Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 618: Dr. Ken Camargo Interview

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Thank you to our guest Dr. Kenneth Camargo     Also OUR BOOK! The Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit available now!   Show Notes

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. 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 gloryhole studios in chicago and beyond this 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 is episode 618 of cognitive dissonance and holy shit do we got to talk about russia man sure yeah i don't even 100 know what to say exactly about russia's fucking invasion into the goddamn ukraine sure except for holy shit did we fucking call that yeah for once our intelligence was not for Yeah. For once, our intelligence was, not for once, but I mean, finally, our intelligence was actually fucking good and actionable. And, you know, we put all that shit out there

and exactly what we said was going to happen. It didn't dissuade Putin. Putin's a fucking pugilistic. It didn't. Fucking. No. Asshole. Yeah, it didn't dissuade him.

I will say this, though. If you look at his fucking uh playbook it's like right out of hitler's playbook i know man it's literally right out of hitler's playbook i mean you talk about the people there it's the russian speakers that are here and we're here to help them and then he's talking about the certain places that are independent remain independent and he keeps on he's basically just following that same playbook and it's i mean it's eerie it's this whole thing, I felt the same way. I'm like, oh my God, I'm like, I'm, we're watching the German invasion of Poland. Sure. That's really

what we're watching. And I've been thinking about this topic too. I'm curious what you think. So for years throughout the Cold War, there was this mutually assured destruction idea. And mutually assured destruction idea was that the big Cold War powers would not fuck with one another because if I lob nukes at you, you lob nukes at me, and then we all die. It was always puppets. We get a puppet, you get a puppet. We make them fight. Our puppets will fight. We make them fight. It's like two crawdads you caught in the river as a kid and you made them fight. But now I'm looking at the state of global politics and I'm thinking, one of the problems with having weapons

the likes of which we have now, these hypersonic missiles, these other things, is that these pugilistic powers like Russia or China or the United States, they can use their conventional weapons against parts of the world at their will, knowing that none of us want to- Nobody's going to really do that. Right. Nobody's ever going to do that.

Because my big brother is not going to fight your big brother. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So my big brother can fight your little brother and I'm just going to say, shit, man, sorry. Because if I break out the fucking baseball bat, he breaks out his baseball bat and we're both getting clubbed to death. And I, you know, I think that just didn't happen before because nobody was willing to play that game of chicken. Yeah. And now you got a guy like Putin.

Yeah. And Putin's like, no, man, I'll fucking stare you in the eye, drive my car right at you. And I am 100% not swerving. What I think is heartening, at least from the things that I'm seeing, and again, I don't know, you don't know exactly how, you don't know how big things are and you don't know how things really work. You're sort of,

you're stuck with these eyes that you have, which is the media, right? So what we have is a set of eyes and then you also have a ton of people all across the world who are now filming things and then posting on the internet. But you can't really,

sometimes it's hard to trust those things because you don't know if that's a bad actor. You don't know if that's somebody who's trying to influence how you think. But from some of the things I'm seeing, it would be hard to, I mean, I don't know how big they are, but it would be hard to fake something like this. There's huge rallies that are happening. These anti-war rallies that are happening in Russia where there's some severe punishments for being anti-government. You know, there's some severe punishment. I mean, the last guy who ran against Putin,

where's that guy? I know, right? Where's that guy right now? You know what I mean? There's been some people that have like, you know, suddenly gotten very sick when they fucked off Putin. And I watched a documentary about doping

that was a couple of years old. It's a really famous documentary. It's on Netflix. And I'm forgetting the name of it. But in any case, it's about doping. And a couple of the guys, one of the guys flees Russia who sort of is involved in the doping scandal there.

But a couple of the guys are just like, yeah, they died of a heart attack. And they're like in their 40s or late 40s, early 50s. is involved in the doping scandal there. But a couple of the guys are just like, yeah, they died of a heart attack. And they're like in their 40s or late 40s, early 50s. And you're like, did they really die of a heart attack? Or did they die of poison underwear? Or did they die of like, you know, I mean, yeah, they had a heart attack, but the pillow over their head helped facilitate that.

But really genuinely, you know, you have a country over there that is hostile towards protesters of that ilk. And they're out there putting themselves online. Yeah, by the thousands. Yeah, and I mean, a lot of people, these aren't small crowds. And so, and there's places all over the world

where there's these anti-war rallies are popping up. You know, nobody's really jumped in yet. And I don't think that it's going to happen. I don't think there's going going to happen. I don't think there's going to be anybody who's going to come in. They, they, the president, our president today said that he was going to send things to Germany, like trips to Germany, but not, we're not putting them anywhere. I mean, he specifically made a mention to be like, we're not putting them anywhere. I don't know. Again, you don't know how true that is.

Why just tell someone your plans that maybe they will, I don't know. But as it stands right now, he has said he won't. Well, I think, you know, from some of the analysis that I was reading is that one of the fears is that, you know, the rationale that Putin is giving is this like historical rationale that hearkens all the way back to the Middle Ages, that these were always Russian speaking peoples and there never was a Ukraine. And that's a fiction. And he's trying to basically rebuild the USSR. And I know there's real fear that he won't stop at the Ukraine, that he'll go into the Baltic states,

like Estonia and Poland. And, you know, those are NATO states. So any incursion onto those lands would trigger an immediate- Yeah, it would have to. Now it's World War III. Now it's legitimately a world war. You can't do anything.

You have to stand with those people. They signed on. Yeah. So this is a scary place to be. And it makes me nervous as hell to be honest. It really does. It makes me nervous as hell. Because one thing, I mean, likeler didn't stop at poland no

a policy of appeasement is what europe sought with hitler sure and it was like i'll let him have poland and he'll stop at poland yeah and you know there is some reason to think i mean again we live in a different geopolitical world now than the world of the 19 late 1930s and 40s but you know putin seems to be very combative and very willing to use force very obviously to to take lands back and he's you know he's a former kgb agent like who felt i think personally humiliated from things that i've read when the ussr crumbled and you know, this seems very much to be an attempt to rebuild that glory of the USSR, which is weird because the USSR had no fucking glory.

Yeah. Like it was not a glorious state. I wonder too, you know, I was also reading some analysis that talked about how this could possibly be like a new Afghanistan for them. Yeah. So they get mucked in, they come in, and then there's just guerrilla warfare, like crazy against them. So they get mucked in, they come in, and then there's just guerrilla warfare

crazy against them, and it just fucks their troops up over and over and over and over again. It's not going to be a you throw a punch and I throw a punch. It's going to be, sure, come on in, and they fall back, and then when they start to set up places, they just start getting

fucked up because there's a guerrilla aspect of being on your own land that you can exploit. And so that's another possibility too. And I think that that's a lesson that maybe we would be, the world should have learned that lesson from Iraq, from Syria, from Afghanistan, that it's one thing to roll into a country with massive overwhelming military force, decapitate the government, install a new government at a high level, but it's another thing to run that country. It was different after World War II because you had official declarations of war, then you had official declarations of surrender. But when you just take over a country, we've not seen any success running and

holding a country in modern times. And I think part of that is the weapons that you can... The United States can sell Stinger missiles and machine guns and deliver all that shit to insurgents all over the Ukraine, and they can make the resistance just painful, just gruelingly painful. We haven't seen in modern times that I can think of any state actor overcome an insurgency long-term. Yeah, I mean, just roll back to Afghanistan. How long were we there?

Yeah, 20 years. How long were we there? And then finally we just had to pack up and leave and what's going to happen? And so it's a very touchy situation. And, and, uh, I I'm heartened that the Russian people are not behind. Some of the Russian people are not behind him. And I think that's a good sign. I hope that, you know, there's, they're doing a lot of hard sanctions, but you know, we'll see how much that affects their economy. Who knows?

You know what I mean? Who knows if this is enough to turn the spigot off and make them stop? I don't think it will be. I don't think it will be either. And a guy feels, God, the parallels to Germany feel so sharp, right? When Germany lost World War I,

they were saddled with these crippling economic reparations for that war. And that is massively influential in their decision to launch the Second World War. And I'm looking and I'm like, man, these crippling, if these sanctions are genuinely crippling, will the response be to pull back and cease aggression? Or will the response be to further their aggression? And I don't know that answer i have no idea or pull back just to build up and then right yeah yeah it feels like some shit we've seen before though man let's talk about that tom before we move off of putin let's definitely talk

a little bit about trump yeah uh yeah it's so funny cecilil, because I did these notes as late as yesterday and Trump came out again today in praise of Putin. Yeah. I mean, Donald Trump cannot get, he cannot get that man's dick any further into the back of his fucking throat. He's been nothing but a fan the whole time. And now he's praising him for his masterful play. Yeah, because this is a guy, he's not looking at this and saying, holy shit, this is another country just seizing hold through violence, another country's territory.

Yeah, another sovereign nation. Right. Just rolling over a democratic country and taking that over and the loss of life. He's described Ukraine as a nice bit of property with some good people on it. Sure. Today, he said something like, you know, well, he gets to take over a whole country for $2 in sanctions is what he said, you know, downplaying the, the effect and the cost of Biden sanctions.

Right. Cause that's what we have. He has to do that. It's he sees strong men. He sees that act of the strong man and, and the act of the autocrat, the same way he sees business leaders. I really think he can't,

he can't separate that sort of combative nature and whoever the last man standing is. This story is from MSNBC. It's time to admit the obvious. Donald Trump sure is acting like a Russian agent. Yeah, he has been for a long time. Yeah. I mean, when Russia helps to get you elected, then I think when you turn to the camera during the electoral process and say, Russia, if you're listening, hack into my opponent's emails. Yeah.

I think there's a pretty good reason for us to say, sure. Maybe you're in bed with the fucking Russians. Sure. You have a bunch of people that are, uh, that are now looking at this and saying, you know,

he's certainly, he's, he's not like one of these, he's not a fucking, he's not a smart guy. No. So, he always, you can always tell what he's thinking, and he'll just blurt it out. He just blurts it out. And so, when you see him talk like this,

you can't help but think, what has happened to you to make you want to do this? And he's been talking like this for a very, very long time. Yeah. Yeah. i think he admires the strength i think you're right i think he i think you're right i think if if if trump in a guy like trump would be like yeah if i could take over mexico with little repercussion why wouldn't i do it would do it and the and the answer is because that's not yours sure i he would buy

greenland if he right yeah exactly oh my god i forgot he tried to buy Greenland. Oh Jesus God. That's a thing. I know that there is some rift on the Republican side. Some people are siding with Trump and then clearly like Tucker Carlson, there was like a whole thing where he was talking about how we shouldn't, you know, there's people talking about. That guy's a straight up Russian. Yeah. There's other people talking about like, oh, there was a story in here talking about praying for Putin. Yeah. You know, so there's, there's definitely some putin sympathy on the right but there's also people i saw a story about mitch mcconnell basically saying no that that's and you shouldn't back that guy and that's horrible and you know so i hope that there is at least some republicans that stand with biden on this

to stop them from doing this i mean you would you would imagine. Right, this shouldn't be controversial. What's insane and inane is that there's anything controversial. I mean, you have a country that just is invaded another country without provocation. Holy shit. Everybody across the world, I don't think that there are any nations

that I can think of that are not standing in solidarity to say, holy fuck. Everybody's on their side. So we've, but the idea that here in the States, the Russian propaganda has been so effective. And that's all I think is that it's hard not to think that it has been so effective that there are people that are like, yeah, I'm fucking pro-Putin. I'm pro-Russia. Polls, we have a story in the notes. There are polls

that show that among Republicans, Putin polls better than Democrats. Than Biden. How the fuck can an autocratic leader of a nation

of another country that we've been at war with that we're in competition with too for a lot of things. We were in a cold war with them for fucking 60 years or thereabouts. Yeah. And all of a sudden

it's like their propaganda has been so successful that a large swath of the population thinks that that's better than the current president of the United States. Holy shit. What is happening? What is even happening? Don't be ashamed of yourself.

Officer. Officer. Officer. No, no, no. Please get back in the car. Listen to what I've got to say. even happening. All right, Cec cecil so this story comes from and this i have to pause and tell you a quick story about my grandpa my grandparents moved all around the country and at one point they lived in oregon and i went out to visit them and i was a you know kid from chicago I would always visit my mom and my grandparents and I would pronounce it Oregon Oregon Oregon sure and my grandfather would give me no end of shit he's like it's Oregon not Oregon and I'm like it looks like Oregon you know it looks a lot like it really does it really does and like I always thought it was the rhyme with Gorgon right I always thought it was the Oregon trail yeah not the Oregon trail you know I'm like organs are what you have in your body, Grandpa. You know?

And then I came across their newspaper, which is the Oregonian. It is? Yeah. So then it must be Oregon. It must be. And so when I found out that their newspaper was the Oregonian, then I was like,

Grandpa, neither one of us are right. It's not the Oregonian. It's not, exactly. It's not the Oregonian. You're absolutely right. It's the Oregonian. The Aragonian. So you live in Oregon. Oregon. Oregon. It's a big, giant bar, exactly. You're absolutely right. It's not the Oregonian. You're absolutely right. It's the Oregonian. The Aragonian. So you live in Oregon.

Oregon. It's a big giant bar of soap with wires in it. There's a generator and a shaman. It's a whole thing. If you don't know what that is, you need to look it up right now. Stop what you're doing, listener. Oh God.

And go search for Oregon generator. If you've never seen one of the funniest things you've ever seen. This story, however, not funny. Not so funny. Not funny. Not funny. Colorado could become third state

to ban police from lying to kids during interrogation it's good but it's not funny it's not and it's good but it's also like holy mother of god there are 47 states where the police can lie they don't even think twice about kids yeah you kids? Yeah, you know, you saw that Making a Murderer show. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Watching that show, regardless of where you land on the grown-up,

the Avery guy, whatever, like, I don't care, wherever you land on it, don't send me your email. Yeah, I know. Don't fucking send me your serial fucking email

about... Yeah, don't tell me Adnan did it. I don't care. I'm exhausted by this. Whatever. I think it is uncontroversial, though, to say that there is no world

where that mentally disabled teenager had anything to do with that crime. There's nothing that should lead you to believe that, and especially watching the tapes and the pieces of the tape that they provided you, watching them mislead him, watching them lead him. Right.

Mislead him and then lead him, that's a horror. And him getting the details completely wrong on every level. Every single time. Every level. He's just making it up so that they will leave him alone. Right. He wanted to go back to class. He thinks that

if he says this is the right, this is the problem with kids is their fucking brains aren't formed yet. Right. They're just physically, they don't have all the brain parts physically that you have as a grownup. So, you know, they think that they don't have these reasoning and risk-taking, like all these things are underdeveloped or not developed at all. So they think if they appease the authority figure, the authority figure will let them go back to class or let them go back home. These people never, ever see their homes again. In some cases, they never get to go back to class.

They never leave that custody of the authority. It's, I read this story and I thought, how the fuck do we live in a world where the police can even interrogate children? That's insane to me. How do we live in a world where the police can interrogate children and then they have to talk about

whether or not they're going to lie to them? And the first thought I had was, how do you interrogate children without a lawyer there? How is it that there isn't a lawyer, even if it's just a public defender, in that room immediately? That's what I mean. It's insane to me.

And even a parent is not good enough. It's not good enough. It's not. That's what happened with the five. Yeah, the Central Park Five. One of the parents was in the room. Yeah, does not matter. Doesn't matter.

These are kids. Think about all the things we don't let kids do. Yeah. We don't let kids act on their own agency in most of the decisions of their life. Most of the time. Almost no decisions. You're absolutely right.

Do kids have any agency? You're absolutely right. Do kids have any agency? You're absolutely right. All of a sudden, if they're going to be, you know, potentially on the hook for a crime, all of a sudden, they have perfect fucking agency?

And we can do things like lead them. Yeah. And lie to them. It's so easy. And make them think that they've been caught. And then they get pressured into saying things because, you know, not caught in this particular case that they've been caught. And then they get pressured into saying things because, you know, not caught in this particular case that they're talking about.

It's a heartbreaking case. It's so sad. They convinced this little girl that her parents molested her. Yep. Because they said, you were told by, your older siblings already told us

that they molested you. And she said, well, I don't think they did. And then they convinced her that it happened. And she's a little kid. She doesn't know did. And then they convinced her that it happened. And she's a little kid. She doesn't know any better. She doesn't realize these are adults. These are trusted figures in your life.

You look at these people as the ones who you go to when you're in trouble. You've always heard that. I don't know. I know what it's like growing up as a white kid. So I know what that feels like. And at least when I was a kid, that was what I was told. Go to a teacher, go to a cop. Those are the two things that you always heard. If you're in trouble,

do those things. That was a standard Gen X narrative for kids. Yeah, for kids. It was 100%. And now, you know, the cops can lie to you. They can trick you. You know, do you really want to be fucking questioned by Loki? You know, like, why is that? Why do we do that?

Why do we think that's okay? I am flabbergasted at the, I don't know that you can pass a law that says the cops can't lie at all. Right, right. And I get that. I understand that too, but I'm talking about kids.

Kids is different. The police should not be able to talk to kids at all, zero, for any reason. I don't care if they are, in this case, they're not this little girl. She wasn't, she wasn't the perceived, she was the perceived victim, right? Yeah. It doesn't matter what, what connection the police have with kids. They should have no connection with kids.

It's not mediated by a responsible adult. You're absolutely right. Because they, they don't have anyone advocating for them. And they have no ability to suss through that. Think about the reason that the statutory rape laws exist. Statutory rape laws exist because we recognize that children don't have the wherewithal to consent. So kids might think that they are, in fact,

consenting to something. But we know as adults, you know what? Even though you think you want to do this, in fact, you are not capable of making a decision for yourself because the stakes are too high. How could these stakes not be higher? And if you draw that analogy out, it's the same thing. Absolutely. I hope that more states take this on and start doing this. You know, it's one of those things that we've come across as we started doing this show. We've come across more and more sort of horrors of justice. And this one really just

stopped me in my tracks because it's one of those things you just don't know exists. You think, you think you live in a world where this sort of thing doesn't happen, right. You know, or that if it happens, it happens on a, on a TV, on a documentary you see about the Central Park five from, from the times before, from before times. Right? But it's something that happens all the time. It's happening right now somewhere. Yeah. And that's a terrible thing to consider. Absolutely.

Hey, so the book might be out right now or it might not be. Check the show notes and there might be a link or not. Okay. It's ready. The book is here, Tom. It's here, buddy. The book is here. So the book is ready and the link just dropped.

Not the audio book, but the physical book is Amazon link. I'll put it in the show notes. Wait, what do you mean you didn't hear about the book? Well, let me introduce you to our mad lads, Tom and Cecil, who wrote The Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit, available in Kindle and paperback on Amazon right now. Navigating the marketplace of ideas can be difficult when there is so much bullshit to wade through, this book helps connect the underlying arguments used by charlatans and gives readers a skeptics toolkit to identify the logical traps and pitfalls of different types of nonsense and to discard each of them using critical thinking practices. From paranormal and medical quackery to conspiracy theories and religion, the authors unpack the grand unified theory of bullshit, pulling out the common thread

that ties these nonsensical and harmful ideas together. Available now on Amazon, not the audio book, that'll in the future, soon. Bye. It's ready to go. You guys can buy the book.

So you can get right now. We're not sure that when this release is wide, we will have an audio book. We're not sure. We are working on the audio book right now. So we suspect next week is the audio book release. Audio book wide, we will have an audio book. We're not sure. We are working on the audio book right now. So we suspect next week is the audio book release. The audio book release, I will say this, as a guy who's editing it right now, it's fucking money. Tom is doing an excellent job reading it. We had other voices chime in. There's a couple other voices in there, but Tom

is doing an excellent job reading it. And it is really, really good. So the audio book, if you're saving your pennies, you want something, the audio book might be what you want to go for. It's really, really good. So the audio book, if you're saving your pennies, you want something, the audio book might be what you want to go for. It's really, really excellent. The print book in soft cover, while not ready as we record this and may or may not be ready for patrons, should be ready Monday to get. Now, patrons, if it's ready,

you will have a link there to buy it. But if not, then the link will be on Monday. The hardcover is not ready yet because it has not been proofed yet because that hardcover takes a month to get. That's bonkers. It's crazy. So if you order a hardcover after it goes live, chances are it's going to take a month to get. But it'll be a hardcover book. And I'll let you know what the quality is once I proof it. I haven't even seen the copy yet. I'm waiting right now for the last two tiny errors. I'm going to turn

those pages when I get the new softcover, which should be here tomorrow. And then I will make it go live. It takes 72 hours

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When you get it, please rate us right away. Just buy it, read it, rate us. The rating is going to help, just like it helps the show. It's going to help push us into places where people are buying it and people are seeing the ratings.

And if you enjoyed the book, we encourage you to please rate the book and let people know it's a good book and give it a good rating so that more and more people could find this book. We're going to put links on this week's show notes. The book, you can search for it. It's called The Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit. You can search for both of our names, the co-authors on the book. We're so happy that we cajoled Michael Marshall into writing the foreword for this. Very kind.

And he's very kind of him to do. So check this book out. We are very proud of this book. We spent a lot of time in it. We spent, you know, the time writing was easily eight hour days for, you know, maybe a month and a half of our time.

That's a lot of time. It's a lot of time we put in this book. And a lot of time, Cecil went into editing and a half of our time. That's a lot of time. That's a lot of time. That's a lot of time we put into this book. And a lot of time Cecil went into editing and a lot of time into the recording and a lot of time into editing the recording. Rereading, rereading, rewriting. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work.

It's a lot of work to put together a book. It's a lot of work. But we think you guys are going to like it. We also have a plan for signatures. We know that some of you guys want signed copies of the book. So here's what Cecil and I came up with. We have bookmarks. Yeah. We have grand unified theory of bullshit bookmarks that we are going to print out and have available here. If you buy the book and you want us to sign something, take a picture of yourself with the book, email it to our email

or the receipt, whatever, however you want to prove it to us is book. Email it to our email. Or the receipt, whatever. However you want to prove it to us is fine. Email it to our email. Give us your address. We will sign a bookmark for you. And we will mail one regular old US snail mail to wherever you're at. Yeah. We're going to charge you a little bit of money for this

because we don't want to go in the hole. We have to cover our costs. But we're not going to charge a lot of money for it. We are still pricing out exactly how much this is going to cost. We'll make the announcement next show. But what will happen is you'll send us a message and then we will just send you an email with a PayPal link probably in it.

And then you just PayPal. And then we'll get your address through that PayPal link. And then we'll be able to send the bookmark out. We'll sign it. You just tell us what you want to say. And if you have something specific, if not, send the bookmark out. We'll sign it. You just tell us what you want to say and if you have something specific, if not,

just say sign it and we'll sign it and then we'll send it out to you and you'll have a nice bookmark that you can put with the book and then if you see us in the future, we're hoping to go to conferences

and stuff. Yeah, when the world turns back on, we'd love to sign things in person. Come see us and we'll sign it in person and you could also ask the scathing guys

because the scathing guys, all the people came up to us when the scathing guys because the scathing guys, all the people came up to us when the scathing guys were- And I signed their books. When they had a book and they were like signing the book. So it'd be hilarious to walk up to Noah with our book and have him sign it.

That would be so funny. You guys have to do it. Guys, you have to do it. It'd be so funny. And I will say no hard feelings. You got to do the same thing because whenever I had to sign, I was asked to sign Noah's book.

I signed over his name on the book because it made me laugh. Yeah. So sign over, you got to sign over one of our names. Sign over one of our names. Turnabout is fair. Yeah. We have pranked them quite a bit with this, but we would love it if you guys would do the same thing to them. And if you see us at a conference, bring the book or we'll probably have copies for sale and stuff. But we'd love to sign it, but there's just no good way with a print on demand book to get the book. Cause it's all, cause we're doing prime, but we don't, you know, it's, it's so much easier if you're a prime person. Cause then you don't just don't pay for shipping. So it's like a cheaper way to do it for you guys. Yeah. It's just like, it's a, it's such a hard problem to try to solve.

And we think that this, you know, we had a nice bookmark design and it's a nice cardstock bookmark. It's cool. It'll be cool to have with the book and it'll have a signature. So we'll encourage you to do that. And then that way we're not shipping a book to here and then to you and then back and forth and all that.

But check this week's show notes for the link to the book. Please, you know, if you're interested in the book, please buy it. And if you liked it, please rate it. So we are joined by Dr. Ken Carmago. Ken is an MD with a master's in PhD in public policy. He's a professor and researcher of the graduate program in public health

at the Institute of Social Medicine in Rio de Janeiro. And he's the associate editor of the American Journal of Public Health. Doctor, thank you so much for joining us this evening. It's a pleasure. So the reason I wanted to have you on the show, is it Ken or Kenneth? What do you prefer?

Ken. Ken, all right. So Ken, the reason I wanted to have you on the show, Cecil and I talk a lot. In fact, we even wrote a book extolling the virtues of appealing to expertise on subjects for which expertise is the right method to learn the truth. And we talk a lot on this show about skepticism and we've been talking about COVID obviously over the last two

years quite a lot and a lot of the disinformation and misinformation that comes out. But I keep running into a problem as a skeptic. I keep running into a problem of trying like hell to read good sources and to come away with a coherent narrative about COVID and about kind of what to expect in the future and how to understand kind of the place that we're in today. And I say that when I say reading good sources, I'm trying to read things from the New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, Wall Street Journal.

I'm trying to read good, generally accepted, vetted sources. And I want to kind of go through some of the things that seem to be both out there in the world from these good sources and that paint a very contradictory picture and maybe get your feeling as to how to understand some of this information when we're dealing with it as a layperson. Okay, but before we proceed, I think that's a very important issue that you're raising. And first of all, I think that one of the issues around this is that everything they're talking about COVID is very recent. And the problem is that science takes time. We are rushing things up because we are pressured by time, sometimes with a lot of success. I think

that the speed with which the vaccines, for instance, were developed is amazing, although they are not so – they have built up on research that has been going on for decades. So it's not all of that. It's not ex novo. A lot of it has been already done. But one of the biggest problems that we have is that you have this kind of science in the making, which usually is something that is not open to the general public view, being discussed in public. And that can create a lot of confusion because sometimes you have the wrong hypotheses. And that's part of the work in science is going through hypotheses

and trying to confirm them and then disproving them and then having to rethink things and doing work again, etc. and so on and so forth. But when you have to give quick answers, this can be very confusing. I read something by a guy called Gil Eyal and he has a very interesting remark about the whole thing about science and the public policy. He made an analogy that I find very interesting that science is going on a very slow lane and politics is going on a fast lane. And the problem is trying to find a compatibility of these two lanes,

and it doesn't work out very well always. And the last thing I would like to point out is that I'd add to those sources that talk about the CDC itself. Go on. Yeah, no, that's a great point because the CDC has been a frustrating and difficult group to manage information coming from. And I don't think, you know, Cecil and I have talked a lot about the need, you know, for clear and effective science communication. And I wrote down a phrase while you were talking. And the phrase I wrote down, it's making me laugh to read it, is sausage crisis. So we have a phrase here, you know, like, you don't want to see how the sausage gets made.

And I wonder if we're partially in a little bit of a crisis with science and the communication around science and that we're being exposed really as lay people for the first time to how the sausage is being made. And I wonder if that's not creating some of that crisis of confusion. I guess so. I think there is a number of problems associated with that. First of all, I think that scientists are not necessarily very good in communicating with the general public, partly because the incentives for the scientific community are all there for scientists to communicate with each other, but not with the general public. And a lot of noise can be introduced in the meantime. You know, that old playground play

that we had, a sort of game, it's called here wireless telephone, that you say something in the ear, you whisper something in the ear of someone, and then that person whispers something in the ear of the other person, and then we get at the end of the queue. The message is totally different from what it was originally. This kind of thing happens a lot because it's very hard.

Some of the things that people are trying to communicate demand a lot of background. And not everyone has the patience to listen to an hour lecture on viruses and the immune system and whatnot, and epidemiology and all the things that are associated with that.

And you try to come out with soundbites. And then a lot can go wrong in that. And I think the other problem that we have is the role of the internet and all these bubbles that have formed around it, that people are very, you have very little exposure when you are inside the bubble to things that effectively challenge it. So I think that a lot of this compounds the problem that was already there, I think, in terms of this whole issue about communication. And the thing is, it takes time to be sure about some of the things that we say. And that time wasn't a luxury that we could afford, at least not in the initial phases of the epidemic.

Now we have a lot more of stable knowledge, if you can call it that. But as it was in the making, it was very hard to come up with definitive answers that people were demanding. Do you think that a vaccine coming out within a year was actually a detriment to what actually happened with COVID? Do you think if it would have taken a little more time, people would have been a little more accepting of it? I don't think so because the vaccines came, there was nothing wrong with the time. It was a surprise.

I can admit that I was surprised because the previous experience that we had with vaccines took a lot longer than that. But all the steps that had to be taken in order to make sure that the vaccine was safe and effective were taken. Nothing was skipped. The only thing that perhaps they have done is to do some parts of the studies in parallel instead of waiting for something to end and then begin the other phase.

I think the problem is that there is a lot of suspicion around vaccines, unfortunately. And I think this has compounded. I think the whole climate of public discussion all over the world is very poisoned by conspiracy theories and stuff like that. So it's very hard. I don't see how having another year waiting for a vaccine to come would make a huge difference, honestly. And on the other hand, I think that having the vaccine as early as we had was instrumental in, at least in the places that people really got vaccinated and getting the pandemic under control. Sure. So I wonder,

I wonder, you know, you said a couple of things that I wrote down some notes for. So much of the language of science is written in a way that lay people like myself, you know, my education background is in English literature.

I have no ability to read and really interpret and understand scientific papers like as primary sources. Like they're written in a language that I frankly do not speak. I don't have that. I don't have access to that knowledge. And I wonder, you know, when those things get translated, and I really think it is a translation, it's translated from the language of whatever scientific discipline they're written in. And then I think they're analogized.

And the analogized, you know, they're analogized by scientific press writers. And then those analogies become how we as lay people come to understand what's true. And then people pick apart the semantics and rhetoric around the analogy that was used to describe science. around the analogy that was used to describe science. And I wonder if there isn't a growing need for some kind of, I don't know, some kind of translation, some kind of like universal lay person's language. We run into this problem in parts of science

that are less urgent. You know, we run into this problem where people misunderstand what the word theory means, for example. That's very common in the skeptical community, right? So, oh, that's just a theory. And scientists use theory one way and colloquially we use it another. And I wonder if there isn't a pressing need for some kind of universal middle ground, language, linguistically.

Yeah, well, first of all, this is a really serious problem. Just to make a point, this is a really serious problem. Just to make a point, I was until two years ago, I was for four years the director of research in my university. And we have a program of incentives for researchers

that is a kind of competition. People have to submit their projects and they are evaluated by committee and the curriculum, etc. And so forth. And people who have better curriculum, better projects, get the evaluated by committee and the curriculum, et cetera, and so on. So, often people who have better curriculum, better projects, get the grants and those who don't, they are left out. And we try to sort of make things accessible to a wider audience. We asked for everyone that was submitting a project to write a small paragraph describing in lay terms what the research was about. And I have to tell you,

I'm a medical doctor. I have a PhD in public health. I worked with a colleague that was a very, very accomplished scientist in basic science and basic biological science. And there was a lot of the stuff that came out that was supposedly in layman's terms that we both couldn't understand. This is really a problem. Did you just hand it back and say no? Just no.

What? No. Yeah. You got to make it. What you got to do is you got to get them in an elevator and tell you on the way down an elevator, like an elevator pitch. Right. If they can't tell you on the way down in one elevator ride, you just reject their application. Pretend I'm your drunk uncle and

it's Easter. This is not something that is done to make things more difficult. It's just that you develop a sort of shorthand for the language. There is necessary for scientific communication. You get so used to use it on

your daily life with other colleagues that are working in the same field that getting things across can be very complicated. But having said that, there is an author that I like a lot that I have used a lot in my own research called Harry Collins. He's a professor, if I'm not mistaken, in Manchester in the UK.

He's a sociologist of science and has written a lot about expertise. And he talks about different kinds of expertise. And one of the things that he writes about and he has used himself as an example is the difference between what he calls a contributive expert and an interactional expert. The contributive aspect is what people usually think about when you're talking about experts. Someone that does actual things, a researcher that does the actual research.

But he says there is another kind of expert that is someone who can, to put it bluntly, can talk the talk but cannot walk the walk. And he uses himself as an example. He has been studying the scientists that work with gravitational waves for over 40 years. And he got to a point that he understands them. He can talk back to them, have a meaningful conversation. But obviously, he cannot.

He's a sociologist. He cannot conduct the experiments. But at one point, he was able to propose a hypothesis that the scientists managed to turn that into an experiment. So I think that we need people like these that would be sort of like this translators that you were talking about, amphibians, that know both languages, you know, like those people who are the privileged informants for anthropologists. We need this kind of people that can be conversant in the language of science, but at the same time can make it understandable by other people.

And this is not easy, but there are people that can do that. We have a couple of guys here in Brazil that have been doing that on the Internet, which I think is also very important, using those social networks. And you have people who are disseminators of science, like Newt de Grasse Tyson or Bill Nye, that do a very good job at that. So I think we need more people doing this. But there are many obstacles along the way. But I think definitely this is something that we need.

Yeah, I wonder if there, you know, one thing that watching the public reaction, the sort of social media reaction to the pandemic is it's turned the entire world into the worst set of armchair epidemiologists we could have possibly asked for. I mean, it's just, and I'll raise my hand and say myself included. And I think, you know, one of the problems is that feels necessary. You know, the information that's out there is voluminous and sometimes contradictory. And so trying to sort through that to understand how to behave, how to assess your risk, how to know in a constantly evolving environment, which information sources are accurate. And so, you know, should I go to the grocery store? Should I stay the hell home? Should I, you know, rinse things off? Is that not necessary?

Are masks essential? Which kinds? What about kids? The number of questions and decisions that we as lay people have been asked and forced to make, I mean, it's not an insignificant amount of stuff. No, no, absolutely not. And trying to sort through that is very challenging. What suggestions do you have to sort that well? It's a daunting task. First of all, I think that we are very bad at assessing risk. That's one thing, in general. Unless you were specializing in it like an epidemiologist,

the kind of intuitive response that people have to accessing risk is very, very bad. And we see that in practice all the time. I think there is no easy... I wish I had...

I would have earned a lot of money if I had an answer. No, I don't need to be an easy answer. I'm okay with complicated. I'm okay with even answers like, there isn't a good answer, if that's true. I mean, I think the thing is, we need to look at organs like the WHO or the CDC itself.

At some point, they're going to come out with the answers. And I think it's correct that people challenge what they are saying, but it cannot get to the point. I think that you were talking about skepticism at the beginning of this conversation. I think the skepticism is very important. But skepticism is not simply denying anything that anyone says all the time. Right. You see, it reminds me of the famous Monty Python sketch of the argument clinic. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. Yes, it is. So that's not being skeptic. Being skeptic is being able to challenge and show me your data, show me your reasoning. And I think that's something that scientists should be more concerned with.

It's not just showing the results of scientific research, but how we arrive at those results so that people can understand how we proceed. And then I think that would be more amenable to rational argument and to accept the conclusions that we arrive. But at some point, simply there is no – we have to take decisions decisions I go back to what Eyal said about the different lanes we have to take decisions with bad data with insufficient data with not enough time to really think about things or to make the experiments

or to get all the data that we need to make a decision so I think we have to sort of figure out what's going on and And there are some general principles that weren't that hard, actually, to understand. You have a contagious disease that clearly from the very start is airborne, that is spread through direct contact between people. So, there is a number of measures that should be very clear from the beginning. The issue around masks, for instance, there was a problem at the beginning because we weren't quite sure of the propagation of the viruses from one person to another. But as it became clear that the main route of transmission was direct contact, masks are absolutely, there is no more discussion about that.

People should wear masks when in close contact. Try to avoid being close to people. Try to avoid agglomeration in closed spaces. So this is the kind of thing that's the simple measures that could have been taken. The other thing is that, unfortunately, there was disputing, narrative in dispute around the thing. But there was disputing, narrative and dispute around the thing. And not necessarily, because that's one of the problems that we have with this kind of public argument, is that not necessarily everyone is really interested in finding out. I wouldn't say truth. I don't like that word. But finding out the best possible course of action or the best reasons that we have for doing something.

But they have agendas. So a lot of the argument about not doing lockdowns or anything like that was basically from an economics point of view. And that the idea was that economics trump the public health. So people were trying to twist. So people are trying to twist that. It's kind of like, and we've seen that in other situations like climate change or tobacco or whatnot. There are actors that are not exactly using the same rulebook in the discussion.

They have a hidden agenda and they are trying to store things to fit their agenda. So I think that complicates a lot. But I mean, if you can show, well, okay, this is a virus. This propagates this way. This is highly contagious. So even if the lethality is not that big as we feared it would be, the fact that we have a large number of cases. That means a lot of people are going to suffer. A lot of people are going to die if you don't do anything. In my perspective, this should be enough to have some minimal consensus about the measures that we should take.

Unfortunately, we didn't see that because we had all the time people challenging the very basic facts that we had that were, at least from my point of view, quite obvious. And on the other hand, I think, to be fair, there were problems inside science itself. Because there's this whole thing about preprints that were created. Because you have this very not-so-fast mechanism of submitting a paper to a journal. It is reviewed by peers. It has to pass several barriers, and then it's accepted and published. This is not an absolute guarantee that it's going to be a very good paper. Unfortunately, lots of not-so-good things go through, but

it is a measure of quality control. With preprints, you don't have that. I think people were, I think the hats were in the right place. They were trying to contribute as much knowledge as possible. So a lot of stuff was published in the preprints. But preprints are not peer-reviewed. And they are not necessarily that very good to start with. So a lot of people picked up those preprints and based on that started counseling people

to do certain things like, for instance, take chloroquine. Based on very, very bad studies, if you can call that a study at all. So, I mean... Yeah, nowhere near as rigorous as the evidence for ivermectin, for example. Yeah, right, exactly. Oh my God. All those crazy things and pseudo treatments that were going around. And that's a general problem

that we have with the whole wellness thing. There's a lot of unproven treatments or treatments that are proven to not work that are going around and people trust them for some reason or another. But in this particular case,

this is very serious because this got in the way of people doing what they had to do. All right, so I'm going to ask you some very specific questions that you may not know the answers to, and that's totally fine. But they relate to kind of, again, trying to suss out where we're at and how to understand some risk based on some, I guess, sort of conflicting or challenging pieces of information. So there are a number of articles. I sent a few of them over to you just for quick review. But there are articles that suggest that, hey, look,

this thing is quickly, people are vaccinated in parts of the world that have access to the vaccination. I know most of the world doesn't. You know, this thing isn't going to go away. But with vaccination, the likelihood is eventually everybody will catch this, but it will be less and less dangerous as time goes on. And that sounds very encouraging for those of us who are fortunate enough to live in a country which has, you know, access to these vaccinations. And then you read something else that says something like,

you know, 10% of people who get infected with COVID, whether it's symptomatic or asymptomatic, will develop long-term symptoms of COVID or potential post-viral syndromes associated with COVID. And that sounds kind of terrifying as far as I'm concerned. And I'm trying to understand how to parse that kind of risk in a world that says, look, eventually everybody's going to get this, but it won't be a big deal, except for for 10% of people, it might change your life forever. And are both of those things, those things seem to be in conflict in terms of trying to feel optimistic. Let me try to unpack two things. First of all, I think that it's a tragedy that not all people have access to the vaccine.

Okay. Yes, 100%. And that's one very good example of how we should be thinking in global terms and not this place or that other place. That's one thing. The other thing is that the vaccines do protect against the disease, the more severe forms of disease. Actually, a review study made by the UK Health Security Agency that suggests strongly that the vaccine also protects from long-term COVID. Good, because I've seen conflicting information on that as recently as yesterday. Yeah, because I think that there's a number of problems with this.

Because, first of all, long COVID is not very well defined. And this is always a problem because of how you can count and have the numbers of anything if you don't have a precise definition of what you're looking at. And I've read that some of the things that have been called long COVID could be just the effects of being a long time in an ICU, for instance, and not necessarily linking to COVID. Okay, definitely there seems to be something there. But the precise limits of what we call, what should be called long COVID are not that clear. But even given that, this review study was not a systematic review, but they went on over a lot of sense of this rapid review. And I think it's very encouraging looking from that point of view. But given that, there is the other problem that there is no case in history that any infectious disease was controlled by herd immunity. So-called natural herd immunity, but just letting people face the disease on their own

without a vaccine. All the diseases that we managed to control were controlled through vaccines in the case of viruses and infectious diseases caused by viruses. So the problem is that as long as they have a large pool of people that weren't infected,

the virus is going to continue to reproduce and new variants could arise. And it's a total toss-up if that new variant is going to be less aggressive, more aggressive. This idea that with time everything is going to be better, that's not necessarily true. We have to have in mind that coronaviruses, we have been living with them for a long time.

And a new variant, a new species of coronavirus, as you can call that, just arose somewhere. And it was not the first time. We had the original SARS. We had MERS. So there is no warranty that this won't happen again. So having this pool of people that are going to be infected over and over again is a sure recipe for having new variants coming up. And that can be a challenge because we cannot be sure that the new variant is going to be the vaccines that we have are going to be as effective against new variants. So the thing is, the main message for me here is that we should

So the thing is, the main message for me here is that we should struggle for the whole world to have access to these and other vaccines. We only managed to eradicate, for instance, smallpox because it's zoonotic. So it seems like it's got an almost infinite well of variability with the animal population as well. Or do you think that it is something that could be effectively long-term controlled with vaccines? I mean, like the Army is looking at a universal coronavirus vaccine that would potentially change the game. Have you read about that at all? Are you familiar with that? No, I haven't. But the thing is, lots of viral infections are actually zoonotic in origin. Some of the strains that we have of influenza virus probably arose from pigs or birds or whatever. I don't know. I think that you can have a situation, like for instance,

if you compare with the flu, we have flu vaccines that are not that highly effective, but they turn the situation into a more manageable one. We're talking about probabilities here. And I think the problem with making predictions,

as someone said, that only predictions about the past are really sure and effective. So a lot of things could happen. I don't know if it's possible to have a universal coronavirus vaccine that would have to target some specific protein that doesn't vary along the different strains or different species of coronavirus. So I don't know if there is this kind of fix, because the problem with this kind of virus, the genetic material from the coronavirus RNA, not DNA, and viruses that have RNA as their genetic material, their genetic material, they tend to produce more variation in the genome than other viruses, which already produce more variation than other organisms.

So, all the time, new things are being produced. So, I think that this is something that we should consider. On the one hand, the importance of preserving ecosystems and not disturbing them so much that we would be getting in touch with new viruses all the time. And on the other hand, having global systems of monitoring and control that would help us develop vaccines. I think that the issue with, for instance, with messenger RNA vaccines is a very interesting tool, I think, that at least in theory, you can come up with a new vaccine very quickly. Once you identify a protein in the respective RNA sequence that codes for that protein, you can create a new vaccine rather quickly. So I think there is reason for hope, but I don't think we should let the guard down.

And if there's one thing that we learned from this pandemic in these two years and something, is that every time that people fell too short, too early, that was a recipe for disaster. If you bring your defenses down too early, you're going to have a rebound. So I think that we should go easy with

everyone. I mean, everyone is fed up with the thing. Everyone is trying to regain a semblance of normalcy. But keep washing your hands, keep using the masks, keep trying to avoid certain things and at least until we can be sure. And particularly in places like in the U.S. which unfortunately you have those pockets of people that are not vaccinated. This is a very serious problem. In the United States, we have a group of people

that we could pretty much guarantee we're never going to vaccinate. These are people that, and this is a large group of people. This isn't a small group of people. This is maybe 20% of the United States population that we're thinking probably will never, ever get the vaccine. Are we just going to be stuck in cycles and cycles of this forever

because there's no way we could ever return immunity at all with an uncooperative populace? I hope not. Certainly. So do I. So do I. It's hard to say that it's not going to be a problem. I mean, when you reach a certain level of population, a threshold of population protection,

the fact that you have people who are hiding in the herd is not a big problem. But the problem is that when you have a highly contagious virus, you have to have a high coverage as well. So this coverage, for instance, for measles, you have to have upwards of 85% of the population vaccinated in order to stop the propagation of the disease. I don't know what the actual number is for COVID. Actually, I don't think we know that. We don't know what the actual number is for COVID. Actually, I don't think we know that. We don't know that yet. Apparently, when it reached around 70%, this sort of at least slowed down enough the propagation of the pandemic.

But the problem is these 20% are not evenly spread throughout the US. You have pockets where they are concentrated. So these areas are a problem. And those people are dying in large numbers. I mean, large compared to the rest of the population. That's one of the things that I find more impressive, is that regardless, they are seeing with their own eyes people dying,

and they still can come up with all kinds of stories why this is not COVID. Well, he died because he didn't get either Mactin or... I mean, yeah. Well, these people, they don't just die, but I mean, reading these stories, people get, they get very sick, and then they stay sick.

They stay sick for a long time where they suffer long-term heart damage or long-term lung damage. And we, you know, a lot of times we consider that like it's technically marked down as a mild case or a moderate case because nobody ended up going to the hospital. To go to the hospital in the U.S. is a pretty high bar to actually get admitted overnight to the hospital. I tell this story on the air occasionally. I got meningitis, viral meningitis, but meningitis. And they just sent my ass home. They're like, here, take some painkillers and sleep it off. So I went home and slept for two weeks with a bunch of painkillers. They don't just admit you for anything. So if the only cases we're counting as severe are people who overnight in the hospital. These people are not only watching their friends and loved ones die, but they're watching their friends and loved ones become incapacitated, miss weeks of work, lose income that they can't replace.

And they're seeing all of that and still digging their heels in. You mentioned something we've talked about on the show. It's something maybe you can speak to. There's something unique about vaccines that makes people feel weird. People don't feel weird about other medicines. If I go to the doctor. Ivermectin, for instance, right? Yeah, man.

That's not a medicine that you can just walk in and get somewhere. Right. You have to get a prescription. That's like a medicine. That's like a real medicine. Right. You go to your physician and you get medicine for just about anything. You have no fucking idea as a regular guy,

what it is, how it works, what's in it, how long it was studied. You go to the CVS and you fill the prescription and you pop that shit in your mouth and you cross your fingers and hope that it fixes the problem. And that's typically how all of us lay people behave. And then there's vaccines, which for whatever reason,

I don't know if it's because it's delivered with a syringe or if it's, I don't know what it is, if it's because it's preventative and we're weird about that, but we're weird about it. Yeah. Why do you think that is? I mean, I actually wrote a paper about that. It was published, I think, a couple of years ago about an essay about the reasons for being an anti-vaccine.

I think there is a number of things for that. I think that for the excellent vaccines, I think that, first of all, they are victims of their own success. success. Because when you see people coming down with polio, for instance, we are much more likely to get a polio vaccine than when you don't because the vaccine was successful. Same goes for measles and so on and so forth. It's like the people that won't get the flu shot because they've never had the flu. And you're like, that's how it works. That's how it works, man. Yeah. Jesus. Yeah. The second thing is, I think, I can't understand a certain hesitancy by moms, for instance, because you're not getting a drug for being sick. You're getting something for someone who's all right. sick, you're getting something for someone who's all right. So when it's

about your kid, you're going to think twice if you cannot see the benefit. And that's the other thing I talked about earlier, how bad we are in assessing risk. And we think that a very small risk is not a problem. But when you look at things like

measles, for instance, measles, the whole thing about calling those common childhood diseases makes them seem very benign. But they're not. Measles can screw up your immune system for years after you got it. And that's one of the reasons that you have a high rate of infant mortality in certain places because they get measles. And then on top of that, they get pneumonia. And you have a very, it's relatively rare, but not that rare, much rare, long-term complication of measles called progressive encephalopathy.

That is a fatal disease. It's a fatal long-term complication of measles. But since you don't see that all the time, people tend to think they are not going to be affected by that. And then you have the problems of people who are active. You have anti-vaccine activism. You don't have anti-ivermectin activism. At least I'm not aware of people having activism against hypertensive medication or statins or whatever. Say no to Lipitor! You do have that with vaccines. And unfortunately, you have that horrid, lousy paper that was published a long time ago by Wakefield. How much damage

did that motherfucker do to the world at this point? I mean, it's incalculable. Yeah. I get so angry when I think about that. Because the idiot, he had his medical license revoked in the UK. And then he went to the US and became a kind of hero.

And he's making a lot of money on top of that. And the whole thing was so horrid, the so-called study was horrid. It was a case series of 12 cases, even if it didn't have all the problems that we know it had. Twelve cases is not enough to make any kind of a session about anything. And then he comes up in all this brouhaha. But I think that compounded the problem, because the problem is that anti-vaccine movements are as old as vaccines themselves. And I think that a lot of it has to do with how people do not understand how they work, on the one hand, and the whole thing about risk assessment on the other. But the fact that you have this sort of organized movement that was immensely amplified by the internet,

that I think compounded the problem. To follow up on that, we've been following, we've been doing this podcast for, you know, what, at this point, 15 years, practically 15 years. It was a different podcast before, but we've been doing a podcast

with this podcast for 11. And we've been watching the vaccine, the anti-vaccine movement for a long time. And while there were certainly vocal anti-vaxxers and there were certainly several pockets of anti-vaxxers across the United States, we didn't see this level of vaccine hesitancy in this country until COVID.

And I wonder if that's a symptom of COVID or if it's just a symptom of us now being completely enthralled by whatever we see on the internet. I think this is not necessarily an either or proposition. I think that both things can go hand in hand. But certainly I think that whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure that the Internet has a role in this. And the whole thing about the problem is that the whole economic basis of all those platforms is the attention economy.

They are vying for eyeballs. So you see something and the pattern of things that you are seeing make YouTube, Facebook, whatever, show you more of that thing. I like to give an example. I've been studying German for a number of years and I like cooking. And at some point I made a search for recipes for fried shrimp. fried shrimp. And for some reason, some recipes, some videos of recipes for frying

shrimps were shown to me in German. After I saw one or two of them, I had an avalanche of videos of cooking shrimp in German showing up in my YouTube. So that's what happens if you start looking at the anti-vaccinal

risks of vaccination. You're going to be shown a lot of this stuff. And I think that after some time, some of those platforms took some measures to sort of stop the propagation of the worst thing. But a lot of the damage has been done already, I think. They said it was 12 people. 12 people. They said 12, around 12 people were the perpetrators of almost 85% of the anti-vaccine misinformation that's been out there.

And it's, what's crazy is, is we're trying to stop this thing, but they are actually the super spreaders. They're the ones who are super spreading this information, misinformation to so many people. And, and it's so frustrating because like you say,

that there's a very easy answer to all this stuff in the sense that you could easily just stop producing or stop giving people stuff that is actively false. You should stop creating a platform for people to send false messages. You're right. The money is just too good. They just don't want to lose the money. I think that you have in about two years ago, I think that the director of WHO, Dr. Tadous Ghebreyesus,

he made a speech where he said, we're fighting an epidemic of a virus and also an epidemic of misinformation. It was funny because I happened to be at a paper bookstore today. I had a little bit of time to kill. My wife was in an appointment. So I saw Barnes and Noble. I hadn't been in a bookstore in forever. And I walked in and one of the first books that I saw was Robert F. Kennedy's anti-vax book, Dr. Fauci and whatever. And I couldn't resist.

I just walked over to it and turned it down. It's a tiny little bit of protest. It was. It's a tiny petty protest, Tom, but I applaud you. I knew as I was doing it, all I did was create a tiny bit of work for an employee. You know what I mean? Somebody just goes, fucking asshole, and puts it back up. I've read that some people were

going through bookstores and getting those kind of books and putting them in the fiction section. You know, there was a part of me that wanted to just buy them all and throw them out. Yeah.

You know, part of me wanted to just buy them all and just throw them right in the trash. Print more. I know. I know. There's an incentive to print more. All I did was just like,

oh, this damn book is selling, you know, and it's, there's no, and that's why I wanted to have you on the show because Cecil and I talk a lot about expertise and how do we vet information

in an increasingly difficult world where this is harder and harder to understand and harder and harder to get to things that are closer to reality. How the hell do you do that? And we really both feel strongly that as lay people, the way you do that is you find experts. So we wanted to put our money where our mouth was at

and have you on the show and really have somebody on as an expert because I can read all the stories that I want in Scientific American and Nature and New York Times. And the whole time I recognized that I am reading a translation of a translation of a translation. And it's important to have people on that are actually experts.

So I am grateful for your time tonight. Oh, again, my pleasure. I would like to add one thing because this problem is compounded, again, by economic reasons. Because to have a very good science journalist is very expensive. a very good science journalist is very expensive. And it's very rare to find these days someone who is a very competent science journalist in the general media. So in the end, what you end up is with this kind of thing that people get press releases from the pharma industry or some research

institution, and they try to dump it down. And then you come up with things that you have a study that says, for instance, not related directly to what we are discussing, but I think it's germane. Like, for instance, well, we found association of this gene sequence and a higher prevalence of depression. And then

you have the headline on the next day, the gene for depression was found. Yeah, because they need you to click on it. They need to produce content for you to click on that shit right yeah and it it supersedes the quality of information quantity of information is just more financially valuable god i have one more question so when our our previous president, President Trump, he touted one specific thing that I was wondering if it works for COVID. Can you use bleach as a way, as a preventative? How would I use bleach as a preventative?

As an add-on, sunshine. Sunshine. If there's sunshine. Can you tell us really quickly how would we use sunshine or bleach as a preventative for COVID I mean you can use it to clean stuff but I would

certainly advise using it in your own body but the problem is we laugh at that but there are people that have been using bleach as a cure-all mechanism

I don't know if you've ever heard of the so-called magical mineral solution oh yeah absolutely people give it to autistic kids and shit. That's me.

It's fucking nonsense. Don't drink bleach. Don't drink bleach, guys. You know that things are pretty fucked up when we have to tell people not to drink bleach. Right. Ken, you were great. Thanks so much, man.

We really appreciate all of your time tonight. We know it's a late night, so thank you. No, thank you. So we'd like to thank our patrons. Of course, we'd like to thank all our patrons. We'd like to thank our newest patrons, Jacqueline, Hoffa, Belzeboy,

Beezleboy, I don't know. I don't know how they, what are they, Beezlelip? Is it Beezlelip? Yeah, Beezlelip. Oh my God,. I don't know how they, what are they, Beazle Lip? Beazle Boy? Is it Beazle Lip? Beazle Lip? Yeah, Beazle Lip. Oh my God. Remember that shit? Elena, Justin, Nathan,

Am, Steve, Steven, Trump's Tasty Tasticle. Come on now. No. That's just wrong. No, you're wrong.

James and Brad and the people who upped their pledges, Murderous Crows and Vince, thank you so much for your generous donations. We really do truly appreciate it. You're the reason why we can give our employees a salary or the reason why we're able to have a studio. So we cannot thank you enough for your generous donations.

Thank you so much. We got a couple of messages. We got one, Tom. This one comes from Amina. And Amina says that they got a message in the mail and the mailer had a fucking MyPillow message. And we're going to put this fucking picture on this week's show notes.

Could you imagine sleeping on a help save our country pillow, Tom? The thing is about this fucking nationalist propaganda stuff is it's fucking hideous. The art is like the ugliest fucking, like it's like a Thomas Kinkade level bad. It's all so bad. It's three wolves howling at the moon. Every single one of them is three wolves howling at the moon. I just, like, I can't, one of the things

that is making me the craziest about the end of the world is how tacky it is. I know. It's just a, it was fabulous. It made me,

it made me fun. Yeah, why isn't RuPaul destroying us all? It would be fabulous. We got a message. This is from Donovan. Donovan says,

if the Christians believe in a trinity, wouldn't they insist on we instead of I? Now, this is going Donovan. Donovan says, if the Christians believe in a Trinity, wouldn't they insist on we instead of I? Now this is going back to the story we covered last week where we're talking about how the Catholics had messed up and used we baptize you

instead of I baptize you. And it invalidated a ton of baptisms. And therefore those baptisms, without those baptisms, it also invalidated the confirmations and all the other stuff that happens afterwards. Any of the sacraments that happen afterwards are essentially on a, uh, on holy ground or whatever. It's like, could you imagine if, if you, if you had to take, let's say, uh, algebra one-on-one and then you took algebra one-on-one

and you pass, but there was something wrong with the record keeping. And then you took calculus and then you took like fucking orthogonal functions and you took differential calc. And then all of a sudden somebody was like, you know what? There was a problem with your algebra 101 class. So you didn't actually pass differential calculus. And you'd be like, yes, I did though.

But one of the things that somebody pointed out, which I think is interesting, is they were basically like, yeah. So they could get more money too, right? Because they want you to donate. They want you to donate when you go do this. There's somebody panicking, man. There's somebody in there and they're like, oh shit, I got to go back and get baptized again and then you know, whatever. So then they

would think at that point, like they'd pay for your fucking punch card. You know what I mean? You would think they fucked up your punch card. You would think that they would be the ones who would say, oh, please come in. No, we can't accept donations. It's our fault. But you know, they're going to be, they're going to hold that thing out there. Absolutely.

We got a message from Vice Rhino. He says, I'm sure I'm not the only person to say this, but in regards to the anti-vax colony in Paraguay, it might be worth mentioning that one of the things that Paraguay is known historically for is harboring Nazis after World War II.

Yeah, all right. Okay. Yeah, no., all right. Okay. Yeah, it all clicks. Okay, I see that. He says, in light of that,

the decision makes it a certain amount of sense given the ideological leanings of a lot of modern anti-vaxxers. Okay, point taken, Vice-Reno. There you go.

Point taken. I don't think you're wrong. Yep. At the very least, it's a bad look. You know? You know? Man man we got a meme this is sent to us from Seth

and Seth says I hope you guys enjoy this it's a meme of Hermione and she's talking about the baptize you we're going to post it on this week's show notes if you're a Harry Potter person you think it's really good if you're me you're like I don't get it Colorado drivers we got a message about Colorado drivers from Richard and Richard says regarding your Colorado drivers we got a message about Colorado drivers

from Richard and Richard says regarding your Colorado drivers in the snow most of us are born here so they're fine they can drive in the snow but all the new knuckleheads moving from Cali have never seen snow before they're a horror and that's that is so true you get somebody who's never been in snow before

they can't they just like freeze literally but one of the things things that somebody else messaged and I couldn't find it, so I don't know how to credit them, but they said something like, yeah, sure, your drivers are bad up there, but they're not as bad as Orlando. And the first thing that went in my head was,

okay, smart ass, have it snow in Orlando six times a year and see what happens. Accumulation, it snows like 20 times a year here, but a good accumulation six times a year and see what happens. Accumulation. It snows like 20 times a year here, but a good accumulation six times a year and see what happens. Because yeah, that's what we have up here. That's what we have up here. Every single time we have our drivers that are just as bad. And then we add road hazards. Yeah, man. It's so funny because it's snowing as we record this. Yeah. It is snowing and I will drive home from the studio in the snow and I will be just fine

and I guarantee there will be cars off the side of the road on my way home. I think at some point, some of them just give up. They're just like, fuck it. I'm just going to just, they like crash slowly and gently into the soft, soft snow

and close their eyes. Kind of bump to the curb. Right? I'm going to stay here until the tow truck saves me. I crashed my car. I'm going to Cancun. So we'd like to thank our guest, Ken Caramago, for coming on.

We are pleased that he was able to join us. And we'll put a link to his work on this week's show notes. That is going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit.

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