TRIGGERnometry - How Twitter Censored COVID Dissent - David Zweig

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

David Zweig is an investigative reporter who has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times and Wired. He was among the journalists invited by Elon Musk to contribute to the ‘Twitter Files’ investigation. Zweig is the author of ‘Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion’ and the forthcoming ‘AN ABUNDANCE OF CAUTION’ which explores the debacle in American schools during the pandemic. SPONSORED BY: Manscaped. Get 20% off and free shipping when you use the code TRIGGER20 at https://www.manscaped.com/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So it's this idea of like, is a journalist just like a megaphone? You know, legacy media outlets by and large were all on board with a certain narrative. People needed a place like Twitter where they could be exposed to different ideas. Were some of those ideas completely nuts? Yes, but many of those ideas were absolutely legitimate. This is a place for legitimate debate by people who understand the issues. Those views were suppressed in many instances. That is very troubling.

There was a Trump tweet about how he said something like, don't be afraid anymore of COVID. It was something to that effect. Does this go against our guidelines? Shouldn't we be like labeling this as misleading or take it down? And some of the other executives had to write back and say, optimism is not against our policy. My God, this super high-level person actually even entertained the idea

for something like that to be suppressed, that alone was like kind of astonishing. It was just a bizarre experience that I will never get over. Like, it's permanently altered me. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry on the road from the USA. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisholm. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is an author and journalist, David Svike.

Welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. Before we get cracking, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us. It all began on the subway. Or that was the last leg of the journey. I'm a writer. I write books.

I write news articles, investigative pieces, commentary. So I've been doing that for a number of years. Written a few books. Before that, I was playing music for a number of years. The joke I like to tell people is, well, it wasn't a joke, this was real, that after I'd been trying to succeed as a musician for many years, I went home and I said, mom, dad, you know, and this is very hard in them having a kid who's, you know, trying to do that. And I said, look, I'm no longer trying to make it as a rock star tour. And they said, oh, thank God. I said, instead, I'm going to be writing a novel.

No! It's like the worst. So I choose uneasy paths, I guess. But finally, it seems to have been working out. So I've kind of hit my stride, I think, in the last decade, working in nonfiction and doing what I'm doing. And here I am, I guess, chatting with you guys. Yeah, and one of the things we really wanted to talk to you about is the Twitter files. And see, I still don't know what I think about it.

Because on the one hand, I was one of the people who was, like, super excited about seeing, you know, lifting the curtain, so to speak. But I also felt that when we did, we kind of only really saw what we already knew, and so it was kind of pre-discounted. Now, I'm not saying that's accurate, but that was my impression. So what is it about the Twitter files that people should actually think, oh, that was worthwhile, you know, all this hype and all the rest of it? Yeah. And it's a good question.

I can only speak about my own reporting. Or at least I can only speak. Tell us about the experience, first of all. What was it like going in there and, you know, how did it work? Yeah, so I was brought out there by Barry Weiss, who, as most people probably know, Elon Musk gave access to Matt Taibi initially. I think he was the first one, and then some short period of time after that, he gave Barry access. Barry runs basically a media empire.

I'm just a small piece of the empire, I guess. And I had sent an email to Barry and one or two of her editors who I knew, because I had written for them before. and I said, because I've been writing about COVID stuff since the beginning of the pandemic, I didn't know what they were doing if they were going back. I didn't know anything. I just trying to be helpful.

Look, if you guys are going to be sending someone else back there, or if you're going back yourself, these are the things I might look for. And I was kind of sheepish, actually. Like, I thought it was a little maybe presumptuous of me to, I'm like, who am I to tell them? But I was just, these are a few things I would do. And like an hour or later, I get an email back.

can you get on a plane to San Francisco? I was like, okay. So they figured, you know, I guess based on that and everything that they know about me that I should be the one to go out and at least initially look into stuff related to COVID because I think up to that point, the reporting wasn't specific to the pandemic.

It was on a variety of other things, Hunter Biden, laptop and other stuff. So I went out there really the sort of, I don't know if this is the right word, but the specialist. I'm like, this is the one lane that I'm going to travel in, which is related to COVID. And so I was there, it was only a few days while I was there.

Michael Schellenberger was there, Leighton Woodhouse, Lee Fong. So it was the three of them and me, and each of us working on our own things. But everyone was helping each other as well, just because it was so challenging to look through the material. And that's it. I basically, I mean, I could get into a little bit of details about what the process. You're nodding like, yes, please do. Yeah, because I think there's still a fair amount of misunderstanding or confusion about what the process was. People were like, why didn't you do this or you should have done that?

I think what a lot of people don't know or realize is it's not like going into some, I don't know, company or some law firm where they're like, open up the books and you can, you know, just rifle through. There are very specific ways that we were able to search. There were no restrictions on what we could look up or public. That's important to note. But the process of actually searching was really challenging. This is not like what we're used to as regular citizens like Googling something or whatever. The systems in place to actually do the digging were not very user-friendly. So I would break it down into there's basically two separate paths that we could search down.

One was looking at what I would call like the log files of individual accounts. and there was an engineer in the room with us on a special laptop, and we could give them someone's name and say, I would like to look up this person's account. We were not able to see any, like, private information on anyone's account, which is important for me to note because there were tons of lawyers involved in this. But what we were able to see were on someone's account, their activity, and what Twitter internally had,

if there were any flags or marks on certain things, on the account as a whole or on certain tweets. And then there were tons of kind of files within files. So that was one thing to search. And then the other one was looking up internal communications or internal and external through email or through Slack channels. And so those searches were not performed in the room. We had to basically send them an email to the people.

I don't know if they were like next door to us or what, but it wasn't directly in there. And then sometime later a person would come in with a different laptop and say, here's this. you can look at this now. So if you imagine we're looking, and we had to look up specific employees, you couldn't just say,

I want to find anything on myocarditis. No, you had to give, and I'm not sure the reasoning behind this, but you had to pick certain employees and they could look up that employee's emails and we could say, I want to see all the emails from this person from this date to this date.

And then, so we could get 4,000 emails from someone. And I have X number of hours and want to look at this. So it's very challenging. It's more, it's not just like, oh, let's just do a word search and we're done, although that was part of it. So you're trying to sift through all this stuff to find what you're looking for.

Sometimes I had a specific idea. Most of the time I knew what I was looking for, and it was just seeing if it was there or not there. And other times you don't even know what you're looking for. It's just like, I know this is an important person. I know this particular topic is something that we might have reason to believe something happened. Let's see what's there.

if something's interesting or not interesting, or newsworthy or not newsworthy. And that was so, it was very laborious, very tedious to do these types of searches. The stuff on the log files, I mean, it could take a very long time to like dig through and you find a particular tweet, and then through there there's all sorts of code

and different stuff written there, and then the engineer was basically explaining to me, okay, here we go, I can see this tweet, what's labeled on here or not labeled. Does that make sense how I'm describing it? Yeah, it does. Very much so. Okay. And I was going to ask, so what role did Elon have in this? Was he overseeing it? Did you have to report to him? Did you have to say, look, this is what we've found? How involved was he in this entire investigation? I love the way you call him Elon, by the way. You're your best mate.

Well, look, I'm being professional. Between me and him, it's musky. Yeah. Again, at least from my experience, I had no personal interaction with, with Muskie. at all. My understanding is, and this was through talking with Barry, was that we had access to whatever we wanted. There were no restrictions. And the only sort of rule was whatever we found, we had to publish it on Twitter first. And it didn't need to be far in advance, but it could be five minutes, but it just needed

to go on to Twitter first. Other than that, it wasn't, if you find X, Y, or Z, you're not allowed to do this, et cetera. And as far as I'm aware, unless there was some incredible conspiracy happening, there was, similarly, there was no constraints placed on us to get the information. So both in regards to what we were able to look for and then what we found, neither of those had any restrictions on them whatsoever. You know, this engineer is, I'm literally looking over the person's shoulder as they're doing the searches.

I cannot imagine how that could have been in some way compromised without us knowing. Some other guy had interviewed me, and he kept saying, well, maybe the email searches or the other thing, they were filtering it. And again, we're talking about thousands of emails. I can't imagine how they could possibly have done this. And it took us, a team of four people in real time looking, because they didn't know what we were going to be searching for.

So this all was happening in real time. It was very kind of like, by the seat of your pants, just trying to do it. I saw Elon while we were there, but there was no, he did not interact with me or have any involvement as far as what I was looking for and what I was able to publish. And that being the case, with your findings, what was the thing that shocked you the most? What was the thing that surprised you? Hmm.

I think looking at some of the prior reporting, I think maybe I had a little bit more of an assumption about the staff, you know, this guy, Yol Roth and some other people. And I have to say, many, many instances, as I'm reading through these internal Slack communications and in emails, in many instances, these people at Twitter really were trying their best to moderate content in a way that they thought was reasonable. Now, I think they were wrong in how they performed this.

But there's that, you know, this is kind of a harsh expression. But, you know, what's the thing about don't ascribe to, you know, nefariousness, what can be, you know, actually is just sort of stupidity. I'm not saying that they were stupid, but in the sense that I don't think this was some big plot, that these people genuinely were trying to sift out things that they believed were harmful. I think they were completely out of their depth with what they were doing. And I think structurally, this was totally inappropriate about how they handled a whole

variety of things. So versus like on an individual level. I saw a lot of people with a lot of conversations pushing back against what they perceived the government wanted Pushing back against what other co-workers wanted in too many instances Bad choices were made, but it is not like there was this thing constantly all the time where they were just You know taking out the red pen against all sorts of tweets that they didn't like There was an internal debate that happened oftentimes and I reported on on a few of them one of them that was actually kind of both encouraging in the end result, but also revealing in the same way

about how problematic it was. Jim, I forget the guy's name, but one of the lead attorneys at Twitter, there was a Trump tweet about how he said something like, don't be afraid anymore of COVID. It was something to that effect. And he was emailing people internally saying, does this go against our guidelines?

Shouldn't we be labeling this as misleading or take it down? And some of the other executives had to write back and say, optimism is not against our policy. So it was both like good that there was that stopgap, but also like, my God, this like super high level person actually even entertained the idea for something like that to be suppressed. That alone was like kind of astonishing.

Well, that is astonishing. And also, I mean, I think if you remember and most people want to forget that period of time because it was a bit, not a bit, it was very unpleasant for a lot of people and for a lot of people are traumatic. One of the things I think a lot of people, particularly those of us who felt

that both government and big tech became quite authoritarian during the pandemic was this feeling that we're not actually able to have a proper sensible discussion about something that actually really matters. To what extent do you feel, based on what you saw, our ability to genuinely discuss

one of the most important issues in our lifetimes, actually, for a lot of people, was curtailed by what they ended up doing in Twitter, whether it was maliciously motivated or whether it was incompetence or stupidity, or they just thought that's the right way to do it. How much of what happened was wrong, I guess, is what I'm asking you. It's impossible to quantify

because I didn't do some sort of systematic analysis, but I would characterize it, to my mind, it was profoundly wrong, about what happened, at least in the things that I research related to COVID. Give us a breakdown, like what are those things that were profoundly wrong? Right. So the thing about Twitter is, I think a lot of us had hoped or saw social media in general, as an alternative to sort of, I guess, what's called the mainstream media, legacy media. This is another, this is a venue for people who are shut out of these other platforms that they can use their voice.

And when I say people, it doesn't just mean regular people. I'm talking about highly credentialed experts who just had views that were oppositional to what the establishment wanted. And so what I observed throughout the pandemic and then what I was able to basically prove was there was a systematic suppression of content that went against the establishment narrative,

at least in America about what was considered appropriate and what was considered correct. And anything oftentimes that went against that was labeled as misleading, tweets were taken down, and accounts were suspended on numerous occasions. So what I don't know is the extent of that, because, again, that would require some sort of analysis that individual reporter is not capable of doing.

But what we do know is I observed it as a person deep in this for years. And what I wanted to do was kind of deconstruct, well, how did this happen? Because so many times I would see a tweet by someone like Martin Koldorf, who's this prominent infectious disease epidemiologist who was at Harvard Medical School,

and I would see stuff by him being labeled as misleading. I'm like, that's troubling. What's going on? So, man, when I got to go to Twitter, I'm like, I can try to find out, well, how did that happen? What led to that? So I sort of wanted to work backwards to find out because I was baffled. I'm like, what the hell is going on?

What did you find? So what I found, I viewed it as sort of like three different like buckets about how they did this. There was a system of bots that they set up, this sort of like AI system where I guess they crawl through Twitter and they're trained, whether it's through certain keywords, or other mechanisms, they're trained to look for certain tweets that were problematic, that the system, the algorithm viewed as problematic. So some of the tweets that were perfectly legitimate, perfectly appropriate, were caught up in this bot system.

If you think of like a trawling net in the ocean, you're looking for certain type of fish, but inevitably you're going to catch some dolphins in there. And I think this bot system probably did catch a lot of garbage, you know, some crazy, you know, conspiratorial QAnon, you know, microchip type of stuff. But in that process, they caught a hell of a lot of dolphins in that net, too. So one thing were these bots. The other thing, you had these independent contractors in places like Philippines who were basically

deciding the content, whether something is misleading or not. They were given these decision trees, basically, this kind of thing where you would have a drop-down menu. Maybe you see a tweet that has myocarditis in it. Maybe a bot would first flag the tweet, then it gets sent to this independent contractor, and they're like, Myocarditis, click. Then there's a drop-down menu, good or bad, click. And then there would be this system set up.

But the idea that some random guy sitting in a cube farm in the Philippines is going to adjudicate something as complex as whether or not a tweet about myocarditis is misleading or not is insane. Like, of course they're not going to be able to do that. So you had that. And then the third mechanism were people themselves at Twitter. And there are many instances where either a particular tweet or account would be escalated where people were looking at it, or sometimes they were just intervening like that example

about the Trump tweet. So you had real people doing this in Twitter, you know, at high levels. You had these independent contractors, and then you had this algorithm. So between those three systems, that's how things were flagged. And, you know, we had tweets by people who were physical. who are licensed medical doctors who were tweeting things from studies that were published in peer review journals.

Now, does it mean the study is well done? I don't know, but it's in a peer review journal, certainly not for Twitter to decide that something that's published is not, and nevertheless, they were flagged. And in every instance, these were things that only went in one direction. There never seemed to be something that was too pro-lockdown, pro-vaccine. That would never be flagged, as far as I saw. But anything that questioned that, that is met by, you know, pulled up in the net. And so there were many instances where things that were true

or that were legitimate from published sources that were tweeted by credentialed people that were nevertheless flagged. And that to me is just like so profoundly disturbing when you think about the information environment and like what we perceive to be real or not real, what information we're all getting. And for someone like me, who I was knowledgeable about this stuff, it was frustrating and enraging. But what I'm more worried about are, you know, regular people who have normal jobs, they're not following this stuff closely, and they see misleading tweet, you know, like a label put on it. I mean, that's obviously going to have an incredible amount of influence over the

public conversation and the narrative. Isn't the real problem here? I mean, to me, there's two real problems. And I'll come to that, the second question in a moment. But to me, this is the problem when you politicize issues which have no basis in politics whatsoever. This is a virus released from a Chinese laboratory. Allegedly. But this is a little astered. Censored, channel deleted. But isn't the problem when we politicize issues like this? And this is what happens? Well, yeah, it's politicized and it's also, at least related to COVID specifically, there was this default that the C, whatever the CDC says, we're going to go with them. And on one level, I appreciate that. I get it. It's like,

am I going to believe some random, you know, doctor or some random, not even doctor, some random person, or am I going to trust the CDC? So on one level, I get that, but that's not how free speech works. And by the way, the experts are wrong all the fucking time. And the CDC, nor a government, Remember the leader of New Zealand? I think at one point she said, I am the truth. Maybe she didn't say, but like the government,

we are your one source. I will be a single source of truth. Remember that unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth. Dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth. We will provide information frequently. That is insane.

That's horrible for any democracy, for anyone. So I think, you know, these are cliches, but sunlight is the best disinfectant. Like, let the best ideas went out. Sometimes there will be bad ideas. But what I think this showed was that our government has no confidence in regular people being able to be informed. There is this, like, incredible sort of, like, paternalistic attitude of, like, the masses

are stupid and they cannot be trusted. So what I think ultimately happened was this idea of the noble lie, where over and over there would be these infectious disease experts and others within the government where they were saying something, whether it was about vaccines, whether it's about mass, where they were kind of often just gilding the lily. There may have been the underlying truth, but then they would push it over the edge

because they felt like they had to encourage people to, quote, do the right thing. And so, and I think Twitter, most of the people who work there, I don't know now, after the exodus when Elon took over, but they were almost all of them were left-leaning, and they were, you know, aligning themselves with the Biden administration, which was aligned with the CDC. So there was this structural, you know, bias toward a certain truth.

But again, I mean, there were plenty of differences of opinion from experts around the world on a lot of these ideas and where different countries were doing things differently and within America. the idea that you're not supposed to listen to the opinion of a doctor at Harvard Medical School or someone at Stanford or anyone, for that matter. I don't think for obviously anyone should be able to say whatever they want in a country that values free speech.

But as far as a platform like Twitter, I don't think there should be zero constraint because I think it will create an environment where there's just tons of like violence and pornography and stuff that, most people probably don't want to be bombarded with that constantly. So it's not that there's no line, but I think the line should be far, far over toward leniency, toward like a wide latitude. And they were far, far too tight on how they were controlling and policing information. And it's profoundly wrong that they did that. And as I said, you know, it just, it altered the...

information environment and because you know legacy media outlets by and large were all on board with a certain narrative it was people needed a place like Twitter where they could be exposed to different ideas were some of those ideas completely nuts yes but many of those ideas were absolutely legitimate this is a place for legitimate debate by people who understand the issues and nevertheless those views were suppressed in many instances. That is very troubling. David, I was going to say, I have actually a great deal of empathy for big tech, and I can already see the comments, how can you say it? But it's true, because just imagine. You're a cuck, mate. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, in the words of my ex-girlfriend. Now,

but just put yourself in their shoes. So you've got this pandemic. No one knows what the mortality rate is. We're seeing these images come from places like Italy, where they look absolutely horrific. And then you have this incredibly powerful tool at your fingertips, which I think it's fair to say, no one understands how powerful this thing is, or the long-term implications of this technology. And you have to figure it out as you go along through the pandemic. Isn't it natural that you would towards a side of caution when dealing with this particular matter, because I would certainly do that. Yeah, I mean, I think as, you know, as I started out saying, I felt a lot of sympathy toward

what these people were doing, and I think they were trying their best. I think, you know, one of the things about society and institutions is that, ideally, structures are put in place to help protect us from ourselves. Your instinct sounds like a reasonable and natural one. Let's try to be cautious with like, let's try to, okay, the CDC says X, Y, or Z. Let's stick with that. If someone's saying ABC, different from X, then maybe we should, you know, the instinct is there, and it comes from a good place, I think, in some people, but there needs to be a structure

in place to go against that instinct, because that instinct is wrong oftentimes. And, you know, there's just so many instances in the, you know, there's just so many instances in society for, you know, all of history where the experts think one thing and they were wrong. Right. And if anything, something like a pandemic, we went in the opposite direction of where we should have gone. We should have, the public, I really, and I'm writing a book about the pandemic, specifically about American schools and what happened with them during the pandemic, but because that's part of the larger thing, I spend a lot of time looking at it in sort of like a more panoramic view.

And to me, everything comes back to the public health authorities. And that they created an environment where a place like Twitter felt like they had to go with them because they spoke with an unearned certainty about so many things. And as we saw over and over again, those things got walked back from the masking guidance flip-flop to vaccines. We were told they would do one thing and then they did something else. and the excuse of, well, the science changed, sometimes that was true and sometimes it wasn't,

but the point isn't that you can't change your advice or guidance. The point was that when they initially gave the guidance, when they initially told people about these things, this was said with a strong degree of certainty. And it was not only was it politicized, but it was moralized, that you were a piece of shit. If you did not do what they said, if you didn't wear a mask, you were a right-wing asshole.

And, well, the evidence on that has been pretty iffy for a long time about mask mandates. The evidence on a whole variety of things, on school closures and all these other things, are actually not clear in the slightest bit. I'm spending a thousand-page book showing that it wasn't the way they said. So that, to me, it comes back to that.

Well, yes, but I guess the reason we're asking you this question, David, is I think we're all in a position where we're trying to understand what the true impact of this new social media technology is on the world. And one of the things that it has done, it has shattered our shared consensus of reality completely. And the other thing is it puts into question, you know, the two of us, and I'm sure you as well, really feel that free speech is a crucial part of what not only is, you know, you could say the First Amendment in America, but it's not about that. It's about the

fact that the entire Western project is based on the principle that people are allowed to express themselves. And at the same time, I have to recognize, you know, we run a YouTube channel, which has half a million subscribers on YouTube and probably the same on the podcast. If we thought that the comments on our YouTube videos had the potential to kill 10,000 people, we would think about what we do differently, right? Even if our impression of that was wrong.

And I think we're all in the place now where the pandemic was really the first major test case of what we now think we're supposed to do about the fact that we have, communication technology that allows one person to, some would argue, not an insight a riot or start, you know, we had David Ike in the UK who was talking about how COVID is caused by 5G and then the next day people are burning down telephine masks, right? So that I think is probably what were the good intentions of the people that you're

talking about were, but at the same time, like once you start censoring noble prize winning scientists who are talking about their field of expertise, that's, you know, way too far. Exactly. So my point is, the line is somewhere in between and nobody knows exactly where it should be, do they? That's my view on it. The only thing that I do know for certain is

the line was drawn far, far too close towards censorship. And I think while it shouldn't be no line at all that we're agreeing on, and, you know, something is clearly inciting violence of something, you know, in these types of circumstances. But by and large, we need to let ideas be free. We need to let people communicate.

And again, when you have credentialed people, but we shouldn't only say credentialed experts. There's plenty of people who didn't have credentials who are also correct on a lot of things. So this becomes more and more complicated. So part of being able to live in a society where there is free speech is it's the freedom to be wrong. And that's important too.

So it is complicated. And I think some people probably have a highly binary, simplistic view. Let everything go through. But I think that's fairly unrealistic and also unappealing to most people. Again, you know, so for me, I view my role in this doing what I did, which was I know a lot about this topic. I have access to internal files at Twitter. Let me actually bring this to light for people. so they can see what actually happened,

these different mechanisms I was explaining by how these things were done. There's a lot more granular details, but that, in a nutshell, and then that starts a conversation. That's the start. So it would be, I feel like I would be an asshole to be, you know, making pronouncements about, well, here's how everything should run now. So I don't even feel comfortable saying that, you can tell.

You know, we're all sort of saying, we know what happened was wrong, we know the line should be somewhere else, or maybe that's not even the right matter. Maybe it's not a line, but it's like a zigzag. Who knows what? It's a levy over the day. We can come up with different metaphors, but we don't know exactly. But for my role was, let me just report on this and let's start a conversation.

Yeah. And the idea that this is quote like a nothing burger, as all these people were saying, is so idiotic to me and so, like, phony, like bogus, naive. Like, everything about that was wrong. that was wrong. I mean, I know the last time I looked, like my thread that I did on Twitter for my Twitter files that I did, I mean, it had more than 60 million views. And as far as I'm aware, no one covered it in any sort of like legacy media. That was shocking to me. And so my view on this is even if, and they would be wrong to say this, but even if someone said,

well, what was reported on here isn't important. even if they thought that, the mere fact that something had 60 million views on it, hundreds of thousands of likes or whatever the statistics were, that in and of itself makes it newsworthy. I mean, that is the definition of news when something is of great interest to an enormous number of people, particularly on a topic like this, that is news in and of itself, even if they felt like the content wasn't important. So that is something that as a society or that people in media, I think, need to reckon with.

It is just a remarkable comment on like the environment we're in today, the culture, that something, a thread, you know, and this isn't about me. I mean, Matt Taibi is reporting that their stuff was far more. I'll give you an example. Hasn't been covered. How is it possible that this stuff was basically ignored? That is remarkable. I'll give you an example. We had it in the UK, and I mentioned it at the time,

the BBC, on the day that the first several instances of the Twitter files were released, they had a story about Elon Musk firing cleaners, who happened to be two women of color. And they had a story, which was, it wasn't a story, it was like a piece, which is who is the billionaire who's running Twitter, Elon Musk. So they obviously felt that Twitter and Elon Musk were important and significant, but they didn't cover the Twitter files at all. me that was very telling. But the other thing I wanted to ask you about, and this is obviously

something that a lot of people felt along political lines prior to the pandemic, and then during the pandemic, I think, strengthened how people felt in this way about it, which was, you know, Twitter as a company headquartered in California. We all know that California, the values of people in California are not necessarily representative of the entire country or indeed the West more broadly, which is where this conversation was playing itself out. Did you find, as you were reading this, did you feel that this was a group of people who were almost captured by a particular worldview?

Or just forget capture, that's a loaded term, who held a particular worldview. And as a result of that, they were making decisions that were not necessarily reflective of the worldview shared across the country. A hundred percent. There were exceptions.

And like I said, I saw a lot of robust, exchanges within Twitter amongst employees, but by and large, absolutely. I mean, again, the fact that they went with, well, here's what the CDC says, that's the truth. I mean, that's crazy that you can't function in a society where a government agency is the truth and everything else is considered misleading or disinformation. And all these people, not all, most of them, and this is a new, and this is a, and this is a known thing, our left meaning, for lack of a better term. And because the pandemic in America

was so politicized, you were on one team or another. I found myself, you know, sort of floating in space. I had no incentive whatsoever to align myself with Republicans necessarily. For years, I had been a Democrat loosely. I mean, I have a complex, as you guys, as you guys, you guys probably do too, a complex range of opinions on a complex range of topics. So I don't align myself. You think for yourself, shocking. I try, you know. Which makes you far right. Yeah, far right. Exactly. That means I am a right wing. I mean, I did an interview with, I forget who it was, but someone who's like center right. And I sent it to a group, this was, I don't know, a year ago. And I texted with, I'm like a group chat with like a bunch of old friends of mine. We've known

each other for 20 or more years. And one of them wrote back to me and said, are you in the proud boys now? You know, that like white supremacist group. And I was like, come on, man. You know, and he was like, half joking? Jew and the proud boys. But anyway, it was, point being, it's like,

if you questioned any of these things, you automatically were thrown into that camp on the other team. And, you know, so for me, as, as, I think I'm considered one of the only journalists or maybe the most prominent one who was writing for a lot of legacy media publications

that tend to be left-leaning. But I was writing from a very much sort of contrarian viewpoint. Not purposefully, I wasn't like, I'm going to be the contrarian. That's where the facts took me. And that's what launched me on this early on in the spring of 2020

when this all began, that I saw every day. that was happening. I, like most of my neighbors and everyone around me, oh my God, there's this crazy virus. Let's like, you know, lock the door, everyone. But very quickly, because of my professional background, so when I like reading scientific journals, I read academic journals, I talk to scholars and research people all the time. So I have that sort of professional background on doing that, and also for better and for worse, my temperament. I'm always poking holds and things. I always see

kind of I'm always skeptical about things and I very quickly started well let me just look and see what the actual evidence is for this and very quickly it took me in a direction that was different from the direction that I was supposed to be in

and all of a sudden I found myself like you know cast out of the boat cast out of the thing with everyone else that I was quote supposed to be with even though there was no zero political incentive for this. But nevertheless, I was branded that way.

You know, I'm a right winger. What are you fucking talking about? You know, I was a Bernie supporter years ago. So this incredibly infantile binary approach to life is just so tiresome and problematic. But what I've come to believe is that I think that's just how, and this is perhaps a banal observation, but that's just how society operates. Most people want to be in a certain tribe, and their default is like in-group, out-group. And so I spend a lot of time writing about this and digging into this in my book that I'm working on about this. It's incredibly fascinating to me.

You know, from what I know about both of you guys, I think we're in the same. We are in our own little kids. It's like the Venn diagram. We're in like this tiny, I don't know. How large is our group? I don't know. Not that we all share the same opinion, but our group of people who are sort of like not, I think there's something, do you think there's something in your personalities? Because I think, I wonder this about myself.

Is there something about us and people like us that we seem to have less allegiance to groups than it seems other people do? Do you think there's something? Like, how do we end up where we ended up? For me, it's quite easy because growing up in the Soviet Union, I kind of had a very early experience of like, just because everyone says,

Everyone goes along with something doesn't mean it's true and then very like informative. Yeah and and then it was replicated more general. I mean if you if you're an intelligent kid you look around the adults and you realize that people don't have a fucking clue what's going on right? So that from a young age I realize I'm going to have to think about things for myself, you know, but I actually you know I think it can be very dispiriting because online communication makes it feel like we are one of a handful and then there's the crazy people on the right and the crazy people in the left but I think what we forget and look the success of our show is kind of reinforcement of this is there's a hell of a lot of people in the middle

who are never going to leave a YouTube comment who don't have a Twitter account who just want to hear something because they're in the middle they're trying to make up their mind they're not hard line and because of that you don't see them they don't show up right

And there are crucial points in the sort of trajectory of society when, yes, you have to go in the voting booth and you have to pick red or blue. But most of the time, I think most people aren't really that welded to those political ideologies and you don't see them as much because they're not on Twitter screaming because they're trying to get their kid to school

and put food on the table and whatever. So at least our hope, I certainly mine anyway, is we've always tried to speak to those people and stay away from the crazies on both sides, who are, you're right, at this point, shaping the debate. No question about it. I think you put this far better than I did. I think you're right.

Exactly. I should be the guest. Smash that like button. Oh, subscribe. You're right, because I observed so many times. But I guess what worries me about that a little bit is, and again, maybe this is just human nature or society, most people are either disinterested or disinclined to speak up.

So I think you're both correct that there is a larger number of people like us than there are. But because most people, for whatever combination of reasons, don't say, and I've witnessed this myself in my small town that I live in with my kids, when the schools were closed, there was this kind of very loud group of people on the local parents' Facebook group, you know, and I was called a murderer for saying that I thought schools should open. Even though kids were in school in Europe at this point, this is a, you know, why do you want to murder children? I'll never forget that. Someone responded to me that way. And I'm like, you're aware

there are millions of children in school elsewhere and they're all, they're fine. I think there, are there still kids in Europe? They're still there. Yeah. Okay. Just click. Unfortunately. So that's the thing that there's sort of this dual dynamic. There's both a lot of us, perhaps, but for whatever reason, and maybe a lot of those reasons are good. Sometimes it makes sense why someone can't speak out for any number, maybe their job, they're afraid. It's regrettable.

I wish more people were a little more vocal or involved than if they didn't, because the forces, particularly, and I guess I have, believe me, I have no shortage of condemnation for people on the far right, but I'm far more sensitive about the left for two reasons. One is that I think I used to associate myself with the left for most of my adult life, so I have a greater sense of betrayal, I feel, and the way I feel like some of these people

behaved during the pandemic. So that's number one. Number two, by and large, the left controls the major levers of society. Yes, the politicians in Washington or in different state houses or whatever change, you know, at each election cycle. But technology, the movie industry, media, publishing, fashion, so many major pillars of our society, the cultural sort of cornerstones are far dominated by the left. So that's why I have like a particular sensitivity of when the left, by and large,

moves in a certain direction, why that really needs to be kept in check so much? Let's dive into the media a second, because we're talking about journalism here. And if you think about movies, there was always the archetype of the intrepid journalist going where others fears to tread in order to get the story. For example, if you look at superheroes,

I don't think it's an accident that Peter Parker, Spider-Man is a photojournalist and Superman is a journalist. They were the ones challenging authority. When did that stop? When did we start seeing a journalist as someone to basically uphold what the government's saying? One of the things that blew my mind in the beginning of the pandemic and as what went on was that I kept thinking, And I've written a number of pieces that I believe it's fair to say that I kind of blew something open in the sort of legacy media that that wasn't being talked about, whether I was, wrote very early on the very beginning of May saying, we should be opening schools, here's why, here's a long compendium of data to show why this is a good idea. I don't think this was common in Britain or elsewhere, but we had this hybrid.

schooling model here where kids go to school for one or two days a week and they stayed home and they had to and I was the first person to write a big piece on this and I had a number of experts in the article saying like this is completely idiotic on for multiple reasons there's no evidence that this is going to reduce transmission so I wrote that there's a piece that I wrote questioning the CDC had guidance I'm going to get to my point in one second the CDC had um guidance before um the summer camp guidance where they wanted children to wear masks outdoors. And when I saw that the guidance came out, I'm like, this is nuts. So I immediately, I reached out to some really prominent people in the field.

Dmitri Christakis is the editor-in-chief of JAMA Pediatrics, you know, the foremost pediatric medical journal, I had an immunologist at Columbia University Hospital, these people. And I reached out to them, they said, am I crazy or is this, like, completely insane? And they were like, oh, this is horrible. And I had a handful of other pieces on myocarditis. I interviewed the guy, the Israeli scientist, who wrote basically released the first major report.

I don't even know how I got a hold of him, but there I am texting with this guy on WhatsApp. So there were a bunch of instances where I wrote about things that I hadn't seen exposed yet. Also, the hospitalizations. Sorry, now I'm just... Take your time. This is what we do.

So, okay. But I mentioned this not as an aggrandizement, but to a little bit of a little bit. larger point than I'm about to make. David is brilliant. Yes. I mean, he's so fucking good. You're really.

So, but the hot people have been murmuring for quite a while that, you know, maybe this hospitalization numbers aren't actually reflective of people who are in the hospital. Rather, it's with COVID rather than from COVID. Now this also ties into our conversation about the suppression and censorship on Twitter and elsewhere. For a long time, that was considered a conspiracy theory and you're crazy. Well, it turns out that's true. And I reported on these two studies that were done on pediatric admissions. And at the time, at least 40% of the pediatric COVID admissions were unrelated to COVID.

A kid, maybe they broke their foot or something, and they had to test them for COVID. And they just incidentally had COVID. But it had nothing to do with why they were in the hospital. But nevertheless, that was added to the tally. Just very quickly, I had a joke that I tweeted during the pandemic. I said my grandfather died with his wife by his side, but it was the middle of the pandemic, so they decided he died of her and put her in prison anyway.

It was absurd. But people said this were conspiracy theorists, you're some asshole, but it was true. So anyway, so the reason I mention all of these things, the school closures, the hybrid shit, the vachyocarditis, and then a handful of other things, over and over, I kept thinking, I need to, like, get this thing out.

I got part of being a journalist, I generally like a slow moving on less in the news cycle, but because I found myself in this, you want to be first. I'm like, this is exciting. And each time I'd be in a panic because I turn an article at first, I pitch an article to an editor, then if they accept it, then there's, you know, then I'm writing it, I'm researching, the editors go back. It could take a week or two weeks or longer before you finally put the thing out, depending how in depth it is.

And I'd just be nervous waiting that someone else is going to start. scoop me, and no one did any of those times. And slowly I started seeing this pattern. And that's the thing, this is a very long response to your prompt about where's the intrepid reporter. And I'm not saying I am the embodiment of that. But what I would say is there was an absence of that elsewhere. When I wrote that thing about the summer camp guidance, I think a day or two before my piece came out, there was a thing in the New York Times on it. And it was like, the nukes, you know, CDC guidance for camps is out. Here's how to keep your kids safe.

And it just unquestioningly, they had one or two, you know, doctors who talked about it. No one questioned the validity of any of these recommendations, including making a kid wear a mask while they're going to be playing tennis with someone, you know, 30 feet away on the other side of a net. It wasn't questioned. So it's this idea of like, is a journalist just like a megaphone?

maybe in some instances that's appropriate, but by and large, that's what these people were doing. And I was kind of astonished that over and over, it seemed like these large media operations with millions or hundreds of millions of dollars behind them. These are huge institutions with large staffs of people and editors and this whole operation. And they weren't questioning the guidance.

They weren't questioning what was said. they were simply reporting it. And they had the same crew of experts, oftentimes, and I use experts in quotes, because oftentimes this is someone like there was a particular emergency room physician who I think was at Brown at the time, who was quoted constantly in the New York Times

and CNN in these other places. This person had no expertise on infectious diseases, had no expertise on mitigation measures and their effectiveness. Nevertheless, this person was quoted, They're on like the speed dial at a place like the New York Times. So you had no questions asked of Fauci or CDC. And then when there was sort of questions asked,

it was almost always from the same pool of quote experts who were basically just supporting what was being said anyway. So that was the weird thing for me. Now when I look back, it's funny, but you can imagine me, I was so nervous I was going to get scooped on each of these things. someone surely is going to write a piece in some major place about like why our schools aren't open here when they're open ever else and I'm like no one wrote that someone surely is going to write about the hospitalizations someone's sure all these things and it wasn't happening so it's just been it was just a bizarre experience that I will never get over like it's permanently altered me seeing this you know from my own experience as a writer in that environment And it also has repercussions right the way down the line because we've all agreed that the media weren't being honest about COVID. The mainstream media weren't being honest.

I think that's fair to say. And then they report on Ukraine and everybody goes, well, how can I trust you? And then you get a large portion of people coming out and going, well, they weren't honest about COVID, aka they're not going to be honest about this. I don't believe it. And then what you have is a fundamental breakdown between media and the people. And that's a really dangerous place to be in. I mean, I think there's a couple things there.

Journalism, in my view, should be adversarial to authority. And for whatever complex range of reasons that we could go into, but it's, again, writing a thousand pages on the why. But for a long range of reasons, that sort of skepticism of institutions was absent. It vaporized. We love Big Pharma now. Right, exactly.

I mean, these are the things that traditionally doesn't make any sense. People on the left. They used to, the left traditionally was like highly skeptical of these places, like Big Pharma, the government, you know, these. But I think because it's so politicized. they then just threw their hat in with this group. That's one piece of it.

I don't think it's the only piece. And then the public ends up not trusting it or at least a large segment of the public. And I think one of the things that's funny not to get too far afield here, and if I'm not already canceled, maybe this will cancel me. Excellent.

But here we go. Is that there's so much talk about diversity, which is important, you know, racial diversity and other types. But we don't see, and again, this is an observation for many people. There's not an ideological diversity in a lot of these institutions. And like most of the people who work at these, you know, at the Times or, you know, these major TV networks, these are, I mean, I know a lot of these people personally and I know of the, they all went to Yale and Brown and Columbia and Harvard. They all went to the same places.

They're all there inside there. Imagine at the Times instead of their diversity land. Instead, if it was trained on, well, let's hire some people who just went to some community college. Let's go and get someone who grew up in West Virginia and maybe didn't go to college at all, but it's like real smart and has some sort of grit. Imagine how different the coverage would be of all sorts of issues, whether it's related to the pandemic or otherwise. So there's certain types of diversity, but you're missing out on working class people. You know, journalism used to be more of a working class kind of profession at,

one point in certain regards, you know, you know, a number of generations ago. Now it's it's far more, I think, elitist. So these people, and I think there's a wonderful article, I think it's Thomas Frank from years ago in Harper's. And he wrote about how Bernie Sanders, and he was running, basically was murdered by his campaign by the mainstream media. And he roughly says this, and this is some of my own sort of projection onto his thesis, but in order to get into a place like Yale or Brown, how do you get in there? Well, you're a certain type of person who follows rules.

Maybe some people get in there who are iconoclasts. They're just brilliant. But most of the people, you're getting in there because you're an apple polisher. You're the worker bee. You know how to get straight A's, you know, 4.0 grade average. You're a perfect student, and then you get in there,

and you know how to work your way within an institution and network, and you get perfect grades there, and then maybe you go to Columbia Journalism School, and you follow this path. So the way that these people became successful was through a certain path. That's their life, that's their lived experience, is doing this.

So it makes sense. So then they saw Bernie as this outsider. How could this guy win or who dare he? How should he do this? He's not one of us. And I think we also see that in coverage of a whole range issues, including with the pandemic, that if you have all these people who all know each other,

they all have the same kind of background, the same way that they became successful, that to veer from that, I'm not even saying this is a conscious thing. I think it's just like it makes sense. This is just how they view things. So that's my thesis on that. And we haven't even reached, as far as I'm concerned, the real punchline of the pandemic, which is the effect on children's education and attainment, and also as well, what that is going to be doing to the ever-widening gap between attainment between rich kids and poor kids. Right. Well, you know, there's, my focus on reporting has not been on what people will call sort of like

victim porn on the horrible things that happen to children. Because to me, it's just like so self-evident that this was absurd. But there's so much just obvious evidence from this. This was obvious before it even happened. And now we have also from the academic harms, you know, from kids. And we know that children who are in less privileged backgrounds were going to do. We knew this was going to happen. I wrote a piece for the New York Times actually early on the pandemic about what they call these pod schools.

They probably didn't have this in the UK where you would pay, wealthy parents would pay generally wealthy, you know, it could be $20,000 where a group of parents got together and they hired a teacher and they had a pod of like, it could be five kids, 10 kids, because the schools were closed. So those kids who had the money, they had the pod or they had tutors, they have, you know, they can get all this extra to help. But some kid who's living in, you know, a tiny apartment in the Bronx with eight other people or whatever the circumstance maybe, and there are those kids because I've spoken to them

and I've spoken to their parents and their teachers, they were never going to learn jack shit. They didn't have an internet connection. There were kids who were sitting in a parking lot of the Taco Bell so they could have a Wi-Fi connection to try to get on to some bullshit remote learning program. That is nuts. So the idea, because I was branded a racist,

as were many other people who advocated for schools to open, they was considered, they said it's racist to want schools to open. It's white supremacist. But the horrible irony, of course, is that the greatest harms were going, we knew this could be seen very easily from the beginning. And it was obvious while it was happening. The greatest harms were born by the kids who were disproportionately black or brown. And certainly moving away from race just who had less resources, regardless of what your race was. We knew the people who have the money, they're always going to be okay.

Most of them. I mean, those kids suffer too. Make no mistake. lot of them. Everyone's different. And it's not automatically you're going to do horribly if you don't have money. But that's the broad trend. And this was, of course, obvious. So school is more than just a place for learning math or something, and particularly for younger kids. In America, school has a role of a societal function where people, by the way, were dismissed and maligned for saying, oh, you just want a babysitter. A bunch of parents just want babies. A bunch of parents just want

babysitters for their kids. Well, that should not be put down. Like, care for children is really important. And that's a wonderful function of school. That's not something that should have been, like, dismissed. It's like you're an asshole for wanting your, you know, six-year-old to go to a place while you're going to work. But somehow these people were branded as selfish for one of the world.

It's the sort of thing you say when you've got your own babysitter that you can pay. That's when you can say it. Right. And that's where it comes from. But I know you've got a book about this coming out. So tell everybody when is coming out and what it's going to be called. Well, it's called an abundance of caution. At least in the States, I feel like they did in the UK too.

This phrase was constantly used. Out of an abundance of caution, dot, dot, dot. And I remember when they closed my kids' schools, that the email was sent out. And there it was. Out of an abundance of caution, we need to close schools for a deep cleaning. They said, you know, meant nothing. But so that phrase always stuck in my head

because the question is, well, caution in what direction? And what... That's right. And what we... What I spend a lot of time writing about, God knows when the book's going to come out because I'm still working on it now. It's probably not for a year.

I saw that when I asked David, there was that little pang. I know that I've written the book. It's like... Every night like my son, he's like, dad, are you still working on that book? I'm like, yes, stop asking me. My, like, temple is pulsing.

But you think about a lot of these interventions, including school closures, I think there's good evidence that the most important word that is not talked about enough about relation to the pandemic and these interventions is time. And a lot of things can be effective over a very short period of time.

If the physician puts on a very tightly fitted N95 respirator and sees a patient for a 10-minute checkup in a room, that mask may very well be protected to some extent. But that's different from wearing some bullshit cloth mask in a classroom with 20 other kids for eight hours. And similarly, pulling the master switch and keeping everyone home for a week or two weeks,

or not everyone, but the people who can stay home, that can definitely have an effect. I think there's good evidence. The problem is a pandemic's a marathon. It's not gonna end. and quickly. And over time, we know that people's ability to comply with things wanes.

You just, wearing a mask is fucking annoying for most people. It's not natural. And whether you purposely don't want to do it or you're just like even subconsciously, you're tugging at it, people are rubbing their eyes, they've done studies on this.

You can see people constantly touching their face or whether it's something like school closures. People are going to spread their ability. And there's Google Mobility data for this too. You could see people just start, moving around more and more as time went on. And you saw this happen, even in places where the restrictions were still in place.

That that didn't stop it. That you can't, like, hammer people with this stuff. Human beings, most of them, are not comfortable being completely isolated from each other. They can't do it. And so what happens is this confusion about, well, this works or that doesn't work. Of course, if people don't go to school,

there'll be less transmission. Well, yeah, maybe for a week or two, but over a month or two months or three months, and that's the main misconception, I think, that a lot of people have about these interventions, that, yes, I'm not someone who says, mask don't work, or this, quote, doesn't work. That's too simplistic of a way of framing these things. Some things may work, to some extent, in this particular circumstance, for a certain period of time. It's not a sexy answer. It's not as easy to just tweet that.

But that's the truth. You need all these little qualifiers. So we knew that over time, this stuff was simply not going to be effective. And that's what I believe the evidence shows. I was going to wrap up that. But just maybe one more thing on that. I think one of the things that you touched on there, but I think we could expand on a little bit,

is that too many people forget that safety isn't the only thing that we are ever pursuing. I mean, freedom for this country would not exist if people didn't get together. who valued something other than safety above safety right the United States was created by a bunch of people who put themselves in harm's way that is the very definition of being the opposite of safety for something else right that something else is called freedom in their case right so the one of the reasons I think we're stuck in the place that we're stuck in is that people have

forgotten that safety is not the only value it's it's not the only thing that we care about and we cannot care about otherwise we'd never leave the And I would say two things. One, agree with you 100% on that. There's a reason why we, right, people go swimming, even though a certain number of people drown every year swimming. We get in a car. We do everything. The second you step out of your house, there's some degree of danger, depending on what you're going to do, but that's part of life, including we also endanger other people because the argument against what you're saying. People say, well, that's different. That's you just endangering yourself. But with the virus, you're endangering other people.

Well, guess what? Every time you get in a car, you're endangering other people. But we all choose to partake in that, and we don't force everyone to drive 10 miles an hour. That's right. So there's a whole range of things we do where we are endangering each other, and we accept that as a society because we value these other things for human flourishing

beyond just putting ourselves in bubble wrap. But the other thing is, staying home is not safe either over time. And that's the other flip side, again, about this idea of caution that it's like, well, there are people, and I wrote this piece about this church that gotten a huge law school, with a county in California where they were barred,

all churches there were barred from having anyone gather indoors for many, many, many months. And so this church ignored the guidelines, people got together anyway and they accrued an extraordinary number of fines. It's an amazing story. I mean, they were

spied on, they had, they were special health officers peering at them through a chain-link fence. They were right at, they were going into the church and monitoring private activities. It's an insane story. But the message from it, though, to your point, is a lot of the people I interviewed,

these were people from the church, church members, these were people, and by the way, I don't attend church, I had no skin in the game about, but these are people suffering from addiction, elderly people who were profoundly lonely. There was a guy who, I think there were more than one.

I spoke to one myself who wanted to commit suicide, because he was so profoundly lonely, he had gone through a breakup, and for these people, church, was their support system. Is it mine? No.

But I have to understand and respect. For them, they needed this. So the idea that they're safe because they're kept home was bullshit. These people, some of them, were literally at risk of dying themselves. And we know that there's epigenetics with how your environment affects your immune system.

Telling a bunch of people, you need to be isolated, particularly elderly people, oh, you're in an old age home and your family can't visit you? Like, of course, that has a profound effect on people's underlying health. So we're seeing this, and it's very complicated, but with excess death rates and all sorts of other measures about what makes for a good life. So, you know, to your point,

this sort of like myopic focus on a virus and not looking at all these other aspects of what makes for a flourishing life, Again, maybe that made sense for a couple weeks in the beginning, but very quickly that, you know, the ratio changes about what is reasonable, both from a public health standpoint and also a mental health standpoint. So that's how I view it. It's been a fantastic interview.

So much for coming on the show. The final question we always ask, all our guests is, are you vaccinated? No. Because if you're not, you're killing people. You're a murderer. You're a murderer. And murdering kids. Anyway, it's one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be.

I would say, just moving away from this topic, one thing that has long interested me is everyone talks about climate change as this macro concern. And I'm not even going to touch on the validity of this. But one thing that I think is really important for people who care about the environment and I'm someone who's long cared about the environment very much is climate change is a very abstract idea. But there are very concrete things that are happening to our planet and to animals that we actually can stop. Because it seems like we failed at climate change. Every year they have the meetings. They go to, you know, Davos or, you know, Kyoto, wherever else.

and they talk about it, but like we still keep producing, like this isn't working. You have stolen my dreams. Right, exactly. But the thing we can do is, you know, there are an enormous number of sharks that are killed every year so people can have soup with their fin.

Are you fucking kidding me? And they slice the fin off this majestic animal and they just toss them back in the ocean and they're left there to just slowly bleed out and die. And they don't even use the rest of the, you know, so shark bin soup, or you think about, there are still multiple countries that do commercial whaling. I think, I might be wrong, but I think it's like Iceland, Norway, Japan.

That is insane, to my view. And palm oil, I'll stop here, you know, most of the garbage that we eat, you know, all these processed foods, they have palm oil in them. That is a massive source of deforestation. They burn or chop. top-down, incredibly important and rich rainforests or other really old-growth forests

and put up a bunch of palm trees for making palm oil. That is horrible for the species that used to live there, who are now dead, because they don't have home, horrible for greenhouse. So those are the things that I think get lost. Once again, it's easy to just be like, we need to help stop climate change. Well, guess what?

That messaging failed. It doesn't seem to work, because we still keep producing all this stuff. So instead, I would love for people to focus more on how do we save specific animals? How do we stop specific practices that to my mind are completely unacceptable? And in 50 years from now, we will be embarrassed that these things were happening, from factory farms to the sharp fins, etc. That's what people should talk about.

Absolutely, David. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Really looking forward to reading your upcoming book. Of course, you have got this one as well, which we didn't get to talk about. By this book, everybody. Buy this book, everybody. And we're going to head over to locals for your bonus. questions so join us there all the links for david's worker in the description take

care and we'll see you on locals very shortly does david think the reason twitter agreed to censor information was due to a willing alliance with the government out of fear of the government if it didn't comply or out of ideological conviction that censoring certain voices was correct