Yaron and Amy: Stealth Power Grabs of the Coronavirus Era (April 26 2020)
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We are live. Woohoo. I gotta get over onto YouTube and actually see this historic event because it's been so long, right? I gotta get over. Okay, I heard myself so we know something's going on. Okay, ready? I guess we are ready, are we? Let me see. Oops, sorry. Something's wrong. Wait, give it a few seconds. Come on.

Yeah, I'm not seeing it over on your channel. It's on my channel, but YouTube's fine. It's my podcasting app that's not working, so we need a second to get that. Sometimes it just doesn't connect to the internet for some reason. Copy, paste.

We'll be with you guys in just a second. We have not started the show formally. Let's see. Go live. Now it's connected. The Radical Yacht. Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Yaron Brook Show. All right, everybody. Welcome. Welcome.

- Sunday, Sunday. I know they all blend together this time, right? - And what's cool today is we've got Amy. Amy's back.

So it's 50-day-on-an-Amy show, all right. Oh, can you put us in gallery mode just, you know, because I'm here. I'm in gallery mode. Nope, now you are. Yay. Oh, you switched it before. Okay, I didn't see on the time delay. Oh, yeah. I think there's probably a lag, but there we are. We're in gallery mode. So how are you doing, Amy?

I'm doing pretty well. It's been a crazy bunch of months and I just got out of that one whole period of illness. And then now I get to be worried about catching this other thing that if, you know, from what you understand, people do end up maybe on antibiotics again, and antibiotics is what ended up destroying my digestion last year after all of my

Dr. J. : Junk. So that's the lie. I've been- Dr. Antibiotics, but mostly the treatment is not antibiotics. So it depends. Depends on- Dr. J. : The azithromycin was part of the hydroxychloroquine cocktail or something, right? Dr. Hydroxychloroquine or whatever that I can't pronounce, cocktail, but that I would necessarily go on that. There's a good article today out by Matt Ridley, the guy who wrote The Rational Optimist, summarizing all the different treatments.

that people are testing. And he says he's very optimistic that within a month or two, there will be a treatment that really reduces the real burden of this disease. And he actually recommends just no proof, but good evidence that zinc works and to supplement right now with zinc. As a preventative, you mean? Yeah, because zinc is shown...

to reduce the period of a common cold, often cold. Sure. So it boosts the immunity, your immune system when you get these things. And it's, you want to take it early, you want to take it at first sign. So the best way to do it is just ramp it up. Okay, but from what I understand, never supplement zinc at more than 30 milligrams a day. And actually, I decided that I'm not going to

I prophylactically in the beginning supplement zinc. And the reason is, is that I haven't talked to you about all of my illness and diet and everything else, but I eat a pile of meat now. And if you eat a bunch of red meat, there's good zinc in there. And so, yeah, for me, it wouldn't make sense. It's meant as medical advice. We are not expert. We have no really clue what we're talking about when we come to this.

I'm just quoting Matt Ridley, who I respect and who studies these things and is being a scientific kind of writer for a long, long time. And I recommend the article. It's on his website, The Rational Optimist, in Spectator magazine, I think, in the UK. And it just summarizes the various antiviral treatments that are being studied right now. He doesn't necessarily have a favorite, but it is interesting. There's a lot of companies that worked on HIV, companies that worked on

Ebola, companies that worked on these others where we don't have vaccines, but we have antiviral medications are working now on a COVID-19 kind of antiviral. So I am hopeful because as he says, vaccines take forever to get. Yes, yes. 12 to 18 months is super optimistic, much more likely five years for vaccine. So at least, so what you want is treatment. What you want is successful treatment. Yeah.

Oh, this is interesting that you've got a super chat for me already. You know, I'm going to try to get super chat on my YouTube channel. And I am over three quarters of the way on my YouTube channel with getting towards monetization, which will allow me to have this super chat toy for my very own. So do go over to my channel and subscribe and watch some videos. I've got enough subscribers. I just need some more watch hours and I'm well over three quarters the way there. So help me out.

And there's some good videos and I mean, I've got some interviews with some interesting people over there. So you will not be wasting your time. I've got Tamir Handelman and David Cohen, who's a non-objectivist, but he's a journalist from New Zealand. That was an interesting discussion. I got John Allison coming up on Wednesday and I'm really looking forward to that because I figured he would have good perspectives on running a business and managing the risk of coronavirus exposure while you're reopening your business.

So the question is about Tucker Carlson. You want to you want to take it? So I get first of all, does he does he characterize your observation correctly? He says that Carlson has charisma and brains to be the leader of the religious nationalist conservatives in the United States. What do you is that a fair characterization? I think I've said that he is charismatic enough and smart enough. He supports the kind of the nationalist what called the national conservatives and

And he's got a following and we've shown, I mean, Trump has shown that having a kind of following, being a celebrity is an advantage. So yeah, I think he's going to be a leading voice within the religious nationalist conservative movement, whether he becomes a presidential candidate or something like that. I don't know. Yeah. Um,

I mean, I would say it's possible, certainly. It's interesting that they have resisted having me on about privacy issues. So, you know, and I've had my debates with him and everything.

you know, he sometimes gets caught up in a little bit of scandally things. And so, of course, that doesn't hurt Trump, though, either. So maybe that'll never hurt him, either. I don't know. I mean, certainly he keeps he keeps going. He's going ratings and and he's he's becoming more and more left on economic stuff as time goes on. So yeah.

Definitely. Yeah, I know there's a number of discussions I would love to have with him. And every so often I pitch something, but yeah. So what do we have on our plate today? So we've got program notes over at DontLetItGo.com, which is my nice old blog. Go and give it some love. Today I've called it Stealth Power Grabs of the Coronavirus Era. Now we're supposed to have it out, Jeroen, right? We're supposed to have it out about whether the lockdowns were ever justified or anything like that. Start by having it out?

Should we do that? I mean, let's just get it over with. Okay. So, so my view has been right that we're in this mixed economy, horrible, yucky era. And in, you know, we could debate about whether even if there wasn't this mixed economy, everything was free that in certain circumstances, like Ebola was on our shores and,

then maybe there'd be a limited role for government in an emergency like that? Yes or no? Well, I don't think there's any question that there's a role for government in a pandemic. It's just a question of what is the role. And I think the role should have been to quarantine. Certainly with Ebola, there's a question there's a role, and the role is to test.

to quarantine, even to track. Okay, okay. But what if you have something that's Ebola, but people can walk around contagious without symptoms? Well, then you need to put testing stations everywhere. And you need to ramp up the infrastructure around testing, which is what- Okay, but then you have to ramp up the infrastructure around testing. Would it be justified, say, to have everybody hang out for a couple of weeks while they ramp up testing and something like that? You'd have to have-

massive burden of proof to do that. So I my view is talked about this a little before the show. My view is, in order for the government to restrict our freedoms, the burden of proof is on it to show that it is absolutely necessary. And they must be able to show the evidence they must be able to show the proof. A they must be able to tell us that it's Ebola, that

that what the level of death is, what it's actually going to do to people. And then they have to have a plan of how they're going to stop it beyond just putting us in our homes and a plan for how we come out of it. That is, they have to have a clear plan. An exit strategy, so to speak. Yeah. It needs to be, in my view, and I've said this before, it needs to be approved by Congress. There needs to be a declaration of emergency powers approved by Congress, not the president. It can't be an executive thing that

He just decides when there's an emergency. And I would even say, if you're talking about extreme things like locking people down, the Supreme Court would have to review it as a non-political entity and say,

Yes, this is within the bounds of Constitution. I'm not talking about this Constitution, you know, true free market. This is truly an emergency. We've heard some expert witnesses. There is a plan in place. And all this would have to happen very quickly, but it's all possible to happen very quickly. So I think, again, the burden of proof for the government to do this is very high. And all the parts of government have to approve. And then...

You know, you then again, it would have to be as limited as necessary. So for example, you know, Ebola's arrived in New York City, it doesn't make any sense to shut down Wisconsin, right? And so you'd have to, again, prove why you need to... Well, you could ban travel from New York to Wisconsin, for example. Well, you could travel for a while, again, under the same conditions, it would have to be very constrained. By the way, I don't think any of that was met in this crisis.

No, no, no. Okay. So I agree with you. Yes. In the normal circumstance where we actually have freedom generally in a proper government and all these things, right? In today's world, we have a healthcare system that is extremely atrophied by decades of government interference. And in addition, we have,

you know, basically the ability to have it become overburdened, right? And we have the doctors and the hospitals and the nurses unable by law to refuse to provide service to anyone.

It's bad law. Yeah. They, yeah, no, it's terrible law, but they cannot defend themselves. Right. So, you know, this is the thing we've got all of these interlocking, bizarre, horrible regulations. And then you do have something that presented itself as I think objectively a real emergency with respect to hospital resources becoming overrun and that if they were overrun, which arguably they at least came close to in New York, um,

but we didn't know, we predicted it was going to be everywhere that way if we didn't do something like it, right? Best as we know, we don't know. This is several weeks ago. We have to think back, not just, you know, what we know now. Now we know that lockdowns probably aren't justified, but back then we didn't know.

And if you have the hospitals overrun, you have our doctors and our healthcare workers, all of them subjected to huge viral loads. Many of them have died from the viral load of this virus that have been thrown at them.

And of course it's under horrible conditions because they work these 12 hour shifts and they're stressed. And I also talk about the psychological load where, you know, they're in this mixed economy, disgusting, atrophied healthcare system.

and they have to make choices like who gets the ventilator. Now, ventilators are the old thing, right? And Trump can brag about ventilators all day long, but it just shows the ineptitude of central planning because ventilators aren't even the treatment of choice. And he's got so many extra ventilators, he's swimming in them, he's still bragging about them, but he's sending them other places because they're not even necessary. But whatever the scarce resource is,

They have to dole it out. They're just in horrible circumstance. So, you know, go back, you know, I make an analogy to the ground zero mosque situation. In the ground zero mosque, if we were going to ban the ground zero mosque properly, it would be some sort of emergency power ratified by, you know, you're going to override property rights. You need probably a declaration of war, all these things. Nonetheless, I was for banning the ground zero mosque.

in whatever weird mixed economy way that ended up happening, zoning or stupid, horrible, right? Today, you know, not today, but several weeks ago, we didn't know what we were dealing with. We saw in China, we saw in Italy, the hospitals being overrun in tragic, horrible ways. I was four and

in a limited context, maybe a two, three week period of everybody hanging out in their homes. I at least thought it was selfish for us to do that as a personal moral basis.

Again, given the total context of this mixed economy and this emergency overlay. But yes, even a ban for a couple of weeks, if our government kept up its side of the bargain, and there would have had to be a mea culpa, you would have had to have Trump saying, our healthcare system is atrophied by decades of this, and we haven't caught up to speed. And I was courting China for my trade deal. I'm so sorry that I didn't take this seriously.

seriously and get the testing resources ramped up. So hang out for two weeks and we'll take care of it and we're not going to do anything more than just, you know, get you, keep you home enough to figure this out and then get you back as soon as possible. If you look at the experts who actually planned for this, who actually have documents written about this, or if you look at a mass who tracked this and who's written about it before and during

Nobody thought in no dark plan document in the CDC in preparation for a pandemic global pandemic is lockdowns even a possibility is an option.

So this was from the hip, shooting from the hip, out of nowhere, based on no science, no data, nothing. Okay, now Amish is a number of times warned against the hospitals becoming overrun now. So solve that, right? So there are lots of ways to deal with hospitals. Now, again, I don't disagree that given the ineptitude, given how bad it was in mid-March because they did nothing all of February and the first half of March,

that you had no option but to shut down New York probably, but not the rest of the country, I don't think. But if you take all of those, but if you take just the shortages in hospitals,

If they had just looked at the hospitals in late January when he shut down travel from China, so he knew it was a problem. And they said, okay, hospitals could be overloaded. And they ramped up production of ventilators and ramped up production of PPE. And they ramped up production of tests, which they completely screwed up. And they ramped up and they brought the army in to build field hospitals, which they ultimately did, but it was too little too late.

then I doubt any of the closures. So you can't say the closures are justified when the government has failed in everything it has done. And of course, even by your standards, there was no mea culpa. There was no two-week closure. There was nothing. So if they had done all those things and then come to the conclusion, yes, in order to really

protect the rights of doctors and so on over the next two weeks when you shut down New York, fine.

But they didn't do any of that. So the less they do and the less information they have, because they had no information. Remember, they don't know how. We still don't know. OK, again, they had a lot of information about the deaths and they suspected probably China was covering up. In Italy, it was just carnage. Oh, no, it wasn't that many deaths in China. If you look back, I wish I wish we only had China. Right. If that was the standard, then they should have shut down anything. Right.

Well, but China, of course, shut down more draconian way than we did here. Yeah, but Italy was a disaster. But nobody knows why it was a disaster. And Italy shut down.

in massively draconian ways, and yet it was still a disaster. It's an ongoing disaster, even right now. And we didn't have real information about why Italy was Italy and why other countries are not Italy. And yet we acted out of, in California, elsewhere, I mean, they acted out of fear and ignorance. And you cannot have government shutting down out of fear of ignorance. They need to have

Data, information, and a plan. Again, the burden of proof is on them. And I don't think Gavin Newsom had provided the burden of proof. I don't think, you know, Cuomo did. The only place I think they should shut down is New York City. And maybe as it rolled away in New Orleans and Detroit and a few other hot spots. But you first have to identify a hot spot.

and then shut it down. You can't claim that the whole of California is a hotspot. That is by all standards, just untrue and invalid. Nothing about California is like Italy, certainly not the Central Valley or other places or the Pacific. No, no. And I mean, I agree that Newsom didn't uphold his side and still is not. In fact, at one point, he had ordered nursing homes to take in

again, patients who had been infected with COVID-19 in nursing homes. We know now that nursing homes are one of the worst places. Why? Because of the air circulated throughout the whole place. That's part of the big things is when you've got a central air system circulating

among all these people, some of whom are infected and some are not. It's going to be just a hot zone for spreading. So he he has done everything. He's in the program knows for today, by the way, in terms of the stealth power grabs going on here in California, it's at all levels of government right now. And so I agree with you. I mean, the lockdown

weeks ago should have been ended at the very least, even if they had done it exactly properly from the beginning. And I think you and I could argue about whether way back when the knowledge would have justified some sort of a very limited measure. Hey, we're going to ramp up some testing for a couple of weeks and see what in the world we're dealing with and then go on with lives. There was no limited anything. They didn't ramp up testing and they still haven't ramped up testing. So the conclusion has to be everything they did was wrong.

And I think that one has to condemn them through every step because they didn't do anything right. They didn't. And they still haven't. And they still not.

And I think if they told people, I think you have to start by voluntarily asking people to self-quarantine and to do self-lockdowns before you have a statewide or what, two-thirds of the nation was in lockdown. Well, there were recommendations for social distancing that came out first, as I recall correctly, before there was an actual lockdown. They should have pushed that, though. And then they showed people at the beach in Florida. But in New York, I don't know that people ignored those recommendations.

And it just, it's, it just is not, again, the burden of proof for such an extreme measure of shutting you down your home. I mean, you can, the government can do it. I've given examples of where the government can do it. You know, remember the, the Boston Marathon bomber bombing and they were out and they were looking for the, now I think they overdid it even in Boston because

- They always overdo. - But they could have shut down the neighborhood, we're looking for the terrorists, don't go out, it's your life. And you're gonna interfere with police operations. - Yes. - If you cannot just say, there are terrorists in town, we're not sure what they're gonna target, they're gonna shoot people in the street, but we're not sure what street,

And this in some city in the United States, so the whole United States needs to be shut down. No, you have to have specific evidence about a specific threat. Right, right, right. Okay. And I agree with that in principle. But again, okay, today, suppose everybody just says, okay, I'm going to assert my right to go out and take my life in my own hands and just go do what I want.

And then the doctors cannot refuse to treat you no matter how careless and reckless and stupid you are and how much you endanger them and everybody else. And again, we do know what we do know about this virus is that you can walk around with no symptoms and have it and be contagious.

It's a horrific virus, but look, there is a price to pay for the mixed economy. People are going to die who shouldn't die. People are going to suffer who shouldn't suffer. Yeah, and I would like to preserve health care workers. So at the very least, your own, your own, your own. All our rights. At the very least. In order to prevent. At the very least, at the very least, I think you and I could agree that it would be selfish to,

take certain measures to reduce the risk to doctors and nurses so that those resources at least are available for us if and when we need them for anything, not just COVID. I think it would be selfish to reduce the risk

Because we all have people we care about and loved ones who are older and so on, and you want to reduce the risk, period. The question is whether you do it voluntarily or through coercion. And every time you give the state the power to do these things through coercion, in a world in which we live, you're creating a very, very dangerous precedent.

Yeah. No, I mean, you are. And so this has to be, you know, the ability to just shut down and nobody's challenging it. Because I think a lot of people are challenging it now. What I'm afraid of is that they're challenging it in an irrational way. They should use the Israeli example where the protests. That was beautiful. It's amazing. All stood six feet from one another. And

and did it responsibly. That was beautiful. That was beautiful. Okay, so we, I guess, disagree about whether there was any lockdown justified at all, even in today's economy. I say there would have been maybe a very short lockdown, but both of us agree that regardless, the government has not upheld its part of the burden. There doesn't need to be lockdowns anymore. As I said, I don't think there was any option but to lock down New York for a while. Things were so bad there. But

We have to recognize that they were bad because of government ineptitude two and a half months ago.

Well, not only though, because I mean, I think again, you know, the biggest thing that we've learned recently about this virus, right. Is it's transmission in those closed spaces, North Korea or South Korea. I keep saying North Korea, look at South Korea, look at Taiwan, look at how these countries handle it. Look at Iceland. Okay. But are they New York city in terms of public transportation, subways and all that stuff? Maybe not, but, but just it, it's order of magnitude was in New York city because the,

what they did in those places effectively and aggressively and amazingly. I mean, these are very, very high population and high population density places, not as quite as New York. But if you look at Seoul, South Korea, now there are unique characteristics to South Korea and to Taiwan, but what differentiates them is their aggressive testing. And if you had put

testing all over New York and you had put testing and look, New York, the people who mainly suffered when Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn, if you just gone into those neighborhoods, aggressively tested, aggressively isolate people who had it and not tracing contact tracing, not waited, but started doing that in, you know, in February, not waited until March, then you could have prevented the overload to the hospitals and look, hospitals in the end,

were not overloaded even with the pathetic response that we had, but because we shut everything down, we shut everything down late. So if you had actually done the contract tracing, but primarily the testing and isolating and some contract tasting, I don't think we could have done it quite as effectively as Koreans. You would have had a lot of people die, but you wouldn't have overloaded the hospitals, I don't think. And healthcare professionals would have still been struggled, but they struggled anyway.

And you would have not violated, you would have not constrained the ability of people to live their lives. And maybe you still would have had it shut down in New York for two weeks. I'm not ruling that out. But then it would have been finite. It would have been over. Whereas this way, because you're fighting the curve, the whole idea of fighting the curve is the same number of people are going to die. They're just going to die over a longer period of time. But what's happened now is nobody wants to undo the lockdowns because people are still dying.

And so people are still dying. So the press of undoing the lockdowns when people are still dying, but that was the point of the lockdowns. No, and then I wonder if some of the governments are manipulating the numbers, you know, because of course now if you increase the testing, which a lot of them they're doing in California now, they're finally starting to test people who aren't even symptomatic, etc.,

the more tests you do, the more cases are going to be revealed. And when people look at those case numbers, they get all freaked out again, right? They're doing things to perpetuate this. The other way around though, because as you look at the case numbers, you look at the mortality rate, the mortality rate is plummeting. So the mortality rate is actually going down dramatically because- I'm actually seeing it about steady here locally, but yeah. Not if you compare it to the number of people who have it based on the serological tests.

Okay, well, I'll have to look at some more. I'm just looking at very local stats and it's about the same. Local stats of people who have it versus people who died, that's fairly static. If you think about who really has it,

Right, not the people who tested positive but those people who really have it which is a much bigger number than you divide and that's what I want to know I want to know that in a more reliable way than what we've seen. And so I'm thinking I'm going to have to go get my to antibody test myself to find out if I've already know it because people, the only people who allow it to be tested in most of the country of people who have already symptoms.

That's changing here. That's changing here. No, it's changing, but so far. So we know that the people who are tested are the people who are highly likely to have it. Oh, sure. People who are not tested have the low high likelihood. So there's a lot of people who weren't tested. Even the 90% don't have symptoms who have this. Huge population of people who have this who have not been tested. Mortality rates are probably around 0.5, 0.6, which is what, funnily enough, what Amesh Adalja said they were

in February. He said it was 0.6. And that's about what you're seeing. He had a really good prediction. Excellent. Yeah, I would like to talk with him about some stuff too. That would be great. So let's focus on what we agree on for sure. I mean, I think we mostly agree, but we have some quibbles because certainly government has not upheld at its end of any bargain that I ever would have wanted to make with it, even given this disgusting context we're in. So stealth power grabs,

Here we go, right? Because what are they doing? They are using this as an excuse. And this is true of the leftist liberal politicians. This is true of conservatives, including Trump and everybody. They're pushing their pet agendas and they're using this coronavirus as a cover-up for it. The one thing that was on my radar personally, of course, that is egregious, I believe, is that we saw an opinion just kind of

pushed out there. And I think it's been pretty quiet in terms of news about it. It is the United States versus Facebook case that I was involved with the Center for Legalization of Privacy. This is the case where the FTC goes after Facebook for alleged violations of user privacy. And basically, they have a settlement order, an agreement that they have

under which the government takes all sorts of control over the corporate governance of Facebook for the next 20 years, and also has given to the FTC and the DOJ tremendous amount of access to information, extensive information, in the words of Judge Kelly, will be given to the FTC and the DOJ in order to enforce a policy

consent decree that is meant to protect Facebook user privacy. My concern is that they are going to have warrantless access to actual Facebook user data. The FTC and the DOJ are going to have this. And when I read the order last year, I identified a few places in the text of the settlement order that

arguably could be used to gain access to the data. And if you think about it, what is it that they say that they're enforcing? They're enforcing certain conditions, certain rules with respect to Facebook's handling of user data. How are they going to check up on Facebook as to whether they are meeting the requirements unless they actually can see Facebook's handling of user data and therefore see Facebook user data, right? So there's a risk here.

And I filed the amicus brief last October while I was sick in a hospital. I mean, not in a hospital, in a hotel room.

I was in a hospital at one point, but I was in the hotel room when I wrote the brief, sent it off there. And it turned out that the judge did order both Facebook and the government to respond to the arguments, the Fourth Amendment arguments I made. I said, you know, you should not give the government warrantless access to Facebook user data as a remedy for Facebook invading our privacy. It's ridiculous. You know, you don't create Big Brother as a remedy. Well, you're penalizing us.

in the name of penalizing Facebook. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so what I got back from what I got back from both the government and Facebook, if you compare the two, it was quite revealing because the government and again, go to legalized privacy.org. If you want to read all the details, I am going to characterize it and, you know, kind of cartoonize it a bit here.

but what the government essentially said was, we can have the data, you know, and we've been able to have it for decades. And as you said, you know, the existing law, blah, blah, blah. Now, what I argued in the brief is that the law seems to be turning in favor of protection of user privacy. And if you applied the recent ruling in Carpenter to the

issue of Facebook data that you would get a very different answer than what the government thinks you would get. But anyway, they said, hey, yeah, of course we're entitled to the data. You know, what are you talking about? You poor amateur, right? And then Facebook in their like one paragraph response says, oh, no, there is law such that the government can't get warrantless access to the data. And here it is. And so your concerns are unfounded. And so why

Those are two different answers, right? The government's was, yeah, we can have it. And so your concerns are insane because, you know, we get to have it. Government always wins. And Facebook says, no, they don't get to have it. We think there's some law that protects us. And I'm telling Facebook, no, sorry, there isn't law that is protecting Facebook users. And you have failed us, the Facebook user. You have sold out. You have no principles whatsoever.

Why aren't you shrugging, Mark Zuckerberg? That's my view. Anyway, I was hopeful that the judge was going to see at least this discrepancy between them and recognize that there's a Fourth Amendment issue in his order, this opinion, and you can see it again at legalizedprivacy.org at that blog post.

You can read the whole order. He makes no mention of concern about Fourth Amendment issues whatsoever. The one sentence in which he even says anything relevant to the Fourth Amendment concerns is which he says that the FTC and the DOJ are going to have access to extensive information from Facebook.

then he goes on to say as the last part of the sentence that it's pursuant to enforcing this order and making sure Facebook doesn't behave badly with respect to your privacy. So they're ignoring it entirely. I'm trying to figure out if there are any next steps and I'm talking to other friends in the public interest litigation space because

I'm it in privacy, right? In terms of privacy, most of the organizations are very statist leftist in nature. And in this case, it was a leftist, you know, epic that Judge Kelly chose to listen to. He was saying, oh, yeah, you're right. Maybe this isn't hard enough on Facebook, but it's not my job as a judge to do that. The people who can be harder on Facebook or Congress, there needs to be legislation and regulation.

And that's just sad that none of them are scared about the uniting of government and Facebook, which to me is an Orwellian nightmare. They need to be worried about this. They need to be concerned about this. And this is a significant step towards uniting Facebook and government. It's scary. And it's not just Facebook. It'll go beyond Facebook. It'll go eventually. Yeah. Places. No, I mean, I think that's right. And I think I think the

The consequence of all this is going to be greater state power. And, you know, the internet stocks have gotten a breather here because everybody's talking about coronavirus. But, you know, in a Trump second term or in a Biden first term or whatever, breaking up big tech and going after big tech and regulating big tech and controlling big tech is going to be a huge agenda item. Well, and they're going to slip it in. That's one of my other stealth...

Well, there's grabs that they're talking about and, and, and, and they're going to keep slipping in little things and then they'll do the big stuff because the fact is they don't need to slip it in because the American people agree with them.

No, and that's true. And so on the left, you basically have people willing to take over any business for any reason. And then on the right, you, you know, first of all, take over businesses if they're run by leftists. Yes. That's a perfect by a leftist. It's okay for the government to be run it over. If it's a conservative CEO, then we're fine. Right. So all the high tech companies need to hire conservative CEOs and

and stealth conservative CEOs, and then they'll be fine. Or actually not stealth because otherwise still you're good. It's got to be all the tech companies need to have a very out there public CEO with a MAGA hat on, and then they'd be safe. That's right. There's no question. That's all governing through narcissism. This is so sad. Okay, so- Absolutely true. I mean, it's absolutely the case. Absolutely.

So this is, I think, one huge problem that this order has been approved while everybody's distracted by the coronavirus. If you want to help me try to pursue something else, again, with respect to Facebook, it may end up being futile, but this is a battle to fight and there are other battles to fight. Go to legalizedprivacy.org. The other one that we need to watch out for, and you've probably heard about this as well, the so-called EARN IT Act.

That they are maybe going to pass during this time as well. And it's going to go quietly and no one's going to pay any attention to it. There are people paying attention to it, but the mainstream media and stuff. And if you talk to Tucker, Tucker doesn't want to hear about this. He wants to talk about coronavirus and he wants to talk about let's make fun of Joe Biden and whatever. He would support it.

Well, I think you would support the EARN IT Act as well, right? And how could you not, right, if you're a so-called conservative? Because what is this framed in terms of? It is framed in terms of protecting people, especially the victims of child pornography. Yep.

Yeah. Right. And so how could you be against clamping down on child pornography? How could you possibly be always do that, but it's, it's aimed really at undermining encryption and undermining privacy online. And, uh, you know, and, and it's just, it's just horrific. No. And think about it. Think about it your own. So they've got us all in our houses.

And all of us right now, most of us anyway, we're, you know, we're conducting communications through our regular channels by zoom and all that. Now,

Right now, the third party doctrine is still in effect, which means that as you and I are sharing information with Zoom or any of these other means of communication that are not encrypted, government can obtain access to any of this without a warrant at any time. And who knows what in the world they're doing behind the scenes right now. Okay. The only way for us to have private communications right now, while we're all stuck in our homes separately and we're not allowed within six feet of each other and the blah, right? And

end-to-end encryption is it, and they want to remove that toy from... They've wanted this for a long time, right? They were against Apple protecting data on your iPhone. They've been against a lot of these encryption services. I mean, governments all around the world hate these encryption services.

And, and they're just looking for a way in looking for a way to explain to kind of justify it to the American people and justifying in terms of child pornography is the masterstroke. No, and listen that you know, against the bill that protects children.

Talk about stealth, right? I mean, there's many of us who are wise to their techniques, but this bill, it never says encryption anywhere in there. The mechanism by which I understand it is probably going to try to ban encryption is the following. You put together some 19-member committee of people.

you know, people who are going to be authorized to send best practices, informate, you know, advisories or whatever, they're going to call them decrees to the tech companies. And the best practices are going to be best practices for eliminating the sharing and the proliferation of child pornography, because if you don't allow it to be shared, you know, there's no market for it. Who's going to make it blah, blah, blah. Right.

you're going to reduce the amount of child pornography if you can make sure that it's not shared anywhere. So what is the very best way to ensure that there's no child pornography shared is to make sure that you can have access to everything that is shared on the internet at all, whether through end-to-end encryption or otherwise. So this 19-member committee is going to say you must...

stop offering end-to-end encryption as a service because people are using end-to-end encryption to send child pornography to each other. How dare they, right? So they'll do that. And then you ask, well, how in the world can they get the companies to do this? Because offering end-to-end encryption is not a crime. Last time we checked, right? You're allowed to offer a service to your users. The way they do it is by saying that if you don't comply with our recommendations and

then you are not going to get the favor, the special favor of liability release under Section 230. Remember our friend Section 230? Section 230 is misinterpreted and abused and the whole way in which that is dealt with. I mean, all of that law should be rewritten because it's so ambiguous and stupid and

anti-freedom. But yes, they're going to use that in order to manipulate companies. And they're going to use anything they can. And if it's not child pornography, we know they'll use terrorism. And they tried for years to use terrorism. And I guess terrorism didn't work that well. So now they're moving to child pornography because that seems to be much more effective. Trafficking, child pornography is people never vote against stuff like that.

No. And so, yeah, they get your emotions stirred up. How could you possibly be against a thing? You guys are not depressed enough because of the lockdowns. Amy has put a whole program together here to get you- Showing you all the things that they're doing while you're distracted by the lockdowns. Yeah. So, yeah. So we need really to keep-

are their feet to the fire on earn it. And some of our friends in Congress are doing that people like Amash and everything, but this is bad news. The other thing that I want to, you know, bring your attention to with regard to threats to privacy again this is one more that I have on my radar.

Trump is focusing his attention on the, what are they, what is he calling it? COVID-4 is the next tranche, as they call it, right? They go, tranches of money. They're just, you know, how many tranches are necessary? And they had, did you watch Munchen the other day? So he wants to have this infrastructure. Oh, you don't watch these? I don't watch news. He is a pro in terms of just throwing the fallacies out there to deflect information.

He's much better than Trump even. Trump, you know, oh my gosh. So they want to have what they call COVID-4, I guess, which is going to be the next big spending bill. And it's supposed to be focused on infrastructure. And one of the things that they talked about the other day. COVID-5. They missed one. We should tell Mnuchin you can't count. Oh, okay. Four bills.

There have already been four bills? Okay, so we can't count. Well, they were counting about four the other day. This one's about eight, then it was about 32, then it was 2.2 trillion. Now it's just the one that passed now is 450 billion. And now we're talking about the fifth one. Okay, so the fifth one is going to be infrastructure. Okay. So actually, it could be my not counting, right? It could be in any event. So they are going to talk about infrastructure and broadband in particular.

They want to subsidize broadband. And what do you think is going to be in that bill along with the subsidies for broadband? Control. You don't subsidize something without controlling it. You don't bail somebody out without taking control of a stuff. So they want to control. Broadband is the way we get our internet. And if they control it, super bad. I mean, yeah, everything about this crisis is leading towards more government control of our lives. There's no...

And the infrastructure bill, I mean, it's like, you know, it's like we want to be Venezuela or Zimbabwe. I mean, I don't think we'll quite get there, but there's no sense of there's only so much money you can print. There's no consideration about that. And this is all money that's being printed, right, directly by the Federal Reserve, because the Federal Reserve has to buy all these bonds in order to, nobody else will buy these bonds. So we're talking about trillions of dollars being printed,

And nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to care. And so your remedy for not getting totally depressed about this stuff is to not look at the news? No, I never watch TV news. I don't watch interviews. I don't watch these people on screen because I'll break the television. Okay, so you read about it, but you won't want to...

Okay. See what I want to do. I'm, I can't watch it. I'm working at learning how to use the fun tool here on zoom, where you share the video and audio. And so I'm teaching intro logic again. So what I want to do is I want to shred some of these, just like I used to shred Obama speeches and playing a little clip and then shredding it, I think will be quite cathartic, but you know, I'll, I'll let you know how that works out. Maybe I'm just going to get more stressed out than justified. Zoom makes it very easy to share screens.

Yeah, it's the audio that I was having tricky with trick with the other day. I have to download something or I'll figure it out. In any event, maybe I'll need a tutorial from you. Who knows? But I put in the program notes again, go to don't let it go.com. I put just a little tweet from Amash just to let you know that, yeah, it is the case that there is no transparency, no accountability on these big bills either. We have Amash there complaining about

not being able to even have any debate or deliberation remotely. They negotiate these bills on their own. And then it's Mnuchin and Pelosi. Mnuchin is a Democrat, really, on economic issues. He's a Keynesian. He's a Democrat. And Mnuchin and Pelosi basically negotiate these things. Mnuchin then gets Trump to agree to whatever Mnuchin has negotiated.

And the Republicans vote for it because Trump says it's good. And with the exception of a handful of Republicans, nobody votes against them. Massey, who was holding up the bill in order to have some discussion about it, was pilloried by Republicans as this traitor and who didn't care about human life because people are going to die and didn't care about the poor people who are losing their jobs and everything. This is Republicans doing this. So

And they believe that the more money you throw at stuff, the better, the more government money you throw at stuff, the better. I mean, just think if Obama was president and he was proposing basic what will add up to about three, no, over $3 trillion.

of government spending to address this crisis, Republicans would be apoplectic. They would be going nuts. I mean, Obama's bill after 2008 was $800 billion. And I mean, the Tea Party and Republicans basically declared it the end of the world. And now Republicans are voting for $3 trillion of stimulus

And everybody's going, yeah, that's what's necessary. We don't have any options. And debt, debt is fine. It's easy. We're only paying 0% on the, you know, it's cheap. Why not? Let's go for it. Let's borrow as much money as we can. Well, and how scary is 0%? And that's a whole nother topic for another day too. I mean, that's part of it. Yes, 0% is very scary, particularly if you have to live off of savings as old people. Yes.

Yes, exactly. So then we find out that if Trump doesn't get his way, he always is threatening now to adjourn Congress. Yeah, but he's not an authoritarian, Amy. He has no authoritarian tendencies. But Pelosi, she deserves it, right? I mean, it's Pelosi, so it's okay to adjourn Pelosi.

That's it. April 15th, ABC News, President Trump threatens to adjourn both chambers of Congress so he can make appointments to fill vacant positions and judicial slots. That is scary. Always worry about when they report stuff like that, if they got the actual quote or not. Well, so here's the quote. He says, if they don't act on getting these people approved, Trump says he will have to do something, quote, that I prefer not doing. Okay, but did he actually say he's adjourning Congress?

Well, he threatened to do it if they don't appoint. Okay. Well, he's insane. He's nuts. Well, okay. So in the back of my mind, I have that we're supposed to have this resurgence of the invisible enemy, the plague, whatever it's called this week, right? It's supposed to come back in November. That's also when we're supposed to have elections.

Yep. Okay, now you can draw the implications. We'll see if I'm not going to go there. Okay. I don't, I think we'll wait and see. Institutions. I don't think we're quite that far gone, but. Okay. Okay. Then I've got a number of

stories here related to California power grabs. I am not a fan of Newsom. I don't know what you think of Cuomo. A lot of people think Cuomo is somewhat better than Newsom, but your perspective? Leftist fascists. So I don't, I think they're both terrible. Although

Although I saw a horrible story about Cuomo that should be proliferated. And actually, I didn't put it here. I should have put it here. It wasn't really a power grab so much, but it was disgusting. Cuomo doing the same thing that Newsom has done, or at least was trying to do, which is order these COVID patients...

Yeah. Back into nursing homes, which is basically a death sentence for their fellow residents. Absolutely did that. So that was that's part of the problem in New York with with nursery homes.

No, and this is why you don't, I mean, obviously the death rate could have been a lot lower if that piece of it had been handled. You know, who are the people who are most at risk from this virus? Mostly older people, but why? Because by that time, all sorts of metabolic conditions catch up with you. We don't know exactly why, but the empirical evidence is unequivocal. You know, most of the people who die over the age of 65, if you're over the age of 75 and you get this,

you are at a very, very high risk of death. And they're the only ones that should be right. Somebody actually asked me a question here, Super Chat. Sure. I'm a student and I have a high likelihood of getting this internship, but it's in New York City.

would you say it's worth the risk as opposed to having no internship for the summer? And I'd say absolutely go to New York City if you're young and healthy. The chances of something bad happening to you because of this virus- Don't ride the subway. Not significant enough to change your decision, change your behavior about your future.

I would say don't ride the subway. Yeah, don't ride the subway. And wear a mask when you're out. Be sensible. Wear a mask. Socially distance. And I assume the company you're working for will socially distance. They'll move their desks away from each other. But even if you get it,

the likelihood of it being life-threatening to you is less than the likelihood of you getting run over in the streets of New York. Do whatever you can to reduce your viral load and also clean up your metabolism. Rob Wolf said,

In the Healthy Rebellion Radio, I think is what he called it, he has a podcast about metabolic derangement and susceptibility to the virus. It happens to coincide as people get older that issues of bad diet and things catch up with them more, and that's when you've got more pre-existing conditions. But the reason I think that we see some young people also being affected by it is because of metabolic problems, diabetes and such. Yeah.

I would never say that, Amy. You don't know. I don't know. I'm just saying, Rob Wolf, go look. He's got all the papers. He's got the papers. He knows right now why young people are dying from COVID-19. Nobody knows.

I mean, he can speculate and he is a doctor. He's entitled to speculate and that's fine. There's a lot of research being cited. Norm Robillard over at Digestive Health Institute. We're talking about two months of data. There's no research being cited. Not a single one of those papers is peer reviewed. Not a single one of those papers could have been published because it's too quick. No research is done that fast.

So he can speculate and that's fine. And if you, if you like Rob Wolf, you can buy into that speculation and maybe it's good speculation in a sense that it's based on, on stuff. Okay. Well, I'll give you one example. There is a peer, there is a peer reviewed published study. Okay. That is relevant. Let me give you one example that I can remember off the top of my head. A peer reviewed published study, not having to do specifically with this coronavirus, but with a respiratory illness in general. And, um,

time needed on a ventilator. Okay. Two scenarios, one in which, okay, they have to be fed through a tube in these. And so that you compare the people who are fed through a tube, the traditional sugar carb filled

stuff versus the ones who are fed through the tube with the low sugar, higher fat. And you have much lower time on a ventilator when you don't get the sugar filled stuff, that kind of thing. So just, you know, you've got to have disclaimers on this stuff. Sure, sure, sure. But I'm saying go look, he's got, he has evidence. Rob Wolf is no dummy. Study like that, that I have read a

Really, is it replicable? That is, other people do the same study, don't get the same results. Something like 60% of all studies now in journals, peer-reviewed, published, in scientific journals cannot be replicated, which in my opinion,

They're out, right? So A, and often with regard to nutrition and food and all this stuff, there is another paper that if you're not on the right side, you don't cite, which is also peer reviewed, which contradicts you and you don't cite it. And I'm not claiming this is the case here. I'm just saying when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to health,

We don't, and particularly when it comes to COVID-19, which is new, and we just don't know much about it. Because now they're talking about blood clots. They're talking about so many things that... Oh, yeah, no, there are other things, certainly. A lot of things going on. It's not clearly a respiratory thing. It's a lot of things going on. We don't know. People can, you know, again...

the best knowledge they have, this is what they think. But to claim certainty or to claim high levels of confidence, I don't think in the medical profession today anybody can claim high levels of confidence in saying why young people are susceptible. I know people who are on the right kind of diet, who exercise regularly, who are marathon runners or whatever, and who got really, really sick from this. Are you talking about David Latt?

No. Okay. Okay. Because David Latt had completed a couple of New York marathons, but I'm not sure what his metabolic health was like. And he had asthma. The number of these cases where there's no preexisting condition, they're perfectly healthy, and they don't have any of this stuff and they die. But we don't, it could be genetic. It could be a lot of things. We just don't know. And we won't know for years. And

You know, I think, you know, no question food impacts it, but I'm skeptical about diets, always have been. It's just inflammation in the body in general, which the standard American diet with a lot of processed foods seems to enhance. No question.

is a good thing. And it's probably a good thing, but even there. No. And that's why I'm saying it's, you know, it'll clean up your health anyway. So yeah, I would, you know, if this is a really cool internship, go to New York, but I would say don't ride the subways, use your mask and, you know, make sure you eat a healthy diet and get good sleep. Other than hygiene recommendations that everybody else has, that the CDC is recommending and don't ride the subways unless you have to. And if you do ride the subway, stay away from other people. It just, it's,

I wouldn't go on the subways at all. Just be fine. Yeah. But hopefully you can you can manage it with Uber these days you can manage without subways. I don't know if Uber is working in New York, probably not. I'm sure Uber would be eager to work if they would let them and they should because there are safe ways to do that too. I mean, the shutdown is crazy. With a mask, you're fine. So I you know, again, in in North Korea, people are using public transportation, they're

There are ways to deal with this virus that do not entail completely uplifting, upending your life. Again, look at mortality rates in places like South Korea. Yes, they have a different diet than us, but it's not that radically different than ours. And yet mortality rates are very, very low in Taiwan. The same thing in Singapore and Hong Kong. Mortality rates are very low. They did good tracing. They did good tracing. Because they did good tracing.

don't 90, sorry, 99% of people, 99 point something percent of people don't die. And 90% of people don't, I think, don't get hospitalization. A very high percentage don't require hospitalization. Yeah, but here's the thing too, right? Because again- 100% don't even know they have it. Well, and like you say, Yaron, though, there's a lot we still don't know about this virus.

So the fact that the people don't get immediately sick doesn't mean that it doesn't stay in and do something weird down the road. So for example, and again, you know, I'm not a doctor, but the thing that comes to mind is the chickenpox shingles connection, right?

People who had chickenpox as a kid, they have some mild thing and then they're fine. And then supposedly there's a danger of shingles when you get older, which is horrible. So, you know, the fact that the people aren't sick now doesn't mean that nothing's going to happen to them later with this. It is a weird virus. Most of us are going to get coronavirus. Most of us are going to get this virus. Well, what if there's a vaccine? What if there's a vaccine? If you can hold out till there's a vaccine, then you won't. For five years, probably.

You're probably going to get it. Four or five years, 12 to 18 months. It's a mesh on a lot of interviews. It's an optimist. You look at vaccine research and you look at what's going on. Vaccines are really, really, really, really hard. And I would not be surprised if it took four to five years to get a vaccine. Don't count on not getting this virus.

you know, stay healthy, stay fit and, uh, and, and try to avoid it as much as you can. Well, then hopefully it'll be the kind of thing like shingles that if you get a vaccine later, then you can avoid getting shingles. Even if you had chicken pox as a kid, something like that. I don't think I ever got the shingles vaccine. From what I hear you want to, cause it's, uh, it's unpleasant stuff. So, all right, let's go through some of these questions. Yeah. Oh, you got questions. Okay. Cause I got more horror stories, but you want questions? Okay.

I know, but we would be at an hour. What do you think about acts of civil disobedience against the lockdown? I mean, I think the ones I've seen I don't like because they don't respect social distancing. They don't respect the fact that this is

a threat to people. They are way too nonchalant about it and they don't respect the science. So I think people claiming that this is a hoax or people claiming this is just the flu or people claiming that this is nothing are doing a disservice to the argument against lockdowns. So I'm for civil disobedience if you do it right, which means if you do it while respecting the science behind it. I agree. Even though I was...

potentially for a limited lockdown if the government upheld its end of the bargain. It has not, so yes. All right, so here's some that are unrelated to Corona. What do you think of Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept? Norm Chomsky and him are close. He is charismatic, heir apparent to the hate American nihilist left.

Yeah, I mean, he's a nihilist leftist hate America first, you know, he's an awful human being. He, I don't think he's, I don't think he's the heir apparent to Noam Chomsky because there will be no heir apparent to Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky is,

you know, is this famous academic who did academic research in linguistics and everybody cites and he is, I don't want to say anything positive about Noam Chomsky, but he is a giant of the left, if you will. I think Grant Grewalters is a nobody and a nothing. He will be a spokesman, but he's not a,

He's not a Noam Chomsky. He'll never have the resonance of a Noam Chomsky. And that's good. I mean, I hope Noam Chomsky goes away and that nobody replaces him because all he's done is distort, pervert, and...

I met Greenwald once and it was his book around the whole Snowden thing and everything. And so I spoke with him, a little book signing and everything, and talked about this issue of the third party doctrine. And he just, no, no, no. I mean, the only good thing that Greenwald has done, as far as I know, is the work he did with Snowden.

But that's nowhere near enough to forgive him for the evil. Well, and then what did he do? I think he actually corrupted Snowden's thinking to a certain extent as well. Yeah. Okay. What do you think of Pam Geller? She fought against Ground Zero Mosque as a symbol of conquest of 9-11. She is a mixed bag in terms of principles.

A mixed bag is... Yes. She's mixed with a lot of bad. A lot of bad. She's a conspiracy theory nut. But then once in a while, she'll do something that's really good, but she does a lot of weird, crazy stuff. So I'm...

I know I've met her. I mean, she uses Atlas shrugged in a lot of that's the thing she calls herself Atlas shrugs or something. Yeah. It's I'm not a fan. I used to be a little bit more during the night post 911 period, but because there were so few of us fighting in those days, but she is. Yeah, I haven't seen what she's done recently at all. But, you know, on Twitter with just crazy tweets.

Okay, no, I haven't seen anything. Neolistic environmentalists have gone berserk over Michael Moore's new film, Planet of the Humans. They feel betrayed by him as he exposes the hypocrisy and evasion. He seems to have pricked the Greta bubble. You know, I don't know because I haven't seen the movie. I just read about it, something that it's kind of anti-environmentalism, but from the perspective of

pristine nature and his critique of the environmentalists in a sense is that everything they're proposing is not pristine enough. So I just, until I know more about the movie, I really can't comment, but that's what I read. I find it hard to believe that Michael Moore has now become anti-environmentalist and pro-humans. That would be bizarre. So I'd have to see the movie to give an opinion about it. Yeah, definitely.

Anymore? Rescue people I know, far leftists, are more anti-China than Trump is.

I've been telling them that any capitalist countries have the prosperity to care about animals. All right, good. Yeah, I mean, the left has always been anti-China. I mean, this idea that anti-trade was a leftist agenda. That was Bernie Sanders. Anti-China has been a leftist agenda. That was, again, Bernie Sanders. The extreme, the kind of radical left, the far left has always been anti-trade and anti-China, always. And Trump,

Pick that up. The whole, the whole, the whole idea of fair trade is a leftist terminology. I mean, you go back, you look it up, you can find it. It was, it was invented by the, by the left during NAFTA to complain about the fact that we weren't imposing labor and environmental regulations on our trading partners. Fair trade was supposed to socialize the world.

Trump basically took fair trade and made it into what I called Pharaoh trade, which is Trump is the Pharaoh. And whereas the Pharaoh had all of these laborers, whether paid or slave, I think they were actually more like selected and specially paid to do this, you know, build these pyramids. And Trump wants

certain industries, favored industries to build a trade surplus for him. And just as these pyramids are just basically, you know, sort of monuments to the pharaohs, the trade surplus was not going to be any more meaningful than just a monument to Trump, a tool for him to get reelected. And it's one of the reasons that we're in the trouble that we are in right now, because he was willing to turn a blind eye

To Hong Kong, we complained about already, right, that he was turning a blind eye to Hong Kong. And then to this virus. Yes, and that reminds me. I mean, talk about stealth. Have you seen what the Chinese are doing in Hong Kong?

They are arresting a bunch of dissidents there, yeah. They're using the fact that we're all distracted. They're using the fact that the world doesn't care right now because it's distracted. They're using the fact that people in Hong Kong are not going to go out and demonstrate in masks because of the coronavirus to basically go in and arrest the people who led the demonstrations. And talk about stealth. That's probably the worst thing that's happening that nobody's reporting about. Nobody cares about. Nobody's talking about. It's just truly disgusting.

And it's truly horrific. And it's so sad because as you guys know, I'm a huge fan of Hong Kong.

See, I knew you could think of some of these stealth power grabs because yes, they are there. And yeah, it's probably worldwide. And there's probably someone who knows a lot about European politics who could list a whole bunch of European stealth power grabs as well. What I've got is I've got our country, I've got California. I should have thought the example of Hong Kong. So good for you. You know, what do we have here in California? We have

a number of California cities going to the governor and saying that they want all of the normal transparency rules that they are under waived in the era of coronavirus and their... What's the reason?

Well, they're so overburdened because they can only do essential services with regard to handling the coronavirus emergency that they shouldn't have to provide, you know, the freedom of information sort of reports about how they're spending money and using all the resources that the taxpayers are giving them.

In the meantime, you have something that's not even so stealth, but there's a couple examples where Newsom is just using this as an opportunity to redistribute money and have a bunch of more social welfare programs. So he's got this one, I've got the link in the program notes, and then I'll tell you about a one that's related that's not in the notes in a second, but

taxpayers in California are going to pay restaurants to feed seniors in California. So you apply if you're a senior and you can get $66 per day of restaurant food paid for a taxpayer expense. And all you have to do is make less than 75,000 if you are an individual or for a family of four, less than 154,500.

It could be delivered or picked up, I suppose. I guess it should be delivered, right? I actually have to admit my statist credentials here. Actually,

suggested this, instead of a $2.2 trillion package, and instead of lockdowns, what you do is you isolate old people and you provide them with food. The government takes a certain amount of money and it gives them Uber Eats and it provides them with the ability, some kind of voucher,

so that they never leave their home. So the idea is you get the voucher if you guarantee not to leave your home and it's only good for delivered food. But it has to be instead of

the lockdowns and instead of the stimulus. But no, this is in addition to they're going to keep spending money like there's no tomorrow and keep loading it up and loading it up and loading it up. No. And then the other thing they've done is, you know, the schools are all closed and there's dubious evidence as to whether the schools should have even been closed.

in the first place. Right. But the schools have been closed all this time. I guess they're going to be closed through the rest of the school year. And he's been using the cafeterias at the schools to provide food, not just for, you know, cause they have these normal low income student programs where they give free food to kids while they're at school during the school day, they have been sending home food for days worth of food for entire families.

and making taxpayers pick up the bill for this behind this. And there was an article about that recently. Expansion of welfare. I mean, it makes sense. Well, I guess you didn't see the clip, but I actually saw the clip where somebody asked Newsom, well, isn't this a great opportunity to enact your progressive agenda? And he says, yes. Never let a good crisis go to waste. The famous words of Rami Manuel.

I don't know if he invented that term. It's too good and too obvious for him to have invented it. But he's the one who's always cited. Yes. In that under Obama after the crisis. And of course, now it's Republicans doing it as well. And, you know, nobody cares. Well, and Obama, I mean, Obama, I'm calling him Obama, Trump. Well, I just called Trump Obama. The immigration ban, the 60 day immigration ban. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

The arguments that he's been making in the briefings about the supply chain, as he calls it, we have to do something about the supply chain. I was right about the supply chain. He says, essentially, he wants to force all the companies to be domesticated. He wants to destroy globalization. He wants to destroy, you know, all the manufacturing OCs. He wants to bring all the manufacturing back. He wants to aggressively lower standard of living and quality of life.

Yes. Okay. You want to finish these? And then I've got two more super chat questions. Okay. So let's see. I mean, there's a couple, you know, don't let COVID-19 kill government oversight. And that is a fairly balanced piece talking about Republicans and Democrats, essentially trying to sweep things under the rug, destroy transparency during this era. And I have an LA times piece at the very end of the bad news series.

program notes, the very end of those, the LA Times piece is talking about California government keeping a lid on crucial information. And this is one of my complaints about government generally right now, is that we are being told only what they want us to hear. And

It's what we talked about with Snowden. Governments should not have stuff secret unless it's truly national security and it's a short period of time. There should be no FISA courts. There should be no secret courts in America. There should be no information not accessible to individuals to get. And the fact that they're not being

The more crisis, the more transparency they should be, not the other way around because of all the things they're sneaking in there to violate our liberty. Yeah. And instead, what do we get after 9-11? We got the Patriot Act, which is still in effect, still in effect.

And now they are building on the precedent set by that in this coronavirus era in ways that I think, again, they are going to try to ban end-to-end encryption. And if you ever want to have a big discussion about why we really should be allowed end-to-end encryption, we can. But in essence, I think government has been spoiled. It needs to go back to the era in which if it wants to investigate somebody, they actually have to present a warrant to that person. Yep.

um you know the they have been made lazy they're lazy they want to go to the third parties they want to go to the Facebooks and the Apples and the Googles and just ask them for information they don't want to have to go to a judge they don't have to present a warrant to the subject of power lusting you know power lusting creeps that's what they are and that's what government represents today is power lust and why should they have to go to a judge when they can get it directly it's it's um

You know, the power lust permeates all of government and it permeates the people because people want them to have the power. That's why they have it. So I guess, what can we do? What can we do, Yaron? I mean, we need to actually probably promote a rational form of civil disobedience. Oh,

Oh, I know one good form that I saw that I was so happy about. I hope you saw this too, because it would have just made you happy, I think. Do you remember when de Blasio put that text out there with his little graphic and he said, we want you to report your fellow citizens who aren't social distancing properly? And he gave a number and you're supposed to send a photo of the people who weren't social distancing properly to such and such number, right? And you know what he got, right? No, I don't. Okay, he got...

Penis photos. Good. He got memes of Hitler. It's overwhelmed, overwhelmed. Social, that's great.

Great way to protest. I'm not a typical, you know, chapter and verse quoting from Ayn Rand, but that quote that she says about defiance, not obedience, is the Americans' answer to overbearing authority. That was exactly what they did. And of course, they were doing it from the comfort of their own homes. They were maintaining proper social distance while telling him, no, you know, whatever the emergency is, this is not an American way of dealing with it to have Americans ratting out their fellow Americans.

Americans. But that's, yeah, but, but I don't know how many, it's hard to tell whether it's too late for, for disobedience or not. I, I, I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of American where we're heading. I mean, somebody writes here, what is, what is left for me? He says, libertarian who wants nothing to do with the two-party duopoly and wants to break away from it. Is my state and country dying? It's dying. It's dying. And what you should do is stop,

is one stop obsessing about politics, try to improve your life to the best that you can within the context of where we are. And to the extent that you want to dabble in politics, be a critic, you don't take sides, criticize and educate, educate people about what the alternative is. And we're still, it's still true that, that nobody out there, that people out there need to be educated about what this country really represents and what they're losing, what they're giving up, but it is the people giving up. It's not one political party or another.

No, exactly. Mark says that it's a quote from Saul Alinsky. Saul Alinsky said, never let a serious crisis go to waste. And I wouldn't even be surprised if Saul Alinsky got it from somebody else, but it seems too obvious. But Rahm Emanuel is usually cited as the source of that. Of course, Rahm Emanuel and Obama studied Saul Alinsky's work, I think, this past year.

think this no idea they got it from melinsky i'm pretty sure yes here's a psychological question does being neurotic mean that you have low self-esteem when you feel a need to get external validation does that mean you have a low self-esteem we are not psychologists so i i i i don't i can't say that all neurosis is a consequence of low self-esteem although i'm sure some of it is

So, but I'm worried about making every psychological problem about self esteem in a way it probably every psychological problem is related, but I wouldn't want to draw, you know, direct causal relationships without you could still have healthy self esteem and neurosis.

I think that's right. I believe because, you know, a lot of times the neurosis is something that is because of something that happened in your childhood. And if you have been undergoing treatment for it and you have it in a certain perspective and you are doing your ultimate best to live your life, you could have a healthy amount of self-esteem. You know, it's the kind of like if you're seeking validation, if you're seeking like a causeless thing,

validation from people all the time, you know, but if you would like to, for instance, be appreciated by people whom you admire, that's very different from like just seeking validation by having a huge Instagram account and people clicking like all the time or something, you know, there's different

ways where, you know, there's a validation that's meaningful and valuable, and then there's a validation that isn't. That's good. That's a good answer. And then, yeah, it really depends on what you mean by validation, why you need it.

I mean, a lot of times you want, you think you have a new idea. You want to talk to a friend because you want to know I'm on the right path. No, I've had that. I've had that with my theory about the third party doctrine, because I have people in the field who just say, well, that's basically crazy. And so then I go to my lawyer friends whom I respect and I run it by them and say, Hey, is it, you know, because you need that check sometimes, especially if you're doing something radical in the world. If it is that,

you can't be confident of anything you do without somebody else telling you it's okay, then it's a problem. Then it's a self-esteem problem. But if you realize that other people can help you improve your ideas, then you can use other people to help validate stuff. And that's a great resource. So, and that's not an issue of self-esteem at all. You shouldn't think self-esteem is about producing everything yourself, making everything yourself, thinking everything yourself. I mean, yeah.

It's not about that. And teamwork is a good thing and bouncing ideas off of people are good things and trying out things are another thing. So there's plenty of ways in which getting external validation is valid and still having a high self-esteem. Definitely. Definitely. Are there more questions? No, I think that's it. I have something good at the end of the program notes. What do you do?

Yeah, so this is the interview that I did with Tamir Hendelman. And in true, okay, first of all, Tamir Hendelman is the Michael Jordan of jazz piano, basically. He's really, really good. I don't know enough about jazz piano to say he's Michael Jordan, but he's really good. I've seen him play live. Amy introduced him. Amy and Leonard introduced me to him.

years and years ago and I've seen him play live many times. We've gone to a few concerts together. Definitely. I saw him at the Hollywood Bowl in 2001 before 9-11, what I like to call the good old days. And he played a

a tribute to Oscar Peterson, who also played that evening. He played Canadiana Suite by Oscar Peterson. Apparently there is no recording of that performance available and I am crushed. It was so amazing. And I had never been a jazz fan. I had

been going to Hollywood Bowl regularly for classical and then did this one jazz show and I was just blown away and then it turned out on the intermission I was just running to the ladies room I bumped into him and actually got to talk to him a little and said hey you know where do we find he tells me his website and then I've been I took Leonard to a show and then been going ever since back there in 2001 yeah and he's in addition to being a phenomenal piano player he's

he is just a nice guy. He's just a sweet guy. So it's fun to talk to him in the chat. I mean, in my case, he's also Israeli, so we can talk a little bit of Hebrew, but he is a really nice guy. And to watch his fingers move on a keyboard,

is something else. It's just, yeah. So check out, I've got the interview. So you get a free introduction to, to mirror. He actually introduces a couple clips of performances and gives the context for those. So you get to, you get to hear a sample, you get to experience what I call, um,

his equanimity and warmth that he always has and he still has it during this era he is putting on a series of concerts that's how musicians are often supporting themselves during this time he calls it tamir at home which he had never done before so now you can watch him over zoom

playing from his living room. And I've watched three concerts that he's done so far that way. And they're truly excellent. It's one hour. You spend it on your Saturday evening from 9 to 10 p.m. Eastern time. Check him out on Amy's website also. It's Tamir at home, T-A-M-I-R.com.

And it's his name is Tamir Hendelman, H-E-N-D-E-L-M-A-N. Look him up. I mean, he's a great guy. You know, if you like jazz, you should definitely get to know him, get to know his music and support him because these artists who have had their concerts canceled and can't go anywhere and can't do this stuff. I mean, it's it's this is really, really tough for them. My other big and there'll be concerts again.

Yeah, I mean, I think that there could be concerts if they're not huge and you could prop, you'd have to make basically sell half the seats or something right you'd have to distance the seats and maybe if they're open air is different right I wouldn't actually probably go to a closed venue I might go to an open in Georgia is that they're keeping half the seats empty or at least half the seats empty. So as to keep some distancing.

Yeah. And maybe what they'll do from what I understand, I heard you on the show the other day, your own, and you were saying you're eager to get back to flights and hotels and now hotels, you know, again, you've got a central air system. So I hope that they have really good filtering from what I understand of airplanes. Airplanes actually have really good air filtering systems. So between the filtering systems that they have in the mask, if you wear a mask, you would probably.

be safe doing that again too. So I have speculated that I've already had COVID and my view is I hope I had COVID. I'm going to, as soon as I have an opportunity, I'm going to go get tested because I go one way or the other. Who knows? But I'd like to have had COVID and get it over with because I think most of us are going to get it anyway. But yes, I'm eager to

I told my wife, um, you know, let's just go to, since restaurants are opening in Georgia, let's go to Atlanta, have a meal and come, come back home. So, um, wow. We'll see. We'll see. That's a, that's a lot of flying for a meal. Yeah. Well, I'm desperate these days, but come to SoCal and I'll cook one for you, but we'll have to, you know, I go around, um, you know, I walk around for, I do walk outside and I walk outside without a mask people, you know, I won't get near you, but I walk outside without a mask. It's open air. Um,

But I see my neighbors and it is the coolest thing. So they'll have little parties at their house, but everyone's got their chairs like six feet apart and they're sitting outside. And it's, you know, yeah, let's be safe, but let's also still try to have some semblance of normal life. Yeah, keep living. Good. Well, go check out Tamiya.

Check out Amy's show and check out her website. Yeah, just watch my interview with Tamir. Then you do two with one and you get a free introduction to this beautiful, beautiful guy. Don't forget to like, don't forget to share, and don't forget to support the show on youronbookshow.com slash support. This was fun. Do we get to do it again on a regular basis now? Yeah, I'm not sure exactly when, but let me, I need to check my schedules. Who knows?

Beautiful. Schedules have been crazy lately. All right. Great. Thank you. Thanks. Bye guys.