The Eric Metaxas Show - CHECK OUT TIMELESS with Julie Hartman

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

Check-out the first episode of Timeless with Julie Hartman, now available on the Salem Podcast Network. Subscribe today at ... Salem Podcast Network: https://salempodcastnetwork.com/podcasts/timeless-with-julie-hartman  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/timeless-with-julie-hartman/id1656808169 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/13IZPkFF5JfER4Eep55V8K  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@juliehartman  Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-2172640  As an open-minded, 22-year-old graduate of Harvard, Julie became a conservative after discovering Dennis Prager's radio show. After reaching out to Dennis to express her appreciation for his work, a friendship was born that became a mentorship. Dennis then invited her as a guest on his radio show. The following summer, Julie appeared as a weekly on-air contributor to his nationally syndicated radio program. At the age of 21, Julie guest-hosted three-hour broadcasts for both The Dennis Prager Show and The Mike Gallagher Show, becoming the youngest person to solo substitute host on a national program. On "Timeless", Julie explores her views on life, politics, and current events.

This is Julie Hartman, and my brand new show Timeless has just launched. In each episode, I talk about news, but also about non-political things, like history, religion, and other aspects of life. And if you want to hear more, make sure to subscribe on my YouTube channel, and also at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Rumble, or at the Salem Podcast Network.com. Enjoy. Hello and welcome again. Today is November 30th, 2022, the inaugural episode of Timeless. Some of you may know me from my show with Dennis Prager, Dennis and Julie, or from my radio guest hosting, and I am thrilled that you are finally joining us here for my very own show.

Now, some of you may know that this show was supposed to launch yesterday, but literally five minutes before we were supposed to start. I was all miced up. I was feeling calm, ready to go. and my producers told me that there was this crippling technological problem that they encountered. So I just think what would be a first show day without something going wrong? At least that's how I'm going to view it. And people were probably so enthralled with the U.S. versus a raw soccer game, so they probably weren't going to even watch my show anyway.

Just a little note on scheduling before we begin. So my show with Dennis, Dennis and Julie, premieres every Monday. And then this show, timeless, is going to premiere the remaining days of the week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. And you can watch these shows live at 1 p.m. Pacific or 4 p.m. Eastern. Or if you can't catch it live, you can watch it later on YouTube, or, of course, listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, Rumble, all of those platforms. For those of you who don't know me, my intellectual journey, how I found Dennis Prager, and how I ended up in this chair doing this job, can be found online.

I'm not going to repeat it for the sake of the people who have heard me talk about it so many times. But I want to start this show by talking to you all about a fascinating paradox that has permeated American life, and especially among people my age. America is among the freest countries in the world. Unfortunately, that seems to be decreasing now, but I think we can all agree that compared to other places, we're pretty free. We are certainly the richest country in the world. Our GDP is $23 trillion, and our GDP per capita is $70,000. We have the greatest access to education. In fact, this generation of Americans is the most educationally credentialed, excuse me, generation, not just in America, but in the world writ large. We've also experienced an unprecedented amount of domestic and international stability in the

past half century. People my age, and I'm 23 years old, we've never experienced something like a World War I, a World War II, a Cold War, a Vietnam War. We've never had to go through those all-consuming conflicts that our parents and our grandparents had to go through. And yet, my generation is the most medicated and depressed generation in American history. We have less sex and we date less than our parents and even our grandparents did. The U.S. is one of the lowest among developed countries in terms of self-rated happiness levels. And our suicide rate has proliferated in the past quarter century. Since 2000, it has gone up by 35%.

And the United States is in the top 25 countries in the world with the highest suicide rate. And by the way, I'm getting this information from the World Population Review. And it's fascinating because if you go online and you look at these country-by-country suicide statistics, you'll see that a lot of countries at the top, as tragic as it sounds, it sort of makes sense why their suicide rate is so high. There's, number one is Lysotho, then you see on the list, Guyana, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and then number 22, you see the United States, which is just plopped in there. The most privileged country in the world stands alongside those other countries that are war, torn that have enormous economic instability. We are right alongside those countries in the top

25 of countries in the world with the highest suicide rate. So the question that just captures my attention is why is there this disconnect? Why do we have all of the trappings of success, fulfillment, and happiness, and yet although we may be successful, we're not exactly fulfilled and happy. There are several answers to this question, but the biggest one for me is that I think that we have lost sight of certain eternal truths of life and human nature that used to guide us and strengthen us. Some things happen unexpectedly in life, like earthquakes, tsunamis, plane crashes, etc. But most things are connected to essential truths about ourselves that make the world less surprising

and more understandable. Now, what are some of these things, these essential truths that we've forgotten? Number one is that the nuclear family is an essential component of any healthy, robust society. By a nuclear family, I mean two parents and a child. If you look at incarceration rates, dropout rates, unemployment rates, all of these phenomena you will find that they very closely relate with an unstable two-parent household. The second eternal truth that we used to know and that we've forgotten, and this one is probably the biggest one of all, is that we have to have pride in our country in order to survive. We have to view our accomplishments and our history and our culture as worthy and distinctive in some sort of important way.

I cannot think of any country, and I love history. Those of you who have watched me before, you know that I'm a history buffed. I majored in history in college. And I cannot think of any country or civilization in history that is ever survived without viewing itself as distinctive in a profound sort of way. What we're doing in the United States is that we are convincing ourselves that we have a defunct and guilty culture. And I fear that we will see very soon that this is suicidal. The third eternal truth that we have lost sight of is that human nature is inherently flawed. All of us have a tendency to be a tendency to be the third eternal truth that we have lost sight of is

to do selfish, self-dealing, sometimes violent, vile things to one another. Now, the worst of us, that is those who commit crime, need guardrails. We need things like arrest, incarceration, sometimes long prison sentences, in order to serve as a deterrent for punishment, but also to serve as punishment itself. Now, for those of us who may not commit crime, but still have some internal impulses towards behaving badly, we need guideposts. We need things in civil society that keep us in check and help us live fruitful and meaningful lives. These include religious institutions. They also include civic or fraternal organizations like athletes.

athletic leagues, and unfortunately, those are sort of gone by the wayside now. Now the fourth eternal truth that we've forgotten, and I credit Ben Shapiro for making me think of it this way, is that our lives need to consist of a portfolio of roles that we fulfill with fidelity, conscientiousness, and integrity. For women, this used to be mother, daughter, sister. For men, this used to be husband, son, and father. For people who, you know, for everyone, it used to be employee, neighbor, churchgoer, synagogue goer, after school tutor, little league coach. We used to kind of all have these roles. And what this did was this created

a sense of responsibility to one another that existed beyond just political lines. And it made our lives rich and fulfilled. Now, all of these eternal truths I've mentioned, I think what's so remarkable about them is that we in 2022 have gathered this wisdom from thousands of years of human experience. We, unlike so many people before us, have the technology. and the knowledge to be able to look back at previous times in history, previous countries, previous civilizations, and we can see what they did right and what they didn't do right. And four of those eternal truths that I just mentioned, and they're just four, there are many more, but I decided to keep the list short for you today.

Those that I mentioned, we have gathered over so many years of human history, and they have been proven to work. So instead of recognizing that we can look at this wisdom and learn something from it, nowadays in American society, we're convinced that these ideas are antiquated. We think that they're stodgy and stale and brittle. But the irony is, in my view, by turning away from these anchors, by turning away from these essential truths about ourselves, we are the ones who have become stodgy and stale and brittle.

So many of us, it seems, live deadened and diminished lives. And the sad part is that a lot of us don't even realize that it's happening. So what are some of the ways that we are done in and diminished? First of all, we are losing the confidence that we have, agency over our own lives. As I mentioned, we used to understand that human nature is inherently flawed. We viewed ourselves as the problem. We thought that we had to keep our bad impulses in check, and if we didn't keep our bad impulses in check, then society would have to step in and do it for us. But nowadays, there's this in vogue idea that's the exact reverse. It's that society

is somehow at fault. It's not us. It's not our values. This is the whole poverty causes crime. Climate change. I saw an article the other day that says climate change of all things causes crime. We're blaming these external things that exist in society and we're saying that that causes our shabby behavior. And what that does, unfortunately, is that that erodes our sense of agency and free will. because that means we don't have to control our impulses because our impulses aren't our fault. And society doesn't have to control our, or society doesn't have a place to control our impulses because if society caused them, then who is society to be the one to enforce any punishment? Another way that we have become deadened is that we have lost our vitality and pride in our country.

I remember when I was young, it used to be so much fun to go out on the 4th of July and feel like I was connected to something. Like I was connected not just to the people around me, but to past and future generations. Another part of human nature that we don't really think about is that part of being happy requires having pride in yourself. People have pride in their looks. They have pride in their families. They have pride in their jobs. And as I was saying earlier, a crucial part of that is having pride in our country. But nowadays, we somehow think that it is oppressive to feel pride in the United States.

We think that we have nothing at all to feel happy about. And again, this has, I think, made us diminished people because we've lost so much of the vitality that we once had. And a final way that we've become deadened and disconnected is that we have reduced ourselves to labels instead of the wide portfolio of roles that we used to inhabit. Nowadays, we chiefly define ourselves along demographic lines. That's LGBTQ, Asian, Hispanic, black, et cetera. So that's number one. We define ourselves along political lines. political lines, often these are loudly proclaimed on computer stickers. I often go into Starbucks or coffee stores nowadays, and I see people with their computers out, and they have all of these

stickers on their laptops that say, I voted, or just got vaccinated. Ro, Ro, Ro, your vote. That was one I saw the other day, and of course, Ro is spelled R-O-E. People literally nowadays, our political identity is such a huge part of us that people nowadays literally wear the uniform of their political belief as they do on their laptops. And the third way that we identify ourselves, the first one was demographic group, the second one was political identity. The third way is our feelings at the moment. This is the idea of, I feel like a woman today, or I feel like a furry today, or I feel like society has wronged me today. And what traditional roles, excuse me, used to do

is that they used to allow us to transcend our demographic and political differences and allow us to relate to one another. For instance, if you're a mother, you used to see a kind of connection with another person who's a mother because you share that same role. Nowadays, a Maga mother or a progressive mother doesn't see any kind of fidelity with a Maga mother, and a Maga mother doesn't see any kind of fidelity with a progressive mother. Similarly, a student of one race doesn't anymore see a kind of fidelity that they have with a student of another race, because we define ourselves along these demographic lines.

And again, this just reduces us as human beings into just what we convince. on the outside. Can't we all agree that there is so much more for us to have on the inside that we can relate to one another about than just these labels? It really is a tragedy that so many of us have become deadened and disconnected. And what I want to convey to you today is that as much as timeless is going to be a news show, I also want to make it a show about life. I as a host really want to make all of you aware of these deadened and disconnected ways that we are living so that we can combat them. The problem is a lot of the times we can't always identify them. For instance, I'm sure a lot of you have seen these computer stickers.

We always don't, sometimes we don't make the link between those computer stickers that just seem benign on someone's laptop at a coffee store. and the ways that we are just defining ourselves along political lines. So I really want to identify these deadened ways of living for you. Because we have lost our vitality. In the adventure of life, we have sidelined ourselves. And the purpose of this show, above all else, is to get us involved again in our own lives. Again, I want to identify these tools of deadened and disconnected ways of living.

so that we can push back against them and allow the eternal truths that I mentioned to remain in their proper place. What timeless intends to do is show you that a life lived according to the accreted wisdom of the human experience is the best possible gift that we can give not only to society but to ourselves. All right, since this is in part a news-driven show. Now let's move on to news. The biggest new story in the world right now, even bigger than the war in Ukraine, is the anti-COVID lockdown protests, which are turning into anti-Shijing Jinping protests and anti-communist party protests that have taken place in at least 10 cities across China. These protests started earlier this month in response to the extremely harsh measures that China has used in a desperate effort to attain, in their words, zero COVID spread. Now an especially egregious practice in China that they have used since the

beginning of the pandemic has been to weld shut the apartment buildings or the apartments themselves so that residents simply cannot leave. Last week there was an apartment complex fire in one city in central China that killed 10 people and the reason for that fire was because the firefighters could not get close enough to the flames because the CCP had put up blockades on the street to prevent people from leaving quarantine in their apartments. So the firefighters couldn't get close enough to put the fire out in time. And so what's happened with these protests is that we have not seen anything like this since the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which happened in 1989.

Now, these protests were crushed by the People's Liberation Army in June of that year. And since then, the CCP has dismantled any group or any organization in civil society that could be a threat. And it also has the greatest regime of digital surveillance of its population, including digital face recognition of any country on earth. So again, this is something, these protests right now are really unique because this is something that we have not seen in 33 years. But according to Gordon Chang, who is the leading expert on China in the United States, unlike the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that wanted to reform but otherwise keep in place the Chinese Communist Party, these protests, these COVID protests right

now have a strong anti-communist party anti-Shi Jinping element. They started as anti-COVID, but now it's anti-CCP and anti-Shi Jinping. And now we see that China is air dropping or digitally transmitting anti-Shi Jinping leaflets in various places across China, which is unheard of. It is totally unprecedented in recent Chinese history to do that for a leader. Some of you may know that Xi Jinping, who's been the leader of China for the past 12 years, was recently given another five-year term as president, and will probably end up serving as president for his life. He's the most powerful Chinese leader since Chairman Mao died in 1976, but it does seem like his power inside the country may be coming at the cost of the Communist Party's control of the country.

Several people, excuse me, inside China right now, are being targeted by Xi's regime, and they're trying, interestingly, to make contact with Western newspapers and news outlets to inform people in the West through newspapers or social media of their persecution. One Beijing student said this morning in the Wall Street Journal that the CCP tracked his phone, saw that he was near a group of protesters and contacted his university. And this student now has to make a statement to the Chinese Communist Party, which explains why he was near those protesters. Moving on to domestic news.

I'm sure some of you have read about this. We don't know whether or not this is going to happen, but there is a possibility of a nationwide railroad strike next week in early December. early December, which would be the first one since 1991. And the situation is that 12 different railway worker unions need to agree on a new contract in order to avoid the likelihood of a strike. And if any one of these 12 unions refuses to vote in favor

of a new contract and go on a strike, the other 11, even if those 11 have agreed to a new contract, are unlikely to cross the picket line. As of this morning, eight unions have voted in favor of the contract, and four have not. Now, President Biden seems to be quite worried about this, and he has called upon Congress this morning to use their power to force a labor agreement on unions and their companies. And as I was reading this, I was thinking, how does Congress have the power to do this? But according to a 1926 Railway Labor Act, Congress is in fact allowed to force an agreement on companies and labor. labor unions to protect railway operations in the country.

Now, this strike, if it does happen, would be catastrophic for this country. 30% of the goods and 40% of pre-packaged food in the United States travels by rail. So if these workers go on strike, which right now looks like it's probably about 50-50% chance of happening, this could really impact our way of life. And as bad as this would be at any time, having this happen about three weeks before Christmas would be the worst time for something like this to occur because two of the largest customers of the nation's railroad networks are UPS and FedEx. Also, a lot of commuter and passenger rail service in the United States runs on tracks

that are owned by commercial freight companies whose workers are members of those 12 unions and who are responsible for keeping the tracks clean and running on time. So the strike won't just have an impact on the flow of goods, but it's very likely that it will have an impact on passenger and commuter service too. So as I said, if this happens in the next week, it will be the first time since 1991 that there has been a railroad strike in the United States. The unions point to significant workforce reductions before the pandemic, and other workforce reductions during the pandemic as the cause of a progressively smaller workforce

being forced to work longer and longer hours and perform more functions without the necessary rest, relief, or higher pay. From what I know about this, and I will admit to you, my audience members, that I am not always the biggest fan of unions, especially teachers' unions. But from what I know about this railroad strike, it's very hard not to have some sense. for the claims and the positions that the unions are making. And unfortunately, I really don't have any confidence that the Biden administration has any handle on this issue. Sean, let's play the clip.

Have you been in touch with the parties again? My team has been in touch with all parties and rooms with the parties. I have not directly engaged yet. The president is indeed involved directly. Yes, the president has been clearly. he's been held, has he's been brief, but he has actually been directly involved. No, I just said he's been direct. I said, this is the third time I'm saying he's been directly involved.

And he has been directly involved. Again, the president has been directly involved. I just said the president has been directly involved. So I could say this. He's been directly involved since before there was even a tentative agreement. The president is directly involved, as I have said. We'll keep you updated. Should that strike happen next week?

week. Now the final news story I want to talk to you about is that in this holiday season of Christmas wreaths, boughs of holly, and spruce and fir trees, I want to talk to you about a different kind of green plant, weed. It has now been over 25 years since California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana and 10 years since Colorado and Washington became the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana. Today, 39 states in D.C. allow medical marijuana, and 21 states, so almost half, and D.C. allow for recreational marijuana. And in the past few months, there's been a lot of new information coming out about marijuana

that many of us, myself included, who grew up thinking that marijuana is a safe drug, were never told. And we are learning that many of the things that we were told about marijuana are either untrue or incredibly misleading. Again, this is really important that parents and especially young people hear this because when I read this for the first time, just a few days ago, I had absolutely no idea that some of these things are true. So let's go over some of the arguments for legalizing marijuana that have been prevalent over the past few decades. The first one that we've been told is that it's not addictive. The second is that there's no known lethal overdose threshold for THC, which is the active ingredient in marijuana. And so

the beneficial effects of marijuana use, like mitigating stress, anxiety or solving pain, those things we were told will far outweigh any negative medical or social consequences. And the third thing that we were told is that legalizing marijuana will have several beneficial criminal justice effects. That it's unfair to incarcerate people for simple marijuana possession, and that legalization will help remedy that, and it will also eliminate the illegal market for marijuana. But here's what we're learning now. First, weed is addictive. According to a 2018 article on the Pew Trust Online magazine,

marijuana's estimated rate of addiction is 9% of all users and 17% of those who begin using in adolescence, which is comparable to alcohol and heroin, which stand at 15%. The National Institute on Drug Abuse also says that 2.7 million Americans meet the diagnostic criteria for marijuana dependence, second only to alcohol dependence. And like alcohol and tobacco industries, the marijuana industry is dependent on the heavy user. A 2021 report by the Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division found that

76% of legal weed in Colorado is only consumed by 7,000. percent of the legal purchasers in Colorado. Since legalization, this number of heavy users, the standard of which is 300 times a year, has soared. In 2006, only 3 million people were in this category, and by 2017, it was 8 million people. So why is it that this heavy usage has increased so fast? The answer is that the human body developed. a tolerance for THC. So for a habitual user to continue to get the desired high from use of the product, they over time need to increase and increase the concentration of THC that their body ingests. So for someone who smoked a joint that had 10 milligrams and it worked for them for a week or two,

after two or three weeks, they may need to increase it to 20 or 30 milligrams to get that same effect. Now for those who insist on further scientific confirmation that marijuana can become addictive, the American Psychiatric Association in its most recent manual of recognized psychiatric disorders, the DSM-5, identifies 11 symptoms and behaviors indicating the presence of marijuana use disorder. And among these are using more than intended, trying but failing to quit, spending lots of time using, craving, needing to use more to get the same high, and experiencing withdrawal symptoms. And also according to the DSM-5, marijuana use disorder may correlate with higher risk of problems with attention, memory, and learning, and confirms that those with the marijuana use disorder

may need to use more and more marijuana or marijuana with greater THC concentrations, to get that desired high. Though for some reason they don't call this marijuana use disorder an addiction, the things that I just mentioned certainly sound like symptoms of an addiction to me. And according to the results of an 11-year study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association

in 2015, three in 10 marijuana users have this marijuana use disorder. Second, although it may be true, that it is impossible to experience a fatal marijuana overdose, what we are now discovering is that the increasingly higher concentrations of THC and legally available marijuana has led to the exploding phenomenon of marijuana-induced psychosis. As background, in the 60s,

the average THC concentration of marijuana was about 2%. That rose to about 5% in the 60s, the 90s. Now in dispensaries, the THC concentration in joints is between 20 and 30%. Edibles are between 40 and 80 percent and vape pens or dabs can go up to 90 percent. And as I mentioned a moment ago, A moment ago, excuse me, this has led to the, until recently, never-before-seen phenomenon of marijuana-induced psychosis. The new legally available products with their elevated THC concentrations vastly increase the likelihood of the user having a psychotic episode involving hallucinations and paranoia, and psychosis with paranoia correlates strongly with violent behavior, including sometimes suicidal or homicides. homicidal behavior. The New York Post on October 22nd published an article about this that is just

both fascinating and devastating, in which Dr. Renete Lev, who specializes an addiction at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, said, and I quote, we're now counting 37 cannabis-related diagnoses a day. When I started in the 90s, this is Dr. Lev speaking, when I started in the 90s, there was no such thing. Now I see one to two cases per shift, and the most common symptom is psychosis. Now let's go on to the claims that were made about criminal justice. There is a myth that there is a significant amount of people in prison right now for simple marijuana possession, and this is simply not true. People with convictions. for drug offenses are in both the federal and the state prison systems. But since the federal

prisons have the highest proportion of inmates serving time for drug offenses, 45% of those in federal prison are there for drug-related offenses versus 15% in state prisons, let's take a look at federal prisons. According to the DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics, 99.5% of all people in federal prisons for drug-related offenses are there for drug trafficking. Not for simple possession. I have two points to make about this. The first is that the vast majority of drugs in this country come from outside of this country, principally through Mexican or other Latin American drug cartels. Any fair-minded person who knows how these cartels operate would not consider a person who does business with them to be classified as nonviolent. If you are doing business with

these organizations, you are doing business with the most violent people in the world. So that's point number one. Point number two is that of the 45% of the people who are in federal prison for drug trafficking, 90% of them were sentenced after a plea bargain and not a trial. So this means that they were arrested in charge with more and more serious things than the thing that they ultimately went to prison for. So this idea that people are in prison for just simple possession is a complete fantasy. There's also a prevalent idea that legalization would eliminate the illegal market for drugs who are in business with violent drug cartels and possibly lace the product with things like fentanyl. But the overwhelming weight of evidence is that

legalization has not significantly impacted the illicit market at all. NPR ran a story last year that was entitled, five years after California legalized weed, the illicit market dominates. Now, this shouldn't be shocking to any of us because the illegal market is much more profitable because it avoids the cost of licensing and regulatory approval. And unlike dispensaries, it doesn't have to pay taxes on the product that it doesn't, buys or charge taxes on the product that it sells. Taxes on marijuana these days can range from 17% in Oregon to 30% in Colorado to 37% in

Washington state. And also the presence of so much legal marijuana decreases police attention on illegal sales and allows illegal dealers to present themselves as licensed. And according to the NPR-E-R-EPS, story. In Los Angeles, where we're filming now, in 2021, there were only about 200 legal dispensaries and between 1,500 illegal marijuana stores. Finally, another argument that was made about legalization is that it would reduce crime. But even the advocates of legalization are no longer making that claim. The only thing they say today is that legalization has no effect

on crime rates, but actually there's evidence to the contrary. The first four states to legalize recreational marijuana were Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. In 2013, so that's the last year when recreational marijuana was illegal in all of these states, combined, these states had 450 murders and 30,000 aggravated assaults. In 2018, after, legalization, these four states combined had almost 620 murders and 38,000 aggravated assaults, a rate of increase that is far greater than the national average. Now, I'm telling you all this because this was a really critical thing that was sold to us as something totally different than what it turned out to be.

And if we can just zoom out for a moment, I've noticed that over the course of even my lifetime, there have been a lot of these really critical things that everyone just kind of accepts and that you're ridiculed and disparaged if you question or don't accept, and oftentimes these critical things actually turn out to be untrue.

One example is that a right, has weapons of mass destruction. That was clearly not true. The second is that COVID originated in a wet market and not in a lab, although coincidentally, the wet market just happened to be in the same town as a virology lab. Number three is that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election. We now know that that is not true. Number four, an especially prescient news story is that Hunter Biden's laptop we believed was Russian disinformation. And now all of these left-wing news sites are admitting that in fact the information on Hunter Biden's laptop was in fact true and that it wasn't Russian disinformation. And the fifth example is that we were told that the

Pfizer vaccine would prevent transmission of COVID. And although the vaccine may help reduce the severity of COVID, a Pfizer executive testified a few weeks ago in front of the European Parliament that the Pfizer vaccine, when it came out, these executives did not have any evidence that the vaccine reduced transmission. And it's just staggering that all of these things, these really important things, that everyone believed we now know are not true. And this marijuana thing, unfortunately, is just another penny in the jar. So please everyone be careful, especially with the prevalence of fentanyl nowadays, be careful,

and encourage people, especially young people, to go out and research marijuana use because it is not the benign drug that we were all told that it was. It has been a joy to be with you today, and thank you so much for joining us. I'm so glad that our technology seemed to work today, at least as far as I know our technologies worked,

I could find out afterwards that I've been doing this whole show and we haven't been live. Okay, I see some thumbs up. Good. And I want to end this show in every show with something that really motivates me. Like a sculptor, starting with a block of stone and the tools to form it, each of our thoughts, choices and actions, big and small, shape who we are. So let's think clearly, choose wisely. and act with principle and determination.

See you all tomorrow. Thanks so much. This is Julie Hartman, and my brand new show Timeless has just launched. In each episode, I talk about news, but also about non-political things, like history, religion, and other aspects of life. And if you want to hear more, make sure to subscribe on my YouTube channel, and also at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Rumble, or at the Salem Podcast Network.com. Enjoy.