Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode Sixty Nine: Illusion of Control

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Episode Sixty Nine: Illusion of Control · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number sixty nine of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
• 0:04
  is John Ziegler. I'm your host on today's program, How and Why the
• 0:08
  Media Is Deceiving You? About what most likely happened with the Ocean Gate Titanic
• 0:13
  exploring submarine, the epic Donald Trump interview with Brett bar on Fox News,
• 0:19
  and our interview with Ian Miller, who has written two books about how the
• 0:23
  expert Scott Covid so Very wrong. I'm known as the Dutch Digital Marketing Man.
• 0:29
  I'm a digital advertising SEO and EMO marketing specialist that also happens to be
• 0:35
  a big fan of John Ziegler and the Death of journalisten. Do you need
• 0:39
  help preaching your target audience? Let me help you develop the right messaging and
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  confaded message in the best channels for your business. Please visit my website,
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  the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com and let me help you tell your story.
• 0:54
  The website is the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com. If you want
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  to grow your business, eater can help. That's the Dutch Digital marketing Man
• 1:03
  dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. The biggest news
• 1:07
  media story in the United States and probably the world This week, by far
• 1:12
  has been the news of an ocean gate submarine which was intending to explore the
• 1:19
  wreckage of the Titanic, having gone missing, and as of this recording,
• 1:27
  the media narrative is that they only have about a day's worth of oxygen left
• 1:34
  to survive deep below the depths of the ocean, potentially possibly even within the
• 1:42
  wreckage of the Titanic itself. Now, this narrative could not have been created
• 1:52
  in a more media friendly way if it had been concocted in a news media
• 1:57
  lab. I mean, if you were going to make up a story,
• 2:00
  and by the way, to be clear, the story is not made up,
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  but if you were going to make up a story that would give the
• 2:07
  news media a week's worth of manna from heaven when it comes to compelling content
• 2:15
  and ratings and the interest of the average citizen and not just the news junkie.
• 2:22
  Especially in a month late in June, when summer is beginning, vacations
• 2:25
  are beginning, you could not do better than this. It has all the
• 2:30
  markings of the perfect news media story. Because there is drama, there are
• 2:37
  lives at risks, at the risk, there is the obvious Titanic which everybody
• 2:44
  knows about both historically and most people certainly above the age of thirty, have
• 2:50
  seen the movie Titanic, which is among the most popular movies in the history
• 2:54
  of cinema, and it's obviously something we can all relate to, and it
• 3:00
  goes to a lot of our primal fears about being trapped in a situation.
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  There's the theoretical drama of a potential rescue, there's theoretically the unknown. We
• 3:14
  don't really know what the result of this is going to be. It doesn't
• 3:16
  look good, but the media is holding out hope for a miracle and also
• 3:23
  because of the oxygen issue. And this is where I'm heading with this story.
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  There is a definitive end point for the story. See, that's important.
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  The news media love stories that take on a cycle, and you know,
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  you have the beginning, you have the climax, and you have the
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  end. An end is important. Now there's some stories that never have an
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  end. Now there's some people have compared this already to the infamous missing Malaysian
• 3:58
  airplane situation, in which CNN became obsessed with for many months in a row,
• 4:03
  and I believe really sowed the seeds for CNN's ultimate destruction. That was
• 4:10
  way back in twenty fourteen, but I'll never forget it one because I was
• 4:14
  personally impacted by it with the interviews that I was doing in the Penn State
• 4:18
  Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky case along with Dottie Sandusky. But that really was a
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  jump the shark moment for the news media. But it never had an ending,
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  which caused a major problem for CNN because they didn't know when to move
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  on. Well, the media is clearly as of this taping using the idea
• 4:40
  that there's just this many hours of oxygen left to be used by the five
• 4:46
  people on this submarine, so that at that point they can effectively declare this
• 4:53
  story over, that it has run its course. We have closure, we
• 4:58
  have an end. Now there's a very good chance, I believe that we're
• 5:00
  gonna ever gonna know for one hundred percent sure what happened, or it's going
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  to be a long time before we get any real evidence of this. This
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  is not going to be resolved in the next few days, and I don't
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  think there's any real chance that we're going to have the miracle rescue. But
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  this is perfect for the news media it's a it's a fairly short story under
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  this scenario, a few days of very heightened interest where the average person can
• 5:29
  relate to it. They're into the story, by the way. The other
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  element of the story that I think has captivated enormous amounts of audience is the
• 5:39
  fact that at least two of the people of the five are very rich people.
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  One of them is the son of a very rich person from Pakistan and
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  others a billionaire from the UK. And so this I think makes the story
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  both more intriguing as well as also it gives the average person as a bit
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  of a bizarre joy in the story, because there's nothing that the average person
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  likes more than when bad things happen to rich people, it seems like,
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  especially when those bad things are happening because of seemingly very stupid decisions. And
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  I would agree with those that have been mocking the idea that it makes sense,
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  even though the best of circumstances, to pay what has been reported to
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  be as much as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to go into a tin
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  can to go down to see the records of the Titanic when we already have
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  lots and lots of photos and videos that are going to be about as good
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  as anything you're going to see if you actually make it down there. And
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  of course there's the inherent safety issues that would be involved, and it appears
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  as if the safety issues involved with this submarine were almost literally hysterically obvious.
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  There have been multiple news reports that have been done about ocean Gate and their
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  Titanic expeditions well before this crisis occurred, and at least in one of them
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  on CBS. There was CBS, there was BBC, and there's been some
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  others, the reporter is literally laughing at how rudimentary this operation is and at
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  the disclaimer that those who went on this journey had to sign off on for
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  legal reasons, basically saying you could die for all sorts of different causes and
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  that we're not responsible for this. I mean, it was almost not so
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  serious and sad, it's almost a joke. I mean, I can't even
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  imagine how anyone would be so stupid as to do this, and to pay
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  lots of money to do it is even more insane. However, having dealt
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  with a lot of very rich people in my life, I do think that
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  there is an inherent arrogance among a lot of these people, and a lot
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  of them believe that, well, if it's if they're paying the money,
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  and if it's happening to them, they're special, so everything is going to
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  be okay. I mean, you wouldn't be paying two hundred and fifty thousand
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  dollars if it wasn't safe. They wouldn't be able to charge you that.
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  I mean, that's the that's the thinking that you're paying. If you're paying
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  that much and it's happening to you, then it must be okay. I
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  think that's the the underlying either conscious or subconscious premise of these people. But
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  the media coverage of this whole situation was so hysterical and apparently also incomplete.
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  I mean, there have been One of the more bizarre elements of this very
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  strange story is that I've seen interviews with reporters who have done stories on this
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  prior to this situation, where they've added new information that weren't in their original
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  reports, like the fact that you know, one guy actually tried to go
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  down in the sub and after thirty seven minutes they had to come back because
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  of technical problems. That another situation they had witnessed where the sub went missing
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  for several hours at a time they weren't able to find it or communicate with
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  it, and that may have been, by the way, part of one
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  of the most underrated facts about this current situation, which is that it took
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  eight hours for ocean Gate to report the problem. Eight hours, and that
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  to me is extremely problematic on multiple levels, including when it comes to trying
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  to figure out what really did and did not happen here. But from a
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  media perspective, there's no question that there is a preferred narrative here, and
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  because this narrative is so enticing and so friendly to their goals and their agenda,
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  I'm inherently suspicious of it. Let's be clear the narrative that they have
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  been putting forward, which I believe is deceiving at best and could be a
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  flat out lie. Again, I'm working at a disadvantage here because the story
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  is still ongoing as of this taping. We tape on Wednesday morning, and
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  by all reports, it's going to be Thursday morning on the East Coast when
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  the oxygen, assuming this is still going on, is officially run out,
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  and that we can presume that these people are no longer alive. But the
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  preferred narrative here is they're still alive, right, because when they're still alive,
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  that continues the drama. If you presume them dead, then that is
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  going to diminish the viewership significantly because people I've no longer invested in what might
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  happen here. There's no longer the holding out hope for a miracle, So
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  the story loses a lot of its essence, a lot of its appeal if
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  they're already dead, especially if we're not going to ever really know for sure
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  what happened. So that's number one. But number two, if they're still
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  alive, and there's this, you know, Edgar Allen Poe like nightmare scenario,
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  being trapped as you're running out of oxygen, like you're in your coffin,
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  the only way to make that narrative even more enticing is if they're trapped
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  within the Titanic itself, right, because you know, then you're talking like
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  a movie where almost literally was since obviously The Titanic was one of the biggest
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  blockbusters of all time, and you know, the irony of going down there
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  to visit a tomb effectively and then have that be your own tomb, you
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  know, is off the charts when it comes to a narrative that might interest
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  people, especially who aren't necessarily news junkies. So that has been the preferred
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  narrative of both the public and the news media. But I don't believe that
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  that narrative makes any sense based upon what we currently know. And here are
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  the key facts as I see them as of right now and trying to figure
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  out what really did happen here. The first fact that's really important is that
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  I already said it took eight hours before ocean Gate declared that there was a
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  problem, that they went to the authorities and say we've got a sub we've
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  lost communication with and we can't find the Eight hours is an enormous amount of
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  time. Now, within that eight hours, here's what we apparently know happen.
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  They lost communication with the sub at about the hour in forty five minute
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  mark. That is, in my mind, the most important fact in what
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  we know for sure. We seemingly know for sure at this point. Why
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  is that the most important fact? Because you can't get to the Titanic in
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  that vessel in an hour and forty five minutes. You can't do It's not
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  possible. It's you can only get about halfway down to the Titanic in that
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  time period, and they lost communication and they lost the ability to figure out
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  where the sub was. Now, the communication apparently was incredibly rudimentary, was
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  basically text messaging. But here's the key part, or one of the key
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  parts of the text messaging system, and that is that without the text messaging
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  system, they can't find the Titanic. That's so what's happening the way I
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  understand, or what's supposed to happen, is that the ship from which the
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  sub came from is text messaging with the submarine to help them navigate in the
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  dark. Once they get down there to actually find the Titanic. They can't
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  do it. They can't. It's basically a needle in the haystack without the
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  text messaging system because they have the sonar on the ship. So the idea
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  that they lost communication halfway down and they then found the Titanic on their own,
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  completely oblivious to the fact that they're no longer communicating with the ship.
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  That just let's to somehow the communication system went down and the ability to track
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  where the sub was just just mysteriously went down for no apparent reason, but
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  that did not impact their ability to continue down towards the Titanic, and they
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  found the Titanic on their own. Is a laughable It's a last laughable concept
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  based upon what we currently know. It just it goes against basic common sense.
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  And I do feel like we're kind of revisiting COVID here where I'm obviously
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  not an expert in any of this. I'm just using basic common sense and
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  what appears to be the facts of the situation. It's not that difficult to
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  figure out the truth and figure out things that don't make any damn sense.
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  The idea that they're in the Titanic wreckage is absurd based upon what we currently
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  know. So what really did happen? Well, I'm an Okham's razor guy,
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  all right, you know the simplest explanation is more than likely the one
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  that actually happened. And if you lose communication and you lose the ability to
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  figure out where this submarine is and after days of looking, you can't find
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  it anywhere. I mean, although there's been apparently delays and they don't have
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  all the right equipment, but you know they have son arm. There are
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  ways that if this thing existed, they would theoretically have some sign of it.
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  So the thing just simply disappears with no communication. And let's be clear,
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  it works in both directions as communication situation, because let's pretend that they
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  don't realize they can't communicate with the ship. They would know within a pretty
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  good period of time that the ship isn't able to communicate with them. And
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  at that point, if they still had control of the vessel and they still
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  everything was still okay, they would have come back up to the surface,
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  because that would have been would have made their ultimate goal impossible to achieve.
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  So if there was nothing catastrophic that had happened, the lack of communication,
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  assuming everything else was even remotely okay, would have ended the exploration. They
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  would have come back up to the surface, which apparently the submarine is able
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  to do using the way ridiculous knockoff PlayStation controller, which everyone has rightfully been
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  mocking online. That's how unbelievably rudimentary this entire submarine apparatus was. So what
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  I believe happened and what I think was implied by people who truly are experts,
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  who were trying not to be super pessimistic, but in the original interviews,
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  and I saw one of them in particular on Fox News Channel with Jesse
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  Waters, a guy who knew three people on the vessel, seemed pretty convinced
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  reading between the lines that the thing had just imploded. I mean, that's
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  the most logical explanation for what really happened here. If you lose contact and
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  can't find a submarine halfway or a little bit bit more maybe than halfway to
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  the bottom of the ocean, and then you can't find any sign of it
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  and doesn't come back up to the surf fist Oxym's razor tells you the thing
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  imploded and these people died instantly. And I have no way of knowing,
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  you know, what the debris would look like in that situation of what would
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  happen with it. But you know, to me, there's a good chance
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  we never find any sign of this, because you know, it's like a
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  needle in the haystack in the in the middle of the of the Atlantic Ocean
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  at very very deep obviously depths. So you know, that's what I think
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  happened. That's what it seems like a lot of the experts are saying happened,
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  but they're not willing and understandably so to say it outright and directly one,
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  because you're taking a bit of a chance. If you declare these people
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  dead, You're you're dousing the efforts to try to save them. And then
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  if it turns out you're wrong, then you're gonna get blamed for having made
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  a bad situation worse if you're in that quote unquote expert class. So I
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  can stand, especially if you know people on board, that you're going to
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  be hesitant to come to that conclusion. But the fact that some experts were
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  even willing to go there at all told me, okay, that's what happened,
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  especially when that seems to be consistent with what we know of the facts,
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  and that's a scenario that is consistent with all of the facts. But
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  the media has very little interest in the implosion narrative for the reasons I've already
• 19:27
  stated, because that ends the story. It ends the intrigue, it ends
• 19:32
  the mystery, it ends the whole concept of being trapped down there, and
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  you know what these people were going through, and the horrible way of dying
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  will losing oxygen, and the father and son situation, and of course the
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  completely absurd idea that they got stuck in the Titanic wreckage and that that's why
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  they can't be found on sonar and that's why they lost communication. But again,
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  that's not consistent with the timing of the whole situation. So the media
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  is not going to ever, I believe, unless forced to accept the implosion
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  narrative. It just doesn't fit with their agenda, doesn't fit what their goals
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  are here. Now, maybe after the time period where they can't be alive
• 20:19
  has passed, that'll change as they seek closure on this thing. And we're
• 20:25
  at the end of the week, and you know by next week, we're
• 20:27
  heading into the holiday fourth of July holiday week the next week, so I
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  mean it's something will end, barring a miracle, fairly soon. But I
• 20:37
  believe that this was an implosion. Now I should point out that there are
• 20:42
  probably people listening to me right now saying but John, John, there are
• 20:47
  reports that there were sounds of banging heard by a Canadian airplane that was charting
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  what was going on. That Ever, on thirty minute intervals, there are
• 21:00
  sounds of banging that seem consistent with the people in the submarine trying to,
• 21:07
  you know, make noise to make it clear that they are still alive and
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  to please help save us. Now, is this possible? I guess so
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  reading the tea leaves of this particular story, I don't believe it. Now
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  again, is it possibly true? Yeah? But I'm pretty good at reading
• 21:30
  the tea leaves on these kind of situations, having nothing to do with what
• 21:33
  subject they're in, just how to the story evolve? And is this the
• 21:37
  story that the news media would be particularly interested in buying despite what the facts
• 21:45
  and logic indicate. And the answer in this case is obviously yes. This
• 21:52
  story originated in rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, not The New York Times,
• 22:00
  rolling Stone, which is an entertainment news outlet, and it's based upon an
• 22:06
  internal email where this report was communicated. Now Rolling Stone and other news outlets
• 22:17
  that followed up on this, which obviously is a very enticing and you know,
• 22:22
  clickbait like story. When there's this much interest surrounding the situation and you
• 22:26
  get a report of a sign of life, I mean, that's ultimate clickbait,
• 22:30
  right, But it's also almost easily predicted that that's what's going to happen.
• 22:36
  Because you have this time limit of how much oxygen has left. There's
• 22:40
  almost you could have predicted there's going to be something that is going to give
• 22:45
  some semblance of hope to keep the story percolating and to keep it as enticing
• 22:49
  as possible, and obviously inherently a story that provides hope while there's still logically
• 22:56
  could be hope when there's still you know, we're still within the oxes and
• 23:00
  time limit. That's going to get a lot of interest and a lot of
• 23:03
  web traffic. But none of the major government agencies that were contacted as a
• 23:11
  result of this email becoming known made any comment about it, and that to
• 23:17
  me is a red flag if this was real, why is there no comment
• 23:21
  from any of the major government agencies? And then this morning the Coastguard,
• 23:29
  which is really at the forefront of this whole search, they referenced this report
• 23:36
  and they actually referenced it in more vague language than Rolling Stone had had described
• 23:45
  it. This banging every thirty minutes. By the way, the thirty minute
• 23:51
  thing, I realized that makes it sound obviously very human, right, because
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  why would you know it would take a human being to decide that you're going
• 24:03
  to make noise every thirty minutes. Inherently, so it's not something random and
• 24:08
  it's clearly intelligent life, and so it's got to be the people on the
• 24:14
  submarine, right. Well, I'm also of the believable. How does that
• 24:18
  make any sense? You're trapped in a submarine and you're gonna wait thirty minutes
• 24:22
  before you you're making noise? I mean, I mean, if you're really
• 24:27
  able to make noise and you can hear, you know, banging sounds,
• 24:32
  then why couldn't you hear voices if you're you know, screaming and yelling,
• 24:37
  if you're if they're here, if you're able to hear the banging on the
• 24:40
  side of the submarine there and they're able to pick that up, why wouldn't
• 24:44
  you pick up screaming voices? And why would it only be every half hour?
• 24:51
  That seems remarkably patient under the circumstances that would exist if this was actually
• 24:59
  happening. But back to the Coastguard tweet that they put out, it was
• 25:04
  very subdued. In my estimation, it was in no way, shape or
• 25:08
  form trying to create hope. I read it as they're trying to address this
• 25:14
  media report and make it clear that Okay, we're aware of this, we're
• 25:18
  on it, and they actually said in the tweet that there was nothing found
• 25:25
  in the area. The area where the sounds came from was searched and they
• 25:30
  didn't find anything, So it felt like a cover your ass statement from the
• 25:37
  Coastguard. And again, I am extremely suspicious of any story where the clickbait
• 25:45
  angle is so obvious. There is a thirst among the news media for this
• 25:52
  to be true, or at least for people to believe this is true to
• 25:56
  keep interest in the story going. And it's also you mean they sure.
• 26:00
  I mean everybody wants most people. There's some people that seem the want of
• 26:03
  those on the sub to die because they're rich and dumb, but most people,
• 26:07
  including myself, would like to see them survive. It was all possible.
• 26:11
  No one wants to see people die needlessly. But you know, I
• 26:18
  don't think there's any hope. It certainly seems to me as if this banging
• 26:23
  story is wishful thinking and clickbait, and it still doesn't explain all the other
• 26:32
  questions that I have. And I also go back to this eight hour delay
• 26:37
  from the time period that they lost communication where they were about halfway down and
• 26:41
  when they finally decided to alert authorities Number one. I mean That shows you
• 26:48
  how little confidence they had giving them the best, you know, giving them
• 26:55
  the benefit of the doubt. This shows how little confidence they had in their
• 26:59
  own system, where they were basically waiting four or five hours, because as
• 27:03
  I've already said, there've been apparently episodes in the past where they've lost communication
• 27:10
  with this sub and then eventually everything was okay. So like my guess is
• 27:15
  they lost communication they thought, okay, um, wow, that sucks,
• 27:19
  but you know this has happened before. Maybe this is going to be all
• 27:22
  right, and we don't want to alert the authorities here one on a false
• 27:26
  alarm. And two you know that once we learn authorities, that's going to
• 27:30
  create bad publicity, and that'll be really horrendous for our business model where we're
• 27:37
  builking a quarter of a million dollars out of rich people. If they,
• 27:41
  you know, get this report that you know, we're not safe, that's
• 27:45
  going to be a problem in the future. And so they waited enough time
• 27:49
  to where it was obvious that the would had occurred in the past wasn't repeating
• 27:55
  itself, by the way, you know, to be clear it once they
• 28:00
  they determined in the sub that they had lost communication with the ship. It
• 28:03
  would have taken a couple of hours for them to come back up in theory,
• 28:07
  and that clearly didn't happen. But they waited way longer than that before
• 28:12
  they alerted the authorities. It was about eight hours, and to me,
• 28:18
  that's really hard to reconcile with any scenario where this situation is going to turn
• 28:25
  out okay. I believe we would have much much better evidence than this vague
• 28:32
  report about hearing of banging sounds every thirty minutes that no one seems to be,
• 28:37
  you know, one of credibility seems to be jumping all over if this
• 28:41
  thing was going to turn out okay. I hope I'm wrong, and obviously
• 28:47
  I will admit it if I am, But my estimation is as of right
• 28:52
  now, is that this thing was an implosion. They're already dead. We're
• 28:56
  probably never going to know for sure exactly what happened, and I'll be curious
• 29:00
  to see, you know, how definitively the media moves on from this.
• 29:04
  They may just keep it lingering because there is so much interest in this story
• 29:08
  during a dead news period in the summertime that it is going to be hard
• 29:12
  for them to resist. I will say a couple other things before I move
• 29:18
  on to other stories, including the Trump interview with Brett bar But I do
• 29:25
  think that there is a psychological aspect of this story that is very similar to
• 29:30
  the Kobe Bryant helicopter tragedy which occurred, I mean just a few miles from
• 29:37
  where where I live. He was They were supposed to land at an airport
• 29:41
  that's right around the corner from my house. Bizarrely, I am convinced that
• 29:47
  my family and I we were going to Disneyland that day, and I think
• 29:51
  we missed the helicopter crash going down the one on one in Calabassa's by literally
• 29:56
  minutes. I'm still to this day baffled as to how we did not see
• 29:59
  the crash based upon the timing of it all. So, you know,
• 30:03
  that was a story that almost literally hit home, and like everybody else,
• 30:07
  I was impacted by the horrible tragedy of nine people dying. But the situation
• 30:12
  with Kobe Bryant, in my view, was that this was the arrogance of
• 30:18
  a rich, famous person that there was no need to take the helicopter ride
• 30:23
  on that day where the weather was less than ideal. It was a Sunday
• 30:27
  morning I did the calculations, he was going to save absolutely no time in
• 30:33
  get into that basketball game that day. If you had just driven in a
• 30:37
  limousine, which would have been far safer than a helicopter ride, you would
• 30:41
  have gotten there at exactly the same time. And I do think that there
• 30:45
  was a belief, probably even among that helicopter pilot, that I'm you know
• 30:51
  one, I'm with Kobe, and so inherently everyone's with Kobe, You're going
• 30:55
  to be safe, but also a pressure that when you're with Kobe, you
• 30:59
  got to make sure you get this done and you get there on time to
• 31:03
  justify the fact that you took the helicopter and you want to please Kobe.
• 31:07
  And so I think that that's always been at least part of the equation of
• 31:11
  what happened with that and similar to this, what I think happened with this
• 31:15
  submarine. I think there was a lot of arrogance among rich people that hey,
• 31:21
  it's happening to us, so we're going to be okay. I also
• 31:25
  think similarly the deaths were instantaneous and the people involved probably hopefully had very little
• 31:32
  if any idea what was even happening to them. But you know, again,
• 31:41
  I hope, I hope that this somehow turns out better than I'm for
• 31:45
  telling, but I do see some some eerie similarities between the psychology. I'm
• 31:51
  not suggesting that, by the way, the risk level was the same.
• 31:55
  I tweeted about this and someone claimed that I was saying the risk level of
• 32:00
  going down to see the Titanic and taking helicopter ride from Newport Beach to Camario,
• 32:05
  California, and then driving two thousand oaks was somehow the same. I'm
• 32:10
  not saying that. I'm saying that they took a risk that was unnecessary and
• 32:16
  based in arrogance and an overconfidence based upon their own status in society, and
• 32:23
  I think that those are similar aspects to what probably caused this particular situation.
• 32:30
  The last thing I'll say about this for now is that the media coverage of
• 32:35
  the Titanic submarine story does validate one of my I don't know what you would
• 32:43
  call these the ten commandments, probably to more than ten of them, but
• 32:46
  the tenants of what I believe drives media coverage, and much to my shock,
• 32:54
  I had someone tweet at me that they remembered me commenting on this phenomenon
• 33:01
  way way, way, back in my radio days at KFI in Los Angeles,
• 33:07
  which is a million years ago, but I used to talk a lot
• 33:12
  about how a news story gains coverage exponentially for how far away from the Earth's
• 33:21
  crust the story occurs. And that might sound confusing at first, but what
• 33:28
  I mean by that is a news story if it occurs way above the Earth's
• 33:32
  crust or way below the earth crust, will get far more media coverage than
• 33:39
  it would if the exact same thing happened on land. It's just a weird
• 33:45
  media phenomenon, and I'm s driven I think by the audience. The audience
• 33:51
  is, for some reason far more interested in that. So therefore stories that
• 33:54
  are in space get the most news coverage and compare arrison to what would happen
• 34:00
  if they occurred on land. I mean the Space Shuttle disasters are a really
• 34:05
  good example. Not that the Space Shuttle disasters were not news stories. They
• 34:08
  absolutely were, but at the same exact people died in a car accident on
• 34:14
  the way to Cape Canaveral that day. It wouldn't have been nearly as big
• 34:19
  a story because it didn't happen in space. JFK Jr Is maybe the best
• 34:24
  example, ever, because that story began in the air and ended in the
• 34:30
  sea, and you had a massive celebrity with amazing hair, and so you
• 34:35
  know that the JFK Junior story, again, while it was a news story,
• 34:39
  you know, with him crashing his plane and killing his wife and friend,
• 34:45
  absolutely a news story. But to me that was one of the most
• 34:49
  overplayed news stories of all time. And it was at least in part because
• 34:53
  of this rule I have that the further away from the Earth's crust or on
• 34:59
  land, and if you will a story happens, that's how much more media
• 35:04
  coverage it will get, especially if a celebrity is involved. And in the
• 35:07
  JFK Junior story, basically, if you relate it to this one, the
• 35:10
  Titanic is JFK Jr. Everyone knows JFK Jr. Everyone's enticed by JFK Jr.
• 35:17
  Obviously the amazing hair. Obviously, if you're of a certain age,
• 35:22
  you remember the salute of his dad's funeral procession. Well, the Titanic has
• 35:28
  a similar place in American lore, and that's why this story has gotten so
• 35:35
  much attention. I mean, if these people again had died in a car
• 35:37
  accident on the way to the kittting to the ship, no one would care
• 35:43
  or if this was an exploration of a shipwreck that no one had ever heard
• 35:46
  of before, it would be a minor story and it would not be getting
• 35:51
  nearly this much attention. But there is this weird phenomenon that stories that are
• 35:57
  way up in the air or deep into the ocean, they get more news
• 36:00
  coverage than they would otherwise, and this story certainly fits that characterization. I
• 36:07
  want to move now to the Donald Trump Brett Bear interview on Fox News Channel,
• 36:14
  which has gotten an enormous amount of attention within the news world over the
• 36:19
  last couple of days, and understandably so. Now, the first thing about
• 36:22
  this interview is I'm a bit confused as to why Trump did it. I
• 36:28
  don't understand what his motivation was. I really don't. I mean, he's
• 36:34
  winning big in the polls, there's no sign that the latest federal indictment is
• 36:39
  hurting his support. By talking, especially with an interviewer that you know is
• 36:45
  a good interviewer and clearly was willing to take Trump Vaughn, probably even more
• 36:51
  so than I expected, You're making yourself vulnerable on legal issues by making comments
• 36:57
  that could come back to haunt you in court. So I don't understand why
• 37:01
  Trump did it. I didn't get the timing, I didn't understand I didn't
• 37:06
  understand why he would even bother to do this. And from Bear's perspective,
• 37:13
  I thought the Bear did a really good job. I thought he did a
• 37:16
  better job than Caitlyn Collins did in that CNN town hall. Now Bear had
• 37:22
  the advantage. This is where the crowd really tells the tale here and how
• 37:28
  dumb it was for CNN to do the Trump event in front of a pro
• 37:32
  Trump, all Republican, mostly very pro Trump crowd in New Hampshire, because
• 37:38
  the crowd completely changes the dynamic of this kind of an interview situation. And
• 37:45
  I defended Caitlyn Collins for trying to do the best she could in the CNN
• 37:50
  town hall, but that it was basically impossible because of who Donald Trump is,
• 37:54
  but one on one in a room, and clearly Trump had a lot
• 38:00
  more respect for Bret Bare. At least he allowed Bret Baar to ask his
• 38:05
  questions and try to hold him accountable where he was not telling the truth.
• 38:10
  I thought that Bret Bear, you know, I liked the tack that he
• 38:14
  took. It was very subdued but unrelenting, and you know, he pressed
• 38:21
  him. He didn't come to as as strong a conclusions as I wish that
• 38:27
  he would have. But it's clear that Bret Bare didn't view his role as
• 38:30
  a debater of Donald Trump. He was a questioner of Donald Trump, and
• 38:34
  that he was only going to go so far when it came to contradicting him
• 38:38
  and saying, well, you're just you're just wrong about that. He did.
• 38:42
  He did basically tell him he was wrong about having won the twenty twenty
• 38:45
  presidential election. But by and large, you know, if I had been
• 38:51
  doing it what I have gone further than Brett Barr. Yes, but I
• 38:53
  probably wouldn't have gotten to that point. One because Trump would never do an
• 38:57
  interview with me, but also because you know, it would have been two
• 39:00
  people going at each other's throats almost immediately. Bear was able to contain and
• 39:07
  keep his composure, and I thought was much more effective than almost any other
• 39:13
  interview where I've seen with Donald Trump when it comes to that particular tactic.
• 39:17
  Now, I was surprised that Bear was willing to do this given the vulnerable
• 39:23
  position that Fox News Channel is in, especially post Tucker Carlson firing. I
• 39:30
  don't think they have the leverage to go full bore on the attack against Donald
• 39:35
  Trump. As many thought that they might at the beginning of this year that
• 39:38
  there would be a divorce between Fox News Channel and Donald Trump. I don't
• 39:42
  see that happening. I don't see any evidence of that happening. This interview
• 39:46
  is as close as you're going to come, at least in the last few
• 39:50
  months, to a situation where a major Fox personality was really directly taking on
• 39:55
  Donald Trump. Now, they did have Bill barr on Sunday Morning Show after
• 40:00
  the federal indictment. They had Jonathan Turley on, and he was pretty critical
• 40:06
  of Trump. I don't know they're going to keep having bar On and Jonathan
• 40:08
  Turley, But well, I'll give Bret bear some kudos for how he handled
• 40:15
  this interview. Now. The interview was aired in two different parts over two
• 40:20
  different days. The first part dealt largely with issues related to the federal indictment
• 40:27
  involving classified documents, but there were also some other highlights, like Bret Baar
• 40:32
  going after Donald Trump on the issue of hiring the best people and what his
• 40:37
  track record really is on that topic, as well as the claims that he
• 40:43
  won the twenty twenty election. When Bear asked him, you know how you're
• 40:47
  gonna appeal to suburban women who you lost in twenty twenty, They're not going
• 40:52
  to want to hear about how you actually won the twenty twenty election and that
• 40:58
  you know you'll do it again in twenty twenty four, there was no There
• 41:00
  was no real answer to that. There was no plan outline as to how
• 41:05
  you're going to change minds in twenty twenty four. What's going to be different
• 41:08
  in twenty twenty four than it was against Joe Biden in twenty twenty After that
• 41:13
  was very clear, there's I could play dozens of clips from both parts of
• 41:17
  this interview, but we don't have the time to do that, and other
• 41:21
  people are doing that, I'm sure, So I'm just going to play two
• 41:23
  clips from part one of the interview. And there are a couple of reasons
• 41:30
  why I'm picking these clips. One is that this was the greatest evisceration of
• 41:35
  Trump in the entire interview, in my opinion, and it probably got the
• 41:38
  most attention. This is Brett Baer, systematically and with a great demeanor,
• 41:47
  very calmly eviscerating Donald Trump on this entire issue of him having hired the best
• 41:53
  people. And this is a topic that I have discussed numerous times on the
• 41:59
  podcast, and that one that I wish and hope will become a bigger issue
• 42:02
  in the twenty twenty four Republican primary campaign. By the way, my friend
• 42:07
  Steve Cortez, who works for a Never Back Down the DeSantis Political Action Committee,
• 42:15
  has been raising this issue and it comes up in the second clip.
• 42:19
  Then I'm going to play for you Steve Cortez and his criticism of Trump on
• 42:23
  this subject come up, and Trump's responses is fascinating, which we'll get to
• 42:28
  momentarily. But here is the first of two clips on this issue. They're
• 42:34
  connected, but I'm going to stop in the middle basically of this discussion.
• 42:37
  This is the juiciest part where Brett Bear absolutely surgically takes apart this entire bogus
• 42:45
  notion that Donald Trump hires the best people as he goes through all of those
• 42:51
  who he is previously hired in major positions who are not supporting him in twenty
• 42:57
  twenty four to various degrees. And here's what that sounded like on Fox News
• 43:00
  Channel in twenty sixteen. You said that I'm going to surround myself with only
• 43:06
  the best and most serious people. Well I did do that, Staff,
• 43:08
  tremendous. Look, we had the best economy we've ever had. This stuff
• 43:12
  has ever seen. Your Vice President Mike Pence is running against you. Your
• 43:15
  Ambassador of the United Nations, Nicky Haley, she's running against you. Your
• 43:19
  former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he's not supporting you. You mentioned National
• 43:22
  Security Advisor John Bolden, He's not supporting you either. You mentioned Attorney General
• 43:27
  Bill Barr says you shouldn't be president again. Calls you the consummate narcissist and
• 43:32
  troubled man you recently called and Bar a gutless pig. Your second Defense secretary
• 43:38
  is not supporting you, called you you're responsible. This week, you and
• 43:42
  your White House called your White House Chief is Staff John Kelly weak and ineffective
• 43:46
  and born with a very small brain. You called your acting White House Chief
• 43:51
  is Staff mc mulvaney a born loser. You called your first Secretary of State
• 43:53
  Rex Tillerson, dumb as a rock, and your first Defense Secretary James maddis
• 43:58
  the world's most overrated in general. You called your White House Press Secretary Kayla
• 44:01
  nay milktoast, and multiple times you've referred to your Transportation Secretary Elaine Show as
• 44:07
  Mitch McConnell's China loving wife. So why did you hire all of them in
• 44:13
  the first place? Because I hired ten to one that were fantastic. We
• 44:16
  had a great economy, we had phenomenal people in charge of the economy.
• 44:21
  We had phenomenal people in the military. I'm not a fan of Millie and
• 44:24
  I'm not a fan of certain of the television people. But I knocked out
• 44:28
  Isis. I defeated Isis. They said, Mattis, it would take three
• 44:31
  years, and I don't think we can do it. I did it in
• 44:34
  a period of like four weeks. There's a lot of people who praise you
• 44:37
  for your policies. I just said that that's true. Well, I mean,
• 44:39
  you just went through a list, But don't forget for everyone you say.
• 44:44
  I had ten that love us, and one thing happens I find with
• 44:46
  it now. One of the more remarkable things about that clip is that Trump,
• 44:52
  I guess, out of respect or maybe because he didn't see it coming,
• 44:57
  allowed Brett Baer at the time to go through that extremely long list of
• 45:02
  people who Trump hired who now consider him to be unqualified to be president.
• 45:09
  The Trump's response is, of course, we're absurd. He claims that,
• 45:15
  well, you're just you're nitpicking, you're cherry pickings. There's ten people,
• 45:22
  so everyone that you're going to find that have come to the conclusion that I
• 45:25
  shouldn't be president. Again, that's just not true. There are not ten
• 45:30
  people. He couldn't name one in a major position. I wish that Brett
• 45:37
  Barry gone further in asking the question, Okay, so who's going to be
• 45:43
  part of your next administration? And this is a narrative that Steve Cortez has
• 45:50
  tried to put forward and did so in an interview and in an op ed.
• 45:54
  And I would like to believe that that's at least in part because of
• 45:58
  the fact that Steve and I community quite a bit, and he listens to
• 46:00
  this podcast, and that this is an idea that he thought had merit,
• 46:05
  and I think it does, and Bred Bear clearly think thinks that it does.
• 46:08
  I just wish that Bear would go to that next step. That's probably
• 46:12
  my biggest problem with the Bear tactics and strategy is that he never puts the
• 46:20
  punctuation mark. He never makes it clear. Okay, so this is what
• 46:23
  happened in the past, tell us what's going to happen in the future,
• 46:27
  and who are you going to hire? Who's going to work for you?
• 46:30
  Now, he does try and we'll get to that in a moment in the
• 46:32
  second of these two clips that I'm playing for you. But Trump's lying about
• 46:38
  this idea that there are ten people, you know, they might be in
• 46:43
  his mind, in minor positions that no one's ever heard of, who are
• 46:46
  still beholden to Trump because they're not celebrities and they don't have the position and
• 46:52
  the confidence and maybe the financial security to come out and say, hey,
• 47:00
  this guy shouldn't be president again. And here's why. I mean, there's
• 47:06
  never been there's never ever been a situation like this where this many people from
• 47:12
  top positions have come out publicly to condemn a former president and I know,
• 47:19
  obviously someone We've never had a situation where in the modern era where a former
• 47:22
  president was running for the same job again. But we're in such uncharted territory
• 47:27
  here in so many different ways, and it should matter. I mean,
• 47:30
  these are all very credible people who Trump hired, and you know, in
• 47:37
  many cases he's attacked them, which I think is Brett Bear's major point.
• 47:42
  I wish you would have focused a little bit more on how they are saying
• 47:46
  that Trump shouldn't be president again, not just that Trump himself has condemned his
• 47:51
  own hirings. I mean, that's I think implied in all this. I
• 47:54
  mean, these were bad hires, based upon your own words, mister president.
• 48:00
  What happened, and Trump's response was very inaccurate and unsatisfying. But the
• 48:07
  exchange did not end there, because Trump continues down this path. He changes
• 48:12
  it from ten to one who are actually supportive of him to twenty to one,
• 48:16
  because I guess that's more impressive sounding in his mind. And he starts
• 48:21
  to talk about some specific people and why they have turned on him, because
• 48:28
  you know, Trump's always the victim, He's the martyr. People are about
• 48:31
  to get him for some reason. And he tries to make this argument that
• 48:37
  those that have turned against him have done so for their own selfish either financial
• 48:44
  reasons or for publicity purposes, or from a job perspective. And he even
• 48:50
  lies about Steve Cortez, saying that that Steve left him because he didn't get
• 48:57
  the job that he wanted, so he acts although very nice. They even
• 49:00
  refers to secret tests as the next guy, which Steve was gratified by,
• 49:06
  by the way, But here is Trump in the second portion of this exchange,
• 49:10
  with Brett Bear trying to explain the sinister motivations behind those who used to
• 49:19
  be with him, but no longer are that. Something happens when people leave.
• 49:23
  They can like me very much. I have this woman named Elisa Fara.
• 49:28
  She said the greatest things long after she left. He's the greatest president
• 49:31
  we've ever had. He was unbelievable and believed. Then the view offered her
• 49:36
  a contract, but obviously only if she changed her views, and all of
• 49:40
  a sudden she can say negative things. Money gets offered to people, and
• 49:44
  some people change. But I will say on that list, they're not taking
• 49:46
  money. That for the most part they are. You know, Bar did
• 49:51
  a book. Bar was a coward. The name people that you name For
• 49:54
  every person your name, I can name twenty people that loved the ad aministration.
• 50:00
  And maybe more importantly, the voters love the administration. The voters are
• 50:04
  dying to get back to it, Brett. The voters are tired of being
• 50:07
  left at all over the world. We're run by a fool, We're run
• 50:10
  by a man that doesn't have a clue. I want to talk about foreign
• 50:13
  policy, but just to leave this, you have former senior advisor Steve Cortez
• 50:17
  saying it's going to be tough for you to get the best in the brightest
• 50:21
  because of some of the name calling of people who left. So what do
• 50:24
  you say that Cortes is a nice person, But I didn't give him the
• 50:27
  job he wanted because I didn't think it was qualified. Then he went over
• 50:30
  to sanctimonious as camp. I didn't give him the job. So I'd probably
• 50:35
  say the same kind of thing if I wouldn't get a job if somebody wants
• 50:37
  a job, and a lot of the people that you mentioned, obviously,
• 50:40
  I'm most interested there in the Bill Barr comments because I consider Bill Barr to
• 50:45
  be the most credible person to come out, especially on the federal indictment,
• 50:52
  to say that Trumps toast and that this was wrong, and then he doesn't
• 50:55
  belong in the White House again, because it was Bill Barr, who is
• 51:00
  Donald Trump's hand picked attorney general, and that is obviously a subject matter where
• 51:05
  he has a great deal of expertise and should, in a rational world,
• 51:08
  have a lot of credibility because of his history with Trump. But somehow writing
• 51:13
  a book. In Trump's mind, writing a book discredits somebody because I guess
• 51:19
  they're making money from that. And then he goes on to Steve Cortez where
• 51:23
  he lies about based upon what I know, based upon my extensive conversations with
• 51:29
  Steve. He lies about Steve Cortes leaving him because he didn't get the job
• 51:34
  that he wanted. I mean, I don't want to divulge too much about
• 51:37
  that process, but you know, Steve and I have talked on this podcast
• 51:42
  before in our interview that this was a very arduous decision for Steve. I
• 51:47
  even tried to talk him out of it. He didn't do this because he
• 51:52
  didn't get the right job from Trump, or that he was selling out for
• 51:57
  money from Never Back Down. He's not getting paid that money. This is
• 52:00
  not life changing situation, and Steve thankfully doesn't need the money from Never Back
• 52:05
  Down. He's doing this out of principle and I'm convinced to that. And
• 52:10
  Trump can't come up with a good explanation for why Steve Cortez would do this
• 52:15
  so in his mind, it's got to be money, because that's the only
• 52:19
  thing that motivates Donald Trump. But you know, if you didn't get the
• 52:22
  right job, that's why he's a disgruntled x X employee X political aid and
• 52:30
  therefore shouldn't be trusted, even though he's a nice guy. That's Steve Cortez.
• 52:35
  That's just not true. It's a lie. And in the bigger picture,
• 52:39
  Trump has this backwards. Trump is a cult leader. And when people
• 52:44
  are in a cult and they're under the thumb of the cult, of course
• 52:47
  they're going to be complimentary to a guy who's a narcissist who needs to be
• 52:52
  complimented at all times and doesn't react well to negative criticism or even or any
• 52:59
  kind of criticism, constructive or otherwise. And so obviously when people are with
• 53:04
  him, they're going to tell him how great he is, because otherwise you're
• 53:07
  going to be either fired or ostracized. But then when they're out of the
• 53:12
  cult, they're they're out from underneath the thumb of the cult leader. They
• 53:17
  now have the freedom to tell the truth. So Trump has this exactly opposite.
• 53:22
  Trump thinks that there's this magnet that causes people to be incentivized to criticize
• 53:30
  him once he has screwed them over, or criticize them, when in reality,
• 53:37
  he's criticizing them because he's trying to discredit them in the minds of his
• 53:42
  cult members, because he knows they're going to criticize him, because he knows
• 53:45
  their story is true. So this is on the opposite of reality here.
• 53:52
  He's It's a completely upside down narrative that Trump is trying to create. The
• 53:59
  reality is when you're outside the cult, now you have the freedom to tell
• 54:02
  the truth. Now, are there people who could be disgruntled employees? Are
• 54:07
  there people who have vindictiveness towards Donald Trump? I'm sure there are. This
• 54:13
  is the nature of politics, This is the game. But what Trump's trying
• 54:17
  to do is discredit everybody with this broad brush that somehow I'm the one who
• 54:24
  is the victim here, and it's just not fair and and you shouldn't believe
• 54:31
  anybody. All these people are lying, and they're all lying after they're no
• 54:36
  longer are working for me because you know, they're upset that they either didn't
• 54:40
  get the right job or I fired them or what have you. And it's
• 54:44
  just all bullcrap. Now, how effective this issue is I don't know.
• 54:50
  To me, the question of who's going to work for you in the future
• 54:53
  should resonate because it's a massive part of a presidential administration. I mean,
• 55:00
  the federal government is so large. The president himself does very little. It's
• 55:05
  the people you hire that do the real work. So to me, this
• 55:08
  is this is something that should be pounded consistently by the DeSantis team. I
• 55:14
  don't know that it's going to be. I have no evidence that they consider
• 55:17
  this topic to be, you know, a very potent one. But I
• 55:22
  think that it is, and I applaud Steve Cortez are doing the best he
• 55:25
  can. And he did a great job here of putting it into the narrative
• 55:30
  because obviously it resonated with Brett Bear enough for him to ask Donald Trump about
• 55:34
  it, and we got his response on tape. As far as the impact
• 55:39
  of the overall interview is concerned, you know, part one, most people
• 55:45
  focused on the legal issues. Now I'm not a lawyer. I believe the
• 55:52
  essence of the case against Trump and the federal documents case, the classified documents
• 55:57
  case, but when I listened and watched Trump's answers, they were convoluted they
• 56:02
  were troublesome when it came to the legal case against him. I didn't see
• 56:07
  it as as catastrophic as some other, even conservative legal analysts did. I
• 56:14
  mean, they are the conventional wisdom. Here was the Trump basically convicted himself
• 56:19
  with his statements to Brett Bear, which again has me confused as to why
• 56:22
  he would even do this interview. But here is Britt Hume. And Brit
• 56:28
  Hume is an interesting guy. I used to love him. He blocked me
• 56:30
  on Twitter. He was my mother's favorite reporter back in the day when he
• 56:34
  was on ABC. I've liked Brit Hume for a long time. But I
• 56:37
  think Brit Hume has is someone who does not like Trump but realized where his
• 56:42
  bread was buttered and has gone along with the Trump the situation and enabled the
• 56:46
  Trump situation many many times on Box News Channel. And here was his evaluation
• 56:51
  of that first part of the interview that was aired on day one of the
• 56:54
  two days, where basically Britt Hume is pretending that it's back in twenty fifty
• 57:00
  now and that these kind of things and details and problematic answers actually matter.
• 57:06
  I don't think there's any evidence in the last seven years when it comes to
• 57:08
  Donald Trump that these things actually do matter. But here is brit Hume on
• 57:13
  Fox News Channel pretending that they do. One is that his answers on the
• 57:16
  matters of the law seemed to make to burge On incoherent. He seemed to
• 57:22
  be saying that the documents were really his and that he didn't give him back
• 57:25
  when he was requested to do so and when they were subpoened because you know,
• 57:29
  he wasn't ready to because he hadn't sorted them and separated the classified information
• 57:32
  or whatever from his golf shirts or whatever. He was saying. It was
• 57:36
  not altogether or clear what he was saying, but he seemed to believe that
• 57:38
  the documentary is that he had declassified of evidence of the contrary and therefore he,
• 57:45
  you know, he could do whatever he wanted with him, which I
• 57:47
  don't think it's going to hold up in court. Secondly, when you asked
• 57:51
  him what his pitch was to the kind of suburban female voter that he had
• 57:55
  lost in twenty twenty, his answer was to talk about how he didn't lose
• 58:00
  twenty twenty election. I don't think that's an appealing message for the future,
• 58:02
  and I'm sure his legal and Pluefland advisors were wincing all the way through his
• 58:07
  answers on both those points. Now, I wish we still lived in a
• 58:10
  world where we can go back in time and it's twenty fifteen, and we're
• 58:14
  going to evaluate Donald Trump based upon the standards that we evaluate anybody else,
• 58:19
  because under that standard, Trump would in fact be done. But we don't
• 58:22
  live in that world. It's obvious from the last seven years that we don't.
• 58:25
  And this is a big reason why my perspective on the Republican race seems
• 58:30
  to be much different than almost every other Rhonda Santis supporter. Now, in
• 58:35
  part number two of the interview, I'm not going to play any clips because
• 58:39
  for a lot of reasons, but there's so many different subjects. I'm just
• 58:42
  going to go through basically what the most important elements of Part two of the
• 58:47
  interview were between Donald Trump and Brett bare Trump claims that he has no regrets
• 58:54
  on COVID in his COVID response, and this is simultaneous with the Trump people
• 59:00
  putting out an ad against Ron de Santist, calling him lockdown Ron. This
• 59:06
  is the level of insanity and gaslighting we have here, where the guy who
• 59:10
  was a lockdown. President is accusing the guy Ron de Santis, who is
• 59:16
  the reason why we got out of COVID, because if he quickly realized this
• 59:21
  was all bullshit and he changed course and he let us out of this quagmire.
• 59:24
  Trump is running ads calling the Santists locked down. Ron. This is
• 59:32
  the level of insanity here. This is flat out gaslighting folks. But he
• 59:37
  told Brett Berry has no regrets on his COVID response. He still loves the
• 59:42
  vaccines, but he understands that weirdly Republicans don't like the vaccines, so he
• 59:47
  can't take credit for having saved one hundred million lives or something ridiculous like that.
• 59:53
  And there's no evidence at all that the vaccines saved anywhere near that number
• 59:58
  of people worldwide. I don't know what the number was that the vaccine saved,
• 1:00:02
  but it's grossly over inflated. And the proof of that, by the
• 1:00:06
  way, it's twofold. If I was going to make the case against that,
• 1:00:10
  just look at the charts of the number of people who died in America
• 1:00:15
  pre vaccine as opposed to post vaccine, and it's very very difficult. I
• 1:00:20
  realize that's a simplistic way of looking at it, But it's very, very
• 1:00:22
  difficult to make the argument that vaccines saved an enormous number of people. But
• 1:00:28
  worldwide, if you look at the continent of Africa, Africa is by far
• 1:00:31
  the least vaccinated continent, and you could argue in many ways was the least
• 1:00:37
  impacted by COVID deaths. So the data argument here is not strong when it
• 1:00:44
  comes to massive numbers of people being saved by the COVID vaccines. I do
• 1:00:50
  think that they were beneficial, especially early on, and from a psychological standpoint,
• 1:00:53
  they clearly helped liberals eventually get back to some semblance of normalcy. But
• 1:01:00
  the idea that Trump is still claiming that, you know, they change the
• 1:01:04
  world and he's a savior of tens of millions of people is just flat out
• 1:01:08
  ridiculous. He says in thet Bear interview that he didn't fire Fauci because he
• 1:01:15
  didn't have the authority to which, by the way, contradicts what he has
• 1:01:17
  said previously, and he referred to it as just one of those things,
• 1:01:22
  which was incredibly weak. Unfortunately, Brett Barron made no mention of the award
• 1:01:28
  that Trump gave to Fauci on his last day of office. So you know
• 1:01:32
  when Trump was trying to say that this doesn't make any sense that people claim
• 1:01:37
  that I love Fauci, That's just not true. Well what about the award?
• 1:01:42
  I mean, if you technically couldn't fire him. The other big issue,
• 1:01:45
  which I never gets enough attention, it's not about firing Fauci, folks,
• 1:01:50
  It's about not putting him on national television, on live TV, day
• 1:01:54
  after day after day, when nobody has anything else to do, and every
• 1:01:59
  network is caring, you're getting almost super Bowl ratings. That's where Foucci got
• 1:02:02
  his power. And that was Trump's biggest mistake in the whole pandemic. For
• 1:02:08
  a guy who understands the media as well as Trump does, to put Fauci
• 1:02:13
  on live television and basically advocate his presidency and give Fauci that much celebrity.
• 1:02:19
  I mean, that was the source of Fauci's power, because he was such
• 1:02:22
  a celebrity and so loved on the left. The media then took everything he
• 1:02:28
  said after that as gospel because everyone in America knew who he was, and
• 1:02:32
  at the country at least loved him because he was the guy wrapping them in
• 1:02:37
  a security blanket in the time of crisis. That was a massive mistake,
• 1:02:43
  especially for somebody who understands the media as well as Donald Trump does. And
• 1:02:49
  there was another element in the interview that I found particularly interesting on a couple
• 1:02:52
  different perspectives, where he is trying to talk about RFK Jr. And these
• 1:03:00
  of the Democratic race versus the Republican race, and specifically the debates, only
• 1:03:06
  he refers to RFK Junior. Trump does as JFK j Bart did have to
• 1:03:13
  correct him, but he referred to JFK Junior as a friend of his when
• 1:03:16
  it was actually rf K Junior, which is a pretty big difference for reasons
• 1:03:21
  that I've already discussed indirectly earlier in the podcast, but more importantly to what's
• 1:03:27
  going to happen in the future. He did exactly, and Bear did too,
• 1:03:31
  did exactly what I have said on this podcast and I've said on News
• 1:03:36
  Nation television was gonna be Trump's strategy here, which is to compare Biden's lead
• 1:03:43
  to RFK Junior to his lead against Rhonda Santis and say Biden's not doing debates,
• 1:03:51
  Biden's not gonna have a real primary. The liberal media is not pretending
• 1:03:54
  that this is a real primary, so why should I have to go through
• 1:03:58
  real debates and a real primary. And it was obvious that Bear was leading
• 1:04:04
  to this idea of okay, so are you going to do the debates?
• 1:04:08
  And it got confusing and convoluted because Trump thought he was talking about general election
• 1:04:14
  debates with Biden, which he said he clearly will do and they have to
• 1:04:18
  happen. It was not definitive because Bear tried to get it to the issue
• 1:04:24
  of the Republican debates. Are you going to do the Republican debates? And
• 1:04:27
  there was no definitive answer, which became particularly interesting and in my view,
• 1:04:33
  frustrating when the next day it was announced. In fact, I think it
• 1:04:39
  was even the same day it was announced that the first Republican debate, which
• 1:04:44
  is going to happen in late August and Wisconsin, is going to be aired
• 1:04:47
  on Fox News Channel with guess who as the co moderator, Brett Baar.
• 1:04:55
  So Barn obviously knew that this was the case and was trying to get an
• 1:05:00
  answer on whether or not Trump is going to do the debates. He failed
• 1:05:03
  to do that. But I think this interview it's and Bear being the co
• 1:05:11
  moderator is actually going to reduce even further the chances that Donald Trump participates in
• 1:05:16
  this debate because Bear came in so strong and so negative towards Trump. I
• 1:05:25
  think it's going to be very easy for Trump to be able to make the
• 1:05:30
  argument to his supporters there's no reason for me to do this. I'm up
• 1:05:33
  thirty five points in the polls. Biden's not debating. Brett Bear has it
• 1:05:40
  out for me. Chris Christie shouldn't be on the stage because he said he
• 1:05:45
  was gonna lie about supporting me in the general election. And you know,
• 1:05:48
  and that pledge automatter, which will be hilarious coming from Trump, who broke
• 1:05:54
  his own pledge, you know, when it came to the twenty sixteen debates
• 1:05:57
  and didn't raise his hand when the candidates were asked who would pledge to support
• 1:06:01
  the eventual nominee in the general election. But that doesn't matter. Facts don't
• 1:06:06
  matter, logic doesn't matter, consistency doesn't matter. So Trump, I think
• 1:06:12
  just got a stronger argument for staying out of that debate, assuming he's still
• 1:06:16
  winning by similar margins to what he is currently When it comes to Republican polling
• 1:06:23
  and the fact that he didn't answer Brett Baar, I think was a further
• 1:06:26
  indication that that's going to happen again. To be clear, there are two
• 1:06:30
  options here for Trump. You either bail out of the debates and say I'm
• 1:06:34
  not doing them because Biden's not doing them, or you sabotage the debates.
• 1:06:39
  You use your leverage to the point where you can dictate who's in the debates.
• 1:06:42
  You can dictate the rules, you can dictate the moderators, you can
• 1:06:45
  dictate almost everything if you're Donald Trump, because you're the star of the show,
• 1:06:49
  and you can make it so that they're not real debates and you're not
• 1:06:53
  really in any vulnerable situation. Gun to my head, I don't think Trump
• 1:06:58
  does this Fox News Channel debate after what happened with Bret Bare. I think
• 1:07:01
  it actually makes it even easier for Trump to get out of the Fox News
• 1:07:08
  Channel debate, which is just a classic example where Trump loses a battle there.
• 1:07:14
  But even losing that battle against Bret Bare may help him win the war
• 1:07:18
  by avoiding the debates and effectively shutting down the Republican primary process, which has
• 1:07:25
  always been my greatest fear in this whole situation, and why I have been
• 1:07:29
  constantly saying that the polls actually do matter right now, even though it's technically
• 1:07:34
  very early in the process. They matter from the standpoint of leverage, and
• 1:07:39
  Trump is a master at using leverage to his advantage. Now, after Trump
• 1:07:46
  taped the interview with Bret bare but before the second part aired, we learned
• 1:07:53
  that Hunter Biden had taken a plea deal with his dad's Department of Justice on
• 1:07:59
  tax and gun charges, and that he's going to be likely facing no jail
• 1:08:04
  time. Now. Supposedly, the investigation into Hunter Biden is still ongoing.
• 1:08:10
  But this outraged Donald Trump and his supporters. I can understand why it does.
• 1:08:18
  Although I would suggest that, you know, Donald Trump could probably take
• 1:08:21
  a plea deal too if he was smart about doing this. And I'm sure
• 1:08:28
  as lawyers would love to get the hell out of this situation, but I
• 1:08:31
  don't see Trump doing that because he would have to meet some level of defeat.
• 1:08:35
  Now, was this sweetheart justice for Hunter Biden. I'm not an expert
• 1:08:40
  enough to know for sure. There are people who have claimed that there are
• 1:08:45
  similar situations where there have been far more severe punishments given out. Obviously,
• 1:08:50
  there's an inherent conflict of interest given the fact that Hunter Biden is the infamous
• 1:08:56
  son of Joe Biden, who did not answer questions about this plea deal,
• 1:09:01
  saying only that I'm proud of my son. As for Donald Trump's reaction to
• 1:09:05
  this, he was outraged and enraged, and he went on true social and
• 1:09:12
  he posted the following, The Hunter slash Joe Biden settlement is a massive cover
• 1:09:18
  up. It's in capital letters. You know it's true. The rest of
• 1:09:23
  this is also all in capital letters and full scale election interference scam, the
• 1:09:29
  likes of which has never been seen in our country before a traffic ticket,
• 1:09:34
  and Joe is all cleaned up and ready to go into the twenty twenty four
• 1:09:39
  presidential election. And this as crooked doj state and city prosecutors, Marxists and
• 1:09:45
  communists all hit me from all sides and angels with bull and dot dot dot
• 1:09:55
  I guess meaning bull crapper, bullshit, make America great again? Exclamation point,
• 1:10:00
  exclamation point, exclamation point. And you know, I'm sure that this
• 1:10:04
  fits right into the narrative in the mindset of Trumps supporters that the whole system
• 1:10:11
  is rigged against Donald Trump. Everyone else gets a sweetheart deal it furthers this
• 1:10:15
  narrative, which further helps Trump because it further makes him immune to any criticism.
• 1:10:21
  It delegitimizes, certainly the federal indictment against Donald Trump in the minds of
• 1:10:28
  Trump's supporters, and it's just not helpful to anybody except those that want Donald
• 1:10:34
  Trump to be the Republican nominee, which may very well include Joe Biden and
• 1:10:40
  his campaign in the Democratic Party because they believe that he will be the easier
• 1:10:44
  opponent to defeat, especially in the electoral College. So once again, it
• 1:10:48
  seems like everything that happens tends to favor Donald Trump, and it's exceedingly frustrating.
• 1:10:57
  Before we get to our interview with Ian Miller, there's two other stories
• 1:11:00
  that I want to mention, and they're kind of similar because I've always connected
• 1:11:06
  the issues of COVID and global warming climate change because I think they're essentially the
• 1:11:14
  same thing many ways. COVID is much more real in my view than man
• 1:11:19
  made global warming, but the way the left looks at them and the way
• 1:11:24
  they've become part of the left wing religion, and the tactics that are used
• 1:11:29
  with regard to both when it comes to taking away freedoms and liberties, and
• 1:11:33
  changing the way America works, and instilling government power over our lives in all
• 1:11:40
  sorts of ways that would have been unimaginable just a short period of time before
• 1:11:44
  in American history. I think are all very very similar. The first story
• 1:11:48
  deals allegedly with global warm and climate change. I have said numerous times that
• 1:11:54
  one of the biggest pieces of bullcrap when it comes to the global warm and
• 1:11:58
  climate change media narrative is the issue of wildfires. There's no evidence that wildfires
• 1:12:03
  are on the increase because of global warming climate change. And I've also told
• 1:12:08
  you that over the last seventeen months here in California, despite the media's preferred
• 1:12:14
  narrative, we have had no major firefight firefighting situations when wildfires of really epic
• 1:12:23
  proportions, and that in its totality, twenty twenty two was a very very
• 1:12:28
  good year for not having major wildfires in California, despite the fact that we
• 1:12:32
  were still in a drought before. We just got hit with the coldest,
• 1:12:35
  the wettest, and the snowdiest winter literally in the modern history of California.
• 1:12:41
  Now there was one exception, really one significant exception, over that seventeen month
• 1:12:46
  period when it came to wildfires, and that occurred in July of last year
• 1:12:51
  with the so called Oak wildfire, which happened just outside of Yosemite, which
• 1:12:57
  I talk a lot about Yosemite because my family goes there at least once a
• 1:13:00
  year because it's my wife's favorite place. Well, there's an interesting development with
• 1:13:05
  regard to that Oak wildfire that the news media, of course will ignore.
• 1:13:10
  This from the Washington Free Beacon. Authorities busted a Democratic donor for allegedly starting
• 1:13:18
  a quote unquote ginormous inferno in Yosemite National Park. Democratic politicians had insisted climate
• 1:13:27
  change was to blame for the blaze, which destroyed more than one hundred homes
• 1:13:30
  and injured several firefighters. In July of twenty twenty two, Edward Frederick Wackerman,
• 1:13:38
  which is apparently his actual name of Mariposa, California, faces a number
• 1:13:43
  of charges, including aggravated arson, following his arrest last week. The arson
• 1:13:49
  suspect is donated almost two thousand dollars to Democratic candidates and committees since twenty twenty,
• 1:13:57
  including one thousand dollars to Tim Ryan's failed US Senate campaign in twenty twenty
• 1:14:01
  two and four hundred dollars to the Lincoln Project. They refer to the Lincoln
• 1:14:06
  Project as they disgraced Liberal Superpack, which claims to be a bunch of former
• 1:14:11
  Republicans who are just against Donald Trump, but they're actually against everything Republican because
• 1:14:15
  their audience and donor bases all liberals and they're just basically total sellouts. But
• 1:14:20
  this story is rich, right, so it basically is a pinball machine when
• 1:14:26
  it comes to my side of this argument. Number One, even the one
• 1:14:30
  exception to the fact that we've had an incredible run of no major wildfires in
• 1:14:33
  California had nothing to do with climate change global warming. It was literally due
• 1:14:39
  to arson, as is often the case with regard of these fires, which
• 1:14:42
  is what happened in large part in Canada, causing the smoke to come over
• 1:14:46
  the Northeast in the last couple of weeks. It's arson. Arson is not
• 1:14:50
  global warming, climate change. But number two, here we have somebody who
• 1:14:56
  is a Democrat, obvious a liberal, who was doing this, and you
• 1:15:00
  have to you know, there's no apparent evidence that that was his motivation,
• 1:15:03
  but you could It doesn't take a leap of faith or or a leap of
• 1:15:09
  logic to presume that that was at least part of his motivation. I mean,
• 1:15:14
  if you're creating the forwarding this narrative and you're very much a liberal,
• 1:15:20
  and you know you want people to believe in climate change, then starting wildfires
• 1:15:27
  near Yosemite would make some sense. Well, the most important part of this
• 1:15:32
  is it had nothing to do with climate change or global warming, and it
• 1:15:35
  was done by a liberal. And the media will keep this story completely under
• 1:15:41
  wraps because it does not fit their agenda in any way, shape or form.
• 1:15:45
  That's a story involving global warming, climate change. Here's one involving COVID,
• 1:15:50
  which is a good way of getting into our interview with Ian Miller.
• 1:15:55
  The Los Angeles Times, which is by the way, just recently had mass
• 1:16:00
  of layoffs because they are failing dramatically, and it's not just because of the
• 1:16:04
  broken business model, but it's because they are so absurdly woke and liberal it's
• 1:16:10
  unreadable and oftentimes they go completely off the cliff and this is one of those
• 1:16:15
  examples. The New York Times has a headline this week in June late June
• 1:16:20
  of twenty twenty three with the following message, could fourth of July trigger a
• 1:16:29
  summer COVID nineteen surge. What LA County data show. We're in twenty twenty
• 1:16:36
  three, and the LA Times still in headlines. One is pretending that COVID
• 1:16:44
  nineteen is still a major thing, even though you know, statistically people are
• 1:16:48
  still dying at pretty much the same rate they were dying during times in which
• 1:16:54
  the pandemic was still considered to be serious. But it's obvious the entire country,
• 1:16:57
  even here in California, has moved on. That is still a thing,
• 1:17:00
  But more remarkably than that, they're still holding onto this incredibly bogus notion
• 1:17:05
  that human behavior directly impacted the spread of the virus and was the source of
• 1:17:15
  surges. There's no evidence for that at all. Zero. I mean in
• 1:17:23
  Los Angeles is a great example of this. If we go back to when
• 1:17:29
  LA first started to become semi normal, it was because we were having the
• 1:17:34
  Super Bowl in February of twenty twenty two. All right, so this is
• 1:17:40
  the best example possible. Fourth of July is an outdoor event where you know,
• 1:17:44
  you don't get large crowds together except maybe for fireworks, and they're outside,
• 1:17:47
  and there is no logic to even if we were in the middle of
• 1:17:51
  a pandemic. But the super Bowl was in February, and it's obviously I
• 1:17:59
  mean stadium is technically indoor parties or indoors. The super Bowl was really what
• 1:18:05
  facilitated Los Angeles started to become normal. That was the event that did it.
• 1:18:12
  And January of twenty twenty two was a terrible month, maybe the worst
• 1:18:18
  month of the entire pandemic nationwide and in California if you look at the spread
• 1:18:25
  as well as deaths, and so we had the super Bowl in February of
• 1:18:30
  twenty twenty two, and what happened in Los Angeles and southern California after the
• 1:18:36
  super Bowl as well as nationwide, cases and deaths continue to go down.
• 1:18:43
  So if the super Bowl, in the midst of one of the worst surges
• 1:18:49
  in the entire pandemic, did absolutely nothing in a negative fashion to continue the
• 1:18:58
  surge or to create a new surge, then what the hell is fourth of
• 1:19:01
  July going to do in twenty twenty three. But this is the illness,
• 1:19:08
  this is the religion that to this day still impacts The Los Angeles Times,
• 1:19:14
  one of the biggest media outlets, so they're not as big as it used
• 1:19:17
  to be. In the entire United States of America. It's a religion,
• 1:19:23
  and they were wrong, and they will never admit they were wrong, and
• 1:19:26
  they're still pretending that this religion has not been discredited. And it is a
• 1:19:31
  religious belief that the fourth of July might trigger a summer COVID nineteen surge.
• 1:19:38
  We have over three years of data proving that that is just a fallacy.
• 1:19:44
  It's a fantasy. It's a liberal fantasy, and it's a religious belief not
• 1:19:47
  based in any logic, data, or science. And these are the people
• 1:19:51
  that pretend to be the pro science people. We're living in opposite world,
• 1:19:57
  folks, and of course when it came to COVID, we lived in opposite
• 1:20:00
  world quite a bit. One of my favorite follows on Twitter is as a
• 1:20:04
  guy by name of Ian Miller. He's a writer for the conservative sports media
• 1:20:09
  outlet OutKick, and he's also written two books about COVID and the COVID response.
• 1:20:15
  His most recent book is Illusion of Control, COVID nineteen and the Collapse
• 1:20:19
  of Expertise. And recently he and I got together for what I thought was
• 1:20:24
  a very interesting interview, and here's what that sounded like. Ian Miller is
• 1:20:28
  a writer at the conservative sports media outlet OutKick, and the author of two
• 1:20:33
  books about the COVID response. His new book is called Illusion of Control,
• 1:20:40
  COVID nineteen and the Collapse of Expertise Ian Miller. Welcome to the Death of
• 1:20:45
  Journalism podcast. Well, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate
• 1:20:48
  it. You and I have exchanged dozens and dozens of direct messages over the
• 1:20:55
  last couple of years because of our common thing when it came to COVID,
• 1:21:00
  especially when it came to masks. You kind of become the conservative Twitter mask
• 1:21:08
  data expert over the last couple of years. How did that happen? You
• 1:21:14
  know, honestly, I have no idea now it was. It kind of
• 1:21:16
  happened by accident, I think. I you know, like like you,
• 1:21:20
  I was in southern California when this all started. When COVID started, obviously,
• 1:21:26
  you know, we had a lot of mass mandates, we had lockdowns,
• 1:21:28
  we had everything you can possibly imagine. And being in southern California,
• 1:21:32
  you know, I was curious myself, just like, is this all working
• 1:21:36
  in La County. It made all their data public, so it was really
• 1:21:39
  easy to just go to their website and download it and check for yourself and
• 1:21:43
  see what was going on. And it became pretty obvious to me pretty early
• 1:21:46
  on that it really wasn't making any difference because you could look at LA and
• 1:21:49
  compare it to other areas. It didn't have mass mandates and there was no
• 1:21:53
  difference, or LA would be doing worse. And that to me it was
• 1:21:57
  like, well, if master is so important, that shouldn't be possible.
• 1:22:00
  And there are a lot of people on Twitter that we're doing similar things,
• 1:22:02
  but they would you know, obviously people are Busyness wasn't their whole life,
• 1:22:05
  so they would do it periodically, and for me, I wanted to see
• 1:22:10
  consistently is this what kind of difference is this making, if anything, across
• 1:22:14
  a broader sample than just Los Angeles, And obviously, you know, the
• 1:22:16
  data was available for across the whole country, across international countries, and so,
• 1:22:23
  you know, just kind of became a project of mind to do that,
• 1:22:26
  you know, every day, go and look at somewhere else and see
• 1:22:29
  is this working? Is this happening? And obviously there was a lot of
• 1:22:31
  interesting especially at the time, and people were just kind of grew organically where
• 1:22:35
  people would share it and see, oh, well, you know, look
• 1:22:39
  at France they did another mass mandate and it's not working. Or look at
• 1:22:42
  you know, New York State that did another mass mandate, it's not working.
• 1:22:45
  So it just kind of happened organically of just taking the data and showing
• 1:22:47
  people and kind of people are interested and shared it, which was great and
• 1:22:51
  very gratifying. Now we'll get into masks in particular and the data surrounding them,
• 1:22:58
  because I think that that's the smoke king gun of the entire COVID response.
• 1:23:01
  Everything else can be related to that if you understand what happened with masks.
• 1:23:06
  But first, let's just talk a little bit about your your book,
• 1:23:10
  Illusion of Control. First of all, I'm curious, as a guy who
• 1:23:14
  does a lot of work for OutKick, how in the world have you had
• 1:23:16
  time to write two books in this time period? How did you do that?
• 1:23:19
  Again? Uh? Yeah, well you know it was a lot of
• 1:23:24
  late night um too. Took a couple of months to get it done.
• 1:23:27
  Just yeah, I just kind of wanted to work on it after after I
• 1:23:30
  would finish my day job of writing. It's a lot of writing. When
• 1:23:33
  I was finished, I told my wife, I'm like, we're taking a
• 1:23:36
  break. So we just kind of took a week off and and uh and
• 1:23:40
  didn't write a single word for a week, which was nice, But yeah,
• 1:23:43
  it was It's a lot of work, but you know, it was
• 1:23:45
  it's worth doing. It's I think people are I think weep who have been
• 1:23:49
  interested in I think it's it's important to kind of put all this down in
• 1:23:51
  one place, because you know, as as you've done a million things,
• 1:23:56
  we've we've both written a lot during COVID, and it's one thing that's send
• 1:24:00
  some people a link to an archive of articles and say hey, here's one
• 1:24:03
  hundred articles, go read all of them. But people are not going to
• 1:24:06
  do that. But if you say, hey, here's a book and it's
• 1:24:09
  compiled a lot of information in one place, it's a lot easier for people
• 1:24:12
  to kind of access it and get a more comprehensive overview of the work that
• 1:24:15
  we all did. Here. So tell us about Illusion of Control. Yeah,
• 1:24:21
  well, so the first book was really specifically focused on masks, and
• 1:24:27
  obviously, you know it just the way the book publishing works. I finished
• 1:24:30
  writing it, I want to say it was sometime in the middle of twenty
• 1:24:32
  twenty one, and it didn't come out till early twenty twenty two. But
• 1:24:35
  so that was it kind of covered the first half of the pandemic, it's
• 1:24:39
  kind of like to say it, and illusion control was the idea to trying
• 1:24:42
  to cover the second half and expand on just it's not just masks. You
• 1:24:45
  know, they got all the stuff wrong, They got the vaccine passport stuff
• 1:24:47
  wrong, vaccine mandates wrong, and obviously masks, and kind of how that
• 1:24:51
  messaging shifted over time where you would see people Initially it was, you know,
• 1:24:57
  just cover up your face with anything like roll up a shirt and put
• 1:25:00
  it in front of your face. Literally, that was a certain general saying
• 1:25:01
  that, um, you know, or doctor Fauci just being like cloth masks
• 1:25:05
  or hard percent effective, you know, that's the kind of line that they
• 1:25:08
  would have. And then over time it shifted to say, oh, well
• 1:25:11
  it wasn't actually cloth masks didn't actually work that well this whole time. What
• 1:25:15
  we actually needed to wear were a ninety five or surgical masks. And so
• 1:25:19
  I wanted to kind of compare areas that did that that that did follow those
• 1:25:24
  examples of Germany being one for as a good good example and show you know,
• 1:25:29
  over time, even as the messaging shifted none of it was particularly effective.
• 1:25:33
  And you know, and also areas like Australia and New Zealand that initially
• 1:25:38
  seemed like, oh, there were these big COVID success stories, and then
• 1:25:41
  that all changed over time, even though they were continuing these masks policies and
• 1:25:45
  the ninety fives and vaccine mandates and all that kind of stuff. And I
• 1:25:47
  think that was the title kind of sums it up. It was, and
• 1:25:50
  it was an illusion of control. People, experts, thought, politicians believed
• 1:25:55
  if we just listened to the science, you know, follow the science quote
• 1:25:59
  unquote, then we will be able to control COVID permanently or will have better
• 1:26:03
  outcomes. And over time we've seen that completely fall apart across the entire world.
• 1:26:10
  I love your subtitle of illusion of control COVID nineteen and the collapse of
• 1:26:15
  expertise because prior to COVID, while I was a cynic and a contrarian and
• 1:26:23
  skeptical in general, I accepted the idea that there was this expert class that
• 1:26:30
  by and large wouldn't blatantly lie to us and wasn't likely to be completely wrong
• 1:26:35
  about something that was fairly easily understood. Post COVID, here I am,
• 1:26:43
  you know, and when it comes to Republicans these days, I'm probably still
• 1:26:45
  on the side of where the establishment has some incredibility. Most Republicans think the
• 1:26:50
  establishment has zero credibility now, and even I and to the point where I
• 1:26:56
  will never ever ever believe anything the called health experts tell us if it is
• 1:27:02
  in remotely the realm of politics ever again. And I don't think I'm alone
• 1:27:06
  to address this particular issue. I yeah, well, and obviously you know
• 1:27:13
  your your speech in Ventura County coming out their public public health director, there
• 1:27:17
  was a huge, I think viral moment for a lot of people. Obviously
• 1:27:20
  I watched it before we even really had started talking that much on Twitter,
• 1:27:25
  So that was a big influence on me, I think a lot of people,
• 1:27:28
  and it showed, you know, a lot of times that these people
• 1:27:30
  really don't know what they're doing. I think they're kind of making it up
• 1:27:32
  as they go. And they were also kind of outsourcing opinions to broader authorities.
• 1:27:39
  So you have this kind of hierarchy of problems where local public health directors
• 1:27:44
  which had an immense amount of power that no one realized. Nobody knew before
• 1:27:47
  COVID that they had this much power. We're kind of taking orders from,
• 1:27:51
  you know, the next level of the state public health director or you know,
• 1:27:55
  the the CDC and doctor Fauci, and so, you know, they
• 1:27:59
  were just kind of this mindless repetition of whatever was coming from the top.
• 1:28:02
  And we learned very quickly the people at the top also didn't know what they
• 1:28:06
  were doing. Um and so it just kind of this cascading effect of incompetence
• 1:28:11
  and stupidity. And you know, I've been fortunate enough people will ask a
• 1:28:14
  lot like, oh, this is you know, is this part of a
• 1:28:15
  plan? Or are they trying to control us? And things like that,
• 1:28:18
  and you know, I'm sure that there is there is some aspects of that,
• 1:28:20
  and there are some people who do feel like that. I've been fortunate
• 1:28:25
  enough to talk to people that were, you know, pretty heavily involved in
• 1:28:28
  top level discussions for a while, and they were, you know, they
• 1:28:30
  kind of tell me, these people are just not that bright, like you're
• 1:28:33
  just they're not that bright. And and a lot of times, when you
• 1:28:36
  are thirty years into your career and you're at the top of an administrative organization
• 1:28:41
  like the CEC or the or your doctor Fauci, you get there through kind
• 1:28:45
  of bureaucratic administration and through ambition. You know, it's not necessarily being the
• 1:28:51
  best in the pridese in your in your field. It's it's a it's a
• 1:28:55
  combination of other factors, and you don't have to do that much at that
• 1:28:58
  point. You know, your fund raising, you're talking to the president,
• 1:29:00
  you're talking to other politicians, and I think they just, you know,
• 1:29:05
  it's pretty clear that a lot of these experts are not willing to engage with
• 1:29:10
  evidence that contradicts what they believe. They believe that they're infallible, they're not
• 1:29:14
  willing to engage with different ideas, and you know, and just kind of
• 1:29:17
  cascades down from there where you have a lot of local people that really hurt
• 1:29:23
  society by by not thinking for themselves a little bit and not examining the evidence
• 1:29:27
  for themselves. They just kind of followed orders Ian. Since you mentioned my
• 1:29:32
  viral speech back in May of twenty twenty, I want to tell the backstory
• 1:29:36
  of that because I think it really illustrates what you're just talking about. So
• 1:29:42
  it's May of twenty twenty and they're starting to do mass mandates, which to
• 1:29:46
  me, the first part of that that no sense is we've been in We've
• 1:29:51
  been in this now for almost three months, and we never talked about masks,
• 1:29:56
  and now all of a sudden, we're mandating masks from the governments.
• 1:30:00
  So there's only two choices here. Either you were wrong back in March and
• 1:30:04
  you should all be fired if masks really work, or this isn't about science,
• 1:30:11
  because because this doesn't make any sense. But what made me think about,
• 1:30:15
  you know, telling the story, was what you said about how these
• 1:30:18
  health directors are not real bright. What really infuriated me. So I went
• 1:30:24
  to the supervisors meeting and I was intending to talk in a public statement about
• 1:30:30
  masks, which I knew. You know, I'm no expert, but I
• 1:30:33
  just knew from logic and the data that we already had and the science that
• 1:30:38
  was in existence before COVID, that there's no chance that these masks are working.
• 1:30:43
  But what we're forced to sit around for a couple of hours waiting for
• 1:30:46
  the for our time to speak. And one of the things that happened was
• 1:30:50
  that our county health director, Robert Levin, doctor Robert Levin, gave his
• 1:30:55
  presentation, and this was the first time I had seen him speak live,
• 1:31:00
  and I I'm telling you, my blood ran cold because I realized at that
• 1:31:09
  moment, Holly Living Hell, we are screwed because this guy is and not
• 1:31:16
  just a moron, he is a Marxist. This is a guy who is
• 1:31:23
  who believes in tyrant. He believes in quote unquote health tyranny, and he
• 1:31:28
  believes in, you know, in the most extreme absurdities that even at the
• 1:31:32
  time a rational person knew we're completely insane, but we now really know because
• 1:31:38
  we have three years of data to back it up. And I saw the
• 1:31:42
  future. That was what was driving my outrage in that speech that ended up
• 1:31:46
  going viral across the world was I saw the future because I realized, oh
• 1:31:53
  my god, this isn't this something that's gonna pass quickly. This is something
• 1:31:59
  that here here permanently because these people they smell blood. They've been waiting their
• 1:32:04
  whole lives and careers for the opportunity to be relevant and to have power over
• 1:32:11
  people's lives, and they're never gonna let go of this unless forced to.
• 1:32:16
  I'm curious what your reaction is to that story. Oh yeah, no,
• 1:32:21
  I completely agree. I think that there there definitely are And again, this
• 1:32:26
  was this is something that nobody knew because I mean, who knew what the
• 1:32:29
  local public health director was. I had no idea. You know, I
• 1:32:30
  had never heard of Barbara Ferrar until March or twenty twenty in LA. You
• 1:32:35
  know, I'd never heard of the San Diego Health Director or to any of
• 1:32:39
  them. And it really I think they were kind of toiling in obscurity and
• 1:32:44
  kind of getting further and further radicalized in a lot of these policies over time,
• 1:32:46
  and we had no idea, and then as soon as they had an
• 1:32:49
  opportunity, it was like, finally, I can, you know, unleash
• 1:32:54
  what all this, all these ideas that I've been wanting to try, and
• 1:32:56
  we can gavinus almost like we can reorganize society and could rethink the way that
• 1:33:00
  we govern. And I mean, it was just the CDC being everything We're
• 1:33:04
  gonna have to reorganize in terms of equity, and you know, especially when
• 1:33:08
  the vaccines came out and they were saying, oh, well, we need
• 1:33:11
  to prioritize teachers over senior citizens and getting the vaccine. It's like, well,
• 1:33:15
  if you're telling me that this is one hundred percent effective life saving product,
• 1:33:19
  how does that make sense? Well, it only makes sense if you're
• 1:33:23
  if you put political ideology above, you know, evidence based thinking. And
• 1:33:28
  I think it's it's really it's a good. I mean, we all know,
• 1:33:30
  if there's one positive we learned this lesson. Now, I think a
• 1:33:33
  lot of people to not trust these these health officers and to treat them with
• 1:33:39
  a lot more skepticism. And I think, you know, it was a
• 1:33:42
  good. It was an unfortunate lesson that we had to learn because they caused
• 1:33:45
  so much damage over time, but you know, I think a lot of
• 1:33:47
  people have gotten a lot more involved in local politics and local elections and they've
• 1:33:51
  realized the importance of having a more competent health director. And to be honest
• 1:33:58
  with you, one of the things that frustrates me the most is how did
• 1:34:00
  this happen? How did we How did all these health directors go so far
• 1:34:02
  in that direction without anybody realizing it? And you know, how do we
• 1:34:06
  fix that going forward? It's not an easy fix, but you know,
• 1:34:11
  over time we're going to have to because as we've seen, we can't let
• 1:34:14
  them have the power and the control because they don't you know, they don't
• 1:34:16
  handle it well, and they the policies that they impose are really damaging,
• 1:34:20
  really harmful, and don't are not backed by a lot of evidence. I
• 1:34:25
  believe these people are glorified HOA directors. It's the same, it's the same,
• 1:34:30
  it's the same mentality of a little person with a little bit of power
• 1:34:33
  and look out. But unfortunately, I'm not as optimistic as you sound as
• 1:34:38
  far as the public reaction, because there's been no accountability for any of these
• 1:34:42
  people. And by the way, as a PostScript to my speech, I'm
• 1:34:45
  sure this was purely coincidental. You know, this is May of twenty twenty,
• 1:34:48
  and they're still having public meetings in Ventura County. My speech goes viral.
• 1:34:53
  They shut down public meetings for over a year immediately after that. I
• 1:34:58
  was the last perfect not literally but almost literally, the last person to speak.
• 1:35:02
  I'm sure that was science basede and I'm sure had nothing to do with
• 1:35:05
  the political blowback that they were receiving because they allowed people to speak and they
• 1:35:12
  didn't like that. So let me give you my theory. You kind of
• 1:35:15
  asked the question, so how did this happen? So let's talk about masks
• 1:35:17
  in particular, since that's you know, in my perception, your greatest expertise
• 1:35:23
  because I think that the true story of what really happened here is so important
• 1:35:28
  for people to understand, and I think very few people do. And I
• 1:35:31
  think even the conservative media has done a crappy job, largely because it involves
• 1:35:36
  Donald Trump in telling the real story. So here's my version of the real
• 1:35:42
  story, and I want to get your take on this. I believe that
• 1:35:45
  prior to COVID, the expert quote unquote class knew masks We're never gonna work
• 1:35:50
  on a virus like COVID. They knew this. The science was clear about
• 1:35:55
  this. And they also thought there's no chance that America, the land of
• 1:36:00
  freedom and liberty, is going to go for government mandated masks. There was
• 1:36:06
  just no chance that politically that was viable. So those were the two premises
• 1:36:12
  in March of twenty twenty that drove the quote unquote expert class. And then
• 1:36:17
  over the panic of that period of time in March, in April and May,
• 1:36:24
  a couple of things happen. Liberals needed a security blanket. They needed
• 1:36:29
  to have this this idea that they had some semblance of control over whether or
• 1:36:33
  not they were going to get the virus, and so that made the mask
• 1:36:36
  like a security blanket much more palatable. And also it became an anti Trump
• 1:36:44
  virtue signal. It was a virtue signal of how much you are against the
• 1:36:47
  virus as well as how much you're against Donald Trump. And so that makes
• 1:36:54
  masks all of a sudden go from being very unpopular in America to being very
• 1:37:00
  popular, at least among liberals. And because all these health directors are liberals,
• 1:37:05
  these are their friends, these are the people they want appeal to.
• 1:37:09
  This is doctor Fauci's fan base. And they flip. They flip on masks,
• 1:37:15
  not out of science, but purely out of personal politics, because they
• 1:37:20
  knew that the public that they wanted to appeal to was demanding masks. And
• 1:37:29
  that's why, all of a sudden, we go from no masks in March
• 1:37:31
  twenty to twenty twenty two, masks being mandated even in what was left to
• 1:37:36
  schools in May of twenty twenty in the same year. What do you make
• 1:37:42
  of that assessment, that timeline, that analysis. Yeah, I think it's
• 1:37:46
  right on the money in a lot of ways. I do think so much
• 1:37:49
  of this is based around politics, especially in the United States, you know.
• 1:37:55
  And I think one other thing I didn't realize until that COVID was how
• 1:37:59
  powerful the US isn't influencing other world decision making. So like I thought,
• 1:38:03
  you know, because I've talked for this with a lot of people and said
• 1:38:05
  it's got to be politics, right, And but I was like, well,
• 1:38:08
  how's I explaining all these other countries that did the same thing. But
• 1:38:11
  I think they all kind of took their que from the US. A lot
• 1:38:13
  of times they don't have a health agency as powerful or as you know,
• 1:38:17
  important as the CDC, and so they just kind of fell in line.
• 1:38:21
  And but our decision making was was really I think, you know, I've
• 1:38:27
  I've thought a lot about like what was the what caused the initial flip flop,
• 1:38:30
  because you know, I think that explains absolutely. After May twenty twenty
• 1:38:35
  April twenty twenty, a lot of this became politicized where these public health directors
• 1:38:40
  were, you know, the good guys wear masks, the bad guys don't.
• 1:38:42
  And you know, liberals love that kind of thinking anyway, though,
• 1:38:45
  it became a way for them to show, yeah, I'm you know,
• 1:38:46
  I'm looking how good of a person I am. I'm wearing the mask,
• 1:38:49
  and you're the bad guy Republican, You're not wearing a mask and you know,
• 1:38:53
  creating an us versus that mindset is very very powerful for them. But
• 1:38:57
  I think, uh, the initial foot flap was just kind of this you
• 1:39:00
  know who, Yeah, we don't have any evidence that will work. We
• 1:39:02
  don't think it's going to work, but we've got to try something, and
• 1:39:05
  we got to give people a reason to go out of their house again houses
• 1:39:09
  again after we close the you know, shut everything down and now we're back
• 1:39:12
  open again. But people don't feel safe, especially on the left, so
• 1:39:15
  we'll give them this like that security blanket to make them feel like they can
• 1:39:18
  go outside and re enter the world again after we exited lockdown. And then
• 1:39:25
  it just kind of spiraled from there where it goes from Yeah, this is
• 1:39:28
  a recommendation like you know, shooting hope kind of thing like tossing up a
• 1:39:31
  half court three point or maybe it'll work. Doesn't work immediately, but as
• 1:39:35
  it's not working, they just have to keep doubling down and tripling down,
• 1:39:40
  the quadrup bringing down because they because they flip flop. Initially it was like,
• 1:39:43
  well it might work, and so if it doesn't, it's because of
• 1:39:46
  lack of compliance, it's because of not enough you know, not enough for
• 1:39:49
  the good guys or the bad guys are wearing masks, and obviously the we're
• 1:39:55
  time, it becomes well, you're not wearing the right mask. So I
• 1:39:58
  you know, I do think it a lot of it was political. I
• 1:40:00
  think a lot of it was based around wishful thinking control, whatever it is,
• 1:40:06
  whatever the motivations were, but the explanation for it is very illustrative of
• 1:40:13
  what we're dealing with when it comes to experts in public health and how little,
• 1:40:15
  how liberal evidence actually matters to them. And you can see it with
• 1:40:18
  the CDC's research they put out over time, with studies they put out to
• 1:40:21
  justify masks are absolutely atrocious. I cover a bunch of them in the book,
• 1:40:26
  and you know, they get made fun of on expert Twitter all the
• 1:40:29
  time because they're so bad. But that's what they you know, they had
• 1:40:31
  no choice. They had to just keep doubling down and tripling down after they
• 1:40:34
  kind of did that initial foot plot. And yet, the only time that
• 1:40:39
  I'm aware of the doctor Fauci has ever admitted that he was quote unquote wrong
• 1:40:44
  hilariously is probably the only time that he was actually right. He has said
• 1:40:48
  he was wrong to be against Masks in March of twenty twenty, and somehow
• 1:40:54
  he just got that one wrong, and he's somewhat apologetic for that, which
• 1:40:58
  is hilarious. And I think of this entire fiasco because no, that was
• 1:41:02
  when he was right. And that's the level of insanity that we're dealing with
• 1:41:06
  here. There's two other elements in on this thing that if we go back
• 1:41:11
  to the beginning of the pandemic, that I want to get your take on,
• 1:41:14
  that are also important, but no one ever talks about. In fact,
• 1:41:17
  I think I'm the only person that I've ever seen talk about these two
• 1:41:20
  things. I think another element that was driving Masks in May of twenty twenty
• 1:41:27
  was we had gotten through the initial phase of the pandemic and it was bad.
• 1:41:31
  I mean, it was obviously very bad in New York, right,
• 1:41:34
  I mean, a lot of people died in New York, but we now
• 1:41:35
  know it's that was largely because of mishandling of nursing homes, Okay, but
• 1:41:40
  by and large within the expert class, I think there was a thought that
• 1:41:46
  wait a minute, this wasn't as bad as we had predicted. I mean,
• 1:41:50
  Gavin Newsom had claimed that twenty five million Californians, we're gonna get COVID
• 1:41:56
  in eight weeks, and here we are eight weeks later, and we're not
• 1:42:00
  even in the stratosphere of that. And while the death rate is bad,
• 1:42:03
  it's nowhere near three percent as we had predicted. And so now we've got
• 1:42:08
  a problem. We have a choice to make. We either say, oops,
• 1:42:14
  sorry, guess what. This isn't as bad as we thought, so
• 1:42:16
  all right, let's go back to normal and hope for the best, or
• 1:42:21
  we hunker down for the long run and pretend pretensing. The thing that the
• 1:42:29
  masks did was it gave them a plausible explanation for why things aren't as bad
• 1:42:33
  as they had predicted. Right, It's the magic mask, And so that
• 1:42:40
  I think was huge. It was huge from the standpoint of never having to
• 1:42:44
  admit that they were wrong about how dangerous COVID was to begin with. And
• 1:42:48
  it also created an atmosphere of emergency and crisis that you could not avoid,
• 1:42:55
  which helped them very much in an election year, obviously, And so by
• 1:43:00
  the way, everything else flows from that. If everyone you see is wearing
• 1:43:03
  a mask, which has never happened before in the history of America, it's
• 1:43:05
  a lot easier to do all sorts of crazy things legislatively because we're obviously in
• 1:43:11
  an unprecedented situation, and this is why we're doing unprecedented things. So what
• 1:43:15
  do you make of that analysis? Yeah, I again one hundred percent agree.
• 1:43:20
  I think that that, on top of being a political virtue signal,
• 1:43:24
  mask also became this kind of symbol that we're all going through something. You
• 1:43:27
  know, these are unprecedented times, as everybody said a million times again,
• 1:43:30
  And I think it's obviously that's not a good way to make decisions, that's
• 1:43:34
  not a good that was not a reasonable way to treat the public. But
• 1:43:40
  I do think it as they realized they were wrong about the severity of COVID,
• 1:43:45
  they couldn't back out. They got we got them. We got ourselves
• 1:43:46
  into this kind of like half halfway situation where you know, there's the zero
• 1:43:50
  COVID top right where Australian New Zealand we're like, we're closing everything, we're
• 1:43:54
  shutting down borders, we're in permanent lockdown because zero COVID, we'll never want
• 1:43:58
  a single COVID case. And the US was like, well, we can't
• 1:44:00
  do that, but we also can't let it just you know, open back
• 1:44:03
  up society, no masks, No, I'll complete normal seed in their minds.
• 1:44:08
  So we had this kind of like stupid halfway zone where we are we
• 1:44:12
  were all still like pretending that COVID was the deadliest disease on Earth. But
• 1:44:15
  also you could go to sporting events starting in the South and like fall twenty
• 1:44:18
  twenty and you could go to you know, things we're hoping and go to
• 1:44:21
  the mall, but you had to wear a mask, as if that would
• 1:44:24
  make a difference at all. And it was just like we're we're not going
• 1:44:28
  to fully shut down society permanently, but we're also not going to let things
• 1:44:30
  just totally back go back to normal, because that would mean admitting we got
• 1:44:33
  this wrong from the beginning, and we can't have that. That's an unacceptable
• 1:44:36
  outcome. M So we're gonna do this like halfway thing of you know,
• 1:44:42
  masks are our way of telling people we're taking this seriously, and we're gonna
• 1:44:45
  do capacity restrictions. We're gonna have perfus periodically, and we're gonna keep schools
• 1:44:48
  closed because the teacher's unions want it. And it's just it's just this like
• 1:44:53
  cascading effective idiocy. That is really frustrating when you think back and think about
• 1:44:58
  how obvious it was at the time. None of this stuff was making any
• 1:45:00
  difference. The masks weren't working, but they couldn't get out of it because
• 1:45:03
  they had, like you said, I think you hit the nail on the
• 1:45:05
  head. They had committed to this idea of COVID being, you know,
• 1:45:10
  this extremely deadly disease, and even though a lot of evidence was coming out
• 1:45:14
  saying, you know, your risk of dying if you're a healthy young person's
• 1:45:16
  functionally zero, and you know, instead of acknowledging that and saying, and
• 1:45:20
  this is what always frustrates me, that's good news, right, we should
• 1:45:24
  have been celebrating that. That was like, young people are at no risk
• 1:45:27
  at this even I mean really under the age of fifty, it's incredibly small
• 1:45:30
  risk. People that are have immunocompromise or you know, over seventy over seventy
• 1:45:34
  five really is what it starts to get at. That's that's who you should
• 1:45:39
  be worried about. Instead, it was we're going to shut everything down.
• 1:45:42
  We're gonna keep schools closed forever. We're gonna have masks for everyone because we
• 1:45:45
  can't just admit that we were wrong, and you know, that's that's insane,
• 1:45:48
  but I think that's kind of exactly what happened. Now. You mentioned
• 1:45:53
  earlier the impact the United States had on other countries, and I always push
• 1:45:59
  back when people say, but John, the whole rest of the world did
• 1:46:01
  similar things, which isn't really true. But okay, you know in Europe
• 1:46:04
  they did, and you know, in the countries that America accepts as legitimate,
• 1:46:10
  I guess they did. But I've always said, well, wait a
• 1:46:13
  minute, if the United States had gone Sweden's route, it would have had
• 1:46:16
  an enormous influence in the other direction. And because what was really happening was
• 1:46:21
  people looked at America not just as a world leader, but again, this
• 1:46:26
  is the statue of liberty as our symbol. And if we're you know,
• 1:46:30
  crapping all over freedom and liberty, then oh my god, this thing must
• 1:46:33
  really be horrendous. Plus, we're you know, seen in most of the
• 1:46:36
  world as a credible entity from a from a scientific standpoint, an economic perspective,
• 1:46:43
  and so the fact that we went along with all this had an enormous
• 1:46:46
  effect on the rest of the country, not just the country, but the
• 1:46:48
  world. Going along with it. But there's another element specifically with regard to
• 1:46:54
  masks. Don't want to get your take on this is the second thing that
• 1:46:57
  I talk a lot about but no one has the balls to ever say,
• 1:47:00
  and that is I think what really allowed the expert class to get away with
• 1:47:04
  masks was the fact that we have this intellectual insecurity about Asia, that we
• 1:47:11
  think that Asians are super smart because they do so well in school in America,
• 1:47:15
  and therefore because Asian countries were masking up and it's part of their culture,
• 1:47:21
  and that because the data originally in most Asian countries was much better than
• 1:47:29
  it was in America, that that was the only semblance of what I would
• 1:47:33
  say, quote unquote logic that was used to legitimately make the argument for masks.
• 1:47:41
  But when we look at the three year history of Asia, it tells
• 1:47:45
  a much different story. So talk about Asia and masks and my theory about
• 1:47:51
  our intellectual insecurity about Asia dictating or allowing the experts to get away with mask
• 1:47:59
  mandates, right, I yeah, I agree. I think early on there
• 1:48:04
  was you know it, there was definitely a looking at South Korea, looking
• 1:48:10
  at Japan, going oh, well, they don't have very many cases,
• 1:48:13
  especially Japan didn't really lock down. That must be because they're all wearing masks,
• 1:48:15
  and and yeah, probably some insecurity about it too. And I think
• 1:48:20
  in people still to this day of say, oh well, a lot of
• 1:48:23
  the Asian countries do better if it wasn't because of masks. And there's been
• 1:48:26
  a lot of studies on this actually, but I think it was probably more
• 1:48:29
  cross reactive immunity that they had from more closely related coronaviruses and that you know,
• 1:48:33
  there's like a T cell thing that it's complicated, but there's a lot
• 1:48:36
  of studies on it, very good ones too, And I think that there
• 1:48:41
  there was this kind of mindset of oh well, if there can if they
• 1:48:44
  can beat it with maths, maybe we can too. And as stupid as
• 1:48:46
  that was, you know, that was that's not a reasonable way to make
• 1:48:49
  decisions. Um. And also I think there was this very concerted effort,
• 1:48:55
  like there's like the Czech Republic, there are studies. I'm sorry, a
• 1:48:58
  story is early on that they were beating COVID with masks, and you know,
• 1:49:01
  there was a lot of these kind of viral videos that we're getting sent
• 1:49:05
  around the internet of Czech Republic's health director saying, you know, everybody who
• 1:49:10
  wore a mask in March twenty twenty, and that's why we have the best
• 1:49:13
  outcomes in Europe. And then if you go back and look, and I
• 1:49:15
  do this in the book, if you go back and look later on,
• 1:49:16
  they have the worst death rate in the world at it. For a time,
• 1:49:19
  you know, they were saying, we did, look at how great
• 1:49:21
  we did. And Asia is the same way. Right, it's not the
• 1:49:24
  worst death rate in the world, but their numbers have gone crazy over time.
• 1:49:27
  South Korea, I just looked at this has I mean, and obviously
• 1:49:30
  you know this is based off testing the other factors, but they have I
• 1:49:31
  think the number six highest case rate on Earth, like the most percentage of
• 1:49:35
  their population is test depositor for COVID sixth highest of any country in the world.
• 1:49:41
  And they've all been wearing masks this whole time. And so you know
• 1:49:44
  that it Initially you could see the kind of like very poorly done logic of
• 1:49:48
  that mindset, but over time you got to go back and admit that you
• 1:49:54
  were wrong and and say, well, it couldn't have been the math because
• 1:49:57
  South Korea now has sixty five percent of their population test test depositive for COVID
• 1:50:00
  and they've been wearing masks this whole time, and I you know, I
• 1:50:03
  think you were completely right, but it's it's another problem that they don't ever
• 1:50:09
  go back and update their thinking and say, yeah, the check Republic.
• 1:50:12
  We all sent around these videos and said, look at us, stupid Americans
• 1:50:15
  who care about freedom and liberty, you know, freedom as they would say
• 1:50:17
  on the internet. And if we've just been like the check Republic, but
• 1:50:21
  the check Republic now has the highest test rate in the world. You know,
• 1:50:24
  there's never that that follow up. It's always just we made our decision
• 1:50:28
  based off of what we think in March and April twenty twenty, and we're
• 1:50:30
  never going to change our minds again. But you know, I think if
• 1:50:34
  you that's the point with the book, that's the point with all the stuff
• 1:50:38
  that could we continue to talk about it is the show they were wrong.
• 1:50:41
  They were wrong about this, then they were wrong about it, their their
• 1:50:44
  motivations are doing it, Then we're wrong. And the data has showed that
• 1:50:46
  they were continued to be wrong, and they never acknowledged it, never admitted
• 1:50:49
  any of it. I'm so glad that you mentioned South Korea. In particular,
• 1:50:54
  and I think Japan belongs in this category too. Of all the many,
• 1:50:58
  many ignoredes in the news media, especially about masks, to me,
• 1:51:03
  right near the top of the list is what happened in Asia in twenty twenty
• 1:51:08
  two, where South Korea not just had an explosion of COVID cases South Korea,
• 1:51:17
  and I watched the data probably as close as you do. I don't
• 1:51:21
  believe that there's any place on the planet that had more COVID cases per population
• 1:51:30
  during a time period in twenty twenty two than South Korea did. And I'm
• 1:51:33
  talking about through the entire pandemic. This is twenty twenty two. That midway
• 1:51:39
  through twenty twenty two, South Korea had a transmission rate that was the highest
• 1:51:45
  that had ever been in the entire world, through the entire pandemic. And
• 1:51:49
  I kept thinking, so, what happened did South Korea do is get a
• 1:51:54
  really bad batch of masks? I mean, this is the ultimate proof that
• 1:51:59
  masks cannot possibly work, and Japan had similar explosion of data. I don't
• 1:52:05
  think the expert class has any explanation for why all of a sudden, Asia
• 1:52:10
  had a horrendous twenty Have you heard one? Because I haven't heard one why
• 1:52:14
  Asia had a horrendous twenty twenty two because it's got ignored. They couldn't address
• 1:52:16
  it because everyone were going, well, what about the mask that he stopped
• 1:52:19
  wearing masks? Of course not but you've not heard any explanation for that,
• 1:52:24
  have you. I I have no, of course not. I mean,
• 1:52:27
  there isn't one, I think, And actually I think you can point to
• 1:52:30
  those those numbers as why a lot of these mandates kind of just quietly dissipated
• 1:52:34
  throughout twenty twenty two, where you know, people were I think it was
• 1:52:39
  especially in the United States too. It's the same thing with like the vaccine
• 1:52:41
  passports that I thought, oh my god, I mean, we're gonna be
• 1:52:43
  dealing with this for years, and especially in Los Angeles, it just felt
• 1:52:45
  like this is animals and then all of a sudden, everybody got COVID.
• 1:52:48
  Anyway, from from winter twenty twenty one into twenty twenty two. You know,
• 1:52:53
  one of not Asia, but one of my favorite examples of just how
• 1:52:56
  bad this stuff was was the La County Public Health director Robert for our commission.
• 1:53:00
  You know, I don't know, there were like fifteen hundred businesses over
• 1:53:03
  just a couple of weeks that her public health deputies went out and did spot
• 1:53:08
  checks, you know, like police spot checks on to make sure masks and
• 1:53:12
  compliance was high. And they reported back in this press release very proudly that
• 1:53:15
  ninety five percent of people in LA were wearing masks, that there's spot checks
• 1:53:19
  and that at least ninety five and that it was keeping LA County residents healthy
• 1:53:24
  and safe. And within two weeks cases have gone up like seventy five times
• 1:53:27
  higher than they were when they released the press release. And it's the same
• 1:53:30
  thing in Asia, right, and there's no acknowledgement of that. It's just
• 1:53:33
  we're just gonna ignore it and move on. They never answer questions about it.
• 1:53:36
  They've never tried. They don't even try to explain it. They don't
• 1:53:40
  try to say, how could Japan have the highest case right on earth?
• 1:53:43
  How could South Korea have the highest case right on earth? When you've been
• 1:53:45
  telling us for years that everybody wears masks and that's the reason why they don't
• 1:53:48
  have COVID cases. They don't even try to explain it because there is no
• 1:53:51
  explanation other than exactly what you said. Masks don't work, But they can't
• 1:53:56
  admit that. So they're just this obstascation and just ignoring it. Really,
• 1:54:00
  and it's it's insane now because the mainstream media will not admit fully at all
• 1:54:05
  that they were wrong about masks, because that would go right to the heart
• 1:54:09
  of their credibility. There are still so many people that believe to this day
• 1:54:14
  that masks must work, at least a little. They've changed the argument a
• 1:54:16
  little to it, well, any little bit helps, and it must help
• 1:54:19
  a little bit. I don't even buy that. I think it actually might
• 1:54:23
  hurt. But when you make the argument that masks don't work from a data
• 1:54:29
  standpoint, I do it in two ways. I look at it in the
• 1:54:33
  big picture and then I and I use one particular example which actually comes from
• 1:54:38
  you. And the big picture is I say to these people, if masks
• 1:54:44
  worked, we have three years of unprecedented real world data. This gets so
• 1:54:50
  underestimated. We've never done this before. We've never tested the entire population for
• 1:54:57
  a virus. So we have data throughout the entire world over three years.
• 1:55:03
  This is, if nothing else, this was the greatest experiment ever done with
• 1:55:09
  enormous catastrophic consequences on whether masks work or not. If masks worked, there
• 1:55:16
  would be no argument, it would be overwhelming that you would be able to
• 1:55:20
  show me a hundred different data charts that make it very clear that masks work.
• 1:55:28
  And instead you can't do anything like that. You go to some BS
• 1:55:32
  study that's contrived with with you know, clearly biased timelines and you know dubious
• 1:55:40
  conclusions. You always go to a study because the study is being done by
• 1:55:44
  people who are desperately trying to justify masks is they're part of the expert class.
• 1:55:49
  And then in the micro I say, okay, so where you don't
• 1:55:54
  have any data where there should be tons, but please explain to me the
• 1:55:57
  disparity or lack of disparity between La County, which you've just mentioned, and
• 1:56:01
  Orange County because they're right next to each other, obviously the same weather you
• 1:56:06
  know to worry about the you know, seasonal issues. La County as masked
• 1:56:12
  up as any county in the entire country. Orange County very much not masked
• 1:56:16
  up, either from a cultural perspective or from a mandate standpoint, and yet
• 1:56:23
  the data lines could not be more similar when it comes to LA and Orange
• 1:56:28
  County. So address those two issues if you will. Yeah, absolutely,
• 1:56:33
  that's to LA and Orange County was one of my favorite examples because it's they're
• 1:56:36
  the same, They're right next to each other, and you know, I
• 1:56:39
  mean the demographics are slightly different, but they're very similar in a lot of
• 1:56:42
  ways actually, and in Orange County had better results with fewer mandates and fewer
• 1:56:46
  policies and fewer and a lot fewer mass. And anybody that was in something
• 1:56:50
  California during COVID would tell you there are a lot fewer people wearing masks and
• 1:56:54
  Orange County than they're were in Los Angeles. In fact, during Las lockdowns,
• 1:56:58
  my wife and I would go to Orange Counting periodically as much as we
• 1:57:00
  could because it felt much more normal than Los Angeles. And yet their results
• 1:57:04
  were better than LA. And you know, I think there's that it's an
• 1:57:09
  excellent point of if masks worked, you should be able to do what I
• 1:57:13
  do in the opposite direction, right, You should be able to present me
• 1:57:15
  with hundreds of examples and all these charts, and I have literally thousands of
• 1:57:18
  charts, present me with thousands of charts showing the opposite impact that the counties
• 1:57:23
  are. The states that mandated masks did so much better than the states that
• 1:57:27
  didn't and it doesn't exist. I know it doesn't exist because if it did,
• 1:57:30
  I would have heard about it. And it doesn't. And you know,
• 1:57:32
  I think you can, Like you said, a lot of these studies
• 1:57:34
  are unbelievably flawed. There's some that are like, oh, it's from March
• 1:57:39
  to May. I'm sorry, from May to June of twenty twenty. That's
• 1:57:42
  how we know masks work. And I mean, it's just do really we
• 1:57:45
  don't we can ignore the next two years of data and focus entirely on the
• 1:57:49
  Northeast in the summer of twenty twenty when they had the seasonal benefit of summer
• 1:57:54
  compared to other areas in the country. I mean, it's just it's like,
• 1:57:58
  it's it's so utterly absurd when you take just five seconds and step back
• 1:58:01
  and think about it. But they don't because I think one of the kind
• 1:58:04
  of broader points that I've realized again is that so many people just outsource their
• 1:58:08
  thinking. There's this comfort blanket of saying, well, experts said this,
• 1:58:12
  and I'm a smart, intellectual person and therefore I believe what experts believe.
• 1:58:15
  And it doesn't mean they don't even have to think about it at all,
• 1:58:18
  it's just somebody smart who shares my political beliefs told me to think this way.
• 1:58:23
  Therefore I think this way, and I would look. I mean,
• 1:58:26
  look, I've asked people before many times. Show me where, Show me
• 1:58:30
  a chart showing that masks were compare a different locate, you know, compared
• 1:58:32
  two counts, because I did it everywhere. It's not just LA I didn't
• 1:58:36
  Washington, DC, in Saint Louis area, and all these places where you
• 1:58:40
  know, one county would have in New York City, one county would have
• 1:58:43
  a mass mandate or you know, a vaccine passport mandate or whatever it would
• 1:58:45
  be, this one didn't. They're right next to each other. There should
• 1:58:48
  be a clear difference if this worked, and there's not. And in most
• 1:58:51
  of the time, the places to have the mandates did worse. That should
• 1:58:55
  not be possible, and it should not be possible over a broad sample where
• 1:58:59
  you can do this across the entire country or the world, really and every
• 1:59:01
  single time the results are the same. It makes absolutely no difference. Should
• 1:59:05
  not be possible. Let's talk about vaccine mandates, because in a lot of
• 1:59:09
  ways they were more outrageous than even the mask mandates. Although I think the
• 1:59:14
  mask mandates were far more damaging than a lot of people are willing to acknowledge,
• 1:59:19
  in ways we wouldn't necessarily think about, especially for kids. But when
• 1:59:24
  it came to the vaccine mandates, liberals really lost their minds. I mean,
• 1:59:29
  the lies were destroyed, maybe even literally, but careers were destroyed,
• 1:59:34
  people were threatened, the people were made to seem like they were horrendous people
• 1:59:41
  causing the pandemic to go on if they didn't get the vaccine. And then
• 1:59:45
  it turned out that the vaccines, at least over the after the first couple
• 1:59:49
  of months, did little or nothing to stop or slow transmission. And I
• 1:59:55
  was one of those people in the first couple of months, you know,
• 1:59:57
  I'm a dad, a guy like you. Certainly seemed it was working to
• 2:00:00
  me. Uh. And then something happened over the next couple of months and
• 2:00:04
  it stopped. And people, especially in the media, will never acknowledge.
• 2:00:09
  But we had by far the highest number of cases in America in January of
• 2:00:15
  the following year, after everyone had already been vaccinating. All right, I
• 2:00:19
  mean, how the hell that happens if the vaccines slow transmission. I don't
• 2:00:26
  know what is your view of what happened with the vaccines, specifically with regard
• 2:00:31
  to the data. Well, I think it's a continuation of a lot of
• 2:00:36
  the same problems that we've been talking about with that where they kind of set
• 2:00:40
  up the good guys versus bad guys argument. Um. You know, I
• 2:00:42
  think early on and you could make some case that it was I mean,
• 2:00:45
  you know, they were saying it was effective. I don't think there was
• 2:00:47
  any data telling it was that effective. But um, and I think pretty
• 2:00:51
  quickly you could you could pick up if you were paying close attention. At
• 2:00:55
  once, you know, rollout got a little bit more widespread, especially in
• 2:00:59
  other parts of the world world that it was pretty obvious even before almicronin,
• 2:01:02
  before January twenty twenty two, that the vaccines were not slowing the spread of
• 2:01:05
  the virus. You know, Iceland is a good example, and I cover
• 2:01:09
  it in the book where Iceland even broke it down cases by vaccination status,
• 2:01:14
  not just like oh, you know, they they had very few COVID cases
• 2:01:16
  for most of the pandemic. And of course there are many stories of praising
• 2:01:19
  Iceland for following science and doing all the right things, and you know,
• 2:01:23
  their their health officials are looking at the United States, going, I can't
• 2:01:27
  believe these idiot Americans don't listen to the experts, and then sure enough that
• 2:01:30
  you know, their cases explode, just like just like the Asian countries.
• 2:01:32
  But in summer twenty twenty I'm sorry, twenty twenty one, their cases what
• 2:01:36
  nuts. And it was they had gotten like eighty five percent of their population
• 2:01:42
  vaccinated. And you can go back and look at doctor Fauci and the CDC
• 2:01:45
  and all these other experts that said, if we could just get to that
• 2:01:47
  level of vaccination, we could end the pandemic prominently. We're done. No
• 2:01:51
  more COVID, it's not spreading anymore. Vaccination, vaccine people are dead ends
• 2:01:55
  for the virus. Iceland at that point they were they had their record breaking
• 2:01:59
  case rates as high as anywhere in the world, and they were breaking down
• 2:02:01
  by vaccination status and it wasn't really any different, Like the numbers were about
• 2:02:05
  the same. You know, seventy percent we're vaccinated, seventy percent of the
• 2:02:09
  cases were fully vaccinated people. So to me, in Singapore was another example
• 2:02:14
  of that summer twenty twenty one where the cases when nuts, and it was
• 2:02:17
  they had a really high vaccination rate. So I mean, early on you
• 2:02:20
  could make you might have been able to make some case, and I was
• 2:02:24
  kind of waiting for the data to come out myself. But once we got
• 2:02:27
  other areas that had that really high uptake and saw these really rapid spread of
• 2:02:30
  infection, to me, it was immediately obvious this is not going to stop
• 2:02:34
  the spread of the virus at all. And that was before Delta really took
• 2:02:38
  over and before Iron took over. But in much the same way with masks,
• 2:02:42
  there's this element of you know, where the good guys, you're the
• 2:02:45
  bad guys, do what we say. If you don't do what we say,
• 2:02:47
  you're going to keep the pandemic going. And it kind of got exacerbated
• 2:02:51
  and made it even worse because of being vaccines in particular. I think so
• 2:02:58
  in my experience, in my experience in as as a writer at the time,
• 2:03:02
  as a columnist, I experienced more direct censorship on the vaccine than even
• 2:03:09
  on MASK. I had a very difficult time writing against MASK mandates, but
• 2:03:14
  I was at least able to do it. I was unable to do the
• 2:03:18
  same thing on vaccines. So they, in my view, the media went
• 2:03:24
  even more overbroard on vaccines than they did on Mask, and I think to
• 2:03:28
  this day the vaccine narrative is more protected than even the mask narrative. Would
• 2:03:33
  you agree with that? Yeah, I think so. I think that's fair
• 2:03:38
  and a yeah, I think it comes down to the people that are that
• 2:03:41
  like to think of themselves as following science. And you know, look,
• 2:03:43
  I'm not anti vaccine by any structure of the imagination. Very normalize for yeah,
• 2:03:47
  very pro vaccine in a lot of ways. It's just this one in
• 2:03:50
  particular could not live up to the claims they were making, and as soon
• 2:03:56
  as that became immediately obvious, any justification for mandates and passports was completely destroyed.
• 2:04:00
  And they did it anyway. I think that's that's the real story,
• 2:04:03
  and that's why I get frustrated. It's like this clearly did not perform to
• 2:04:08
  the level that they were claiming it would, and yet you still forced people
• 2:04:12
  to get it. Biden was trying to get private business businesses to fire and
• 2:04:15
  vaccinated workers. Many people did get fired. You know, you've denied access
• 2:04:18
  into buildings, denied travel and places like Canada you could not go internationally.
• 2:04:24
  I mean, just all these endless stories of these absurdities, these absurd policies
• 2:04:29
  based off of a complete fabrication that you know, was almost immediately disproven,
• 2:04:33
  and it took basically a year for these policies to kind of dissipate after the
• 2:04:38
  whole world can see they were wrong. That's that to me, is is
• 2:04:41
  the big story. Now, you're a sports guy, you work at an
• 2:04:45
  OutKick, a conservative sports outlet, and I am sure, like yourself,
• 2:04:51
  I am just flummixed by the liberal media's reaction to Novak Djokovic. I want
• 2:04:59
  you to imagine for a second, because you're a perfect person to do this,
• 2:05:02
  given your expertise and you work at out Kick. Can you imagine if
• 2:05:06
  Donald Trump had won reelection and he had been the source of vaccine mandates right,
• 2:05:14
  and everything else was exactly the same with regard to the rules, and
• 2:05:18
  Novak Djokovic had been prevented from playing in major tennis tournaments, including the freaking
• 2:05:24
  United States Open, and that he had stood his ground and not gotten vaccinated,
• 2:05:30
  and it eventually comes back and wins numerous multiple major championships and becomes the
• 2:05:36
  greatest tennis champion of all time. How much would the liberal media be embracing
• 2:05:43
  Novak Djokovic to this day in comparison to how much they are ignoring this entire
• 2:05:47
  story under the current fact pattern. That's actually that is an amazing example something
• 2:05:55
  I'd never thought about before, but at one hundred percent truw. I mean,
• 2:05:57
  And obviously we saw this one when the vaccines were before they'd been officially
• 2:06:00
  released, where it was like, I'm never taking a Trump vaccine, right,
• 2:06:03
  that was that was the left mantra. So yeah, as soon as
• 2:06:06
  had Trump been realicted, had he been the one, you know, banning
• 2:06:10
  unvaccinated people, it would be he's a tyrant, he's an authoritarian, he's
• 2:06:13
  a wielding government control, he's you know, etc. He's a fascist,
• 2:06:16
  he's whatever and h and yeah, no, back would be a folk hero
• 2:06:20
  for standing up to the to the authoritarian fascist Donald Trump, and instead it's
• 2:06:26
  you know, well, completely ignored because it's inconvenient. Right, he was
• 2:06:30
  the guy that he stood up to the wrong people, and so the media
• 2:06:33
  doesn't care, especially sports media, which in some ways is even further left
• 2:06:38
  than the regular media, which is hard to believe. But uh, yeah,
• 2:06:41
  he's It's a great example of just how politicized this whole thing was,
• 2:06:44
  that had he stood up to Donald Trump, he would be a folk hero.
• 2:06:47
  He would be endless, glowing profiles of his profiles and bravery and courage
• 2:06:54
  to stand up to authoritarianism and everything. Instead, it's completely, uh just
• 2:06:59
  whitewashed because he's Yeah, it's an inconvenient story, very inconvenient story. And
• 2:07:03
  so that brings me to another topic that is one of my pet peeves when
• 2:07:08
  it comes to COVID. And I agree with you that this having been in
• 2:07:11
  the sports media, that the sports media bizarrely is to the left of the
• 2:07:14
  news media, which is I've always been confused by this, and it's gotten
• 2:07:17
  worse over time. I believe largely because of racial issues. I think that
• 2:07:23
  that's a big part of what drives it. But what I believe in,
• 2:07:29
  and I don't think you and I have talked much about this. I don't
• 2:07:30
  know one hundred percent where you stand on this, but I actually blame sports
• 2:07:35
  for the quote unquote pandemic lasting as long as it did. See I think
• 2:07:41
  if sports had stood up in a way that it should have and could have
• 2:07:45
  given the actual science, especially when it came to outdoor events, that if
• 2:07:49
  sports had been a bashing of rationality, this whole thing would have ended much
• 2:07:55
  sooner than it did. And while there were some small points of hope,
• 2:08:03
  like, for instance, I give credit to the SEC in football and in
• 2:08:07
  twenty twenty, because you know that without them pushing there would have been no
• 2:08:11
  football at all, even though it was pathetic what happened to football in twenty
• 2:08:16
  twenty. But I mean there were there were some small examples of people pushing
• 2:08:22
  back. But you know, I'll always blame Augusta National because Augusta National should
• 2:08:28
  have had the goddamn masters in April of twenty twenty and we all would have
• 2:08:31
  seen that nothing would have happened, and the whole world would have been different.
• 2:08:35
  But I was very disappointed and will never forgive the sports establishment for going
• 2:08:41
  along with this nonsense in a way that made it impossible to have school in
• 2:08:46
  Blue states in twenty twenty and in twenty twenty one. Do you agree with
• 2:08:52
  me on that? Yeah, I do, I do an extent. I
• 2:08:56
  think I think sports could have stood up for themselves a lot more, and
• 2:08:58
  I think part of the reason they didn't is and this is again something I
• 2:09:03
  didn't realize fully until until COVID started, is that a lot of the kind
• 2:09:07
  of bureaucratic administrative rulers of these institutions at the top, are they share that
• 2:09:13
  they're all the same politics, you know, they're they were very they're very
• 2:09:16
  cowardly first of all, and they're very scared of media criticism. And I
• 2:09:20
  think that they kind of probably correctly assumed that if you know, the Big
• 2:09:24
  ten, the Big ten. Initially, and this is a very funny thing
• 2:09:28
  to remember in hindsight, they didn't want to play football in Fallow twenty twenty
• 2:09:31
  because they were concerned about MYO kardias among their players, which, you know,
• 2:09:35
  considering the amount of fact the mandates that they did later on and knowing
• 2:09:39
  that that's a known side effect rare but it's there for young men, is
• 2:09:43
  pretty laughable. But um, you know, they did not want to play
• 2:09:48
  the season in Fallow twenty twenty, and they were probably to song extent worried
• 2:09:50
  that if they tried to go against the health experts, tried to fight back,
• 2:09:56
  the media would absolutely crucify them, especially sports media, because like we
• 2:09:58
  said, they're really far left, and they would have said, I mean,
• 2:10:03
  they did this anyway, like when the doctors pull in the World Series
• 2:10:05
  of twenty twenty, which was like, you know, a life highlight for
• 2:10:07
  me. There were countless stories of these these sports writers saying, we shouldn't
• 2:10:11
  have even played the World Series. You know, how many people are going
• 2:10:15
  to die because we had to continue to play the World Series, you know.
• 2:10:18
  And that was with twenty five percent capacity for just for the NLCS and
• 2:10:22
  NLCS in the World Series. So I think if the if the if the
• 2:10:26
  athletic institutions had tried to push back, which they should have, they were
• 2:10:30
  concerned that they would have been really hangered by the media, and they're very
• 2:10:31
  scared of that. And I think, I mean, honestly, I think
• 2:10:35
  that's part of the problem in society generals, and nobody has any courage or
• 2:10:37
  bravery or willingness to stand up for what's right and follow the signalled, the
• 2:10:41
  actual science, fall the evidence. It was just kind of outsourced thinking and
• 2:10:46
  cowardice. Early. Yeah, I agree, and I will always be angered
• 2:10:50
  at the sports establishment for the way that they handled that situation. I don't
• 2:10:56
  think there's nearly enough attention that's put on it because it had sought a huge
• 2:11:01
  impact on everything that happened, because it it really I think influenced the mindset
• 2:11:07
  of the average American Oh my god, we're not having sports. I mean,
• 2:11:11
  my god, they're not having the Ohio State Michigan game, or the
• 2:11:13
  the USC Notre Dame game. I mean, these are things that you know,
• 2:11:16
  people look forward to all year long, and this is this is the
• 2:11:20
  level of emergency we're in. Of course, we can't have graduations or school
• 2:11:24
  or go to a funeral or what I mean, weddings or all these other
• 2:11:28
  things. It all flows down from that, and it all is about cowardice
• 2:11:33
  and fear of media criticism. You're you're right about that. I have to
• 2:11:37
  ask you, since it's a sports story that I've talked a lot about that
• 2:11:41
  obviously directly my view directly relates to the pandemic, and I'm curious just to
• 2:11:45
  what your view is. Although the media will never accept the connection. I
• 2:11:48
  find it absolutely freaking hilarious and so telling that the sports media has just now
• 2:11:56
  accepted that Damar Hamlin collapsed on a yield of a cardiac arrest because of Commodio
• 2:12:03
  Cortis. Yet no one ever said it was Commodio Cortis. His doctors never
• 2:12:09
  said it was Commodio Cortis. Commodio Cortis makes no goddamn sense based upon what
• 2:12:13
  we know happened. If it was Commodio Cortis, they would have told us
• 2:12:16
  that immediately. But many months later, all of a sudden, DeMar Hamlin
• 2:12:20
  finally after telling Michael Strahan, I don't want to get into that. That's
• 2:12:24
  that's a subject that I don't want to talk about. Then all of a
• 2:12:26
  sudden he has the explanation, oh, yeah, it was Commodio Cordis,
• 2:12:31
  and everyone in the media goes, oh, of course it was Commodio Cordis.
• 2:12:35
  Well, I just find that to be absolutely insane. I don't know
• 2:12:39
  for sure what happened, but I know it wasn't Commodial Cordis, and I
• 2:12:41
  don't trust the sports media establishment to get to the bottom of that at all.
• 2:12:46
  What's your take on that? That is, that's pretty much exactly what
• 2:12:50
  I agree. I agree with that. It's like, I don't I don't
• 2:12:52
  know what happened. I mean, obviously we weren't examining him one on doctors
• 2:12:56
  anyway, but it's like, if there is something there, we would never
• 2:13:00
  or hear about it because there's no interest in reporting it, right, And
• 2:13:01
  I think, I mean, that's a broader problem that we saw during COVID
• 2:13:05
  in general too, was like, you know, if the media really had
• 2:13:09
  the relationship they're supposed to have with government and power, they would be investigating
• 2:13:13
  doctor Fauci, right, they would be doing exposs on the CDC and pointing
• 2:13:16
  out, here's how all the stuff they got wrong. But they don't care
• 2:13:18
  because they're supportive of it. And obviously there's no you know, I have
• 2:13:22
  Like I said, I have absolutely no idea. But if it was vaccine
• 2:13:26
  related, if it was milocardis related, there's no interest in telling that story
• 2:13:30
  among the sports media because it's it directly contradicts what they what they want the
• 2:13:33
  public to believe, and what their political ideology demands they believe, so they're
• 2:13:39
  never going to find it. And a lack of intellectual curiosity among the media
• 2:13:43
  is part of the reason. I think that why these restrictions continue for so
• 2:13:46
  long, because instead of asking adversarial questions of people in power, they just
• 2:13:52
  went along with it and they function is almost like the propaganda wing of public
• 2:13:56
  health bureaucracies and politicians saying yes, you need to follow science. I mean
• 2:14:00
  every article you can go back and look, it'll be if there is some
• 2:14:03
  if they cover something about a claim about masks not working. It'll say at
• 2:14:07
  the bottom, the CDC of public health experts unanimously agree that masks are completely
• 2:14:11
  you know, effective at stopping as part of the COVID COVID virus, that
• 2:14:13
  kind of thing. There's always that like underlying message of you know, trust
• 2:14:18
  the experts, and we're not going to do any work on this ourselves because
• 2:14:22
  we believe the experts too. We're smart people, So yeah, I agree.
• 2:14:26
  In our closing minutes, I have to ask you, because I just
• 2:14:28
  I just remembered about this. I have to ask you about what happened with
• 2:14:31
  the recent wildfires in Canada and the the the smoky air that infiltrated most of
• 2:14:39
  the Northeast, and how it was that the so many people immediately went right
• 2:14:46
  to their masks. You know, I'm assuming most of these people, you
• 2:14:50
  know, they still had their their masks, and some of them probably still
• 2:14:52
  wearing masks because they're they're liberals, especially in New York and other big cities.
• 2:14:56
  But what I found fascinating, I'm guessing you did, is well,
• 2:15:00
  is that a lot of the so called health experts were forced to issue statements
• 2:15:05
  saying that you know, these masks don't really work very well for smoke,
• 2:15:09
  so be careful. And I'm like, well, wait a minute, a
• 2:15:13
  lot of second. If they don't work for smoke, and the smoke particles
• 2:15:18
  are thousands, sometimes larger than the COVID particles, how the hell were they
• 2:15:22
  working for COVID And yet no one in the media even asked this question.
• 2:15:28
  Did you have the same response? Oh, oh yeah, one hundred percent.
• 2:15:31
  I mean, it's mind boggling, and there's no interest again with some
• 2:15:35
  of the media, there's no interest in the media's saying that's telling that story
• 2:15:39
  of well, wait a second, smoke is larger than viruses, virus transmission,
• 2:15:43
  and aerosols. So if masks can't stop smoke, how did they stop
• 2:15:48
  viruses. I mean, it is just like basic one on one thinking here,
• 2:15:52
  and there's no awareness in the media. There's no willingness to ask that
• 2:15:56
  question or bring it up to people. Just completely amazing, and they're you
• 2:15:58
  know, it's like, oh, well, if you have to wear perfectly
• 2:16:01
  fitted in ninety five, it's the only way it'll stop this. Well,
• 2:16:03
  yeah, that's what you're telling people for COVID too, but nobody is wearing
• 2:16:05
  them perfectly fitted at ninety five. So what you're saying is all this,
• 2:16:09
  all the masking that you were demanding people do, never had any chance of
• 2:16:13
  working because it's not perfectly fitted in the NY five. I mean, it's
• 2:16:16
  just ludicrous. It's really frustrating the lack of ability for people to go to
• 2:16:22
  the second level of thinking and just think, well, wait if this,
• 2:16:24
  if this means that, then this means that they can't do it. And
• 2:16:28
  the smoke was just a perfect example of that where it was I mean,
• 2:16:31
  you know, the Twitter was going nuts with all these people calling out that
• 2:16:35
  exact point of like this is this is ridiculous. This is exactly what you
• 2:16:39
  were telling people for COVID, And honestly, it's what they were all saying
• 2:16:43
  pre COVID, Right, That's what all That's all they said. If you
• 2:16:46
  go back and look at UK's Health Services Agency, the CDC's pre pandemic planning,
• 2:16:50
  the World Health Organization pre pandemic planning, they all said masks don't work,
• 2:16:54
  mass don't stop aerosols. Now they're saying they're saying the exact same thing.
• 2:16:58
  They just don't even realize it. All right, last thing, I
• 2:17:03
  have been incredibly frustrated by a couple of related situations regarding COVID, this idea
• 2:17:09
  that it's over and it's old news, it's in the past, we don't
• 2:17:16
  have to worry about this anymore. And I look at things like what happened
• 2:17:18
  with the wildfire, and I see everyone going to mask and I see schools
• 2:17:22
  being closed in sports being shut. Now, now maybe that was the I've
• 2:17:26
  never understood the concept of closing schools in a wildfire, because there's the air
• 2:17:31
  any better at your home than it is at school. And by the way,
• 2:17:35
  there's parents that presumably work and now their kids are unattended. So how
• 2:17:39
  is it that it's better for the kids are at home than they are at
• 2:17:41
  school. It's the same damn air. But that's beside the point. My
• 2:17:45
  point is that it really illustrated how the country has changed because of COVID and
• 2:17:50
  how desperate liberals are to find another COVID, whether it's another virus, or
• 2:17:56
  it's a wildfire, or it's climate change, global warming, or whatever it
• 2:18:01
  is. That they are now going to use what they learn they can get
• 2:18:03
  away with during COVID to do it in other areas of life. And I
• 2:18:09
  have and I want to connect this to the Republican presidential race because as the
• 2:18:13
  Santis supporter, I have been incredibly disappointed and frustrated that the Santist campaign seems
• 2:18:20
  to be very, very hesitant to use COVID as a weapon against Donald Trump
• 2:18:26
  because I believe Trump to be responsible for a lot of what happened, and
• 2:18:31
  I don't think that they're using it as an issue politically, and I don't
• 2:18:35
  think that they're seeing the big picture that this is not over, this is
• 2:18:39
  just the beginning of this, This is this is what the left is going
• 2:18:41
  to use as their playbook going forward, and that the Santist campaign is not
• 2:18:46
  fully understanding this and they're not taking advantage of it. What is Ian Miller's
• 2:18:52
  take on what I just said? Yeah, I think that there it is
• 2:18:56
  a I mean I've been worried about the from the beginning that the precedent we
• 2:19:01
  were setting is was incredibly dangerous. I completely agree with that. I think,
• 2:19:05
  you know, I've pointed this out many times, where as soon as
• 2:19:07
  you started giving people belief that masks work, there will always be an excuse
• 2:19:13
  to come back to them. And we've just sat with the wildfire thing,
• 2:19:16
  right, I mean, that was not something that anybody would have considered wearing
• 2:19:18
  masks for wildcut foiler smoke walking around New York City until COVID and I do
• 2:19:22
  agree, I think it's opened up. Administrators now have a lot more license
• 2:19:26
  to do things like closed schools or closed businesses, and public health directors now
• 2:19:31
  realize, well, we can get away with closing everything down at the first
• 2:19:35
  sign of a health crisis quote unquote if we feel we need to, and
• 2:19:39
  people will go along with it, you know, with very little pushback,
• 2:19:41
  and the pushback that does exist will be demonized by the media, and the
• 2:19:45
  media will be on our side and laugh and make fun of those who are
• 2:19:48
  standing up for liberty or calling out the mistakes that are being made right now.
• 2:19:54
  And yeah, that's an incredibly dangerous precedent to set, you know.
• 2:19:56
  I do think that as far as the Santas it goes, I think that
• 2:20:00
  they will use that more when it becomes more of a direct conversation between him
• 2:20:05
  and Trump. At least that's my hope, because I do think that Trump
• 2:20:07
  made a lot of mistakes. I mean, everybody did. Nobody's perfect,
• 2:20:09
  and it's we can't expect perfection. But I do think that Trump made a
• 2:20:13
  lot of mistakes because he kind of in some ways he did a lot of
• 2:20:16
  what we're what we've been talking about, where he outsource some of his decision
• 2:20:18
  making and thinking to doctor Fausting to the COVID task Force, and he realized
• 2:20:24
  it. He did realize it, to his credit, but it took too
• 2:20:26
  long. So by the time you know, Scotts comes in start of things
• 2:20:30
  start to change a little bit with the messaging that was like August September or
• 2:20:33
  twenty twenty, it was too late. The damage was done at that point,
• 2:20:37
  and so you know, I think that it's you know, the santis
• 2:20:39
  for his credit because was initially kind of I think where a lot of us
• 2:20:43
  were. Where I was was like, yeah, these people seem credible,
• 2:20:46
  they seem like they should know what they're doing. I'm going to listen to
• 2:20:48
  what they're saying. And then he did what we did, which was he
• 2:20:50
  looked at the data really quickly and said they don't know what the hell they're
• 2:20:54
  talking about, and and swished and that's it. That's going to be a
• 2:20:56
  major campaign inity for him, I hope going forward, because it shows not
• 2:21:01
  just that he got COVID right, but that he was willing to engage in
• 2:21:05
  like intellectual humility and say, yeah, you know, maybe I got this
• 2:21:09
  wrong initially, and I'm going to change my mind here because new evidence shows
• 2:21:13
  that I need to, so I do. I'm a little I mean,
• 2:21:16
  I'm a little more optimistic I think you are in general. But that's my
• 2:21:18
  hope anyway, that's that's what we see going forward. Well, well,
• 2:21:22
  it's not unusual for people to be more optimistic than I am, but I
• 2:21:26
  appreciate that and hope that you're right. Ian Miller, thanks so much for
• 2:21:30
  your time and for your work, author of the book Illusion of Control,
• 2:21:35
  COVID nineteen and the Collapse of Expertise. Go get it for yourself. Ian
• 2:21:37
  Miller, thanks so much for coming on the show. Oh thanks a lot,
• 2:21:41
  really appreciate it. Thanks again to Ian Miller for his time. Sorry,
• 2:21:45
  it took a little bit of time before we actually aired that particular interview.
• 2:21:50
  We did that about a week and a half ago, but there were
• 2:21:52
  so many things that occurred in the meantime. But this was the right time
• 2:21:56
  for us to make it part of the podcast. And I hope you'll account
• 2:22:00
  Ian Miller's book. It's going to be a little while before the next episode
• 2:22:03
  of the podcast. That'll probably be somewhere around the July fourth holiday because I'm
• 2:22:11
  going on our family vacation and so it'll be about a week off before we
• 2:22:16
  return with new episodes of the Death of Journalism podcast. Until then, please
• 2:22:20
  remember to subscribe, rate, and review this episode of the podcast, and
• 2:22:24
  share it with other people you know and on social media. If you do
• 2:22:28
  so, tag me and I'll be happy to share it with my Twitter followers
• 2:22:31
  and Facebook friends. The next time we speak, good chance, we'll be
• 2:22:35
  talking about the Supreme Court affirmative Action decision, which has been heavily anticipated and
• 2:22:41
  which will hopefully be finally an example where the Conservative Court has done something that
• 2:22:46
  actually matters by ending effectively if they can affirmative action when it comes to college
• 2:22:52
  admissions. So we'll talk about that, as well as whatever else happens between
• 2:22:58
  now and next episode, which will be sometime around the fourth of July holiday.
• 2:23:03
  Until then, this has been episode number sixty nine of the Death of
• 2:23:05
  Journalism podcast. Thanks so much for listening. My name is John Zickler.