Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Wed 1/19 Special: The Cult of the Democratic Party, Covid Truth with Dr. Vinay Prasad, Congressional Corruption, & More!

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk on this special Wednesday show about the cultish behavior of the Democratic Party, the popularity of banning Congressional stock trading, tensions between Russia and Ukraine, Rep. Dan Crenshaw's meltdown, Joe Rogan censorship attempts, the billionaire problem, Starbucks workers' revolution, and fact from fiction on all things covid with Dr. Vinay Prasad.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Dr. Prasad’s Article: https://unherd.com/2022/01/we-need-to-talk-about-the-vaccines/ Dr. Prasad’s Work: https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUibd0E2kdF9N9e-EmIbUew http://www.vinayakkprasad.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar. We're gonna be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media.

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ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to breakingpoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Good morning, everybody. Happy Wednesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. Not used to saying that, Crystal, but it's good to be here. Yeah, dude. I'm glad you were handling that part because I definitely would have gotten confused about the day. Nevertheless, we have a great show for you with many interesting stories that are unfolding right now.

Some new polling numbers expose just how interested in a stock ban members of the public are, of course, for members of Congress to be able to buy and sell stocks, something we've been tracking here very closely. A movement which really started online and has now- No, this is the first big online movement I've seen in a while. Has now made it not only into mainstream discourse, but politicians on the right and the left jockeying to be on the right side of this issue, of course, with some major, major roadblocks in their way. So we'll get into those numbers, which is pretty interesting. Also, Secretary of State Tony Blinken headed for some big meetings with top Russian officials as tensions mount in Ukraine. We will sort out as best we can, given the intense levels of propaganda, what is fact and what is fiction and what the path forward looks like there. Also, a viral video of Congressman Dan Crenshaw kind of losing it when he's challenged

by some question over whether it's a young girl or a young woman. Yes. Well, it's still revealing as to how these people think about themselves and how they look at their constituents. Indeed. Yes, indeed. So we will tell you about that. Also, the latest effort to censor Joe Rogan and his podcast falls on its face yet again. And this is interesting, actually. We have a Dr. Vinay Prasad on, someone who you brought to my attention, who has some really nuanced and fact-based analyses of vaccines, the benefits, the potential side effects, how we should be thinking about all of this. He's just up with a lengthy 6,000-word post sorting through a variety of the claims that are actually made on Joe Rogan's podcast. In our opinion, if you have objections to the things that are being said on his podcast or any other platform, this is the way to deal with it.

You say, here's the claim, here's the truth, here's the evidence, here's what we know, here's what we don't know. So we're going to have Dr. Prasad on to help us sort through some of those claims. But we wanted to start with a rather noteworthy moment from Paul Begala on CNN, where he analyzes the real problem for the Democratic Party. Let's take a listen. Paul, let me start with you and the words of the daughter-in-law of Martin Luther King Jr., Andrea Waters King. This is what she told Politico, quote, what we have seen with President Biden is what happens when he puts the full force and power behind an issue like infrastructure. What we want to see is that same power and passion being put behind voting rights. Do you think that's fair criticism?

Did President Biden put more effort into getting infrastructure passed, for example? Well, he got infrastructure passed, and that's a good thing because success can breed success. He is putting the full force of the presidency behind it. I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers. Okay, I read the most amazing essay today from Andy Young. Andy is former mayor of Atlanta, former UN ambassador, and more importantly, probably the closest confidant in aid to Dr. King. He told the story, December of 1964, Andy Young and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. go to see Lyndon Johnson to push him for a voting rights

act. Johnson says, I can't do it. I used all my power to get the Civil Rights Act done last year. I don't have the power to push Congress any further on voting rights. As they left the White House, Andy Young's words, he said, I asked softly, I asked Dr. King what he thought. He said, I think we got to go get the president some power. And so you know what they did? They organized. These are Andy Young's words. We mobilized the churches, the universities, the labor unions, the business community, a coalition of people of goodwill. In other words, those of us who want to save voting rights, we need to get to work. I do think Biden is putting everything behind this, but he needs better followers. So he needs all of us in the game as well. I remember. We need better followers. Better followers. The problem isn't Democrats' leaders.

It's that they have bad followers. I mean, so for those keeping track at home, you'll remember Paul Begala and James Carville. They were famously the like, it's the economy stupid guys. Now they're the it's you stupid. Apparently that is their approach. And I have to say, I have to say too, this sentiment is not just with Paul Begala. This is the dominant sentiment within the elites of the Democratic Party. It's something that Barack Obama says a little bit more eloquently, but he tends to be

like, you know what happens when you all fail to show up for us is then we get these Republicans in and then that's really bad. So even the fact that we disappointed you means you still got to show up for us. And it is this attitude of total contempt for apparently like 90 percent of the country. That is a big part of the reason that the Democrats are in the terrible straits that they ultimately are. I mean, it started with Hillary Clinton and her basket of deplorables, which apparently was about just a segment of the Trump base. Right. Then that quickly expanded to include anyone who voted for Donald Trump is evil and bad and wrong, etc. Well, now it's just the whole country that is unworthy of the wonderful, enlightened Democratic Party, according to Paul Begala.

And one more thing that I will say on this. Whatever you thought of the George Floyd protest, it is undeniable that we just had the largest protest movement in history. So to be like, why are you all just sitting on your butts and not doing anything is just absurdly insane, given the history that we've lived here just in the past couple of years. I think that's a good point. And it's a big sentiment which dominates the very top of the party. And the disconnect is one which is just so astronomical. You know, we, I think it was yesterday, you and I were talking in the premium discussion, Post Your Radar, about Democratic donors. But I think this is an important discussion for everybody to hear as well. I was just looking at some of the behind the scenes news. And yesterday, Chuck Schumer held a meeting with like the ultra rich Democratic Party donors. And they were like, you got to do something on voting rights, Chuck, like this, this and this. Once again, you think what you want about voting rights. But why exactly is the entire country's national political elite focused on voting rights in the

filibuster reform when the economy is the number one issue with gas prices for all Americans second to COVID? Neither of those things are being talked here at the top. Well, the party's ultra rich. They're doing fine. Not just fine. They're richer than ever. They are identity politics obsessed people who this is their like crowning achievement. And who does the political establishment work for? I really have come to believe that the Democratic Party donor base is actually more out of step with its own base and pretty much the entire country than any donor base that exists out there. And it's a very detrimental thing. These are the tech billionaires.

These are the Wall Street billionaires. These are people in Hollywood. I mean, they run our society, but they're also running one of these major parties. And the key to understand about this is not the followers. The followers aren't the problem. It is the leaders and it's the funders. And the people are revolting, Crystal. Go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which is that we now have the latest Wall Street Journal poll here. Hispanic voters are now evenly split between parties. Republicans have made rapid gains amongst the crucial voting demographic that has looked at Democrats. But just go ahead and look at that level of support here. We're talking about 45% Trump and 46% Biden for if the 2024 election were held today for whom Hispanics would vote. That's all adults.

Look at men. It's 56%. 56. So the only thing that really evens it out is the disparate treatment between Hispanic men and Hispanic women. But that is just a stunning figure. And actually, in terms of the generic ballot, which candidate you would support for Congress, the GOP is coming out on top at 44 to 41, Crystal. I've never seen anything like this before. I mean, we should say, I do want to put in the caveat, that it's a pretty small sample size. This was 1,500 registered voters, but only 165 Hispanic voters. Okay.

And there is a margin of error of eight points. However, this tracks with other data that we've seen. The Glenn Youngkin victory. Again, small sample size in terms of what they were able to glean from the Hispanic electorate. But the numbers come out very similarly. Of course, we saw, and this we had a lot of numbers for, how much of a significant shift there was among Hispanic voters towards Trump in the last election. So it's a small sample size. Take it with a grain of salt. But because it does match up with other trends that

we've seen, I think people should really take it seriously here. And to go back to the point about, you know, Pavagala and the leaders versus the followers, I think you're exactly right when you say the problem with the Democratic Party is not the followers. In fact, the problem with the country isn't the American people. It's the people who are here in Washington who run the show. It's the donor class. It's the elites who control Wall Street and corporate America. They're the ones who are the radicals and they're the ones who are standing in the way of an agenda that could be wildly popular. Put party labels aside. We're about to cover this in the next block.

The stock ban. It's over 70 percent of the country is like, of course, members of Congress shouldn't be engaging in insider trading. Like, obviously, we're basically all in agreement on that. We're in agreement on paid sick leave. We're in agreement on prescription drug price reform. We're in agreement on paid sick leave. We're in agreement on prescription drug price reform. We're in agreement on affordable care. And yes, Medicare for All continues to be pretty darn popular. There is a popular consensus agenda out there waiting to be implemented that the American people are totally on board with.

$15 minimum wage, another great example. Easy majority right there. What is blocking this progress? It is not the followers. It is certainly not the base of the Democratic Party. It's people like Paul Begala and his buddies here in Washington that prevent any sort of change from happening. And they want you to believe that it's the followers,

that it's the American people. They're too dumb. they're too racist, they're too this, they're too that. But actually, if we just picked random names out of the telephone book to sit in Congress in these people's chairs, I am 100% certain we would get way better results than what we're ultimately getting. And by the way, this attitude, again, from Begalu, which comes from a lot of the Democratic elites and people are not stupid, they see it and they feel it, has translated into dismal approval ratings for Joe Biden, who has now got to be counted as one of the least effectual presidents in our lifetimes. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. From Quinnipiac, Biden's approval rating in this one poll

drops to a new low of 33%. Okay? Do you know what Donald Trump's lowest approval rating was his entire presidency? 35. 34. Ah, there we go. Biden now has a lower approval.

Now listen, again, it's one poll. I looked at the average of polls on RealClearPolitics. Right now, his approval is running about 42 to 52. He's 10 points underwater. But this is a dire sign of how badly this presidency has gone. We talked yesterday about how many voters feel like Democrats and Joe Biden are not focused on their concerns. And I don't know how anyone feels like these people are focused on their concerns. And I don't know how anyone feels like these people are focused on their concerns. What are they even focused on except for like making a speech and posturing about voting rights,

which they have no plan to actually implement, even if that is your number one issue, which by the way, when we look at the polling, number one issues are healthcare, economy, and climate change. So given that state of affairs, I don't know how anyone feels like these people are really in touch with their concerns unless your top concern is like

Lin-Manuel Miranda coming out to celebrate January 6th anniversary. If they dropped all this voting rights stuff, they spent a month on trying to lower the price of gas. They may not even have to succeed. Just try. They would do better in the polls. But look, these people are idiots. And I think that that's the part that we really have to focus on. And just so you guys, you know, have an understanding of how broken the system is, do you know the prospective GOP senator, John Sununu, who was the governor of New Hampshire, was considering a run for the Senate. But he gave an interesting interview. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen.

So here's what he said as to why he did not run. He goes, well, for the most part, they are content, as in the GOP senators, with the speed at which they weren't doing anything. It was clear. We just have to hold the line for two years. Okay, so I'm just going to be a roadblock for two years? That's not what I do. The governor said that the message from every GOP senator he chatted with, and chatted with most of them, was that they plan to do little more with the majority they are fighting to win this November than obstruct Joe Biden until hopefully 2024, ushers a Republican into the White House. It bothered me that they were okay with that. Sorry, it was Chris Sununu, not John Sununu. But I think it's very important to understand here that the incentives on both sides here appear to be that the Republican Party has no mandate, at least a part of what it's given, then to obstruct.

The Democratic Party, I mean, they kind of had a mandate. I would say Biden had a mandate on vaccines and on economic recovery. You know, vaccines, it certainly did well. And actually, it's the only area in which he has above 50 percent approval. It's like 52% on vaccine distribution. Great. In terms of handling the pandemic, like 30. So he failed in terms of his broader mission, but in that one broad way.

But on the economy, obviously, that didn't work out. And when you have just such a total, I don't even want to say gridlock, because that almost understates the problem. When you just have such titanic forces, both at the very, very top, not actually working in order to make life better, things are falling apart out there. I mean, no wonder people are angry, you know, social dissatisfaction. The metasociological trends are moving in a direction which is terrible. I mean, depression, suicide, the deaths of despair, fentanyl overdose. It's like housing prices are out of control. I'm going to be doing

something on that tomorrow. Every facet basic of American life, I said this yesterday, is becoming miserable. And what are they doing? I mean, it's almost like they're responding it by trying to make it more miserable for the everyday population because the people at the top are doing quite well. Yeah, I mean, the point of showing that thing from Sununu, who was a top recruit, who actually people were pretty surprised when he took a pass. And that would have been an almost gimme pickup for Republicans in the Senate, because he is popular in the state of New Hampshire, which is, you know, it's a swing state. It's a tough state for the Republicans to ultimately win. The reason to show that is to say, it's utterly pathetic you all are losing to these people. Like, they're up front about the fact that

they literally don't stand for anything. What is the agenda that they're running on? Nothing. They're literally upfront saying, we don't have an agenda. We're just not them. And they are very likely to win, not just a majority, but it's possible that if things continue to go their way, they'll win the largest majority in a century. Now flip that around to last year, about this time, a little bit before this time, when Democrats had a very significant partisan advantage in terms of party identification. Well, what were they talking about relentlessly then? Vaccine distribution and checks. Checks, direct stimulus checks, something that was measurable, something that they were dramatically on the right side of, something where the Republican Party looked completely on a step with the American people. Well, there are a ton of issues that I just named

where you still have that position where you could be on the right side here on the 80% or 70% side of public support and put Republicans in a tough spot. But you're not doing that. You're not even coming close to doing that. It's insane. And of course, now they've basically like given up on any kind of an economic agenda. It's more comfortable for them. And it's like what the donor class wants to hear for them to sort of posture on voting rights, something else that they have no chance, no plan to ultimately get through. And so ultimately, you know, these disastrous numbers that are coming out, it's not the fault of your followers. It's the fault of you guys. And so placing blame anywhere else is just absolutely absurd. Yeah, that's well said. And let's give

them an example of what they could vote for. Do it tomorrow. Go ahead. It'll be very popular. Let's move on to the stock ban. Let's put this up there on the screen, data for progress poll, which is that would you support or oppose Congress passing a bill that would ban members of Congress from buying or selling stocks while in office? Support, 74%. Oppose, 19%. Who are those 19%? Yeah, I want to meet these 19%. Who are you? Members of Congress in your families?

People who work in the defense industry? What's happening here? People who are following Nancy Pelosi's stock trades and making a lot of money off of them. People who are making money by following insider trading. That's very, very smart. But for real, though, and I've said it before, I have not seen a groundswell online movement actually become fruition in terms of seeing members of Congress actually seriously work towards this end in a really long time. I mean, this is a real thing that started out because those guys like Unusual Wales were making it, you know, transparent and effective for people like us to air it on our show

and bring to light, you know, these outrageous trades that the Pelosi family, that the Republicans were doing about how many members of Congress were beating the S&P 500 when guys on Wall Street who are billionaires don't even beat the S&P 500. As we said, I met some of these folks. They're not smart. They are truly not sending their best here to Congress. And, you know, when you see those results, it doesn't take a genius in order to figure it out. And the best part about the current bipartisan push is that it is forcing people to get on the record, and even better, forcing members of Congress to try and get as out front and co-sponsor and more in order to appeal to you, because you know that this is

corrupt as hell. So let's put this up there. So there's been more movement here. John Ossoff's bill to ban members of Congress, that's Brian Schatz from Hawaii. I just checked yesterday, Patty Murray from the state of Washington also said that she would go ahead and co-sponsor the bill. Now, that bill is going to move through, you know, I think it's going to move fairly quickly, but look, here's the way it works. You know, it gets moved out of committee or whatever, but from that point, then what happens? Then the roadblocks and the amendments, and then will it actually get moved from the committee to the floor? Will they give it the floor time in order to vote? created. Eventually, it has to move its way through the committee system. We'll cover the hell out of it here. From there, it then has to,

you know, be presented with amendments, scored, etc. Then it will move on to the floor. Then will they actually bring it to a vote? This is the other thing that we need to do. We need to make sure to keep the groundswell because right now they can see that they're scoring a lot of points by introducing the bill, you know, co-sponsoring it or whatever. Like I said, Josh Hawley also has his own version. Representative Chip Roy, another Republican in the House, he's representing the House version. So there is bipartisan support for this stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Libertarian members of Congress also were to support this thing as well.

But we need to get them on the record, and we need to check as to actually what's happening. They could actually do this. They could do this, what, it would take them two weeks if they really wanted to. Yeah, of course, Nancy Pelosi, her effort to stop any movement in this direction and say, oh, well, we're going to beef up penalties on the Stock Act,

which all that the Stock Act does is provide transparency, which has been useful for us to be able to work with something and for Unusual Whales to be able to work with something and for Unusual Wales to be able to run the numbers and give us some data that also Business Insider crunched the numbers on. I mean, that has been useful, but she wants to pretend like, oh, I'm totally on board with that. Let's just up the penalties when no, no, no, that's wildly insensitive. We're way beyond that. Now we just need to end the practice, period. End of

story. I also want to say, yes, there are Republicans who are coming out with their own proposals, but it's pathetic that no Republican has signed on to John Ossoff's measure. And the reason is because they see this as a political winner. They want to play games that they don't want anything to actually pass under Democrats. They want to be able to say, oh, we're going to do it once we ultimately win the majority. So, again, Democrats have a wide open opportunity here to put Republicans in a very tough spot. OK, Kevin McCarthy. OK, Josh Hawley. Bring it to the floor.

OK, Chip Roy. You said, like, you're on board with this. So here's the bill. Let's vote up or down and see where you actually stand on prohibiting members of Congress from trading stocks and see what happens. And, you know, maybe they ultimately fall to the pressure. Maybe they don't. Either way, that would ultimately be a win. And there is literally no argument against doing this except corruption. Yeah.

I mean, that is ultimately what it comes down to. But to your point, the fact that you've had this online swell of support and interest and so much heat around this topic and now legislation starting to be crafted and people trying to position themselves. Jen Psaki got a question at the podium about whether President Biden actually supports these moves or not. Let's take a listen to what she had to say. Does the president think that members of Congress should be prohibited from trading stocks? The president is prohibited from doing this. So where does he stand on this? And should their spouses be too? The president didn't trade individual stocks when he was a senator. That is how he approached

things. He also believes that everyone should be held to the highest standard, but he'll let members of the leadership in Congress and members of Congress determine what the rules should be. Abdication of any sort of leadership there, obviously. Kind of indicating, kind of indicating like, yeah, I'm kind of on board with the sentiment of here, but it's up to Congress to set the rules of their body. You were in Congress for a long time. You can certainly have an opinion and press them on this one. Also, yeah, I don't think, first of all, whenever it comes to Joe Biden, may not have traded individual stock, but had some really sketchy stuff whenever it came to his own personal finances that we don't necessarily get into. We talked to Ryan Grubb about his brother and all that. His brother, his house, which he just happened to sell for a very large profit. But I think this is important because that Psaki quote came after the White House economic advisor, Brian Deese, had appeared to endorse that legislation.

So in a way, Psaki is walking this back from joining Squawk Box, you know, a couple of days ago, saying that this would restore faith, quote, in our institutions. And now just saying, well, it's up to Congress. So I just happen to wonder, I mean, did the Democratic leadership call the White House and say, hey, don't say a damn word whenever it comes to this bill? Why did one White House, senior White House official, seem to seemingly endorse this thing? And then days later, they're like, well, that's up to them. Why don't you just endorse it from the podium? Just be like, yes, the president supports this legislation and hopes he passes it. He's willing to do it for both.

He's willing to go to the frickin' Congress to try and push voting rights legislation, which doesn't have a chance in hell. Why doesn't he throw his weight behind something like this? That actually could pass. It could pass. We have bipartisan versions. As you said, okay, let's see if people are full of it. Bring it to the floor. Let it get 60 votes. I would love to see every Republican vote against this thing. Truly, because it would just show that they're completely full of it. And even Democrats, too. I want to see them vote. Force them to actually do a talking filibuster about keeping the ability for members of Congress to trade on inside information. I would love to see that. Nothing could be better for Democrats

than for once being on the right side of a populist, clear-cut, anti-corruption issue. And the fact that they don't do it, again, there's no argument for it except for corruption. In terms of the leadership in the House and the Senate, Schumer has demurred. He just won't say what his position is ultimately. Pelosi, of course, made those obnoxious comments about how, oh, it's a free market and people should be able to participate in that. It is the opposite of a free market to be trading on inside information. Okay. That is not what a free market ultimately is. If you're into such things, Hakeem Jeffries, who's widely seen as her successor, he was happy when Kevin McCarthy said basically like, oh, we're going to do our version of this. If the GOP takes the House. He was happy to slam McCarthy as not credible on the issue. But then when they were like,

all right, so where do you stand on it? He, you know, he had nothing to say. He wouldn't answer the question. So not a great look for them. Good on John Ossoff and others for getting out front on this issue and pressing the case and making it a little uncomfortable. And if Democrats had half of a brain cell and were like slightly less corrupt, they would take advantage of this rather than just crying about their bad midterm prospects. They'd rather ultimately lose than actually do anything to deliver for the American people or to restore faith in our institutions to try to bolster their chances. Also, just think of the layup, Crystal. If the House leadership and the Senate leadership, if Schumer and Pelosi let this thing die, then Kevin McCarthy and Hawley and them are going to look like heroes if they actually get it done. Or if they introduce it and then force them to vote against it.

Can you imagine the popular groundswell? Or to force the Democrats to filibuster that legislation? That's the greatest thing that could ever happen to them. Which they easily could do. I mean, consider if the House and the Senate go Republican, they could send that legislation to the president's desk. Then what? The president is going to veto or not sign a Republican-led bill? I mean, I'm gaming this out. And frankly, I think that's probably the most likely scenario at this point. And it's not just Republicans who would be put on the spot if Democrats

brought something like this to the floor. Okay, Joe Manchin. Yeah. You claim you're just representing the interest of West Virginia. All right.

How about on this one? Yeah, what about Mark Warner? How about on this one? I think he's worth like $500 million. He's a very wealthy man. Yeah, he's a very, very, which no one has yet

explained to me how exactly he made all of this money. I mean, you all have seen the list that Unusual Whales compiled of who has beaten the market. We've got another one in the show today, Dan Crenshaw, who's done extraordinarily well. One of the top performers in terms of Congress. Where do you stand on this bill, Congressman?

What do you think about all this? So a man who's got no real-world experience, was in the military, then got elected to Congress, and all of that, is the fifth best performing person in terms of a stock portfolio, outbeating some of the best private equity funds in the history of Wall Street. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So high frequency traders, algorithms and all that, Dan Crenshaw. He's very good at what he does. Yeah, that's interesting. We'll talk about that. All right. So let's talk a little bit about Ukraine, because this is also very important. Big geopolitical situation.

And as you alluded to, Crystal, trying to sort through the propaganda from the U.S. government and the Russian government on this thing is the biggest headache that could possibly exist. So let's put it all to you straight. What raised our eyebrows and frankly made me a little bit scared was yesterday the White House really escalating their rhetoric, saying that they believe that an invasion of Ukraine from Russia could be imminent. Here's exactly what Jen Psaki had to say. I'm staying on Ukraine and Russia. What does the White House make of the evacuation of Russian diplomatic staff from their embassy in Kiev? And do you think the threat of invasion is getting higher or lower? Well, I think, as I noted a few minutes ago, we believe we're now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack on Ukraine. I would say that's more stark than we have been. In terms of the decision to move, to evacuate their embassy or to move personnel out of their embassy. We have information that

indicates the Russian government was preparing to evacuate their family members from the Russian embassy in Ukraine in late December and early January. We certainly would refer you to them for more specifics about what their decision is, but we don't have an assessment on why in the meeting. Okay, Crystal. So one of the key elements of manufacturing consent, especially whenever it comes to a national security operation, is to say things are happening based on intelligence and then launder stuff through the media. Okay. So I've been watching the Russiagate people very closely. Lo and behold, they're getting all sorts of quote unquote scoops from the CIA and the national intelligence community.

Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Natasha Bertrand, who's possibly one of the worst examples of a Russiagate reporter, reported all kinds of false information at that time. Now says, quote, scoop. The U.S. has information that indicates Russia has pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine, a U.S. official told CNN on Friday, in an attempt to create a pretext for invasion. Story to come. Now, this is again the perfect example of, what's the intel? Who actually believes that? They feed it to a friendly reporter, one U.S. official. Does anybody else disagree? But it gets parroted on CNN over and over and over again, gets repeated then to the White House.

The White House then reads out a statement saying that we believe something is imminent all in Ukraine. Let's actually figure out what the hell is going on in Ukraine. Well, there was a revolution. Some say the U.S. was involved. Some say they don't. Back in 2014, okay, there was a crowded thing. They called it a color revolution. The president was ousted, and a new government of chaos is essentially roiled since then. And then Crimea was also war in which the Russians were backing some Eastern Ukrainian separatists who largely speak Russian, identify more as Russian. The Ukrainian government obviously did not support that. Big fights here in Washington then, Crystal, over whether the U.S. should arm said Ukrainian rebels. Sound familiar?

Half is happening in Syria at the time. Obama refused, rightfully, in my opinion, not to arm those Ukrainian rebels. Trump, despite talking about a Russian reset and all of that, actually did arm those Ukrainian rebels. Here's the key point. For an entire, what, five, six years here in D.C., there was a massive fight over arming those rebels. But then once we actually did, nobody actually told you whether it worked or not. And here's the answer. It's 2022. It didn't work in terms of ending the quote-unquote civil war.

That didn't happen. We didn't give them enough firepower in order to actually do anything because doing so would, you know, basically be a Cold War, whatever type move against Russia. And they would probably respond in kind. So we gave these guys all these weapons. It actually didn't work out in terms of moving the battle line whatsoever. And finally, it brings us to the here. 2022, it's been eight or so years since the said revolution. And at that point, Russia finds that a lot of this basically arming of the rebels, the current discussion within NATO of bringing Ukraine into the NATO alliance and giving them Article 5 protection is unacceptable to them. And they, because they're a failing gas state, say that, hey, we want to remain powerful and

relevant on the world stage. They spark this international crisis in turn. This is not the perfect summary, but I'm trying to give you kind of all sides of the debate here. And what then happens is that they say, you US can deescalate this now. Let's put this up there from the BBC. They say, right now, you can stop all of this crisis whenever it comes to Ukraine. All you have to do is say that NATO will never include Ukraine. This is where I just am astounded that we are even pretending that it would be in the U.S. national security interest crystal of letting Ukraine into NATO. This was a dream of 2008. But guess what? Ukraine is in Russia's sphere of influence. It has been for 500 years.

They've been fighting over it, was once part of the USSR and all of that. Affording them Article 5 would essentially mean that, you know, you extend the U.S. kind of security nuclear blanket all the way up to the border of Russia. And that is just unacceptable to them from a security situation. And I would just point finally to George Kennan, who was the architect of the U.S. strategy of containment over Cold War, who predicted after the Cold War ended that letting the Eastern Bloc into NATO would spark a new conflict with Russia because it was rubbing it in their face as their downward spiral post-collapse of the Soviet Union. Not to mention that as part of the deal in terms of reunifying Germany, what we agreed to, we said NATO is not going to expand any further east. And guess what? NATO has expanded a lot further east.

And predictably, that has led to these increased tensions. So what we're trying to say is when you're getting all of this in from the U.S. media, all you're hearing is our government's propaganda. And so it becomes very confusing. They have to make Putin, and I'm not saying like standing for Putin or pretending like he's a good guy or anything like that, but you have to imagine that he is some like uniquely evil, bombastic caricature of a person, which is again, typical of the sort of propaganda that our government ultimately puts out to the consumer in order to help you understand, well, why is he making? Oh, he's just super aggressive. And that's the only reason why.

And it's just Putin's a bad guy. And we got to figure out how to check Putin, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Again, this is not to stand for Putin, but to say from their perspective, they feel like they were lied to by the U.S. Which is true. And by NATO allies, which is true, that we have expanded NATO and expanded NATO and expanded NATO. And that has led them to feel like they are under threat. Now, NATO said, well, we're only defensive, et cetera, et cetera. But here's the other thing that's going on that you will barely see mentioned in mainstream press here. In addition to arming Ukraine, we have also been training, the CIA has been bringing over Ukrainians here to effectively train an insurgency. Let's take a look at this tear sheet. This is from Yahoo News. Oh, well, so this is, let's do this first.

Blinken is set to meet with Russian, his counterpart, the Russian foreign minister as Ukraine tensions soar. So we will see what comes ultimately out of that. But let's put the next tear sheet up on the screen there. Here we go. CIA trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades. This is a very good and very unusual piece of reporting here. The lead is the CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. That program started in 2015. It's based in an undisclosed facility in the southern U.S. It started under Obama, it was expanded under Trump, and it has been further expanded under Joe Biden. Just so you get a sense of how bipartisan the support for the deep state and the military

industrial complex ultimately is, one person familiar with this program put its goals very bluntly. The United States is training an insurgency to kill Russians. Going back decades, the CIA has provided limited training to Ukrainian intelligence units to try and shore up an independent Kiev and prevent Russian subversion. But cooperation, quote, ramped up after the Crimea invasion, said a former CIA executive. So those are some of the activities that our government is engaged in. Did you vote on that? Did they ask you if you wanted, you know, the CIA to be secretly training a covert, you know, training an insurgency here and getting us more entwined? Did they ask you about that? No, I bet they didn't. Just like they didn't tell you that there are reasons outside of just Putin being a maniac why Russia

feels threatened by the potential incursion of NATO into Ukraine. We're not trying to stand for Russia. I don't like Russia. You know, I think territorial conquest and wars of that are really bad. That being said, it comes down to how bad do you think it is? Is it bad enough in order to risk the lives of American soldiers? Here's the problem, which is that currently the Biden administration says that, you know, the penalties for invading Ukraine would be economic only. OK, that's a proportional response, I think. But here's the problem, right? When you have the CIA backed rebels, the and they're there and they start firing off and maybe they fail. and then there's pressure here in the national security state in order to escalate even more. You got to give them more arms. Have you heard this story before? It's called the Bay of Pigs. This literally happened

already. And this is the problem. There's steps up the escalation ladder that can make it and bring the tensions extremely high and make it so that, you know, Russia could feel as if we have, you know, literally exported troops here, then encroaching on what they would consider their sovereign territory, especially if they annex it. I'm not saying even that I agree, but it's important to always understand that the enemy gets a vote whenever it comes to war, and especially whenever it comes to strategic posturing and conflict. And trying to understand and see the failures of the U.S. national security establishment, who had the hubris to think that you could invite Ukraine and Georgia into NATO

back in 2008 and just simply think that the Russians would be too weak and do nothing to care about it, is crazy. Look, yes, they're a failing economy and they have massive demographic decline and their society is mostly like a joke, but they have nuclear weapons. You have to respect that. These are also historically proud people who are not going to be pushed around and have a much higher capacity for suffering and for tension than we ever do here in the West. Any read of Russian history will tell you that. So respect your adversary and understand where they're coming from. That is true. That is true.

And if you don't, then you're going to be very confused about what events are unfolding and why they're unfolding and what the actual options are that are on the table. And even with the economic sanctions, I mean, these are either mostly for show and they don't have any impact or they fall on not the elites. No matter how you target them, they always have ways of getting around this. they fall on not the elites, no matter how you target them. They always have ways of getting around this. They fall hardest on the people. I mean, that's what economic sanctions ultimately do. You're punishing. You're much more likely to punish the Russian people than you are to punish Vladimir Putin

with any sort of sanctions regime. So those are the stakes. That's sort of the context as you're consuming news. Just keep in mind that we can very easily spot the sort of like state media propaganda, Pravda and whatever, coming out of Russia. Just know you are getting just as much propaganda from your government. It's just done in an even more sort of like crafty and often effective way because they pose as neutral journalists, which at least some people still believe them to be. Yeah, absolutely. And it has a capacity to really get completely out of control.

When bullets start flying, I mean, you know, missiles, and this is not a joke. You know, this is not some AK-47 war in Afghanistan. This is a real nuclear power. This is a proxy conflict, which has hundreds of years of history and tension. I was just listening to something this morning, a Russian history podcast about wars over like Smolensk and stuff. This goes back to like 1500, right? So it's important to understand that context. It's important to also realize the escalation ladders and that whenever you have constrained options that come from the national security state and their interest in their long-held dream, really, of confronting Russia, that Biden could really be put into a box and put in a situation which is not in anybody's interest out in Eastern Europe. That's what they're so good at,

is putting presidents in a box. And I mean, yeah, that's what happened with Bay of Pigs. That's exactly what happened. JFK said, no, I'm not going the next level that you want me ultimately to go. All right, let's talk about Congressman Dan Crenshaw. He was confronted by a young woman down in Texas at, I believe, a tea party meeting, who was trying to ask him about the differences between how he portrays himself when he's speaking to a broader podcast audience and when he's back home speaking to his constituents and how he portrays himself. Let's take a look at how that went. The most important thing here is that we have important hero archetypes that we look up to.

Jesus is a hero archetype. Superman is a hero archetype. Real characters, too. I could name a thousand. Rosa Parks, Ronald Reagan, end quote. I can't wrap my head around this. I'll help you. Put a period after the word Jesus and don't question my faith. Wow. Wow.

Way to go, guy. You moron. What? Yeah, you don't talk to a kid like that, guy. You moron. Love. Love. Talk to a kid like that. Don't question my faith. You guys can ask questions about all of these things, and I will answer them. But don't question my faith. I can question your faith if this is what you said.

I mean, you can read the quote again. But nowhere in that quote am I saying Jesus is not real. That's a ridiculous statement. Of course he's the son of God. Of course he's the son of God, and of course he's real. You can say two different things. You can say that on a podcast, and you can say this here. On the podcast, nobody would have understood it that way.

I think you're twisting it that way. Which is not very Christian. Let's go, Brandon! Let's go, Brandon! It's not. And I'm not going to have my faith pushed. I'm not going to have my faith pushed. Now, that's what you might call a disproportionate response there, Crystal.

Got no dog in this fight over the actual interpretations of evangelism. But to me, it's just extraordinarily disrespectful in order to speak to a young girl constituent that way. He lost the audience so fast. Yeah, he did. Especially when she was just quoting you, Congressman. Here is what he actually said. Take a listen. So that's important. The important thing is that we have societal hero archetypes that we look up to.

Jesus is a hero archetype. Superman is a hero archetype. Real characters too. I put – we can name a thousand. Rosa Parks, Ronald Reagan, all of these people embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good. Yeah. So what she's trying to get at here is, okay, you go on Jocko Willink's podcast and you say, Jesus is a hero architect, just like Superman, just like also real characters like Rosa Parks. But when you're back home, Jesus is the literal son of God, et cetera, et cetera.

So listen, again, I'm not here to question his faith, but she is pointing out something that is reasonable, which is, look, there seems to be a bit of a divide between how you're presenting yourself in these spaces versus how you're presenting yourself in this space. The most revealing part, though, is how just, how pissed off, I mean, she really got under his skin here.

And the audience turns on him immediately. You know that you've really lost a conservative audience when they start cheering, let's go, Breach. And I think, I mean, he must be feeling sort of like ego bruised because there was a time when he really looked like this sort of up-and-coming star in the GOP, and now more of the, like, super Trump-aligned figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are sort of, like, the base superstars. And so I think there's some sensitivity there, perhaps.

You know, I find him almost a tragic figure because he really is an unreconstructed neocon. He does seem like he's interpersonally a nice guy. I will give him that. This is a very, like, boss's heart kind of analysis. Yeah, look, some people online call him Crenshaw. I would never say that. I'm just saying that some people call him that.

And I think that pretty much sums him up pretty well because here's the thing. He does seem unreconstructed in his beliefs. But, and like I said, I literally don't care. I have no dog in this, but I grew up around evangelicals and to them, this stuff is very important. So I kind of understand because I'm from Texas, kind of why all this literalism and all that stuff makes a lot of sense and why it's very important to them. And the girl has a point, which is that you're presenting yourself one way whenever it comes to this podcast. And now, you know, you said this, what did you mean? You know, saying don't question my faith

or whatever is a ridiculous way in order to respond to that, especially when she's directly quoting you. And I find hubris amongst these people to think that when they're representing us, that they are unquestionable, no matter what the question is, to be ludicrous. That's why we decided to highlight it on the show. And by the way, if anybody is listening out there in the state of Texas and would like to ask Congressman Crenshaw a question, let's put this up there on the screen as we alluded to during our stock trading session. Congressman Crenshaw's stock trading return yielded the fifth highest return in all of Congress. In fact, he actually beat Nancy Pelosi in terms

of his return. You should recall Pelosi's husband himself is a hundred millionaire or whatever, and routinely trades multi-million dollar stock options. So I'm really curious, what did he buy? What's he doing over there? And this is, again, the point, which is that when you have the ability in order to see exactly what these guys are doing and then beat the S&P 500 so dramatically to be the fifth highest returning person in all of Congress, and then you also set up a paradigm through which nobody's allowed to question your good faith or nobody's allowed to question your integrity maybe as a lawmaker without you shouting them down, well, I think that that is a little bit of a problem. And that's what you can see here

in terms of the ego, which he's shrouded himself in. And routinely, I've seen him do this with constituents, where people, constituents and others will confront him and he'll lecture and, you know, kind of talk down to them. Yeah. I just think it's the most entitled attitude. It's the worst type of thing that you see amongst an elected representative. And, you know, you see some politicians who can kind of get away with this type of bullying. Oh, like Chris Christie. Trump is a classic example and Chris Christie is the other person I was thinking of.

I mean, Chris Christie basically became a thing nationally from like yelling at teachers at town hall meetings. Crenshaw doesn't have the goods to be able to pull that off. I mean, that's very clear from this exchange where the audience just immediately is on the side of this young woman who is ultimately asking the question. Newsweek says she's 18. The clip there said she's 10.

I don't know how old she is. It really doesn't matter. The point is that he was an asshole to her and the audience was really not impressed. Just to put some more meat on the bones in terms of Crenshaw's incredible stock trading performance, if you want a few tips here in how he was able to make so much money. So in March of 2020, he made half a dozen buys while the country went into lockdown and Congress was debating a huge economic stimulus package that included purchasing stock in Boeing. That's a company that successfully lobbied for billions of dollars from the CARES Act. Not to mention, he also failed to disclose all of those trades for months, which is actually a violation of the law, the Stock Act, which at

least gives us some transparency around what these jokers are doing. Wow. That's just incredible. But you know, it's very revealing as to what exactly goes on behind the scenes. So once again, I mean, we should hold our elected leaders accountable. That's exactly what that young woman was doing. She was asking him a question. Nothing is out of bounds when you're questioning an elected representative and acting that way is disgraceful. Let's go ahead and move on to the Joe Rogan episode. I've been looking forward to this one for a long time. So you might've seen online, a lot of doctors are calling for Joe Rogan's, censorship of Joe Rogan's podcast, specifically asking Spotify to take it down. Now, this is interesting because the 270 doctors that keeps getting cited, let's put this up there on the

screen. Yeah, it turns out most of them are not medical doctors. They are PhDs, which, listen, I'm not saying they don't have the title doctor, but if you're going to go ahead and tout 270 doctors say that Joe Rogan's podcast is full of misinformation and one of them is like assistant professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, well, I've got some questions. And it turns out that some of these people are like postdoctoral fellows. Some of them are psychologists. Some of them are editors. Some of them are professors. Some of them are psychotherapists. One of them is a vet. He's a veterinarian.

One of them is a podcast host, apparently. Oh, okay. Teachers, engineers, social workers. I'm not even sure they all have PhDs. I'm not clear on that. I'm not denigrating these folks whatsoever. I'm actually blaming the media for taking it so seriously and then gaslighting folks into thinking that the majority of these people,

whenever you hear 270 doctors, are not actual doctors. And the way that they present this is just so utterly disingenuous. And we saw a perfect representative of that on CNN in the way that they covered this story. Take a listen. And Joe Rogan, so significant here because it's the most listened to podcast in the world. Millions of people listen to each episode. Have you heard anything quickly from Spotify? No, we have not. I have not personally. So we reached out to Spotify. We reached out to Joe Rogan. We've not heard anything, but I want to read to you what Spotify said, the statement they released back in April after Joe Rogan said that he would advise a 21 year old against getting vaccinated.

This is what Spotify said. Spotify prohibits content on the platform which promotes dangerous, false, deceptive or misleading content about COVID-19 that may cause offline harm and or pose a direct threat to public health. When content that violates this standard is identified, it is removed from the platform. Is that not good enough or what do you think about that? Well, it's just not being enforced, right? I mean, if we talk about the word prohibit, that would mean it would not be allowed to air. I know that YouTube removed the video version of the podcast, but that podcast is still available on Spotify. And that is a problem because it is clearly. No, it's clearly misinformation. By the way, I went and looked it up. It took me two seconds to find same doctor June of 2020 during the Floyd protests that go

ahead and protest because racism is still a public health crisis. These people are so full of it. It drives me completely crazy. And, you know, she actually happens to be one of the real doctors who presents herself. But who arbitrated and made you the person who gets to decide what is online and what is not? I mean... Here's the

other thing that really bothers me. We talked about the Robert Malone podcast. Yeah, that's right. And I had my issues with that, which we lit. Yeah. We talked about the Robert Malone podcast. Yeah, that's right. And I had my issues with that, which we litigated. We're going to have Dr. Prasad on actually to go through all of the claims that have been made. He's a doctor. He seems to have—

MDMPH. Yeah. Nuanced, fact-based, non-ideological approach to these things. So we'll wait and go through the claims with him. But, you know, we just did this segment on Ukraine. And all of the government propaganda and misinformation propagated by people like CNN's own Natasha Bertrand. And somehow that doesn't alarm them. That doesn't make them want to censor and labor as misinformation.

And listen, I want to be careful about how I say this because you guys know I am very pro-vax. I am vaxed. I am boosted. My kids are vaxed, at least the ones who are old enough to have received the vaccination. And I think that it is a good idea for yourself and your community to get vaccinated. I looked at the numbers yesterday in preparation for this segment from the Mayo Clinic of what percent of the U.S. adult population has been vaccinated at this point. For both of the oldest age ranges to have received at least one dose, it was near 100%. Yes, I know.

If you're over 75, near 100% of those individuals who are the most at risk have received a dose. If you're older than 65, near 100, very, very high numbers have gotten vaccinated at this point. OK, so I think we also have created in the media this perception of a much larger pool of totally unvaccinated people than actually exists. So true. And they fixate on it like it's the only problem in society. And it's the only place where there is misinformation and bad information and like it's a sort of unique evil. And I just think if you look at the landscape of problems and lies coming out of the media, like it's very hard to make the case that this is the worst example. Not to mention, it's such a lazy way to deal with the problem. Again, we're having Dr. Prasad on. You know what

he did when he saw things that he didn't agree with and didn't think was backed by the science? He wrote a lengthy post going through each of the claims saying, oh, this one's supported. Here's the debt. This one's not. This one's a mixed bag. Do that. Actually take the time instead of just being like, they're wrong, they're evil, and let's take it down. Take the time to go through, rebut the claims, lay out the evidence, and make the case. That would actually take time and brainpower, though. And also, by the way, the regime of just censoring and just pushing people off of the platform. Joe Rogan is extremely popular, in some ways a competitor to CNN, so it's very convenient there. It's also very convenient for politicians who get to say, that's not my fault, that, you know, it's not our fault that people have no trust in institutions and they're not taking basic public health seriously.

It's these few bad actors and so they can sort of scapegoat people who, you know, they put in the bad actor category whether it's Joe Rogan or anyone else and it lets them off the hook for their own complete manifest failures in this regard. And I'll end it with this way which is that there was a clip going around in which Joe actually invited

a guy from Australia, Josh Sheps to defend Australia's lockdown policy and argue with him about COVID on the show. And while they were having a debate, he did something you will never see on CNN. They were both arguing over claims around myocarditis, and Joe had Jamie pull it up and look it up and got corrected in real time on the show. Show me one instance of that happening on CNN, MSNBC, or on Fox. It will never happen. Take a listen and watch how he comports himself.

There's an adverse risk associated with the vaccine. It's like a two to four fold increase in the instances of myocarditis. Yes, but you know what? Versus hospitalization. You know that there's an increased risk of myocarditis among that age cohort from getting COVID as well, which exceeds the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. I don't think that's true. I don't think it's true.

No, no, no. I don't think it's true that there's an increased risk of myocarditis from people catching COVID that are young versus increased risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. No, there is. There's both. Well, let's look that up because I don't think that's true. Myocarditis is more common after COVID-19 infection than vaccination.

But is this with children? Yeah, we're talking about young people. Men and boys aged under 30 after this is what it says here. With children is the issue. Well, no, we were talking about 15-year-olds. Well, we're talking about young children. Male child. 12 to 17. 12 to 17, more likely to develop myocarditis with three months of catching COVID at a rate of 450 cases per million infection.

This compares to 67 cases of myocarditis per million at the same time following their second dose of Pfizer. Yeah, so you're about eight times likelier to get myocarditis from getting COVID than from getting the vaccine. That's interesting. That is not what I've read before, but also it's like, even when we're reading these things, it's like, what are we getting this from? Is this from the VAERS report? But even from the VAERS

reports, when they report this stuff, it's like the amount of people that report the under-reporting. Show me somebody on CNN who does does that you can't that's my point well and then he shares it himself yeah and then he tweeted it out with sources and he was like well here's why i was confused and here's what it says and i still like jeff seps and here's a substatic article actually by vene prasad so look in terms of figuring out what's

right or not i would put him much closer to determining the truth than the people over at CNN. All right, Tiger, what are you looking at? Well, as my station in life has improved, I have been lucky enough to meet a few billionaires. Not lucky, as in I was graced by their presence. Lucky enough to actually get the chance to interact with them and learn a very important lesson. They're really not all that special. In fact, some of the ones that I've encountered, with rare exception, remain some of the most cringe and self-entitled people that you could ever meet. And they seem to believe because they hit it big in one area of their life that

they know exactly how the rest of the world works. And they'll tell you. And the one thing you can mostly count on those people to do is to tell you what they think, to say the quiet part out loud. That's why what happened recently with Chamath Palihapitiya, who I confess I did used to like and had run rising back in the day for an epic CNBC rant that he gave in which he said the airline should go bankrupt in one of his lamest on his podcast when he was discussing the treatment of Uyghurs in China, gave the game away and unfortunately did not surprise me. Nobody cares about what's happening to the weekers. Okay, you bring you bring it up because you really care. And I

think the rest of us don't care. I'm just very hard. I don't care. I'm telling you a very hard ugly truth. Okay, of all the things that I care about. Yes, it is below my line. Okay, of all the things that I care about. It is below my line. Wow, below the lines of the things I care about. I wish I could tell you that if you listen to the full podcast, it gets better. Honestly, it gets worse. Chamath compares a single incident at Rikers Island for why Americans should not care about Uyghur eradication in China.

It's true galaxy brain level stuff. It also reveals a deep rot at the core of many of America's tech billionaires. Fundamentally, these people's outward morality aligns only with what they can get social media points for speaking out on and disappears if it ever conflicts with them making money now or in the future. From Chamath to Elon Musk to Ray Dalio, a trend is appearing. The single greatest obstacle to U.S. independence from Chinese economic servitude is the billionaire class of the United States. Dalio is perhaps the best example. He's an icon on Wall Street. He's venerated for his trades and bets, and he apparently passes for what they call an intellectual amongst the finance crew. Now, in his latest bow to China, Dalio said that the

United States should adopt China's drive for common prosperity. And it just so happens that Dalio has billions of dollars invested in China. He continues to shill for China at the highest levels of all of Wall Street. He even says that China is a better place to invest his money than the U.S. because in China, they have good internal order. That's code for authoritarian repression. But who can forget his most infamous moment on CNBC when he compared the disappearance of private individuals like Chinese tennis player Peng Shui to a big brother, little sister relationship? You recognize, I think that what's going on in the United States and there are there look, there are things that happen in the United States that I

don't agree with that I imagine you don't agree with. But I think that those things are different than some of the things we see happening in China. People aren't, the government isn't disappearing people, for example. Okay. Look, you want to get into the policy of disappearing people. I'll give a little bit of a perspective of that. Okay. What they have is an autocratic system. And one of the leaders described it. He said that the United States is a country of individuals and individualism. And that's what it's and that's what it's about. He said in China, it's an extension of the family. He said, if you look at the word

country in China, it consists of two characters, state, family. And that has to do with confusion. And it's very much a top down. And as a top down country, what they're doing is that it's that kind of like a strict parent. They behave like. Yeah. Include Elon Musk and opening a Tesla room in Xinjiang, the site of Uyghur atrocities. I literally just showed you examples all from just the last month. Look, in a way, I don't blame China. They're using the greed of our billionaires and our open capitalist system that we have in order to exploit our democracy and compel the speech and actions of the richest and most powerful people in our country. And I've got bad news. As much as Trump talked a very big game,

things have gotten far worse since he stepped on that escalator in 2015. China's trade surplus and the U.S. trade deficit vis-a-vis China has literally hit an all-time high. The pandemic scramble to buy cheap stuff, which in no small part triggered the supply chain crisis, has been a bonanza for the Chinese economy. As much as there is tough talk from Washington, the truth is we are more reliant on Beijing today

than ever before in our history. Half of China's entire trade surplus is just the United States, a trend which continued under Trump during the pandemic and right now under Joe Biden. In fact, if you look below the hood of the U.S. economy, we are exporting even less than before and losing the ability month after month to even make anything here in the U.S. Why? Because even the limited amount of manufacturing that we have left here in the U.S. is vulnerable to supply chocks from China. The raw materials necessary and the limited number of other places to source means that when there's a shortage over there, there's a shortage over here.

Not just of things like actual finished goods, but literally in terms of the stuff that we need just to manufacture. The biggest problem in America today is that the easiest way to get rich is not by building a world-changing company and creating jobs here, thus making America more resilient, but instead stripping existing companies of value to the absolute bare bones, a world-changing company, and creating jobs here, thus making America more resilient. But instead, stripping existing companies of value to the absolute bare bones, offshoring as much as you can, reducing the cost of inputs, and sending as much as you can to China. You keep management here, they reap the profits, the shareholders get rich. The global financial system does not work for you.

It doesn't even work for ordinary Chinese people. It is for a global economic cartel at the top. You don't have to take my word for it. Take Klaus Schaub, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, the billionaires forum. Look at the way he speaks lovingly about President Xi before introducing his speech at the Davos. China has made significant economic and social achievements under your leadership. In the first three quarters of 2021, China's economy grew by over 9%. You have achieved a historic goal to become a moderately prosperous society in all respects. Mr. President, I strongly echo your remarks in 2017 that mankind has made progress by

surmounting difficulties and when encountering difficulties, we should join hands and rise to the challenge. I believe this is the best time for leaders to come together and work jointly for the world to become more inclusive, more sustainable, and more prosperous. So to sum up, the billionaires are the problem. Until we free ourselves of their yoke, we will never really be free, economically, geopolitically, or culturally. So let's get to work. I mean, how revealing is that quote from Chamath there, Crystal? I don't care. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, a movement is quietly sweeping the country, and it is corporate America's greatest fear. Starbucks workers at store after store are organizing, and some are even unionizing. It looks like exactly what Starbucks founder Howard Schultz and the rest of the execs feared when Buffalo stores started collecting union cards. As we closely followed here, Starbucks corporate threw everything they possibly could at stopping those stores from unionizing. They flew in execs, they closed doors, they engaged in some weird creepy surveillance, they hired a bunch of new workers to try to dilute the pool, and they brought in Howard

Schultz himself to tell some story about Nazis that apparently made everybody uncomfortable. Now, the reason they were so freaked out is because they feared that if unions gained even the tiniest toehold in their American stores, it could set off a type of domino effect. Well, these executives' worst nightmare has now become reality. Here's the backstory. So against all odds, two stores in Buffalo did vote to unionize. The success of those efforts basically required a perfect storm. New York is the most heavily unionized state in the country. Buffalo has a union tradition that also gives workers some history and some muscle memory and some experience with the concept of solidarity. The inspiring, though ultimately unsuccessful, campaign of India Walton also injected some energy into the left in that city. That foundation met its moment with the increasing labor militancy that we've seen coming out of the COVID pandemic.

Workers are taking power in every way that they can, whether it's through strikes, the Great Resignation, slowdowns, and also union drives. Well, today, friends, I can report that it appears the sparks from Buffalo have indeed lit a nationwide flame. Workers at no fewer than 15 other Starbucks stores from coast to coast have filed for their own union elections. More stores in Buffalo, along with one in Mesa, Arizona, will actually start voting this month. Now, instead of focusing all their efforts on just a handful of stores in one town, Starbucks bosses are left playing an impossible game of whack-a-mole, trying to stomp out efforts to unionize that are cropping up everywhere from Boston to Seattle to Nashville. Workers slash organizers at many of these stores are explicit that Buffalo inspired them. One worker told the New York Times, the Buffalo folks became superheroes. A lot of us spent so much time being afraid of retaliation,

none of us could afford to lose our jobs or have our hours cut. It makes some sense that Starbucks would be the first of corporate America's service sector behemoths to unionize. After all, workers at Starbucks are only asked in the company to live up to the values that it claims to support. You can't say that you're a progressive company and engage in cringy PR stunts like their failed attempt at some national conversation on race, and then be shocked when your workers, who were attracted in part to work for you because they actually believed in your state of values, want those progressive values extended from PR bullshit to actual policy. So what does all of this mean, not just for Starbucks workers, but the national labor movement?

Well, it's actually quite extraordinary. As one labor expert told the New York Times, in terms of creating a moment for unions, if you organized 100 stores, it would be the biggest thing that happened in 50 years. Even if the direct economic impact on Starbucks is minor, he added, the media attention and political pressure on the company could be enormous. It is not just that company, though. America right now in real time is relearning labor history and union values. Unions and workers are shifting back to an offensive position after playing defense for literally decades. The gains that are made in these fights, they serve as a warning for other companies that if they don't treat their own workers with humanity, they can

face their own successful union effort. If it can happen at Starbucks, it can happen anywhere. But that's not all. Zooming onto the big picture, we desperately need a massive cultural shift in how we think about real freedom and real power. A resurgent labor movement is the perfect vehicle for doing exactly that. We have got to shake off the Reagan era's exclusive obsession with individualism and personal responsibility and reclaim an identity as some sort of collective. We need a balance between the me and the us. Individual rights and identities, yes, but combined with some sort of collective aspirations and values. That ethos is what the entire labor movement is ultimately built

on. You see, we've had 40 years of leaning exclusively into the individual without any concern for the collective, and that's been great for those with power and money. After all, individual atomized workers all searching for their bootstraps pose zero threat to them whatsoever. And it's easy to defund every government program devoted to the public good if there is no public good, only private interests. But we shouldn't be surprised whatsoever when the ignored, defunded, and derided collective ultimately falls apart. The effects of a collapse of the collective are everywhere right now. You can see them in an overclass that feels entitled, righteous even, when they put their own personal financial interests and ambitions over literally every other thing. You can see those effects in the massive decline in unionization

that has led to plummeting wages and dehumanizing work conditions. You can see it in the degrading of public infrastructure such that we can't even do the basics of distributing rapid tests and persuading the public that highly effective vaccinations are in their best interest. You can see the effects in the kind of celebrity politics that would cast voters in the role of enabling politicians' personal aspirations rather than actually demanding those politicians act on behalf of the collective. You can see the effects in the ultimate collective action problem that's dealing with the climate crisis on a society-wide level rather than on the level of liberals making choices they can ostentatiously display as virtuous. Buying sustainable sushi and driving

a Tesla alone are not, in fact, going to save the planet. All of these ills, and a whole lot more, stem from a society that has been intentionally pushed towards a sort of radical individualism. A radical individualism that makes it way too easy for cynical politicians to successfully deploy a divide and conquer strategy. The Starbucks domino effect is gaining steam as workers take it on themselves to try to rebalance the scales, to relearn the courage that solidarity requires and the power that it can ultimately confer. It's actually the greatest legacy of the Bernie campaign, the reintroduction of that basic principle. And his influence, by the way,

is all over this new effort. One of the lead organizers in a new Starbucks union effort described her inspiration as such. Bernie Sanders is my everything. I love him more than anything. Another said they had gained political organizing skills as part of the Bernie campaign. Starbucks has more than its fair share of Bernie bros piping his political message of solidarity straight into their workplaces. An old seed has been replanted in a new generation and its fruit is just beginning to ripen. Now, Sagar and I believe 2020 could, 2022 could be the year of the worker. Let's hope that it sparks a new era with values that extend beyond the corporate bottom line. And you can see now why they spent so much money and effort trying to stop. And if you want to hear my reaction to

Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, Dr. Vinay Prasad. He's the host of—he's got his own podcast. He's got his own sub stack. He's an associate professor. MD, MPH. He's got all the credentials. Dr. Prasad, thank you so much for joining us.

We really appreciate it. A longtime listener, first-time caller. Thanks for having me. I love it. I love it. Glad to get you on. So, you know, it's perfect because you actually just came out with a piece last night. So recent, we didn't even have the ability to make an element for it, but it's in UnHerd. We'll put the link in the description. We need to talk about the vaccines. You did a 3,000-word piece fact-checking Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone on Joe Rogan's

podcast. First of all, can you just establish your credentials for the audience? Why are you qualified to talk about this as a scientist, as a medical doctor, and all of that? Okay, great. So, you know, I'm an associate professor here in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. I'm also a hematologist oncologist. I'm a practicing doctor. I think this is my seventh year attending. And so I, you know, I still run clinics. I attend on service and I do research on evidence. Literally what my laboratory studies is the quality of evidence and how to appraise evidence. And so, you know, I took those skills and I turned it to these two, three hour podcasts. And that's what you get in this essay, sort of what they got right and what they got wrong. I think it's important to talk about both.

Yeah. So can we start with myocarditis? Because this seems to be the thing that gets discussed the most. Full disclosure, I had never heard of myocarditis before we started talking about vaccines. First, tell us just what is it, what happens typically when someone has it, and what do we know based on the evidence, the relative risks of having myocarditis because of the vaccine versus because of being infected with COVID? That's a great question. So I guess first people should know what is myocarditis. It's literally itis of the myocardium. It's an inflammation of the heart muscle. And as you would imagine, that's not a great place to get inflammation. Before the vaccines, we've been dealing with myocarditis for many, many hundreds of years. They're caused by all sorts of things, including it can occur

after a viral illness. It can occur a few weeks after a viral illness, and that is a well-known phenomenon. When we first started giving this vaccine, no one was aware that there was a potential for vaccine-induced myocarditis. It wasn't until the Israelis put out some information in April of 2021 that suggested that there's possibly a link, and they identified the link in young men between the ages of at least 16 and 19 in the original Jerusalem Post news story. What is myocarditis? I guess it's an inflammation of the heart muscle. The rates after vaccine are, I think, modestly elevated, particularly in young men, particularly between the ages of 12 and, let's say, 30. That's the highest risk group. And as you get to the core of that group, 16 to 22, it's the highest risk of

myocarditis over baseline, over what you might expect without a vaccine. It is almost certainly due to the vaccine. It is higher with dose two than dose one. It's higher with the Moderna brand than Pfizer brand, perhaps in part because Moderna uses a higher dose. And your question is good, which is, you know, as you think about how to vaccinate, the question isn't, you know, should you get vaccinated? The question is, once we've decided to vaccinate people, how can we do it the most safe way possible? How can we give people most of the benefit with the least amount of side effects? And sometimes what that means is you delay the second dose. Sometimes what it means is you think differently about boosters in an 85-year-old woman than a 20-year-old man. And so I think this myocardial discussion is really important because it's not about

vaccinating or not vaccinating. That's a mischaracterization. It's really about vaccinating safely, which is what we all want to do, give people immunity in the safest way possible. My issue, and I think you laid out the evidence very well, is that often people who, you know, they proclaim we're just neutral, we're looking at the costs and benefits here. They focus on the risks and the costs of the vaccine almost exclusively without also talking about the benefits. So one of the claims that you seek to sort of debunk in the post that you have up here is that vaccines also have lots of other dangerous side effects. So when you consider, you know, this still very rare condition of myocarditis that can be vaccine induced and you layer on all these other scary vaccine side

effects, well, then people start to question, oh, well, is the vaccine a benefit net to me at all? So how do you weigh those different things, doctor? Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I guess what I gave them credit for is I think we need to have a discussion about vaccine-induced myocarditis. In fact, it's such a big deal that Paul Offit, this is the man who's the director of vaccine communication at CHOP, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He's quoted in The Atlantic as saying, I told my own 20-year-old son, I don't recommend a booster. And that's likely because he's concerned about myocarditis. So I think that's a very important safety signal. It happens in a very small subpopulation, men between the ages of 12 and 30, typically. But it's worth thinking about

how policy should be different there. Just like it's worth thinking about different policies for natural immunity. And J&J for women, I think, has different issues. Your question is, what about all these other things we hear about? And on these podcasts, they alluded to things like maybe your immune system becomes so exhausted, you're at risk of cancer down the road. Maybe there's an increased rate of death from getting vaccinated. Maybe there's, and then there's a whole host of other things they talk about, such as possible development or abnormalities, changes in fertility, et cetera. I view all of those claims as extremely speculatory, and I don't think that

they should even be introduced into the public narrative. It takes a lot to vet a potential adverse event. You need to do vetting, and vetting requires careful epidemiological studies. Myocarditis has cleared that bar, and there's a particular type of blood clot that happens after J&J that has also cleared that bar, but all of these other things have not yet cleared that bar. And one can imagine, after you get vaccinated, all sorts of things have happened to people, from car accidents to heart attacks to strokes. The question is, what's due to the vaccine and what's merely coincidental? And to separate those two, you have to do really careful studies. And for many of the claims that they talked about, I worry it creates sort of a fear-mongering

atmosphere around vaccination that will help people who have already decided they don't want to do it, but it doesn't really provide additional scientific certainty. And it's kind of, I think, misleading to even suggest that when you haven't really vetted those adverse events. Something that gets a particular amount of focus for both McCullough and Robert Malone is the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, also known as VAERS. So, breakdown for the audience. What is VAERS? Is it reliable? Is it undercounting? And how should we think about the figure that comes from that of supposedly 45,000 deaths attributable to the vaccine? Yeah, and that's what the McCullough figure is. So, here's what I'd say about VAERS. VAERS is the adverse event reporting system. It's what we call a passive collection reporting system. In other

words, if a doctor is taking care of a patient and something happened to them, and the doctor has a light bulb go off, say, you know, I wonder if this was due to the fact they got a Moderna three days ago, dose two Moderna. And if that happens, the doctor may, and you know, in concert with the patient, with the team, may decide to report that to the VAERS system. So there are two potential biases with VAERS. One is that there are real instances of events that are unreported to VAERS because nobody had that light bulb go off or nobody followed through on the reporting. So I think it is possible for some things we have some underreports. And there are some small differences between CDC numbers on myocarditis and numbers that come from Israel and Norway and Hong Kong and OptumHealthcare, a private insurer.

And maybe some of that is explicable by sort of an underreporting. But at the same time, there's also the potential to overreport things. Because you can imagine that after somebody got vaccinated, a whole host of things might happen to them. Somebody might have a stroke or have a heart attack. And the doctor there may say, I don't know if it's linked or not. Maybe I'll report it anyway. And so when you start talking about deaths after vaccine, I'm sure that some people after vaccine did die. But that doesn't mean the vaccine caused their death. Because if you vaccinated an 85-year-old, there's some 85-year-olds who are going to die in the next week. You didn't know who they were. How will you separate those two? And that's where the next step comes in.

You have to collect all the data. You have to compare to what we call base rates, how many events you'd expect in the absence of vaccination. And it's a tricky science. And so I was not a fan that they said those things because I worry two things. One, I worry it's fear-mongering. And two, I also think it distracts from the safety signal you've already found that we could act upon, myocarditis.

And some of the things that I and some colleagues have proposed is, if you space dose two out in young men, if you put it at a further delay, there's province of Ontario data suggesting lower rates of myocarditis. If you in the United States were to ban Moderna in men under 40, as other European nations have done,

you would dramatically lower myocarditis. And boosters really need to think differently in young people than old people. And I think we have had a one-size-fits-all policy on boosters that has led to the resignation. You know, the director and deputy director of the FDA have resigned over the issue of boosters, citing White House pressure on boosters. So that's a real discussion to be had. This question of, you know, did the vaccine kill somebody? I'm not saying that they shouldn't investigate that. They ought to investigate that. But you really need to bring gold standard evidence before you sort of raise such a claim. Is that this can give you basically directions of things that you should look into, that this isn't like the final statement. This is like, oh, maybe there's something, let's actually research it and find out if this is just correlation or if there is

actual causation. So just pulling from that sort of raw data to me seems wildly irresponsible. Let me have you go into another claim that McCullough and Malone were both making. The claim here, as you write it, is effective early treatments, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, are being suppressed. What do you find there? So, you know, I guess one thing I want to say

is they actually make an even stronger claim, which I think is that in March 2020, in April 2020, in May 2020, the early months of the pandemic when New York was getting hit hard, they make the claim that doctors didn't want to try early treatment. They put all their eggs in the vaccine basket. I believe that claim is incorrect in a few ways. One, at that time, I think most of us did not believe the vaccine would have been developed by the November cutoff date. That was an astonishing feat. And I didn't think, and I

myself didn't expect it. Fauci was quoted as saying 18 months at a minimum. That was an astonishing feat. And I didn't think, and I myself didn't expect it. Fauci was quoted as saying 18 months at a minimum. That was not really on the horizon. The next thing I would say is I believe doctors had an incredible appetite for risk in those weeks. In the week, in March and April and May of 2020, when a patient came into the hospital with COVID-19 or a patient had COVID-19, the appetite to try a drug you didn't know for sure worked, but just try it anyway, was massive. There were reports of people giving hydroxychloroquine. I believe ivermectin wasn't very popular then, but some of the HIV drugs, lopinavir, ritonavir, convalescent plasma, tocilizumab, so many different drugs were tossed in,

almost a kitchen sink approach. If anything, at the time, I was very critical that we shouldn't just throw things at patients. We won't know what helps or hurts. We need really controlled, randomized studies. So the first objection I have to their claims is that we didn't try to find therapeutics. I think we did try to find therapeutics. Maybe the part I'll give them a little bit credit for is we put a lot of stock in remdesivir, which is a branded Gilead product. That was what the United States ran in the NIAID study. Whereas in Europe, they focused a lot of stock in remdesivir, which is a branded Gilead product. That was what the

United States ran in the NIAID study. Whereas in Europe, they focused a lot on older, cheaper medications such as dexamethasone, which came out of the UK Recovery Group. So does the United States have sort of a preference for for-profit products owned by drug sponsors? Maybe that is true. I think that's a bias that may exist. But it doesn't mean these things weren't investigated. Hydroxychloroquine has been tested now in many, many randomized controlled trials. When you put them all together, you actually find, if anything, perhaps an increased risk of death. And so I guess I would say that I don't want to say it's, you know, when you talk about the evidence, I think the evidence for hydroxychloroquine in particular is very poor. For ivermectin, I'm not yet convinced, but I think there are ongoing studies and I keep

slightly, you know, keep that door cracked open a little bit. I don't want to say I know for sure something doesn't work. In terms of the demonization, I will give them one point, which is that, you know, as both of you talk about, Joe Rogan did not take horse dewormer. These drugs have become anchored to a culture war. CNN is leaning into the culture war. They're saying it's horse dewormer. He's taking a human, you know, a human anti-helminth product that has a long track record in human medicine. And I think they're doing so intentionally to kind of foster that narrative. It's unfortunate that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin became politicized. They did, in part because Trump touched hydroxychloroquine. That politicizes it.

But other drugs, you don't think tocilizumab and the Democrats. You don't think serolimumab and the Republicans. There are some drugs that are still politically neutral out there. And that's the way all drugs should be. Drugs don't vote for presidents. Drugs are neutral. We should just run controlled studies. So I give them a little bit of credit. There's unique demonization of the drugs that the deplorable, so quote unquote, that's not the term that I would prefer you like to use. But I do think they're wrong, that doctors were willing to throw everything. If anything, I thought they threw too much in the you do kind of come to a consensus on, and this is very important, is that public debate over this is unfairly censored. And you point to this and point out critical of the evidence on school masking, on booster mandates, on school closures. We're not talking here to somebody who just completely toes the party line. Why is it,

do you think, that censorship around these issues on Dr. McCullough and Dr. Malone itself is the wrong way in order to go about this? That's a great question. So first, the reason I'm heterodox on these issues is i follow evidence and i don't follow what other people tell me to think um and so the reason i think that censorship is really bad in the situation is we have to acknowledge a few things one people are afraid they're anxious they're scared we're not using the best part of ourselves in thinking you see that every day on twitter you see two extreme camps i think people call them the covidians the who are still in pursuit of zero COVID. I don't know how many deer they plan on hunting, but you're going to have to hunt a few deer if you want to get COVID down to zero. I don't know. You have to kill a lot of other animals polar spectrums of this debate. And I think that happens when you're fearful and afraid. You gravitate to extremes. I also think what happens when you're fearful and afraid is that it is difficult to

engage with people who you disagree with. You view everyone in this modern culture, if we disagree about medicine, you're killing people and I'm trying to save their lives. It's so black and white. And so it's natural for me to say or to think, I think, let's use the brute force of the technology platform or the state to just extinguish your speech. I think it's problematic in many ways. One, these companies that are doing it are entirely unaccountable. It's not transparent. I did a little investigation of how Facebook was censoring some popular media articles, including articles in the Wall Street Journal. And I found that in some instances, the people they asked to fact check the article had already tweeted their opposition to the article. I don't like that article. So imagine if you're the editor

of one of these platforms, you can look on the internet, who are the three doctors who already decide they don't like this? And they'll be the impartial reviewer. That is a very, you know, that's like finding a juror by looking who already thinks the guy's guilty. It's not a very impartial system, and it can be prone to extreme manipulation. The next thing is, what are the qualifications of the censors? I mean, not everyone goes into academic medicine and publishes thousands of papers, but you do get some sense and perspective of science by doing that. The sense you get of science is that there are many times in my scientific career I've seen people very certain about something. With a little bit more

time, I see that certainty evolve. And the censors may not always have that broad arc of science. They don't know what are the bounds of legitimate disagreement and what is truly egregious or unsupported claims. And when you give somebody that power, they're much more likely to wield it like an ax and not a scalpel. And so I think they have made great mistakes. They censored, for instance, the lab leak debate for many, many months. You couldn't even talk about lab leak. That is a huge infringement on free speech and a huge error. And if it weren't for those three articles by Wade and et cetera, what would have happened? The last thing I think is that censorship may even backfire. In this case, these two people, McCullough and Malone,

are far more prominent because they have been deplatformed than they would be if you just either rebutted them or ignored the claims you thought were wrong. And so it really did massively backfire. I see now, you know, as you were talking about, all these doctors want to censor Joe Rogan. Good luck with that. The man's platform is massive.

He cannot be censored and he shouldn't be censored. He should be engaged with, given credit for the fact that, and I will give him a lot of credit, he's willing to talk to people with different ideas. He himself is open-minded and he allows you to hear what these people have to say, which helped me write the piece. So where do I agree with him? Where do I disagree? Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think that point about how it's backfired is really clear in this instance, because these efforts to censor have made guys like McCullough and Malone into effectively heroes. And it feeds their narrative of there's a conspiracy. The truth is being silenced. They're out to get you. We have the real information and they can't even let you hear it. If you were, you know, why are you so afraid if we're so wrong than just engage with it? And the truth is what you've done here, like

going through each claim and, you know, saying, hey, here they have a point and here they're just wildly off base and irresponsible. That is a far more effective way to deal with this. And I think there's been this fear that if you even acknowledge things like myocarditis, which again, I think folks who sort of fall in the anti-vax camp fixate on exclusively and don't want to talk about any of the benefits and blow it up out of proportion, et cetera, et cetera. But I think on the liberal side, they're so afraid to even admit that there's any possibility, albeit rare, of a negative side effect would give the talking point to the anti-vaxxers and play into the hands of the anti-vaxxers when really you should just be

about trying to sort out the evidence and get at the truth and then make policy based on whatever evidence ultimately you find and be open and willing to change your mind here. That's absolutely right. I agree completely. I mean, I think that this, yeah, I think exactly as you say, I think there are people who want to misuse safety signals, but there is a right way to deal with safety signals. Take them seriously and think about how you can minimize a safety signal. And I think these college campuses right now, and I think there's a petition this week at Stanford campus saying, you know, do you really need a mandatory booster policy for healthy 20-year-olds on a college campus? And I guess I'm sympathetic with that because you've got a guy like Paul Offit, who literally he himself has made a vaccine, and he's on the Vaccine Advisory Committee of the CDC.

He is critical of it. And so that's a place where we should be reluctant to impose the brute force of mandates. I think that the group of people that needs the boosters the most are the nursing home patients. They still don't have 100 percent boosting. That's a huge error. That's an error that's going to haunt you in the near term. You need to solve that problem. But college kids, young people, those are places where you can have a light touch. You don't need this brute force.

And just to be clear on what your recommendation would be for young men who fall into the highest risk category, even for that demographic group. Highest risk for myocarditis or COVID? Highest risk for myocarditis. Young men, highest risk for myocarditis from the vaccine. Even for that group, you're not recommending don't get vaccinated. Your suggestion is that, hey, maybe we space out the shots. Maybe we don't do boosters here. How are you weighing that evidence to come to that particular conclusion? I guess I would say that even in that group, I think there is compelling evidence that

the first dose dramatically will reduce the risk of severe illness and hospitalization. The first dose will do a lot, like a huge majority of the reduction in severe illness and hospitalization. The first dose will do a lot, like a huge majority of the reduction in severe illness and hospitalization. The question is, when do you have the second dose? What happens if before you have the second dose, you have an Omicron? Do you really need the second dose then? You've had an exposure to the virus.

I think these are legitimate questions, and I will be the first to admit, I don't have the perfect answer. The way to answer the question is to compel the drug company that has made tens of billions of dollars to run randomized studies in each of these subpopulations. They require a unique approach. Somebody who's had one shot and then the virus, somebody who is an athlete, you know, they require a unique touch. But I do believe the evidence is clear that for the vast majority of people, that first dose will have a marked reduction in severe illness and hospitalization.

So it is worth it to you to take it. That's one of the things that Malone brings up, which is he keeps comparing natural immunity to the vaccine. I think that's kind of the wrong comparison, because it's natural immunity. If you survived your illness, then you have great immunity. But what if people didn't survive compared to against vaccination? And so I think for most people, the better thing to do is to get vaccinated rather than to take your chances with the virus the first time. But that doesn't mean,

but the point he has right is that once you have been exposed or had infection, for instance, Joe Rogan has already had a virus. For instance, a lot of people have had breakthroughs. I think, you know, Sagar, you've had a breakthrough you've described. You know, yeah. And you've had Moderna and a breakthrough.

Do you really need a booster? I think that's an open scientific question. Nobody knows the answer to that question. Moderna should be compelled to do a study in that subgroup of people to give you information you need. They got the cash for it. I know they do. And so that's where I think the right interpretation of this data should be and how people should take it seriously. But I agree with you, Crystal. There are folks on the extreme left who think that, you know, you'll be fully vaccinated when you get your next booster. And it's always the next booster. That's when you're fully vaccinated. That's an extreme position. We cannot boost people in perpetuity. We can't boost people just to raise their antibody titers forever. We need to boost people insofar as we improve their health and maximize their reduction in hospitalization, but minimize their

harms. Yeah. You know, doctor, I'll tell you guys. Oh, but minimize their harms. Yeah, you know, doctor- Last thing I'll tell you guys. Oh yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, please, please. No, no, the last point I want to make to you is, one thing shifted. You know, what did Omicron do that Delta didn't? Omicron, the vaccine, is still good for preventing you

from getting very severely ill and hospitalized. And that's why you ought to do it in your own best interest. Be a selfish American and get the shot. But Omicron changed it in one way, which is that the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing you from getting a mild or symptomatic illness, that has dropped dramatically. And so I do think there is a tension in policy because the moral justification for workplace mandates, et cetera, wasn't that it will help me,

but it will slow the spread in a community. That is an increasingly tenuous claim. So we can have a dialogue about mandates separate from a dialogue of whether or not you ought to do it. And I think that's also hard to kind of tease out. See, that's very important. And that's actually what I wanted to get with you finally, which is that why can't we boost our way out of this? Israel's got the fourth shot. Why is it, and you were the first person who ever really floated this to me in a mainstream, compelling way, that everybody on earth was going to get COVID? Why do you believe that? And what do you think the best way that we can manage it from a public health perspective going forward? Yeah, and I think now Anthony Fauci believes it as well. Why do I believe it? I mean,

the moment I saw the vaccine efficacy with Omicron in three series, and I saw it over time, so not only was it lower than what I thought with boosting, it was also waning even after a booster. Booster is a transient, you know, it'll have a transient reduction in your ability to get the virus. So what do I think will happen? I mean, this virus will circulate forever in human beings. It'll circulate for the next 10,000 years. It'll be intertwined with us. Many of us are likely to be infected many times in our lives. Most of us who are not yet born will be infected in childhood and then again, again in adulthood. And I think it will be a milder and milder infection each time you're infected with it. Boosters, unfortunately, do not provide sterilizing immunity. There are too many animal reservoirs. This virus will not

be extinguished. It won't go the way of smallpox. That's okay. We have to get on with life. We have to do what both of you do, which is talk about trade-offs. You know, you want to minimize the harm of this virus. You want to protect the people who are susceptible, the immunocompromised, people with medical conditions, people who are overweight. Sagar, you're great about pointing that out. That's a huge risk factor that's within your control. People who are older, being old, age is not within your control. But we need to protect the older people by giving them boosters. And maybe older people will actually have a survival benefit from every six-month boosting. I don't know the answer. Pfizer should run the study. But what should we do with younger people? I think we should give them some vaccination to dramatically lower the risk of hospitalization or death. But then we might have to accept the fact that they will have breakthrough infections. And I'm critical of policies that say we should all wear an N95 starting now, because I think when will be the stop date? What are you looking for to stop that policy? If you wear it now, you might wear it for the next 50 years. Do you want to do that? And so I think that's a problematic policy to me. And that's why I think

sometimes the administration has schizophrenia when they're passing out N95s, while also saying we're all going to get this virus. That's a great point. One more question for you, which is a little bit more, a little less science and database, although you might be able to bring that to the table as well and a little more philosophical. How much does the fact that these pharmaceutical companies do have a gigantic profit motive, that does warp their incentives here? I mean, how much does that skew the conversation? How much does that feed the sort of mistrust that leads folks like Malone and McCullough to have massive fan bases and be able to persuade people that, you know, not only should we be talking about the risks, but actually the risks outweigh the potential benefits of the vaccine, which, you know, based on the data that we have, not just from here in the U.S., but

around the world is just not the case. You know, you two have been terrific on this issue. You're absolutely right. And in fact, I've written two policy books that have talked about the untoward influence of the pharmaceutical industry in medicine. The pharmaceutical industry, their goal is to sustain their profits and revenue. And so that goal, so I think we have to be very clear. The pharmaceutical industry's goal is to make profits, but that goal actually has a huge overlap with making people better off. You know, insofar as we make people better off, we can have make profits, but that goal actually has a huge overlap with making people better off. You know, insofar as we make people better off, we can have more profits, but the arrows do not point exactly the same direction. Sometimes a company wants you to use more drug earlier,

more often, never stop it, continue boosting in perpetuity. I think that is part of the business plan of Moderna and Pfizer. Moderna is also developing an EBV vaccine. That might be the next thing they work on. They're going to try to come up with other vaccines. Now, that doesn't mean I'm skeptical and I'll never take these vaccines. It means that we need to hold them up to rigorous standards. We need independent regulators to say, prove to me you're making people better off. And then we will let you have the market share. But we can't lower the bar just to give you the market share.

And so for boosters, the regulatory standard is something called mean geometric antibody titers. It's basically show me that you're boosting antibody levels. But as a doctor, that's not what I want to see. I want you to show me you're keeping people out of the hospital. You're keeping people from getting very sick. You show me that and I'm sold on boosters. But if you show me antibody levels, a blood test,

I'm not sold because that doesn't have a perfect correlation with the thing I care about. And so it is important that regulators and independent people like yourself and doctors hold these companies accountable. We're not saying we'll never consider your products. We're saying we want you to prove they make Americans better off. And that is a bar we should hold them to. Dr. Vinay Prasad, can't thank you enough. you've been a vital resource to us here on the show read your work all the time we're going to have links down to everything in the description

but subscribe to his YouTube channel subscribe to his sub stack check out some of his articles the one that we mainly discuss will be there you're a vital resource at this time sir and we really appreciate it

great to meet you doctor thanks for your time our pleasure thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. You know, every day I'm reminded of why we do the show. Crystal, I was telling you this. I posted that monologue that I did yesterday on Instagram,

and it was throttled in a way that I've never seen. It's unbelievable. It usually gets thousands of views, like, per hour. It had 500 in two hours. I was thinking, when we were talking about Ukraine today, I was like, this one's probably going to get demonetized. 100%. This one and Dr. Prasad are probably going to get demonetized.

There's no question. I wouldn't be surprised if they even took it down, even though he's like pro-vax and goes through all the stuff. But look, guys, this is why we need you. We can literally be taken down at the drop of a hat. It's always a good reminder of we are only as free as they let us be. And the reason why that we designed our business and more is specifically to be censorship proof. That's why we have the premium link down in the description. If you can help us, it gives us the confidence and the ability to say it doesn't

matter. Demonetize it. Go ahead. Make sure that you can, you know, you can't make sure you can take the money. We don't care. We can still keep the lights on, on the studio and keep bringing the show to all of you. That's the only thing that matters to us, and it always will be. So we appreciate you guys so much. Love you guys. Have a great day, and we will see you right back here tomorrow. See you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

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