Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Problem With Covid Contrarianism" with Cathy Young

Transcript

"The Problem With Covid Contrarianism" with Cathy Young · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  What an amazing time to be alive, what an amazing time to be watching the news, and having conversations about the news, and consuming all kinds of bits and pieces and opinions from Heather and Thither.
• 0:12
  Like a little bower bird pecking around the internet and social media, trying to figure out what's true and what's not.
• 0:19
  But also what an amazing time to be susceptible and vulnerable to stridency, to misinformation, to what aboutism, to people trying to distract us from what really matters.
• 0:33
  Just jangling keys in front of our face in order to get us to look over here instead of remaining stable and calm and even keeled about our own opinions, our own vision of the truth.
• 0:46
  Now is a moment to reach across aisles, to set aside differences, to have faith in democracy, to have faith in bigger ambitions and bigger things to believe in than just the day to day.
• 0:59
  The only way we can do that is by having conversations that resonate with all of us, conversations that make sense to all of us, conversations that are difficult, conversations that are important, conversations that are, as always, a little uncomfortable.
• 1:16
  Today on the show, a terrific individual, an individual with whom I just wish I'd had more time.
• 1:30
  That was my only regret, because sometimes you speak with someone and they give very short, carefully thought-out answers.
• 1:38
  Kathy is not that sort of a person. Kathy wouldn't do that to you. She wouldn't give you a little sound bite.
• 1:44
  She will go careening off into her own universe of thoughts about something, and I have to use all of my stamina just to get a word in edgeways.
• 1:52
  And I use my journalistically well-approved of the technique of interrupting her, incessently, to try to get a shot up about whatever she's talking about and start talking about what I want to talk about, but I don't even want to talk about what I'm talking about, because I'm so intrigued by what she is talking about.
• 2:07
  That's the kind of vibe of this conversation, which I wanted to have on the basis of her recent article, Column, on our digital, which is sort of a sub-stacky thing.
• 2:20
  She writes a weekly newsletter. She's a former Boston Globe columnist. She was a weekly columnist also for the Detroit News.
• 2:28
  She is written in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and then basically everything, right?
• 2:32
  And now she, like many people, has gone online. She's a contributing editor at Reason, and you know, she'll write occasionally at Quellat and Places like that, but it's mostly her own gig now.
• 2:40
  Anyway, her most recent newsletter was called The Problem with COVID Contrarianism.
• 2:45
  And it was about this phenomenon in the sort of intellectual dark web, you might say, of people who previously prided themselves on being rationalists, independent thinkers.
• 2:57
  This loose coalition of people from Sam Harris to, I guess, Joe Rogan, maybe Dave Rubin, Barry Weiss, Marjid Nawaz, who have now, even if they ever were a community, they clearly are no longer a community.
• 3:13
  They are driven with, oh, Brett Weinstein, we mentioned this, of course, as well in this conversation.
• 3:18
  They have now fallen apart into a set of camps in which there are the people who are still expressing a field to reason and independent inquiry in a genuine way, genuinely curious way from a place of intellectual humility and good conversational faith.
• 3:41
  And then there is this other cohort of people who have shamelessly sold out and either should know better or do know better and are pandering to an audience and captured by their own conspiratorial thinking, or they just plain right wing hacks like Rubin.
• 4:00
  And in that case, it requires an explanation. What has happened? Why is it so hard to maintain independence of thought during a pandemic, or maybe why is it so hard to maintain independence of thought ever without tumbling down a rabbit hole in and being captured by group think.
• 4:21
  Kathy has thoughts about this. She and I, I suppose, have occasionally been sort of perceived of as being adjacent to this community of people that's no longer a community and good riddance to it.
• 4:32
  And look, I would have talked to Kathy for we only had an hour or 15 minutes or something together. And so I kept trying to hurry her up, but she was so fascinating and talking about her early years growing up in the Soviet Union, which by the way, I think gives her some real insight into the nature of authoritarianism and state power.
• 4:50
  And state power and truth and misinformation.
• 4:55
  The first half of this chat is just me talking all about the Soviet Union. So if you get bored of that, just skip forward like half an hour if you want to hear all the covered related stuff.
• 5:07
  Stop asking me about Joe Rogan, please. I, if you are interested in continuing that conversation specifically, make sure you're following me on Twitter, JOSH, ZE, PPS or ZE, PPS, that's an intentional misspelling of the name on Instagram. I'm Josh, JOSH, SZ, EPS or SZ, EPS, which is the correct spelling of my name.
• 5:28
  You can also Google an article that I recently wrote in the Australian about this. You can see a recent appearance of mine on the drum, which is a panel show, which is available if you're in Australia on ABC, I view that was on last Wednesday, if you're listening to this in real time, so a week ago Wednesday.
• 5:44
  I mean, all I will say if you can't be bothered finding this on other platforms that I've been talking about it on ad nauseam is this has clearly transitioned from being a perhaps well meaning well intention campaign to try to clean up misinformation online into what it perhaps always secretly was, which is a witch hunt against an individual for on trumped up charges essentially.
• 6:14
  I mean, if you're producing hours and hours and hours and hours of content and if your whole raison d'etre is to push boundaries and be funny and be a little bit of a bad boy and just shoot the shit with friends and get stoned and smoke cigars if that's your thing.
• 6:30
  Then out of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of content people are going to be able to find you occasionally stepping up to the line and crossing over that line.
• 6:40
  And unless you want to live in a world in which that never happens in which people who do that are not on public mainstream platforms.
• 6:49
  This whole thing is a storm in a teacup I mean Joe as I say in this I can't even remember I've done so many so much about this and been asked about so much I can't remember where I'm saying all this now but it may be in the conversation you're about to hear where I just make the point that he is he has been tremendously.
• 7:08
  A tremendous force for good in the entertainment industry to almost everyone I know I don't know anyone who knows him who speaks poorly of him I speak highly of him he's been good to me he's given me encouragement.
• 7:22
  I just don't think we can be holding each other to you know the the marquee of Queensbury standards I mean do we all have to is there no space for getting things a little bit messy and getting things a little bit wrong.
• 7:38
  The misinformation component is being dealt with you know by Spotify and ways that Joe seems to condone like putting warnings on some of the episode that are the most controversial or it's driving for greater balance by inviting on more mainstream voices fine.
• 7:55
  But all this other who are about stitching together old clips of him saying the N word or telling racist jokes or being sexist or being intentionally provocative.
• 8:04
  You know things that things that did not cause a stir 10 years ago didn't cause a stir because 10 years ago they were not the same level of transgression as they are today so to dredge them up and then present them today as if we should hold the person who was doing them 10 years ago to today standards is incredibly blinkered incredibly short-sighted I mean there are clearly things that we're doing today that in 10 or 20 years time.
• 8:34
  Are going to seem out of step with current norms sure there are all sorts of things that I'm saying on the show I'm sure the casual way in which we.
• 8:44
  Abuse animals in concentrated animal feeding operations where the only objective is to lower the price of a pound of their flesh and shave a fraction of a cent off to maximize profits and to make your.
• 9:00
  You know clean washed chicken breast that's sitting there under a fluorescent light in the supermarket as cheap as possible under the cling film.
• 9:08
  That I'm pretty sure in 50 years or 100 years at the most will be considered a barbarism and your children's grandchildren will probably think to themselves how on earth did people live in that society and not spend every day doing everything they could to dismantle that system or the very least not to be complicit in it.
• 9:28
  And they might say the same thing about the climate chaos that we're all participating in rendering worse and more expensive to fix and more disruptive to everybody's lives in coming decades even if you're not a climate change alarmist and you know you think people have gone over but it's very clear.
• 9:44
  That unless you're doing something really proactive about assisting in getting carbon out of the atmosphere through who you vote for and how you live your life.
• 9:55
  You are contributing to a scenario that's going to be at best very expensive and very disruptive to fix and may lead to unintended consequences like everybody getting just fractionally poorer every year while we have to pour vast resources into fixing this problem after it's too late.
• 10:13
  It's going to be a great movement of people are transitioning across South Asia because the monsoons have been disrupted and the rice paddies are no longer providing rice and people are on boats coming down to Australia and all of a sudden you're electing more authoritarian leaders because you have to close the borders.
• 10:29
  I mean there's going to be so many knock-on effects from the fact that we're just cavalierly flying and driving and putting so many fossil fuels as we currently are that it will someday be incredible to people that we are paying no attention to it just as it is currently incredible to us that people in the days of slavery were able to have the cognitive dissonance and walk around thinking they're good people at the same time as they're taking part in a system that is complicit in probably the worst thing that humans have ever done.
• 10:56
  I use the term slavery very broadly there obviously the Holocaust is a close competitor but that's a form of slavery in itself.
• 11:03
  So I mean all of that is not to really say anything specific about Joe it's just to say can we please get a grip can we please like take a deep breath can we please remember the adage of he who is without sin can cast the first stone people in glass houses and so on and so forth.
• 11:26
  You don't have to like him you don't have to listen to him but a lot of what's going on now especially with regard to people's claims about COVID misinformation is bullshit I mean I was on a panel show and you had a bunch of people who were saying that they'd never seen or listen to Joe's show.
• 11:50
  But they say that they think that it shouldn't be on Spotify because it's spreading misinformation and he has blood on his hands.
• 11:58
  And they cut me off before I could say what I wanted to say which is so let me get let me get this straight we're sitting here talking about a person whose work we're unfamiliar with whose show we haven't seen or listen to who operates on a platform that we don't use and our gripe with him is that he doesn't do his own research.
• 12:16
  That's rich.
• 12:19
  Like cut it out at this point unless you want to live in a style boring authoritarian world where everything is fact checked and every person is constantly second guessing themselves in their heads about what is about to come out of their mouth back off.
• 12:35
  I don't think anybody actually wants to unleash the kind of world in which Joe Rogan's don't exist.
• 12:41
  Oh but he would not exist he would just you know he would which take removing from Spotify and of course they would cease to exist.
• 12:51
  They would become fringe elements it would be a warning would be a chilling effect.
• 12:59
  I used to say thank God Australia was founded by convicts instead of puritums.
• 13:06
  That may still be the case or maybe we're all just becoming so puritanical that we're getting so far up our own arses.
• 13:13
  We've lost sight of what it actually means to be generous anymore.
• 13:20
  And that doesn't mean that you can't criticize Joe Rogan for not being I don't know adequately generous towards the minorities who is made jokes about.
• 13:28
  But that's not the point right now the point is what you do about him.
• 13:34
  And what kind of person it makes you to take one side or other on the censorship debate which is fundamentally what it is.
• 13:43
  We can say it's not about free speech we can say it's not about censorship but at the end of the day it's about who do you want making decisions about who can say what in the public square.
• 13:52
  Because platforms like Spotify and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter are the new public square yes they're private companies and they can do whatever they want but the reality is if you boot it off them you are not functioning in our conversation.
• 14:06
  So who makes the decision.
• 14:09
  Do the people who listen to the show make the decision about what they want to consume and do we set the boundaries of public conversation as capaciously as possible because we believe in an old fashioned small liberal idea that.
• 14:23
  The best outcomes come from the maximum amount of debate and dialogue.
• 14:28
  What do we outsource our censorship to 22 year old software engineers in Silicon Valley writing skateboards who are responding to a Twitter mob that's responding to aging rock stars threatening to pull their music off the platform.
• 14:44
  But enough about me.
• 14:47
  Follow me on Twitter following on Instagram you can Google some of my articles there'll be some big changes and big opportunities coming so if you ever don't like a particular episode of this podcast or don't agree with me on something make sure you are subscribed to the show and at least listen to this first portion of each episode even if you're not interested in the guest because things are going to be rolled out that you will not want to miss.
• 15:08
  In the meantime I hope you enjoy as much as I did this all over the place chat with the one I'm only happy young.
• 15:24
  When did you come to the States.
• 15:27
  In 1980 when I was 16 years old I'm sort of dating myself here.
• 15:34
  So yeah I've been here for quite a while.
• 15:39
  What was that like?
• 15:41
  It was pretty remarkable I mean of course at the time this was during the age of communism so Russia was a very close society I mean well I mean it wasn't close like North Korea because there was a lot of stuff.
• 15:58
  I mean the iron curtain in some ways was very leaky by then.
• 16:04
  When it comes to information I mean I remember there were like Western like there I like at one point there was a coffee of bugs circulating in my soul.
• 16:17
  That sort of thing.
• 16:20
  So yeah I mean it wasn't totally closed but I mean certainly at you know my parents were sort of closet dissidents who had for different literature at home and so on.
• 16:33
  What sort of forbidden literature did was lying around in the house.
• 16:38
  My writers you know that stuff that was pretty cool of the Soviet regime.
• 16:44
  Would you get punished for having soldier Nitsune in the house?
• 16:49
  Well I mean if you got found out sure I mean yeah my because my parents were very careful to warn me and they started being kind of open with me about political stuff when I was around probably 11 or 12 so at a fairly early age.
• 17:03
  But I do remember being told like very firmly that you're really not supposed to tell anyone at school that we talk about this at home or that we have these books.
• 17:12
  So yeah I mean I was very aware of the fact that the political refreshment was a reality.
• 17:19
  I mean in that era probably like if you got busted for having forbidden books it was more likely that you would lose your job than that you would actually go to prison just like that.
• 17:32
  But it was still like best not to take any risks.
• 17:36
  And would you lose your job on a pre on some other pretext would they find something to hang out that they didn't have to be up.
• 17:43
  But I mean there was officially for because there were at the time there were articles in the Soviet criminal code that basically penalized.
• 17:55
  You know very very broadly defined activity intended to support the you know to to support the government or to support the state.
• 18:10
  The anything really including literature that was not officially approved could be part of that so and you know the the severity with which people got punished for political crimes kind of wax and waned depending on the climate.
• 18:28
  I mean there were moments when they started to crack down like when the sun got a little more spoken they would start to crack down.
• 18:37
  So yeah it was very and that was part of why my family left because things were getting really in some sense more unpredictable.
• 18:45
  And I think they were getting more unpredictable because the regime was getting shaky or you know because as we know it collapsed like 10 years after we left which was amazing.
• 18:56
  It's funny because I remember there was there was a Soviet dissident named Andrea Maurek who wrote a book and I think it was written in like 19 something but it was called will the USSR survive until 1984 and of course he picked the date 1984 because of George or well.
• 19:16
  And at the time it just seemed like this you know very theoretical very abstract question kind of like you know where are we going to travel to other constellations someday.
• 19:28
  That sort of thing like I'm going to have colonies on Mars you know and then suddenly I mean he was off by like unfortunately he didn't live to see the day because he died in a car accident which still you know I think to this day among you know Russians from that generation of dissidents is still being debated whether it was really an accident or not but he died in I think 1979 or something like that.
• 19:57
  And you know he was off as it turns out by like six seven years depending on what you count as like the official class.
• 20:06
  It's so funny Kathy because when I when I was in my teens I became fascinated by political philosophy and by the big the big sort of different ideologies and and this was post at the end of the Cold War but I read like Karl Marx was communist manifesto and I read like some primers about about the Soviet Union.
• 20:26
  I just wanted to understand these big ideological battles that had happened in one of the books that I read had been written in the 80s and it ended with a code about communism saying there is no foreseeable way that communism will end.
• 20:39
  This is the way that the world is now structured into capitalism and communism so the Soviet Union is here to stay and I was like man it was only a few years later.
• 20:48
  It was proven so wildly wrong but it's amazing to parachute into the minds of people in that era and see how it really did seem very very kind of frozen in place at the time and it was very difficult to imagine that it could start liberalizing.
• 21:09
  Sorry were you in Moscow or were you in the regions? Yeah I was in Moscow I actually have a book that was published in 1989 called Growing Up in Moscow.
• 21:20
  Cool.
• 21:23
  And so do you have you have memories as a teenager of like Brezhnev and so the pre-opening up pre-Paraspa?
• 21:34
  I love to.
• 21:37
  And it's funny again because it was this very kind of repressive regime and everything but at school we told Brezhnev jokes.
• 21:55
  I mean the Brezhnev jokes just usually just depicted as a complete moron.
• 22:01
  Can you tell me at Brezhnev jokes do you remember?
• 22:05
  To be told properly which I'm not going to attempt to do you have to like try to convey a speech defect because by that time of course it really wasn't nice to laugh at that but it apparently was because he had survived the stroke but by that.
• 22:19
  Well you definitely I mean I don't know I don't know about Soviet authoritarianism but in the modern woke authoritarianism you will definitely be cancelled for making fun of.
• 22:27
  Oh yeah yeah so the president jokes properly you have to imitate the slurred speech but I'm not even going to try to do that especially since it's nice you know.
• 22:36
  But anyway so yeah so one of the jokes for instance is that Brezhnev you know leaves his apartments for for a polydora meeting in the morning and you know he puts on the shoes that his housekeeper puts out for him and.
• 22:56
  You know he gets to to the polydora meeting and somebody says oh Leonidiliage you're wearing like one black shoe and one brown and he says oh well I'm going to go back to the to the apartment change.
• 23:17
  And oh I actually I flubbed one detail which is that his housekeeper puts out two pairs of shoes for him to choose from so he puts out you know one black and one brown so he gets to the polydora meeting and somebody says you know you're wearing one black shoe and one brown he says oh well I'm going to go home and change right now.
• 23:35
  So he goes back to the apartment and then he comes back to the pod bureau conference from still in one black shoe and one brown and he says you know I really don't understand what's going on like I went home and it's the same thing over there one black shoe and one brown.
• 23:53
  I didn't hear it.
• 23:55
  Oh I see.
• 23:57
  Right.
• 23:59
  Yeah.
• 24:00
  It's much less political than I thought it was going to be.
• 24:03
  No it's not political.
• 24:04
  No it's not political.
• 24:05
  Most of the president jokes were really sophisticated like anti-communist.
• 24:10
  Most of the president jokes were really just about depicting Mismar.
• 24:14
  And there was another one because he was always like reading these very long speeches from a piece of paper and he was reading them in a kind of expression was flat way you know.
• 24:25
  All of these speeches were pretty written they didn't have teleprompters so he would just very obviously read from a paper.
• 24:31
  So one joke was that you know president goes to a meeting and you know delivers this long like interminable speech and then after he gets home from the meeting he calls in his secretary was also a speech writer.
• 24:47
  And so hey you know what's going on I wanted to speech I told you I'm going to speech 15 minutes long and that must have got over at least 45 minutes.
• 24:56
  And the secretary says oh but Leonardo I gave you three coffees.
• 25:01
  So yeah that was the general president.
• 25:08
  Right.
• 25:09
  Some of them were more of like political.
• 25:11
  Yeah that is sort of political.
• 25:13
  That is sort of political.
• 25:14
  That is sort of political.
• 25:15
  In the sense that it's not just these people.
• 25:17
  And I remember though there were also only jokes about like yeah there were really jokes like you know,
• 25:22
  Brezen of Nixon that this was back when Nixon was was the it was president.
• 25:29
  So it was Brezen of Nixon.
• 25:31
  Whoever the French leader at the time was I think it was hard to stand.
• 25:35
  But yeah I think it was Brezen of Nixon and his car just going to a bar that was sort of that was a set up for many many jokes.
• 25:44
  I love it.
• 25:45
  So when you got to the States what was your first start very quickly how did your parents get out.
• 25:50
  And what were your impressions on arriving in the States where did you where did you go to initially?
• 25:55
  To New York and my parents got out this was when Soviet Jews were sort of emigrating on moss.
• 26:02
  This was when the Jackson Van Ack amendment was was in force where the Soviet Union had to allow the you know,
• 26:10
  allow immigration for a certain number of groups mainly Jews.
• 26:16
  But there were also other sort of marginalized groups as we would say today like Pentecostal Christians who were persecuted.
• 26:23
  And like a few other groups so they had to permit the immigration of a certain number of people in order to receive like most favored nation trading status.
• 26:36
  So you know, Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate as part of that.
• 26:42
  And officially I think we were supposed to emigrate to Israel.
• 26:47
  The procedure at the time was that when you got to Vienna which was the first stop sort of outside the US.
• 26:54
  So sorry you spoke to some people from refugee assistance agencies because officially more classified as refugees.
• 27:03
  You know, which sounds much more dramatic than it actually was.
• 27:08
  I mean, we were not like fleeing a war or anything like that.
• 27:11
  But you know, we did really have to leave behind like proof.
• 27:17
  I mean, yet obviously we were able to take luggage with us.
• 27:21
  But there were like they only allowed you for instance to take out a very small amount of money.
• 27:26
  So you really kind of have to start over with what pretty much nothing.
• 27:32
  So yeah, once you got to Vienna, you got a choice of where you wanted to apply for a visa.
• 27:39
  And we were, I think the majority of Soviet Jews who were emigrating at the time were going to the US.
• 27:45
  So that's how we got out.
• 27:47
  We spent I think like three or four months in Italy, which was another official kind of way station waiting for a visa to the US.
• 27:57
  And we got here on July 1st, 1980.
• 28:02
  Yeah, you know, four days later it was the 4th of July and we were kind of freaked out by the fireworks.
• 28:08
  I mean, you know, it was like, what's going on?
• 28:11
  What makes bombs exploding in the sky?
• 28:13
  Yeah, yeah, like is this a revolution?
• 28:16
  No fireworks in the Soviet Union.
• 28:19
  Oh, there were fireworks.
• 28:21
  And I mean, we weren't used to like people shooting their own like, you know, privately owned fireworks.
• 28:27
  So it was the thing of I worked on everywhere was kind of right.
• 28:32
  The thing that was really I think the most overwhelming.
• 28:35
  And again, I'm probably not saying anything here that people haven't already said like a hundred times was just the sheer abundance of consumer goods.
• 28:44
  And, and of course, the first experience of that was obviously in Vienna, just the experience of going into a store and seeing like, you know, seeing all this stuff was really, really remarkable.
• 29:03
  Because what was there in Moscow? I mean, I appreciate the sense of there being a massive overabundance of consumer goods even when I go to the United States today from Australia or Western Europe in the sense that, you know, the supermarket in Australia will have 15 different types of breakfast cereal.
• 29:18
  And in the States, it'll just be aisle after aisle after aisle of hundreds and hundreds of like rainbow flavored fruit loops.
• 29:25
  So there'll be banana and cherry flavored fruit loops. And I'm like, really, do we need all this?
• 29:30
  So I feel like I'm coming from a Soviet, you know, a Soviet state when I moved from Vienna.
• 29:36
  At the time, this was like, this was the era of the food lines. And this was when it was pretty normal like to get to a supermarket and there would be like, maybe one type of cheese available.
• 29:54
  Butter, you know, depending on whether it was a good day or not, I mean, I remember, like, I can tell you that when I was, this was not long before we left, I was probably 16, like, I went to, like, my mom asked me to go to the supermarket and, you know, just get some basic stuff.
• 30:14
  For instance, like, all the milk cartons were leaky like every single one.
• 30:19
  I spent a long time trying to find a milk carton of coffee.
• 30:23
  They still are those that's super designed. Still doesn't work for me. I always end up half the time.
• 30:30
  They had these, I still remember them. They had these triangular milk cartons and they were always leaking.
• 30:37
  And were you buying things leaking milk cartons?
• 30:40
  Were you buying things with state issued like food vouchers or did you have it?
• 30:45
  No, no, there was money. There was no. The state issued food vouchers, I think, was mainly like during the World War II.
• 30:53
  I think during Stalinism and the Cold War, that was the main way that you bought milk and eggs, wasn't it?
• 31:00
  I think only during the war. They didn't have, yeah, there was money.
• 31:06
  You're the one from the country, so I suppose I should yield to your authority.
• 31:10
  But the thing that I remember most from that shopping trip is that like all of a sudden there is this crush of humanity.
• 31:18
  Like, there is a stampede like rushing past me and I actually got caught on this crowd.
• 31:23
  And I got a button torn off my coat. And I was like, what's going on?
• 31:28
  And apparently they had brought out butter. People had been waiting for that butter was going to be brought out on the shelves.
• 31:36
  And I got caught on the butter stampede.
• 31:40
  There is something you can't relate to. And I mean, it was very difficult for instance, like bananas, for instance.
• 31:47
  There was this incredible rarity. And I'm like, today, I'm like, oh, well, I have some bananas, but they're kind of spotty.
• 31:55
  I'm going to throw this out.
• 31:59
  You could literally, like, people would stand in line for two hours to get bananas.
• 32:06
  I know. I'm just looking like, are they really that good?
• 32:11
  Would I stand in line for two hours today to get a banana now?
• 32:15
  Well, people stand in line for two days to get a new iPhone, which is almost exactly the same as the previous iPhone.
• 32:20
  So I suppose we all have our bananas, our Soviet bananas.
• 32:24
  Kathy, I'm just looking at the at the ration and coupon system in the Soviet Union.
• 32:28
  I think you might have missed it by leaving too early. It's not earlier.
• 32:32
  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, after a while.
• 32:36
  I think you're using coupons. Yeah.
• 32:39
  Yeah, no, because that was the right of time after we left when things got really bad.
• 32:44
  And they were getting worse, you know, when we were when we were leaving.
• 32:49
  Yeah, right. So I'm like, that was a lot of things.
• 32:52
  Also, by the way, that sort of induced my, my parents to take the leap.
• 32:56
  I mean, not that they didn't primarily like hate the political system, but it was also the fact that things were getting worse and worse in terms of like food availability.
• 33:05
  And, and, and that was in Moscow, by the way, because outside of Moscow, oh my god, like we, at one point, before we left, we decided that we, well, my parents primarily decided because I was 16, decided that they wanted to go and see some of the like, there's a bunch of old towns.
• 33:26
  I would like, well, then probably 200, 200 mile radius of Moscow, or maybe even a hundred miles with a lot of like medieval architecture, which was by the time, by the way, in really horrible shape.
• 33:41
  But, you know, that side, they were these really, really beautiful, like old Russian town.
• 33:47
  So my parents decided that, you know, before we leave, you know, we really want to go see those.
• 33:53
  But, this was like, this was outside of Moscow, and my god, like, the, the, the, the, the living standards and the, the availability of food, because, oh my god, like we, at one point, we literally went into a shop that had complete, like a food store that had completely empty shelves except for like a stack of boxes of fudge candy.
• 34:17
  And I mean, the fudge candy was actually kind of good, but, you know, you can really live on fudge.
• 34:23
  I love that. You rock up, you rock up for your butter and bananas.
• 34:26
  Yeah, I can't.
• 34:27
  You know, my mom, and there was a woman, because, you know, somebody had to be there on staff, and, you know, in case somebody wanted to buy the fudge candy.
• 34:37
  And my mom asked if they were expecting, like, any food to come in, and she was like, Ha, well, you know, if you want to buy food, you will actually have to, like, line up outside the store at six o'clock in the morning.
• 34:51
  Yeah.
• 34:52
  And because by the time the store will open at eight, you know, people will just pick everything clean right away.
• 34:58
  And, you know, so it was just, it was completely insane.
• 35:03
  Yeah, so a lot of people from outside Moscow.
• 35:06
  And my mom ran into this when, when she did food shopping, and she was mainly wanted to food shopping.
• 35:12
  But, you know, people from outside Moscow used to travel on weekend, especially, or, you know, retired people who weren't working during the day.
• 35:20
  They used to get on this suburban train and go to Moscow to buy food.
• 35:25
  And then people would, like, when, when people standing in line for food kind of detected the fact that somebody was from out of town, who came in to do food shopping.
• 35:38
  They were often, like, really, really nasty to them.
• 35:41
  Like, oh, like, you people come in from out of town and, you know, pick everything clean. And then there's not enough left for us.
• 35:47
  Right. It's like anti-immigrants.
• 35:50
  So it was just very, very, very doggy dog, which was kind of funny because, like, the idea that people have of socialism reading, you know, human solidarity.
• 36:00
  Humans are human.
• 36:02
  And sorry, just to finish the finish that point. So, I mean, this is, this is all fascinating to me, but I want to get on to the present day as well.
• 36:08
  But it's so it, yeah, from 1983 onwards, there were these colored coupons that everyone would use to go.
• 36:13
  A coupon for sugar, a coupon for kerosene, a coupon for this. And there's a, there's a joke that where the little boy asks his mom, where is, where's papa.
• 36:23
  And she says he's standing in line to get coupons for coupons.
• 36:26
  Oh, that's funny.
• 36:28
  And lastly, just to clean up the, so the French, this is just aligning all of the incase people are wondering.
• 36:34
  The French president in 1980, as you say, was there staying and then Mitechon was from 1981 onwards.
• 36:42
  Oh, yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 36:44
  And all that's tidied up.
• 36:46
  Who would have been in, like, 1972, 1973?
• 36:49
  Because I remember that there were these, like, before Watergate, there were these, you know, president of Nixon and, you know, French president.
• 36:57
  Let me have a French president.
• 37:00
  This thing was 74 to 81.
• 37:04
  Proceeded by Pompidou.
• 37:07
  Oh, okay, so some of it must have been Pompidou, but I definitely remember a lot of, like, yeah, I think it was, yeah.
• 37:13
  Yeah, Pompidou was 69 to 74.
• 37:15
  Yeah, and then it was like, and then it was Brazil of Ford and, and just got a stack.
• 37:22
  I remember that.
• 37:23
  Amazing.
• 37:24
  So that's, well, now you've made me desperately want to read your first book, which I didn't even know about.
• 37:29
  I'm embarrassed to say growing up in Moscow.
• 37:31
  I know about your second book, which was published in 2000, or thereabouts.
• 37:35
  Yeah, I mentioned 99 ceasefire.
• 37:37
  Yeah, about, that's right, about feminism and, and, and, and equality.
• 37:42
  And now you write wonderful pieces about, well, how do you describe what you write about?
• 37:48
  Because I mean, I think it's broadly in the scope of the cultural world.
• 37:51
  Oh my goodness, I think it's, well, I guess it could be broadly defined as culture wars.
• 37:57
  I guess culture wars.
• 37:59
  I mean, your recent, I've, we've sort of been circling each other on social media for a long time, and I've been aware of you.
• 38:05
  And I'm so glad that we could talk now because your latest piece of lines perfectly with the finest norm that I've been involved in.
• 38:11
  Oh, right, right.
• 38:12
  In the month since doing that.
• 38:14
  Yeah, because I heard it's from your Joe Rogo and the parents.
• 38:17
  Yeah.
• 38:18
  And your, your latest piece is called The Problem with COVID Contrarianism.
• 38:21
  The, you know, the, the, the, the battle that I had been fighting for much of last year was against this, this narrative that had become so, so entrenched in the United States.
• 38:31
  Especially among the right wing.
• 38:33
  Oh, you mean that Australia has, like, become one of the finest.
• 38:35
  Well, yeah, the Australian hate.
• 38:36
  Australia has something.
• 38:38
  Well, I a concentration camp and also be that the, that when governments implement these things, you can never claw them back.
• 38:44
  That like this, you know, it'll start as a, you know, as a quarantine hotel for people who are coming in from abroad.
• 38:51
  But soon enough, the government will be locking up political dissidents and, you know, the, the border will never reopen.
• 38:57
  And, and like the fact that on February 21st, the border will reopen to everybody around the world and that emergency powers are taken in democracies in times of emergency.
• 39:07
  And then relinquished in when the emergency ends, it seems to be like just beyond belief for people who are so obsessed with their own libertarianism that they think the state can only ever be fascistic or authoritarian.
• 39:21
  Anyway, they can, they can see what they're doing.
• 39:23
  You know, I'll tell you one thing that I find really funny, like looking at the, um, at the commentary from those political portals.
• 39:31
  It's like you get all these contradictory narratives.
• 39:34
  Like one moment and it's, oh, well, look, all those countries are reopening, you know, therefore there is absolutely no reason to close anything down and all those restrictions are stupid.
• 39:46
  And then in the same breath, it's like, well, how can you allow governments to impose those restrictions? They will never have left them.
• 39:53
  You know, it's like, yeah, I don't understand how, I don't know if people are stupid or just haven't thought it through, but like one of the...
• 40:03
  No, it's called motivated reasoning, motivated reasoning is what it is.
• 40:07
  It's all a graph, Kathy, that someone had sent, they thought they were really owning me by sending a graph of Australian COVID cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
• 40:18
  And it bumped along, you know, sort of at all, close to zero up until November of 2021.
• 40:26
  And they had put arrows in where all of the lockdowns had happened and it was like lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, lockdown.
• 40:33
  And then the arrow goes right up in, after November of 2021, the graph goes shooting skyward with COVID infections.
• 40:43
  And they say, you know, Australia thought its lockdowns had worked, you know, based on the quote-unquote science, but where's your science now or something?
• 40:54
  And I was like, that's because we ended the lockdowns, opened the border and allowed COVID in, like that was the plan.
• 41:02
  That was the plan was get everyone vaccinated, get ready.
• 41:05
  And then when it's when we're ready, then of course we're going to have to join the rest of the world, not we remain in lockdown forever.
• 41:12
  Like does this person think that we thought that we were going to stay in a state of emergency lockdown forever?
• 41:19
  Like you just like think for one second about what the even the stated purpose of the lockdowns originally was, which was to flatten the curve on hospitals, potentially wait for a vaccine.
• 41:30
  Like the graph shows the exact opposite of what the person who's posting the graph thinks it does, it shows that the lockdowns worked, worked, worked.
• 41:36
  And then there were no more lockdowns and the COVID cases went up due to like, I don't even know what they think that it's proving.
• 41:43
  Anyway, let's talk about this whole area because you think you think you've got an insightful position to come from because you're not of you and I both are not of the establishment.
• 41:53
  We don't want to just be spouting whatever the authorities tell us to spout mindlessly.
• 41:59
  We're both quite anti authority and anti establishment in some ways.
• 42:04
  But we're worried about the way that that has bled in the alternative media universe into a certain level of crazy and I don't know what to make of it, but maybe you do.
• 42:15
  I mean, I do think that to some extent, we've all been a little kind of unsettled and you know, by the pandemic.
• 42:24
  And I think everyone may have gone a little crazy sometimes.
• 42:31
  But seriously, like there has been so much, just complete weirdness, you know, from people that I really didn't expect it from, like, you know, Majid Nawaz, who I had a lot of respect for.
• 42:47
  That was so disappointing and like suddenly this guy is spouting these completely bizarre conspiracy theories about, you know, like the whole COVID-19 thing is just engineered to, you know, institute the New World Order or whatever, you know, global surveillance state.
• 43:08
  I mean, seriously, it's so bizarre. And I mean, the thing that is even more irrational though is people, you know, again, I've seen people whom I consider to be sort of rational, you know, basically saying that, oh, well, you know, this whole thing was just, you know, gendered up to undermine Trump and keep him from getting re-elected.
• 43:32
  Right. So like the whole world, like the whole world was so competitive, you know, preventing Trump from being re-elected, like they completely upended the global economy.
• 43:45
  Yeah, I mean, I'm glad you say the whole world, Kathy, because one thing that one notices from outside the US is how parochial so much of the squabbles are in, I mean, the US tends to superimpose its own domestic concerns onto the rest of the world.
• 44:01
  You know, the American racial struggles between African-Americans and white Americans become a proxy for every single struggle all around the world.
• 44:10
  So you find, you know, I don't know.
• 44:13
  Yeah, but African-French people taking that into account.
• 44:16
  And a lot of countries right now really are sort of, you know, imitating more trend that like activists in a lot of other countries are transplanting to their own soil sometimes in very incongruous ways.
• 44:29
  Yeah.
• 44:30
  There's American racial categories, and I think that's a very bizarre development.
• 44:34
  Yeah, I mean, social media makes it easy to join the good, what you perceive as being the good fight.
• 44:39
  But I mean, so I've always I've always as a as a as a sometime US resident and sometimes non US resident and even when I was a US resident, obviously being an outsider in that country, even though I've spent the majority of my professional life of my adult life in New York.
• 44:54
  The experience was always one of sort of noticing this cultural behemoth that was had exerted such gravitational pull on its own residents that they sort of could not see out beyond it's almost like you're living inside a dome when you're in America.
• 45:12
  And you almost can't quite see out through the dome to the rest of the world, everything out there becomes just an apparition, which is a projection of your own.
• 45:21
  You know, you know, the people will constantly talk to me about like the vaccine adverse reaction schedule in the States and how unreliable it is, so there might actually be many more adverse reactions to vaccines.
• 45:48
  And I'm like, well, maybe in one country, there are, you know, over 100 countries that have active vaccine programs and they're not all just, I mean, it's not all Senegal, like a lot of those countries have you have really, really robust public health systems and good data collection.
• 46:07
  So you can say what you want about the American vaccines, the idea that in today's world, like what the social media that we have, like what the amount of just, you know, transparency that exists today, where, you know, anyone can very easily, you know, anyone armed with a cell phone can easily become a whistleblower that you could have this massive cover up of, you know, adverse reactions.
• 46:36
  I mean, that is really just bizarre.
• 46:39
  Yeah, and I mean, it's not even in the interests of many powerful people for there to be such a cover up, like the heads of hospital systems are not going to be in cooots with the drug companies, they're going to, they want to make money in other ways.
• 46:50
  Yeah, just this whole, like the whole COVID conspiracy thing doesn't make really any sense whatsoever because, you know, who would benefit from this? Like if the idea that this was engineered by governments, like what exactly, how would governments benefit from having a home doing nothing?
• 47:15
  No, I think the theory is that if you're a proto-fascist, if you want to, if you want a new Soviet Union and you want a population to be cowed, and then maybe this is the way to, to, to frighten people into becoming obedient.
• 47:33
  If you've broken their spirit, then like you can do other things, and they'll go along like cheese. I think that's the argument. There's just no, I mean, there's, I, there's no evidence that the vaccine, that the virus was created artificially, even if you believe in the lab leak hypothesis.
• 47:49
  Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't.
• 47:52
  I do think that, you know, the lab leak story certainly does, I mean, there's a kind of consensus among the sort of dissident, you know, with the, the dissident thinkers, so to speak, like the people who are vaguely intellectual dark web adjacent.
• 48:11
  There is a kind of consensus that, oh, well, the lab of the obliques theory by now is like just fully vindicated.
• 48:19
  From what I can see, I don't think it is. I mean, I think it definitely has much more support today than it had before, but I don't think it's the consensus in me.
• 48:30
  No, it's not.
• 48:31
  I mean, I'm agnostic about it. I think it's entirely possible, but the, but most infectious disease experts who I've spoken to, who are not, you know, they're not beholden, they're not cowtowing to China, they're not getting money from Beijing, they're not part of, you know, the WHO with political sort of a political need to pander to geo politics.
• 48:54
  I think it's probably more likely that it just, just emerge naturally, but sure, it's entirely possible that it actually, because I would be interested in this guy.
• 49:00
  I think the media were a little too, you know, quick too.
• 49:04
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 49:05
  To dismiss it out of hand, and I think that did make them look bad.
• 49:09
  Although, you know, you couldn't have any careful, because when you go back and look at some of the media accounts that have been cited as, oh, you know, like here are people just mocking.
• 49:21
  You know, completely dismissing the lab leak theory.
• 49:25
  When you look closely, it turns out that what they were actually referring to in those stories was not the lab leak theory per se, but claims that the virus was deliberately engineered by the Chinese regime as a bio weapon.
• 49:39
  Yeah, there's a difference, I mean, you often really have to like, you know, kind of closely parse exactly what people are talking about, because I have seen a lot of claims that claims like that, like that really fall apart when you subject them to a little spring.
• 49:55
  Yeah, I did a piece for the bulwark.
• 50:00
  Linda, this was probably like last February.
• 50:04
  There was a flurry of articles and, you know, comments on the right, basically saying, oh, well, it's actually the mainstream media that initially completely dismissed COVID as any kind of threat.
• 50:19
  It was just the flu and then people started pinning this on Trump. So it's like, again, like everyone is being horribly unfair to Trump and, you know, and Trump never said it was a hoax.
• 50:31
  Yeah, when you look, I actually went back and like looked at some of the early media coverage.
• 50:37
  And it's completely like not, I mean, there were, yeah, there were a few articles.
• 50:43
  And I think those articles were rooted primarily like at one point, I think the Kaiser Family Foundation put out a press release like this was like January of 2020, which, you know, in retrospect, of course, it looks very bad.
• 50:57
  So basically saying like, oh, you know, we're all worried about COVID, but we really should be more worried about the upcoming flu season.
• 51:04
  And I think the reason, like even for that press release was not so much to be dismissive of COVID, it was to like do a flu vaccination drive because they were trying to like, you know, get more people to get vaccinated for the flu.
• 51:18
  And I think that was the unfortunate angle that they chose. So a few media outlets kind of picked up on that and then, and then, you know, ran stories basically saying, oh, you know, like people are worried about COVID, but we should really be more worried about the flu.
• 51:32
  But, you know, the thing is now, if you look at the overall just of the media coverage, there were already like in late January, there were quite a few stories that said, you know, this is a serious problem.
• 51:45
  And, you know, it may very well become a serious problem in the US. So I mean, this was really by no means like uniformly dismissive media coverage.
• 51:53
  And, you know, you can find like, again, early on, like in February of 2020, there were like a ton of, you know, items in the right wing media.
• 52:04
  They're the, you know, the Russian limbo show and the radio and, you know, the Laura England Fox, there was this narrative that was already taking shape.
• 52:13
  That the Democrats in the media are, you know, overhyping coldness COVID thing, you know, in order to undermine Trump's chances for reelection by using him on this handling COVID.
• 52:27
  So that was like, that was the, this whole attitude that, oh, you know, this whole COVID thing is so much hype. That was, you know, that was a right wing narrative from very early on.
• 52:40
  So, you know, people rewriting history really doesn't.
• 52:44
  Right.
• 52:45
  Yeah. And, I mean, that, that, that's also consistent with what we were just saying about the Americanization of the, rather, you know, the super imposition by Americans of the American experience onto the entire globe, like the idea that a global pandemic would be engineered in some way or reacted to in some way specifically for American electoral purposes is
• 53:06
  Yeah. And I've actually, you know, everyone was freaking out about the world.
• 53:11
  Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was going to point out like one of the countries that had the most kind of hawkish response to COVID was Israel underneath Niyahu, who was one of Trump's closest allies. And I've actually said this to people. So I mean, like, do you think that Niyahu, like, engineered this, you know, this really, really strong response
• 53:32
  that didn't work out well. Well, also, I mean, Australia had a center right government that was very harsh. New Zealand had a center left government that was very harsh. Taiwan went hard. Singapore went hard. South Korea went hard. Like, was that all because of American electoral politics?
• 53:48
  Yeah.
• 53:49
  I mean, that's just open your bloody mind. Like, you know, think outside your bubble.
• 53:53
  I mean, the one thing that I think is worth conceding is one is a point that you make in your last piece, which is I had not actually realized coming from a country that for all of its faults in, you know, having had examples of police overreach and police brutality in enforcing sometimes arcane rules about the COVID zero strategies.
• 54:17
  Perhaps after they were useful with that as a caveat, I would say that Australia has broadly been scientific in the rules that it's imposed and has tried at least in the, in the largest state New South Wales to, to take to do lockdowns in a way that actually makes sense epidemiologically and then to withdraw them as soon as they no longer needed.
• 54:38
  I wasn't real, I didn't realize that like I was watching Bill Mar and he said that he hasn't been into his office in two years.
• 54:45
  I mean, most people I know are back in their offices in Sydney and you, I mean, in terms of schools, schools have basically been open in Australia the entire time,
• 54:56
  a few changes, children aren't wearing masks, we're not forcing like I see videos of, you know, toddlers being forced to wear masks in American schools, there are some jurisdictions in America, some people outside the states might not know this, there are some jurisdictions where basically haven't been to school for two years and still aren't.
• 55:14
  No, no, no, no, no, no, I'm still having to wear masks and so I understand that if, you know, if I was an American and I heard an Australian saying that being tough on COVID is a good strategy.
• 55:28
  In my mind, I might think that that Australian is saying that he supports school closures, masking of children, endless COVID theatre at restaurants and airports, hypocrisy from our leaders like Gavin Newsom go to the French laundry and Boris Johnson holding parties and so on.
• 55:49
  So again, I think this is confusing things because the culture, the culture warriors on the anti COVID lockdown side definitely have some points in America, it's just not the point that they think they're making when they impose those points on the experience of other countries.
• 56:06
  Oh, yeah, yeah, no, definitely the strongest argument I think from the anti hawk side is that the school closures really were completely misguided.
• 56:19
  And I mean the school closures, I think it was especially kind of ironic in an almost tragic way for progressives to really strongly line up behind these school closures because like the number one priority in these past few years has been racial inequality.
• 56:38
  And there's data showing racial gaps in performance on various academic tests really have grown wider since the beginning of the pandemic.
• 56:52
  And, you know, this is primarily because you have in the minority populations, you know, black and Latino, you have a lot of people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds where, you know, the parents are, you know, really do not have the resources to supervise their kids homework very closely to make sure that they're doing the zoom lessons and so on and so forth.
• 57:17
  And just really to almost homeschool them to some extent.
• 57:21
  So, you know, what you have is a situation that really like the whole distance learning situation really, I mean, this is where I mean I often whistle at the overuse of the word privilege, but, you know, this is a situation that really does empower the privilege more and, you know, further marginalize the disadvantaged where, you know, these disadvantaged kids really find themselves, you know,
• 57:46
  deprived of the school resources that were their best opportunity to, you know, to close those gaps and that's really tragic.
• 57:58
  So, I think it's very true that, I mean, the teachers unions, this is hugely ironic because teachers unions in America are like a mainstay of progressive ideology and they're always trying to push these, you know, curriculum schools, you know, teaching of that privilege of this and that.
• 58:15
  And, you know, and the here they are like resisting tooth and nail in some areas, the reopening of schools and perpetuating a situation that really does, you know, hit the disadvantaged hardest.
• 58:30
  So, you know, and I think there's certainly that that is something that, you know, can and should be pointed out and the progressives should absolutely be hammered on this.
• 58:40
  But, you know, instead of zeroing in on these very valid issues, you have a lot of the, you know, a lot of people on the right or, you know, even the center right to some extent.
• 58:55
  Kind of embracing these narratives that are to some extent, kind of like dismissive of the whole COVID situation, kind of, you know, this whole A, you know, it's really not such a big deal.
• 59:07
  And, you know, the panic is really much worse than the disease itself, you know, it's not, you know, and that is, that is kind of disparaging.
• 59:18
  And, you know, I think you probably saw that in my piece, which, you know, we should probably mention to your audience that it's in a, kind of an online substack magazine called Oregon Digital, which you can find at Oregon Digital, ARC, digital.media.
• 59:41
  It's a substack and I have a sort of, you know, newsletter that exists as part of the magazine.
• 59:47
  Yeah, it's great. People should read this is on is on COVID contraanism and it's dangerous.
• 59:54
  And one of the people that I sort of critique is Barry Weiss, who, who I like, you know, who I sort of generally consider, I sort of ally in the culture of words, I think she's done some great stuff.
• 1:00:07
  I think her substack newsletter has a lot of great material and I think you've been part of one of around tables, right?
• 1:00:14
  Yeah, she invited me to write a piece about vaccine mandates.
• 1:00:18
  Yeah, yeah, I remember that.
• 1:00:20
  Yeah, my general.
• 1:00:21
  I think she did a good job of, you know, rounding up different views and I can understand, you know, that mandates are controversial.
• 1:00:28
  I mean, I don't, you know, when it comes right down to it, you know, I, this is like the libertarian man made really kicking in.
• 1:00:35
  I mean, I do think that the government mandates like for everyone to be vaccinated are really a step to far.
• 1:00:43
  Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't believe in a universal mandate where everybody has to get, has to get vaccinated.
• 1:00:49
  But my point was that, that there's, that I was talking about things like a vaccine requirement to go into indoor dining or to go to nightclubs or something like that,
• 1:00:58
  or for certain professions like if you're going to be a cop or a teacher or a nurse or a doctor.
• 1:01:04
  And my point was basically, it was basically that.
• 1:01:08
  I mean, I know that you're supposed to be asking me questions, but what do you think of the whole trucker thing?
• 1:01:14
  Because I was like, I don't know the problem of saying, you know, if you're, if you're a Canadian trucker who's making runs to the United States,
• 1:01:20
  you should show proof of vaccination to.
• 1:01:23
  Well, I'm not sure.
• 1:01:25
  But I mean, I think, yeah, I've been asked about this online and for people who don't know the story.
• 1:01:29
  The fact is that if you're a truck driver, then you have to be vaccinated to cross the border to come into the US.
• 1:01:35
  I mean, is that, is that, am I understanding it right?
• 1:01:38
  So there's a big protest in Canada.
• 1:01:40
  But I, I mean, my general take is that it's a ridiculous rule because America has never taken COVID seriously domestically.
• 1:01:48
  It's had one of the worst performances in terms of the rampant spread of infection and the, and the scale of disease and death.
• 1:01:56
  And so it's a little bit, I just think it's a bit rich for America to have any rules about people coming in,
• 1:02:01
  I'm vaccinated.
• 1:02:02
  Oh, no, this is actually a Canadian rule.
• 1:02:04
  This is the Canadian rule.
• 1:02:06
  So they're not allowed.
• 1:02:07
  I think America also adopted that rule recently, but the, but no, originally it was a Canadian rule because basically the Canadians imposed a rule for there.
• 1:02:17
  Well, both for American truck drivers coming in, but I think primarily it was for Canadian truck drivers who made runs to the United States.
• 1:02:25
  And they basically said, you know, if you're making a run to the US and you're coming back, you know, you need to show proof of vaccination.
• 1:02:31
  Oh, I see, because the way that it was framed for me by someone online was saying, do you think that truck drivers should be allowed to enter the United States if they're unvaccinated?
• 1:02:38
  And my point was just, well, everyone should be allowed to, I mean, I think it's ridiculous that I, when I entered the States a few weeks ago, had to get a negative test.
• 1:02:47
  I guess I didn't need to, did I need to show I was vaccinated? I can't remember I crossed so many borders, I don't remember all the rules.
• 1:02:52
  But I think it's a little bit rich for America to be insisting that everybody who comes in be kind of negative, when there's been no serious attempt to do anything serious at a federal level or a border level about the pathogen in the first place.
• 1:03:04
  If it's a Canadian thing, then I would have to think about it.
• 1:03:09
  And I guess it would depend on the epidemiology of what the outbreak was like. I mean, if there's a massive outbreak in Detroit or, you know, Albany or.
• 1:03:19
  I'm not sure about that. Yeah, because I think Michigan has always had a pretty bad COVID numbers.
• 1:03:24
  Yeah, I mean, on the other hand, then I feel like.
• 1:03:28
  I think it's really rational. I really don't, this is the kind of thing that I really find it difficult to see as some sort of like outrageous government overreach.
• 1:03:39
  I mean, you know, there's, I mean, even I know that there are libertarians who are like completely open or, you know, non-assistant borders, but I mean, that's a bridge too far.
• 1:03:52
  I mean, I understand that. I think it's entirely sensible to say that, you know, we can decide that.
• 1:04:01
  And I mean, Canada has generally done a much better job than the US of containing the virus.
• 1:04:06
  Yeah. And I consider seeing them saying, well, you know, we don't really want people coming in from America, you know, bringing this.
• 1:04:12
  Also, I mean, if you live in a jurisdiction and there are some Canadian jurisdictions that are very strict, if you live in a jurisdiction that's going to opt for, you know, strict lockdowns when, when epidemics get out of control, then it's a bit unfair for other people to be recklessly, you know, not doing the absolute minimum that they could do, which is to get vaccinated to lower their chance of getting sick and being infectious.
• 1:04:39
  Like, if, you know, why should, why should someone impose that cost on the rest of society by increasing the chance that there's going to have to be a lockdown?
• 1:04:46
  On the other hand, I then think Elmokron is so infectious that vaccines, you know, even if everyone's vaccinated, it's not doing a terribly good job of stopping the spread of the infection.
• 1:04:56
  It's doing a great job of keeping people out of hospital, but it's not doing a great job of spreading infection. So then are you just, you know, are we sort of using delta tools to fight Elmokron? Are we fighting the last panel?
• 1:05:07
  But why would you, you mentioned that you're, the way that you open your, your piece that, that your most recent piece in our digital is talking about how you think there's a new battle of the pandemic breaking out and, and you cite this modify controversy over Joe Rogan and COVID misinformation on.
• 1:05:26
  There's always, yeah, yeah, so, yeah, I mean, my, my, my basic point, and I mean, I think the Joe Rogan situation is, is, is very complicate and now they're also going after him with this, you know, old, like racial stuff from the old episodes they did.
• 1:05:45
  And it really does at this point, I think, look like a witch hunt. So, you know, I'm certainly not like a favor of booting him from Spotify.
• 1:05:57
  So, you know, but my point and the thing that I was concerned about, and this is also where my criticism of Barry White comes in, I mean, I think there really is in certain, I guess what I would call sort of dissident circles and dissident with regard to the kind of mainstream progressivism that seems to be the dominant like strain of thought in most.
• 1:06:27
  So, I left the mark on media today, and then you have the sort of dissent from mainstream that's exemplified by people like Barry White, for instance, or, you know, or Joe Rogan.
• 1:06:39
  And, you know, and I think that this dissent is absolutely good and essential to a healthy dialogue, you know, because I do think that there's a tremendous amount of groupthink and kind of knee jerk, political, you know, dogma in the American media right now.
• 1:06:59
  And I absolutely welcome the sort of dissent and then the debate, but the sort of rejection of conventional wisdom can become a knee jerk contrarianism, and that's what I was writing about.
• 1:07:14
  Where suddenly people are sort of embracing, I guess, non-mainstream ideas about COVID really just because they're non-mainstream.
• 1:07:29
  And really because there's this assumption that, oh, well, anything mainstream is really just the establishment trying to force a dogma down your throat.
• 1:07:38
  And that is really just not the case with COVID, I think, and I think we have seen that this confrarianism really is leading people to embrace not only really bizarre conspiracy theories.
• 1:07:53
  And I think if you look at James Lindsay, you know, that's just, you know, walking disaster area where, you know, he's really pretty much ended up endorsing the idea that the pandemic was engineered as part of some, you know, sort of conspiracy to institute a new world order, you know, whatever.
• 1:08:11
  I mean, I'm really not paying that much attention to him these days because he's just, you know, gone completely, you know, around the bend or, you know, whatever.
• 1:08:20
  But, you know, even, well, I mean, I don't need to tell you that some of the people that Joe Rogan has amplified in this show are really, really like, you know, people who are way out there when it comes to scientific information.
• 1:08:40
  And, I mean, I do think that the vaccine skeptical propaganda really has quite dangerous.
• 1:08:52
  I mean, the just the idea, and I mean, I know that, you know, and I really don't mean to dump a job of them.
• 1:08:58
  I mean, I don't think he sets out to be, you know, someone who supports the vaccination offer, whatever.
• 1:09:07
  Yeah, I mean, I, as you can imagine, I've been asked my opinion on this endlessly and I've been on TV shows and radio shows and written in print about the whole thing and I'm generally supportive of Joe.
• 1:09:20
  I mean, he's been extremely generous to me and my colleagues. He's been very, very supportive and an enormous force for good in the worlds of entertainment and comedy and podcasting on an individual level.
• 1:09:31
  But even on a broader social level, for all of his flaws, I do think that he's generally, I make a distinction between some of these people in the alternative, alternative media ecosystem who really are just persistent firehoses of misinformation and they are willfully pumping out things that if they don't know or untrue, they should know our untrue.
• 1:09:53
  Whereas I see Joe as more of a clown, a ringmaster, a, you know, a curious puppy who is perhaps too credulous at times and doesn't have, you know, journalistic standards and so is just doing is just chatting with people and that can go off the rails and that can, you know, that can exhibit his own biases and his own preference for conspiratorial thinking sometimes.
• 1:10:16
  But a person who's trying to deal with people in good faith and who's trying to do the right thing and is trying to be generally correct.
• 1:10:24
  Again, that's not to excuse him, but I mean, I've, you know, everyone keeps asking me and keeps asking me to sort of throw him under a bus and I just won't, I just won't do it because I think there's a huge difference.
• 1:10:34
  But I, but let's wrap here with your thoughts about why he is unique and why even someone like Sam Harris, I think his unique in being a standup person who has refused to, to, I guess go down the crazy rabbit hole that you're writing about because it is striking to me, I got an email from someone who I don't know, which who was pointing out that I didn't event with the so called intellectual dark web.
• 1:11:04
  People in Sydney that that went south and it was anyway, but it was at the time it was this illustrious collection of people, it was, it was Eric Weinstein, Brett Weinstein, Margie Noah's Douglas Murray and Sam Harris and I was moderating it on full day thing.
• 1:11:24
  And this person who was emailing me was saying, like, look at that run down now, look at that lineup of people, this person was saying, I knew at the time that if you, if you believed that wokeness was a sickness that was coming to take our entire society over.
• 1:11:40
  Then it was obvious to me this person was writing to me saying that that was such a blinkered sort of privileged inside the bubble concern because this person lives in the southeast United States where it was like, he was like, this was obviously stupid right wing hysteria to me that the liberals had bought into because they don't actually know what it's like in land from their coastal bubbles where wokeness is just, you know, not a thing out here.
• 1:12:06
  And this person was saying, like, it's completely unsurprising to him that that suspicion of wokeness has now ballooned into a, you know, a truly crazy suspicion of basically everything and the only standard out of.
• 1:12:22
  Yeah, that is very true. That is very true. And, you know, I'm going to say that I think to some extent of the quote unquote, you know, woke establishment, I think, is to blame for, you know, for for for sort of instigating.
• 1:12:40
  This kind of mistrust because I do think that on some issues, like, even on issues related to science, I think there has been a tendency to kind of subordinate science to audiology that really does generate this.
• 1:13:00
  This skeptical attitude, and I mean, some of the discourse around transgender issues, which, you know, and I should say, you know, obviously I fully support, you know, civil rights for transgender people.
• 1:13:17
  But when we have scientific magazines, trying to sell the idea that, you know, well, you know, there really isn't such a thing as sexual dimorphism and it's more complicated than that because, you know, what about the, you know, tiny percentage of people with, you know, congenital, chromosomal, or, you know, other, you know, anatomical, you know, abnormalities.
• 1:13:42
  And don't they really like call into question the existence of two sexes.
• 1:13:47
  And now they really don't, you know, and I think that's, you know, that kind of thing really makes people feel like, well, you know, science is being co-opted by audiology.
• 1:13:59
  And I think because of that, it's sort of easier for some people to believe that, you know, the scientific establishment is playing politics with COVID.
• 1:14:09
  Although, again, my question would be like, why there isn't anything particularly woke about, you know, about COVID-19.
• 1:14:19
  I mean, as I pointed out, there isn't anything particularly woke about friends that's calling for lockdowns or calling for Alex, you know, really strict, you know, policies to contain, you know, and mitigate the spread of the virus.
• 1:14:35
  I mean, I even pointed out in my newsletter that some of these measures really went counter to certain progressive values, like there were a lot of concerns that were expressed early in the pandemic that the lockdowns were really bad for working months because, you know, because kids were not at school, you know, kids were not in daycare.
• 1:14:56
  And there were a lot of people saying that, you know, the effects of this pandemic and the lockdowns are going to be really terrible for gender equality.
• 1:15:05
  So, I mean, this is really not a woke thing. I mean, there is no, like, woke agenda that is being pursued by people who are saying that the COVID, you know, we're saying them in the beginning, that COVID-19 is something that needs to be taken very seriously.
• 1:15:22
  And, you know, and yet, either there really was, I think almost from the beginning, this sort of culture war, you know, polarization, where there were a lot of people on the right who, you know, who have been trying all along to minimize this and to say that, well, you know, not such a deal unless you were like really, really old or, you know, incredibly second, you know, otherwise you're going to be fine.
• 1:15:46
  And you should just live your life as, you know, as usual. And I mean, by the way, I always thought this, this idea that we could, and this was, of course, the great parenting declaration that we can somehow, you know, isolate the vulnerable and let everyone else lead a normal life.
• 1:16:06
  I never really got that. Like, how do you do? Like, how are you, I mean, you say you're never going to see your grandparents in an age gap?
• 1:16:12
  Yeah, I think the great down to declaration actually suggested I'll have to go back and look it up. I mean, I think they actually suggested like moving all of the elderly and, you know, immuno compromised people into like, you know, some sort of facilities for the duration of three or four months.
• 1:16:32
  Well, I mean, also for how long was what happens up in three or four months?
• 1:16:36
  And libertarian thing, you know, why wouldn't it be three or four decades? I mean, this thing is not going to, you're not going away any time.
• 1:16:42
  Yeah. And if you look at how many Americans, for instance, have pre-existing conditions that make them vulnerable to COVID, you know, just, you know, obesity and obesity and hypertension thing.
• 1:16:54
  I mean, you'd really have to like move, though, you know, one third of the population into concentration camps.
• 1:17:00
  I think you would just have to create another another Mason Dixon line and just sort of provide America into into civil war.
• 1:17:09
  The fat people in the South can stay there protected.
• 1:17:16
  Any people in the North.
• 1:17:18
  God, we're being very politically inclined.
• 1:17:21
  I don't know if I'm being conservative or progressive.
• 1:17:26
  I can't wait to read about your childhood in Moscow. I'm going to have to let you go.
• 1:17:32
  I can just finish like one real quick point. So one one issue because I started saying something very wise that I didn't really believe this hanging just, you know, yeah, just to sort of randomly.
• 1:17:45
  I didn't want to do this like drive by.
• 1:17:48
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:49
  Very quickly.
• 1:17:50
  I think she did some really good.
• 1:17:52
  Like she did some really good around like the roundtable on mandates that you were a part of. That was really good.
• 1:17:58
  But, you know, I did notice like in recent weeks, there has definitely been a slant to a lot of what she runs on her newsletter.
• 1:18:09
  That is kind of, you know, a little sort of much more favorable to vaccine skepticism than I'm comfortable with.
• 1:18:17
  And that's especially ironic because of course the gist of her.
• 1:18:21
  I mean, you probably know about her appearance on Belmar where she did this. You know, oh, I'm done with COVID thing.
• 1:18:27
  And she was very frustrated that, you know, we were told that once you got vaccinated, everything will be fine.
• 1:18:34
  We've just gone, you know, lead a normal life and that to the pan out that way.
• 1:18:38
  Okay, but I mean, if that is the, and I think we're all the vast majority of people are frustrated that it didn't pan out.
• 1:18:45
  Yeah, I mean, I would certainly be frustrated if we're living in California.
• 1:18:49
  Yeah, yeah, I think we're all happy that we were sort of entering outside and, you know, going to, you know, restaurants again and meeting up with friends.
• 1:18:57
  And then suddenly boom, you know, we're back to, you know, to something much more stringent.
• 1:19:05
  Yeah, I'm going to lose, I'm going to lose this line in 30 seconds. So I have to love you.
• 1:19:08
  Yeah, so yeah, so I mean, just my point is that it's if you really want to go back to normal life, the vaccination is the key.
• 1:19:15
  Obviously. So yeah, exactly. That's right.
• 1:19:18
  It's not an imposition. It's actually the path to the path to back normal.
• 1:19:22
  For the vaccine, of course, is just Mr. Kathy.
• 1:19:27
  Thank you for joining us.
• 1:19:29
  Our digital is where people can find your art digital dot media. You take care.
• 1:19:33
  Well, thank you.
• 1:19:39
  Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postumer. Follow me Josh Seps on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest.
• 1:19:46
  May your day be fruitful, your mind humble, your enemies generous,
• 1:19:51
  and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly, delectably, uncomfortable.