Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "RFK, Joe Rogan & Vaccines" with Michael Shermer

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"RFK, Joe Rogan & Vaccines" with Michael Shermer · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Good day, humans. Welcome to Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas, and whew! Who's Nelly?
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This is Dejavu all over again for yours truly. The visage of Joe Rogan in mind, arguing
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about vaccines, feels a little close to the bone for me. Last year I was on Joe's show
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for the seventh time, and we got into a little debate about the safety of COVID vaccines,
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and now we see that tiny, tiny, tiny little tidbit of an inkling of a hint of a sliver
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of a thing turn into its fully fledged and most gigantic Godzilla v. King Kong style battle.
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What's going on is that RFK Jr., the nephew of President JFK, son of Bobby Kennedy, has
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always been an anti-vaxxer. I think you can use that term with him. This is not someone
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who has a reasonable and measured level of hesitation towards a very new vaccine in the
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throes of a pandemic. This is a man who has been consistent for decades in his belief,
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his unfounded belief that all vaccines do all kinds of horrendous things. Not just vaccines,
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5G, waves, mobile phones, frying your brain, all of that kind of cookie, granola, sort of
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northern California, northern New South Wales, depending on what country you're in, hippie-dippy,
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lovey-dovey, bullshit, crystal dangling, astrology stuff. He loves it. I've interviewed
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the guy on Half-Post Live, lovely guy, delightful gentleman, and of course, a titan of American
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politics just in terms of the dynasty that he comes from. You kind of have to take this
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guy seriously, which I think is why some of the bruhaha has erupted over whether or not
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we should, quote unquote, platform people with beliefs that we disagree with and beliefs
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that can really be shown using the scientific method and reason to be largely wrong. You
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kind of have to platform a guy when his uncle was the president of the United States and
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he's polling 15%, which is not a bad number in democratic primaries against an incumbent
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democratic president. So RFK Jr. is running for president, and he goes on Joe Rogan's show.
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I'll give you the background here, just in case you've either been living under a rock
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or like me are just too busy to keep track of all the ins and outs. Like, what the hell?
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Rogan and vaccines and RFK? What's happening? So what happens is he goes on Joe's show,
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he does all of his standard talking points about vaccines and Joe in his usual curious self
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is interested in sort of probing and questioning, but doesn't come armed like, you know, an
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investigative journalist would to hold an accountability interview and, you know, pull them
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up on everything. So the guy basically gets a platform and a large proportion, a large
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swath of the scientific and medical establishment, think this is wildly responsible and that
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RFK should not go unchallenged, but they're also uncomfortable with the idea of sort of
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debating him, right? And the person who falls into, I suppose steps into, but accidentally
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then tumbles into a massive rabbit hole that, you know, will become the first line of his
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obituary now and has branded him in the public consciousness forevermore is a man who you
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hadn't heard of until three seconds ago, Professor Peter Hotez, who's a vaccine scientist
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and a writer, he has a book, funnily enough coming out this September. So this content,
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this isn't going to hurt the book sales, I wouldn't imagine. Sure, he has to put up with
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the fact that his life is ruined and he has to go into hiding because crazy right wing
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people are showing up on his doorstep, taunting him to debate RFK Jr. But apart from that,
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it isn't funny that they're right wingers. RFK Jr is far left on this stuff. It's this
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weird horse shoe thing, isn't it? We're like, you've got the kind of QAnon anti-vaxxers
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and then you've got the crystal dangling hippie anti-vaxxers and they find common cause
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in each other's irrational insanity and detachment from the facts. So anyway, they show up at
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Hotez's house, apparently, making him needless to say, feel somewhat unsafe. But this book
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he's got coming out in September will presumably benefit. It's called the deadly rise of anti-science.
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He's a professor of pediatrics and molecular verology. He's the dean of the chair in tropical
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pediatrics. I mean, he is big. He is big. Even as I speak, he's in New York meeting with
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the prime minister of India, the prime minister of India about the delivery of COVID vaccines
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to save Indian lives. So he's not a nobody. And he tweets about this exchange between Joe
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Rogan and RFK Jr. He reads tweets on article and the article is entitled Spotify has stopped
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even sort of trying to stem Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation. That's the title of the article
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and he tweets not written by him. But he clearly condones this point of view. And it's true. It's
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true. At the time that Joe and I had our run in that it was when the whole thing was exploding
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with Spotify and Neil Young was pulling his music from Spotify and Joni Mitchell was pulling
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her music from Spotify. This wasn't directly because of my appearance on his show, but my
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appearance was one of a number of flare ups. I mean, me being on the science side and the other
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guests being on the skeptic side, or shall we say denialist side. And this kind of wave of people
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who he'd been interviewing, who Joe had been interviewing, Peter McCullough and people who
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and Brett Weinstein, people who thought that COVID vaccines were the real problem with the pandemic,
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the real danger, the real threat that outstripped the threat of COVID itself. That was the environment
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in which Spotify said, okay, we're going to start putting warnings on Joe's podcasts with links
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to accurate information about the pandemic and about COVID and about how vaccines work and about
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their risks. And you know, we're going to basically lean on Rogan to do better.
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Shortly thereafter, Rogan released his episode with Majid Nawaz. So that was probably the
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beginning of the end of that attempt, I would say. And I'm not saying that these conversations
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shouldn't happen. After that whole flare up with Joe, I went on a panel show in Australia.
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I wrote an article for the Australian Australia's main broadsheet newspaper, defending Rogan,
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saying, you know, if you want NPR or the BBC, then go to NPR or the BBC. That's fine. Those things
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exist. But a human being in a free society ought to be allowed to have conversations with people
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he finds interesting. And just because other people find those conversations so interesting that his
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audience grows a lot, shouldn't suddenly mean that he isn't allowed to do what he likes to do
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anymore. And we're like, okay, you've gotten too powerful, too big for your boots now. So we're
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just going to enslave you and force you to say the things that we want you to say and talk to
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the people we want you to talk to. In fact, that's where we live in a free country. Joe can do what
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he wants to do. You know, he's not out there intentionally peddling lies. He's a curious guy
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who has his own biases. Don't we all? And who does his own, who has his own little playground,
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his sand pit, and which he does his thing. And it's wildly popular. So that's that. Then the
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question becomes how do the rest of us deal with the existence of this uber phenomenon juggernaut
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thing? When it contributes to, I guess, the extremification machine that's already functioning
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in society already being exacerbated by algorithms that encourage us only to like and click,
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you know, and comment rather than be informed or be stimulated or find nuance. This is my bag,
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obviously, you listen to this show. So, you know, that my mission in life is try to count to the
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force of those flare ups and those algorithms and try to turn down the volume on hostility and
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antagonism and try to encourage people to understand each other to talk to each other. And to
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reason with each other rather than screaming at each other from inside echo chambers and silos of
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misinformation. I think Joe Rogan is broadly on the same page on the same mission as I am.
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And I think a person like RFK Jr. is not. And that's where the challenge comes. What responsibility
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to people on the scientific side of things, you know, real experts, not me, not Joe, real experts,
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like Professor Hotez. What responsibility if any did they have to publicly refute and
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robot and debate? People who are throwing sand in the gears of science and understanding and reason,
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people who are seemingly willfully spreading misinformation, misinformation, such a clumsy word.
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Let's just say interpretations of data and events that don't withstand scrutiny.
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Anyway, Hotez basically says, you know, he tweets this thing saying, you know, Joe Rogan and
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Spotify have gone off the, over the waterfall. He tweets this article and he adds his commentary
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saying it's really true, just awful. And from all the online attacks I'm receiving after this
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absurd podcast, it's clear many actually believe this nonsense. So Joe Rogan sees that tweet
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and retweets it with a comment. Peter Joe writes, if you claim what RFK Jr. is saying is,
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quote unquote, misinformation, I'm offering you $100,000 to the charity of your choice.
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If you're willing to debate him on my show with no time limit. Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter,
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when Richard's been in the world, then says, this just got interesting. Oh, actually, sorry,
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that's not only on Musk account. That's a fake Elon Musk account with a picture of him.
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Elon will come into this conversation in just a moment. So Joe's challenge issues this challenge.
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Peter quotes that on Twitter and adds his comments, Joe, you have my cell phone, my email,
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I'm always willing to speak with you. Professor Hotez has been on Joe Rogan's show before.
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Joe Rogan quotes tweets that saying, this is a non-answer. I challenged you publicly because you
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publicly quote tweeted and agreed with that dog shit article. If you're really serious about what
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you stand for, you now have a massive opportunity for a debate that will reach the largest audience.
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A discussion like this has ever had. If you think someone else is better qualified, suggest that
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person says Joe. And Joe then sub-tweets. By the way, Peter Hotez, I saw this tweet that you deleted.
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And Peter had deleted a tweet saying in response to the debate challenge, the $100,000 debate
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challenge saying, be serious, Joe. $100,000 is what you throw out for your hunting buddies on a
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weekend. A $50 million endowment, which you and Spotify and RFK Junior can easily afford,
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not for me, but so we can continue making low-cost patent-free vaccines for the world's poor
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would do preceded by RFK Junior's public apology. Then Peter Hotez obviously thought better of
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that and deleted that. So Rogan says it's a non-answer, come on the show. And Professor Hotez
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refer referencing the tweet that he deleted. Says, yes, Joe, I thought it was over the top.
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I'm necessarily provocative. So I took it down right away. But I've been hurt right, Peter.
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By the public and untrue statements that you and your guests have made about me being a
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big farmer, shill, when all I do is make vaccines for the world's poor. I don't take big farmer money.
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And he follows up, I'm happy to come on and clear the air. I respect you and your show. I don't
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want an adversarial relationship. I think we can work well together. To which Joe sends a screenshots,
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a tweet from Professor Peter Hotez, which says I'm quite concerned about the Elon Tucker
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link, then fold in Rogan and RFK Junior. And it becomes a pretty formidable coalition with neo-fascist
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leanings in some ways darker or perhaps more dangerous than Trump, in my opinion, awful. I just
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hope team Biden is preparing. And he linked to Tucker Carlson's return to television on the internet.
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Now this was from back in May. This is from like four weeks ago, but Joe has dug this up,
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noting that he was cited by Peter Hotez a month ago in a tweet naming Elon and Tucker as a
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formidable coalition with neo-fascist leanings. And because Joe Rogan was name checked in that tweet,
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Joe tweets, are you sure I'm not part of a coalition with neo-fascist leanings? Seems like that's
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what you really think or what you're projecting to the masses, says Joe. And in response to
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Joe Rogan's other tweet saying that Professor Peter Hotez has given a non-answer and that basically
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he has to, you know, shit, I'll get off the part. Come on the show and do a debate with RFK or don't.
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Peter tweets, Joe, if you're serious about addressing vaccines and the fact that 200,000
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unvaccinated Americans needlessly perished during our awful Delta BI1 COVID waves, including 40,000
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in our state of Texas because they fell victims to vaccine disinformation, I do want to have that
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discussion, says Peter. And Joe Rogan replies again, I'm going to ask you very clearly, are you
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willing to debate Robert Kennedy Jr on my podcast? And no response. At least not from Peter Hotez.
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There is a response from Elon Musk, the real one this time, who says he's afraid of a public
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debate because he knows he's wrong. This is Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, one of the richest
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men in the world who has 144.2 million followers accusing a vaccine scientist of being wrong about
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vaccines. So did that contribute to this gentleman getting harassed outside his house?
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It's hard to say. It didn't help. He has since been interviewed and he says the scientist
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being tag teamed and dog piled on by Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. all at once has been
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overwhelming, especially being stalked in front of his home. I invited Peter on this show and
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completely understandably he felt like this wasn't exactly the time for it. Hopefully I'll speak to
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him later. Not everyone's on Rogan's side in this, not even the people you might expect.
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Mark Cuban, the billionaire, has criticized Joe Rogan for bullying Peter Hotez.
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Now there's been this unedifying spectacle of other podcasters who are much less
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good-natured than Joe and much more captive to right-wing genuine, right-wing misinformation
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and bullshit who are piling on and raising the offer to Peter Hotez as if it's a financial thing
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at the end of the day, although he did tweet that thing about $50 million. Dave Rubin, of course,
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predicted. But just these leeches, these hangers on, they know their audience, they know their crowd,
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it's red meat to the lions. Andrew Tate jumps in. You've probably heard of Andrew Tate.
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Convicted or merely alleged rapist and a human, what do you call it? People smuggler.
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He was a former kickboxing champion who rose to fame for saying that women should stay in the
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home and pitching a very sort of, I was going to say conservative, but there's nothing conservative
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about it. Very reactionary and sexist and misogynistic attitude towards gender.
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Andrew Tate chimes in and says, I'll add 500k, but I also want to state a lot of the nerds who are
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anti-vaxx. Now, with total COVID pushies at the start, a lot of them even took the vaccine.
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I feel for Peter Hotez, I feel actually for Joe Rogan at the moment because I've had the same
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experience of like the, with friends like these who needs enemies phenomenon. You know,
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he's doing fine, he's a big boy, he's wealthy, he knows what he's up to, but it doesn't help
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to then have like Andrew Tate or even necessarily Elon Musk editorializing about what I think Joe
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thinks is a forum for conversation rather than for editorializing. I do think that Joe thinks
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that a debate would be an even playing field in which everyone can be heard. It seems like
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these other people, I mean, is there any doubt that Dave Rubin would do a, or Andrew Tate would
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do a complete self-serving shamozel that was totally unedifying? So that's the question.
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Do we engage in situations like this? One of the most prominent people saying that nobody
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should engage in such a debate has been Tom Nichols, who's a prominent journalist, a staff writer
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at The Atlantic, he has 680,000 followers. He's been piling on about this and you know, he's
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good at kind of presenting the mainstream left position on a lot of culture war issues.
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He retweeted Joe Rogan saying, I'm going to ask you very clearly again, are you willing to debate
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the RFK general on my podcast and Tom Nichols jumped in saying, no medical professional should ever
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agree to do this, never. It elevates the conspiracy guy, demeans the medical profession, and will only
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convince the cooks out there that RFK is right because a real doctor took the time to debate him,
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never debate a conspiracy theorist, right Tom? Which Joe Rogan then retweeted? Commenting,
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that would be a great suggestion if you could assure that the industry you were representing
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wasn't completely captured by heartless monsters who have a history of some of the biggest
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criminal fines in human history because their deception has cost hundreds of thousands of people
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their lives. It would be a great suggestion if the industry you were defending didn't occasionally
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look at human beings as an opportunity to generate insane wealth regardless of the tragic consequences,
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but you can't do that, so maybe it would be a good idea to have a fucking debate, right Joe?
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And one person who jumped into the breach to come to Joe's defense or at least to come to the
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defense of debate on Joe Rogan's show was America's leading skeptic, Michael Shermer, former guest on
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this show not so not so long ago. In fact, he's a presidential fellow at Chapman University,
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the host of the Michael Shermer show, the publisher of skeptic magazine. He himself tweeted to his
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220,000 followers. To be clear, he wrote, listening to the entire Joe Rogan episode with Robert Kennedy
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Jr., I found at least a dozen claims I think can be refuted. Mercury was taken out of vaccines in
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2000 and autism rates continue to climb. 5G towers do not degrade immune systems, cell phone energy
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is not high enough to cause brain tumors. But right, Michael Shermer, I still think someone should
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debate him. I don't know the rebuttals to his many other claims and I'd like to hear them in a
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public forum. I don't need elites like Tom Nichols, who I just quoted, who seems to think people are
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too dumb to think for themselves and need someone like him to tell them who to listen to. Very
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disconcerting to see this. But there's a lot of this going around. I think the Tom Nichols
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attitude is fundamentally the mainstream one on the left that you don't elevate voices like this.
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You don't do them, you don't give them the credibility of platforming them. You don't make the
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onlooker think that they're really two sides to this. I mean, I think if there was a phony debate
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where there was no hope of a fair outcome and some people might say that Rogan's environment
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is not unbiased enough. But let's suppose you could get someone who genuinely is good at
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giving people a really fair crack of the whip and doesn't feel hugely invested in anything other
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than the truth. Someone say whose name rhymes with Bosch BLEPS and that person could moderate a
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debate between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Professor Peter Hotez. I don't think it would be fruitless.
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I don't agree with the Tom Nichols of the world that there's no point in elevating these voices.
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I mean, you're talking about a man who has 15% of the Democratic Party vote already
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against an incumbent president and whose father and uncle are some of the most important
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Democrats of the 20th century. Michael Schirmer's final tweet on the subject so far was to say,
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over the past 30 years, I've debated theists, creationists, ufologists, gun advocates,
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vaccine skeptics, climate skeptics, and conspiracy theorists of all types. One reason Peter Hotez may
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not want to debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Joe Rogan's show is that it is a lot of preparation work.
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You need to be ready to answer every claim and many are obscure and difficult to answer. But that
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should not be a barrier. Roll up your sleeves and do it Peter. It's a public service.
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I thought Michael Schirmer would be an interesting person to try to clear my head about
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exactly what I should think about all this. I hope you too enjoy as much as I did this chat with
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Michael Schirmer.
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Should someone go on Joe Rogan's show and debate RFK Jr. about vaccines?
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Well, if they want to, they should do it. I mean, why would you pass that up? First of all,
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if you get $100,000 donated to your favorite charity, I mean, why would you not want that?
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And now I think the number is up to like $600,000 or $700,000. Other people have kicked in,
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I think, just to up the...
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Well, I mean, the answer to the question of why wouldn't you want that is that it feeds into
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the illusion of a debate and you get steamrolled by such a fast-paced torrent of bullshit that
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you can't fight back? Yeah, but you can. All right. So, okay, there's a couple of factors here.
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First, let's clarify. It's not a free speech issue in terms of the law. Anybody can talk to
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anybody that they want or not. So it has nothing to do with the First Amendment or anything like that.
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And then it just becomes a personal choice. Like, what's the best strategy for disseminating truth?
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You know, what is truth? How do you know what's true? You know, what is the consensus?
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You know, what does the scientific community say about X, whatever that is? And how best to
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communicate that to the general public? So, about 10 years ago, there was this thing called the
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Backfire Effect that merely discussing a false idea and refuting it would backfire on you
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because then people would not be able to process the counter-information and they would just then
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believe whatever it is that they heard the easiest explanation. That did not survive the replication
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crisis that started in 2008, 2009. The Backfire Effect does not appear to be real. In fact,
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it looks like people are able to process information, counter-information to their original beliefs,
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and change their minds. If the information is presented in certain ways, if it's visual,
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if it's striking, it's clear, and if it doesn't threaten or challenge their core worldview beliefs.
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So, for example, if you are skeptical of climate change because you're a Republican and you don't
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know much about it, but everyone on your team says it's, you know, a bunch of baloney or it's
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hoax or whatever, and you just kind of go along with that and someone says, well, what about
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this chart and this graph and so on? That can be hard to process unless you say you make it clear
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that you actually don't have to give up being a conservative or a Republican to believe in climate
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change. Then people are more open to changing their minds and accepting new ideas or, you know,
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different facts, facts that counter their beliefs. If it's clear, it's obvious, they don't have to
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like give up their core identities, that sort of thing. So, that's my initial reaction to that.
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I mean, if you really want to reach a lot of people, you know, Rogan's the place to go. 10,
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20 million people. Well, I'm guessing 50 million people would watch this debate. I mean,
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where else are you going to get anything even remotely like that? It's astonishing.
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Yeah, but maybe you don't want 50 million people thinking that there's a debate about the safety
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of vaccines. Maybe only some small cohort of that number are currently convinced by RFK
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Junior's position and believe the, you know, the established medical science. Yeah, but if RFK
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was was just some flatter of nobody and no one cared, yeah, okay, that's probably not the best
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strategy, but the guy's running for president. He's one of the most famous people in the world.
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He has a massive audience and polls show that millions of people agree with him.
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So, don't you have a public duty to counter his arguments if you are a scientist?
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And I think we learned a lesson with Trump just ignoring the lies and hoping it goes away and
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people won't buy it. It doesn't work. You actually have to counter the arguments.
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And in my experience, people are not that stupid. And in fact, not only are they not that stupid,
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they recognize that you think they're stupid, too stupid to hear the counter arguments.
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So basically they say, fuck you. You know what? I'm, you know, if you're not even willing to
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counter what this guy says, then I'm going to ignore you. I'm going to listen to this guy.
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You know, that's the counter argument. What are you so afraid of?
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You know, why won't you stand if this guy is so easy to debunk, then debunk him.
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What's the problem? Now, I listened to the entire three hours. Okay. And at least a dozen,
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he said RFK, Juniors said, at least a dozen things I know are wrong. And, you know, I posted some
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on Twitter and so on. Okay. But what if the 200 things he said in the three hours, you know,
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that I know a dozen that are wrong. Maybe there's two dozen more that are wrong. Maybe there's a
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dozen things he said, all right. I would like to hear somebody that looks it all up and says, all right.
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Here's what he says. And then here's the argument. Here's what he says. Here's the argument.
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Boom, boom, boom, boom. What's the explanation?
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That's, you know, that to me seems like a public service. Yeah. I think that the initial overture
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from Peter Hotez, who was this vaccine researcher who has, you know, been the subject of so much
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of the conversation for not agreeing to go on Joe Rogan's show. I think his initial perspective
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was, well, I'll just come one on one on your show. I mean, you have my, he tweeted Joe,
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saying you have my number and you have my email address, you know, I'll come and talk about it.
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But he doesn't want to get in a head-to-head sparring match where the, the number of claims is,
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is overwhelming and too hard to wrangle. I don't know what, what I feel about that. But since we are,
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like, let's just, since we do have an opportunity where RFK is not in this room to throw more sand
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in the gears, can you go through some of the dozen things that he said that you know to be untrue?
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Okay. But first, let's back up for a second. So I've done a lot of these debates.
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One reason why he probably doesn't want to do it, and a lot of people don't, is because it's
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a massive amount of work in preparation. I mean, I, I have spent days, weeks, months preparing for
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a debate with an intelligent design creationist or a Holocaust and I or a gun, you know, anti-gun control
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person climate skeptics. I've done all these debates. And you really have to prepare because they
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have a certain set of arguments that are slightly different from the kind of arguments that scientists
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make with each other. But it's the kind of arguments that the public hears. So you can't count on the
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general public like looking up in some technical scientific journal what the answer is to this guy's
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claim. You got to have it ready. And this is part of your job. If, you know, if you want to be a
29:19
public intellectual and you want to rebuke or debunk nonsense, you got to roll up your sleeves
29:26
and do the work. It's just the way it goes. You can't be a public intellectual and go, yeah, well,
29:31
I don't want to debate anybody that's going to require me to do the work and look up what he's actually
29:35
saying. And then what the problem is with that particular study. I mean, RFK Jr., it was clear. He,
29:42
you know, he had like this study and that study and this study back in 1973, you know, and Anthony
29:48
Fauci published his paper back. You know, if you don't know that, then you look like an idiot. So,
29:53
but, but you can do it if you, you know, if you would take the time. So, you know, he should either
30:00
get out of the public intellectual business and just say, I'm not going to do this anymore because
30:03
I don't want to do the work. And I'm just going to do a mainstream regular science thing or go on
30:09
Rogan and debate the guy. Again, it's not a nobody. He's running for president. He's one of the
30:14
most famous people. He comes from one of those famous families in America. I mean, what's the
30:20
problem? Okay. You know, I don't get that. Okay. That's for what he said. Okay. So, you know, he,
30:26
he's long been a vaccine skeptic. And he initially back in the 90s was claiming that vaccine
30:33
caused autism. Can we reclaim the word skeptic Michael Shermer so that we don't call vaccine
30:38
deniers skeptics or climate deniers skeptics. It has an honorable tradition. I don't want to.
30:44
I know. Well, I'm a skeptic. I publish a magazine called skeptic. I mean, yeah, of course. But,
30:50
you know, so here's my line. Are you a global warming skeptic or are you skeptical of the global
30:55
warming skeptics, which makes you a believer? Well, what does that word mean, believe? You know,
31:00
I don't want to believe things that have to be believed in to be true. I just want to believe
31:04
things that are actually true. So, how do we know? Okay. So, you have to, you know, just what is
31:09
the scientific consensus and so on. All right. So, you asked me to go through a couple of these
31:13
things. Okay. So, the vaccine autism thing was debunked a long time ago. The initial response was
31:21
in the 90s that the mercury in the vaccines, this in the form of thimerisol, you know, sort of broke
31:32
through the brain blood barrier and caused these problems with development in these young children
31:40
around the time that they got the vaccines. And it really looks like unquestionably now that
31:46
it was just a matter of timing that autism comes online with children around the same time
31:54
that most get their vaccine shots. So, it's just pure chance. It's just pure correlation without
32:02
causation. That happens all the time, you know, and Kennedy himself said, well, I can't just say
32:07
correlation and assume causation. You have to prove it. And then he himself said admitted to Joe that,
32:14
you know, they took the the mercury out of the vaccines in 2000 in the year 2000. That's true.
32:19
It was banned in thimerisol was taken out in 1999. So, starting in the round of vaccines in the year
32:25
2000, they had no mercury. And then autism rates continued, not only continued, but continued to go up.
32:32
Now, they're going up for a different reason because of the classification process. That is
32:39
the recognition of autism spectrum as a diagnosis, the category got broader. So, more and more
32:48
symptoms get pulled into that category. So, the category expands. It has nothing to do with
32:55
vaccines or any other particular environmental. It's just the reporting of it by physicians
33:02
as based on the category and the diagnostic and statistical manual that
33:08
doctors use to diagnosis things. That's what happened.
33:12
Yeah, there's an interesting case study actually, Michael, in Australia of that phenomenon,
33:17
which is that 10 years ago, a central left government introduced a national disability insurance
33:24
scheme, which has subsequently become a massively expensive but beneficial program to people
33:29
living with disabilities. And one of the conditions that it treats is pediatric autism spectrum
33:36
disorder. And you won't be surprised to learn that now that you can get assistance and benefits
33:42
for having a child on the autism spectrum, the number of Australian children, I think that one
33:49
in 10 Australian boys between the age of five and nine are on the autism spectrum according to
33:58
the national disability insurance scheme or some extraordinary statistics like that. I'm not
34:02
saying that people who are on it are scamming the system. I'm saying that if you can avail
34:07
your child of any benefits that they can get such as, you know, you get a case number and then
34:12
down the track, they may be eligible to do their tests in a private room instead of in the public room.
34:18
They may be given more time on essays and so on. You'd be crazy not to take every advantage that
34:23
you can get if your child is exhibiting some sort of either intentional deficits or some other
34:30
behavioral issues. So yes, the classification thing has, we've literally witnessed it in the past 10
34:36
years in Australia in real time with some kind of doubling or tripling of the number of cases.
34:41
There are also, I mean, people anecdotally say that more people are suffering from being on the
34:46
autism spectrum and maybe there are issues with devices, maybe there are issues with social media,
34:52
maybe there are issues with, I don't even know what it could be. But just to loop back to the
34:56
debunking of the vaccine link, isn't that the case that the initial link between autism and vaccines
35:02
was literally a fraudulent study conducted by a British charlatan who made it up and forged it?
35:11
Yeah, well made it up well. So his research was quite flawed, possibly probably fraudulent to
35:21
a certain extent. You know, he was working for a vaccine company to find some link between vaccines
35:30
and well, no sorry, not vaccine company, lawyers suing a vaccine company to find some link between
35:37
vaccines and something, anything that is bad and then the autism thing came up. So he came up with
35:43
his leaky gut idea that the vaccines cause the gut to be leaky and that breaks the blood brain
35:50
barrier, if I remember this exactly, and that causes brain damage of some sort. Something like
35:56
what lead does to development in brains, but in this case, it doesn't look like. I mean, mercury
36:07
in massive doses would cause mental retardation, but the doses were very low and in any case,
36:14
as I said, they were taken out. So interestingly on Rogan, you know, Kennedy made a reference to
36:21
the moving goalposts. He himself does the moving goalposts. So he and he himself, because Joe,
36:27
you know, Joe, Joe doesn't know a lot of this stuff. So he didn't, you know, he didn't know about
36:32
the mercury being taken out of the vaccine. So Kennedy says, well, you know, they took the mercury
36:36
out of the vaccines in 2000, you know, and Joe's like, oh, well, then I thought you said mercury was
36:41
the problem. Well, no, it's aluminum. Aluminum is the problem. It's like, well, wait, I thought you
36:47
said mercury is the problem. Well, aluminum is also a toxin. And it's the rate at which they give,
36:53
or the order at which they give the vaccines and so on. That's the moving goalposts. The answer
36:57
is always going to be vaccines of the problem. And autism is the result. And so if you, if you
37:05
refute that, then we're going to find some other pathway. Okay, that's just not how science works.
37:09
And when you said RFK, it complains about moving goalposts. What is he, what, what, what instance
37:14
of goalposts shifting is he talking about? He's talking about how like the CDC or whoever
37:21
classifies these things and they change their definitions and they expand, like the definition
37:26
of autism is an expansion, expanding classification system. So they go, well, that's moving the goalpost.
37:32
Well, that's how science works is you're constantly updating, well, so you're, you're updating your
37:39
priors and changing your credence based on something in a Bayesian way. And that's normal, like,
37:45
with client. The other interesting thing about the, about the Rogan Kennedy thing was then Rogan
37:51
asked him about climate change. Now, so on the one hand, he's gone, we should be skeptical of the
37:57
experts. Don't believe the, you know, those science, you know, they get it wrong and they're
38:02
corrupted and they're in their, you know, bias because of money and so on. And then Joe asked
38:10
him about climate change. He's like, oh, no, no, no, climate change is real. Global warming is real.
38:15
It's human cause. I accept all of it. It's like, well, why do you accept it? Because the science,
38:21
the experts all tell us it's like, I thought you just said the experts are not to be trusted.
38:26
I thought that was, that was pretty revealing. Okay. So, you know, people pick and choose their
38:31
battles, right? And for some reason, he totally accepts all the climate science with no skepticism.
38:36
And as you know, there are plenty of skeptics, climate skeptics. I'm also skeptical of them.
38:42
So I guess, I guess the difference there would be to be as generous as possible, Michael, to RFK
38:47
would be that there's a strong vested interest in the experts misleading us in the field of drug
38:52
companies because there's so much money in drug companies and in annual vaccinations and so on,
38:57
whereas there doesn't seem to be such a cabal of sinister forces directing us to believe in
39:03
climate chaos, although I suppose people who are climates skeptics believe that there are.
39:07
Well, actually, no, I was surprised by his response about that because in fact,
39:13
that standard conspiracy theory about climate science, scientists accepting grant money and
39:22
funding from whoever is that they are biased, that they are, they are tilting the data to go
39:30
in a certain direction because they can't get grants otherwise. You know, if you're going to publish
39:35
a study that showed that, you know, climate change is not human-caused or whatever,
39:40
caused by volcanoes or sunspots, no one will fund you. That's the argument.
39:44
So it's the same argument, it's exactly the argument he's making about Big Pharma.
39:50
Okay, so now to his defense here, you know, because I kind of got hammered on Twitter about this,
39:58
you know, that's just a crazy conspiracy theory and he's a crazy loony, kooky conspiracy theorist,
40:04
so he should not be debated. Well, hang on. That's a pejorative. There are conspiracies,
40:11
lots of them. We know this. And a conspiracy theory is just a theory about what might be happening,
40:18
whether it's true or not. Some of them are true, some are wrong or not. So a conspiracy theory that
40:22
turns out to be true is just a conspiracy. And these do happen. And so, you know, to big tobacco
40:30
lied about the carcinogenic nature of tobacco for decades. And we know this. We have the paper
40:38
trail, you know, our product is doubt. You know, the jury is still out. That whole argument about,
40:44
you know, the science is not clear. The jury is still out. We need to do more research.
40:49
That was all invented by PR people working for big tobacco companies. And then chemical companies
40:54
took up that cause. When people started having home fires due to smoking and bed,
41:02
they're falling asleep on the couch and your cigarette falls and couch catches on fire or whatever.
41:06
There's a lot of this in the 70s and 80s. The chemical industries response to this,
41:13
well, I should say the larger industries was that the problem is not the cigarette. The problem is
41:18
that flammable materials like carpets and drapes and couches and bedding should be chemically
41:27
retardant, you know, chemical retardants. And so the chemical industry pushed this idea
41:34
that that's the problem, right? And it turns out Robby Kenner did the the late work on this in his
41:41
film on this Merchants of Down. Based on the book, the Merchants of Down. Yeah, I'm in that. Yeah.
41:48
So it's not only the same arguments, it's the same people. The companies, these chemical companies
41:55
hired the same people that the tobacco companies hired for PR to lie, to basically, you know,
42:01
give this idea that, you know, the science is not out. The jury is still out. You know,
42:06
what jury? Where? There's no jury. What are you talking about? These are just, you know,
42:11
rhetorical lines that people use. Okay. So, you know, and RFK Jr. talks about this. He's right.
42:18
Big pharma, big chemical companies, big industries. They do lie. They do conspire
42:24
to cheat the public and capture the regulatory system so that they can make more money. They do
42:30
this. They do it over and over. They've been caught over and over and over. And it's just naive
42:35
to think that, you know, this just doesn't happen with, you know, whatever your preferred
42:40
arguments are. That doesn't mean he's right about everything. It just means like,
42:45
maybe we should listen to this guy and check out what he's saying. Now, maybe half of what he says
42:49
is wrong, but which half? How about somebody knowledgeable that, you know, looks it up. Okay,
42:56
you can do this. All right. I mean, there are sites that do this, that fact check things that
43:01
people like RFK Jr. say. But the average person doesn't know where to look, you know,
43:06
Rogan is this, this is the way, this is the media now. It's podcasts. It's where the action is.
43:12
That's where you got to go. Kennedy himself said this. He said, Trump won in 2016 because of Twitter.
43:18
He knew how to use Twitter. And then he made this great reference. My uncle understood this
43:23
back in 1960, you know, with television. It's like, your uncle, oh, he's talking about JFK.
43:30
And frankly, his uncle, John F. Kennedy, right. You know, the television was the new medium.
43:35
And then Twitter, you know, was the new meat now, podcasts are the new media. So he's doing podcasts
43:40
because no one will talk to him on the, you know, on the legacy media. They won't talk to him. They
43:46
won't debate him. They won't host him. Nothing. And it's like, yeah, come on, man. Just if you,
43:52
I would go on and do it, but, you know, I'm not a medical expert. So it really needs to be a
43:57
vaccine person, you know, like the guy will do it. Now, maybe he personally doesn't want to do
44:02
it. It's not his thing. Maybe just doesn't feel comfortable in engaging with somebody in debate.
44:07
I understand. It's hard to do. It's very stressful. I've done a lot of these. You know, I mean,
44:14
I get worked up. It's, you know, it's not like given a speech. When I go on Rogan by myself,
44:19
it's a no brainer. I don't have to prepare. I just, it's just big fun. We sit there for hours,
44:23
yackin it up. But like the one I did with Graham Hancock, the alternative archaeologist about,
44:30
you know, who really built the pyramids and all that. He's not an ancient alien guy. He's a
44:34
different, different thing. But, you know, I prepared for days for that. I mean, it was a lot of work
44:39
and it was really stressful. I mean, it was a tiny little studio. It was really hot and there's
44:44
like five of us in this tiny little room, this old studio in the valley. It was in the summer.
44:49
It was hot. I think the air conditioner went out. I mean, it was really stressful. And, and I
44:54
thought, man, it is so much easier to just go on and just yack it up with Joe by yourself. Of
44:59
course, I get that, you know, but this is what they wanted to do. And if you're thinking, well, Joe
45:05
Rogan should be like 60 minutes where he has, you know, two people and he says a team of researchers
45:09
and that's not what he's doing. That you don't go to Rogan to get 60 minutes and you got this
45:15
journalist and that journalist. You got this expert in that expert. That's not what he does. And
45:19
if you don't like it, then don't watch. Well, they do. But I mean, I don't think that I don't think
45:24
we in the media, even the alternative media can take a purely popularity is the ultimate justify
45:34
of the integrity of what we do. Line. You know, there are lots of things that are popular
45:39
pornography that I wouldn't regard as being respectable lines of work. You know, I mean, you
45:45
could, and there are lots of things. There are lots of news outlets from the edge of the legitimate
45:51
like Fox News and Newsmax and the one of America News Network that are, you know, adjacent to
45:58
spouting bullshit that a lot of people like to consume. So I'm not sure that it's convincing to me
46:04
from a journalist perspective to say, well, lots of people like this format. Therefore, it's a
46:08
it's a format that we should condone. The question for, for me, is given that it does exist,
46:13
then I suppose you're sort of pragmatically forced to reckon with its existence. And I mean,
46:19
so just while we're, well, before we leave the subject of what RFK gets wrong specifically
46:25
about vaccines, is there anything else that you want to flag that you noticed in that three-hour
46:29
conversation, other than mercury in vaccines that we can just knock on the head?
46:34
Oh, well, of course, the cell phone, I, the 5G towers, cell towers, cell phones, you know,
46:40
people that hold their phone up, their cell phone up to their ear, they get more tumors and cancers
46:45
on the right side than the left side, or they get more geo-plastomas in their brain. He actually
46:51
said that it's not possible. It's impossible. In fact, the energy from this has all been research
46:57
very thoroughly. The energy coming from your cell phone just holding it up here doesn't even go
47:01
through your, barely goes through your skin, not even through your skull, into the neural tissue
47:06
to cause mutations and then a tumor. And so it's not possible. I don't know what he's thinking.
47:13
I don't know where he's getting this stuff. Well, I do know he's getting this alternative
47:16
sites. But, you know, this is just, yeah, this is just bullshit. This has been debunked. Okay, so
47:22
that, oh, then he had a whole thing about frogs changing their gender because they're soaked in
47:29
some kind of chemicals, hormones. You know, he's kind of rambling about, you know, they got off
47:35
on trans for a little bit. And then, you know, why are there so many trans? Well, because our,
47:39
you know, our, our societies in a washing chemicals and children are just soaked in chemicals.
47:45
And it's like, okay, this is just, you know, crazy. But all, all of that, you can look all that
47:50
stuff up. There are sites that do that. And so I kind of feel like if you want to be a public
47:55
and intellectual, you can't just expect the average person who has a real, a real life to look
48:01
all that stuff up. And, you know, go on Rogan and say, here's the hundred things he said, here's
48:07
why he's wrong. You know, that's our job. I mean, part of, isn't part of the problem here, though,
48:12
that there's a, there's a tendency. We do love a, we do love an explanation. And some of these
48:18
things don't necessarily have clean explanations. Like what's causing the rise in transgender
48:23
young people? I mean, that is a very, very complicated sociological and cultural
48:28
question to answer. It's a lot easier to say, well, they're, we're washing chemicals. And now
48:33
we're turning into gender swapping frogs. Like that has a certain, at least a certain cleanness
48:38
and tidiness to it, you know, well, how would you refute that? I think we do have a reasonable
48:43
explanation when you separate two different things. One is gender dysphoria, which has been around
48:49
for a long time. And these are young children that feel uncomfortable with the sex that they
48:55
are. And well, whatever the reason is, it's not like they're in the wrong body because that's
49:00
a meaningless concept. You are your body. There's no ghost in the machine that float around up there
49:05
and you got the wrong body. But for whatever reason, a mix of hormones in utero or early development
49:12
or whatever. And they're really uncomfortable. And they feel uncomfortable from the earliest
49:18
memories. And that's been around for a long time. The other concept is what's called rapid
49:23
onset gender dysphoria, ROGD. And ROGD. And that's new. That's only within like the last decade.
49:34
And that does not happen to young children. That happens to teenagers, mostly teenage girls
49:40
who are uncomfortable with their bodies. And then they're going through puberty. And then they
49:44
have this kind of social contagion. So this is the social contagion hypothesis that I think is
49:49
correct. Where there's a huge spike, like a 2,000 percent increase in identification of being
49:58
trans. And there's entire classrooms where like 20 percent, 30 percent of the girls in the class
50:05
are trans. And it's like, this is different from this other thing. So the one may have something to
50:12
do with whatever chemicals or genes or in utero hormones or whatever. The other one is purely social.
50:19
So you can, if you separate those, you go, okay, I see these are two different things. And so
50:24
that helps. Not that dissimilar from the autism conversation. In fact, that there's probably
50:30
there's clearly some cohort of people who have a biological difference where they're autistic or
50:37
on the spectrum, as we say, in a severely debilitating physiological way. And then you have this
50:43
cohort of people who are struggling and for whatever reason, we're sort of putting the two groups
50:47
in the same pot. Maybe a similar thing is happening with trans people.
50:50
I think so, in part, because also we don't know the cause of autism. There's obviously probably a
50:54
genetic component, early childhood in utero. Who knows? I mean, we just don't know. And it's also
51:02
not one thing. There's a spectrum. That's why it's literally called a spectrum. I mean,
51:06
you have Temple Grandana one end that has a PhD in animal behavior and writes books and gives
51:12
Ted Talks and she's autism. And you have Elon Musk who says he's on the spectrum. Okay, well,
51:19
you know, the most successful richest person ever. And then you have people who, you know, can't even
51:24
talk. They're nonverbal. And they have their self-stimulation. They can't function
51:32
at all. They need 24 hour care and so on. So you can't just say, well, there's one thing that
51:38
causes that entire spectrum. I mean, it's like saying, this is the cause of religion or government
51:44
or whatever. It's just it's too big a category to have anyone cry. And where we don't know what
51:49
the cause of something is, then everybody and their brother has a theory. Okay, that's the problem.
51:55
Yeah, that's what probably what I was pointing to that it's easy to have answers when people don't
51:59
have answers. And that's probably a meal of our okay, junior. It's also part of the appeal of
52:03
Donald Trump, who has great clear simple answers to complicated things. You know, build a wall to
52:08
fix the integration crisis, stop people from stop Muslims from coming into the country to solve
52:13
the problem of terrorism. You know, these are nice, comprehensible punchlines. And I wonder why
52:19
you think we're more susceptible to those kinds of punchlines now than we have been or are we?
52:25
But this way, I'm Zaraf Kay, Jr.'s conspiracy mindedness, an asset or a hindrance to his campaign.
52:31
Oh, I think it's a huge endurance, his own family disowned him. I mean, he's not, you know,
52:37
the Kennedy family is old-school liberal. They're more like Biden. And so he's kind of got off
52:43
the deep end with the conspiracy stuff. I mean, he's not going to make any inroads against Biden.
52:49
We're going to have Biden, Trump probably, unbelievable, unbelievably. I just really can't
52:55
believe that this is where we're at. You know, that's the interesting question to me is,
52:59
how is it we got these two guys? You know, I mean,
53:04
I was saying to a friend the other day, this is this does not reflect well on the United States'
53:09
presidential selection system that these are the two individuals who you've managed to choose.
53:13
No, it doesn't. I don't know how much you follow NBA basketball, but you know, back in the 80s,
53:20
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were the two big stars. And the NBA finals was that it was those two
53:26
guys. And then So Andrew Yang tweeted the other day because the NBA finals were just on last week.
53:31
It's like, this would be like the NBA finals in 2023. Still starring Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.
53:37
It's like, these two guys again. Well, come on. We don't have anybody new, young, sure,
53:44
but Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were once great, neither of these individuals were ever at the very
53:50
top of their field. Well, that's true. There's that also. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I do have
53:56
some thoughts on that. I do wonder if maybe it's such a horrible job where it doesn't really pay
54:03
that well compared to, you know, if you worked in tech or Wall Street or something like this,
54:07
you'd make orders of magnitude more money. And, you know, everybody hates you. Half your own party
54:13
hates you. The other party they completely hate you. It's probably a miserable job. And so the
54:19
talent goes elsewhere. That's that's kind of what I think. You know, there's no more Thomas
54:23
Jefferson's and and, you know, these great minds, atoms and, you know, it's like, where are
54:30
those people? And, you know, Lincoln, whatever. I don't know. They're just, I think they're just
54:34
few and far between now. Don't you think they'd get weeded out by the selection process anyway?
54:39
Probably. Yeah. I mean, look at Andrew Yang. You just mentioned Andrew, right? Andrew is a smart
54:44
guy. There's no reason why he wouldn't be present. I mean, there's something to an outsider.
54:48
There are two glaring things about the US presidential system, if I may. One is primaries,
54:55
you know, rather than having the party itself select who the internal politicians believe is
55:02
the best to lead them. Because sometimes people who actually work with individuals every day
55:06
can know them better than a person who's just watching them on television in three debates.
55:12
And occasionally, you know, watching the 24 hour news cycle about them. And the other is the
55:16
the primary, so I'm talking about there being, you know, party primaries. And then the other is
55:21
just the order of the primaries, you know, being stuck in this New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina,
55:28
Nexus, where you know, you're just selecting for the kinds of people who are good at relentlessly
55:34
meeting people in diners and being phony with them instead of, you know, any content. It seems
55:41
weird that that's what you're selecting for a day after day after day of hitting the road and
55:46
giving stump speeches and pretending to give a shit about some trucker. You know, like that's
55:52
these aren't the same qualities as you want out of the presidents. These aren't the same things.
55:56
You know, it's a skill set, but it's not the same skill set you need to do well in the White House.
56:00
No, no, it's embarrassing. Yeah. So on the question of conspiracy thinking, I mean, I'm not sure that
56:09
I'm not sure that it's a bad thing for a candidate at the moment to have simple conspiracy
56:14
tutorial answers to things in some ways. Like I wonder whether like RFK juniors never had a moment
56:22
yet. He's been in the public eye all his life. He could have, I mean, has he, has he run before?
56:29
He could have, has he ever made a splash before? Has he ever gotten this much attention before?
56:35
I feel like this is a moment where people, where people are more receptive to believing that
56:42
the elites have failed us and institutions can't be trusted and we need someone to come in from
56:47
the outside who has, you know, who can see through the bullshit and and bring a, well, Trump did
56:53
it. Well, Trump did it. The vested interests. Yeah, Trump did that. Yeah. I don't know if RFK has the
56:59
personality that Trump has. You know, he's, of course, is the voice, which is difficult to listen to.
57:06
But just by temperament, he's much more drull. He's more like,
57:11
Jeb Bush, you know, kind of low energy. Please clap.
57:19
And, you know, Trump took advantage of that. I don't know. I think that's part of it as well.
57:26
He's a little too cerebral, you know, he was on with Jordan Peterson also earlier last week.
57:33
And, you know, pretty intellectual, you know, he's talking about reading Kamu and the existentialists
57:40
and, you know, the average Trumpless, you know, viewers not going to go like, what? What's he talking
57:45
about Kamu? The existentialist, what? I just don't think that's going to fly.
57:53
And his father was, was quite a campaigner as was his uncle. They were great campaigners,
57:58
you know, Trump is a good campaigner. I mean, I'm not a Trump fan, but, you know, he can sit there
58:03
and talk for three hours and be entertaining. He's funny. That's hard to do. Not many people
58:08
have that temperament, I think, and I don't think Kennedy has that. No, I mean, his dad was
58:13
incredible. You know, if people haven't seen the footage of the night that Martin Luther King
58:18
was assassinated and Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to give a speech in front of, you know,
58:25
a huge crowd of African-Americans and security didn't want him to do it. And they didn't know yet
58:31
that Martin Luther King had been shot and Bobby got up there anyway, and he broke the news of them
58:37
and continued with this speech. I mean, I'm getting chills on my spine just remembering the video
58:41
of that and thinking about it myself. But talk about having big balls and leaving the brain
58:46
to pull it off. Incredible. Yeah, incredible. Yeah, there's a good Netflix documentary. I think
58:52
it's Robert Kennedy for president or Bobby Kennedy for president, something like that. It tracks
58:57
the whole campaign. It's really quite moving. Oh, cool. I'll check it out. I haven't seen it.
59:02
So in the unlikely event that RFK, Jr. would have become president, what impact would that have on
59:09
science or on culture? Probably not much because there's only so much that the president can actually
59:15
do. And he can make decrees and try to sign bills or whatever, but he can't, you know, veto bills,
59:21
but he can't really do much. Probably not that much other than because he's already perceived to be
59:27
fairly fringy, even if he got in there and said, on day one, I'm going to do this. Actually,
59:32
usually they can't do it much of anything, you know, the same thing on the other side. I mean,
59:36
Trump, I'm going to do this. I'm going to fill that wall while you never did, you know, because you
59:41
can't do that stuff, right? You know, the same thing with Obama, you know, I'm going to close get
59:46
mal, I'm going to pull the troops out. You know, none of this happened. You know, I'm going to,
59:50
you know, when nuclear weapons, we're going to go off of the, you know, we're going to go no first
59:54
use, no first strike, you know, which has been our policy forever, you know, that we will strike
59:59
first if we feel we have to. And NATO is dependent on that. And so when Obama campaign, he said,
1:00:05
I'm going to ban no first you. I'm going to go no first use. That's what we're going to do.
1:00:10
And he didn't do it. And then later it came out, well, all the NATO allies said, you can't do that.
1:00:15
We, you know, we need this sword hanging over Putin that if, you know, if he does, if he invades
1:00:21
one of the NATO countries, we're going to nuke him. We, he has to know we're going to do that.
1:00:26
Right. You know, so it's like, okay, so they say one thing when they're campaigning, but usually they
1:00:30
can't do very many of those things. What's the end game then for anti-vax superstition? Like,
1:00:38
is it going to get, are we at peak anti-vax at the moment? Or is it just going to keep, is the
1:00:43
roiling competition of our, for our attention through social media and alternative media going to
1:00:49
reach such a fever pitch that it just gets worse and worse? Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to say because
1:00:56
again, the moving, go post the moving and line here, you know, like it now looks like closing the
1:01:03
schools and protecting children was unnecessary. Even masking children was probably completely
1:01:10
unnecessary. You know, there's all these studies coming out in the last couple of months showing that,
1:01:15
you know, these kids are now two years behind in math and reading and writing and so forth. English
1:01:22
and whatnot. Why? Because you can't learn over Zoom when you're five years old, six years old,
1:01:29
seven years old. It doesn't work. And it is probably completely unnecessary to do that because the
1:01:36
children were largely unaffected by the, by the virus. And it's looking more and more like it's
1:01:42
mostly people with comorbidities over, you know, obesity, cardiovascular diabetes and so on that
1:01:48
were most affected. You know, so people now looking back on that going, well, you know, the experts
1:01:56
science said X and it doesn't look like that was correct. Now, on the kind of charitable side,
1:02:03
I feel like nobody really knew for sure. So, airing on the side of caution, precautionary principle,
1:02:10
it's probably a reasonable rational position to take, you know, close the schools, close the
1:02:16
restaurants and so on, mass mandates and whatnot. Just in case it turns out it's like Ebola,
1:02:23
you know, we're like 30% of everybody dies, you know, if you want that on your record, your
1:02:30
politician, no, public policy expert, no, so you, you cite on the air of caution. And it turns out
1:02:38
that, you know, that that's not a cost-free decision to make. There are consequences to making
1:02:46
those kinds of decisions or cost to that. Same thing with climate. I mean, this is Bjorn Lomborg's
1:02:52
whole point. You know, we spend trillions of dollars to lower the global temperature by half a
1:02:57
degree by the year 2100. Well, okay, you know, there's an argument to be made there. But what else
1:03:04
could you have done with the trillion dollars to lift people out of poverty and malaria, you know,
1:03:11
mosquito nets, potable water, vaccines, you know, supplements, you know, it's just, there are no
1:03:19
solutions. There's just trade-offs. You know, this is Thomas Sol's argument. There's no utopian
1:03:25
solutions to things. There's just trade-offs. You want this? You're going to give up that.
1:03:29
Well, no, but I mean, that in the case of climate chaos, the precautionary principle also comes
1:03:35
into a, into a fact where if there's a five or 10% chance of getting runaway climate change or
1:03:42
of, you know, seriously devastating and irreversible impacts on the monsoon and that you have the
1:03:48
huge refugee flows that come out of that and the political destabilization that happens in
1:03:52
Western countries, simply as a result of having to absorb more refugees or having to deal with
1:03:58
a GDP, a negative GDP growth year after year as we constantly try to shore up New York from
1:04:03
bigger storms and Miami from flooding, just the sheer distress that that puts on our democratic
1:04:10
systems, how many percentage points do you want that likelihood to be to nonetheless want to
1:04:17
invest a lot of money now in avoiding that. You know, five percent is that too risky, two percent,
1:04:22
ten percent? The end of liberal democracy as a result of, you know, lots of red chaos.
1:04:29
Well, there are people that do these calculations. Nordhouse, the economist Nordhouse did this
1:04:36
and these calculations on this. He won the Nobel Prize for this, you know, it's, you can't do
1:04:41
everything and so everything has a cost and we should do something about global warming for sure,
1:04:47
but you can't do everything at the cost of doing nothing else for the other problems.
1:04:52
You know, there's like 20 different problems. We should be addressing and so, you know, you just
1:04:57
have to balance it out. You know, I just think that, you know, the Greta Thunbergs of the world,
1:05:01
it's, you know, if we don't do something in the next 10 years, then we're doomed.
1:05:05
Well, you know, I don't see the evidence for that. I mean, I think it's a serious problem.
1:05:10
We should address it like poverty, you know, and other issues, communicable diseases.
1:05:16
The next pandemic, it's coming. It'll come. Yeah. So we should work on all those things.
1:05:21
I don't know. It's, you know, these are our problems. But back to where we started,
1:05:27
really open conversation, stop the censorship, stop this business of, you know, no one should
1:05:32
talk to anybody else. Like if you personally don't want to go on Rogan, fine, don't go on Rogan.
1:05:37
You know, but if you're a public intellectual and you want to do something about the problem,
1:05:42
this is where you have to do it. That's just the world we live in now. You know, you can't go on
1:05:47
CNN for six minutes to make your case. It's just not where the action is anymore. It's over.
1:05:53
There's a new media now. That's, you just have to do that. So do it. What's the problem, right?
1:06:00
And again, this isn't like the flat earthers. You know, even though maybe you could make the case
1:06:05
that RFK is just as wrong as the flat earthers, I don't think that's the case. But,
1:06:10
but even if it was, you know, he's running for president and we know from polls that tens of
1:06:16
millions of Americans believe what he says. Okay. So maybe he should be refuted publicly, loudly,
1:06:27
on the biggest platform ever. Maybe that's not a bad idea.
1:06:31
Michael, it's great to talk to you as always. Thanks for joining us again for this special edition.
1:06:38
Always fun.