Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLdRZlrwvAI
[Music] what's up how are you i am delighted to be here delighted to have you thanks for reaching out man yeah nice to talk to you it's been nice to get to know you you too you too thanks are you enjoying texas yeah i you know it's funny i hadn't been to austin in some time and it's it's changed in a in a really good way i was staying at a hotel downtown walking around tons of cool restaurants and i guess austin city limits has their little stage that's downtown yeah there was a big thing going on there last night and it was great yeah they've recovered it's uh a few months ago it was pretty rough with the tents and all the homelessness stuff but they moved those folks into hotels and they've uh purchased some hotels have they done that yeah they've done the mayor's done a good job of trying to like clean up the situation it's all over the country anywhere you go any big city you have this fairly unique situation in terms of like modern times of people camping on the street i mean i don't remember that as a child do you remember when did you remember first seeing tents i mean you know i grew up in small towns in the midwest yeah i was never living i never lived in big cities i think i saw it sometimes when i when i visited those cities maybe when i was a kid but it wasn't the thing it was very rare it was very rare for sure yeah i think maybe california to be honest was the first time i really saw it you know i just i was just back in l.a a couple of weeks ago and it's overrun it's crazy it's just i don't know how they ever fix it are you uh are you happy with your move i love it here yeah yeah yeah where do you live i'm in atlanta yeah i'm not from there but we moved there uh about 20 years ago now took a job at the hospital and uh michigan i lived in dc for a while various various places but yeah it's good it's it's it's different than what i ever you know knew growing up but i've atlanta's nice call at home now i like atlanta a lot got three girls i you know
born and raised there so it's good there you go cool yeah so what made you uh want to come on the podcast yeah well i i am i like listening to you joe i think you're an authentic guy no see i listened to your podcast for for a long time and you take on some big issues and i feel like there's a conversation to be had you know it's it's it's interesting times obviously with this whole pandemic and i've struggled at times you know really understanding not what people think i think that that that part you can get what people think it's the how people think so what i would say is i was curious how you think i mean you know how you approach things and um and frankly you know i was gonna ask you sort of the same thing like why you would have me on your podcast right i mean if there's value to be added if the conversation is useful i think it is i mean i'll take it even a step further you know i g so i'm on cnn and i feel like the audience that shows up for cnn kind of gets it gets what i'm saying they they hear it they've heard it for a long time it's preaching to the choir i guess not even the converted because they weren't converted they believed this but there's obviously a lot of people who who think who who aren't watching cnn who like if i wanted to reach them in some way i mean you you reach them and i thought to myself if there's one person really that i would have a conversation and say hey man just listen to how i think about these things i want to hear how you think about it listen to how i think about these things who would that one person be in the united states and it was joe rogan hmm it was you how weird said well does that surprise you that doesn't surprise you it does it still surprises me um i wanted to have you on first of all because i really respected that you made this change of opinion publicly
when you were first talking about marijuana uh you were talking about it as if it had no medical benefit and it was really just a recreational drug that was possibly or probably harmful is that a assessment that you agree with i i think it certainly didn't seem to have any medicinal benefits right yeah but then upon further examination you publicly changed your position and and you in in doing so you actually examined all the scientific evidence that pointed to for many people with diseases many people that are on chemotherapy many people with you know some serious ailments marijuana can be very beneficial and you talked about that and i really admired that because that takes a lot of courage because a lot of people when they uh have an idea and they proclaim it publicly they double down and they just they you know use confirmation bias and whatever you know echo chamber news sources they can get to sort of confirm their initial position and you didn't do that and i i thought that's a real a real thinking person who is trying to [Music] honestly figure out what's going on instead of just working on being right well i look i i appreciate that and i have been very it was very illuminating for me because i think the way that we become a more knowledgeable society i think sometimes surprises people um i do think and maybe this will dovetail even to a little bit of what's going on now but but the thing is that when you looked at the so if you were just to look at the bulk of evidence around cannabis at that and i'm talking i wrote this time magazine article back you know this is probably 12 13 years ago and i looked at the bulk of evidence and you say okay i'm going to look at the 400 most recent papers i'm going to read the abstracts i'm going to dig in deep on some of them and 94 of them were basically the hypothesis was where's the harm here show me the harm right the hypothesis was not show me the
benefit that was only true for about six percent so right away you're dealing with a sort of very biased sort of set of data and that's one stream up now if you're just looking at papers you're like well this one potentially long harm this one possible addiction this one gateway you know you're seeing all those individual studies but at a broader level one step upstream you realize that most of the studies that are getting funded are designed to look for harm right yeah so when i saw that that was the first time i thought why why are the studies that are getting out there why are they all designed to look for harm then i started looking in other countries and some really good research out of places like israel in particular a guy named raf mushulem who's 91 years old now he was the first guy to i ever isolate thc and then synthesize it he's been doing this work forever he may get the nobel prize before he dies for for his work in this they were talking about the use of cannabis for all sorts of ailments including refractory seizures in kids um and that one really that really got to me for a couple reasons one is that i think when you're trying to do studies on things like pain it's it's hard it's a subjective thing right and so you think is is how do you how do you really have conclusive proof that this is working the way that you think it is someone says their pain is better and that's important but how do you measure that a little child who's having 300 seizures a week and is now not having seizures is a much more specific sort of metric and it it seemed to work really well in in kids who did not respond to existing seizure drugs which was kind of amazing to me and i think i told you when we've spoken before that that to me in some ways that wasn't just a a medical issue at that point it was a moral issue because nothing worked for these kids and they were thinking about even compounding veterinary medications for them and these parents are like you know in their kitchen things stirring up you know cannabis trying to get the formulation right to turn it into an oil or a tincture they could put underneath
the kid's tongue and and it was working and you know i did stories on these kids and they were emblematic of thousands of more kids these weren't just anecdotal stories and that's when i said you know there's something here but i gotta tell you um when i wrote the article saying i changed my mind on this you know you know you hit send at night and then you wake up in the morning and i work at a university i'm a i'm a practicing physician you know i live in that world and part of me did wonder like what is the response going to be i felt very comfortable with what i had written what i did not know was how it would be received yeah and that and that's that's always a challenge i think how was it received i think well i'm still employed so that that part of it was good you know i i didn't know if my chairman would say hey look you know uh i may agree or not agree with you that's beside the point you shouldn't have done this or whatever i i had no idea how they were going to respond i think it was received well joe i think that um it added to the knowledge tree of how we advance as a society it's a sign of the times i think i think if you had done that a couple of decades ago maybe there'd been a lot more pushback i think people are coming to much more of an understanding and and also the logical aspect of it like when when people look at all the things that human beings are allowed to consume including this uh that you gave me here this looks it's pretty spectacular i'm pretty proud of my gift that i've given you some serious bourbon here well thank you for that for the man who has everything this is um legal you know i mean we can enjoy the glass it's normal it's it's a normal thing and we all agree to that it's it's a you know it's a long-standing tradition for people to drink alcohol socially marijuana for whatever reasons and we could go into that if you want but it's been demonized unfairly and people know that it's not like heroin or crack or things that
you've seen people's lives fall apart on it on a regular basis and i think most people are aware of that now so in the era that you publish that it's people have come to an understanding that it's not it's not one of the hard drugs it's not the most dangerous thing in the world it's not good for kids it's not good for some people it's not good for some people maybe with uh possible schizophrenic tendencies i think there's a real concern there and uh no i mean yeah i you know it's it you you raise a really important point you know one thing i i tried to stay away from whenever i wrote about this was i felt like was a little bit of a trap to get into the moral equivalency of things like i think things should just stand on their own two feet yeah well it's better than this right what you're saying is true i feel like alcohol can be a sledgehammer to the brain i really do if you think about the way alcohol affects the brain very different than the way cannabis affects the brain and that that part of it is true but the idea that it could be a medicine in particular i mean you know i i think that that that is really quite striking and it's a plant you know and there's all these things and i listen like i said listen to your podcast i listen to brett and i listen to others and i get the points that they're making about that in terms of can you look to the earth to heal and oftentimes you can you know we've been given a lot of things but i think that with with cannabis in particular the the evidence i'm not the first to say this obviously people have been saying this for a long time maybe the timing was right but two decades ago people were saying this three decades ago people were saying this this was on the formulary in the united states in the river 1940s madness which i think was like 1936 or something like that people were already saying hey wait a second this could be used to treat addiction this could be used to treat you know
even parkinsonian-like symptoms there was all these things that they were putting out there and then it went through this cultural sort of assassination for a while which was which was wild to sort of reflect on historically have you ever looked at the original cultural assassination of cannabis uh like before reefer madness or well when it when it all got what do you know the origin of it it was all because of uh the the commodity of uh of hemp versus yes versus paper versus it was all the demonization came about right at the invention of the decorticator decorticator was a device that was invented in the 1930s that was going to effectively process hemp uh far easier was this crazy looking machine and before that they had used slavery to uh to process hemp back in the day and then with the invention of the cotton gin cotton became a preferred source of textiles but then when the decorticator came around it was the cover of popular science magazine that said hemp the new billion dollar crop because of the fact they figured out this new machine and then william randolph hearst yes harry anslinger because william brandon of hers didn't just own uh hearst publications and her the newspapers pharmaceuticals and nylon well also he owned paper mills right and he owned forests filled with trees they were going to chop down to make paper and it would have cost him millions of dollars to convert all that to hemp so this evil [ __ ] what he decided to do he decided to demonize this particular plant because of the textile because of the commodity of hemp and he blamed it on the psychoactive plant and then named it after a mexican slang for wild tobacco right so nobody knew what marijuana was when they started printing this and they thought there was some new thing that was running rampant through our communities and causing people to do horrendous things and and then they you know did the reefer madness films and that kind of stuff that that's where all came from a rich guy who didn't want to lose money from the 1930s felt threatened by what this could represent haunted us almost 100 years later the
the same pro that propaganda the echoes of that propaganda are what is uh bothering people even today it it's really frightening to think about it that way i mean you see it and then when you see it sort of unraveled like that i knew the the william randolph hearst connection i didn't know it to that level of detail but there was some you know this idea that people had a lot to gain from this substance being sort of really suppressed i thought was scary yeah but fascinating to see because you know then you you look for it you say like is this happening well it shows you how dangerous it is when the press is lying and when they're inaccurate when they're allowed to print things and publish things that aren't true that the echoes of that as i said could last for you know 90 100 years well he was he was depressed yeah i mean if the press is owned by somebody who is who is sort of uh using this for their own personal gains i think obviously that's a it's a huge problem yeah especially in the days before the internet right right um have you had any experiences on marijuana i i've tried it yeah really i have when recently not too recently [Laughter] you have to be careful saying this no i don't i don't care but you've had a drink before right i've had a drink before okay yeah i um i yeah i i i could see the appeal of it i really could um i think i i i even kept a little log of my experience so like i just was curious like what am i gonna write and some of the stuff that i wrote was pretty i thought pretty brilliant actually um but i will say this it did make me and i don't know if it's my own personal thing like i'm bringing too much baggage to it i did get the sense of paranoia that people often talk about and i did not find that very comfortable yeah it's supposed to be uncomfortable i think i think you're supposed to learn something from that is it is that right yeah i thought it was just supposed to be like fun and and like
anxiety relieving it can be that too but the uh i think the uncomfortable feeling that you get from the paranoia when it when it goes away you're left with an understanding of maybe what are these things that you have issues with and maybe if you could shore up those aspects of your life you wouldn't have maybe these underlying feelings that you're suppressing and ignoring for the most part until you get high i think you'd like to get your life to a place where when you get really high you don't feel bad that would be i think that that's a really interesting way of looking at it if i could get to that point if i've dealt with some of these things in my own life then if i were to get high i would be yeah not as overwhelmed by the paranoia yeah i fully accept that uh i have issues that i got to deal with that's what you're saying we all do i fully accept that it it is it is weird though because i do see the the you know i read you had michael pollan on i saw a while ago i read him read his book uh how to heal your mind yeah i've talked to him about this stuff and and i interviewed even the guys who were doing some of these psilocybin trials now and stuff and it's it's really interesting to me you know yeah um in terms of you know your own personal growth when you when you're on taking some of these substances i'm not there i still have you know i had that paranoia and it really it kind of bothered me maybe i got some work to do i don't know well it's also a dose issue you know when you don't have any experience with thc and then you smoke marijuana you know it's hard to regulate like how much should i be taking in yeah you know it's even weirder if you eat it if you had any edible experience i did not try the edibles um and then you get this i was told you get sort of a biphasic you get the first sort of hit and then it goes through your liver and then you get a second hit which can be very hard to manage is what i was told well the liver part your body produces 11 hydroxy it's a far more potent version of a psychoactive that you don't really get
when you smoke it it's not really active in smoking it but when you eat it when it's it's called a one pass as it goes through your liver it's four to five times more psychoactive than thc is that right yeah that's why people get confused and they think maybe it was laced like you'll have like a pot cookie or something have you ever watched the video of the cops who took the marijuana from the kids and then called and i called them they thought time had stopped somehow that's 11 hydroxy metallic that's what's happening to them yeah they're tripping balls it's it's more like a psychedelic well they they they were totally paranoid yes i mean is that is that what tripping well i mean they thought time had stopped right it's not as simple as being paranoid they were they were probably watching the earth through a different dimension it's uh it's a different experience when you're uh when you eat it it's very psychedelic like you might as well be on psychedelic like you're hallucinating and stuff you certainly can when you close your eyes yeah when you if you eat it one i used to enjoy eating it and then going into the sensory deprivation tank yeah because you close your eyes and you have these wild visions yeah and you're awake yeah you're wide awake when you're but you're see so you're not hallucinating with your eyes open but when you close your eyes you're seeing some wild visuals that i don't know what is uh responsible for those you you and you and elon doing that you know everyone has talked about that but i'm curious for you like do you feel i mean obviously you feel different but do you feel more creative do you feel more unleashed in some ways are you less inhibited i mean you think about that with alcohol right you just it dis it's a disinhibiting sort of substance what about i mean when you was i'm sure was it's just a different sort of feel in terms of the conversation you have with somebody yeah i definitely think it opens up some aspect of your mind that tends to favor creativity i think there's you know carl sagan had a really
fascinating quote about marijuana carl sagan was a huge marijuana enthusiast and his quote was essentially something to the lines of he believes there are thoughts that are available to you when you are smoking cannabis that aren't available otherwise i i you know when i when i was only semi-joking about the fact that i wrote some stuff down that i thought was brilliant what i kind of realized in retrospect is that it's there yeah but i'm i'm i'm inhibiting it i'm i'm worried about putting it down on paper i don't think it's going to be very good or i don't think it's going to sound very smart or whatever it might be and it never gets out there and then all of a sudden i don't care and i'm putting it out and then i read it in retrospect and i'm like well there's holds up think about what you do right like you're a public person you're on this major television news network talking about science and and medicine and you're a practicing physician that works for a hospital and you have affiliation with the university there's a lot going on with you where you're scrutinized and you're a public person so there's these constant eyeballs on you and you have to be very aware of saying something that'll be preposterous or some where people are going to diminish your you know your viewpoint because oh but he said this and right look at that you can you know you could look at you in a an unfavorable light very easily so it's that lends itself to paranoia yeah i i i i totally see that i i gotta tell you you know i think that the biggest concern i have sometimes is that people aren't forthright with me you know about what whatever it might be it's not that i'm trying to not disclose something but i think sometimes when i'm having conversations people behave a certain way around me they say certain things around me around whatever the issue may be you know they feel like they have to act a certain way around me i i'm pretty good i think that's saying i don't know when i don't know no i think you are very good i'm humble i think i grew up humble that's my family you know i'm child of immigrants my mom is a refugee for 12
years you know there's not you know there's not a lot of room for arrogance there was a study that came out last summer i think that said scientists are increasingly perceived as arrogant and i was that bothered me i was i found that jarring because you know i some people are arrogant obviously but i think as a general rule if you say hey look this group of people is arrogant and they're also the group of people like with this pandemic that you know we want to listen to but if we see them as arrogant and you know we we don't want to be taking instructions or feel like it's too didactic or too top-down there's not enough of a conversation going on that's a problem i not that i'm strategically trying not to be that way but i think that that's just not who i am you know i'm not trying to to lecture people on on this stuff i think when you are a person that is discussing something that is affecting millions if not billions of people you have millions if not billions of opinions that are coming your way and when you have spent an enormous amount of time studying an issue and you're discussing this issue with people that have spent almost no time studying and maybe read a few things online or watched a youtube video i think it's very easy to get arrogant it's also very easy to appear arrogant to try to stifle or to dismiss or diminish the opinions of people that don't agree with you and it is a very common thing when someone is constantly being questioned or constantly being pressured and you can see it unfold like a good example i don't mean to pick on her but the white house secretary that jen saculating she has over time adopted an increasingly more combative tone with people that are questioning her in the press and you know she comes off a lot of times as arrogant right i think that arrogance comes from this constant pressure of being questioned constant pressure being scrutinized and
criticized and she's standing up on that podium and she wants to stop it stop it in its tracks and so that sort of tone comes out of that and unfortunately it does the opposite of what it's intended it's intended to sort of silence critics but it just emboldens them and it makes them more enthusiastic about asking more grading questions and more questions that are going to be more irritable or irritating and get under her skin more and try to get more of a reaction like that from them i think people do that with scientists i think they do that with journalists i think they do that with everybody is it a is it a game though yeah like so the people who are asking jen saki questions are they do like i guess the question is are these legitimate questions are they just doing it to get under her skin i think they're definitely legitimate questions but i think there's also an aspect of playing a little game trying to say something that you don't really have an answer to not really trying to have a rational discourse but it's also it's a terrible place to have a conversation right like one person's on a podium they have a microphone you're wearing a mask you're yelling things out there's a bunch of other people behind you that also want to ask questions you don't it's not a good way to communicate right so she's under the gun already and then she's also responding to these people um as a representative of the president but she's not the president so she's not elected she's hired she's a press secretary and we know from previous experiences those people don't last like you look like trump went through a gang of them right which it was pretty funny watching these poor people just like having to deal with answering you know the press that were freaking out about the [ __ ] that trump would say and they they stopped doing press conferences for a while they just didn't think they said they they i guess they thought there was no value in them anymore i think they just get tired of being just criticized and scrutinized and it's uh it's a it's a fascinating position because it's a very unnatural position it's uh it's not
conducive to good discourse it's not conducive to good conversations i i think that you like going back to you know just you and i having this conversation i mean i i think that there can be real conversations about these important topics right yeah and they don't and they don't have to be uh it is insightful to see how people think about this not just what they think about this i think that it's just everyone says it's so polarized now and you can't disentangle anything from politics and i think that's true and it's not just this pandemic you know i mean even prior to this pandemic people science and politics were not neatly cordoned off from one another there's always been these sort of things but i've i've never seen it quite like this nor about i think i think the question is when people raise these issues are they are they trying to start [ __ ] or are they actually having a they have a legitimate question i had this i had this guy joe the other day who who um our air conditioning broke at the house this guy comes over to the house to fix it nice guy probably in his mid 70s he has a mask on he goes and fixes the air conditioning and when he's walking i'm walking him out and i don't know if he knows who i am or anything but it turns out that he does and he says hey you mind if i ask you a question i said sure he says do you think i should get the vaccine this is just a few weeks ago okay i said yeah i think you should get the vaccine and he says well the reason i ask is because i got this stent you know in one of the blood vessels and i'm worried about clotting and i said oh yeah well there was some news reports about clotting i can see why you'd think that way um but here's the thing you know your risk of clotting is as it turns out 80 times higher from the disease covid rather than from the vaccine 80 times 80 times really you know the clotting risk was primarily among post-menopausal women and it was primarily the adenoviral the the johnson and johnson type vaccines you didn't
really see it in the in the um mrna vaccines like pfizer moderna but the the risk is there but clotting is a real concern with this disease which is weird to the point where some people say we shouldn't even call this a respiratory disease as much as a vascular disease yeah i've read that which i think is really i mean this is we're learning here i mean this is a novel virus we don't get to see that very often a novel people focus on the word virus but the word novel is really important here i mean when is the last time you did something for the first time when's the last time you experienced something for the first time what happens when you when you have something novel what you automatically do is you bring your own world view to it right coronavirus from china oh well that's going to be like sars i remember sars back in 2003. this is going to behave like that so you automatically put this in that box wrong box to put it in oh it's looking like a pandemic i'm going to put this in the h1n1 box that was the last pandemic in 2009. that would have been the wrong box as well this thing didn't have a box of its own it behaved totally differently so but but the air conditioning guy you know he he's worried about the clotting and i tell him this and he says he thanks me and he says well i really appreciate that um i've been trying to get an answer on this and part of the reason why is my daughter died last week of covid this is my air conditioning guy telling me this okay he's in the mid 70s so which i mean yeah it was just hard you know somebody's telling your daughter died and he's you know he's it's a week later and he's working again which in and of itself was like i don't think i could do that go back to work i mean he was grieving still yeah and his daughter died and they weren't vaccinated now they aren't they're not following the news reports they're not i mean they're working they got their lives and it's not something that they uh like this is the hill i'm gonna die on as far as vaccines they're not those people they're just living their lives but she says to him before she goes on
the ventilator please get vaccinated and and then she dies and and so he's now telling me that he wants to get vaccinated but he's worried about this clots he's been calling his doctor's office he hasn't gotten a call back yet and i'm the first person he has seen since this all happened the first doctor he's seen and so he asks me and i tell him and you know am i going to get pissed off at the anti-vaxxers after spending time with that guy no i'm not because there are some who are going back to the same thing some who are just starting want to start [ __ ] they're just trying to sow chaos and doubt and for no good reason chaos is the the metric as you've talked about on your podcast but this guy he wants to do it he understands the consequences of not he just watched what happened to his daughter he's worried about his stent and his leg there's all these things and we've got to communicate that to people if we're going to ask the country to do something if you're going to ask the country to give vaccines if you're going to ask the country to get boosters which is the most recent thing you've got to explain it well if you can ask kids to get vaccinated why why are you asking kids because everyone says well aren't they far less likely to to get sick and and all that yes but here's why they should get vaccinated why do you think kids should get vaccinated well i think i think there's a few reasons first of all they have children yeah like how old you know i mean i think the the we'll probably see a vaccine authorized for five to 11 year olds do we have real studies on the impact of young children in covid in terms of what it what it does to their bodies uh we we know that they're far less likely to get sick right that's for sure far less likely to be hospitalized far less likely to die and far less likely to die from cover than even from the flu correct that could be you know i mean flu is is a concern for sure 60 000 people die of flu every year but it's more dangerous for children than kovalev is correct i think when you looked at like h1n1 you know the the um that's a different one right that was a bad flu
but i think you know like in any given year i think what some 500 children have died of covid in any given year you know you may have similar numbers of flu it's it's so death rates yes i think the children that died from covid most of them had pretty extreme comorbidities though correct yes and and same for adults and that is a good conversation to have yeah you know but i mean the conversation about children let's let's just stay on this yeah so what studies are there about children and the dangers of being vaccinated because there was a study that came out recently about young boys in particular that young boys face a higher risk of myocarditis from the vaccine than they do from getting coveted i don't so i'm not sure that's that's that's right i mean you know so the 16 to 24 year olds i think that may be the study you're talking about it was young it was young people young boys in particular right and i think that yeah young it was almost all men might not be able to have just been myocardial it's been an adverse reaction from the vaccine versus from coveted i mean you're right myocarditis was the big one and this came up at the cdc meeting and all that and it's going to come up again so i think there's three ways of looking at it one is that you've got to say what is just the background rate of myocarditis period pre pandemic has nothing to do with the vaccines or coveted neither exist what is the background rate and there is a certain background rate i think per million it's like 1 500. it's it's not many but it's not children but for children immediately upon receiving a vaccine no so that's just the background rate right but this is immediately afterwards which is almost i mean not entirely 100 correlated but most likely i think you can make a strong case that it's correlated yeah you know i mean given that it happens and then what they found was that so after the first shot it was about 0.8 per million rate of myocarditis but after the second shot it went closer to six 5.8 per million myocarditis rates so still very low but definitely like if
you see a number like that jump especially between the first and second shot you've got to pay attention to that yeah and but then you've also got to look at what is as you point out the risk of getting myocarditis with the disease covet as opposed to the vaccine and it was higher it was like children with children these studies were in children and it was about 16 times higher now keep in mind 16 times higher sounds like a lot but we're still talking about five out of a million versus now maybe just under 100 out of a million so it's still really rare now the one thing i will say about the vaccinated patients who got myocarditis is that they they were all treated and you know myocarditis can be a really frightening thing they can develop chest pain and shortness of breath it's inflammation of the heart that's what it is and you got to think of it like this the reason it can happen in young people can happen in anybody but people who have really robust immune response you're basically giving the vaccine and you're counting on the immune system to really respond to that if it responds a lot in someone with a really healthy immune system it can cause more widespread inflammation people feel miserable for a day or two and in this case it can cause inflammation around the heart do we know what the long-term consequences of myocarditis in young people that comes from the vaccine are i don't think we we can we don't know and i think the only way we can know long-term things to be perfectly honest uh of any of these aspects of the vaccine the only way we can know long-term stuff is with the passage of time you know for certain that's terrifying for parents it is the idea that your son could get vaccinated and most likely he would have been fine if he got coveted and that your son could catch myocarditis and have permanent heart problems well i don't know that we can say the person will be fine if they get koba joe a young boy well most young boys with no when you say fine you mean what that they're not going to die i mean like me i had covered you you look like you look like you're strong as an ox yes i give
you that but you know i you get teenagers who who will have these long covered naps you get you get what does that mean they just they're tired all the time they get these sort of long hauler type symptoms you know less so in kids but you know when you talk about 33 of people having persistent symptoms at last months i just feel like we define like i think we're allowed to have a nuanced conversation about this we measure things in terms of life and death yes and i get that i mean it's easy it's public health that's the way the numbers get presented and frankly we probably that's our fault as well in the media to just say this is how many people have died when that study from scripps came out and i think i think brett or somebody on your show mentioned it even the other day and they said hey look we should probably start thinking of this thing as a vascular disease not a respiratory disease because you know i'm a neurosurgeon when i first heard that this respiratory pathogen could cause isolated loss of smell i thought to myself like the fact that they can't smell that's not the end of the world i get that but how is it doing that right why is it causing strokes in young people why is it causing all these other organs to have problems you know it's it's really weird and this gets back to the novel nature of this virus we don't know a lot about what this virus does to the body we probably shouldn't just think of it as another type of pneumonia or cold because it's clearly doing something else a cold wouldn't just cause isolated loss of smell flu wouldn't even do that and then these so so many people developing long-term symptoms i think about my kids those things are though when you say long-term symptoms what do you think is going on there is this a result of overall poor health in general lack of vitamin supplementation and exercise and just a robust immune system and just a person who's eating poorly sedentary lifestyle like what is causing their body to have this sort of reaction where some people get through it quite easily young people in particular like my children my children got through it it
was like the worst was like it was like a day and my other one had a headache for a day i and i and i you know thankfully i think mo most people are that way right yeah when i say most i mean you know even among adults 80 right so should we be making decisions based on the small amount of people that have these long-term symptoms and not instead addressing why did these individuals have these long-term symptoms and is this something that's inherent to their own biology their own lifestyle choices is that what the consequences are coming from or is it coming from this very serious disease like shouldn't we look at it in terms of what does this do to healthy people and if these people are not healthy what can we do to make them healthy so that they could have a more robust immune system and a more uh you know a more favorable outcome instead of just thinking we should vaccinate kids well i mean all kids why can't we do both because i'm worried because i'm worried because i know i like one of my friends his good friend that he grew up with his daughter was 14 years old got vaccinated and had to be admitted to the icu because she was she had some sort of uh cardiorespiratory issue from the vaccine that scares the [ __ ] out of me that scares the [ __ ] out of me i've read a story about a 19 year old girl who had to get a heart transplant because of the vaccine yes we could find it for you wind up dying because she had got on immunosuppressant drugs to deal with a heart transplant and then got pneumonia this is a very rare case very right very rare but if you're going to bring up anecdotal evidence about people that have long term fatigue and consequences you also have to bring up these anecdotal tales of people that have lost friends and loved ones to being vaccinated yeah you're right i mean the real those are the real things those are terrifying i mean no one wants to discuss those well we don't want to pretend that they don't exist i don't i don't want to pretend they don't exist trust me i don't i did not know about the uh 19 year old who who needed a heart transplant jamie that's that's terrifying it's uh but i think a young lady who was um apparently she followed all the rules
was wearing a mask all the time was very disciplined was going to college was one of the first people to you know out of college get vaccinated and she had a terrible reaction and now obviously if you vaccinate millions and millions of people you're going to have a certain percentage of them that have a bad reaction just like if you give peanuts to millions and millions of people some people are going to die yeah no i i mean the the long haulers thing that i when i was mentioned the covet naps that was just an example i mean there is there is data you know when you look at across the board not just young people but adults as well they're saying about a third of people will have symptoms that last longer than a couple months i have a friend who was a long-hauler and what his issue was i'm most sure um was that he was training while he was sick and didn't know and he's a fighter and just kept going and kept training while he was sick and didn't allow himself to rest and it just got worse and worse and he would take a little time off and then push it again and you know what he wound up having symptoms that lasted for months i mean that that that part of it i think is is an important part of the discussion as well just because um you know we we often do just define things in terms of life and death and the virus is just weird i i just there's a lot about this virus i still don't understand i don't know what this virus does to the body exactly how could we right i mean it's fairly new it's novel it's we're still learning but but i do think that um when you think about something that's causing such a change in your vascular system i mean the only the way that so many different organs are affected in the body is through the blood you know and the idea that the blood is somehow affected by this virus or your vascular system is i think is you know we're going to learn a lot about that i mean the risk reward proposition on the vaccines for for young people if that's the question yes we i you know i think that the fda and these other organizations will look at this data and make make some recommendations and there's probably
going to be people who say look in the end i just don't think it's it's worth it for my kids what i would say is that you know we if you if you're concerned about a specific issue like myocarditis look at the data and just sort of say hey what's the risk reward proposition for vaccine versus risk reward proposition for the disease look don't take my word for it look at that data we are getting better at actually having data because more time has passed now and then also keep in mind as you've talked about on your on the podcast that that you could still be a pro someone who's perpetuating the pandemic because you could potentially still be spreading this virus i mean we're i think we're going to get to the point where we can actually have this pandemic under control obviously you're aware that you can spread it when you're vaccinated in fact this most recent outbreak that we had at the comedy store was spread by a vaccinated person and put a bunch of people you know out of business very sick and two of them in the hospital who i think they were both vaccinated but it's it's obviously vaccinated people can catch it and vaccinated people can spread it yes they can right so if that's the case the argument of getting vaccinated to stop spreading it doesn't seem to make much sense to me well what i mean but what if you were far less likely to get infected if you were vaccinated wouldn't you be far less likely to get infected also if you're healthy and wouldn't we promote people getting healthy i i totally agree with that and i want to i want to talk to you about that because i wrote a lot about this but but i but just on this point of the vaccination again i don't think that it's either war with this i think that you're so you're eight times according to some this this new data that's coming out eight times less likely to get infected if you have been vaccinated than just someone who's just plain unvaccinated never somebody does not have immunity right someone does not have immunity which we'll talk about that as well i'm sure but just in general someone who doesn't have
immunity versus someone who does if you have it you're eight times less likely to get infected now if you do get infected you're right you can still carry the virus in your nose and your mouth and you could still transmit it a study out of singapore says your viral load comes down much faster so there's a period of time where you're probably just as likely to transmit it as an unvaccinated person or a person without immunity this is within what time period of the vaccine right because the vaccine immunity supposedly wanes over time yes which is the argument for the boosters that's right so like what how much of a time period are we looking at i mean there's there's new data coming in eight times the ability to fight it off so now they're saying that you know six to eight months after the vaccine there's some evidence that against mild infection the vaccine's uh effectiveness wanes which probably means you're more likely to get infected so that's that's probably that's probably the case so it's not indefinite and i think that's part of the reason they're recommending boosters for some people let's say but they who is they because the fda just declined the recommendation of boosters and the two top people resigned because they didn't think that the science was there to recommend boosters right they recommended for people over 65 people who are have vulnerable you know because of pre-existing conditions things like people who they think will get quite sick if they were to get a breakthrough infection if so look at it this way if you look at the number of people hospitalized with covet in the country 95 of them are unvaccinated so who are the five percent is that real that's that you know it's different in different places but 90 plus in most places we were just discussing that and i mean that was uh there was a study that was out of england and then there was another one out of israel where a large percentage of it yes great great in israel that's right and and and that's it's really interesting but you got to remember something though joe is that once you start getting the vast majority of people vaccinated in a society
then the the total number of people who show up in the hospital with covet are likely to be vaccinated right because it's a much smaller number vaccinated it's a much smaller absolute number but like if you have a lot of people who are showing up in the hospital over 100 000 at one point you know in this country that are in the hospital with covid 90 plus were unvaccinated now once we get to a higher vaccination level or a higher immunity level the ratio will flip just because more people will be vaccinated because we have a greater percentage of a greater percentage but i think the question they were asking as part of this booster discussion is who are the five percent that are that are vaccinated and still get sick enough to end up in the hospital and what they found was that they tended to be older they tended to be people with certain pre-existing conditions they had already made a determination that people who were immune compromised should should get a booster shot so there was all these various things they did not do you're right across the board recommendation for everyone to get boosters they don't think the data is there to sort of support that yet they think the vaccines do work pretty well for people who aren't vulnerable for these things and then the two people resigned two people resigned because i think they felt that they were being pressured to why did they resign i i resigned over the boosters correct yeah yeah and they i think you can safely say that that seems like a strange world right in the middle of a pandemic for someone who is it's not good not good it's not good so what was your assessment of that i tell you what i think and this was a problem i mean this is a problem we the first we heard of boosters was from who it was from the white house right right we should be hearing about these things first from fda or cdc yeah scientists and i think that there was this concern that the white house was sort of getting out ahead of things and making it seem like this was preordained right which i agree because they not only did they say boosters are going to be necessary for liberty they said
starting september 20th you know they put a date on it right they came back and they said hey look uh what we really meant was that we think boosters are going to be necessary because we're seeing what's happening in israel we're seeing what's happening in the uk we want to be ready we want to make sure pharmacies have boosters and we don't go through the whole thing when vaccines first rolled out where people couldn't get them that's not what they that's not how they approached it and i think the fda at least a couple of people who are very senior people within the vaccine office basically said we feel pressured and and that's not how we we should be conducting science policy and they left as a result i can see i can see the problem with that this should have been something that was just data driven and if you're going to make recommendations to the country on something like this you've got to justify it you've got to explain it it can't feel too didactic and it felt very top-down did it concern you when you saw those folks resign because in the middle of a pandemic you would think that the people that have already worked on this and have been working on it for quite some time are extremely valuable for whatever reason that's forcing them to step down like that it concerned me a lot and i and i you know look i i spoke up about it even at the time and i said there was two problems here one is that clearly the fda and the cdc were not even part of some of these discussions at least not some of the career scientists over there they weren't even part of the discussion because they were surprised when suddenly the white house coronavirus task force was saying boosters and so some of these folks who were the actual scientists who are looking at this data trying to make these determinations were obviously blindsided by that that's not good but the second part of it that i think was even a bigger concern was what was the data then how do you justify this and that that that's a problem i think that like okay my parents are in their late 70s they're living in florida they've been pretty good throughout this but i think they
would benefit from boosters they my dad lives with some chronic disease they're at risk and so yeah i think they should get boosters because a bad breakthrough for my dad would be a problem he could get really sick and you know might need to be hospitalized or even die if i were to get a breakthrough i'm less concerned i'm a healthy person you know generally speaking i don't think it would be a big problem for me to if if you know a breakthrough infection i don't think it would happen but if it did it would be less of a problem ultimately there may be a case made that i need to get a booster too but right now i feel like the vaccine works pretty well for me but but can i stop you there that feeling of saying that i feel like if i got infected i would be okay why is that okay to have that feeling if you've been vaccinated and not have that feeling if you're unvaccinated if you are not concerned about a breakthrough infection because you feel like your immune system is strong enough to handle it yeah why is that not okay for someone who is especially a young person let's think of a like a young male who's 18 19 years old who is in this risk of myocarditis versus you know kovid getting the vaccine shot why wouldn't it be okay for that person to make that choice and what is the argument against just vaccinating vulnerable people like your parents and my parents who have also been vaccinated and taking care of them and protecting them and not having this entire across-the-board population vaccination strategy well i i think are you when you say unvaccinated you mean somebody without any immunity or or or somebody who's had coveted and now may have natural immunity someone without any immunity at all well i mean the problem is that they could become infected even if they don't get sick and be as a spreader i realize that is happened to you it could happen to me but it's less likely because i am less likely to i'm eight times less likely to get infected in the first place if i do get infected my viral load which could go up and have you know i could carry virus in my nose and my mouth it will come down much faster too so i can
spread but it's a narrower window and i'm less likely to get infected it's a narrow window within a certain period of time after your vaccination correct waning over time yeah it looks to be waning over time i mean we only have you know we really start only vaccinating you know this you know december january so it's only eight to ten months worth of data right johnson and johnson really didn't start doing it till march so we're seeing this i mean if you look at vaccines overall leave aside the flu shot for a second just say vaccines most vaccines do require a prime maybe sometimes a couple shots that sort of prime your immune system and then eventually you get a boost and it sort of boosts it so that you're you get long-lasting protection you see that with you know a lot of childhood vaccines and and other vaccines as well even some that we take as adults that's not unusual i think what what the question really is is when is does everyone need a boost like me for example and younger people and is there is there a right interval for that is it six months is it eight months is it a year like what's the best time to do that do we do we have real data on boosters and what the long-term effects of those are i mean with the the effects from the studies were essentially just on the two shots right how much how much data do we have on three shots or four or five or however many it's going to take i mean some of this data is from other countries that have been boosting for a while but no i mean again you know we don't have any long-term data on that we know what the vaccine does inside the body but i think it's a fair question joe if you were to ask me we're recommending something and what does it mean ten years from now or five years from now whatever i don't think anyone can say without a doubt there's there's no problem here but i think overall you'd say we have a long history of vaccines in this country admittedly some of these are new types of vaccines and if people have side effects they typically occur within the first 42 days significant side effects and that's why they waited two months for these safety studies before they really started uh
you know saying the safety data is is enough right remember in the fall of last year they wanted to authorize these vaccines really fast just get them out there put them out there and they pushed back and said no we're going to wait for two months at least of safety data because the vast majority of side effects occur within the first first 42 days again i i don't know about this 19 year old woman and i'm sure that there are some stories like that yeah but i think that that data has held up i mean there's been some six billion shots now given around the world of this vaccine so in addition to the clinical trials which were tens of thousands of people you have a lot of real world data now over the last you know eight to ten months you could make the case that these are some of the most studied therapeutics anywhere on the planet which is not surprising because everyone on the planet will ultimately need these or take these you know so you get billions of pieces of data do you really think everyone on the planet is going to have together kobe shot what about people that have had the infection okay we're covered we can talk about that we can't but i still want to talk about people that are vulnerable versus people that are not don't you think that even with a breakthrough infection untreated you're probably more vulnerable than the average child who is not vaccinated who gets coveted like people have died who are double vaccinated in fact there was a guy who just won an emmy who's uh yeah i saw that yeah i saw that just was just at this celebration a couple of weeks ago i don't know if he got covered there or whatever but you know this mask-less celebration has a breakthrough dies from kovid the odds of that happening to a healthy child are very very low very low but that guy is probably your age how old are you i'm 51. yeah he's about your age i think he was 53. so at least there that theoretically you would be more vulnerable than a young child would be you vaccinated would be more vulnerable of a breakthrough infection than a young child would be statistically speaking right but you're not worried they're both rare but you're not worried about catching it
you're not worried about catching it because you've been vaccinated and you think it imparts a certain amount of protection what i'm saying to you is i think that not worry is the same feeling that a lot of people have about their children they're not worried about their healthy children catching it for the same reason you're not worried about catching it being vaccinated that if treated correctly they think that the child probably has a better chance even than you do because you're 51 years old i i think does that i mean they're both that seems reasonable right well i think it's i don't i i i know the story about this 50 feet what i'm saying like with your attitude that you're not worried about catching it because you've been vaccinated and you're a healthy guy that is the exact same feeling that people have about vaccinating their children if they have healthy children and they know that statistically speaking there's so few children that have died from covet well yeah there there are it's like i think 500 or so out of millions and millions and millions of kids that probably have been exposed yeah and but you know it's again part of it is is not defining this in terms of life and death i think having antibodies as a general rule is going to put you in is going to make you safer than if you don't uh it is and not just talking about life and death but i mean you know that most children when they catch covet have a very quick recovery yeah i think most do but there are there are these long haulers look there's also adults like you that are vaccinated that die yes but but i i think people in their 50s if you look at the data of people who get hospitalized with these breakthrough infections they do fall into very specific categories they they just do i mean now there's data on that it's not impossible i know it looked healthy i i get it and i'm sure there's there's they said he had no underlying health conditions i i don't i don't disagree with that i i think it can happen obviously um i think do you understand my point well are you suggesting i get boosted i'm not saying that what i'm saying is your attitude about not being concerned because you
have antibodies and you think you would get through it even if you had a breakthrough infection that is the exact same attitude that a lot of young people have where they don't want to get a shot because they're worried about the consequences even though they're incredibly consequences of that vaccine incredibly small but the vares report they do have deaths they do have injuries they do have consequences i know that you're vaccinating hundreds of millions of people in this country alone you're going to have a certain percentage of them that have an adverse reaction but the same attitude that you have where you're not worried about catching it they have that same attitude why is it okay for you and not okay for someone to have that attitude about their child i i think you do have to draw a distinction between someone who has immunity versus someone who doesn't a child yeah is going to get through it as if they had immunity don't you think well most likely first of all they can get sick and even if they don't die and you can as well right but you're not worried i i'm i have immunity i do i got a vaccine right but breakthrough infections are real they can happen no they can happen but they're not despite this this particular story uh the person who died of it in my age group they're not very common at some point if if there's more evidence that the vaccine's effectiveness is waning even more you're seeing people my age getting it that's like a like a more common thing then i would consider that some would suggest i get a booster shot because i work in a hospital right i'm a healthcare worker and i don't take care of covet patients specifically but there can be covert in the hospital obviously i'm you know my patients are neurosurgery patients it's a little different but yeah i think it's a fair point but i certainly wouldn't look at that and say this is a reason for children not to get vaccinated but if there is a statistic if there's a study that shows that young boys in particular are more likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine than they are to and covet why is there a study that shows that yes let's find it find that study where it
says uh young boys more likely to have an adverse reaction to the vaccine than the covet we were just talking about it i mean the myocarditis data i know which is what a lot of people have focused on you know it was about it was about 16 times higher with the disease than with the vaccine but i don't i don't know what other we'll talk about but my point is the same attitude that you have about not being worried if you catch it because you're vaccinated a lot of people have that not being worried if they catch it because they're young and healthy here it is boys more at risk from pfizer jab side effect than covid study suggested u.s researchers say teenagers more likely to get vaccine-related myocarditis than end up in the hospital with covet so if you have a child and you read this don't you think that you would be hesitant to vaccinate a child that would most likely cruise through covid with no issues but specifically if they're healthy boys well i think yes so i think you gotta you do have to compare apples to apples a little bit here so i think what this is saying joe is so if you just said if here here's the question what is your likelihood of myocarditis from vaccine versus myocarditis from the disease it says here the children with uh boys aged 12 to 15 with no underlying medical conditions are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in the hospital with covid over a four-month period right yeah that's that would make me very concerned a lot of the kids who got myocarditis after the vaccine did not end up in the hospital that's part of the thing they could be treated as an outpatient they got steroids they did not need to we don't have any idea how that's going to affect them long term correct that that that is true that will i think when when you raise that point that's always going to be a fair point because until we have four to six times the this is this the absolute risk versus the relative risk is it's a real thing but i think if the question you're
saying is look i'm worried about myocarditis period how likely is my child to get myocarditis from the vaccine versus from covid okay not just hey how likely are they end up in the hospital period from cova but just how likely are they to end up with myocarditis i think you know like if you were to ask the question how likely you'd end up in the hospital after a vaccine versus how likely you end up in the hospital after covid that would be a fair comparison what do you think is wrong with this comparison that they're making let's put it up again so you can specifically read it and tell me what's wrong because i feel like you're kind of cherry picking here because it says the data suggests that boys 12 to 15 with no underlying medical conditions are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis then ending up in the hospital with covid ending up in the hospital with covet for anything right i mean that's there are two different groups of patients here one is specifically myocarditis right but ending up in the hospital with covid over anything would give you more data yeah they'll give you more instances right so so i mean that would make more people hospitalized with covert your your example falls the wrong way so so right what i'm saying is that most of the people who got myocarditis did not need to go to the hospital is what i'm saying that they they they they were treatable outside the hospital right so you're saying that it's okay that they got mild no not at all i'm not i'm not saying but it doesn't even say that that it doesn't say that but it doesn't say that they're not hospitalized it doesn't say that right it says 86 of the boys affected required some hospital care yeah i i think so that's a lot yeah i i don't know that they ended up needing to be hospitalized though but it says it right there 86 of the boys affected by vaccine-related myocarditis required some hospital care yeah no i i see what you're saying but when you look at the data this doesn't concern you this doesn't make you pause it does concern me totally i think but the question
still is from a risk reward proposition uh what is the risk reward proposition there is very clear no no but but i'm just saying that if i say hey look i'm worried about myocarditis okay let's say that's the thing let's just take that as an example okay what is the likelihood i'm going to have myocarditis from the vaccine versus myocarditis from the disease it seems like the likelihood according to that study for young boys age 12 to 15 is far more likely to get myocarditis from the vaccine than you are from covid there's not a lot of kids who go to the hospital for covet you're right about that and myocarditis is a risk but myocarditis is more common in those who get the disease well according to that study i know not according to that study it's but you're saying it but you're ignoring the science that they're presenting they're showing that you're more likely to get myocarditis at a large number four to six times more likely they're not saying myocarditis they're they're saying it's it's then be hospitalized with covenant hospitalized okay push to put that up again it's saying you're four to six times more likely to get myocarditis than to be hospitalized from covet i will take a closer look at this but you're in but you have an impulse to defend vaccination in light of this data let me can i can i pull out something here because i have i have been thinking about this a lot you know i mean i got teenage kids and we we looked a lot of things the myocarditis data overall so but that is saying that you're four to six more likely to get myocarditis than you are to be hospitalized for covid for any reason at all yeah so here is the here's the myocarditis data specifically which showed that it was a 16 times higher risk of myocarditis among patients with covet 19 as compared to the vet right but this is among all patients 90 year old people they they they count as patients right you're talking about we're specifically talking about 12 to 15 year old boys what i was saying to you is your confidence and not worrying about catching covid because you're a healthy guy and because you've been vaccinated so you catching an infection of a highly novel virus which is a real
thing you're less worried about that because of your circumstances what i'm saying because i'm because i have immunity these young boys will breeze through this thing for the most part you know that right i think those young people totally fine most young people breeze through it including my own children breeze through it yes but can they can they spread it though can they spread it you can spread it you can spread it if you get sick but you're not worried about it because you'll be okay i'm far look it's not it's not a perfect vaccine i'm not suggesting that but if i tell you i'm eight times less likely to get infected right but you could get infected and thousands and thousands of people have and are still spreading it right my point was that your attitude which is a totally reasonable attitude of not being concerned about a breakthrough infection is exactly the same way a lot of people feel about their children and kovid i'm i'm not you know i i think do you see my point i do i i and i and i appreciate the the the conversation around this but i think that you know we have to apply the same degree of certainty and confidence in across the board right when i tell you that i am not concerned about getting a significant breakthrough infection i mean that i because i know that the people who do get these significant breakthrough infections are people who are more vulnerable and elderly right we know who the five percent are true that guy is fifty-three i understand he's your age and he's dead more likely i'm saying i'm saying more likely that's that's that's what i'm talking about with the certainty joe it's like we can't we i'm not saying 100 but it's it's it's less like if you look at the vast majority of people who have breakthrough infections that end up in the hospital you do you you can start to see who is most vulnerable here i understand but don't you see that the same logic can be applied to young people the same logic can be applied to young healthy people why would you be worried about them they're going to be fine just like you're not worried i'm i'm not that worried about young people in terms of their health i'm not i don't think so that's a big concern in that
circumstance why would you want to vaccinate young people if the risk of being vaccine injured is four to six times more likely than being hospitalized for covid under for any circumstance according to that okay well if you just leave aside that study for a second because and i and i and i get you a bit why would we okay but let me let me say what is the what is another reason for for young people to get vaccinated besides that is there is there any other benefit to it i mean we're in the middle of this pandemic if we know that people who don't have immunity even if they don't get sick can still catch this and spread it and that the majority of spread was coming through people who did not even have much in the way of symptoms is that true yeah i think they said asymptomatic spread accounted for more than 50 percent of the spread at least you know at least in the early days i have a theory about that i think most people have no idea how their body's supposed to feel because they've been feeding it [ __ ] and not taking care of it and so when they say i didn't know i was sick it's because they're not aware of their body i i think i was pretty aware that's what was wrong with me well i mean and you're you're a healthy guy right i mean you're you're a healthy guy you you you take care of yourself and and and you got sick still right i mean that you you have like you said you're more aware of your own body but i think whatever it was either because people weren't getting tested or they didn't feel they had symptoms unlike with a lot of respiratory pathogens you're usually transmitting it when you're sick right coughing and you're sneezing and that sort of stuff a lot of the spread happened through asymptomatic people so that's incredibly novel correct like that is nothing that we've ever observed and that and that is part of the argument i think that people made around masks ultimately which i i'm happy to talk about that i think it was a muddled message around that but i think it's please tell me what your what's your position on masks well look let me just finish let me just finish one thing
because i think that um because i really want to address this kid's thing and i think about it a lot uh can kids is there benefit to transmitting to vaccinating kids in terms of decreasing the overall transmission of the virus that's the thing if you've it's not perfect by any means i'm not suggesting that and we know you're you can still potentially be a carrier and spreader even if you've been vaccinated but it's a lot less likely so if we're serious about bringing this pandemic to an end and giving as many people immunity as possible is there benefit to vaccinating young people i think i think there is that that that's that's another reason i think there may be some protection overall although i think they're far less likely to get sick i am going to look at that study but i'm telling you that we're comparing very small numbers regardless right when you're talking about one to two in a million versus four in a million these are small numbers right so the absolute risk of these things are all small but the idea that that they could be uh helpful in terms of like i feel like we could bring this pandemic under control not extinguish it completely probably this virus is here to stay but we could bring it under control and no keep going and i think if the more people that have immunity the better um at some point you know you have to sort of uh i think look at the risk-reward propositions and i promise you i will dig into that study i'm not sure i think that was the guardian newspaper i i've looked up a bunch of studies on myocarditis specifically especially when i was thinking about getting my kids vaccinated and that's what i what i found you're right that was across the board but this was really up to 24 years old because you weren't seeing a lot of myocarditis in people who are older i think this is primarily i think it has to do it was primarily boys too i think it has to do with how much your body responds to the vaccine how much how much inflammation you sort of have in
response to the vaccine when you feel miserable after the vaccine for a day or two it's because your body's sort of revved up do you know anyone who's had a bad reaction to the vaccine um i've had people i mean they don't feel well they feel like they need to you know they have a little fever they you know i know a lot of people thought that sick i mean do you know anybody who's had a stroke no yeah yeah i know too that had strokes after the back yeah one guy had a stroke what happened two heart attacks all right no excuse me heart attack and two strokes were there young guy were they pretty sure it was related to the vaccine yeah almost immediately afterwards like within the next uh four or five days afterwards had a heart attack in two strokes well i i do you think that what's happening is that maybe perhaps the vaccine accidentally gets injected into a vein is that a possible reaction for some of these like very rare instances where people have these uh horrific side effects it could be there was a study that just came out basically saying you know frankly reminding people that when you inject you should aspirate you got to aspirate a little bit make sure you don't get blood back and and then be able to to inject directly into the muscle is there a specific site that's more conducive to a straight muscle than to hitting a vein or a blood vessel or is it just dumb luck um you know when you're injecting into them you're not you obviously got big blood vessels around so obviously you have to avoid those within the muscle itself you may have smaller blood vessels small veins small capillaries and so is it just luck whether or not the vaccine gets into those into the blood vessel yes i mean that would be bad if it got into those so you know you that you're supposed to aspirate a little bit to not have that happen it's unusual for it to happen but i think that there might be something to that there's a study that just came out i think over the last couple of days showing that there may be some concerns
about more adverse effects in people who had it injected directly into their bloodstream yeah i mean it just makes sense right because that study on the spike protein um that they did at the salk institute i'm sure you're aware of that yep that showed the spike protein is responsible for the deterioration of blood vessels yeah that that this is i mean the salk and they were the same ones who who then think classify this potentially as a vascular disease as opposed to a respiratory disease for that very reason they think that there's these these receptors that are really you know predominantly in your blood vessels that do get you know that the spike protein is binding to so that's a that's that's a concern and the obviously your blood is going everywhere in the body which is why so many organ systems are affected so do you think that the injection if it does inadvertently hit a blood vessel or some sort of a vein and then it goes straight into that that it's possible that could be what's going on with people yeah i mean what you're injecting into the body is is a a um a signal a messenger rna signal that is then telling your muscle cells to make some of the spike proteins right and then your body reacts to the spike protein it just made by creating antibodies these proteins so you're essentially the body is the the vaccine making factory here you know if you inject it into the bloodstream does the muscle even get to make the spike protein i'm not sure because you need you need you need these muscle cells to actually you know yeah get the signal so i'm not i'm not sure you know why why that would cause a problem specifically but it does seem to it could be a concern if you're injecting this directly into the bloodstream which is why they have to do it carefully i never haven't had any friends that have been vaccinated that had the nurse aspirate first really have you did the nurse aspirate you first i didn't look i [Laughter] that's what you're supposed to do what are your thoughts about therapeutics like specifically the new merck has a new therapeutic that's coming out and pfizer has a new
therapeutic that's coming out and monoclonal antibodies which are been observed to be very effective i think i think the therapeutics are are potentially really good i mean the merck one i have not seen any data from the from besides a company yet so i think we need to you know i it's do not trust the company i i don't i don't have i i got to be suspicious i always have to be yeah so you know i mean these are companies they obviously want to sell a product it's expensive isn't that scary though 700 bucks for when when healthcare companies when companies like pharmaceutical companies have a direct vested interest in ignoring certain aspects of studies because it might somehow or another inhibit their profit or scare people off of the drug doesn't that scare you yeah i i i gotta be i gotta be skeptical though yeah and they're big companies and they're for profit and they've also been busted before like pfizer with the largest ever healthcare case 2.3 billion dollars for fraudulent claims fraudulent advertising which one was that the was that the that was the cancer the talc one or what was that was no that was john that was johnson and johnson pfizer was uh some sort of an anti-inflammatory right what was it jamie but uh whenever that happened yeah well google knows everything jamie knows how to google uh 2.3 billion for fraudulent marketing uh plea guilty the felony violation of the food drug and cosmetic act why is that right and is an anti-inflammatory drug so this is back in 2000. yeah look i mean even even when the first vaccine data came out um before it was reviewed i think we had to be skeptical and and i was you know i mean when they first said 95 protective i mean that that that's huge you don't typically hear about vaccines being that protective and by the way it was supposed to take four years and they they did it so fast you know so yeah you have to do a lot of homework i
had to dig deep on some of that stuff and um and i think it's the same thing with the merck if this medication holds up and the data is you know if they review it and it's true i think it's it's pretty significant you know it reminds you a little bit of like tamiflu when we talk about the flu but this would even be potentially more effective than tamiflu is for the flu would you change your perspective on vaccines if that turned out to be very effective i still don't want this disease joe i just don't want it i don't know what the heck this virus does to the body i just don't and i'm not saying it to scare you because you're like i said most people are gonna be fine yeah they really are it's 99.what well seven percent look let me let me let me put it to you like this you know risk is an interesting thing to to sort of evaluate i remember having this conversation with people early on maybe like the summer or spring and last year and at that point we said well across the board maybe 0.5 lethal okay so 99.5 percent not 0.5 lethal right and i would have these conversations with people and people would say some people would say so one in 200 people are going to die [ __ ] we better be really careful we got to protect ourselves one in 200's a lot and other people would say so i'm 99.5 good right what's the big deal i mean it's the same objective data and people's subjective interpretations of course and by the way it can be very much influenced by what their lives are like right if they can stay at home and do zoom calls and things like that are they gonna take a point five percent risk some people may some people may not if you're a front line worker if you have to work in a hospital like i do you know then all of a sudden maybe you're thinking 99.5 is not so bad i'd love to talk to you about that too because one of the things that saddens me deeply is these hospital workers who risk their
lives during the pandemic to [Music] treat people with covid most of them were exposed a lot of them got coveted and they have the antibodies and now they're being forced to either get vaccinated or they get fired right that seems ridiculous given the information that we know about the natural impu natural immunity that uh is imparted immunity with immunity yeah that is imparted through uh previous infection we know that to be very effective in fact the study out of israel showed it to be six to 13 times more effective than the immunity that's imparted by the vaccine but yet they're ignoring that and forcing these people to comply with this mandate why do you think they would do that and does that piss you off i this one surprises me i i it does i because first of all just historically we do know that people who have natural immunity it can be very effective immunity i'm talking even pre-pandemic you know even sars going back to 2003. people have 18 years later that's right there's evidence of immunity so i mean this is not like whoa we should be blown away by this this is kind of a known and it's normal i think what has surprised me a bit about it is that we still don't do enough testing to really know for sure if people actually have the immunity people say they have had covets so they should have antibodies some of these antibody tests are pretty good some are not you know so it's it's weird that two years into this that we still don't have good we don't we still don't have good vision on just how much immunity we have well you took that little antibody test today i did we got to see your immunity my immunity is good it's okay i you know that's a little faster what's it better i don't know you can tell how strong your immunity is yeah we judge lines around here jamie's got some thick lines the the uh yeah so i should feel safe in this room without yeah we're lined up the the the uh but no i i think that that's been a that's been a a weak spot for for for us in terms of action
because you're in the middle of a pandemic and you're firing healthcare workers with massive amounts of experience treating the very disease that is affecting everybody if if somebody can demonstrate that they have immunity i think that should be worth something i really do i really do but we still don't have enough testing and these tests are available those are good tests but i talked to mercy your nurse and you know those tests she got from the hospital you go and get the over-the-counter tests and she'll be the first to tell you she doesn't use those because they sometimes don't work or they'll give different results the over-the-counter tests are not blood tests correct you can buy over-the-counter antibody tests a blood one really yeah finger prick just like this why don't they sell those it's not hard to do this this is this is just in the news now that they're spending another couple billion dollars putting out more tests and and making them more available um and we have vaccine sites everywhere we should have antibody sites far more complicated given the amount of extreme cold that you have to store the modern and pfizer vaccines in why can't they have antibody tests everywhere the same way they have it was a far easier procedure i think they should for sure and i think they should have antigen tests too yes because the thing about antigen tests is that they can tell you they can give you the answer to the question you're really trying to ask which is am i contagious right you know so if you if you could have an antigen test every day even i know it sounds ridiculous i have one every day you do it's not yeah you do it here at your house when you're brushing your teeth and you know that day if you're contagious or not and we don't do that and and i've asked joe and and there's there's not a good answer but one of the answers that i keep getting if i can explain this well is that if you think about the purpose of an antigen test like me taking an antigen test benefits who exactly it benefits the people around me right because well i'm healthy so i i'm not sick so now i just want to know am i spreading
this to other people right contagious going back to what i said earlier i think there's a lot of people that are just not aware of how their body's functioning because they're eating cheetos and drinking mountain dew and sitting around doing nothing so their body is always in a state of discomfort i have a lot to say about that please do okay but can yeah go ahead the antigen test the way that they regulate that is as a public health tool because they're saying this is good for the public health yes whereas the pcr you know the specific gold standard test they say that's an individual test because that tells you if you have presence of virus i'm not saying i agree with this i would like to tell you about that as well i'm just telling you that that's sort of the answer you'll get as to why it's these antigen tests are not as widely available yeah people haven't known how to use them a guy named michael minna who has done a lot of writing on this he was saying early early days that we should just have antigen tests available for everybody every day they could do this at least till we get through yeah the worst of the pandemic until we get it under control that's how you know if you're contagious you don't go be around people that day it seems like that would be a good solution the only thing i would say when it comes to merck the therapeutics and when it comes to testing and i know i i know how you feel about this i'm getting an idea of how you think about this is that the testing is obviously testing you to see if you have the virus the therapeutic is to treat you because you have the virus yes i still think it'd be better not to get the virus i think it'd be better to get the virus and recover and have amazing immunity to it like well you could get sick you know what i think you should do i think you should get vaccinated and then get sick this is why because then you got the vaccine protects you from a bad infection and then you get covered so then you get the robust immunity that's imparted from having the actual disease itself which is far more complex and comprehensive
than you're getting from the vaccine that targets one specific protein right you could make that argument i think yeah so that's the move all right get vaccinated let it wane and hang around with a bunch of dirty people okay well i i then get a lot of therapeutics on hand so you could take care of it quickly i will see your recommendation and do it and give you one you come out with us last night i would have caught it i almost did yeah now i know now i know what your secret plan was no no but but what but uh so so for you joe rogan yes i would say you've had it yes so now get one shot of the vaccine no why not because i have better immunity than i would if i was vaccinated we so right yeah i think your immunity is really good so why if i've already gotten through covid and i was really only sick for a day and then five days later i was negative and i do have the natural antibodies now why would i take a chance in getting vaccinated on top of that by the way i'm glad you're you're you're better i think that it only lasted a day you're probably the only one at cnn that's glad no no no no no no the rest of them are all lying about me taking horse medication we should talk about that that bothered you it should bother you too they're lying at your network about people taking human drugs versus drugs calling it a horse dewormer is not a flattering thing i guess it's a lie it's a lie on a news network and it's a lie that's a willing that's that's a lie that they're conscious of this is not a mistake yeah they're unfavorably framing it as veterinary medicine well the fda put this thing out you saw that did you see that thing that the fda put out what did the fda put out it was a tweet and it was snarky i admit it they said you are not a horse you are not a cow stop taking this stuff or something like that why would you say that when you're talking about a drug that's been given out to billions and billions of people a drug that was responsible for one of the inventors of it making nobel prizes nobel prize in 2015 15. yeah yeah a drug that has been
shown to stop viral replication in vitro you know that right why would they lie and say that's horsty warmer i can afford people medicine [ __ ] this is ridiculous it's just a lot like anyone but don't you think that a lie like that is dangerous on a news network when you know that they know they're lying you know that they know that i took medicine like here it is this is ivermectin you gotta sit right here somebody gave it to me all right hang on i i do the thing is we're we're like going so fast like i feel like i'm missing i'm missing you i want that's a problem that your news network is not lies well i don't i don't think dude what did they say they lied what they said i was taking horse dewormers first of all it was prescribed to me by a doctor yeah yeah they shouldn't have said it was a bunch of other medications if you got a human pill because there were people that were taking it the veterinary medication and i you're not obviously you got it from a doctor so that it shouldn't be called that ivermectin can be a very effective medication for parasitic disease and as you say it's probably you know i think what a quarter billion people have taken it around the world i get that way more so way more billions of people have taken it can i just come back to the one i want to talk about two things on the ledger you have before we get to that does it bother you that the news network you worked for out and out lied was outright lied about me taking horse dewormer they they shouldn't have said that why did they do that i don't know you didn't ask i didn't think that you're the magical guy over there i didn't ask i should have asked before but they did it without such glee no no i watched you watched i watched you watched no i don't think there's a yesterday i don't i no one takes joe rogan says taking livestock drug but despite warnings yeah jamie had to pull this out you want to play it is she this is your news network let's see i'm going to watch rogan telling his 13 million instagram followers that he was treated with several drugs and he included ivermectin
on the list a drug used for livestock the fda and the cdc warn against using to treat kovid turns out i got coveted look at they put a yellow filter on me the kitchen sink at it it's monica see the original video versus that i look like [ __ ] there do you know that i think you look good it's enough prednisone i don't think enough jimmy i don't think aaron had glee oh well it's more brian stelter was the gleeful one but the point is that's a lie it can be used for humans i i get it not just could be used for humans is often used for humans along with all the other drugs i took all human drugs yes they know it's a human drug it's a it can it's right but and they lied the thing it's defamatory it is it is uh yeah they shouldn't have done that it's defamatory right well i don't know if it's defamatory i bet it is yeah well i'm not a lawyer i'm not a lawyer it's a lie well see here's the thing can we you can have nuanced discussions about this i can't you can't have nuanced discussions about lying about someone taking horseshoes there was no glee by the way from from her she was not i didn't watch it anyone takes uh anyone takes people's illness oh yes they do they don't want you to get sick joe that's one thing that they didn't report on the fact that i was negative five days later and working out six days later well six days after infection i was back in the gym i'm glad i felt great i'm glad you you do i really do i i thank you most of the people you're glad you're a nice guy most of people i know i think would be glad that you i don't think that there's anything there's a lot of people out there that weren't glad but my point is you're working for a news organization if they're lying about a comedian taking horse medication what are they telling us about russia what are they telling us about syria do you understand that that's why people get concerned about the veracity of the news the the the concern was look just the nuance part of this and you're not taking a horse to warmer i get it you got that as a legitimate medication from a pharmacist that's kind of a joke my friend megan
brought me the the the thing about it is that what people were doing as you may know when they when they had the original trial they showed that the plasma concentrations that you needed to be anti-viral anti-parasitic it's it's a very useful tool same thing with a lot of medications by the way that they can be very effective for one thing but not as effective for something else or not as effective at the same dose what they were finding in some of these trials was that to get the plasma you know the blood concentrations high enough you had to take very high doses that were more in that has nothing to do with me they shouldn't have called it a horse dormer it's just a lie i i i am agreeing that they shouldn't have called it that are you aware what's going on in india what is the uh the country in india it's called is it carolina pradesh uttar pradesh yeah yeah how do you say it uh that they uh handed out ivermectin with this kit for people when they either got coveted or is a prophylactid they're they have 230 million people in this country and they've essentially not coveted down to almost nothing this is something that dr pierre corey from the frontline critical coveted care project what do you what's your thoughts on that well there was two things i looked at that study uh pretty careful i have relatives who are over there and i've been talking to docs in in india quite a bit just for reporting purposes i think there's two things one is that there was one part of the trial that was giving it to people that had coveted right so they were using it and people had coveted i think it's very hard to then say you know know for sure was it knocking it down because this this was app this was after the fact there was another group that was getting it prophylactically like you mentioned and i even remember like really looking carefully at the dates it was the spring of spring of this year right that we're talking about and what you saw was that there was a there was a significant decline in cases that was already happening when they started doing this you know so what was this correlation was it causation i
don't know i i'm not sure that you could say for sure whether this was actually preventing though isn't it but the numbers aren't 30 million people and they've knocked it down to an insanely small amount you know what happens joe i think is that that virus really burned through that population you know it my uncle died during that that spring surge of covet so when you get a significant significant spread going back to the natural immunity thing you do get a fair amount of natural immunity does that happen anywhere else yeah i mean 30 million people knocked it down almost nothing well that's a huge number but i think even if you looked at what happened in the uk and you saw that significant spike you know a few months ago and then it came down really rapidly what would account for that i think what what accounts for that more than anything is that a lot of people were exposed they got natural immunity from it and that started to bring the numbers down the virus doesn't have anywhere to go or this widespread distribution of ivermectin was effective because they did distribute it to hundreds of millions of people they find in these studies and i looked at pierre studies as well i looked at the meta-analysis and what did you think well the the when most of the studies that they use in that meta-analysis or a few of them at least were were in the in the lab right so they're trying to basically figure out what dose of ivermectin could be antiviral we know it can be very effective anti-parasitic what they were finding was that you needed to get pretty high doses you know it's going to kill the virus haven't they already used it on other um rna viruses in the past like isn't it something they use for dengue and a few other it may be viruses and i'm mostly familiar with it with parasitic disease river blindness and things like that so i don't know it could be i think it's got a history of use for yellow fever that could be i think but but i think what they were showing and again i i i feel badly about this whole horse dewormer thing but that i you know i i'm that's not that's not a
good way to have portrayed that to you but what i'm saying talk to anybody over there about it i haven't talked in funny but you're the medical guy i will talk to them but but i do no it's too late sir they redo it but but i mean i if i would have talked to him i would have been after the fact anyways but i will talk to them because i'm curious kind of silly that a news organization would risk their reputation on such a dumb lie i think it's it's um to present ivermectin in a way that is uh you know it can be a very effective medication for certain things and as you point out it it's it won the nobel prize for what it's done with river blindness i think the question is is it effective for for covet we need more studies we need more studies there's been a few randomized control trials which have not shown much benefit from this i wish it did they did the same thing with hydroxychloroquine that's interesting i would love to have you talk to dr pierre cory because he disagrees strongly i would like to haven't shown there was one study that he talks about and i listened to him on your podcast and i don't know if this is a study that he showed you but the one that he was referring to on your podcast was one that did look promising the only problem with the study was that people were also getting dexamethasone which is a steroid and we know dexamethasone can be effective for people who who have coveted in terms of preventing them from getting really sick so was it the dexamethasone was it the ivermectin it's hard to participate a combination of the two yeah and dexamethasone by itself can be really really effective is it prescribed by itself i was prescribed prednisone yeah so that another steroid you know so steroids can be very effective i mean this is the same sort of thing we talked about with the myocarditis thing which i still you know i want to come back to that as well but when you have a significant inflammatory response if you can like to the disease in this case if you can knock down that inflammatory response then it can
prevent you from potentially getting very sick which is how the steroids seem to work i want to go back to why you would suggest that i get vaccinated yeah okay thank you even though i've already had coveton recovered and have far thicker antibodies than you sir well i'm not so sure about the the thickness of the lines so important in this room in this room we managed who's this thicker yours or jamie's i don't even have to battle it he's been exposed twice jamie had it in october of last year correct was it yeah last year october and then he was exposed to it somewhere we think is like three or four months ago right somewhere around then some somewhere a couple months ago he was exposed to it and didn't get sick but uh his antibodies fired up like we saw a significant change in his antibodies like i said we test here i've been tested hundreds of times like we started testing in april of last year right that's when we when you know we just when we were told that we're allowed to keep doing podcasts we had we said well okay how do we do this correctly and i stopped doing stand up so i wasn't traveling anywhere and no just started testing people i i i gotta tell you like when i came here for the podcast i wasn't exactly sure what to expect but it was pretty locked down i mean i got swabbed i got my antibodies tested we have a protocol we don't allow like pot andrew schultz tried to show up with a posse we gotta kick them all out by the way you know what i bought online the other day what'd you buy a jre mask oh look at that the jre masks i've never even seen one of those in the wild can i see that come on really i know you're selling them get your face on it well someone's selling them it's a group of people that work for me oh cool look at my face so i mean people would say hey man high quality mask it's a very impressive seems like a good mass made in china by the way god damn it did you see that i didn't son of a [ __ ] so we could talk about put mass i'll i'll leave this reminder talk about math do you think they're effective yeah i think i think i i i think that they can be beneficial
i think that i think what what happens is that again people expect a certain level of certainty and saying how effective they are or they're going to be a panacea for things right and nothing is have you ever seen the doctor online who vapes through a mask there's a doctor that he thinks that masks are silly and they're really only for surgery and uh that really they're just to stop spittle and particles from falling out of the story he's like these cloth masks that people are using he's his argument is essentially like watch this yeah and then he uses one of them vapes that blows out all the smoke and he blows right through them and it comes out the side he's like this is what's happening if you breathe yeah so he doesn't think they're effective at all i think i think the cloth mass is definitely not although this is a high quality mask but the surgical masks better very much i'm not trying to sell these for you they're pretty good right although people should wear a mask i think and they tighten up on the sides too i noticed that yeah i mean it's for a particularly big this is the guy look at this guy watch back it up so he vapes again on the other one watch this he so he takes a hit and then blows right through this look at that so if all that is going out into the air just like your breath is how is that protecting you from covid is some of it being caught in that thing is that the idea like what makes you think but those vape particles they are larger than covid correct i mean right and covet aerosolizes that where do you guys find this stuff by the way we're online man this is a podcast you've listened i listen i just like i i don't you know i can't be shocked now i've been so immersed in this for two years every day i'm i'm reading about this stuff and and um unfortunately me as well yeah and so but you guys still seem to find things i haven't seen but the the um it's not perfect you know i think that the source control meaning that is this
am i wearing this mask if i wear this how much is it protecting me versus how much is it protecting you if i wear it right the source control right i think it offers some protection you know and i have made the case uh many times that if you're going to wear a mask you probably should wear a high quality mess like a kn95 that's what i have that's what i carry around with me as a kn 95. i can't see the difference i came in an uber when i came over here this is [ __ ] compared to my masks bro well i'll tell you what i'll tell you you didn't even know about your masks okay you don't even know about it yours doesn't even adjust that's what if you have big ears my i have a normal sized face you do have a normal size you have a beautiful foot thank you very much the um no but it also has these electro the it's electrically charged so it's supposed to catch things a little bit better than they they take the uh the particles or the the fibers and they electrically statically charge them so it makes it harder for the the particles to go i don't know what it is okay but kn95 supposed to block about 95 of particles i it's not it's not by any means perfect and most people don't wear these they wear a cloth mask so it's not going to be as effective so you suggest that people wear a kn 95 that is what you suggest i think if you're going to wear a mask then wear a good mat wear a good mask and then dudes wear bandanas like the robin old west bank they they would totally be vaping through those things easily so you i saw a guy the other day he didn't even have a [ __ ] mask on he had a face shield with all this underneath you could like reach under it and touch his face like what are you wearing what is this it's not doing anything okay a lot of it doesn't make sense but does it doesn't make sense i wear masks because i don't want people to feel uncomfortable that's why when when when you know you're supposed to wear a mask or a mask is suggested i wear a mask just so people feel at ease because i see certain people particularly people that are anxiety ridden that see someone without a mask
and they get upset and they tense up this has been a strain on a lot of folks that were barely hanging on during normal times yeah two years ago there was people that were filled with anxiety freaking the [ __ ] out about regular life those people are still around i recognize that so when i'm supposed to wear a mask i don't complain i put it on but i don't think it does anything i feel like when i'm wearing that mask i'm just placating people and making them feel good which i'm fine with we're in a weird time it doesn't bother me but i i know people that have gotten sick while wearing a mask i know a bunch of people i know like i think at this point i know three or four people that for sure were wearing a mask when they caught yeah i i it's it's by no means perfect at all but also you got to keep in mind that when you're wearing the mask it's most likely it's it's what's called source control so you're more likely to to keep from giving it to people to keep from spreading it yeah not perfect obviously from the video even a little bit not even a little bit i think that guy you know i think maybe he's hamming it up a little bit a little bit but what if you breathe heavy what if you just get through the guys really heavy you know no but but um all these things you know i think in in combination help look this is how i look at it right now things are looking good in terms of the trajectories yeah averaging falling down right hospitalization's coming down it's still a fire burning we're still level 100 000 cases a day once we get under 10 000 cases per day it's an arbitrary number but if you say hey what is it the point where you say we feel like we got this under control the original vaccine was designed to deal with the alpha variant right they're the first the first version that's right how much different is it with the delta and then with all these other ones that are coming up from the rest of the world like i know the lambda the was it the wu is that the or mu does it move it's going down the alpha they ain't nothing to [ __ ] with i don't even know that the the uh the other variants don't look as uh they don't look as um as bad as delta so delta but i thought the lambda was a it was a reality
they're keeping an eye on it but delta it still appears to be more contagious than that one so delta was a particularly bad variant you know yeah hopefully that's what i got that's what you got yeah because it was what a month two months ago now yeah and the way i got it was just being dumb i mean you're in florida in florida doing concerts in the round so what that means is there's a it's an arena and uh there's 14 000 people and you're in the center so here everyone's screaming they're laughing so that's spraying out and then when you get off stage you have to walk through the crowd to get back to the to the green room so you're in a high-fiving people walking through people breathing on me then we went out drinking and playing pool and didn't get back until we quit playing pool at 3 30 in the morning jesus yeah so i was how do you do that i mean just i'm just aside from pandemic i mean i'm 51 how do you know 54. how do you do it man i exercise and i take vitamin c so you can go play pool till 3 30 in the morning i'm trying to suck life dry i'm trying to enjoy myself and that's how i enjoy my i'm a big uh fan of pool i'm a enthusiast well that's my addiction and the next day you weren't sure because the next day i was hungover so i assumed it was the hangover i was like god i feel like [ __ ] uh but it was like headachy you know hangover type thing but then um i did a show that night um uh no problem show was great had a great time in orlando shout out to orlando and then uh got on a plane and when i was on the plane i was like i am weary like in a weird way it was an odd weary and i was like i'm just gonna you know keep an open mind about this but then when i got home i was in my house i was like something's up and i told my wife i said how about i'm gonna go to a different part of the house i go i really feel like i have it i go and she's like you look great and i was like yeah i know but you were getting tested regularly then weren't you yes so you did you know you had it at that point no it didn't test positively because we didn't bring uh the test test kit
to florida got it but when i got back i was like i feel like i caught something there i'm not sure but let me just let me just isolate because i knew something was off i was hoping i was just gonna recover and be fine because i was talking normal i wasn't coughing or anything like that but then um in the middle and i was sweating a lot and i had like chills and i was like i think i got it so then we got tested on sunday and then um i started immediately getting treatment so sunday was the only the real rough day and he wasn't even you know i've had the flu before it was like the flu so how like yeah how how bad was it over walking around you know doing stuff do you wish you didn't have it though yeah of course i mean it wasn't but i was also kind of relieved to get it over with because i feel like you know there's a lot of people that um they you know they feel like they just want to catch it and then recover so they have the antibodies i was in that category i don't know i'm not saying it's wise i'm not saying it's a smart thing it's not but my feeling when i got it was good i got it let's just get through this i knew i was healthy i knew i take care of myself and i knew i was most likely gonna bounce back quickly that turned out to actually be the case so i was correct most people aren't as healthy as you they should get healthy should they should we should encourage them no i shouldn't encourage them to get help number if we're gonna do that we should first of all encourage them to get healthy because getting healthy will prevent a lot of things like heart disease which kills way more people than any disease i mean what we're dealing with with covin is 95 of the people have four comorbidities that die right when you're dealing with heart disease you're just getting heart disease right some of it is obviously you're you're born with it you're born with like certain pre you know predetermined conditions that you have you have no control over but there's a lot of people that are making poor life choices we don't say anything to those folks to tell them that an
injection of a pharmaceutical drug is the answer to their problems i think is not true it's not accurate it is it is a band-aid on one problem but the overall metabolic health is poor and that's one of the reasons why their body's in decline when you're dealing with people that have four co-morbidities outside of genetic conditions outside we're dealing with so many lifestyle choices in this country there's people that are just not exercising are not drinking enough water or not taking vitamins or not being healthy or not making healthy choices these things should be encouraged above and beyond because this is the this is the that's those those are the things that can get your body to a place where it can be better it'll perform better you'll think better you'll feel better yeah you'll have better relationships with with people you'll you'll your life will work better because you're not in this constant state of decay yeah i i look joe i 100 agree with you i spent a lot of time in the book writing about this if you were obese uh by the way 42 percent of the country uh is either uh obese or morbidly obese did you hear that bert crusher 42 percent so so and you were are you shaming somebody about choice my buddy is a buddy of mine just a joke well the the the the risk of uh the risk of getting severe disease was four to five times higher yeah if you if you were obese so we we this is a big problem and why don't we encourage people we need well why is there all this talk of just go and get vaccinated why isn't the president why isn't the press secretary why isn't all these major news why are they saying if they all they have to say get fractionated that's all that's all you ever hear why isn't there you've got to take care of your body it's the front line and not just for covid but the front line defense for everything that ails us i think that um it's been an issue for a long time it remains an issue it needs to be addressed i think when you're dealing with an acute crisis in the middle of a
pandemic hundreds of thousands of people have died it's not to say don't get healthy not saying hey ignore that but that's not going to take care of the problem as rapidly as you know being able to stop the transmission but this is it's not like there's only been one press conference oh look look there's been thousands of discussions and almost no discussion of the fact that 78 of the people that wind up in the hospital for covid are obese right yeah i think i think right and and 113 percent in the icu and whatever it's it's a hundred thirteen percent more likely 113 more likely to end up versus those but yeah this needs to be addressed like joe we we spend 4 trillion a year on health care in this country 70 of the diseases are probably totally preventable and most of that is lifestyle and most of that even more specifically is diet so i think we there's always been again going back to the nuance of these discussions people say hey look you know we can't shame people who are obese and and no nobody's saying shame people who are obese they're saying there's a real problem in this country if we spent one percent of our health care budget on actually helping people get fit and making sure had healthy food and whatever it may be it would go a long way we don't do that this expression you can't shame people is that it's been distorted down to the point where even bringing up the fact that someone is obese is shaming them and that is ridiculous that's what i'm saying that's what gets in the way and it doesn't need to get in the way of this we can have a a good smart discussion about this and doctors and nurses they need to be talking about this stuff with their patients i write a lot about this in the book you know i even the microbiome like what you've eaten in the morning could probably have some impact on how you might fair if you were to get the disease uh later on that night i mean eighty percent of our immunity is in our gut the gut associated lymphoid tissue so there there's a lot you know that we need to be doing i mean what struck me about this pandemic is that wealthier countries
almost across the board got hit harder yeah than poorer countries it's interesting diseases of affluence yeah well i mean wealthier countries but is it wealthier people in those countries that are getting get hit disproportionately harder well it's obese people some right and and and that there's certain you know the demographics you know whatever but if you just compare country to country wealthier countries you think of malaria tuberculosis you think of poorer countries with fewer resources with covid it was wealthier countries and there's there's a few reasons why but we did not we're not healthy it's an overeating issue we're not healthy overeating and poor diet is a is a huge issue and it's it's really stunning when you go back and you look at what people looked like in the 1920s and 1930s and you compare it to what people look like today yeah you know we are so sloppy now and and when you look even more specifically at this virus it probably likes to hang out in fat cells going back to the long haulers thing you asked me earlier why would people who are obese be more likely to develop long-hauling symptoms we don't know for sure but the virus may be sticking around longer in people like that overall but the the issue is not the virus right the the they test negative of the virus even on pcr tests with these long haulers the issue is rather the disease damaging their body to the point where they can't repair correctly they're right they get they get these these high levels of inflammation that just don't come down they continue to have deterioration as a result of that it affects just about every organ system in the body i was telling you about my friend who is a long hauler it's uh cody garbrandt he's a former ufc bantamweight champion he had no idea he had coveted he was just really wrecked and kept training and run the problem is like a lot of these guys particularly like these ufc fighters there's another guy hamzak chimayov had the same problem they don't want to not train right they're such savages that like when they get sick they like [ __ ] this cold i'm i'm going to the gym and they work out
while they're sick yeah kovit is very like i've had many friends that have said they started feeling good and then they worked out and they kicked it back in i waited until i was negative until i was negative before i started training and even when i worked out the first day back i took it pretty easy i just wanted to see what my body felt like yeah but some of these guys are they're they're no they're professional cage fighters so that that makes sense and i know another guy who is a cyclist who kind of did the same thing he was getting better and then he worked out and [ __ ] himself up again yeah i i mean what do you mean he got it again you're saying no he just he was starting to get better but he was still sick and he worked out and then he got way worse you know this is what happened with cody he like he was sick for weeks right because he wouldn't give his body a break yeah yeah because he's a [ __ ] maniac yeah well i mean and that's like any other illness but my point is that's a very different thing calling him a long haul because i think that if he just sat around and did nothing he would have bounced back from it very quickly right whereas an obese person they just have a hard time with all diseases this is going to serve as a significant wake-up call i think for the overall health of the country there's no question we think about this in terms of you know i don't have a heart attack when i'm 70 so i will eat right now you know yeah this showed us just how how how vulnerable we can be and how quickly we can see that vulnerability i mean two years and this this exposed just how much these these uh poor health conditions can can you know affect us in the short term you know what's really good for your health this bourbon you gave me this is super good imagine a doctor giving you something that's like read that read the title do you want to have a drink of it sure sip yeah all right come on man so we the tides are beautiful doc yeah is that why yeah you know then the alter ego part oh what what about the alter ego i just had my alter ego had to show up
to do the joe rogan pogba oh really no i'm kidding i'm kidding this is a cute it's a cube it's a good good bottle i like the bottle it is a good bottle i've not never had this well me neither so okay can can i so did we cover everything like this this myocarditis thing does this this is cheers buddy thanks for having me joe thanks for being here man i enjoyed talking to you i'm glad we did this i told some friends i was having you on they were like what i was like he's a nice guy i talked to him on the phone they say joe rogan you're crazy why would you have heard that before know about having me on oh no um well they just a lot of people think i hate cnn now which i don't you know you don't no well that's the i still watch tnn look i think news organizations have a very specific function in our society it's a very important function and it's to tell people what's going on to inform people when they lie about things like that it's so pointless to me because it's not like i don't have a platform to tell people that you lied and it's not that people don't figure out very quickly that it's a lie but it's it we already have probably the highest level of distrust in mainstream media than we've ever had ever in our lives i don't know if that's because of trump calling everything fake news i don't know it's because of people exposing things that some some uh parts of the news that weren't accurately deployed displayed or depicted i don't know what it is but i think the new i have a great deal of respect for journalism i think real journalism is incredibly important but i think there's an issue today where too much emphasis is put on ratings too much emphasis is put on uh sensationalism uh exaggeration hyperbole changing the headlines in order to get people to pay attention this this is dangerous i think i think we need real hardcore investigations
objective journalism where people just tell stories for what they are this is what they are let's examine what the actual news is and let's distribute it to people for the greater good of mankind i don't think amen yeah i mean i think for the most part that's what cnn does i think that for the most part that's what fox news does for the but when we get ideologically conflicted and distort these narratives in order to sell clicks in order to get people to tune in like that to me is not just dangerous but foolhardy because it engendered it it changes the way people view the news they don't view the news like they viewed the news when i was a kid when i was a kid if you watch cnn or if you watch any news source you assume that what they were telling you was the truth there is probably never been a higher level of distrust in mainstream news than there is today yeah i mean i i i it has changed there's no question about it it's become much more opinion-based especially some shows you know the there's a lot of editorializing even the way that things will be presented with modifiers you know it was just this or you know can you believe x so you've kind of given a a way to think about this i think not that i want to bring this up again you know the whole ivermectin thing but i think that they they the the reason there were the fda put that out there saying you know someone at cnn told them let's make some money i don't i don't let's get people to tune in they like eugene no they don't i like lying i like you too yeah i like jake tapper jake tapper's a good guy i think he's uh they're all good guys he's a very good journalist yeah and and you know so i mean there's a lot of clowns on your network too though you know that right yeah i'm gonna get into that [Laughter] these are my friends i'm sure these are my friends partnered with those dudes and they're high grab ass [Laughter] they they are they are they are um leaving this horse the horse dewormer thing which i know bothers you i think
that this came about because the fda is saying there's no excuse there's no excuse there's no excuse not you're not gonna walk talk your way out of this it's nonsense it's not that's it's not kind it's just a lie it's dumb well it's used as that but that's not how you were do you think people believed it there's a small percentage of people that aren't online no idea that believed it everyone else was like wow look at cnn lying but you know it it's it's just one of these things where it again we're allowed to have nuanced conversations about these things i'm not disagreeing with you that that was insulting i get it and and um but like when you look at these things in terms of how you think versus what you think again like the vaccine i i i'm still like part of me thinks would you ever would you have gotten it i almost got it okay so i'll tell you what happened i was supposed to get it the ufc had allocated uh a bunch of doses for all of their employees um and uh i came down on friday and i said hey um can i get vaccinated and they said yes uh let's set it up um and then right before the event started they said you're gonna have to come to the hospital can you come on monday because i guess with whatever the cdc requirements are you have to be in a hospital setting or i don't know what it was this is in vegas okay i don't know where the rules are and what's and i said i can't be here monday i said i i have a previous obligation i said but i'll be back in two weeks let's do it in two weeks i'll come in a day early okay and they said great in the meantime johnson johnson got pulled shortly there after that one of my friends had a stroke and i'm like oh jesus and johnson johnson got pulled because of that because of blood clots and i shouldn't say one of my friends is a guy now and then i got concerned and then i had another friend who had a very bad adverse reaction this is a guy who had had coveted and recovered and then got vaccinated he got one dose and he got hit really hard and he was bedridden for 11 days and developed all
this fluid built up inside of his body and then i knew another vaccine yeah and then there's a guy from jiu jitsu that had a heart attack and and two strokes and i was like jesus christ like i got nervous about it and i also got nervous that these some of these things are being under reported because when i talked to some of these people i was like was it submitted to the vers report and no they weren't submitted to the various report so i'm like how many people have had adverse reactions that were submitted versus not submitted and i do know that some of the people that submit things to the various report they're not telling the truth they're making things up there's a lot of you know whenever you have like an open forum like that you're going to get a lot of [ __ ] right right so who knows how much of it is true and how much of it is not um so then i started researching therapeutics and talking to people about therapeutics and the conversation with dr pierre corey and brett weinstein and you know and there's many schools of thoughts on this some people think everyone should get vaccinated some people think we should only vaccinate the very vulnerable and what we should do is concentrate on improving the metabolic health of the the general population and having therapeutics in place i i think we should improve the general health of the population i think that's a no-brainer it'll take time you know and we're in the middle of this right now i don't think you're going to be able to do that though well i i think if we spent one percent of our four trillion dollars that we spend on health care every every year to to actually get people healthy but i don't think you can well i don't think it's hard to motivate people well joe i mean isn't so if that's the case then what doesn't that make a stronger case for the vaccine then if you're if you're basically saying hey we can't do that people are just going to be sick and vulnerable and by the way that's half the country probably more when you talk about obesity and diabetes and the other comorbidities that are associated with this you're talking about hundreds of
millions of people yeah so are we just going to say if you're going to say hey look can't do it then doesn't that make the case that we need to vaccinate i think it makes a good case to vaccinate vulnerable people and that includes obese people now i have some obese friends that i've encouraged to get vaccinations i know you're making fun of one of them right behind me bert's been vaccinated okay good all right so he had to he's doing a big movie so so would you now with what you know now and and having had cover would you have would you have wished that you had been vaccinated no beforehand but you almost got vaccinated yeah but again i explained got through it but i got through covid yeah pretty quickly yeah so so that was my my my thought was i'm a healthy person i exercise constantly i'm always taking vitamins i take care of myself i felt like i was gonna be okay and that was true it was correct i'm happy i got through it i don't wish it upon anyone it wasn't fun but it wasn't the worst cold i've ever had and i got over it fairly quickly relatively speaking i i think that uh yeah and again i am truly glad about that i i'm not all kidding aside i don't i don't think anybody wishes you everybody wants you to be well and healthy but i think the question is just in terms of the nuance of this it's not a strategy to recommend people get infected i'm not recommending anybody get infected so they should get vaccinated i think a lot of people should get vaccinated you're trying to think about talking a lot of vulnerable people yeah if you just said vulnerable people yeah older people fat people all i think a lot of those folks my real concern is this urge to vaccinate children and i don't know what kind of data we have on the long-term effects of this and i don't know what kind of data when you look at the study that shows that the 12 to 15 year old boys are four to six times more likely or what is that the number was that whatever the number was much more likely that scares the [ __ ] out of me the the thankfully it's really small numbers period right period so again i am i don't know that we've settled
this whole myocarditis thing maybe we won't today but i worried about this okay because i have kids so you know the thing about a pandemic it's not just me reporting like i go to haiti and i report on an earthquake i'm living this as well and i joe i did deep dives into this and the myocarditis thing specifically came up and and and what i found was that there's a certain background rate of myocarditis there's a certain rate that people would get from the vaccines and there's certain rate that they would get from the disease itself the likelihood of a good whiskey do you like it it's very good good you didn't say anything at first i was worried very you're the you're the expert you're the connoisseur no it's very good good i'm glad to hear that doc swenson's doc swenson's very good i am kind of like relieves your anxiety a little bit right yeah smooth yeah so so we we made the decision based on the risk reward proposition yeah to get our kids vaccinated okay now i i and there's another part of it though that i think is important and you brought this up on another podcast which is that it it limits their chance of them being spreaders of this virus they i don't you know i want to bring this thing to an end and i know that do you think that that's possible bring it down to control control i think this virus is probably here just like there's descendants of the 1918 flu pandemic right that still linger we now have it under much better control it's still by the way flu still kills up to 60 000 people a year so i don't i think this virus is here to stay but it will be a more inconsequential virus let me put it that way part of getting there is to really bring down the amount of transmission if you could see the virus you would see it being sort of a viral storm you know you'd actually see that we're being showered and virus kind of like you're you're vaping guy over here you know it's just just a lot of virus out there yeah so if you have more and more people who have immunity and the virus runs out of places to go not perfect again eight times less likely to
get infected not perfect but eventually it starts to really wither down and i think having more and more people immunized helps that what do you think about the uh discussion about leaky viruses excuse me leaky vaccines and that legally vaccinates no leaky vaccines vaccines that still allow people to get infected and that they help the virus select for more aggressive variants yeah this is this is an interesting point so this idea that somehow you know like kind of like antibiotic resistance you could be developing resistance to the to the vaccines because uh the the types of viruses that are then allowed to to what the virus will select for like because the vaccines target a very specific protein that some of these variants that are more aggressive like particularly the delta or whatever one they are that the virus will then propagate through selection of more aggressive variants yeah i i think that the idea that the more the virus spreads the more variants come out is is real uh if if you're if the if the idea is that more people getting having immunity you know i use the term generally immunity to the very specific original variant right if more people have immunity to that does that then you know select for more delta or more whatever that's coming down the line maybe but i think ultimately if you just slow down the spread that's gonna be that's gonna that's what's won in the past or at least brought these things under control in the past traditionally when viruses uh do mutate and change do they change they tend to change towards i'm just i'm going to ask you this do they tend to change towards more spreadable but less dangerous viruses typically but that doesn't mean they have to do that right that's that's exactly what i've heard as well is that that's that they want they want to find hosts they don't want to kill their hosts they'd rather their hosts stay alive us human beings but they want to spread you know be able to spread easily which is kind of what we saw with delta it's not clear to me that delta is actually more dangerous than the other variants it's just it's very contagious
you know so people who got away with things earlier in the pandemic were less likely to get away with it with delta yeah and i think that was me because there was uh two separate occasions where i was around a lot of people that got sick one time in the green room of a concert where everybody got sick but me i mean everybody and then another time where my whole family got sick and i didn't get sick but i did feel like [ __ ] there was two days where i was working out i was like something's going on like where during normal activities i felt fine yeah but then under exertion i felt a diminished capacity for work like when i was doing workouts i was like god i feel draggy right and i knew something was going on so i've done that before and i've gotten myself sick by being a meathead that was you know years past but now when that happens what i do is i just basically go through the motions very lightly and i break a sweat stretch out and get out of there so i get the benefits of exercise you know with the endorphins and you get the respirator your you know your circulatory system pumps and your respiratory system pumps and you get a good little you know you get some activity but no stress no strain right and i did that for two days and i was good but the second day was the same thing i was like something's going on my whole family got covered during that time period my wife got it my two kids got it are they all okay yeah my older kid didn't get it but she she knew that we had it and so she didn't come by but we're good but i knew that i had encountered it and that my my immune system had fought it off and i think i probably i mean i like to think that i probably would have fought it off in florida too if it wasn't for getting hammered and staying out to three in the morning playing pool i feel like that part of your life's not gonna change yeah uh probably not it's probably it's a lot of fun dude see that's one of the reasons why i stay healthy yeah i know i could still have fun i'm i'm impressed i i'm having a harder and harder time doing that as i've gotten older i can't i can't go out and yeah you gotta get angry i gotta i gotta get angry you gotta get angry before you work out
is that what it is yeah you can't like lackadaisically approach your fitness your fitness has to try like a life or death battle as you get older i'm very inspired to be fit i really am and because i feel good right i think part of it is i just want to be healthy and live a long time but feel better i feel good and i think that's closing the loop a lot of times you tell people to eat right and exercise and then nothing will happen to you and it's not the most inspiring message right wow but if i tell you feel good now just on you your your your vaccine though just just this one point i will make you're a vaccine salesman you're working for a vaccine salesman hey you know you you texted me when i asked about the natural immunity thing and i think you're raising a really good point about natural immunity i think the the issue a little bit joe and this is more just because i care about you i do is that is no idea is that we don't have good data on how long the the natural immunity lasts we don't have good data how long the vaccine immunity lasts either we we get in some which is showing that there's some waning uh against mild disease right but against severe disease it's still pretty good sars cove won the original size very good we have 17 18 years later there's a t-cell immunity jamie's got fat pipes when he gets his he's one year in he's very proud of this guy's our test subject he's our canary in the coal mine look at him he got it again though right no he didn't no he didn't no he didn't get it again no he never got that exposed again he got exposed to him but he would not get sick he never stopped working out never stopped working he never got never tested he tests every day just like everybody he never tested positive would you would you the the the idea of getting another so some countries are doing this why some countries are doing this i'm going to tell you why would i get a vaccination why would i get vaccinated when you know i have better immunity than someone who's been vaccinated that's true i don't know how so if that's true this conversation is over i don't know how you're encouraging non-vaccinated people to get vaccinated
right which would be better why don't you encourage them to get sick as well then they could be as healthy as me uh i'm still working on my first one here get in there all right big [ __ ] putting around so if i said if i said and then you're going to ask me how i know which i get but if i said you're likely to have longer term immunity there was a stuck study that came out of kentucky cheers brothers this is fun you know i i i go on cnn and i'm pretty much as i said not that fun well people people are we're all saying the same thing right i wanted to come talk to you because i felt like we could have a conversation and maybe i could even convince you of a few things like convince me to get vaccinated on top of the fact that i've already got antibodies that are stronger than vaccinated people good luck there was a study that came out of kentucky that showed oh is this how long we've been talking by the way no no no no i'm talking for about an hour two hours and 20 minutes it's amazing i you know i watch i listen and watch your podcast i can't you know it strikes me that so many people are moving towards these really abbreviated things like there was quibby you know like we'll do this in two minutes yeah that didn't work out so good no and then i'm thinking like the number one podcast in the country are these two to three hour conversations but i tell you there was an accident it wasn't by like i designed it saying that you know if i have these long long conversations it'll do better i just like to do that that is what i enjoy i don't feel like you get to know someone until like an hour into talking to them i think you're right i think you wear them down it sounds like you wear me down and then you like flash up some study and you're like you know you i don't know what the hell you're talking about i knew i'm not i really want to tell you this i really i knew when you changed your tune on marijuana that you were a good person wow i really and i knew that that's a difficult thing to do
and so then when cena our friend cena reached out and said sanjay gupta wants to talk to you i was like oh [ __ ] i go talk to that guy and then we talked on the phone i'm like you're a nice guy like let's do a podcast okay let's do it well i i really appreciate it and i as you know i was wanting to talk to you even aside from a podcast yes because i'm curious how you think about things and and and you a lot of people listen to you joe and i think a lot of people depend on you oh a lot like that well i mean they're taking your cues they're taking no they're taking your cues on things and and that's you know i think with the vaccine i i think that what you said and i heard you say it afterwards that you're not anti-vaxxed at all yeah and and even that 21-year-old thing that made all the 21-year-old guest you had on the show or no it was a friend of yours i think that you were he asked you should he get vaxxed no no no i was talking about young people like a 21 year old uh healthy person should you get vaccinated and i didn't think you should because i think you could beat it fairly easily but then you but then afterwards you said hey look what hasn't been explained well is exactly why he should give acts beyond uh the fact that you know he's likely to recover well but could he be potentially someone who is a source of spread and that was sounded like from what you said that was of concern to you right well that was one of the things that fauci had said like you know he responded to me saying that if you uh only are concerned about yourself but that if you're talking about spreading it to other people that's you know your responsibility to the community is different like okay well that's a different argument yeah and i see his point but i think really the response to that i think what i would like is far more comprehensive testing i think that would solve a lot of our problems in terms of spread and i think there's a tremendous amount of spread that's unnecessary that if people knew they were infected we could have cut that down radically yes i i we've never had testing right in this
country we still don't know i mean the other day a study came out that's a 43 million confirmed cases of cove in the country i think it's way higher than that because we just don't know we don't know we have no idea that's a problem i've had quite a few friends that were sick and weren't sure if they got kovid and then we brought them in here four or five months later and gave them an antibody test and it turns out they had had it you know when you talk about your like the friends by the way was that 19 year old i'm really curious about the story of the 19 year old who needed a heart transplant if you have that yeah i found one place that said it was claiming it was due to that and then i found other places that said that the doctors didn't know exactly yeah the family says it's 100 from the vaccine that she got vaccinated right afterwards and they didn't want to submit it to the verse and you know there's a lot of hesitancy amongst hospitals and doctors are submitting things to the various because they don't want to contribute to vaccine hesitancy but do you agree with that they're there yeah and it's not a very good system either right because you have both you have people who submit things that are not right fake fake stories and then and then other people not submitting so i don't know that it's a really but i i just don't i don't this is the one that started out that way just so you can see it got it it's i mean it's a sad sad that's really she's 19. she had a heart heart transplant one month after developing what her doctors believe is myocarditis following her second dose of moderna so this this what's really sad is she gets the heart transplant and then the immunosuppressant drugs um caused her to succumb to pneumonia and then she dies in pneumonia i you know i i mean how do you just there's no chance she would have died from covet you i mean a [ __ ] an infinitesimally small chance i think when when you when you put it all together just again in terms of how you think you're not anti-vaccines no still despite that there are there are stories like that and i'm gonna again you've given me two things i'm gonna look at one is this story the 19 year old and the other one is the hospitalization rates among these
these young people you know versus versus the vaccine but overall you know when you just put it all together you would still recommend people get vaccinated i would definitely recommend people who are vulnerable get vaccinated so and definitely people who are thinking about getting vaccinated and think that it's the right option for them to get vaccinated but i'm not a person that should recommend anything helpful no i i i get that i think that sometimes people will because a lot of people listen to you that's a problem see the thing is like i'm not trying to get people to i'm not telling people to listen to me i'm not telling people to follow my suggestions i'm just talking and it's it's become this thing where millions of people listen and it's not i mean it wasn't by design i know right and the idea that i'm supposed to change how i talk about stuff now because it's really popular well then guess what it won't be popular anymore the one of the reasons why it works is because i don't have a filter yep is i just when you were talking to me right here if you and i were at a restaurant it would be the same conversation if you and i'm at my house same conversation i'm what i have figured out a way to do is be professionally be me i could be me professionally the only time it really varies is when i do ufc commentary because then i'm very professional because this is like a profound respect to have for the athletes and my job is very different there it's just to give life and to to put words to their performances that's that's the difference that's the only job i have i feel like when i listen to you and even this conversation now is a very authentic conversation and i think it's that's all i have you don't have we don't have enough of that uh overall in society so from authenticity people don't take my advice take the advice of people who are professionals listen to you and then also listen to other professionals like dr pierre corey and decide for yourself listen to evolutionary biologists like brett weinstein listen to
various real experts what i'm doing is just having conversations with people and if you want to listen you can listen but my advice to you is to not take my advice do you do you have like certain levels of evidence or or facts that you say okay well this is going to convince me one way yes most certainly not everything can have the same one most certainly in your in your yeah so like uh you know um ivermectin i won't call it the stuff that makes you upset sports dewormer yeah we'll call it that i'm the only person on cnn come on matt you know what's so funny when we spoke on the phone i'm like wow he really he really took that seriously this this whole thing i mean it's like you don't strike me as someone whose ego would would be bruised or anything it's not an ego thing i know i know it's like it has nothing i know i don't know they're lying on tv and they're the news like legitimately if you know that they're lying about you and you see that you'll okay well what are they saying about hunter biden what are they saying about russia what are they saying about syria how do i know if they're telling the truth about all these other very important things when this insignificant thing of a dumb comedian taking a medication can i just tell you i'm sorry that i brought this up again so no but just level of evidence-wise yes so ivermectin versus vaccine does one have a lot more evidence behind it well one has a lot more use in this country that we're aware of right that's for sure when you compare we need to figure out what the [ __ ] is actually going how do you say that the country in india again it's a so they don't think of it as well india is a country right obviously but the the count is it a county i'm sorry uh it they it's a i think it's a region or a state i think in this case yeah okay and it's crazy that a state has 230 million people i mean you know it's like how big india is it's like i know right when and funny when they described wuhan as a little town in central china 11 million population right bigger than manhattan a small town
we live in a small we're four percent of the world's population here um but yes so ivermectin yeah the evidence of what that i'd like to see what's going on there yeah no i i i i looked at that and and i think it's these things are definitely worth looking at i really do spend a lot of time reading these studies and trying to make decisions and judgments on my own in part from my own family and myself my parents yeah i mean when you tell when you say the thing about you know people getting really sick and having strokes after a vaccine for my parents who are probably listening right now um they're in their late 70s that's gonna scare the [ __ ] out of that but ironically those are the people that are less likely to have adverse side effects my parents breezed through it both my parents got vaccinated it was nothing i know it still scares people though my mom literally felt nothing she didn't feel any fatigue nothing so so but the the vaccine has some six billion shots that have now been given around the world forty thousand people clinically ivermectin has some some data it's not you know there's still a clinical trial that's just starting in south carolina so we're gonna get more data on ivory single trial and ivory mechanics yeah yeah around mine's conducting that i'm not sure if it's the university or it's another group but they they just saw the the announcement for the uh do you know what the dosage is i don't 300 does that sound right i can't remember three hundred no no i may have the dose wrong don't quote me on that i think the current recommendation is uh 0.6 milligrams per kilogram oh okay so i think what i was taking was 18 milligrams uh i think i was taking an 18 milligram dose got it so so maybe it's 30 i don't remember what the dosa but but there are trials that are still happening and and whereas with the vaccine there's a lot of data and then you know you bring up the long-term effects we're going to need to know at that dosing which is probably going to be higher dosing than treating you know river
blindness and things like that what is the dosage well because we're treating riverboats i don't know but the blood concentrations you needed in those studies that they you know that pierre talks about as well were much higher doses in order to get the antiviral effect at least in the lab so if you're trying to replicate that in the body you're probably gonna need higher doses and i think you're talking about the in vitro uh that's right in vitro versus in vivo the in vitro studies that showed the uh the the the ceasing of viral replication that the that's what you're talking about yeah so so i i just like in in terms of how you think about this like the vaccine has a lot of data behind it there's obviously some terrible stories which i'm going to look at here i had not heard about for example this 19 year old but for the most part it has a lot of data behind it that shows that it is safe and that it's effective in terms of keeping people from getting super sick can i say one thing that's really important too yeah i know that people are going to bring this up i am very aware that these rare anecdotal stories like this woman who's 19 years old it's not it's you you can't take that as the you know absolute this is what's going to happen to people these rare stories of this young poor young lady i'm very aware that these are unusual but that gives no comfort to the family that lost that dog i totally agree no trust me man that bro i i that that i get my chest hurts a little bit when i read stories like that what bothers me is my daughter's 16 years old when it bothers me at 19 years old it is especially especially when you look at her and she's very fit and young highly unlikely she would have had a problem with covet yeah i i agree that drives me crazy i want to know i wanna i'm gonna i'm gonna deep dive there i'm going to i promise you look into that but overall just statistically speaking you know you do have one of the most studied therapeutics or you know products now this vaccine on the planet we've had an incredible amount of people
take it over a short period of time but very understudied in terms of long-term consequences would you agree to that the only way you can study long-term is with the passage of time right that's what but that's what i'm concerned about i know but but that's what a lot of people are concerned but you're not going to wait 10 years before you give a vaccine in the middle of a pandemic if 99 99.7 people survive is that accurate or somewhere in that range you know i've heard a 0.5 mortality rate roughly so 99.5 and you know of two people that almost died from a vaccine you can understand why someone would be hesitant right two people out of of the people that i know two people out of the people you know died from a vaccine no no no no no no i said had an adverse reaction okay did i say died i didn't say die did i i don't think i said die okay i said had adverse reactions very bad reactions like i said one of them had a stroke the other one had a uh a heart attack and two strokes well i'm sorry to hear that you know this this kind of reminds me of the air conditioning person i talked to where you know there was a real concern that he had about clotting yeah and that's probably if you talk about heart attacks and strokes clotting is sometimes the root cause of that and again i'm aware like this is very very very rare when you're dealing with hundreds of millions of people that are vaccinated i'm aware this is very very rare yeah so so i i just you know i i know again you're not saying don't get vaccinated you're you're i'm not recommending people do that especially recommending it to older people like my parents i didn't try to convince them not to do it at all right i convinced them to do it i mean or encourage them to do it i encouraged some of my overweight friends to get vaccinated i'm not an anti the problem is also it's not a traditional vaccine right it's more of a gene therapy than it is like in you know an inert virus that you've inserted into people right so it's a different sort of virus i mean different sort of vaccine yeah mrna vaccine so the term is weird that's an mrna well the term vaccine is weird because it's really a therapeutic
because it's only got a certain amount of lifespan like if you need a booster after a year or whatever it is that but that is that is not unusual for all vaccines to get a booster but it's only the flu vaccine that's similar the flu vaccine is a yearly sort of thing but like if you look at things like hepatitis or you look at other other vaccines you know you get boosters of some of these things um tetanus they get hepatitis boosters every year not every year no i'm saying a booster i'm not saying we may not need boosters every year for this how often do people get hepatitis boosters i'm just saying they may get one booster like you get a you get a prime and then a boost when do you get the boost i can't remember but then you're good for the rest of your life right so that's different than this well we don't know i mean we don't know we're not sure that we're going to need to get boosters every year i mean if the people get boost like i'm saying and this gets back to even with me i got a prime and then i got a second shot three weeks later i think we should have centers where people can go to catch covet after they've been vaccinated so you have like the ultimate control i feel like this conversation you somehow you're trying to convince me of something and i'm trying to convince him to get covered you're telling me to get fascinated [Laughter] so look if i get coven yeah and i call you up and i say joe then i have to get vaccinated yeah [ __ ] off come on well i have better immunity than you you got cloven you don't know i guarantee you i do you i got fat lines do you want to measure lines i saw yours these are [ __ ] ass lines they're pretty good huh yours are barely what barely i thought you meant they were really strong no jamies are strong jamie's like [ __ ] fat sharpies these these uh these places are recommending that natural immune they say as you said and i asked the question about natural immunity it can be very protective we don't know how long those antibodies last right yep in other cases
like sars you know immunity lasted a long time there was a study out of kentucky showing people who had had um uh natural immunity their reinfection rates versus people who had natural immunity plus the vaccine and they found that the reinfection rates were twice as high in those who just had the natural immunity the natural immunity people where they have been reinfected what is the mortality rate is it zero because it's pretty close i'm sure it's low it's really close it's certainly way way way lower than people who've been vaccinated people who have been vaccinated who die of covid are rare but you they're numerous the people who have died from re-infection to covet is very low isn't it you might be right i don't know the numbers of that off top my head i just know the reinfection rates and it does bring up this question of who that's what brings yeah brings up the questions what do they look like well also are they fat also should we treat all breakthroughs right we got kind of fixated on that oh it's a good thing to get fixated on we're going to fix that problem real pro we should fix it you say we can't say i know i think we should look it's this is coming from a person who used to teach martial arts for a living it's very difficult to motivate people very very very hard to motivate people you know this is this is a really interesting thing about you i think most people who are listening to podcasts know this but i did not know this about you you were the taekwondo champ state champ in massachusetts yeah messages right yeah 21 years old well i won four years in a row from yeah and and and then you left because you're worried about uh concussions yes i started having real fear about brain there was more kickboxing i started kickboxing after i uh did taekwondo or during and then after the last three fights that i had were kickboxing fights and i was aware that first of all i was suffering some some issues like had really bad headaches but also i was aware that
people around me that i'd known had been fighting for years were starting to slur their words and we're starting to exhibit diminished behavior like diminished cognitive cognitive function clearly like there was something about it and then you know that term punch drunk has always been around but we really didn't understand cte right until you know the early 2000s it started and then the concussion movie and then you know people started doing examinations and all these different studies of people post-mortem but now we under we have an understanding about brain damage now that we didn't have when i was a child right but i was aware that i was doing damage to myself i mean so your risk assessment at a pretty young age was you mean you you evaluated that made a decision and yeah it sounds like it was a smart decision i mean you know i mean you were at risk who knows how high your risk would have been for having a real problem but it was enough of a concern for you well i'm also very fortunate that there was no real professional avenue when i was young right like you think you would have stuck with it otherwise it's hard to say it's hard to say because i remember reading recently about this 24 year old football player in the nfl who was really promising and doing really well san francisco yeah another guy i i know the story yeah and he was like i'm done yeah and they were like what but he was like he realized like hey i have a whole life you know i probably have another 70 [ __ ] years of life i am not going to do it drooling on myself i'm not going to do it having these uh you know their ct it can play it it's so strange right because the apoe4 the whatever that uh the the issue that some people have versus some people don't where it leads you to be more susceptible to cte and um and and various um issues that people have from uh repeated uh head trauma they don't know you know you don't know if it's gonna affect you like it affects some people i know i know fighters that have been
fighting for 10 15 years and a hardcore and they're fine see this is exactly how i feel about this whole issue with the pandemic you just contextualized it for me i don't know i think i'm going to be fine could i have a problem i mean you're pinning me down on this right you're you want me to get a third vaccine so you i don't want you to get through i want you to get coveted yeah no you don't you did i think you'd be fine listen listen we know about monoclonal antibodies yeah and i really firmly believe that if you were sick and you got monoclonal antibodies should be fine yeah i think the monoclonal eyes work really well they work really well trust me i still don't want covet though yeah you'd be fine i think it's okay but you're younger than me come on look at you you little kids but just like you're saying about the concussions though like most of those guys will be fine they didn't have a problem right not most of those guys no no no no no no no it's the opposite it's not muslims most of them have problems yes most yeah most of us most uh the it's the opposite equation yeah it's not that prevalent yes yes it is my main moral dilemma about being involved in martial arts in in uh and commentating and it's not that i um don't respect the decision of the athletes to pursue a dangerous but ultimately insanely rewarding uh lifestyle choice and and career choice it's not that and i understand that the glory that these people the highs that they achieve are impossible for mere mortals like myself to comprehend that is a fact when you're dealing with uh israel at a sonya when you're dealing with uh conor mcgregor or you're dealing with the dustin poirier we're dealing with like the elite of the elite like what they experience upon victory is probably most of us will probably never understand it probably never understand it but it is my personal belief that most of them stay too long most of
them take too much damage most of them will suffer most of them this i mean this this you know some people have likened some of these sports like football you know we're taking a lot of blows to the head like you know the coliseum days where people were were fighting well those were slaves i mean there's a real difference like the colosseum days those people were forced into combat yeah they're forcing the countdown although you know some people if this is this is their life this is their source of revenue you know i mean but it's a choice you know it's there's a very big difference between locked in a cage and then giving a sword like [ __ ] russell crowe and being forced out into the i mean like i don't think i don't think they're valid all right fair enough not not a valid comparison in terms of that like the the servitude part of it but the idea that you're putting yourself at real risk but you can in order you can choose not to but this is why i draw the distinction um i feel like there's a great danger in a lot of things that we celebrate whether it's bmx riding people who do skateboarding and do a lot of [ __ ] jumps and flips and falling hit their head people get concussions from soccer there's a lot of cte from soccer i don't know if you're aware of that um there's a lot of things that people do where there are long-term consequences for for short-term gains so for a lot of fighters they have to figure out how to navigate those waters with the just mitigating the amount of damage that they get i think if when i look at fighters overall in general one of my favorite examples of someone who's done a fantastic job of mitigating risk is floyd mayweather and the reason why he's been so good at it is because first of all he's very intelligent and he recognized early on that defense is of primary concern it's the most important thing defense is the most important floyd mayweather is probably the least hit boxer in the history of boxing it's incredible how good his defense is and because of that he's managed to get to i mean he's in his 40s
now and when you hear him talk there's no evidence of decline he's fine and he still maintains his physical ability you know he's doing like these kind of freak show boxing matches now but he's just doing that because he can make enormous amounts of money with relative low risk in my opinion he's like the smartest boxer of all time because he's managed to take fights where he's almost guaranteed victory and make hundreds of millions of dollars doing so it's kind of crazy yeah and if you go over his career with a fine toothed comb he's really only been hit hard like three or four times he's so good defensively which is but not everybody is so you're entering into the same sort of sport some people their approach is to just go ah full blast and clash into each other and hope that they survive and that the other person falls floyd mayweather's approach is like some four-dimensional chess game with like you know he's just got far more comprehensive understanding of movement and boxing and like what what happens when you do this and then i do that and then what's your natural response after that he's two three four five six steps ahead of the average boxer but it's because of work it's because of thinking it's because of having his you know his uncle was roger mayweather and his father was floyd mayweather the guy who fought sugary leonard back when leonard was in his prime yeah his father was an amazing boxer so because of that he's got this lineage and he's got this you know he's a part of like an incredible boxing lineage but not everybody's flying mayweather right in fact there's only one there is only one ever or two it sounds like five thousand but i mean he's 50 and oh 50 victories no defeats has literally never been really in trouble in a fight well i i mean that that it's it's really interesting to hear how people mitigate their risk you know like you're saying he does he's focused on defense and things like that i don't know if that's if he's consciously thinking about for sure but i you know it just comes back to for me with with you even like you've thought about risk in your own life with uh the taekwondo you've thought about
like whether or not that was the right thing for you and i think for for everyone who's navigating their way through this pandemic it's sort of the the same thing right the difference i think is the collective on this like how what is our obligation to the larger group in terms of reducing the spread of this virus that's that's what that's what it i mean it's part of the reason i've you know wanted to come talk to you and the reason i wrote this book was what book did you write world world war c you didn't get a copy of it no yeah what the [ __ ] i didn't even know you wrote a book oh my god do you have one on you i don't have it what kind of publicist are you working with oh my gosh she did didn't get jamie didn't give you a book world war c no we didn't get a book you have do you have a picture of it there it is look at you handsome so there it is world war c covid 19 pandemic and how to prepare for the next one but honestly why would you think that i i should get vaccinated on top of having natural immunity from overcoming covid i think your protection's really good right now how does my protection right now without it without the best of the vaccine yeah i think you know it's like you said i mean if you look at the israel data you know it's maybe six to 16 some there was one study that said even up to 23 times better in terms of neutralizing antibodies i think we don't know how long it lasts that's the only thing i mean you you're going to keep checking your antibodies and so you'll probably know and jamie will know so maybe maybe you're a little different if jamie gets it again i'll spit in his mouth i'll tell [Laughter] i wanted to find out how long it'll last sort of that's why i've been testing it accelerated that's the old damon wayans yeah we've been waiting to see if it would ever go away and hasn't ever gone away yeah just showed up every single time so most people don't have access to it they should in terms of the testing i understand they have access to it i understand that they've been very
privileged in that regard that kentucky study worried me because more people got reinfected now maybe they weren't what are they doing down there they're eating chicken drinking booze yeah bourbon there's a lot of fat people in kentucky no disrespect and no disrespect to cheetos or mountain dew either but let's be honest some of your friends who've i've got fat friends so my favorite people are fat and some of the some of your healthier ones have gotten it right they got covered too a couple of them yeah they've all been fine unfortunately you don't wish them well no but but the people the the higher reinfection rates among those who did not get a second i've only had one friend that's been reinfected post covet infection one friend and he's very overweight it yeah i mean i i think you know if you start to look at the the like specific numbers you know the kentucky study just showed you at a higher rate of reinfection yeah if you were not if you just had the natural immunity and you didn't get vaccinated so if you wanted to say hey look i want to be done with this there's a good chance between a prime which was your coveted infection in this case and then a boost which would be the vaccine that you'd probably have really long-lasting protection can i say that a hundred percent no you know basing that on on just the data from other vaccines and and you know looking at what's happening with these antibodies overall i mean i've had um four five friends who got covered and then got vaccinated after they got covered one of them had a severe reaction to the first modernist shot and did not get a second that's the one that i was talking about about fluid built up in his body and he's an elite athlete by the way right and he had a severe reaction whereas he was bedridden for i think it was 11 days uh he put videos up on his instagram of it's disturbing see the fluid built up in his body it was like his lymph nodes were it's like it was overrunning his like one side of his body um so that's
you know out of six people five six people that got coveted and then got vaccined one had a severe reaction you think that do you think that's a real problem though i think it is it's more likely um to have a severe there's a study that showed that people who have had coveted and recovered and then got vaccinated are more likely to have a bad reaction or a more severe reaction from the vaccine than people who have not had covet and got vaccinated i heard that about the second shot it's like people got two shots after the thing and i think that's why some of these countries started going to saying hey look you've been primed already right because you had it so now we'll give you the boost because that'll probably give you long a longer lasting my friend craig who had a bad reaction that was just first one shot one shot of moderna but the thing is like um if i got one shot i still wouldn't be considered vaccinated right so all of the perks of that saying like to be able to go to new york city that may need to change that may need to change that may need to change i'm with you on that you know that's that's why i asked the ifauchi as you know about the question about natural immunity it's not clear at this time you're giving him the australian accent no evidence what did you think he doesn't speak like that though yeah he does no i can do a fouchy impression if you give me some time um what did you think about um the connection between fouchy and uh the eco health alliance and the gain of function research at the wuhan institute because that's very disturbing i did a i did a whole documentary on this i mean it is um i think it's concerning uh that we don't know the origins of this virus still i think it's concerning that um they were you know they were obviously doing all kinds of research on bat coronaviruses and wuhan institute of virology i talked to ralph barrack who is the he's sort of the gain of function guy he's at he's at uh he's here in the states at unc but he's the one who spent
some time in wuhan knows dr she you know who's called the bat lady and so it's it's concerning you know what concerns me the most joe i think just statistically you know most uh most pathogens like this have been natural spread over events from animals to humans that's how you know sars started that way um a lot of flu viruses start that way and that's what i would have believed here as well what has been so suspicious is that they just won't there's no investigation into they say that they investigated but they didn't investigate the lab leak theory there was a database that went down in september of 2019 there was workers who got sick at the uh at the wuhan institute of virology there may have even been a a relative of one of those workers who died we're not sure a spouse died yeah i mean there was and the blood samples of them to show whether or not they have antibodies that would be a very a good thing to know those blood samples were not released to the who they didn't allow people into the lab so like if you were to say to me hey just de novo before i knew any of that what's how do you think this thing started i would have said it probably started from animals to humans because that's how they usually start but why is there such cover-up right and they were buying ppe including from the united states in the fall of 2019 there was a study just came out said they were likely buying reagents for pcr testing in the summer of 2019 maybe that was for something else we don't know we just don't know so it's it's and and china has not been very transparent even going back to the days of sars you know they waited a long time before they actually alerted the world on this so it's it's it's concerning did you read the email leaks do the emails from people intercepted and yeah all the the different discussions that they had about their concerns that they were responsible for this through gain of function research they applied for a grant to specifically do a to insert a furion cleavage site which is that particular part of the virus that that raised so much concern yeah i mean look the thing is like if
this gets back this gets back to the same thing i think we're dancing around a little bit which is i don't know sometimes what to do with this it's highly suspicious i think of this sometimes the way i think about my teenage kids they're not telling me everything here now do i automatically assume they're totally guilty of everything i think they're guilty of or is there something else going on here you know i i think china has not part of being prepared in my world wars ebook is is that is that um we have to have a a world health organization that's actually empowered to be able to do things it's just it's too beholden i think to china and and there was a letter that came out from peter dashik in february of last year that he wrote in the lancet along with a bunch of other people saying this thing you know this is ridiculous to suggest that this had somehow been bioengineered at a lab meanwhile the internal emails suggested that he had very different concerns that's that's that's worrisome and i said that i said peter this this is not making sense and what did he say he said hey there's no evidence that the virus ever existed in this lab there's no evidence that at least that's because they destroyed a lot of evidence they they they it this is concerning they deleted in how many how many how much evidence did they delete in 2019 i mean some stunning amount well the entire database went down exactly now i said what i said to him you were part of the who investigation did you see the database now it's been over a year later he said no when i said is that not of concern to you he said look he goes it was a public database they were worried about hacking and and so that's why they took it down i said if it was a public database why were they worried about hacking you know what were they what were they trying to hide you know so i don't i don't know joe what to make of it it's the the the there's clearly as you said earlier i think you said where there's smoke there's fire probably but can i say conclusively no and and part of me things we may never know we don't have a system in place
at a at a sort of global level to mandate that these things actually come to light yeah we don't treat this like we treat department of defense issues we don't treat you know we should be thinking about this more from a defense standpoint rather than a public health preventive standpoint that's interesting yeah yeah um when you see fauci being grilled by rand paul and he denies that they were doing gain of function research what are your thoughts on that because by any definition that was gain of function research right gain of function research is taking a virus we should probably google the exact definition but what my um impression is that gain of function means you are imparting new ability to this virus to infect humans right the idea is that you're juicing it up and making it more contagious that's right and and that type of research has been done and in fact i think it was done 2015 i think in the in the netherlands somewhere but if the nih was was giving funding to eco health alliance and equal health alliance was funding that kind of research i think and then is not being honest about that i think i think the nih is clearly funding eco health alliance and eco health alliances clearly giving grants to wuhan institute of virology here's how they answer the question when i ask them including francis collins who's the head of the nih they they define gain of function research as this you have a known bad contagious pathogen and you're going to essentially do it you know use the backbone of another known bad pathogen and you're going to splice them together essentially you're taking one thing that you know to be bad and contagious and splicing it with something else that you know to be bad that is you're expecting this to be worse than what you started with if you're taking a novel virus and you don't know how contagious this is and you're basically saying look i want to i want to isolate the spike protein on this new virus i'm going to put it on
the backbone of something i do know and make it contagious to humans we'll see how it behaves at that point does this actually start to behave as something super contagious or not the the the possibility is that it could but they're not sure so this is nuanced and you know a lot of people have taken issue with it including scientists who work in the field but the strict definition is that you've got to know for gain of function research you know that it's going to lead to gain of function so maybe the problem is using the term gain of function yeah if we instead abandon any sort of uh nomenclature that might be problematic and say were they doing experiments to make viruses more contagious to people the answer would be yes yeah were they doing experiments that could lead to viruses being more contagious yes i think that that's right um that is that is research that is done to try and figure out i mean it's a lot of these pathogens they they examine they're they're not contagious they put the spike protein and they put some component of the virus onto the backbone of a known thing and it doesn't do much so they say we have to worry about this but it could turn into a situation where you take a component of a new virus you put it on the backbone of a known virus and it does lead to something much more contagious and that's what a lot of people are concerned about here i mean you know there was the part of those emails as you know joe were emails that were sent to fauci in january of last year where christian anderson raised this concern he subsequently wrote a paper saying hey those changes that we saw i thought that that was clear evidence of bioengineering but now i've seen evidence of those same abnormalities in existing naturally occurring viruses so now i don't think that's that's the problem but it's just it's it's going back and forth and you know frankly we may never know for sure it's really complicated and the problem is for someone like myself who doesn't have any education in the matter i'm i'm reading these analysis back and forth and back and forth and trying to figure out what's what yeah but i i don't like the way fauci responded when he was
asked by rand paul well he made me very it's so freaking antagonistic it's just so antagonistic i mean you know i i it made me uncomfortable too and you know rand paul's really grilling him i mean this gets back a little bit how you started this whole conversation like jen saki yeah is the is the what's the goal here well yeah and and that kind of conversation i feel like doing it like from a far distance they're both at these tables fauci's over here rand paul's over here what i would like to see is fouchy and rand paul in a podcast yeah just the two of them yeah i mean i would be a moderator i would i would sit on the side and just ask him questions i like that i would i would love to do that i i think i think you know i've heard you talk about fouch i mean you you have feelings about him i mean i i do what am i feeling you don't like him it's not that i don't like him um i think he likes a lot of attention and i think that's a real problem for someone who is in a position where he's essentially directing public health i think he enjoys being in the spotlight which a lot of people do it's a natural human inclination and i but i think that's not why you don't like it's an issue for scientists why don't i like him tell me i don't know i mean you think he's being he you you i think he's being deceptive i think you think he's not being honest with these things i think you think that too i don't know i i think that you know the gain of function thing like look let's put it this way he wasn't surprised by that question right it's not like holy [ __ ] when you saw his emails yeah did you get concerned that he possibly knew that they were maybe responsible um that's a good question that hesitation that's a good question that hesitation alone if i asked you do you think jamie's responsible for the pandemic yes definitely no hesitation let's see what i'm saying no but here's why i'm on this podcast because we can have a nuanced conversation about this yeah i think that when you're doing bat coronavirus research and you
suddenly hear about a coronavirus that's that's spreading around the world from the same exact area same place you've got to you've got to you saw the john stewart bit that he went crazy on i mean i i love john's too i mean i was amazing that surprised me a lot of it because he's usually you know he he's a comedian but he's usually kind of modulated here well jon stewart people a lot of people forget when he was on the daily show was honest and balanced as he's very left laying left wing leaning as am i but he is very honest i didn't know you were left wing leaning i'm 100 left-wing i thought you're a libertarian i get labeled that way because of my position on guns and and some other things but i'm very pro-choice i'm very women's rights civil rights gay rights trans rights i'm very i'm even universal health care university basic income i think i think we're going to come to a point in time where i think andrew yang has some really good points about uh automation and and elimination of jobs and i also think that we should take into consideration like where do our tax dollars go and if people just had their basic needs met would that give them more of an opportunity to pursue uh innovation and and and creativity and other goals or would that you know with a negative uh perspective would that encourage people to be lazy i mean i think it's it's something to be considered like whether or not people who are ambitious would always be ambitious i don't know i think there's a certain amount of discussion to be had about all these topics but my parents were hippies i grew up in i mean i lived in san francisco from age 7 to 11 during the vietnam war in the hippies where i mean that's like a formative period of my youth and i'm always going to be open to anyone's choices i want people to live their life as uh genuinely and authentically as they feel represents who they really are that's why i'm left-leaning yeah and that's why
i've you know i've never voted for a republican ever i just i feel like one of the things that gets lost on the left is law and order and then the importance of discipline and encouraging discipline and and and encouraging hard work and rewarding hard work and commending people for that and this victim mentality drives me [ __ ] crazy that's what drives me crazy about the left this idea of like weaponizing victimhood and and making it so that people are excited about the fact that they have certain things that are holding them back i i just think that's not empowering in any way shape or form and that that's one of the main issues i have with the left yeah i mean we we live in a very capitalistic country yeah and we obviously have these divisions within the country but still you know for a country that's four percent of the world's population it is generally what you're describing aren't you i mean in terms of there's there's it's a capitalist country you know we do have federal entitlements and social programs and yeah it sounds like you agree with those things i think they i think they should be expanded i mean i think but i mean people may say well that's going to buy into the victim mentality no no no what i mean by expanded is um education i think the idea that children should be saddled down with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt right out of high school is crazy and i think their brains aren't even formed yet and you're saddling them down not just with student loan debt but debt that you cannot escape even through bankruptcy it's the only debt that we have currently available that you can't escape through bankruptcy if you start a business and your business fails you're not responsible if you go bankrupt if you're 17 years old you get out of high school and you get a student loan you're responsible for that [ __ ] until you die in fact there are people today in this country that are getting social security docked because they owe student loans i didn't know that yeah it's madness that's why i was in favor of bernie sanders yeah i saw that i mean you're you're a paradox in some ways but
i feel like i'm i'm better understanding you know a few hours into all this i'm not a paradox well i'm just i'm just who i am i knew i knew what i knew of you and you know listen to your problems from cnn because they're [ __ ] lying i feel like i i keep walking into this friggin trap no i listen to your podcast by the way can i just tell you one more because because i know you pre we we got you probably have to go we're probably wrapping up so is that is that how we've been three hours in right three hours in jimmy okay so i just want to read you something about this my three hours went by pretty quick right i i'm amazed actually although yeah i think you gave me wrong you gave me the whiskey like two hours give me the whiskey i know but i wouldn't give it during the podcast all right look here's what i have on the myocarditis thing and and i'm gonna look into that study okay baseline rate of myocarditis no no pandemic okay just in general what's going on 1500 out of a million this is 16 to 24 year olds okay with covid19 uh you it went to just just people who had the disease it added about 200 more cases per million okay and then if you if you talk about the vaccine for the first shot it added about another case per million and the second shot added around 5.8 around six cases per million so really the comparison is the disease versus the vaccine and this is uh what has been reported to the verse this was cdc data i mean you know and we do know that some of this comes from the hospital under reporting and perhaps even over reporting there there could be you're right about that this is this is what they say so this is not absolute data it's not it's not like we know the mass of the sun right true the certainty or the speed of light what is certain in life speed of light i don't know listen this is one of the things that i like about this podcast you and i came into this podcast not totally knowing each other not knowing exactly what to expect and wondering how much adversity and how much antagonistic uh conversation would take place and
very little i felt like it was gonna be more good did you yeah i just felt like it was you know joe rogan's a brawler he's gonna go i'm not i'm not i'm he's over i'm a nice guy no i thought it was i just look like a douchebag i am glad that i convinced you to get vaccinated that was my goal i convinced you to get coming that's my goal we're gonna go to a bar on sixth street tonight i'm gonna get you hammered and you're gonna get back you're gonna get vaccinated by covet itself oh my god i i just i i i'm glad we have the conversation i'm glad that people let's do it again and if there's any concerns that you have that you feel like things are being misrepresented or misinformation is being distributed i am very open to discussing things i'm not dogmatic i i have my questions and i'm willing to push back against things but i'm open to being wrong and i'm very open to talking to people especially a person like yourself that is very knowledgeable and a really nice guy well i appreciate you i feel the same way i i i you know it's it's okay for people to not always agree on things yes but i respect you and i and i like how you think i respect you as well and i like how you think too cheers sir thanks buddy thank you thank you you're welcome thanks for being here man you got it all right have me back let's do it i wrote a book you know i can't even believe it i can't believe these [ __ ] didn't send your book all right sanjay gupta ladies and gentlemen goodbye [Music] [Music] [Applause] you