The Competing Covid Narratives

I tell you this, flying into Texas, on an aircraft I was on, one of the flight attendants came up and tapped me on the shoulder as we were getting ready to land and said, well, be careful because Texas has gotten rid of the mask mandate. And the point was, from the flight attendant, was... Did she just say it to you? Yeah, it's going to be like the... She likes you. Yeah, it's a wild west. She's trying to let you know. It's going to be the wild west. You're going to be careful out there because... Does that like you? Yeah. But to put him... My wife was sitting right next to me. There was nothing untoward. It wasn't like... Okay. No, we were not engaged in any shenanigans. But the point was that they looked at it and they go, oh, you know, Governor Abbott said this, and it's political, right? But my point of my story is I walked off the plane. Everybody was wearing a mask. Yeah, this is the thing that Governor Abbott said. He said, I encourage you to wear a mask. You should still wear a mask, but I don't want the state to tell you what to do. Right. That's what I support. And if you don't want the state to tell you what to do, you shouldn't want the federal government telling you what to do. Exactly. Exactly. But everybody I've seen in Austin, wear a mask. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, until you go to a restaurant and then you sit down, then there's no mask, and I don't understand that. Well, that's all things nonsense. You have to wear a mask when you go to pee, and then you don't wear a mask when you come back and sit down at your table. Get back to your table. Like, okay. It's going to be fair. They've got mostly six foot distance. The places that I've been here in Texas, they keep the social distance. But I guess my point was like, you get this. We talked about this earlier off before the show, but it was the idea that some people just like to suffer, and they suffer well. They enjoy the fact that this is hard and bad. And that's really sad, but it's true. There's people that they enjoy being depressed. It's a hard thing to even say because you don't want it to be real. You don't want there to really be people out there that like ... There's some people that when we got shut into our homes and everyone was sad and everyone was scared, they enjoyed it because that's how they live all the time. Yeah. Or it's their time to shine. Some people have really shown during the pandemic. I saw this post from this individual who was a professional clearly from their job, and they posted, oh, I'm dealing with such anxiety now because of the possible return to normal and the idea that I'm going to have to travel and I won't be able to have dinner with my kids. And I'm just like, and I'm thinking, fuck you. It was clear from the post that they've had the luxury of working from home and not losing their job. They could teach their kids and it's this idea of not opening the public schools. These kids out here who don't have WiFi, who don't have laptops, who have a one parent home who has to work, all those ... Can't afford a tutor, can't make a little pod to teach their kids. Those people aren't doing well, and those kids are suffering. Then you get the people who can afford to set up a private pod for their kids and bring a tutor in and have strong WiFi and can do all those things. I have English as a first language and they're doing just fine. And they're like, well, we should not go back to school. Fuck you. Kids have disappeared off the radar during this past year and the schools don't even know where they are in places like New York and Chicago and other places. So it's fucked up. Yeah. There's narratives out there and the problem with these narratives are it's not that they're all completely inaccurate. The problem is when you say, when you espouse these narratives in a very condensed, processed way like social media, you get a bunch of people that support it and a bunch of people that argue against it. But if it's a narrative like, we should stay home, we should all wear masks. Pretty hard for people to fight against that, right? So people, they pile on and then people get addicted to the reactions and the interactions on Twitter. It becomes this weird fucking method of communication, the method of discussing ideas. And they get, people get really attached to whatever, whatever they believe in, whether they believe the kids should be in school to the end of time and all fucking interactions should be done through Zoom or that we should all throw away our masks and achieve herd immunity and you should take vitamin D and go out in the sun and fucking exercise and be healthier. You can do it. You can do all of it, right? You can wear a mask because, you know, okay, fine. My freedoms aren't infringed by wearing a mask. I don't give a shit. It's not that big a deal. Yeah. But at the same time, do I want my kids back in school? Do I think it's healthy for my oldest boy's logo to, you know, be wearing his, you know, pajamas or his sweatpants all day long and learning from distance? No. And I think that it's just, so there are, you know, I do agree with the idea that there are people that suffer well. They're kind of wielding this whole thing as a sort of justice. Yeah. So. The comedy community is an interesting example because one of the things that a lot of my professional comedian friends have found is that there's a lot of people that never worked. And when I say never, I'm exaggerating, but they weren't, they weren't successful. They didn't, they weren't selling out clubs and theaters. They weren't doing well. And they're so angry that some comics have decided to go on the road again because a lot of places have opened up. Texas has opened up. Florida has opened up. And they can go and do shows. That's a chance to do work, right? I mean, so it is, but they're angry and they want the narrative is that you're doing these super spreader events. People even got mad at me and Dave Chappelle because Dave and I were doing these shows at Stubbs, uh, amphitheater in Austin outside. There's no evidence whatsoever that the, the, the, that the virus spreads outside. And I mean, literally none. There's no evidence. And then on top of that, we test everyone in the crowd. It's expensive. It takes a long time. The people get there early. We test the entire crowd. Are you doing temperature checks or? No, we're doing, we're doing antigen tests for the entire crowd. That's crazy. I mean, that's great, but it's crazy. It's expensive, but it's the way to do it. And we had a great fucking time and we're doing it again. And but some comics have been mad at that. But if you go and look at the comics that are mad, they're all unsuccessful or super liberal and they're virtue signaling. They're looking to like tag on to this idea that what you're doing is bad. And then what we should do is all stay home and locked down. Like you can go outside. And by the way, most people like 99.9, whatever percent survive. There was a recent study that showed that 78% of all the people that are hospitalized from COVID are overweight. Yeah. You seen that? Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah. The shame. All these people are talking about fat shaming. You want to talk about the super spreaders. It's people that have ignored their health and those people need help and they need support and they need love. But there's a reality to the people that are getting sick from this. If everyone was healthy, this would almost be a non-issue. Now that's not a health shaming thing. Like we should be shaming people that are in poor health or people that are born with comorbidity factors like diabetes and whatever. Of course, of course. Yeah. Yeah. And we get this thing 100% objective. If we were, we would have a completely different take on it. Well, look, there's no science as an example. I'm focused because I got these three knuckleheads at home. So I'm focused on the education side of things as well. And so as are you, but there's no science. People believe science. Well, of course, believe science. That's one of the funniest narratives. Believe science. Well, who the fuck doesn't believe? That's fine, but it's a political issue. But I think that there's no science that shows that a six foot distance in public schools for kids is essential to their health. So in fact, the science shows three foot. That's fine. And what that does, though, the importance of that is logistics because it allows for you to get the schools open again. People will talk about the six foot distance. We can't get the kids back into their classrooms with six foot distance. We can't get enough of them in there. It's the little things. It's the logistics of it saying, well, get it down to three foot, which is what the science supports. And then you can get these schools. You can start opening these places back up in a responsible manner. Honestly got we're going to look at this thing in a year or two. Maybe we won't because we're not going to be honest with ourselves. But if we actually did an honest hot wash of this reaction to the pandemic, our reaction has been pathetic. Right. Over over this past year. This has not been a shining moment for us. Don't you think part of the problem is we started out with a different idea with the viruses. We started out thinking that it was going to be like the next Spanish flu and that it was going to kill. I mean, everyone was terrified. Me included. I was scared of it. In the beginning, I thought that it was going to be something that kills 10 percent of the population. You know, and it didn't turn out to be that way, but we never made an adjustment. Yeah. No, I yes, I think that's true. And I think also part of it is you can't negate the or minimize the political reaction. Right. If Joe Biden had been president when this thing broke, I guarantee you the reaction would have been somewhat different. The fact that Trump was in there and created so much emotion and there was such animosity. Thank God Trump wasn't pro vaccine. We would be fucked because he was pro so many other therapeutics and they're like, hydroxychloroquine is racist. You know, like thank God he didn't say anything about ivermectin or vitamin D or corsetin or any of the other things that would or zinc. Yeah. But I do think that way. You know, that was a big issue was was like, see, he's so polarizing and we can't and we can't trust the vaccines because, you know, they were developed under Trump. Well, fuck it. Believe the science. It would develop by companies that have nothing but scientists and doctors and engineers working inside them. And so if you believe the science and you better believe that they were developing vaccines that you should have been happy about. So, you know, I guess everything, you know, I don't know. It's the political nature of this country. And again, going back to what we were talking about earlier with the Russians and the Chinese, they see that and they just keep sticking the knife at us. And the more they do, the more they tear the threads of our belief in the system and the more polarized we get and the more yelling that goes on and the more bullshit people believe when they read social media and they don't bother to say, well, who wrote this? Is this actually a scientific piece of work or is this just and what's the origin of it? What's the outlet? Right. And half the time the outlet is overseas someplace and then you got to dig into it. It's like an asset tracing exercise. Who owns that company? Right. Then you find out it's owned by some, you know, Russian entity that's got an operation out of Cyprus or whatever. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.