Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Ivermectin Episode

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Robert is joined again by Jamie Loftus to continue to discuss Ivermectin. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast. That's a podcast legally is a podcast. As opposed to whatever. Get her with that, Jamie. Whatever. There's no getting around it. It's a podcast. Absolutely. This is a podcast where a man in an animal onesie depresses me over Zoom. A man in an animal onesie who also bragged about eating fresh grapes during our little break. I kind of liked that though. Yeah. What is a lanai? Watch the golden girls, Jamie. It'll catch you up. Oh, wait. What do you say that? I do know what it is now. Yeah. Wow. Wow. That's good. That's good. Golden girls, you know, people say they learned nothing from golden girls except, you know, amazing sex tips. I learned a lot about golden girls

from girls. You did? What's the biggest lesson you would say you learned from the golden girls, Robert? Is it always in your grapes on your lanai? If you've killed somebody and you need to get rid of the body, you don't want to use a normal hacksaw, right? You want to use, like, ideally, like a reciprocating saw of some sort. And then the other problem you're going to have, right? You can't just chop the body up and then deal with the pieces. Shit's going to spray. So, you're going to have to cover a wide area. That was a hilarious scene. I didn't learn that from the show, but I did learn that from one of the golden girls when we killed the man together. Oh, good. I learned that from the jinx. That's another perfect murder in the jinx.

Well, it really is. Speaking of murder, do you want to continue talking about this topic? Oh, yes. So, Jamie. Yes? What is a podcast? Oh, what? Oh, well, it's when a series of sort of charismatic, but maybe not that charismatic group of charlatans sell you a mattress. Oh, Jamie, I'm glad you brought up mattresses because oh, good. Casper mattress has a new offer, right? Now, really? The only way to get a mattress? Is it finally the mattress that eats your ass because I've been waiting for it? That's exactly it, Jamie. It is the mattress that eats ass, whether you ask for it or not. This mattress doesn't ask for consent. It just goes for it. See, that I, it just goes for it.

It just goes for it. There's so many scenarios where that is going to be a problem. Well, Jamie, if you want the mattress that asks for consent before eating your ass, then you want a purple mattress. That's the purple. The purple mattress has consent checks. I've heard that the Casper just goes for it. Just goes for it. Now, here's the thing though. What? What? The purple mattress, great at consent checks, can't talk about emotions. The Casper really emotionally open and has access to pretty good ketamine. The purple mattress is cheaper, but you will have to pay for it in terms of dragging it to therapy. You're definitely not going to get it to therapy easily. Again, the Casper has access to cheap

ketamine. That's the great thing about capitalism though, Jamie. If you want a mattress that eats your ass, you have a choice. That's what makes this the best system in the world. I'm really glad that we got this sorted out because sometimes there's just questions that you know that your friend will be able to answer for you, but you just don't really know how to start the conversation. I can't call text you saying which mattress eats the best ass. There's one answer, but we have choice. That's what's beautiful. In Venezuela, you're lucky if you get one mattress that eats your ass. We're very lucky here. We get to choose our ass-eating mattresses. You know what else we get in America, Jamie

Loftus? What is this metaphor? What? Joe Rogan. Yes, now I see what you're saying. Joe Rogan. Yes, yes, yes. You get a choice too. You can either listen to Joe Rogan, give you inappropriate healthcare advice, or you can just not listen to him and be quietly affected by everything he says because his influence is so great that even if you don't, like him personally, epidemic rates that will affect you and potentially derail your life will still, I don't know. Here's a clip of Joe Rogan announcing that he's tested positive for COVID-19. Got tested and turns out I got COVID. We immediately threw the kitchen sink out at all kinds of meds, monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin, Z-Pak, prednisone, everything. Oh yeah, keep

it on a loop, baby. This is, God, also from, why is this a thing with Gen Xers that it's like, everything is from the least flattering angle possible? What is that? What is the up angle? You know, the more... It's so easy to catch a better angle. Yeah, but the shittier the angle, the more it looks authentic, I guess. Yeah, oh, that's how Joe Rogan tells us he's one of us. He's one of us. He's one of us just with an extra hundred or so million dollars. Jamie. Sick. Yeah. If you're a person with a reasonable grasp on observable reality, you will note that Joe Rogan there specified that he'd used his rich person powers to take every available treatment. And some of those treatments are real medicines. Monoclonal antibodies

absolutely do some shit. Now, there were almost certainly unnecessary to him because it sounds like he may just have had asymptomatic COVID and maybe all he needed to do was self-isolate for a little while, which he did do, I think, but monoclonal antibodies probably not necessary for him. But if you have, actually do get sick, can be very helpful even life saving. On the other hand, the data suggests that hypermectin probably doesn't, again, not solid solidified yet. We may find that there's some treatment case for it yet in the future, but certainly not the same amount of evidence that there is for monoclonal antibodies. Now, being a healthy guy with access to the best health care on the planet, Joe was always likely to survive COVID without much of an issue. And

again, he may have just had an asymptomatic case or mostly a symptomatic case. But because he took ivermectin alongside everything else, his example is going to spur huge numbers of people who can't afford monoclonal antibodies or round the clock medical observation, but can afford to go down to the fucking feed store. And that's again, part of the problem, right? This is how the intellectual dark web launders deadly misinformation. Because if you were to hold Joe's feet to the fire on this, he would say, well, look, I didn't say take ivermectin if you're sick. I said, we're going to do all of the different things. You know, we tried everything. We tried all of the different medications. And if question, I'm sure he would also explain that his ivermectin was

prescribed by a doctor and that there are doctors like the FLCCC who will advise taking ivermectin even as a prophylactic. He also took treatment alongside a yada, yada, yada, yada. But again, a lot of the people listening are either just kind of here that he endorsed ivermectin or of all of the things he listed, the only one they can afford is ivermectin. It's great. So yeah, it's good, Jamie. We're not good. Again, this is why the world is doomed. So the intellectual dark web or IDW is a term that was coined by a guy named Eric Weinstein to describe himself and a loose alliance of other right wing thought leaders who generally pretended to not be right wing. The IDW is so embarrassing. You came up with your own name for what you and your dumb

fucking friends are. You piece of shit. That's like naming your banned corn with a K. No, except corn rocks. Yeah, corn does rock. No hate to corn. I got nothing against corn, either the food or the band. So it's an embarrassing name. It is an embarrassing name, but whatever. So it's Bono. I mean, Jesus Christ. So it's God's Mac. Oh, I heard God's. Fuck that. Yeah, that is pretty embarrassing. You know what? Anyone with a banned name, it's if you think hard enough about it, it gets embarrassing. I think Jamie and I agreed. The concept of music is cringe. Honestly, I'm glad someone said it. Yeah, because I don't appreciate art. Die alone in a small room. Come on. No one asked about your feelings.

Bjork. I'm kidding. I worship Bjork. Bjork rocks. Oh, Jamie. And she didn't need, and she didn't need to. She just goes by her name versus corn or God's Mac. Jonathan Godsmack has as much of a right to his name as Bjork has to her. That's true. They're of the Boston God's Macs, I believe. Of the Boston God's Macs. Kind of when I have a kid and name it God's Mac now, just to have to say that shit. So God's Mac Evans. God's Mac, get down here. Because I've never listened to one of their songs, and I know that would be a lot of people's first question. No. Oh, see, maybe that is why I've been put on this earth is to spread the good word

of God's Mac. It's because they're from Massachusetts is that how I know who they are. So my uncle would bring us to their concerts. Yeah. You know what's not from Massachusetts is the intellectual dark web. So that's actually a relief. IDW started out, I think, around 2018 by branding itself as a reaction to and a rejection of authoritarian left-wing trends. They defined these as cancel culture would be a big one. Respect for trans people would be another big one. The fact that groups of marginalized people get angry when you question whether or not they're, you know, deserve rights. The fact that people get angry at that is authoritarian to the IDW. So Barry Weiss, who used to be with the New York Times. Not Barry Weiss. Yeah. She's

the one who popularized the term intellectual dark web for a 2018 article for the Times and ever since the luminaries of the IDW have positioned themselves opposite the left on every conceivable social issue. Now, I don't give Barry Weiss credit for much, but in that first article on the IDW, she did identify what would come to be a problem with the intellectual dark web. Quote, I share the belief that our institutional gatekeepers need to crack the gates open much more. I don't, however, want to live in a culture where there are no gatekeepers at all. Given how influential this group is becoming, I can't be alone in hoping the IDW finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth seeking. Spoiler, they would not.

Oh, Barry. That's our Barry. Oh, just kidding. I don't, I can't stand her. Okay. Yep. That's a lukewarm take. And it's, and it's barry. But that's okay. You know what? You know what? I could. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck it. So Eric Weinstein, who named the IDW, is the Managing Director of Teal Capital. So he's a real, real upstart truth teller, really on the, he just manages billions of dollars in wealth, you know? He's an insurgent. He's an outsider. He's not like the rest of us. He has a billion dollars. He's not like those rich journalists working for, I don't know, slate. He's not like other girls. So Eric has a brother named Brett. And Brett also is a member of the IDW because nepotism. Brett is a former evolutionary biology professor from Evergreen

State College. He got famous when he resigned in 2017 over the school's yearly day of absence. In years past during the day of absence, students of color had left campus to have conversations about race and equity. But that year, they asked white students to leave campus instead, and Weinstein complained. He said this led the intolerant left to bury him in death threats, which made the campus unsafe for him and forced him to resign and sue his former employer. He received a half a million dollar settlement. Nice. Good stuff. Real honest wages. So Brett operates with his wife, Heather, the Dark Horse YouTube channel, which is probably the primary non-medical source of a rational ivermectin exuberance. That's just words, Thrommer. You

can't just say those words in that order and expect me to think something. I can and I have. Oh, okay. So Brett and his wife left on the anti-parasitic drug as soon as the first studies into its efficacy were released. Like the FLCCC, he started off by pointing out that he had a history of being right about important COVID facts that the medical establishment had been wrong about, namely wearing a mask. You remember when we were out of masks and doctors said it might not be necessary because we didn't know much about it at that point? Well, Brett Plains, he was right about that. Who the fuck knows? It's not like masks were an option for most of us. We were cutting them out of fucking t-shirts, Brett. Right. Anyway. Yeah. I'm going to quote next from Vice.

They began promoting ivermectin this spring and interviewed Corey on their podcast in early June. Corey claimed that public health bodies are ignoring the potential uses of ivermectin in the fight against COVID-19, perhaps deliberately, striking the same conspiratorial tone that often arises in conjunction with flimsy medical claims. He speculated that a World Health Organization committee was told they can't come out of that room with a recommendation for ivermectin. Corey and Weinstein both agreed that COVID-19 vaccines are being promoted at the expense of other treatments, seemingly for the benefit of the same sinister days whom they imply, control the WHO and other health agencies. Another podcast featured Weinstein literally taking ivermectin on air.

We are not going to make any recommendations as to what you should do, Weinstein said, shortly before doubting the drug. And we are not going to say anything conclusive about what the data say because the data are not themselves conclusive. However, it doesn't mean the data don't imply things. Robert, I fear that our medium is the source of all of society's current ills. Well, social media, our medium is part of it. Social media is really what got the ball rolling before podcasts were, because this is also on YouTube where he's doing this. It's like, it's all part of it. Podcasts are part of it. YouTube is part of it. It's this whole, you know, Barry Weiss talks about the gate. There were too many gatekeepers. And the problem is now

there are, there's no such, there's no gate. There's nothing at all. You just pick the facts that are most convenient to you. And then you get increasingly violently agitated when reality doesn't line up with those facts. And so you attack the Capitol and start storming school board meetings and threatening to murder school administrators who demand people. I think that there's still gates, but the gates are far tinier and very easy to knock over. So it's like, there's one person to each gate and so you could just walk up and they're like, yeah, come on in, whatever. Like there's no institutional gate. Not that I'm advocating for an institutional gate, but in this case,

there were problems when it worked that way too. It's not like, I'm not saying like, oh, we need to go back to the good old days when Walter Cronkite was the entirety of news, you know? Right. When there was one source of news, of course not. The fact that there is a massive, that you can make millions of dollars if you just wait until somebody makes a vague suggestion that a medication might be helpful and then tell them to eschew all proven medications in favor of that and then claim that you're being silenced by medical authorities when doctors say what you're saying is a bad idea. And that way you make huge amounts of money. That's bad. Yeah, you should have to be able to like prove what you're claiming if

you're claiming to be an authority. I think, I don't know. I don't know what the long-term solution is and I don't think we'll find it, but maybe it would be something like, okay, well, you told a bunch of people to take ivermectin and not get vaccinated and these people died, so we're going to shoot you in a field. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, in Minecraft, of course, but I see what you're saying. So, Weinstein went on in that episode to claim that neither he or his wife had been vaccinated, quote, because we have fears as we have discussed at length on this podcast and that given the apparent effectiveness at ivermectin and ivermectin at preventing COVID-19, why would he bother taking the vaccine? Cost benefit for me, it makes sense.

So, when Vice asked Heather and her husband which reputable scientific sources they followed on ivermectin, Heather responded like a truly gifted grifter and as a connoisseur of grifters, I have to give her a little clap for this response, quote, we are not following any particular experts. That isn't what scientists are supposed to do. We have been in continue to read the scientific literature as it emerges. The one exception to this is with regard to protocol for using ivermectin as a prophylact against COVID-19, which is listed on the website for the frontline COVID-19 critical care alliance, an organization of doctors of which Dr. Corey is a leading figure. So, we don't, we aren't following any experts, but we are only listening to this one guy and

taking this medicine because he said to. It's good shit. Sure, sure. No, that's solid, solid. This is like absurd, okay. Now, after, it's good stuff. After Brett took ivermectin live on air, Heather claims she and her entire family begin taking it as a prophylactic. At one point, Brett Weinstein acknowledged that his advice might stop people from getting vaccinated, quote, they could well contract COVID-19 when they otherwise would not have, they might die. That's not a responsibility I want, but it's I feel it's one I must take on because the analysis that matters is the net analysis. What is the best policy from the point of view of reducing the number of people lost to this disease as opposed to lost to

adverse reactions to vaccines? So, that's bad, but it is Brett acknowledging, again, that he knows he's going to get people killed. It's him claiming, of course, that net he's getting less people killed, but he fucking knows what he's doing. Right. That's, that's, I mean, I guess that's not even really tripping me up logic-wise because it's abundantly clear that this, that this group is aware that this is a risk the entire time. And I feel like that is like in the case of Joe Rogan, one of the only things that is preventing him from falling off the edge of a cliff is he will never acknowledge that he knows that what he is doing, that hundreds of millions of people consume every week has a demonstrable harm. And if he admits that,

then the game has kind of changed a little bit for him. But the fact that he would admit it, like Brett, I mean, would it would admit that he's well aware of the consequences of his actions in public that easily is like, just speaking of the consequences of his actions, Jamie. Oh, do tell. Oh yeah. Oh no, we'll be, we'll be getting to the consequences of his actions. But you know, so Brett has more than 562,000 followers on Twitter and 351,000 followers on YouTube. One of his followers was an English man named Leslie Lawrence and note that I said was very on Facebook. Oh no. Leslie regularly shared Brett's content. Underneath one post, wherein Leslie shared one of Brett's videos, he wrote quote, and this is this is Leslie.

Ivermectin has been around for 40 years. There have been more than four billion doses administered in that time. And its risk profile is extremely well known. Frontline doctors across the world have reported that it is not only safe, but extremely effective in successfully treating COVID-19. Yet its use is being suppressed and blocked by every single government that is within the purview of big pharma. And the mainstream media is exercising a media blackout, aka censorship regarding its existence so that the sheep never get to hear about it. Shortly after that, he posted a video announcing that he had caught COVID-19 and that he was glad of this because the virus was nothing different from a normal illness. And the potential risks of the vaccine were not worth it.

Days later, his family found him dead in his home. God, I mean, it's like, do you need a more one to one analysis of what this guy's rhetoric is doing? That's, oh, that's like, that's fine. That's negligent homicide. That should be punished the same way as hitting somebody with your car when you're wasted. But we reward it with lots of money. No, instead, he makes a bunch of money. In a larger platform than ever before. It goes on Joe Rogan's show. And yeah, look, I'm not, you know, I'm very critical of a lot of, like, the revolutionary fantasizing among some sections of the left and the up against the wall, bring out the guillotine's part. But yeah, so can bring out the guillotines. Let's do it. It's like,

that's the right thing for Brett. There are some clear cut examples of like, well, that situation calls for a guillotine. You're, you are knowingly getting people killed for your own personal benefit. And I don't really care what happens to you, Brett. And it's not even, he can't even, like, and there's names to the faces and he knows the names and he knows the faces and he doesn't give a shit. Like that is just horrific. Anyway, let's have a Nuremberg for disinformation. And like the actual Nuremberg court, most of the guilty people will get off scot-free and later wind up working for NASA. And then someone will make a movie about it. And that will lead to Joe Rogan designing the

first successful Mars lander. Joe Rogan is the Werner von Braun in this art. Yeah, what? Sorry. You want to see the spaceship that Joe Rogan makes? Do you? I mean, is it possible to make a bigger, like, penis complex than Jeff Bezos is? I would like to see Joe Rogan try. You know, I don't think that Joe Rogan has that same particular issue that Jeff Bezos has. What do you think his problem is? He has a lot of problems, but he strikes me, I don't think he's insecure. That does not strike me as Joe Rogan's issue. Clearly fucking both Bezos and Musk are. But I think Joe Rogan is, I think Joe Rogan would have been a perfectly banal, perhaps even positive influence on society if we had never developed the internet. He would

have been, he would have been great at, you go in to watch a bunch of sweaty guys punch each other and Joe is an entertaining announcer. And that would have been fine. He would have been living off of fur factor residuals and like living in Glendale for the rest of his life. Yeah. And we wouldn't have known the difference. No. And you could say, oh, I like Joe Rogan. And people would say, oh yeah, the guy who made people eat bugs, he was funny. And that would be the end of the motherfucking conversation. If he had stopped at bugs, I would have no complaints and no no problems whatsoever. I love when people eat bugs. It's when you start spreading disinformation to hundreds of millions of people to the point where, like you were saying, even if you don't

give a shit about him, you can't escape the consequences of his actions, which he claims is free thinking. I just, I'm getting all sweaty like a Joe Rogan, just thinking about it. I can't stand it. Jamie, you're so shiny right now. Oh my gosh. I'm so shy. I'm sorry. All the blood is at the surface of my skin. And that's why that's happening. Well, you know what won't make you sweat. It's going to be going to be some weird, weird thing that will make you sweat as the ad. But yeah, I mean, yeah, we do actually a lot of our kids. Like if you're taking if you're taking dick pills, they will cause things that will lead to sweating for sure. You know, fair enough. Sex works. And if you take a Honda Odyssey, we're sponsored by Honda. Are we? Does a Honda Odyssey

eat your ass? By how hot it is. Yes, it will, Jamie. Okay, just checking. The Honda Odyssey will eat your ass. Oh my God. Sorry. It does ask for consent. But unlike the Casper mattress, it does not have a good canopy. Well, yeah. Short at your own discretion. All right. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on

protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one

that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system

today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. We are back and talking about shit that's none of your goddamn business. None of you. That's what we talked about during the break. What are you doing

frying into our personal lives? How dare. God damn it. I told you once, listener, boundaries. Come on. Boundaries. Look, I'm open. Break down those parasocial walls. Come over to my house. Poison me in my sleep. That is why we get out your address. Please don't poison Jamie in her sleep. She's like one of four people that I really like. You can find my address in the show notes. It's the only show note we still publish. Has Jamie lost his address in a series of recent photographs? Come to the duplex I live in. There's no air conditioner and it's very hot. But please don't. Please. You'll notice, Jamie, that we haven't played any clips from Brett's YouTube videos. This is because YouTube has started removing his content that discusses

ivermectin in vaccines. A week or so before I wrote this, Weinstein tweeted, YouTube just demonetized both dark horse channels, wiping out more than half of our family income. Their message dropped the science and stick to the narrative. Or else. So a bevy of right wing and generally oppositional defiant thought leaders spoke up in Brett Weinstein's defense. These included Matt Taibbi, whose recent turn has really bummed me out being a fan of his earlier work. Matt wrote an article titled, Meet the Censored, Brett Weinstein. Quote, as detailed in Why Has Ivermectin Become a Dirty Word, Weinstein is on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent casualties to a censorship movement that it's hard not to see as part of a whiter evergreening of America. He's

referring to the college that Brett left because he was being a baby. Oh, he went to evergreen? Yeah. That's where he got, he had to resign from because he didn't want to walk out during, anyway. He made nothing into a big deal because he's a fucking baby, like all of these fucking people. Yeah, that's the MO, right? You know what happens when people ask me to do stuff I don't want to do? I just quietly go don't do it and I don't make a big deal about it because why would you? You don't want to leave campus during the day when they ask the white people to leave, just keep doing your thing. Fuck it. You don't have to make a big deal about it and it'll go away. It's fine. You don't have to make everything. You don't have to be a baby about everything,

but if you are a baby about specifically things that the left does, then you'll make millions of dollars becoming a right wing thought leader, which is why he's done it. He doesn't believe anything. Fuck all these people. Thought leader is such a meaningless term. I just, yeah, every element of this man's being is disgusting to me. Yeah. So Bill Maher also came to Brett's defense along with, of course, Barry Weiss, Glenn Greenwald and bitch hero. She's on Bill Maher all the time. Bill Maher is the most effective Republican working today. It's incredible at it. And it's so funny because Barry Weiss in her first article in the IDW is like, I hope they get a handle on grifters and people spreading misinformation. But of course, when they actually do that,

she defends them to the fucking hell because she's also like, wait, not the grifters I like. Makes 800 grand a year writing shitty sub-stack articles about how canceled she is. No, is read by these. None of these fucking people actually suffer consequences. They just whine about the consequences. They're not suffering because they're fucking babies. I fucking hate all these people. So Ben Shapiro blamed Brett's demonetization on the increasingly sensorious left. Weinstein took to Odyssey an alternative YouTube replacement for canceled people. But the reality is that he has not been at all censored. YouTube's policies on Ivermectin are extremely liberal, as this quote from Weiss makes clear. And I think this is by Anna Merlin. She's done a lot of the

best reporting on the Ivermectin stuff. I like her stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I like her a lot. Quote, Weinstein's tweets called the YouTube decision an assault on science. But according to YouTube, even materials that advocate for the use of unproven COVID treatments like Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine would be allowed. So long as there's some nod to the fact that medical and health authorities worldwide don't currently recommend them as a COVID treatment. Ivermectin is an anti parasite and has been widely and safely used in both humans and animals for that purpose for decades, among other things. As an example, the company pointed to a January video from Dr. Mike Hansen, an internist and pulmonologist who said he was cautiously optimistic about Ivermectin

as a treatment option, but acknowledged that the studies conducted on it up to that point weren't numerous or necessarily high quality. So you see, Brett was not demonetized for being a truth teller. He was demonetized because YouTube's policies, you can say, hey, Ivermectin might work. You can even, you can even tell people things that might lead most of them to take Ivermectin as long as you're saying, hey, this isn't proven yet. And the studies are very much inconclusive, right? There's, you can talk about Ivermectin, you can talk about Ivermectin research. You can't say it's a wonder drug that works better than the vaccines because that's a fucking lie that'll get people killed, Brett, you fucking idiot. He's not an idiot. He's very good at making a lot of money

in a very specific evil way. No, it's like he's, he knows exactly what he's doing. Like, okay, cool. He's very cannily manipulating the information ecosystem in order to make a profit, and he is, he does not care that it's killing people. And he never will put him through the large shredder. That's my best guillotine idea. I've been saying it for years, the largest shredder available. I think actually what you should do is exclusively let him hang out in a room with his biggest fans, make him live with them. And he has to listen to all of their opinions, no matter how long-winded they are, which they all are, of course. And he has to get COVID from them. And he has to let them cough on him. So again, Brett is claiming to be censored and shit. He

was not censored. He broke incredibly permissive policies that YouTube had set by literally stating on air that Ivermectin was quote, something like 100% effective at stopping you catching COVID, which it is not. We may find when conclusive results come in that Ivermectin has a medical case use for COVID-19. There is a non-distinctly non-zero chance of that. Perhaps even a decent one that it has specific uses in treatment. It is not 100% effective at stopping you catching COVID. It's just not. You know why? Because some of the people who listen to Brett Weinstein are dead now. So of course, Brett is now doing the canceled truth teller circuit. Barry Weiss compared him getting demonetized and having videos removed from YouTube to a book burning.

How have we gotten to the point where having conversations about important scientific and medical subjects requires such a high level of personal risk? How have we accepted a reality in which big tech can carry out the digital equivalent of book burnings? And why is it that so few people are speaking up against the status quo? Also, by the way, Barry Weiss and Brett would all have been huge fans of the original Nazi book burnings because those were deliberately targeting the healthcare of trans people. Anyway, Joe Rogan has acted as a significant amplifier of Weinstein's nonsense. In an episode with comedian Dave Smith, Rogan said that he'd been listening to Weinstein and Hying's advice on Ivermectin. In the same episode, he said that COVID vaccines weren't

necessarily for most people and that getting them was just virtue signaling for a lot of us. If you're like 21 years old and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I'll go no. Now, in his defense, Rogan later called himself a fucking moron for this, which is to be fair, an unequivocal statement of fact that that was a stupid fucking thing that he said. The problem is that, again, 100 million people listen to those fucking shows. How many of them made healthcare decisions based on what you said earlier and maybe didn't catch the other thing? I found Jordan Peterson tweeting about Ivermectin stuff and he's tweets both the positive and the negative studies. Guess which one gets twice as many likes and retweets?

Dude, look, I say this as a comedian. Don't fucking listen to us unless there's footnotes, unless there's shit that is demonstrably, but I don't know. It's just not true. Why would you trust someone who makes a living monetizing their opinions? That's the worst instinct possible. It drives me up a wall. Anytime someone, they're like, oh, comedians are the philosophers. They're not. No, they monetize their opinions that are kind of funny sometimes. I like Bill Higgs too, but you know what? He also had a three-minute bit about a 12-year-old girl's genitals. Maybe we shouldn't have listened to any of them that much. None of it age as well. It's by design, not based in fact, unless they're working in some other fucking capacity.

The problem is that humor has... Obviously, Joe Rogan doesn't know what he's talking about. It's in his job description that he states his opinions for money. I wonder to what extent Jamie, you and I both worked at Cracked for different periods of time and in different checks. We both cashed him checks from the old place. A big part of Cracked's business model was getting people to pay attention to fact-based articles to learn things by wrapping them in comedy. Boy, howdy. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wonder, did that do more harm than good in the end? Because obviously, we weren't doing this kind of shit. We're not giving people health care advice about telling them not to take vaccines. But the broader trend of like, well,

it's the same with the John Stuart stuff, right? The Daily Show where it's like, well, this is quote unquote, better news than the real news. It's like, well, no, it's not. It may be better news than what talking heads on like 24-hour news channels give you. Sure. It may be better than like different news anchors. But also what they're doing is a journalism. They're just reading from a fucking prompter about actual journalism. That's a different brand of monetizing your opinions. The problem is so broad and it's not a right wing problem. The right wing has monetized it most effectively and used it most effectively to derail human civilization. But it's a human problem. And part of the problem, like fundamentally a big part of the issue is that like, if somebody

makes you laugh, you'll listen to them because we like to laugh. Sure. Like, sure. I mean, we're beneficiaries of that principle. Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's definitely people who think that I know things that I do not know. I am a legitimate recognized expert on two things. One of them is how extremist groups use the internet to recruit and radicalize people. And the other is how not to die while taking weird research chemicals that you bought off of a Canadian pharmaceutical website. And anything else that I tell you, I'm not an expert. You can ask me about Kathy Comics and you can ask me about the history of Chuck E. Cheese animatronics. Anything else? Well, I'm Mensa. And I wouldn't even say that I'm like an expert

on Mensa. I have experience with them. I've researched them, but I can't claim to be the main expert on that. That's a very large issue that I don't have full knowledge of. Jamie, you saying that has made me decide to make you my primary healthcare provider. Now, how much cancer should I have removed? Because I feel like some of it's good to keep, right? You want to have some in there just so you don't get lazy, right? Well, I like to think of keeping some in there as a memory. As a memory. Yeah, the science of memories is very under researched. And I would say that I'm an expert in memories. You want to keep your physical ailments in you just about like two or three

percent. And you do run the risk of them growing and hurting you. But wouldn't you be sadder if you lost the memory? Absolutely. See, this is the kind of hard hitting medical advice that podcasts were invented to give. It's so frustrating that this is happening. And at some point, I feel like Joe Rogan has reached this level of cognitive dissonance where he has to tell himself that it's not causing the clear harm that it's causing. Because it's too late on his career trajectory to start backpedaling it that he's platforming really dangerous people and has been for basically the entire run of his show. I wonder how much he thinks about it. Because I fucking do a lot, Jamie. And I try not to, I don't give people health care advice,

unless I'm literally reading, here is the medically recognized advice here, like with a vaccine. I'll tell you to get the vaccine because there's an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that it saves lives. But there's stuff like we did a Bill Gates episode, right? And I fucked up a fact in it, which was this circumcision program that I still think has some kind of gross under tones. But I was wrong about a lot of the negatives of that. And I kind of got, I found the source that was not, that I should have vetted more properly. And I recorded a correction. We put it up in the episode. But by God, there's still people who will like make jokes about that part of the episode that make me think they didn't catch the correction. And that is, I think,

minor compared to telling people not to get vaccinated. But it's still like, it should worry you if you do this. Yeah, I mean, it's it is. And I feel like the nature of, and this isn't even a criticism of Joe Rogan. I mean, it's like the nature of podcasts and the nature of a lot of whatever, like, I can't think of less, like a worse term on the planet. But like, content, creation in general, is that there is such a pressure on people to release so much so quickly that it's like, it's inevitably there's going to be stuff that isn't carefully vetted enough because of the capitalistic demand for there to be more and more and more of it. And it's, I mean, the amount, I mean, if you just think of the sheer amount of information and just like,

stuff that Joe Rogan releases into the world in a single week, there's no way that it could be properly vetted. There's not enough time to properly vet a show like that. And it's like, well, then maybe there's an issue with how it's being done. But there's such a clear incentive for him to do that, that maybe that makes it worth the cognitive dissonance that he's clearly hurting people. I don't know. It's just a real problem, Jamie. I mean, I don't know. This is like the biggest moral quandary within my my own life, my own personal ethics, like I'm way less worried about the ethics of me personally driving a fucking car that burns gasoline than I am worried about the ethics of like, we got behind the bastards got like five and a half million downloads last

month, right? And then another one point. Okay, bragging, Robert. Well, but I'm saying like 14 downloads last night, something up. And depending on what you fuck up, it can permanently alter someone's the way people think about the world. And I'm not trying to be arrogant there. I have people talk to me about the influence things that I've said have had on them. And I think it's generally been positive. Like it's often someone being like, I was, you know, on the outright or whatever. And like tonight. And so I feel fine about that. But like, you don't actually know what impact you're having on all because maybe it's more subtle for a lot of people. Maybe you say something offhandedly that is inaccurate. And for whatever reason,

it causes someone to make a choice they wouldn't either wise have made. And maybe they're not even aware of it. Because when you're producing content at that kind of scale to that kind of that many people, I don't know, we should all be more concerned about what we're doing for a living, I guess. I agree. Yeah, I mean, it's like, we're, we're certainly like not above this criticism in any way. It's something that like, I think about all the time where it's, I mean, we're, we're above it in that neither you or I are pretending are giving people advice on taking unregulated and unapproved medications to treat a pandemic. We are better than them. I will say that. Yeah. We are better than the people that are killing people. But that, but what a low bar

to clear. It's a very low bar. I think about that a lot where it's like, there's times that people have like, I don't know, or just sort of you hear someone's takeaway from your work, repeated back to you. And just like, I've had moments where someone has said something to me of like, well, when I heard that you did this, I was like, Oh, wow. And it was like, well, that's not really what I was saying. That's not really what I was saying, but that's what you took away. And that's kind of the, the risk that you take when you really shit into the world. Like it's just, I don't know. I mean, with the obviously not a new problem, but on this like scale and in this way, it really is a stressful. Yeah, it's made me realize, fortunately,

the most influential people on the planet don't give a shit. So there you go. Yep. So there you go. They don't think about this at all. Unless they're thinking about how to profit from it. So I guess this was a long digression, but I think a necessary one. I want to get back to that episode. Rogan did the emergency episode with Weinstein and Dr. Pierre Corrie, where they talked about how and one of the things they talked about, they brought up a lot of bad science, including the the, what was it, the fucking this one of the studies we broke down earlier. But one of the things that Corrie talked about in that episode was that the virus had been, quote, eradicated in monkey kidney cells in a lab test. And the cells, the kidney cells that they had used are called

varrocells, which are used by virologists in research, including some early research into hydroxychloroquine last year. But as Wired reported in 2020, increasing evidence suggests that varrocells actually might be a terrible thing to use for studying treatments to coronaviruses in this way, quote, human lung cells contain at least two different enzymes that can help the virus sneak through their membranes with varrocells. However, only one of those modes of entry is available. And it turns out to be the one that hydroxychloroquine will block. Pullman and his team published the results in the journal Nature on July 22nd. For him, it's a clear example of why using human lung cells is really important in studying this pandemic virus. Varrocells

should be handled with caution, Pullman says. It's true that the varrocells are very popular, but unfortunately for this particular aspect of COVID-19 research, they are absolutely not useful. I think this is now clear to the field. And that's again part of the issue. What Corey saying isn't a lie. You couldn't prosecute him for it or like take his medical license. It's true that there was a study where they eliminated COVID-19 in monkey kidney cells in a lab test using ivermectin. The problem is that when you actually look in varrocells in their use in COVID-19 virology research, they're very flawed. And that's not what you're getting in that fucking Joe Rogan episode. And it's a thing that, I don't know, it's very frustrating. In conversations with

Rogan, Weinstein pushed the extremely successful line of claiming that ivermectin is being suppressed as a treatment because it's not profitable. You have a drug that's good enough to end the pandemic at any point you wanted. Who decides to prioritize business interests ahead of that? I find it hard to imagine. He speculated that the pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the system of approving new drugs and that because there's no profit to be made from ivermectin, it's being ignored or smothered. Now, during their emergency episode discussion, Dr. Pierre Corey backed Weinstein up in this line of reasoning claiming no one is going to fund pharmaceutical trials around ivermectin. No one, he said, is championing ivermectin except for my little group of nonprofit doctors.

Can't say they're not nonprofit. I'm not really it. My little group of nonprofit doesn't mean they're not making money. That's how nonprofits work. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. Okay. Yeah. That was yet another sentence that gave me a migraine. Okay. Also, what he said is just objectively untrue. A lot of people are funding pharmaceutical trials around ivermectin. A study from Spain was published earlier this year that showed no difference in outcomes as a result of ivermectin use. Oxford University just announced that they would be studying ivermectin as part of a massive study on COVID treatments. There have been a bunch of studies on ivermectin, which are very have a lot of disputing different kind of results to them, but it's not being ignored.

It's being studied. You're just demanding that people come to a conclusion about it before the actual science is there because you're a grifter. Now, it's worth noting that the main manufacturer of ivermectin has also warned people against taking their medicine from COVID. They recently announced that their own product has, quote, no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical trials. No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease and a concerning lack of safety data. And I'm not one to go to bat for big pharma, but they have a profit motive in they would make a lot of money by pretending otherwise. Yeah. It's like, I don't even think it's going to bat

for big pharma to say that the fact that it was this serious of an issue that big pharma like gave up a check, like what else do you need to hear? Please stop taking our horse medicine for COVID. Right, right. They don't do that very often. They're not one to pass on a check. We've talked about the FLCC and the Intellectual Dark Web so far, but there's one last bad actor in the ivermectin story that I should probably explain, an organization called America's Frontline Doctors. These cats came onto the scene in July of 2020 when a group of them gave a press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court, urging people to take hydroxychloroquine. They claimed that the mental toll of the lockdowns was worse than the virus, which by that point had killed several

hundred thousand Americans. While the FLCCC started their public careers by making serious medical claims that wound up being very valid, the AFLD was bogus from the get go. They timed their coming out speech to coincide with a major push President Trump made to convince governors to reopen states. The basic idea was that hydroxychloroquine was all the medicine American needed to reopen. This was patently absurd and the medical community responded accordingly. From time, quote, to the extent that the mainstream medical community paid attention to the group at all, it was to point out that these doctors making the statements lacked the expertise to comment. There was no evidence that any of the doctors who spoke that day had treated patients

severely ill with the virus, according to MedPage Today, a peer reviewed medical news site. None of them were infectious disease experts or worked in intensive care units during the pandemic. One was best known for promoting bizarre religious beliefs, including tweeting that American needed deliverance from demons sperm, because people were falling ill from having sex with demons and witches in their dreams. Two of the frontline doctors talk about Joe Rogen, two of them were ophthalmologists, only one of which was still licensed. No. Yeah. So again, FLCCC, these are more credible doctors. But just because someone says it's an organization of doctors, dig a little deeper. You know who else were all doctors?

The guys prescribing people in LA, marijuana back in the mid aughts. And most of them were day drunk while doing it. They were not doing medicine. They were giving us access to pot, which is fine, but it wasn't medicine. Which is, yeah, it's a victimless crime, but yeah. So the quote from time, the emergence of AFLD was a coordinated political effort months in the making. The group was the brainchild of the Council for National Policy, a secretive network of conservative activists. During a May 11 call of C&P members that was leaked to the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group, members complained that Trump was being slammed for his handling of the pandemic, including failing to follow

scientific guidelines. The group needed their own medical professionals to promote their message, they said, in the face of data showing two thirds of Americans were wary of restarting the economy. So very much an astroturfed sort of thing to justify a reopening, you know, at the cost of people's lives. Nancy Schultz, a Republican activist, had spoken up during this call and hinted at the existence of the AFLD. Quote, there was a coalition of doctors who were extremely pro-Trump that have been preparing and coming together for a war ahead in the campaign on health care. And these doctors could be activated for this conversation now. Again, it's all out there. All of this is public information. Obviously, yeah. They're talking about,

they're talking about this like they're fucking like deep frozen Marvel heroes that they could be activated for a, that's just, yeah. But you know who is a deep frozen Marvel hero, Jamie? Who? The products and services that support this podcast all crash landed into the Arctic while trying to, something to do with World War II, right? I don't know. Do they have good butts? Do they have good butts? Amazing assets. Incredible assets. We're talking about Chris Evans here, right? Yeah, we're talking about, we're talking about the butt from above. Exceptional assets. Look, nobody's, you know, there's a lot of scientific debate about Round Ivermectin and no debate around Chris Evans's ass. No, that's a, there's some things

that bring people together and Chris Evans's ass is one of those things. Yes, exactly. And a cure for COVID-19, anyway. Robert. What? I don't know. I mean, I guess it's spreading the rumor that Chris Evans, what would you, just his ass, like, you know, I don't want to destroy his ass for fake science. Well, Jamie, the good news about Chris Evans's ass is that, I don't know. I don't know how to continue this joke. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the

little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good, bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow

to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, obviously, we're back. And obviously, scientific evidence eventually made it clear that hydroxychloroquine is not a miracle cure. We got our vaccines, Trump lost the election, and the virus kept mutating because a bunch of people refused to wait to get vaccinated before going out in public and all sorts of things to get vaccinated. Anyway, whatever could happen. Likewise, the AFLD continued to shift and change to offer effective disinformation at every stage of the pandemic. At the start, the group's leader, Dr. Simone Gold, had focused on the danger of the lockdown and minimized the deadliness of COVID.

Once hundreds of thousands of people were dead, she pivoted to claiming that hydroxychloroquine could save lives and end the pandemic. The AFLD's videos were regularly shown on info wars, and the group partnered with a right-wing conspiracy theorist named Jerome Corsi to sell prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine via a sketchy telemedicine site. In January, Dr. Gold took part in the January 6th insurrection. The AFLD sent emails to their donors begging for urgent and generous donations to withstand such aggressive assaults from the ruthless enemies of free speech. They raised nearly half a million dollars for Gold's legal defense. The AFLD spent the spring and early summer engaging in predictable grifts. They held

a national RV tour, which sold VIP tickets for a thousand bucks a pop to meet Dr. Gold. Complaints on the Ella AFLD Telegram channel make it clear that these appearances were regularly cancelled at the last minute. One user in Cleveland wrote on June 22 that, hundreds of us registered and received no information or cancellation notice, to which the AFLD monitors responded that events could, quote, continue only when everyone donates what they can monthly. Just a fucking grift. With the luster off of hydroxychloroquine, the AFLD focused its messaging on just being anti-vax for a while. They called the vaccines experimental biological agents and blamed them for 45,000 deaths. All of this was pretty bog standard stuff, and the AFLD was honestly languishing a little

behind the pack in terms of COVID disinformation until Ivermectin came onto the scene. When it did, the AFLD turned out to have the best infrastructure in place to take advantage of it, because they had this telemedicine network. They had these deals with companies, with pharmacies and whatnot through a telemedicine network to prescribe people hydroxychloroquine, and they were able to just pivot that shit to getting people prescriptions for Ivermectin. And they had 160,000 followers on their telegram channels to sell shit to, quote, from time. Two pharmacists told time they were alarmed when they noticed an odd surge in Ivermectin prescriptions called in by telemedicine doctors in recent weeks. We're calling it the second

coming of hydroxychloroquine, one pharmacist in Maine says, noting he had seen prescriptions come in from quack telehealth prescribers in Texas, Florida, Illinois, and California. It's wild to me and other pharmacists I've talked to how people won't get a vaccine that is well tolerated and effective because it's experimental. But they'll take a dose of Ivermectin that's been extrapolated based on weight from equine veterinary guidelines. On social media, AFLD is one of the top organizations steering customers to the de-warming medication as a coronavirus treatment. On its website, people looking for COVID-19 medicine are told to click on the link labeled contact a physician and pay $90 for a consultation. The link takes customers to another website, speak with an MD,

where they're asked to submit payment information and told that one of the frontline doctors will call them within a few days with sick patients being prioritized. The group described speaks with an MD. This is the same process that you like get your dog to be able to go on a plane with you. It's literally an emotional support dog system, whereas you're just give someone $100 and then you get to do what you want for basically no reason. Or to not have to pay or to like get your dog into a building. Or to get dick pills, you know, which is fun. So the service they use is called Encore Telemedicine, which is one of a bunch of different services that purports to connect patients to doctors who can write prescriptions. A lot of perfectly legitimate

services do this. I've gotten prescriptions for allergy meds and the like renewed this way. But the doctor I do telemedicine through is also a real doctor that I've visited in person. Since 2015, Encore had, well, yeah, my doctor offers you can do like follow-up visits and stuff via Zoom and stuff during the pandemic. And so it's like, hey, I believe you're visiting a real doctor. Yeah. Yeah. For that, I'm visiting a real doctor. When I went ketamine, I go to a Mexican veterinary, well, actually usually just a feed supply store. They sell it at OTC over there. Robert. Do you want some ketamine, Jamie? Do you want some K? Not today. I mean, give me a couple weeks. You have to lie and say your friend's dog has nerve pain.

It works. I don't know. You're doing what all those boys in high school tried to do to me. It's funny because I went with a friend. He tried to get ketamine first, allegedly. And they wouldn't sell him ketamine because he's like tattoos his own hands and just looked like the kind of person who was trying to buy drugs from a Mexican veterinary store. And I just like memorized how to say, I think it was, mi amigos, pero estelores de nervios, ketamino, por favor, which crudely means my friend's dog has nerve pain. Can you give me some ketamine? And by God, it worked every time. That is, how can you get medicine for your friend's dog? That makes no sense. Fine. You know what, it works every time. I know you didn't care because you're

just like the boys from high school, Robert. Allegedly. So anyway, since 2015, Encore has been run from a golf club in suburban Georgia. So not a real doctor. About as legitimate as my ability to get ketamine. Allegedly. Prescriptions written from Encore go through Ravku, a digital pharmacy in Florida, whose address time describes as quote, a dilapidated white structure by a strip mall. Ravku calls in prescription orders to local pharmacies. Sounds like a fake name. Like either fake name is even bad. Ravku. It's good shit. When the service switched over to selling prescriptions for ivermectin time notes, their telegram channels filled with complaints about the service, quote, many users call the arrangement a fraud. Still no drugs as described have not

heard from their pharmacy. Very disappointing, wrote one user on telegram August 1st. They took my money though. Definitely feels like a scam. That same day, another frustrated customer wrote, you tell us the vaccine producers are getting rich off us. Seems like you are doing very well yourselves. Yeah, maybe follow that line of thought, buddy. Other supporters who had been promised they speak to AFLDS trained physicians were upset when the doctor pressed them to get the vaccine during a paid phone consultation. Not happy at all with that. But one woman who said her doctor's telemedicine doctor had told her to get vaccinated in addition to prescribing ivermectin. I felt I could trust them not to push the vaccine. Severely disappointed. He's giving you the drugs. Like come on. Dozens

of messages reviewed by time were from people with sick family members who were begging for AFLDS to escalate their cases. A woman named Cynthia, who had paid the fee $90 is a lot for us, she said, wrote that she had never been called back. Please help. My husband is sick and it looks like he does have a hard time breathing. Moderators for the AFLDS group on Telegram have tried to claim that issues with the service are the fault of the CDC. Do they say have carried out a blockade on ivermectin? When clients complain about failing to receive services once their physician fee is paid, AFLDS claims that this is out of their hands, quote, because of HIPAA. But there is no blockade of ivermectin. The simple reality is that all these groups have so thoroughly fucked the

information ecosystem around COVID that people have bought up every pill, dip, and paste bottle they can find. While Joe Rogan and others like him get the prescribed human version of the drug, desperate people who believe the FLCCC or AFLD or Brett Weinstein often wound up self-medicating with fucking sheep dip. And this brings us to Facebook. Of all the things we've talked about, most of the ivermectin Facebook stuff is not a grift. It's the result of guys at the top, like Dr. Corey and Weinstein, spreading vaccine distrust and vague bullshit about ivermectin and institutions like the AFLD being unable to provide prescriptions for most of their clients. A lot of people who believe this shit are too poor to use these services anyway,

so they turn to veterinary medicine. And because they're trying to figure out how to use it right, they want advice, they can't afford to use any of these other services, they get on Facebook groups. These are not... There are grifters in these groups. There are people who like scan for just like what random medications people are telling you to take on Facebook and then buy them up to sell them and stuff. That does happen. But most of these people just think they're protecting their family and are very bad at vetting information. So there's a shitload of these ivermectin Facebook groups. Some of them have tens of thousands of members, more pop up every day. Vice did a solid investigation where they looked at several of these groups and quote,

in another group with more than 2000 members, an administrator focused Wednesday on updated protocols from the frontline COVID-19 critical care alliance. The FLCCC, the administrator wrote, is as of this week advising people to take two to three times as much ivermectin as it had previously recommended for early treatment of COVID. Members of the group studied charts and attempt to find out just how much they would need to squirrel away. And yet another group, which has 26,000 members and promotes itself as a medical team, a user who had just tested positive for COVID asked for help. I tested positive this afternoon, day two of symptoms, she wrote. And I literally cleaned out my pharmacy supply of ivermectin and I only have enough for two doses

until Friday. I'm one pill short of each dose for my weight. Basically, I have to skip a day and I can only have one dose accurately weight-based until I get more on Friday. Should I take one full weight-based dose and one less than weight-based or two equal doses, both the same amount? Either way, I have to skip a whole day, which is disappointing. Users advised her to front load her dosing for maximum efficacy. Facebook's rules officially prohibit this sort of thing. You're not allowed to sell fake cures for COVID or make claims that are unfounded COVID treatments, but the reality is that the sheer size of Facebook makes moderation impossible and they don't really try. When Vice brought specific groups up to Facebook, those groups were removed,

but ivermectin aficionados keep creating new slang terms to use for the medication in order to evade sensors. We saw this with like the boot glue boys going big igloo or whatever, right? It's just how this shit works. In these groups, people don't just provide each other with advice on how to acquire and take ivermectin. They provide emotional support for what they believe is an unfair crusade against what Dr. Corey calls a wonder drug. Quote, help a person posted to a Facebook group laying out the particulars of how a family member hospitalized with COVID-19 was being treated with oxygen, antibiotics, steroids, and expectorants. He's going downhill fast. They're not willing to give him ivermectin.

Why do hospitals not allow treatment of ivermectin? I still can't wrap my mind around it. Another distressed person who described their father being hospitalized with COVID-19 posted to a Facebook group. Is it straight up money? Later, this person updated their post. I just talked to the doctor with all the bad news. I asked him about ivermectin. He said the words that will haunt me forever. Ivermectin is a quack. This fucking doctor trolled me as he's telling me my dad is dying. Oh, my God. That's so dark. It's rough shit. Now, when taken as direct to Jamie, ivermectin is actually a very safe drug. If you are taking it the way it is supposed to be taken and taking it for human purposes.

Yes, it's a very safe drug. But many of these people are just buying horse paste and taking crude calculations. Again, like the FLCCC just tripled how much they recommend you say. Overdoses of ivermectin are becoming increasingly common and have a variety of side effects from blurred vision, dizziness, hallucinations, lung issues, comas, and seizures. According to the CDC, there has been a 300% increase in calls to poison centers this year and a five-fold increase from the baseline in July. And most of that is believed to be resulting from ivermectin use. In Mississippi, at least 13 people called poison control after taking ivermectin in a single month. 70% of those calls from people who ingested veterinary forms of the drug. After I finished this episode,

there were new articles. One, patients overdosing on ivermectin are backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals and ambulances from News 4. Dr. McElias said that patients are packing his eastern and southeastern Oklahoma hospitals after taking ivermectin doses meant for a full-size horse. The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims are having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and treated. So that's fucking cool. And there's another one. It's just... Yeah. Ivermectin poison control calls increase in Minnesota amid COVID-19 pandemic. Sorry. I won't even read a quote. It just keeps happening. It's everywhere. It's increasingly common. Yeah. And the fact that this is even happening... I mean, it's just... I don't know.

The Facebook group posts, those are so fucking stark. And in order to even... And I guess I'm speaking strictly to Americans specifically or people from rich countries that have plenty of fucking vaccines, that it's like this... In order to be engaging really firmly with that kind of stuff, you've already been sold and convinced of several bills of lies. The ivermectin thing is several layers deep in things that you already needed to have believed in order to get to the point where this would be sold to you as an idea of hope and an idea of handling disease. It's just... God, it's terrible. It's terrible because it's like... I don't know. With stories like this, it always... It's hard because it's like they're whatever. People are firing off tweets that are objectively

funny about shit like this. But then when you hear comments like that and you hear specific things, those... It's just like several layers of coercion and desperateness that lead to the way people are acting and putting themselves and their families at risk. It's just fucking awful. It's horrible. I mean, one of the most fucking things I learned. So I just mentioned blurred vision is a common overdose side effect in ivermectin. Because of this, a lot of people in these Facebook groups are now telling each other that you know it's working when your vision gets blurred. That now people are giving themselves river blindness. Yeah, it's amazing. I'm not going to go in and read these, but there's a lot of reports of people

pooping what they think are worms and now they're convincing themselves like, oh, I've got parasites and what's actually happening. We talk about this in the Bleach Drinking Church episode where parents are force-feeding bleach to their autistic kids to cure it and they see that they're passing all of these. They're full of parasite. They're passing these worms. It's intestinal lining. They're shitting out the lining of their intestines because they put so much poison into their fucking bodies. Without oversimplifying... It's horrible. As I'm talking about... Yeah. I don't know. A lot of what we were talking about in part one and also now is like it to me and I'm not an expert in this in any way, but it seems like a lot of the issues with

autism anti-vaxxers was that they read a bunch of bullshit studies that were not proven and were later redacted, but it didn't matter because the damage had already been done and it's like that same exact pattern is present here. Yeah, and when that study gets redacted, that's just proof that the deep state... That's censorship. Yeah, censorship. Anyway, Jamie, how you feeling? That's the episode. Oh, man. Demolished. How are you? Oh, pretty good. I think I might get back out onto my lanai, pick a couple of tomatoes. Oh, yeah. Well, as long as you're on the lanai consuming your produce, then I think that you'll be fine. I've got to go. I've got to go take 500 brain pills and sweat in a freezing cold room. That sounds like a great idea. Sounds like the show really

gave way. Yes, yes. It's the new golden standard for all comedians. We have to do it. Or we'll never work in this town again. This town being Austin, Texas, of course. The only town, in my opinion. Jamie, where can the good people on the internet find you, other than Austin, Texas, where you are no longer allowed after? I was banished. I was banished. Listen, I sweat too good. For good reason, to be honest. I sweat too good. I posed a threat. You can listen to ACKcast. That's my podcast about the history of Cathy Comics and 20th century American feminism. You can listen to the Bechtel Cassie. You can listen to anything you want. It's not my business. You can follow me on social

media if you can find me, that is. Listen to all of Jamie's shows. Just do it. Hey, listen to all my shows. I think they're great. I'm not biased. Yeah, listen to Jamie's shows. Sophie hasn't produced every single one of them, even a little. And check out my upcoming appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, where I give you advice on how to learn how to drive with your eyes closed. Because, you know, big pharmas trying to convince people that you need to look at the road like a cuck, but real men close their eyes and look, Luke Skywalker didn't need his eyes to blow up the Death Star. You don't need your eyes to drunk drive down to the 7-Eleven to get more white cloth. Damn. Look, on that note, I'm going to go let my mattress eat my ass. Live your truth.

Thanks. Oh, this is, I'm at Coolzone Media at Bastard Spot. Okay, bye. Bye. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to

go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts.