Kevin, thanks for coming on the show, man. Thanks for having me, dude. Yeah, no problem. All right, so I'm going to talk about how you got my attention, but then we'll talk a little bit about your background and all that. But I'm going to read a tweet that you have pinned. And your great Twitter account, by the way. Here's what you said. You said, I was wrong about lockdowns and mandates. I was wrong. And the reasons I was wrong was my tribalism, my emotions, and my distorted understanding of human nature and of the virus. It doesn't matter much, but I wanted to apologize for being wrong. Now, you really got my attention with this. And I had known who you were before because you comment somewhat on nutrition and health. But this really got my attention.  And then you wrote this article in Newsweek, which you'll get into, which was amazing. But let's back up a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about your background. Let's start there, and then we'll move forward. Yeah, as people know, I'm an MD-PhD student, but it started first becoming interested in medicine whenever I was in high school. I actually wasn't a great student, but I had medical problems. And that first piqued my interest. Thankfully, I was good at standardized tests. I went to a good school. So I did well on standardized tests. It took a year to do a community college. And then I got into UT Austin. I only went there because some pretty girls I knew went there also from high school. That's a good thing. That's all I was interested in and all I knew. So I applied there, I didn't apply anywhere else. And I got in, I was like, wow, that's great, I got in. Didn't date any of those girls, but yeah, but I got into UT Austin, so that's a good thing. Yeah, I did well there. Studied anthropology and biology partly because I was into paleo diet. So I liked anthropology because I wanted to learn what's the truth of the paleo diet? Maybe we should all live like our ancestors without technology and without shoes and stuff. What's your thought on that now? I mean, has that shifted? I mean, did you think that way completely and then it changed your mind? Or you confirmed the bias? Like, where do you feel about it?  We really did learn, we learned like woke anthropology. But yeah, later on, of course, I realized that like we can't do that. Like we can't go back to live like our ancestors. So it's foolish to even consider it.  Evolution happens over even relatively short periods of time. So even in terms of dietary metabolic evolution. So in a certain sense, biologically, we can't fully go back and be that. And there's also no going back anyway. Like there's so many different anthropological periods. There's so many different cavemen. There's not one kind of caveman. We have this idea of like a caveman who like runs around chases mammoths, it's not true. I think there's some truth, right? And how we evolve over history or over time. But I also think that we tend to, which it makes me laugh, is we tend to look back and we paint this super rosy picture and we don't really, we're not quite honest about what it was really like. Like if you look, if you find bones from, you know, humans, you know, 100,000 years ago, it was like spear marks and broken skulls. Yes, holes in their skulls.  And we just, that's true, right? Yes, yes. So it's like, okay, there was, okay, I think there's some truth there, but there's a lot of truth and also how we have progressed. And I don't think it's like black or white, you know? Right. We project our own fantasies onto those people and we ignore everything else. Like that's not savory. So we'll pick one anthropological tribe to study in, say college. And that's the anthropological tribe that matches the ideological biases of the professor. And that's what we got taught. So do you remember like that unfolding for you? Cause I mean, I totally believe that and agree with you. But do you remember like that kind of aha moment that you had when you started to realize, wait a second, like this seems to be- This is romantic. Yeah, this is way too. Well, I think I had, I realized the entire time that while I was being indoctrinated through much of college. So you were aware? Yes, yes, yes. Before I started college, I was like reading other things and yeah, I was aware. That doesn't mean I wasn't affected. That doesn't mean I wasn't indoctrinated. Despite the fact I was aware, I was completely like woke by the end of college. Wow.  I don't know. And also the opportunities, everything else, sort of in the future, the people who are doing great things in the field, that said, are they're all the same way? You're like, they're great. And also there's great things to be said about people who pursue certain ideas along those lines. For example, like one of the doctors who I really admired for a long time, his name was Paul Farmer. He went to Haiti, he made hospitals, he saved so many like Haitians lives, maybe hundreds of thousands of Haitians lives. Of course, he was like far, like kind of far left. People who are far left love him. He's kind of like one of the idols among people who are in the academic far left, but yet he did like amazing, great things. So just because somebody's like woke, doesn't necessarily mean there. So because he was like that, I kind of emulated or wanted to be like him first. Today's giveaway is the RGB bundle, Maps Anabolic, Maps Performance and Maps Aesthetic. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment under this very controversial episode in the first 24 hours that we drop it. Also subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. Do all those things and if you win we'll let you know in the comment section. We're also running a sale on two workout programs. Maps Anabolic and Maps Split, both 50% off. If you're interested in either one or both of them, just click on the link at the top of the description below. By the way, I look forward to the comments and the discussions in the comment section. So here comes the show. See, this is why I appreciate you, Kevin, because I really appreciate people that can be objective. And I think a hallmark of someone who's not objective is they'll take a position and then they'll take all the, like all the positions that are connected to it or people say are supposed to be connected to it and they just adopt all of it. So it's like, this is true. So I'm gonna believe all this other stuff and there's no like, wait, let me break this down. Although this person was right here, that doesn't mean they're right about everything and that's really lacking. And what I find, like again, what I like about you is, well, I mean a couple of different things. One is you're very objective, so you can do that. And then two is your ability, which is rare nowadays, to be like, hey, I was wrong here. Here's now why I think, why I've changed my mind, even though this is gonna cause potentially a lot of problems for me. Yeah, I try to be objective. You say that I'm objective. Like the reason I'm saying these things now is partly like as a result of struggling to be objective and failing so many times. And I'm still gonna keep like messing up and having points of view that are wrong, but I'm just constantly trying to learn more and correct the things that I'm getting wrong. Yeah, and about the second part, yeah, yeah. I think, look, we're all, I don't know, I'm gonna get morbid here, but we're all like, we're all gonna die, right? Like what kind of life do you wanna live?    You convince people a bunch of things that aren't true. Or do you wanna like tell people the truth, sometimes take your hits and then when you die, you left behind something that was true and will help people out later.  Like I'm trying to do the thing and should leave that thing behind that's good. Have you always been that way? Like, yeah, that's developed over time. In college I was exposed to some ideas about like death and stuff. And then it's taken me over the last like 15 years or so to really, but have I always been on? Yeah, I think also, yeah. I think I'm also maybe congenitally tend to be honest. Like my mom is that way, she can't lie. She has a hard time lying. My daughter is that way. My younger daughter is that way. She'll like say the worst things in the world to me. Like talk about my appearance, all sorts of other things. She's not trying to be mean. Dad, you should take a shower. You may do stuff like that. So hopefully I don't get that beaten out of them. I know they will to some degree, but I'm gonna also teach them to keep carrying that on because I think, but it is part of maybe my makeup, my disposition as well. Now what got you to then go to medical school and what type of medicine are you pursuing? Yeah, so I was very like woke after medical school. I thought like medicine oppressed people and hurt everybody like it's hard to really... So there's these two authors. Some people might be familiar with them. One is Ivan Ilyich and one is like people have heard of Foucault, Michelle Foucault. Basically like medicine is this oppressive structure that takes advantage of people. Or in the case of Ivan Ilyich it like takes health, the health of people who are in like well-developed or affluent societies. And then like uses that health to give drugs to profit, et cetera. And actually takes away the health through medicine. Weird distorted view. Yeah, yeah. I had some, these are like exaggerations but I had something kind of like these kinds of ideas and I was, I just didn't wanna participate in the system of healthcare because I thought I was like an oppressor or something or part of an oppressive system. But then like I realized that even if there are problems with medicine and healthcare like you can still help one person at a time. I can still make one small difference even though I can't like overthrow all the bad things that are the case in the world. Like there's so many oppressive structures, et cetera. I can still like help one person at a time and have a meaningful life that way. Otherwise, like I was maybe 26 or 27 at that point. I just didn't know what I was gonna do with my life. I was like so negative about the world. Like I was pretty depressed at this point because I was so negative about the world. Partly because of what I learned in college for real. And then I just at some point say, okay, do I wanna like live or do I not wanna live? Like do I wanna live in this world or do I not? And then I decided like, okay fine. I can find some meaning through day-to-day interactions with patients. And over time my views have become like less, like tremendously less like negative about the world. But I had a very radicalized view about like it was just all terrible about the world. So then yeah, that's when I decided to try to pursue medicine. I did well on the MCAT. I like got a 99th percentile score. Interviewed at a bunch of different places. I was still kind of like radical at this point. I still kind of like didn't know if like medicine was like a good thing for people or whatever. And this isn't something to talk about a lot actually. But yeah, but then I like, I still got into med school cause I got along with some of the interviewers, whatever. So it's- And what type of medicine are you pursuing? I was thinking about doing, so there's a dual residency called Med Psych. Medicine and psychiatry is basically two residencies at the same time. It's five years instead of four years. Psych could be just four years. I just wanna do like, I wanted to do psych, but I also love medicine. I don't know if I can leave behind medicine itself, so yeah. Oh, very interesting. Okay, so let's get back now to your tweet. Let's talk a little bit about how you felt and what your ideas were or your opinions were about the pandemic and our approach with the pandemic and some of the policies that we passed. Let's take me back to that time and how you felt about what was going on and then we'll get to like, what got you to write that tweet and then that Newsweek article that I think was so well-written. At that, well, it is important to like, bring together. Okay, so we can talk about that particular tweet. Yeah, I just realized that, well like, one of the things that I thought we should have done during COVID and this is, I literally believe this stupid stuff. Like I thought we should like, I really loved what China was doing. Hey, that's, it's hard to, I mean, it's really, I think now there's a lot of people, by the way, there were a lot of people who agreed with you who now will not admit that they said that. So what you're saying right now is, it's like, again, that's why I appreciate you. Cause there's people now, public people. Oh, I never said that. We got it on camera, buddy. You thought we should do this exact thing.  I mean, basically they did whatever they needed to do to get rid of the pandemic. So if, if you were going to leave your apartment and you could potentially spread the disease, we're going to weld you into your apartment. I thought that that was like, I thought that was cool because they would do whatever they needed to do to stop. And I thought the most important thing was human health. There's nothing that's more important than life and health. Like what's more important than life and health? There are some other things that happened to be important and that I started to recognize later on, but like, if those are the most important things, then yeah, you need to do what's the most important thing to, you need to do whatever you need to do to stop people from dying. So I thought China was great. And, but then at some point I realized like, look, we're not going to be like China. And even, and, and I was actually talking to people from China and the situation in China was terrible. Like nobody, nobody loved like living under lockdown all the time. They kept getting locked down over. I know people who are in China, like the virus that starts spreading in their neighborhood after they hit a certain threshold of cases or whatever they, the whole, the whole like district would get locked down completely. Like, I don't know if you guys saw the videos like people literally running to try to, try to get out before the lockdowns happened. And I just started to realize that first off, we're not going to become like China. And if we became like China, that would be terrible. Like it's terrible in China. And then, and then it's even worse. Like over the last like a couple of months, they unlocked down, like they removed the lockdowns and like millions of people died apparently. Like the real figures aren't released, but I know people again in China, apparently like millions of people die, like hundreds of thousands of days, stuff like that. It was crazy. You know, Kevin, let me, let me pause you for a second cause you, you said something that I 100% agree with, but I also think our view of this particular thing is, is can tend to be extremely narrow. So I agree with the statement that health is one, is one of the most important things without health. I mean, what do you have? Okay. But here's where I think it's narrow is we view, we viewed health as a very narrow infection, illness, death. We did not consider how complex human health is, which includes psychological health, mental health, spiritual health, your relationships, all of which if our poor will cause a decline in your physical health, which now we have all the evidence that that's exactly what ended up happening. But I mean, I knew this cause I'm working in the fitness industry. There was this famous study that I think Stanford might have been Stanford Harvard that did where they showed that having poor relationships was bad for your health and smoking 10 cigarettes a day. And so what happened is, and this is hindsight for a lot of people, but for us, it was quite clear. We took infectious disease specialists and we said, hey, you guys create the policy. We're not gonna ask psychologists, economists, we're not gonna ask people who understand human behavior or children, child behavior. We're just like, what reduces infection? Let's just do that and then nothing else matters. And that is the science. That perspective is the science. Right, right. So that was all happening. You're like, let's do it. We need to do this. At what point during that time, we're like, oh, wait a minute. This is not the right approach. Yeah, I mean, it's whenever I started, so it's important to like explain the history. So whenever I got into medical school, I saw that doctors are good people, like everybody's trying to do a good thing. There's problems. So I became much more moderate. So I went from being like a left-wing extremist like very much a centrist thinking, yeah, there's problems in the system, but you iteratively improve them. And then my perspective became, once I got into the social media, that there are people who are saying things that were like wrong about health, wrong about fitness, wrong about diet nutrition, on Instagram, on Twitter, et cetera. And we needed to correct these people to make sure that people had the right information. And then I took a very like pro-establishment perspective, like the establishment everybody's trying to basically do the right thing. And then it's other people who are criticizing the establishment or who are the bad guys. And I got so like involved in this perspective that I couldn't stop being able to see to a certain extent many times, like how we were actually doing things that were wrong sometimes. So during the COVID pandemic, I was unable to see that. But then when I started creating some of my own content, like telling people, okay, here's what the science says about X, Y, and Z, here's what you should do as a result of that. I started getting debunked. So I used to be like this big debunker. I had like this thing called the quack list. I would like have lists of names and stuff. It was crazy what I used to do. But I used to debunked like huge amount of people. Then I started getting debunked by the people who like were supposed to be like my friends. And then I started realizing- What's the first example of that? First example of that. Well, do you guys know Spencer Ndolski? Oh, yes I do. Yeah, he like really hated my content. He's like, you're just a student. Like what are you talking about? But I was right. Oh, a really good first example was a sunscreen. So there was this really good FDA study published in like 2019 published by like all the people in a particular part of the FDA that were involved in this question. And there were like MD, PhDs, great scientists, et cetera. Showing that whenever you applied the chemical sunscreen to your skin, it got absorbed into the bloodstream. And then you could detect it several days out above the threshold of the level at which it might raise alarms for potential toxicity. That was published by the FDA and some of these levels were really, really high for chemical sunscreen. Now it didn't show that it necessarily caused harm. And I was like very clear, it's not showing that but it's above the- What they consider to be harmful. What they consider to be above the threshold for concern for future study. So they ended up doing a bunch of other studies and they're still doing these studies based on those detection levels. But they said, hey, you know, there's something potentially risky here. So all I did was report that. I reported it exactly that way. And then I was interpreted as saying that chemical sunscreen was risky. A chemical sunscreen is gonna cause you harm. All I said that is that we don't know right now because we have this evidence gap that the FDA itself is recognizing that we have an evidence gap about. And there's these other sunscreens called mineral sunscreens that you can wear and you don't have to deal with this problem. And other people are talking about this. So I just wanna address this and clarify this for people so that people understand. The issue that's here- Seems very balanced and rational. Totally. And then like so some crazy people from like, I think they love like chemicals and they love- From copper tone. For real dude. They're copper tone scientists. Dude, I think they might be, I don't know what they are, but they're volunteers. They might be paid by whatever, but they're zealots. They're like anybody who like says anything negative. What's a good example is, they polarized in the opposite direction. So there's all these crazy people online who are like natural living people who like all chemicals are bad, et cetera, et cetera. So then there's a whole another group of people who's like dedicated to fighting these natural, and like debunking them.  Like they're, they just polarized like a cult and then they tried to debunk me without even like listening to what they weren't even able to understand. So they just immediately put you in that box. Exactly. So that's what they did. They put me in that box. It was the weirdest exchange I've ever had. We had like this public confrontation. It's so strange because it was clear like they weren't listening to what I was saying and they just wanted to like pretend I was crazy. It was, and it was like almost traumatizing for me because I had spent so much time like building identity online as like a debunker, as somebody who was like pro science, et cetera. And then I was being called like a charlatan. I was being called like all these terrible things. And then like people who I respect were unfriending me and blocking me and stuff.  Like what's wrong with these people? Like, yeah, it was like a cult. So. Did that give you a new perspective? Yes. Well, that was like the beginning. Well, that and like another thing about like animal products and veganism and like I got mobbed by the vegans who were also, I was, I am, like I have a plant-based oriented perspective, I support a lot of the things that they do. And then so whenever they did that to me, I was like, what's wrong with you people? And part of it is because I like, there are these boxes, there are these like tribes online, but I like one of the things you mentioned is you like that I like try to be objective, but being objective also gets you in trouble. Totally. Yeah. Oh, it's dangerous. Especially if you tell other people they need to be objective, which I've done a lot of. Yeah. Okay, so this takes us to human behavior, which it is our nature to try to put things into clean black and white boxes. It's very hard for humans to understand nuance and grayness. It's either you're good or you're bad. You're good or evil. This is right or wrong. It's never, it's so challenging for people to be like, well, there's some truth in what this person's saying. Not all of it, but I can see some truth. And you know what? This person over here, some of the stuff they're saying is crazy, but they're also saying some stuff that's true.  I think it's human nature. This is why you find it in medicine, fitness, in economics, I don't care actually.  But you were now on the other end of this cancel mob feeling type of thing.   Why didn't you back down? Did it embolden you or did it make you scared? Like, what was the deal? Oh, okay. Well, so I wasn't, I was ready not to back down, but like nobody cared too much about it. Like nobody was like interested in hearing my like complex discussions about the, what the different regulatory agencies said. So I just like let it go because nobody was like, I wasn't getting any engagement.  Like this is, this is terrible what they like said. And I felt like I couldn't even say anything back. Like nobody even cared about what I was saying. It was a weird, it was so weird. Yeah. And then this happens over the course of several different times, several different cases of this where, where this sort of thing would happen. And people would like DM me and say, hey, Kevin, you need to like, like be careful what content you post. I'm like, what are you talking about with content I post? Like, I think they were seeing it from their perspective of like, like that's bad. And so other people are also going to see it's bad, but I think it's their own like cold light perspective. And so it just turned out that there's a lot of people around me that all have like weird, I think it's just like, almost everybody does online or something. They have like cold, like these group perspectives. So yeah, just over time though, I started to become more like disconnected from like those, the evidence-based, the online evidence-based community. And by being like sort of de-tribalizing from that, I started to see things a little bit different, especially when people would attack me. So one of the things that was posted by, by Elon was this prosecute Fauci tweet which I thought was great. I loved when Elon got like Twitter. I thought it was like the greatest thing because it was a total breath of fresh air. He's a smart guy. He seemed like intelligent. Like he was going to do things. He seemed like he loved Twitter. He wanted to make it better. So I was like, I loved it. So I like retweet everything he said. I think I retweeted the prosecute Fauci. And then like, I just got like hammered in my comments whenever you're encouraging people to like attack and try to murder Fauci, man. Like, he's got all these guards. Now you're putting them in danger by saying these things. I'm like, dude, I just retweeted prosecute Fauci or like said something positive about it.  I don't understand like how they could be so, I mean, the other thing I would say to them is like, look dude, you can say all sorts of different things. Doesn't mean you can't criticize somebody because they might get attacked by like somebody else because you criticize them. Like it was just so weird, like how irrational. And then, and then I just started realizing, hey, you know, I've been like this all the time. You know, I've done this to people. I've like said, dismissed their perspective, et cetera. And I started thinking about COVID. I started thinking about like, other people had a different perspective than me whenever they were protesting lockdowns. Other people thought differently than I did. And I started trying to think about, okay, why would they think differently than me? Is it because they're ignorant?  Literally, I literally couldn't see anything any other different way than that. And then when people would respond, I would be like, this is crazy person responding to me, you know? Or they're just like lost. I was, it was so weird thinking about it now. It's like, I dismissed them as a human. They're like, they were not a human to me. They were just some weird words coming out. It's hard to even describe like how crazy this seems to me now. We lived through the- Very honest though. Yeah, we lived through the largest in recorded history, in my opinion, PSYOP operation. Now I'm not saying that there was like one central person in charge, but there was a lot of, it's very clear, I can argue this all day long, it's very clear that there were special interests and people who either through tribalism or because they could make money or because they're protecting themselves or because of politics would create a narrative and then the strategies were to silence. And there's lots of different ways of silence people.  The other one is to say, if you open your mouth, they're gonna hurt someone to scare them or to cancel them outright. And so it was very clear to me, there was actually a turning point for me that I've talked about many times in the show. I wonder if there was one for you, but I remember specifically, there was a newscast and in the newscast, they were talking about how you need to stay home, don't be around anybody, you will kill people if you're around anybody by spraying the virus, you will literally murder people. And then in the same newscast, and I remember when I saw this, I was like, this is peak propaganda. The same newscast, they pan over to the George Floyd protests where there's thousands of people packed around each other, like yelling, spit flying everybody, nobody's wearing a mask. And they were saying, this in no way is contributing in any significant way to the spread of the virus. And I said, those two things are not possible in the same universe. And that was a huge turning point for me. Did you have any of those where you're like, this is crazy? No, no, for me, it was all just like slowly breaking up this, this shell that was locked around me that prevented me from seeing anything because I was always demonizing everybody else. Once that got broken down, I progressively started seeing this crazy stuff that you're talking about. And I feel like weird not having seen it. Whenever people would point this stuff out that you're, actually, I will say, I will say that was the one time I had one of the first disagreements with sort of the evidence-based community was during the George Floyd thing actually. Because I pointed out, hey, look, people can't go to church, people can't protest lockdowns, but they can go to the George Floyd thing. Also, block life's matter isn't gonna, isn't gonna change like racial inequality in the United States. That's been going on for like, you know, decades and or hundreds of years, if you wanna point it that, put it that way. Like, you're not gonna do anything by having these protests. You're just like doing the same thing people are going to church that are doing. You're just doing it according to a different belief system. Yeah. Not to go down that rabbit hole, but now, you know, we know that BLM now is a huge money-making thing, but we don't have to go down there.  Like, you're not gonna be able to serve your patients, all this stuff. But even at that point, I just thought, I just thought some people were wrong about some things and overall, the whole lockdown thing was, or the COVID policy was done with the right intentions and I didn't see it as a systemic problem until later. And then, once I saw that, I started seeing it everywhere. I started seeing it everywhere. All of these contradictions that you're alluding to, like about masks, vaccines, like they lied about so many different things. And you called us, I especially just, I honestly, I know a lot of people who, I don't necessarily know the people who are in charge of CDC, but I know people who are their classmates. I know a lot of people who are at great academic institutions. I think everybody was, I think they were trying to do their best. I honestly do. I thought, I think they just got locked into their own. I think they were like me, most of them. Maybe there were some psychopaths that were manipulating it and pulling some strings here and there, but I think a lot of people had good intentions. I believe, I subscribe. That's what makes a PsyOp, that's what makes a PsyOp operate. I subscribe to that philosophy more, I think. Well, that's what makes, so an effective Psy, if you study like the Soviet Union and these past oppressive regimes, all you need to do is plant seeds and then you let people do the rest. So I'm not saying that you had millions of people that were part of this thing. It's literally, you had a few things happening, then you had the media, which would follow along because they're trying to get clicks, they're trying to get whatever. You get two distinctively different narratives going on at the same time. I remember having a conversation with my brother who was like, literally didn't see, to your point, didn't see anything that I was seeing and I wasn't seeing anything he was seeing. And then we started discussing this and getting frustrated because it was just like, where are you getting this information? We completely had two different biases going on at the same time. Did you experience that with any of your friends and family? Yeah, especially once I wrote the news week and I went on Tucker, I got like excommunicated from everything. I lost like 90, 95% of my online connections. Yeah, and I would try to get on the phone with them and they wouldn't be able to understand. Like I couldn't like explain to them because they would either say like, their belief was either I was drunk on the clicks, which by the way, I wasn't. Of course I was elated to get the attention, but like the overwhelming part of it was like this miserable sense of like, everybody hates me kind of thing. But I've got to do the right thing anyway. I like had like kind of a mild depression during that period, it was terrible. But they thought I was drunk on the clicks. And then once they realized I was serious, then they thought I was brainwashed. I literally, it was no way for me to get into them for them to take what I was saying seriously. They had to have some mechanism by which to dismiss it. So I would love to talk to you about, because you are a science-based guy and again, objective. So you don't tend to have a bias. You're like, okay, well here's the data. This is what it says. It contradicts what we thought. So this must be the truth. I'll give you a couple of examples. I'd love your opinion on them. There was one, and this happened either during the pandemic or shortly afterwards when it was unpopular. Okay, when it was unpopular say, but they showed they compared places with strict lockdowns to places with much looser lockdown. So like Florida to California, for example, like those would be two extreme examples, right? California lockdown forever, Florida two weeks and then almost wide open. And they showed the tracking, they tracked cell phone data, like the way people traveled. And what they found was in the places where they didn't have strict lockdowns, when the cases of COVID went up, people stayed home. People stopped moving. And they kind of mirrored what the lockdown places did except it was voluntary. They didn't feel like they were locked down, business didn't feel like I have to shut down and it's being forced. It was rather like, well, this is what I'm choosing to do. And so you had similar behaviors, even though this place over here, people could do what they want essentially and people over here. I remember seeing that and being like, oh man, like these lockdowns are causing more harm than good because just the way people feel about them, more than anything. Do you remember seeing some of that stuff, that kind of stuff? No, but it makes sense to me because I know Sweden had a similar approach. Everything was voluntary. Of course, I think they'd limited large gatherings above like 50, at some point in 2021, above like 50 people and stuff like that. But the vast majority of the measures were voluntary and yet they have the same thing, the mobility day they saw it just plummet whenever you had peaks and spikes. Yeah, I wonder if we could have just followed more of that sort of model and achieve much the same thing. And without the fallout, yeah, of the public trust. Here's another one that I would love you to comment on. When they started doing the mask mandates, so I used to work, I used to have a wellness studio and I used to train a lot of doctors and nurses and I remember, I don't know, it was this random conversation I had with this doctor and they talked about the protocol for teaching medical students the proper ways to use a mask. And it was ridiculous. But I remember you have to touch a particular way, use it once, they do this one test where they like, where you wear a particular mask, can you smell anything if you can, you got it on wrong. It was like this whole ordeal. And I was like, oh my God, there's training around wearing a mask. I remember this was years ago, it was like 10 years ago, maybe longer. And then when they came out with mask mandates, I was like, nobody. Nobody in there. Nobody knows how to do a mask properly. Protocol proper. I'm like, this is total waste of time. And now we have that Cochran review that shows, it was, is that, do you think that's why the masks were largely ineffective? Cause people just don't understand medical protocol on how to use them or was it more because it just was a waste of time. There's a million different explanations for it. But in the end, like, yeah, you could say it's people not adhering, not wearing them, people not wearing them all the time. They take them off whenever they're eating. You could say it's people don't wear them the right way. It's a, maybe the minimal effective dose of the virus coming out of the mask is too high for the mask to make any difference in transmission. There's all sorts of, but ultimately just whatever the reason is that masks don't work, they don't work. Yeah. Like, yeah. The answer is still the same.  Well, in theory, they should work. So you should still use them because in theory they should work. Like that's not how science works guys, but you know, that's what they were trying to do. And they're still trying to do that in the New York times and stuff. So I don't know. Yeah. That's the difference between intended, like passing policy because of intended result and actual result. Yeah. We often do that. We'll pass a law like this law is good because it's going to do this. It's like, well, what did it do in real life? It didn't do that. Why have this law? I guess, I mean, I don't know. It's a great point because it's almost like the drug war and all sorts of other things. Yes. But people are like almost more concerned about the intention and the intended effect rather than the actual data, which is a, it's a weird thing. Yeah. What about the data now that's coming out? I know that some countries now are no longer allowing young people, maybe just young men to get booster shots or extra doses of these mRNA vaccines. I think there's some European countries here in the U.S. are still advocating it for everybody all the time. Like what is the data showing on the potential risks of the vaccines for, I know specifically it's like younger males is what we're seeing. Yeah. Like it's more, like more risk than reward type of deal. Am I, am I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I don't know if it's, I think the risk to reward ratio is unclear among like especially young males. And there's also maybe among females a whole nother range of potential downsides like they call it dysautonomia and POTS and all these other weird, I haven't looked at that. Explain this. I don't know much about it. Apparently it can disrupt sort of your autonomic nervous system in ways that I don't fully, I don't understand. This is not something. Interesting. I've been focused on the myocarditis and pericarditis part of the story, but apparently there's other sides of the story as well. But for me, you know, I'll tell my story because it's good to clear this up. People often have a misunderstanding about this. I had, I got pericarditis probably from the vaccine. Oh, you did? Yes. It was from the, so I had the two Moderna primary series and then I had a Pfizer booster. I think a couple months later, I had an isolated pericarditis. So elevated CRP, no troponin elevation. What were your symptoms? Just tight chest, like the whole Whenever I would lay down, it would felt like my head was about to pop off like if there was blood like in my neck and like it felt really weird. And then whenever I would like exert myself, it would feel like I feel like pain or like anxiety. And then whenever I sat up, things were okay. During most of the day it was fine.  And then it got really bad one night. And I just had to, I was like, if I have COVID myocarditis, so I have to go to the hospital.  You go to the hospital now. Turned out like I didn't have COVID, but I had like pericarditis. What's the difference with myocarditis and pericarditis? So pericarditis is the sac that covers the heart. Oh, is inflamed. Yeah, yeah. There's like fluid that is inside the sac that if the sac becomes too inflamed and too filled with fluid it actually stops the heart from beating because it's called cardiac tamponade. The heart literally can't beat through the fluid. So it can be life-threatening if it gets bad enough. Of course we have with modern surgery you can cut the sac and drain the fluid so people's heart is okay. But pericarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle itself. Or sorry, myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle itself, which is in some ways kind of worse because if you have the heart muscle gets damaged it's permanently damaged, like for life. So they can look at MRIs. You can look at the heart of people who've had this kind of myocarditis so you can see permanent scar tissue as a result of it. And we don't know the long-term consequences of that. What if you're 60 years old, 70 years old, 80 years old you had this vaccine when you were much younger you have some compromise of your heart does the earlier compromise your heart that you had when you were much younger make it worse and make you more likely to have a negative outcome or more likely to tip over into that range where your heart's not working properly. We don't even the answer to that. Cause of course- Logic would say yes, no. Right, which is like, it's the concern. So then most people like the doctors there's a kind of a controversy in the medical community or at least there used to be or maybe there still is about whether or not. So establishment, we'll call establishment doctors they say it's so mild that it's probably not a big issue but we don't know and we can detect literal we can detect little scar tissue. And in some cases of course people's heart stopped working properly they get permanent heart issues. So the rate, the incidence of these kinds of problems is between it could be anywhere from like it depends on how you define it. If it's subclinical if it's just like some damage to the heart so some elevated enzymes that indicate heart damage and then maybe some clinical tests it could be as high as like seven in 300 or like 2.3%. Wow. That's subclinical. So that's not something most people detect but if you're following up like so they did this in Thailand they had a bunch of patients they gave them the actually the two dose series on the second dose they followed them all with these lab tests and they found of these 300 people seven of them showed these heart symptoms seven adolescents showed these heart symptoms. So and that included some girls too in that cohort. So it's very interesting it could be quite high in terms of detectable changes to the heart muscle that might be adverse but most of the estimates focus more on like okay am I having like an episode where I have to go to the hospital? Right. So maybe like one in 2001 and 5000. You know what I find interesting about this Kevin? How familiar are you with traditional because these were not traditional trials, right? We fast track everything understandably by the way I think that when there are emergencies I do support changing regulations if there's emergencies to make things come through. I just don't think we should coerce people but that's a whole different argument or conversation. But how familiar are you with traditional vaccine trials because from my understanding like if they show like a little bit of problems in a huge group of people, they halt it right away. I don't think these vaccines would have passed based off of the current accepted data I don't think they would have passed traditional trials. Are you familiar with what the thresholds are with like phase one, two, three? Yeah, I don't know what the thresholds are but I know that in the past like with the Norovirus vaccine where they had the Intest deception or the basically the Intestant Telescopes on itself one of the original Norovirus vaccines they took it off out of I think one to 10,000 adverse events for them. And that's the thing is like for young men COVID is not like life threatening for the vast majority of them, right? So the rate at which you get myocarditis from COVID is probably much lower than the rate at which you get myocarditis from say the second dose of the Moderna or say from a booster. So then why are we giving people the vaccine if we don't know for sure because there's other problems you can get from COVID besides myocarditis so we don't know exactly but there's an, sorry, I was about to, there's an evidence gap. There's an evidence gap and I don't understand why regulators don't care about this. Like if there's an evidence gap you're not sure what the relative ratio of the risk and benefit is you should pull the drug off. You should pull the drug off the market until you know for sure that the risks don't exceed the benefits that the benefits exceed the risks. You shouldn't be giving it to that population. This is something I believe personally I don't know why they think they can do this. They use observational studies. They don't use trial data as a result but I don't know why we don't do more trials. For the polio vaccine, do you know how many children were enrolled in the polio vaccine trial? And this took like one year, this took one year. How many people? 4.5 million children were enrolled in the polio vaccine. This was like 19, what is it? I mean, either 50s or 70s. This is forever ago. Like why can't we do that now? Is it 2023? Don't we have like a modern medical system? And polio was way scarier, way scarier. Yeah. I mean that would hit kids and it was, I mean that was scary. Yeah, true, true, true. But this is still a big issue. We could still have the political clout to do this. We just, FDA is not requiring it. And we don't need to do 4.5 million kids. We can do less and still get the same results. And you know, if there's a question we shouldn't release the drug until the question is gone. I don't understand what we're doing. So I'll take a separate, I'll take a little bit of a different opinion with that. Okay. Cause I can agree somewhat to what you're saying, but I'm more of a like, let people choose type of person, just inform them. So I would come out and say, here's the deal. There's an evidence gap. We don't know. It's up to you, but you're taking this chance. Not you have to, to go to school, to go to work, coerce you, oh, it's safe and effective as the slogan that we kept hearing, which is, I remember when I heard that, not that I thought it wasn't safe and not effective, but I thought, how can you say that? That's a ridiculous thing to say when we don't know if it's safe or effective, it hasn't been around long enough. There's no way we could possibly know. In fact, I got labeled by other people as anti-vax, which I'm not at all, I'm pro-medicine. But I got labeled anti-vax because my position was, we don't know what the long-term effects are. I'm very fit, very healthy. I think I'm going to take my risks. If you don't want to be around me, I totally understand, and I won't walk into your business if you don't want me in there, whatever, it's all up to you. People like your anti-vax, no, no, no, no. I think vaccines are one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern medicine. I'm just, we don't know. Do you know, you don't know. So why are you saying you do? It was crazy to me. I agree. I think that's another approach that we could take that would make a lot of sense as well. I do want to mention about you walking to people's businesses and stuff like that. So just because you're, maybe, have you taken any of the vaccines yet? None? No, none of the, no, no, no. I was going to wait for FDA approval before seriously. So I have a bit of a hypochondriac streak in me. So the pandemic to me was kind of like, it was a tough time. I was going to wait for FDA trial, for the actual FDA to say it's approved, because I know up until then it wasn't. But by that point, I had seen that it didn't stop transmission. It wasn't super effective. I had known enough people who got in COVID. I had saw that fit healthy people were low risk. So at that point I said, nah, I'm going to wait. I'm just going to wait. And then more and more stuff came out and I was like, oh, I'm happy I did. So I haven't gotten any of them now. All you guys, same things? No, interesting. My opinion early on from even the early data was, because I told both my parents who go get it, they're north of 60. They're both deconditioned. They're at least 30, 40 pounds overweight. They've had other conditions before. To me it was like the risk versus reward. I said, go get this. You should go get this. I'm not going to. Because I think I'd rather take my risk because I'm healthy. And I've just kind of stayed that way the entire time. I think that it makes sense for somebody who has two, three underlining conditions and they're advanced age, that you probably want to roll the dice with this vaccine because hopefully you could save your life if you did get COVID. If you're somebody under the age of 20 years old without any major underlining conditions, probably shouldn't roll the dice. Yeah, so yeah, yeah. Yes, I agree with that. Also, I think like, I do think the vaccine isn't that bad. Like it's not that bad. It's just that there's a question in young grade and people are healthy and we need to be open about that question. And a lot of people probably can. A lot of people will benefit from the vaccine. It's just we need to be aware of the risks also and be open about that.  Here's the deal.  If you look at the efficacy, how long it lasts and what the data is showing, the side effect risk profile. Not death, I'm not going crazy with this, but like people saying I got to take days off work, I feel like shit, whatever, that's a side effect.  Like I can't think of another vaccine that sucks as bad. Here, no. Is it COVID vaccines? Let me try to... Make it sound better. It's not that bad. So it's true that the COVID vaccine wears off between say three to six months for symptomatic disease, but it provides durable protection. I sound like I'm on like a pharmaceutical commercial now. Yeah. So, but it really does provide durable protection. As far as I know, many years, maybe even almost lifelong protection against severe disease and hospitalization and death. So that's what the data is showing now. Yes. You will, after three to six months, you don't have much additional protection from just getting COVID.  Yeah. So you still get sick.   Got it. And that's something that like they're not communicating. I don't know why they're not communicating this. Well, I'm glad you're explaining this to me because they're not. It's so crazy that they're not, and they're just saying instead, oh, you got to get boosted every year. Like there, I'm just gonna die. So there's no... I don't understand why they're telling you to get boosted because the boosting doesn't actually add additional protection against severe disease, death and hospitalization. They don't tell you that. According to the randomized control data, including like 6,000 participants, they saw no benefit whatsoever. In the median age was like 60 years old. And they saw no additional benefits because everybody who received the vaccine, the two-dose series, nobody went to the hospital. Nobody got severe disease. Nobody died. So why are they giving these extra boosters? And then you have the side effect profile. So in that sense, I would say, I would agree with you 100%. As far as boosters are concerned, the benefit versus the risk is terrible. Okay, so yes, that's my... That's where you are now because obviously you said two shots plus the booster, right? I didn't know at the time. I just trusted the experts. I trusted the science. I just took whatever they told me to take. Well, I got the answer for you. I know why they're still doing it. You have simultaneously one of... And compared to other vaccines on the market, okay? So I said it sucks, but to be clear, compared to other vaccines that had been around for a while, like polio vaccine, incredible protections, you know? We had smallpox at one point. Those vaccines protected us very well. There's diphtheria, there's pertussis. I mean, okay, compared to other vaccines on the market, we have a very, not very effective, still allows for transmission, yet simultaneously the most profitable vaccine in all of history. That's why. That's why they're still telling people to... Because this was one of the first times in history you had a vaccine that was, first of all, taxpayers paid for millions of doses. And then on top of it, government advocated for coercion that forced people to get it. So that's why. That's what I think. Well, and also, I mean, I just remember Johnson and Johnson getting pulled off because I was, you know, trying to do my research and slow playing it. And I know this was like an experimental vaccine coming in, but I was looking more at Johnson and Johnson, something I can understand. And then that got pulled from the shelves and I'm like, okay, like, let's see what happens after this. And I'm trying to see like how the population has been affected by all this. And, you know, for me, it's all about being educated as much as possible and not just being like pushed into something. And so that was like where I was like, kind of waiting this out and like not seeing a lot of progress. Yeah. Kevin, you have two kids, you said, right? Yeah. Two kids. Okay, let's talk about the effect of the policies on our kids. This is where I feel like this is the clearest, easiest thing that I think everybody should be able to see by now that we have anxiety, depression. Yeah. We have just social skills, verbal skills, education in terms of like people's test scores all took massive, massive hits during the pandemics now directly connected to the lockdowns and isolation which had a terrible devastating effect on children. This is super, super clear. Now, were your kids, where were you at the time and were the policies keeping your kids at home for a long time, like we were here? Or, and were you looking at that going, wait a minute, this is not making too much sense for my little ones because like for me, I remember they were doing mass mandates in school. I'm like, do you know how hard it is to have a four-year-old keep their socks on? You can tell me they're wearing masks all day long. This doesn't make any sense. When that was happening with your kids, were you like more, oh, wait a minute, or were you still 100%? Yeah, so you got to remember, I started from the point of view of like, we should lock people in their... China. We should like, we should weld their doors shut and get the military in the streets. That was my, so it's, you know, it's a long ways to... It's true, it's true. It's a long way to, yeah, so. Have you seen any, have you seen any personal, personally with your kids, any negative effects of the mass mandate and all the hysteria and stuff like that? Personally, they've been fine. I'm not exactly sure why Ico's taken care of it. That's my mom's kids, or my kid's mom. But, so their test scores did fine, but I didn't see like on Mia's like, like she had these standardized test scores where it showed like her class and then it showed her progress and like her class like did like completely plateau for that period of time. Like maybe it went down a little bit in terms of their educational attainment during that entire time, which is crazy to think about. And this is like a good school. This isn't like, you can think about just disadvantaged kids. It's, yeah, it's destroyed a generation of children as far as their schooling. It's literally in the United States, I think they've lost like half a year of schooling compared to, and then in Sweden, they didn't lose anything because they refused to close down the school. So yeah, it's tragic, especially people, kids who are disadvantaged. Yeah, did you find that ironic that the side that was like, that's like pro help the disenfranchised, help minorities, help the working class, their policies actually caused the most damage to those people, like small businesses got destroyed, minorities got hammered by the policies worse than other people. And then kids in like not super affluent schools where parents could afford tutors and mom could be home or dad could be home. Like they got crushed. They were at home by themselves, sometimes without internet access, so they couldn't even get school for months at a time. Did you find that ironic that whole? And it might not have helped disease transmission at all or had minimal benefit as far as preventing deaths for those people. They only got negatives and no positives. And then wealth got more concentrated among the top 1%. They of course, as you point out, can have tutors. So they're getting even more ahead than they used to be. Well, yeah, while the lower class is getting crushed and their dreams of social mobility are now seriously impaired compared to what they would have been. And it's, I don't think they did this on purpose. I don't think we did this on purpose, but it was a disaster, you know? It's like, some countries didn't do this. Sweden knew not to do this. So we knew at the time, we had that available. We had that option available. We were villainizing Sweden, by the way, when this was happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were villainizing them. We had that option available. We chose not to use it. So at that time, we had the knowledge to make that decision, that right decision. We did not make that right decision. We made the wrong decision for some reason. And we need to, and so this is one thing that Jay Bhattacharya, who's kind of a leader in criticizing a lot of these policies, is one thing Jay says is we have to have a commission to, Congress needs to pull together a commission and we need to have a reckoning. We need to understand exactly what went wrong and why and people who did these things wrong need to be held accountable because they could have made a different decision than they made. Kevin, let's talk, let's go there for a second because you mentioned something that nobody's talking about that I think is the greatest danger that has come out of these policies that some people are still advocating for, which is the distrust of the medical scientific community, which I think is terrible because what happens is when people start distrusting, you know, these people who actually work hard, many of them good, most of them good people who are trying to be objective, who use data, they don't just like go, they don't just distrust this person, that's it. They distrust them and then they move their trust to all kinds of crazy places. I feel like that's the biggest, I don't know if you've seen polls, have you seen the polls on like people's distrust of the media and the scientific community? It's like dismal, it's terrible. How do we heal that? Because that's screwed now, it's totally screwed. So we have to have that commission like what we were talking about. I think one thing I was thinking for a while was we should remove those people, but then that would just be a partisan battle and then liberals would just be like, oh, like Republicans are anti-science, they're trying to remove, like, so this is the only thing I can come up with, I don't know if this is the only thing I can come up with. This is the one I'm gonna write in my next article. Like we need to be able to, we need to persuade those people who did all this stuff to like step down. Like. Like. Like. Like. Like. Like. Like. Like. Like. Welcome to the fantasy land. Like. Like. It meant you're wrong and stepped down? Yeah. Sure, okay. I'm gonna take an L. I mean, okay. A lot easier to lie and sweep it on the rug and just let delay for about four more years. Everybody. We're actually just talking about this. Was it off air? We're off air to have this conversation of like, how crazy some of the stuff that, I mean, we were talking about MLK and John F. Kennedy. We're talking about the things that the government has done. That has now come out. That has come out. That is clear that they, that just blatantly like insane that if in the moment when it happened, we knew for sure and that proof was there, there would be just an upheaval and distrust. But when enough time goes by, we tend to just not care and just let it, and that, and to me, that is going to be the strategy with all this, is to just keep kicking the can down the road and denying and lying and manipulate. And then five years ago down the road, everybody forgot about that. That's what it'll probably have. And the reason why I believe that is, look at history. Look at those things that in the past. If you don't have these conversations, that's what's going to be the real problem. You know, like, that's why we need to keep like sort of dissecting this whole thing. Like what actually happened? Like, where did we go wrong? Like we need to have these out in the open and we need to discuss this because it is something that's going to repeat itself in the future. You mentioned Jay Badacharya.  They weren't crazy. They weren't saying anything crazy. And they were getting hammered from all angles. When you were seeing this at the time was, were you starting to be like, what the, this is weird. Like, why are they, this doesn't feel like a free country. No, I thought they were terrible people who are who are saying terrible things. So you're so honest. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely love it. It was wild to me though, to look back. I remember when Joe Rogan got COVID and he talked about what he was taking and he's like taking ivermectin, which now we have data showing that we do anything. But they totally talked about ivermectin like it wasn't the drug that it was. So I go, oh, this is animal horse medicine. It's like, we've been using this on people for 60 years. It's only been for veterinarians apparently. Yeah. Okay. So this is actually really interesting. The point that you mentioned is that they're going to just wait. I don't know if they can now though. This is 2023. You know, we have social media now. I think that might change the equation. That's why they want to control social media. That's why they hate Elon, right? That's why they're going to probably do anything they can to get rid of Elon. And that's why I don't know if this is true. You guys may know more about this than me, but like apparently that may be why they want to get rid of TikTok because they can't censor TikTok. China controls TikTok. Oh, wow. So like they don't want.  It's horrible. I haven't heard that before. But it's not really about that. It's really about, oh God, we can't control this and therefore. That's not the propaganda we want. We want our own propaganda. Wow, that's a good point. So, but with social media, maybe we can just keep talking about this and it's not going to go away. Well, so. I don't know. Yes it will. Unfortunately, the way it'll look is we'll create a bigger problem. Okay. That will distract us from that one. We need to release the next variant. I guess. And that's, I mean that's the.  I agree because of social media, it's going to be harder and there's going to be more upheaval. But I think there's so much stuff coming left and right that I think that we'll just get distracted by something else that's crazy. But okay here, let me make this argument. The aliens are coming soon. I mean, I'm sure that's down the road. Like real soon. Yeah, we're never trying that for a while. We're shooting down balloons. That's why I think they're doing like these sprinklers. Somehow nobody cares, bro. Let's see what they say about this UFO sighting right here. Oh, that's not working. Let's try something else. We should have done. Jesus. Okay. Let me make another argument, though. And this, I haven't made this argument publicly yet. I've been working on it. I want to put this into something I'm going to write. But, and I just, I've been thinking about it like last week or not more than like a month. It's not just the loss of public trust that resulted from this. I also think when you suppress speech, when you suppress your critics, when you demonize them, when you say, oh, only Fauci's right, only Willinsky's right, only like this small number of like elite experts are right and everybody else is wrong. We shouldn't listen to them. Then you're actually preventing yourself from getting feedback for getting information that can allow you to know how your policies are doing. Yeah. So if you're, that's, and so science, that's how science works. Science works by- Isn't that anti-science? Exactly, exactly, exactly. That's beautiful. Perfect. So- That's going into sub-stack. It's going to go in my next article. It really is. So, science works by put up for a hypothesis, try to support by data and then you have people who criticize it. Yeah. Well, science stops working when you shut down that process.  Yep. And so this problem needs to be solved not just to restore public trust but also to make the institutions work better. Yeah. And if we have all these problems that are going to come from on the horizon towards us and like screw everything up, we have to solve this problem in order to make us better able to respond to those problems. So I would say that's the argument for why we can't just sweep it on the rug. That's being idealistic. No, actually that's been a battle for a while now. Again, if you look at totalitarian regimes and one of the things that they do is they create the truth, they create the narrative, they demonize anything else and then they switch it so much, this is the Soviet Union did this quite effective, that people just said, just tell me what to believe, like just tell me what I need to think. And that is a very dangerous it makes people very easily manipulated, it makes a manipulatable and it strengthens tribalism quite a bit. We need to have the ability to debate and discuss and to have some trust in some of our institutions. Otherwise, what do we left with? I think we're gonna be left with something much worse. Yes. Yeah, you know. Yeah, like when Hitler came along, right? Yeah. That's what he was giving them the order that people craved that they didn't have at the time and he was, he was elected. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the terrifying thing. Yeah. So, I think what you did is what needs to happen. I don't necessarily think people need to step down, but maybe they do, but I think if they came out and said- It'd be nice if some did. I know. I think if they came out and said- I'd be all for it. And just were honest, like even if they're not honest, this sounds honest to me. We didn't know. We were scared. We acted the way that we thought was best. Here's the mistakes that we made. Let's not make those mistakes again because- That builds trust. I mean, any kind of transparency, any kind of effort in that direction, I think will go a long way with the public. Yeah, and here's how we're not gonna make those mistakes again. Here's the kind of changes we're gonna make in order to make those mistakes. Yes. Again, yeah. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, but I mean, is that possible when many of those people, their pockets were getting lined with the profits from some of these pharmaceuticals? Yeah. Isn't there a lot of, and I'm asking, I don't know for sure. Yeah, so I think so because, look, I will forget, actually I have a lot of empathy for people, cause I was on the other end. Like, so I'm a very pro-liberty person. And I look at history and I know some of the biggest risks. And to human life, which a lot of it revolves around, especially in the 20th century, being oppressed, silencing speech, throwing people in the gulag or whatever. And I also know the danger of viruses and what that has posed to humanity. And my opinion was, tell people the risks and the dangers. If you own a business and you say on your sign, you can't come in here unless you're vaccinated.  That's people voluntarily interacting with each other and protecting themselves and just inform us. And then let's take it step by step because if COVID turned out to be Ebola or something like that, I think that it would have changed. That's where I was. So people on the other end of that, I was like, no, that's not cool. I don't like that. You can't tell me that. Don't tell me what to do with that kind of stuff. But if they came out now and said, hey, this is what we thought. This is where I was. And you know what? The data is showing I was wrong because it didn't help anybody. I don't, I'm forgiven, done. I understand. It was a scary time. It was weird. It was unprecedented in modern times. I mean, the last time we dealt with something like this was Spanish flu and we didn't have social media and technology and all that kind of stuff. So I get it. I think a lot of people would do that. I do. I think a lot of people would be like me, who would be like, all right, no problem. Like I get it. So I don't think it's a problem. I think the issue is they're afraid of doing that because it just gives power to political parties and stuff that can use it. So if I say I'm sorry, I'm wrong. So do you not think there is a financial incentive for a lot of these to continue to push and promote? Oh, of course. So, I mean, if your incentive is better than your salary, that's a real tough thing to overcome, right? And it's already moving in that direction for you. It's easier to probably continue the lie and kick the can down the road than it is to admit you're wrong and then also potentially cut off a stream of income that is greater than the one that you make for your profession. Yeah, there's that. And then it's what Justin said, political fodder. If I say that, the political party on their end is gonna play that clip over and over again and win. So that might be the problem. I don't know, man, but I like what you did. And I think if more people and that's in the medical community and the scientific community did that, they'd rebuild that trust. Because here's my fear. My fear is that we're entering into a time. We see this with media. We see this with, you know, with news and we're seeing that with science. We're entering into a time when nobody's gonna trust anybody. And that's chaos. And people will find somebody to trust, as you point out. They will find somebody. They will find, and it's gonna be whoever's the most charismatic, whoever can write the best, speak the best, whatever, that person will then get the power. And that person will not be subject to the system of checks and balances that is the government. They will have their own source of power, which is not good for, like, yeah. Yeah, that's my biggest, that's 100% my biggest fear. Because look, we work in the fitness industry and I know what that looks like on our end.  And so we're constantly battling that. I'm like, oh, we're gonna do that with everything? You want everything to be like that?  And yeah, the HCG injections you're doing, eating 500 calories a day, that's not a good idea. Like, I had to do that constantly.  Yeah, so that's what I used to do constantly. That's what I was, I did. And for the same reasons we're talking about is to, I was worried that we would lose authority in medicine and we would get the same sorts of results. So I was trying to shore it up. That's why I always was a debunker. That's why I was trying to debunk misinformation. And it was constant. It's never ending. I know you're not in that space necessarily, but like, it's the same as what you're dealing with. I will say this. I actually thought about things based on what you guys are. I don't necessarily think that the leaders need to take responsibility, so to speak. I think if we just have a body, maybe a commission, maybe something that just says, here's what happened that's respected enough. And we have the sorts of changes in government that we need to have in order. I don't know if we're gonna get that, but at least we start with the body that makes that statement that's respected enough. It won't matter what Fauci or Willensky said. Well, isn't that what the CDC is supposed to be for us? Yeah, CDC is not, yeah. I mean, that's what they're saying, right? We could have a commission though that's appointed by the government that could do this, that could like make this. Bipartisan. Yes, and then we could maybe reform, we need to reform the CDC I think, but yeah, it's bipartisan, hopefully bipartisan. It's hard, yeah. It's crazy. You know, here's my optimistic view. I remember when the internet, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when the internet became just widely used and I remember what it was like before. And I remember having this conversation with people, family members and saying the, you know, the cat's out of the bag, the toothpaste is out of the tube. This is going to democratize and decentralize information like the printing press did just much faster. And the printing press, if you know through history caused a lot of problems. Yeah, yeah, there was wars as a result. Yes, they took that a little long time because books take longer to print, but would it result in the enlightenment, renaissance, you know, scientific method, like spreading it, right? So I said, look, they're going to try to control it. They're going to try, but ultimately, I feel like the good information will surface. I feel ultimately will progress. So we're still in this massive filtering process.  But I think ultimately it'll lead to something much better. That's my optimistic. Yeah, we're not going to say, oh, China's great. We're going to like suppress Twitter. We're going to like turn all, we're not going to do that. We're American, right? Like I don't think we're going to do that. Maybe we'll, in the short run, but in the long run, we'll, you know, we see this as a gift. So hopefully it will be a gift and we'll have like a new, you know, revolution of ideas and in science and stuff. So yeah, I do want to point out one thing about vaccines though, because it is important. Vaccines don't reduce transmission. They do for like three to six months, then they don't at all. So people saying like there's no public health basis for vaccine mandates. There's no public health basis for vaccine mandates in universities. It's just a lot of risk. All vaccines or are you referring to the COVID vaccine? COVID vaccine, sorry. What would you, okay, so I'd like your opinion on, what does the data say in regards to somebody, say of our age, healthy individual who got the vaccine versus actually caught COVID and get natural immunity? Who's got the advantage going forward? Well, it's going to be similar. I would say natural immunity is probably going to be better. That's what the data show tends to be better. Assuming you don't get messed up by COVID, you know, of course it's probably safer to get the vaccine from, for many demographics, it's probably safer to get the vaccine for then to get COVID. But as far as immunity is concerned, it's probably natural is a little bit better. Were you familiar with what happened with the supplement NAC during that period of time? I've heard about NAC people in talking about this. So NAC has been around as a supplement for, I don't know, 20, 30 years. And you take it orally and it raises glutathione levels in the system. And there was some data showing that it was efficacious at preventing severe COVID because it connected low glutathione to severe forms of COVID. FDA randomly is like, we're going to make this prescription. NAC is the lucker available over the counter. Now it's since hasn't happened, but I found that very strange. It's so weird. This is another thing I don't understand. It's like why the FDA, why the establishment has gone to war with alternative treatments for COVID. Ivermectin's not going to hurt you, especially if you have a doctor overseeing the administration of it, you use it in reasonable doses. It's super safe. It's super safe. There are some like top events. There's some case reports of toxicity. Usually it's like veterinary grade, Ivermectin. It took a whole tube of it or something. Yeah, like they don't know what they're doing. Well, and the reason they're taking veterinary grade of Ivermectin is because their doctor isn't giving it to them. If their doctor gave it to them, they're like, okay, well, you know, we know that it says, and it doesn't affect COVID outcomes. It doesn't affect one way or the other. So why was there this war against it? It's almost like, it was spiteful. It's like, no, you're not going to take the vaccine. Like it's not going to harm anybody for people to try these alternative things. It's only going to alienate them. Thank you. It's only going to make them upset. Yeah, I think what they were trying to do, if I'm going with the good intentions route, I think what they were trying to do is say, look, we got to get as many people. You can usher everybody to that one option. Like here's what we think works. Here's what we think works. This is the best option.  But instead what they did is they actually created more conspiracy theorists, more people who are alienated, more people that, that's the real cure that they don't want us to have. Like if they just said, eh, it doesn't work and left it alone, I think they would have done way less damage than what they did. Yeah, like it's not like by preventing somebody who believes in ivermectin, preventing them from getting it, suddenly they're going to believe in vaccines. What kind of magical thing is that? If anything, it made people go, it's exactly. The oldens or other thoughts, yeah. Yeah, I know, it's a terrible approach. Okay, so let's talk about the heat that you got for writing your article and some of your positions. Like what was that like for you? You know, what kind of, what kind of response did you get from doing that? Yeah, do you have any friends still? Not on, not online. Of course, like, yeah, people in real life are cool, especially my Republican friends are awesome. I've actually gotten more Republican friends now. I'm like, ironically. It was actually really sad. I mean, I have, I'm actually not political at all. None of my friends are, but the first, I mean, I had really close friendships, just it drove a wedge between us because of how. They got politicized so bad. I stopped talking to my parents for a year about this. Wow. Yeah. Were they on, so you were like super pro lockdown, so were they on the other side? Yeah, they love Trump, all that stuff. Maybe he's so angry, I would yell on the telephone. Man, I'm so many households, I'm sure, went through that. Are you guys cool now? Yeah, we're super cool now, especially after wrote the article, like, we love each other again. What happened to our son? Yeah, so what was the fallout like, when you wrote that article?  Yeah, I mean, as far as med school is concerned, I was worried about getting, like, consequences from med school, like, getting kicked out or something, but, like, my editor was like, you know, if that happens, you'll just go on a Barry Weiss podcast and you'll have a different direction of your career, but it'll be fine. You'll still be rich.  So I was like, okay, we'll try it. Yeah, like, whenever I put the article out, I had, like, a full hour where I wasn't able to respond to my editor. She's like, it's out. I was like, oh, God, like, and I read the title and it was, like, a very, like, provocative title. I didn't come up with the title idea. She did. What was the title again? We were wrong about, the scientific community was wrong about COVID-19 and it cost lives. That's it. Yeah, that's crazy. So, so I was like, I was like, like, I'll be staying home for a week or two? I was, I wanted to, like, send a message back to her being, like, please remove the article. Like, but then I just, like, stayed there. And it took me, like, 30 minutes or an hour to, like, feel normal again. Like, not, I was, like, literally, like, paralyzed sitting there. And then it took, like, a few more hours and I was like, okay, everything's gonna be fine. Yeah, but, like, basically all the people I talked to online, especially my scientist friends, yeah, they think they stopped talking to me. They, like, unfollowed me. Have you not seen anybody... Yeah, they're coming around at all? Come around at all? I mean, that's kind of sad. I also have, but I do have a minority, like, kind of people. Like, do you guys know who Alan Aragon is? Yeah. He's a really cool guy. He's been so cool. And I've always tried to be very cool whenever he's struggle with stuff and he's been super cool. And then there's a few other people, like, yeah, there's definitely, like, supporters and there's definitely, like, probably people in my administration at my school who support and stuff. But it's, like, sort of behind the scenes and it's definitely the minority, for sure. Even the people who don't necessarily disagree with me strongly, like, they see what I'm doing. They're like, ooh, like, gotta stay away from that. Like, whisper to you, like, it's cool. Don't let anybody know we're friends. That type of deal. So it was pretty bad. Mainly the thing is, I thought I could persuade people. I thought I could talk to people who disagreed with me, who were, like, my friends. And I couldn't. And that was just... I don't understand. I still don't fully understand, but... Have you inspired anybody to come out and say the same thing? Like, hey, man, I... It looks like it. It looks like it on Twitter, right? Like, for a month after, there was a bunch of people who apologized, have these, like, tweets and stuff. I thought it was, like, great. I think maybe it has impacted things. It's, like, enabled people to think... Like, just because I did it, like, now other people, it's okay. It was a news week. I did it. Right. Like, now it's a news week. Now it's okay to do it. And maybe that helped people. So... It does feel like the tide is turning a little bit. But they think I'm a grifter. I'm a clout chaser. I'm making all this money. I don't make any money. I almost walked here because I didn't want to pay for the Uber ride. But it was raining too hard. I didn't want to, like, come in a puddle. So I didn't. But, um, yeah, it's alright. You know, whenever you do things you believe in, that's the cool life, you know? That's, like, where the life is cool. Like, do things that are meaningful. I couldn't, like, live a life where I'm not doing, like, the authentic things. Like, how can people live like that? No, I agree. Yeah, you're preaching the choir. 100%. Well, I mean, I really appreciate you and how you communicate, whether I agree with you or not. Although I tend to largely agree with you. I appreciate it. I hope more people say or do this in every space because it's a scary precedent right now. Lots of people are... We're not arguing ideas. We're now just arguing people's character. Your idea is wrong. It's your evil. And that's scary.  And that's a dangerous precedent. I think that's really the first thing that needs to change is the attitudes on the ground. People on the ground need to understand that empathy, compassion, understanding that other people have a different perspective that's different than there's tolerating that perspective and understanding that they're coming from a place that's just different and trying to understand what that place is. That's, like, the first step. Like, all this other stuff about people admitting all this stuff, that's also important. But, like, it really kind of depends on us. And hopefully we can become more like that and more people can become like that. I don't know how to get people to become more like that. I think by making it not so scary to do so. Like, you came out, other people saw it. Okay, he didn't get, you know, crucified. I can do the same thing. So, yeah, so we need to be kinder to each other. Yes, totally. 100%. Be civil. Well, thanks for coming on the show. Kevin, this was awesome. Appreciate you coming down. Thanks for having me.


Cheetahs are beautiful and speedy. There once were more than 100,000 cheetahs living in Africa and Asia. Today, only about 10,000 of the animals remain. Lori Marker is working to keep cheetahs from disappearing. I started working with cheetahs when I lived in Oregon and I ran a wildlife park there. This was back in the early 70s and nobody knew anything about cheetahs and I was fascinated about them. And the more people I asked, they said, when you find out something about cheetahs, let us know. They don't do well in captivity, they have a very short lifespan and we're losing them throughout their ranges in the world. So that just made me fascinated and I wanted to know everything there was about them. Dr. Marker traveled to Namibia to learn more about cheetahs. The country has the world's largest wild cheetah population. Understanding about how the cheetah lives is really important, so understanding its biology and its behavior, understanding the ecology of it, which really revolves around where it's living and how it's living, and that interfaces with humans. In 1990, Dr. Marker created the Cheetah Conservation Fund, a non-profit group based in Namibia.  So Dr. Marker started working with farmers to find ways to help protect their animals from the big cats. In 1994, she began telling farmers about the Anatolian shepherd. This breed has been used for about 5,000 years to protect livestock from predators and they act as a guardian by avoidance. They bark loudly, they tell a predator that they're there protecting the flock and the flock will come around the dog and by the dog barking the predator doesn't want to get hurt and they will then avoid those flocks where the dogs are. Over 15 years, the fund has donated more than 400 dogs to livestock farmers in Namibia. Since our time in Namibia, the population of cheetahs there was about 1,000 to 1,500 individuals. Today it's probably 3,500, maybe 4,000 cheetahs, so we've been able to really grow the population and that's out of a world population of about 10,000. The farmers have reported up to an 80% decrease in farm animal deaths. You're such a good boy. Dr. Marker wants to expand the CCF programs to other countries where cheetahs once lived. If we are not successful, we're going to lose this amazing species in a very short period of time. I'm Mario Ritter.