May 8, 2020 • 65 mins
As governments work to fight COVID-19 and industries struggle to survive, more and more people are concerned society will never actually return to normal. World leaders have been disappearing (and reappearing). Millions are unemployed. Governments and tech companies are rolling out vast surveillance schemes that would make a supervillain blush. And, around the world, people are wondering -- did we start fighting this too late? Are we opening too soon? Tune in to learn more in part four of this continuing series on the coronavirus pandemic.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of My Heart Radio, May the Fourth be with You.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decades. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Your favorite conspiracy QUARANTINEAM is back
live and in full effect. Gentlemen, This is part four
(00:47):
of our continuing series on the coronavirus pandemic and fellow
conspiracy realists. As we said in earlier episodes, we will
likely need to create more updates in the future. Since
our last COVID up so published on April fift many
many strange things have come to pass. One of the
most interesting trends I saw recently is that world leaders
(01:10):
are going missing. Yeah, it's true. UM as we record today,
no one's entirely sure what's going on in North Korea?
UH is Supreme Leader Kim John Un actually dead, possibly
recovering from heart surgery. Maybe he didn't have surgery at all. Yeah,
or maybe just taking a little little sabbatical from from
(01:31):
public life to avoid contracting the virus. M Yeah, I mean, Ben,
we were just talking about how, you know, they've kind
of made a big to do about trotting him out
at some public some events where he's visited a fertilizer plant,
I believe, And you mentioned finding the footage to be
a little on the fishy side. Yeah, It's not unusual
(01:53):
for authoritarian governments to have back pocket footage of earlier
appearances and then put it out as though it is current.
It's also very strange that the Supreme Leader missed the
largest holiday in the country, uh, and then just showed
up at a fertilizer factory. So I'd love I don't
know about you, guys, it's a real shordinger's kim. If
(02:14):
we're making dumb jokes, I'd love to hear. I'd love
to hear uh from you listeners, what do you what
do you all think is happening? Also, the President of Nicaragua,
Daniel Orteca, has disappeared. Uh. They think that that's probably
more health concern related, because he's he's been notoriously concerned
with his health after suffering some heart complications, so possibly
(02:37):
hold up in a bunker of some variety, similar to
Kim John jun There there was an attempted coup in Venezuela.
At least eight people were killed when that went through
or failed. Let's say there's all kinds of weird stuff happening,
sort of a minor coup though right, only eight, I
mean could have been worse. Yeah, the the guy in
(03:00):
large of that, the guy says he's in charge of it,
was an ex U S. Green Beret. I've got did
a piece on that for Strange News Daily, but it
sounds like, Okay, it's weird because, uh, we don't have
to get in the weeds on it. But the US
is saying they had nothing to do with it, and uh, yeah,
who do you believe, right, I mean, everything's topsy turvy,
(03:22):
cats and dogs sleeping together. Oil dropped to a negative
number people are paying to sell oil, which is weird. Uh.
The Navy confirmed that UFO footage we talked about that
I think or the Pentagon confirmed it. That's correct, and
that footage has been uh actually it hasn't been debunked,
but it's been shown. Several of them have been shown
(03:45):
to probably be weather balloons from a physics perspective on
a couple of videos that have become more and more
popular over the last couple of days, which is disheartening
but also good to know. I guess yeah, I mean,
the ugly true ruth is always more preferable, right, even
even if it's not as cool as what we wish
(04:05):
it would be. In short, folks, a lot of stuff
has happened. This is what we know to be true
as of today, May fourth. As you said, May the
fourth be with you as we record this podcast. We're
going to we're gonna look at some facts. We're gonna
dive into the multitude of things just off the edge
of the mainstream media map today. What better or more
(04:28):
somber way to start today's episode then with the facts.
So here are the facts about COVID nineteen statistics. We
did something interesting here, so we've got the most up
to date estimates right to get a sense of the spread,
we're gonna give you the numbers from last Friday and
the numbers from today, May fourth. So what's going on?
(04:51):
Maybe in the global sense, and then maybe we can
dive into the US. Yeah, globally, there have been an
estimated three million, three thousand, two hundred and forty six
cases of coronavirus across the entire planet um as of
this past Friday. Today there are three million, six hundred
twenty eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty one cases. There
(05:14):
were officially two hundred thirty four thousand, seven hundred to
deaths on Friday. Now we're looking at two hundred and
fifty one thousand and nine deaths. Thankfully, there is good
news here. As a Friday a million, about a million
and fifty thousand people had recovered as a Friday, and
(05:35):
today we're looking at around one million, one hundred and
eighty four thousand people who have reported to have recovered,
which is really great. Well, it's funny too that that's
not the number that you see trotted out nearly as
much as you would think it should be. I mean,
that really is the silver lining there. That's quite a
large number of folks that have recovered. Yeah, it's it's
number that I personally wish would be reported more often.
(05:58):
It's it's just it doesn't show up in a lot
of news content here in the US. We see that
on Friday, this country had an estimated one million, nine thousand,
three four cases. Now that numbers jumped over the weekend,
it's more like one million, one hundred eighty four thousand
and twenty. And the number is just ticking up as
(06:21):
we record. By Friday, sixty three thousand, eight hundred seventy
one people had passed away. That number is now jumped
to sixty nine thousand, two and twenty. I want to
take just a second here, because we're throwing a lot
of numbers at you, and those can sound you know,
you can get number fatigue or get desensitized to it.
But what we're what we're telling you is that thousands,
(06:46):
thousands of people died just Saturday and Sunday. I have
coined a new term, you guys, number numbness. There we go. Yeah, well,
let's just stay in that numbness just for a moment,
because I just want to talk about Fulton County and Georgia,
where our office is located. You know, we're officially open now,
our our state Georgia is open, and we are seeing
(07:08):
cases in Fulton County specifically continue to rise and they
haven't fallen, and we are now open. So I would
just say the three of us are um feeling a
little extra cautious now, even even though our state has
decided to open up, and there are several of the
other states that have opened up at least partially. Um So,
(07:32):
even though it seems like that just that concept that
a state could be thinking about reopening right now makes
you feel a little better, but the numbers are not
bearing out uh positivity here well. And you know, one
thing that I believe we mentioned on the previous episode is,
you know the idea of quote unquote opening back up
the economy, thinking about it like a big picture. Sure
(07:54):
there can be announcements and officially we can be open,
but it's ultimately up to people and their comfort level
as to how they deal with that opening up. And
I was pretty shocked over the weekend in Georgia to
see that people seem to have taken this announcement by
our governor as a sign that everything is mainly just
cool again. I live very close to a big park
(08:16):
and I walked there, you know, for my daily exercise,
and and walk there over the weekend and there were
just tons of groups of people with no masks, just
hanging out in large numbers. And we're seeing images like
that rolling in from places like Central Park in New
York and Brooklyn, you know, and a Prospect Park. And
I really feel like, while I think many of us
(08:37):
and and our friends take this kind of stuff with
a grain of salt, and well, I it's up to
me whether I decide to you know, go back and
return to normal or not. I think the very announcement
of things like this is enough for some people to
just decide that, Okay, everything's cool again. We don't have
to social distance anymore. And that couldn't be farther from
the truth, right. Yeah, At the risk of sounding cold,
(08:59):
given what we know about that two week time period,
I think I'm gonna give it another two weeks at least.
I am not champion at the bit uh to be
the beta tester here. Uh. And you know, again, like
to that point about personal responsibility of personal rights, it
carries on a on a larger on a larger scale
(09:20):
here because the US has no coherent federal pandemic policy,
it does go down to the states, and that's I
think that's that's something that will keep this process happening
for a while. It's lengthening what we would do, you know,
as opposed to other countries that have the authority legally
to lock it down like immediately. This is I don't know,
(09:46):
this is this is a trade off, you know. Um,
we will say that there is a good sign though,
because here in the US, despite these openings, a hundred
and fifty five thousand, seven thirty seven people had contracted
COVID nights are contracted coronavirus and recovered as a Friday,
and today that number has jumped by almost thirty thousand.
(10:08):
A hundred and eighty one thousand, nine one people today
are officially recovered. Recent studies from South Korea seem to
confirm that you cannot recontract this brand of coronavirus after
you've already had it, which is why people are getting
the antibody test. But I've been hearing other things though,
I've I've heard other studies coming out of China saying
(10:29):
that they've seen cases or people have recontracted it or
tested negative and then tested positive. Do you think that's
more a case of false false negatives and then getting
a new test that that that is more accurate or
gives you a more accurate result. Yeah, it's likely the
the efficacy of the Chinese produced testing kits, especially in
(10:50):
the early days, is not super great. It's not near
a hundred percent. So there have been multiple countries, uh,
and institutions can plaining about receiving broken test kits. There
was one country I can't remember who it was, but
there was a leader of one country I think of
the African continent who said the Chinese tests were bad
(11:11):
because he just just to test the test. He administered
it to a goat and the goat tested positive for
COVID nineteen. Uh. Animal lovers, Uh, you'll be glad to
know the goat is fine. M hmm. Well, it's a
great point about accuracy there, because the tests and the
ability to test accurately. That reflects directly in the numbers
(11:35):
that we just spoke about, right, And there are issues
with these numbers that we we've talked about already in
the show. Mm hmm. Yeah. New numbers might arrive even
as we're recording this, indicating spikes in some countries or
drops and others, and numbers need to be updated for accuracy.
And you hit the nail on the head, Matt, that
(11:56):
is a huge problem. Are these numbers accurate? It depends
on who you ask. The government of China, and not
to pick on China too much, this happened in other places,
but the government of China is currently taking a ton
of heat internationally because people just don't believe their numbers.
And you know, it's an understandable skepticism because those numbers
(12:17):
keep changing. Yeah. Earlier this month, authorities in Wuhan, where
the pandemic began, revised the death toll of that city
by more than fifty percent um while the government in
Beijing has continuously denied that there had been any cover
ups in their handling of the virus, and the Department
of Homeland Security is reporting a claim that China covered
(12:40):
up the severity of the virus from the start in
order to better look out for their population by hoarding supplies.
And you know, I mean, in our very first episode
about this, before it really hit us at home, I
think it was very clear that there was at the
very least a minor cover up in the way they
handled the individual who first reported this virus and threatened
(13:04):
him with some form of sedition or you know, spread
rumor mongering. I believe it was. So I think there's
no question that they definitely were approaching it with some level,
whether you could say it with skepticism or outright desire
to cover it up. They certainly didn't jump right on
it right, Yeah, I agreed. And there are also you know,
(13:26):
there are so many ways, devious ways to gen these
numbers up and push them in the direction you want
them to go, if you want it to seem less extreme,
or as some have proposed, if you're a government that
wants it to seem more extreme. Like what counts What
counts as a COVID death is a death only COVID
related if the person who died had previously tested positive
(13:49):
for coronavirus in a in a test administered biomedical professional.
It's tricky, especially in countries like um, you know a
lot of Sub Saharan African countries and the US where
there aren't a lot of tests. They're in short supply.
We know COVID can cause heart attacks. Uh do you
know do people who die of a heart attack after
(14:10):
having contracted coronavirus do they get listed as a COVID
death or do they get listed as a victim of
a heart attack, especially if they have you know, problematic uh,
pre existing conditions, whether it be obesity or sedentary lifestyle
or any number of of of of factors that can
contribute to having a heart attack exactly. And and then
(14:34):
we have to ask about the indirect fallout, which um,
you know some people aren't thinking about. And what we
mean by indirect fallout is what happens to people who
die because something about the pandemic made their life impossible
or dangerous. Like if you have to your point about
chronic medical condition, what if you die because your hospital
(14:56):
infrastructure is overwhelmed and you cannot obtain say insulin or
something that you need to live. Is that a COVID
related death? I mean, in this conversation, it sure sounds
like it is. But they didn't die from COVID. They
died from UH an overwhelmed system, That's right. Daniel Weinberger,
who's an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School
(15:16):
of Public Health, commented that quote the assignment of causes
of death is more of an art than a science
because it really is sort of in the eye of
the beholder UH in the same way that the testing
is and also in the same way that you can
categorize UH. For example, the way our president is pushing
the line of well, per capita, our deaths are actually
(15:40):
pretty good. And he sort of got railed a bit
because he referred to our death toll as being really strong.
I believe was the term he used in terms of
like positivity and spinning it. Because you're right, Ben, I mean,
there are so many ways to spin this, and with
so many different numbers and so much change happening so quickly,
it really is something that and be quite misleading if
(16:01):
you don't look at the root cause or don't actually
look at the numbers in a more holistic way. Yeah,
it goes down to our understanding of something called excess death.
This is kind of cold, but excess death is a
term describing the number of deaths in you know, a
given amount of time that occur in excess of the
(16:24):
normal established death rate. So researchers over at Yale found
fifteen thousand, four hundred excess deaths in the US from
March one through April four. That's the early the early
stages of coronavirus really kicking into high gear. Uh. During
that time, only about half that many deaths have been
(16:45):
attributed to COVID. Then this means, if we can look
at this, we can trust some of these numbers. The
death's the death toll that's official is probably much lower
than what's actually happening. How much higher we don't know,
and that should scare people, that should that should frighten you.
The projections also are not set in stone, UH They're
(17:07):
they're not mandates. Instead, there are a seriously there like
a decision tree, their fluid branches of if then decisions.
And we we have to remember that every choice policymaker
or an institution UH makes during this time is going
to move the prediction in a different direction. And of course,
(17:28):
if you've been watching the news in the US or abroad,
you know that there are quite a few disagreements domestically
and internationally. Yeah, you've likely seen on the news some
of the protests that have been occurring. Michigan, I believe,
is one of the major places that these protests have
been occurring, but there have been smaller ones across the States. UM.
(17:51):
A lot of times you will see these reported on
with a bunch of individuals who are brandishing weapons. Who
are you know, they air to just protest their inability
to work. Generally, it has been about getting back to work,
like open up, like remove these restrictions so that we
can work. And that is a valid thing, you know that,
(18:14):
Like we've we've been talking about earlier today about Georgia
opening up, it's a valid concern for a lot of people.
But there's also the overall dangers and we're having to
I mean, we're we're obviously disagreeing at the core about this,
but we're attempting to find a path I think, or
at least it feels like we're trying to find a
(18:36):
path where we're gonna be able to open up more
of the economy while still staying quarantine to an extent um.
There's another thing here that we really have to think
about is if a lot of people cannot pay rent
and they have no income, they can't pay for bills,
what do we do. And so far, as we talked
about in previous episodes, the answer has been give a check,
(18:59):
you know, for a certain amount of money to each
individual um. But that's only gonna take you so far. Yeah, yeah,
because the landlords have to pay rents as well in
terms of a mortgage right or taxes. And we know
that other countries, such as our neighbors to the north, Canada,
have approached the situation much differently. They're they're issuing payments
(19:22):
to people. UH. I think in some cases, in some
areas they're instituting rent freezes. But I don't think it's
a country wide thing. You know, if we look at
the international sphere, the way I kind of thought about
this is, UH, China versus everybody and the US is
sort of a Charlie Day like wildcard from Always Sunny
(19:46):
in Philadelphia. China is UH, make no mistake taking the
opportunity presented by covid UH to conspire and expand on
some longstanding geopolitical goals, and it is getting ugly. There
was actually there was a report that came out recently
that was internal. It leaked UH from Chinese intelligence, the
(20:08):
Ministry of State Security, writing to top Beijing leaders, including
the President uh Ji Jumping. They said that global anti
Chinese sentiment is at its highest since the Tianamen Square
crackdown in nine and they're preparing for everything up to
and including armed conflict between the US and China. That
(20:30):
means literally war. They're they're not declaring it, but they're saying, hey,
heads up, well yeah, and and it wasn't helped by
are the is the leak to document you're talking about
the Five Eyes report there, because there was a there
was a allegedly a leaked five Eyes report that came out,
(20:52):
essentially confirming some of the beliefs that have been floating
around out there that that China did take some of
the actions that it had been accused of previously, of
kind of covering up the virus that we mentioned, you know,
earlier in the show. Um it. It certainly didn't help
that that came out at the time when these tensions
(21:14):
are continuing to rise, because then it makes you know,
I'm I'm assuming I don't know about a ton of
this stuff, but it's going to embolden the United States
to feel like we're in the right to, uh, you know,
not only defend ourselves, but to prevent China from taking
some of these bigger steps that you're talking about. Ben Yep,
there's a there's another story that hasn't got a lot
(21:35):
of play here in the US. Uh, you know, we
don't want to make this myopically about just the U
S and China. China has also been increasing its attempts
to influence Australia in a major way, and they're getting
help from Australia's billionaire mining class. Like there's a guy
named Andrew Forrest who recently snuck a Chinese official into
a think of it like a federal level government press
(21:59):
conference after the Australian government had already declined to speak
with the guy or have him speak. So it's sort
of like for a perspective, it's similar to say, um
Elam Musk or Warren Buffett or someone crashing White House
press conference and bringing you know, one of their international
(22:23):
buddies in and saying, hey, can you just can you
just speak here? I know that you guys aren't super
great friends with Tehran, but can this diplomat that I
just brought in speak here? It's it's stunning, uh. And
he's doing it because of mining interests in agreements he
has in uh in China. Yeah. Yeah. And just to
(22:45):
connect it back up to the five Eyes thing as
a refresher course, five eyes or five intelligence agencies of
English largely English speaking countries, the United States, Canada, the
United Kingdom, Um, Australia and New Zealand, and it's all
of those intelligence agencies working together and they're in Australia.
(23:06):
It's interesting that that was that was the next thing. Australia. Uh, well,
we'll see what's going on there. Yeah. And at this point,
you know, we said the US is a wild card. Honestly, Uh,
what else is there to say? It's losing massive ground internationally.
It's policies often seem from the outside looking in self contradictory, disparate, mercurial. Uh.
(23:33):
And that's because, you know, a lot of states are
taking their own paths. The line between business and government
has eroded, and we have to be honest, it is
difficult to keep track of all the conspiratorial narratives out there.
They keep growing. Some are more plausible than others. What
do we mean. We'll tell you afterword from our sponsor.
(24:00):
Here's where it gets crazy. Let's start with the big
businesses and billionaires. Oh the devil b oh Bill, Mr Gates,
big business billionaires and Bill Oh god, quadruple b oh.
There's too many. Yes, Bill Gates. You may have heard
(24:21):
quite a few headlines about his foundation, the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation. Yeah. The idea is that they teamed
up with a you know, with a cadre of fellows,
super wealthy supervillains, and they ran a simulation back in
October where they predicted sixty five million deaths due to
(24:42):
COVID nineteen. Here's the thing that actually happened. There was
actually an exercise was called Event to oh one. I
think we mentioned it briefly in a previous episode. It
was hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security,
and it did focus on emergency prepared witness in the
event of a severe pandemic, but it did not deal
(25:04):
with COVID Night Team, and it did not make real
life predictions about death tolls. It did deal with a coronavirus,
but not this kind because as we said earlier, uh,
there there are multiple kinds of coronavirus, just like there
are multiple um genres of music with drums, multiple kinds
of cancer, multiple flavors of ice cream. Yeah. Yeah, And
(25:27):
just so you know, if you want to delve deep
into this, you can just use quotations in your search
and do event to zero one and you'll find all
kinds of stuff. There's you know, you can see the
official documents, the the results, the videos that are put
out there, people speaking about it. Um it is. It
(25:48):
does feel very creepy, especially if you've been watching this
season of Westworld with that giant computer simulation that runs
the entire planet UM, it feels like, hey, maybe maybe
Bill and Melinda have access to some giant simulated machine
that's gonna eventually tell each human what their life cycle
(26:09):
is going to be. If anyone has it, it's them, though,
I mean I would say, well, unless it's our next
set of happy billionaires, the Koke Brothers. So the idea
here is that the Koke Brothers UH and similar super
hard right wing um neo feudalists are financing the protests
(26:33):
that we've been seeing. What what do you call that
when you call crisis actors of some kind or we're like,
like not sock puppets. That's exclusively online. But it is
the idea that there is in some way financing this
UH to create kind of a a bit of a
push so that their pals and the corporations they have
(26:55):
staken don't suffer further economic catastrophe because of this endemic.
And there has been a lot of catastrophe going around
in the business world, and make no mistake there. I
don't know if you guys saw the news about J
Crew that just came out that they're going to be
going in there. They filed Chapter eleven bankrupts. You didn't
see that, Yeah, and made Well it's one of the
(27:17):
one of their brands. But yeah, they're going to be
closing a ton of stores. And you know that's just
one company, one clothing retailer, and that's gonna be happen
a lot more in the near future. Yeah, the only
question is how extreme that trends will become. This is interesting.
So are they protest puppet masters? It's true that a
(27:39):
lot of the well, it's true that I would say
the majority of those protests are reopened are you know,
are purposely designed to appear as though they are grassroots,
and the question is whether they're being astro turf. There
were a couple of people on Reddit who did some
fantastic research into the powers behind the front organizations right
(28:02):
Open Michigan, Open Maryland. Uh. So, you know, it's understandable
that people might think the Koch brothers are behind this. Again,
remember they they ran point on the Tea Party protest
that back in oh nine in but this one actually
seems to be not true. Their main political arm for
(28:22):
the Koch Brothers is an organization called Americans for prosperity,
beautiful name right, chef's kiss. Uh. They rejected the in
person protest, they said. Their CEO specifically said, the question
is what is the best way to get people back
to work. We don't see protests is the best way
to do that. She went on to say the choice
(28:43):
between full shutdown and immediately opening everything is a false choice.
So they didn't actually, you know a lot of times
they get rightly vilified, but they didn't actually do this one.
Someone else did and we found out who. Yeah, and
it can apparently be traced back to Betsy DeVos UM,
(29:04):
So don't be fooled by the slightly different names. Here.
We've got Indiana Citizens Against Excessive Quarantine, and then we
also have Operation Gridlock Tennessee and other groups that are
bankrolled by powerful people. Um. They are the opposite of grassroots.
The Michigan Freedom Fund UM was founded by Greg McNeely,
(29:27):
a political advisor to the Divos family UM, who has
provided financial support to that organization. But that you know,
but this is one of those things where it doesn't
mean Betsy Divos did it right, It just means there
are connections there. Just pointing that out, remember that, Yeah, Yeah,
you're being fair, uh that that is true, but it
(29:50):
does appear to be some astroturfing. There is a possibility
that some of those protesters are in fact paid to protests.
So it's a dig in more um. But don't don't
let the easy headlines fool you, especially when there are
frankly other things to worry about. I'm not saying they're worse,
but I'm saying the protests are not the only thing
(30:12):
going on. Let's talk about tech companies, you guys. Let's
talk about surveillance. Let's talk about tracking apps. They're blowing
up in countries around the world, and I would say
there is a genuine I don't I don't know the
correct wording here, but there is good reason to want
to have tracking apps when you're inside a pandemic. There
(30:36):
there is a genuinely good reason to have that because
you want to see or to be able to predict
whether or not someone is at risk of spreading the
virus to someone else, or whether or not the individual
is going to be, you know, at risk of getting it.
What they're calling contact tracing, right, Like that's like like
the big, you know thing that's going to have really
(30:57):
help stem the tide of this, uh, this this disease
is being able to somehow systematically figure out exactly who's
been in contact with whom and then trace that back
to the source and then you know, institute proper testing.
That's really the only way to kind of get a
handle on this. Yeah, the motivation is smart. It's something
that probably should be done. The problem is, in our
(31:20):
world of big data, all of this stuff just becomes
another data set, uh, to to track people, to control
in a certain way, or the at least to have
the information about the individual and then apply it to
massive groups and and you know, continue going upwards. It's
one of these things we said, Um, whatever the intentions
(31:40):
behind these things are, once you let the badger out
of the bag, it's really hard to put it back in,
even when conditions get better. So what happens post Corona
once these things have been put into place? Yeah, yeah,
it's an excellent question. Let's go country by country. Talked
about in this past, but we have more detail else now.
(32:01):
So a lot of our fellow listeners in Australia have
written in thank you so much to talk about something
called COVID Safe. It's an app and it uses bluetooth
to record, uh, you know, to keep a record rather
of other people with the app who have been in
close proximity to you or your phone within the past
(32:22):
twenty one days. It's modeled on a Singapore's earlier app.
The info remains on the phone until the user, who
until a user test positive for COVID, decides to upload it,
and then that information is used to trace the contacts
of that infected person. It collects a lot of data.
(32:43):
The government says that only state health officials will have
access to it. But uh, you know that there's so
what does that mean? You know what I mean, there's
no time limit. Just as a fun aside here, we
we had a listener from down under a right to
us and whenever you sign up for this service, COVID Safe,
(33:07):
you get a specialized pin It was like a pin number,
and the pin number that he was assigned was six
six six zero zero one. And he found that to
be amusing. Uh. Yeah, and yeah, and so let's go.
We mentioned Singapore, right, Uh, Singapore's app is the basis
(33:29):
for the Australia app. Uh. This one had about of
the population and Singapore started using it since Uh, it's
launch in April. But the issue here is one of
not just privacy but efficacy because the number of coronavirus
cases during that time shot up from one thousand to
more than sixteen thousand. So it's still a good diagnostic tool,
(33:53):
it's just the question is how effective is it at
stopping COVID. And then you have New Zealand, UM and
as that country comes out of it's hard lockdown, it's
also going to launch a contact tracing app, but it's uh,
the details are a little scarce, so we're not quite
clear on how that's going to work. Radio New Zealand
has reported that it will update people's details with the
(34:15):
Department of Health so they can be contacted directly, but
beyond that, very little is known of the stage and
and just to piggyback off of that really quickly, even
here in Georgia, uh, the Department of Health is doing
a an outreach kind of situation where they're going door
to door and UM offering uh that uh what is
(34:37):
it called the h antibody tests so people can see
if they have contracted it. But obviously those it takes
a long time to do that kind of outreach because
it's very hands on very one on one just just
to take it back to New Zealand really quickly. This
is one of the first countries to declare that they
(34:57):
eradicated coronavirus within within their country's boundaries. That was a
little They made that announcement I think on the thirtieth
of April, but then it was found that there were
several cases that actually arose after they made that announcement.
But it is one of the first places where the
heavy restrictions on travel with like to New Zealand as
(35:20):
well as away from New Zealand. It really did seem
to stop the virus in its tracks pretty well, like
Madagascar in pandemic, but also in New Zealand. Isn't like
a super densely populated country. I mean, I think we
said like in a previous no, it was a ridiculous
(35:40):
history episode. We were talking about exploding pants because of
a chemical that was used to eradicate a type of
weed that was killing off grass that cows would feed on. Um.
The number of sheep I think out number humans in
New Zealand. Yeah, it's about six to one. Is the
number gets thrown around. Uh, but they have a ton
(36:02):
of people coming in through that country. But to your appointment, Matt,
that obviously was a smart move for them to institute
that so quickly and effectively that a travel man. One
of the things that you might you need to know,
fellow listeners is this New Zealand also is currently harboring
(36:23):
a lot of people have gotten in on Golden ticket passports.
That's where you get citizenship just based on an investment
that you make and you're you're essentially you're buying citizenship.
And right before this hit, as it was hitting, some
of the people who were in the know ducked off
to New Zealand where they already lived on property that
they have bought um months or years ago, specifically for
(36:46):
its isolation and it's potable water. Neil Gaiman is uh
is currently in New Zealand, but I think he just
got caught there, uh, you know, with bad luck. But
Neil's fine, And I don't think he was part of
the billionaire elite escape plan uh than most of us yea,
(37:07):
or is he? Because you know, one thing New Zealand
can't do is uh stock is change its proximity to China.
China is probably the most solid example of how extreme
these apps can be and they can become this way,
it's the hardcore one. This app is mandatory. It is
tied to your I D. It governs where you can
(37:28):
go through QR scanners and A and a color system.
If you're clear, you're green. If you're yellow or amber,
you need to isolate. If you're red, you've either been
confirmed positive or you've been in close contact with someone
who has tested positive. So that means that unless you
stay inside all of the time, you could turn red
(37:49):
at any time. And you need this app by the
way to travel anywhere you needed to get into venues. Uh.
And now those restrictions are starting to ease, But that
is real black mirror stuff. It's happening now that this
can happen. It's not Blade Runner. People can do this
to you now, Ben. Do you think the infrastructure of
(38:09):
this was in some ways helped by the Sesame credit
situation that was sort of being tested. Yeah, that's a
that's a great question. I I assume that they have
some of the same architecture they would have to uh,
and it stems from some of the some of the
same ideology and goals. Definitely. Um. Yes, Sesame credit still
(38:34):
in full effect. That's a very good point. And I
will say this is a hot take, and I'm half
joking when I say this, but I can't think of
another situation than this that has had more uh net
positives from being a totalitarian government because they can actually
force you to behave and force you to do what's
(38:54):
best for uh the masses as opposed to the individuals
like we're seeing with all the people just coming out
on mass based on the concept of opening back up
the economy. I would just say, there's there's less manipulation
required and you can be a little more straightforward when
you're authoritarian. Yeah, you don't have to worry about the
(39:15):
Overton window. You don't have to uh you know, have
offline conversations with your pals in the media. India, France, Israel, Germany,
the United Kingdom, uh South Korea. Everybody has either instituted
a system like this or they're planning to do so.
Israel's having some difficulties because of the privacy concerns. Now,
(39:38):
we've talked a lot about these tracking apps and other countries,
but what about the good old United States? Apple Pie,
bald Eagles freedom in all caps, underlined, highlighted, a couple
of exclamation marks to really make it pop. We'll tell
you after a word from our sponsor. Okay, Now, to
(40:04):
be fair, we aren't just talking about the U s here.
What we're about to discuss are It's really a baseline
version of an app that will be instituted or can
be instituted in any country that chooses to adapt it.
So let's let's jump to on April tenth, when Apple
(40:24):
and Google announced that they were going to be working
together and using the smart the smartphone tech for you know,
both Apple iPhones iOS stuff as well as Android operated
phones to help track COVID and the spread of COVID
in the same way we've been discussing before. Just like
the one, the first one that we talked about in Australia,
COVID Safe, this version is going to use Bluetooth or
(40:48):
the Bluetooth four point oh low energy. Um, they're gonna
use that tech to keep track of mobile phones and
proximity just which phones come into close contact with each other.
And that's really all you're talking about here. That's everything
that this app is meant to do. Is this an
advancement of the website that Google was supposedly working on that.
(41:08):
Trump kind of prematurely announced early on saying that developers
at Google were hard at work creating some kind of database,
and then turned out that they barely had begun work
and it wasn't really as much of a thing as
he may be made it out to be. As this
sort of the next gen of that announcement, this is
an evolution of of that. Yes, correct Early on it was,
(41:31):
you know, people were touting that it was going to
use GPS technology to trace, to actually trace where people
were going once they've you know, contracted COVID nineteen. As
of right now, as of today on May four, the
official word is that it's just going to be using
bluetooth data in proximity and it won't be collecting GPS
(41:52):
data or location services data much less of real time. Yeah,
so this has brought up these grave can turn So,
I mean, here's how it works, right, It keeps track
of who you know, and then let's say you test
positive for COVID nineteen, and then it uses that information
to go back and tell everybody that you plausibly could
have run into and then also helps to try to
(42:13):
trace when you may have contracted it. And how. But
as you can imagine, not everybody is happy with this.
The two big questions how effective will this actually be?
And then secondly, how does it affect what's left of privacy? Yeah.
Jennifer Grantick from the A c l U, who heads
up their surveillance and cybersecurity program, notes that contact tracing
(42:36):
is only one piece of the puzzle, which which I
think is fair, saying that it can't be fully effective
quote until there is widespread, free and quick testing and
equitable access to healthcare. I think the that healthcare piece
has been something that really has been highlighted by this pandemic.
How disparate, Uh, the availability of healthcare is depending on
(42:59):
who you are and who you work for and the
economic strata that you find yourself in. Uh, it's really
pointed a glaring finger. Can a finger be glaring? I
don't know, but just at that problem in our country,
there really is no Uh. I'm I was about to
say universal healthcare, which is true, but there really is
no equitable access to healthcare in this country. I can
(43:21):
I don't think anyone would argue with that too hard. No,
absolutely not. I mean, that's a reality. It's here. Let's
look at how this will roll out, despite the fact that,
to Jennifer Grant's point, the US does not have the
infrastructure to get the most use out of this. Companies
Google and Apple are planning to roll this out in
two phases. First, they're releasing software this month to let
(43:45):
public health authorities build and release apps on Android and
on Apple. And then in the coming months they'll move
to phase two. Phase two is where Google and Apple
build this function directly into the operating system. You heard
that right, It's being built into the OS on your phone.
Doesn't matter if you download the app, it doesn't matter
(44:06):
if you love or hate the app. It will be
on your OS. No one sure what happens, uh to
all that surveillance, all that data once it's gathered, Does
it just vanish? Post COVID. Google recently made an announcement
about this, or I think Google and Apple jointly made
an announcement. Yeah, they independently sent out a couple of
sent out announcements about this thing. So here's the big
(44:29):
takeaway that they keep pushing on that concept that they're
not going to collect location data using this. It's not
gonna be used for this at all, And they're not
going to be using the data collected for targeted advertising.
And I think the most positive thing going here is that, well,
it's positive and negative. It's positive for privacy, it's negative
(44:52):
for the effectiveness of the app because each individual person
is going to have to upload it or confirm that
they have tested positive for coronavirus. So it's not as
though you're going it's going to automatically upload when when
let's say, Matt, when I contract coronavirus, I get tested,
(45:17):
I find out, you know, through the test that I
have definitely contracted it. It's not going to then connect
my phone, my device to my identity and upload that
I am coronavirus positive. I have to then go in
through the gooey or through the app and then upload
or confirm my test, which, because there's each coronavirus test
will have a number essentially generated associated with it. Um
(45:41):
you have to confirm that. Then that gets sent out
to everybody that has come into contact with my phone
over the course of you know, whatever that time window is,
let's say two weeks, like Ben and Nol and my
wife and all of my friends that I've talked to,
which I haven't really seen anybody in the past two weeks,
but they would all get note ified that perhaps they
(46:01):
came into contact with someone would not identify me with coronavirus. Yeah, yeah,
that's correct. So you can see how there's an effort
towards anonymity here. Uh. And you know, you can believe
Google and Apple when they say when they say they
won't ask for certain things or they won't share them
if they get them, because you know, a company is
(46:23):
able to get rid of that if they want, they
are able to avoid collecting certain things. Uh. They can
do whatever they want with it unless they are legally
compelled to do or not do something. And that brings
us to one of the big worries, which is the
government big brother. Let's say that Google and Apple are
acting in good faith. Let's say that they have, you know,
(46:44):
an app called, uh, I don't know, called America Breathe
Easy or something, and that's too long about America Breezy
there we go, Yeah, America Breezy. And so they have
America Breezy and they're collecting this data and their their
plan is to chunk it like to brick it afterwards,
(47:05):
but legislation requires them to hand it over. You see
big Brother. Whether that's the US or whether that's it
doesn't matter whichever country, Nepal, Bhutan, it doesn't matter. Big
Brother is there and is able to use this opportunity
to get sweeping surveillance powers. It is naive, extremely so
to assume that every country granting itself sweeping surveillance powers
(47:29):
is actually going to give them up after this is over,
after it normalizes. In fact, if you know, some people
might call this too far out there to tinfoil hattie,
but it is plausible that several of these capabilities for
widespread monitoring already existed. A global pandemic is just the
perfect opportunity that happened along. And now governments can go
(47:51):
public with stuff they already had. Now tech companies can
go public with stuff they already had. I am personally demite.
I'm personally certain that's that's the case. In the US,
the n s A, as we know, as you know,
long time listeners, the n s A and various other
organizations here including five Eyes, can do way more than
(48:13):
um that is publicly admitted. Yeah, we we know this,
I mean, we absolutely know this from what we know
about the giant data facilities. That were built in Utah
and what the n s A was using them for
because people leaked information about it and we found out
about that. I think about how long ago that was
Ben when we were talking about that, and how we've
(48:34):
just kind of forgotten or at least just choosing to
not think about it because it makes me feel a
little better when I don't think about it. Um. Yeah,
you make a great point, and I'm trying very hard
to stay positive here, so maybe not. We'll we'll have updates,
by the way, in a future episode very soon on
(48:54):
Julian Assan, Jean Edward Snowden. Don't think they are forgotten?
Uh and maybe that Russians by you know, I think
she got back, she's out of prison. But you're right.
Will these remain post pandemic? The answers this, unless there
are specific sunset laws put into place, then absolutely. Unlike
(49:15):
tech companies, the government has yet to issue any official
statement about this to the public, which means that for
right now, unless something changes, if privacy is Elvis in
America is a building, than Elvis has left the building.
Oh my god. Well, okay, here's the positive. If there
(49:35):
is ever a pandemic of some sort or even an
outbreak that is more isolated to one section of one
country or you know, a cluster of countries. You could
use this infrastructure to help from the jump, and that
could be a good way of perhaps avoiding the the
(49:56):
economic downturn that we're experiencing right now. If that was
the and it was only being used for positive means
to trace a you know, an outbreak like this, that
that's the one silver lining I can imagine. But that's
the thing, privacy versus safety, right, or liberty versus safety. Yeah,
and thinking speaking of things people have more or less
(50:16):
forgotten about, how about the election that's coming over right?
It just seems so bottom of mind given everything that's
going on, which is messed up to say the least.
But yeah, there still are increasing concerns swirling around whether
the government will use COVID as a way to essentially
change the nature of or delay elections. Um, this is
(50:40):
spreading through all political walks of life in the US,
and there's a handful of potential concerns. Does mandatory mail
in voting constitute a poll tax? That's interesting. Does mandatory
in person voting constitute a health risk? Two sides of
the same coin, will the November presidential election be delayed
(51:00):
or not happened? I mean they delayed bonnaru, So I mean,
who's to say they can't delay the election? You know?
Or dragon con right? Right? Uh? It certainly does not
seem out of the realm of possibility, and it seems
like the kind of thing that could be very easily
justified as a very reasonable measure to take to to
(51:21):
keep people safe. But is there nefarious intent behind it?
That's the thing, right right? What is the intent? And also,
this is an interesting one, this one that's gained a
lot of popularity recently. It's the concept of the distraction.
What if instead of being under reported COVID numbers, the
death rates, the um the contraction rates, What if they're
(51:43):
actually being inflated? If so, why? This argument is pretty
popular in various groups. The The idea here is that
a great deal of the COVID worry is, either in
part or in full, an intentional effort by media in
various governments to distract the public from other pressing issues,
such as, you know, an election, or to allow a
(52:06):
government more breathing room to institute massive surveillance capabilities without
all the debate, conversation, and criticism that would normally happen.
I mean, this is an interesting one. We noted the
inherent opportunism. There's no question that people are taking advantage
in tremendously unethical ways. But you know, when we talk
(52:26):
about this, we have to ask ourselves the same question
you ask whenever you see a government messing up. Is
this out of ingenious design? Ingenious insidious design? Or is
this out of you know, garden variety and competence, the
kind you can encounter at UH street corners and all
you can eat buffets the world over. I I don't know, um,
(52:50):
I really, you know, if we if we walked through it,
I think we can find arguments for both sides. But
as far as inflating the numbers, one of the other
arguments would be that the numbers are being inflated to
prevent them from reaching uh a catastrophic point. I don't know, well,
I mean, what do you think? What do you guys think?
(53:13):
What the narrative I've seen floating around is that the
numbers are being inflated to cause enough fear in people
to self quarantine even if there are you know, if
there are orders from your let's say your state's governor
or the president himself that you have to quarantine. Not
(53:34):
everybody is going to listen to that, but if the
death toll and the numbers are scary enough, then people
will do it because they feel like they're protecting themselves
and their families. Um, that's the narrative I've seen floating around.
I do not I do not believe this to be true. Um,
though I do know psychologically that would be correct. Right.
(53:57):
It's like, psychologically you would have an effect on p
well if you if you made the numbers higher than
they were, and you made it more scary, you get
everyone to comply the way the majority of people, at
least in the United States have been complying. That would
be a pretty generous and magnanimous use of that kind
of inflating though, I would say, right, like, well, with
(54:17):
the best with the best interest of people's health and mind.
We're talking also about versions of it that are much
more self serving, you know, right, Yeah. The the nefarious
part to that, generally, to that narrative, is that the
economy is being crashed purposefully to either bring in you know,
to to kill cash essentially, or to cause a revolution.
(54:41):
Within the United States and abroad. Oh, I love it,
you know, uh Iran. Just before the attempted the latest
attemptive Venezuelan coup, Iran went in and cleaned out some
of their gold bars because oil countries are in a
in a fix right now. So this speak of narrative,
this brings us to something that I know a lot
of us were hoping to hear on today's episode as this. Recently,
(55:05):
the current President of the United States made international headlines
when he stated that he had proof, proof positive of
some sort that convinced him this coronavirus did indeed come
from a laboratory, that same laboratory that we mentioned way
back in our first COVID episode. But keep in mind
(55:27):
this contradicts several other findings, including those from some US
departments and intelligence agencies. When asked to describe this proof
or to speak more about it, the President said, this
is this is a quote. He said he wasn't allowed
to uh that, you know there that could be taken
to mean there were security concerns. Right. If there is
(55:49):
something more to this story, it could fundamentally alter our
understanding of the situation. And again, if that sort of
proof does exist. Going public with it could exposed the
US intelligence apparatus at play. You know, spies could get compromised,
people would learn about tech that maybe they weren't supposed
to know about. UM. But that would be that like,
(56:12):
that's the if we're making an assumption, right, if we're
assuming that there is something real there, then that would
be the first reason not to reveal it. But no
one else has confirmed this. There's no second second source
coming out in agreen with it at this point. Yeah,
And I would just say we have seen similar statements
(56:35):
UM like this that appeared that appeared to be UM
akin to, Hey, I've got some really important information, but
I can't tell you about it yet. Yeah, I've got
a I got a girlfriend. You wouldn't know her. She's
in AA, she goes to a different school. She's from Canada.
She's I swear she's real though, she's absolutely absolutely real.
(56:57):
Her name is Tess. And that's not to say that
the president isn't. Maybe maybe he does have some kind
of highly classified thing. But I totally agree with you
Ben about how it's Uh, it seems like it just
seems like a poor move UM in general. And we're
waiting to hear more as that story develops. But again,
to be absolutely fair, if it is true, then that
(57:20):
is a powder keg of a of a development. There,
one last one, one last one. Today, as we've just
sort of skimmed across a wide variety of things, you
may have heard that a book by UH fiction author
Dean Koontz predicted coronavirus, The Eyes of Darkness. Uh. You know,
(57:41):
if you read one of the paperback editions now you'll
see that it's a story about something called Wuhan four
hundred coronavirus, a pandemic that spreads across the world. However,
that's not what it originally said. If you look at
the first printing, it was called gork four hundred, and
they changed it. Yeah, oh, talk about opportunism. No, they
(58:07):
didn't change it to wuhan. Okay, okay, well still still
it's still somewhat predicting it, or at least some clever
you know, copy editor predicted it. He's got a lot
of eyes of books, a name a book called Eyes
of the Dragon as well. Is that that's Stephen King,
I think, isn't it? Now it's Dean Kutz. Let's see,
Eyes of the Dragon is by Stephen King. Your damn right, Ben,
(58:31):
Twilight Eyes? Okay, he made Twilight Eyes? Is that the
only other eyes book he has? I don't know. He's
got a lot of books. He does have a lot
of books. I remember Hideaway, Remember Hideaway, Ben, That was
about a Satanic worship Satan worshiping serial killer, and there
was a movie where Jeremy Sisto played that character. Jeremy
(58:54):
Sisto famously played the unhinged boyfriend of Air on six
ft Under. He's kind of like a cookie artist guy.
He was also in Clueless, I want to say, but
that guy always played like kind of an unhinged character.
But that was an interesting movie. Um, that's so crazy
that they that they changed that. I wonder what their
(59:15):
motivation was for changing the text. Well, originally the virus
I believe in the first printing from eighty one it
was I think a Russian town. Maybe that's incorrect. I
want to say it was a Russian town where the
virus originated. That Gorky Gorky Park is a famous Russian
uh amusement park. I believe that is as a place
(59:35):
you can visit still where Um, it's sort of been
ravaged by radio activity from Drenobyl, I believe. Yeah. Yeah.
So it came out in one it was gorky, and
then when it was released again in nineteen eighty nine,
it was changed to wuhan. So so that's I don't know,
(59:55):
myth busted. It's just it's interesting to think about, Dean.
If it sneen, keep it up, man, Let's let us
know about your next projects, uh speaking, things that are next.
This is this is our show for today, and we
have to leave it to you. What do you think
is going to happen next? Are we going to see
a spike in deaths? Are we going to see a
decline in deaths? Are we going to see that these
(01:00:18):
numbers and the origin story of coronavirus are in fact,
uh fabrications? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna We're
just gonna have revelation after revelation. I'm pretty sure every week,
every day moving forward, and there's gonna be a ton
for us to talk about, especially once all of us
have our iOS or Android devices, letting us know all
(01:00:42):
the people we've come into contact with coronavirus. And and
as it stands right now, I don't believe any of
us have gotten the test, whether an antibody test or
you know, a test to see if we're currently infected.
Because I think in here in Atlanta, we are pretty
lucky that a few places are making those tests available,
and the criteria for getting one has started to loosen
(01:01:04):
in the past few weeks, where you can you know,
that promise that the President made early on where anyone
who wants a test can get a test is starting
to be a little more true, but still not you know,
as true as it maybe should be, I would say,
in a positive and scary thing. Um, waffle houses reopened
in Georgia and Guys. I went to one. I walked
(01:01:27):
into a waffle house and picked up my to go order.
It was pretty scary, but they were actually they were.
It was not crowded, but they were taking a lot
of steps, I would say, to to make me feel
safe as the customer, as well as keep their employees safe.
It was actually it was great. What did you get? Uh?
(01:01:48):
You know all star special? Dude? Come on, it does
with some pecans in it. Baby. Yeah. So uh, hopefully
everybody knows this, but here in the American South, a
waffle house closing down is a huge deal. In fact,
for a while, FEMA unofficially used used waffle house closures
(01:02:11):
as a measure of disaster severity from the waffle House Index.
One last little update, by the way, I don't know
if you guys saw this, but Billboard magazine recently put
out an article saying Missouri governor says concerts can resume Monday.
Missouri Governor Mike Carson has given the okay for concerts
to begin again as early as Monday, as long as
(01:02:33):
UH certain social distancing measures are taken. I don't know
how you do that at a concert properly. That does
seem tough. Well, let's keep an eye on Missouri and
see what happens in the next two or three weeks
with it. And we also want to hear what's happening
in your neck of the Global woods. Let us know
do you think COVID is overblown? Do you think it's
(01:02:54):
all underestimated? And let us know what you think life
post pandemic will be like. You can tell us about
it on Instagram, You can find us on Facebook. You
can talk to us on Twitter where we are conspiracy
stuff on Twitter and Facebook, and conspiracy Stuff Show on Instagram.
If you wish you can find us as individual human people.
(01:03:16):
UM follow our quarantine adventures. Uh. You can find me
exclusively on Instagram. I am at how Now Noel Brown
and until the Black Bag gets me. You can find
me on Twitter where I'm Ben Bolling hs W. You
can find me on Instagram where I am at Ben Bulling.
I'm getting back into painting again. I guess I'll just Uh,
(01:03:38):
it'll be very on brand for me to paint some badgers,
so maybe I'll send those along to you guys online.
Nice And you can always find me at Dean Coont's
official on Instagram. I'll be there just showing you all
the books that I've got, really great books hideaways, one
of them also devoted just check it out, oh hey,
(01:04:00):
and another one about eyes Noel for you my work
from the Corner of his Eye. Thanks Dean. And if
you don't want to find me on Instagram again Dean
Coon's Official. You can always give me a call as
well as the rest of the guys here. Our number
is one eight three three S T D W y
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(01:04:21):
you're doing, what you're thinking, something you want us to cover,
something you want us to stop doing there. There have
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been like, hey, you're pronouncing this wrong. Stop doing that.
So you can do that, that's fine, It doesn't hurt
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(01:04:43):
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(01:05:07):
know is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of My Heart Radio, May the Fourth be with You.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They call
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decades. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Your favorite conspiracy QUARANTINEAM is back
live and in full effect. Gentlemen, This is part four
(00:47):
of our continuing series on the coronavirus pandemic and fellow
conspiracy realists. As we said in earlier episodes, we will
likely need to create more updates in the future. Since
our last COVID up so published on April fift many
many strange things have come to pass. One of the
most interesting trends I saw recently is that world leaders
(01:10):
are going missing. Yeah, it's true. UM as we record today,
no one's entirely sure what's going on in North Korea?
UH is Supreme Leader Kim John Un actually dead, possibly
recovering from heart surgery. Maybe he didn't have surgery at all. Yeah,
or maybe just taking a little little sabbatical from from
(01:31):
public life to avoid contracting the virus. M Yeah, I mean, Ben,
we were just talking about how, you know, they've kind
of made a big to do about trotting him out
at some public some events where he's visited a fertilizer plant,
I believe, And you mentioned finding the footage to be
a little on the fishy side. Yeah, It's not unusual
(01:53):
for authoritarian governments to have back pocket footage of earlier
appearances and then put it out as though it is current.
It's also very strange that the Supreme Leader missed the
largest holiday in the country, uh, and then just showed
up at a fertilizer factory. So I'd love I don't
know about you, guys, it's a real shordinger's kim. If
(02:14):
we're making dumb jokes, I'd love to hear. I'd love
to hear uh from you listeners, what do you what
do you all think is happening? Also, the President of Nicaragua,
Daniel Orteca, has disappeared. Uh. They think that that's probably
more health concern related, because he's he's been notoriously concerned
with his health after suffering some heart complications, so possibly
(02:37):
hold up in a bunker of some variety, similar to
Kim John jun There there was an attempted coup in Venezuela.
At least eight people were killed when that went through
or failed. Let's say there's all kinds of weird stuff happening,
sort of a minor coup though right, only eight, I
mean could have been worse. Yeah, the the guy in
(03:00):
large of that, the guy says he's in charge of it,
was an ex U S. Green Beret. I've got did
a piece on that for Strange News Daily, but it
sounds like, Okay, it's weird because, uh, we don't have
to get in the weeds on it. But the US
is saying they had nothing to do with it, and uh, yeah,
who do you believe, right, I mean, everything's topsy turvy,
(03:22):
cats and dogs sleeping together. Oil dropped to a negative
number people are paying to sell oil, which is weird. Uh.
The Navy confirmed that UFO footage we talked about that
I think or the Pentagon confirmed it. That's correct, and
that footage has been uh actually it hasn't been debunked,
but it's been shown. Several of them have been shown
(03:45):
to probably be weather balloons from a physics perspective on
a couple of videos that have become more and more
popular over the last couple of days, which is disheartening
but also good to know. I guess yeah, I mean,
the ugly true ruth is always more preferable, right, even
even if it's not as cool as what we wish
(04:05):
it would be. In short, folks, a lot of stuff
has happened. This is what we know to be true
as of today, May fourth. As you said, May the
fourth be with you as we record this podcast. We're
going to we're gonna look at some facts. We're gonna
dive into the multitude of things just off the edge
of the mainstream media map today. What better or more
(04:28):
somber way to start today's episode then with the facts.
So here are the facts about COVID nineteen statistics. We
did something interesting here, so we've got the most up
to date estimates right to get a sense of the spread,
we're gonna give you the numbers from last Friday and
the numbers from today, May fourth. So what's going on?
(04:51):
Maybe in the global sense, and then maybe we can
dive into the US. Yeah, globally, there have been an
estimated three million, three thousand, two hundred and forty six
cases of coronavirus across the entire planet um as of
this past Friday. Today there are three million, six hundred
twenty eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty one cases. There
(05:14):
were officially two hundred thirty four thousand, seven hundred to
deaths on Friday. Now we're looking at two hundred and
fifty one thousand and nine deaths. Thankfully, there is good
news here. As a Friday a million, about a million
and fifty thousand people had recovered as a Friday, and
(05:35):
today we're looking at around one million, one hundred and
eighty four thousand people who have reported to have recovered,
which is really great. Well, it's funny too that that's
not the number that you see trotted out nearly as
much as you would think it should be. I mean,
that really is the silver lining there. That's quite a
large number of folks that have recovered. Yeah, it's it's
number that I personally wish would be reported more often.
(05:58):
It's it's just it doesn't show up in a lot
of news content here in the US. We see that
on Friday, this country had an estimated one million, nine thousand,
three four cases. Now that numbers jumped over the weekend,
it's more like one million, one hundred eighty four thousand
and twenty. And the number is just ticking up as
(06:21):
we record. By Friday, sixty three thousand, eight hundred seventy
one people had passed away. That number is now jumped
to sixty nine thousand, two and twenty. I want to
take just a second here, because we're throwing a lot
of numbers at you, and those can sound you know,
you can get number fatigue or get desensitized to it.
But what we're what we're telling you is that thousands,
(06:46):
thousands of people died just Saturday and Sunday. I have
coined a new term, you guys, number numbness. There we go. Yeah, well,
let's just stay in that numbness just for a moment,
because I just want to talk about Fulton County and Georgia,
where our office is located. You know, we're officially open now,
our our state Georgia is open, and we are seeing
(07:08):
cases in Fulton County specifically continue to rise and they
haven't fallen, and we are now open. So I would
just say the three of us are um feeling a
little extra cautious now, even even though our state has
decided to open up, and there are several of the
other states that have opened up at least partially. Um So,
(07:32):
even though it seems like that just that concept that
a state could be thinking about reopening right now makes
you feel a little better, but the numbers are not
bearing out uh positivity here well. And you know, one
thing that I believe we mentioned on the previous episode is,
you know the idea of quote unquote opening back up
the economy, thinking about it like a big picture. Sure
(07:54):
there can be announcements and officially we can be open,
but it's ultimately up to people and their comfort level
as to how they deal with that opening up. And
I was pretty shocked over the weekend in Georgia to
see that people seem to have taken this announcement by
our governor as a sign that everything is mainly just
cool again. I live very close to a big park
(08:16):
and I walked there, you know, for my daily exercise,
and and walk there over the weekend and there were
just tons of groups of people with no masks, just
hanging out in large numbers. And we're seeing images like
that rolling in from places like Central Park in New
York and Brooklyn, you know, and a Prospect Park. And
I really feel like, while I think many of us
(08:37):
and and our friends take this kind of stuff with
a grain of salt, and well, I it's up to
me whether I decide to you know, go back and
return to normal or not. I think the very announcement
of things like this is enough for some people to
just decide that, Okay, everything's cool again. We don't have
to social distance anymore. And that couldn't be farther from
the truth, right. Yeah, At the risk of sounding cold,
(08:59):
given what we know about that two week time period,
I think I'm gonna give it another two weeks at least.
I am not champion at the bit uh to be
the beta tester here. Uh. And you know, again, like
to that point about personal responsibility of personal rights, it
carries on a on a larger on a larger scale
(09:20):
here because the US has no coherent federal pandemic policy,
it does go down to the states, and that's I
think that's that's something that will keep this process happening
for a while. It's lengthening what we would do, you know,
as opposed to other countries that have the authority legally
to lock it down like immediately. This is I don't know,
(09:46):
this is this is a trade off, you know. Um,
we will say that there is a good sign though,
because here in the US, despite these openings, a hundred
and fifty five thousand, seven thirty seven people had contracted
COVID nights are contracted coronavirus and recovered as a Friday,
and today that number has jumped by almost thirty thousand.
(10:08):
A hundred and eighty one thousand, nine one people today
are officially recovered. Recent studies from South Korea seem to
confirm that you cannot recontract this brand of coronavirus after
you've already had it, which is why people are getting
the antibody test. But I've been hearing other things though,
I've I've heard other studies coming out of China saying
(10:29):
that they've seen cases or people have recontracted it or
tested negative and then tested positive. Do you think that's
more a case of false false negatives and then getting
a new test that that that is more accurate or
gives you a more accurate result. Yeah, it's likely the
the efficacy of the Chinese produced testing kits, especially in
(10:50):
the early days, is not super great. It's not near
a hundred percent. So there have been multiple countries, uh,
and institutions can plaining about receiving broken test kits. There
was one country I can't remember who it was, but
there was a leader of one country I think of
the African continent who said the Chinese tests were bad
(11:11):
because he just just to test the test. He administered
it to a goat and the goat tested positive for
COVID nineteen. Uh. Animal lovers, Uh, you'll be glad to
know the goat is fine. M hmm. Well, it's a
great point about accuracy there, because the tests and the
ability to test accurately. That reflects directly in the numbers
(11:35):
that we just spoke about, right, And there are issues
with these numbers that we we've talked about already in
the show. Mm hmm. Yeah. New numbers might arrive even
as we're recording this, indicating spikes in some countries or
drops and others, and numbers need to be updated for accuracy.
And you hit the nail on the head, Matt, that
(11:56):
is a huge problem. Are these numbers accurate? It depends
on who you ask. The government of China, and not
to pick on China too much, this happened in other places,
but the government of China is currently taking a ton
of heat internationally because people just don't believe their numbers.
And you know, it's an understandable skepticism because those numbers
(12:17):
keep changing. Yeah. Earlier this month, authorities in Wuhan, where
the pandemic began, revised the death toll of that city
by more than fifty percent um while the government in
Beijing has continuously denied that there had been any cover
ups in their handling of the virus, and the Department
of Homeland Security is reporting a claim that China covered
(12:40):
up the severity of the virus from the start in
order to better look out for their population by hoarding supplies.
And you know, I mean, in our very first episode
about this, before it really hit us at home, I
think it was very clear that there was at the
very least a minor cover up in the way they
handled the individual who first reported this virus and threatened
(13:04):
him with some form of sedition or you know, spread
rumor mongering. I believe it was. So I think there's
no question that they definitely were approaching it with some level,
whether you could say it with skepticism or outright desire
to cover it up. They certainly didn't jump right on
it right, Yeah, I agreed. And there are also you know,
(13:26):
there are so many ways, devious ways to gen these
numbers up and push them in the direction you want
them to go, if you want it to seem less extreme,
or as some have proposed, if you're a government that
wants it to seem more extreme. Like what counts What
counts as a COVID death is a death only COVID
related if the person who died had previously tested positive
(13:49):
for coronavirus in a in a test administered biomedical professional.
It's tricky, especially in countries like um, you know a
lot of Sub Saharan African countries and the US where
there aren't a lot of tests. They're in short supply.
We know COVID can cause heart attacks. Uh do you
know do people who die of a heart attack after
(14:10):
having contracted coronavirus do they get listed as a COVID
death or do they get listed as a victim of
a heart attack, especially if they have you know, problematic uh,
pre existing conditions, whether it be obesity or sedentary lifestyle
or any number of of of of factors that can
contribute to having a heart attack exactly. And and then
(14:34):
we have to ask about the indirect fallout, which um,
you know some people aren't thinking about. And what we
mean by indirect fallout is what happens to people who
die because something about the pandemic made their life impossible
or dangerous. Like if you have to your point about
chronic medical condition, what if you die because your hospital
(14:56):
infrastructure is overwhelmed and you cannot obtain say insulin or
something that you need to live. Is that a COVID
related death? I mean, in this conversation, it sure sounds
like it is. But they didn't die from COVID. They
died from UH an overwhelmed system, That's right. Daniel Weinberger,
who's an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School
(15:16):
of Public Health, commented that quote the assignment of causes
of death is more of an art than a science
because it really is sort of in the eye of
the beholder UH in the same way that the testing
is and also in the same way that you can
categorize UH. For example, the way our president is pushing
the line of well, per capita, our deaths are actually
(15:40):
pretty good. And he sort of got railed a bit
because he referred to our death toll as being really strong.
I believe was the term he used in terms of
like positivity and spinning it. Because you're right, Ben, I mean,
there are so many ways to spin this, and with
so many different numbers and so much change happening so quickly,
it really is something that and be quite misleading if
(16:01):
you don't look at the root cause or don't actually
look at the numbers in a more holistic way. Yeah,
it goes down to our understanding of something called excess death.
This is kind of cold, but excess death is a
term describing the number of deaths in you know, a
given amount of time that occur in excess of the
(16:24):
normal established death rate. So researchers over at Yale found
fifteen thousand, four hundred excess deaths in the US from
March one through April four. That's the early the early
stages of coronavirus really kicking into high gear. Uh. During
that time, only about half that many deaths have been
(16:45):
attributed to COVID. Then this means, if we can look
at this, we can trust some of these numbers. The
death's the death toll that's official is probably much lower
than what's actually happening. How much higher we don't know,
and that should scare people, that should that should frighten you.
The projections also are not set in stone, UH They're
(17:07):
they're not mandates. Instead, there are a seriously there like
a decision tree, their fluid branches of if then decisions.
And we we have to remember that every choice policymaker
or an institution UH makes during this time is going
to move the prediction in a different direction. And of course,
(17:28):
if you've been watching the news in the US or abroad,
you know that there are quite a few disagreements domestically
and internationally. Yeah, you've likely seen on the news some
of the protests that have been occurring. Michigan, I believe,
is one of the major places that these protests have
been occurring, but there have been smaller ones across the States. UM.
(17:51):
A lot of times you will see these reported on
with a bunch of individuals who are brandishing weapons. Who
are you know, they air to just protest their inability
to work. Generally, it has been about getting back to work,
like open up, like remove these restrictions so that we
can work. And that is a valid thing, you know that,
(18:14):
Like we've we've been talking about earlier today about Georgia
opening up, it's a valid concern for a lot of people.
But there's also the overall dangers and we're having to
I mean, we're we're obviously disagreeing at the core about this,
but we're attempting to find a path I think, or
at least it feels like we're trying to find a
(18:36):
path where we're gonna be able to open up more
of the economy while still staying quarantine to an extent um.
There's another thing here that we really have to think
about is if a lot of people cannot pay rent
and they have no income, they can't pay for bills,
what do we do. And so far, as we talked
about in previous episodes, the answer has been give a check,
(18:59):
you know, for a certain amount of money to each
individual um. But that's only gonna take you so far. Yeah, yeah,
because the landlords have to pay rents as well in
terms of a mortgage right or taxes. And we know
that other countries, such as our neighbors to the north, Canada,
have approached the situation much differently. They're they're issuing payments
(19:22):
to people. UH. I think in some cases, in some
areas they're instituting rent freezes. But I don't think it's
a country wide thing. You know, if we look at
the international sphere, the way I kind of thought about
this is, UH, China versus everybody and the US is
sort of a Charlie Day like wildcard from Always Sunny
(19:46):
in Philadelphia. China is UH, make no mistake taking the
opportunity presented by covid UH to conspire and expand on
some longstanding geopolitical goals, and it is getting ugly. There
was actually there was a report that came out recently
that was internal. It leaked UH from Chinese intelligence, the
(20:08):
Ministry of State Security, writing to top Beijing leaders, including
the President uh Ji Jumping. They said that global anti
Chinese sentiment is at its highest since the Tianamen Square
crackdown in nine and they're preparing for everything up to
and including armed conflict between the US and China. That
(20:30):
means literally war. They're they're not declaring it, but they're saying, hey,
heads up, well yeah, and and it wasn't helped by
are the is the leak to document you're talking about
the Five Eyes report there, because there was a there
was a allegedly a leaked five Eyes report that came out,
(20:52):
essentially confirming some of the beliefs that have been floating
around out there that that China did take some of
the actions that it had been accused of previously, of
kind of covering up the virus that we mentioned, you know,
earlier in the show. Um it. It certainly didn't help
that that came out at the time when these tensions
(21:14):
are continuing to rise, because then it makes you know,
I'm I'm assuming I don't know about a ton of
this stuff, but it's going to embolden the United States
to feel like we're in the right to, uh, you know,
not only defend ourselves, but to prevent China from taking
some of these bigger steps that you're talking about. Ben Yep,
there's a there's another story that hasn't got a lot
(21:35):
of play here in the US. Uh, you know, we
don't want to make this myopically about just the U
S and China. China has also been increasing its attempts
to influence Australia in a major way, and they're getting
help from Australia's billionaire mining class. Like there's a guy
named Andrew Forrest who recently snuck a Chinese official into
a think of it like a federal level government press
(21:59):
conference after the Australian government had already declined to speak
with the guy or have him speak. So it's sort
of like for a perspective, it's similar to say, um
Elam Musk or Warren Buffett or someone crashing White House
press conference and bringing you know, one of their international
(22:23):
buddies in and saying, hey, can you just can you
just speak here? I know that you guys aren't super
great friends with Tehran, but can this diplomat that I
just brought in speak here? It's it's stunning, uh. And
he's doing it because of mining interests in agreements he
has in uh in China. Yeah. Yeah. And just to
(22:45):
connect it back up to the five Eyes thing as
a refresher course, five eyes or five intelligence agencies of
English largely English speaking countries, the United States, Canada, the
United Kingdom, Um, Australia and New Zealand, and it's all
of those intelligence agencies working together and they're in Australia.
(23:06):
It's interesting that that was that was the next thing. Australia. Uh, well,
we'll see what's going on there. Yeah. And at this point,
you know, we said the US is a wild card. Honestly, Uh,
what else is there to say? It's losing massive ground internationally.
It's policies often seem from the outside looking in self contradictory, disparate, mercurial. Uh.
(23:33):
And that's because, you know, a lot of states are
taking their own paths. The line between business and government
has eroded, and we have to be honest, it is
difficult to keep track of all the conspiratorial narratives out there.
They keep growing. Some are more plausible than others. What
do we mean. We'll tell you afterword from our sponsor.
(24:00):
Here's where it gets crazy. Let's start with the big
businesses and billionaires. Oh the devil b oh Bill, Mr Gates,
big business billionaires and Bill Oh god, quadruple b oh.
There's too many. Yes, Bill Gates. You may have heard
(24:21):
quite a few headlines about his foundation, the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation. Yeah. The idea is that they teamed
up with a you know, with a cadre of fellows,
super wealthy supervillains, and they ran a simulation back in
October where they predicted sixty five million deaths due to
(24:42):
COVID nineteen. Here's the thing that actually happened. There was
actually an exercise was called Event to oh one. I
think we mentioned it briefly in a previous episode. It
was hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security,
and it did focus on emergency prepared witness in the
event of a severe pandemic, but it did not deal
(25:04):
with COVID Night Team, and it did not make real
life predictions about death tolls. It did deal with a coronavirus,
but not this kind because as we said earlier, uh,
there there are multiple kinds of coronavirus, just like there
are multiple um genres of music with drums, multiple kinds
of cancer, multiple flavors of ice cream. Yeah. Yeah, And
(25:27):
just so you know, if you want to delve deep
into this, you can just use quotations in your search
and do event to zero one and you'll find all
kinds of stuff. There's you know, you can see the
official documents, the the results, the videos that are put
out there, people speaking about it. Um it is. It
(25:48):
does feel very creepy, especially if you've been watching this
season of Westworld with that giant computer simulation that runs
the entire planet UM, it feels like, hey, maybe maybe
Bill and Melinda have access to some giant simulated machine
that's gonna eventually tell each human what their life cycle
(26:09):
is going to be. If anyone has it, it's them, though,
I mean I would say, well, unless it's our next
set of happy billionaires, the Koke Brothers. So the idea
here is that the Koke Brothers UH and similar super
hard right wing um neo feudalists are financing the protests
(26:33):
that we've been seeing. What what do you call that
when you call crisis actors of some kind or we're like,
like not sock puppets. That's exclusively online. But it is
the idea that there is in some way financing this
UH to create kind of a a bit of a
push so that their pals and the corporations they have
(26:55):
staken don't suffer further economic catastrophe because of this endemic.
And there has been a lot of catastrophe going around
in the business world, and make no mistake there. I
don't know if you guys saw the news about J
Crew that just came out that they're going to be
going in there. They filed Chapter eleven bankrupts. You didn't
see that, Yeah, and made Well it's one of the
(27:17):
one of their brands. But yeah, they're going to be
closing a ton of stores. And you know that's just
one company, one clothing retailer, and that's gonna be happen
a lot more in the near future. Yeah, the only
question is how extreme that trends will become. This is interesting.
So are they protest puppet masters? It's true that a
(27:39):
lot of the well, it's true that I would say
the majority of those protests are reopened are you know,
are purposely designed to appear as though they are grassroots,
and the question is whether they're being astro turf. There
were a couple of people on Reddit who did some
fantastic research into the powers behind the front organizations right
(28:02):
Open Michigan, Open Maryland. Uh. So, you know, it's understandable
that people might think the Koch brothers are behind this. Again,
remember they they ran point on the Tea Party protest
that back in oh nine in but this one actually
seems to be not true. Their main political arm for
(28:22):
the Koch Brothers is an organization called Americans for prosperity,
beautiful name right, chef's kiss. Uh. They rejected the in
person protest, they said. Their CEO specifically said, the question
is what is the best way to get people back
to work. We don't see protests is the best way
to do that. She went on to say the choice
(28:43):
between full shutdown and immediately opening everything is a false choice.
So they didn't actually, you know a lot of times
they get rightly vilified, but they didn't actually do this one.
Someone else did and we found out who. Yeah, and
it can apparently be traced back to Betsy DeVos UM,
(29:04):
So don't be fooled by the slightly different names. Here.
We've got Indiana Citizens Against Excessive Quarantine, and then we
also have Operation Gridlock Tennessee and other groups that are
bankrolled by powerful people. Um. They are the opposite of grassroots.
The Michigan Freedom Fund UM was founded by Greg McNeely,
(29:27):
a political advisor to the Divos family UM, who has
provided financial support to that organization. But that you know,
but this is one of those things where it doesn't
mean Betsy Divos did it right, It just means there
are connections there. Just pointing that out, remember that, Yeah, Yeah,
you're being fair, uh that that is true, but it
(29:50):
does appear to be some astroturfing. There is a possibility
that some of those protesters are in fact paid to protests.
So it's a dig in more um. But don't don't
let the easy headlines fool you, especially when there are
frankly other things to worry about. I'm not saying they're worse,
but I'm saying the protests are not the only thing
(30:12):
going on. Let's talk about tech companies, you guys. Let's
talk about surveillance. Let's talk about tracking apps. They're blowing
up in countries around the world, and I would say
there is a genuine I don't I don't know the
correct wording here, but there is good reason to want
to have tracking apps when you're inside a pandemic. There
(30:36):
there is a genuinely good reason to have that because
you want to see or to be able to predict
whether or not someone is at risk of spreading the
virus to someone else, or whether or not the individual
is going to be, you know, at risk of getting it.
What they're calling contact tracing, right, Like that's like like
the big, you know thing that's going to have really
(30:57):
help stem the tide of this, uh, this this disease
is being able to somehow systematically figure out exactly who's
been in contact with whom and then trace that back
to the source and then you know, institute proper testing.
That's really the only way to kind of get a
handle on this. Yeah, the motivation is smart. It's something
that probably should be done. The problem is, in our
(31:20):
world of big data, all of this stuff just becomes
another data set, uh, to to track people, to control
in a certain way, or the at least to have
the information about the individual and then apply it to
massive groups and and you know, continue going upwards. It's
one of these things we said, Um, whatever the intentions
(31:40):
behind these things are, once you let the badger out
of the bag, it's really hard to put it back in,
even when conditions get better. So what happens post Corona
once these things have been put into place? Yeah, yeah,
it's an excellent question. Let's go country by country. Talked
about in this past, but we have more detail else now.
(32:01):
So a lot of our fellow listeners in Australia have
written in thank you so much to talk about something
called COVID Safe. It's an app and it uses bluetooth
to record, uh, you know, to keep a record rather
of other people with the app who have been in
close proximity to you or your phone within the past
(32:22):
twenty one days. It's modeled on a Singapore's earlier app.
The info remains on the phone until the user, who
until a user test positive for COVID, decides to upload it,
and then that information is used to trace the contacts
of that infected person. It collects a lot of data.
(32:43):
The government says that only state health officials will have
access to it. But uh, you know that there's so
what does that mean? You know what I mean, there's
no time limit. Just as a fun aside here, we
we had a listener from down under a right to
us and whenever you sign up for this service, COVID Safe,
(33:07):
you get a specialized pin It was like a pin number,
and the pin number that he was assigned was six
six six zero zero one. And he found that to
be amusing. Uh. Yeah, and yeah, and so let's go.
We mentioned Singapore, right, Uh, Singapore's app is the basis
(33:29):
for the Australia app. Uh. This one had about of
the population and Singapore started using it since Uh, it's
launch in April. But the issue here is one of
not just privacy but efficacy because the number of coronavirus
cases during that time shot up from one thousand to
more than sixteen thousand. So it's still a good diagnostic tool,
(33:53):
it's just the question is how effective is it at
stopping COVID. And then you have New Zealand, UM and
as that country comes out of it's hard lockdown, it's
also going to launch a contact tracing app, but it's uh,
the details are a little scarce, so we're not quite
clear on how that's going to work. Radio New Zealand
has reported that it will update people's details with the
(34:15):
Department of Health so they can be contacted directly, but
beyond that, very little is known of the stage and
and just to piggyback off of that really quickly, even
here in Georgia, uh, the Department of Health is doing
a an outreach kind of situation where they're going door
to door and UM offering uh that uh what is
(34:37):
it called the h antibody tests so people can see
if they have contracted it. But obviously those it takes
a long time to do that kind of outreach because
it's very hands on very one on one just just
to take it back to New Zealand really quickly. This
is one of the first countries to declare that they
(34:57):
eradicated coronavirus within within their country's boundaries. That was a
little They made that announcement I think on the thirtieth
of April, but then it was found that there were
several cases that actually arose after they made that announcement.
But it is one of the first places where the
heavy restrictions on travel with like to New Zealand as
(35:20):
well as away from New Zealand. It really did seem
to stop the virus in its tracks pretty well, like
Madagascar in pandemic, but also in New Zealand. Isn't like
a super densely populated country. I mean, I think we
said like in a previous no, it was a ridiculous
(35:40):
history episode. We were talking about exploding pants because of
a chemical that was used to eradicate a type of
weed that was killing off grass that cows would feed on. Um.
The number of sheep I think out number humans in
New Zealand. Yeah, it's about six to one. Is the
number gets thrown around. Uh, but they have a ton
(36:02):
of people coming in through that country. But to your appointment, Matt,
that obviously was a smart move for them to institute
that so quickly and effectively that a travel man. One
of the things that you might you need to know,
fellow listeners is this New Zealand also is currently harboring
(36:23):
a lot of people have gotten in on Golden ticket passports.
That's where you get citizenship just based on an investment
that you make and you're you're essentially you're buying citizenship.
And right before this hit, as it was hitting, some
of the people who were in the know ducked off
to New Zealand where they already lived on property that
they have bought um months or years ago, specifically for
(36:46):
its isolation and it's potable water. Neil Gaiman is uh
is currently in New Zealand, but I think he just
got caught there, uh, you know, with bad luck. But
Neil's fine, And I don't think he was part of
the billionaire elite escape plan uh than most of us yea,
(37:07):
or is he? Because you know, one thing New Zealand
can't do is uh stock is change its proximity to China.
China is probably the most solid example of how extreme
these apps can be and they can become this way,
it's the hardcore one. This app is mandatory. It is
tied to your I D. It governs where you can
(37:28):
go through QR scanners and A and a color system.
If you're clear, you're green. If you're yellow or amber,
you need to isolate. If you're red, you've either been
confirmed positive or you've been in close contact with someone
who has tested positive. So that means that unless you
stay inside all of the time, you could turn red
(37:49):
at any time. And you need this app by the
way to travel anywhere you needed to get into venues. Uh.
And now those restrictions are starting to ease, But that
is real black mirror stuff. It's happening now that this
can happen. It's not Blade Runner. People can do this
to you now, Ben. Do you think the infrastructure of
(38:09):
this was in some ways helped by the Sesame credit
situation that was sort of being tested. Yeah, that's a
that's a great question. I I assume that they have
some of the same architecture they would have to uh,
and it stems from some of the some of the
same ideology and goals. Definitely. Um. Yes, Sesame credit still
(38:34):
in full effect. That's a very good point. And I
will say this is a hot take, and I'm half
joking when I say this, but I can't think of
another situation than this that has had more uh net
positives from being a totalitarian government because they can actually
force you to behave and force you to do what's
(38:54):
best for uh the masses as opposed to the individuals
like we're seeing with all the people just coming out
on mass based on the concept of opening back up
the economy. I would just say, there's there's less manipulation
required and you can be a little more straightforward when
you're authoritarian. Yeah, you don't have to worry about the
(39:15):
Overton window. You don't have to uh you know, have
offline conversations with your pals in the media. India, France, Israel, Germany,
the United Kingdom, uh South Korea. Everybody has either instituted
a system like this or they're planning to do so.
Israel's having some difficulties because of the privacy concerns. Now,
(39:38):
we've talked a lot about these tracking apps and other countries,
but what about the good old United States? Apple Pie,
bald Eagles freedom in all caps, underlined, highlighted, a couple
of exclamation marks to really make it pop. We'll tell
you after a word from our sponsor. Okay, Now, to
(40:04):
be fair, we aren't just talking about the U s here.
What we're about to discuss are It's really a baseline
version of an app that will be instituted or can
be instituted in any country that chooses to adapt it.
So let's let's jump to on April tenth, when Apple
(40:24):
and Google announced that they were going to be working
together and using the smart the smartphone tech for you know,
both Apple iPhones iOS stuff as well as Android operated
phones to help track COVID and the spread of COVID
in the same way we've been discussing before. Just like
the one, the first one that we talked about in Australia,
COVID Safe, this version is going to use Bluetooth or
(40:48):
the Bluetooth four point oh low energy. Um, they're gonna
use that tech to keep track of mobile phones and
proximity just which phones come into close contact with each other.
And that's really all you're talking about here. That's everything
that this app is meant to do. Is this an
advancement of the website that Google was supposedly working on that.
(41:08):
Trump kind of prematurely announced early on saying that developers
at Google were hard at work creating some kind of database,
and then turned out that they barely had begun work
and it wasn't really as much of a thing as
he may be made it out to be. As this
sort of the next gen of that announcement, this is
an evolution of of that. Yes, correct Early on it was,
(41:31):
you know, people were touting that it was going to
use GPS technology to trace, to actually trace where people
were going once they've you know, contracted COVID nineteen. As
of right now, as of today on May four, the
official word is that it's just going to be using
bluetooth data in proximity and it won't be collecting GPS
(41:52):
data or location services data much less of real time. Yeah,
so this has brought up these grave can turn So,
I mean, here's how it works, right, It keeps track
of who you know, and then let's say you test
positive for COVID nineteen, and then it uses that information
to go back and tell everybody that you plausibly could
have run into and then also helps to try to
(42:13):
trace when you may have contracted it. And how. But
as you can imagine, not everybody is happy with this.
The two big questions how effective will this actually be?
And then secondly, how does it affect what's left of privacy? Yeah.
Jennifer Grantick from the A c l U, who heads
up their surveillance and cybersecurity program, notes that contact tracing
(42:36):
is only one piece of the puzzle, which which I
think is fair, saying that it can't be fully effective
quote until there is widespread, free and quick testing and
equitable access to healthcare. I think the that healthcare piece
has been something that really has been highlighted by this pandemic.
How disparate, Uh, the availability of healthcare is depending on
(42:59):
who you are and who you work for and the
economic strata that you find yourself in. Uh, it's really
pointed a glaring finger. Can a finger be glaring? I
don't know, but just at that problem in our country,
there really is no Uh. I'm I was about to
say universal healthcare, which is true, but there really is
no equitable access to healthcare in this country. I can
(43:21):
I don't think anyone would argue with that too hard. No,
absolutely not. I mean, that's a reality. It's here. Let's
look at how this will roll out, despite the fact that,
to Jennifer Grant's point, the US does not have the
infrastructure to get the most use out of this. Companies
Google and Apple are planning to roll this out in
two phases. First, they're releasing software this month to let
(43:45):
public health authorities build and release apps on Android and
on Apple. And then in the coming months they'll move
to phase two. Phase two is where Google and Apple
build this function directly into the operating system. You heard
that right, It's being built into the OS on your phone.
Doesn't matter if you download the app, it doesn't matter
(44:06):
if you love or hate the app. It will be
on your OS. No one sure what happens, uh to
all that surveillance, all that data once it's gathered, Does
it just vanish? Post COVID. Google recently made an announcement
about this, or I think Google and Apple jointly made
an announcement. Yeah, they independently sent out a couple of
sent out announcements about this thing. So here's the big
(44:29):
takeaway that they keep pushing on that concept that they're
not going to collect location data using this. It's not
gonna be used for this at all, And they're not
going to be using the data collected for targeted advertising.
And I think the most positive thing going here is that, well,
it's positive and negative. It's positive for privacy, it's negative
(44:52):
for the effectiveness of the app because each individual person
is going to have to upload it or confirm that
they have tested positive for coronavirus. So it's not as
though you're going it's going to automatically upload when when
let's say, Matt, when I contract coronavirus, I get tested,
(45:17):
I find out, you know, through the test that I
have definitely contracted it. It's not going to then connect
my phone, my device to my identity and upload that
I am coronavirus positive. I have to then go in
through the gooey or through the app and then upload
or confirm my test, which, because there's each coronavirus test
will have a number essentially generated associated with it. Um
(45:41):
you have to confirm that. Then that gets sent out
to everybody that has come into contact with my phone
over the course of you know, whatever that time window is,
let's say two weeks, like Ben and Nol and my
wife and all of my friends that I've talked to,
which I haven't really seen anybody in the past two weeks,
but they would all get note ified that perhaps they
(46:01):
came into contact with someone would not identify me with coronavirus. Yeah, yeah,
that's correct. So you can see how there's an effort
towards anonymity here. Uh. And you know, you can believe
Google and Apple when they say when they say they
won't ask for certain things or they won't share them
if they get them, because you know, a company is
(46:23):
able to get rid of that if they want, they
are able to avoid collecting certain things. Uh. They can
do whatever they want with it unless they are legally
compelled to do or not do something. And that brings
us to one of the big worries, which is the
government big brother. Let's say that Google and Apple are
acting in good faith. Let's say that they have, you know,
(46:44):
an app called, uh, I don't know, called America Breathe
Easy or something, and that's too long about America Breezy
there we go, Yeah, America Breezy. And so they have
America Breezy and they're collecting this data and their their
plan is to chunk it like to brick it afterwards,
(47:05):
but legislation requires them to hand it over. You see
big Brother. Whether that's the US or whether that's it
doesn't matter whichever country, Nepal, Bhutan, it doesn't matter. Big
Brother is there and is able to use this opportunity
to get sweeping surveillance powers. It is naive, extremely so
to assume that every country granting itself sweeping surveillance powers
(47:29):
is actually going to give them up after this is over,
after it normalizes. In fact, if you know, some people
might call this too far out there to tinfoil hattie,
but it is plausible that several of these capabilities for
widespread monitoring already existed. A global pandemic is just the
perfect opportunity that happened along. And now governments can go
(47:51):
public with stuff they already had. Now tech companies can
go public with stuff they already had. I am personally demite.
I'm personally certain that's that's the case. In the US,
the n s A, as we know, as you know,
long time listeners, the n s A and various other
organizations here including five Eyes, can do way more than
(48:13):
um that is publicly admitted. Yeah, we we know this,
I mean, we absolutely know this from what we know
about the giant data facilities. That were built in Utah
and what the n s A was using them for
because people leaked information about it and we found out
about that. I think about how long ago that was
Ben when we were talking about that, and how we've
(48:34):
just kind of forgotten or at least just choosing to
not think about it because it makes me feel a
little better when I don't think about it. Um. Yeah,
you make a great point, and I'm trying very hard
to stay positive here, so maybe not. We'll we'll have updates,
by the way, in a future episode very soon on
(48:54):
Julian Assan, Jean Edward Snowden. Don't think they are forgotten?
Uh and maybe that Russians by you know, I think
she got back, she's out of prison. But you're right.
Will these remain post pandemic? The answers this, unless there
are specific sunset laws put into place, then absolutely. Unlike
(49:15):
tech companies, the government has yet to issue any official
statement about this to the public, which means that for
right now, unless something changes, if privacy is Elvis in
America is a building, than Elvis has left the building.
Oh my god. Well, okay, here's the positive. If there
(49:35):
is ever a pandemic of some sort or even an
outbreak that is more isolated to one section of one
country or you know, a cluster of countries. You could
use this infrastructure to help from the jump, and that
could be a good way of perhaps avoiding the the
(49:56):
economic downturn that we're experiencing right now. If that was
the and it was only being used for positive means
to trace a you know, an outbreak like this, that
that's the one silver lining I can imagine. But that's
the thing, privacy versus safety, right, or liberty versus safety. Yeah,
and thinking speaking of things people have more or less
(50:16):
forgotten about, how about the election that's coming over right?
It just seems so bottom of mind given everything that's
going on, which is messed up to say the least.
But yeah, there still are increasing concerns swirling around whether
the government will use COVID as a way to essentially
change the nature of or delay elections. Um, this is
(50:40):
spreading through all political walks of life in the US,
and there's a handful of potential concerns. Does mandatory mail
in voting constitute a poll tax? That's interesting. Does mandatory
in person voting constitute a health risk? Two sides of
the same coin, will the November presidential election be delayed
(51:00):
or not happened? I mean they delayed bonnaru, So I mean,
who's to say they can't delay the election? You know?
Or dragon con right? Right? Uh? It certainly does not
seem out of the realm of possibility, and it seems
like the kind of thing that could be very easily
justified as a very reasonable measure to take to to
(51:21):
keep people safe. But is there nefarious intent behind it?
That's the thing, right right? What is the intent? And also,
this is an interesting one, this one that's gained a
lot of popularity recently. It's the concept of the distraction.
What if instead of being under reported COVID numbers, the
death rates, the um the contraction rates, What if they're
(51:43):
actually being inflated? If so, why? This argument is pretty
popular in various groups. The The idea here is that
a great deal of the COVID worry is, either in
part or in full, an intentional effort by media in
various governments to distract the public from other pressing issues,
such as, you know, an election, or to allow a
(52:06):
government more breathing room to institute massive surveillance capabilities without
all the debate, conversation, and criticism that would normally happen.
I mean, this is an interesting one. We noted the
inherent opportunism. There's no question that people are taking advantage
in tremendously unethical ways. But you know, when we talk
(52:26):
about this, we have to ask ourselves the same question
you ask whenever you see a government messing up. Is
this out of ingenious design? Ingenious insidious design? Or is
this out of you know, garden variety and competence, the
kind you can encounter at UH street corners and all
you can eat buffets the world over. I I don't know, um,
(52:50):
I really, you know, if we if we walked through it,
I think we can find arguments for both sides. But
as far as inflating the numbers, one of the other
arguments would be that the numbers are being inflated to
prevent them from reaching uh a catastrophic point. I don't know, well,
I mean, what do you think? What do you guys think?
(53:13):
What the narrative I've seen floating around is that the
numbers are being inflated to cause enough fear in people
to self quarantine even if there are you know, if
there are orders from your let's say your state's governor
or the president himself that you have to quarantine. Not
(53:34):
everybody is going to listen to that, but if the
death toll and the numbers are scary enough, then people
will do it because they feel like they're protecting themselves
and their families. Um, that's the narrative I've seen floating around.
I do not I do not believe this to be true. Um,
though I do know psychologically that would be correct. Right.
(53:57):
It's like, psychologically you would have an effect on p
well if you if you made the numbers higher than
they were, and you made it more scary, you get
everyone to comply the way the majority of people, at
least in the United States have been complying. That would
be a pretty generous and magnanimous use of that kind
of inflating though, I would say, right, like, well, with
(54:17):
the best with the best interest of people's health and mind.
We're talking also about versions of it that are much
more self serving, you know, right, Yeah. The the nefarious
part to that, generally, to that narrative, is that the
economy is being crashed purposefully to either bring in you know,
to to kill cash essentially, or to cause a revolution.
(54:41):
Within the United States and abroad. Oh, I love it,
you know, uh Iran. Just before the attempted the latest
attemptive Venezuelan coup, Iran went in and cleaned out some
of their gold bars because oil countries are in a
in a fix right now. So this speak of narrative,
this brings us to something that I know a lot
of us were hoping to hear on today's episode as this. Recently,
(55:05):
the current President of the United States made international headlines
when he stated that he had proof, proof positive of
some sort that convinced him this coronavirus did indeed come
from a laboratory, that same laboratory that we mentioned way
back in our first COVID episode. But keep in mind
(55:27):
this contradicts several other findings, including those from some US
departments and intelligence agencies. When asked to describe this proof
or to speak more about it, the President said, this
is this is a quote. He said he wasn't allowed
to uh that, you know there that could be taken
to mean there were security concerns. Right. If there is
(55:49):
something more to this story, it could fundamentally alter our
understanding of the situation. And again, if that sort of
proof does exist. Going public with it could exposed the
US intelligence apparatus at play. You know, spies could get compromised,
people would learn about tech that maybe they weren't supposed
to know about. UM. But that would be that like,
(56:12):
that's the if we're making an assumption, right, if we're
assuming that there is something real there, then that would
be the first reason not to reveal it. But no
one else has confirmed this. There's no second second source
coming out in agreen with it at this point. Yeah,
And I would just say we have seen similar statements
(56:35):
UM like this that appeared that appeared to be UM
akin to, Hey, I've got some really important information, but
I can't tell you about it yet. Yeah, I've got
a I got a girlfriend. You wouldn't know her. She's
in AA, she goes to a different school. She's from Canada.
She's I swear she's real though, she's absolutely absolutely real.
(56:57):
Her name is Tess. And that's not to say that
the president isn't. Maybe maybe he does have some kind
of highly classified thing. But I totally agree with you
Ben about how it's Uh, it seems like it just
seems like a poor move UM in general. And we're
waiting to hear more as that story develops. But again,
to be absolutely fair, if it is true, then that
(57:20):
is a powder keg of a of a development. There,
one last one, one last one. Today, as we've just
sort of skimmed across a wide variety of things, you
may have heard that a book by UH fiction author
Dean Koontz predicted coronavirus, The Eyes of Darkness. Uh. You know,
(57:41):
if you read one of the paperback editions now you'll
see that it's a story about something called Wuhan four
hundred coronavirus, a pandemic that spreads across the world. However,
that's not what it originally said. If you look at
the first printing, it was called gork four hundred, and
they changed it. Yeah, oh, talk about opportunism. No, they
(58:07):
didn't change it to wuhan. Okay, okay, well still still
it's still somewhat predicting it, or at least some clever
you know, copy editor predicted it. He's got a lot
of eyes of books, a name a book called Eyes
of the Dragon as well. Is that that's Stephen King,
I think, isn't it? Now it's Dean Kutz. Let's see,
Eyes of the Dragon is by Stephen King. Your damn right, Ben,
(58:31):
Twilight Eyes? Okay, he made Twilight Eyes? Is that the
only other eyes book he has? I don't know. He's
got a lot of books. He does have a lot
of books. I remember Hideaway, Remember Hideaway, Ben, That was
about a Satanic worship Satan worshiping serial killer, and there
was a movie where Jeremy Sisto played that character. Jeremy
(58:54):
Sisto famously played the unhinged boyfriend of Air on six
ft Under. He's kind of like a cookie artist guy.
He was also in Clueless, I want to say, but
that guy always played like kind of an unhinged character.
But that was an interesting movie. Um, that's so crazy
that they that they changed that. I wonder what their
(59:15):
motivation was for changing the text. Well, originally the virus
I believe in the first printing from eighty one it
was I think a Russian town. Maybe that's incorrect. I
want to say it was a Russian town where the
virus originated. That Gorky Gorky Park is a famous Russian
uh amusement park. I believe that is as a place
(59:35):
you can visit still where Um, it's sort of been
ravaged by radio activity from Drenobyl, I believe. Yeah. Yeah.
So it came out in one it was gorky, and
then when it was released again in nineteen eighty nine,
it was changed to wuhan. So so that's I don't know,
(59:55):
myth busted. It's just it's interesting to think about, Dean.
If it sneen, keep it up, man, Let's let us
know about your next projects, uh speaking, things that are next.
This is this is our show for today, and we
have to leave it to you. What do you think
is going to happen next? Are we going to see
a spike in deaths? Are we going to see a
decline in deaths? Are we going to see that these
(01:00:18):
numbers and the origin story of coronavirus are in fact,
uh fabrications? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna We're
just gonna have revelation after revelation. I'm pretty sure every week,
every day moving forward, and there's gonna be a ton
for us to talk about, especially once all of us
have our iOS or Android devices, letting us know all
(01:00:42):
the people we've come into contact with coronavirus. And and
as it stands right now, I don't believe any of
us have gotten the test, whether an antibody test or
you know, a test to see if we're currently infected.
Because I think in here in Atlanta, we are pretty
lucky that a few places are making those tests available,
and the criteria for getting one has started to loosen
(01:01:04):
in the past few weeks, where you can you know,
that promise that the President made early on where anyone
who wants a test can get a test is starting
to be a little more true, but still not you know,
as true as it maybe should be, I would say,
in a positive and scary thing. Um, waffle houses reopened
in Georgia and Guys. I went to one. I walked
(01:01:27):
into a waffle house and picked up my to go order.
It was pretty scary, but they were actually they were.
It was not crowded, but they were taking a lot
of steps, I would say, to to make me feel
safe as the customer, as well as keep their employees safe.
It was actually it was great. What did you get? Uh?
(01:01:48):
You know all star special? Dude? Come on, it does
with some pecans in it. Baby. Yeah. So uh, hopefully
everybody knows this, but here in the American South, a
waffle house closing down is a huge deal. In fact,
for a while, FEMA unofficially used used waffle house closures
(01:02:11):
as a measure of disaster severity from the waffle House Index.
One last little update, by the way, I don't know
if you guys saw this, but Billboard magazine recently put
out an article saying Missouri governor says concerts can resume Monday.
Missouri Governor Mike Carson has given the okay for concerts
to begin again as early as Monday, as long as
(01:02:33):
UH certain social distancing measures are taken. I don't know
how you do that at a concert properly. That does
seem tough. Well, let's keep an eye on Missouri and
see what happens in the next two or three weeks
with it. And we also want to hear what's happening
in your neck of the Global woods. Let us know
do you think COVID is overblown? Do you think it's
(01:02:54):
all underestimated? And let us know what you think life
post pandemic will be like. You can tell us about
it on Instagram, You can find us on Facebook. You
can talk to us on Twitter where we are conspiracy
stuff on Twitter and Facebook, and conspiracy Stuff Show on Instagram.
If you wish you can find us as individual human people.
(01:03:16):
UM follow our quarantine adventures. Uh. You can find me
exclusively on Instagram. I am at how Now Noel Brown
and until the Black Bag gets me. You can find
me on Twitter where I'm Ben Bolling hs W. You
can find me on Instagram where I am at Ben Bulling.
I'm getting back into painting again. I guess I'll just Uh,
(01:03:38):
it'll be very on brand for me to paint some badgers,
so maybe I'll send those along to you guys online.
Nice And you can always find me at Dean Coont's
official on Instagram. I'll be there just showing you all
the books that I've got, really great books hideaways, one
of them also devoted just check it out, oh hey,
(01:04:00):
and another one about eyes Noel for you my work
from the Corner of his Eye. Thanks Dean. And if
you don't want to find me on Instagram again Dean
Coon's Official. You can always give me a call as
well as the rest of the guys here. Our number
is one eight three three S T D W y
t K. You can leave a message, tell us how
(01:04:21):
you're doing, what you're thinking, something you want us to cover,
something you want us to stop doing there. There have
been a few messages coming our way lately that have
been like, hey, you're pronouncing this wrong. Stop doing that.
So you can do that, that's fine, It doesn't hurt
us that much. Maybe our feelings a little bit, but
we'll be okay. And if you don't want to do
any of that stuff, you can send us a good
(01:04:43):
old fashioned email where we are conspiracy at i heeart
radio dot com. Yeah. Stuff they don't want you to
(01:05:07):
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