Decoding the Gurus - Interview: Debunking (Antivaxx) Funk with Dr Dan Wilson

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

This week we speak to fellow traveller, kindred spirit, and vaccine misinformation debunker, Dr Dan Wilson. Yes, we know we've talked SO much about anti-vax rhetoric recently, and we hope the day will soon come when we can leave it all behind us, but friends, today is not that day.For more than a year, Dan's YouTube channel DebunkTheFunk has focused on rebutting COVID and vaccine misinformation from characters such as Geert Vanden-Bossche, Joseph Mercola and RFK Jnr. His recent episodes on Robert Malone and Peter Mc Collough have been an invaluable source for the decoders for our recent episodes. So of course we were delighted that Dan could come speak to us about what he does, what they do, and what kind of rhetorical tropes and tricks he sees from these characters.Dan seems to suffer from the same masochistic malaise we do, in feeling compelled to listen to some of the worst material available on the internet, so as to point out what's wrong with it. And he accomplishes that mission effectively, and most mysteriously for Chris and Matt, concisely as well.It's not all negative, because as well as talking about anti-vaxxers specifically, we all bask in our shared admiration for This Week in Virology, the kind of critical yet open-minded science communication show we'd all love to see a lot more of. We also talk about the kind of everyday epistemics that we can all practice to separate fact from fiction, and the kind of public engagement that genuine experts, researchers and scientists need to practice in order to take back the infosphere from snake-oil salesmen and attention-seekers of all kinds. It was an absolute pleasure to talk to Dan. We love what he does, and we hope he goes on doing it for a long time to come. We hope you enjoy it too, and we heartily recommend sharing DebunkTheFunk with friends, family and colleagues who have slipped down the conspiratorial rabbit-hole on COVID and vaccines.

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru, it's the podcast where a psychologist and an anthropologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown and with me is Chris Kavanagh and we have someone else with us today to help us do a bit of COVID-specific decoding, don't we Chris? Do a bit of COVID specific decoding, don't we, Chris? We do. We have Dr. Dan Wilson from Debunk the Funk channel on YouTube, which we relied on quite significantly when we did the recent episodes on Robert Malone and Peter McCulloch. So Dan, we owe you a debt of gratitude for at least saving us a bit of effort in the preparation for that episode.

So welcome and thanks. I'm honored, guys. Hi, thanks to be here. So Dan's channel is focused around debunking COVID misinformation and some other broader forms of misinformation that we'll talk about. But your background, Dan, and correct me if I get any of this wrong, you're a PhD in molecular biology and now working as a researcher in some variety of labs, is that correct? So now I work in biotech. I got my PhD and then instead of getting a postdoc, because I had a baby in the way, I decided to go out into industry. So you actually make money.

More than I would if I was working as a postdoc, yes. I think you made a wise choice. Even without knowing any other details, I could say it's probably a wise choice overall. To get started, Matt and I were looking at your channel and that it started off in 2020. So just to be clear, did your channel emerge out of the pandemic and responding to COVID misinformation or were you on YouTube and stuff beforehand? So no, I didn't respond directly to the pandemic. I was actually really passionate about science communication for a very long time and I was actually a believer in some conspiracy theories and health misinformation many years ago. My science communication passion was kind of focused around teaching science by debunking.

And I was getting towards the end of my PhD and I thought, I really want to scratch this itch that I have of practicing the science communication. And I always wanted to try doing it through YouTube. And so I thought, I'll just do it. I'll just try it. And that was in like January when I started actually recording videos of 2020. And then March, of course, is when COVID really took off. So it started out just, the intention was to debunk anti-vaxxers, people like Del Bigtree, who I think is just so fun to cover. But then it evolved into addressing all these different grifters, I guess, who have arisen out of the pandemic and taken advantage of all the misinformation.

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, that parallels my own thing in a way in that I was interested in anti-vax and publishing on the psychology of it well before the pandemic. And at the time I thought it was kind of just a cute, weird piece of delusional thinking, but it didn't seem like such a pressing concern. And boy, oh boy, did that change. Yeah, it did. And because I saw that your early videos were addressing Robert De Niro and his regrettable anti-vaccine turn and the kind of Andrew Wakefield stuff, the kind of classic anti-vax, the good old Coca-Cola original anti-vax sentiment. But I'm curious about Del Bigtree

in particular, not just because of his name, but I wonder, Matt and I have kind of been forced into dealing with anti-vaxxers apart from, you know, Matt had some research interest in that, but the guru sphere and the kind of online secular gurus that we are dealing with, they are kind of inextricably drawn to the topic of COVID because they can be contrarian there. And it seems that for a lot of them, promoting COVID misinformation and lending credence to figures like Robert Malone has been something they can't resist. I was curious, when you had an interest in science communication and you were aware of the original community of anti-vaxxers and their rhetoric, normally it seems like a much more bigger and contemporary topic because of the pandemic.

And a lot of new figures seem to have emerged or took it on. And I'm just curious, because you've dealt with a lot more of them, And I'm just curious, because you've dealt with a lot more of them, do you see essentially the same rhetoric being repackaged? Or is it that people are bringing new things that you are kind of surprised to see? I'm wondering if there's much of a disconnect or if it's all repackaging of the same misinformation. I really think that the skeleton of the anti-vaccine playbook has remained pretty much the same for a very, very long time. It's always the same concerns. Will the vaccines hurt my children? Will the vaccines be safe for my pregnant wife? Are these vaccines safe in general? safe for my pregnant wife? Are these vaccines safe in general? It's rehashing all these things, even all the stuff about, oh, this disease isn't as bad as the media says it is. Natural health is a better way to go and supplements and blah, blah, blah. All that stuff is repeated even since

a hundred years ago when smallpox outbreaks were happening. It's almost depressingly the same arguments. But yeah, there's definitely a through line for all of them. And then they just kind of pluck specific bits of information out to support those core ideas that persist. That certainly gels with what we've seen as well. There's some excellent articles, which were surveys of anti-vax disinformation on the internet. They were published many years before COVID, but they have some very helpful enumerations of all of the talking points and tropes and all of these things, like quite specific ones, like a reference to the VAERS data sets. Yeah.

And it's quite striking. You can go through that list and tick off all the ones that have been recycled for COVID and it's pretty much all of them. I was wondering as well, Dan, with that, like that kind of repetition of rhetoric and recycling of debunked points. I watched your recent video about John Campbell and he's repeating some stuff about ivermectin and then, but also as you mentioned at the end of the video, the misinformation about COVID deaths, the way that they're recorded, and if the death certificate only lists COVID, that that's the kind of figure we need to be focused on,

which as you pointed out in the video, which we'll link to, but is obviously silly because having additional comorbidities listed on a deficit ticket is pretty normal, right? Especially if somebody is older, but with not just that specific example, but the tendency for rhetoric to keep coming round, you put out debunking videos, other people put out articles detailing why it's wrong. And maybe in some cases it gains a bit of traction and there's a response to the kind of misinformation that people link to but how how does it feel that every time you debunk something or you show it's false it's like that bobo doll that just like will pop back up and i'm kind of you know curious how disheartening that is and how you deal with the same argument like zombie returning.

You know, I kind of let it just roll off. It is depressing a little bit to see an argument, like you said, the one John Campbell rehashed. I mean, word for word, the idea that listing COVID as the only cause of death on a death certificate is somehow the only legitimate COVID death. That idea was first brought up in 2020 in the US. There was a wave of misinformation about it and articles addressed it, videos addressed it. I've had a video about the topic. And now John Campbell, someone who has been a quote-unquote sensible figure in COVID communication for several months of the pandemic and has only recently made a big change, rehashes it and it makes its rounds. That is very sad to see, but I do think that my prior experience as a believer in conspiracy theories helps me be

patient with that. I know that these ideas that I'm debunking aren't ever going to completely die. I know that they're always going to find new life in either the next wave of influencers or a core group of influencers are never going to change their mind and they're just going to keep spreading it. So I've kind of accepted that early on. And there are several things on my channel that I end up repeating month after month. And that's okay with me. I know that science communication has to meet a higher bar and I'm just trying to do what I can on my platform. So one of the questions we get a lot is people asking whether or not these characters really and truly believe everything they're saying or whether or not they're, as you say, grifters or opportunists, something like that. It's difficult to wrap your head around how somebody like Peter McCulloch, who does have an

extensive research background, can be so obviously wrong about such basic statements of fact. So this is a diff, this is just something, it's just hard for people to wrap their heads around. I'm just wondering, what's your take on that? It is hard. I, I don't, I honestly don't know if all of these people like McCullough and Malone genuinely believe all of the things that they say, But part of me wants to say that there's a general pattern among believers or promoters of conspiracy theories where they believe it because

of some sort of personal trauma they went through, at least in part, right? Like they felt ostracized or they felt like they were wronged in some way. and this conspiracy theory belief kind of helps to repair that damage that they experienced i think i would go as far as saying as i think that might explain some of malone's behavior actually does he wholeheartedly believe all the things he says i don't know but i think that he is saying them because it's bringing him the attention and the recognition that he thinks that he has deserved for so long because he believes he deserves more credit for mRNA vaccine technology, which he doesn't, but he genuinely feels wronged in that. And I think that much is very clear. He had a falling out with his

PhD advisor, didn't finish his PhD. There was clearly some bad blood there and he's gone on to be bitter about it, I think. And I think that now with the attention that he's getting spreading these COVID myths, that's kind of really making him feel better about that. Because now he has an audience of several million people with Joe Rogan. With figures like Peter McCullough, I don't know his backstory much at all, but you could argue this a similar thing where how many people would actually know his name if he weren't spreading this misinformation. I'm sure he's getting some satisfaction out of his newfound fame. Yeah, this is something we talk about a lot, which is that everybody enjoys attention

and recognition. This is totally a normal human motivation. Some people are, just like everything, further along the spectrum than others, perhaps up to and including a narcissistic level. And that can result in much greater sensitivity to the kind of attention and recognition, especially if one has a life history, as you say, in which they feel they haven't been properly recognized, haven't had the achievement that they expect that they deserve. I guess the other aspect to it is the, and you can probably comment on this as someone who's been susceptible to conspiracy theories in the past, as you said, which is that sometimes the specific topic like COVID, vaccinations, et cetera, just fits with the broader worldview. It just clicks so nicely. So in this case, if you have, say, a very government

skeptical libertarian, say, maybe hyper conservative, or just a naturalistic worldview, then I guess it's just amazing the way human minds can shoehorn specific evidence on a specific question such that it clicks with the broader worldview. Right. I think you guys have talked about this before. That's the beauty of conspiracy theories, right? It's a way to bring comforting answers to the world. The human mind doesn't really like uncertainty. We like to think that we figured things out. And with conspiracy theories, you can do that without really doing much work. Any world event can fit right into a conspiracy theory if you just say, oh, it was orchestrated by this person

and this person and draw these questionable connections and boom, job done. You've figured out the mystery. That can be satisfying to a lot of people. Yeah. And look, actually, I just want to circle back to that because I think it's really helpful that you mentioned that you yourself were vulnerable to conspiracy theories or believing in some sort of health misinformation before and you know you have a phd you're at this point extremely in my opinion extremely knowledgeable and reality-based and doing very well but i think this is like a lot of people feel a kind of i guess shame or you know embarrassment um we've had some feedback along those lines,

and I think it's a helpful message or a helpful thing for everyone to recognize that you can be very smart and very well-educated and well-intentioned, and all of us, through a bit of epistemic bad luck, get some wrong appreciations about the world. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was a believer, like I said, many years ago before I even did my undergraduate education. And yeah, it is a little embarrassing to be honest, but it's also okay because you come out of the rabbit hole by being honest and questioning and genuinely trying to learn in an earnest way. and questioning and genuinely trying to learn in an earnest way.

And it's okay to say you're wrong. That's part of what science is. I had to experience that a lot in my PhD. You go in and you are very optimistic and you think you're going to plan a project super well and get the answers right away. And then you encounter months and then years of failed experiments results that don't make sense being wrong having to reform your hypothesis and test it again i mean being wrong is what science is all about so it's it's okay to like have been in that

rabbit hole and then found your way out sure is one thing I've noticed in your videos as well, which Matt and I are definitely not good at, is that you're quite succinct in addressing arguments. I think it was the Malone video is 45 minutes, but that's uncharacteristically long, right? They're usually around between 10 and 20 minutes. It's kind of like a personal question, I guess, but I'm wondering how, like, when you address an argument, I know that you often will reference, you know, other videos or other resources where people can get more details. But in the case of me and Matt, we definitely step into overkill of, you know, making a point and repeatedly demonstrating the point and talking about potential rebuttals to the

point. I guess I'm just wondering, like, how do you manage to do that? Because you could, right, spend a long time going into when somebody miscites VAERS, the alternative reporting systems that exist and papers that are on VAERS and what it's used for and so on. But your responses tend to be like direct, pretty straightforward. And as a result, I think like very useful to share. I'm guessing I'm asking your advice to how you're capable of doing that. You know, I think that you guys do a great job though. I think that the long form, long winded, I don't personally mind that. I love listening to you guys' episodes all the way

through. You know, my style is just a little to keep things shorter and also because I'm just one person trying to make videos every weekend. I'll find a video that I want to address and I'll listen to it through in my editing software. And anytime I hear the person say something that I've heard before, or I know that there's a resource I can use to address that, I'll just pause it, cut it, and then go find that resource, paste it into a Word file. And that'll be like the little snippet I address. And then I'll move on to the next point. I try to just say it in a way that would make sense to me if I were a conspiracy theorist. Just say like, what's the evidence here? What does it actually say? And what can I show on screen to support that? I was able to keep them short when I started and I just kept doing that.

So I don't know if that helps at all, but that's what I do. Actually, I had a related question, which is that nobody wants to be wrong. Nobody wants to succumb to a conspiracy theory or disinformation, but it's fair to say that it's easier said than done to avoid that. So you, like us, certainly aim to be evidence-based, reasonable, all of those good things. So how do you personally do that or try to ensure that the information that you have is accurate and evidence-based? Yeah, so I do my absolute best to just look at what the scientific community is saying at that point in time. And by scientific community, I mean the actual researchers in the field actively publishing papers. papers and read them, look at the data, and I'll also seek out the scientists themselves. I'll look them up on Twitter. I'll see if they have any speaking platforms that I can listen to to see if I'm interpreting their data correctly. And through it all, just try to recognize what do

the data point to and how certain are those pointing fingers. I'm going to try to think of an example. So for example, currently with COVID vaccines, all of the data say that they remain very, very effective against preventing hospitalization and death, which is the whole point, ideally, with a vaccine. Because if you don't have hospitalization and death, then you don't really have a pandemic. You just have a lot of people with the sniffles and maybe a few people, unfortunately, passing away, which will be inevitable. But it's much better than having thousands of people dying every single day. But where the uncertainty in that remains is, how long will that immune memory, which is what is protecting people against hospitalization and death, how long will that immune memory last? We just don't know. We don't have the data for that. We

don't know how long we have before either the immune memory somehow wanes, which is unlikely, or more likely a newer variant emerges that is far enough evolved that it can evade that immune memory, which is also fairly unlikely, at least in the short term. But in the long term, it's inevitable. But just trying my best to be aware of the uncertainties in science. And I think where I need to be more cognizant, at least in my videos, is trying to communicate those uncertainties better, because I recognize that as a big problem in science communication. And I think that has shown during this pandemic that when you don't communicate those uncertainties

effectively, you get a lot of backlash when those uncertainties then become apparent. That's an excellent point and something that Chris and I have talked about as well. I mean, one obviously recognizes the constraints on public health messaging. It generally needs to be short and simple and to the point with a clear direction for action and going into the nuances of probabilities and certainty and so on is a challenge, right? But as you say, it's just the nature of how most people think about these things is a bit binary, cast-iron certainty or total doubt, total uncertainty. And, you know, I really liked that you pulled out two examples there.

One example where the evidence is very strong, like on the ability of the present vaccines to dramatically reduce rates of hospitalizations. And it's the nature of that phenomenon that it's possible to gather a lot of data very quickly, right? Because hospitalizations and deaths happen across a relatively short time span. Then the second example you gave was one about long-term immunity and by its very nature is something we're not going to be as certain about. Just helpful messages, I think. Because the platform that you use is YouTube and the comments on YouTube are infamously terrible, right?

At least, I don't know if that's true for a lot of channels, but it is often the case that like, if you look at Joe Rogan's subreddit, it's actually pretty critical of his content. If you look at YouTube comments under his clips, it is not. It kind of destroys your faith in humanity. And I wondered, one, about just that, how you find YouTube and the audience that you have, but also related to that, given the content that you're doing and that it has debunking in the title,

do you get much in the way of direct or vitriolic responses from the anti-vax community or has it been manageable? I'm just wondering about pushback for you personally. video that I make and who I'm addressing. For example, I have one video about Peter McCullough on my channel, which I made before he went on Joe Rogan. And before he went on Joe Rogan, I think that the response to the video, the comment section, was mostly a normal level of positive for my channel. A lot of people who are appreciative, but also the usual trolls. But then when he went on Joe Rogan, the video picked up a lot more views and kind of got flooded with a lot of trolls. The kind of people that you would see probably in Joe Rogan's YouTube comment section. But that's okay. I generally knew that that was going to be a thing whenever I first made my channel. I never expected

to get many views when I first made my channel. I never expected to get many views when I first made my YouTube channel. I actually had the intention of mostly messaging to anti-vaxxers and engaging with them in the comments section. That's kind of what I wanted to do when I first started my channel. And that's what I did for several months when my videos were just getting a few hundred views, maybe a thousand views. And then when my videos were just getting like, you know, a few hundred views, maybe a thousand views. And then when my video started getting more than I, I was like, okay, responding to all these comments is not realistic. It's going to be way too much of a time sink. I'm going to spend too much energy on it. So now I generally don't read the comments and I just try my best to respond to messages that people send me directly because I do still want to have that core goal of engaging

directly with anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. So I put my contact information in the description of all my videos and just hope that anybody who is serious about having a conversation with me would message me and not just leave a comment. And normally I get direct messages that are all very positive. I only ever get a few people who want to have real discussions and a few people who just send the usual, the usual hateful message

that isn't worth responding to. So yeah, that's mostly what I encounter. I'm curious, because you work in biotech, do you get accusations from trolls about that, about like being a shill for big pharma? Because it seems like it doesn't matter what you do, you will get accused of being a shill for big pharma. But if you have any relationship to biotech, in my experience, people leap on that. But I'm wondering if that's the case for you. Oh, they definitely do, but they usually get it very wrong. During my live streams,

I usually see people, I get my usual hecklers in the live stream comment sections, and they'll all be saying stuff like, he's paid by Carnegie Mellon University. They'll all say, he's paid by Carnegie Mellon university. They're funding him and blah, blah, blah. And I just think I haven't gotten paid by them in years. I got my PhD and left. I am somewhere else now, but yeah, they, they accused me of being a big pharma shell, which my job has no connection at all to my YouTube channel. Of course I started it. I started the channel before I got the job and I don't do anything in my job that has any relevance to COVID or anything like that. So one of my favorite comments that I got was someone misspelled a big pharma shill and called me a big pharma shill. And so, so now I, so now I imagine how I would show myself out to Parmesan cheese companies.

Big cheese. I have a colleague who was just messaging me recently. And the particular institute that we're associated with in Oxford is called the Center for the Study of Social Cohesion, which I realized like, oh, that actually does have, you know, like a Soviet ring to it, but it's just a social science unit. But because they were talking about actually doing some research with footballers and anxiety levels, I think, or measuring cortisol, But like, obviously this was not related to COVID because, you know, footballers, heart attacks and stuff,

it's now kind of got washed in with that and they find the name of the center and we're like, look at this, it's a government plot, it's communism in action. So yeah, I don't think it takes much for people to draw those kinds of connections. So I have another question. This is more sort of oriented towards helping people have good epistemics.

And this is two broad streams of thought. One thought is to kind of do what you do. You adopt good practices for evaluating the primary literature and get a good technical understanding of the issues at play and practice that kind of literature review skills. Of course, many people won't have the time or perhaps the skills, the resources, whatever to do that. So this leads to the other approach, which is one has a good trust network.

One identifies people who are good sources of information and you might not invest all of your trust in just one point. It might be spread out a bit, but you can sort of get to the same place, I guess, by trusting the right people. I'm just wondering what your thoughts are there. Like, I'm thinking, like, what should someone do? Like, there might be someone listening

who is conflicted about COVID, finds some of the arguments put forward by Malone and McCulloch compelling. What would your advice be? Um, if someone listening had listened to all of Joe Rogan's episode with Malone and was struggling with that information or found themselves being convinced by it and were willing to challenge that to listen to an opposing viewpoint I would say that since they're used to listening to long-form podcasts like Joe Rogan I would suggest to them go listen to This Week in Virology and I know you guys know about them and I honestly cannot plug them enough I think that what they're doing is so beautiful and so

needed in science communication because they're essentially just having journal clubs where a lab would get together and talk about a paper that they all read and they would critique it and review it and talk about what's important, what they didn't like about it, what they loved about it. And they're just what they loved about it. And they're just doing that and recording it. And it's amazing. I really think that that's like a glimpse into the post-publication peer review process that not a lot of people know about. And they really go into it. They try to make things clear because they know their audience aren't all scientists and they have such

good perspectives on issues that the media is talking about and they do the thing that you mentioned before of course which is communicate uncertainty well yes um of course we totally agree with you there and it is i think the benefit there is not only in them like rattling off I think the benefit there is not only in them rattling off specific content, specific information to listeners, but as you say, giving the public a bit of a glimpse into the process, how they think about things, how they talk about things. One thing you'll see on the internet, of course, is there'll be a single paper comes out. It could be a preprint or something like that. And there's a tendency among so many people to treat every little snippet of information

or every little report as a smoking gun. This is the, this is the thing. And, and of course, that's not what researchers do. That new study, that bit of information gets integrated into everything we know and is treated with the appropriate level of weight. Right, exactly. It's all a body of literature, right? But I think that, of course, the general public and the general media aren't used to thinking of science that way. And it's been a problem during this pandemic where normally in science, before a paper becomes a paper,

where normally in science, before a paper becomes a paper, there's months or years of research with tons of lab meetings where there's back and forth. And maybe we think this, let's test it. Oh, we're wrong about that. Let's test something else, come at it from a different angle. And then after all that long process that the public never sees, then you get a paper and then the media still reports incorrectly on it. But now you have the pandemic where people need answers right away. And lots of labs are jumping on the COVID problem. Labs that might not necessarily have a good amount of experience in virology or immunology. And so you get a lot of preprints that might not be good quality and the media is reporting on them as they come out. And as we, as the uncertainty is still there, they're reporting it as if it's certainty. And so it gets very muddied and confusing. So it's nice to have something like This Week in Virology where

they're actively reviewing all the information as it comes out. I think they do a fantastic job of that. And it just makes me think, why aren't more academic professors having podcasts like TWIV? I mean, maybe they are and I just don't know about them, but I certainly didn't know very many people at all who would even entertain that idea of recording their lab meetings and their journal clubs and putting them out for the world to listen to. So I just think that's great. I'm evangelical about Twiv as well. I had some people in my mentions on Twitter or there by complain about Twiv because of some takes they disagreed with, you know, Vincent, uh, I always mispronounce his surname, but there Vincent, let's say, yeah, we're on a first name basis. But the thing to me was that they, like, it was like they were

listening to a different podcast because when I hear the discussions on Twiv, I don't view it as this is science coming down from on high. I hear that they have decades of expertise in subjects I know nothing about, and they speak with a fluency, which is impossible to fake that, because they're just very clear when they're talking about these very technical topics. But in their discussions, I always get the impression that they're talking about these very technical topics. But in their discussions, I always get the impression that, you know, they're giving their opinion. They're sometimes disagreeing about the relative weight to attach to things, but they correct themselves or they talk about, well, you know, you think that evidence is stronger and that

you have more experience doing this kind of experiment. So that makes sense. And I just find it like a kind of a weird thing that people would listen to their discussions and, you know, take away from it that they broker no debate and that they're kind of ideologues. Because I remember when they were discussing the lab leak and they were pretty dismissive about it. And I think for justified reasons, as a lot of virologists are because of the conspiracy theorists, popular versions of the lab leak tend to be, and that like a

lot of it is based around, we don't know X, right? So the, but, but when they were talking, they discussed the kind of political situation in China. And it sounded to me like slightly naive reading of the influence of the steer, but that didn't make me suddenly think, oh, I can't trust anything of their opinions. It was just like, oh, I disagree with their assessment about politics in China, but they're not professors of politics in China. They're professors of virology. So I guess I'm just saying that TWIV is great.

And I have always been surprised that when people respond, suggesting that they're dogmatic or that kind of thing, because I read it exactly the way you described, like a journal club with very well-informed professors. Yeah. And I think that if anyone thinks that they're too dogmatic, Vincent Racaniello and Amy Rosenfeld, who sometimes appears on TWIV, they have live streams on Vincent's channel on YouTube. I think it's every Tuesday, every Wednesday, I believe. They have live streams on Vincent's channel on YouTube. I think it's every Tuesday, every Wednesday, I believe they have live Q and A's and they sometimes will fight during, during those live Q and A's where Vincent will be answering

a question. Amy will be like, where'd you get that? What are you talking about? No, that's completely wrong. And, and Vincent's like, oh, well, okay. I guess that's that. Yeah. That's really fun to watch.

All the bits I cut out where you're just wrong. Like Matt, where'd you get that from? You said Aristotle has. Titanic forms. Yeah. Yeah. We confused Aristotle and Plato on our last thing. It was very embarrassing

and i was too tired to pick him up because i knew i totally knew but um the um but uh yeah i mean and they you're right they do correct themselves for example early on in the pandemic when they were talking about covid vaccines and the current plan for the vaccines was to focus on the spike protein of sars-cov2. And they were thinking, maybe that's not a great idea. Maybe we shouldn't put all our eggs in the spike basket. They were critical of that. And I think they had good reason to be because there was just so much uncertainty on whether or not the vaccine would actually work, whether it would be immunogenic enough and safe enough. But now there have been episodes where Vincent's talking about that and he said, yeah, I was wrong.

These vaccines ended up working much better than anyone expected. It was surprising, but we were wrong on that prediction that it could be a mistake to focus too much on the spike protein. So self-correcting is very, very important and something that you often don't see from the kind of gurus that you cover. So, you know, just summarizing some of the things you guys have talked about, there's a few things that stood out to me. One is that when you listen to something like This Week in Virology, then you can see that their attitude is one of skeptical, open-mindedness and robust debate. And the portrayal of the virology or medical or scientific communities as this dogmatic

orthodoxy where people who get out of line are punished and censored and so on is clearly cartoonish and nonsensical. The other thing that you guys were emphasizing is how it seems to be like a really positive and good thing for more academics to somehow realign their KPIs, their key performance indicators, so that public engagement is in the mix along with publications and citations and so on. Because I guess I think that is probably the mix, along with publications and citations and so on. Because I guess I think that is probably the way to go. Because if we think about the situation now, in a way, some of the blame lies with researchers and the media or science media. Because for a long time, my field of psychology has been one of the worst offenders here, where some flaky, crazy, counterintuitive thing, a very weak study is then pushed a little bit too hard by the researchers and then amped up again by the media.

So you get these flashy results, which will be contradicted or debunked a few weeks later. And of course, everyone is used to the kinds of articles that drinking a glass of wine will increase, you know, chocolate is good for you now, you know, that kind of science, medical media story. So the situation at the moment is that I think the public has got a partial, so the internet has given people a lot more access to the inner workings of science, right? And a lot more direct access to, you know, preprints and papers and so on. But it's a partial picture. And I think the message I'm getting for what you guys are saying

is that we've sort of opened Pandora's box and it's, it's probably better to go the whole hog and give people the full picture of how science works. And then there'd be less points for which conspiracy theorists and propagandists can kind of latch on to, to promote disinformation. Conspiracy theorists and propagandists can kind of latch on to promote disinformation. Yeah, I think that you're right that more public engagement is definitely a way to go with that. We have all this technology and all these connections and we don't know what to do with it. We don't know how to use it to its full potential in a productive way. I hope that scientists and academics are recognizing that and will hopefully begin to change it because I think there's a general aversion against engaging with the public.

I think that those sentiments run fairly deep, so it might take a while to change. One historical example I like to bring up when I think about that is back in the fifties when there was the race between Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin to create polio vaccines. Jonas Salk was kind of a media man. You know, the newspapers loved him. The people loved him. And he was a great scientist. He obviously produced a very great vaccine.

And Albert Sabin, most people don't know him, but he also created a very great polio vaccine. It was the oral polio vaccine. And he went off against Salk. They had kind of a bitter rivalry, but he went off against Salk for talking to the media too much. He thought that made him less of a scientist. So you have two great scientists who did great things with very opposing viewpoints on how much a scientist should be out of the lab engaging with the public. And I think Sabin's view is present in a lot of academics still to this day, because there's the sentiment of, oh, if you're not working in lab seven days a week, 12 hours a day, then you're not trying hard enough because science is so competitive. It really is very competitive. And so you can be viewed that way if you're not

dedicating all of that time to the lab. And so it's almost viewed as like, you have time to talk to all these media people and do all this stuff with the public, but you can't review my paper. You can't write this grant. Like what's up with that? Like there is that attitude still. Um, so I think that will hopefully, hopefully it will change over the next few years and we'll get more public engagement because the more, the more scientists that the public can hear from the better trust they'll have because you, you see it with pundits and influencers like Rogan. He even said in his, in his interview with Malone, when they started talking about, uh,

oh my God, what's his name? The HIV guy, Peter Duesberg. Yes. Thank you. Uh, when they started talking about Peter Duesberg, which was ridiculous. Uh, but Rogan, Rogan mentioned, uh, Rogan mentioned, yeah, I had him on my podcast and I tried to find any scientist who would debate him when I couldn't find one. I'm like, how is that possible? Like you, you can walk into any virology lab and find a postdoc, an undergraduate who would, who would debate him. And, ah, it like really just baffles me when people say like, I can't find a scientist who will tell me X and it's like, they're everywhere. They're just, you just don't see them. So yeah, more in the public eye is.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it's, it's vital. Like I was going to say, maybe there's a bit of a danger for academics to get more concerned with self-promotion, but the state of affairs at the moment is that people who have no scientific credibility whatsoever are dedicating themselves full-time to self-promotion and dominating the infosphere. We won't name names, but we've covered a few of them on Decoding the Gurus. I just wholeheartedly agree. I think we need to get as many researchers and professors as possible to just spend 10 or 20% of their time engaging with the public. I don't think it has to be all

on the scientists either, because what a lot of academic scientists will say is, well, I'm a non-tenured professor and I have to recruit undergraduate students. I have to train undergraduates. I have to train graduate students. I have to recruit postdocs. I have to write grants. I have to write papers. I have to manage my lab. I have to do faculty duties. I have to do all these things. And you want me to do this extra thing? Ah, there's no room for life there. So it's, it's tough to ask more of scientists. So, you know, one of my biology teachers said this to me many years ago, and it still stuck with me. He said that we need more good science journalists. I think that can really help fill

the gap. If we have scientists who are more willing to spend a little extra time to talk to a journalist and have that be a good science journalist who can report on what that scientist is doing accurately and responsibly. That can really help solve at least a big part of the problem that we have right now with this constant wave of disinformation. Yeah, I think an interesting wrinkle, and the both of you touched on that, is that there may be cases where there are people, and I online that can sweep people into like attention ecosystems where, you know, contrarian positions are rewarded, not just with attention, but financially, it's hugely rewarding. You can look at John Campbell's metrics on various platforms and he's doing very

well now by promoting misinformation a lot better than when he was offering relatively mainstream takes on the pandemic. So I'm not arguing this as like keep people away from, you know, keep scientists away from the online sphere or they'll get dragged down into influencer hell. But I do think there's this like double edged sword where academic credentials, they highlight an expertise in a particular subject. And often they're a good sign that you can trust someone, right? Because they've devoted X amount of time to getting a PhD in whatever the subject may be. But because of the people like

Malone and McCulloch and other figures that have emerged during COVID, I think there's also a potential danger in people not realizing that academics and researchers are people. And like all people, there's a wide spectrum of personality types and of incentives that are at play. So Matt is often trying to highlight when we discuss these figures on the podcast that if you have tens of thousands of people within a given field, there will always be a contingent that have very out there views, very extreme views and have relevant qualifications and have, you know, a track record of, of publishing.

And it feels like Joe Rogan in particular, when you said, you know, like surprised about Peter Duisburg, every time I kind of come across someone who is involved in disinformation or whatever, there's always a connection to Joe Rogan. Like Joe's been on this show or Joe's had him on to talk about things. And it's one of the reasons why all these people are now saying, you know, oh, people just don't know what Joe does. But like Joe's history is full of this. But like Joe's history is full of this. Like he's the COVID stuff is new, but his epistemic approach means that he was always

likely to be a victim of what's emerged in the coronavirus. So, so yeah, I guess I'm just burnt recently by academics in the public sphere with like credentials who have, after listening to Melona McCullulloch it's it's made me wary yeah i definitely think that's something to think about when considering this goal of getting science more involved in public communication and i think just more praise for twiv you can use that as a model because it's more of a it's not just one person like for example how john campbell i mean he pumps out videos almost every two days or something now and he has guests but it's kind of few and far between and he has definitely isolated himself from some guests he used to have on his channel who have gone on to question some of the more dubious claims that he's made.

But in the case of Twiv, it's multiple people all in one episode, constantly having guests who are actively publishing in the field. It's more of like a community thing that Twiv is doing. thing that Twiv is doing. And I think that, you know, if like different arms of biology or different niche fields in biology might want to do that, do a similar thing, they could definitely use it as a model. We talked about that awareness of incentives. Yeah. And how everyone is susceptible to them. I think one of the helpful things about Twiv and similar kinds of things is that the people involved, their main source of recognition is not from being an online influencer or getting their metrics of Twiv up or whatever, right? This is very much a side gig. And I think that's a big protection, isn't it? And it kind of relates to what we talked about before, which is about how to identify a good epistemic trust network.

And one of the little rules of thumb that I think is really, really helpful is you think about, well, has this person come to prominence? Have they suddenly parachuted into this topic after it became a big deal? And do they get, like, is this their main game is this their main thing because if it is then they're going to be highly susceptible to audience capture and you know attention getting stuff and contrarian stuff whereas if you look at say twiv as a just as a counter example these are people have been working in the field for a long long time before coronaviruses were a big deal. They still are working in the field. Their public communications is a side gig. They have nothing to gain from disinformation or just

having their finger on the tiller and pushing it this way. And so I think we've got some of the ingredients there for identifying what makes a healthy information ecosystem. identifying what makes a healthy information ecosystem. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what I try to do with what I do. I mean, I have my day job and my life outside of YouTube, and I have tried to make it a very cognizant choice to keep it a side gig. I don't want it to turn into a job because this is something my YouTube thing is just something I started because I enjoy doing it I thought it was fun to watch these wacky anti-vaxxers like Del Bigtree and fun to make videos about them and so that that's what I feel like if I made it a job I wouldn't enjoy it as much anymore. So I just try

to keep it as side gig and I don't try to attach a Patreon or any kind of donation system to it. That's just my style. I do monetize my videos, but I end up donating most, if not all that money. Sometimes I make the donations public, but yeah, I mean, that that's i totally agree with that that model of trying to have a background a good background in it and then not having like a skin in the game kind of thing just doing it for the sake of doing it that's very different from matt he he has plans for the coding the guru's empire he He wants to get a franchise out. He's always talking to me, Chris, get the numbers up,

get your interactions on Twitter out. No, you guys are having a great thing going. It's been something that we've talked about and it's been on our mind too. Like when we started decoding the gurus, it was just a fun hobby. A good excuse for us to chat about fun stuff that we were keen on talking about anyway.

Fun stuff. Yeah, okay. Chris is a masochist. You have to keep that in mind. But we didn't expect to get as many, as big an audience as we did. And as the audience has grown and the significance of the podcast in our lives, our jobs is still very, very marginal.

But even at that small level, being aware of how the podcast community works, we've sort of just accidentally gained an awareness of, yeah, I've become very aware of the incentives at play. And I would be concerned if this ever became our main job or even a part-time job, it would just be something you'd have to constantly keep an eye on because it can very subtly and in a very insidious way affect some of your decision-making and thinking thinking yeah i i totally am with you there and you try your best to be aware of that clout chasing bug that ends up being the downfall of so

many youtubers and influencers where the fame gets to them and they change and they there's i'm sure you guys know of so many so many of the terrible stories um that ha where that happens to them and they change and they there's i'm sure you guys know of so many so many of the terrible stories um that have where that happens to people and yeah you just try your best to be aware of it and how you deal with that as your material grows in viewers i i don't know the answer to that yet hopefully it stays the way it is honestly i like the way it is it is. Yeah. I don't, I don't mind it. I don't mind it being where it is right now. I'm waiting for my anti-vax turn so I can just steal the podcast and, and then produce episodes, tearing him apart. That's, that's the final goal for the coding, the gurus, but he hasn't

took the bait yet after I've just sent them the breadcrumbs, but the covering all these anti-vaxxers. But one thing I I'm kind of curious about, and it might be a broad picture kind of thing to, to return to COVID misinformation specifically, we talked about, you know, the recurrent things and stuff that you hear. And I think your cast of characters, when I looked at your YouTube channel, it overlaps with what the conspirituality guys talk about. You know, the disinformation dozen. And you mentioned Dale Bigtree. I don't think you've covered JPC years, but he's just really a regurgitator of other people's things.

I did one video on him a while ago. Oh, one video. Lucky. That's all he needs. So I'm wondering, just from your experience dealing with all the varied characters in the anti-vax world, if you were giving people three or four, you know, the kind of top five, whatever the case may be, things that you hear frequently and maybe some, you know, I'm not asking you, I kind of, I'm asking you to do this on the spot, which is unfair, but I just mean, are there things that, you know, if friends and

family that people are likely to hear that you identify and that you would say, even if there isn't like a response that's easy to put in a short nutshell, but just like these are things that you're likely to hear from that whole ecosystem. So one thing that comes to mind right now is a lot of worry about COVID vaccine safety that I hear pretty consistently. One of which is this idea that the vaccines are experimental. That seems to be a very common talking point. A lot of conspirituality-esque influencers will say that it's not a vaccine, it's experimental, blah, blah, blah. So that's something I hear all the time. And what I would say to that is just, well, if it's experimental, then what experiment

would you like to see? And what experiment would thus make it no longer experimental? What experiment do you need to see in order for it to not be experimental anymore? And they usually don't have a great answer for that. But then piggybacking off of that, another common concern is that the vaccine's long-term safety is unknown. That's very, very common. People have this idea in their head that... Oh my God, yeah. Man, he's a trip. He's such a trip, but we concur. But yeah, it's just, people have this idea in their head that it takes years and years and years to create a vaccine and they don't understand what those years and years and years actually involve people often will cite

10 years to make a vaccine but the the actual figure is more like 30 years and the things involved in those 30 years are is mostly a very slow process of basic research to understand just fundamentally how to design a vaccine for this particular situation and then designing it testing it and once you actually have something to test then you have to do pre-clinical trials which is testing it in animals you have to secure funding for that convince someone that it's important to test it, do the experiments, report the data to the FDA, wait for them to review it, send it back to you. You get the go-ahead.

You have to now convince the company or the committee that you should move forward to Phase I clinical trials in humans with that particular vaccine. That takes time to do all of that. And then you have to repeat the process for phase two and three, each phase accumulating more and more people. So you can start to see how it can just be stretched longer and longer and longer. And with COVID vaccines,

they didn't have any of those issues because at the core of all that holdup is money. Someone has to be convinced at every stage that this is important enough to dedicate millions, billions of dollars to run these very large clinical trials. But for COVID vaccines, the money was all guaranteed up front because everybody agreed that this is an emergency and we have to get this work done as fast as possible. And of course, the FDA was giving all COVID vaccines and COVID products priority in their review queue. So as soon as it came to their office, they started reviewing it instead of putting it in line behind other things. So that's why the process went really fast.

And then beyond that, long-term effects with vaccines, it's not really a thing. There's no biological reason why if I get vaccinated now, it might cause some disease years down the line or even months down the line. There's just no biological reason for that. It's not been observed because almost every single vaccine adverse event is caused by your reaction, your initial immune reaction to the vaccine. And that initial immune reaction doesn't last super long. So usually it's within eight weeks.

All of the adverse events that that vaccine is going to cause to you have already happened. So that's just the general understanding in vaccinology. And that's what I think a lot of people are missing with that common talking point. I know I'm getting pretty long-winded here, but i think i'm trying to think of a third thing now okay so so let's rehearse we've got the got their experimental that's that's the first that's the first uh trope that'll get around what was the other one sorry my mind the second one that they're not see if long-term long-term safety concerns yeah I guess those two things are kind of connected. Yeah. They certainly crop up in the content that we look at. And I guess I'm not putting, I don't think, I think this is perhaps a new thing that's emerged, but you get people who are very annoyed if you lump anti-vax sentiment in with anti-mandate sentiment, right? back sentiment in with anti-mandate sentiment, right?

Some people want to say this completely different because you're, you could be pro-vaccine, but you just don't think governments have the right demand there. And of course that's true, but it's also true that like the, the march against the mandates was primarily an anti, a march led by prominent anti-vaxxers talking about anti-vaccine talking points. So it feels a little bit disingenuous to me that there's no, the correlation is purely coincidental that the anti-mandate movement is strongly led by anti-vaxxers, but yeah, I'm adding in something of my own there, but then veiled behind this core belief that you have that government shouldn't tell you that you need a vaccine, you're not getting the vaccine for a reason. What are those reasons? And then those reasons are almost always misinformed talking points that just get commonly

repeated and repeated. I guess something I've debunked a lot on my channel is the whole misunderstanding around a fourth vaccine and a fifth vaccine and it's just going to go on forever. And that therefore shows that they don't work. It's just kind of interesting to me because it just kind of reminds me how much people don't really know what the regular vaccine schedule looks like. Most of the regular vaccines that children get involve two, three, four doses. That's normal because there's this immunological principle where the more your body sees a certain antigen, even if it's the same

antigen that it's seen before, it's going to develop a more refined and honed immune response to that antigen upon subsequent exposures. That's why boosting works so well. People have gotten two vaccine doses, mostly two or four weeks apart. And now after waiting several months, you boost again, and there's a very, very efficient response and a much more broad immune memory. And we see that on an antibody level. I'm not quite as confident on the data about seeing that on a T cell level, but we definitely see it on an antibody level, this wider breadth of immunity. That's why with two doses, when Omicron surged, we saw neutralizing experiments showing that people who had been boosted or previously infected,

neutralizing experiments showing that people who had been boosted or previously infected, or people who had taken two doses or had been previously infected, weren't able to really neutralize Omicron very well. But then with a boost, with a third dose, they were able to neutralize Omicron very well. Even though the spike antigen they saw was from the ancestral Wuhan strain, the breadth of antibodies were then broadened enough that they could effectively neutralize Omicron. So there's the lack of understanding of how boosting works and why it's important. And also, the reality is we might one day need a fourth shot, but the only reason that would happen is if a new variant emerged that necessitated that. Right now, there is no data to suggest that anyone in the world needs a fourth shot.

There's just no reason to think that that's needed, despite what some policies might be suggesting, because policy doesn't always follow good science but as we found out during this pandemic but uh when the data show up that start suggesting that we need a fourth shot because covid keeps evolving because not enough people are vaccinated then we can talk about a fourth shot but until then there's just no data and that uncertainty should be communicated better to the people who are saying, oh, have fun with your 16th dose, because it's just a talking point that gets regurgitated out there now. I will say that I find like you that a lot of the response about that, like in some sense,

it's kind of understandable frustration because, you know, what people have expected has changed over time, but it's also like this misunderstanding that like we can argue with a virus or something, right? Like people are reacting like, well, you said that we, you know, just vaccination and done. And like, first of all, I don't think that's exactly what was communicated, but there may have been people overstating things that will inevitably the case, but even then, like the virus is what it is. It doesn't care if we think that three or four boosters are necessary, like they're either helpful or not. And I, I feel like there is a bit where people have put these

vaccines into a special category. And the influenza vaccine, which people get annually and needs to be adjusted and doesn't always get the actual strain which emerges and so on, that was, you know... That's fine. Yeah, that was not this big... I mean, it was a controversy for anti-vaxxers. It's not like they accepted that, Elon. But it wasn't the global controversy. But I guess it's just the situation as it is now. But I think it's a good point that people don't look. I've seen some scientists sharing the childhood vaccination schedule in the US., it's full of multiple doses over like subsequent years and months and stuff.

So yeah, better education about that would be helpful. Although if you've got like a hardcore anti-vaxxer, I suspect they are also trying to avoid most of those as well. But I think they are. So, well, I think we've probably stole enough of your evening's time and forced on you science communication late at night, but I, I've got to say like, from the perspective of both me and Matt, like when we came across your video, it was a godsend because like we documented in the episode dealing with Malone and McCulloch,

we could identify their kind of rhetorical techniques. And we can also, you know, it's not that hard to do a fact check and see that they're talking absolute bollocks at times. Like it's, you know, really, really extreme lies. But there's another part where they're more dealing with kind of technical points and using medical jargon. And then you are in the status of being like, well, I'm not in a position to reject that. And your video was perfect because it took all those points and it just, you know, neatly summarized, no, you can reject it because

here's the resources and here's the references. So from me and Matt, I have to say like, thank you for what you're doing and please continue it as long as mental health and tolerance continues. But you sound like you share some of the pathology that myself and Matt might in terms of looking at anti-vaccine communities. And you mentioned joy at dealing with Dale Bigtree, which is, I, you know, I think Mark Chioyi as a different kind of person than, than many. So, yeah. I, I, I hugely appreciate that.

I, uh, it's the channel's already honest already honestly exceeded my wildest dreams so far. And yes, you're right. I do find joy in it. I'm a masochist like you guys. I will hear about some new Plandemic 3 coming out, directed by Mickey Will willis and i i'll just think oh my god that's horrible where can i watch it yeah yeah so um ditto for me that you're doing i'm not blowing smoke when i say you're doing

important work and you're doing it effectively and and concisely which is more than chris and i managed to do um and so um yeah it's been hugely beneficial to us and it's it's just a great thing to share around so thanks for doing what you're doing we really appreciate it there's one last question that i have to ask that i think everybody will be very upset and it's very core to the reason they interview you. So in your videos, you have an impressive Afro, right? Looking back over the history, it's kind of amazing because I can see now for people that are listening in audio, you have trimmed your hair. I showered. It's all down. Holy God. Yeah.

If I pick it out, it's going to be poofy. Wow. Because my curiosity was that that's very distinctive. You have a huge afro in the videos. And did you always have that is that from like a side life as a like b-boy or just i'm just curious no so so yeah i mean back when i did the b-boying i i never had an afro i was always really self-conscious of my hair actually i never liked that my hair would would get poofy

when I grew it out. So I would always try to cut it, keep it short, but then the pandemic happened and I didn't get my haircut for a few months. And so in my videos, I decided, well, let me, let me just start picking it out and see how it looks. And, uh, I kind of liked it. Yeah. And so it just kept growing and growing and it's, it's now become kind of like a, a special thing for me because my dad, when he was younger, had a pretty big Afro,

uh, when he, you know, growing up in the seventies and whatnot, um, he looked like a member of earth, wind and fire. And,

and so I kind of like that. I get to be that image of him now and i i hope that he's proud of that so i've embraced i've embraced it yeah i mean i it's it you know you could listen to the audio content and you would never know but i think it actually it it kind of helps the videos have a distinctive visual style to it. For my part, Dan, I've got reasonably thick and curly hair. And my goal recently in middle age, now that it's all gone white, is to go for like a Steven Pinker-esque kind of. And it's not looking, it's

not doing the job at the moment because you thinned it out and I've had a shower and it's gone floppy, but I think I can achieve it. So watch this space. I agree. I want everyone that's debunking just the gray hair, that can be the, we can be the guys in the, you know, the alien guy, like say, no, I am not saying it's conspiracy theory, but yeah, I know what he does. And I know he's, you know, an advocate for ancient aliens and all that, but I, I kinda don't mind because of his hair.

Yeah. The, the meme is so good. He's my secret car that I'll let pass just for that. It looks like if you ever watched Babylon five, the, what were they called? Centauri aliens had that hairstyle. So yeah, that's a geeky reference. Matt, you wouldn't get it. No, no, I, I see that.

Yeah. His hair is, his hair is wacky and yeah, for all the terrible ideas he's spread on the history channel, the hair and the meme makes it forgivable. Not really, but we'll say that. Yeah, I might have my priorities wrong when you put it like that, but yeah. But so on that very important note, Dan, thanks for coming on and keep doing what you're doing and we'll remain fans. Thank you so much. And I'll remain a fan of you too. I just want to say one more thing in that, you know, when you guys were doing Joe Rogan, you said several points that you would rather

be doing almost anything than listening to his podcasts and i've listened to i think less than five joe rogan podcasts and those do not include the brett weinstein ones so i was very thankful that you guys covered him so that i could just listen to that instead of feeling like i would rather be like putting a campfire out with my face. When I saw your video, when I watched your video, like actually a couple of days ago by John Campbell, we'd been getting requests like, oh, cover John Campbell, do John. And I was like, no, I can't, I can't, I can't, not another one. But when I saw your video, it was like, oh, great. I can just, yeah, you've done it.

So I, that, yeah, you've done it. So I, that, yeah, we can serve similar functions in that way. Um, so yeah, thank you for the John Campbell. You took the bullet there. I did.

I did. People are already asking me if I, if I am going to cover them again soon. And I like, I don't want to give it a couple of weeks. People. Anyway, and i like i don't want to give it a couple of weeks people anyway i really appreciate you guys having me on it's it's been so great um thank you so much yeah our pleasure as well and thanks dan everybody check out the debunk the funk channel on youtube

we'll put links in the podcast and yeah, and have a great remainder of your night. Thank you. you