Ep. 1768 Why Don't More People Want to Live? And Other Important Questions

the tom wood show episode 1768 prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion your daily dose of liberty education starts here the tom woods show hi everybody tom woods here jordan shacktel is with me today and i'll tell you this is one of these times when it's just great to be a podcast host because i have appreciated jordan's content during this whole covet fiasco and as a podcast host i'm able to have a conversation with him because i have a podcast that he might want to appear on and i get to talk to interesting people all the time thanks to this podcast before i bring jordan on let me tell you what's going to be going on this week i've got of course an election analysis episode coming tomorrow then later in the week mark crispin miller will be back to talk about what's going on over at nyu very interesting situation with him when i had him on a week or two ago people told me it was one of the best tom wood show episodes of all time and i think it speaks to the open-mindedness of libertarians that we have this guy on the left on the show and i have an overwhelming response that this is one of my best episodes ever and i wrote to him and i said you know somehow you came on a libertarian podcast and you're one of people's favorite episodes ever i don't know how you did that so we've got him coming on and if all goes well dr deborah soh will come on to talk about her book the end of gender so we've got a great week coming right up jordan shachtel welcome to the show thanks for having me tom all right i got to know you because i guess we've been following each other on twitter and i don't remember when i started following you and you probably don't remember when you started following me but i just kept noticing geez i keep getting tweets that i not only agree with but i viscerally agree with for this same blankety blank guy over and over and over again so i finally thought let me get this guy on the show and let's talk about this for a while you've been doing some really interesting stuff that i want to talk about but i want to start with just the the basics i mean you and i are not specialists in anything having to do with pandemics or infectious disease and yet it seems like you and i know more than almost anybody in the world like for example for example i wasn't panicked in any way about school resuming i wasn't even slightly panicked about that i don't think you were either yet there were people who were claiming that we were sending our kids into a bloodbath and this and that and then that didn't come to pass or this pcr testing fiasco i just did an episode on the other day we now have fouchy in a recording from july saying yeah of course it's ridiculous to have to run pcr cycle threshold of 35 and above this that's ridiculous and and yet we've been saying that oh no no one listens yeah what the hell is going on here so basically i think i think 2020 is a very clarifying year i ran into a bunch of very interesting people i think we found out the difference between someone who can really be thoughtful about stuff and someone who can just become completely overwhelmed by their fear and terror unfortunately there's a lot of people who just can't get over the covet madness the virus stuff but on the bright side there's a lot of people who on the other side of the spectrum are able to really think even more clearly through the chaos so i think that's how i became you know interested in in your feed and a lot of the stuff that you're doing and you know plenty of other thinkers and you know i have to give credit to a lot of people particularly involved in the austrian school they seem to be able to really come i think they're going to come out on top across the board you know the literature coming from i don't know if you're directly affiliated or you know you just kind of have a loose affiliation with um you know the mises people but i think they've done some outstanding work and it says a lot about just people in general who have fundamental grounding in the importance of individual sovereignty and free thought and how those people were able to kind of navigate this landscape and and it says a lot about you know our fundamental ideas both as a nation and as an individual as well well i appreciate that i'm actually a senior fellow with the mises institute and i i second everything you've said uh they and a few other places have been really really solid throughout this thing in uh let's see i guess about two and a half weeks i have the opportunity to address a hundred state legislators from around the country and i'm gonna brief them on this and i'm gonna tell them where i get my information and these are the sources you should use and if you want to have your life mean something don't just go along with the herd you should stand up and protect those people among you who don't want to be locked in their homes the people who want to be locked in their homes they're hopeless there's nothing you can do for those people but there are people who have been intimidated into silence and bullied people whose livelihoods have been ruined but if they dare say anything then they're terrible murderers who want people to die they need a voice and they have almost no voice you can be that voice so that's what i feel like every time you have you release something that says what a lot of people are thinking i just i want to retweet that i want to get that out there to make more people feel comfortable talking it's so funny that the left talks about the they feel like fascism is coming to america okay but do any of them ever hesitate to speak their minds whereas our people i constantly talk to people who are afraid of getting fired if they say what they think and even people in you know in the scientific world have been ostracized you see what's happening with dr scott atlas who had a decades-long reputation as a hoover institute scholar uh you know tremendous background of research in in the health care space widely respected you know all of a sudden he enters he didn't really enter politics but he's trying to help out his country by advising the president on the you know the coronavirus pandemic and all of a sudden he's been demonized and they're trying to destroy this poor guy for getting the word out that you know lockdowns don't work that all these other mitigations are very ineffective and trying to drive america towards prosperity and reopening and against lockdowns and and i think you're right that there's millions of people who want to be able to speak out about this but the left moves so fast and taking the supposed moral high ground that a lot of people are afraid to say anything or even act in a certain way that goes against these superstitions basically involving the masks and the distancing and people have you know settled in unfortunately on this ridiculousness you see it in your daily life especially you know living in the dc beltway everyone is wearing masks everyone you know why they're indoors or outdoors is distancing masking doing this and that so it's just become like this cult appeal and people are tremendously afraid to speak out against it for being labeled you know grandma killer being you know not caring about other people there's all this moralistic nonsensical talk that you know they've been able to dominate the space with but hopefully we're making a difference on this front i guess i one area where i've turned out to be wrong was that i thought that by now there would be more people even in the entertainment world where i know it's just hopeless and they all think the same way but you would have thought that eventually just the natural human desire to live would have overcome their political prejudices to the point where more of them would be saying look we're all going to do everything we possibly can but nobody can ask us not to live that that's unreasonable and inhumane so we we want to live we want to make movies and we want to entertain and we want to have those those irreplaceable moments of life back and so we're going to do the best we can to keep people safe who need to be kept safe but who's with me i mean we're on this earth not to sit at home and stare at a wall all day we got to live we can't live our lives on zoom i'm shocked at how few people have said that i i can count a handful but it really it's only a handful i got this wrong as well i thought back in maybe march or april that people would start to wake up in mass and start to reject this stuff take back our freedoms as as americans fundamentally but i think we both underestimated how powerful fear and panic can really become a motivator for people to actively um engage in behaviors that are against their best interests they're you know they're they're sitting inside all day not going to work not looking for employment not sending their kids to school the surgeon general jerome adams had this twitter thread the other day on halloween and he was talking about how he had to tell his one of his kids that no he can't go to the halloween party this year because he might have he might be spreading a virus and he's like oh as a parent i'm being responsible but he's not being responsible as a he's being he's being a coward and he's ruining his kid's life but people are doing these things all in the name of fear of spreading a virus that as we know you can't really stop to spread and the whole notion that the government has this all figured out is beyond preposterous but people have bought into this idea that they have to basically ruin their own lives to sacrifice for the betterment of humanity but all they're doing is contributing to a completely sunk cost and meanwhile there are plenty of older people who are saying i don't want to live my life this way i'm probably in my last year or two and i'll be darned if i'm going to spend it trying to figure out how zoom works on my computer or if i'm going to spend it waving at my grandchildren through a window then there's no point in being alive i mean if you just keep my heart beating that's really not enough that's no i'm not a cow i have to have social socialization i have to have the things that that give me joy now meanwhile i guess the thing that i thought would have made people see the light was just by looking at places like where i live in florida where do you live you live in the dc area yeah yeah yeah yeah um so i live in florida i've lived here for about four years now and i wouldn't say life is normal because there are a lot of masks and you know there's still some you know you still see on the floor stand here with the cash register kind of thing but you know that desantis removed all occupancy restrictions and all that i mean so we're as close as you can get outside of south dakota in the u.s to normal life and we're doing pretty well our numbers are pretty good and i guess i would have thought that people would look at that and say wow they've been doing this and that and they've had bars and they've had all these different sorts of things and people are just going about their lives and well they have about the same result that my state has where i'm not allowed to do anything and and not to mention florida has the fifth oldest population in the whole country and has tourists coming in and out all the time so you would think we should be a disaster zone and we're not and i guess i would have thought examples like that would do the trick but some of it is people are getting the wrong data they're being told that florida is doing very badly again i i have to admit i'm throwing my hands up in the air i'm stumped it's this thing this constant manipulation of statistics and data you know you see this in the electoral polling too but people can decide for the outcome before they even start to do the research and investigations i mean the new york times has this interactive graph that twitter's been promoting for the past week or so that says oh we've proven how masks work and they have these sophisticated models but but it's all nonsense and and that's just kind of you know people who are watching cnn all day who are reading articles in the legacy media stating as fact that these mitigations work you know not proving with any particular evidence any trials studies and they just it's become basically a religion to this point because there's no evidence you know the evidence is supporting our side for reopening but it doesn't seem to matter when you have this you know fear and terror component combined with this very manipulative stuff that's coming out of these you know so-called public health institutions where they're just making demands upon us and then citing their credentials as a reason for us to comply with them i think the whole thing has exposed so-called public health as a fiasco that i i hadn't even realized how how bad it is and and we we've been joking on twitter about public health being the field that kids who weren't bright enough to get into medical school go to but you would think if it's public health that would mean that well we have to think about measures that taken overall will be beneficial to the public but there's been absolutely zero public health analysis in all this it's it's just monomaniacal fixation on covin yeah the game that these media people and pundits play is that they say that oh if you're not a public health expert which is a very you know authoritarian collective concept in and of itself yeah you have no right to comment on these extremely complex issues that involve manipulating society as they see fit including the economy including distancing people human beings from each other there's so many biological and other elements involved here that have nothing to do with so-called public health but for whatever reason the media has determined that only these people with public health masters and phd degrees can can tell us what to do with our lives it it's so bizarre to me but they have you know crafted this strategy particularly well because they they know that if you're an individualist why would you ever get into a space called public health which is you're basically trying to determine how collective action works to you know either mitigate viruses or or help out in some kind of way but it goes against the fundamental political philosophy of a lot of people who you know reject this concept and and who would say that it's much more important to focus on your individual health than to try to manipulate society into some public health scheme so that's why there's a lot of people on our side who unfortunately you know don't have a background in this kind of stuff because just like you know a sociology or a gender studies degree it doesn't attract much interest in people uh on our side of the political offense right and man geez the result's been catastrophic everybody let's take a quick break to say a little something about well frankly being an adult which you wake up one day and find that indeed you are and there are some things that go along with being an adult and one of them is buying life insurance and it may seem like a daunting task and you don't know where to begin but if you have loved ones who depend on you it is very important and that's why policy genius makes it easy it's an amazing marketplace that saves you time and money right now you could save 50 percent or more by using policy genius to compare life insurance so first head to policygenius.com in minutes you can be working out how much coverage you need and comparing quotes from top insurers and finding your best price and then policy genius will compare policies that start at as little as a dollar a day and you may even be eligible to skip the in-person medical exam everybody raves about policy genius they have a five-star rating across over 1600 reviews on trustpilot and google because they get you such amazing deals they take care of all the paperwork and red tape and if you hit any speed bumps during the application process they take care of everything so if you need life insurance head to policygenius.com right now to get started you could save 50 or more by comparing quotes policy genius when it comes to insurance it's nice to get it right i want you to take a few minutes and tell us about what you wrote about what's the name of this crazy panic-mongering doctor and you wrote a report about who he really is oh yes so are we talking about eric bageldang or oh we sure are we sure are eric fagelding has a very interesting background and if you're on twitter or facebook i'm sure you've heard of him because he has hundreds of thousands of followers and this is a guy who was basically plucked out of obscurity he was a medical school dropout decided to get his phd in nutrition and he a couple years ago ran for congress conspiracy theory he's very close with the soros family and he was sponsored and they supported his run but this was before he was a big name so he came in third place in a pennsylvania u.s house primary democrat primary and we hadn't really heard much of from him since then he only had maybe a couple thousand followers on social media but what he did was he weaponized his association with the harvard school of public health which by the way is funded thanks to a monster donation from actors tied to the chinese government but that's you know separate bag of worms there eric feigelding is basically just the worst of panic salesmen he poses as an expert in these fields of virology epidemiology he pretends to be a doctor a medical doctor sometimes but this is a guy who basically his entire professional background is in nutrition diet he's he's tried to run a couple health technology startups involving his expertise and what he found was that early on in the covet pandemic he released you know all these crazy tweet threads about how it was the worst uh virus in human history he was quoted as saying was the most virulent virus ever which is obviously not true that this is going to be the most lethal thing and people really became attracted to his tweets because he was just total fear panic and otherwise but this guy's always been a far-left politician when he was running in 2018 he ran on a platform of complete government-controlled medicine completely socialized medicine universal health care basically reforming medicare medicaid to become completely government dominant you know no space for private industry in the healthcare space so he's he's a radical leftist posing as this medical expert and he's trying to now he's trying to push biden across the finish line and he's getting involved in all these big time super pacs but the guy's a total fraudster he has no credentials in the space but he claims credentials in this space as you know so-called expert he even appeared in a biden super pac ad that's running in running in tv spots all across america he's wearing a tie and a white coat which signifies that he's a medical doctor and it even says in his uh in the chiron on the in the in the advertisement that he's dr eric fagleton but when you address you should be addressing a medical doctor as a doctor and he's he's a phd so they're basically deliberately confusing their audience and this guy's just always been an academic researcher so uh in summary he's just he's a total fraud he's he's a panic salesman and he's using it i think to advance his political agenda and i think that he will probably be running for congress the next cycle around and you can almost take that to the bank well i don't want to spend too much time on trump and biden because you and i are speaking here on election day and whatever we say half of it will be irrelevant by tomorrow or whenever we find out the results but still biden has been so slippery on what it is that he wants to do oh he's got a plan and he's going to implement that plan and then he finally let his plan out and it's well you know i want people wearing masks and doing social distancing yeah okay well thanks i mean we actually heard that believe it or not but beyond that he had this tweet his by the way his tweets make me insane they treat the public like we're seven but one of them was something like i'm not going to shut down the country i'm not going to shut down the economy i'm going to shut down the virus okay the problem with that is first of all other than that that's a meaningless platitude you've surrounded yourself by people who seem quite eager to shut down the country that's the problem right yeah i've i've looked into his his team of covid advisors and they're all very progressive and they all believe in the lockdown stuff the the school closures the masks mandates they're 100 on board with this this wave that you're seeing coming through europe of of lockdowns and i would expect them to advise a president biden to do exactly that and he in order to supposedly shut down the virus they're absolutely going to plan attempting to lock down luckily we have a system of federalism so in places like florida you might be at least safe for now but who knows you know we're entering this uncharted waters with the amount of uh unconstitutional action that a lot of these governors and even federal officials have been making during this time so i i hope that biden doesn't try to make a move to overrule the states if he's elected president but i wouldn't be surprised to see you know another big power grab so so hopefully you know in the case of a biden presidency if you're living in a so-called i guess free state red state you know anti-lockdown state hopefully you'll be able to keep yeah together yeah i hope so but as you say it's it's very hard to to predict the thing is let's say there is a president biden and again i don't want to dwell on this because maybe there isn't one and there was no but it's still an interesting intellectual exercise obviously we see that people on the left are very effective at protesting and rioting and stuff like that this is this comes naturally to them it doesn't come naturally to people who are right of center i mean obviously we've seen they'll go to trump rallies yes but most of them frankly i don't think that i'm just it's just a cliche most of them they have jobs they have lives they have other they don't politicize every aspect of their life so they're not constantly looking for reasons to protest or make signs or whatever but man they would need to figure that out quickly if if ever there was some attempt at some kind of national lockdown we would have to say look you're gonna have to try to be like these people and i wonder if a solid 15 of america was prepared to just plain not do it and just keep living their lives are they really going to send in the tanks all over america i don't think so i think it has to fall apart right but it is it is alarming because you saw this with the amy coney barrett uh stuff that when she was nominated for the supreme court confirmed for the supreme court the left's reaction on a lot of the left was that okay we're no longer going to play by the rules even though the right's been playing by the rules in this issue now they're threatening to pack the supreme court you know fundamentally shift its dynamics so if they're not going to play play by the rules on such a big issue what makes people think that they're going to abide by you know specific constitutional authority and our traditional federalism yeah i just you know it very much concerns me that the left increasingly is not playing by any is not limiting itself to any type of legal or constitutional boundaries who are your sources on this so that every day when when you start your day do you have any sites or or twitter feeds that that you review first thing uh it's nothing really in particular you know i would just definitely urge people not to i think avoiding television is extremely important this day and age no matter who who's speaking or what ideology it is i think concepts like this more long-form conversations are great because you can get into the weeds about issues but when you're watching jake tapper from five minutes go on about how this is these people are evil the virus is killing everyone all these deaths i think that twitter has become a great resource for people to kind of expand their horizons as much as i dislike the censorship that's coming out of there there's still a lot of thoughtful people particularly those connected with the uh the great barrington declaration which is the anti-lockdown coalition founded by you know scientists from oxford harvard stanford you know they have all these they have ivy league credentials too and elite institutional credentials but there's a lot of people out there i i would i would urge people not to you know go to these like john hopkins or world of meter sites that just you know put out these testing data because as we know the pcr thing that the testing data is complete junk which expands to the deaths data i think the best thing people can do is just you know educate themselves on these specific issues don't get so caught up in the panic charts the panic graphs and you know that's the best way to think logically and rationally about the stuff to tune out the the hysterical maniacs and try to you know become more sophisticated on these particular issues that you know if we're looking at like all-cause deaths or you know important metrics that compare one year to another and we're finding that 2020 isn't particularly different than 2019 so what does that say about the lethality of a virus you know people really need to expand beyond looking at the daily numbers and freaking out yeah exactly exactly it's an interesting observation by some somebody from sweden the other day that september of 2020 was the least lethal month that sweden has ever seen since they started recording stuff like this in terms of deaths per hundred thousand i mean that's a little bit weird in the midst of 2020 this seems like that would make people curious you would think it would make people curious um you mentioned the great barrington declaration of course i'm a big supporter of that and just before we started i on last tweet of mine was a response a comment tweet to somebody also from oxford trisha greenhall who said that she just turned down an invitation to debate one of the signers of the great barrington declaration on television she says because it isn't science and i'm not playing your scientists or divided game so my comment to that was she refuses to debate out of sheer principle you understand not because she'd be rhetorically dismembered on live television which i think is more likely the thing is the great thing about that great barrington declaration is people like that woman that i just quoted are used to not being challenged uh they're used to having the things they do go unremarked on like for all the stuff that was going on in the federal government with critical race theory nobody ever expects that to be called on they expect that just to go on because they're the left and they're in charge and they do what they want somebody pointing out what they're up to and then demanding that they explain and account for themselves is unusual to the point of shocking the hell out of them apparently well you see this in the united states with a guy like fauci i mean who has ever brought thauchi on in uh tv and he does tv every single day does countless hits have you ever seen a tv an adversarial interview with dr fauci the only time i ever saw anyone ever debating fauci was really just when rand paul was trying to ask him to explain his his past guidance compared to his his newer guidance and how it seems kind of that he's on both sides of the issue and he's back and forth and back and forth and these people you know whether they're from the government bureaucracy or from these academic institutions very rarely have they ever been challenged and you you definitely see that on social media when they say you know this is disinformation i'm not going to debate this i'm not going to debate this data with you because uh i'm i i'm in the right and you know you can't even question me this is this has been their fundamental attitude and they're really exposing themselves how can people other than twitter how can people follow you i know you have a newsletter yeah so i have a new uh publication called the dossier on sub stack you can search for it on google uh you could follow me on twitter and i don't really do facebook too much because i think facebook would just kick me off anyway they seem to be heavily involved in the censorship but uh yeah i'm definitely expanding i write a lot about the the pandemic and my background's actually in national security and foreign policy so i write a little bit about that too on my subset publication but right now i think it's it's easiest for me just to be an independent journalist not to be tied to particular big institutions uh i worked in right of center media for quite some time and i think it's easier for myself to just be publishing on my own and i encourage other people to do that too you know there's really no reason why you need to be it's nice to have you know salary but you know there's a lot of ways to be effective and successful without the support of you know big media institutions and i i think that some of the most profound thinkers tend to be more uh you know independent anyway so yeah that's the best place to find me okay excellent excellent i think that's pretty sound advice for this day nature the link to your newsletter i'll put it on the show notes page it's also uh in your twitter bio so twitter jordan shacktel s-c-h-a-c-h-t-e-l is the uh the twitter handle but i'll put all this stuff up on our show notes page tomwoods.com 1768. all right well look keep doing what you're doing because i'll tell you i asked you about your sources you're one of mine okay every day i actually look at your feed uh sometimes you show up in my natural feed but i i'm too impatient for that i i go right to your to your and i just see what you've been retweeting and half the time i retweet those things and every once in a while one of my tweets is in there and i say how about that the old man is getting noticed so again thanks for what you're doing it's it's it's very important yeah thanks you too i really appreciate your time all right folks before i let you go what a fascinating new podcast by a tom wood show listener it's from patrick mcfarland the creator of liberty weekly and it's the unhallowed podcast you can check it out at unhallowedpodcast.com it's a husband and wife show patrick and elizabeth met by chance in the gothic horror class at the university of minnesota and their podcast dissects classic works of gothic horror for a modern audience and this is a genre that is fraught with post-modernist and neo-marxist analysis but pat brings a classical individualist approach it's a great idea brilliant original find it on all major podcasting platforms and the website once again is unhallowedpodcast.com i'll link to it at tomwoods.com 1768 and of course you know why they're getting this nice shout out they used my link to get their hosting and so they get this benefit among many other nice benefits that will give you a great head start out of the gate with your brand new website or blog so if you would like benefits like that check out tomwoods.com publicity and i'll see you tomorrow become a smarter libertarian in just 30 minutes a day visit tomwoods.com to subscribe to the show for free and we'll see you next time [Music] like the sound of the tom wood show my audio production is provided by worth media check them out at podsworth.com

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Length: 33min 0sec (1980 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020