Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 600 Part B

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

Thank you! Through persistence, never surrendering, and a disregard for our 1 star reviewers e have made it to 600 episodes. It's your fault and we thank you for it. Make sure to follow Cara Santa Maria https://twitter.com/CaraSantaMaria   Seth Andrews https://twitter.com/ThinkingAtheist   Marsh and Andy https://twitter.com/MrMMarsh   https://twitter.com/merseyskeptics   https://twitter.com/inkredulosi 

Today's show is brought to you by PaintYourLife.com. Text the word COGNITIVE to 64000 for 20% off your first purchase and free shipping. And today's show is brought to you by AdamandEve.com. Go to AdamandEve.com right now and you'll get 50% off just about any item. All you have to do is enter the code word GLORY, G-L-O-R-Y, at checkout. This is Josh, aka Stone Banana. From my divorce last year,

my dad just dying from COVID, and all the insanity between, you guys gave me a reason to laugh. And I'm so grateful for those live streams because it gave me something to look forward to every week and a way to return that favor. Congratulations on 600 and I hope to hear 600 more.

Hi Tom and Cecil. Congratulations on your 600th episode from David in Edinburgh. Still remember the pleasure of meeting you and the Puzzle and the Thunderstorm guys on that fateful evening in Edinburgh. I had a pleasure. I don't think everybody else did.

All the best from Scotland. Congratulations on 600 episodes. This is Amanda, the motor from Scotland. Congratulations on 600 episodes. This is Amanda, the motorbike lady. I've been listening for probably 14 years. I joined in for the sharp, insightful rhetorics and dick jokes, and I stayed for your intelligence and unwavering compassion. I hope you get to Melbourne someday. I'd love to buy you a coffee.

Hello, Tom and Cecil and Ian. Happy 600 episodes and a big hug from Santiago de Chile. Tom, Cecil, congratulations on 600 episodes from Alfred in South Carolina. Met you guys at ReasonCon. Glory hole, you motherfuckers. Hello, Ian. guys at ReasonPod. Glory hole, you motherfuckers. Hello Ian, I just want to congratulate you on 600 advertisements for Adam and Eve, whatever that is, and your excellent Thursday night livestream. I've been a patron and listener

for almost over one day now, so keep up the good work. Just one small point, I don't understand why you have the other two guys in your videos. John Pearson in Ireland. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence

to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at this. This is episode 600B. 600B. We decided to skip. No, we're going to keep 601.

601 will be next. 601. We're not going to. I'm not going right to 602. We're not going to go. No. We're splitting these two episodes up. I can barely count as is. Into one big episode.

It's one big giant 601, 600A and 600B. This is the finishing. This is the finishing of that last week that we started. We're going to be doing more interviews this week. A lot more fun to be had. We hope you guys enjoy it. So we are joined by Cara Santa Maria. Cara, this is our 600th show, and we want to invite our favorite guests that we've had in the last 600 shows.

We were so excited to have you back on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. That's so sweet. Favorite guests. I mean, you were like number eight, but still, I mean, I'm not going to... Top 10, bitch.

Don't take it. Don't get too excited. I mean, it's still this show. At the end of the day, I'm not going to. Top 10, bitch. Don't take it. Don't get too excited. I mean, it's still this show. At the end of the day, it's still this program. Admittedly, we've only had like 10 total guests on the show. It was names out of a hat. Let's be honest, Cecil. It was names from a hat.

Well, that's true. A lot of people after the first time they came on said, we'll never go back on the show. I mean, it's a diminishing population for sure. Right, for sure. For sure. Kara, so, you know, we're in the middle, still in the middle of this pandemic.

It's funny, we talked to you maybe like six months ago. We're still in the middle of this pandemic, it turns out. When we talk in six months, I think we'll still be in the middle again now. The middle's really long. It really is. Yeah. But in any case,

I just want to ask you a question. So let's say we could rewind time, but we can only go back to February of last year. So just go back to February of last year. We know for sure there's a pandemic coming. We know there's a pandemic coming. What could we do different in February till now to change the outcomes of where we're at? Do you have any idea

what we could have done differently? Well, okay. So we would have had to go before that and not elect Donald Trump. I don't think that there's a lot. I mean, honestly, we didn't have much power. We couldn't have done much differently because even if we, the thing is we knew what we needed to do and we had somebody behind the reins who just refused to do it. So the only thing we really could have done differently is to not have had him there in the first place. I remember in February, I went to Kazakhstan to see a rocket launch at the historic Baikonur Cosmodrome. I went to see a Soyuz capsule launch. I'm not jealous at all.

What? Yeah, I know, right? I'm not jealous at all. I'm so jealous at all. What? Yeah, I know, right? I'm not jealous at all. I'm so super fucking jealous. I can't even stand it right now. Goddamn. First of all, it was really cold. It's crazy cold in Kazakhstan in early February.

But because we already knew that there was an epidemic happening in China, and Kazakhstan borders China. So when I was visiting, it was the first taste of like every airport. There were people in the airports in the full bunny suits, like taking people's temperatures. And for me, it was so surreal because it looked like, you know, the movie Contagion and nothing had happened back at home yet. Like we now know that there were cases kind of circling in Seattle first and then New York. But at the time, we thought it was localized there. So I'm like, okay, I'm in a country that borders were just all being extra cautious. But it was bananas to see how these like public health measures were in place. And then it was even

more bananas to see how long it took for those public health measures to go into place here at home. Well, I mean, you have to admit though, oftentimes when you think of, you know, the first most, you know, technologically advanced nations, we think Kazakhstan. We always, all of us,

it just, it just, it explodes off the top of the mind. Like, okay, who's going to knock this one out of the park first? And obviously, it's Kazakhstan. We actually invited them to be on the 600th show, but they turned us down. Kazakhstan turned us down. And to be clear, you're so, like, in a way, you're so right.

Like, I'm in an airport that only has one gate where the people there are, you know, fully up to speed. They're taking temperatures. Like I said, they're in full PPE. Right. But we have paper handwritten tickets. Like, it's, you know, it's like on the one hand. Well, you know, that does speak, though, that like the bulk of the major public health measures that needed to be taken early on were not technologically driven. They were not technologically driven. They were not technologically advanced. They were essentially the same measures

that we took in 1918 to try to limit the spread of the Spanish flu. So they're a hundred year old techniques to reduce the spread of disease, which is why you can implement them quickly in Kazakhstan, who has a GDP about the size of like lower California. Probably not even. Probably not even.

Probably not even close, actually. I actually picked the wrong state. Like totally the wrong state. Rhode Island, you know. There you go. Yeah, but yeah, it's, when Cecil and I were talking about, you know, kind of what we wanted to talk to you about

for this show, one of the things that we discussed was the idea of vaccine hesitancy and the vaccine mandate. And, you know, I was interested in having this conversation with you because you are a science communicator. And so much of the success or lack of success around vaccines at this point has nothing to do with the technology of vaccines. That question has been asked. It's been answered. We have the technology. The studies have been done. The research is out there.

Yeah, we know they were. And now it's all messaging. It's all messaging. And we're in this morass now. So I am curious. I keep coming back to this. I've got a bunch of thoughts on this. But I keep coming back to this word mandate.

And I'm wondering what your thoughts are around how this is being communicated not in the past because those fuck-ups are old but now but right so you're talking about like like biden's new initiatives to require vaccines for businesses of a certain size and for all federal employees and and statewide mandates that we have as well. California, of course, where I live, it has some of the strictest mandates, which I love. So, you know, kind of going back, one of the things that I would say is that I remember somebody once said to me, and it always really stuck with me, that droughts are sort of a natural phenomenon, but famine is human-made, it's man-made um not to use sexist language but it's human induced and i feel like that's sort of like like covet 19 we had no control over

but the fact that people are still dying from it is um didn't have to happen like this is a human failure and it's not because we didn't act fast enough and it's not because we didn't act fast enough, and it's not because we didn't get our shit together fast enough. It's because there are active people who are refusing to choose the safety of their peers over their own ideology about freedom, about independence, about these kinds of things. And that's the frustration. Yeah. And that's something I wanted to ask you about, because I think we have seen what I would describe as at least a 45% failure of people to act on behalf of others, right? We're 55% vaccinated. We're asking people to act in large part to protect others. And people just don't seem that interested in that.

I mean, if that was the clarion call, it would have been answered by now. I'm thinking, what needs to happen next? I was Googling around a little bit today just to have this conversation. And one of the things I'd read about and I wanted to confirm and I found it is, if you get COVID, you're six times more likely to develop erectile dysfunction. We talk about COVID in terms of deaths all the time. And then people then flout the survivability rate, right? And they don't understand the number, the problem of big numbers.

And, you know, there's all these problems. Risk analysis. Yeah, people are pretty bad at that. But if you tell people, hey, you're six times more likely to get boner problems if you catch COVID. Do we need to change our messaging to be more selfish? Right. And the sad thing is, like, you're probably right because the largest block of individuals who are denying COVID vaccines are like white male Trump voters. Right. And there's that toxic masculinity piece to it, right?

They may actually be sensitive to this messaging. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think about one of the things that, and a lot of this comes from prejudice. It comes from, you know, kind of having a traditional frame that needs to be broken.

But even amongst some of my like educated and progressive friends, you know, I'll talk to them about boosters and we'll have a legitimate ethical debate about whether boosters should be made available in wealthy Western countries before first doses have been made available globally. And a lot of people will argue, yeah, and so, you know, we'll look at the vaccine rate. And I don't know what it is now, but I remember not long ago

quoting that the vaccine rate in greater Africa, so across the continent combined, was only 1%. And people saying, yeah, but there's a lot of distrust in medicine. And there's a lot of, and I'm like that,

all those points would be valid if those people had access to the vaccine. But we're not even talking about that yet. So calm the fuck down. Whereas when we're having a conversation about vaccine access in America, it becomes the complete equal and opposite, which is that the vaccine is readily available and free early on. This was a different conversation in poor communities, in communities of color, by and large, we were seeing that there wasn't the access that was necessary and people weren't able to take off of work to get vaccinated. People couldn't afford to get vaccinated. There was confusion about getting in line. And of course, yes, there was

distrust in these communities and other communities. But now the vaccine is readily available. You can walk to the pharmacy within most neighborhoods. You can schedule time off with your employer. And obviously, there's still going to be some burdens to access. But a lot of those basic problems at the beginning have been worked on by public health officials in a major way. There's been a major effort. And so what we're starting to see is that in black and brown communities, in communities of lower SES, in communities where there's greater distrust in medicine, the vaccine rate is ticking up. But we're not seeing that change in communities that have been poisoned by pseudoscientific rhetoric, poisoned by a true kind of politicization of this issue.

I just got a tweet like literally just a few hours ago from somebody who said, I'm going to find it because it pissed me off. And I quote tweeted it. Just curious, why do you feel the need to announce that you're vaccinated in your screen name? Is it a political thing? Vaxplaining? And I'm like, first of all, that's not even what mansplaining. Like, you need to understand mansplaining. You can't do that.

You can't just put any word there. Splaining gate. You can just give it splaining gate. Right. And second of all, no, I said, I do not think vaccination is political, nor should it be. I am a science communicator. I am advocating for vaccination as the number one public health measure to get the pandemic under control, because we know for a fact we may not be able to eradicate COVID. though. It does have other reservoirs than humans, so it will pop up again. But we also know that if everybody were vaccinated, it would

not be mutating, it would not become more deadly, and we would be able to let our guards down. If we were all vaccinated, we could freaking live normal lives again. I know. Gosh. I know. I know. Just the feeling of being able to do a normal thing once in a while would be

amazing. It's funny too because like at the beginning of the pandemic, I was 100% thinking it's going to be the vaccine that pulls us out of this. It's going to be the vaccine. And I was actually, you know, a very glass half full kind of guy at the beginning of it thinking, you know, this is the whole world is on this.

We have, you know, the best scientists, the best minds are thinking about this. There is, they're going to produce a vaccine. I was confident that they were going to do it. Within nine months, they come out with a vaccine and start distributing it. And I thought, this could be it. This could be the end of the whole thing. And then it was just, then it was the back and forth, literally, between Republican and Democrat in this country on whether or not you should take it. And in fact, last, it was three in fact, last was three weeks ago. And I know this is coming out much later because we're recording this early,

but three weeks ago or something like that, there was a Trump had gotten laughed at off of off the stage when he mentioned that he, you should get vaccinated. Even, even he even can't say it anymore. Like they won't even listen to the guy who poisoned the well. I know it's amazing. It's like, it's taken on this mind of its own. And just the utter irony of like this person who is, was actively poisoning the well the whole time was probably the first person in our country to get vaccinated other than those. For fucking sure he was. Other than those who were in the trials. Right. I mean that, of course we're going to vaccinate the president first. The president has this key position. We need to make sure the president is safe.

Regardless of who the president is, this is precedent. We're supposed to keep the president safe. Even if we hate him with every fiber of our being, we should still vaccinate him. That's a pretty standard operating procedure. So you're right. You're right. It's one of these things where I see, and we've all read the articles, right? And I have a lot of friends in healthcare.

I work in healthcare. As part of my PhD training, I do therapy in a cancer center. And we've seen the sort of exhaustion of the frontline workers who are saying like, it's, it's compassion fatigue who are like, I know that every life is precious. I know that I have to be apolitical in my approach to working with these people, but it's so hard when you're sitting here trying to vent somebody who's actively, and they're saying to you, I wouldn't even get vaccinated now.

And it's like, why am I doing so much to try to save your life when the prevention was, you know, they talk about the prevention that worth a pound of the cure, but this is like not even an ounce versus a pound. This is like a drop versus an ocean. Like it's, it feels futile to a lot of these people because it's like, you clearly don't want to live. And it must be so frustrating because it bumps up against the core ethic of like, maybe this person is so led astray and has been duped so fully and is so vulnerable to this kind of messaging that I

still need to maintain my empathy and treat them with every fiber of my being and hope that they survive. But we've seen this. I mean, I've seen two ends of the spectrum. My mother, who is fully vaccinated, who is, you know, incredibly reasonable person. She's older. She's, you know, in her seventies, she has, um, diabetes. She got vaccinated the minute she could in Texas, even though her vaccine came later than a lot of people in California. Um, she caught COVID because of an unvaccinated family member who did not disclose the fact that they were unvaccinated. It turns out they were positive. They got very sick. Luckily she only got kind of sick, but it was brutal and she was pissed. And then on the flip side, I have a dear friend who refused, not a dear, I should say an old friend who refused to get vaccinated, whose mother refused to get

vaccinated. He's now struggling with symptoms. She's now on a ventilator and I don't think she's going to live. And this is not a story that is uncommon now. You know, this is what people are dealing with left and right. At my work, I love a lot of folks that I work with. It's a big company. And last year, the people that were getting sick and passing away at this time last year were people's grandparents or people's elderly parents. And, you know, this year, this week, we've had three people who lost sisters. So they're, you know, contemporaneously aged to myself. So they're not, they're not 70, 80, 90 years old. We had three people this week, well, in the last week and a half, I should say,

that lost their sisters. So, you know, that's skewing further and further down. that's skewing further and further down. Yeah, because it's A, more contagious. Right. It's a more dangerous variant. We know that now. It is a more dangerous variant. It's also cycled through the population already.

Right. And so we're seeing a twofold reason that younger people are getting sicker and they're dying. And somebody who I'm very, very close to is a physician at a children's hospital. And, you know, I can, somebody who I'm very, very close to is a physician at a children's hospital. And, you know, we have to be very careful because none of those kids can be vaccinated and a pheromone of those kids have COVID. That's often not why they're in the hospital. It's incidental because this thing is contagious. So kids are getting it. And some kids

are getting really sick. Many more kids aren't sick at all, but they're still carrying it. And so it's making it very difficult, like just to live a normal life because there's a huge percent of the population that can't get vaccinated. So you mentioned hospitals here, vaccine. You know, one of the things that's really shocked me has been, you know, in news stories,

and I don't know how common it is, but there's been a lot of news stories about vaccine-hesitant hospital workers, people, nurses, doctors. This is not something I would have expected at all going into this. I think it's, to be fair, I think it's stratified. It's much rarer among doctors than it is among nurses. It's much rarer among nurses than it is among support staff. And so I think that there is at least some correlation with level of education and with exposure to these kinds of diseases. There is some inoculation that comes with education,

as we know. And so, yes, there are some vaccine hesitant doctors and we know some of them are quite famous because they're the ones pushing some of the anti-vaccine rhetoric. The ones monetizing that? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, of course. Yeah. There's obviously an agenda there, but as you get more into kind of actual working individuals, the more likely they are to get vaccinated. It's, you know, it's to get vaccinated. It's tied to education. It's tied to not just education, but knowledge about immunology and epidemiology and virology. And it's also, I think, tied to exposure to COVID. When you've seen what it does to people, it's harder to refuse the vaccine. But for healthcare workers who don't work in COVID

wards and might be working in specialties that are really far away from the front lines, and obviously there's going to be, I don't want to say obviously there's a lower likelihood because there shouldn't be, but there is a lower likelihood

amongst those individuals. Right. Is it time to change our messaging? Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. We should be doing, it takes all types. I don't think it's one Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. We should be doing, it takes all types. I don't think it's one message, one person, one people. It's never, that's never going to work.

So it has to be all of it combined. And I get where Biden is coming from. And I get where Newsom was coming from. And I get the need for the word mandate because at a certain point, it being your choice is not working because you have chosen not to. And so it's now,

okay, you don't want to, then here's what's going to happen. Either you're going to lose your job or maybe we'll be nice and we'll give you the option that sure, you can still go to work if you're not vaccinated, but you have to get tested every day on your dime. You know, today, Pfizer announced that the data back from kids five through 12, today they announced that that's back and it's safe and it's effective and it produces a strong antibody response. And they were saying that in the next several weeks, kids will be able to be vaccinated, right? And so I was overjoyed. I've got a couple of little kids. So I was overjoyed. I was like, this is great news. And the Times article was really good about spelling out like, hey, even though kids are less likely to become seriously ill,

they carry it and they spread it at the same rate as adults is what the Times indicated today. And I was reading that and I was like, yeah, I mean, that's enough. There's a million reasons why I'm convinced. There's a million reasons why I've just been waiting. I try to get my kids enrolled in trials. Let's get this done. Right. So, but you know, when you read through the comment section, which I almost never do, almost never, um, there's so many parents on there who are like, no way I got the jab. I'm not having my kids get it. So many comments, even on the New York times, so many people who are unwilling to take what they perceive as such a high risk. And I wonder, how do we over, because that's inaccurate, right? Vaccines are a low risk proposition

compared to hopping in the car and going on a three-hour car ride. Vaccines are an incredibly low risk proposition. And I'm wondering just in general, how do we fight this perception that vaccines are an inherently high risk proposition? Because so many people seem to have it. It's super hard. Yeah, it's super hard to unring a bell, right? And so we know the havoc that Wakefield wreaked. We know the havoc that Jenny McCarthy continues to wreak, or Wakefield continues to wreak as well.

And it is really hard to unring a bell. And we also know that there are I don't want to say legitimate, but I at least want to say not misguided or how do I even word this? Understandable concerns from parents when you think about the risk benefit analysis of an adult versus a child getting a relatively new vaccine, it's understandable that parents are scared for their kids than they are for themselves. It's understandable that parents who look at their kids and they go, but my kid's not even getting sick. Why would I mean, that's the thing we need to be answering the sort of valid questions that these parents have, which is my kid is more vulnerable because he or she is a kid.

And so I'm afraid of some of the, you know, actual risks that we know exist. We don't want to say that there are no risks of vaccines. We just want to say they're exceedingly low. So because that is the most accurate way to word it. because that is the most accurate way to word it, we need to really be answering their valid concerns instead of saying that their concerns aren't valid. Because, of course, it's scarier. You know as a parent, and I'm not even a parent,

but I know that I'd be much more willing to do something myself than to try something on a kid. And we need to make sure that the messaging is such, and this really what we've learned time and time again, is that the messaging has to come from the doctors. It has to come from the pediatricians. It's the most valued source of information about vaccine. So if we're in a culture where our own medical profession isn't comfortable saying, this is what I would do for my own children. This is the right thing to do. We've sort of, this is kind of neither here nor there. And I don't know if you guys want to get into it, but it's a conversation I often have with one of my supervisors that medicine historically

was very paternalistic. And we see this a lot with the cancer patients I work with. So historically, it was pretty paternalistic and it was pretty sexist. You would go to the doctor, they would say, this is what you're going to do. And if you were a woman, they would say it to your husband and then he would tell you it was insane. And then they would treat you with what the doctor thought was best. And then we sort of swung the pendulum the other way, which I completely and totally agree with, which is patient choice, patient advocacy. But what ends up sometimes happening is that out of fear of misguiding, there becomes this thing of like, well, you have this option, this option, this option, and this option. What do you want to do? As opposed to a real conversation about risk and benefit. You have this option, which I don't think is the right one. And

let me tell you why. You have this option, which based on my medical expertise is probably the most promising. Let me tell you why. And you have this option, which, you know, if you want to really go for that risk, you have that option, but I don't know, you know, if I were in your shoes, but the problem is that a lot of physicians are kind of afraid to speak in those, in those parameters for many reasons, liability reasons. That's how they were trained to that might not be the model at their hospital. But I do think we need to be working against that. And we need to find a more balanced approach to expertise from a medical professional tied with patient advocacy and choice. Both of those things should exist hand in hand.

Yeah, but that's hard to get done in the seven-minute appointment time that you're allotted. You're right. You're right. I'm very lucky. As a psychotherapist, I get to hang out with my patients for an hour at a time. I have the luxury of time. It's amazing. And so we end up often, you know, I can't get medical advice at all, but I can definitely work with them as they're struggling through some of these decisions. But I can tell you, hands down, I don't have a single patient in the cancer center who is vaccine hesitant.

And I work with some very sick people who are like, oh, it seems like a real risk for me to get this jab, but I'm doing it anyway because I don't want to die of COVID. Well, it's that selfishness motive that just seems like overwhelmingly the strongest thing to tap into. Because if you look at the elderly population and compare the rates of vaccination amongst the elderly compared to people in my age group, the elderly are overwhelmingly better vaccinated than people in my age group. So how do you tap into somebody's selfishness?

I think you've got to make them fearful of other things. Right. If they're not afraid of dying, get them afraid of losing their jobs, losing their boners, losing things that they... Right. Losing your healthcare?

Going bankrupt. I mean, losing your life insurance? That's another thing. There's a possibility you could lose that too. We're seeing some legitimate real moral and ethical quandaries coming out of Iowa, coming out of these states where they're having to ration care. Yeah, Idaho. And it's like, who do you triage? If you only have two crash carts or you only have

two vents left, do you give the vent to the person who was vaccinated and who did everything they could? Or do you give the vent to the, I mean, generally speaking, triage is all about the sicker patient. That's how it works. You give the care to the sickest patient. But there is also a question of, do you give the care to the patient who's most but there is also a question of, do you give the care to the patient who's most likely to survive? Yeah. And you know, this is, it's just gross that we even have to be

having these conversations because I'm not being punitive here. I don't want to see anybody die. Right. I don't want to see anybody be harmed. The whole point is that it breaks my heart when somebody refuses a vaccine and then they get sick.

I don't want to say I told you so. That doesn't feel good. There's no schadenfreude there. It's heartbreaking. It's funny too, because there's an article today that I saw in Breitbart where they are twisting the logic to make it seem like the reason why people on the right aren't getting vaccinated is because the left is laughing at them. It's, it's. And they're that fragile? Yeah, no, seriously. It is the craziest fucking article I've ever read.

It's an, it's an editorial and it is, it's, it's one of these things where you have to do so many mental backflips just to get there and just be like, no dude, you did it because Trump said not to. Like, that's why. Right. But there is a point where there is like, there's a doubling down that could exist.

Sure. Although you're absolutely right. They there's, they did it because they chose not to get vaccinated because their, their minds, their brains were filled with misinformation about vaccines and they weren't able to calculate an appropriate risk benefit. But it doesn't help when people also then call them idiots, because much more likely somebody's going to double down than they are going to change their minds and change their views. It's much easier to change your mind if you feel safe in doing so. If you feel like your community is going to be with you and they're not going to judge you. But if you feel like you're going to be made into a laughing stock if you change your mind you're just going to double down yeah the the the right also very much demonized uh the people who were then touting the vaccine before the vaccine came so like we saw memes and lies about fauci well before the vaccine ever came

out they were talking about how he went to school it It was a lie that he went to school with Bill Gates or something and that they owned a thing. It was like this big meme was going around where they were pretending that- They have a tracking device injection factory. Right. And literally like they were planning it years ago in Stanford or wherever they went to school.

And now you're the guinea pig that's gonna get it, et cetera. So they were demonizing him on the right well before there was ever even a chance that there was even a vaccine. And then once the vaccine came, then you've already, like I said, you poisoned the well, you've, you've, you've already said this messenger is a liar. And so now when he comes, you're just like, well, great. Well, like no one's ever going to believe it now. And so like there was, I mean, it's, it's, it's scary how easy it is to manipulate a group of people in this country to kill themselves. But it's also scary how easy it is to blame the victims. And I think one of the things that we all have to be, and I'm not saying you guys are doing it.

Yeah, no, no, yeah, no, it's fine. But we all fall into this. But we all fall into this. And I liken it sort of unto the war on drugs is that it's very easy to poke at the people who are in doing, I truly believe what we should be doing is we should be prosecuting the individuals that are spreading deadly misinformation. Prosecuting them. I couldn't possibly agree more. Absolutely. Because they are actively harmed. And if that megaphone were turned off.

Yeah, well. There would be so much less downstream trauma. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, one of the things, and I won't go too far down this rabbit hole again and again, but like one of the things that is always super galling is there are easy systemic things we could do if we had the political will to do them. Oh, for sure. Yeah, with climate change. I mean, with so many things. We know how to solve a lot of these problems. With this particularly, you know, if you really had real partnership with the megaphones themselves, with the Facebook and the Twitter, if they had real partnerships to create truth, there are easy technological solutions to ban that kind of material and to remove that material very quickly and to remove the people and to report the people to a prosecutorial board.

But there's no systems in place to reward truth because we monetize the exact opposite. We monetize a volume of information. We monetize virality. a volume of information. Yeah, we monetize controversy. We monetize virality and it just happens to be that mistruths

and pseudoscience tend, they just, they have the right ingredients for things to go viral. And you're right. Like,

I think the thing to remember is that there will always be that kind of QAnon like undercurrent. There's always going to be, if you guys remember in, I mentioned it earlier

in Contagion, you guys remember in um i mentioned it earlier in um contagion you guys remember jude law's character jude law's character will come out every time there will always be a jude law and jude law will always have his followers but if we can keep that group in the fringe yeah if we can keep that group so small that they can't do harm to others that's and that's what happened in Contagion. He existed. They were pissed. They were working against him. They figured out some seedy meetings that he was having. They squashed it. But it wasn't like, and yeah, they were like, this is a real concern. They got on it fast. The FBI or whoever it was was like, we need to make sure

this guy's message does not go mainstream. But the problem is that, unfortunately, that distrust has been systematically dismantled over many, many years. This isn't something that you can change overnight. We've the, you know, fourth estate, in journalism, to undermine trust in Congress, to undermine. And I'm not saying that all of these entities are 100% trustworthy, but there is consensus here. And, you know, when a certain swath of the population doesn't believe first the scientists and then the journalists writing about what the scientists say, and then the political leaders who are trying to legislate what the journalists are writing about what the scientists are saying, what do we expect? We let this happen. Wow.

We didn't fight against it when we need. And that kind of goes back to your very first question. What could we have done differently? We would have needed to start sooner, start a lot sooner. So then you don't wind up with Joe Rogan talking about ivermectin on his show. You know, Kara, if people are going to find you on the internet, where would they look? So I do, um, I do a daily show for, um, KCET and PBS SoCal called SoCal Update, which you can see if you're in the L.A. market on both of those networks. You can also find it on TAY Interwebs. I also do my podcast, which is a weekly podcast called Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria. I'm also one of the co-hosts of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

I'm also one of the co-hosts of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. As of late, I've been doing an episode of God Awful Movies once a month because I'm a masochist. You sure are. Absolutely. And all the other things I've been involved in. I would say probably, you know, you can go to my website, which is just my name, carisantamaria.com or talknerdy.com. But if you follow me on Twitter, I also share five different curated science articles a day through my social media channels just to kind of help people. And I don't get paid for this, but I feel like it's kind of my, my duty as a science communicator to help people be informed. So if you're looking for like good

science content that's curated, if you follow my follow my Twitter, you'll get that in your feed every day too. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. This was fun. Thank you so much. We were just ranting the whole time. Maybe next time we'll talk about something fun. We'll do something fun. Something fun will have

to happen between now and when we have you on next. Okay. Deal. For episode 1200, we'll have a new pandemic. Stop it. Fuck. We'll have a unicorn pandemic. We'll have a...

Yes. We'll have a pandemic of unicorn lightning bugs. What? That sounds adorable. I love it. That's amazing. Super adorable.

Just shit and glitter as they fly. Yes. Yes. What's this? What's this? There's dildos everywhere. What's this?

There's big cocks in the air. What's this? I can't believe my eyes. I must be creaming. Wake up, Jack. I'll fight. I need killer hair. What's this? There's dildos everywhere What's this? There's big cocks in the air What's this? I can't believe my eyes, I must be creaming Wake up, Jack off, I need killer hair What's this? What's this? What's this? There's someone in a thong What's this? There's holders for your schlong What's this? The website's filled with sexy toys I'm gasping, there's a sign to use, go glory With this offer I get more, what is this?

What's this? There's half of almost any item Free gift for your friend Another one for you and one for both your sexy ends There's six free spicy movies Oh, I can't believe my eyes In my boners I feel warm Free shipping does provide

Oh, look! What's this? Where is that mistletoe? They kiss? They hung it from below. Desired! They're gathering around to use code glory on what website they inquire. What's this? What's this? In here? He's got a big weenie. Oh dear. And something very pink. I think. And what? What? Gary? What? Gary! I've been looking for you for weeks. Where am I? Where are we? You've been stuck in this weird world.

The robots. The what? We're still in the non-copyright infringing matrix style computer thing. What? I know. Here, take this. Oh my God. How long have I been in here?

Like four weeks since the last ad we did. But somebody did an ad last week and it was like a robot mimicking you. What? We gotta get out of here, man. I know. Wait, what did you just give me? It's a timer. Okay.

Just point it at that AdamandEve.com sign. What's it gonna do? It'll bring us home, and, you know, give us 50% off almost any one item when you use the door. How? Just press the button. Okay.

What is that big weird thing? Just right here! Just whoosh! Just came out of nowhere! Whoosh! Oh gosh, I hope that timer has enough power. Wait, where is this portal gonna take us? I don't know, but anywhere else.

Okay, well, see ya, Schrodinger. What? Nothing. I don't know. Jump! Well, it's actually more like a slide. No! jump? Well, it's actually more like a slide.

No! Oh, what the? Where the hell am I? Gary? Gary, where are you? What is this? Oh, ad read? But I just traveled interdimensionally. Okay, table that. We want to thank our sponsor,

PaintYourLife.com. You know, it might be that your family isn't getting together this year for the holiday season because of the world ending. Or maybe because you just don't like them. That's fine. But you know what you could do? You could get a painting to remember the time you're away from them. Or with, yeah, either way. Remember the time you're away from them.

Or with... Yeah, either way. If you're looking for a special gift for someone this holiday season, something truly unique and personal, we've got a great idea for you. At PaintYourLife.com, you can have an original painting by a world-class artist, done by hand from any photo at an affordable price. Get a professional hand-painted portrait

created from any photo at a truly affordable... I just said that. With Paint Your Life's compilation portraits, you can bring together family members who never had the chance to meet or create a portrait of the whole family without the need for everyone to be there

for a family photo. Or it could just be a photo of you holding a photo of your family and saying, ha-ha, I don't want to see you people anymore. or it could just be a photo of you holding a photo of your family and saying, ha ha, I don't want to see you people anymore. But then you could send them the painting to remember you not wanting to go to holiday parties.

So I'm looking at you, Uncle Steve. So choose from a team of world-class artists and work with them until every detail is perfect. You can order a custom-made hand-painted portrait in less than five minutes. Get the hand-painted portrait in about three weeks. It's meaningful, personal, and can be cherished forever. At PaintYourLife.com, there's no risk. If you don't love the final painting, your money is refunded, guaranteed.

And right now, as a limited-time offer, get 20% off your painting. Your money is refunded, guaranteed. And right now, as a limited time offer, get 20% off your painting. That's right, 20% off and free shipping to get this special offer. Text the word Cognitive to 64000. That's Cognitive to 64000. Text Cognitive to 64000. Paint your life. Celebrate the moments that matter most. Okay, I'm stuck in another ad. Somebody find a payphone. This is an image from... This is an image from... It's so good.

The crypto money is not a virtue. It's fucking something else. It's fortune cookie cutter money issue. No Babylon bullshit. This is cognitive dissonance so like i guess that like if i'm ever getting to the end of my life cecil and there's not like a euthanasia law and oil just eat a bunch of hot dogs it's smoking these meats smoking meat is this mercola or is this kennedy on here this is robert kennedy here

fuck those people look at this gaping asshole up above here. What a fuck this guy is. Smoking these beans. I wonder if you boil berry urine if it gets smoky. Good smoky flavor. So we are joined by Seth Andrews of the Thinking Atheist podcast. Seth has been a guest on the show many times. Seth, thank you so much for joining us.

It's great to be back. Thanks, guys. So, Seth, we wanted to talk to you a little bit about an article that came out and at this point it will have come out a while ago, but it's okay

because it's still relevant, I'm sure. I don't think the facts on the ground with this are going to change in the four weeks or so that this takes. Right, exactly.

Exactly, right? Even though we're doing a get-ahead, it's still fucking relevant when we do this. The article talks about how it looks like there's a lot of vaccine hesitancy among believers. And non-believers, it looks like they're vaccinated in the 90th percentile.

We have our ideas on why that is. Yes, we do. We wanted to talk to you about it a little. What are your ideas, Seth? Yeah, well, I was curious. I was looking at the headline of Hemant's article, and I was like, why didn't he title it, What the Fuck is Wrong With You People? Because that's exactly the thought I have every single day. I think, what's wrong

with you people? And here's an example, okay? I happen to bump into some extremely conservative, very distrusting of vaccine type family members. Okay. And they're on my short run family tree. They're pretty close. Yeah. And I had told them about the death of my next door neighbor who had passed away of COVID.

He was 69 and he got it, spent two weeks on a vent and he was dead. And it was just tragic. It was just a waste, a tremendously senseless death. And it was just tragic. It was just a waste, a tremendously senseless death. And it was extremely sad. And so I mentioned this and the person on my family tree,

their first response was, well, did they have a preexisting condition? And I thought to myself, this is in microcosm, a reflection of the death of empathy in the American evangelical because her first thought wasn't, oh, this is so sad. I'm so sorry. How close were you? How's his spouse doing?

How is his children doing? I got to understand. They wanted to know if he had a preexisting condition. I think I understand, but tell me, why did they ask that question? Because they don't believe COVID is all that serious. They think it's been blown up in the media. They voted twice for Trump, so they believe fake pandemic, or it's been exaggerated. So in her mind, she thought, well, if COVID killed him, there must have been something else seriously wrong, and COVID just nudged him over the edge. And of course, first of all, it's a tremendously horrific and problematic thing to say. But secondly is, who do we know in our lives who does not have a pre-existing condition of some kind? Yeah, well, okay. All right. So many, I know, but I have to pause on that real quick because that's where I thought, and it's not just a lack of empathy, but it's like obesity is a preexisting condition that exacerbates the effects of COVID.

And that obesity affects an enormous number of people, like percentage-wise in our population. That's an enormous amount of people. But it's also sort of not at all the point. an enormous amount of people, but like, it's also sort of not at all the point. If, if I'm a hemophiliac and somebody shoots me and I bleed out, right? Like I bled out faster because I was a hemophiliac, but I still died of the gunshot wound because nobody had gone ahead and shot me with the fucking gun. I would have had a Tuesday as a hemophilia. Yeah, exactly. You know, like I'm a heavy guy. Like if I walk around and I don't get COVID,

I probably am not going to die. But like, what the fuck? What if you have hypertension? What if you have celiac disease? What if you have some other sort of intolerance? Diabetes under control. Autoimmune disease. You've got cancer.

Cancer runs in your family. I mean, this idea that, well, you know, I mean, hey, survival of the fittest. Sometimes you got to thin the herd, let the healthiest survive is a weird position to take if you are a white American evangelical young earth creationism. You know what I'm saying? It does feel like there's a miss there, right? There's a little bit of a logical miss there. I would also point out that I have never heard one of the people, somebody say that who is actually in shape. Have you ever heard anybody say that? I've never seen anybody that's like a CrossFitter. It's like, motherfucker, you want to go run a mile?

You want to run a mile? And I bet when I'm done, I can still talk. I will say this though. I will say this though. And you know, like the evangelicals, I'm sure you've heard this before, Seth and Tom, I know you've heard it before, but it's that you ever heard that, that parable of the person who was praying down the alley and then they, they like didn't get raped. And then the person behind them got raped because they thought that there was a, there was

a big angel around them and that's why they didn't rape. It's like a parable that I've seen a bunch of times. It's like one of those four words that evangelicals send each other. They're famous for blaming the victim. They are, I mean, think about how they deal with rape. They're like, oh, you shouldn't dress like that. You know what I mean? Like they're famous for blaming the victim. So it does not surprise me at all

that evangelicals have this, that this is the mode they go to. Very true. It was interesting when Tom said all those people are not healthy people. I was thinking about the person who said that. Oh, no. Her bathroom medicine cabinet looks like something Hunter S. Thompson would have.

I mean, it's out of, I thought, yeah, you are a pre-existing condition. But there's an angle to this that I haven't heard quite enough of. I'm sure you guys have probably covered it. But I think one of the reasons that people are so conspiratorial when it comes to trusting the scientists, they vilify Fauci and they vilify the scientific community and they vilify the World Health Organization and the FDA and the CDC, etc. And it's all part of this apocalyptic end times book of revelations scenario that's supposed to be playing out and you and i consider it laughable but we ask ourselves why are they so predisposed to trust in these wackadoodle conspiracy theories but distrust the actual vaccine science and i hold that many of these people are predisposed

because christianity itself is a conspiracy theory right the whole religion is a conspiracy theory. I mean, if that's woven into the fabric of your thinking, then anything apocalyptic that comes along, you know, you got a mega pastor that's talking about how we got people talking about mandated vaccines is actually like taking the mark, right? The mark of the beast, which is a precursor to the second coming. That makes no sense either. The freak out there makes no sense to me because I'm like, this is what you want. Are you been talking about how you can't wait for Jesus to return?

And every time somebody talks about the end times, you lose your shit. It makes no sense to me. Well, and the QAnon people, the thing that they're talking about is the reveal. I mean, think about revelation. You know what I mean? Like it's the same thing.

It's just, it all rhymes. It's all the same thing. It's all the same argument over and over. It's the same. They are all linked together in the sense that they use the exact same tactics that conspiracy uses to try to get your trust and to try to bilk you.

What amazes me is like these guys have been waiting for the apocalypse their whole lives. God, that bus needs to get here. And now we have an apocalypse. And they're just like, no, we don't. No, we don't. Like, I sort of feel like at this point, the fucking locusts with armor would show up and knock on their door.

And they'd be like, I don't see any locusts. You're stupid if you see this locust. These are the same guys that like made a special cow for Jerusalem. Right. I mean, come on. We live in the Marjorie Taylor Greene era, right? We do.

We have crossed the threshold. We are past idiocracy. We are in this weird, I don't know, it's a culture of celebrated ignorance, but also extreme paranoia with an apocalypse narrative that sort of intertwines into everything. I mean, when I'm listening to my own mother and she's like, you know, Fauci and Bill Gates roomed together at Cornell when Bill Gates was filing an RFID patent for the chip or something like that. I'm like, all right, hang on just a second, Ma. Hang on.

Whenever Fauci was at Cornell, Bill Gates was 10. Okay. And he never filed a patent for an RFID chip. And I'll tell you this, and I hate to break your bubble, Ma, but you're not interesting enough to track. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, right. Right.

You're just not that interesting. I mean, I love you. You're just not enough to track. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, right. Right. You're just not that interesting. I mean, I love you. You're just not all that interesting. By the way, you're talking to me on a cell phone with GPS tracking on it. Yeah. It is amazing the level of intrusion we will allow into our lives if we can post memes because of it. And at the same time, it's like, can I post a meme?

Because if I can post a meme, I'll basically let you take pictures of my open asshole. And then sell them. It doesn't matter. I literally don't care. It literally doesn't matter. Whatever.

If I can post a meme, I'm doing a fucking game. You could tattoo an ad on my eyelids if I could post a meme. 100% doesn't matter. But if it's like a vaccine, vaccines are this weird special case situation though. And, you know, we talked to Kara Santa Maria and she said, oh, it goes back to Wakefield. But it goes back further than that.

Vaccines have always, I was doing a little research this week. Vaccines have always had this level of kind of weird, inherent distrust attached to them. Yeah. And I don't get it at all. I don't get it at all. Look, the one that gets me is this. I don't get the flu vaccine because I heard somebody got the flu vaccine

and it gave them the flu. And I'm like, this is a scientific impossibility. This does not happen. You cannot get the flu from the flu vaccine. But this sort of anecdotal thing that goes down through the grapevine, it takes on a life of its own. People who are primed to distrust scientists anyway,

which is, I think, also interwoven into Christianity, right? Because science, they're all just a cabal of star chamber, God killers. They get together at a kegger once a month to talk just to come up with ways to kill yahweh and jesus you know it to me just blows my mind they'll trust the bible and they'll trust anything that anybody says that is related to the bible but they distrust the actual processes of science that have provided the solutions that they enjoy and use every single day. I was just thinking, I wonder, you know, the difference, right? So these same idiots,

they'll go to the hospital when they get sick, right? They'll show up at the emergency room if they break their arm. And they always have. And I wonder if like, maybe it's because Jesus cured shit, but he didn't prevent anything from happening. You know? Because if you look back at those stories. No, he's preventing them all from going to hell by dying on the cross, Tom. You're throwing it out. I'm throwing it out. I'm not allowing it.

I'm not allowing it. You know what, Cecil? You've got a point. I'm not allowing it. I forgot about that one that didn't happen. Here's the one that gets me, and they say it all the time. Dear Lord Jesus, we ask that you guide the hands of the surgeon. And I think to myself, that prayer makes no sense because I guarantee you, if this person was given the choice of two doctors, they had someone who was going in for a tumor removal

surgery and the atheist was the cancer expert, right? There was an atheist oncologist and the Christian was a dentist. They would choose the actual expert atheist who knew what the hell they were doing. Rarely does anybody ask the religious leanings of someone when they're in deep shit, right? Because when the chips are down, you're like,

you can just help pull me out of this burning car. I really don't care where you think you're going to go when you die. You've got a severed limb. You're like, so are you a Southern Baptist or a free will Baptist? You know, I do feel though, you know, you mentioned earlier, I do feel

like anecdotes that people have and that they hear from other people have so much more weight than anything that a fact checker can give you or that, you know, especially anything that the news would deliver or anything that they would see from any other source. Those anecdotes carry so much weight.

And I've run into it even with people, I think, and it's funny, even with people that I know do trust getting a flu shot, they will still bring up that same anecdote. I've heard it from people, and I'll be honest, I even at a certain point in my life, this was a long time ago,

but I had a very similar reaction years and years and years ago. And I thought, oh man, I got kind of a little ill off of it. I don't want to do that again. But I, you know, like, but that's the thing is there is a little something to that.

I mean, we all got a little ill from the COVID that I know I did. I got a little, not a bunch, but just a little, I felt a little out to that. I mean, we all got a little ill from the COVID. I know I did. I got a little, not a bunch, but just a little, I felt a little out of whack. And they've really put a lot of, way too much weight into that,

I think. There's just too much weight into anecdotes too where they talk constantly about, oh, my brother Jimmy had this friend. I mean, look at how quickly that Nicki Minaj's friend's balls sweat. Oh, I know.

Did you see that meme that went on the internet and it said a photograph of Nicki Minaj's friend's balls and it had the Trump sons on the... Oh God, it's a visual gag, but it was hysterical. Let me ask you guys this. How much of this do you think serves a hero narrative? Because I think if you say, well, I'm sticking it to the man or I don't trust the man kind of thing, you know, the system is infected and I, I'm going to be brave enough to, it's sort of that Pastor Greg Locke thing where you throw your chest out and you say, well, I'm not going to believe anything they tell me. I'm going to march to my own drummer. I'm going to carve my own path. I'm going to stand up against the man. And that also in some way kind of makes me the man. I really think it's kind of a masturbatory

exercise. It's like an ego gratifying thing that makes you the hero of the story. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're right. And there's also the idea too of, you know, battling against something. They always need something to battle against. There's, you know, that whole thing of the Christian evangelical is that they're, you know, God warriors. And whenever you see, you know, these people in the hospital

and there's a couple of websites now that are really documenting people dying and their Facebook posts as they're doing it. And it's really heartbreaking, but there's a lot of conservatives on there. And constantly you'll see, I need my prayer warriors. That's the language that yields. And so I feel like that conflict is built right in. There's a certain segment of the population that rejects sort of out of hand, and I think reflexively, any kind of top-down influence. At the same time,

that is the same demographic that absolutely welcomes top-down influence spiritually. But they reject top-down influence when it comes to government of any kind. So it's like, well, I got a solution. Well, who? I don't know where that solution come from.

It came from Pfizer and it came from Moderna and it came from Johnson & Johnson. It came from years of research. But like in their minds, and if you read it, it's like, I'm not taking that government vaccine. It's like, that's not a government vaccine.

The government's just paying for it so you don't have to. I just don't get it because it was like started under Trump. Like everything was started when their guy was in there. But even still, it's funny because most of those people, even when Trump was in there, were all pretty much anti-vaxxers then. They were. I saw a poster and it said at the top, the four stages of COVID denial.

One, it's a hoax. Two, don't be a sheep. Three, prayers needed. Four, visit our GoFundMe. three prayers needed for visit our go fund me. Yeah. That is essentially the four stages of COVID. It's it's, and it's becoming more and more problem. I mean, there's lots of people dying right now because of the Delta variant and they're dying in places that are,

you know, very vaccine hesitant. You've been watching these right wing radio hosts, right? I mean, they're dropping like freaking flies. Absolutely. Like flies.

And I i you know some people i do feel very sorry for i will say and i know cecil i don't agree on this because he's a good person and i'm not and that's the truth that's just the absolute honest to god recognizable truth but like those guys are influential they they they wield a big megaphone and and the the power of that megaphone, when they go, like, I can't help it. I'm like, yeah, the world's better.

The world's better because your megaphone, you use that and other people believed you and maybe you believed it too. But like, it's important not to be wrong sometimes. I just picture Tom sitting over there

and he's got all their faces on a big bingo card. He's like, check, check. He just, he just walks up to the wall, crumples up their paper, throws it away, goes to the next one.

I just walk over, swipe left. Rejected bitch. Seth, if people were going to find your show somewhere or find you on the internet, where would they look? I'm easy to find. I host a website, an online community called The Thinking Atheist. I always like to say I am not The Thinking Atheist. It is an idea. It is an encouragement that we reject faith and embrace reason. The website is

thethinkingatheist.com or you can find my personal page at sethandrews.com. Seth, thanks so much for coming on our 600th episode and joining us. We appreciate it. Congratulations, guys. I am so excited for all of you. And here's to 600 more. Hot damn.

Hot damn, man. Thank you. Thanks, bud. Thanks, bud. I'm sorry. That works Huh Penis You scooped me so we are doing our 600th episode and we are joined by some of our favorite guests in the past and we have invited

Marsh and Andy from the Mersey is it Mersey? Do I have to say Mersey? Mersey side? You've nailed it. You've nailed it. I've only known you

for like eight years or however many years it's been going and you finally I always say Mersey. Learned how to do a hard S sound in the middle

like a Z sound and look at that word. Mersey side skeptics. Guys, thank you for joining us on our 600th episode. We're so happy you guys could join us today thank you

certainly our pleasure it's a pleasure to be here it's an absolute pleasure to be here and Marsh gotta hand it to you for crushing it on Citation Needed

if anybody's listening and didn't and missed the episode where Marsh gave an essay as an expert on homeopathy you did a great job Andy if you're ever an expert on anything

in the future let us know and we can invite you on I was just marinating in the delicious irony of Marsh're ever an expert on anything in the future, let us know. Yep. And we can invite you on. I was just marinating in the delicious irony of Marsh being called an expert. Come on, Andy. Let's go through top three things you're likely to ever become an expert on. We've got all day. There's 600 shows.

This will last us until the 700th show. Wait in. Can you be an expert in alcoholism? Because then Andy and I both, I think, get that. Anyway. How's things in England? You've got full shelves, lots of gas.

Is it going well over there for you guys? Brexit killing it? Yeah, things have improved a little bit. Oh, it's utopian. It's utopian. We are flying our way

through the sunlit uplands of Brexit land. It's beautiful. We've got the highest COVID cases in Europe. We've got the emptiest shelves in Europe and there's people literally following gas tankers down the motorway waiting to see where it stops so they can try and get some petrol out of there. Holy shit!

Which is amazing because they're driving down the motorway using petrol they don't have to try and get. So by the time they get to the petrol tanker, they may well have driven like half a tank away from their house. Wasn't one of them filled with like slurry or something as well? Oh, concrete, I think. Yeah, yeah. Concrete, yeah. There was something else. And then the people were angry with the tanker driver

that he didn't have petrol in his tanker. How dare he? They were angry that he hadn't told them. They were driving around in empty? He was driving around in empty and they were following an empty dude? No, he was driving around something, like a tanker of something else because it's not just petrol in tankers. It was just a tanker.

Oh, there's a tanker. We'll follow it. At that point, you have to just volunteer to fill up his car with whatever you've got, you know, fucking dairy milk, whatever.

Yeah, man, we'll put it in there. I don't give a fuck. Yeah. No, but they were annoyed with the tanker driver because he hadn't declared that he wasn't carrying petrol. Like, I mean...

What, like at a stoplight or something? Just get out and just wave everybody down. Hey, just let you know. Yeah, semaphore. That's amazing. He should have had a little sticker on the back of his tanker

like, my other tanker is a petrol tanker. Just as a... Petrol on board. It's funny because in the States, we get a chance to work. It's not funny because we get a chance to see

a lot of people who were COVID deniers. And there's a lot of people who are COVID deniers there. There's places in the United States where you can't even get a hospital bed and lots of people are dying because of COVID. So there's a lot of like,

and it's like schadenfreude, but it's not really because it's very sad. But when it comes to Brexit, do you guys get to just like deliciously eat that schadenfreude, but it's not really because it's very sad. But when it comes to Brexit, do you guys get to just like deliciously eat that schadenfreude or do you just, just because you're suffering,

it sucks? I mean, it's the only thing we've got to eat. The shelves are empty. Everybody's forgotten about Brexit. How could they forget about it while they're eating the shit of it? Boris Johnson created COVID

using the Russians in Wuhan in order to forget about Brexit. No, no, we're supposed to have the stupid people over here. Boris Johnson created COVID using the Russians in Wuhan. No, no, we're supposed to have the stupid people over here. We're not supposed to have them. No, I'm getting confused. I was invited on the Joe Rogan show. I've got my scripts made up. I do apologise. Well, the other thing is,

every time they talk about anything that's happening in terms of shortages in this country, none of the news mentions Brexit. So it's like, oh, suddenly we can't have that we're having to cull thousands and thousands of pigs because there is a butcher shortage there's a shortage of abattoir workers but they don't then say why there's a shortage because there's not a shortage anywhere else it's just a place that said we don't want you people anymore oh shit we've got a surplus of pigs and too few people willing to kill them the government's issuing emergency visas or trying to anyway to uh to foreign workers who can come and drive our trucks yeah and they wanted they said oh we'll issue like something like 2 000

emergency visas they got 27 applications because we've spent years telling these people to off and now they're like could you come back back? And we're like, obviously not. You guys are all the way full circle. Like, won't the immigrants take our jobs? Yes, we are. Yes, that's exactly where we are. I saw today that there was a story recently where they're like going to get army people to drive your trucks.

You guys don't have any people at all to drive things around. So they're going to find like National Guard or whatever you call those, like the British. Yeah. You guys don't have any people at all to drive things around so they're going to find like National Guard or whatever you call those like the British Yeah. Well, there's several groups of people that are trying

to encourage to drive trucks. One is army, like soldiers, people like that, which is fine. I mean, if they're going to be doing anything, I'd rather they were

driving trucks than killing people. So pretty cool use of that. I mean, you can do both. Those are usually exclusive. That takes us to category two. that takes us to category two. That takes us to category two, which is they're extending the hours

drivers are allowed to safely drive. Oh God, I was kidding. So they used to be, you can't drive more than so many hours a day. I was supposed to be kidding. Yeah, well, just generally, they're like, well, let's just relax

the regulations around how many hours you're allowed to drive. So you can just drive while sleeping, essentially. And then the third category is people who've retired from driving trucks for some time who are now going to be, like,

invited to come back and be truck drivers. Or the old, senile, blind people. So the solution is the elderly and the exhausted? Which, again, there's overlap there to be concerned about. It's basically the House of Lords.

They're recruiting the House of Lords. That's essentially what it is. Who've suddenly found new purpose in life. They realize that Brexit is fertile territory. But guys, 600 fucking episodes. 600 episodes. 600. That's an entire decimal point more than mine.

That's one way of looking at it. Could you imagine how long it would take to make 600 Incredulous episodes? Like, we'd be at the heat death of the universe. Special guest is Methuselah. Methuselah, welcome to Incredulous. Hosted by Confucius. There's just a round where we all have to improvise a rap about the universe's heat death. This is why we don't do the show too often, to be honest.

This is painful. Just bring on the apocalypse. I want to talk to you guys about Russell Brand. We sent a story over about Russell Brand. Normally,icans are really stupid but this time a brit is really stupid and so we figured we'd point it out you know we would like to point it out every once in a while you know that's a good idea i particularly like the fact that after 600 episodes you sent us a link to something we couldn't look at

it opens up in the states without anything so i I'm just saying. You can open it. It's just it has a little wrapper across the middle saying you can't read it. But if you just scroll up and down, you can read around it. Come on. Innovation. Andy, what you got to do, Andy, is you got to get a retiree who's exhausted to open it up for you. Yeah. Just somebody.

That's definitely the way. That's probably the problem. See if there's some Eastern European that can show you how to use your browser. Give him an emergency visa, Andy. Or from a visa. Fuck, I'll tell you what. I'll take a visa to drive a truck over in England. Are you kidding me?

Get me out of here for crying out loud. Jesus Christ. Although, it feels like we're exporting our stupid, though. I mean, it feels like you guys are having, you guys are having like QAnon stuff. You guys are having like marches against masks, I'm sure, right? It just demonstrates

the nature of the special relationship. Doesn't it? Yeah. Right, yeah. What really makes the point is when you see some of the marches, I was sent footage

from one of the marches in London and there's someone there in the march, obviously they've got their Trump signs in the middle of the march about masks. They've got their QAnon signs. There was someone there with a confederate flag. What? In the middle of the march obviously they've got their trump signs in the middle of the march about masks they've got their q anon signs there was someone someone there with a confederate flag

what in the middle of the march yeah why the fuck have you got that what do you thinking the goal you know that is very confusing on so many levels it's incredibly confusing you know in that film march if you skip to the end, do all of the other protesters rally around and get them to take the flag down? No, no, no. No one mentions it. Just like no one mentions

all the signs they've got accusing people of being pedophiles. No one mentioned that they spelt it P-E-D-O, which is the American way, which just shows how much influence this has. Like, you're getting these people to use the American spelling

because they're seeing these claims in American. Oh, my God. In whatever telegram group they're in and whatever various things they're sort of coming across online. It's all through bizarre telegram groups that I spend a lot of my time in. Don't you think it's a weird thing, though?

Because it's not copy and paste, it's copy and paint, isn't it? The rest of the world doesn't paint it onto a banner. Right, yeah. It's copy and paint, isn't it? Paint it onto a banner. Right? Yeah. It's copy and paint. Yeah, yeah. Backward in so many ways.

I remember reading, like, many years ago, like, America's biggest export was culture. And this is not what we thought that was going to mean. Yeah, yeah. No. What was it meant to mean, Tom? Well, I think it's music in Hollywood. Like, I think that's what, and not fucking lunatics carrying signs spelled wrong.

The thing about Russell Brand, when he's talking about, and he's certainly in this article, he talks about, they're talking about how he's boosting his views on YouTube by essentially catering to right-wing talking points over here. And the right-wing talking points are essentially, don't trust the government, the vaccine isn't real,

or the vaccine is bad for you, or you should go with these very cheap drugs like ivermectin because that's going to cure your COVID, even though none of that's been proven. One thing I got to ask, because we don't have a national healthcare system over here, so you could easily find some jackass doctor to write you a

prescription for ivermectin if you needed it, although you probably couldn't buy it now because it's probably all off the shelves. Could you do that in a national healthcare system? Are there jackass doctors in the national healthcare system, or is there something that they have to answer to somebody for doing something? Yeah, I'm actually real curious about that, too. Yeah, so the way it would work

in the UK is, yes, there are some doctors like that who would. So there's doctors who prescribe all sorts of um bizarre things and they're allowed to do that if you're a practicing gp uh which is general practitioner i don't know if that's a term used in the us but um uh you're allowed to do that as long as you're allowed to do an off-label prescription as long as you are a gp with uh with um prescribing rights the chances of finding a gp like that is actually quite slim. So for example, I think there's maybe 50 or 60 GPs in the UK

who are also homeopaths. So they obviously got quite a low standard of evidence. But we've got thousands of GPs. So like percentage wise, it's quite small. So I think the majority of people, and there are people in the UK taking ivermectin, I think the majority of those are finding it online or they're doing what I saw in one telegram group that I follow, which is they're

making natural ivermectin. Wait, what? Homebrew ivermectin? But it's not. It's just fucking lemon juice in water or something like that. But they're calling organic natural ivermectin. That's quite actually better. They're better than ivermectin because people were ODing on iververmectin here so because they were taking the horse pills they were taking the big ones so they'd go to like the farm and fleet out here where they give the this dewormer to horses and they just pop like a whole horse and then they call poison control you're like dude that's a horse suppository first of all that's i mean like bravo but still i'd much rather i'm eating fucking lemon rind or whatever

yeah you know there's some fucking hipsters like dude have you tried my homebrew ivermectin it's uh

you gotta fucking choke it down and tell them it's good like it's fucking awful it's the worst thing you've ever had but you don't want to be rude because this is

ivermectin party fuck but it's weird because all that stuff is coming from like channels like David Avocado Wolf on Telegram, and you see the same names that we in skepticism have been seeing for a decade. Yeah, they've

disappeared largely off the... You won't stumble across their bullshit on their website anymore. You won't necessarily even stumble across their bullshit on Facebook in the same way you used to, but it's just all throughout Telegram, and that's somewhere that nobody's looking. It's like when people are forwarding WhatsApp messages and how we can't track that. It's just, there's a subculture, an underground of this ecosystem of conspiracy cross-pollination that's happening that very few people are even aware is happening. So no one's able to really track it. It's pretty scary stuff. just to add a bit more to marshy's answer on the doctor thing i went to um india a long time ago now but i wanted some antibiotics to take with me just in case and he said i can't prescribe you those on the nhs but i can prescribe them for you privately so i had to pay him a fee and basically he can prescribe

what he wants but it's also true. It's true. What, did he use his left hand to write the prescription instead of his right? Did he have to hold the dollar bill over the pen or whatever? But we have a second line of defense because pharmacies in the UK can refuse prescriptions and they can change prescriptions, as in a doctor can prescribe.

If a doctor prescribes a a drug and the pharmacist decides that they want to replace it with a generic that's less expensive they can do that so all the drug companies lobby the doctors to prescribe their stuff but by the time they get to the pharmacy, the pharmacy can change that, refuse that prescription, or they can change it to a different brand. So the concept of like Invermectin is a brand name, isn't it? Yeah, it's a Merck drug.

Yeah. So depending on if the drug is 10 years old or not, it could easily be replaced by the pharmacist with an equivalent. Well, Invermectin's definitely out of patent. Yeah, out of patent for a long time. I didn't know that pharmacists could reject prescriptions. I knew that they could switch for a generic alternative, because I think that was something that was brought in relatively

recently. But I'm not an expert on the pharmacy regulations. The pharmacist is the expert in terms of the chemistry and um if a doctor for example has mistakenly prescribed drugs which clash with each other that's not the correct word is it um then they can they can make an intervention in that prescription but they can't do it from from an ethical and moral stance that it's not like america where you can say well i have a religious exemption to prescribing birth control. We don't have that kind of rejection. I have seen stories about it, but I don't think it's allowed.

Oh, so there's no conscience laws. There's no... No, no. Okay, because there are conscience laws in parts of our country where, like, if you go to get Plan B, for example, there are pharmacists in some states that can be like, yeah, my conscience doesn't require me to provide this to you. And then you just can't get medicine that you should have access to. I don't think we have that. I think that would be something that the pharmacy regular to the GPHC would have a go at. Do you guys have politics?

So we have politicians at this point that are that are pumping and pushing ivermectin. Do you have any politicians that are doing, that are undermining sort of COVID treatments and COVID protocols? Because we have several. Yeah, so I think, I'm trying to think off the top of my head of which politicians that would be. There's definitely some, I think from some of the more fringe parties, maybe not sitting MPs, so I don't think there's any sitting MPs doing it, unless you can think of any, Andy? No, I can't. I think there's actually been a deliberate broad consensus on the issue, treating it. So in times of crisis, one thing that we do do is eventually we come together in a positive direction.

That must be nice. What? That must be nice. Well, it's happened here. It's happened on matters of the economy in the past as well. I've got a much more cynical version of what's happened, Andy, is that here our conservatives are in power, whereas in America, it's the Democrats that are in power

and the conservatives are out of power. So it's much easier to keep our version of the Republicans in line when you're the ones actually in power, when you're already in power here, whereas obviously they're the opposing party in the US and so they don't have quite as much top-down control as Boris would have over his MPs.

Because the bullshit's not coming from Labour, and it's not coming from the Lib Dems. It's coming from the right-wing nutters, basically. Yeah, and there's plenty of idiots like Russell Brand contributing. I don't think Russell Brand is particularly the worst example of this. No. Because at least he has... One of the things he is doing, for what I believe are cynical reasons, which I'll come to in a minute,

but what he's doing is he's saying, it's not my job to give you health advice. I'm not telling you take it. I'm not telling you don't take it either. So he talks about science and he's sort of, if you think about the worst version of an anti-vaxxer, he's probably about 60% of the there i'd say yeah but one of the things i really dislike and find insidious about his uh his work is exactly that he sits on the fence and doesn't express a view and the

problem i've got with that is that it kind of belies his view because facebook and youtube and all the social medias they're really cracking down on this sort of thing aren't they and if he came out and said i'm against vaccinations yeah he'd be at risk of having his five grand a week hobby taken away from him so but if he if he's got any sense of ethical values, he can't say overtly, I think it's a good idea if he thinks the opposite. So I think he's sitting on the fence for that reason, because he doesn't want to compromise his social medias and he doesn't want to lose his, uh, lose his revenue. It's the problem of the just asking questions guy though. The just asking questions guys asking bullshit questions that are rhetorical

answering them yeah i'm not answering yeah and it's it's which questions you're asking as well because the questions he he's he's asking aren't um what is the the the best way to go about getting vaccinated and how how best to talk to to people who are who are anti-vax the questions he is asking are the ones that undermine trust in the vaccine so if you're just asking questions but all your questions are aimed at undermining trust in the science and the vaccines you're an anti-vax, the questions he's asking are the ones that undermine trust in the vaccine. So if you're just asking questions, but all your questions are aimed at undermining trust in the science and the vaccines, you're an anti-vaxxer at that point. You're just hiding behind this bullshit veneer of impartiality. And just asking questions without any actual desire to reach a solution has an, it has an intrinsically undermining value. Like it's like, it's your exact point, Andy. Like if I'm just going to be like, well, you know, I'm going to walk that line.

You're walking that line because you don't have the courage to say what you actually mean or because you know that by putting those questions out there, you can be the fucking water under the foundation. You can be constantly eroding and constantly an erosive force. And it doesn't add anything to anything. It's just fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's people's racist insecurities that it appeals to. And that's the main reason I really dislike the Russell Brand stuff,

because it's all for him with no actual value to the argument whatsoever. It's all about who you're talking to as well. So I think the fact that he'll have people on who've got much more extreme views and then offer very little if any pushback to them he can come across as being i'm just talking to people from all sorts of different perspectives the perspectives you're coming from are pretty clear and then when he's when he's talking to people with quite extreme views and doesn't offer a pushback and then he talks people on the other side and offers quite a robust pushback it's pretty clear from the audience's point of view what they're meant to be taking from this. And it reminds me, there was a report done by, I forget which organization

it was, but it was a report called the Alternative Influence Network, which looked at the ways that people get radicalized through YouTube just through watching people talking to people talking to people. And you can end up with white supremacists and with, you know, Stefan Molyneux and rape apologists and men's rights activists by starting at the places that are much more your Joe Rogan types, where Joe Rogan can say, look, I'm not the one saying that you shouldn't get vaccinated. I'm not the one saying that, you know, feminism is cancer. But you are talking to the people who are saying that and you're not offering a are talking to the people who are saying that, and you're not offering a real pushback. And when your massive audience then sees you talking to

this person, they think, oh, that guy seemed reasonable. I'm going to follow his channel. And maybe he's not the guy saying the really awful stuff, but he's the gateway to the guy who is saying that. And this report just spied a diagram starting from this one YouTube channel, who have you ever spoken to? And then who have they ever spoken to? And just showed you the network that was there. And from this entry point that could seem quite reasonable, you quickly within a few clicks, get into really dodgy stuff. And that entry point is Russell Brand's role right now. The reasonable entry point to a world of conspiracy theory. And the algorithm will bring you there too. Absolutely. The algorithm of YouTube will radicalize you too, because it does suggested videos and it'll just radicalize you through

that too. So you get it from two different ways, not only through organically through that, through that person who's interviewing these terrible people, but it's also suggesting terrible people on the side. And it's the way you frame your videos as well, because he's framing his videos with kind of the clickbait. You'll never believe what this says about biden's wrong hillary's this and then when you watch the video he never actually fulfills on that he calls which he washes his way around it because he knows that you can get so many clicks by being that by the title alone sure yeah by the title but then you're also embedding that viewpoint in people from the title alone because they might not watch the entire thing do you remember when we used to play that game like Like how many steps removed were you from Kevin Bacon?

You know, now it's like, seriously, now you can play that with YouTube or Facebook or Telegraph. Like how many steps removed are you from any starting point to like white supremacy or anti-vax or, and it's not seven steps. I would be willing, I would seriously, I'd be willing to bet I could go into YouTube, enter virtually any search term

that is health related and get to this kind of bullshit in under seven clicks. We are, we are like, we're a hair's breadth away all the time from that like,

from that fucking Kevin Bacon, except for now, Kevin Bacon's got a Confederate flag that he's running around England with for no apparent reason. Oh yeah. With no mask reason. Oh, yeah. With no mask on. Right.

Looking for a visa. Right, yeah. He's just trying to get a truck driving visa. Now we're going to recognize him and say they're only seven steps away from him. We're going to get a shitty email now from Kevin Bacon like, hey, man, I've been a listener from a long time.

There was a really interesting study that looked at exactly this on TikTok. They said if you just sort of somebody set up a brand new fresh account on TikTok and followed 14 people, and they're 14 people who were known for expressing transphobic, they put it, gender critical views, and they only followed those 14 videos, those 14 people, no one else. And within a couple of scrolls, I think an hour's worth of scrolling or something, they were seeing literal swastikas and white supremacist content.

And they didn't interact with those videos. They were only interacting with the initial 14 people who were just expressing transphobic views. And then you were so quickly into neo-Nazi stuff.

It doesn't take much to get you very quickly from an already abhorrent position into literal Nazism. There's a part of this article, though, that I wanted to bring up. And it's actually part of the article, though, that I wanted to bring up, and it's actually part of the article I have the biggest problem with, and it's from the experts at the bottom. I hope it's the part I actually read. It's at the bottom. Oh, no. I'm sorry,

Andy. It's toward the bottom, and it's from the experts, and I really dislike it for a number of reasons. I wanted to get your take on it. So Dr. Sadia Khan, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, which by the way, I want to recognize that I automatically have no right next

to criticize what she's going to say. She told the Daily Beast while she would never have any issue with brand or anyone else asking questions about the vaccine or being hesitant to take it, she says it's important to get their answers

from a trusted source. Then what she says in the quote, I think it's really important for everyone to think for themselves. I'm not frustrated at all by individual level questions, by individual level discussion or making sure that individual concerns are addressed. What's frustrating is when there's not

a national conversation, when there's misinformation or blatant lies as related to FDA approval. Dr. Rebecca Weinstraub, an assistant professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, agrees, I think the most important thing is going to the source and looking at the original data for these discussions and decisions. And I read those two in concert with one another, and I really have an issue with that. The vast majority of people have, and this is not hyperbole, I mean, most

people don't go to college. Most people who go to college don't study science. Most people who study science don't study epidemiology, right? So most people are not going to be intellectually or experientially prepared to read primary source material in epidemiological literature. And I'll put my fucking hand up first. Yeah, me too, me too. I talked to Alice about this because she's an expert in that area. Right. I think we are constantly telling people, do your own research, think for yourself, go to the sources. But people don't even, one, we don't all have access to those sources. Most of them are behind a paywall. They may or may not even be written in a language

that's your first language, right? Like if I want to read the Argentinian study on ivermectin, well, fuck me, I can't read that. And then also I'm a guy with an English lit degree. I don't know how to read a meta-analysis or do any kind of a statistical regression or to know whether confidence intervals in a medical study, what those things mean. They're written effectively, even if they intervals in a medical study, what those things mean.

They're written effectively, even if they're in my first language, in a language I'm untrained to read. But we tell people all the time, go to the primary sources, go to the primary sources. But the primary sources are effectively written in a way that most, almost everybody is unprepared educationally, experientially to read. I think that's bad advice because it tells people don't trust the experts

who have told you, who have parsed this data, right? There are experts who have parsed this data. And now we're saying this is an individual level decision to make at a primary source level. And I can't think of, honestly,

like that kind of undermines the expertise. That kind of undermines the advice of the WHO and the CDC and the other guys. Yeah. I mean, from the person in the experts in the article, I can understand why they'd say I'd never discourage individual discussions at an individual level. Because what they want to do is to say, if you are someone who personally has concerns, I don't want to shut you off from talking to someone who might be able to allay those concerns. To say, at an individual level, I'd rather be talking to someone who's saying, hey, what should I do? Rather than saying, no, no, no, this is just a blanket thing. But I think you're absolutely right. That's telling people to

go away to just look at the source. I can't go through the literature on evamectin. I can't go through that and understand that. And even if I've read plenty of studies, I'm better at it than I used to be. But even though I can understand the language of it, I can't spot the subtleties of it. And you look at the big study that was out of Egypt and was retracted because they've been literally faking loads of data. I can't look at a data table and say, hang on, those two patients seem to be exactly the same patients. You're just cloning patients here to inflate your numbers. So I can't look through and say that I can identify that date of admission is actually later than the date of the death. Right.

So you've faked your data here. You know, I can't spot those level of fakery. So I would have just taken that study and said, well, if I'm supposed to be reading that study, that study looks legit to me. I can't see the problems with it. I'm not experienced

enough to do that. Right. So do we think that the advice to go and check the source material is a cop-out or is it naive or is it something else?

To me, honestly, it feels pandering. Yes, exactly. Thank you. It's pandering to people who over here, and I don't know how it is over there, but over here it is my freedoms.

Like what it is is personal liberty versus public health. That's what we're dealing with right now is there's two moral forces. One sees the other one as completely morally abhorrent. The one on the one side is a group of people who are saying my personal freedom overrides everything else one on the one side is a group of people who are saying my personal freedom overrides everything else. And the other side is saying,

no, public health is very important and we need to pay attention to public health. And those two are butting heads right now. And I don't know if that's as strong as it is over there, but it definitely is a huge, I mean, go to any place in our country that has strong right or libertarian leanings and it is 100 full hospitals yeah it's similar here maybe not quite the same strength but certainly

the people who are protesting that is what they're protesting on and i and i even though i wonder you know the same ones who are carrying confederate flags and spelling pedophile with uh with with no a in it i wonder if that's an inheritance of american culture like genuinely i wonder if that kind of that feel of personal freedom and liberty um is is just a a holdover from the fact that we do get so um so infused with your culture what basically is is fought on our shores yeah i wonder what the alternative version of that though is so if um was it khan or weintraub if if what they'd said instead was uh instead of saying you know do your own research if what they'd said was well trust the experts that's not going to wash either is it i think i mean really problematic communication thing you

know yeah but i mean like shouldn't the advice be and they allude to it like speak with your health care provider about your health care decisions, go to the people that you trust for all of the other healthcare that you trust. You know, it's not something that we're not already tuned to doing. I think we need to draw that analogy back and say this one decision should not be weirdly divorced from your other medical decisions. If I have a heart attack, I don't like go online and see if I can whip up some like homebrew nitroglycerin pill. Like I go to the fucking hospital, you know? Well, and they go to the hospital with COVID though too, Tom. And that's the thing is like, when it gets too bad, everybody goes to the hospital. There's very few people that are just like, I'll just tough this out. Everybody goes, even the most vicious anti-vaxxer

goes to the hospital when the chips are down. Everybody does it. So it's, you know, I'm not saying everybody, but I mean, there's a great lot of them that head out. Yeah, they head out to the hospital. I don't care how badly they've bitched about COVID. The other problem too is that people will hear an answer and then they, or something will be rectified and they still don't care.

And for instance, here in the States, we had the FDA give emergency use authorization for our vaccine. So what that meant was is they went off this study, it was a large study and they said, you know what, it's good enough. People need this vaccine in healthcare and in other places. We're gonna give an emergency use from the FDA.

It's not as, it's not as stringent as we normally would be, but we're going to give it out. Well, a bunch of people that were fighting against the vaccine essentially said, well, it's an emergency use. I'm not going to, I'm not going to take an emergency use. I'm not going to take that. I'm going to take that. Well, they took away the emergency use six or seven months later, and those people are still not getting vaccinated. So it's, you know, it was just, all it was, was a temporary crush and they're going to find something. Yeah, because ultimately what people do

is they give you the justification they think will work in that situation. And they may even believe that that's their justification in that situation. But the reason they're anti-vax is never the reason they're telling you, it's something else. And it's kind of one of the reasons I do be reasonable

is to try to say, the thing that people tell you is their belief. That's just a bit of their belief that they think is the most persuasive to you. But it's very rarely the thing that was persuasive to them. It's just, we make our decisions based on our gut instinct and our identity and our values and how we see the world and how the world fits with us. And then we back fill that with justifications to explain why we we think what we do we don't do it the other way around that that's the perverse thing that we're trying to do is to say i'm going to try and change my views on evidence that's that's not the natural human condition that's

what i'm sort of fighting against the other thing that really annoyed me about um about russell brand in this article is that um he references um in one of his videos I watched, I can't remember which one, he references Joe Rogan's bullshit treatments for when he was on tour in a court. So he had like vitamin C infusions. He had Invermectin. He had this. He had that. He had the other. Monoclonal antibodies.

Yeah, and the monoclonal antibodies that probably helps. Yeah, I mean, let's not talk about the stuff that might work. And like being in an age group that's really high risk, but you know. Yeah, exactly. That's not the insidious part. The insidious part is it's completely, all of that is treatment, not prevention. All of that is treatment. It's not to do with reducing the number of infections.

Right. And what really, really angered me about it is the lack of context presented there. Because I'm perfectly, one of the things I do like that he talks it is the lack of context presented there because i'm perfect one of the things i do like that he talks about is the politicization of treatments and how they become political collateral and how the media spins things one way or the other depending on which way the wind's blowing you know i've got some i've got sympathy with those points of view but when he's the one in the middle who's muddying the waters confusing the idea of treatments that you get once you've got the disease with the idea of vaccines

which do a completely different their role is completely different to the idea of anything bullshit or not which is used to treat the symptoms of COVID. And it made me really angry watching that. And it shows the difference in journalistic integrity when you get somebody like Russell Brand, who's good-looking, tall, semi-famous bloke with an English accent who knows a lot of big words and has a colourful history and a big social profile. He comes on and it's Russell Brand that's muddying the waters. It's Russell Brand that's confusing the two different lines of attack, those being treatment and prevention

opportunities. I just, I really hate that. You know, whatever redeeming qualities he's got, he's guilty of that. I dislike it. Well, he is. And it's a real shame because I used to quite like Russell Brand back when he was, you know, doing standup and when he was on BBC Two, he used to have a late night radio show on BBC Two and he was pretty good. But the problem with Brand is that he has, and he's obviously admitted this, a deeply addictive personality. And at one point that addiction was to heroin. And then for a while he was having sex with fans, you know, two, three at a time for several years. And that was his life.

It's problematic because you've got to find somewhere to plug him in every time. It's a nightmare. Is that why you've got a fan behind you, Andy? He was a serial womanizer, and that was a big part of his persona. He's a charismatic egotist. And the problem is, he then went on this kind of spiritual journey to try and cleanse himself

from all those problematic behaviors. And he's not an unintelligent man. He went back to university and actually did some proper study and things. But the problem is, he's someone with an addictive personality. And part of that addiction is to attention. And he doesn't, he's not somebody who has a voice in his brain saying, hang on, is that right? Hang on. Are you right about that?

He gets carried away. In my opinion, he gets carried away with himself and then becomes this charismatic guru figure, um, surrounded by people who are just going to say yes to him. And I think this is just a big negative feedback loop, which is happening again in his life and is unfortunately taking people with it into damaging places. And he's being fed by YouTube dollars now. Oh yeah, absolutely. It's become a thing now. He's got 4 million subscribers now. That's a proper business, right? Yeah, because he's eloquent. He's eloquent and he's charismatic, but those are tools. They're not qualities. Be eloquent.

And the tools that can be turned to good and bad. And I don't think he's somebody who spends a lot of time looking to distinguish which one of the two he's doing at any given point. He just rolls with where he's going. I just wrote dollar sign, dollar sign, Cecil. Tom, write down 4 million subscribers because I think that's also necessary to make money.

I think we need to make sure that first. I just need to be eloquent. Then I need to be charming. I'm neither. Okay, forget it. No, we're giving up on this early. We're going to scrap this plan early. Skinny jeans.

Yes, nobody wants me in skinny jeans. Guys, guys, if people were going to find you, okay, we'll start with Andy. Andy, if people were going to find

back episodes of Incredulous from like three, four years ago, where would they look? If you go to the, if you go to the South African tundra, there's a few

rolling around the dunes. You can find them there. Or you could just type Incredulous with a K into anything. Well, not a word processor. Don't type in the word processor. Marsh, if people were going to find you on the internet, where would they look?

Well, I'll point out, the first episode of Incredulous was actually a cave painting. It goes back that far. That's how long it was. That was episode one. We're on 60 now. If you want to find me, you can find

Be Reasonable, the show I do where I talk to people I disagree with, or I'm editor of the Skeptic magazine. If you go to skeptic.org.uk, you'll see how we do skepticism in the UK. Wonderful publication. Yeah, absolutely. We're patrons. You are, and thank you so much. The support we get is really, really valuable to us. It's very,

very useful. And you're also on Skeptics of the K, right? I am. I'm a regular. I've been on Skeptics of the K for, I think, 12 years now, but we're nowhere near 600 episodes. You're way ahead. It's the problem of doing a fortnightly show. You quickly get outstripped by people,

and now we seem embarrassingly low. But yeah, we do sort of original skeptical journalism on that show every fortnight. So check it out if you're interested in that. See, so I'm just happy that we got both Vitamint and Fortnite into this record that's just

I know I'm good that's the only reason I wanted you guys here I wanted Vitamint and now I'm gonna now I'm gonna go try on some skinny jeans

so guys thanks for joining us I appreciate you guys coming on we both appreciate you coming on on our 600th we very much enjoy every time

massive pleasure well done so it's a great achievement I'm sure you'll be doing 600 more at least who knew that a couple of American wankers on our 600th. We very much enjoy every time. Massive pleasure. Well done on getting 600, guys. It's a great achievement. I'm sure you'll be doing 600 more at least. Who knew that a couple of American wankers could do it?

It's hard for everyone. You're breaking up, Andy. You're breaking up. I'm sorry. I'm going under a bridge. You're not synced anymore. Something's wrong. So that is going to wrap up our 600th episode.

Tom, I have to say, 600 episodes. It's been my absolute pleasure to sit across from you. Just have fun, brother. Oh, man. Just have a good time. 600 episodes, but it's been an absolute wonderful journey, and it's been a lot of fun. It has, man.

Honestly, this show has changed my life. And I got to tell you, you asked me in the car, I still remember the car ride. You asked me, do you want to do a podcast? And I was like, yeah, whatever. I'll just say yes to shit. I'll just say yes. And then you called and you're like, we're doing it tonight. And I was like, yeah, I'll wing that. And brother, it has been the honor of my life to wing it 600 times with you, buddy. You know, it's funny too, is we were doing Everyone's a Critic for a couple of years and then we decided to break off Cogdiss.

Well, we didn't even know the name of it at the time. We're just like, let's break it off. And we sat on my couch and called Cogdiss. But we didn't know at the time, we didn't know we were going to call it and we were going to keep Everyone's a Critic, but Everyone's a Critic died out relatively quickly and Cognitive Distance became the podcast

that we decided to do because it was the things that we were the most passionate about that we pulled out of the other one. But it was one of those moments too, like we knew when we started doing it, how much fun it was to talk about the things that we really wanted to talk about.

I think from the very beginning of when we started that other show. And it's been such a great, a great journey. You know what I mean? Did you ever think we'd do 600 of them? You know what? I never thought,

I never thought we'd do 600. You know, because the thing is, is like, you wind up with, you wind up with a lot of projects that anybody does. You and I have had a bunch of projects that anybody does.

You and I have had a bunch of projects that fizzled out. They fade away. They just fade out. And I never thought we'd do a live show in England. I never thought we'd do a live show in Australia. I just never thought we'd do those live shows anywhere. I never really thought people were going to listen as much as they do. Right, me either.

And one of the best things about this show is just getting messages from people who enjoy it and who want to talk to us and meeting people who like what we do and talk to us when we go out. I'm never more humbled than when I go out and meet people who listen to the show. I'm never more humbled than that.

Like it's a very humbling experience to know that people spend their time, their moments of their life, this time that they can't get back listening to us. I remember. I'm always grateful for that. I remember the first time we got an email from a listener overseas. Yeah, overseas. Yeah.

And I'd never even been overseas. Yeah. You know, and I was like, whoa, man. Somebody's listening to us from across the ocean. I just realized in that moment the power that a medium like this has. Sure, yeah. And I remember just being floored

and I still feel floored. Me too. I still feel absolutely blown away when we get messages from all corners and just, hey, I listen. And I'm like, really, why? I love it though, because they'll send a message

and they'll, you know, it's rare, you know, we talk about hate mail. We rarely get hate mail. The people who stopped listening to us, who were mad at us, stopped listening long ago, you know, and that's fine.

We didn't want them listening anyway. We've had, we've had a great audience. We've had a great group of people. We had a great community. And, and I couldn't be happier with the product that we put out.

I'm always happy and always proud of what we do. So, I want to thank everybody who's listened to, even if it's just your first show. Thank you very much. The reason why we do this

is because people listen. And, and we thank you so much for listening reason why we do this is because people listen. And we thank you so much for listening to us and for supporting us for so long. It's been an absolute pleasure. And to all of our patrons, a special thank you. You guys have made 600 episodes possible. Absolutely.

We would not be at 600 without the support of our listeners and specifically our patrons. Yeah, for sure. Ian thanks you. Sarah thanks you for sure. Ian, thanks you. Sarah, thanks you. Yeah. And we thank you. Yeah, for sure.

Thank you, thank you. So that's going to wrap it up for this week. We will be back next week with another show and then on the live stream next Thursday, we will be coming back. We skipped a couple of weeks, but we're going to be coming back and we're going to be having a great time

on the live stream. Come check us out, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, 9 p.m. Central. That's going to wrap it up for our 600th episode. We're going to leave you like we always do the previous 600 episodes with the

skeptics. Creed credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter. Mommy issue. Hypno Babylon. Bullshit. Couched fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quasi-alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized,

stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late night info-docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls,

Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides.

Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. the opinions and information provided on this podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only all opinions are solely that of glory hole studios llc cognitive dissonance makes no representations as to accuracy complet completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information and will not be liable for any errors, damages, or butthurt arising from consumption. All information is provided on an as-is basis. No refunds. Produced in association with the local dairy council and viewers like you.