 Welcome to the Reason Stream. I'm Zach Weissmuller, joined by my co-host Liz Wolff, and it is back to school season. And for some parts of the country, that means dealing with COVID policy once again. We're no longer in a world of indefinite school closures and ubiquitous masking, but intermittent school closures, temporary mask mandates and COVID vaccine requirements persist. Will it ever end or are we in the new abnormal, as today's guest argued in a book with that title? The author of that book is Aaron Cariotti, a psychiatrist and fellow and director of the program in bioethics and American democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He formerly worked at the University of California, Irvine for almost 15 years, both as a professor and director of UCI's Health Medical Ethics Program, until he was fired for challenging the school's COVID vaccine mandate. A case that we'll discuss at length with him today. Aaron Cariotti, thank you for talking to us. Thanks, Zach. Great to be with you and Liz. Yeah, we're super excited to chat with you. For sure, absolutely. And we're gonna start by surveying the landscape of COVID interventions that have returned to both K to 12 schools and colleges. But first, before we do that, Aaron, let me ask you, why do you think schools are seemingly the last strongholds of COVID interventionism in America? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I talk in the book about the fact that higher education, colleges and universities were the first institutions in the US to mandate COVID vaccine. So vaccine mandates began at universities. And some of the earliest institutions to adopt the most sort of rigorous ongoing asymptomatic testing were schools from kindergarten on up. And as you've pointed out, the masks and the vaccine mandates and other authoritarian, I would argue COVID measures have continued long after any plausible public health justification has disappeared. And they've continued mostly in our institutions of education. And I think one of the reasons for that is that people who want to exercise a micromanage level of control over other people's lives and try to influence society tend to focus on schools. Obviously, there are many people of goodwill in education who care about educating children. But I think there's also a certain personality type. Perhaps people attracted to certain ideologies that tend to think that if we can get them when they're really young, we'll influence all of society by making these sorts of changes in the schools. That's one factor. In fact, universities were sort of incubators of a lot of the most stringent, what I call biosecurity protocols, protocols of mass surveillance and monitoring and constant asymptomatic testing and really a micromanage level of detailed control that I describe in chapter one of the book. I think at the K through 12 level, also we're seeing the influence of teachers unions and the outsize influence of probably a small subset of teachers that are actually still worried about COVID that don't understand that the epidemiology that shows clearly that while adults pass COVID onto children, it's very rare for children to pass COVID onto adults that the whole specter of asymptomatic spread was not a driver of the pandemic. And also that we're at the point now where most of the population has natural immunity from a prior infection, which is very robust and or vaccine immunity. And COVID is going to be around forever. It's endemic. It's never going away. Even if we, it's not possible to do this, but even if theoretically we could eradicate it in the human population, it circulates in at least a dozen animal species, which means the virus is going to mutate in animal species and come back and reinfect human beings. So it's never going away. It's like the annual influenza season. And this is not something that we need to continue living in fear of because viruses tend to evolve in directions of becoming more infectious, but less deadly, less fatal. And the people who probably are gonna have really bad outcomes from COVID, the aged and the medically frail and infirm have already been through several waves where they were likely exposed to the virus. And so it's hard from a purely epidemiological standpoint to understand how the schools could continue doing things like this, particularly when we know that these interventions aren't effective anyway at slowing or stopping the spread of the virus. I mean, the Cochrane review, the gold standard of evidence-based medicine revealing all the literature on masks came to the conclusion that masks had no effect on community spread for COVID, which should not have surprised us because masks have no effect on other respiratory viruses as well in the community. This was, there was a large body of research showing that for similar respiratory viruses like influenza, mask masking and certainly mask mandates did not help. This is an personalized virus and your typical surgical mask or cloth mask that people wear is completely absurd actually. And yet we're still seeing institutions like schools requiring people to wear this even in the face of known harms, especially for the speech and language development. So can you spill that out for us a little bit? I mean, we'll definitely get into this a little bit more later. But so would it be correct to say that there's basically no use for masking at all or are there specific types of scenarios and specific types of masks where you do sort of still support it or see it as valid? Yeah, I would say that there is no use for masks at all including N95s for this virus. And starting with the masks that most people wear the surgical or the cloth mask, there was a time when we thought that COVID was spread through droplets. That was the basis of the six feet rule, basically as far as the droplets when you sneeze or where you cough go. But we now know, and we knew within a few months of the pandemic that it spread through aerosolized mechanisms, meaning your exposure to COVID is based on how many symptomatically infected people are in the room with you, the size of the room and the quality of the ventilation in the room. Anyone who wears a mask and wears glasses knows that the glasses fog up, which makes it obvious that it's not gonna stop the circulation of air into your nose and mouth, but that's exactly how the virus spread. So rather than putting up plastic barriers which only impeded ventilation, we should have been having kids sit outside more. We should have been opening windows. We should have been, which in some cases we did improve the ventilation systems on airplanes and in buildings, but the masking has no effect. Even in highly controlled settings, even with the use of N95s, their utility is very limited because you can't wear an N95 for very long before the rebreathing of your own CO2 becomes really problematic for your health. So after an hour or two of wearing one of those masks every day, you get to the point where the harms to your health clearly outweigh any slightly marginal benefits. So looking at the research literature, even on N95s, the Cochrane Review concluded that they had little to no utility outside of very limited, highly controlled hospitals setting. I recall going out to dinner in, yeah, I recall going out to dinner in New York early in the pandemic and dining outdoors but seeing these massive plastic barriers that were between diners. And there's a certain sense of like, aren't you telling on yourselves? You clearly misunderstand what an aerosolized virus actually, like how it functions. If you think that these plastic barriers with their little gaps below and above are somehow going to be the thing that prevents us from the terrible contagion. Exactly, it's sort of theatrical. It was a kind of demonstration that we're trying really, really, really hard to keep everyone safe, no matter how absurd the things we're doing actually are. Let me bring up that Cochrane Review article that you've referenced a couple of times so we can just clearly state what it says. This is a meta-analysis of a bunch of different randomized control studies. And the objective that I've highlighted here is to assess the effectiveness of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of acute respiratory viruses. So they looked at masking, distancing, hand washing and their conclusion as you stated is that, well, their conclusion is that there is uncertainty about the effects of base masks and that the pooled results of the randomized control trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical slash surgical masks. Furthermore, there were no clear differences between the use of surgical masks compared with N95s in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infections. They found hand hygiene was likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illnesses. And to your point, harms associated with physical interventions were under-investigated. And they conclude there's need for a large, well-designed, there's need for more large, well-designed randomized control trials addressing the effectiveness of many of these interventions in multiple settings. So at the very least, it's a big question mark of this needs a lot more study. It kind of is like the closest you'll get to, like masks don't really work according to any evidence that we've been able to turn up. And Dr. Fauci though, yeah. I think their conclusions there which they tweaked under pressure from mask paddocks are a little bit under-determined if you read actually the results of the overall review. I think the conclusion should have been stated a little more strongly without the kind of, we're not sure yet, we don't know question mark. Prior to COVID, there were 15 randomized controlled trials of masks in community settings for respiratory viruses. All 15 of them were negative, showing no benefit. So yes, we can always do more randomized controlled trials. But I think this, I think they actually, Paul Thacker and other investigative journalists have written on this recently. What happened after they initially published the review was they came under pressure basically from advocacy groups and ended up tweaking some of that language that you just read from to make the conclusion sound a little bit more agnostic and like we need further research. And I think actually their entire review read as a whole does not support the soft peddling of that kind of agnostic, we're not sure yet attitude. Why do you think there is that kind of pressure to not acknowledge the weak evidence of this intervention? It seems like there would be a desire to learn from this and do something different next time if it's not the right approach. But I mean, unfortunately we have a ruling class who will never ever, ever admit that they were wrong about something. So there are a lot of reputations at stake from public health officials, from political leaders, from institutional leaders who pushed mask mandates on the public who are going to have a difficult time, I think just simply saying, look, we tried this, maybe we were acting in good faith, maybe we were just ignorant of the data, whatever. Okay, but it turns out that this didn't work. And so let's learn from that and move on. I think the American people would accept that and be forgiving about some of those mistakes if they were honestly acknowledged. And they even have an out now, they could say, well, in the face of new evidence, we're gonna stop using masks. But I think it's just too many people feel that their reputation is staked on these kinds of interventions. And also too many people have become conditioned into the psychological feeling that this protects me. This is some way for me to deal with my free floating anxiety and they haven't been able to come out of that sort of conditioned response state where the mask has become a kind of magical talisman that makes me feel a little more safe, regardless of whether it's actually doing anything. One person who's been pushing back against this mask study is Anthony Fauci. And we have a clip of him doing just that just last week. We're gonna play that. And then I'd like to get your reaction to what Fauci is saying here. Let's roll that clip, Hunt. You know, John, some of the studies that are confusing, the study that recently has been now quoted a lot and causing a lot of confusion is this Cochrane study, which even the people who run the Cochrane studies say that that study can be misleading because people have commented on that study saying absolutely masks don't work, which is absolutely not the case because there are a number of studies that show that masks actually do work. And there's a lot of confusion when you take a broad series of studies and you look at them in a meta analysis, only a couple of those studies were specifically looking at COVID. So I think we better be careful that that study that people keep talking about can be very, very misleading. There's a lot of good data that masks work. But you've also said we're not gonna go back to the time of federal mask mandates. That's a thing of the past. No, I don't see that in the future at all. I mean, I can see that if we get a significant uptick in cases that you may see the recommendation that masks be used on the certain circumstances and indoor crowded settings. But I don't see there be certainly not federal mandates. I would be extremely surprised if we would see that. There may be local organizations that may require masks, but I think what we're gonna see mostly if the cases go up, that there might be recommendations, not mandates. There's a big difference there. Specifically, I believe the study he's citing is a big one that in Bangladesh where they handed out masks to one village and not to another village. And there was a reduction in transmission of the disease. So what's your response to what Dr. Fauci had to say about the Cochran review meta-analysis? So the mask fanatics always point to that same Bangladesh study which had so many confounders, so many other factors that could have accounted for the differences in COVID rates between those two regions. I believe that study was sloppy. It had methodology that was poor. And that one study needs to be read again in the context of the research literature as a whole. It's not enough to say you, well, we have 15 negative trials and one apparently positive trial. Then you have to scratch your head and say, okay, why did this trial come to a different conclusion? Do we need to scrutinize this study and look at the methodology and see why it's not squaring up with what the other research is showing? It's never the case that one scientific study is sufficient to answer a complex question like what effect do masks have on this particular respiratory virus? So you've always got to place the research literature in the context of all the rest of the research, not just the research that happened during the pandemic for COVID, but also analogous research that happened prior to the pandemic for other respiratory viruses. And then I think when you do that, it becomes very clear that this is not an effective intervention. There's no plausible mechanism of action. In other words, if you just look at things from a physics perspective, how big is the virus? How big are the holes in these masks? Is the virus spread by droplets or is it aerosolized? Is it basically in the air as a kind of gaseous spread? And when you look at it from all those different angles, not only do the studies show at a clinical level, overall the strong preponderance of research that masks don't work, but also we have no basis in physics to believe that the masks could in theory work. And so I think Fauci is really grasping at straws. It's a little bit of an embarrassment actually to the scientific community. I heard him on another interview basically say, well, the Cochrane Review found that masks don't work on a population level, but maybe they still work on an individual level. I'm not sure how to interpret or what to make of that distinction, but it seems- Preferably we would see a connection between those two things to some degree, right? Exactly, if the masks worked for individuals and you measured a bunch of individuals, you would see a population-wide threat. So tell me a little bit like post-SARS in so much of Asia masking caught on. And so to some degree, that part of the world had a much easier time sort of re-adopting that, especially in crowded public spaces. Are you saying essentially that like that's also totally not bullshit maybe, but like a pointless exercise, a pointless thing to do was post-SARS masking also pointless and did we see the same sort of lack of effect in that region? It is pointless. The SARS outbreak fortunately was not as widespread as SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID. So again, masks may have given people some psychological sense that they were doing something and made them feel safer, but it's subjective feeling that this is doing something for me is not actually evidence of efficacy. So I think we can now put to rest, including for Asian countries, the question of this habit of masking when it comes to flu season or when there are outbreaks of things like SARS. I mentioned the specter of asymptomatic spread earlier, which we had evidence very early on in the pandemic that asymptomatic spread was not a driver of disease. But basically, and once we had clear evidence that was the case, that evidence was not really shared with the public. It wasn't widely known. People still thought I could be walking down the street and see someone who looks perfectly healthy and they don't have any symptoms and I might get COVID from them. And this basically turned every other person into a potential threat to my existence. That's a terrible state of mind to put people in, particularly unnecessarily when the science didn't support a notion like that. That creates all kinds of free floating anxiety that people want to feel that I have some kind of power control over. Maybe if I put on my mask and you put on your mask and we do this thing, we do it well, that can lower the risk somewhat. So I'm taking back some sense of agency and control rather than just having this constant threat hanging about me and about every other person I meet like a sort of cloud. And in fact Fauci sort of hinted early on in the pandemic that yeah, well, we sort of know because you might remember early on he said that there was no evidence in favor of mask and he was right about that. And then he changed his mind for reasons that are still unclear. When we asked him under deposition why he changed his mind about masking between a Friday and a Monday, he couldn't recall any of the studies that he relied on when he changed his mind but he was pretty sure the evidence was good. But at one point when he was still saying masks don't work, he sort of hinted, but yeah, maybe we ought to give people this as a way of kind of giving them some sense of control. Maybe there's some sort of psychological benefit to wearing a mask. But the problem with that theory even at a psychological level, I'm gonna put on my psychiatrist hat for a moment is that it actually just creates a conditioned response that confirms that I'm in constant danger from other people, right? Otherwise I wouldn't be putting on the mask whenever I'm around someone or even when I'm driving in my car or riding a bicycle alone. So this basically creates a conditioned response to confirm that other people are a threat to me or that I'm under this sort of constant threat when I encounter my fellow human being. And in the end that actually increases fear and anxiety rather than diminishing it. I wanna take us back through some of the concrete examples of the lingering COVID interventions in schools because we're not giving the impression or implying that we're back in 2020 or something like this but what we're seeing are things like this ABC News story, school districts in Kentucky and Texas cancel classes amid surge of illnesses, including COVID. So this is a case of lots of kids, I guess testing positive for COVID and other illnesses and they go below some sort of attendance threshold and just say, we're gonna go remote for this week. There's also this- If I could just intervene, I wanna correct that headline because a positive test for COVID is not in fact an illness. A school might have a policy that if you test positive for COVID and by the way, we're gonna test the students routinely even when they're not symptomatic. If you test positive for COVID, you have to stay home but that doesn't mean that the student who is staying home has an illness, right? And illness is defined by clinical symptoms that impair a person's functioning in some way. An illness is not defined by the results of a test and without getting down into the weeds on the problem with the PCR testing and the high cycle thresholds that basically result in many false positive tests and so on and so forth. A positive test for COVID, even if it's a valid test that detects basically some fragment of the virus in your body, does not mean that you have an illness and I think it's important to emphasize that. It does not mean that you have something that you can actually spread to other people either. So this would be an example of like the new abnormal lingering because before you wouldn't send your, you wouldn't test your kid for a virus. You would just observe if they are sick or not and then so that that might be boosting up the number of absences because they're, we can't really know, but it's probably the case that there's some percentage of those kids who just tested positive or who otherwise would have gone to school and had a deal. Suppose that you have a test with a 2% false positive rate. Well, if you repeat that test indiscriminately on the entire student body twice a week, you're gonna get a lot of sick people with COVID that don't even have any virus, much less symptomatic illness. So this is a basic principle that was drummed into our head in medical school that we threw out during the pandemic. And that's that you do not use diagnostic tests indiscriminately on healthy people because that tends to create more problems than it solves. Problem of false positives, which then causes anxiety and requires you to work, do more diagnostic workup, sometimes even invasive procedures, biopsies and so forth that have risks associated with them. But also basically if I were to run a battery of tests on all three of us right now, I would do a CT scan of our entire body and I were to do a whole array of lab tests looking for problems. Those tests would come up with something that's probably an outlier, that's probably a nothing burger that's there's gonna be some blip on the CT scan. It is a blip in your lung, it's a benign calcification. But now that you've seen it on the CT scan, it's like, okay, well, is that something to worry about? Is that cancerous or is that should? And that you get to the point where I wanna resolve this. So I'm gonna get a lung biopsy which has serious risks associated with sticking a needle in there to aspirate this thing or whatever. So indiscriminate, especially repeated testing of healthy people is bad medical practice. You don't just test, test, test. You test when you have reason to look for something. I encountered this a little bit, not personally but some moms who gave birth around the same time as me also in Manhattan, I gave birth to my son in Manhattan last year in October and RSV was going around, New York COVID was going around. I mean, it was fall, there was the classic surge that many school districts experienced. But a few moms have told me this absolutely terrifying story of and I got COVID tested, but it came back negative. And then that's part of hospital admission nowadays even from others who are giving birth. I know some moms though who got tested and without any symptoms, it came back positive. And then what this did essentially is it triggers a whole bunch of regulations that go into effect that make it so that for in most settings the mother has to be masked. Can you imagine being masked while trying to be in labor for many, many hours? In many situations, it means visitors are restricted and they're just unable to actually have family members present next to them. I think that for whatever reason we downplay the severe human cost that many people have encountered as a result of this and it's really horrifying to me to think like what if I had tested positive? What if in that situation, my mom and my husband and people who are totally fine with getting sick while being in my vicinity, what would have happened if they hadn't been allowed to be there with me during one of the hardest times in my life and in my son's life? I mean, there's a really horrifying thing when you think about, okay, what is the actual cost beyond just the financial cost, beyond just the cost in terms of time to the doctor or nurse? I mean, I think there's a real human cost there that people for whatever reason are not comfortable confronting. Yeah, very well said. Very well said. That's a perfect example of the harms of testing. Testing seems like a benign thing, but it's not. It's actually done a ton of mischief. And it's always the more vulnerable groups, right? It's K-12, school children, sometimes college students, people in medical environments, mothers, like young children in daycare settings. It's groups that necessarily have to interface with things. You have to interface with the medical system. You have to interface with the school system if you're going through a certain situation or if you're of a certain age. And there's really not much of a choice to opt out. I wish I had had the ability to shop for hospitals and care providers who did not require me to mask. But you know what? In Brooklyn and Manhattan, in 2022, it was really, really hard to find people that were actually sort of in accordance with my values in that regard. Zach, did you wanna take us to... Yeah, well, I was gonna ask, Erin, is that sort of what you mean by, you know, the subtitle of your book, which I'll throw up here, is the Rise of the Biomedical Security State, which is quite a catchy phrase. And I think I've heard some politicians down in Florida use it. But is that kind of what you mean by that, this idea that if we overdo it on the testings, on the testing and on the metrics, that now we're stuck in this world where our movements and our freedoms are sort of bound up by whether or not we have a false positive on some sort of biometric test. Yeah, exactly. And even going beyond the kinds of things that we've described, I talk about in the book sort of the three elements of what I call the Biomedical Security State. The first is an increasingly militarized public health, apparatus, and I can get down into the weeds a little bit on what that means. If you're interested, the second element is the use of digital technologies of surveillance and control. So the simplest example of that is the vaccine passport, having to show a QR code to get on a train, get on a plane, go to a restaurant, gather public space, demonstrating that I... To the United States as well. There was a time where in order to literally enter the country of which one is a citizen, you have to prove that you medically qualify. Exactly, exactly. This would have sounded insane to us in 2018, but after a year of prolonged lockdowns and school closures and the kind of psychological and emotional abuse of those policies, I think people were willing to do just about anything to get their freedoms back, freedoms which never should have been taken away from them in the first place, I argue in the book. But there are other forms of digital surveillance that we saw during the pandemic as well. So the CDC bought from a very shady company bulk cell phone data to monitor basically people's movements and how many people were gathering at churches and schools and other public institutions to monitor basically compliance with lockdown orders. They admitted when this vice broke the story on this, they admitted that they were gonna continue doing this through 2026 and they talked about all kinds of other public health applications. The data was supposedly anonymized but there were some researchers at Princeton showing that with only four data points, for each of the numbers, they could easily identify who that phone belonged to. So it was not anonymized in any meaningful way. And this was done without the, certainly without the consent of the American people but without even the knowledge of the American people. So this level of kind of intrusive surveillance that's happening in the background that we don't even realize, right? Okay, I didn't opt in on my phone for the contact tracing or tell me if someone around me has tested positive for COVID because I don't wanna be monitored or surveilled in that way. And yet the government was doing it anyway without my consent. And those two elements, the increasingly militarized public health apparatus and the digital technologies of surveillance and control are backed up by the police powers of the state. So you could think of the example of the Canadian truckers protest in Ottawa. Justin Trudeau invokes the emergency act for the first time in Canadian history and to sent in a militarized police force to rough up the truckers and forcibly remove them from the city even though there were no incidents of violence at the protests prior to the police going in and basically roughing up the truckers. And beyond that, he basically commandeered the banks who cooperated to freeze the bank accounts of not only of the truckers but of anyone who gave money to the Freedom Convoy. So imagine giving a $50 donation to this protest one day and going to the ATM the next day and you can't withdraw money from your checking account because the banks have frozen it under the directives of the government. This is a pretty severe form of social control that the declared state of emergency empowered executives particularly governors, presidents, prime ministers to exercise a level of direct control over populations that they in the past they were never able to exercise. The declared state of emergency at the federal level which went on for the better part of three years gives the president of the United States 128 additional extra constitutional powers that he wouldn't otherwise have. He's the one who declares the state of emergency. He's the one who unilaterally decides when the emergency is over with no checks and balances on that system. And he's the one who accrues the additional powers including access to emergency funding which is a big deal because Congress typically holds the purse strings, right? The president wants a new program he's got to go hat in hand to get Congress to appropriate some funds but under the state of emergency he's got a lot more money at his disposal. And go ahead, sorry. So yeah, I mean, that's a very quick kind of quick summary of the kinds of things that I have in mind when I talk about biosecurity. Yeah, and I want to explore particularly near the end of this conversation where you think that might be going and ways to stop the advance towards that. Let's linger a little bit on some of the concrete present day examples just to see what is actually going on in some of these schools. We already mentioned the absences. This is an elementary school in Maryland where they imposed KN95 masks on all students and staff for the next 10 days except while eating or drinking. And this is, I mean, we've already talked about the kind of weakening case on the science of masks. This is putting one of the most kind of severe types of face coverings over an elementary school student all day. And I had the chance when I covered this issue in Florida when I covered the mask wars, I asked the head of the Florida chapter of American Association of Pediatrics, like, what are the psychological effects of this? Because it just seems from a common sense perspective that a kid not being able to see other kids might have some sort of effect. Then she was like, well, kids are resilient and we know that COVID can spread if you don't put on the mask. And the thing that struck me about that was that they're willing to accept the uncertainty of evidence around masking since we know we don't have a robust body of evidence there, but they're willing to kind of roll the dice on the social, psychological side of things. Does as someone who works in mental health, does that surprise you that that sort of message was coming out from an organization like the American Association of Pediatrics? It's shocking and very disdain. Or Academy of Pediatrics, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the policy that you just described with the N95s for kids, this is a form of child abuse, in my opinion. I mean that very literally. This is clearly going to be harmful. All masks are harmful to children, especially in the early years with speech and language development. Any child that has any hearing impairment or difficulty hearing needs to see the face in order to supplement their ability to communicate and to listen. I mean, set aside scientific research on this. Just use your common sense. What do you suppose it's like for a child to go through an entire week of school and not see a single person smile at him or her? I mean, that's terrible. That's just wrong. N95s also are going to cause pulmonary problems for those children. There was one study that showed that if you do get COVID and you're masking while you have COVID, you tend to get worse illness because it re-breathing of the viral particles causes them to go down deeper into the lungs where you get the sort of COVID pneumonia type problems that tend to produce more severe symptoms. So there's plenty of evidence on the harms of masks. It's not a question mark anymore. We have the evidence rolling in. Talk to any speech and language pathologist. They'll talk about the wave of children that are coming in. Look at the cognitive development. Look at the academic achievement of children in these circumstances. There's plenty of evidence that this policy is going to do damage. We don't have to be agnostic about that. And it's worth reminding people as well that healthy children are not harmed by COVID. Are these temporary setbacks in terms of language acquisition and other parts of childhood development? Like, do we have any evidence to indicate, oh, there's a six month delay versus, oh, this is a longer term, more permanent thing? I guess what's still pretty early, but do you have a sense? Yeah, my sense is, and this is based on a lot of research on development and neurobiology. There are critical periods of development where if certain things don't happen with a lot of work, you can do some catch up later, but you're never going to achieve the level of development that you would have had it been done during the critical period. So fancy term, the brain has what's called neuroplasticity. That's the ability to change with experience. But, and that continues throughout the lifespan, which is great, but there are also critical periods of neuroplasticity where the brain is more plastic, more open to change and development. Language development is a perfect example of that. If you learn a second language before the age of six or seven, usually it's much easier to learn, first of all, and you can speak it fluently without an accent. You learn after seven, eight years old, it takes longer to acquire the language. Anyone who's taken foreign language classes in college understands you've got to work really, really hard. And it's almost impossible to acquire that second language without speaking it with an accent. You don't speak with a facility of a native speaker. So that's a great example of, yeah, there are critical periods of development where a lot of work later can help you catch up somewhat, but it's not going to get you to the point where you would have been had you not missed that critical period. And that's why just saying children are resilient. I mean, okay, children are resilient, but that's no reason to abuse them. Fair enough. Let's move forward through the, we covered a little bit of case 12. This is also, as you mentioned at the top, higher education is really where some of the very first vaccine mandates were imposed and they are still being imposed in some universities. The University of Michigan, as our colleague, Robbie Suave reported here, will force students with COVID to leave campus. They have an isolation policy that if you test positive for COVID-19, you have to make an isolation plan, leave your residence hall, even if you're in a single room and then make pay for your own accommodations off campus. I dug into like, how widespread is this policy? This is from the American College Health Association. And this one that I have highlighted here, 8.8% of colleges surveyed had that policy where you pay to relocate at your own expense. It's almost 50% have some sort of isolation policy. And then this 12 and 8%, the 8% offers no direction for students who have COVID-19. And then 12% says that they will be asked to isolate in place and their roommates are offered free alternative housing if they want, if they're at high risk of getting very sick. That 20% category strikes me as the most rational, but there's also the question of vaccine policies on campus for the fall semester. Vaccines are required for all students in 7.4% of cases and required for subgroups of students, for example, residential students. So that would be- Literally all students who live on campus. Most students, yeah. So like it totally, well, that's just how it goes, right? Like you're in- You're approaching, you know, eight, yeah. So we're like over 18% basically, vaccine mandate for college campuses. And then, you know, 60% recommended and then 23% have no requirement or recommendation on COVID vaccination for students. So are these two questions, Aaron, where do you fall? What do you think should be the COVID policies for pirate? Yeah, so I'm completely opposed to the vaccine mandates. I sacrificed my career in academic medicine to challenge the University of California's vaccine mandate policy. These vaccines we knew from the very beginning did not stop infection or transmission of the virus. Therefore, whatever risks or benefits of the vaccines there are accrued to the individual who's accepting or declining vaccination. So the whole argument of get vaccinated for the sake of others, even if you're not worried, even if you're not gonna benefit, even if, you know, you're at an age bracket that's not high risk for problems with COVID. That argument falls apart. It doesn't apply to these vaccines. And so we have to apply the traditional medical ethics doctrine of informed consent, right? Where there's risk. And we can argue about how risky these vaccines are. But where there's any degree of risk, there must be choice. There must be the ability to voluntarily accept those risks for the sake of potential benefits or to decline them. So on a purely ethical grounds, setting aside issues of safety and efficacy of these vaccines, vaccine mandates are unethical. And the, I mean, why are you paying tuition at a school with a policy like this? Where, again, when you're healthy, you have to isolate, right? Now look, if you have symptomatic illness of any kind, if you have any respiratory virus and you're really sort of symptomatic in your coughing and sneezing, you got a fever, yeah, stay home, right? And maybe the campus could find a way to, if you have roommates or another situation that makes it more difficult to isolate, maybe they could facilitate a way to give you a single room for the people who are sick or something like that. Fine, fine. But again, let's indiscriminately test people and then anyone who comes back with a positive test kick them off campus. I mean, this is just insane. This is totally insane. Why would you pay money to go to an institution like this? I just, you know, I just can't, it amazes me that people subject themselves to this kind of treatment and fork over tons of money for the privilege of being treated like that. It's crazy. You were an early dissenter from the tyrannical COVID regime. I mean, you were fired from UC Irvine because of your refusal to comply with the vaccine mandate. Could you tell us your personal story, how you made that decision? I mean, you stuck by your principles at tremendous personal cost. Yeah. So I was the director of the medical ethics program, which means that I did all the ethics consults in the hospital, directed the ethics consult service. I taught the required ethics course to medical students. And I was actually on a committee at the UC office of the president, which oversaw not just my branch campus, UC Irvine, but all the UCs, UCLA, UCSF. And we had a committee with representation from all five of the UC hospitals, bioethicists and critical care doctors. And we vetted basically all of the, and wrote many of the COVID policies up until the vaccine mandate policy, which puzzled me because it was clear to me this was going to be the most ethically controversial of any of the policies that we had developed. And so why hadn't it gone through our committee? It just came down from the top, came down from on high. And there was no discussion or debate about it. I tried to get a conversation going at the office of the president about this policy because I knew it was going to be publicly controversial. And I had serious concerns about it and was just met with radio silence. So I ended up in, I think it was June of 21, publishing an article in the Wall Street Journal with the title university vaccine mandates are unethical. And as I mentioned before, those were the first institutions mandating vaccines. That's why sort of focused on universities. And I made the case that I just made to you regarding informed consent. And then I passed that around to the committee to try to stir the pot and get some discussion. And again, no discussion, no debate. We're not talking about this. And a week or two later, the proposed policy was finalized. And then once the policy went into effect. So nobody engaged with it? Nobody engaged with that Wall Street Journal article that you wrote? Not at all. Not at all. Okay. Yeah, which I found, because these were people that we, I was on the phone with the UC general council, like every night hammering out all these other COVID policies with the ventilator triage policy, the vaccine allocation policy, who should get it first when it first rolls out, all that kind of stuff. And then suddenly, nope, this is not under discussion. It was just very bizarre. And then once they instituted it, I started seeing my colleagues getting steamrolled. So I, because I had written the piece in the journal, I was publicly known as an opponent of the policy. I had students and faculty and staff reaching out to me. Students saying things like, I'm not a religious person, so I can't in good conscience, submit a religious exemption to their credit. They're trying to be ethically scrupulous. But I have conscience-based objections to this vaccines or I have medical concerns about safety and efficacy. And it became virtually impossible to get a medical exemption, even in circumstances where that might have been appropriate in California because the California medical board was threatening physicians who wrote any exemptions basically. So it was a really terrible situation. I was seeing students getting kicked out. I was seeing nurses that worked every day during the pandemic and had worked at the university hospital, alongside me for 15 years, getting fired. And I just got to the point where it was like, okay, I can be an ivory tower intellectual. I've said my piece, I've made my case. It actually hasn't had an effect or I can actually try to do something to change this policy. And I think that the final decision came down to just trying to project ahead a few months to where I would start teaching the annual ethics course to the med students and just feeling like I couldn't stand up with any credibility and talk about informed consent, talk about moral courage and integrity if I hadn't tried to do something. So I made the fatal decision to challenge that mandate in federal court and the university immediately moved to get rid of me on the pretense of alleged non-compliance with the same policy that I was challenging in federal court. I say alleged because the university also twice denied my medical exemption that was signed by my physician. So that's what happened to me. Did you have the opportunity to appeal that denial of medical exemption? I did and they denied it again on. Wow. So what was with the case, the substance of the case you were making, which was that first of all, you had been infected by COVID before and so presumably had natural immunity to the virus that as far as we knew at the time was as good or better. And that's only been borne out by the evidence since. I wanna just pull up a little bit of your Wall Street Journal op-ed. You said that these coercive mandates violate basic principles of medical ethics. Informed consent is likewise required is required for medical decisions in all adults of sound mind. This is arguably the most deeply rooted doctrine in contemporary medical ethics. First could you talk about informed consent and then I have a follow-up question about vaccine mandates as the broader concept of vaccine mandates beyond the COVID vaccine. Yeah. So informed consent in a nutshell is the notion that adults of sound mind have the right to accept or decline proposed medical interventions after receiving adequate information about the risks, benefits and alternatives to those treatments. And they have the right to make those decisions on behalf of their children who are too young to consent. And even in people who are incapacitated and can't give consent because they're in a coma, we still have to obtain informed consent for medical interventions from a proxy from a family member or from someone who's been appointed a conservator or power of attorney. And this doctrine goes all the way back to the early 20th century, but that one of the landmark articulations was of course the Nuremberg Code following the Nazi doctor trial where about a dozen, a couple of dozen Nazi physicians were tried for crimes against humanity for basically doing gruesome experiments on death camp prisoners without those prisoners consent and the world responded with horror. Some of those doctors actually received the death penalty and hung about half dozen of them were convicted for capital crimes. And the Nuremberg Code grew out of the experience of the Nuremberg Trials and the very first principle articulated in the Nuremberg Code is the principle of informed consent for medical research which was later applied in federal law to also requiring informed consent for all medical interventions. And even for medical tests, speaking of testing, we can't run tests on patients in most circumstances without gaining their informed consent. Would there ever be a situation where a vaccine mandates would not violate medical ethics in this kind of emergency type of situation where there's a pandemic, let's say in a deadlier pandemic, a more effective vaccine. How do you, how do those factors change the calculation if at all from an ethical viewpoint? So in my view, they don't. So I am an opponent in principle of vaccine mandates across the board. I think prior to the pandemic, I might have been more open to some of these. They're usually theoretical, hypothetical, really deadly virus, everyone is at risk, which already is not a real world scenario because really deadly viruses tend to burn out very quickly. They tend not to produce epidemics or pandemics because they kill people too quickly before they can spread. So viruses come in two flavors, low mortality viruses that are very contagious and can spread across countries or across the world. And high mortality. So examples of much higher mortality viruses that burn out rather quickly, the Ebola virus would be a good example of that, right? Much more concerning infection fatality rates than COVID, but only very time limited localized outbreaks that can be usually be contained much more easily than something like COVID, which is basically impossible to stop. It's okay. So where does something like smallpox work? So yeah, smallpox would be somewhere in the middle. Smallpox is probably the strongest example for vaccine mandates. Would be smallpox. It's got about a 30% mortality rate. So it can produce epidemics, but not necessarily pandemics, but it certainly can produce regional problems. The argument I think when it comes to something like smallpox, even then it falls apart because if you have a virus that's deadly enough and you have an intervention that is sufficiently effective, you have a sterilizing vaccine that protects the recipient, you're not gonna have to mandate it to people. People will voluntarily take it if it's clearly and obviously good for their health. And those that don't are not necessarily putting other people in harm's way because if the intervention is as effective as this hypothetical scenario describes, then the people who want that protection can have it available to them in the form of the vaccine. So there's a- There's a natural rebuttal to that so frequently. I think about this in the context of smallpox, but also polio because actually when my son was an infant prior to being eligible to getting vaccinated against polio, we live right next to Hasidic South Williamsburg. And so this was actually kind of an interesting thing because we had a few cases of polio detected in New York City and detected in Rockland County right around the time when I had a baby in my arms who had not yet been vaccinated against polio. What do you say in terms of the, what do you say to the immunocompromised or people with really, really small infants were even if they want to opt into that protection they're for whatever reason unable to do so at that time. I'm sure you've considered this at great length. Yeah, absolutely. So I think bodily integrity and bodily autonomy are sufficient overriding goods that accepting some degree of risk in order to maintain bodily integrity and bodily autonomy in order to avoid abuses of power is important for us as a society as a whole. I don't think we want to live in a society where anyone has the right to force another person to inject something into their body that they may or may not want. And there may be circumstances where the time limited use of force to quarantine contagious people that are symptomatic might be warranted because that's a time limited infringement on civil liberties that may be justified for the sake of protecting other people. But the kind of scenario that you describe we're still talking about infinitesimally low risks of acquiring a disease like polio in the current context. And so I just don't think that very small theoretical risk justifies forcing vaccines on the Hasidic Jewish community, for example. Yeah, fair enough. I'll also say that one consequentialist argument of all this, like just having seen it all play out is the way that these heavy handed mandates were implemented, which I was against from the beginning as well, is that predictably people don't like it and now they're more distrustful of vaccines on the whole. And I think that's put us in a very dangerous situation especially given that we now learned about all this laboratory manipulation of viruses. Like who knows what's coming and this is unfortunately like a very real issue that we have to all think about both on a policy level and also a personal level, like what we're gonna do if that God forbid ever happened. I think to your point, Zach, there is this interesting unintended consequence that all three of us seem to be storing in the very front of our minds, but that for whatever reason, our policymakers haven't really stopped to consider which is that you do squander public trust and you might in fact find yourself in a situation many years down the road where you wish you hadn't done that. I actually think that to your point, Erin, with the specific Hasidic example and these relatively few polio cases that were detected in the wastewater in New York City and surrounding areas, we did actually see in Rockland County where there's a really, really big Hasidic enclave exactly what you were talking about earlier which was a voluntary vaccination drive where a bunch of Hasidic moms seeing the news about this polio outbreak were like, oh crap, a bunch of my kids aren't vaccinated and just immediately hopped into action and went to these local vaccine drives and very quickly got their children vaccinated recognizing that up until this point, polio isn't really something that circulates in the US and hadn't really been a realistic fear but now that there are a few cases that have been detected, now they're choosing to protect their families and no government coercion was necessary in order to get that outcome. In fact, all the government did in this case was say, this is available to you. Here's the news as to the wastewater detection. Here are the news as to where this is circulating and if you would like to, you can come to this place and get this free vaccine available to you and people decided to opt into that of their own volition which I think is a really heartening case study. That is a beautiful real world example of good public health functioning well and relying on the goodwill and the trust and the civic mindedness and the other directedness of most Americans, including people that might naturally because of cultural or religious reasons have skepticism about the need for those things. And we don't have to coerce parents to help their kids brush their teeth or to feed their kids or to take them outside once in a while so they get sunlight because most parents want to do the best thing for their children and their children's health when you start forcing things on them going back to the discussion of masks or you mandate a vaccine for an illness that they're not at high risk from and that vaccine has potential side effects or adverse consequences. You squander precisely that trust and that civic mindedness of voluntarily complying in situations in a sort of other directed community minded spirit. And I think that is a per, the situation you described is a perfect contrast to what we actually did in COVID and you see the different results and you see the different attitudes that both of those things fostered in the community. And I think it becomes pretty clear that we can come up with hypothetical scenarios that might incline us to believe, yeah, we should force this on people. But if you see how that actually plays out historically in real world examples, I think it becomes very clear that that's not the way to go with public health. For the last part of this conversation, I wanna take us to some of the pushback, both the pushback that's been happening in the real world and some of what you suggest in your book. And I think there's no better place to start than in the Sunshine State and down in Florida where I'm coming to you from. And DeSantis made a name for himself going the opposite direction that the public health establishment went in this country. And he recently was restating that case at a press conference in Jacksonville. So let's take a look at what DeSantis had to say and I'd like to get your reaction to his comments. You give these people an inch they will take a mile. And so in Florida, not only did we stand in the fight when it was happening, but we've enacted permanent protections against these policies now and in the future for Floridians. And that is really, really important. And so you as a parent can send your kid to school and the school can't force them to wear a muzzle all day. They're allowed to breathe. You also have a right as a Floridian to earn a living regardless of whether you wanna take the latest COVID-19 booster shot or not. They can't make you do it in Florida. Same thing, we provided protections for businesses against local governments. When local governments were doing things back in 2020, I issued a blanket pardon for all the fines and fees that local governments were imposing on individuals and businesses. And I think we're the only state that has banned gain of function research. And so we're not doing that. We've also protected the rights of physicians to be able to treat their patients according to their best judgment. We're not gonna be like California and having physicians be penalized just cause they're dissenting from the accepted narrative. We did not and we will not allow the dystopian visions of paranoid hyperchondriacs control our health policies. So what do you think of what DeSantis has done and is doing in Florida policy-wise? I've been a big fan of DeSantis's approach to COVID from the very beginning. I think, you know, he locked down initially but very quickly started looking at the data himself, consulted my colleague, Jay Bhattacharya and others who gave him sound epidemiological and public health advice. And the outcomes speak for themselves, the age-adjusted mortality in Florida was the same as California, even though California enacted all of these policies, prolonged lockdown, school closures, vaccine mandates that Florida avoided for the most part. And all of those policies that had lots of downstream adverse consequences had no public health benefit in California. And in fact, my own governor Newsom in a recent interview more or less admitted that he was wrong on COVID policy. He didn't say I was wrong. He said, we collectively, we didn't know any better but now, you know, hindsight is 2020 and whatever. So he tried to soft pedal it but he definitely walked back his approach to COVID, maybe preparing for a presidential run against DeSantis and not wanting to have that conversation because it's hard to argue with the numbers at the end of the day. And it's also clearly, you know, people are wise to this now. The city of Huntington Beach just up the street from me in California recently passed an ordinance basically saying that institutions within our city cannot mandate masks or vaccines. So you're starting to see pushback at the local level even when at the state level we're not getting a good response. And one other piece of good news in this regard. So DeSantis sort of hinted at a law in California that would threaten physicians who didn't follow the government's preferred pandemic policies. That was Assembly Bill 2098, which went into effect in January. It was in effect only for a few weeks, fortunately, because I and four other physicians in California filed a lawsuit, Hogue v. Newsom is the name of the suit. Challenging that law on First Amendment and 14 amendment grounds. That's a law that would have empowered the medical board to discipline any physician who contradicted what the law called the current scientific consensus on COVID, which is ill-defined legal concept and basically which had the chilling effect that physicians who didn't know how to interpret the current scientific consensus would just read from a script prepared by the California Department of Health. So physicians having a gag order and becoming sort of robots for state policy was gonna be the effect of that law. Fortunately, we've got a preliminary injunction in that lawsuit, so the law has been enjoined while our case is going to trial. And just a couple of days ago, quietly in another bill as it was going through committee, the state legislature basically inserted a portion that would vitiate and remove Assembly Bill 2098. So the legislature is quietly now gonna sun down on this lie, I think in anticipation that they were gonna lose our case and not wanting to face that public embarrassment of passing a law that was in fact unconstitutional and violated free speech rights of physicians and equal protection rights of physicians. Yeah, it's interesting how this stuff is getting sort of quietly walked back in some cases. And yeah, I covered that case with you. And I'm also a former California resident, so that's where I was riding on the panel. Covering California. Covering California. I wanna, you mentioned that interview with Gavin Newsom. I think it's worth just playing a bit from that interview because I would like to get your thoughts on the content of what he was saying there. Let's roll that. During COVID, you were pretty strict with the lockdowns here. And it was an interesting piece in Harper's that sort of was critical of your decisions from this perspective. You found a way to allow the motion picture industry and the sort of the movie industry to get back to work. But you didn't allow people to grieve together at funerals or at churches. And that it sort of, and that this may be why there's such a polarized disconnect. What you prioritize, right? This is this anger between the populace and the elite supposedly. Here, you prioritize this industry, but you were tougher on those that just wanted to go worship. What do you say to that, Chris? I think there's a lot of humility. And we didn't know what we didn't know. And it was hardly I who was we, collectively. I think all of us in terms of our collective wisdom, we've evolved. We didn't know what we didn't know. We're experts in hindsight. We're all geniuses now. So think about what you ended up collectively prioritizing. You're prioritizing industry, you know? One specific one, but then didn't prioritize maybe ones that whose maybe values you didn't connect with. I don't think it's a binary. There was iterations within that theme. There was fits and starts. There were regional frameworks that had impacts more broadly defined. There were more industry specific frameworks. All of us went through a process. I mean, there was few states that didn't go on aggressive lockdowns, including Florida's Ron DeSantis. I understand that. But within the framework of who opened the door, it's what industry got leniency in which one state. All of it is legitimate in terms of reflection. All I know. What is something you do differently? Well, I think a whole lot we would have done everything differently because we understood, we would understand outdoors, as an example. The nature. You want to shut schools down, you try to figure out how to maybe have outdoor classrooms. No, that's not it. Well, now you're getting into things. But I think the nature of the spread early on and understanding epidemiology of that spread, understanding the spread in the context of how it spread very differently indoors than outdoors is one perfect example what a lot of us would have done differently, including again, in states, red states that shut down their beaches in the early part of the pandemic. So his defense is kind of, we didn't know what we didn't know. And we all kind of, would have done things differently. What do you think of that, Aaron? I think we did know. And there were people like me in the state. There were people like Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford in the state. There were many of us who were speaking out, who were criticizing these policies from the very beginning, starting in 2020, continuing through 2021. We had the epidemiological evidence to understand the lockdowns, which had never previously been tested and were never part of pandemic planning prior to 2020 and had been rejected by the public health establishment. Did you all ever try to get like an audience with Newsome or any local officials? Oh, absolutely. All of us were trying to get a hearing. And in fact, we were silenced. We were suppressed in some cases. We were fired. But even when we weren't fired, our universities vilified us. People accused us of wanting to kill grandma. And so this whole, it wasn't I, it was we. No, go back and look at the stay at home order. It was signed by Gavin Newsome. Go back and look at his press conference when he announced the first lockdown in California. It was very much I am ordering us to do this and I am taking responsibility for this. So we didn't know any better as nonsense. Many of us did and we were silenced, vilified and in some cases lost our jobs. And I'm not responsible because all of us and our thinking has evolved and it's a big we is just a dodge of responsibility. You're the executive. You're the one who declared a state of emergency within California gained additional extra constitutional powers and utilize those powers in ways that were enormously damaging. The effects of which will be felt for decades. The effects of school closures, the effects of lockdowns will be felt for decades. So I have no patience for this. I have no patience for this dodging of responsibility. I'm glad he admitted. Yeah, we would do everything differently now. So you feel sort of vindicated as a critic of lockdown school closures and mask and vaccine mandates. But he's hardly admitting responsibility. He's hardly admitting that he was wrong. He's, I don't know, he's trying to deflect responsibility onto some sort of anonymous collective blob. And that's not how a leader behaves. A leader takes responsibility for his or her own decisions. I think you're totally correct that there's been a stunning amount of pandemic revisionism, which is what I term it. I've covered this a little bit for reason.com specifically as it pertains to teachers unions and Randy Weingarten who our colleague, Matt Welch covered wonderfully as she was imposing some of these absolute horrible restrictions and lobbying for all kinds of disruptions to schooling on behalf of the teachers unions, which I think kind of- Oh, she just wanted to keep the school open, Liz. She just wanted to keep them open. Yeah, I think it laid bare the relationship between the teachers unions and school policy in a way that many people who aren't libertarians had never really contemplated before. But Randy Weingarten, exactly, to your point, Zach, I mean, she kept talking about how actually, she was fighting all along to keep the schools open. And it's like, well, wait a second. I recall at Reason Magazine having many a busy workday where I was working and Matt Welch was working and a whole bunch of people were working to cover articles specifically talking about how Randy Weingarten was fighting to keep the schools closed. And so it's going to take more than some soundbites circulated all over Twitter to get me to forget that. And then I think about that in terms of people who were much more profoundly affected by that, right? It wasn't just libertarian journalists were pissed off and busy writing about it. It's like children missed out and in many cases are not reading at grade level and won't ever read at grade level because of the effect that Randy Weingarten had. The amount of alienation, isolation, depression that some of these children have seen. It's just stunning to me. But the question that I have for you because you've described with great detail the sort of biomedical security state, the biomedical surveillance state that has descended on us or that at least descended on us for some time you term it the new abnormal. In your view, are we in the new abnormal or did we just narrowly avoid it? No, no, no, we still very much are and it's ready to move forward into the next stages which I describe in the book. So even though a lot of these specific policies have been rolled out, the whole infrastructure, the legal infrastructure that made this possible, the social conditioning that made it possible is still in place, just waiting for the next real or manufactured declared emergency in order to ratchet things up again. I believe the next steps in the process which are going to be rolled out under non-emergent circumstances are the use of digital IDs tied to biometric data. So the face scans that you see now at TSA that are collecting data and monitoring movements at that level. And that being tied into a central bank digital currency which will be the ultimate method of social control through financial control are I think the two next steps and probably a thorough discussion of those two things the biometric based ID system and the central bank digital currency system which needs to be distinguished from decentralized cryptocurrencies. That's probably a whole separate interview that would take us far field today but I very much argue so my book is not so much a retrospective on COVID I really try to frame it as this is a book about the future. Yeah, it's about what happened to us over the last three years we have to understand that to have an appreciation of what's happening here. But what I argued basically is that in March of 2020 what we got was just a not not just a novel untested method of trying to control the spread of a respiratory virus what we got was a new paradigm of governance and that new paradigm of governance has the advocates of that have no intention of slowing down simply because COVID has lost all sort of plausibility in the minds of the general public. Are there any policies well, hold on, are there any policies that we could implement right now that would stall this? I mean, the future that you're describing I mean, Zach and I have covered the CBDC issue pretty closely, especially because we're both huge cryptocurrency advocates and this is something we cover so much at Reason TV we just produced a pretty long documentary from Miami's Bitcoin conference trying to basically discern are we in crypto winter what's the future for cryptocurrency? But CBDCs are something that we've absolutely been watching with hackles raised or worse. What in your mind, how do we stall the implementation of all of this? What's the way that we can oppose this? If we don't voice, how do we choose exit? What does this look like in your view? It's a really hard question, but what I've come through is people need to be informed so that they can voluntarily opt out. You can opt out of the face scan at the TSA. You have to read the fine print on their website to see that but we need to collectively stand back and say help, no, we're not gonna do this. No, I'm not gonna adopt the CBDC and we're not going to be trading with it and this is not how things are going to work. I have some public policy proposals in the last chapter of my book, things that could be done at the federal and state level, particularly to put systems of checks and balances on the ability of the executive to declare a state of emergency or to renew and continue it indefinitely without some sort of legislative or judicial check on the system. So I mean, if listeners are interested in some of those specific proposals, I'll refer them to the last chapter of my book. So there are some things that can be done I think at the policy level, but the more important thing right now is people need to be aware of what is happening. They need to be, most Americans don't know what a CBDC is. Most Americans don't know the difference between a passport and a digitally based identification system and why the latter might actually be a threat to my liberty whereas the former is kind of more acceptable. So people need to be educated on these things. That's the main reason that I wrote the book because I didn't want to see a future like the one I tagged on a little epilogue at the end called Seattle 2030 which is imagining not new technologies or new methods of control, but things that are already available that just have not yet been rolled out on a wide scale but we're seeing the beginnings of those rollouts. And basically I sort of try to paint a picture of the kind of future that we're gonna be living in in the not too distant future. It's not Seattle 2050, it's a few years from now if we don't see where this train is headed and take some specific steps to reject kind of the worst aspects of it. Yeah, and I also just mentioned that there was a recent ruling in this Missouri v. Biden case which you were involved with and which I did a stream with Jay Bhattacharya a couple of weeks on which is the social media censorship case and the court essentially argued a rule that they coerced the platforms and commandeered their processes for censorship and upheld the core part of the original injunction saying stop doing that White House. So that's possibly another method is to get involved and if your rights are being violated take it to the courts and things can happen. It looks like you actually can still get redressed in this country. So that's an optimistic bit of that's a development that gives me some optimism. But I wanna- I think that in the meantime continuing to have conversations like this one I know probably to some viewers it seems like we're rehashing problems that have disappeared from their minds but I think it's actually really important that we try to have as many of these discussions as possible where we attempt to hold policymakers accountable for the really heinous things they did to us. So thank you so much for speaking with reason we really appreciate it. Thanks Liz and Zach.