shows the algorithm
45:43
that there's activity on the show.
45:44
So it bumps the show up.
45:46
You know, it allows other people to find it.
45:49
So that would be great if you like the show or if you just knew to me
45:52
and you sort of, you know, you want to do a good thing.
45:55
I'm not going to ask you for money yet.
45:57
The show, the basic show will always be free.
46:00
Don't worry.
46:01
But it would be, you'd be doing me a good solid.
46:03
If you just took your phone out right now, just give it a quick rating
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and just say, yeah, great show, whatever.
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And such on such silly things to show is either succeed or fail.
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Terrific to have you with us.
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Love you to bits.
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And I will see you next week.
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Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postumer.
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Follow me, Josh Zeps on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest.
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May your day be fruitful, your mind humble, your enemies generous,
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and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly, delectably, uncomfortable.