Robert Tracinski - The Pandemic: Is There Any End in Sight?

Speaker 0 00:00:02 All right. So I'm going to just get this started. Usually there's a, can everybody hear me? I assume you can. And can't talk. All right. So, um, usually there's, I'm here on my own today. Uh, so this is a clubhouse on, is the pandemic finally over? Is there any end in sight? So I want to talk about, uh, what, where we're at, uh, after two, not quite two years of the pandemic. So the first thing to say about them had DEMEC is no, it's not over. Uh, if you look at the numbers, uh, we are actually just coming off of some numbers that are, uh, in terms of cases and especially in terms of deaths that are as high as they've ever been since the beginning of the pandemic. Uh, so, uh, uh, you know, deaths in the thousands per day, uh, somebody estimated that about, uh, over the last, uh, the previous three or four weeks, about 50,000 additional deaths from COVID. Speaker 0 00:01:07 So then all of that is because the Omicron wave does the overcrowd wave is tailing off, which makes us think we're about to leave the end of this, but usually deaths, um, uh, follow the peak of the wave by a couple of weeks. So we're still, you know, a fairly large numbers. They're starting to fall here in Virginia, they are falling elsewhere, but you know, it means the pandemic is not over. If you look just by purely by the numbers, that the number of people dying that pandemic is not over, but there was a hope. And now when I scheduled this, this is I scheduled this, uh, uh, clubhouse a couple of weeks ago. And at the time there was a sort of a hope that the trailing off that the, that the Omicron wave would be the final wave. And the idea is that, uh, the main differences between Omicron and previous waves of the current of, of, of COVID, uh, is that, uh, Omicron is far more infectious, meaning it's far more contained and reformer contagious. Speaker 0 00:02:16 It's far more likely to spread to other people than previous ones. It's, uh, now the, the numbers that they use here, this are the R zero number, which basically means the number of, for every person who gets infected, how many other people do they infect and for measles, which is the high-end the most infectious, uh, was contagious disease out there. It is about 18 people, uh, for COVID, it's probably more like seven. It might be a little higher. And for the, uh, for various, for the Omicron wave of COVID, it's about seven, maybe a little higher for previous waves of Omicron, uh, or so previous waves of COVID did not. Before over Cron, the numbers were more like three or four. So it was, this is much more infectious. It's going to spread to a much larger number of people, a much more geometrically. It's also proven to be so infectious that it's also proven to create a high number of breakthrough cases of people who were already been infected by previous waves, or who have already been vaccinated, where you would think, okay, you're relatively protected, uh, you know, not be perfectly protected, but you're relatively protected. Speaker 0 00:03:27 Larger numbers of those people are, are getting reinfected because this is such a contagious, uh, extreme to the virus. But the hope for Omicron was that that might actually end up being kind of a good thing, because the other thing about Omicron is it is considered less deadly or less, um, less dangerous free, you know, that your, your risk of, of getting the, the, the disease itself is inherently less severe, that it's more on the nose and less than the, in the throat and less in the lungs. And that it has a lower death rate in terms of the number of people who get OMA Cron, who ended up, um, who, who ended up getting hospitalized and ended up dying. So the idea is the hope for Macron was that it would, uh, be more people would get it, but it'd be less deadly. And so what you have is, you know, this would be the way we're finally, everybody finally gets it, but hardly anybody gets sick. Speaker 0 00:04:27 And then, you know, we also the fact that a large number of people around the world have been vaccinated already, especially in developed countries like the United States, not as many as should be, but a large number. So the idea is that, you know, everybody would get it, uh, and everybody get the natural immunity and relatively few people would die. So this would be the final wave. Now it looks, it's a little unclear still whether, so what I wanna say is to the extent that that's going to happen, I want to make the thing I want to say about it is I thought by now in late February, when I scheduled this up by late February, we'll have a really good idea of how that's working well, it's late February. I, like I said, we're still in the tail end of that big Omicron wave. And what happened with Omicron is a lot more people, it turned out to be less deadly in terms of the number of people who get it, who become hospitalized or die is much lower, but so many more people got it that we still have numbers. Speaker 0 00:05:28 We ended up having numbers. This big Omicron spike, the number of deaths ended up being comparable to the previous big waves, the big winter wave of last year, uh, especially where, you know, the, the, the deadliest portion of the pandemic was about this time last year, uh, before the vaccines had really come widely available. And there was a long peak that happened going into February and March and, uh, very large numbers of deaths. That was the highest number up to now. We've pretty much equaled that with the Omicron wave and the mathematics is, uh, is roughly along the lines of it's half as deadly, but twice as many people get infected or twice it's half as deadly, but twice as many people get it. So you end up with roughly the same number of deaths. So we're not quite past that we're going to know in the next couple of weeks, we, you know, we're going to have the drop off. Speaker 0 00:06:25 We're going to know exactly how far we drop off, but there's still kind of an open question. Will this be the last wave? Well, so many people have gotten at this time, and then so many people be vaccinated that we won't have another big wave that comes. And the, unfortunately the, the bad news on that is it looks like that, uh, Omicron has a, uh, a tendency to reinfection. That is, if you, you know, we think, okay, if you have it, you have natural immunity and you won't get it again while they're saying, no, it looks like it might be that you can get reinfected again, you know, after 90 days or so. So people could get Omicron multiple times. It just becomes because of the fact that this is such an incredibly infectious variation on this virus. All right. So we still don't know that. Speaker 0 00:07:17 And that's been a sort of a problem with the, uh, uh, the outlook on this, the, the public reaction to COVID from the very beginning is that the basic problem as I see it, I mean, we can talk about, I'll talk. We can talk a little bit later about the, the CDC and the way it did the messaging and all the mistakes made by the government of which there were many. But the biggest fundamental problem I see is that science is slow. And that is that, you know, if you follow, you know, scientific studies on other topics, what you find is that they will often take years to study a topic years, to go through it and figure out the, you know, uh, you, you, you, you get, you propose, uh, a study, you hit funding for it. You gather your test subjects, you observe them over a long period of time. Speaker 0 00:08:07 You crunch the data, you publish it in a paper, you get responses, somebody else publishes a different study with different results. And then you have back and forth before it, it can take years to come to a solid conclusion about a scientific topic. And of course we don't have here is, you know, it's been less than two years for the whole thing. So people want immediate answers now, and the science is inherently slow, and can't really be, you know, there are certain things you can do to speed it up, but it can't be sped up all that much. So the science is slow, but the public is impatient. And I think that's why you get then, you know, filling that gap, you get the culture where we have over masks and over vaccines, where, you know, people want to be able to take a firm stance on it one way or the other. Speaker 0 00:08:53 Right now they want simple answers, uh, delivered to them without having to wait for the results. And people do a bad job of, of, you know, this is one of the cases we have to make decisions in the face of uncertainty about the long-term consequences of longterm, um, uh, results of what you're going to find out. As the scientific studies get done over a period of years, you can't wait for that. You have to make decisions now. And so, and people are generally very bad at that. They want something very simple. They want to, uh, uh, and, and they want an answer that, you know, is absolute right now when that's not available. So after the pandemic being over, is there an end of the pandemic on site? I think we're, it's not over right now. We're new, we're on the tail end of a big wave. Speaker 0 00:09:46 We don't know how many other waves there might potentially be. So it's unknown to the extent, the extent to which the Omar Cron wave will be the last big wave or whether there is as has been happened before, there's going to be a trough going into the summer and then another big wave in late summer or fall. And then again, in the next winter, that's sort of what happened last year. You know, you had a big peak in the winter, you had a trough, you had another peak of late summer with the Delta wave and then another peak of the winter with the Omer crime wave. That could happen again. We don't know, but what I can tell you is the pandemic is going to be over in one sense, which is people have decided they wanted to be over, right? So the public is done with taking precautions. Speaker 0 00:10:30 That's the big thing that's emerged over the last month or so the public has totally done with taking precautions. They don't want to do anything more. And so I think what we're going to move into, and I predicted this last fall, I think it got kind of delayed by the arrival of the Omicron wave. Uh, got delayed by a couple of months, but I think what we're moving into is what I call the live and let die stage of the pandemic. And that is the idea that people want the freedom to not be told what to do and not be told to, to wear masks or to get vaccinated, you know, and they want that they, they use the, you know, they use that as a, we should be free to make our own decisions. And so the attitude has lifted, you know, so libertarian approach of live and let live, but we're going to do that, but it's going to be not the happy version of live and let live. Speaker 0 00:11:18 It's going to be the unhappy version, which is live and let die, which is that there are going to be a lot of people and this is already happening. They call it, um, the term being used for it is red. COVID that is that, uh, there's a gap that has opened up where in the quote, unquote red states. Now I always object to this terminology because I'm from the, uh, I'm from the era when the reds meant the communists. And somehow in the 1990s, red came to mean conservative, but the so-called red states and, and the, the red, uh, conservative, leading areas have more people who are resisting vaccination, more people who are resisting any kind of any, not just unreasonable measures, but any kind of preventive measures. They want to go back to living totally normal life as if COVID didn't exist. And the odd sort of, uh, somebody stated to the paradox nicely, which is, they said the people most at risk from COVID, which is the people who are unvaccinated, people who have not taken precautions, the, the people who are unvaccinated and therefore at most risk from COVID are the ones who are taking the least precautions. Speaker 0 00:12:22 And the people who, uh, are most likely to be vaccinated and most protected from COVID are taking the most precautions. So it's this weird sort of paradox that the people, at least at risk are taking the most precautions and the people most at risk are taking the least precautions. So I think what we're going to have is a sort of a live and let die pandemic where, or what they call red. COVID where the, the, uh, the people were going to say, you know, you cannot force people. You cannot, there's only so much you can do to save people from themselves. We're going to have to sort of return to normal, but in a way that there are people who have stubbornly, uh, resisted the best protection that they can get against COVID. And so we're still willing to see much higher death rates than, than were necessary. Speaker 0 00:13:07 And I think we're still gonna have, you know, the pit never's gonna drag on for a long time, largely because of the people who have refused to take the vaccine and refuse to be, to protect themselves. Now, that's the flip side, the bad side of it. The good thing is, and I, I think we want to in looking back at the pandemic so far is I hate it when people call this, but somebody talking about the, the, the miracle of the vaccine. Now, it's not a miracle at all. It's science, right? It's the opposite of a miracle. Uh, but what we've done with, with the COVID, uh, uh, COVID-19 is we developed a vaccine using and several other innovations. We developed a vaccine far faster than any previous vaccine and implemented it. And somebody I just saw, I figured that about half the world has now been vaccinated for COVID, which has never, ever, ever before happened in so short a timescale. Speaker 0 00:14:05 And that's the amazing achievement of the pandemic. Uh, there's something I saw recently, somebody said, um, uh, it's called Makia Ann's hypothesis, which is basically that in a situation like this, especially in infectious disease, that the medical interventions to treat it and to prevent it tend to not be implemented until after the whole thing has already run its course. And you can see that with the, you know, the, the flu pandemic, the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago, that, you know, we have that the, the vaccine, the flu, the normal flu vaccine we have, you know, have had for decades now is a vaccine for that particular flu for previous versions of it. Uh, and, uh, the, uh, but you know, that vaccine was not developed until many years after the Spanish flu had already run its course and burned its way through and caused enormous numbers of deaths. Speaker 0 00:15:01 Uh, and this is like the only time I can think of where we sort of, one of the few times when we've short-circuited Bikinians hypothesis, where we've actually brought an effective measure into play to make this significantly less deadly while it was still happening. So that's the enormous achievement of a, I won't call it a miracle. It's an achievement, a scientific and technological achievement, uh, that we should, you know, we look back on the pandemic, we should be very grateful for. And that's the one sense in which the pandemic is over or is becoming over, which is that the data's pretty clear now, especially with Eva, with the, especially with the old crime wave, that the risk of being hospitalized, the risk of dying is much, much, much smaller. It, uh, uh, if you have the vaccinated and especially if the vaccinated and had the booster, so there's one sense of which is over, which is if you want it to be over and you're willing to take that preventive measure then for you, it is largely over. Speaker 0 00:16:04 Uh, but it means also that, you know, there's that second track where if you refuse to take those precautions, then for those people, that pandemic is going to drag on, uh, in some way, uh, for a significant period of time. All right. So that's the main thing I wanted to do is the overview. And I think in the discussion, I'd like to, you know, maybe talk a little bit about what the government did, what it, and especially what it did wrong and, and the extent to which, um, uh, uh, we had, uh, uh, some of the lessons we can draw from that, uh, about measures. Uh, now I am usually not in charge of bringing people up onto the stage. So I think you can raise your hand, uh, if you want to, and I can invite you onto the stage if you want to talk And invite Scott up here, if he wants to, Speaker 1 00:17:09 Hey there, Hey there, I'm sorry. I didn't, uh, no, uh, no one asked me to do this one, but, uh, Speaker 0 00:17:17 Well, I don't know what happened, but that's fine. We'll wing it. This is, you know, I don't know if you have anything to say or if anybody else, Speaker 1 00:17:24 I mean, yeah. I, I, you know, for me, I just, I have become jaded enough on this kind of scientific establishment that I have trouble believing that they're going to just ever say it's over until something happens as a catalyst from outside. Speaker 0 00:17:49 Okay. So, yeah, let's talk about that. A couple of times, one thing is I think that the way I've been following it, I don't want to talk about the scientific establishment, but there's lots of scientific sources that if you follow it, it's one of these things where if you actually follow what is being done, scientifically it's not as confusing or as, um, uh, as a dishonest, as it might seem from the outside, if the confusing political messaging that comes around it. And I think what we've had is we've had the pandemic has become a football in the culture wars, right? And, uh, so you have, and that's on both sides. You have the people who are, you know, uh, uh, the sort of teacher's unions types. So we're saying no, the schools have to stay closed. We have to have complete masking in the schools, which is, I think the most dubious anti pandemic message measure we've had, um, because they're maintaining their side of the culture war because they have to be the opposite of, you know, the Maka types who were saying, no, this was all made up. Speaker 0 00:18:55 It's all, it's just the flu with all bogus. Who've been saying that from the very beginning, I also think there's a, a major problem that happened with the public messaging, especially from the CDC. And I think the thing is the CDC in addition to everything else, I think one, it's like a very subtle thing, but the CDC I think was designed is public health messaging was designed around an era of mainstream media and the big three television networks that it was designed around this idea that you have this very centrally planned and controlled release of information. And you'd have people to CDC deciding what's the exact best message to send out, you know, in their little, their little cluster, uh, and then a little conference hall conference room, and then they would send that out. And, uh, it would be adhered to, by everyone else, uh, by, by the, the gatekeepers and the mainstream media. Speaker 0 00:19:54 And they would have this very high level of central control over the information. And what I think happened instead is that this is the modern world, that access to information is so widely spread. And I think thinking I'm obsessed with the idea that no, we have to have our people controlling the message, and we can't admit to any uncertainty of the data. And I also think that their, their public health messaging remember they haven't had a pandemic of this type for a hundred years. So their messaging was also based around small and temporary events where you come up with a message. You, you send it out there and it doesn't last very long. So, you know, this goes back to this issue. I was saying earlier about slow science versus fast. Decision-making right, there's this big crisis as big emergency, huge numbers of people dying. Speaker 0 00:20:46 And you have to decide what to do. Politicians want to decide, need to decide what to do about it. And individuals need to decide what to do about it, you know, on a scale of weeks or months, whereas the science takes years to go. So I think they're used to the idea that, well, we just come up with a message. We send it out there and by the time all the science comes in and catches up, but we start to decide, oh, well, we were wrong about that. The whole thing will be over and nobody will ever, you know, w w we'll study that at a scientific conference, but the public won't won't care. Well, when the thing lasts two years, what happens is you have science going back and forth on well, does do masks work or not? What kind of masks work do cloth masks really work two and 95 masks work, or, you know, the exact information about how transmissible it is, uh, to what extent to, to mandates or lockdowns work. Speaker 0 00:21:41 All of that takes, you know, as, as more information comes out about that, you can't have that sense of, we control the messaging and we will never, um, admit to uncertainty because what's going to happen is the uncertainty is going to catch up with you, right. Where, you know, a much better approach would have been early on to say, well, we don't know, here's, there's all sorts of things. We don't know. We're going to give you our preliminary views, and we're going to have this very transparent, uh, discussion of the information. Uh, and you're never going to prevent the conspiracy theorists from latching on to things and, you know, uh, uh, abusing the data. Uh, but at the same time, uh, you have to acknowledge in order to keep up your credibility, you have to acknowledge that uncertainty. And I think they had this very, I mean, the CDC from the beginning when they're their biggest first blunder in the independent DEMEC was that they had to have control centralized control over all testing for the, for COVID, which meant that we basically never got testing off the ground really, honestly, on a large scale on the, on the scale we needed, uh, in America, we never got it off the ground, even now we're still playing catch up. Speaker 0 00:22:49 So, uh, uh, they all had to have everything so centrally controlled, uh, from, from the CDC headquarters that they were really unable to respond profitably. I think that's, you know, one of the big lessons that come out of this is going to be the failure of that central planning mentality. Um, now let me see if I can, is there anybody else who wants to hop on board? I don't know if there's a way to raise your hand or something like that. Speaker 1 00:23:11 I'm going to make me a model. I can bring people up as well. Speaker 0 00:23:15 How do I do that? Speaker 1 00:23:19 Um, but, uh, in the meantime, you know, there is just kind of this, um, thing that happened. It seems over the 10 years, you know, the last 10 years I I'm in Florida, and it just seemed like FEMA and all these people would get more shrill about every hurricane coming and just saying, you know, oh, if you're gonna stay at your house, just, you know, put your, put your ID on your toes. So, uh, we can, uh, identify you with the morgue. And, and I just think that that ended up becoming, I'm not saying that, you know, precautions didn't need to be taken, but it's the whole way that, you know, they couldn't have anyone questioning lock downs, or even when they changed their mind on masks from, you know, they said it wasn't important when they were trying to make sure all the doctors had masks and then, you know, switched on a dime when once they were supplied and wanted everyone to have masks. Speaker 0 00:24:15 Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you know, on the one hand though, here on the other hand, though, I think that I've seen a lot of people use the bad messaging, the poor messaging of the government as kind of a crutch or an excuse, right? So the fact that the CDC has had bad messaging or government agencies have had bad messaging, you should expect that it's the government you should expect. They don't do things well, but it doesn't excuse you from the responsibility as either as a private individual, or especially as someone, if you're someone in the media, it doesn't excuse you from this responsibility for being responsible for yourself and saying, okay, you have to go with good sources of information. So I see people basically saying, you know, the CDC, you know, they, they flocked to sort of conspiracy theorists and people who are minimizing COVID and they sort of have this, the CDC made me do it kind of attitude, you know, that you are responsible for coming up as you always are for coming up with good information. Speaker 0 00:25:13 And that I want to lead to this question about mandates and lockdowns. So I think mandates the lockdowns tend not to work, but it's not because the thing that is being mandated doesn't work it's because the act of mandating it is generally ineffective. Uh, so for example, when it came to the lockdown, when it came to the early lockdowns, um, that people say, oh, well, places that have lockdowns didn't really do much better than the places that didn't have lockdowns, but that's largely because of the individual, the behavior of individuals moved faster and moved with less control than the planners. Yo thought, you know, th th there's always in the public health. So the public health field, there's this thing that first of all, they are inclined to be, they have an incentive to always, you know, do that sort of like, you know, if you're going to stay in your house, put a, put a toe tag on so we can identify your corpse because if any, cause if, if people don't evacuate, it makes them, you know, and, and it turns out to be a huge disaster. They, you know, th they get the blame, so they don't want to be blamed for anything. That's their, that's their, you know, the, the basic bureaucratic incentive. Oh, by the way, Scott, I did make you a moderator. So if you want to put anybody on Speaker 1 00:26:29 Yeah. Some of that was post-Katrina when they used it to make Bush, seem like a terror because of his slow response. Speaker 0 00:26:38 Yeah. Well, the thing that was bugged me about Katrina though, is, you know, this is a failure. Well, first, all, it was fair. It was a failure primarily on the state local level, in the hurricane response. And of course, you know, but no, but those were all Democrats, so you can't blame them. So we had to blame Bush. Um, but also what really bothered me was that Katrina hit very, it was very devastating in Mississippi, not just in new Orleans, but across the river and in the state of Mississippi. But nobody wants to talk about that because again, you couldn't make political hay out of it. And that's, you know, that's part of the overall problem with our politics is that, uh, everything becomes part of the usual partisan battles. Everything becomes a football of the culture wars. Uh, but, but I do want to say that, you know, what I think is the other, uh, sort of folly of the central planners is thinking that I can mandate a lockdown and that's going to make all the difference when actually what they're generally doing is they're lagging. Speaker 0 00:27:36 The first of all, they're liking behind the behavior of, of acts of private individuals. So when they declared the lockdowns, it was about two weeks after, uh, activity at restaurants and activity at large gatherings, et cetera, all of that had already gone through the floor as people stayed home of their own volition. Uh, that was one of the things. And then at the same time, you know, they, when they post the lockdowns, there were still people going out and going to gatherings. And, you know, so the people who are going to listen to you about walking down were already locked down and the people who were not going to listen to you basically just didn't follow the order or found various ways to get around it. So the, you know, there's a lot of overconfidence, uh, involved in the house and mandates a lockdown. So we're seeing that with vaccines that, you know, you can mandate the vaccine, but that doesn't mean that people actually go out and get vaccinated. Speaker 0 00:28:29 Uh, and so, uh, and then you'll end up with, you know, these, these, the increasingly stubborn and angry resistance, like you're seeing in Canada, I think in Canada, they've had stricter government controls than we've had in the U S so you can see they're reacting against that. So, you know, I think that the, the hubris of the central planner thinking I'll, I'll pass a mandate, all impose something from Washington DC, and that will solve the problem when it actually really accomplishes relatively little, the people who were likely to agree with you, that this was a good idea. I have already complied. And the people who don't agree with you, aren't going to comply. And, you know, you're not really going to be able to put in the, the draconian enforcement methods necessary to make them do that. So there's been this tremendous overconfidence, and it said, you know, where you should have been focusing on messaging and education and convincing people, the act of persuasion, you know, I think there is some role for government indepen DEMEC. Speaker 0 00:29:28 I think the role, the proper approach is one that we never even tried, which is what the test and trace approach, where you test people, you do mass testing and contact tracing and what they did in South Korea with largely successful. Although they've, they've had a hard time dealing with Omicron cause it's so infectious. Uh, but up to that, they've had a fraction of the number of deaths, the fraction, the number of hospitalizations we've had, uh, because they did the and with much less disruption to society. So, uh, to, to their normal activity. Uh, but it's something we never even tried here. I think that would be an illegitimate use of government power, but you know, this is, but the idea of just sort of the central command approach, I think has largely proven to be, uh, irrelevant or ineffective. Speaker 1 00:30:17 And, uh, we also want to invite others to come up on the stage. If you have a question, just raise your hand and we'll bring you up. Um, I have to, you know, I hope this isn't too off topic, but I'm just curious to Leonard Peikoff came out last week and made a comment in full support of the truckers. I'm curious if you'd heard that, and if you have any thoughts, Speaker 0 00:30:41 I'm not in full I, wasn't a full support of the chakras. I want to say that since that happened, the big change has happened is that, uh, and this is so emblematic of our times, right? That, um, the, the, you know, the minute you start to criticize one side, the other side goes out and does something awful. And so you have to criticize them. So we're the current context what's going on? Is that the Canadian government? Uh, I think so. Let's start back on the truckers. I think there was a legitimate complaint against the truckers. I do not like the idea of basically a blockade, which is what they were doing. Right. You have a legitimate right to protest. You don't have a right to blockade. You don't have right to go into somebody else's neighborhood and essentially occupy it. I sort of thought of the trucker convoy in Canada as occupy wall street, but for conservatives and I also strongly disagreed with the cause that the truckers had, which is that, uh, from what I could tell it again, coming from a distance here, uh, this is, you know, Canada, Canada is like a whole other country. Speaker 0 00:31:42 It's kind of hard to figure out what's going on there. Uh, so, uh, but from what I could tell there, mean, it was mainly driven by people who were anti-vaccine. So, you know, there's this, I think we have to sort of differentiate between, we could sit here and talk about how well vaccines are good, but government shouldn't be mandating them. Uh, and that's, uh, there's, there's a really good argument. There's an argument to made there, this an argument. I think those arguments we made in favor of vaccine mandates, but, you know, it's sort of the libertarian, I call it libertarian debate club. You know, we, the, the, the sort of principle, uh, laissez Faire people consider honored debate, theoretically, what's the right approach. But in practice, what I could tell from that, from what I could tell the trucker, uh, convoy is, it was mostly people who were against the vaccine. Speaker 0 00:32:29 They didn't want to take the vaccine because they thought the vaccines were bad. They were forced to, well, no, but I see, I looked for that. I, they are, they baking, we, we think the vaccine is fine, but we don't want to be forced. An awful lot of them were basically against the vaccine. All right. So that's one thing I've been noticing, like, for example, there's a, I think it was in, uh, Illinois. No, it wasn't Illinois. It was, oh gosh, you're going to miss. I, I just saw this and now I can't remember what state, somewhere in the Midwest, maybe it was Indiana. There was a state legislator who introduced a law that would ban private companies from mandating the vaccine. Right? So this isn't, we're against the government vaccine mandating the vaccine. It's like a private company can't ask you, can't tell you, you have to get vaccinated. Speaker 0 00:33:22 So it was very, and what I've been seeing, especially online over, over the past month is that, uh, uh, opposition to the mandates spills over to opposition, to the vaccine. And that's so much emblematic of our politics right now because people don't have this concept of, uh, was it, uh, uh, you know, either something's either mandatory or it's, or it's, uh, or it's prohibited, uh, they don't have a concept of, you know, if, uh, if something shouldn't be mandated there, they don't have this concept. They don't have the concept of freedom, uh, uh, that, that sort of find differentiations. They have this idea that, you know, either something should be it's like the debates had a good formulation for it. And I'm trying to recover that. Uh, it's I find it similar to the debates over, uh, over wokeness and critical race theory in schools, right? Speaker 0 00:34:14 So either you have the one side that wants to mandate that woke this, be imposed on everybody in schools, and then you have the other side that wants to pass laws, banning anybody from mentioning anything, even related to critical race theory. So you have, you know, it's not a question of, of people being free to make their own decisions. It's really a question of who's in charge my side of your side, and that's so typical things. And I, I think you can see that in the reaction to the trucker convoy in Canada, where instead of saying, look, we're just going to use the ordinary traffic rules. We're going to tow the cars that are blocking the bridges. We're going to tow the trucks and pound the trucks that are blocking, uh, downtown Ottawa. They said, no, we're going to oppose the state of emergency with special emergency powers. Speaker 0 00:35:00 And we're going to track down the financing and we're going to freeze people's bank accounts and this incredible, you know, overreach, uh, uh, that sort of goes, the Krantz has 500 years of calm of British common law. Uh, and suddenly, you know, give the truckers what I think is unmistakably legitimate grievance against the Canadian government. Uh, so again, it's one of these things, but, uh, but, uh, I also noticed in that video were below that, or Peikoff came out for the truckers. What I found really interesting was that Amy Peikoff was trying so hard to get Leonard to, uh, sign off on being anti-vaccine, uh, because she's flipped to that side. Uh, and I was glad to see that at least he resisted that part. Okay. Speaker 1 00:35:46 Well, I think that, um, I want to get the bill, but I just want to say, I think that part of what they're responding to, uh, is this pressure on businesses from, you know, the establishment to have a vaccine mandate like Biden basically explicitly did, even after the Supreme court struck down the OSHA mandate. Speaker 0 00:36:12 Well, yeah, there's always pressure on businesses. I mean, I think the thing is though that, that actually passing a ban saying businesses cannot require people to come back, send it, did that really shows, uh, this attitude of, it's not about freedom. It's about who's in power, my side or your side. Uh, and like I said, I see in seeing a lot of the anti-vaccine approach, gaining a foothold on the conservative side, because they can't, again, it's this thing. If we can't, they can't take that, that, that, uh, principled approach of we're for this, but against coercing, it, it puts weight. When I hear libertarian arguments coming out of conservatives, I'm always suspicious because it's usually in my experience, it's usually, and in this case, I think definitely it's, it's very opportunistic, right? They don't really, if, if they believed in this whole, these fine distinctions of, well, it's good, but we shouldn't, the government should mandate it. Speaker 0 00:37:10 If they believed those fine distinctions, they would have totally different views on a whole range of other topics. Uh, so I think conservatives grab what looks like a libertarian position. I'm always very suspicious of that as a, it's a superficial opportunistic thing. And I've been sort of seeing that, that the work we're not against the facts we're against the mandate keeps slipping into we're against the vaccine. And I think that those, these laws proposing, oh, well, we should, we should ban private companies from mandating vaccines for their employees that slips into the, uh, we're just against the vaccine kind of outlook. Speaker 1 00:37:48 Well, bill, thank you for your patience. Speaker 2 00:37:52 Okay. I wanted to slip in a little factual observation here, according to my sources, most of the truckers were in fact vaccinated. Their protest was actually against the mandates, not against the vaccine itself, although of course, I'm sure in that 10% that were not vaccinated, you can find an anti-vax people. So I do not think that categorizing them as anti-vaccine is accurate. Um, that's one point. The other thing is that we do not live in an ideal society. We also do not live in a tyranny. Um, and so I'm of the opinion that when the normal, um, methods of dealing with, uh, government wrongdoing, uh, are not effective or are not available then protest, it is the appropriate thing to do, um, between, um, doing nothing on the one hand. And on the other hand, um, uh, you know, taking up your guns and going after the government. So I, I I'm with Peikoff, although I disagree with most of the, what the, what I read listened to it in his thing, cause it was basically conservative talking speech and I didn't approve of that. Um, but I agree with his conclusion, the truckers were within their rights, um, to, to, uh, protest, even if it inconvenienced a lot of people. Um, so I think that's my Sam. Speaker 0 00:39:23 Uh, okay. So I want to talk briefly about the, the, the, cause the motivation of the truckers. So it's hard to gauge from a distance. Like I said, Canada is like a whole other country it's, it's strange up there. Um, and I've been working hard to try to find that w one of the things that tipped me over the edge is I saw a widely shared article, uh, that started out with, I think it was a very Weiss's, um, uh, common sense, uh, sub sec, widely shared article proposing to say, here's what the truckers want. And it starts out by saying it's not really about the vaccine. And then every single person she interviewed was somebody who had refused to take the vaccine and was, you know, thought the vaccine was dangerous or something like that. So it was like, yeah, I've rarely seen an article where the first, the initial thing that tells you what the article is going to be about is so completely contradicted by the actual subject of the article. Speaker 0 00:40:14 Um, but you know, so that's that again, that's something I've tried to gauge from a distance I'm trying to figure out and you get a lot of very partisan sources telling you somebody assuring you, oh, 90% of them are vaccinated. And you're like, well, how do you know, how can you tell? Um, so I think 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, but that's not necessarily the subset that's there at that protest. But I think the much more interesting topic as the one, you, second one, you brought up, which is the, the ethics of protest. And it's something I think maybe we'll do a whole other clubhouse on this. At some point I'm trying to go out and concurrently for, I think I'm going to do some stuff on it at symposium. I want to do it at more of a 30,000 feet level where it's like, let's not just talk about the details of this one protest. Speaker 0 00:41:00 Let's talk about, you know, the Boston tea party. Let's talk about the whiskey rebellion. Let's talk about the, uh, uprising in 2014 in Ukraine that kicked out the Putin backed government. Let's talk about all these different, you know, let's talk about occupy wall street and let's talk about the Capitol hill autonomous zone in, in Seattle. Let's sort of look at all these different examples and talk about what are the principles in terms of when should you protest? How can you protest what's appropriate for different kinds of, uh, conditions. And I think it's something objective as I've never really talked about because we're not the protesting type. Right. Um, and I think that's probably all the better for us because we've been the, uh, let's write articles, let's write books, let's advocate for ideas types. So to think is way more effective. The thing I'm both disagreed about and which I found almost kind of sad in that Peikoff video was, he said, things are so terrible. Speaker 0 00:41:56 He's always been a things are so terrible guy. He's been very, he always has a pessimistic outlook things. Us are terrible. We're so close to tyranny, writing a book, isn't going to change anything. Now we need to do action. And I thought, well, it's this letter Peikoff talking. Cause this is a guy who spent his whole life basically advocating that no advocating ideas since the only thing is going to change something. So it was almost sort of like sad to see that sort of surrender to that outlook. I totally disagree. I think writing books and articles and having clubhouses and talking about things, it might, I've been to protests. I've been I've, I've went to tea, party protests and things like that. And writing articles and talking and advocating is way more effective than anything we did with, with the massive, we had massive protests talking to people and writing articles it's way more effective than any of that. Speaker 0 00:42:43 But I think this an interesting coldish and discussion. I know we're getting sort of down to the end here so we can pursue this if you'd like, because I think there are, there's a certain level of protest of just like going out in the street and holding signs and saying, here's where we stand. It's always, you know, there's no reason that should ever be banned or there's anything ever anything wrong with it, but then you get to, you know, civil disobedience breaking the law, blockading bridges, uh, blocking traffic, uh, and then, you know, there's these various steps all the way up to yo insurrection, like on the far end of things, where you actually are going out and, you know, you're the whiskey rebellion you're going out and you're, you're hanging the tax collectors, uh, or, or whatever. And, you know, you have to have extreme provocation that th that the greater, the more forceful your method of protest, the more, the more extreme, the kind of provocation that would be required to, to make that justified. And I think generally forcible protest where you're blocking people where you're blockading a city, all that sort of thing is only necessary. Only justified to the extent that you are being blocked from using ideas and words that you're being blocked from using speech to affect what the government does. So that's my, but we could go, we could go with, Speaker 1 00:44:02 Yeah, that could be its own show. And, uh, maybe we should talk about doing that. Uh, but I, I do, uh, want to get Roger in before getting a TAs founder, David Kelly, and, um, Roger, thank you for your patience. Speaker 3 00:44:18 Yeah. Now this is exactly that the reason I raised my hand is, is, is to ask the question, well, what is an effective form of protest? And, uh, it sounds like we probably need a room to get into this conversation in a thorough way. Um, but I I'll say this from a distance. I look at what happened in Canada with the truckers, and I thought to myself, Hey, look, here's a large amount of people that are now actually saying, you know, enough is enough. Um, and the observation that I had that I thought was interesting is that, uh, the people that we typically hear that we need a revolution from are people that are on the left and that what they say is that the workers are gonna rise up. Well, here are the workers rise up and then the left threw them under the bus. Speaker 3 00:45:06 And, and so like, I, I'm now confused like it, you know, the right doesn't like the way that the left protests, the left, doesn't like the way that the right protests. And, uh, I, I, I'm kinda confused on, on what the heck are we supposed to do if we decide that protesting is what we ought to do. And, and, and let's remember that, you know, uh, some things are worth protesting, other things are not. And, and in, in the grand a sense of a protest, you know, I, I could think that the, the American revolution, you know, if that was a revolution that, that started with a protest and when the government didn't, uh, you know, recognize, you know, the rights, uh, that the people, uh, demanded then, uh, then it was, then it was worthy of a fight. And I, I, I w I wonder, uh, I don't necessarily think that not trusting vaccines is certainly not a reason to fight, but when these encroachments that we're seeing over time on individual rights, um, you know, again, I think this was probably like, would be better set up for another room where, you know, like, what is the proper provocation to, uh, you know, to have a protest. Speaker 3 00:46:19 And, and, and where do you take these protests if the government is not recognizing your rights? Like how, like, at what point do you know that it's okay to use your trucks to blockade, uh, trade routes? And at what point is it, uh, is it maybe even justified to take that protest even further? And, uh, and, and why is it that we're also hypocritical about, you know, oh, that protest is bad because I don't believe what they're protesting for is, is a good idea or worthy of protest. And I, and like, I would just, I would love to see personally, people just be more ideologically, uh, you know, consistent, uh, you know, w when we observed these protests, uh, I, I certainly think that, uh, property damage and, uh, hurting innocent people is there's really no place for that. Um, but, but short of that, like, I think, I think that, uh, well, a well-oiled machine of, of good intention and I, and I love the distinction that you make Rob between the, um, you know, th the people that are anti mandate and the people that are anti-vax, uh, and there is this bleeding in, uh, I hear a lot of people say, oh, I'm, pro-vaccine, I'm pro science, I'm pro medicine. Speaker 3 00:47:32 I'm just anti mandate, but then every word that comes out of their mouth after that is all of these reasons of why people should be worried about the vaccine rather than, you know, talking about the mandate. So, uh, anyways, like, I don't even know if I'm, if I'm looking, if I'm asking a concise question, maybe just, uh, reemphasizing the need for an additional room to talk specifically about protests. Speaker 0 00:47:57 Okay. So tell you what I think next week I'm talking about, I have a topic already set up for next week. I have a whole list of topics for the lease after that, that I don't think they've been fully set yet. So I'm going to get in contact with the people at Atlas society, and two weeks from now, I think we talked about protests. I think it's a whole topic, but, you know, Roger, the really simple rule here, though, it's actually quite simple at the end people I like are entitled to protest people. I don't like are not entitled to protest very simple role, very easy to remember. Speaker 0 00:48:29 Um, so that's, that's the working definition of most people have a mayor member about this time last year, uh, during some of the, uh, black lives matter demonstrations, that there were a lot of conservatives insisting, you had a right to run protestors down with your car. If they blocked you in the street. And then these are the same people saying, no, no, no, that's the trucker thing is totally different. Uh, so again, it's like people I like are, are, you know, people I like can protest and people, I don't like aren't entitled to protest. Then that's the working definition most people have. So I think we definitely do another whole room on it, but anything more about that, about the pandemic and whether it's winding down. And, and basically what I'm proposing here is we have a reluctant truce of sorts, uh, or a tragic truth of sorts where, uh, we, I think you'll the Kenny Tarkir thing is an indication that the point at which you can mandate this on people, the point at which you can sort of, you know, the, the vaccines work, but the point at which you can save people from themselves has sort of, you know, you get to very rapidly diminishing returns on that. Speaker 0 00:49:34 And to some extent, we current have to accept the live and let die solution, which is, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll, we're not going to force you to do this, but you're going to be the one primarily to pay the price for it. Uh, just by the nature of the pandemic is not going to be over for you. It's going to continue to dribble on, uh, uh, and fortunately we, those of us who are vaccinated are mostly, uh, you know, protected to a fairly high level every time you say live and let the, I get the Paul McCartney song of mine plus, or minus depending you could blame me or thank me for that. It's one of the better ones, I think, musically Dr. Kelly, thank you for joining us. Oh, Speaker 4 00:50:18 Sure. I just, uh, I want to thank Rob for a very, uh, intelligent and well-informed, uh, presentation. And I, uh, I think this issue of protest is a great one for notes, its own topic. I just want to throw one thing into the mix. Um, bill mentioned the, um, you know, crack the word. It makes the economy where principles are mixed and people have trouble isolating good principals for bad ones. And, um, but on top of that, many people don't function really in terms of principles and the very concrete bound and the pro physical protests like that, of the community and truckers, um, make a point to make headlines, you know, Rob, you know, you're, you're a prominent author, you get a lot of attention. I I've done some things that have gotten some attention, but nowhere I've never been on the front page of the wall street journal or in post or anything like that, the preppers have been. And so I think there's, there's some role here, and this is pretty culturally sensitive. I'd much rather live in a world where people functioned in terms of ideas, but we, that's not our world right now. And, um, so more power to, uh, to you in setting up, uh, you know, a follow-up session. I think it would be very interesting. So anyway, thanks. Speaker 0 00:51:43 Oh, thanks. Yeah. So, you know, the thing is that, uh, the, the, uh, I'm kind of digging into the material for next week, but just to part of the problem with the question of protests is that the whole theory of, of protest has largely been developed by the far left, right? So there's a whole theory of protest. That's based around the idea that the people will rise and we will have, uh, finally have the, uh, uh, the, uh, the revolution that overthrow capitalism. And every time I look, you know, look, I've just in the last week or last few days I was looking for what's out there. What are people saying about the ethics of protest? And almost all of it comes from the ethics of protest is about how we have the people rise up against the capitalist system. And it's all just from a totally leftist, uh, viewpoint that, you know, they assume that when the people rise up, they're going to rise up on our side. And of course they don't. And that was Roger's point about how, you know, they keep saying the people, the proletarians going to rise and the workers rise up, but it's for something they didn't expect. Um, Speaker 4 00:52:48 I agree. And I just, uh, I'll just throw in here that, uh, you know, Atlas shrug is in his own way, the ultimate, uh, protest, uh, novel and movement. Um, and, uh, I, it's interesting. I, I hope, you know, if we do this again, uh, you know, a full session on protesting, um, the withdrawal of the sanction of the victim is, um, of a piece with, I think, uh, but more sophisticated than similar, um, protest by Martin Luther king Gandhi and others. So, Speaker 0 00:53:25 Um, yeah. So in, in my book on Atlas shrugged, I have a whole chapter comparing Atlas shrugged to Vaclav hobbles manifesto, uh, the power of the powerless, because it's also, and I was amazed. I had, I hadn't looked at it. I, I was amazed at the parallels because it's also about this idea of basically withdrawing your sanctioned, withdrawing. Your has that the famous example of the, uh, the grocer who puts a sign in his window, it says workers of the world unite, and he doesn't care about the workers of the world United. And he does it because he's afraid. He's afraid that he'll be in trouble. If he doesn't put this sort of symbolic show of support for the regime. And, you know, his whole thing is withdraw that sanction, stop putting the sign in your window, uh, and go basically form alternative institutions in ideas. And, uh, you know, are not supported by the regime and start doing things. He doesn't say go to a valley, but he says, you know, basically create your own parallel life, a parallel life where you're living inside, living within the truth. That's the term he uses. So it's, it's a really interesting parallel. So there is that there is a sort of objectivist theory of protests that I think could be developed, but like I said, we're not the protesting types. We haven't done it. Speaker 4 00:54:42 Yeah. Rob, thanks. I haven't got that. Put that chapter in your book. I would, would I be ruining with great pleasure? Um, I, you know, I would just recommend everyone get, uh, Rob's book who, so who is on rent? Uh, so who is John Galt anyways? Is that correct? Speaker 0 00:54:59 Yes. That's it. Um, Amazon and, uh, you know, the finer internet spots near you, uh, sorry. Anybody have anything they want to bring out about the pandemic, uh, to, to finish out because I think where we're at right now is see what I don't like about it though, is there is a certain subjectivism to the attitude I'm seeing on a lot of people, especially on the conservative side. And the subjectivism is, I think it was Barry Weiss went on bill Maher show and said, I'm done with the pandemic. I was like, well, you don't get to decide whether you're done with the pandemic, right? Yeah. It's the ride's view of the whole yacht. You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. You don't get to decide whether you're done with the pandemic. The pandemic decides whether it's done with you. Speaker 0 00:55:44 Um, so, you know, that has to be determined, not by your personal fatigue or by your being fed up with restrictions. It has to be decided, you know, like, and this goes to the issue. I was saying if the personal responsibility, um, it's like, you know, the government mandates that you wear a seatbelt, does that mean you should rebel against wearing seat belts? Well, no, you will. You, you know, you as an individual, make your own decisions and decide yes. Wearing a seatbelt is a good idea. Uh, so again, you know, you, you have to do the extent and put it this way to the extent that you don't want government mandating things to you and telling you what to do that almost your personal responsibility to say, I have to go out and decide what the evidence indicates, what the best thing is to do and what measures I should be taking to protect myself and the people around me. Speaker 0 00:56:35 And in my case, you know, I, I take more protective measures, probably the most people do because although I don't consider myself to be at particularly great risk, I'm, you know, I'm at the area of, uh, if I were unvaccinated, I'd have above average risk at my age range. But, uh, it's because I've got, you know, my, I spent a lot of time with my parents. They live nearby, they're almost 80 years old. I'm focused on, you know, there are going to be more, even though they're vaccinated, they're still going to be more vulnerable. And of course I can, I have the luxury, you know, I'm not, I don't have kids in public schools, by the way, I have to $2 that I'm a lot less angry about pandemic restrictions. And I always have to remember remind myself that the reason I'm not less angry is I don't have kids in public schools. Speaker 0 00:57:20 So my kids were not abandoned by their teachers. Uh, you know, as they were in some of the, especially in some of the big cities like New York and in Chicago, my kids were not abandoned by the public school system for over a year. So that makes me significantly less angry about the whole issue. Um, so, uh, but you know, I have the ability as a writer to also have less contact in the world and withdraw more. And it comes to me naturally to not want to spend too much time with people. Uh, so, uh, you know, it's a lot easier for me to do it and I perhaps let have less fatigue, but again, the responsibility is on you to decide, uh, and, and to get the best objective, objective information you can, and to make your decision, um, regardless of what the government's telling you to do one way or the other. Speaker 1 00:58:10 Well, Rob, thank you very much for taking on the topic in the first place. Uh, I think it's a great sign when one topic kind of leads to another it's building like the hierarchical nature of knowledge. So, uh, we'll see, uh, what comes of, uh, the next show. Maybe we'll see if we can set something up on here and healthy debates. Um, but, uh, thank you to everyone who joined us and, um, who participated and, uh, thank you. We'll uh, see you again next time. Speaker 0 00:58:44 Thanks everyone. See you next week. Speaker 1 00:58:47 Thanks Scott.