Gone Viral with Justin Hart
2022-10-13 · Guest: Justin Hart (Author and Data Analyst) · 52:46
COVID-19 public health policy failures and societal impact
Bob Zadek interviews data analyst and author Justin Hart about his book, Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane. They discuss the failures of public health officials, the lack of scientific basis for many pandemic policies like lockdowns and plexiglass barriers, and the significant hidden costs to children and public health. Hart argues for a return to rational, data-driven decision-making and a healthy skepticism of government authority.
Topics: COVID-19, public health policy, lockdowns, data analysis, Dr. Anthony Fauci, CDC, school closures, asymptomatic spread, government accountability, Rational Ground
Speakers: Bob Zadek – Host Justin Hart – Author of Gone Viral and founder of RationalGround.com
Intro & Guest Background [00:28]
Bob Zadek: Is the pandemic over? President Biden says it is. Except insofar as student loan forgiveness is concerned, he says it’s not. During the pandemic, did we follow the science? We did according to Fauci, except according to Fauci, the science changes. We did according to Dr. Walensky, except when the scientists were wrong, which they were according to Dr. Walensky. Does all of this make you crazy?
Today’s guest, Justin Hart, agrees. Justin has just written Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane. Unlike Biden, Fauci, Walensky, and their sycophants, Justin knows what he’s talking about. In addition to writing his book, Justin is an executive consultant with over 25 years experience working with Fortune 500 companies and presidential campaigns as a data analyst, and has recently founded RationalGround.com to provide us all accurate, data-driven observations about the issues which matter. Justin, welcome to the show.
Justin Hart: Bob, thank you so much for having me.
Bob Zadek: Now, Justin, you’re a data analyst, and here you are writing a book about how the COVID experience drove the world insane. I didn’t notice in your bio that you’re a shrink, so we’ll assume you can defend your decision to offer psychoanalytical opinions about nothing less than the world. But let’s have our audience get to know you a bit, Justin. Now, you wrote this book about COVID. So the book was about a worldwide experience that just recently ended. But I didn’t notice that you have spent your adult life writing books about problems around the world. So is this your first venture into authordom? And what have you been doing before writing the book? Help us understand Justin a bit and what motivated you to provide this psychoanalytical conclusion about the world.
Justin Hart: Well, fantastic. I’m going to go for some honorary doctorate of psychology from some college. They’ll grant it to me, I guarantee you, Bob, after this, because I think the diagnosis is pretty strong. I’ll tell your audience a little bit about myself. I grew up in the Bay Area. I went to BYU. And then after a while, I decided, you know, I love politics. So I high-tailed it to DC. And this is in like 1996, okay, aging myself now. But I got there and it was—I wanted to marry the internet and politics.
But this was 1996. The internet was still just a glimmer in a few techies like myself, right? And so I cut my—I decided, okay, well, I’ll go back into the private sector. And I cut my teeth on the first dot-com boom and bust. I was building websites for Toyota.com, Dupont.com, Blue Cross Blue Shield. I built all those websites just around the turn of the century. And then the bust came. And I said, maybe now’s a great time to get into politics. But it still wasn’t. It took going to 2008 when President Obama handed us our hats on the right side of the aisle where I place myself. And we were embarrassed, wholly embarrassed that they had caught us, right?
But then the Tea Party movement started up and things started to get really exciting online. And that’s where I sort of entered the fray. I started my own consulting firm helping senatorial candidates, helping people like Chuck DeVore here in California. I was helping Sarah Palin. I helped a bunch of people. And then I ended up actually in the last few months of the campaign on the Mitt Romney presidential campaign doing some black arts technical stuff that was really, really fun, bringing them a whole bunch of fundraising money online. Super disappointed in the way that campaign ended up and decided, well, the next four years didn’t quite work out for my future boss, and I high-tailed it back to California.
And there, I went back into the private sector. I did a lot of stuff. I did a lot of leisure stuff. I did a lot of—I had a startup airline that I was part of. And my background is in, again, data analytics, doing huge marketing upsells and lots of fun stuff there. And when COVID started, I was doing a consulting business. I had three awesome clients. I’ll tell you them about—and this will sort of be the segue into this—which is one of them was golf excursions for baby boomers. The next one, parents sending their kids to college with an online consultancy. And the third one was a high-end vacation club for families. Now, you can imagine those were my three clients going into 2020. By April, they were all out of business, especially the one that was doing…
The Business of COVID [03:24]
Bob Zadek: By the way, I’m not going to ask you to help me pick stocks. Also, Justin, when you were active in politics, you mentioned some names. You also mentioned to me before we went on the air that you were active in the Romney campaign as well. So my question is, you mentioned the three business activities that you were in right before COVID, and you mentioned the candidates you worked on before that, including Romney. My question: Did you ever work on anything that succeeded? Sorry to ask that, but I couldn’t resist.
Justin Hart: That’s a great question. Well, the ones I did succeed at I can’t talk about because they were kind of Black Ops. No, I had a lot of great successes, I feel, in the private sector. In the public sector and political one, yeah, I didn’t have quite the home runs that I wanted there. But I picked the right horses still. He was the right guy for the job, even if he wasn’t the best candidate. But even now, you know, we look back and what actually I’ve been doing since that time is just helping out a bit on the side.
Now, one of the things about—we’ll talk about with COVID and with our team that I formed—was that we ended up being one of the primary sources helping the Trump administration behind Dr. Scott Atlas when he was at the White House, providing him all the data and charts that he needed to get things sort of righted and try to right the ship before, well, we lost the election and things went awry. But that’s maybe fast-forwarding a little too far. Bring me back, Bob. Where do you want to start?
From Data Analyst to COVID Skeptic [04:19]
Bob Zadek: So you, like most of us, like as most of us did, you watched the performance of government at all levels—state, federal, and quite local, county and town level. And all of us, or many of us, scratched our heads and said, “This is government, Big G government’s darkest moment.” That’s what we all said. But I just got angry and I just wrote checks to organizations that I felt could help turn the tide. You did something far more productive. You wrote, put together, decided to write, put together, and then published this book, Gone Viral, dealing with the world going insane. So tell us the process that immediately preceded your writing of the book. Because why didn’t you just sit around like the rest of us, be really grumpy and really bad company for two years?
Justin Hart: Well, like you, I was pretty miffed, especially when all of my clients got canceled. And I thought, this is just not the way we should be doing this. And especially when I looked at the stuff. Now, a curious thing about me: In 2018, I was here in San Diego. I was vacationing on Carlsbad Beach with my family. We had those trailers and it was a great week. By the end of the week, I was super sick and I didn’t know what happened. Next thing you know, I’m in the hospital for two weeks suffering from a near-fatal dose of a staph infection. Staph is that natural flora that you have on your skin, but if it gets into your bloodstream, it can do some—reaks some pretty good havoc.
And so I went into shock and my body started shutting down. And it became kind of a side hobby for me to try to understand how did this little thing just completely almost destroy my body? And so I got into it. I wanted to know the numbers. I wanted to know the research on it. And then it came time for COVID and I started looking—well, I know the numbers on influenza, I know the numbers on these things. Something is off. Because Dr. Fauci was getting in front of Congress and saying basically one out of 100 people are going to die from this. And we said, I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.
And as I say at the outset of my book, I’m not a health official. I’m not an expert in any way there. But I’m a darn good data guy. And normally, Bob, I wouldn’t insert myself into someone else’s domain. But they seemed to have no problem inserting themselves into my domain—my business, my kids’ education, my church, my gym. You name it, they were there. And so I said, I’m going to give a little pushback here and find out what’s going on. And when we did the math, we found out it was wrong.
So we formed a ragtag bunch of analysts, activists, experts, doctors, and just moms and dads. And it was called Rational Ground. And we coordinated on Twitter, we coordinated over social media, we went on TV shows, we put out infographics, we put out a lot of information trying to basically counter the usual narrative that the answer to this was to lock everyone down. Like, here’s a perfect example, Bob. We all know and everyone attests now that the key, as we say, comorbidities—that is, the ailments that make you most at risk for COVID—are obesity and lack of Vitamin D. So whose idea was it to stick us inside, out of the sun, eating takeout, getting fat, everyone putting on their COVID-19—well, if you know what I mean, right? And we—and then going out to face the disease. This was a terrible decision.
And then when you come to realize that the median age, the average age of death is 80 years old, right? That’s a much different pandemic than the one that happened in 1918 where the average age of death was under 30, right? And you realize when you do the math that our young kids, who are still like the last ones masked up in preschools, that literally their risk of dying of COVID compared to an 80-year-old is 100,000 times lower. And yet we decided one size fits all, you get exposed any which way, you have to lock down. And then no one looked at the other side of the coin, Bob. And that’s what we looked at. We looked at the other side of the coin, and what we found frightened us.
The Myth of Asymptomatic Spread [07:51]
Bob Zadek: Now, when you wrote the book, when you’re putting together the book, I have never written a book. I’m only guessing a bit how I might go about it. And I presume you had some outline, very rough, brief outline in the beginning, and then you fleshed it out as you went along. When you started the project, did you have in mind a conclusion? Was the—for example, and I’m not prompting you because it is in the book—but your conclusion could have been “Government’s horrible, we can’t have government.” Government is part of the problem, not the solution. Or it could be it’s not about government, it’s about a few individuals who were terribly wrong and had too much power. Or was it a criticism of federalism? Or was it a paean to pure science and how pure science was ignored? Or was it some combination of those? What was—because you had to—you couldn’t just be writing a book to say some mistakes were made. There’s more to a book than that. So give us what was in your head or on paper as far as the conclusion that you were trying to achieve in the book.
Justin Hart: Well, what’s crazy is building up to the book, which I started to write at the end of last year, I had already written hundreds of articles for my Substack and thousands and tens of thousands of tweets with my colleagues. In fact, our main domain was kind of Twitter. We were in the throes of things. And then it would get picked up in the press. We’d put together a meme, we’d put together a chart.
For example, one of my most popular ones was trying to get above the noise, as I like to call it in marketing, Bob. I had a picture of one of the skater boys in Venice Beach, right? And they have that famous skateboard arena right there on the beach, all carved into the ground. And they were so scared of these kids getting COVID that they decided to fill that with sand early on, like late March 2020. And it was ridiculous, right? And I saw this picture of this one skater kid and he was standing in front of a bulldozer, and I put it right next to the famous scene from China where the man is standing in front of those line of tanks.
Bob Zadek: The tanks. The tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Justin Hart: In Tiananmen Square, right? And so the contrast was found by a lot of people. Now, I made that rather stark and it prompted conversation. But it was things like those that we got above the noise. Now, the crazy thing, Bob, I never intended to write a book. I was approached by Regnery Publishing, the same folks who do Mark Steyn, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, all the great, you know, conservative authors right over there. And they said, “We want you to write a book.” I said, “Well, that sounds easy. I’ve got all these great writings,” right? And we outlined it and by the first draft they’re like, “I don’t think this is going to work.” Because I started translating Twitter into that book and it was a bunch of memes and pictures. Like, “No, this isn’t going to fly.”
And I said, “Wow, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” So got down—my wife sacrificed greatly as I sort of put myself up in a hotel for four or five days at a time to finish this thing off. But I made it very accessible. And the approach I finally landed on with the help of my editors was to say, let’s talk about the myths. So basically the entire book is chapter by chapter, myth by myth, and busting them left and right.
So the first one we talk about is the myth that started the whole cascade, Bob: asymptomatic spread of the disease, right? That was, you know, we learned all these vocabulary words over the course of the pandemic that increased our knowledge, but also the asymptomatic meant someone who has COVID, they don’t know it, and we think they’re spreading it. That was the main theory that Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci put out there. And that one assumption, Bob, led to mask mandates, it led to quarantines, it led to the six-foot distancing, it led to plexiglass. All of the non-sent rest on that assumption. We now know from multiple studies, Bob, that asymptomatic spread—that is, they must be spreading the disease, they don’t even know they have it—accounted for less than 1% of all of the cases. When you talk to people on how they got it, a lot of them sometimes don’t know, but a good portion know that they got it at home because they were quarantined at home with someone else that had it, right? And so it’s a really interesting piece when you look at all these myths that are out there and we try to bust them wide open. And it’s really written for someone who says, “Okay, I know something went awry. I don’t know how to articulate it. My neighbor’s still masking up in their car alone. My principal keeps threatening to shut down the school for a quarantine another time in the fall. What are we going to do?” And now you have the tools at your hand, the information, the quick stats, the rebuttals. And I hope it’s a good read where people can say, “I know how to address that.”
Pandemic Insanity Anecdotes [08:51]
Bob Zadek: One little anecdote, when you just a second ago you mentioned your neighbor, you made reference to a neighbor sitting in a car by his self wearing a mask. And what I flashed to, Justin, is I was on—during COVID, when I was going out of my mind, I took a vacation. We went to Hawaii. And we’re in Hawaii, and hotels were kind of half-filled. But I went for a walk one morning, and this hotel in Hawaii had a golf course. And there in the middle of the golf course, early in the morning, was a gardener picking weeds by himself in the middle of a golf course wearing a mask. And I said, “Wow, he’s making sure the dandelions don’t get COVID.” I mean, there was nobody to the horizon, and yet there he was wearing a mask as another anecdote to your story.
Justin Hart: Yeah, well, and that’s exactly what grounds into the title of the book: It Drove the World Insane. Even my kids—my kids go here to—or they did previously—I have two older stepdaughters and they went to a private classical Christian school here in San Diego. I won’t mention the name. But this is a school that’s built on the pillars of rhetoric, logic, reason, right? And yet my 14-year-old daughter comes home and she says, “You won’t believe what happened at lunch today. I’m sitting there and the lunch attendant comes to me and she says, ‘You’re going to need to sit perpendicular to the bench.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because we don’t want you facing your fellow students while you eat lunch.’” Because COVID only spreads in one direction, right?
Or you think about this one picture—it’s always seared into my mind, Bob—it’s a Catholic priest and he’s performing his duties for baptizing an infant. The mother is six feet away holding the infant in the air. Between them is the font. But the baby’s not going to make it to the font because the bishop has a squirt gun. And the bishop is using a squirt gun to baptize the baby. I kid you not. It’s right there at the top of my Twitter feed, you’ll be able to see it. And so we all had those moments, right, where we go, “This person is insane because of these policies.”
Fauci and the Administrative State [11:01]
Bob Zadek: Your book—I think it’s fair to say, but you—I will not—I don’t want to put a label on the book. It’s not a political book. It’s a book appealing to the rational side of the reader. It’s a book in favor of rational decision-making, just as your website, RationalGround.com, clearly is appealing to an audience who has rationality as their goal. And the reason I’m mentioning that is when we started this discussion of the book, Chapter 1, when you talk about Fauci and others who started off totally in the wrong direction.
Now, my question: Is the conclusion from that chapter—is it a narrow conclusion that Dr. Fauci didn’t know what he was talking about or was motivated by politics rather than by pure science? Or was it—could another doctor in the same position have done the same thing? Is your complaint about the person doing the job, or is it a more broader complaint about how government is organized? What is the issue, having identified a clear mistake? What do you hope the reader concludes from that mistake? That Fauci was an idiot or something broader?
Justin Hart: Well, that’s the right question to ask, Bob, because the next thing after the pandemic is, right, how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again? So what transpired and how did it happen? I believe my kindest interpretation is that Dr. Fauci got taken by what was happening in China and thought he could play God to basically curb a respiratory viral aerosolized pathogen. And so he thought to himself, “I can do this. I can actually turn it.” And then he didn’t change course because he couldn’t save face.
My worst interpretation is that Dr. Fauci made these intentional choices, didn’t care what the results were going to be, he basically just had set his course and it was going to be the case. This man has enriched himself over this thing. He’s also demonstrated the huge issues that we have with the pandemic. Even now, just the other day, Dr. Fauci said, “I never recommended to anyone—I didn’t shut down anything.” And then we rolled the tape. And there’s lots and lots of tape, Bob, of him saying, “We have to shut down. This has to shut down. If you want to take care of this, you’ve got to shut down.”
And we now know, if you look at something like California, where I am and you are, and it’s just, you know, we know the craziness that we endured here. And then you go to something that was open like in Florida since June or May even of 2020, and you realize that the age-adjusted fatality rate—the number of deaths per million—is exactly the same between the two states. Exactly the same. Meaning that there is no evidence anywhere from multiple studies now, no evidence that these what we call non-pharmaceutical interventions—the six feet, the plexiglass, the masking, the quarantine—did anything to stop or sway the cases. And there’s even a good deal of evidence to show that the vaccines certainly didn’t do what they promised they would do and actually may have made things worse.
So that was—I don’t know the intent of Dr. Fauci. I know what broke it is that he had unbridled control. And then they unleashed, Bob, that unbridled control to every county health supervisor and 13,000 school districts across the country. You and I don’t elect Wilma Wooten here in San Diego, who is our county health director. And so there’s really little way that we have or address redress that we have to hold her accountable. In fact, I have it on good authority President Trump tried very hard to figure out how he could fire Dr. Fauci. But he couldn’t. He is the highest-paid federal employee in the history of the United States. He has the largest pension in the history of the United States. He has made disastrous error, but he built up so much political rapport.
And there are things that need to change. So here’s a great example, Bob. Dr. Fauci and former director of the NIH, who’s supposedly his boss, Dr. Collins, sit on the committee and basically make the decision as to where all that billions of grant money goes. But they also make the policy. So if you come and you say, “Hi, I have this really interesting study that’s going to look at the effectiveness of masks and show that, you know, all your different interventions really didn’t work,” and they’re going to go, “Well, we’re not going to give you money for that,” right? It is a—there has to be a separation of the science and public policy.
The Hidden Human Costs [13:36]
Bob Zadek: Now, you understand because you’ve been a participant in both the public sector and the private sector. And we all of us know, or strongly suspect if we don’t know, that you have somebody at the top who is in front of the camera, in front of the microphone, at the head of the table at the conference room, is the moderator in the Zoom call. That person is at the top. But we know Dr. Fauci as a representative of the person kind of at the top. If you were to visit him in his office, he’s not wearing a lab coat and he hasn’t got a stethoscope around his neck and he’s not sitting around looking through a microscope or whatever they use these days.
My point is, he is not doing the work to reach the conclusion. He doesn’t stay up at night, I would imagine, reading detailed scholarly papers in order to make an independent intellectual conclusion. He has a large staff of specialists, of scientists, who are doing the work. Now, and Dr. Fauci or Rochelle Walensky or any other head of any other department or company merely is given the information, hears points of view, one would imagine, and therefore decides what the answer is, how the problem gets solved, and goes in front of the camera or wherever they go and reports the result.
Now, so to say Fauci was wrong, I don’t understand how he could be wrong. He didn’t do the work. Other people did the work. So was the whole CDC wrong and he was fed wrong information? Did they tell him the right information and he, for whatever motives, selfish or charitable, he didn’t follow what they told him? Do you happen to know with a bit more precision how a mistake that serious was—or mistakes plural—came about? That Fauci was an idiot or something broader?
Justin Hart: Yeah, so it kind of rots from the head down. And we know that Dr. Fauci, like you said, had never really seen a patient in decades, had his whole debacle in 1980s with the AIDS epidemic, and then went on to make these horrific, terrible decisions around lockdowns. A quick note on that: Here’s one example of something he never even considered or looked at that’s undeniable, factual, everyone understands it, and it’s devastating. We believe that we missed during the spring—just the spring of 2020—250,000 cases nationwide of child abuse. Why? Because it’s typically wide-eyed teachers and administrators who catch those things—a bruise on mom’s cheek, something roughing up Junior’s arm—and they call it out and that person is caught. We missed those because kids weren’t in school, right? Millions of kids weren’t in school and that was—but he ignored all of that, right? That was just one side of it.
Another example: Oncologists were the first ones to ring the bells for us, Bob. They came to us, they said, “Either COVID has cured cancer or something else is happening altogether.” Because in April and May of 2020, they diagnosed half as many cancers as they would the previous year. The reduction in colon cancer diagnoses went down by 78%. And so where did those show up? Well, the people still have the cancers, they just were scared to go to the hospital because of the fear that Dr. Fauci induced in them.
And I know this because we were in daily contact with Scott Atlas, who arrived there in late July 2020. And he was brought in to say, “I think we’re doing the wrong thing. We need to right the ship.” And he would counter Dr. Fauci with some of these facts and Dr. Birx, and they had no idea. Like you said, they’re just fed the information. But what’s crazy is down in the CDC, they weren’t interested in this information at all. They would hide it. We have direct evidence that the CDC was hiding death numbers, they were skewing numbers towards their direction when it came to population numbers.
So you’ve heard, for example, the number that came out at the end of December that if you were unvaccinated, you were 100 times more likely to die than someone who was vaccinated. We said, that’s just—that’s off. And we went back and we looked at their numbers, we realized they were using, first, old population numbers, they were using the worst of worst-case scenarios at the peak of the pandemic, which had nothing to do with vaccination, it was crazy. And we called them out on it and they had to correct it multiple times. One—like here’s another example from the CDC. And we’re like, this cannot be published. Note that when the CDC puts out their weekly what they call their mortality report, where they highlight some type of interesting factoid or study, these aren’t peer-reviewed. One of their ones they call back to and they say, “Oh, masks work,” they found two hairdressers in New Jersey who had COVID and wore face shields and were able to get a hold of 30% of their patients and found out that no one of those 30% of patients had COVID. And they used that as evidence that masks work. There was no science behind it, it was completely anecdotal. They would have been thrown out of a freshman biology class for a random control trial. Nothing like that ever existed. So the entire outfit is corrupt. They have no idea what they’re doing and they take direction and they build a narrative. And if you don’t tow the line of the narrative, you’re gone, right? We saw that again and again. At the peak of when they were going to approve a next wave of vaccines at the FDA, the two people that were in charge of that panel resigned quickly and suddenly. They were not going to be part of that sham. And so we have to clean house. It’s the only way that—there’s so much trust lost in our health experts, Bob. It’s—we’re going to have to clean house.
Political Fallout and the 2020 Election [17:51]
Bob Zadek: You also, of course, discuss in the book—and this has started to become widely reported in what passes for mainstream media—and that is the hidden but now not hidden long-term effects upon children. Psychologically, you mentioned child abuse, we don’t have to go back and revisit that. And I presume by the way when you said 250,000, it is estimated instances—alleged, yes—of child abuse have gone unreported or uninvestigated. I presume you reached that conclusion by looking at the number of reports one would expect as a baseline under normal circumstances. You compared that to what the effect—or the same number during COVID—and therefore you concluded clearly the number of instances didn’t go down, therefore all that went down is the regulatory system learning about it. And so it is an estimate, but it’s a data-driven estimate. It’s not just making up a number. And I wanted to be sure the audience understood that. It wasn’t just a rant. It was just, here’s the conclusion, but if you want to see our work papers, here they are.
And you know, Justin, it’s similar to when I either in social conversation to the extent that I have social conversation or with guests or with friends, I always observe having somebody tell me what they think or their conclusion is invariably boring. Indeed, even when I tell me my conclusion, it’s boring. What is fascinating and sometimes deeply fascinating is why you think it. That is to say, how you reach that conclusion. Did you like make it up or did you—was your source material in reaching the conclusion something reliable? And I wanted to make the point that I made to show that this wasn’t just the political trick of a politician in front of a microphone spewing out numbers because nobody in the audience is going to be able to Google it fast enough to find out he’s making it up.
You were an excellent footnoter and that’s exactly—and the book is actually, we back up everything with footnotes and sources for any of these assertions that we made. And then we had some really interesting interviews, Bob. Like all of us experienced, for example, let’s go to a completely different topic: the TP shortage. Remember the March run on TP, on toilet paper, right? And the subsequent ones we had as well when you’d go to the store and realize, oh my gosh, those shelves are empty, they’re usually full of toilet paper. Well, you know, I didn’t quite understand why that was. So I went searching through the research and it comes to find out, you know, the world does half of its business, if you’ll excuse the expression, in their business, right, at work, in their office buildings, at campuses. And when you shut down the world, all of a sudden the paper supply industry had to scramble because the supply chain and the type and quality of the TP that they deliver to, let’s say, a baseball stadium—one of those big round mounts that you put in there, right, that goes for like a month so they don’t have to keep coming back—is much different than the Charmin fresh stuff that lasts you a week here with five girls in my house, right? And so what—one of the things you come to realize is that it impacted the entire industry. And even it impacted the personal protection equipment because paper was needed so quickly to catch up to delivering all that Charmin goodness. Here’s a funny thing is they’re still playing catch-up. If your audience goes and Google this phrase, “Charmin Forever,” you’ll find this very interesting and you know exactly what this conversation is about. It’s a pole-mounted roll of toilet paper that will last you a month that Charmin will sell you because they have a lot of leftover stuff from all of the stuff that didn’t get delivered on pallets to these businesses and to Las Vegas air strips. It’s just crazy the type of impact it had on every single industry and no one stopped for a second to consider what sort of downline impact that would have.
Plexiglass and Surface Transmission [19:28]
Bob Zadek: You mentioned in the book also something which I didn’t really think about that much until I saw your Chapter 10 in the book about something I wouldn’t have imagined. You commented on the use of plexiglass. And I smiled a bit and I nodded my head in saying, “The guy’s right.” Tell us about—just it’s not the main point, but I highlight it because I hadn’t thought about it before and therefore it’s possible my audience hasn’t thought about it that much. So just tell us about COVID and plexiglass.
Justin Hart: It’s a great microcosm of the entire insanity, you’re right, Bob. So plexiglass, as we know, became a very strong recommendation for retail, for schools, for any place you go. They had the six-foot distancing and then the plexiglass started getting installed. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent installing these things because it was predominantly thought, Bob, that the main transfer of this disease was you spitting on someone else when you were sick and didn’t know it. That’s what they thought. They thought there’s no way—but we come to find real—realize that it’s actually aerosolized. That is, you ever walk into like a bathroom or a small study and there’s like a layer of dust that the sun shining through the window sort of just articulates there? You go, “Wow, I had no idea there was so much dust in the room.” Now imagine that particle 10 to 100 times smaller. That’s what the COVID particle is. No amount of plexiglass is ever going to stop that. It’ll go right around it. And in fact, in March 2021, the CDC—another example of how just ridiculous and stupid they were—they quietly just removed the bullet point that recommended for schools and retail that they install plexiglass. They didn’t mention anything about it. But a study came out shortly afterward and said it probably made things worse because it gave more surface area for things to stick to, to bounce off of, to clean or otherwise. Just absolute disaster. Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars. I still go to Home Depot. And Home Depot decided they were going to go, you know, full DIY kit on it. They have these big metal mounts with these six-foot plexiglass in front of every cashier still. And they’re all masked still here in San Diego. I don’t understand it. And so it’s a disaster in the making. It’s just one more pinpoint of absolute ineptitude that our government agencies showed and that was implemented by our politicians and our unelected officials, the health officials.
Conclusion: Restoring Rationality [21:52]
Bob Zadek: Just I’ll ask you for a comment or two about another bit of early incorrect hysteria. And I’m mentioning that because everybody will have who’s listening to our conversation will have forgotten about it, but everybody will instantly recall it. Remember when it was told to us that you could catch COVID by touching a surface that somebody else has touched? And all of a sudden everybody had spray bottles all over the place and every—on the sides of trees were dispensers of sani-wipes when you walked down the street, they’re on stop signs. So tell us about that fear. It was almost like the Salem witch trials or some Middle Ages superstition: If you touched a surface that somebody two years ago touched, you’re going to get whatever they got. So discuss that and what you have concluded from the data, what they concluded ultimately about that bit of superstition.
Justin Hart: Yeah, and to this day, Bob, you still have people who will get the DoorDash groceries brought to them from Instacart or whatever else, and they will spray the food before they bring it in the house, right? It broke those people, it broke the world that way. But you’re right, this was—what’s interesting is there is an actual White House presser in early April, I believe, where the special arm of the Department of Homeland Security who deals with these infectious diseases came out and they actually are some of the few people who actually found particles, were able to isolate particles of SARS-CoV-2, the thing that causes COVID, the virus. And they said that as soon as it hit sunlight, it evaporated. As soon as it touched a surface, it was gone. And so we knew early on that that was not the case. But people went crazy.
And then the downline of that, and I mention this in the footnotes of the book, I think maybe in the book itself, but we talk about, for example, the people that run sanitation and these water reclamation plants. They can tell you that the loads of clogs that they saw during that time required massive manpower to fix. They saw 70% more clogs than they would see. And the impact was just drastic and dramatic. And here’s another one that’s peripherally involved here. We talked to a few people who are engineers there on the Las Vegas Strip, for example. And when that shut down, there are no guests in any of the hotels. And so the engineering staff would literally spend the next two months walking up and down every hall every week, going into every room, flushing every toilet, running every sink, putting on every shower, because otherwise that water would stagnate and you’d get even worse diseases. And so literally like in The Shining, they’re walking the halls in this empty abandoned hotel just taking care to make sure that things are there. Because these cities were designed for a certain amount of people flushing and they weren’t. And when they were flushing, they were throwing Clorox wipes down the drain and that was clogging up entire sewer systems. Crazy downline stuff that no one realizes.
Bob Zadek: While as we are on this rationality roll that you and I are enjoying during our conversation, what are the conclusions a rational reader of your book would reach? For example, and I’m going to coach you but not asking you to nod your head that I’m right, the type of answer I’m looking for is: Is your rational conclusion a conclusion that would proudly be carried on RationalGround.com website? Is it your rational conclusion that government sucks and government is stupid and we’re not going to get—maybe we will if we have time—into public choice theory and James Buchanan, but we may get there, but that’s not what I’m driving at right now. Is it your conclusion that this was the mistake of a few scientists who weren’t good at their job? Was it the case that they may have been good at their job but they put aside the science for political motives? Is it the case that this is not a commentary on the competence of anybody but on the structure in which we all live? Is it a comment on federalism? What are the conclusions, the rational conclusions, the most rational conclusions you would hope the audience would get from your book?
Justin Hart: Well, I hope they would get a couple things. The first one was the same question I asked of Dr. Atlas when he was at the White House. I said, “What is the problem? Are they just trying to save face?” And he said, “No, Justin, these people are dumb. They are dumb.” And that was unfortunate. But I think you can come along with a lot of those conclusions. But I will say that one conclusion I hope that people come away with is that a good portion of our populace decided to fold their table, right? They decided that their rights weren’t worth fighting for. That their rights to religious assembly, to assembly itself, freedom of speech as they censored us, our kids’ education, the pursuit of happiness, right? I would say about 20% of people were kind of in my camp, really sticking their neck out and, you know, it could have gone a very extreme way and we would have lost our heads. Another 20% were full in on what we call Team Apocalypse, right? They were like, “The sky is falling and if you even dare say it’s not, you should be silenced.” There were about 60% of the population, I’ll tell you, Bob, who didn’t stand up, who didn’t stand up and did not take the risk to say we need to do something else. And I hope that people come away from the book reading this and say, “You know what? I hope I take a stand next time. I hope that I’m brave enough to do so.” Because it’s going to come back again. I hope people will look inwardly on it.
Bob Zadek: The lesson I would hope that readers would get from your book is to undo this assumption that a human being who happens to get a paycheck from a governmental entity is for that reason and that reason alone more honest, smarter, more selfless. It’s a human being. The biology is identical. And if you start with the same skepticism when a government official speaks as when a huckster promoting a product on late-night television speaks, you listen and you are skeptical and maybe you’re persuaded in the margins, but you’re skeptical. But that skepticism seems to be infinitely weaker, if not nonexistent, when the spokesperson is a government official. And if we just allow ourselves to remove that mantle from somebody who happens to get a governmental paycheck and accept the fact whatever you may think of the most who you perceive to be the most venal private sector player, if you apply only that skepticism to the government official that you do to a private sector official, if you do, there will be a lesson that gets reinforced in your book. It really just invites people to not be sheep and blindly follow somebody who happens to get a governmental paycheck versus somebody who gets a private sector paycheck. The book is called Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane. The author is Justin Hart. Justin is one of the founders of RationalGround.com. Justin, tell us about RationalGround.com, what the website hopes to accomplish and how people can benefit from the work you’ve put into the website.
Justin Hart: So Rational Ground, like I said, just a ragtag bunch of really interesting people that were countering the regular narrative of the pandemic. You can find a bunch of resources on there, everything from lockdowns to kid masking. We have all the infographics there, things you can share around and just remind yourself why you fought the good fight against the government narrative there.
Bob Zadek: Justin, thank you so much for sharing what you have learned and shared with us in your book and what you continue to share with us at the website RationalGround.com. Once again, Justin’s book is just coming out, Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane. Justin is in the driver’s seat now and hopes to drive us back from the insanity back to rational ground. Thank you so much, Justin. And please, to my friends out there, I hope you have enjoyed this hour of your valuable time that you have given to Justin and to myself, and I hope you continue to follow my show and Justin’s writings as well. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of the weekend and the rest of your time. Thank you.