That I think is well over 50% of the audience believe something like that. I mean, you know, feel free to react to that. I just, and this is an audience that is, you know, arguably this is an audience that is on any given day considerably bigger than any other audience that you could name. These are podcast episodes where the numbers of listeners, you know, at the end of the week or at the end of the month exceed, you know, the finale of Game of Thrones, right? I mean, these are just enormous numbers of people listening to these long form conversations. Yeah.

You know, at a baseline, I would say I agree with just about everything you've said and your perspective on it all. And I think it's really, you know, damaging and worrisome. A few things to mention. One is, you know, a lot of these fears as they were expressed, especially early on in the pandemic about this sort of Orwellian takeover really have not come to pass in any meaningful way, which is to say, even taking seriously the possibility that somebody might have been trying to get you to take a vaccine for some nefarious future purpose, or they were trying to lock you in your home for some, you know, out of some sense of, you know, social control. All of that pressure disappeared relatively quickly. We are not living in the world that, you know, Naomi Wolf warned us about we're not living in a world in which we're being pinned down and syringes forced into our arms every six months. We're not being tested as we walk out the door. We're not being told that we can't leave our homes. We're not being told we can't go to school. The long-term vision that was offered as this kind of this is a stepping stone, a global stepping stone to a kind of new totalitarian order, just as obviously not come to pass. There was a period of time in 2020 when our lives were restricted to some degree. But I think even in remembering that history, we often overstate how significant and how intrusive those restrictions really were and how politically divisive they were. If you look at the data all through 2020, red states and blue states across the board imposed roughly the same level of restrictions. They all closed schools at the same time. They all restricted social gatherings at the same time. They all issued mask advisories at the same time. By the fall of 2020, there was some difference starting to emerge between red states and blue states, but it was relatively small. If you look at the mobility data that Google and others have assembled, people were still moving around at some nowhere between 90 and 98 percent of what they had been doing before the pandemic. We remember that time now so many of us as a period of intense government-directed lockdown. And mostly, it wasn't that. Mostly it was a culture of fear, partly cultivated by public officials, I think for good reason, but partly cultivated by them, but also embodied and instantiated by individuals who were largely scared. And I think in retrospect, we've made this collective mistake. And the big point I want to make is this is not just an information problem about what Joe Rogan says about the pandemic. It's a problem at the level of the consumer, too. So many people have revised their own memories of the pandemic or have a distorted memory of that period and think of it as a much more aggressive, much longer lasting, much more restrictive regime than we really had. I think to sort of pin the blame for all of the disruption on someone else, as opposed to really reckoning with what it meant that given the facts, and we all basically did know the facts. We did know roughly what the fatality rate was. We did know what the age skew of the disease was. All of those things were publicly available in the winter of 2020. As early as the first data coming out of China, all of that has been really quite remarkably vindicated in the years since. Responding to that set of facts and that set of data, most of us had a really quite panicked response. Even if we knew that I'm 41 years old, even if I was, you know, when I was 37, when the pandemic had even if I knew that the risk of dying given an infection was incredibly low for a healthy 37-year-old male, I was still scared to get the disease. And part of that was because I was spending time with my father-in-law who was immunocompromised and older, but part of it was just pure pandemic fear. And I think a huge amount of what we remember as the emotional, social, and political disruptions of 2020 are or were projections of that fear, which we don't want to acknowledge and we want to blame someone else for. And so we've kind of collectively decided, and again, this is not just in sub-stackistan. It's among good liberals I know in Brooklyn, we decided that we went too far and that if we had the chance to do it again, we would do things differently. We'd be much more open and much more voluntary. And you know, that is, I think, a bad lesson to take going forward, especially if we're going to apply it to potential future pandemics that could be considerably worse. But it's also just at the level of truth-telling delusional.