Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Josh's Soap Box: What I Got Wrong About Covid

Transcript

Josh's Soap Box: What I Got Wrong About Covid · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Hey humans, Zeps, Equals, Misinformation. Misinformation in capitals there. This is from a Twitter
• 0:13
  account in the name of Mark Smith. The image is just an American flag. Actually, it's American flag
• 0:19
  with the styles in a circle instead of in lines. Is that some old Confederate thing?
• 0:24
  Some kind of real American flag for real Americans. Not the ones with this new pansy flag.
• 0:32
  They've been starting since World War II, the real one. So Mark Smith is saying Zeps equals misinformation.
• 0:40
  Furthermore, Mark writes a big word for a guy with a Confederate flag that may or may not be a
• 0:47
  Confederate flag. I'm just an odd flag, an American flag of some description. Furthermore,
• 0:53
  he writes a big word, without a doubt, there are parents who have followed his advice, my advice,
• 1:00
  on COVID, on the COVID jabs, which have resulted in the death of their children.
• 1:05
  Says Mark, let that sink in. Go ahead, Libs. Fact check me. He writes,
• 1:11
  so he certainly owned me. I'm getting a lot of this at the moment. My Twitter feed is nothing but
• 1:18
  hate about how I was a peddler of misinformation. Now I've been called out. Now I've been proven to
• 1:27
  be on the wrong side of history because of my infamous moment with Joe Rogan. If you don't recall,
• 1:35
  earlier on this year, I was on Joe Rogan's podcast. I've been on seven times. Every time I'm on,
• 1:41
  we have some mild, agreeable disagreement about something because we see the world differently,
• 1:46
  but we love each other, nonetheless. This time it was about the risk of heart inflammation as a
• 1:52
  result of taking the vaccine, especially in young males. This is how that went. For young boys,
• 1:58
  in particular, there's an adverse risk associated with the vaccine. It's two to four fold
• 2:04
  increase in the instances of myocarditis. Yes, but you know what the hospitalization,
• 2:09
  you know that there's an increased risk of myocarditis in among that age cohort from getting
• 2:13
  COVID as well, which exceeds the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. I don't think that's true.
• 2:18
  I don't think it's true. No, no, no, no. I don't think it's true that there's an increased risk of
• 2:22
  myocarditis from people catching COVID that are young versus increased risk of myocarditis from
• 2:27
  the vaccine. No, there is. There's a lot. Let's look that up because I don't think that's true.
• 2:31
  There's a lot. Myocarditis is more common after COVID-19 infection than vaccination,
• 2:35
  but is this with children? Yeah, we're talking about young people and boys aged under 30 after
• 2:43
  this is what says here. With children is the issue. Well, no, we were talking about 15 year olds.
• 2:48
  Well, we're talking about young children. It's a yes to all of the 17. 12 to 17,
• 2:52
  more like to build myocarditis with three months of catching COVID at a rate of 450 cases per
• 2:58
  million infection. This compares to 67 cases of myocarditis per million of the same time,
• 3:04
  following their second dose of Pfizer. Yeah, so you're about eight times likely to get myocarditis
• 3:09
  from getting COVID than from getting the vaccines. That's interesting. No, that's not what I've
• 3:14
  read before, but also it's like, well, even when we're reading these things, it's like, what are we
• 3:20
  getting this from? It was this from the VAERS report, but even from the VAERS reports, when they
• 3:25
  report this stuff, it's like the amount of people that report the under-reporting. So after that,
• 3:31
  the world exploded and then there was a campaign against Joe Rogan, not directly as a cause of
• 3:35
  this, but I sort of got swept up in it when Neil Young wanted to have his music taken off Spotify
• 3:40
  and people were saying Joe Rogan needed to be booted from Spotify and he had to apologize and
• 3:46
  all that jazz. I think you remember that unless you were living under a rock. And as a result,
• 3:51
  I was persona non-grata for a large swath of the people who thought that there had been COVID
• 3:56
  overreach because I was representative of the authoritative mainstream bootlicking blind
• 4:05
  sheeple attitude towards things instead of giving appropriate deference to, shall we say, crack
• 4:12
  pots on the sidelines who were claiming things that didn't have any epidemiological or medical
• 4:17
  basis, likely idea that vaccines were riskier than getting COVID. Now, subsequently, there have been
• 4:25
  studies that raised questions about whether or not COVID has the same impact on heart inflammation
• 4:32
  that we thought it did back then. And there's been more evidence about the validity of concerns
• 4:38
  about heart inflammation, particularly from the Moderna vaccine. So, you know, a year has passed,
• 4:46
  almost a year and so tons more data has come in and most recently was an Israeli study.
• 4:52
  The Israeli studies suggested that there was no increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis
• 4:57
  from getting COVID. Now, I never know what to make when I see on Twitter people with PhDs spreading
• 5:04
  one study because there have been so many different studies, but that would seem to indicate
• 5:11
  that the risk of getting heart inflammation from COVID is lower than we thought that it was.
• 5:16
  Nonetheless, at the same time, heart.org, which is the official like heart health institute of
• 5:24
  the United States, which gives people the official advice about heart attacks and strokes.
• 5:31
  The American Heart Association, I should say, has a piece from not that long ago, August 22nd, 2022,
• 5:38
  so still a lot of data was in. Saying COVID-19 infection poses higher risk for myocarditis than
• 5:44
  vaccines. This is the official American Heart Association. The overall risk of myocarditis,
• 5:50
  inflammation of the heart muscle is substantially higher immediately after being infected with COVID-19
• 5:54
  that it is in the weeks following vaccination for the coronavirus. A large new study in England
• 5:58
  shows the detailed analysis of nearly 43 million people was published on Monday in the American
• 6:02
  Heart Association journal circulation. Now, again, that's for the whole population. So, the people
• 6:11
  who are attacking me on Twitter will note out say, yeah, but what if you just isolate it for,
• 6:15
  you know, like 15 to 25-year-old males, then it may actually be worse for them to get
• 6:21
  specifically a Moderna vaccine than just to catch COVID. Another person on the text line,
• 6:27
  hey, at Josh Seps, did you apologize to Joe Rogan yet? Remiocarditis from the Vax? I bet you didn't.
• 6:34
  And at Josh Seps, right, Tom, from sales, is outpedaling more misinformation and propaganda.
• 6:43
  Unfortunately, he won't be available to comment. Well, here I am being available to comment.
• 6:50
  And since everyone's asking for an apology for having owned Joe Rogan on the narrow point of
• 6:58
  myocarditis and vaccines, let me say this, if it turns out to be the case that myocarditis
• 7:07
  among young people is caused at a greater degree by vaccines in general,
• 7:17
  then by catching COVID-19, then I'm sorry for saying that that wasn't the case.
• 7:24
  I'm almost certain that's not the case, do we have not yet established that vaccines as a general
• 7:34
  group of drugs, COVID vaccines, and young people as an overall cohort, that using those two groups,
• 7:43
  that there is enough data to say that COVID-19 causes myocarditis at lower rates than vaccines do.
• 7:52
  But the more important qualification that I want to add here is how we ought to think about
• 8:00
  how we arrive at our beliefs. Because I'm happy to apologize for things I get wrong. I think
• 8:09
  that's the hallmark of an upstanding and good and intellectually curious person.
• 8:16
  But I'm also going to insist that I take pride in the means by which I arrive at my conclusions.
• 8:26
  And that anyone who has arrived at their conclusions, unsoundly, also needs to apologize,
• 8:34
  regardless of whether what they ended up believing turned out to be true. Let me explain.
• 8:39
  Anyone who's down to epistemology 101 in philosophy will be familiar with the term justified true
• 8:48
  belief as the basis of what we think knowledge is. A piece of knowledge is a justified true belief.
• 8:58
  It's not enough for it to be just a true belief. It's not enough for you to accidentally arrive
• 9:06
  at something that is true without having gone through a sound process of reasoning to get there.
• 9:15
  If I just tell you that the periodic table of the elements is a certain way, but you don't know
• 9:21
  off the top of your head whether or not that's true. And you believe me as a random stranger in
• 9:28
  the street or as someone who's just blogging without any authority online. And you take that belief
• 9:33
  to the bank. You haven't done a good job of arriving at your beliefs. And I have no reason to give
• 9:40
  credence to everything else that you say just because you happened to be right through a random
• 9:45
  crapshoot about that one thing. You're not an intellectually serious person. You're not being rigorous.
• 9:54
  I try to be rigorous. What that means is that at each point in time I'm going to take the best
• 9:59
  available evidence. And I'm going to try to articulate that. And I'm going to try to be as
• 10:03
  measured as I can in taking in all the evidence, all the opinions of people who know more than I do.
• 10:12
  And then trying to give credence to those propositions that I regard as being the most plausible.
• 10:19
  Is that going to always make me right? Of course not. I'll be wrong about many things,
• 10:25
  but I want to be wrong about them for the right reasons. I want to be wrong about them because at
• 10:31
  the time I was justified in believing them. So if it turns out to be the case that I was wrong about
• 10:38
  my occurditis and vaccines, which I don't think it yet is, then I am sorry for saying that. And
• 10:45
  I'm proud of the fact that I said it. And if you could run a tape of time again and put me back
• 10:50
  in that situation, I would defiantly say it again because I was believing the right thing based
• 10:56
  on the available evidence. If you disagreed with me at the time and it turns out that you were right,
• 11:04
  on what basis will you disagreeing with me? You were disagreeing with me because you're a
• 11:09
  fucking idiot who'd read something online and you wanted to spread misinformation about vaccines.
• 11:15
  You disagreed with me because you wanted to make sure that people whose lives might be saved by
• 11:20
  vaccines, that people who might help each other to get out of a raging pandemic were suspicious,
• 11:27
  needlessly suspicious of the health consequences of a safe drug because you didn't want them to take it.
• 11:36
  So you were complicit in spreading misinformation regardless of whether or not the misinformation
• 11:40
  turned out to be true. Science is a process. Knowledge is a process. At each way station along
• 11:50
  our walk, our march towards greater information, towards greater understanding and greater knowledge,
• 11:58
  at each way station, there will be occasions on which we get things wrong. But the solution
• 12:04
  to inadequate information is more information and better reasoning. It's not
• 12:12
  worse reasoning and googling something online and then clinging to that belief in the hope
• 12:18
  that it will end up being vindicated by the facts. But believing in it even before the facts were
• 12:23
  on your side. So I don't frankly don't give a fuck whether or not you were right or I was right
• 12:30
  or Joe was right or whether you want me to apologize on Twitter.
• 12:35
  If I was wrong about something then I'm sorry for being wrong about it and if I was wrong because
• 12:41
  I was arriving at that conclusion for sound reasons then I'm proud of having arrived at that
• 12:46
  conclusion and I would absolutely 100% do it again. In addition to justified true beliefs,
• 12:55
  there are unjustified true beliefs. I just sort of said like if I just randomly told you
• 13:00
  something about the periodic table of the elements and you believe me for no reason other than
• 13:04
  that I have a blog, that would not be a good reason to believe it. Another analogy I'll sometimes
• 13:10
  find in philosophy classes, suppose that a genie comes to you to grant you a wish or some supernatural
• 13:19
  being and says here's what I'm offering you. Over the next year you can acquire a lot of true
• 13:28
  beliefs about all kinds of topics that are important and interesting but you'll acquire them
• 13:32
  for unjustified and completely fallacious reasons and you will abide by those beliefs you will
• 13:39
  defend them quite firmly even though you have no good reason for believing them and they will not
• 13:45
  really be knowledge in any meaningful sense because you'll have unsound reasons for believing in
• 13:49
  them and as soon as you take this wish on you'll forget that I have a gave you this wish, you'll
• 13:54
  forget that this ever happened and you will go through the next year arriving for all kinds of
• 14:00
  stupid reasons at conclusions that are accidentally correct and you won't know why but you'll be right.
• 14:08
  Would you take it? Would you want to accept the offer to acquire a lot of new knowledge
• 14:17
  that will turn out to be true if the reasons why you're believing those things are total bullshit?
• 14:25
  It's an interesting thought experiment. You would be taking on a lot of unjustified true beliefs.
• 14:31
  In this chaotic world of knowledge where it's hard to make sense of what's right and wrong and
• 14:37
  there's a lot of skepticism towards institutions there's another class of belief or should I say
• 14:44
  disbelief to be more accurate which is not the unjustified true belief the thing that you just
• 14:51
  happen to be right about like for example that vaccines cause myocarditis at higher rates than
• 14:59
  COVID-19 or rather that a specific vaccine among a specific cohort of males of a specific age does.
• 15:08
  But there's also in addition to unjustified true beliefs unjustified true disbeliefs.
• 15:15
  So these are examples of popular skepticism towards things that people are mistaken about.
• 15:22
  A good example might be genetically modified organisms. There is widespread skepticism towards
• 15:28
  the safety of genetically modified organisms. GMOs are safe but we the EU for example has banned
• 15:38
  a genetically modified crops that harms Europeans it harms the people who need GMOs the most which
• 15:44
  are African farmers. At one point Zambia and it's not the only country refused food aid in the middle
• 15:52
  of a famine because it was genetically modified and the president thought that was poison.
• 15:59
  So there's this sort of cheap skepticism that filters down through blogs and the internet and
• 16:06
  whatever else superstition to people who don't know what to do and they just end up in a horrible
• 16:11
  mess. Another example of an unjustified disbelief might be skepticism towards evolution skepticism
• 16:20
  towards vaccination skepticism about genetics skepticism about nuclear energy a lot of the
• 16:26
  opposition to nuclear energy is not founded on science. It's founded on unjustified untrue disbeliefs
• 16:36
  and we are at risk at the moment of combining this weird tendency toward to disbelieving official
• 16:44
  organs of knowledge like academics and universities and health departments and combining that with
• 16:53
  a sort of credulity a real gullibility towards other sources of information that we might see online
• 17:00
  or on Twitter and this just brings me to my final point which is about the big picture of something
• 17:09
  like a public health crisis like a pandemic. The big mistakes that were made during...
• 17:16
  I mean look let me also add a lot I don't feel any shame about if I was wrong about my
• 17:22
  acarditis about being wrong about it at the time because I think I got I arrived at for the right
• 17:27
  reasons I know I did. There is one area where I do feel shame about the pandemic and that has to
• 17:34
  do with the effect that vaccines had on the transmissibility of the virus. All of the lockdowns all
• 17:41
  of the vaccine mandates all of the scanning of QR codes that we put up within Australia indeed
• 17:47
  really all of the mandatory isolation and the lockdowns and so on certainly all of the
• 17:53
  masking of kids and the closing of schools that took place largely thankfully not in Australia
• 17:57
  but much more predominantly in the United States. That was all predicated on the idea
• 18:02
  that once we got vaccinated we would be able to protect other people that the virus would not be
• 18:09
  infectious. Now there's a lot of misinformation about saying all the vaccines don't do anything
• 18:13
  to prevent transmission they do they reduce transmission you know seatbelts don't eradicate
• 18:20
  your risk of dying in a car accident they minimize it. There are all kinds of health
• 18:24
  protections that we do that don't eliminate our risks you know eating more fiber it doesn't
• 18:29
  eliminate your risk of bowel cancer but it does reduce it and similarly being vaccinated does
• 18:34
  reduce the transmissibility of the virus but it is by no means the panacea that we had been led to
• 18:41
  believe that it was at the beginning and I should have been more rigorous about that. That's my
• 18:47
  big regret from the pandemic I should have been more critically critically curious. I didn't
• 18:53
  separate in my head the I sort of took it as on good faith that public health officials were
• 18:57
  saying that the vaccine pretty much eliminates the risk of death and severe disease and therefore
• 19:08
  I thought that it probably dramatically reduced transmission and I didn't really spend the time to
• 19:16
  clearly articulate for myself on what grounds we were justifying lockdowns and QR codes and
• 19:25
  contact tracing and all that because if vaccines didn't play a big role in reducing transmission
• 19:32
  then all of that stuff should have ended much earlier and the only question should have been
• 19:36
  about hospital capacity and giving people an opportunity to get vaccinated but not coercing
• 19:42
  them into getting vaccinated because then it becomes a matter of personal choice. If the vaccines
• 19:46
  aren't really doing much to stop the risk that you pose to other people then you really do have to
• 19:52
  fall back on a fairly libertarian point of view about vaccination and just say look you're not
• 19:56
  really harming anybody else by being unvaccinated not to such a degree that it's worth deranging our
• 20:01
  entire society and locking us all up for hundreds of days right I mean so that's my big regret
• 20:08
  during that that's my that's my true me a culper because that was not just me arriving at a
• 20:13
  potentially untrue belief as a result of good reasoning that was actually a failure of reasoning
• 20:19
  in a fail my failure to think through clearly okay if how do we know that the vaccine is as effective
• 20:26
  at reducing transmission as they're saying it is I've only seen the data about reducing the risk
• 20:31
  of death and severe disease I haven't seen data about transmission and then making the second logical
• 20:38
  leap of if it's not true that it has a big impact on transmission if it's only reducing maybe by
• 20:43
  twice or three times but not by like you know 99% the risk of transmission then does all do all of
• 20:51
  these other restrictions that we're imposing on people to try to reduce the spread of the pandemic
• 20:56
  make any sense and do we have to dramatically curtail the amount of the imposition that we're
• 21:02
  imposing on people's lives so that's my genuine me a culper about covered um but coming back to
• 21:10
  the bigger question of the sort of context in which these debates were happening when I was sitting
• 21:14
  there in front of Joe Rogan and we were arguing about my car dytus and vaccines we were still in the
• 21:23
  midst of a very severe and traumatizing global public health crisis traumatizing both because of the
• 21:31
  virus itself and the consequences that it was having on people the million people it had killed
• 21:36
  in america alone and also because of all of the policies the scrambling policies that various
• 21:41
  countries had imposed to try to deal with it and my general attitude throughout the pandemic was
• 21:55
  it's extremely important that we minimize all of the health risks that come from this
• 22:01
  virus we know that a highly effective way of doing that is through vaccines
• 22:09
  and the mission to try to pick apart every single little thing that could be wrong with vaccines
• 22:19
  on the fly while we're in the middle of a sprint to try to get on top of this thing seemed a little
• 22:27
  bit personality and badly motivated COVID-19 causes a very mysterious range of knock-on effects
• 22:40
  on your body now for most people especially vaccinated people those effects are mild
• 22:45
  for a minority of people they're reasonably severe and peculiar and for a minority of a minority
• 22:54
  they ruin their lives for quite a long time and people have these sort of mysterious symptoms that
• 22:59
  are almost reminiscent of Lyme disease or something we have this ongoing fatigue you have ongoing
• 23:04
  lung problems you have ongoing cognitive problems where you can't focus and so on
• 23:10
  it deranges your system it's a new virus our bodies don't know what to do with it and it causes
• 23:15
  inflammation everywhere including sometimes in the heart and when you give this new flu even if it's
• 23:20
  a mild flu to billions of people who've never had it and whose immune systems have never seen
• 23:25
  anything like it it shows up in weird ways that are fine for most people and really awful for some
• 23:33
  and in the context of that to hunt down fringe examples of specific ways in which one vaccine
• 23:43
  can cause one problem for one cohort of people just seemed like bro give it a fucking rest
• 23:50
  you know what I mean it's like this is why I haven't engaged with this whole myocarditis thing ever
• 23:55
  since and why I just let the Twitter hate just wash over me because I'm like get a life really
• 24:03
  we're talking about extremely rare events we're talking about a pandemic where we know that the
• 24:08
  virus itself in rare cases causes really fucked up examples of inflammation all over the body
• 24:16
  so you're telling me that you've found some little Israeli study that shows that there were
• 24:22
  like hard inflammation incidents in 22 year old males as a result of getting this one vaccine
• 24:29
  well great it's good that we know that now maybe I won't get a fourth jab now the authorities
• 24:36
  can take that into account in their recommendations I mean what's even more bizarre is that this has
• 24:41
  now been taken into account by official health bodies including in Australia and it's being used
• 24:48
  by the conspiracy theorists as evidence of the secret ploy to hide the side effects of vaccines
• 24:59
  like it's literally I'm literally seeing it being tweeted by vaccine skeptics a piece on the
• 25:05
  news in Australia that is saying that people under the age of so people under the age of 30 are now
• 25:11
  not advised to get a fourth Moderna jab in Australia because of myocarditis and a conspiracy theory
• 25:22
  website or a rather a pro conspiracy theory like anti-COVID website has tweeted out saying
• 25:27
  but it was just a conspiracy theory and like the insanity continues in Australia I'm reading this
• 25:32
  of Twitter after mandating the vaccine on every Australian worker in 2021 the government says it will
• 25:38
  advise under 30's not to take the fourth due to increased events of myocarditis too late for
• 25:44
  the unfortunate coincidences who were told it was safe and effective look again this is how science
• 25:52
  works like we gather enough data we go okay the upsides of getting a fourth jab if you're
• 26:02
  under the age of 30 to protect you against COVID are less than the downsides of the risk of myocarditis
• 26:09
  so don't get it fine what is that prove that proves that the system of science basically is
• 26:16
  functioning and they all thought that the authorities are fundamentally basically responsive to
• 26:21
  data they're not hiding it there's now enough data to say that in that particular cohort this
• 26:27
  particular vaccine causes more problems than it solves I'm sorry that we didn't have all of that
• 26:32
  data initially and you weren't a genius for having feared that initially and not gotten the jab when
• 26:38
  you didn't have any good reasons to believe that and you probably weren't in that cohort anyway and
• 26:44
  you probably weren't taking that vaccine and you probably weren't triple jabbed so my attitude was
• 26:51
  we know that we're in a massive pandemic we know that this virus causes inflammation all over
• 26:56
  the body not just in the heart we know that it has knock on effects for your immune system for your
• 27:01
  brain for all kinds of systems in your body so like it's a sort of an academic question if you want
• 27:09
  to tease out this one data point and say could it be the case that this one effect that this one
• 27:16
  vaccine can have on this one group of people might be more severe from the vaccine than this one
• 27:21
  effect is from COVID well okay I don't know I mean at the time it that didn't seem to be the case
• 27:29
  at the time based on the information we had that didn't seem to be the case if that is the case
• 27:33
  then I'm sorry that I got that wrong and as I say I'm proud of the reasoning that went into why
• 27:38
  I believed that and also on top of that shut the fuck up because we were in the middle of a
• 27:43
  pandemic and that one data point about that one illness should not have been decisive as to whether
• 27:48
  or not to broadly put forth a pro vaccine or an anti-vaccine case so I hope that explains some
• 27:54
  of my thinking about thinking in other words the conclusion doesn't really matter whether or not
• 27:59
  you arrive at conclusions in a rational and reasonable and well informed way does I did that I'm
• 28:05
  proud of the fact that I did it I'm closing the chapter on this I'm done we good we good oh what's
• 28:11
  that shit head 44 we're still not good you want another apology no fuck off here to me uncomfortable
• 28:22
  conversations is produced by Stefan post humor follow me Josh leaps on Twitter and Instagram for
• 28:27
  all the latest may your day be fruitful your mind humble your enemies generous and your
• 28:34
  conversations perfectly sparklingly delectably uncomfortable