Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 812: President Musk, Vatican on Brink of Bankruptcy - With Noah Lugeons

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

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where you can master your business career. Today's show is brought to you by Adam and Eve.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 at checkout. 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 mat today is Thursday December 19th in the summer 19th and I hope you guys are doing As you could tell, Tom is not introducing the show this week. Tom is still taking care of his wife. She is having a real hard time and Tom is trying to take care of her and the whole household and having a real rough time,

especially at the holidays with a lot of things going on with Haley in a very sick condition. And so he has been off of many podcasts. If you follow any of the podcasts, the verse, he wasn't on citation needed earlier this week. I don't think he's on dear old dads either. He hasn't been on Cog Dis in a couple of weeks. Tom, certainly would love to hear from you. If you're a, if you're a fan of the show and you want to wish Tom well, you can always send him a message. Dissonance.podcast.gmail.com or you can make a comment. you're patron on this episode in

Patreon Tom will certainly see that with the way things shook out this month. We are going to be behind episodes There's no way we can It's gonna be real hard to record even Monday episodes all the way through to the end of the month. I am going away on vacation I have a vacation planned all month and Inopportune timing and not being able to record, normally we would record something that would be a sort of evergreen for next week and we would post it, but we can't even post it.

But we probably will not have a Monday show. We also won't have a patron show, I don't think, this month because there's just not enough time at this point to put anything out there. So we're essentially behind episodes this month. I apologize. We've never really done that. You know, we've been doing the show here at this point for a very long time.

We've never really been behind episodes. We never missed a Monday in the entire time that we've been recording, but we're in a pretty dire circumstances right now. So we're not going to be able to record, I don't think next Monday. The only possible way that it could possibly happen is if I come back from vacation,

which I'll be landing on next Saturday, if everything's okay with Tom, which I hope by then, my goodness, I hope by then it is, there's a possibility I might be able to record something on Saturday with him and then do a quick release Saturday, Sunday morning, something like that, and then have a Monday show. But I'm not gonna bank on that.

There's a possibility that we don't have a next Monday show. So I'm just letting people know ahead of time. I know it's a long way to say that, but I'm just letting people know there probably won't be a show next Monday. I'm hoping that at the start of the new year, Haley's feeling much better, and Tom can come back to a semblance,

some semblance of normal life. He's been very stressed and it's been very difficult for him and for his wife. So we're hoping the best for them. The good news is I have a friend of mine who's gonna join us today. No illusions from the scathing atheist is gonna join us. We're gonna do some stories

and we're gonna hang out and talk. And so why don't we jump right into that right now? ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] And so why don't we jump right into that right now? So I am joined by No Illusions from Scathing Atheists, Skeptocrat, D&D Minus, Godawful Movies, and their sister show and our sister show, Citation Needed. One of the OG skeptics, one of the OG atheists on the podcast circuit. Welcome back to the show, Noah. Hey, the OG atheists on the podcast circuit.

Welcome back to the show, Noah. Hey, it's great to be back, man. I wish I was here under better circumstances. Yeah, me too, bud. Me too. So we're going to jump right in today. We've got a lot to cover. So we're going to start today with this story from New York Times.

Elon Musk flexes his political strength as government shutdown looms. And this is a story about how the richest man in the world led a charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal in part by promoting false and misleading claims about it. That's where I want to start is here's a guy who owns one of the biggest bullhorns in the world and he can't even argue his way through to get this thing shut down. He has to spread misinformation in order for it to get shut down.

Yeah, yeah, he's just making shit up. Remember how in 1984 they thought they'd have to go in and physically change pieces of paper and shit? Right, like, George Orwell overestimated us by so much by how hard it was gonna be, right, to fool us. But yeah, that's the, like, kind of the most terrifying thing hiding in this, and there's a lot of terrifying shit, right?

Like, this is a Matryoshka doll of terrifying shit, but that's the key nugget, is that it's misinformation to begin with, and nobody seems to give a shit, right? Like, the response to this is Marjorie Taylor Crean calling for Elon Musk to be elected Speaker of the fucking House. I know, dude. And there's multiple people suggesting this. What on earth is happening?

They were suggesting though last term that Trump be elected to Speaker of the House. What do you think about this? I know that it's not a rule that you have to be in the Congress in order to be Speaker of the House. Do you think something like that slips past the goalie in this Congress? It feels a little weak for it to do that. Yeah. I mean, what they're ultimately talking about doing there is taking a job away from themselves, right? And taking control away from themselves.

So I don't, like it would have to be some crazy amount of pressure for that. But hey, we're seeing what he can bring to bear, right? Yeah. We're seeing that, because like, I think the, what I expected and when I gathered from you guys, listening to you guys talk about this, is that there was gonna be a very quick mega breakup. Right?

I thought so too. As soon as Trump, right? As soon as Trump felt like Elon Musk was outshining him, you know, he'd do him like he did Steve Bannon, right? And that still may happen. It seems like this New York Times article was actually trying to bring that about a little bit, right? Like they kept saying, well, you know, and Trump only has a mere 6.6 billion to Musk's 485 or whatever. I like how they're trying to, they are trying to poke the bear a little. And I think they're trying to like, and also Bernie Sanders comes out and he says, President

Musk, right? Right. I think you stoke that fire. You do what you can to stoke that fire. Get those guys hating each other. Look how quickly through Steve Bannon out last, last time he was in office. The moment he saw Bannon getting power, he was like, get him out of here. Right.

They did that, uh, the Saturday Night Live sketch right where he was the Grim Reaper and he made Donald Trump sit at the little desk. So in a lot of ways Saturday Night Live saved the fucking day with that right? No shit. Could you imagine the puppet master fucking Bannon actually staying in the entire four years what we'd have? Right and so so that's the thing, right? The most terrifying thing about Trump being president, and again, that's a matricidal of terrifying shit, but the most terrifying thing is that he's so easy to manipulate, but we can also use that to our advantage, right, like hopefully we can manipulate him away from Musk.

Yeah, please do it. I think the best way to do it is to target both their fragile masculinities, right? Target, let's say like, Trump is a coward and he's on a leash by Musk, and say the exact opposite about Musk and Trump the other way. Like, do it both ways, and make them so that they think the other one is sort of the one who's in control. And it makes them feel suddenly like— Because they're both really weak dudes. I mean, if you really cut it down,

they're weak, terrified guys. And so I think that's gonna be the best way to do it. What I see too is, you know, you talk, you look at the story and you hear Musk talk and you see Musk's exes or tweets or whatever they're called now. And he's talking about how there's these unelected people that are running this nation.

And you're like, do you hear you? Do you hear what you're saying? Now he's talking about a $60,000 a year IRS employee. He's not talking about himself who he spent two on a quarter of a billion dollars in the last election to get his voice at the table. Right, yeah, exactly. Well, and again, it's the exact thing

that everybody thought they were voting against, I think. You know, having the billionaires in control of the government. These idiots seem to think somehow they were going to elect billionaires to get billionaires out of control or something. But, yeah. Yeah. I really feel like the next time, you know, America has any kind of choice whatsoever, I think some of the things that have to be on the table, and certainly one of them needs to be

campaign finance reform. Because my God, the amount of money that went into this last election, almost $2 billion goes into this last election, and you see a lot of these oligarchs are able to chip in so much money, and look at how badly Musk manipulated the last election just with cash alone. It's just, and you could also include into that Twitter,

because he bought Twitter with cash to manipulate the election. Right, exactly, which is the only damn thing he's done with it, right? That's the only return on investment he's gotten out of Twitter so far. Well, and then what they're harping on in this article in the New York Times, and I think what

Republicans in Congress are largely harping on is the fact that like most donors don't then go on to exert this much vocal, like public influence on the president, right? Or on whoever it is that they donate it to. You know, it's usually kind of behind the scenes, hey man, you know, I gave you a lot of money. So do this. Elon Musk is just stepping out there going like, yep, we won the election. Yeah.

And he's coming in and saying, here's how it's going to be. And he's saying that essentially on the House floor. It's insane. Maybe a few days in the stockade. So this next story, this one comes from the AP. This is Joe Biden calls for a ban on congressional stock trading here. Here.

My gosh, this should be also this is also something that should be part of the Democratic platform next time. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it's something that it's such a no brainer, right? Whenever you talk to people about this, people go, wait, shit, they're allowed to do that? They don't even know, right? Right, like how is that not a thing? Because like up until Trump, that was assumed,

you know, fucking Jimmy Carter couldn't have a goddamn peanut farm and serve as president because then he might like, you know, push peanut laws his way or whatever. And we're letting Congress trade stock, especially, you know, after, after COVID when like they all got the, you know, they all got the briefing on COVID and they all went and they're like, well, shit, we better invest in PPE and stuff. Call my broker as soon as they left that meeting, call my broker and make sure I'm out of all

of these positions and in these positions as quickly as possible. Absolutely. Drop all my TGI Friday stock as quickly as possible. Yeah. Yeah. I go back to that Jimmy Carter thing all the time where I think, you know, there's this huge bit of hypocrisy from the Republicans that they talk, oh, they just need to divest them. He needed to divest himself from this business. It's such a conflict of interest. He's gonna put a can of Jif in every pot. It's ridiculous.

And then you get to Donald Trump who's like, yeah, I will put up the Secret Service in my hotel and overcharge the government to make more money off of it. Right, right. And then that guy is gonna be like, and also there will be an office of government waste and abuse. Right. Right. And then and then that guy is going to be like, and also there will be an office of government waste and abuse. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think too, you know, Tom and I have talked about this in the past. I think you've got to make the job of Congress person and Senator, not as,

as lucrative. And I think a lot of these people recognize that once they get in, there's a lot of lucrative angles. And this is one of them, right? I can, I don't, there's nothing that stops me from learning something and then trading stocks. There's nothing that stops me from doing that. And except for ethics, which they don't give a shit about. So there's no reason for them to stop. And this is one of the ways, one of the avenues in which these people enrich themselves. So just get rid of this avenue, be like, and suddenly you get a bunch of people who want to be in that office

because it's their life calling or it's a thing that they're driven to do. It's not, I'm doing this so I can be very rich later. Right, well, and it's another one of those things where you really just have to start sort of marvel at the inability of the American people's voice to be heard, because this is, again, it's such a no brainer. I have a feeling that if, you know, if you could somehow get people to pause their partisan bullshit and not know which side of the fence they were

supposed to be on, you know, for team red or team blue on this, I'd have to assume that the number of people agreeing that Congress should not be able to trade stock, that has to be in like 90 percentile or some shit, right? You don't get that normally in the United States. You don't get a lot of 90 percentiles. Right, but it's such a, but even that like basic, just tiny little chunk of ethical requirement is too much for us. Cause they've been talking about this for years, right? Like Biden has sort of come around to this now, right?

This is something that at least Elizabeth Warren was talking about, you know, eight, 12 years ago. Yeah, man. They've been talking about it for a long time. Pelosi has enriched herself multiple times with this. Our side, their side doesn't matter. They've all done it. They're all doing it.

I wanna get rid of it. I also like to see them live in barracks. I feel like we put them in like military style barracks and sequester them from everybody. So they have to live, like you have to live. There's like a drill sergeant that comes in and wakes them up every morning and takes them down to Congress.

I feel like that's how you go. Well, and then they all have to live in the same like big brother house, right? Regardless of which party they're in. So you mix them up. They actually have to, like, you know, cause they can't even get breakfast if they can't get anything done together in that instance.

Don't you have keg stands together on the weekends? That'd be amazing. Forget it, Donnie. You're out of your element. Donnie, you're out of your element. Donnie, please. Shut the fuck up. Donnie you're out of your element. Donnie, please Shut the fuck up Donnie. I am the walrus. Shut the fuck up Donnie. This next story comes from the Hill survey Most voters disapprove of JFK's JFK jr's nomination after learning his view

I I just want something to say to voters really quickly, if you'll excuse me, Noah. This is something you learn before you vote! Absolutely. Sorry, I want to make a slight correction here. I know you meant to say this otherwise, but you said JFK Jr. instead of RFK Jr. JFK Jr. is definitely... He might be coming back to Dallas, but he's not back yet. He would be the better... I would be less worried if Donald Trump came out and said, I'm going to let JFK Jr. be the head of the health and human services when he gets back. Right. QAnon says when he comes back, he'll just like, let, let, let it wait. Like we'll put the office, you know, just how he'll like

it or whatever. I would be less concerned about that than RFK Jr. doing the job. Yeah, for sure. But I just, it blows me away that after the election, we have seen multiple times where people have been asked things and they're like, oh, I didn't want that. And you think, yeah, maybe just maybe open a newspaper, turn on a TV station that isn't like propaganda for 10 minutes before you vote. Maybe just look into it just a tiny bit. Yeah, no, it's just bat shit. How many people you're seeing going like, oh, did I vote for racism?

Yeah, man, you voted for the fucking racism. You just want to take them and just grab them and shake them. Like, listen to literally anything that man said for more than four fucking minutes. Oh, God, it's so terrible. I also think, too, this doesn't mean anything, right? This is just nothing. It's just like people disapprove, but who cares, right?

Trump's still going to say, I want him in there, and it doesn't really matter. And unless there's sort of this groundswell of support from people who send their Congress people or senators messages, and even that doesn't always work, they're probably going to get approved. So I don't know that this is, it's not like it's a big deal. I think it's just like one of those data sets that makes us mad. Well, you know, the truly terrifying thing is how little the numbers moved, right? Like so before they, so what this

come or this survey did is they had a bunch of statements that JFK Jr. had made in the past, and they're like, they ask everybody, hey, do you approve of this guy or no? Right, and then they're like, all right, let's read you some shit that he said. Right, and I have some examples here. These are things that they pointed out that he said. He's proposed stopping infectious disease drug development

and research for eight years. He does not believe that infectious disease drug development and research for eight years. He does not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health. He believes, quote, there is no vaccine that is safe and effective. He said chemicals in the drinking water are causing some children to become gay or transgender. What? He blames, yeah, he doubts that HIV causes AIDS and blames it instead on gay lifestyle. Oh my God. Right?

So now here's the truly scary thing. Well, the truly scary thing is that that guy's gonna be in charge of health and human services. But the truly scary aspect of this survey is that before they told them that shit, 45% of people approved of RFK Jr. After they told them that, the number only dropped to 39. There's only 6% of people can comprehend how bad that is?

Right. They're like, oh, well, you know, there is chemtrails though. So that's probably, they probably are turning the frog today with those. That's what we actually have going on here, is that the numbers barely moved at all. Who is... I want to talk to the person in charge of this simulation, because I feel like we're playing on hard mode.

And they've turned up the difficulty. And all of a sudden, right? They could have ramped it up on us a little bit. Yeah. It's like when you're playing Civ and you're like, ah, man, I just rolled over that Civilization way too easily. I wound up, you know, I had tanks. They had like horseback. I just no problem. I'm gonna ramp the difficulty up just a little bit right now. And that's what happened mid game. I mean, we are mid game here.

What are you doing? And the other thing too is that like you I, like we've been around since Gen X times and shit, but they, oh, you got all of these Zennials that were voting for the first fucking time and shit and they're new to this game. They don't even know how to play yet. Right? Best of luck. Godspeed.

So, but you know, you were saying, you were talking about how like you'd need this groundswell of support to keep him out of, you know of confirmation for health and human services. RFK Jr. is one of the few people I think that has sort of that Matt Gaetzian ability to fuck even that up. And not because he said that they were turning the frogs gay with the chemtrails and shit, but because he said reasonable shit about abortion. Oh, what a great point. Wow.

He's got a lot of like, and he was an environmental attorney. He still has like some, like, you know, he talks about chemtrails and shit, but he also has really good liberal views about environmentalism and about food preservatives and shit like that, food additives. So there's some good within all of his crazy.

And it's gonna be, if anything gets it keeps him out, it's going to be that good stuff. Yeah. I think, I absolutely agree. I think you're right. I think that's something I had overlooked is that he, he is a liberal guy. Yeah. And that may really cheese off some of these Republicans who are going to be asking them these questions. One final question here. When he's doing his confirmation hearing, One final question here. When he's doing his confirmation hearing, is he gonna lean over and ask a sawed off whale head? Like, for advice? You know, like, should I plead the fifth on this?

It'll be sitting on one side, there'll be a brain worm on the other, you know? There's a dead bear on the other on a bicycle. Fucking amazing. God, can't believe this is a world we live in, dude. Unbelievable. I can't believe the simulation even has a setting this high, right? Like, this is quite... Why would you have a ludicrous on the dive? Yeah, man.

You just don't... You never want to go that fast. How does a guy who, like, takes a roadkill bear to Central Park, how is he going to be our health and human services guy? He went off the ride. There's going to be a va... there's going to be a pandemic and he's just going to be like Can we set it up with a bicycle next to it so that somebody blames us? Yeah, I want to prank somebody Oh my god I am never going to financially recover from this

This next this next story is from the Irish star, Vatican on the brink of bankruptcy due to dramatic decline in global donations under Pope Francis. Oh no, anyway. Who fucking cares? Holy shit. Let me grab my violin.

Well, you know, the funny thing is this is just like what we were talking about with RFK jr. You know about how his liberalism might be what actually gets him not his evilness. That's what's going on here, right? You know, cuz they're not going broke because they have to pay out so much money to the children that they raped That's just a fucking drop in the bucket for them and they're insulated against it. What's really That's just a fucking drop in the bucket for them. And they're insulated against it. What's really problematic for them right now is that the international donations are drying up

because they are too, because Pope Francis is seen as too liberal. Yeah, the conservatives are not pitching money into the pot anymore. And they're just, they're just not, there's not enough money because their views on, I mean, views on a lot of different things. And to you and I, those are still conservative views,

but to hard rock conservative Christians and Catholics, that's not, they're lefties to them. Right. You know, we've talked for years as atheists, we've tried to highlight the fact that the Catholic Church is one of the world's leaders in trying to keep condoms away from, you know, the AIDS epidemic. They're one of the world's leaders in trying to keep gay marriage illegal

in what parts of the world it's still way behind the times. And now that they're not doing that as much, cause people always told us as atheists, oh, come on, you're cherry picking, you're trying to find, they have all these hospitals and orphanages that they run, they do all of this other good shit, right?

But when they stop doing that stuff, and they didn't stop, right? But when they slow that down and slow down how vocal they are about supporting all of that shit, suddenly the donations drive to the point where they're talking about fucking bankruptcy. Yeah. Do you think that the Pope doesn't like an OnlyFans

and sells his holy bathwater or something? Why does the Pope, what's the Pope's side hustle on this? the pope doesn't like an only fans and sells his holy bath water or something. Why does the pope, what's the pope's side hustle on this? What do you think it is? Indulgences, man. He's got to, they got to bring it back. You know, go with something that works. Something that you know works. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think mick indulgences is what you do. Right. Yeah. And you door dash those. Indolny fans. I don't know. We need to bring Heath in for a good name He'll come up with something he'll a hundred percent come up with a great pun name that that he could do his side hustle on I this is this is one of those things though is like like just like you said if they were going bankrupt for the right reason Which is paying people who suffered because of their

Maliciousness, I mean, I'm not even gonna call it anything else. It's them being awful for their evil, right? Into the world. If that was the reason they were going bankrupt, that'd be amazing. That would be like, awesome. That's great news. But the fact that they're going bankrupt

because more conservative, rich conservative people don't wanna donate their money means that that money, that rich conservative money is going to go to other things that are also really, really bad. Right. Yeah. Although the one nice thing about, I mean, there's a lot of nice

about the Vatican running out of money, but one of the nice things about it is that the people who are most likely to suffer first are retired priests. Right? Cause this is going to hit their retirement. Their pension. Yeah. And yeah, right. And these are the people who were running the church at its most rapiest

and cover-up-iest, right? So like there's at least that come up that's happening, you know, even if it's happening for the wrong reasons. Well, is anybody else at the grocery store at 9 p.m. on a Sunday? Because you don't have all the things you need for an upcoming Christmas, Eve dinner that you forgot would actually be on a Tuesday. And you ask yourself, hey, how did I get here? Am I right? Well, why am I here squeezed between all these people when instead I should be squeezing

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So get fucking, thank you, before we are. You know what I mean? Alright, thank you. Have a good one. Tobias, are you sure that this dolly isn't related to your recent health problems? Okay, so my legs and my left arm occasionally go to sleep, and you want to call it a health problem. No, I can, I can get up myself. Let me get in the dolly. No, thank you. I don't need your help. All right. This next story, uh, this is a longer article from the New York times.

Kennedy's lawyer has asked F the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine, but this is a longer article about his lawyer, Aaron Seary, and sort of their exploits throughout the years. And what struck me about this article, you know, because they're talking a lot about, you know, the things that they're going to be doing. If RFK is put in as the head of Health and Human Services, then he's going to have somebody as his right hand and they're suspecting this person will be his right hand,

this lawyer. And this lawyer has been suing and depositioning vaccine scientists for years on behalf of other people saying that vaccines are dangerous. And this is like a, it's like a legal disinformation campaign that he's been running for years and years and years and years to try to, to try to sort of chill people on the spread and trying to keep vaccines around and to try to research new values. Just chilling all those things.

Yeah, I know. This is definitely the New York Times sounding the klaxons, right? They saw that survey we were talking about earlier and they're like, hey, when people find out what this guy believes in, they don't support him as much. Let's make sure people find out what he believes in. And it's fucking scary, man.

Yeah, this guy's serious. So he doesn't just depose these vaccine scientists, he deposes them with these ridiculous eight, nine hour long depositions where he just grills them. And his goal in doing so, right, cause he's never gonna prove anything that he's trying to prove

cause what he's trying to prove is bullshit. His goal is to create snippets that he can pull out of context and make it look like these guys are shills for big pharma. Right? And like the people that he's doing this to, like the guy that, the lead guy that developed the mumps vaccine. Right? Like these are people who have, by and large, foregone much more profitable uses of their education and their genius to devote themselves to like keeping kids from getting fucking polio and shit.

And these are the people that he's demonizing and that he's like torturing with these ridiculous long depositions. And one of the things that comes out of this, and we saw this in during COVID, is that it doesn't take a lot of vaccine hesitancy to really throw the gyroscope off and knock it over. We saw this during COVID. There was a small murmur in the beginning of vaccine hesitancy that was hitting the internet. You were seeing a couple of videos, getting maybe a million views here and there. But for the most part, there was sort of a bunch of people that were making sure that, no, look, we really are going to need a vaccine for this. If we ever want to have a normal life again, let's, let's not like pull the

plug on vaccines and let's, you know, try to make sure that we're doing the right thing here. And so there was a lot of people holding that back, but then you get to the summer and there's just, you know, suddenly your president is talking about, is starting to sound a little vaccine hesitant. There's other people that are in the administration that are sounding vaccine hesitant. While the people underneath him

in Health and Human Services and Dr. Fauci and things, they were always 100%, yeah, man, we need a vaccine for this. That's stupid to think otherwise. There's a bunch of other people, bunch of different pundits out there pushing like, oh, I don't know, maybe we don't need this. And man, they poison the shit out of that well.

And look where we are now. And it's not and it's radiated off of the covid vaccine. Now this all this vaccine denial stuff's been going on for years, but it really took off during covid. And now there's I have a hard time wondering how we make our way back to even pre-COVID levels at this point. Right, because like there's an obvious parallel here, right?

Where there's like an intellectual herd immunity that you get if the only people who are spreading this vaccine misinformation is this tiny, tiny shred that's way over here in the corner and 99.3% of the people are vaccinated against vaccine misinformation, then you're okay, right? But once you hit that critical mass, which could only be, it only has to be like three or 4%.

Right? It just has to be so that like everybody knows somebody who's hesitant to do it because like, you know, what vaccine denialism ultimately gives you is permission to do something you wanted to do anyway, which is not get stuck with a needle. That's why it's so easy to sell people on this because getting a vaccine or watching your kids go through a vaccine,

it's so tough when your kid is really fucking young and you gotta get them stabbed with a goddamn needle and they don't know why, or when you take, like especially the early COVID vaccines, they were rough, man. Yeah, sure. It was uncomfortable for like hours after, to a day after you took the shit.

It was really uncomfortable. So people are being told what they wanna hear anyway. It's real easy to convince people in that instance, right? Yeah. And, and, you know, you bring up herd immunity, but one of the things they bring up in this article is that RFK and this lawyer and even Donald Trump are sort of all on the same page with, well, look, we don't want to ban vaccines. We just, what we don't want to do is make sure they're not mandatory anymore.

And you're like, dude, that's why vaccines actually work is because we're able to say, if you want to go to school, you got to get stuck in the arm and you have to go to school and you have to have these vaccines, because if not, we're going to turn this into a measles fun house and we don't want to do that. So we're going to make sure that everybody is vaccinated and that herd immunity, you know,

there's going to be some people out there that are immunocompromised and you can't give them this vaccine, but the rest of the kids are going to be able to protect those kids because they're herd immune. And what we have now is a bunch of several people that are in the highest positions in our land saying, we want to make sure we don't mandate that. Well, then suddenly there's a bunch of flavor of the month parents who decide,

well, I'm not going to do it for my kid. My kid seems pretty healthy. I'm not going to do it for my kid. And then suddenly we're going to have a bunch of schools that are going to be overrun with measles because it wasn't mandatory. And the doctors are sure as shit aren't going to be trying to pressure you to do it because to them, that's just going to be another fight they don't want on their calendar because they got to run to the next appointment. You know, we're kind of burying the lead a little bit on this, on this story, because of course, the big takeaway that most of the press has gotten from this is the fact that among the vaccines that this guy, Aaron Sirius, tried to cast out on or even like try to get the FDA approval of revoked

is the polio vaccine. What the fuck? Polio, Noah? Right, this guy is so evil that Mitch McConnell had to come out and be like, stop being so evil, man. Mitch McConnell crawls up from his bubbling hole in the middle of the Senate so he could scream out

in his black tar-filled hole and then he scuttles back. Yeah, man, Mitch McConnell actually, wasn't he a polio survivor? Yeah, so this vaccine, because we think of polio vaccine, we think of like fucking salt, but this vaccine is only like 57 years old or something,

1977, so not even 50 years old. So yeah, like he predates this vaccine and shit. He had polio his leg was like temporarily paralyzed and he's like, look guys, I'm all for being evil, but not. I am long evil. Like this is the fuck are you talking about? We were like on the verge of eradicating polio from the globe. Like we were on the verge of making it so it wasn't a thing anymore. And then, you know, a lot of different cogs hit the wrong space,

and now we're in this place where people are saying, you know what, maybe polio needs a comeback. Maybe what we need is a comeback of this. You know, and scientists are saying that, hey, the fucking virus is still out there in the world, right, you're never more than a long flight away from fucking polio. Yep.

But the thing that Siri is talking about, and the thing that RFK, because you know, RFK Jr. and his people have now come out and tried to distance themselves from all of this shit, even though Aaron Siri is helping and pick people for the HHS right now, And Aaron Seary was the guy that he talked about as his fucking attorney general when he was running for president. And he's the guy that they're talking about as the lead counsel for the HHS. RFK Jr.'s trying to pretend, you know, oh, I'm not,

you know, I'm, he's fucking communication instructor for his goddamn presidential campaign was Dell Big Tree. Okay. Oh my gosh. And he's going to pretend like he's, he isn't anti-vax now. Right. But what they're saying, what they're arguing is that the polio vaccine never underwent double-blind placebo testing. Right?

And that's the gold standard of medical studies. So they should take it off the market until they can do these double-blind placebo tests. But that would mean like you, you get a group of people and you're like, okay, so half of you don't get vaccinated against polio and half of you do. And that's fucking unethical. You can't do that. It says in the article, they've done over 300 different tests on polio, right? Like, or I,

sorry on this polio vaccine, to make sure that it's safe to give people. And we've got almost 50 years of data of giving it to, you know, billions of fucking people over that time. So we have like a ton of data. There's nothing that we would learn from doing a double-blind placebo test

that we don't already know. So like, even if it wasn't terribly unethical, it would be unnecessary at the very least. Yeah. And the Dell Big Tree thing, this is a guy who has been anti-vax forever and who's been spreading misinformation about vaccines for forever. So like the idea, and I mean, he's one of the names.

Like when you hear the names, he's probably right up there with, uh, with Robert F. Kennedy is one of those super spreaders of misinformation. Yeah, no, he's the guy who produced the movie Vaxxed. Yeah, this is a, this is a guy who's so, he's so intertwined with this anti-vax stuff. And I know people are trying to separate themselves, but you got to separate yourself from RFK and the president, you know, the upcoming president does not sound like he's that convinced that vaccines are super cool. He's like, ah, you know,

you'd really have to, you'd have to show me something for the polio one. I would have to, it'd have to be something big. And I'm thinking no one should be able to tell you anything that changes your mind on that. You are too dumb. You thought we could do spray cleaner in people's bodies, man. You thought we could do spray cleaner in people's bodies, man? Get ready for a Las Vegas style action of bet MGM the king of online casinos Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas strip excitement MGM is famous for when you play classics like MGM Grand Millions or popular games like blackjack Baccarat and roulette with our ever-growing library of digital slot games, a large selection of online table games,

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It's unique, something you won't find anywhere else. This is the graduate experience at the Asper School of Business, where you can master your business career. You people need to wake up because if we go there, we'll be able to see that Antarctica is the edge of the flat earth. This article is fucking delicious. No, I love this one so much. This one's from I fucking love science Oh God, so good flat earthers travel to Antarctica to test theories but are quickly humbled. So Evidently there's a you know in certain places on the globe. I've been lucky enough to visit one of these places

There's a there's a 24-hour day a midnight. Well, I've been to place with a midnight sun Is that I don't think it's a 24-hour day, but it's close, right? And like in Antarctica- Was that in Norway? Yeah, I was actually in Svalbard. I visited Svalbard, which is an Arctic. I think it's owned by Norway, and it's like north of Norway,

pretty much in the Arctic Circle. And so it's, you know, it's, I don't remember if it was 24 hours. I thought it was like a really late, it was like midnight sun is what they called it. So, but this in particular is, you know, it's, it's, it's, I don't remember if it was 24 hours. I thought it was like a really late, it was like midnight sun is what they called it. So, but this in particular is, you know, on the Antarctica, you go there and if it's during summer, it's a 24 hour day. It's just like, guess what? You have a 24 hour day that you have to deal with. And these people, they don't have, when you talk about the flat earth, it's like a disc.

It doesn't make sense. I guess, unless it's like spinning like a coin somehow, it's not gonna make sense to have a 24 hour day. So they're just, these guys, as soon as they got down there, they moved those goal posts. Bunch of them did. A couple are still on the fence, but a bunch of them, they flew a bunch of these guys down here. A bunch of the people who they could,

they said they put round earthers in flat earthers in a plane and took them down and they watched the 24 hour sunlight and now some of them are a little confused. Yeah, so they brought, I think four of each at the price of $31,000 a person. Some fucking pastor spent the money and I'm glad that he did because whatever pastors would otherwise do with the money is probably worse, generally speaking.

You're not wrong. But he spent, so what is that, for fucking eight people, spent $31,000 a piece on these guys. Quarter of a million dollars. And nobody's going to change their fucking mind, right? Because you're right, all the models that they have don't... Like, you can't make the 24-hour sun work at the South Pole. You can make it work at the North Pole with their silly models.

But you can't make it work at the South Pole, but they're just going to change their fucking models. Their models aren't based on anything. It's not based on observational fucking science or whatever. They're just going to change their fucking models. In fact, because the pastor that paid for it, he said, like, one way or the other, whatever, you find out you have to do a video.

That's what I'm getting for my quarter million dollars, right? So they all did a video together. And one of these assholes says, well, you know, I don't wanna tell you everything quite yet, but I have seen a demonstration where you could get a 24 hour sun at the rim of the planet and shit. But he doesn't go into any more detail

because he doesn't wanna say it in too much detail where somebody could go, well, you know, we could test that while we're still here in South America. Yeah, while we're here. Right? While we're here, we can just fly right back real quick and test that theory. Yeah.

You know, the worst part about being a flat earther is there's only so far you can move the goalpost because it's flat. So you can't just keep moving it forever. You get to the edge eventually. Right, and then you have to move the goalpost because it's flat so you can't just Get to the edge eventually you have to throw the goalposts over yeah Eventually, we're gonna pin them down that goalpost can't move that far It does kind of piss me off to know that like if I had just lied more and been more of an idiot I could have got a trip to Antarctica out of it and been more of an idiot, I could have got a trip to Antarctica out of it. Right?

Is there any way that we can create like new pseudonyms and do like change our face and be like, we're super duper flat earthers. Yeah, I like it. Whoopsie doodie, I don't even know about that. The earth is just super flat. And then you and I can go down there and be like, you changed our minds. Blown away. Yeah.

Amazing. Or they put us in orbit. Like we see if there's some way they can get us up. Oh yeah. You know what I mean? Like there's a couple of ways we can angle this. Yeah, no, we need to leave Tom off of this list because you've seen his citation needed episodes. He's dying to be in a situation where he has to eat one of us, right? Or he has to eat somebody who goes first. So we don't want him along for it. He would 100% shipwreck the ship on purpose just so he could meet somebody else.

Exactly. So I don't think we need him in a long, and I don't think we have to worry about Eli or Heath even wanting to come. So yeah, I'm in. I'm in. Outside for Eli, hard pass. Yeah, he's like, no, I'm good.

Very special I want you guys to meet. Oh, well, that's a pillow. No, no, no, no, no, no. She's so much more than a pillow. Oof, my, don't you want to just stick your dick in her? Wait, what's that now? Jay, do you fuck the pillow? Yeah, my same question. Oh yeah, guys, I fuck my pillow.

I'm sorry, my tone was off. Yes, I 100% fuck my pillow. This next one also delicious. Man, we're ending this show with a lot of good news. Mike Lindell says cash-strapped my pillow took 1.6 million dollar payday lender loan at 409 percent Way to go, man, you hate to see it except you don't because it's Mike Lindell

There's literally nothing that could happen to Mike Lindell where I would feel bad Luigi. Just so you know. Nothing. No, he's too fucking low on the food chain for Luigi. There's no way. Yeah, right. There's no point. What would you even be killing at this point?

You shoot Mike Lindell and then you inherit his debt or something like fund that. Who wants that? I want to see this guy languish too as well. Like it's just of all the people in the world, the worst people in the world. And also genuinely, this should tell you something about Mike Lindell and his intellect level. He's 100% back on, he's, he's fallen off the wagon. When you, when you hear about Mike Lindell and you just hear, here's a guy who his whole, his whole life, he was, he's kind of a fuck up and then he changes his whole thing, invents

a shitty pillow. And then suddenly he's a darling of the right. And you're just like, man, you can just be loud and not spend any money on it you could Have just been really loud about the election and never spent any money Like all of your fortune to try to prove it was wrong You could have just been like really mad about it for a while and that would have been fine But instead he gets sued he gets he you know There's all these the every bad thing which is good befell him him. And it's like, this is perfect.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the thing I like the most about it is that, like, I feel like payday loans should not be a thing. It's just fucking evil. Right. And I'm fine with it happening to Mike Lindell, but not regular people. And I feel but I feel like the fact that it can happen to millionaires and like people in in big business, like the closest we've ever been to getting legislation against payday loans is when like some congressmen

opened up the news and saw that it could get like Mike Lindell, right? Yeah, well, cause keep in mind like Mike Lindell, what I love the most about him is that he puts the truth to the lie about meritocracy to begin with, right? Cause he's obviously a fucking idiot. This is the guy that was talked into buying election data that proved that the election was stolen

that turned out not to even be data in any recognizable format. Right? This is the guy. And that guy's being handed loan documents for millions of fucking dollars. Man, there's gonna be some bank is gonna be making pillows in a couple weeks. You know what I mean?

They're 100% gonna be a brand new MyPillow guy soon enough because this guy is, you're not paying back a loan that's that steep of interest if you needed that loan in the first place. I mean, that's why payday loans are so predatory is because if you needed that kind of money, you would never take a rate like that if you could get it elsewhere.

And that's why they're super predatory. Right. Well, and apparently he's suing them now, right? This is a case of him suing them for charging too much interest. He's suing them for him being too stupid. Oh. You people have been ripping me off, stealing my money, stitching me up, robbing me. This story comes from CNBC.

FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel and event ticket prices. Now that necessarily doesn't necessarily mean that it's they're banning it per se. They're just saying you gotta disclose it. It's not that they're saying you can't put junk fees in there. They can put all the junk fees that they want. They just have to disclose it before you rent the room or before you sign up for the hotel. Right.

Right, or before you buy the ticket or whatever. Buy the tickets, yeah. And this is, again, this is one of those things where like how the fuck is this, is there no movement on this already, right? Like how in the world is it legal for them to tell you one price, wait until you're like nine tenths of the way through the purchase and say,

oh, look at that, 17 bucks. Where the fuck did that come from, right? But yeah, you know, you owe us another, you know, like all of that shit. Yeah, my wife and I, we were trying to like plan our trip to Sedona. We took a big vacation out to the Grand Canyon and we saw Sedona. It was a great trip. But the whole time I'm trying to figure out how much anything costs and it's an impossibility.

Yeah. Yeah. At this point, it's like you go to the courtyard and there's a fucking resort fee. And you're like, where is your resort? What are you telling me? This is a hotel. This is not a resort. I feel like I just want to be like, look, I realize you think it's a resort, but it is definitely a hotel.

Please don't charge me an extra hundred dollars a night to stay here. Right. But it's also but that fee is just like. It's but we're a really good hotel. And it's like, put that in the price of the fucking room. And that's what this is all about, right? Like what it's really all about is that everybody's just like, oh, wow, $169 a night. Well, I guess we can afford that.

It's a really nice place, Mike. We could probably afford that much. And then they get there. Yeah, yeah. So and again, this is like a dumbed down version of the law that was proposed, right, which was supposed to ban junk fees altogether. And they're like, they finally land on, all right, but you at least have to tell people

about them. And even that probably won't actually get through. It's it's funny, because when you talk to people from other countries and they come here and they're like, wait, I don't pay the same price as what is on the on the wall for this thing, because they don't have they have sales tax already written in. Right. Right. If they say 100 bucks in another country and most other countries you walk up and it's a hundred dollars. That's it. That's the price here. Depending on where you're at. You know, my city could be very different from Chicago. I was paying 8% tax in Chicago paying six and a half out here. So it's a either a hundred and six dollars

or it's a hundred and eight dollars, but it's not $100. Everywhere you go, you've got to expect to spend more. And in America too, you also have a tipping culture, right? So not only do we have a sales tax added on at the end, we have a tipping culture. We've been lying to ourselves about all these different prices for so long that everything's so cheap. And it's like, nothing's cheap because we tack on a million different fees after the fact. Well, that's actually a really good point that just structurally we've created a world where that's almost bound to happen, right?

Because we're so used to, like you say, we're so used to the price not matching up what we're paying to begin with that we don't even notice. And that's where these fees come from, right? Like they come from the, cause like, you know, most of the time if you're like, hey, what's this resort fee going on here? They'll take it off.

You know, most of the time you can get those fees removed. It's just that most people don't notice it. And like you said, they don't notice it because they're so fucking used to that being the standard of like what what you say is the price of what I end up paying are two different things no matter what. I've tried bad diets, powders, pills. Still, my weight's been up and down like a yo-yo until the AIDS plan taught me how to take off weight and help keep it off.

AIDS may taste like a candy, but AIDS contains one of the most effective appetite suppressants you can buy, and there's no stimulant in AIDS that could make you nervous. With AIDS, I ate less, so the weight came off. To help keep it off when I sometimes want things loaded with calories. AIDS helps put me in control. Let the AIDS plan teach you how to take off weight and help keep it off. Try peanut butter AIDS. Another final good story tonight.

This is from NPR. This drug is the breakthrough of the year and it could mean the end of the HIV epidemic. And this is a drug that could change the face of how we, how HIV is treated. Currently there's, there are some treatments for HIV like PrEP and other things, but one of the things that they were saying in this article is that often it's not as effective. And some of the reasons are is because people don't take it as much as they should. They're supposed to take it every day and sometimes they don't.

And, you know, so it's not as effective. And this, in fact, would be essentially like a cure for the disease. And it's a huge, it's a huge win. The thing that bothers me when I read this is I had read that New York Times article that we read earlier. And I was like, oh, neat. Well, isn't RFK like, uh, like an AIDS denialist? What is going to happen with this if he is the guy behind it? You know? Yeah. The first thing I wrote when I saw this was like, well, let's hope we can get through

all the regulatory hoops before RFK Jr. takes over. Get in there now. Like get this one past the goalie, slip it past the goalie quick. Yeah. But it was really an interesting story because I don't think a lot about this because obviously, you know, I don't do anything related to medicine in my life other than, you know, take it on occasion. But like, you know, they're saying like, you know, you have this drug that's like 99% effective

in preventing the transmission of HIV and you're like, oh, okay, well then that cures it, but you have to take it every day and people don't take it every day. And then there's like, apparently there's a stigma in a lot of Africa about taking it because if you're taking it, doesn't that mean that you think that the person you're having sex with is going to give you AIDS and shit like that, that stands in the way of that. And then this is, I guess, a twice annual shot, which is way the fuck easier to talk

people into. But it is really, it's really telling that we're in a situation where like figuring out the cure is one thing and then figuring out the psychology to get people to take the cure is a completely different issue. Do you think, you know, there's another thing that pops up into my head and I have no idea and I don't like, this is just spitballing. I'm not sure. But like I wonder too how much stigma has been placed on things like this in Sub-Saharan Africa and other places because of the Catholic Church and their reluctance to deal with AIDS in any real way.

Right. For many, many years, they've never really wanted to deal with the probably the easiest way to deal with AIDS, which is condoms. Right. That's our super easy way to deal with it and they wouldn't do it for a long time. So I wonder how much stigma just religion itself casts on some things too, you know, stuff that's sexually transmitted suddenly becomes a bit like a lot harder to deal with because of human beings have a hard time dealing with stuff like this, especially when religion is involved.

Well, and not only that, but then because you're denying them the legitimate cure, when there's no legitimate cure, that's where superstition steps in, right? So the longer you stigmatize something that actually works, the more time there is for that superstition to take root. And that becomes a problem all on its own eventually, because that does have momentum.

So Noah, thank you so much for joining us, joining us, joining me today. Tom is here in spirit. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. If people were gonna find you on the internet, where would they look? Just go wherever you get podcasts,

look for The Scathing Atheist or God Awful Movies and we'll get you to all the other stuff from there. Thanks so much for joining me Noah, I appreciate it man. Yeah, thanks for having me bro. I wanna thank Noah for joining us of course Noah's, you can find him at scathing atheists, search for scathing atheists or search for God awful movies or check the show notes and you can find all the podcasts

that Noah does, Noah and his crew, Eli and Heath, they do amazing work. They're very funny guys. I'm so glad we got a chance to know them and get to know them and become partners with them on a show called Citation Needed. They are funny, clever dudes, and they really have a lot of great insights. So you can check them out on the inner webs

and in your podcast players, and I'm sure they will delight and make you laugh. Well, that wraps it up for this show. I'm gonna wish everybody a Merry Christmas, and I'm not sure I'll be back next week, so I'm gonna wish you a Happy New Year, and we're gonna leave you, like we always do, with the Skeptics Creed.

Credulity is not a virtue. leave you like we always do with the Skeptics Creed. 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, nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Thrust your hands, bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonance pod.

Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Prets, all under the handle at DissonancePod. This show is CAN-credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org.