Interview with Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson is a writer and reporter.
[Sic] Questions
Contents
Max Raskin: I don't know how I feel about telling you this or if this is the right place to start off, but I have Covid right now…so it's kind of ironic that we’re talking.
Alex Berenson: Are you alright?
MR: Yeah. The right side of my face is congested, and I just feel a little shvach and flu-y.
So you’re the Covid guy and I wonder — do friends and family ask you for health advice?
AB: Yeah — in 2020 and 2021, more frequently. When people were scared of it, sometimes they'd come to me, even though my position in general was, "Don't be overly afraid. Treat the fever, treat the symptoms, but don't go to the hospital. Don't do too much." People would come to me, and sometimes — very, very rarely, but a handful of times — people had serious complications, or, in some cases, they had older family members who died. There were a couple of those people.
Interestingly, there was one guy who had been very anti-Covid and he had a mother with lupus and who was immunocompromised and ultimately did die of Covid. He knew what I was saying and my general attitude towards it, and he emailed me afterwards and he was not angry with me.
So people back in the day would ask for advice. And really, the only thing that worked clearly in 2020 and into 2021 was steroids. Steroids worked in serious cases, and the monoclonal antibodies seemed to work. So I would tell people that.
And I've gotten in trouble with some of my supporters about this. I never particularly believed in ivermectin and I still don't, and hydroxychloroquine clearly can actually be a problem. Paxlovid, I think if you're at high risk, is meaningfully helpful these days, but omicron is so mild for most people. You're talking about a $700 cold medicine that does come with its own side effects. So, I mean, at this point, Covid is a cold for most people, even older people, even people with comorbidities. And so, there's just not that much to do.
MR: Is this still your thing? How do you move on to the next thing?
AB: That is a great question — how do I move on to the next thing? First of all, I still have a large and engaged audience. Now, the world has moved on for the most part. But I think if you are not vaccinated, if you didn't want to be vaccinated and you didn't get vaccinated or if you got vaccinated basically against your will for a job, we have not forgotten. I'm in that group of people. I was not vaccinated.
MR: Are you still not vaccinated?
AB: I'm still not vaccinated against Covid, no. And my kids are not and will never be against Covid. So 2020, I think for most people, was really the Covid year and then 2021 to some extent.
But for those of us who thought it was all overblown, 2020 was a pain in the ass and we wanted 2020 to go by, but it was 2021 when I felt, "I'm really under pressure here." Those people who didn't want to be vaccinated the fall of 2021, wondering if their right to fly was going to be taken away, wondering if I was ever going to be able to go to another country again, wondering if they were going to have to move out of New York State because their kids were going to be forced to be vaccinated to go to school.
That stuff — if you chose to be vaccinated — was certainly not a big deal. You didn't really realize the real slow-motion constitutional crisis that was happening then. But I have not forgotten that, and a lot of my readers have not forgotten that. That said, there's only so many times I can write about that and there's only so much research being done into vaccines at this point and they look increasingly problematic.
I do think it looks like there's some long-term negative health impacts, but it's very, very hard to tease out various drivers of above-average mortality. And the government is really the only institution large enough to do that, and Western governments are not very interested in doing that. So it's very hard to figure out how to move the ball forward in a meaningful way. And so I am still writing about this stuff, but I am also trying to figure out what to do next.
MR: There’s this interesting paradox I see with Covid, and I wonder what you think. On the one hand, a lot of people say the lockdowns were harmful and the risks of Covid are overblown when you look at the data. Then on the other hand, if it's not overblown, it's China's fault. How do you reconcile that paradox?
AB: I agree with both of those. Look, it's overblown in a couple senses — most of the people who were sickened or died from Covid were very, very sick. And you can look at that in terms of the age distribution of deaths. You can look at that in terms of the comorbidities.
Medicare did research, and so many of the people who died from Covid were so sick that they thought they were going to have a meaningful decrease in their costs relative to baseline through 2029, because the people who died were really the very, very high utilization, the very, very high healthcare users. And that's one reason why the US death tolls are worse. It has very little to do with vaccinations. It’s that we have a sicker population. We have a more obese population, but we have all these people.
It was also overblown because nothing we did worked. You can argue about the US and say, "Oh, well, Florida wasn't as good as California," if you're in the lockdown group. Just look at Europe. Europe locked down hard, early, vaccinated everybody they could. The European death tolls in Western Europe, they're indistinguishable from US death tolls. They're a little lower, once again because we have this population of really sick people.
So the only places that managed to keep Covid at bay in 2020 and 2021 were countries that essentially cut themselves off from the world and had really aggressive, idiotically hard lockdowns. And yes, they saved a fraction of older people at great societal costs. So yeah, Covid was overblown, our response to Covid was overblown, and the Chinese are still to blame. That's absolutely the case. All those things are true.
Nothing Works and Everyone Dies so Just Stop Whining and Go for a Run
MR: If someone looked at your life, would they see a life that was basically indistinguishable from a typical New York Times-reading, Upper West Side-living, progressive Democrat?
AB: You mean aside from the work that I do?
MR: Yes.
AB: So my life is, I would say, meaningfully different than that. 10 and a half years ago, my wife and I moved up to the Hudson Valley about 50 miles north of the city. We don't have an apartment in the city. And it's not Westchester. It's not a suburb. It's more semirural than that.
And so I go to Walmart all the time, for example. I have a life that's much more typical American than most of my former colleagues at the New York Times. I drive a lot. I use a lot of energy to heat my house.
MR: What about health or lifestyle habits? Do you do anything quirky like take certain vitamins or something like that?
AB: No, no. And I'm not super organic. Our kids eat at McDonald's probably more than they should. We are not health nuts. My personal belief is that some of that stuff may be marginally useful. But most of it is basically expensive placebos. I joke that if I ever wrote a health manual, it would be called Nothing Works and Everyone Dies so Just Stop Whining and Go for a Run, because, I mean, that's basically it. All you can do is exercise. You're going to get old anyway.
MR: Both my parents are surgeons and they always said — either these vitamins work or we have the world’s most expensive urine.
AB: Right? I mean, that's about it. It's very hard to fix the human. And it's actually amazing that anything works, given the complexity of the human body and given the fact that almost anything you do can have a rebound effect. If I were going to be a physician — and I didn't go that route — I think I would've wanted to be a surgeon, because there's a problem, you address it, you never see that person again, hopefully. But trying to deal with chronic conditions much less, chronic diseases like cancer…that’s just really hard.
MR: What do you do for exercise?
AB: I just do cardio and sometimes I lift. Do you know what Planet Fitness is? See, there's another thing. I don't go to Equinox. I go to the $10-a-month Planet Fitness in the strip mall. That's my life. And it's not like I'm making a conscious decision to be anti-consumerism. This is where I live. That's the gym that's available to me. That's what I go to.
Trump, Biden, and DeSantis
MR: Did you grow up left-wing or right-wing?
AB: I would say center, center-right. I always voted Democrat. I've still never voted for a Republican presidential candidate.
MR: Would you vote for a Republican this go-around?
AB: I've gotten in trouble with my readers for saying it, but I will never vote for Trump. I think Trump is dangerous personally, which is funny because people are like, "Well, you're suing Biden. Would you vote for Biden?" And I say this in Pandemia: I didn't vote for either Trump or Biden in 2020. And in 2024, it'll be the same thing. I would vote for DeSantis, mainly because I think he did a great job during Covid. He stood up. He was really the only national political figure who stood up and said, "I'm not going to do stuff that's not scientifically driven."
MR: Do you care about taxes and guns?
AB: I mean, do I care? Look, I would like my taxes to be lower, like everybody…or almost everybody. The US has a problem with guns. I don't think it's fixable under our current constitutional structure. And I also think this idea that the Second Amendment is a joke or there's no reason for it, that's not true.
I was in Iraq. I was in Afghanistan. Poorly armed people can fight a modern army. Okay? They can. They had more than just AKs, but guns can be a meaningful check on the power of government. Now, they come with enormous problems. There's just no question about that. The US has rates of gun violence that are gross. And now that I'm a parent, now that I send my kids to school, and I know that school shootings are very rare, but they're not as rare as they used to be and they're upsetting to me as a parent. But I don't know how we deal with this stuff.
MR: Where do you get your information first thing in the morning?
AB: I read The New York Times. I read it. Now I read it with a jaundiced eye, but it's still valuable as a source of information. I read the New York Post and I read a lot of medical journals and stuff like that.
MR: What medical journals do you read?
AB: I mean, it could be anything from The New England Journal of Medicine to some obscure, fourth-tier rheumatology journal that has a piece about mRNAs that I'm interested in.
MR: Where do you get your medical news from? Is there a blog or a website that you recommend?
AB: Google Scholar is very good. It's a very good search engine for medical journal stuff.
Going to Pot
MR: So your views on pot are pretty well documented — what about psychedelics?
AB: I think psychedelics are problematic too. I don't think they're as problematic as cannabis basically because I don't think they're going to be that widely used. I think most people, by the time they get to psychedelics, are pretty heavy drug users to begin with.
MR: But there is this new group of people, especially in the tech world, that are “microdosing” that I think are not getting into it through the typical pathway.
AB: It's not a good idea. It's just not. But my hope basically is that it's not going to be as big a problem as cannabis.
MR: Have you ever experimented in psychedelics?
AB: I have not. I just don't have an interest in it. People have asked me to debate this issue and discuss it, and I tell them the truth, which is I've not looked at the research. So my gut is that, in general, legalizing or encouraging the use of drugs that cause people to have psychotic-like experiences is not a good idea, but I haven't actually done the work.
And it was interesting on Twitter, a few weeks ago, one of the big researchers and I engaged briefly, and I said, "I appreciate you're doing these clinical trials, but don't you have a problem in that the people who sign up for the trials are basically looking to use?" It's not a really random sample of people, and he said, "Yeah, we know that's a problem. We try to account for it." He answered at least.
On the other hand, the pot research is just complete nonsense. It's just crap.
MR: What do you mean by "it's just crap"?
AB: It's not seriously conducted. It's conducted by people who really wanted cannabis to be legal and wanted to pretend that it was medicine…"Oh, pot can cure cancer." No, it can't. Just stop.
MR: And what about helping with anxiety?
AB: Oh, no. It is a terrible drug to give to people who have moderate psychiatric conditions, because it causes rebound anxiety, for example, when you stop using it, and it causes withdrawal. The only people who should be using cannabis are people who don't have any psychiatric problems, and even they should probably be using it moderately. But to pretend that it's a good psychiatric medicine, it gets you high in the same way that cocaine could be an effective antidepressant in the short term.
And when I say short term, I mean two weeks. Drugs that cause euphoria in the short term are going to make people feel better. It doesn't mean that they're good long-term treatments for anything. But the psychedelics, it seems to me that the people conducting this research take it more seriously and actually want to know if there are ways that the therapy can help.
The problem is, and you saw this with cannabis, that gets turned into, "This is medicine. This has medical benefits. I don't need to use it under a psychiatrist's care or a therapist's care. I don't need to microdose once every three months and then take an inventory of how that was. I'm going to use ketamine every weekend and I'm going to go out and party." This potential medical use gets turned into basically an excuse for recreational use. So I'm not hopeful about psychedelics, but I think cannabis is a bigger problem.
Regrets and the Afterlife
MR: Do you have any religious practice?
AB: I’m a Reform Jew. I'm probably a little bit more observant than most Reform Jews because most Reform Jews are completely atheistic.
MR: How are you raising your kids?
AB: I married a non-Jew who actually was going to convert and then decided, "You know what? I don't want to do this." So she didn't convert. Our kids, I would say, are even more weakly Jewish than I am. So I feel sort of sad about all of this, but that’s where I am.
MR: Do you believe in God?
AB: Do I believe in God? I want to believe in God. There are some times that I've felt, possibly in the presence of God or that there is a God, but I think it's hard to be a rational person and see the last 100 years and believe too strongly in God.
MR: What about the afterlife?
AB: I try not to think about it. We’ll find out, right? We'll all find out.
MR: Do you have any hobbies?
AB: I like to hike. I like to play chess once in a while. I like to read. I don't have any particularly interesting hobbies.
The other thing I do is I play poker, and I play pretty seriously. I could walk into a casino and certainly have a hope of walking out with more money than when I walked in.
MR: What do you think makes you a good poker player?
AB: I have a good mathematical mind and I'm an asshole.
Obviously I say that I'm joking, but people on Twitter say I'm an asshole. You can find terrible things written about me that I didn't care about the people who were dying from Covid.
I think if you're too nice a person and too softhearted, you can't play poker for money, because you're taking other people's money. So you have to be willing to be a bit of a jerk. And as people will tell you, I can be a bit of a jerk.
MR: Is there anything you've said that you regret? Where you thought you went too far?
AB: There have been one or two times that I said something I regret. I got into it with a guy named Jamelle Bouie, who is a New York Times columnist. This was early on in April 2020. And he was talking about how he was in Georgia and I said something like, “Oh, well, I wish I could get a haircut, but I'm in New York.” And he said, "Oh, well, my grandfather died of Covid, but I'm sorry you didn't get your haircut." So thus, I looked like a complete asshole as I had been making fun of him and his grandfather died. And I did not know that. If I had known, obviously I wouldn't have engaged with him, but that was one where I didn't come off particularly well.
MR: Flip side of that — are you more proud of your Covid work or your pot work?
AB: That's a good question. We're now four and a half years out from Tell Your Children, and I think that book held up really well. And I think it's actually made a small but real difference in the debate around legalization. I think it's made people more aware that this issue is real. So I am proud of that book.
Pandemia is a good book, but it's less scientifically driven and a little bit more personal. So if people are going to read one bit of nonfiction that I wrote, I would tell them, Tell Your Children and judge for yourself whether it seems like I know what I'm talking about.
MR: And what about blog posts? Is there one piece on Covid particularly that you're the most proud of?
AB: That's an interesting question. I would have to go back and look, as I've now written hundreds of Substacks.
In some ways, the very first real piece that I wrote on Substack, which was in June 2021, about the death of a young woman, a college freshman named Simone Scott from myocarditis. That piece was really reported.
It's about a young, innocent girl who died after and probably as a result of the mRNA vaccines. That's a tragedy. She was at very, very low risk from Covid, essentially no risk of death from Covid, and she should not have been vaccinated, and she died. And so, that's a piece I'm proud of. I think that piece holds up.
The Naked and the Cancelled
MR: Was there a moment for you when you felt like you got canceled?
AB: Well, two. So early on, in April and May of 2020, there was a lot of heat on me, and Vice was writing a story about me, and I think Vanity Fair was writing a story about me. And they approached me and I was like — look, I know these people. They don't like what I'm writing, but I'm going to put them in touch with people at The New York Times and I'm going to put them in touch with the editor of Tell Your Children. I'm going to show them, like I'm a real reporter. I've always held myself to a high standard. That's what I'm doing now. And yeah, maybe sometimes my tone on Twitter is aggressive, but I know what I'm doing as an investigative reporter.
And the pieces that got written took no account of that. Literally I can show you the email — I tried to get these people to interview people who I'd worked for and they did not care. And that was my first realization that this game is rigged…they do not care, they just want to call me a grifter. Back then this was particularly ironic because, obviously, no one makes any money on Twitter. Now you can have these little subscriptions, but I wasn't making any money.
And then the other big cancellation was when Twitter banned me. So Twitter banned me in August of 2021 completely against their own rules. I sued them. Everyone said the suit was going to be a joke and dismissed. It was not dismissed. That was in April of 2022, and my lawyer said to me that we're going to get a lot of publicity about this. I said, "James, we are not going to get publicity about this." Nobody wrote about it.
But strictly from a business point of view, the fact that I survived the motion to dismiss was important, but those stories were not written, and it was framed as “Berenson just survived on this very narrow ground.” Yes, true, but even a very narrow ground can be important, and this was important.
And then July 2022, they let me back on. Twitter settles with me and lets me back on. They put out a statement saying they should not have banned me. And again, nobody writes about it. So that's when I knew.
That was a big deal. Again, if only from the point of view that there have been hundreds of these lawsuits against these companies, and nobody had ever gotten back on as a result of suing. So strictly from a man-bites-dog point of view, that should have been a story. And because people hate me so much in the mainstream media, they didn't write it.
MR: But you started your career in mainstream reporting. I’m curious — who were your mentors when you were starting out?
AB: I liked my first editor at The Times who was a guy named Glenn Kramon, and the deputy business editor when I left was Winnie O'Kelley. They're both very good and I was happy to work with them. I wouldn't necessarily say I had somebody early on who guided me, but those were good editors at The Times. Also, Larry Ingrassia, who was the business editor when I left the Times, and Jon Karp, who now runs Simon & Schuster and actually published my first non-fiction book, as well as The Faithful Spy, my first novel and Tell Your Children. So Jon has had a huge impact on my career.
MR: And are there any books you'd recommend about writing?
AB: The best way to learn how to write is to read All the King's Men, which is a novel from the ‘40s. That is a great novel about politics and journalism and being cynical. Some of Norman Mailer's books, The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night. Some of the new journalism from the '60s and '70s is excellent.
MR: What’s it like going on Tucker Carlson and getting a huge audience?
AB: I wrote about this when Tucker got fired. I don't agree with him about everything. I think he's always been honest with me. When I came on, he never said to me or his producers never said to me, "We want you to say X or Y." They let me say whatever I wanted. I think he's an interesting guy.
There are four or five people in all of the United States who spoke out, who had a real voice. Tucker was one, Joe Rogan was one, Elon was one, and DeSantis was one, and I guess you could say Kristi Noem was one.
MR: What do you think about Jonathan Haidt’s work on the dangers of social media and smartphones on Gen Z?
AB: I mean, using social media isn't particularly good for anybody. I don't know how we get out of it. There was this cartoon where a woman is talking to her daughter and it's like, "All the money comes out of the computer. I spend all my time on the computer. I get all my information from the computer." The computer is basically God. Right? And that's sort of how it is for me. My life is built around my laptop, and my Substack helps pay our bills. And I'm on Twitter a lot, probably more than I should be.
MR: Do you have any good apps on your phone you like using that you’d recommend?
AB: The only app that I've discovered that's pretty good for me is the BravoPoker app, which is live, real-time game updates so I can know if I'm going to go to a casino how many tables they have opened.
MR: What's your next crusade?
AB: I'm just going to try to keep writing what I think is interesting. I posted on my Substack on Unreported Truths asking what I should be writing more about. Different people had different points of view, but a lot of people were just like, "Look, we read you because you pursue stuff that's interesting to you and you try to tell it straight and you know sometimes that we're not going to like it." Certainly, a lot of my readers are big Trump fans. They know I don't like Trump much. And so what I took was, "Just keep doing what you're doing." So I'm just going to look for stories that I think are, to coin a phrase, unreported truths.