The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 285: Justin Hart—Scream Inside Your Heart

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

In his new book, Gone Viral: How Covid Drove the World Insane, Justin Hart, the founder and chief data analyst of RationalGround.com, puts out the case for what our government did well and what our government did not-so-well to battle Covid-19.  Spoiler Alert: The second category contains a lot more items.

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What you have here is episode number 285, the way I heard it. This one is called Scream Inside Your Heart. Scream inside your heart, Mike. Don't do it out loud. It's a translation from a Japanese expression that I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce, but it came up late in the conversation you're about to hear with my guest. Justin Hart. Justin Hart has written a book called Gone Vaugh.

viral. And I hope it does, actually, because it is filled with information, insight, opinion, and fact about what we got right and what we got wrong over the last two and a half years regarding COVID. And spoiler alert underneath the what we got right column is nothing. Well, the subtitle of this book is How COVID Drove the World Insane. And that's what really drew me to it because I felt like I was going loopy for the last two years. He explains a lot of reasons why. Look, I think we all have. Yeah, look, I mean, so, okay, it's going to be a little controversial for some people because I think in general, it's safe to say that as we get some distance between the lockdowns and where we are right now, people are more willing to look back

and talk about what we got right and what we got wrong. But I think it's also pretty clear. that some people aren't ready to do that. Personally, I wanted to talk to this guy, not because I know with certainty that he's correct about anything. I happen to agree with a lot of it, but that's beside the point. I wanted to talk to him because I think we're going to go through this routine again. Don't say it. Well, I'm not, I don't know that we're going to go through lockdowns again, but there's going to be another COVID. There's going to be another variant. There's going to be another thing, you know, hopefully not for a long, long time. But there's going to be. to be another thing that fills our hearts with dread. And that thing is going to push us to make

all kinds of decisions and do all sorts of things that we might live to regret. Now, I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems like regret is on the menu right now when people look back at everything from school closures to masks, to protocols, to social distancing. Two vaccines. Two boosters. So I'm just kind of throwing it all out there. I know I'm not saying anything new. This isn't a terribly controversial or political conversation. At least it shouldn't be.

But it might be controversial. Because I don't know where you are. As Chuck said, moments before we started recording, if you're sitting home right now alone, listening to this with your mask on, you're probably not going to enjoy the conversation. But if you're genuinely curious about what we all just went through, and you'd like to hear from a guy who's got some real skin in the game,

you know, he started his site pretty much right when the lockdowns begin. What was it called reasonable ground? Rational ground. Rational ground. Yeah, rationalground.com. Right. So anyhow. Thatorg, I think. Dot org.

Right. So what you're about to hear, is the opinions of a guy who will be the first to tell you. He's not an immunologist. He's not an epidemiologist. He's not a doctor. But he is a data geek. He lives and breathes data.

And when he started looking at the early data around some of the claims that were leading to many of the policies, he saw all kinds of warning signs. And in many cases, his concern has been justified. So now he's got a book out. It's called Gone Viral and scream inside your heart is an expression that, I mean, it's not the happiest feel-good hit of the summer title of all time, but I think it's super appropriate for what you're about to hear. Chuck, final thoughts before I seamlessly throw to this advertisement? I can't find national ground. National ground. Maybe that's it. I'm saying it wrong. Rationalground.org.org. Right.org. Yeah, rationalground.org. Right. Good. Stand by, folks, before I

throw to this commercial, I want to make sure I got this right. Pretty sure it's rational ground. I just, it's, nothing's coming up here. Maybe I'm going to try dot com. Hold on. I think it's dot com. Yep, it's definitely dot com. All right. Well, folks, I apologize for that. It was a hole you could have driven a truck through,

brought to you by the one and only Chuck Klaus Meyer, former producer of the way I heard it. It's been swell, people. It's episode 285. Scream inside your heart and it all gets gone. Ah, right after this. Do do, do, do, do do do do do. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial.

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text and data on a blazing fast network for just 3499 a month really is an unmitigated bargain from an American wireless company that keeps all their customer service in this country, supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the MicroWorks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. my mom did, get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. There we go. How's that for you, Chuck? All better? That sounds pretty good. How's it sound to you, Ross? Well, how's it sound to you, Justin?

Yeah, I think you sound terrific, Mike. It's great to be with you. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. Thanks for coming here. I'm full disclosure. Halfway through your book gone viral and I'm so angry. I don't know that I'm going to be able to finish the rest of it. That's a common refrain. We hear that a lot. Very painful to get through sometimes. I mean, there's just so much to talk about and I know you've been so busy promoting this thing. But first things first, I was literally warming up my coffee here when Chuck sent me a thing and you're suing Facebook and Twitter now? Or has this been? going on for a while? You got to come out of the gate with that? Yes. I'm coming in hot. Well, since last year, right? So last year, you know, Jen Saki, the press secretary of President Biden,

made the announcement next to the Surgeon General that they were indeed working with Facebook and Twitter to take down posts and accounts that they felt were not upholding the sort of approved narrative on what they saw there. Shortly before that, my account got taken down. Others did on Facebook and Twitter. And the post I put was pretty benign. just there's not a ton of evidence that masking kids is a positive effect on curbing cases for

our schools and the evidence shows that it could actually be harmful. And for that one infographic, like supported by a bunch of studies taken down. So yeah. Don't you think maybe that could have been a straw that broke their back? I came across you first with a rational ground, right? Very, very, early in this. So you've been a jagged little pill for these guys for, from the jump. So I guess maybe we'll circle back and get to all that. But I, my feeling, as I was listening to your book, first and foremost, was this weird mix of anger, but also vindication. Because on a personal level, I mean, you can fill a book with what I don't know, but I was saying to Chuck from the beginning and anybody else who would listen to me on my Facebook page, that whatever's

going on here, it is what it is. But if we don't have a metric, if we don't have some sort of benchmark by which we can say, okay, we're going to get back to normal, then I don't know that we'll ever get back to normal. And it was just that, for me, it was that nagging feeling that really turned into something else and metastasized into the kind of discomfort I know you feel and many, many, many millions of other people feel. But unlike me, you wrote a book about it. You've gone through this thing in such a declarative way that, well, hell, it just strikes me as important, Justin. Well, thanks for having me up.

I'm so glad to be with you guys. My wife is super excited, too, to see this, too. She's a big fan of yours. In fact, we were just watching the other day, she's been zoning out at night to last man standing. And, you know, is that Mike on the? It is, Mike is Tim Allen's brother there. That's great. It was so strange.

I've had Tim on the podcast before, and neither one of us quite knew. You know, you just never know with these things if it's going to be good or bad or weird or what. But halfway through rehearsals, we were like, good grief. You know, I could come back here every week. It could be a whole new direction. I mean, he's such a great guy, and I don't have an older brother in real life. But he was my TV older brother. And it was just a kick working with that guy.

Those are fun episodes. I like those. I'm glad. I bet if he were on this call, he'd have some questions for you, too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He'd be throwing bombs left and right, yeah. Good grief.

So let's start where we started. When things crap the bed, rational ground, you're in a Brady bunch type situation. You got three kids, previous marriage. Your wife has three kids. Suddenly, I'm guessing there are eight people in the house at the same time. Life is not the way it used to be. Yeah, it's a little crazy. You know, going into 2020, I had a host of clients that,

was really proud of, right? One was doing golf excursions for baby boomers, right? And just hold your laughter. The next one was going to be, it was college kids. It was a platform for parents to send their kids to college and figure out which one they should go to. And then the third one was my favorite client was a high-end vacation club for wealthy families. So you can imagine all three of those clients were dead by the time that March and April came around being in the leisure space. It was quite the scene. And so I had some time of my hands and I thought, well, my background is really as data guy doing just a big, deep analysis. And that's what I do for companies. I come in and say, here's where your sales are going wrong. Here's where your company is going off. And let me show you

these really cool dashboards that can help you understand how to get back into shape. Right. And so I said, well, let's see what we can do to get the country back into shape. And when I ran the numbers, all of a sudden I realized, I think these are the wrong numbers. I would see what was coming out of Italy, what was coming out of China, two of the first countries, obviously, to be hit. And I said, those calculations are not quite right. And I knew a little bit about infectious diseases just by chance. Two years previously, here in San Diego, where I am, I was hospitalized for two weeks, nearly died, the septic shock, staff infection, you know, that natural flora on your skin somehow got into my bloodstream. And so I thought myself, I got some time in my hands of

hospital and what I do, I run data. How did this tiny little thing almost kill me, right? What were the stats of my survival? And so I took some of that same learning, some of my data background, and then just my general interest to keep occupied. I really don't like being inside and keeping from my job. And so when I ran the numbers and I realized Dr. Fauci, for example, was indicating to Congress that one out of 100 people would die from this thing. And I said, I don't think that's the number. And so I found a group of experts and analysts and ragt moms and dads who are like, hey, look, I know this isn't my domain. And as we say, I normally wouldn't insert myself into someone else's domain, but, you know,

Mike, they had no problem inserting themselves into my domain, my kids' education, my barber shop, my coffee shop, my business, my gym. And I said, something's just a miss. And I think in the end, it was basically, I was brought up as really a very strong, proud American. I've got ancestors since we're going into Thanksgiving time. I've got ancestors on the Mayflower and everything else there. I really proud of sort of my heritage there.

And when I looked at this, I said, I don't think you can go wrong if you stick by our founding documents and sort of that pillars, right? Because that's sort of baseline of pursuit of happiness. They kind of stop that, right? It's tracks. It's like your plow is in the field, right? You're looking out the window and they're saying, no, no, you're going to have to let that rust. I can't let you go out there and plow the field. And you're like, what am I going to do?

to support my family. Well, we'll pay you for that. I don't know that that's quite right. And so the group of people I was with were the same way. And we ended up somehow getting in touch, our Scott Atlas reached out to us. And he's a professor at Stanford. His whole experience in his professional career was public policy and applying science to the policy, right? And so he called us and said, hey, I need some help at the White House. Can you provide me with charts or data? We said, pro bono, we'll do anything you ask. So we had a group of people. on Twitter and we just every morning get together and say, okay, what does Scott need? What does Atlas need? And we try to produce these information. We thought by the end of the summer, we'd have this thing

quelled and over with and everything else there. But the way it was set up was just kept going and going. So that was sort of the intro to this whole thing. And it changed the trajectory of my life. I never thought I would be sort of, you know, leading the charge as MIT dubbed me, the anti-mask brigade, a leader of the anti-mask brigade. And so it was a crazy scene to see all. all these people really pushing back in such a dramatic way. And I said, well, maybe we're over the target, right? We're taking flack and we're over the target. So that's the beginning of the story.

So what I'd like to do, it's probably impossible because politics has seeped into every single thing there is. But the reason I think your book is important has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with all of it or not. It has to do with my belief that we really, need to look back with a dispassionate eye and really understand what we got right and what we got wrong and why? Because it's coming back, right? We're going to go through some version of this dance again. And it just seems like the stakes are so high. And honestly, for me, I'll take a lot of grief,

I'm sure, really for having you on and just for having this conversation, because it's still hot for a lot of people. Yeah, it's a difficult one, right? It is. But the other day, I forget what channel it was on, but I heard somebody make what really sounded like a rational plea for forgiveness or maybe amnesty was the word, right? We want to look back on this and let's not be too hard on the people who got it wrong. And I thought, you know what? I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's not that I want to put anybody in the public stocks necessarily. But we have to understand what was fundamentally wrong with us. our overall analysis. And if that hurts people's feelings, I think maybe that's a fair trade. You know, there was an article, this was Des Moines, Iowa, and there was an editorial, and they were talking about how the American people are perfectly willing to do whatever it takes, but they greatly dislike learning later that it was all for not, right?

And actually, that was written in 1919 after the great stringencies they had during that pandemic. So 100 years later, we didn't quite learn that lesson, right? And I think that's part of where a lot of people are, right? I think a lot of Americans just dutifully said, hey, I don't want to hurt anyone. I want to be a good person. And frankly, you know, sticking your neck out, it seems like you're going to get it slapped, whether it's a grocery aisle and someone yelling at you or the plane and someone yelling at you. No one wanted to be yelled at. And that's perfectly understandable. But I think in the end, what we have to do is kind of step back and say, all right, all these interventions, whether it was the plexiglass, the mask mandates, the social distancing, the quarantine from the slightest exposure.

And then especially the impacts on our kids, the school closures, the education lost, the learning loss from just, you know, our young kids masking and not being able to see people's lips moving. Something as simple as that, right? You know, there's one stat that kind of cuts across political boundaries and everything else there. everyone understand it's undeniable. And it's something that happens. You know, when you throw a wrench in society and just put the break on, we believe in the spring of 2020 that we probably missed about 200,000 cases of potential domestic abuse. Because it's typically sharp-eyed teachers and administrators who call those out.

And our kids weren't in school. I mean, how many bruises do we miss on mom's face because she was wearing a mask and drop-up? I mean, those are sad sort of realities when you just change the world as it exists, right? That's the sad part of that equation. But I think there is, you're like, you have to have sort of like those stories. Then you have to come back and say, okay, well, what will we do differently? What can we do differently if this happens again because it will? Well, my sense from reading your book is the answer to that question is every damn thing.

Every damn thing we do differently. I mean, am I wrong? we get anything, in your view, did public policy get anything right? Only the reopening, right? And I think even then we failed, but it was too late. But everything from the transmission of the disease to the implementation of plexiglass to the shutting down the country, the free forgiveness, PPP loans. I mean, obviously, you know, we needed to do something because we were forcing businesses to close. But those impacts we're filling now financially. I think those are direct repercussions there. And it was crazy. Some of the stories in the footnotes, too, if you get the book,

is really interesting. It's like, we talk about the TP rush, right? And you'll find this very inching, Mike. I know you will. That in that rush, what it was, I remember I stood in Costco getting the, you know, big Kirkland slab with my wife a day before the shutdowns trying to make sure I had that. They were really orderly, right? Costco had that down to a science, right? And, but I remember reading and talking to a few executives from the paper industry. And they told me the reason why we had so many TP shutdowns and we'd come in waves, right, that you would have these scarcities, was that we do, if you'll excuse the term, and I know you will, half of our business at our business, right? And so when you shut down, you know, gyms and when you shut down

buildings, stadiums, universities, everything else there, you know, the supply chain for those big sort of non-intimate swabs of, you know, not the cushy bear stuff were used at home, when you stop that train, right? All of a sudden, they have to reproduce the stuff at home. And then I talk to people in the sewage and water reclamation plants. And their clogs wore up by 50 to 75% every month because of, you know, the universal use of those Clark swipes, remember, early on? And people are just flushing that down the toilet. I'm sure you heard from a lot of friends in your time as to what impact that had in the blue collar scene. When that all was happening, that's when calls to bring dirty jobs back really started to blow my Facebook page, right?

Because essential work was headline news, but it was the story of a giant horrible mass in some sewer, the size of like the big ball in Indiana Jones that nearly ran over Harrison Ford. It was all just these wipes and crap combined together. And I hadn't even thought about it in those terms. But when you shut down the economy and the society, you shut down two-thirds of all the plumbing. So all of that became a very at-home adventure. Yeah, let me tell you a story about Michael Hurtado. Okay, Michael Hurtado, and this was in the footnotes.

It was really detailed. My editor thought this would be fun, but maybe later on, he wanted a really accessible up front. But in the footnotes, you'll find this. He was an engineer for property off of the Vegas strip. And, of course, Vegas shut down as well. and the way they engineer those hotels, as you know, is they anticipate a certain amount of people staying every day and a certain amount of water flushing

to provide all the volume and gravity you need to get things flowing. And so literally his entire engineering team spent the spring of 2020 walking the halls like Jack Nicholson in the Shining, right? And just, you know, flushing the toilets, tending to the loose, watching it. Because otherwise, Legionaire's disease and everything backs up. I mean, all work and no play makes Michael Hurtado a very, very bad book. So these are things that no one really, you know, thought about the flip side of the coin. Those are the humorous things, right?

The real impacts, you know, where you see the learning loss in our kids. And, you know, Mike, you and I are adults, Chuck, we're adults, right? And we're going to, we're really going to deal with this as best we can. We lost a couple years of our life. It's set us back professionally in some ways. In some ways, it was positive for some professions. But our kids, right? I mean, I've got, I had kids five, three, and one, right, right now. And they were in preschool.

I remember the preschool teacher coming up to us and she's deeply apologetic. She says, Justin, I am so sorry. You know, your daughter, are you? She's just not, she's not going to be ready for preschool. I mean, I'm having the most difficult time trying to teach them how to pronounce the letter H through a mask, right? You can't do it. And so those devastations are things that we're going to, fill for a generation. And we've got to have some, you know, comeuppance for that. Like you said, I love the idea. We welcome all people, as we say, to team reality. We've had a lot of people come and say, oh, what masks probably weren't the best mandate to make universally or plexiglass? Yeah, everyone agrees that was stupid. Or, you know, even these mandates where I lose my job if I don't get a jab,

especially if it's not stopping the spread of the disease, that's questionable. So they can come to team reality. We welcome them to make that decision. But some of these people, I hope they never have a shot at setting public policy again or influencing that. That's sort of the key tradeoff I'm willing to make. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company. But he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed. and labeled as domestic, and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company

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Free meat for life, $40 off your first order. Good ranchers.com. American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers now. Hey-haw! Part of the thing that bothered me most to. aside from not having a clear glide path into some kind of return to normalcy,

was the degree to which all of the advice that was being dispensed was cookie cutter in nature. We didn't seem capable of articulating a strategy for different groups based on their susceptibility. And I'm just personally sensitive to this, you know, in my foundation, and in that part of my world, the thing I rail against is the idea that the best path for the most people happens to be the most expensive thing there is in terms of education. So I felt like we were treating everyone, sort of like we treated everyone in the wake of 9-11. You know, the level of scrutiny directed at my 84-year-old mother trying to get through TSA was no different than the degree of scrutiny, right?

It's like we, it's like, why are we treating everybody the same when it seems clear that the disease is going to impact many, many, many people really, really, really differently? Look, my kindness interpretation was kind of a squeaky wheel theory, which is when, you know, these health overlords, as they sometimes unkindly referred to them, made the decisions which they did. Team Armageddon, I think.

Team apocalypse, right, yeah, exactly. Team apocalypse, right. Yeah, yeah. And so they're hearing from all these people, when is my child going to be safe? People that were seriously fearful, right? But I mean, like you and I would have a very different conversation. We talk about this in the book about the average age of death for COVID was 80 years old, right? Which is about the average age that people die here in the United States as well from any other causes.

The average age of death during the 1918 pandemic was 29 years old. The impact on society is much different for someone that dies who is your brother at 19 or 18 or 10 than someone, you know, a grandparent who's lived a full life and is dying at 96. What do the actuarial guys call that? Yeah. Years of life lost. YLLL, right? Yeah, YLL.

And so the challenge that you have is trying to understand, well, if I don't do a one-size-fits-all, then I'm going to hear from all these squeaky wheels. And so I've got to sort of even those out. And it didn't feel, you know, they have this sort of notion sometimes of fairness that overrides them. And that's why the subtitle of the book Conviral, how COVID drove the world insane. It really did. And it was my two older daughters, stepdaughters, were going to a classical Christian school here in San Diego. My wife had seen them through the entire growth of the school.

And even, you know, this group that prides itself on, you know, rhetoric and logic and reason were like pillars and on flags throughout the school. My 14-year-old came home today, she says, you won't believe this. So the school attendant came to me, and she said, you're going to have to sit perpendicular on your bench, straddle your bench and not face your classmates. So you're not facing them. Oh, my God. So COVID only goes in one direction, right? I mean, that was the insanity.

And then they tried to make accommodation. So 2020, while the schools were closed down, when you finally got to the 2021-22 school season, right, the schools were open mostly. but it was closures by proxy, right? If anyone who had kids will remember this, the slightest exposure to a positive case, whether the kid was sick or not, would send you home 10 days.

And I was super frustrating for us. You know, my daughter was 13. I don't think even the Vax was approved for her then, but she was in a school play, and we got a note she's going to have to quarantine for 10 days. Well, why? She has no symptoms. Well, one of their classmates in the play, they tested positive for COVID.

Well, are they sick? they're doing okay. All right, well, why does my daughter have to stay home and others are going to school? Well, your daughter's not vaccinated. Was the kid who got sick and tested positive vaccine? Well, yeah, he was. So I still just that sort of just really, you know, that's where I go. Okay, now that's unfair.

But I understand why they, you know, my kind of interpretation as to why the one size fits all cookie cutter thing came into play was because they didn't want to treat people differently. But in doing so, they really just drug us all through the mud, right? And it seemed like so overwhelming, right? And so unfair all to begin with. It's like, it's not just the unfairness of that, which I think is, what do they call it, prima facie. I see that. How much harm was done to people who were morbidly obese when we simply didn't say out loud, look, what is it, 87% of all fatalities and hospitalizations had that morbidity?

I mean, if you're seriously overweight, you're in serious trouble. But we didn't seem to articulate that. And look, I want to be really careful, Justin, because I don't want a Monday morning quarterback it, what we know now, what we know then. It's easy to second guess. But as I remember it, and I don't want to forget this, but as I remember it, that data was out there. It seemed to be out there, but it seemed to be being affirmatively ignored.

And that quashed. That's hard to forgive. Yeah, that's hard to forgive. The single best thing people could have been doing in hindsight, admittedly, is to be outside, to be walking five, six, eight miles a day, to be eating better, to be taking care of themselves. Yeah, it's true. We were living in opposite, Phil, though. Yeah, the other comorbidity we saw, Mike, was that it was obesity and then the studies came out from India and a few other places. is showing that the people who really had an issue and bad outcomes with COVID were not only obese,

but a lot of people had really low levels of vitamin D, right? And we know that basically, you know, succumbs to respiratory diseases very easily. So whose idea was it to stick us inside out of the sun, eating takeout, and everyone, you know, putting on their COVID-19 pounds, right? And I know, I did. And so it's a devastating. I remember I looked at my Apple Watch or my whatever, my tracker, right? And I said, well, you know, I was doing pretty well. I was doing seven to ten, sometimes 12 to 15,000 steps a day if I was working out or whatever else there. It went down to like two to five thousand steps a day during the spring. I said, that's probably going to have an impact on my life, right? And I think that's something they didn't consider, right? I don't think, well, look, again, you want to give people the benefit of the doubt.

And I want to be mindful, too, of, I mean, it's going to be so easy to forget. some of these things, Justin. Again, that's what worries me. Those early days in March 2020, washing the fruit, washing the doorknobs, operating from this assumption that it was droplets before we understood the aerosol thing. And then once we understood the aerosol thing, not changing the protocols. I was literally standing in a jetway two days ago, getting off a flight, and the decals are still there. Please stay six feet apart. The marks are still on the floor, right? So part of me is like, good God, get those things off there.

But another part of me says, you know what, keep them there. Because as time goes on, we're going to look at that and we're going to realize, I think, just how superstitious and profoundly wrong we were. There's a really interesting side point that happens here. The pandemic is very local, right? Like here in San Diego, where I am, it's a pretty affluent place here. It was 90% massive the height of it. but if I went like 15 miles inland, they didn't care if you wore a mask, right?

In God's country and Poway there and the diners still gave you menus and everything else. And sometimes the county people would come on them. But you'd go to Florida. We visited Florida a few times and it was like a different world in some places. And it felt so odd, right? It seems to be at least what I experienced, whether your school district, your county, if they were coming down hard on you, you experienced that. But literally your neighbor three miles away in the next county might have a very different experience.

You know, that sort of divergence really shook people up in some ways. And there are some people still are wondering, like, what was your experience? I didn't experience anything like that. It's like, well, you weren't here in California. But they sort of locked us down. They padlocked my daughter's swing set at her local park for a year. For a year. It was like, it was literally like they had a padlock on it.

And they had a police tape around the playground. Yeah, on the swing set. It was just like, why are we doing this, right? And especially when you consider that the risk for these kids was so low to begin with. And we just put so many burden. In fact, the only people that are mandated to be masked now are preschoolers in some cases because the VACs hadn't ever been approved for them. But of course, they take the masks off when they're napping next to each other for two hours during the middle of the day.

I mean, again, it drove people crazy. And I think that's part of the thing. It's like even the people that we assumed had some sanity in this thing. It just everyone had their sort of run in. And it's understandable. My kindness interpretation was that just it's understandable why people were very fearful because it sold a lot of newspapers. It became sort of the main tool that people would use.

My own county health director said, you should just treat everybody like they have the disease. And I said, that's going to have some societal impact, right? Well, my God. Of all the things in the book, the thing that jumped out at me in terms of a real hinge or a real turning point in the way people thought, about this was the moment it was articulated that the asymptomatic person could and would spread it,

and that the only sensible way to live life, I forget who said it, but somebody's out there on record, was to go about your life with the working assumption that every single person you encounter has COVID. Am I remembering that right? You are? And that, like I said, it's kind of like butterflies and hurricane scenario. A butterfly flaps its wing here and causes a hurricane on the other side of the world. We had this one assumption was that asymptomatic transmission, we all these do scrabble words that you and I can use, right? And so asymptomatic meaning the guy is sick and he doesn't know it and he's spreading it, right? Well, it turns out that accounted for less than 1% of all the infections. And so from that one assumption came plexiglass, mask mandates,

social distancing, quarantine from the slightest exposure. It was a crazy scene. It just that one terrible assumption cascaded that something just awful. And take the plexiglass, for example, this is a pretty benign one that we saw happen, right? Everything turned into like a bank in the inner city, right? Every retailer had this plexiglass in front of them. I don't know, Mike, I'm sure you went to Home Depot. I wonder what the conversation was there because they thought, oh my gosh, this is our calling, right?

We have all the equipment here. let's show them how to do some real plexiglass. And so you see it, right? They had those big metal mounts of these six-foot plexiglass. They're still up there here in San Diego at these Home Depot's. I can't hear anything. It's like ballproof glass. I can't hear them.

But it turns out, you know, when the CDC actually did studies on it, they said, oh, this is actually stopping ventilation, which is actually one thing you can do to sort of help stop the spread of the disease. And also it becomes another surface to clean. And so they quietly, very quietly in March 2021, over a year and a half ago, said, oh, yeah, we should just drop that recommendation. And they didn't really tell anyone about it until we caught it and made it made a beef about it. And yet I see them everywhere. I see them at my bank. I see them at the grocery store.

I see them at the drug store. There's plexiglass everywhere. Somebody's got to get the word out if that's the case, that this is worse than not having it. My wife asked her doctor one time. She says, look, why are we still wearing these masks? And they said, well, you know, people are nervous about it. And she's like, well, I'm nervous about you wearing a mask, right? And me wearing a mask.

And so we're catering to the fears of society, which I don't think can be a very good thing. It's not sustainable, certainly. You know that one neighbor who's still double masked in his car alone, right? I kind of wrote the book for that audience, too, which is to say, I want this to be conversational, accessible. I don't want to get too down into the weeds of the data, but I want the data there, but I also want a lot of stories. So I kind of mixed in a lot of conversations that I had so that people will kind of say, oh, yeah, I do relate to that.

And hopefully, slowly we can pull them out of that. And you take our college kids, for example, I mean, they're the one last bastion that's maxed to the vaxed and maxed to the masked and everything else there. And I think the reason my kindness interpretation, Mike, is that for these kids, the real risk of getting canceled by some errant social media post of you wearing a mask in a place where you should have been, right? It's very real to them. And so it's not the generation of my parents in the 60s. So I'm like, yeah, stick it to the man. They're like, we better obey the man because, you know, I'm going to get pummeled by my friends online if I don't tow the line.

When did that happen? It's so backwards. It used to be the college kids would be the tip of the spear the other way. Say what you want to say. Live your best blah, blah, blah. It was amazing the way that happened. It was also amazing the speed with which they would forgive hypocrisy in their leaders. That cohort used to be among the most skeptical, and they seemed to have become the most forgiving. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I live up here in Northern California. I tried to stay in my lane for the most part during all of this, but when Gavin Newsom was out there at the French laundry, my head exploded. I actually thought that's it. I actually thought that's it. forget it. There's no way. People will forgive well-intended elected officials who get it wrong.

But how do you forgive that level of hypocrisy? It's tough. I grew up in the Bay Area too in the East Bay and my parents are still there. My dad has been a prominent guy in business there in San Francisco for four decades and everyone knows him in the city. And he's very quiet. He's kind of tell me, you know, I ask him some questions about how's the real estate business there and everything. else there. And I can tell it's a different city. And it'll give just a couple hints, you know, towards that as to things have really dramatically changed. And that's a, that's an unfortunate things. It really became a catalyst for massive changes and how things went. And again, Mike, this is like nothing new. In the book, we talk about what happened 100 years ago and what happened 400 years ago. I tell the story that was from journal entries during the 17th century in Milan,

Italy when they faced, you know, a really big pandemic, the plague, right, that took one and three lives. That was a biggie. They were so suspicious of everyone, right? At one point, they see an elderly gentleman at the top of the front of the pew and they thought that he was purposely spreading the disease more because that was a rumor that was going around. And they took him outside and pummeled him and the journal entry just simply ends and says,

I do not think he could have survived many moments longer. And you saw all the altercations that we went through, whether it was someone trying to get into their gym or their kids trying to go to school or not putting on their mask high enough on a plane. Those things real have societal impacts that it's going to take us a little bit to get through that. Huge. When do you think the mask became a talisman? When did it begin to signify something that had nothing at all to do with public health? Well, we now have all the FOIA emails, That is the emails that we get from filing these lawsuits against the government to see who made these decisions in the first place. And early on, Dr. Fauci was telling him his emails, he says, no, no, don't wear these masks.

These things you get at the drugstore, they're not going to do anything, right? But it quickly changed to that being a universal mandate. One of the reasons was, I'm sure he got an earful from a lot of governors and county officials who were like, give us some tools, right? And so this became kind of a political tool, right? If cases were going up in your area, it's easy to blame masks, right? You weren't wearing your mask hard enough, right? If cases were going down, it was, thank you very much for wearing your mask, right? And then we come to find out two years later, the masks we were wearing, everyone agrees now,

probably did very little to stem the side of the pandemic. And then everyone went to these N95s, you know, very, very late in the pandemic. It was mind-boggling. It became an outward sign of an inward faith. Maybe that's the best way to put it. And people really did want to believe that, you know, they can make a difference. There was a poll done. It was just a year ago, I think, and it said, it asked Americans, what gives your life meaning, right?

And it was something like one in 20 Americans said, oh, COVID, COVID gives my life meaning. Yes. I think people, they found that it was a virtue signal that was very tempting and very easy to initiate in their lives. And they were rewarded for it many ways. Shamedless plug. Long before she was Peggy Rowe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored

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That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered to make nine perfect old-fashioned every time. It's my favorite way to support Microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com, K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Chuck, you'll remember this. I think it was the first time I saw the thing you're talking about, but Chuck came up here for a visit maybe six months into the lockdowns,

maybe not even that long. And I lived kind of in the woods, you know. We were just walking down a small street. and not a small street, maybe 40 feet away from us, was an old guy. And he looked over and he just shook his head and then he shook his fist. And what did he say, Chuck? Put your mask on. Shouldn't you be wearing a mask?

And you know what? Now I look back at that guy and I feel like, well, he was bamboozled. But when it happened, I was really torn because on the one hand, I hate to be yelled at in public. it's annoying and kind of embarrassing, even when there's nobody else around but your old buddy. But I also saw on his face and heard in his voice unmitigated, abject terror. He was scared. And he saw me and Chuck as the proximate cause of his demise. And he just couldn't believe, couldn't believe how irresponsible we could be.

And that worried me, not because he was wrong. but because he was not along. How is it? It's a challenging time altogether. And you think about sort of the adage, you are your brother's keeper, and now you are by mandate, right? What a crazy scene that it took one sort of set of influencers

four decades to convince us that what we exhale was going to kill the planet. It took a what, four weeks to convince us that what we exhale was going to kill everyone else and grandma, right? Instantly. And so those are really challenging things when basically your actions affect the entire course of a hurricane happening in someone else's

house. And when you do that, now, you know, it gives your neighbor a complete plausality to come and pummel you because, you know, you're not wearing a mask and you'd see those incidents again and again. You know, I'm doing this for your health. Why won't you wear the mask and take this thing? And it's like, okay, thank you very much, right? What a crazy scene. And I think, like I said, it drove a lot of people insane because when you sort of throw a wrench into the works of society, the outcomes are just unpredictable. I think we see that now. Now the question is, and this is the tough one, right, which is I think the numbers are kind of like 20% in my group, which we call team reality, got really sticking our necks out, right, and taking it on the chin as we

could. There was another 20% of people that were totally on team apocalypse, as we call them. But there was that 60% the majority of people in between who were like, look, I really don't want to get into the fight. But now that same group is like, it's really hard to think that all of these interventions were basically for nothing, right, or could have been for nothing. And then I made all those sacrifices. My kids made all those sacrifices, and it didn't move the needle an inch, right? That's really difficult for people to stomach.

But in some cases, they've already come to it. Like, I think most people agree closing schools was a terrible decision and has far-reaching ramifications. And now it's just sort of like we've got to go through each one of these. Do they? Do most people think that? Yeah, I'm not sure of that. Your neighbor, Mike, I believe if you ask that guy what he thinks, he'll say, well, we were doing the best we could. We didn't know what to do.

We didn't know any better. So what do you say to somebody like that? That was then. At some point, you can't argue that because now we're saying, okay, fine, but what do you know now? What can we say empirically now that we know for certain that we did not know then? And I'm just asking, Justin, are we overstating it at all? Or can we definitively say? I mean, walk me through like the structure of your book because it's chapter by chapter. It's a methodical debunking. Here's what we were told. Wrong. Here's what it was. Here's what we were told wrong. And it goes on for a dozen chapters. So is it, God, I hate to even use this expression because you're just going to love it and hate it at the same time. is the science settled? Yeah, you know, that was the tough thing.

If you picture it, and most people can who are in business, for example, they can think of a funnel, right? Like I have so many people that come to my website or visit my shop, and then that turns into people that are interested in my product or services. And then I contact them some more, and now they become customers, right? It's the same sort of thing the way the CDC does. They say a certain amount of people get sick and maybe don't know it, a certain amount of people get sick and visit the doctor, some of them are hospitalized, and some of them die, right? And so when they say, for example, that influenza has a fatality rate of 0.14, right? That means that basically up here, I've got 44 million people who got sick, and I've got about 50,000 that died, right? So it's a very,

very small thing. And then when you do it by age, all of a sudden, now you have more details, right? So when we walk through that whole scenario, right, how did you define that someone getting sick? Well, we have these PCR tests. Well, tell me about those. Well, they're really sensitive, right? And they could pick up a virus at five days or 75 days. In fact, in some counties, they were denoting deaths from COVID for anyone that tested positive within the last 90 days. We actually got to look at some of these death certificates. I think we're one of the few groups that actually asked for them. And we looked at them and it's like 86-year-old female fall from height. Diabetes, broken fever. tested positive for COVID three months ago, COVID death, right? And that's a really challenging thing to stomach.

Now, my kind of interpretation, you might say, okay, well, who's the fraud at the hospital who put that on there, right? Now, think about these hospitals, right? So we're going down through the funnel, right? You got sick and now you're going to the hospital. And we put these trinchies on these hospitals. We said, you know what, you're going to have to do away with all incidental, the elected surgeries, right? anything like plastic surgery. Well, getting to know the hospitals now, that's like a big part of their revenue, right? So if you're a hospital administrator worth your salt, right, you're like, okay, how am I going to keep this company afloat? Well, they've given me $9,000 for a positive case, $39,000 for a hospitalization. If I'm in a rural county and I have someone in the ICU, I can get $90,000 to $120,000 in reimbursement from the government for having a COVID case and seeing that through, right?

And I'm not saying they pushed those through, but they wanted to watch. lightitude. So for example, in October, the hospital lobby has got the administration to allow them to count, this is October 2020, to count anyone that was in an observation bed for COVID as a COVID hospitalization. So now what happens? Well, those get up to the dashboards. And I see his huge spike in October 2020. You're like, what happened there? Well, they changed the rules and hospitalizations. And then that frightens more people. And so it's this terrible cascade feeding back into the funnel. So when you go through all of these steps, like, okay, well, you think about the one big issue, and this is something I think we can look at down the road, which is if you get sick with something,

your doctor diagnosed you with that, right? He'll send you back, take two aspirin, call me in the morning, right? Yep. They couldn't do that, right? Remember the first point and the last point of care was going to be the hospitals, and we didn't want them to overrun, but, well, okay, if I tested pause for Kobe, what do I do, Doc? Well, go home, and if you get close to die and go to the hospital, right? And so, wait, should I take anything in between?

I can't really recommend anything. You know, in India, when you tested pause for COVID, they gave you what we would call like a blister kit, right? And it had like all these little meds in there and everything else there. And I won't go into them right now. But they basically, it helped them and say, hey, like take some of these and see if that helps you. They did pretty well, right? But somehow we couldn't, there was no protocol, like no, no major institution, medical institution, stepped up and said, we've got, you know, the vaccines are in the works, right? We're going to do what we can with those.

But right now we've got, you know, a protocol that you can use to help stave off severe COVID if you happen to get it, right? No one tackled that. Why didn't they? And I think it's because we were on this course where, well, this is the next step of the funnel that we have planned and everything is set there is the hospitals, right? And everything is focused towards there. I got a text from a friend. I think I mentioned in the book in Orange County. And said, both of my parents are died now.

I said, what happened? Was it COVID? No. One from an undiagnosed blood disease. One from an undiagnosed cancer. in four months of each other, they were too scared to seek treatment. They were too scared to seek treatment. That one stat, Mike, because it was oncologist.

I'll never forget, I get a call from a friend who was an oncologist, cancer doctor. And he said, okay, either COVID has cured cancer or something else is happening altogether. Right. Because we're seeing half as many patients as we did the year before. Yeah. That's rough. So the funnel broke somewhere along the lines. And that's what we do in the book.

We take each one of those steps and say, hear all the assumptions they may. You can this Rube Goldberg machine of terrible decisions just ended up with terrible outcomes and wrong outcomes and terrible numbers too. And we're still seeing that today. I don't want to ask this the wrong way, but clearly all of our institutions seem to have let us down. The faith, whatever amount of trust they deserve from us was abused. The politicians, the hypocrisy, for me anyway, it was a deal breaker. The science, I don't know how to feel when Anthony Fauci says he is the science. It made me bristle, and I know he spoke for a lot of people.

That didn't upset a lot of people, but, and then, of course, there's the media. They all three seem to have fed on each other to keep the fear and the loathing at a fever pitch. But who do you think was most culpable as an institution, not an individual, but as an institution? Who let us down? I would say, you know, technically it's the CDC and the NIH. They made a lot of these decisions. They decided to implement these lockdowns. I mean, they were talking and from the emails we have it, you know,

welding people inside of apartments like they weren't in China, right? And just going completely anathema to what we have here is our rights in the United States. But I'll tell you, one institution that let us down was just kind of our education, just in general. I mean, I can't believe we, for example, let them close our churches and let them sort of dictate how many people could assemble at one time. I know why we did it. I can think through that. But the fact that our sort of the American family, the American sort of spirit failed to really stand up for those pillars, I think, you know, our founding fathers would be embarrassed. They would want us to say, hey, you can't go wrong if you stick by those things, right?

I can understand the feeling. I remember I had written my first paper. It was the coronavirus dashboards will kill us all long before the virus ever will, just talking about how the numbers were scaring everyone. But I woke up the next morning just 4 a.m., texting a friend saying, I'm sick over this. What if this really is as bad as this is, and I'm downplaying it, right? And that morning, Johnny Anidas, the most cited living scientist out of Stanford, he noted, we are probably in a once-in-a-lifetime data fiasco. and we could shatter the entire world on this thing. And that's kind of what we did. There are government institutions, and there's kind of the institution of the spirit of America kind of fell by the wayside. We need to teach and sort of encourage our people to stand up for this thing that makes us who we are.

It's really difficult. Sidebar, I shared that article by Ionidis, the day after it came out. And for the first time on my Facebook page, I saw a warning. at the bottom of the post, classifying it as some level of either misinformation. I forget the exact language,

but it was the first time I had seen that entity say, no, don't share that. And they really threw him under the bus. Where is his standing today? And where, if you could talk a little bit about those three behind the Great Barrington Declaration, who they were. And as I recall,

all the credentials you could want to see, all of the acronyms and, you know, abbreviations you could want after an expert name. What happened to them? And where are they today? Well, John is a professor of medicine there at Stanford. My most unkind interpretation of his enemies is that they were really, really miffed about what he did 10 years previously. John made a name for himself and the reason why he's the most cited.

living scientist in papers, is that he went and tried to reproduce both medical and sociological experiments. You know, the ones we talk about like the marshmallow and the kids and everything else. He tried to reproduce a lot of these things and found out and was able to statistically demonstrate that about 60% or more of all of these sociological studies that people have been citing over the years could not be reproduced. And so he basically did away with 60% of the sociological literature. I think a lot of people were miffed. But John was there, and John is like, he's the nicest guy. He's there at Stanford still. My other good friend, Jay Batchtaria, one of the most gentle souls,

but so brilliant, he got together with Martin Kuldorf from Harvard and Sennepta Gupta from Oxford. And they formed the Great Barrington Declaration. It was named after the town and the place they were at when they signed this declaration. And it was a very different approach. Like you said, it was a targeted protection, that is to say, the people most at risk, by a factor of a thousand or 10,000 comparing like a kid to an 80-year-old, our elderly, right? And so let's protect them as we could and let everyone else kind of go about their business. And, you know, they would note that the impact on treating this all the same and treating kids like a vector of disease was so disastrous. In those death certificates I mentioned, this was in the summer of 2020, which we examined them.

One of the ones that kept coming up, you know, when you get a death certificate says, here's part one, he died of diabetes. or a diet of respiratory disease, and that is part two, things that contributed into it, right? And invariably, the contributing part, we would see this phrase that's very common in destrophants. It was failure to thrive, right? We saw these massive waves of deaths come into our Alzheimer's, our nursing homes, right?

And part of the reason why they passed away is they relied on that sort of human touch and the interaction, and now they were barred from that. And the appendix of the book, I share some really, really difficult stories of people who saw their last, you know, their last sight of their loved ones over FaceTime, right? Because they weren't allowed into the hospital. And what a devastating consequence that is, right? That end-of-life moment, talk about a woman who was mentally challenged and her sister had been taking care of her whole life. But because she tested positive, she died alone. Yeah.

In this hospital just plugged up, she had no idea what was going on. Yeah. We just can't. Sorry, I get an emotional because it scares me when I see this. We can't let this happen. That's why I wanted to talk to you because I mean, when you really sit down with people off camera, if you're me anyway, in the middle of wherever I am and you have these conversations, these are the stories that people are hanging on to from COVID. They seem so small sometimes when you compare it next to life and death. But of course, what we're learning is, let's say the quiet part out loud, there's some things that are more important than not dying.

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USA There's some things that are just simply more important to life. Some of it has to do with risk. Some of it has to do with freedom. You said it before. I'm not a regular church-going guy, but when I saw that outside church services had been made illegal,

but protests in the streets were not only tolerated but encouraged, well, then clearly that's not science. That's not public health. Well, certain protests. Certain protests. Not all protests. Right.

So any reasonable person on either side of the aisle ought to be able to look at those kinds of decisions and immediately see something really mischievous at work. And when those same decisions force, it's just so heartbreaking, a mentally ill woman who doesn't have the capacity at any given time to understand what's happening in the world is shut off from her caregiver and forced to. to die alone. Well, it takes a special kind of person to shrug and go, look, sorry, but the stakes are awfully high here, right? How much freaking higher can the stakes get than that? Right. To your point, you said, do people, do the majority of people believe that, you know, that was wrong? I think

probably yes when they're told that. I think a lot of people have come around. I mean, I've never seen political divides bridge so quickly as when your children are jointly being kicked out of school or threatened with whatever mandate they have. That bridge political. I have people and friends who are extremely close to me now, and we're completely on different sides of political spectrum, but we all agreed on where this thing should go, right? We can be great parents and teach our kids this next generation of,

we're going to stand up for you, and I'm going to make recompense. I remember my daughter at her preschool, our preschool for our kids was doing everything they could to keep masks off of kids, right? We were able to get some type of letter in there to say our kids don't have to wear masks. Well, the California County licensing or the preschool licensing would come down for surprise visits. And I remember the office told me, and they were laughing so hard that they came back to my daughter, which was one of the few people that was unmasked there on the playground outside, right?

And the licensing people said, little girl, come here. Why aren't you wearing a mask? And she said, well, my daddy signed a piece of paper so I don't have to. Also, we don't believe in them. Bye. And I was like such a proud moment. I was like, oh, that's great. I don't think the administrators or the licensors like that at all.

But, you know, those sort of things is where we need to have our kids sort of understand kids. Here's where you draw the line. I have a 17-year-old boy. I've got seven girls and one boy, right? And my three older kids are from my previous marriage, but I'm close to them and they live just north of me. But, you know, he missed the last couple years of school. He missed the last couple years of that interaction in his church group. and it's, you know, set them on a different course altogether, and those are really devastating

things, but they're finding their sea legs and saying, yeah, you know what? I'm going to make something of this and try to pivot from us. As adults, that's easy to do. We can look at this and say, all right, that was a great set of learnings. Let's use that to pivot into something better, right? For a lot of these young kids, that'll be impressed upon them. I remember looking over a friend's shoulder and his daughter was there. She had pulled out, you know, a target catalog. And she had taken a marker and she was covering over the face of everyone in the magazine, she wanted to make sure they had a mask on, right? What culture sort of does that to a kid?

They see everyone is a vector of disease that's devastating. And how do they get out of that? How do you turn that around? What's that going to do to every single trust issue that's going to confront her for the rest of her life? How does that not wind up informing virtually everything you do? We just don't know yet. But, I mean, that's part of the reason I suspect you wrote the book.

Yeah, it really is. I wanted this to be both a remember all, right? So you just kind of, this is something I won't forget. But I also wanted to be a defense. So I put some pretty poignant letters that you can take and take right out there and give them to your school board if they start doing this again. Right? Because they do these same tactics, whether it's for the next wave of COVID, the next pandemic, or whatever other boogeyman they envision needs to put you under their thumb. they're going to use again, right?

I guarantee you there are people, especially in the press I noticed, who would gladly have welded you inside your apartment back there and your house. If they felt it was too good, they'd probably burn their hands off before they'd learned how to do a welding torch. But they would try. They'd try to weld you. And they would volunteer for that. It wouldn't end well, I'd guarantee you that.

What was the moment for you when you really believed that we had turned a corner and entered into something that was decidedly not? not of public health, but of something else and that we were all just going off the cliff. I know what mine was, but was there a time when you just said, okay, this is getting real and terrible? Yeah, you know, I spent part of my career in politics doing the same sort of thing I do for businesses, trying to build dashboards and funnels for non-profit groups or political campaigns. I worked on a presidential campaign, and I was very interested what President Trump had said, I predicted just looking at demographics that he was going to win, regardless of where I ended up on the political spectrum.

I said, I think he's going to win. I know where these wins are turning. When March 29th, 2020, it was the Rose Garden Presser, and he was there, Mike Pence was there, Dr. Berks was there, Dr. Fouch was there. He said, at that faithful day, we're going to extend the two-week lockdown to 40 days. And it paid me to have to say it, but I tweeted out. I said, President Trump just lost the election. And I knew it not from some type of anger. but I knew it just demographically, if only three or four percent of an elder population felt too scared to go to the polls or otherwise or upset at him for this. He loses straight out. Now, people say there was shenanigans. Sure, we can look at that during the 2020 election, but in the end, it was a demographic issue. And I think in my mind, I thought, I'm willing to test this for two weeks. For another 40 days, I don't think people are seeing the end game here.

I think this is, and what happened is it opened up Pandora's box, 50 governors, 3,200 counties, 13,000 school districts across the country. Everyone formed their own policy. And once you open up that, you know, ghost of things there, it gets crazy. Yeah. It's funny. A lot of epidemiologists and virologists, they kind of picture themselves as like Dustin Hoffman from that movie Outbreak with Rue Rousseau back in the 90s, right? He's chasing this sort of infected monkey.

Right? He's holding up. He says, if you see this monkey call this number, they really do see themselves as that. but in truth they're more like Walter Peck and Ghostbusters, right? The EPA inspector who comes down and shuts down the power grid and the ghouls all go flying around the city. That's kind of what transpired on that day. That was the moment for me.

Best exchange in that movie is somebody's talking to Beck and he says, and when Dickless here said, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-and. And then the judge says to Murray, is this true? And Bill Murray says, it's true. This man has no dick. I just thought that. You know, that's the best exchange in goes buzzer. I have to admit, I used this analogy in the book, and I included the last part.

My editor took it up. I mean, that's the same great film that gave us, dogs and cats, living together. Living together. Living together. And here we are. I mean, this is it. Dogs and cats masking together. Masking together or not masking.

Shouldn't you have a mask? Righteous indignation. Certainty. God, Justin, there was so much certainty. I mean, it's just to be wrong at a time of great uncertainty is one thing, but to sound so certain. Either your correctness or your incorrectness. It seemed like humility was a giant casualty in all of this. And around the same time, you were predicting Trump's loss with that tweet.

Andrew Cuomo said the thing. Now, he was being lionized at the time with his daily press conferences and whatnot. and I watched one and he said something, and I can still hear the sound of my sphincter slamming shot. I was so appalled. But I'm going to get pretty close to it, but it was something along the lines of no measure, no matter how draconian can be deemed excessive

if it saves but a single life. And the press applauded. They were in the room and they applauded. And that meant a... okay, that's a new thing. What we're saying right now is no matter what it costs, we need to save every life. And that's when I thought, well, that will last for a while,

but not forever, because we'll get bored with that. We'll get bored of being terrified. In that moment, we weren't. A lot of people bought that, really, really hung on to that. Wrap yourself in bubble pack and don't get in a car. That's right. Outlaw left-hand turns, lower the speed limit to five miles an hour, and in case every vehicle in rubber, and require everyone in the car to wear a helmet. If you're serious about saving every life, you can do it. You can start by saving the 8,000 who die in New York every year, right? So there was this analogy. I saw one time on this, an amusement park had just opened up back in Japan. This was right in the middle of pandemic, and they were going to allow guests back in. right and the executives wanted to demonstrate how safe it was right but you had to wear a mask on the rides on the roller coaster ride they had a video of these two executives sitting at the front of the

ride wearing masks only there were instructions given not to scream and i'm sure it sounds better in japanese but the instructions were scream inside your heart scream inside of your heart and i tell you there were times i wanted to scream inside my heart too and out loud i mean you just sat them there going like, mm, going through the roller coaster up and down, not saying a word, right?

And just that nonsense, just it drove the world insane. And those are, those are embarrassing moments. And hopefully we never have to relive those again, but I'm sure they want to kind of put that away. I'm trying to capture those so we can understand the ridicule here.

Yes. Well, look, it's that fine line between I told you so and bashing them over the head. But seriously, keeping it top of mind, because it's going to happen again. There's going to be another thing. Maybe it's this same thing. Maybe it's a new

variant. Whatever it's going to be, there will be another elected official who says, no measure, no matter how cronion can be deemed excessive if it saves but a single life. And there will be people who nod and want to hear it. And there will be a chorus of people who challenge any skeptic and criticize any skeptic as a denier. And we're going to go through all of this. And we're going to go through all of this again. And I hope that what you've written will serve as some kind of record, some kind of evidence, you know? I'm trying to figure out what to call this episode. And I can't decide. You've given me two amazing titles. One is failure to thrive and the other is scream inside your heart. But given all we've discussed, do you have a preference? Oh, I think scream inside their heart like

that one. Both of them. You know, the failure to thrive is, I think the title of my next book there, because it's just those are the devastations where you realize, wow, we really, I mean, that was one of our greatest generations. My grandma died. She was 96, not a COVID, but she lived a very full life and we were all there. The funeral was fantastic. I can't imagine not being able to celebrate those lives. And in general, that was kind of what they took from us was our ability to celebrate life altogether, right? You know, we all felt it. If you were in a very stringent state and mask mandates were everywhere. When you took off that mask, you felt naked. It felt awkward and odd. And I hated that feeling that they had curbed me into this sort of this,

I'm a mouse eating the cheese and this maze. And I need to find that again, right? I need to put the mask back on. I felt naked. It's amazing what you can get used to. And it was really devastating. There's going to be a host of sociological studies. Just one came out the other day said, because of all the Zoom calls, right? It had been known or shown in some studies that more, attractive women received better grades than their counterparts who maybe weren't as attractive in college. Well, Zoom is the great equalizer, and apparently that went back to normal, right? Little interesting things. I mean, human psychology is really, really difficult to curb. I share this story. It's a little dishearting, but it also kind of epitomizes this entire moment.

It's apocryphal. It's handed down through Jewish literature. It tells the tale of the people that didn't make it onto Noah's Ark, which was everyone else except for real souls, right? The story goes that this was a very wicked people, as the history tells it, a very vile wicked people. When the waters rose to their knees, they held their kids to their waist. When the waters rose to their chest, they put their kids on their shoulders. But when the waters rose to their neck, they put their kids under their feet so they could live with themselves. And I think about my own experience with my kids, and that truly epitomizes what we kind of did to these kids. I'm going to deal with the punch

you just gave me to the gut. But you come after my kids and I'm going to write a book and start a movement to shut you down altogether. And you're going to sue two of the biggest companies to ever live.

That's going to be very exciting for you, Justin, in the coming weeks and months. Yes. You've got to put a shot across about someone. How's your wife done through all this? They've had a front row seat. They've watched their mild,

matter, data-driven dad turn in to an apostate. How's that working out? for you. She's been with me right along. You know, she tweets even harder than I do on these things and really brings down the boom. You know, she was fearless going into stores sometimes and not wearing a mask. And she challenges the health care. We had a kid in the middle of this pandemic, right? And we had two miscarriages, two on either end of that child. And that was rough too. The first one I remember was really rough because I couldn't go in with her. So I was at home

and I get the text message, baby died. She was only a couple weeks along. so it wasn't as devastating, but it was like, I'm not there with her. My heart just sunk. I'm like, what is going on? And so this next time, you know, any ultrasound I go to, I'm going to be with her. I don't care. I will bust through those doors, right? And she makes sure that I could bust through those doors. She just, she's fearless in that way. So it's been a real boon to have someone at your side. I can't imagine what sort of frustration this must have been for families who were divided. I know there are family members I have who wouldn't speak me for a year. There are friends I've lost over the years. entire email list that have kicked me off and everything else there. And I try to be kind and

everything else there and try to convey my side. But they use the bludgeon of you're trying to kill grandma and I won't have it. And they block you and sent you off. And I hope we can come to some recompense and some type of reassessment of that. What I would say, my biggest lesson is stick your neck out for something you know is right. It will be painful first, but the rewards will come and people will come to you. And I have, I have people come to me at conferences that I speak at. We had our own conference here in San Diego a few weeks ago. You know, they said, I am, you guys were the only ones that I could find comfort in to know that I wasn't going crazy. And there are other people that I think like I do. And I think eventually people will come around to that feeling.

It's going to take a little bit. Last question. Has there been anyone in your personal life who basically shunned, ostracized, unfriended, who's come back in the way? of so much new information, much of which is in your book, and said, hey, I, I'll take a mulligan on that one, you know, got that one wrong. I had one incident just recently I'll recount where I had a good friend. He's in the biotech industry, big biotech area down here in San Diego. He was very big on these vaccines. He says, I can't wait to get these.

I'm going to give these to my kids and to everyone go. And I'm not going to touch a third rail here. But it's been pretty well attested that once you get a third. you actually become more like susceptible to the disease that was just an NBC news by the way to the other day we were together and he had been kind of shunning me because of some of the things and then we haven't to be at a party together the other day and a pilot friend of ours came forward and he said hey Robin is his name and he says hey I'll just say Rob he said Robba should I get this third booster he stopped and then he looked at me he looked at the pilot and he said no don't get the booster it's just going to make you more susceptible and we had this sort of laugh together because he was so hard and fast that this was the way out, this was going to be it, right? And, you know, they promised us the 100% protection against all these things. And when even just that little promise that was so outlandish, when that didn't come through, people were like, wow, they just took a knock on the chin there too. So we lost a lot of friends, but I think you're right. I have a couple more coming back

and saying, you know what, I can meet to the middle ground here. And I've had a couple people come back and say, yeah, I wish I'd come out sooner. I have a lot of people saying, I wish I had stuck my neck out like you did. I was following the example other people. We're still in a very fraught time. My sense of it is that there are many thousands of doctors still in this country who would say, you take that third booster. Trust me, it's good. That advice is still out there, and there's some people very close to me who have gotten that advice and acted upon it. So I guess I'm still left in this place where somebody is wrong, And whoever it is sounds pretty certain.

And there's not much to do in the face of that ambiguity except to scream in your heart. Right. Screaming your heart out loud. That's all you can do. Don't want to affect anyone else. Make sure you scream in your heart and not out loud. You know what?

I'll give you 50-50 odds that within six months, at least one band is going to form. And they're going to be called scream and, your heart. I don't know if they're going to be any good, but they're going to be out there, and they're going to be loud. And I think we can all take a little bit of pride in that. And team reality is going to open for them. Team reality. That's right. We will. Team Apocalypse or Armaged. Which one was it? Apocalypse or Armaged? Yeah, Team Apocalypse is the other guy. You've got to pit yourself against those views. All right, man. So your book is gone viral. That's what it's called it.

Gone viral. Go to gone viral book.com. Gone viral book.com will take you right there to Amazon to buy it, but you can get the audible book, which is great, and just appreciate we've had some great success with it. I think, you know, the next steps are kind of looking and saying, okay, well, let's have some real frank, open, transparent hearings on this thing. So we'll see how that happens next year. Well, consider this a rehearsal for that very thing. I look forward to seeing you on the big screen, the small screen, and keep shaking things up, Justin. This was fun. Thank you for coming by.

Thank you, Mike. All right. Thanks, Chuck. All right. Thanks, guys. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile,

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