Shaun Newman Podcast - Ep. #211 - George Grosman

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

He's a jazz musician/writer who grew up in Czechoslovakia where he saw communism first hand. He's spent time in Israel, Canada, Iceland and now the United States. George is a captivating story teller who weaves now & then like few on the podcast.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday. Hope everybody's had a great weekend. Another weekend with no snow, fingers crossed. Let's get to Halloween. Let the kids run around and not have to worry about park is underneath over top their costume, whatever it is. Let's let them hopefully have a little bit of fun here. Fingers crossed. Before we get to today's episode, let's get to our sponsors of today's episode.

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780808 5025 and if you're heading into any of these businesses make sure you let them know you heard about it from the podcast right now let's get on to that t bar one tale of the tape born in prague checkless sylvakia in 1953 he has a BA in english masters in linguistics he served for a year in the IDF Israel defense forces back in 1975 76 has lived in Czechoslovakia Israel Canada Iceland and now the United States he's a jazz musician who who now writes, I'm talking about George Grossman. So buckle up. Here we go.

This is George Grossman and welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today, I'm joined by George Grossman. So first off, George, thanks for hopping on. Thank you for having me on. You know, I got to give the listener a little bit of a background here. I still don't know how I stumbled across you. And I assume I go back to Twitter.

but it's worked well up to this point sometimes not every time but I trust my gut on things and I started reading your blog and I'm like man this guy can tell a story and he's got a fantastic story I think that people need to hear so first I just appreciate you agreeing to do this but second I probably should let you tell a little bit about who you are so people understand well who you are Sure. So I was born in Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer exists, in 1953, in Prague. And I lived there until I was 15.5, at which point this was 1968. And in August of that year, the armies of the Warsaw Pact, by the Soviet Union occupied the country as a result of political changes that were taking place that the Russians didn't like, the Soviets, I should say, didn't like. And as per usual,

when they don't like something, they solved the problem with tanks. So we left, me and my parents, and we moved to Israel, where I lived in Tel Aviv for nine years. I went to high school. I served in the IDF, although a shorter time than usual because of various circumstances. Usually you serve three years, I served one. And then I moved from there to England to London, where I studied, I studied music, classical guitar, but I also completed a master's degree in linguistics at the University of Essex, which is about 60 miles east of London. And then from there, the British didn't want me to stay there. I would have loved to stay in England.

I love London. But I couldn't, they wouldn't renew my student visa. So one thing led to another, and I ended up in Canada. I ended up in Toronto. I got a part-time job as an assistant, a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto. That didn't last, but then I changed my visa from, you know, tourist visa to an immigrant visa and I became a landed immigrant, me and my then wife. And I lived in Toronto for a long time, for 30 years, with a, there was a period in the 90s

where I lived in Iceland in Reykjavik. I continued being a Canadian resident, I guess, because I would always go back for a few months and work in Toronto and then fly back, you know. But I was in Iceland for a good, you know, four years and a bit. And then finally, the last move was in 2011 when I moved down to the U.S. I always wanted to really live in the States and if not lived, then at least get to know it well and spend a longer time. And I, my ex-wife and I bought a condo in Orlando and I started getting to know musicians. here and and I didn't want to work illegally because, you know, you just don't want to do that.

Every time I would cross the border, I would be like, you know, oh, geez, you know, they'll find out traveling with my guitar. I think I have a, I think I have a thing from like having been brought up in a communist country where like, you know, border, border officials or, you know, cops and, you know, anybody in a uniform, I like immediately, I know I'm doing something wrong. Long story short, I applied for a work visa. It just took a long time. I got it. Then I, you know, lived here for a few years and I met my wife and my present wife.

And that's the story. Well, I got to rewind you because like I told you in my email, after reading your writing, your blog and listening to you talk, I just, there's so many questions that I find just, they just. I can't get them to stop. So we'll start here. You talked about being a young kid and the Soviets, when they had a problem, they rolled the tanks in. I don't think anyone in North America understands even what that means. Yes, you're right. So I'm curious, could you talk to us a little bit about, and we'll start there and we'll see where it goes, is what does that mean military law?

What does that mean to have tanks roll down? Like, just I'd love to hear what that was like, I guess. Well, it's a good thing that we have a lot of time. Let's put it this way. It's 52 years ago. It's a lifetime ago, right? I'm guessing you're in your 40s? 35.

Oh, well, I'm sorry. I added five years too. I apologize. So, you know, it's a lifetime ago, but yet it's as fresh. to me as anything in my memory. And I come back to it, I write about it, I think about it. Now, so I'll give you a little bit of background, okay? So my parents went through the war.

Both of them had terrible, terrible stories to tell, especially my mother, because she was in a concentration camp, which I think we'll get to later. But even my father, although he himself was not imprisoned, but he was in hiding and went through a countless, you know, number of very dangerous situations. And then when he came home from the war, meaning he came back to the town he had known and the town and a house that he had known, he found out that his parents and almost all siblings, he was one of seven. And so almost all of his siblings and his parents were killed in a bombing. And it was an allied bombing. It was the only bombing of that particular

area in a train station and his, you know, it was just a sheer bad luck that they were the wrong place, the wrong time. Anyway, so he comes back and pretty much his whole family is wiped out. My mother came back from the, from the Holocaust. And then, you know, they, I don't know how you start a new life after that, but they did. And so they, so in 1948, three years after the end of World War II, Czechoslovakia became a communist country. Up until then, those three years between 45 and 48, there was a window of freedom. If you look on the map, that will explain that window because Prague is actually west of Vienna. And we were always called Eastern Europe, but people, Czech people objected to it. We're not Eastern Europe. I mean, we're all 300 miles.

about yeah, 300 miles west of northwest of Vienna. We're actually, you know, more like in Germany almost, you know. And that was the reason that there was a bit of freedom after the war because General Patton's army came within, I think about 70 kilometers west of Prague. And then the Red Army was pushing in from the east. and the powers that be sat down and decided that it was going to be in the Soviet sector as opposed to in the America sector. It was a question of 70 kilometers, right? If he had continued two more days, I wouldn't be here talking to you.

And Czechoslovakia would have been something like West Germany became or Austria or something like that. Well, that didn't happen. And the Soviets won the day. and in 1948, there was a that was a coup d'etat and the Communist Party took over. So now my parents had gone through the war, and now they were living in this deep communist country. They went from, you know, frying panes of fire. And I was born, you know, exactly at the worst possible time from that point of view. I was, in fact, two days before Stalin died.

He died on a fifth of March. I was born on a third of March. So anyway, so I grew up in a communist country. Most people in Canada and the U.S., you hear communist country, you have a certain vision or a certain idea. But, you know, Czechoslovakia was never the Soviet Union. For the simple reason, like I said, it was farther west. It was more of a Western country in between the two wars. It was a free liberal democracy, just like the UK or France or, you know,

those. It had a very developed industrial sector so that although it became communist, there was a lot of historical background that just made it slightly better than, say, the Soviet Union or some hellhole like Romania. And I apologize to Romanian people who I love, and I love Romanian gypsy music and I've been to Romania, but I'm talking about the communists. So anyway, so I grew up in this, in this sort of milieu, you know, atmosphere. But around a time when I was about 12, things really started improving a lot, meaning, you know, there was a little bit more freedom to travel. And you somehow felt the oppression was lessening.

Now, again, I was a kid, you know, when you're 10, 11, 12, 13, I really don't even know that I felt any kind of oppression other than my parents talking about it. And, you know, whispering when people, we had guests, you know, and my parents would just be like, I can't say that. So it's 1965, 66, 67 is when what was then called the Prague Spring, which was from January 68, right till the occupation, which was in August 68, so those eight months are known as the Prague spring, and you can Google that and you'll get a million results. And what happened just before

that in 67, I don't know if I'm going into too much detail, but. No, carry out. Okay. So somewhere in mid-67 or, you know, I can't remember exactly. I was, you know, 13, 14. But what happened was, I remember we were watching TV. And this, there was some discussion program, you know, on, and of course, we only, you know, TV was the size of my palm approximately, black and white, one channel. And this guy comes on, and we're all sitting there, my parents are watching, I guess, I always watch TV with the guitar in my hands, practicing.

So, you know, we're watching. and this guy comes on and he starts talking about reform. We need to, you know, like economic reform because the country is going to go down the drain if we don't implement economic reforms. He was a short little guy with thick glasses, you know, and I remember my father, my father went, this guy's in jail tonight.

He couldn't believe that somebody would, you know, come on TV and say, this. Now, you got to remember if, by the, I remember his name, his name was Otto Schick. But anyway, most likely he had gotten prior permission because you would not go on TV and just criticize the government and get away with it unless, you know, however, what that meant, the guy didn't go to jail. And newspapers started talking about economic reform. And that's when the real fall came in. Now, in 68, January 16th, a new head of the Communist Party came in by the name of Alexander Dukchek.

And he was from Slovakia. I'm going to say he was relatively a young man because everybody prior to that was just like in American politics. You know, if you're under 85, you don't even qualify. It's ridiculous down here. But anyway, so he was a relatively young guy in his early to mid-40s. And he relaxed the country completely. Like suddenly you could talk, you could say whatever you wanted.

You know, newspapers started writing without censorship. People started traveling. It was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And I'm 15 years old. You know, all I'm interested is the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Suddenly I'm able to get, you know, records, which I couldn't get before.

And everything opened up. And it was like, you know, you could listen to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America unscrambled, which before that, you know, you could kind of try, but you couldn't really do it. So we tasted this freedom. Now, I had been with my parents, I had been to the West before in 1965 on a trip to Israel. So I'd been to like Vienna and I could imagine what it looked like.

But to millions of people, Sean, you have no idea what, you know, I mean, when one day you can't, you know, I mean, you feel like you're in a bubble, all right? not Siberia, not the Gulag. There was enough food to eat, but it's still a bubble. You can't say certain things. You can't travel. You can't meet certain people. And that suddenly it opens up. Well, that can only lead eventually to free elections, right?

Because when you have freedom, the Communist Party can say, well, we're the best, we're the best, we're the best. But if you're free to vote for whoever you want, then, you know, sooner or later. you'll find an alternative. It's true that they probably would have lasted two or three years, I mean, the party, because they, you know, they ran things well and everything kind of opened up and people were, oh, yeah, but eventually it would have collapsed, just like we saw it collapse later in the Soviet Union. So, you know, there were signs during the spring and then later on in the summer that something's going to happen, that the Russians don't like this.

What do you mean science? Pardon? What do you mean by science? What I mean is we felt there was, it was on the news. There was pressure, you know, so they would say, you know, Comrade Dukchik was called to Moscow for urgent talks. Okay, well, he came back and he would say, well, I talked to the comrades in Moscow and they, you know,

they agreed to our reforms, but, you know, we have to be cautious about how we proceed and blah, blah, blah, blah. But nothing happened. It was all talk. Then in midsummer, the Warsaw Pact, by the way, you probably don't know what that was. The Warsaw Pact was the answer to NATO, right? It was, you know, Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and maybe one or two other countries. And that was the Warsaw Pact.

So they in June of that year, June and July of that year, they held maneuvers in Czechoslovakia. But they were maneuvers. So they were strictly confined to certain areas, you know, in the country. But still, it's presence of a foreign army on your soil. It doesn't feel good. But strangely enough, by mid-July, they packed up and left. And at that point, everybody thought, well, they were here. If they wanted to occupy us, they wanted to put an end to these political reforms, they could have done that.

They were there. And they didn't. So it was done, I think, we don't know. We can read historical books about it, but we don't know. It was probably done to put people off guard. right and say okay well nothing can have or free we can continue these reforms and the reforms kept coming daily right so up until then you couldn't own a private business now the party said well if you employ less than 10 people you can open a private business of course that would have

led down the road to 100 people and open any kind of business so once you open the gates to freedom and this is what we'll talk about later. But I mean, it just, it's a flood, the damn burst. Well, on the 21st of August 1968, the comrades in the Kremlin decided that they had had enough. And I don't know the exact number, but I believe it was in excess of 200,000 troops. You know, I think you can look it up.

I'm not exactly sure, but I think a division is about 40,000, and it was five divisions. So, you know, something like 200,000 troops. And so that's huge. I mean, you know, for a country of, you know, 14 million people, you know, it's a massive, massive occupation. We woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning with, you know, jets screaming overhead. and then a little bit later, tanks rolling. We lived in a southeastern suburb of Prague, very close to a main road that led out of the city.

So you could see the tanks coming in, armored vehicles. War. I mean, it wasn't war because they didn't encounter. Resistance. Almost none. There was a little bit. Well, what happened was that the radio, the first thing they did, they occupy the main radio station in Prague. And so, but, you know, people immediately set up underground radio stations.

And we were asked by the leadership of the country to not resist. You know, resistance is futile, you know. Anyway, so but there were some, you know, there were some of casualties for sure because people would stand in the way of a tank and wouldn't move. And then, you know, so a few hundred people were killed. But, you know, pretty much unopposed. Isn't it interesting? The first thing they do is take over the main radio station, the main form of communication. Yeah.

Well, first of all, you know, I'll do this. There we go. That's better. So they were well-versed, you know, in occupying countries because in 1956, they had done the same thing in Hungary 12 years previously. I'm not sure about the year I don't want to like, but before that they had done the same thing in Poland. And the Hungarian uprising was very bloody. I mean, the Hungarian uprising was a, that was a real, again, I don't like over-explained. But what happened in Czechoslovakia was more of a, it was more of an inside-the-communist party change of guard.

Okay. What happened in Hungary in 56 was an out-and-out revolution. anti-communist revolution. They threw the Communist Party out. The Soviet tanks rolled in. There were, I mean, you know, machine guns in the streets. You know, there was a real war, basically, for about a week and a half. So they had done this before, and they knew the first thing was

communication centers and the airport. So the airport had already been taken over in the, in the middle of the night, but we didn't, obviously we didn't know that. That's the first thing they did. They landed at the airport, and then the second thing was the TV and radio. Yeah. Do you get chills watching what's going on right now? Yes.

Of course. More than chills. I mean, it's, it's, I get chills now when I talk to you about it. I got goosebumps, you know? I mean, it's horrendous. Like, I don't know. I sit up here and free Canada or, you know, like God loving, like, everybody loves Canadians and we're just so like, you know, you lived here, right?

We're just so easy. Oh, yeah, I have a Canadian passport, man. You know, of course. We're just easy going. But, you know, like, like right now, I just, I don't understand why no, like, I feel crazy for even talking about it. Right? Like it's weird, George. Like I just sit here and I'm like, I'm listening and I'm going, listen, you turn on mainstream media. You get the same message over and over again. And you can see kind of the playbook that's coming down the line. At least I think you can. You talk about the airports. Well, they made sure that if you're doing any type of traveling now, even in Canada, it's got to be their way or the highway. Like you're not getting, literally, you're not getting anywhere. And they're taking away options. And it's all under public. safety, right? Like it's, and I, listen, I want to sit back and go, that's okay. Yeah, we're just

trying to get through the pandemic. Everything, get through the pandemic and we'll all be fine. No. But the longer it goes, no, the stranger is fine. You won't be fine. You won't be fine. And we won't be fine. So what's, what city are you in or what province are you in? I'm right on the border of Alberta and Saskatchew. Okay. So, um, strangely enough, Those are the two provinces that I haven't been to. Seriously, I've been to Atlantic Canada. I've been all over all the other provinces. But anyway, be that as it may.

No, I mean, I'm in Florida, which is significantly different. For how long we don't know. Texas is significantly different. But all the things that you mentioned in the United States, just like in Canada are under federal jurisdiction. So flying, for example, right now you can still fly without, you know, being vaccinated. But I don't know how long that will last. Not too long, I don't think.

That's the next step. And it doesn't, you know, the vaccination, again, it's just, I know we're jumping from subject to subject. Yeah, sorry. And I'll rewind us back to your story. Yeah, we'll rewind it back. Yeah. You know, the vaccination is, it's not a symbol, but not a milestone or stepping stone, let's say. Okay.

So every single bit for the last 19 months, they're all were stepping stones. And people were predicting this back a year ago. And a lot of people said that Canada, that can't happen. No way. I was one of them. Me too. I was like, what are we worried about here, guys? Let's just all go along with getting along and things are going to get better.

Right. And to be very honest with you, I was like you, even though I had done now. I was more skeptical about the virus part of it, okay? But about the, you know, the freedom. I thought, okay, you know, that can't happen here. Come on. What? They're not going to allow you to go to another province.

or to an understanding, how can they do that? Well, they can't. So I think they're all stepping stones. And whether it's the mask, whether it's whatever it is, it's just a means of gaining control. In Australia, they have already done it almost completely. New Zealand, too. Canada is not quite there yet, but on the way.

The United States depends where you are. If you're in New York State or California or Michigan, that's just like, you know, any Canadian province. Down south, not so much. So, yes, I'm very frightened. I'm very scared. I write about it all the time. I think about it all the time. I don't think about anything else.

My wife has headed up to here. But, you know, I try to explain to her what else? What do you want me to think about? I mean, there is nothing else. Everything stems from that. The economic situation, anything you want, stems from the Chinese takeover, aka COVID. Well, rewind me back then.

You know, I'm so much of lessons and knowledge and comes from stories. Like just hearing as you talk, This is why my brain doesn't shut off. I try and quiet it down. But I love just following up with questions, I guess. You're talking about tanks rolling in, 200,000 troops. They take over the airports, the radio station.

Like, I just, I sit here and I go, I got no idea. I've read, you know, I was a history major in college. So some of the stuff you talk about, I certainly remember. but firsthand experience is like completely different than reading it in a book, right? I can sit here and read Solgen-Etsin, but I was never in Soviet Russia. I have no bloody clue. Well, yes, yes and no, because you are beginning to get a clue now, see. So you say you have no clue, but if you compare your life now, okay, to December 2000.

19. It's completely different. So you do have a clue. Okay. It's a little different. Like, you know, Canada doesn't have Chinese troops on its soil yet. But you are getting, you're getting, you're starting to understand it, you know. Anyway, carry on.

Well, some of the things, no matter what you read, you can draw comparisons, similarities. like, oh, you know, you wrote in a communist Prague, nobody believed the bullshit. You were talking about politicians where the wild thing here is, people believe everything. Yeah. And I watched our premiere yesterday talk about one of the early treatment drugs. And just the way he talked about it, I'm like, man, how are you in a position of power? And you're not, I'm just a lowly nobody. I keep saying that.

I'm just a guy who goes around and has some conversations is passionate about what's going on because I see it happening in front of my eyes. And you'll go on national television and say stupid crap like that and have everybody eating out of your hand. It makes zero sense to them. Well, so we can approach this for many different ways and many different directions. you can say, for example, that when the coup d'etat took place in 1948 in Czechoslovakia, a very large portion of the population was in favor of it. Okay? So maybe not quite as large as we have now, because I think in Canada is probably like 70% or 75 or whatever it is.

Back then, it could have been maybe 50%. or 60, but it was a large proportion. Yes, that totally went along with it. And then when they had the show trials, they had the show trials where they put their own people, people, I mean, the head of the Communist Party, the head of the party was on trial and was hanged, by his own people.

Now, that whole thing was in a large part an anti-Semitic thing because out of the 13 accused, 10 were Jewish. However, it's the machine eating its own. So they had to put on the show trial and say these people were, you know, Zionist collaborators who were inside eating the soul of the party and they wanted to turn us into a Western imperialist, you know, monstrous blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, this was 1951, 52, my parents had just come through the Holocaust. Now they see 10 out of the 13 people on trial being Jewish. And the whole country, as far as they could see, there were signing petitions saying, yes, they should all hang. You know, they're all, what you're describing is going on in

Canada, where everybody agrees with, you know, Premier of, I guess you're talking about Alberta, Kenny. Saskatchewan. Oh, Saskatchewy, yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. But, you know, same idea, right. Same idea. Right. So they come on and most people go, yeah, yeah, you know, these stupid drugs, which are not going to mention because we don't want to get you in trouble or whatever, you know, the horse paste, whatever it is, you know. And people go, yeah. To be honest, it's just a slightly milder version because you still don't have really people in concentration camps or hanging or, you know. So it's a milder version, but it's the same thing.

they had, and I only knew about this recently, by the way, because I was preparing for one of my essays or articles. And so I read about it how people were signing petitions. They had people go out and sign, you know, they should all hang. They're all traitors, you know. So the echoes are there. Now, to come back to the bullshit, once, you know, when it goes on and on and things are just getting worse, okay? And then sooner or later, everybody, no matter what, I mean, that's going to be 10% or whatever, you know, and those 10% will be only in it to win it, you know, those will be the people that are lining their pockets. But if it goes on, you know, people go, wait a minute. Yeah. Okay, it's been five years now. Come on. You know, there's no hospitals, you know,

overcrowding, no people are not dropping dead the street. So sooner or later, but it could take a very long time. I keep writing on my, mostly on Twitter, I try to look at the, you know, like the George Harrison song, all things must pass. All things eventually do pass. And these people will eventually be exposed for who they are. But when I say eventually, you could be 50 by that. You know, I don't know. So at the point in time that I'm talking about in the 60s, everybody knew it was bullshit. Everybody. Nobody took it seriously.

They took it seriously only as far as being afraid for their own, you know, safety. So they wouldn't get on a streetcar and say, you know, the leader of the Communist Party is an asshole. But everybody knew it, you know, and they would say it over a beer in a pub. but it took time. Yeah, I think that's maybe the most terrifying part about it all is you're like, time. How much time, right? I keep going. I play out two scenarios in my head, George, all the time.

I can't shut it off. It won't shut off because every day you walk out and you see it. I'm the same way. Yep. So two scenarios play out in my head. One, pandemics over in a year or two years. and life goes back to normal. Like normal.

No papers for nothing. You get that, right? That's what everybody, all of my close friends, etc. That's like just, man, just stop worrying about this.

It's going to go back to normal. Everybody gets back to, and we'll go back to normal. The other side of my brain is screaming at me going, right now people are not allowed to go to restaurants, gyms, bars,

movie theaters. Part of the, population right now is not allowed to have anyone in their house again. We're not allowed to have freedom of assembly. And it's all under the idea that if you do such things, people are dropping dead in the street. Which we know is not happening. But are people getting sick? Right now in my community, I know a ton of people are sick.

I know that people have gone to the hospital. In fairness, to everyone listening, I still don't know a single soul who's died from it. That doesn't mean people aren't dying. I know they are and I know people are getting extremely sick. I can recognize that. But all of our liberties are being stripped away to protect everyone from themselves, from the other person, and it's just creating this. And I go like, that part of the brain is screaming at me like,

don't stop talking about this. Continue to talk about this because it's so evident and everywhere. And the ridiculousness of it just keeps coming down the pipe more and more. And I got three young children. five and under. And as we know with Pfizer, pretty soon, my oldest is going to be eligible for. And I go, why? No. Yeah. Well, you know, that's a lot to unpack in what you just. It is. Sorry. I get, I get going. And away we go. No, no, no, don't be. As far, I'll stop from the end. Just today, I read in an Icelandic newspaper because I have, connections in Iceland. My grandson, who's 15, lives in Iceland with his father, Icelandic father. Just today, the Icelandic government, and I know Saskatchewan and Manitoba have

a large Icelandic population, well, large, you know, the whole country is like 350,000 people. But, you know, anyway, they banned today, Moderna, not just for a certain group of people. It's banned. They can't use it anymore. Okay. So there, is hope. That means that Pfizer's next because they're very, very similar. So it's just a question of time. If you look at other Scandinavian countries, Norway, Sweden, Denmark now also. Finland is the exception, but they're different. They're close to the ex-Soviet Union. So they have to be more careful, I guess. I don't know why. I don't understand. But anyway, so Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, those four countries, Scandinavian countries, they have no restrictions. life is completely back to normal.

There's no masks. There's no nothing. There are like border controls that are stricter. I believe in Sweden there are certain countries that they won't allow in. But that's minimal considering to what's going on compared to what's going on in Canada or even in the U.S. in certain parts of the U.S. So I think they're catching on. And now Moderna, in Sweden and Denmark, you cannot, under the age of 30, you can't use it.

In Iceland, they banned it completely. Those are very encouraging science, okay? Because how far can then the rest of Europe be when they see that the whole Scandinavian, you know, block is going one way? And then what? Everybody's going to go the other way? I don't know for how long that can last. That's similar to like this freedom opening up in Czechoslovakia, then the Russians have to crush it with tanks, right?

And so, yes, it's possible that somebody will come in and crush it, not externally necessarily, but from within the government. So that's one thing. So I understand about your kids, I would be scared shitless. I completely, I'm with you completely. So I get that. Now, the other thing about the freedom coming back, it's never coming back in the sense that governments don't give freedom back once they take it.

Never. I mean, you're a history student. Okay. Once they take it, it's gone unless there is some kind of an uprising. If Trudeau, for example, if there was a lot of objection in the country, okay? And last month, Trudeau would have lost the election. I'm talking like crushingly loose, you know, like Kim Campbell in the 90s, which you don't remember. But I do something like when they were reduced from, you know, I don't know how many seats each to three or two.

So a defeat like that would have meant somebody else comes in and said, okay, something is really wrong here and we need to fix it. But that didn't happen. okay so they can hide behind a facade of democracy true is like the worst fascist ever right but you can see him come on and he looks nice he's got the hair and thing and you know and but the stuff that comes out of his mouth the way he talks like we're doing this for Canadians and Canadians are behind us and this is to get through the pandemic and we'll get through the pandemic and we'll get through the pandemic. Bullshit.

Bullshit. You know, the pandemic as it was in March of 2020 is gone. All right. It's gone. Now, are we going to have waves? Yes. Like we have, you know, waves of other diseases. The flu, sometimes.

I did the math, by the way, Sean. And I tweeted about it. But my, usually I get way more response to my tweets that are about like my historical background than I do about the current stuff because there are people that do the current stuff better than I, better than I do and more of them. But I crunch some numbers, okay? So in 1957, there was a influenza pandemic in the United States and Canada, 68 as well, but 57 was the larger one, the bigger one. One hundred and sixteen thousand people died. in the United States.

At a time when the population was about half of what it is now, all right? So I crunched the numbers, and if you take the total number that we have now, we know that number is not correct. We know it for sure. So I just took 25% off of it. I think I would be justified and taken off more than 25, but I took 25% out. And then you compare the amount of people in the population.

Okay, it's not the same, but it's about twice as bad. I mean, COVID, right? So if you look at the hard numbers, really what it is in terms of the hard numbers, and you compare it to 1957 and 1968, it's a really, really bad flu season, or two, or three. all right. That's what it is. So what needs to be done, and I'm not an expert on this. This is not where I really want to go with this. But instead of saying, okay, we have this pandemic, what we're going to do, we're going to beef up the health system, we're going to hire more doctors, we're going to permit more freedom in the healthcare system, and on and on it. You can do a thousand

different things, right? Instead of doing that, no, no, no, no, no, no. Shut everything down. And that is what shows you that it's not about that. It's about control. Why? That's a whole different story. And we don't know. You know, do why of it. Yeah.

Well, when it comes to COVID and what's going on, like, I, if I want to win a war, let's just talk in war sense. Yeah, sure. If I want to win a war, do I just send in infantry? You're not going to win it. Do I just send in only tanks? You send it everything you have and you hit it with as much of everything that you got. So for the first six months, I think everybody gave grace period.

I think even a year, you gave a grace period. Just because you have a nuclear bomb doesn't mean you drop 10 nukes and it's gone, right? Like I look at this and I just, I come back to Canada. I look at, everybody assumes that the only way out of this is by vaccinating 100% of the population. No. I don't know how many more guys I have to have on this that are experts in their own fields and that just disagree. And a disagreement means, and chances are 100% A might be impossible, probably is. But regardless, on top of that, not everybody agrees that 100% vaccination on a vaccine, a shot, a treatment, whatever we're calling it.

where it's, it's leaky. I'll put their term in it. Oh, yeah, it is. You get it and you carry on and you can still pass it on. So, like, that isn't the only way. And so you just, you go like, okay, so if this is really about getting pressure off and here, and I'm talking where we're at, pressure off the healthcare system, or getting away from COVID being so bad, wouldn't you look to the rest of the world

and see what they're doing? And they're going, geez, that's some smart ideas. Like, we should implement that. We've been attacking this with, air raids and oh wait we could use some ground troops too instead what we have going on in Alberta right now is and I've seen this across North America in particular is we have a group of doctors nurses medical staff who've signed a letter to Alberta I'm speaking Alberta specifically right now saying please do not mandate this you mandate this where we need to have this in order to work

and you're going to lose us how does that how does that defeat COVID I can't I can't I can't I can't figure that out. My brain won't figure that out. It just is like, that makes zero sense. Well, you can figure it out because it's not about COVID. It's a decoy. You know, it's like, you know, here's a hockey example for you.

You know, a guy coming in a net and he deeks to the left, right? And the gold on the goes to the other side. So that's what's happening, man. It's a decoy. It's, you know, you go this way. But they're really talking about this. They're not talking about this. So they gave it a name and the name is COVID.

And the COVID now, now we don't know why it is. We don't know why everybody is in total agreement. Jason Kenney, as you know better than I do because you live right on the border and I'm only reading about it back in the summer was like Mr. Texas. Okay.

Let's open everything up. Everything's going to be great, fantastic, amazing blah. Then he gets a little bit of a rising. I said, oh my God, fire. That makes no sense. Well, I had, I had heard this from Stephen Pelick, who's a professor out of BC, because he had talked about how they were going to bring kids back or students back to school, put some social distancing measures, masking, you know, I don't know, a lot of different things, but they were not going to mandate a vaccine. And he said the fear that's been created in the public forced them to mandate a vaccine to be on campus because they thought they were doing a disservice to children or kids.

I shouldn't say children, students, if they allowed them back where everybody was vaccine. And he talked about the fear loop, essentially that now the public is pushing governments. You know, when I came back from my wife's from Minnesota, when I came back, I walked into a place in Alberta that said it was endemic, that we were going to no more content. contact tracing, nothing. I went, where the hell did I walk into? Like, did I just time travel? Like, honestly, this is weird. And within a week, the pressure from, the pressure from not only, we can try and be conspiracy theorists about this and say it's some foreign thing, but the pressure from our own population. Yeah. Because you're abandoning us. Why are you doing that? That was top doctors. That was everything.

And within that week, they said, okay, we're going to wait six weeks. before the six weeks is over, now we're back into full on. Like, and here's the crazy thing. Here's a crazy thing, George, is like,

from my own eyes and data, this second wave is worse than the first. I can't save for everywhere in the world, but here specifically, more of my friends are getting sick, getting worse sick than the first go around. I've had friends go to the hospital now and had to do, et cetera,

et cetera. So it's evident, like it's clear. And as soon as that becomes clear, the population is going to, freak out more. And now the push to get everybody vaccinated is not push from only government, but the people itself. You talk about when they came marching through half the population embraced it. It's probably 80% of the population embraces right now keeping anyone who is

unvaccinated out of the businesses. That isn't the business is pushing that. That's the population pushing it. It's such a weird. But Sean, let me interrupt you. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But that's fine. I believe what you're saying. it's based on fear. 100%. Who created the fear? The government created the fear. Okay. And continues to push the fear because they could get off the, they could get the train off the,

they could change the tracks if they wanted to, but they will not. Exactly. So I'm saying it does go back to the government because the fear is created. In the United Kingdom, there was a leaked document which you may know about when in the beginning of the pandemic in, you know, March 2020, you know what I'm going to say, right? That was a memo that, you know, the fear level is not high enough. Excuse me. We need to push the fear levels higher.

Now, if you have a, this is from the central government of the country admitting this is what they're doing. We need to put the fear of God in the population. Again, we can, and it's not a, it's not conspirator. listen, we're not, it's not, I don't think that there's some men in a smoky basement make, no, but what happened was we had this thing in Wuhan in China, right? The Chinese Communist Party saw this as a fantastic opening, right? That, well, but they don't believe in God, but that was God given, right? It's like, oh my God, we can do this. So they started putting out these videos of people collapsing in the street. They put out videos of people being hammered in. You remember that,

hammered into their apartment. Now, if you see it on TV, and I live in a communist country, if you see it on TV, that means that the Communist Party of China wants you to see it, because if they didn't want you to see it, you wouldn't be seeing it. Trust me. Okay. So they put out this enormous thing out. Oh my God's happening in China. Then it happened in Italy. Well, it happened and that, you know, there were a lot of Chinese workers. We don't know how it did. That's unimportant how it got there. But what is important is that no one questioned back that, again, it's fear. No one questioned that you kept watching the same report from Italy. It was the same hospital in the same town. And they showed it 20 times on Canadian TV, US TV, British TV,

everywhere. Fear, fear, fear, fear. Nobody told you that back then that the people who dying are in their 80s, okay? Nobody told you back then that in southern Italy, nothing is happening. Okay? They just wanted to concentrate. And I fell for it, man. I fell for it. I saw it. I said, oh my God, this is, this is it. This is, you know, the apocalypse. I was, you know, putting, you know, alcohol over surfaces, you know, spraying my groceries, you know, telling my wife, don't, you know, don't go there, don't do this. And it took about maybe, well, we can get to it, why I changed track. But the point is, so in Saskatchewan and Alberta, the public is fearful because the government

pushed the fear. So now they succeeded. They succeeded. They got what they wanted. So you say that you know people, and it's definitely more difficult now than it was. I live in Florida. Just this past summer, we had like the wave of. always, okay? It was like

the saddest, they called him Death Santos, you know, Governor Death Santos. The whole country hated him. He's allowing this, oh my God, he's, you know, this. Well, the wave they talked about it was coming up. Everybody was saying, oh my God, you know,

he's killing his people. He's a murder. Now that it's gone way down, nobody's talking about it. And nobody's saying, oh, gee, they succeeded in, you know, in pushing it way down. Nobody cares. anymore. It's not in the news because it's not fearful. So why should we care? It's, you know, and even during that terrible wave in, it was mostly in August, okay? Again, do I know people that

had it? Very few. I live in a small town. Nobody in my immediate, you know, I know some people. I know one person that was quite sick and a couple of people never, you know, so I don't believe anything anymore other than if I research it myself. So it's a loop. It's a fear loop that the government created. I talked for about 20 minutes now, but that's all I wanted to say.

No, that's, I just find your experiences. You know, I, many will probably think I brought you on to talk about, like us heading into a communist world. And maybe, I just want it. You're young enough and vibrant enough. You can talk about it with such ease. It's very interesting for me to hear,

and I assume from my audience to hear, how your experience have shaped how your brain thinks. Because in your writing, and I suggest everybody to do, what's your substack, George? It's just my full name. So George Grossman, G-R-O-S-M-A-N. So George Grossman.

dot substack.com. I really suggest they support it because your writing is fantastic. I've read all, I've read all your articles. I should point out right now, I'm just a free guy. I'm the freeloader on you. But I think I'm going to have to support it because

like when I read it, I'm like, man, this guy can really write. Like, just the ability to tell a story is so fantastic. It's why I wrote up. Thank you. I appreciate it. So what I've done now, in fact, when we're done, I'm going to write a piece for substack, I've implemented a little change so that, you know, there's going to be

one piece a week, which is still free for everybody. And then on Friday, I'm going to write something like, you know, a week in the, in the rearview mirror and write about one or two events that happened this week and what I think about it. And that is going to be only for paid subscribers. And then maybe once a month, if I have the time and the inclination, I'll write about my life in the music world, which is a much more fun. You know, a much more fun. And someday we're going to get into that because it would be fun. It'd be good to have some fun again instead of just worrying about what's happening right in front of her eyes. Well, I mean, you know, we can't help it.

You know, you have three small children. I have two daughters that live in Ontario. I have three grandkids, two very small. and one older. He's in Iceland, but the others are in Ontario. And you have three children. So of course, we're worried about it. And not only, to be honest with you, it's not just children, even for myself. I'm 68. I hope that I have at least 10 years of like a productive life, knock on wood. And we were hoping my wife and I, we wanted to go to Prague and spend a year. and I wanted to write in Prague because I'm working on a memoir and I wanted to be there and kind of

reconnect and write that was the plan well that's not going to happen now because you know I'm not going to travel I'm not going to sit on the plane for 10 hours with a mask on and you know go through all that bullshit that you have to go through so it's not just the kids it's our lives too you know your life you're young man you know you want to travel you want to experience you want to do things and it's made extremely difficult or impossible so it's about I don't blame you for one second. We're all very much involved in it. But anyway, now and again, I write a piece about, you know,

working with some crazy musicians that God knows. I've known a lot of them, both in Canada and everywhere else. So it's going to be the substap will be kind of divided. And the reason that I have done it is that I felt that I'm being unfair to the subscribers, you know, the people that actually pay. Because they're paying, but everybody else has access to everything. So you go, well, why am I paying this? guy if I can read like what everybody else is reading for free. So that's why I made that vision.

And you know, it's going to be the Friday pieces won't be long, but it'll be kind of observational. And we'll see if that's it. I encourage you to keep going because just like I get told to keep going by tons of people. Absolutely. But I don't know how I stumbled upon it. Sometimes I wonder how I stumble upon anything these days. But just doing some research on you and listening to what you say and writing everything. It's fantastic. I really strongly suggest if people are interested in this conversation, they fall along with what you're writing because like I say, it's very well written and constructed. And your experiences are, you know, they stand the test of time, I guess, right? Well, you know, my dad was a writer and actually a very successful writer.

He wrote a book in the early 60s called Shop on Main Street. and he was talked into writing a screenplay by a friend of his who was in the movie industry. And he and the director, movie director, sat down and wrote a screenplay, and my father wrote the bulk of the screenplay. And the movie's called The Shop on Main Street, and he got an Oscar in 1965, the best foreign movie. It was the first Eastern Blue Street. or Iron Curtain country to win an Oscar. So it's a great honor and my dad wrote it. So, you know, it was my father's, in this year, February,

was my father's like 100th year of his birth. If he were alive today, he would be 100 years old. And the country of Slovakia, which is now an independent country, it wasn't when I was born, but it is now, issued a stamp with my dad's, you know, portrait on it and shop on Main Street, you know. So that's, you know, I mean... Your dad has a stamp.

Yeah. Yeah. I can show you that I would have to look for it. I'm up there. No, no, no. That's... I'll email it to you. You do that.

You do that. That's super cool. It's pretty incredible, huh? Yeah. Well, I didn't get that from your stories, right? No, I didn't. I wrote one about my mother. I didn't write about my dad.

My dad, Doug Young, you know, I was 20. when my father died and he was just shy of his 60th birthday. So he was still a young man. I died of a sudden heart attack. And so I think about him a lot, but I don't, obviously it's been so long. So I haven't really written about him. But, you know, it'll come up. But here's the funny thing.

So I always knew that I wanted to write, but until COVID hit, you know, I was busy with music. I was gigging. I was usually working about three times a week. And then I worked for a, there's a university in Orlando, excuse me, called Full Sail University, which is one of the most well-known institutions for teaching sound recording.

And so people from all over the world go there to study sound recording. And there's three amazing studios. And I worked for them as a studio musician, you know. And it was a part-time gig that was on call. So they would call me sometimes at 1 o'clock in the afternoon and sometimes at 9 and they would say, oh, gee, we need a three-piece band.

Can you help us? You know, I would hop in a car. It's not driving up there. I was on the phone, you know, calling like 50 different bass players and 50 different drummers. You know, can you make it? And I would always make it. So they love me for that, that they could really trust me.

So anyway, so I worked a lot in music and I play a lot of gigs. So writing was, you know, I did a little bit, but it was secondary. And then COVID hit. And for the first two months, I was, I actually felt good. You know, I felt relieved that, you know, all gigs were canceled. But, you know, we weren't suffering financially. We had some savings and, you know, and my wife has a little part-time job. And it was like, you know, a couple of months.

How long can this last, right? So I remember the first month or two, the streets were empty and it was great. You could get everywhere you wanted to within minutes. And I was like, okay, no gigs. Awesome. You know, I don't have to worry about packing my shit up. I'm already 65 years old and 66 or whatever I was, you know, two years ago, 66. Driving.

Anyway, long story short, after two, three months, you know, gigs never came back. Now, as you know, now it's dragging on and dragging on. I was in Canada last July 2020, not just July 2020, before my mother passed, just as she was, you know, really on a deathbed. And back then you could still travel. You didn't need any, I mean, you know, they, you know, you filled out a form at the airport saying, you know, I'm staying with my daughter, but nobody checked it. The airport was crowded, you know, it was like, anyway, long story short, at the time we're still thinking, okay, well, it'll change. It'll come back.

It'll come back. The gigs never came back. And then when they did start coming back, I was like, you know, I don't really want to do that anymore. You know, I don't want to do it. I studied linguistics. I have a master's degree in translation. I write. My father was a writer.

Why don't I spend more time writing? If I can make a little bit of money at it, great. If I can't, I still teach guitar, so I make a little bit of money on the side. And we'll see. So that's what kind of led me into it. And now at the age of 67, you know, I 68 now, but I mean last year, you know, I switched careers, I guess, and I do way more writing. I still do music. I have an Instagram and I post music almost every day.

So I'm still active. But that's what led me into it, you know, led me to change careers late, late in life. I say it's it's it's interesting to hear your journey into where you are you know I always think you know I'm sure the the audience always laughs at me when I continuously bring this up the universe is weird right like you know like how how me and you get hooked up is you know well a few years ago it would never happened it just would never happen instead uh you know day by day things shift and change and move us in different directions and somehow you know a year ago here's a guy who grew up up in Canada. My 100th episode was Ron McLean. Not long after that was Don Cherry and guys like

that. Really? Yeah, absolutely. And then now, you know, I was a hockey guy through and through. I chased stories that were based around sports and learning lessons of how people succeeded and things like that. And now I don't even know if you'd call it a 180, George. I don't even know what are I called this. I just call this honestly talking about what's going on because I can't it's hard to hold the conversation about a hockey story while I'm going like is are they going to push on my kids to have this in a month's time like I really need to do my due diligence before I allow something like that to happen and so now the podcast is just taking on its life of its own here here we sit across from each other and both of us in that instance then have completely changed course and now we're running into one another so um what do the 20% of people in Canada that are against this regime? What can they do? What do they do? So there's a lot of pushback by lawyers trying to get religious or medical exemptions.

I've heard of that. But in talking to those lawyers, constitutional lawyers, I don't think it's been working. I don't think it's been working as well as people have hoped. I feel like, I think I said this the other day, is that there's a ton of energy that wants to get behind this. Like, where do we push? Where's the pressure point? But right now, it's like you're fighting a medieval night clad in armor

and for the first time. And you just don't know where the pressure point is. You're trying to find out, is there a weakness? And right now nobody knows. And so there's people standing up and talking about it and trying to do the right thing, but there's been no weakness identified. Well, yeah, I hear you, man. I mean, it's the same in New York.

I have friends that live in New York, and it's terrible. You know, I mean, one of the most vibrant cities in the world, it's, it's L.A. I mean, I've been to L.A. countless times. Well, okay, not countless. Let's say 10 times. it's a graveyard compared to what it was. My wife is there right now. So you studied history.

I'm going to bring something up. Have you seen the movie, the Churchill movie? Which one? Well, I think it's called. Churchill? From like two years ago. I'm not sure if it is called Churchill. It might be.

Yeah, you can look it up But it's what's the name of the British actor He got an Oscar for it Oh, at least it was nominated. Darkest hour? Yes, yes, yes. Yes, I have seen that. Yep.

Okay, so you remember the scene When Churchill stands up in Parliament, okay, and he's booed, they're booing him. Another time he stands up, Parliament, he's almost the only one up. He's only the only one there, okay? and even when he finally gets into power, even then he's got so much internal opposition.

He's the only one, well, him and Eden, but basically he is the leader, right? The only one in the whole world, basically. Think about it as a leader that sees what this is. He sees where this is going. and he stands his ground, all right, because he knows that he is the last bulw between chaos and between hell

and between a normal life as we know it. He knew it, all right? I don't want to make comparisons between him and Trump because they're nothing alike, but they're alike in one aspect, all right? I hated Trump when he first came in. Now I can vote in the U.S. I couldn't back then. But if I had, if I could have voted, I would have voted for, you know, the libertarian party.

I guess I hated Hillary just as much. But I thought he was, you know, yeah, well, I mean, you know, come on, let's face it. But I thought, you know, Trump was, I don't have to tell you, you know how he was, how he is. He's rude, he's crude. He's, you know, he's a buffoon. He led to hair, you know, the whole whole thing was like, how could this guy be president? But then, you know, time and on and little things kept happening. Like, you know, he recognized Jerusalem, which four presidents before him had promised

and nobody had kept their promise, right? He did. And everybody said, oh, my God, now it's going to be a revolution and uprising. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Then he met with the North Korean guy, right? And people would say, well, how can he do that? he's giving legitimacy to the North Korean regime.

But Trump is a businessman, and he knows the best way to deal with everything is to sit across a table, all right, hash it out, shake hands. And he can think, you know what, I know you're an asshole. I know you're a dictator. He's thinking it. I know you're killing your old people. You're putting in a concentration camps. You're a disgusting person, and I would nothing to do with you. But I want to achieve something for my country, United States.

I don't give it a shit about your country. I want to do something to my country. And the way to do it is to sit down and shake hands. And you know what? He was right. The tension eased. The Korean guy, whatever his name is thought, suddenly he thought that his shit doesn't stink.

I'm sorry, I'm probably going to have to edit it out. And I apologize. But suddenly he thought that, you know, he's semi-god because Trump, you know, the president of the United States met him. Tension's eased. And I went, okay. So that guy's got something. You know, then we had the midterms and the Democrats lost a lot of seats.

The economy was just, you know, going on all cylinders. I mean, it was unbelievable. I mean, the unemployment down here at the time was like 3.9 or something. You know, it was like unbelievable. Everything was going. Taxes went down. You know, there was optimism. So on the one hand, you know, all the people that hated Trump.

And, you know, I never like. Like I never got to really truly like it. Okay. But I got to understand that he had that in common with Churchill. He knew he's the bork. You know, he knew he stands here. And you got the Chinese threat, communist threat on the one hand. And you have the United States on the other hand.

And we're going to stand our ground you. Okay. And we're not going to let you play around. See, like right now China can say, we're going to take back Taiwan and no. Nobody says anything. If they, they wouldn't dare to utter something like that that Trump was president.

Because he didn't fool around. And that is, now to come back to where we are with COVID or with whatever you want to call it with the pandemic, this is what we need. You need someone a figure like that. And it could be someone who's not even likable. It doesn't matter. But someone who will just stand his ground.

Let's say it's the premier of New Brunswick, small, tiny province but let's just say, I'm just riffing. He gets elected and he will say, enough, enough is enough, okay? We are a strong, rich, western country.

We're not going to give in A to a virus and B to communist intimidation. Just want to guy and he will get a lot of crap you know he will he sorry yeah a lot of heat they'll go oh why you'd want people are dying but but he will stand his ground he or she he or she because hey maggie thachar right and plenty of fantastic women politicians and you know what that's what we all need

like we have in florida we have ronda santis he's that guy here and i believe that ron the santis mark my word, he might get kicked out of office next year. I don't know. It's possible. But if he, if he's not, Ron DeSantis is the leader of the free world. He is the number one person that stands up, whatever comes down from Washington, and he says, no, no, you're not going to tell me how to run my state under the Constitution. You cannot do that. Now, certain things they can do. You know, if it's the federal airports, air travel, interstate travel. Yeah, okay, he can't do anything about that. But the things that, for example, the educational system or the health system or whatever

is the state responsibility, he has the last word, not Biden, okay, and not those people in Washington who just like in Canada and Trudeau want to impose, you know, everything top down. Well, what are we seen, you know, this is coming from watching up north. but what have we seen with Texas and Florida? We've seen a huge migration to those states. Oh, yeah. Because, and we, you know, we joke about it up here.

If Saskatchewan or Alberta, right? Because they've been, well, and actually there's been a bit of it right now, right? People flocking this way because, honestly, in Canada, we've had some of the, Saskatchewan in particular, some of the easiest of restrictions. I don't know if that's, yeah, yeah, I understand. Let's, yeah. Yeah. We've, and if you just adopted more of the Texas of the north, so to speak,

mantra, you get half a Canada moving to your province because people just want to go back to life. It just even, it doesn't matter what your medical choice was, is, it doesn't matter. People just want to be, let me just go work, man. Let's just go. That's what everybody wants. Yes. And what they're being told is the way to do that is if we get to 100%. We get to 100%.

And what I fear that nobody could see. Well, and here, I'll tie in Israel to where we're at. You mentioned growing up in Israel. No, I didn't grow up. Well, sorry, but you lived in Israel. High school, yeah, you're definitely. Yeah, yeah, I live there, yeah. I assume you mentioned you've been watching Iceland.

I assume you've been watching Israel then. Yes, terrible, yeah. Am I wrong in saying that at one point there were like 88% double vaccination? and I'm just going to get around there. And now they're at like 67%. Well, I don't know about the double vaccination, but the, the, well, what they're calling, what they're calling vaccinated. Like you're fully vaccinated. I don't know what you're calling.

We were at 88% fully vaccinated and now that numbers come way down. Because they need a booster to be fully vaccinated, right? That's what you're talking about. Yes, that is exactly what I'm alluding. Yeah, exactly. So I was going to say those people who say, oh, we're going to get to 100% we'll get through it. Those are the same people that were saying,

if only everybody wore a mask, we would get through it. Okay. And those are the same people that said, oh, if only everybody, you know, whatever, and it failed every single time. And you have these graphs so you can see, you know, like you can here in a state of North Dakota and South Dakota, right? So you had, you know, one of them was no masking.

One of them was full open. One was masked. And you look at the graphs and they're like exactly the same. There's no difference. If you were, if you, I listen to one of them, I listen to many podcasts and now I'll listen to yours too. But I listen to Tom Wood. And he put together, you know, on his website, he says, he's got like a quiz, you know, don't look at the answer.

Just look at the graph or the chart and try to guess which is the state that had, you know, more masking and which is the state that had last mask. Same in Europe. You know, try to guess which country had the more strict regime and the less strict. And you can't tell. You absolutely cannot tell because they move it completely in tandem. So the same people that told you if you mask hard enough, we can be rid of this. This guy, Redfield, Dr. Redfield, who was the head of the CDC before this woman who leads it now, who's like, you know, I remember him saying he was on TV and he said,

I consider the mask even more important than the vaccine. He said that in July 2020, okay, which is, it's laughable. But what it meant was that they always set themselves a certain goal and then it's going to be another goal. Like you say in Israel, they were 88%. You know, now you're not fully vaccinated unless you have the booster. Great. So now we're 65%. In six months time, you'll need the second booster.

Sean, I don't know what to tell you. How people don't see it, my best childhood friend in Prague is a doctor. He is the most sought, and I'm not saying that because of the mind is the truth, sought after pediatric cardiologist in the country. He's semi-retired now, so I guess he's not really working as much. He is a guy that parents would bring their newborns to, and they were blue. They couldn't breathe because they had a heart defect, okay?

These infants, well, you have three small kids, you know, what it's like. These infants weigh four pounds, I don't know, you know, you know, nothing, okay? Their hearts are the size of, you know, two centimeters. My friend was the guy that used these specialty precision instruments to get into the heart of this baby, okay? And to do the work that was needed to be done, to reverse the chamber flow or whatever it was that he needed to do

to save that baby. He didn't save every single one, but he saved the great majority of them. And he, it's God's work. Sean. It's God's work. No doubt about it. This same man today writes me an email saying that he had his booster and he now feels super safe. The same guy. So I ask you, you know, and this is a guy who went through, he was, he stayed there the whole time. Well, you know, my family left. They never left. So he went through an extra 22 more years of communism or 21, whatever it was, okay? So he knows it even better than I do, much better than I.

And yet today, he's just like those people you told me about, you know, full of fear. And he tells me, he goes, oh, I have the booster and I'm great, I feel great. That's fantastic. And I said something and we had a falling out and it's like, you know, I told him, I think I said, you know, stupid. You know, I said, okay, well, great, you're looking forward to your next booster now, you know, in six months or what, you know. And he has no answer. And he says to me that I'm a cult follower and, you know, you know, the usual stuff.

You hear it all the time. So I'm telling you, this is the same. I mean, this is the smartest guy I know. He's a medical doctor. He's published all over the world. He's lectured in Thailand. He's got a PhD in statistics. But he's completely bamboozled by this.

Does that give you pause when your best friend who's smart? But hear me, is there any party that goes, maybe I'm wrong? Maybe I got it wrong. Absolutely not. No, I believe, no. I believe my eyes and I believe what I read. And the differences, why I know that I don't have it wrong and he does. because I do way more reading about it, way more reading than he does.

Now, yes, he's a doctor. So, you know, if I had a heart problem, I'd much rather see him than someone like me or you. Okay. But, you know, I read both sides. So I can read on the one hand, Dr. Gottlieb and Dr. Zubin, whatever his name is. There's a lot of doctors on the sort of more of the pro-vaccines. side, right? And then I read the other side and I'll make up my mind and I know, I know where the truth is. And even if I can sum it up like this, even if I am wrong medically and he's right

medically, which I'm not, but even if I were, I am not wrong when it comes to a political side of it. In that, I know a thousand percent that I'm not wrong, that this is control, pressure, and these are kind of communist methods of gaining control of the population. In that, I'm not wrong. Even though he might know more about the medical side of it than I do. You know what you understand what I'm trying to say? Yeah. Well, I've said this now for a month or two is that politics is blame medicine, right? So that's a really tough thing to decipher when politics and medicine are like just like they're one and the same almost. It's like I'm trying not to make a medical decision because of politics, but you're making it really tough because you're just keep ingraining it and ingraining it so they're the same bloody thing.

You're right. Absolutely. In fact, in fact, just like two days ago, I wrote a tweet. I said, history teaches us that when doctors take their marching orders from governments, it never ends well. You know, Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz was the worst sadist and butcher, you can imagine. a brilliant, good-looking man with a family who considered Jews subhuman so he could do whatever he wanted.

The lives were not lives. They were like insects. So if you sent up the gas chambers, no matter. Why? Because he stopped thinking, he didn't think as a doctor. He didn't care. He obeyed the government. He became a servant of the Nazi government.

And when that happens, the same happened on the communism, by the way, same thing. You know, doctors were, you know, injecting people with drugs and killing people. And, you know, they were in the service of the government. That's the worst thing that can happen. Absolutely. That's the most frightening thing that can happen. We've been going here. And I mentioned it maybe off the start.

And then you start talking about your parents. And once again, now Auschwitz and everything else. I've been meaning that since we started. Like you have parents that went through arguably the worst atrocity known to mankind. If not only in the last 100 years, certainly, well, for sure the last 100 years and maybe even before that. I was curious, you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about your parents' experience. And I'm assuming as a son of them, you asked them about it. And by sounds of it, your mom was willing to talk about.

Yeah, she was in. So my father expressed his anxieties and his profound sense of sorrow through his writing. But other than in his writing, in his daily life, he didn't. really talk a lot about the war. He did tell me some stories, but not nearly enough, which I greatly regret today, because I would like to know more and there's nobody left to ask. I mean, I have cousins who are, you know, son and daughter of his brother, my uncle, but they don't know much more than I do.

So he wrote about it and very successfully. He was a great writer, great writer. I mean, I know you like what I write and I don't think I'm a complete piker, but, you know, my father was honestly, I think he was like, you know, Anton Chekhov's level. Great, great writer. his way with words. So that's how he taught.

My mother, on the other hand, was much more willing to talk about her experiences, even though, I don't know if you can compare, but her experiences were, my father went through a tough, very tough time, filled with anxiety, fear of being caught. some periods of hunger.

And then at the end of the war, he actually fought for about, I don't know, maybe six to eight months with the partisans, you know, up in the mountains there. They joined the Red Army going, so his war was not easy and nobody's war was easy. But my mother went through the worst hell imaginable. Well, actually, not even imaginable. and yet she was more willing to talk about it. Now, when I was a kid or a teenager, my father didn't want to, you know, he always kind of like almost like stopped her.

You know, he would say, I don't want to talk about it. You know, it's, you know, don't talk about it in front of our son. Don't talk about it. You know, it was like almost he had a, like a phobia, you know, about going back to it in conversation. He could go back to in his writing, but in conversation, he didn't want to hear about it. So then when he passed, you know, like I think I told you before, my mother then later on in life made it a mission to talk about it as much as possible. So I learned a lot more after my father passed because my mother opened up more kind of in front of me and, you know, talked about it.

My mother and I had a very strange relationship, and I think if you talk to other children of survivors, not only Holocaust, but other survivors, maybe veterans, war veterans, that if you talk to the children, I think you will find something quite similar. And that is because the parents are so affected by this profound PTSD, the relationship with the kids is never quote unquote normal. Right. So we fought a lot. And we didn't see eye to eye in our daily life. And she was a very, she was, man, she was the toughest person you could ever imagine meeting.

And when I say tough, she was tough to everybody else. as much as to herself. I mean, look, she came to Canada when she was 56. She didn't speak a word of English, not one word of English. She was a widow. She had just become a widow.

And I already lived in Canada, so I brought her over. She didn't speak a word of English. She learned the language. She got a job. She got another job. She got, you know, she made friends. It's like, no big deal.

You know, she was 56, like a new life. she had already, she spoke like five languages or six or whatever. She spent nothing. She saved every, Sean, you have no idea. I don't know what background you come from. But like my mother, she would, if I came abroad, let's say, you know, I don't know, I would come over and I would bring some takeout. You know, just say, Mom, you don't have to cook.

You spend money. I'm telling you, why are you spending money? I would never. And she gave me, you couldn't give her a present because everything, no, no, no, buy nothing. She was very generous with the money, but she was, she did not. It's unbelievable, man. It's unbelievable. She wore, before she got sick in 2019, she had like, she had like blouses and like shoes like from the 70s, you know.

And they weren't tattered. They were clean and ironed and nicely put away. And, you know, so she was really, really tough. But she did talk about her experiences. And so I learned a lot from her in the last 15 years of a life. Well, for the listener, I can't remember, George, if we've talked about this, but she went through Auschwitz. And for even the person who doesn't follow any history, when you mentioned that word, I think we all understand. I'm, I guess I just, I don't know how to ask it.

I just, I go like, I would, I would, I would just be interested to hear what you learned about her experiences towards as she opened up about it. Because you're very unique in the sense that being the son of a survivor, A, puts you in close proximity to hearing the stories firsthand. But then on top of it, to have a parent who actually talked about it is, from what I understand, understand extremely rare. Maybe I'm wrong on it. Yes, you're right. You're right. No, you're right. You're right. A good friend of mine in Israel, his father, I'm not sure about both parents, but his father went through Auschwitz. He'd never opened up about it while he was alive. Never. He said, the only thing he said, damn the Germans to hell, and I will put a bullet in my head before I buy a German product. Okay. That was it. That was it. That was the end of it.

Never talked about it. And his son, my friend, does know anything other than he was there. That's it. And you're right. A lot of people don't want to talk about it. So my mother not only was she in Auschwitz. She spent the longest possible period of time that any woman could have spent. What do I mean by that?

She was deported from a small town in Slovakia called Humane in March, 1942, with a thousand other young women. There's a great book that was written about it by a friend of ours. I can tell you about it later or maybe even emailed to you by it. Anyway, so she was deported in March 1942 when she and these other young women, arrived at Auschwitz Berkinau. There were two camps. Auschwitz was mostly a work camp. Burkanao was the extermination camp. It's horrible for me to say those words, you know, but that's what it was. So when they arrived there, there was no camp. They built it. So not only was she in Auschwitz,

she was not the longest possible time from March 42 to January, 45. And so that's almost three years, two months short of three years. What happened in January 45 was that the front, the Red Army was already so close, they could hear the cannons. They could hear the front coming their way. And so the Germans, they killed whoever they could, and those that they didn't kill, I mean, think about it. Think about the depravity instead of leading the people in the camp, let's say, okay? Because the Russians were going to get there within days. So leave the people who are alive in the camp and get the hell out of there.

No. They gathered the people that were alive who were barely alive, and they started marching them from Auschwitz, which is in central Poland, towards Germany, which is, I'm going to say, you can look it up on the map, but it's about 500, you know, the border would be about 450 kilometers away. Marching them in the dead of winter. Polish winter is like Saskatchewan winter, okay? People that I have dead anyway. So my mother was on that march. Whoever was still alive when they started out, almost nobody survived. My mother had a friend of hers managed somehow, and I don't know, that's the one detail she didn't really exactly tell me,

but they somehow managed to break away from the column of people walking, which was really almost impossible to do because you were shot on site. But they managed and they hid with local farmers, et cetera, et cetera. But the war was essentially over. Once that column of Germans went west, right, the Red Army was coming the other way. And so really the war was over. So this she made it home in May. of that year, May 45, early May.

So in a way, there was, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, but in a way there was an advantage to having been there that long. Because those people that came into the camp in 1943, 1994, especially, were killed instantly. Because in 1944, the Germans knew the war is lost. And they did not, they just had this blood hunger. And they just wanted to kill. And they didn't need people to work anymore, like they did at first.

So because my mother was young and strong and she was able to work, you know, she was very, very sick. She had typhoid fever. And then, you know, after the war, she had a, complication she had what's called bone bone tuberculosis which is the same bacteria that gets into your lungs it can get into your bone and just eat the bone away so she had a left kneecap taken out you know after the war and she couldn't bend the left leg so she she limited her whole life and but anyway but you know she she survived the camp and so in 19 let's say 44

she by that point she'd been there for two years the new arrivals had no no chance. But the people that were in the camp and they were working, they threw, you know, like if you serve in the army or any kind of regiment in one that you do, if you do it long enough, you kind of get into a slightly better position.

So you're in a little bit of a more of a bargaining position, not with the Germans, but with what they call the capos, they were like, they were Jews, but they were put in a position of, of like guarding, you know, so you get into a position if you get little perks.

There was a, there was a place in the camp, it was a building called Canada. They called the building Canada. That was a building where the Jews that went straight to their death, you know, they stripped them and they took gold teeth out of their mouths.

And, you know, and all of that was then, sorted in this building was called Canada. Why was it called Canada? Because if you got to work in Canada, you were warm, you were not working outside in a frost. You were doing manual labor, 10 hours a day, seven days a week, but it was not like working in a quarry, breaking rocks. So I think she was able to get maybe not. And the reason they called it Canada, because that was the land of plenty, right? Canada was the land of plenty.

It was the dreamland. That's why they called it that. So my mother worked there for a little bit and then somewhere else. But before that, she did all the physical labor. And you had to do every morning at, I think, five or six, I'm not sure. There was a roll call. The roll call, and you've seen movies, so, you know, was done with German precision had to be done right down to the last name.

And if they missed somebody on the roll call, would take an hour. It's minus 25 degrees outside and you're standing there in wooden clogs and these pajamas on, right? People falling over from frostbite, whatever, they were just dragged away, start the roll call again. Right? Okay, now it's minus five people.

Start the roll call again until it's finished. then you know she also told me and you know they marched them out of the camp and then they worked either you know building the railway or building something else putting buildings up whatever they could and my mother for example when she got the typhoid fever she has diarrhea right but you know and she has a high fever so it doesn't matter you have to go out and work if you don't go out and work. If you're not at the roll call, you're automatically dead. That's just like automatic. So she had people supporting her, right? Like a friend of hers holding her back so she could stand straight. And then when everybody marched out to work, a couple of friends would hide her for the

day and then bring her back out. Right. And she did that about two or three days. She was young. She was 18, 19 years old and strong. She got over it and she got better. Millions didn't. And then she supported other people. And she told me she would, people loved her because, you know, she would sing. And she never, she never let on that she wasn't, you know, depressed with the wealthy print. That's a stupid word. Nobody was depressed at Auschwitz, but like, you know, she always sang and she made, she said, oh, it'll be fine.

We'll get out of here. Gave people optimism, right? Because she had that personality. So, anyway, so she survived. her sister, whose name was Leah, L-E-A, my youngest daughter's middle name is Leah, and then I have a, now I have a granddaughter called Leah, but she died. She died of typhoid.

She couldn't move anymore, so she was just, my mother saw her. That's the one thing that she couldn't talk about without crying, was seeing her sister dying. When they left, when they were dragged away, left, they didn't leave, when they were dragged away, her father, my grandfather, said, I'm not worried about Leah. She's a little older. She's strong. She'll be fine.

But I'm worried about Edith because she's, you know, younger and short and slim and skinny. And, you know, well, it was the other way around, you know. he did survive and Leah didn't survive. She told me a story. She remembered Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. She actually saw him in person. He came to visit the camp. And they were lined up, you know,

and he was kind of inspecting, you know, Reichs Fuhrer, the SS, you know, the head honcho. and one of the local one of the sort of commanders there said something to him like you know you know her command d or whatever you know we'd better we'd better get a move on because it's it's cold and rainy and he said for Jews there's no such thing as cold and my mother heard him he was like four feet away from her he's passing by you know for jesus Jews does no such thing is cold.

She remembered that, you know. She passed through the selection with, you know, Dr. Mangalai, all that stuff that you see in movies and read in books. She, she'd been through it. She went through it. And it marked her much more that she was even aware. You know what I mean? Like, she functioned in a daily life. She built a life.

She, you know, had me, obviously, and beautiful grandchildren, knock on wood. and great-grandchildren, and she built a fantastic life. And, you know, her husband was a very successful man, well-respected, all of that. Then, you know, even after the Soviet occupation, they rebuilt their lives in Israel. Then she rebuilt her life again. You know, can you imagine that? Like, you know, never mind that concentration camp, but just let's say you are in Saskatchewan right now. And now, you know, tomorrow, it comes on from on high.

can't live in Saskatchewan anymore and you have to take your family and you move to Venezuela. Okay. And then something happens in Venezuela and you have to learn Spanish and then you move to Japan. That's what happened to my parents, you know, like it's incredible. But she was marked by it in ways that she didn't really even comprehend. She had so much anger, impatience. And it came out as not always very pleasant, John. You know what I mean?

The way that she sometimes talked to people, I was kind of, I was always embarrassed, you know, because she, you know, she always got away and not, in a way, I was like, oh, geez, you know. So you kind of understood it on a rational level that she can't help it. This is what, this is what, this is Auschwitz, you know. This is, this is the, the, the worst place that, like you said, existed in the 20th century.

Well, there were actually worse places than ours. Which we're not going to get into right now. But anyway, but, you know, it's hell. It was hell. So it's obviously going to mark you in ways that are not always pleasant. That, you know, you will become someone that's not necessarily always the nicest person in the world, you know. We try to understand. And I say we, I mean, me and my daughters, we try to.

My daughters are about your age. a couple years older. We try to accommodate her as much as we could, and most of the time we could. Sometimes it was pretty tough. But that's what she went through, man. That's some heavy stuff, you know? It is.

Yeah, I said this very early on, Georgia, that drawing the comparison of now to what your parents went through, through loses a lot of people. This isn't Nazi Germany in Canada, so to speak. We don't have everything going on that happened to them. And that story right there, we, in my opinion, are a long way away from it. But that didn't happen overnight is what I guess I'm really understanding now is,

you know, a year ago, we weren't where we are right now. And you wonder where we are a year from today. in a year after that. Nazi Germany, that's exactly 100% correct. Nazi Germany did not start with Auschwitz. And, you know, well, Soviet Union is a whole different story because you can say that system, and this is a whole new podcast

and we can do it another time. But I'll be happy to do it. Because I think, and this is going to sound completely unreasonable from a person who is a, you know, who is a son of a survivor to say this. But I'll say it anyway. I think the Soviet system was more evil than the Nazis. Well, if you've read anything about the gulags, well, just go pick up. I mean, it is daunting to try and read it. But Soljianitsyn's account of like archipelago is mind numbing.

and it happened in front of everyone's eyes for not a couple of years for decades. I think that the reason it's more evil is because, like you say, first of all, it was a lot, much longer time, right? I mean, the Third Reich lasted 12 years, of which about six were horrible and six were just terrible, you know? The Soviet Union lasted much longer. But I think it's even more than that. There is a kind of a deep evil. The Nazis were thugs. They were goons that got into power

who hated certain groups of people, most of the Jews, but also the Roma, the gypsies and others. And they got rid of them as if they're vermin. But there was a certain perverted kind of crazy logic to what they did, you know, not any kind of logic that, you know, Sean or George would understand, but logic nevertheless. The Soviet evil had no logic. That was just, we are going to build this new society. Only we, meaning Stalin and his, you know, circle. Only we know how to do it and we're going to kill and murder and mean anybody we want and as many people as we want

and as many nations as it takes will eliminate in order to build the society. So that is an evil that's in the, do you understand what I'm trying to say? Like the Nazis were evil. Of course they were, right? But they just got into power almost by mistake. You know, like six months later, it probably wouldn't have happened, Hitler would not have become chancellor. If the Kaiser of Germany had been five years younger, Hitler would never have become Chancellor. He became Chancellor because the what's his name, the Kaiser was senile, okay? Whereas in Russia, it was a mass movement that swept across, like it said, and it went on for decades.

Well, they wanted the perfect society. and when the perfect society wasn't working instead of changing course they just pushed harder no this will work it's going to take time it you don't get it right and it just kept going and going and it was willful blindness from not five people from millions of people that everybody kind of knew what was going on but nobody'd talk about it because if you talked about it out of the door you went like the some of the from Soviet, Russia is, hurts the brain. And yet, and yet, there are brilliant people right now just in North America along, Canada being one of them. They're speaking out saying, this does not sit well. Why aren't we talking about XYZ?

And they're being lamb-based by the population. I've been told many a time, why are you listening to the 1%? go with the 99. Like go with what the consensus says. Like, don't you feel that part of your gut that just goes, this doesn't feel right? And that 1%, gee, they say a lot of things that make sense.

Why wouldn't you listen to them? Why wouldn't you bring them to the table? Why wouldn't you open that dialogue? Well, yes. And you can add to it, you know, in 1930s, in the 1930s, eugenics was the consensus. in your province,

Tommy Douglas was, you probably know this. There's a big supporter of eugenics. Am I right? And that was the consensus. So you could have said,

well, everybody agrees, you know, this is a very clever guy and he's, you know, eugenics, we have to really,

okay, they were not talking about murder, but they're talking about sterilizing people, you know, because only the intelligent,

more intelligent people had a right. right to procreate. That was the consensus, Sean. In the 1950s, the psychiatric consensus was lobotomies, right? So why did you go along with it? Look, this is very helpful. These people, these schizophrenics, you know, they suffer, and then we perform this operation, and they're doing a lot better. That was the consensus. That's the answer. Consensus means nothing. The consensus will change. And I, and I always point to Cassandra's, right? There's people who speak up about like, you can see this coming. What are we doing here? And nobody, you're a worry war. You're worrying too

much. You're worrying. They literally put a canary in the coal mine for a reason, right? To warn everybody. Yeah. I point out Vairs all the time. And I, I just, because I don't fully understand it, right? Doctors write it off. Other doctors say it's great. I just go, when you read it, it literally says it's an early warning system. I go, okay. So what needs to happen for for the bells to go off and people go, oh, that's like right now it certainly looks like that makes a lot of sense. The whole point it was developed was to be an early warning system and now nobody's even recognizing it except for a small portion and the small portion. Nah, it's a junk system. Okay. Right? But even if it is a junk system, at least the part of it is true. So it's not all junk.

Like there's got to be a little green. You know, again, I'm, I'm going to have to go soon, but I don't know if, no, seriously, I got to, I got a, I got to call him to write, man. I'm looking out the window. It's like this big thunderstorms coming through. The, oh, yeah, that's sorry. That word. Edit, edit, market. Listen, this is a podcast, man. You say whatever's on your mind. I ain't ended in nothing. You're good. Okay, good. And I just saw this yesterday. President Gerald Ford getting a shot.

It was a picture. So this would be about 1975, probably, getting a shot, which was developed for the influenza of that year, I guess. I can't remember what it was, you know, but he was getting. And very similar to today, it's like except no masks. Okay. But, you know, he's getting a shot and he's like, you know, very proud of it. And, you know, there are two doctors standing around. They're all like this, you know, hey, look, you know.

and 56 people, 5-6, 56 people died as a result of the vaccination. The vaccination was at the time, you have to check me on the numbers. Please do, because I don't want to just be BSing. Check my numbers. I'm telling your listeners that I could be wrong about the numbers, but there were millions of shots given, millions. I don't know how many millions, but there were millions. It wasn't half the problem, but it's a lot.

56 deaths, they immediately put a stop to the program, and that was it. And it's considered a debacle because of those deaths that occurred. Again, check my numbers, but it was a small number as compared to millions. Now, VERS is pointing to a signal, as they call it, of at least a few thousand. Okay. Let's say that the system is not well built. So I think their number, I can't remember what it is, but it's up there. Maybe some like 8,000 or 9,000. It's, it's over 50. Well, last time I checked it was 15,000 deaths. Okay. And it was 100,000 versus offense. Okay. So let's just say that 90% of it is not true. Yeah, it's bullshit. Sure. Okay. So even the 10% is already 1,500 people. And, Back in the 70s, they stopped it for 50 or 60. So, I mean, something is wrong, man. And there's nothing wrong with saying that something's wrong or there shouldn't be.

You know, let's be, hey, okay, so these vaccines are great. Fine. But let's take a breath. Have a look at what's going on. Have a look whether it's all true or half of it is true or one quarter of it. You know, let's investigate it. Do you know, by the way, that it's a criminal offense to misreport to theirs?

You know that, right? Yes. Yeah. So, therefore, how wrong can it be if you're under federal penalty for misreporting? So, yeah, if you don't report, that's okay. So, I mean, no, it's not okay. I don't mean it's okay. But I mean, if you don't report it, it's not a criminal, that's not a criminal offense.

You just, you should report it. But if you don't. But if you do, you're not allowed to make stuff up. You're not allowed to say, hey, this patient came to me with, monocarditis, okay, and you're just making it up. But even if you go to jail, you know. If you just go, even if people were willing to put in a whole bunch under the thought that nobody will check and I'll never go to jail.

I mean, so take away a good chunk of it. But then they also go, George, that a small percentage is reported. They say 10%. Who knows what percentage of this is reported. I just go, at the end of the day, it's an early warning system. Why put a system in place if you're never going to listen to it when it's going off? Like, I don't get it. That's right.

But I don't get it either. But here, this is what we're going to do. I mean, I do get it. I do get it. It's again, it comes back to control. They want to censor. They have the media on their side 100%. They have social media on their side 100%.

And all that. And that's why, and we're going to end on this note. And that's why you and I and people like us, people like Trish Wood, who I'm sure, you know, has a great podcast in Canada, people like Tom Woods, no relation. has a great podcast down here in the United States. Great podcast that I listen to is No Agenda, which you may or may not know. It's awesome because they make fun of everybody,

left, right, center. They just explode everything. They basically say everything's a lie so, you know, we can make fun of everybody. So you and I and these podcasts and these bloggers and these writers, and I know quite a few, I've made friends with a lot of them, great writer on Subfax and Karen Hunt,

look her up, like you hear it, this Karen Hunt, H-U-N-T, a couple of other people. What's his name? Alex Berenson, who I'm assuming you know his name, you? Yeah. Used to work for the New York Times. He had about 350,000 followers on Twitter. They, of course, they got rid of him.

But he's very active on substack, and he's pointing out stuff that, you know, he said 12 months ago, and it all has been coming. true. He was the one that I first said, ah, back in 2020. Wait a minute. I'm going to follow this guy. This guy's got something. And people like Professor Ionidis and, and what's the name? The guy from Harvard. Anyway, you know, but a chariot. Yeah. There's a time. These are all, and this is what I pointed to my check trend in Proud. I said, why, like, okay, you're a doctor. Okay. Why are you right and Professor Koldorf, who is at ethene distances. Well, that's what he does. He studies thorology and immunology. That's his profession. You're a cardiologist in the Czech Republic.

I didn't quite say it like that because it comes across as really rude, but I hinted at it. Why do you think you know better than this guy who actually does this for a living at Harvard University? Why do, you know, and people say, well, fake news. Well, before I let you go, I got to do the crude master. A couple final questions. Quick, fun, easy, nothing too deep. Wow. This will be.

If you could do this with somebody, sit across, pick their brain. Who would you take? Professor Ionidis. That's who you want to pick their brain on. Yes. John Ionidis, and I would do it, well, I mean, the politicians, yes, of course, I would like to understand why Duck Ford in Ontario is doing what he is. Like, I mean, he's an ass.

So, you know, I'm not going to waste my time on politicians because they're too stupid to understand what they're doing, right? I would pick Ionitis. Professor Ionidis from Stanford is not just a great authority on virology, but he is probably the greatest authority on statistical and, analysis of medicine. Okay. So he writes papers about writing, about doing peer reviewed papers.

You understand? Yeah. And he's seriously, if you look up his name, he's a Greek American. He works and lectures mostly in the US. But now that they hounded him out of everything, you know,

I think he spends most of his time in Greece, I guess, because I haven't, you know, heard from him for a while. Brilliant guy, soft-spoken. I'm like, compared to him, I'm like, I'm loud and I just, And, you know, he's like, we're like this, you know, just very soft spoken,

explains everything nicely. And I would pick his brain. I would like to know, I would say, Professor Anadis, you are such an authority. You are way more of an authority that someone like Fauci, you know, or whoever it is in Canada, way more in terms of what you know about the subject, about studying recent trends, recent developments. How do you explain that you cannot pick up the phone and call President Biden or call somebody in the CDC? How do you explain that? Why do you think that's happening? Because he knows those people. And that would really interest me. I'm interested in the why.

Because I said, you know so much about this. I know that you know so much about it. All your medical colleagues know it. Fouchi knows it for sure. Okay. So what is it that would blow my brain to find out, you know, like what are the machinations that put that barrier up to these really smart people? What's, you're a jazz guy, yes? Yeah. What's it, what's an artist we should all go hop on the YouTube and, and give a listen to? Louis Armstrong. Without any, I have to think about it. Your final one then. Yeah.

You catch me as a guy who reads a lot. What's one book that either, no, one book that's really influenced your life, I would say. That's really influenced my life. Okay. So one book that I have read

and reread many times is the check classic the good soldier shwake it is a satirical novel which in the check republic everybody knows it okay um i'm trying to see what i would compare it in canadian literature but you know it's like i don't know more than more than margaret had like huge like everybody's read it but that's not something that your listeners would would know so i would say Hemingway, the sun also rises, you know, really anything by Hemingway, you know, to whom the bell tolls from the Spanish Civil War, just incredibly powerful writing. So I would say those two

books by Hemingway, the sun also rises and to whom the bell tolls. Crime and Punishment by I read that when I was 17, a huge impact. It, you know, anybody can read it. It reads like a detective now. Well, it is a detective now, but it's very, the implications for today, man, it's like, you know, a hand and glove. It fits so well. So those, and, and, you know, the good soldier, shvake, you know, there are English translations. One particular is decent, but.

None are great. But those are the books that, you know, that I've read that, that I wouldn't say, that affected me a lot. Let's put it that way. But there's more like recently I read a book that I would recommend to you and, you know, everybody called The Entihuman's. And it's by a Romanian writer whose name is, I think his last name is Baku, B-A-C-U, Baku. but the book is the anti-humans. And it's about the communist takeover of Romania. And it is every bit as evil as Auschwitz.

It's a very, very, very, very difficult read. But in the times we're living through now, I think it's highly recommended that as many people read it as possible. because Romania went from being a kingdom. They actually had a king. They were allied with the Nazis, but they went from being a very staunchly Catholic country, very God-fearing country and very conservative country.

And the Russians, the Soviets went in there, and within two years, they devastated. the country by means that are so disgusting and so sadistic and so vile that, anyway, I'm sorry I'm ending on a download, but it's a great book to read for 2021. Well, I appreciate you cutting some time out for me, George. This has been thoroughly enjoyable. Enjoy hearing a little bit about yourself and your life and some of your experiences and your thoughts. I love the podcast because it allows me to explore these conversations

and allows my audience to come along for the ride. So I appreciate you hopping on. I appreciate you having me, Sean. All the best of you. And it was really great talking to you. Hey, folks. Thanks for joining us today. If you just stumbled on the show, please click subscribe.

Then scroll to the bottom and rate and leave a review. I promise it helps. Remember, every Monday and Wednesday, we will have a new guest sitting down to share their story. The Sean Newman podcast, available for free on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever else you get your podcast fix. Until next time.